Visit Gina’s new blog at www.ginalake.com. It’s called “Reflections from Another Dimension about Being Happy in this One” by Theodore on the sixth dimension, transmitted to Gina. Every day she has been posting something about awakening and living in the now.


Special offers:

1. New offer: If you buy 5 copies of any of Gina’s books or Nirmala’s (her husband’s) on Amazon.com, you can receive a free spiritual mentoring session with Nirmala. Please email a copy of your Amazon receipt to nirmalanow@aol.com and mention the free mentoring session. See Nirmala’s website, www.endless-satsang.com, to find out what his mentoring sessions are like.

2. If you buy Gina's latest book Embracing the Now: Finding Peace and Happiness in What Is on Amazon (preferably through a link to Amazon on radicalhappiness.com), you can have a free MP3 recording of the May 2008 Boston Intensive (4 hours). Email the Amazon receipt (copy and paste it into an email or forward the receipt that Amazon emails you) to Gina at ginalakenow@aol.com.

 




This may sound obvious, but you have to want happiness to have it. You have to want to be happy more than you want to be “you” (the egoic self), with all your stories, beliefs, opinions, judgments, dreams, and memories. Happiness will never be found in being “you,” not even in being a better, improved version of “you”; it can only be found in losing your self—losing all thoughts that relate to the “me”—and finding your true self.

This is the price to be paid for happiness. Happiness isn’t attained by working harder on improving yourself or working harder in general or by having more money, more beauty, more success, or more friends because you will never have enough of these to make “you” happy. As long as you are focused on this “you,” you will not find happiness because the “you” doesn’t know how to be happy. Only in realizing that you are not this “you” that you think you are will you find true happiness. When you discover who you really are, you don’t need anything to make you happy because you already are.

The real you has always been happy, and it has always been possible for you to feel this happiness. Whenever you stop thinking or stop paying attention to your thoughts, there it is: peace, contentment, happiness, and joy. It turns out that the only thing in the way of your happiness is your thoughts about you. Involvement with this “you” (the egoic self), is the cause of suffering. This “you” and suffering go hand-in-hand: You can’t have one without the other. So, the choice is clear: You can be involved with all your thoughts about you and suffer or you can be involved with essence and be happy by ignoring your thoughts.

Although this choice is clear, it is not easy to make because we love our stories, beliefs, opinions, judgments, memories, fantasies, and other ideas. We love them more than we love love (essence). We want to be who we think we are more than we want to stop suffering. When it comes to choosing between our ideas and love, we often choose our ideas. But there is no blame in this. We are programmed to make this choice. Nevertheless, there comes a point in our evolution, when it is time to wake up out of our programming and make another choice. When this time comes, essence’s pull becomes stronger.

This is the point which most of you are at, or you wouldn’t be reading this. It is time to see that you don’t have to suffer. There is another way to live, but you have to choose it, and doing this is not so easy because of your programming. The hardest thing about making this choice is that it has to be made again and again—in every new moment.

You are never done with making this choice because the ego continues to play its role of protagonist, even long after you have realized who you really are. The egoic mind weakens the less you pay attention to it, but it continues to tempt you with stories, judgments, opinions, fantasies, and memories. You come to see these thoughts for what they are, but they still have some power to draw you in for as long as they do. How long this will continue remains to be seen. It is different for everyone, but many who have seen the truth never fully get the ego behind them.

It doesn’t matter how strong the egoic mind’s voice is as long as you ignore it. You can’t change the programming, but you can change your relationship to it. When you do, the programming does weaken. This is really the only way out of the suffering the ego creates, and no one but you can do this choosing. Waking up is not easy, but neither is suffering. However, suffering is our default position, and there is some comfort in that position because it is so familiar. So we are pulled in one direction or the other until eventually essence wins out.

This moving back and forth between the ego and essence can go on for a very long time, even an entire lifetime. Without the spiritual understanding needed to get beyond the ego, it is a formidable opponent. Once you understand how the ego operates and maintains suffering, however, it becomes easier to choose essence over the ego. Furthermore, the more you choose essence, the stronger its voice becomes. The desire to awaken and to be done with the ego and its suffering becomes stronger than the desire to indulge your thoughts, and then you are on your way to freedom—and happiness.




Everyone experiences essence. How could you not, when that is who you are? But it is covered over much of the time by identification with the false self. Like clouds may cover the sky, the false self covers over the true Self, or essence. And like clouds, this can be to varying degrees: On some days, there are only a few clouds, and on others, it is completely cloudy. Essence is experienced to varying degrees, depending on how involved you are with the egoic mind and how much of your attention is on the present moment.

Your attention might be bouncing back and forth between being present to what you are doing and being involved in thought. Or it could be totally absorbed in thought. Or, if you have meditated or done some other spiritual practice, you may have learned to be present much of the time. The longer you are able to be present, the deeper you go into essence, which is why it is often in meditation that people have the deepest experiences of essence.

The point of meditation and any spiritual experiences that occur in meditation (or outside meditation, for that matter) is to show you the truth and depth of your Being. Experiences of Oneness, Emptiness, and No Self show you the truth; and yet, you have a life to live in this reality, so you return to ordinary consciousness, albeit changed by this experience. After this, you never see yourself or anything else quite the same. You know the truth, and it can’t be forgotten. Nevertheless, this experience can’t be maintained amidst life. It is a true and deeper experience of who you are, but to function in the world necessitates a lesser experience of essence. An experience of Oneness is there very subtly when you are present during your day, if you notice it. Life flows out of it. That attunement to Oneness causes a natural response to the Whole. The Whole calls forth certain responses and actions from you. You are in the flow, and this flow includes the whole of life.

Most people live in their minds and are not very present to life, but many are learning to be more present. In this learning process, you move back and forth between giving your attention to the egoic mind and being involved in, or present to, what you are doing. When you are sufficiently present to what you are doing and not allowing the mind to interfere, you will enjoy what you are doing. However, when you are barely present to what you are doing and mostly attentive to your thoughts, you won’t be enjoying what you are doing. You will probably feel like you just want to get through it and on to something else. That’s a sign you are more identified with your thoughts than with what is actually going on—with real life, or essence. On the other hand, when you find yourself enjoying even the simplest thing or something very ordinary or routine, you can be sure that you are in essence. When this happens, you will notice that you haven’t been involved in thoughts about “me,” how am “I” doing, how is it going, and so on. Those are the thoughts that are problematic, that cause suffering.

Now, it is possible to be involved in using your functional mind and be very at peace. The aspect of the mind that causes suffering is the egoic mind, the aspect that generates stories about “me,” not the functional mind. When you do mental work, you become very focused and lose your sense of “me,” just like when you are meditating or absorbed in anything else. The problem with mental work, however, is that those who do a lot of it become very used to looking to the mind for answers and entertainment. A strong pathway to the mind is developed, and that pathway can just as easily take you to the egoic mind. So, those who are intellectually oriented and do a lot of mental work may have more difficulty than others moving out of the mind and discovering essence. Meditation or physical activity would be especially helpful in balancing this.

You are happy, free, and at peace to the degree that you are aligned with essence and ignore the egoic mind. If you bounce back and forth between the egoic mind and essence but live mostly in the egoic mind, you will experience some happiness, freedom, and peace. If you are involved only a little with the egoic mind, you will feel much peace and contentment. Or this could be said another way: If you are involved with the egoic mind most of the time, you will suffer a great deal; and if you are involved with it only a little, you will suffer only a little. Fortunately, evolution takes everyone toward greater peace, freedom, and happiness and away from suffering. What a blessing!





When you make a choice, commit yourself to that, at least until you make a different choice. What so often happens is that people make a choice and then they don’t fully commit to that—they don’t fully say yes to it. They might complain about it, dream about doing something else, or not invest themselves in it, all the while they are doing it. The egoic mind has a tendency to do this with life—it resists and distances itself from even what it chooses to do.
One way the egoic mind keeps you out of the now is by feeling victimized. It chooses something and then feels powerless to choose differently. It often keeps people in the choices they make either by confusing them with too many options or by shooting down every option that comes along that would be different. On the other hand, the egoic mind might suggest changing constantly as a way of trying to be happy. The mind doesn’t know when to stay and when to go! That’s the truth.

Listening to the egoic mind will make you miserable, whether your choice is the right one, from the standpoint of essence, or not. It questions your choices and brings discontentment into every moment. Even when you are aligned with essence’s intentions, the mind is often complaining, doubting, questioning, and judging because that’s what the egoic mind is designed to do. When that’s happening, it may feel challenging to be true to your choice. The egoic mind will make you miserable in the midst of it if you let it.

By the way, many choices you make are perfectly fine with essence because you learn from everything you do. It’s not that there is one “right” choice, and you have to figure out what that is. There are almost always many possible paths to take that would be satisfying to you (essence). But some choices clearly won’t be aligned with essence, and those are bound to not be fulfilling or make you happy—although you might learn a great deal from them! Essence works hard to steer you toward what will be fulfilling and away from what won’t be, and it lets you know this through your intuition.

The ego, which operates through your thoughts, just doesn’t know what will make you fulfilled or happy, and when you are doing what makes you fulfilled and happy, it doesn’t necessarily recognize that. This is a challenging situation, but less so if you recognize that thoughts don’t have the answer to what to do. Only the silent, subtle communications of wisdom that come from the Heart (essence), which are felt, rather than thought, can be trusted to have the answer about what will fulfill you.

It makes no sense to make a choice and then not fully involve yourself in it; this only makes for suffering. But if you listen to the egoic mind, that is often what happens. You may have the perfect job for you or the perfect relationship for you—the one designed and brought to you by essence—and you may not realize it, and feel discontent and restless. On the other hand, restlessness and depression can also come from not being aligned with essence. These may be messages from essence that you need to make a different choice.

When that’s the case, these feelings (which are not really the same as emotions) will come from deep within you and not from a thought, like emotions do. They won’t manifest as complaints and judgments, but just as a sense that something isn’t right—a sense of “No, this isn’t right for me. I’m not willing to do this. I can’t do this. This isn’t for me.” You might put this sense of things not being right into words and express it as a complaint, and that might create emotions, so this can make for confusion.

This is a little tricky, but with some examination and learning to discriminate between thoughts and intuitive feelings, you can determine for yourself what is true. Then, when you make a choice, be sure to say yes to it as long as you are choosing that. Jump into whatever you have chosen to do or whomever you have chosen to be with, with both feet and do it with all your Heart. If and when the time comes to jump out, if you are attuned to your intuition, you will know it.


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Blessings,
Gina