9. We have a sense of humor about our jobs.

The artist must operate territorially. He must do his work for its own sake. To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution. Recall the fate of Odysseus’ men who slew the cattle of the sun. Their own witlessness cast them away. The fools! To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, wherefore the sun-god blotted out

Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

Remember, Resistance wants us to cede sovereignty to others. It wants us to stake our self-worth, our identity, our reason-for-being, on the response of others to our work. Resistance knows we can’t take this. No one can.

If you didn’t love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn’t feel anything. The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference.

Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. We feed it with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance.

The more you love your art/calling/enterprise, the more important its accomplishment is to the evolution of your soul, the more you will fear it and the more Resistance you will experience facing it. The payoff of playing-the-game-for-money is not the money (which you may never see anyway, even after you turn pro). The payoff is that playing the

When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul’s call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We’re doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many

The Self is our deepest being. The Self is united to God. The Self is incapable of falsehood. The Self, like the Divine Ground that permeates it, is ever-growing and ever-evolving. The Self speaks for the future. That’s why the Ego hates it. The Ego hates the Self because when we seat our consciousness in the Self, we put the ego out of business.