Life crises, as we pass through them, confront us with polar opposites. Shall we hate or forgive that person? Shall we learn from this experience and grow, or resent it and become bitter? Do we choose to overlook the other person’s shortcomings and our own, or instead do we resent and mentally attack them? Shall we withdraw from a similar situation

For example, when a person is in a lower state of mind, an old gentleman carelessly dressed standing on a corner would be perceived as a “bum.” With that characterization goes other negative thoughts such as: “He might be dangerous—let’s avoid him”; “He’s costing us taxpayers—he’s probably on welfare”; “The police ought to clear the streets of such

Of these mechanisms used by the mind to keep the feeling repressed, denial and projection are perhaps the best-known methods, as they tend to go together and reinforce each other. Denial results in major emotional and maturational blocks. It is usually accompanied by the mechanism of projection. Because of guilt and fear, we repress the impulse or

As we surrender, life becomes more and more effortless. There is a constant increase in happiness and pleasure, which requires less and less from the outer world to be experienced. There is a diminution of needs and expectations of others. We stop looking “out there” for what we now experience as coming from within ourselves.

You become progressively primarily the witness rather than the experiencer of phenomena.

Thoughts are like gold fish in a bowl; the real Self is like the water. The real Self is the space between the thoughts, or more exactly, the field of silent awareness underneath all thoughts.

The real Self is the space between the thoughts, or more exactly, the field of silent awareness underneath all thoughts.

In other words, because of what has benefited us in a situation, we feel guilty about leaving it. So the unconscious ingeniously has created the whole mechanism of wrongness to force us out of dead-end situations. This often happens in interpersonal relationships where we feel that we have to make the other person “wrong” in order to justify

The corollary is obviously true. If our mind, by its decision, has the power to make negative things happen in our life, then it has equal power in the opposite, positive direction. We can choose all over again. This time we can choose the positive. We can cancel the old programs, and we can do that by beginning to relinquish the gratification we