Awareness always is. There is never a time when you are not aware. Even when you sleep and dream, you are aware that you have slept and dreamt. Awareness is the one constant in life. It is even constant after this life, for consciousness—awareness—continues even after the body has stopped, although it is no longer connected to the body. You are this that is conscious of life and of everything coming and going. When your attention is placed on this rather than on the comings and goings in life, you feel at peace with whatever is coming and going.

This that you are is content with life however it shows up. It is even content to have the experience of an ego that argues with whatever shows up. It participates in life by being aware of it, but unlike the ego, it doesn’t try to control or change life. Consciousness just is, and it allows whatever is to be the way it is for the time being, since life is always changing into something else.

When you are aware of yourself as Awareness, you have a very different sense of yourself than when you are aware of yourself as the ego. When who you are seems to be the ego, you have a specific definition of yourself: I am this but not that; I am male but not female; I am smart but not stupid; I am short but not tall. You fit into some categories and not others because the mind categorizes “you.” It defines you in a particular way, and this definition changes frequently. In making these distinctions, the mind separates you from others. It makes you distinct from others. That is its job, and it does it very well.

The Awareness that you are, on the other hand, cannot be defined. It has no gender, no physical dimensions, no this or that. It is not distinct, in fact, from anything that is being observed. Although you might experience it as a witness of life, because that is how the mind conceives of it, it is not a witness, although it does witness life. When we are first learning to separate ourselves from the mind, it is helpful to conceptualize a witness who is observing the mind, but this witness is not Awareness; it is just an idea that represents Awareness. To witness the mind, you need awareness, but making Awareness into a witness is making it into a thing, which it is not.

Learning to witness your own mind is the first step in becoming free of your egoic self and its conditioning. But to get free takes more than witnessing. If you witness your mind and still believe it, you are no more free than when you were identified with it. To be free of your conditioning, you also have to be able to see the falseness of the conditioning. Even so, there is one more very important step.

Many people are aware of their mind and the falseness of it, but still are not free of the egoic mind because they are still giving their attention to it. The experience is like watching a bad TV show, acknowledging that it is bad, but still staying glued to the set. Until you put your attention on what is true rather than keeping it on what is false, you will not be free. You will still be experiencing your egoic self more than your true self.

To be free of the egoic self requires moving your attention away from the conditioning and onto the truth of who you are. It requires that you know yourself as Awareness and see and respond to life as Awareness. From this place, your thoughts are only a small part of what is going on in any moment, not the main show. Awareness takes in all of life, not just what is showing up on the TV screen of your mind. True freedom comes from stepping back from the TV screen of your mind to a place where you can take in the rest of the room and what is going on in the rest of the room.

By becoming aware of what else is showing up in life in this moment, you can for once begin to really live in this moment and respond to it naturally, uncluttered by your mental commentary and the ego’s desires for this moment. You are just in the moment without the ego’s influence on it. Freedom is when the voice of the ego no longer dominates and colors the landscape of life. Rather it is one small aspect of this landscape—one other thing that comes and goes in this landscape. It becomes impersonal—something in the landscape that has no more personal relevance than the bird’s song or the temperature of the room. It is experienced, but not experienced as you.

Then it is possible to experience the Experiencer—the true Self that is behind all life and behind your particular life. This Experiencer is in love with life and when you let it live you, you are in love with life and your actions and words express that. Freedom from the egoic Self brings a final relaxation into the true Self and the possibility of being that in the world instead of the egoic self. What a relief!



When you make a choice, sometimes it is spontaneous and not thought about, like when you jump out of bed in the morning, and sometimes the options are laid out, examined, and decided on. These are two different experiences of choosing—one just happens and one is a decision.

Decisions always come from the mind. A decision is the result of making up your mind (an interesting turn of phrase). To the egoic mind, questions feel like problems that need to be solved by making a decision. There is a feeling of needing to make a decision, and almost any decision will do. To the egoic mind, making a decision is important because that ends the discomfort of not knowing. You make up your mind. You make it up!

The egoic mind wants to know, and it wants to know now. It has no patience with not knowing. Its job is to know, even if it doesn’t, even if it is impossible to ever know. It is determined to know, to decide, and to give answers. Its very existence depends on knowing because if you stop turning to it for answers, it can’t thrive. If you catch on that it doesn’t know the answers to most of your questions, it is doomed. So it fakes it.

To the egoic mind, there is no sense of there being a right time to make a decision. To it, the right time is always now. It needs to know now. It makes you feel that it is wrong to even have a question, so it needs to make questions go away as soon as possible. It seems wrong to not know. How can you not know where to live, what you want to do for a living, what to eat for dinner, where to go on vacation? In the egoic state of consciousness, not knowing produces shame, and the longer you don’t know, the more incompetent or inadequate you feel.

Because of this urgency to know, the egoic mind has developed many strategies for knowing. Asking others is a primary one: “What do you think?” You just go with someone else’s answer. Research can be a variation on this: you research what others have chosen and what they have to say about that choice. This strategy appears less risky and more intelligent than just asking someone else. Then there is more serious research: you study the subject and draw conclusions from that. You list the pros and cons and then decide. The mind uses information to make decisions.  

This way of making decisions has its place. It depends on what kind of question you are asking. If you are trying to decide on what kind of flowers to send your aunt, then it may be helpful to ask your cousin what your aunt likes best. Or if you need flowers that will last especially long for a bouquet you are putting together, research will give you the answer. However, other questions are not as suitable: Do I send flowers to my sick aunt or do I go visit her? How are questions like these answered? How do you decide something as simple as this? And what about the bigger questions: who and when to marry, whether and when to have children, what career, where to live?

The egoic mind pretends to have answers even to these bigger questions. If you ask it, it will give you an answer or at least tell you how to find one. In the egoic state of consciousness, you turn to the mind for answers because you may not recognize any other possibility. It seems like you are the one running your life, so you must choose. However, something else is co-creating your life along with the egoic mind. It allows the egoic mind to have the influence it does, but all along it is offering other choices, other possibilities, than what the mind is offering. You are free to follow what you think or to follow these other possibilities. They are not immediately obvious, however, because they are not usually introduced through the mind but arise in the moment.

The greatest interference to becoming aware of these other possibilities is making another choice too quickly. The impatience of the egoic mind results in quick decisions, which often take you somewhere other than where essence would take you. To discover where essence wants you to go, you often have to wait for the answer to arise in its own time.

When it is time, the answer arises spontaneously out of the moment, and you often act on it just as spontaneously. When knowing does finally happen, it happens all of a sudden, but it may take days, weeks, months, even years to get to that point. Knowing shows up all of a sudden, but you can’t predict when that will be. You just have to wait for it, and the egoic mind doesn’t want to wait.

When this sudden knowing happens, you know it because of how it feels. There is a sense of relaxation, relief, peace, elation—a yes—about a choice. Gone is all confusion, resistance, and doubt about what to do. It is clear and obvious. You know. This knowing feels solid, real, and unshakable.

When a decision is made from the egoic state of consciousness, the experience is a very different one. There is not the same relief, relaxation, or peace about it. The mind usually continues to think about it: “Did I make the right decision? What if …? Maybe I should ….” It has decided, but this doesn’t end the deliberation. This lack of peace is a sign that a decision was made by the mind. In the flow, decisions arise—they are not made—and they stick, while in the egoic state of consciousness, they are frequently changed.

There is a big difference between thinking and then deciding, and not knowing and then suddenly knowing. The difference is that no thinking is involved. That is a big difference. It might be hard to imagine life without deciding, but it goes much better than deciding before it is time to decide.

There is a reason for the timing of this sudden knowing. There is wisdom behind providing clarity when it is provided and no sooner. You learn to trust the wisdom of the moment—of the flow. Rather than “pushing the river” by choosing before it is time to choose, you wait and listen and trust that you will know when it is time to know, and no sooner. Essence operates on a need to know basis: you will know when you need to know and not before.

You learn to trust this. You can relax. All is well. When you allow it to, your life will be lived by the real you—by essence. The ego is out of a job. It still has a place, but now it is put in its place. It is not what it pretended to be, and it doesn’t get to be that anymore. The rewards are great for this discovery: peace at last, happiness—and fulfillment because the flow knows where it is going. It has always had a purpose. Now you can better align with that, and that will make you much happier than anything the ego could have created for you.

To purchase Return to Essence in paperback or as a download, go to the Books page on radicalhappiness.com.


How we look is so important in this culture. It becomes how we see ourselves. The image in the mirror seems like that is who we are. We carry this image around with us inside our heads, and when we think of “me,” we think of this image. We have many self-images, and the image of what we look like is perhaps the strongest. We are most identified with this self-image in part because identification with the body is so strong and because the mind needs something to pin the idea of “me” on. This inner picture of ourselves strengthens and holds in place the idea of “me.” Without this inner image of what we look like, the idea of “me” weakens and can’t be maintained as easily.

You may have experienced this at times in your life when you were away from mirrors for a while, like when you were camping or in a more primitive living situation. You begin to experience yourself more as you truly are than as an image you hold in your mind of yourself. There is a big difference between the experience of yourself and the experience of the image of yourself. The image is an idea. It’s flat, unalive, and you have to work hard to maintain it (especially without mirrors to help you), while the experience of yourself is mysterious and ever-present. It is just there; you don’t have to work at producing it. It is experienced as what is looking out of your eyes. This is very mysterious—what is this that is looking out of your eyes? Just take a moment and experience what it is like to look out of your eyes and experience yourself that way. What a different experience this is from imagining what you look like in your mind’s eye.

When you experience yourself looking out of your eyes, you experience your body very differently than when you imagine your body or when you see it in the mirror. Stop a moment and just look at the miracle that is your body with your eyes, without any comments or thoughts about your body. What do you experience? You are likely to experience the body as something apart from yourself, something you look upon with amazement. Whose hand is that? Whose leg is that? The body appears to be more of a vehicle for who you are than who you are. And so it is. The body is a vehicle for who you really are. The mind pretends that this vehicle is who you are, but the body is only a temporary carrier for the consciousness that is looking out of your eyes.

That’s the truth, and the mind takes us away from this truth through the inner image, which is made possible by mirrors or other reflective surfaces. Without these, you wouldn’t know what you look like. You would just experience yourself without this inner image. Your mind would still form other self-images, perhaps even a made-up picture of yourself based on how people react to you, but it would be much harder to identify with an image that was not constantly being reinforced by mirrors.

We don’t have to get rid of mirrors (although living without them for a while is helpful) to begin to live more from the real experience of ourselves rather than from the image we have of ourselves. We can just see the truth of this and consciously choose to put our attention on what is looking out of our eyes rather than on what we think other people see when they look at us.

This is a dramatically different way of experiencing yourself, and it will allow you to be much more present to life. Maintaining a self-image is hard work, and it interferes with being very present to whatever else is going on. When we give our attention to our self-images and thoughts, we miss so much else that is going on. It may seem like nothing is going on, but that is the mind’s take on every moment: “Nothing’s going on here, so let’s think about something interesting.” The mind doesn’t give life a chance to reveal its richness. When you give life your full attention instead of your thoughts, you discover the happiness and contentment you have always wanted but have never been able to find in the mind’s world. Ideas just can’t substitute for real life.

Although metaphysical understanding isn’t necessary to awaken, it can be useful in counteracting the negative, fearful, and untrue beliefs the ego has about life and God, which keep you tied to the egoic mind and cause you to run from essence when you experience it. Many hold beliefs about life and about God that limit their understanding and keep them identified with the ego and afraid to experience essence and trust life. The ego doesn’t see itself as part of a greater Whole, but as a separate actor that must defend itself against a hostile world. It doesn’t trust life and it doesn’t trust that there is an Intelligence behind life because it can’t know it as it knows other things. The Intelligence—the Oneness—can’t be understood by the egoic mind, and when essence is experienced, the ego is afraid and turns away from it. In order to awaken, there must be some trust in life and belief in the goodness behind life, which comes about naturally through more experiences of essence, such as in meditation.

Beings in other realms exist, and they do affect us. They assist us in our evolution and healing, and they guide us on a daily basis. This is a metaphysical fact, experienced by many throughout the ages who have contact with these realms and beings. If you don’t have a direct experience of this yourself, you have to take this on faith. It really wouldn’t matter if you believed this or not if you held no other negative or untrue beliefs about life, God, yourself, or others, which keep you feeling separate and ego-identified. Metaphysics teaches that other realms and beings exist and that you are not alone and not operating alone. Rather, you and all beings are part of the evolution of the Whole—the Oneness; and this Oneness helps itself out through you and its other manifestations.

Nonphysical beings that reside in other realms are part of the Illusion, or Dream, that is often spoken about in spiritual teachings: The Oneness differentiates and experiences itself through these individualized aspects of itself, both in physical form and in nonphysical form, which eventually evolve back into Oneness. This Illusion includes not only this planet and this humanoid species but other planets, other humanoid species, and all other physical life forms and nonphysical beings on many different dimensions. Why would this vast Intelligence limit itself to creating one planet with humanoid life, one dimension, and one lifetime? The truth is that this Intelligence has created and is creating anything it can imagine, and we and the physical reality we are part of are just one of its expressions.

Both physical and nonphysical expressions of the Oneness are evolving, and they do this in part through service to expressions of the Oneness who are less evolved than they are. Eventually all return to Oneness, but awakening as we experience it in this third dimensional reality is just one step in our evolution, which continues beyond this third dimension. We don’t return to Oneness after awakening on earth, as some have posited, but continue to evolve on nonphysical dimensions.

This knowledge that you are part of a greater Whole, with a destiny to awaken and then serve the rest of the Whole, is a truth that can help counteract the ego’s belief in its self-sufficiency, which keeps it fearful and defensive towards life. Realizing that you have helpers and that you are a helper to others can help you break out of the egoic trance and experience your true nature.

Some teachers who awaken say that this world is an Illusion—a Dream—and that it therefore has no meaning. It’s true that this world is Illusion, in the sense that it isn’t representative of the Whole truth of existence. The Oneness gets lost in form temporarily for the experience that form affords it. The metaphor of this world being a dream is a good one, in that, as in a dream, you wake up from it and realize that you are not the actor in the dream but actually the creator of the dream. Awakening is like that: You realize that you are not who you thought you were but part of the Oneness that created the sense of being an individual. However, unlike dreams, which are often meaningless, this Dream is not devoid of meaning. The Dreamer—the Oneness—is creating it to have an experience and to evolve itself through this experience. It is not a random act but purposeful, both to the individual and to the Whole.

Every individuated form has a purpose within the Whole of creation. Every life is purposeful and meaningful. It enriches the Creator, and the Creator rejoices in this. The purpose of awakening is not to awaken and be done with life but to allow the Creator—essence—to act in this world. When you awaken, your ego stops dominating your actions and essence begins living through you more fully. Awakening is for the good of this Illusion, not an escape from it. A lack of metaphysical understanding might cause you to conclude that life here on earth is meaningless, which is not helpful because there is work to be done here. Essence uses us to play and work in this reality and to serve those who have not awakened yet. If you understand that life is meaningful, then you will find the meaning and joy that does exist in life and you will do what you came here to do. This truth aligns you with the Love that is behind all life rather than with the ego’s sense of separation and fear.

Understanding that nonphysical helpers are involved with us and helping us heal, carry out our life purpose, and learn our lessons can help us live the life we were meant to. One of the things we might be meant to do in this lifetime is awaken. Nonphysical helpers can play a role in helping us heal our conditioning, which is often necessary in order to detach from the egoic mind. If we are aware that they are there to help us, we can ask for their help, and it will be given to us fully. If we are not aware of or open to them, they can only help us so much. When we are very involved in negative thoughts and feelings, they have difficulty reaching us because we are in a sense saying yes to the negativity and no to their help. But if we ask for help from them to move out of negativity, we will receive that, both energetically and intuitively. They are able to work in our energy fields to release negativity, and they are able to give us insights intuitively that help us heal.

Healing is part of preparing for awakening because a negative mind and negative feelings are very difficult to detach from. They keep us tied to the egoic mind. Negative thoughts are more compelling than positive ones, so it is difficult to awaken from a negative mind and remain awake. There are some rare individuals who have accomplished this, or so it seems, but more likely than not, they are walk-ins, or souls who have walked into a body as another soul has opted out of it. For most, awakening is a slow process of learning to detach from the egoic mind and live from essence. Healing emotional wounds and neutralizing negative conditioning make it easier to move from the ego to essence and stay there.

What you do does matter. You do have a choice, once you see that you are not the egoic mind. Once you have gained enough detachment from the mind to see it for what it is, then you can choose whether or not you will listen to it. The more you choose essence over the egoic mind, the stronger essence becomes in your life and the weaker the egoic mind becomes.