When my spontaneous awakening happened and all this information was suddenly in my head, there was an immediate shift in my perspective of my life, my past, and the world around me. Within a few months, I’d become a dramatically different person living a dramatically different life. The only thing I was really doing differently was cultivating the ability to hear the voices of my higher self and Spirit and then trusting what I heard. What surprised me most was how easy it was and how rapidly it developed. I’d lived more than 40 years with high anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and frequent bouts of depression. All of that evaporated, not as a goal but as a by-product. That’s what convinced me that the messages I’d received were true: it came so naturally, unlike everything else I’d tried over the years.
Remembering who we are reveals to us a number of truths that relieve our burdens far more effectively than our distractions and manufactured excuses ever did. That’s the reason for applying what’s written on this site: it works extremely well despite how counter-intuitive the practices can be from the ego’s perspective. That’s the topic of this post: the outcomes of living in connection with Spirit and Higher Self. Rest assured, this way of life is not about denying ourselves pleasure or becoming moralistic. We simply become able to fill our lives with what pleases and thrills us most rather than guessing at what will do that (and being wrong). There are a lot of things we won’t be anymore – like selfish, suspicious, avaricious, deceitful, and petty – but not because we’re imposing an external set of morals, values, or expectations on ourselves. We simply stop being the things that we no longer feel the need to be, and the primary thing we stop being is fearful.
What we become is a natural consequence rather than something we struggle to attain via a process we don’t enjoy (i.e., no white-knuckling). In fact, living this way is so surprisingly enjoyable that we end up being too immersed in the present to worry much about outcomes. All the good stuff just happens, more than you’d think and faster than one would think. I tried numerous therapists and medications throughout my life. I spent countless years of pouring my effort into workbooks and techniques like CBT had not accomplished that. That effort certainly helped, but it required becoming vigilant about practicing the techniques instead of being vigilant about protecting myself from any experience that might cause pain, so I was still exhausted. All in all, the return on investment wasn’t great and I still wasn’t happy. I was less reactive to the painful experiences that kept coming at me, but my life continued to bring more suffering and fear than joy or peace.
When I remembered who I am, it was a completely different experience. I started seeing everything differently and so I acted differently without having to try. Instead of fearing what something might mean or what someone might intend and preparing for the worst to feel protected, I knew what was happening and there was just nothing to be concerned about anymore. Following the direction of my higher self and conversing with Spirit felt so good that I did it constantly – it wasn’t a fight like all the changes I’d made before; I was doing what I wanted to do because it felt good.
The only challenging times occurred when something hit my ego’s most sensitive triggers, but in those cases, my connection with my higher self was so strong that the feelings of fear and pain passed fairly quickly. My higher self comforted my ego until my awareness came back to the bigger picture I now knew to be true rather than the one relatively tiny event. One of the most significant aspects of that bigger picture was the realization that triggering occurred because I was taking an event personally rather than recognizing that the person in question was still living in the equivalent of a hamster’s exercise ball – an ego-ball, if you will – and expressing what was going on in their own mind and experience.
Here was another soul playing out their own role in the game. They’re where I used to be – trapped in the invisible ego-ball they don’t even know exists and so can’t break out of. How could I be angry with someone who was desperately wishing to be where I was, especially when I remembered how it felt to be where they were? When you’re enjoying paradise, it’s pretty difficult to be angry at all the people who are toiling in the trenches and wishing they were in paradise.
Most of my negative emotional responses just faded away and instead, the unpleasant emotion I struggled with most was survivor’s guilt (which was a big part of discovering and pursuing my life’s purpose to share what I’d learned). Instead of feeling the need to defend myself to people and resenting their refusal to admit they’d wronged me, I now saw clearly that they were just interacting with the inside of their own ball and all the junk it was reflecting back at them, getting thrown around every time their ball crashed into something, living in a perpetual state of confusion and fear because the thing causing all the trouble isn’t visible to them.
The interior of the ball is just a mirror reflecting back all of our own fear, and we don’t realize that wall is between us and the rest of the world. We think we’re seeing everything around us clearly and for what it really is when our view is completely distorted by something we don’t even know exists. It’s like saying “rose-colored glasses” to mean perceiving life through an optimistic lens, except instead of rose-colored, it’s mud, and instead of glasses, it surrounds us entirely. We think we’re being realistic and practical when we tell an idealist to take off their pink glasses because we’re completely oblivious to our perpetual distortion. It’s a lot like this:
Except we don’t know we’re in a ball that’s interfering with our vision and action. Those of us who start constructing it very early don’t have any concept of the world and life being any other way. Those of us who started later remember childhood nostalgically but also believe that our perception then was the illusion and our perception now is what’s real.
The bad news is that the door only has one knob and it’s on the inside; we’re stuck until we let ourselves out, which is impossible as long as we don’t realize the ball exists. The good news is that the door isn’t locked. As soon as we become aware of the ball and choose to turn the knob, we’re free. We can decide to climb back in any time we want, of course, but it won’t ever be invisible again.
It’s pretty mind-boggling how completely different life and the world around us become when we aren’t in that ball anymore. I mean, if the guy in that picture above starting yelling at us, insulting us, and expressing contempt for whatever he thinks is wrong with how we look or move from his perspective, we’d feel more awkward than threatened. Our instinctive response would be, “are you stuck? Can I help you climb out of there?” He’d call us crazy. If we tried to describe the thing he’s in that we’ve already escaped from, his contempt would grow along with his certainty that we’re the crazed fools with distorted vision.
Anger and hurt feelings just aren’t ways we’re likely to react, especially when our higher self is driving. After escaping the ball and experiencing life this way, we become confident in who we are and what we know what to be. When we can see so clearly what others are trapped in, their opinions of us and the world just don’t have the impact they once did. It would be like a deaf person criticizing your singing: it’s not insulting, it’s just weird.
I think the strongest negative reaction I’ve had to someone yelling at me from inside their ego-ball while refusing to even hear about the ball, let alone unacknowledge it, has been exhaustion and exasperation. No matter how much we love the person and want to free them, there’s always something more worthwhile and enjoyable that we could be doing with our time and no good reasons to keep standing there tilting our head at the awkward display. I’ve also reached annoyance when their misconceptions are leading to decisions that will actually impact my life in some way, but even that doesn’t cause real concern. I know whatever situation they create will be easier for me to handle than it will be for them and that the way I live my life will create outcomes that serve my highest good regardless of their choices. The annoyance is only because there are more fulfilling ways to spend my time. Still, I remain aware that Spirit makes use of anything and everything, so perhaps the events that play out will prove to be fulfilling after all.
Another aspect of the invisible trap: once we’ve built that ball and start rolling around it, it starts getting muddy. When we look around, we see all this ugliness and we think it’s part of the world we’re in. We don’t realize it’s just another part of a thing we’ve created that we keep maintaining and building onto. Our vision grows increasingly distorted and our choices get worse. Our ball-trap keeps picking up more muck, we keep adding to our structure to protect us from the muck, our vision distorts further, ad infinitum. We try to get away from the muck, but it’s OUR muck and it goes where we go. The harder we try to run from it, the more additional muck we generate. With every bit of muck that accumulates, it becomes more difficult to see all the beauty in the world and people around us.
Our ego keeps thinking it has identified the problem(s) and trying solutions. Things get worse instead of better because we’re acting on patchy, garbled information while believing that we have the whole story and complete clarity about it. Here are the essential and somewhat paradoxical facts of the very complicated situation that we have constructed for ourselves:
- We’ve built walls for protection, thus maintaining a wounding sense of isolation.
- We run from what we fear is the painful truth of who we are, when the truth of who we are is what frees us from suffering.
- The more we suffer, the more we wall out anything that might cause suffering.
- The more we wall out what we fear, the more we wall ourselves in with what we fear most: ourselves.
- Ultimately, we all reach our own unique point where we have suffered long enough and run far enough that the only option left is to simply sit with what is, to be with the one that has been patiently waiting for us all along – our self – and surrender to the truth of it.
- That truth sets us free. In essence, we spend our lives running away from one thing in pursuit of something else when it’s actually the thing we’re running from that will give us what we’re seeking, not the thing we’re pursuing.
In a state of surrender, we become willing to accept the truth instead of fight it. All along, we’ve been certain this would be a moment that overwhelmed us with despair, that we’d be giving up any chance of ever feeling good about ourselves and living a happy life.
Instead, we discover the truth is what sets us free. When we connect with our higher self – the essence of who we truly are, we become aware that none of the things we’ve been afraid actually exist in any way that matters. All the fears of our ego that have caused our suffering evaporate. Our need for protection is revealed as an illusion and the mucky ball that trapped us dissolves. As we emerge, we can look back and see that the very suffering we perceived as unjust persecution was creating exactly the situation we required to provide us with what we’d been desperately chasing all along, believing it to be outside of us. We can now see that every “bad” thing that ever happened was serving our highest good, that it all happened so we could experience true and lasting love and joy.
There’s a momentary leap of faith when we choose to face ourselves which is why most of us have to try everything else that doesn’t work first. Once we become willing to truly let go of all our ideas about pride and control, when we embrace the simple truth of who we are, that’s when everything falls into place in such a way that what develops could never be called “blind faith.” We have instead profound clarity, deep certainty, and utter confidence.