Recognition: A Teaching and a Practice

You seem to only experience joy when you get a desire fulfilled, recognize a great time or have a sensory experience you find pleasant. You always seem to connect joy to an outer experience. But there is no joy inherent in an outside thing, or experience. Joy is the natural experience of the Self and joy is available only in experiencing the Self. It is always available in the experience of the Self.

Joy is always Self-generated. The only joy you ever experience is when you are experiencing the Self, your consciousness. It is never caused by the fulfillment of desire or any outer experience. Outer things are simply focuses and triggers for what lies within. So why do you associate joy with getting something, finding love, recognizing a pleasant past experience, or having a favorable sensory experience?

Your mind is always grasping. It is always desiring something. It is always seeking fulfillment outside and constantly searching. So you are in a perpetual state of resistance to ‘what is’ and you are always feeling a mild to extreme state of dissatisfaction. The mind is never at rest or at peace. When you fulfill a desire, experience a pleasant sensory experience or recognize a pleasant past experience the mind moves into a state of satisfaction and relaxes it’s grasping, dissatisfaction and outward seeking. In this calm state of mind you become open to experiencing the Self. Because joy is the natural state of the Self, you experience joy when all that resistance subsides.

The joy and love you feel from a relationship is also Self-generated. The other person is creating a reaction in you that again allows your mental fluctuations, your monkey mind, to relax. You desire someone and they appear and then you feel joy and love. It’s the same process as getting the pair of shoes but on a more powerful level.

The problem with thinking joy is reliant on fulfilling desires or a sensory experience is that it is always fleeting. When you get the new pair of shoes you feel joy but it only lasts a short while and then you are back to desiring something else, seeking joy outside yourself again. It is only the joy of the Self that is ever-present and constant but your grasping, resistant mind is too busy to allow you to experience it.

The joy you experience in getting the shoes is but a shadow of the full bliss experienced by directly experiencing the Self. And here is the value of meditation and mindfulness. They train the mind to go within and experience the Self, or at least calm the mind. That is the value of surrender and acceptance because they allow the mind to relax and feel joy.

Joy is a core aspects of the Self. The work becomes recognizing it in your day to day life and recognizing joy’s true source, causes and conditions.

Throughout your day you may feel joy arising when you have a desire fulfilled. Your children pick up their rooms and make their bed. Your husband tells you that you look nice. You get a promotion. You buy a new house or a car. You plan a trip. You get a positive result from the doctor. You have wonderful sex. You get a deep sleep. Your haircut turns out perfectly.

You are very conditioned to think it is the event, the experience or the thing that is producing joy, but this is a false assumption. These events, experiences and things are only creating a situation to release the mental struggle and quiet the mind. Every time you recognize this you allow yourself to recognize a deeper truth about life and source joy. This allows you to expand joy. When you look at the source and the true causes and conditions of joy you have the ability to create more joy. Then you find and create more causes and conditions for joy; everything that creates a connection to the Self.

1. Recognize every time you feel joy and expand it and feel into it. Follow it back to its source.
2. Recognize that it is occurring inside you and is not happening outside you.
3. Recognize that the joy is arising because you have released mental resistance, your mind has softened, your mind has relaxed, you have let go of grasping, you are more allowing and accepting and you are more in surrender.
4. Recognize the joy that arises from fulfillment of a desire, a memory or a sense experience is temporary and is not the true source of deep, permanent joy.
5. Recognize that the mental releasing, quieting, relaxing and softening allows you to experience the Self and that the Self is your true source of all joy.
6. Recognize, practice and reinforce this realization, and practice what allows and supports your experience of inner joy.

We are taught that success comes from hard work. There is some truth to this, but hard work is only a surface, minor power of life. All abundance arises from the well-spring of the Self. The Self contains all consciousness and energy. From this arises inspiration, expansion, creativity, enthusiasm, clarity and manifestation. Hard work arises from the physical or mental levels but these 2 levels are not the true power levels. When you function in connection with the Self, the deepest, most profound and highest vibrational level of life, abundance in all forms manifests.

When you are in direct alignment with all the laws of nature, your thoughts, words and actions will be supported by all of nature and everything that you do will create the highest and most profound impact and result. Alignment is vibrational. You can be aligned with the vibration of lack and limitation or you can be aligned with the vibration of abundance. That will determine the results you receive. Vibration determines outcome.

Life is set up to bring forth abundance. Prana, life force, is the nature of life to move into creation and to manifest. When you live in resistance you choke off the flow of life fore, the source of abundance. Resistance is found in grasping and pushing away. It is found in attachment and aversion. This is the value of acceptance, allowing and surrender. They remove resistance and allow life force to flow, fully supporting all that you do. It aligns you with abundance.

You can see that there are different levels of power. The atomic level is infinitely more powerful than the physical, surface level of life. An atomic bomb is more powerful than fire. You will also experience that when there is strong emotion behind something it becomes very powerful. Life basically has 4 levels of power; 1) the physical, surface level 2) the mental level 3) the feeling, emotional level and 4) the Self, which holds all power. Each level has a corresponding vibrational resonance, the physical being the lowest vibration and the Self being the highest. The deeper you connect, the higher level of vibration you achieve, the more power you connect to and the more powerfully you manifest.

In every moment of your life, life is presenting you with possibilities. When you live in lack and limitation, you live in a narrow and confined state of consciousness. That state prevents you from even seeing the possibilities, let alone seizing upon the possibilities and creating something greater. When you live a high vibrational life and in an expanded state of awareness you are able to see and take advantage of all possibilities. You draw to you all that is required to turn possibilities into reality.

Power and awareness arise and manifest through 4 levels, initially arising from the spiritual level of the Self, moving into the emotional level, then into the mental level and finally into the physical level.

Generally you go through your day habitually; getting ready in the morning, working, being at home in the evening and going to sleep. There is little mindfulness about where your power is coming from. You spend your work time functioning on a limited number of power levels, and for most that is the physical and mental levels.

At the deepest levels is the greatest power, creativity, possibilities and alignment. These qualities are most responsible for the manifestation of abundance in life. The greatest aspect of intelligence and power directly arising from the Self is intuition. This aspect of the Self is a pulsation of the nature of abundance. Intuition creates the leading edge, the most expanded understanding, on all levels.

But all 4 levels are necessary for maximum abundance to manifest. Someone may be extremely emotionally creative but not able to mentally put a plan together to optimize that creativity or physically carry that plan out. Someone may be physically very adept but not creatively optimize that talent. Someone may be a creative CEO with a great, innovative plan but lack inner connection to the Self and unhinge all that they created. Conscious access to the Self and balance of all 4 levels yield optimal abundance.

1. Recognize on what level you are mainly operating. It could be 1, 2, 3 or all 4 levels.
2. Recognize that functioning on all 4 levels holds the greatest power.
3. Recognize if you are functioning habitually you need to bring mindfulness to your work.
4. Recognize consciously that when you are connected to your Self and your spiritual and emotional levels you have greater contact to power, creativity, possibilities and alignment.
5. Recognize and identify what practices, focus and action will develop and bring forth untapped levels and expand the manifestation of abundance in your life.
6. Recognize the work required to access and balance all 4 levels to fully manifest abundance in your life.

You live much of your life at war with life. You find your reactions are often in opposition to ‘what is’. You resist what life is trying to bring to you and where it is trying to lead you. You miss possibilities. Your war with life takes you into a state of disconnection. War is also a result of the belief that there isn’t enough to go around and internally that you aren’t enough or worthy. Peace is the result of the understanding that life will supply you with the perfect people, places and things that support the experience that will expand your evolution in the best way. Peace is a symptom of connection, authenticity and acceptance.

There is a choice in every moment of life to create war or align with peace. Peace is actually not created. It exists within the fabric of the essential nature of life. It is an aspect of the essential Self. The Self is full. It contains all power, all possibilities, all awareness and all that is necessary to support life. In that fullness and knowing there is peace.

Peace is the opposite of struggle. There is struggle when you don’t surrender to all that life is creating for you – when you are not open to receive. There is a strong tendency to judge life as less than or to compare your life to another’s life. The realization that you are in the exact place, with the exact people and living out the exact situation you needed to in order to expand sets you free and allows peace to be realized. That doesn’t mean you don’t decide that your life needs to change at certain points. But seeing that you are being taken care of and supported in ways that will create the perfect expansion allows you to watch and witness life’s unfolding.

Attachment to outcomes is one of the main opponents to peace. Attachment to outcomes limits what life has in store for you. You think you want life to look a certain way and for you to have certain things. You become attached to the outcomes of your desires thinking that is the road to your happiness. But life is creative intelligence flowing through and as you. It is supremely intelligent about what is necessary for your highest good. When you become attached to outcomes you struggle against life and disturb your peace. Control is an aspect of attachment. When you try to control life and not surrender, you limit possibilities and create resistance to peace. When you surrender to the flow of life, you move into alignment with life and rest in the peace that is the essential fabric of life.

You probably aren’t even aware that you spend much of your time at war with life, in opposition to ‘what is’ and in resistance. It’s easier to see it when you hate your job and you get cranky and all worked up about it. But sometimes it is very subtle. Maybe you are feeling a little sad and you want that feeling to go away. Instead of looking deeply into the emotion you resist it and distract yourself.

It’s important to see how you are in resistance or attachment and maybe it has become a habit and how you live your life. Because peace is woven into the fabric of life, if you resist life or remain attached to certain outcomes, you will not experience peace.

As life is always flowing and expanding, whenever you are not flowing and expanding you will feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied. You will always want something else and remain in a dissatisfied outward focused search for peace.

1. Recognize when you don’t see life as perfect. You will probably find you react with resistance; grasping for something different or pushing away what is happening now. Find acceptance.
2. Recognize that life is always moving into more and expanding. When you are expanding with life you will feel peaceful.
3. Recognize that peace is an inner experience and that when you are inwardly connected you will find that peace is there.
4. Recognize what outcomes you are attached to and see how that attachment affects your peace of mind.
5. Recognize that when your mind is not at war and is calm you feel the peace of the Self and that the peace of the Self is an aspect of who you are all the time.
6. Recognize that you have a mindful choice to remain in resistance or to surrender, allow and accept and move into your peace.

When pure awareness moves into creation it assumes the role of creative intelligence. That movement into creative intelligence is a pulsation of love. Love is the essential movement of the unified principle of life. But that movement of life from unified universal consciousness into creation allows for the illusion (maya) of separation to take place. The one becomes many. The reality is that the many always remains one but you experience it as many. This is the basic ignorance, the basic suffering of life. Living in the illusion of separation is the root of all suffering, and separation is the root of attachment and resistance.

When you find love in another, it is always an internal experience of inner connection. Any time you experience love you are touching the essential nature of your Self. You are recognizing that the separation you are living in is minimizing itself and you are experiencing a small amount of lessening of separation and an increase in the reality of unity. The experience of unity is love.

This unification is experienced in many degrees in your life. You love your pet, you love your partner, you love nature, and if you are so inclined, you love God. What these experiences are pointing to is that your pet, your partner, nature and God are providing the impetus that triggers you to internally move, to some degree, from separation to unity. This is one of the reasons you seek someone to love, why you could be so devoted to God or why you feel unconditional love for your dog or cat. They have the power to allow you to end separation momentarily within yourself.

The experience of pure love, as an aspect of the Self, is beyond what most people realize is even possible. In pure love exists the unity of all that is. In pure love, there is no possibility of separation. It is beyond anything the mind can conceive. It is independent and relies on no other thing. It is the subtlest and finest emotion at the finest relative level of existence. It is the initial movement of life and it is fully contained in the Self.

There are only 2 basic emotions in life; love and fear. Love is unity and fear is separation. You spend your entire life trying to understanding this and move from fear to love. It is the basis of your path to wholeness, to wellness, to abundance, to well-being, to peace and to joy. It is the heart of the spiritual path. It is Self-recognition, Self-realization, illumination and enlightenment.

This is because love is the essence of Self. If it is hidden, that void generates your core wound. The pain of unworthiness arises when Self-love is hidden. A deep sadness sets in. Depression, meekness or pride follow.

As life moves into creation, love permeates every level. It is the power of the emotional support of life. It is what you seek in your desire for acceptance and desire for a relationship. It is all simply a desire to return to Self and wholeness.

1. Recognize that your main desire and impetus in life is your return to love and wholeness. Everything you do revolves around that. Your relationship, your desires, your expectations, your actions and your goals are all tied up in this.
2. Recognize that what you seek is the Self, pure love. You are always seeking to move from separation into unity, from resistance to acceptance and from control to surrender and love.
3. Recognize that love can be followed back to its source. Identify when you experience love and consciously follow it back to its source.
4. Recognize that the love you experience in people, places things or events is always arising from within you.
5. Recognize that it is love that is the unifying principle of life.

6. Recognize that universal love is capable of focusing and that you can be the conduit for love in the world and to another individual.