​CREATIVITY
Your personal creativity is fueled by your imagination. We would define your imagination as the ability to conjure up images, ideas, methods, interpretations and appearances that are unexpected and original. You are able imagine many things that you have not seen or heard of previously; you can innovate because you can imagine.
Imagination is one of the great gifts of being human. It can bridge non-physical realms with physical realms by inspiring you to create. When you really investigate the nature of imagination it becomes clear that imagining something is a magical display of the mind’s ability to organize phenomena that may or may not have any substantiality, into something that appears to be substantial or appears to be able to achieve some state of substantiality.
We suggest that the imagination blossoms when it is given the opportunity to take some form. That means, when you imagine something and you make it, build it, write it, compose it in some way—create it--then the imagination “muscle” gets strengthened. If the imagination never fuels something creative into manifestation, it can languish and find itself diminishing.
We would say that creativity is the outward expression of the usually more seemingly inward energy of the imagination. Imagination renders everything internally, while creativity renders externally. The information used by the imagination comes from perceptions stored in memory most often. No sensations are necessary as input for the imagination to work, in other words it is not necessary to have a flower in front of you to imagine a flower. You can invoke the imagined flower image at any time and in any place.
Creativity flourishes with an experimental attitude, unconditional self-acceptance, self- confidence, and focus which we identify as the four main obscurations of One Life Awareness. By noticing if any of these obscurations are at play, and perhaps hiding your deeper view, letting go of any aspect of these obscurations may result in an expanded sense of your creativity. That is to say, creative expression can cultivate awareness, and can dissolve what might seem to obscure your most natural state of awareness. Creativity often prepares the ground for One Life Awareness to flourish. One Life Awareness is indeed the ground of everything, and may actually be noticed through imagining and creating consciously. It is in this manner, that conscious creation of any sort serves you in your ever-unfolding relaxing into One Life Awareness.
Having an experimental attitude as an outlook beneficial for a creative endeavor might seem obvious. However, many of you approach your creative process with a fixed notion of what must transpire to be successful. We suggest that you eliminate an inflexible fixation on either the process or the outcome in order to experience your presence in the process. Approach your creativity with the idea that it is all an experiment, that whatever you are going to do, you can shift and change and adapt to whatever unfolds as the creation. Try a few things out—don’t be afraid of mistakes and just experiment. This is true for life as well as for any creative project. Make choices in every moment to allow the unfolding as well as to spontaneously incorporate whatever you believe is your plan.
Unconditional self-acceptance is the most important condition to develop for all creative activities. Lack of self-acceptance, feeling full of self-doubt, will cause you to be hesitant and unavailable to your natural state of awareness. For example, you cannot create anything of value if you begin with thoughts of your own lack of value. We are especially speaking to how you handle what might appear to be at first a mistake. If you are self-accepting, this does not unleash a barrage of self-criticism. What seems at first to be a mistake can become the foundation for something new to arise in the process. How you work with your “mistakes” in a creative activity is good practice for how you can work with whatever you might perceive as “mistakes” in your life.
Self-confidence—not arrogance or a lack of responsiveness to what comes up—flows from unconditional self-acceptance. Self-confidence cannot be rigid or fixed, but must underwrite your actions while you also maintain humility. Self-confidence is what allows one action to flow to the next. From this sense of flow a sense of freedom arises. It is easier to fully immerse yourself in your presence and the flow of actions if you are also able to trust and have confidence in yourself. Connect with your presence, your being, and your imagination, and the active part of creating will naturally flow.
Focus is an important piece of creating. Not a narrowing of the aperture kind of focus, but the sense that you have some direction and some ability to “stay on task” and complete in whatever fashion you complete, something that you set out to do. This kind of focus is akin to intention. Focus cannot be contrived or efforted. The focus we refer to will allow completion to feel like a spontaneous result manifests out of enthusiasm rather than out of an intense push to achieve an end.
Now you are always creating. Creativity extends to all aspects of living life. You create based on thoughts, ideas and perceptions, and many of these creations inform the nature of your relative experience in your world all the time. Let yourself imagine something, then consciously create it by bringing it into some kind of form as a practice of Awareness and Presence. Creativity has more to do with your state of being, your Awareness, than really anything else. This is why it is a good practice. If you find yourself feeling un-creative in any moment, stop to see if you are lacking in any of the attributes described. A lack of any of them can be at the center of your feeling stuck or blocked creatively. Look within, dive deep and then just breathe and know you are loved! It is always that simple!

​PREDICTIONS 2019
Catherine Weser—channeled from One Life
UNDOING THE CULTURE---UNDOING THE SELF
With months of challenging energy in 2018 behind you, 2019 begins with a realization that you can transcend your usual, conditioned reaction to the challenges you perceive with One Life Awareness, presence and compassion for all life. That may sound like a tall order, however, we suggest that 2018 has pushed you in many ways to become more authentically you in the midst of ever shifting circumstances. For each individual, there has been some form of required diving deep into the nature of self in order to find stability in a world that rocks and rolls like a dinghy on a turbulent ocean. You have had to find where you stand, what you believe, and know that whenever you became comfortable, it was just a matter of time before you would be uncomfortable again. Most of you found yourselves wanting to withdraw from others, your culture, and the world, because it seemed as there was very little supporting the values and understandings you had gained over the decades that brought you to 2012.
We suggest the cycle of 1999 to 2012 was experienced by most aware beings, those who feel to be on a spiritual path, as a cycle of expansion and growth of One Life Awareness and shared consciousness—a time of realizing humanity is a family of light. While there was some fear of the year 2000 known as Y2K, most of you felt a celebratory entrance into a new millennium with a feeling of its potential for the creation of the new world. This carried on till 2012 when the predictions surrounding 2012 as an end time filled the collective with some foreboding. We would suggest that these predictions were correct if you recognize that after 2012 many things seemed to begin to unravel.
The cycle of time from 2012 through 2025 is a cycle of undoing. You are right in the middle of that cycle now. The culture needs to be transformed, the individual sense of self needs to be revamped, and the energies of the world reflects all of this. Culture is created by the humans who define the nature of the culture and are simply a part of the culture. The sense of shared values and judgments is the important glue that holds the culture together. A disparity of values and judgments in a culture contributes to its breakdown. Similarly, an individual sense of self is created out of defining a self in terms that contrast or align with another seeming individual self. When a majority of people believe there are more differences between people than similarities among them, the very notion of a culture crumbles. The world, all of relative reality, both contributes to and reflects simultaneously the undoings of this culture and also contributes to a sense of a self that also must “undo” itself in order to deeply transform.
In the course of the undoing of a culture, a belief in the contrast between people heightens as common ground erodes. This is evident now in many places all over the planet. At the center of this experience is a belief in scarcity, or “not-enoughness”. You may feel this “not-enoughness” on many levels---spiritualy, emotionally, physically, and even economically, for example. Though the economy in 2018 was touted as very good, most of you found it to be unreliable. This continues in 2019, and you may feel like there are creative openings and possibilities for economic growth in your personal sense of well-being, but along with that sense of things, there will be an anxious feeling that all could go very wrong very quickly. This is because the economy, like other cultural structures, is trying to rebirth itself and allow for a greater One Life perspective to emerge. This perspective is one of generosity and connectedness, and it will take several iterations of transformation before a One Life perspective is more widely held. In times of undoing, what is found to not work is often discovered before what is found to work, and that is what is underway. The economy moves very slowly with occasional reminders that it can transform dramatically in an instant. You will likely see slow changes in your personal economic situation, and see a few instances of the new paradigm of generosity and connectedness emerging as well.
Very noticeable changes in the culture in 2019 occur in the breakdown of trust in social media. Several events create the perception that the most popular social media platforms no longer respect the original motivation to connect people. More and more breeches of confidence occur and people exit social media in large numbers. This is a process which takes many years to complete, but will become evident in 2019. At first, new platforms may show up and seem more popular than old ones, then even the new platforms will be abandoned. In the “not-enoughness” belief that permeates the undoing of the culture, suspicion of others rises and the idea that you have to get yours or someone else will get it causes many people to simply withdraw from any situation which requires any kind of exposure of themselves.
In frustration and disillusionment with the culture, as it continues its undoing, we suggest that there will be a significant number of people who do not withdraw, but instead protest and become much more visible as activists. There seems to be a great divide between those who withdraw and protect, and those who come out to make a loud statement to the world as to their preferences. Of course, everything in between these extreme reactions will also exist, but will not be the majority.
The last few months of 2019 hold the potential for some of the gifts of all of the undoing to be received. A few leaders will appear who will be speaking deeper truths and promoting the new paradigm of a One Life perspective. These leaders will have empathy and true compassion and will become models for those attributes.
Women continue to come forward to play a larger role in the culture, taking over for men in positions of power. This is natural and gradual, yet distinctly a movement that is telling. We see women as necessary in the transformation of the culture, and appropriate in their claiming of positions of influence. Of course, this is not without resistance. You can expect to see an overall adaption to women in power, and likely will be able to appreciate this change.
What can you do to facilitate the re-creation of the culture? Even though 2019 continues overall to be a year of undoing, the spark of light---knowing you can transcend your conditioned reactions to it all---opens up new pathways upon which you can thrive. The idea is to go beyond your conditioned responses to whatever you are experiencing. This is the time to be so vigilant with your perceived state of consciousness as to be able to transcend the ordinary and cultivate the extraordinary. Now we do not mean this in terms of making something “better” or improving with effort or contrivance, we mean having confidence in the notion that you can have a clear and broad view at all times. Remove the blinders and see the whole picture for what it is—One Life unfolding.
To transcend your conditioning means to respond in a new and less predictable way, to understand that if you are operating in a conditioned manner, you are acting in a way that you have become accustomed to, or that you have been rewarded by. These acts become empty over time. The rewards no longer seem adequate, and the feeling of familiarity can become habitual and unconscious. In order to operate in Awareness, you must be flexible and resourceful. You must return to and rely upon One Life, which is unknowable, indescribable, indivisible, nothing/everything, luminous emptiness.
If you are constantly tracking appearances in the relative world and describing them, labeling them better and worse, for example, you can diminish your view so much that you start to falsely believe that you have control over your relative existence generated by a need to dominate. You can fall into the belief that you can manipulate your world and bend it to your will and expectations. This is actually a trap that emerges out of conditioned responses. If you are able to take actions which are unexpected or adaptive, you naturally open up your view to the infinite potential for anything and everything to happen.
You have to surrender to the ever unboundaried sense of One Life unfolding by knowing you are not who you think you are, nor are you who you think you are not. You have no real control, because there is no singular you who holds the keys to the Universe, there is just One Life unfolding. Even with all of your habits and conditioning, attempt to navigate the unfolding as if on an ocean of unlimited potential, but basically without control or any advantage based on appearances.
Initiating new habits can be a very slow process. You are naturally attached to your habits, especially if you have judged them to be positive. And if you have judged them to be negative, you may be even more attached because you can run a lot of energy through your judgments—how bad this is for you, how much you should be able to change, grasping for help and will power to make the change, for example. Sometimes, it can seem like there is no way to make change happen, and in a sense that is true. But you can plant seeds, nurture those seeds and usher them into maturity with patience and loving kindness. Just as the culture must undo itself in order to transform, so must you , in a sense, undo the conditioning and become who you really are.
The nature of your reality is dependent upon the boundaries you place around it. You define yourself and your world in a nano-second on the fly over and over again. If you create your reality from a conditioned reaction to life you end up living within boundaries that become rigid and inflexible. The qualia (individual instances of subjective conscious experience) of your existence, how things might seem to simply be to you, is direct experience, not a belief about the experience. You cannot evaluate an experience without generating labels for the experience and hence calling upon your beliefs about the experience. To have direct experience is to be, in a way, with out labels and evaluations, but instead with Awareness and presence.
We see 2019 as a year that is like a fulcrum—the middle of the undoing phase—with 2025 being the beginning of a new phase of creation. At this mid-point there are inklings of what is to come as well as the obvious breakdown of what has been that no longer serves. Be easy with impermanence. Everything must undo and redo simultaneously. You cannot force anything, but you can influence your perception of all that is with One Life Awareness.
Look to this upcoming year as a year of opportunity to commit to fearlessly allowing the changes which move the culture from a culture of “not enoughness” to a culture where the truth and the knowing that there is always “more than enough” becomes evident. Do this by allowing yourself to act with the wisdom that you are more than enough, to act with consistent loving kindness and acceptance, and confidence that as One Life unfolds, it is always Love that is.  

This is the time of year when friends and family often gather to share holidays. It is the time of year when the ups and downs of life can seem especially potent. It is a good time to reveal to yourself the nature of your emotional strategies, and uncover the deeper One Life Awareness that is who you really are.

There are times you feel good about yourself and times you don’t feel so good about yourself; these are the ups and downs and comings and goings of life as a human. Amidst the ongoing always changing experience of relative existence, emotional strategies appear usually unconsciously. These are the strategies used to try to always feel good, to try to feel loved, and to avoid everything other than “positive” feelings. The strategies take many forms, but have in common the need to prove one’s value and lovability.

“Underneath” all of the strategies, there is steadiness, a reliable emptiness that is always operating exactly as it must, meaning that there's always a sense of reliability even if you cannot name it. This sense doesn't go up and down, or have understanding and then lose it. This sense doesn't question whether people like you or not, whether family is connected to you or not, this sense is not trying to achieve or prove anything. This sense is One Life Awareness. The recognition of emotional strategies as false notions and attempts to identify yourself according to your expectations and beliefs about who you are, while not separate from One Life Awareness, can facilitate a deeper knowing of who you are.

For example, you believe yourself to be a certain kind of person—a spiritual person, an emotionally aware person—but also you can believe that you are unworthy, lacking, or naïve. These beliefs are supported by evidence gathered over the years and develop into important concepts that must be defended and maintained. The defense and the maintenance of ideas about who you are become the foundation of the emotional strategies you employ.
An emotional strategy is used in an attempt to release yourself from discomfort usually. You feel bad about something you said or another said to you, and it keeps coming up for you to examine. The strategy might be to try to disprove whatever you believe, or the strategy might be to try to suppress the whole incident and put it into some imaginary vault somewhere in your consciousness. Eventually you find that every strategy will not work—cannot work—because it is all insubstantial. One concept on top of another idea, held together with strategies and feelings, all of which are not the reliable emptiness that is One Life Awareness.

When you let go of the strategies, knowing without much doubt that they are not necessary or vibrant, when you come to an ease in allowing One Life Awareness to arise in the midst of all of your strategies, you relax into who you are. You are who you are and whatever unfolds around you is exactly what must be, and all is what it is.

We are not promoting some nihilistic or esoteric philosophy, we are suggesting just being who you are, by not getting caught up in judgments and inner soliloquies about who or what you think you are. Just notice that thoughts and emotions and ideas try to get your attention and attach you to a place you assume is stable because it is based on something you believe about yourself. The deeper dive reveals that you cannot live your life trying to achieve happiness, simplicity, joy, or even a sense of being loved. You have to live your life as it is, in the perfection that it is, without any arrogance derived from a belief that you can control anything.

You must be willing to consider that whatever you are experiencing is insignificant—even though you may think that that your experience is incredibly important and worthy of countless hours of examination and analysis. You must also be willing to consider that what you are experiencing is important, not in a self-aggrandizing way, but in the sense that experiencing everything is a part of living life. Holding these two views, that you and your experiences may be insignificant and important simultaneously is another version of the paradox of nothingness and everythingness.  It is the paradox of being nothing and everything without contradiction that allows for incredible freedom. If you get stuck in one polarity or the other you are no longer liberated.

​Just realize that being aware, being present, is the simplest thing you can do. Everything else gets very complicated and convoluted. Strategies are always complicated and filled with contingencies. They are not necessary, and furthermore do not work in the way you might hope for. Let go of all of them, even if you have believed in the past that in order to love friends and family, and to believe that they love you, required all sorts of strategies, the deeper knowing is that One Life unfolding is all there is. No effort is required, just love and be loved in ease and grace, and be the One Life Awareness you really are. 

​Feeling overwhelmed is dependent upon maintaining boundaries between what is perceived as your inner world and what is perceived as the outer world. In an attempt to protect yourself from the unpleasant aspects of feeling overwhelmed, you try to tighten up this border in order to withstand the pressure you believe the outer world is forcing upon you. This strategy is used over and over again, until it is found to be of no avail. Usually, it takes many attempts at this strategy, and many failures of it, to get to the place where you are ready to drop the strategy altogether.
The first question to ask yourself is, "who is in charge of determining where this boundary exists?" Look around, is there a sense of you that wants to be protected and perhaps hide from a world that seems full of agony and trouble? Why did the world, the seemingly outer realms of reality, become so distressing? This is especially appropriate given what the world "out there" seems like today.
From our perspective, a natural tendency is to enforce the idea that there is a world "out there" responsible for the suffering that has nothing to do with the experience of self in the bubble of the inner worlds. This notion becomes reinforced by every aspect of "real life" lived. There are wars, and starvation and misery as far as your eye can see. Who wouldn't attempt to maintain a sense of separation from all of that? And the idealized version of the spiritual life, living on the mountaintop in peace and serenity, even if in isolation, seems to be the easiest way to maintain the boundary you believe to be necessary.
The deeper dive into all of this reveals that there is no boundary, there is no one in charge of determining where the boundary should be, and most importantly, the illusion of a boundary is not maintainable. Your thoughts are always taking you to one side of the boundary or the other. You are always seeking the peace on one side and rejecting the distress on the other, and this takes you to feelings of overwhelm. For the moment you catch a glimpse of the peace, you can only sense it by simultaneously believing in the distress, that it has been vanquished, and cannot have impact upon you. Over and over again, you are proven wrong. The distress creeps back into your experience, but not because it has more power, because your sense of peace is dependent upon its (the distress) continuing existence. Flipping into the distress just upholds the notion that the counterpoint, peace must live somewhere else.
At some point, you determine the strategy of a boundary doesn't work. This is the moment the complex creation of separation between a you that is victim to the outer influences is no longer victimized. This is the time when you lay down all your fears and realize there is nothing "outside" or "inside" that there is simply and always One Life. The ineffable and indivisible nature of One Life is what frees you from the discomfort of the complexities of seeking peace and avoiding distress in favor of just being who you are, One Life Awareness. This Awareness transcends all the reference points, the "in here" and "out there" positions.
There is no effort in being One Life Awareness, it exists as you right here, right now. There is great effort in attempting to maintain the idea and belief that you have to protect yourself from the power and domination of the outer world in order to maintain the bubble you believe is your inner world of peace and harmony. That effort implies that your inner experience is fragile and falls apart easily if any of the outer world gets in. You can take yourself higher and higher to the top of the allegorical mountain, but you can never escape the outer world, because the mountain and the outer world are totally your invention. They do not exist in any reliable manner. You cannot depend upon any creation to keep your experience limited to a few favored emotional states, you can only become fearless and thereby come to appreciate everything and all that is. This appreciation does not require you to favor the distress, but enables you to see it for what it is, another color in the rainbow of experience.
You may have thought that if you protected yourself from the outside influences of the world, you could avoid pain and grief and all the unpleasantness of the world, yet we would suggest that protecting yourself tends to limit all your experiences, not just the ones you believe you are able to avoid. Life becomes dull and creativity dims if experience is contained or diminished. This is because it is fear that underlies the contraction. In other words, whenever you are motivated by fear, the actions you take initiated by that motivation, do not serve you. They just reinforce the fear.
Another erroneous idea is the notion that you can lessen the distress if you are prepared for it. "Think about the worst that can happen, and then whatever actually happens will pale in comparison." You have probably tried that strategy or heard someone else espouse that idea. The deeper truth is that you will react the way that you will react in the moment, and no preparation for that moment is ever really valid. You cannot numb yourself to pain now to diminish its effects in the future. Pain is pain and is experienced in the moment with very little regard for previous experience of it.
The mystery of being human is always present. At times there will be pain, distress, discomfort. At other times there will be other experiences. Be present with all of it and your life will be full and vibrant. Let go of believing in boundaries and protection as a means of avoiding overwhelm. Instead, adopt an experimental attitude, and you will be able to abide as One Life, knowing One Life Awareness is who you are.

While there are many ways to describe a change in energy patterns experienced as either external or internal, we describe this kind of change as a frequency shift. When the world around you seems to alter, or when you find yourself feeling like you are waking up from a time of being less aware, you are experiencing a frequency shift-a time of transforming the nature of your reality.
 
This time must be seen as something that is going right and not something that is going wrong. You might be feeling slowed down energetically, or you might be feeling speeded up. You might feel even more precisely clear about the nature of your mind, body and heart; or you might feel completely confused or lost. Any way you experience this "shift", the opportunity is to actually unhook all of your attachments to the nature of your reality as you have defined and experienced it in the past.
 
We could go so far as saying you are detaching from a lot of the dualism that is, of course, a necessary aspect of living in the world, but becomes less necessary when you're ready to operate at a new frequency. In the time of transition from one frequency to another, the method of assembling your sense of reality finds a new foundation and sometimes new boundaries. This can cause confusion, but confusion can become the rich realization that everything is new, nothing is known, and there is only the present moment of experience that is in any way real.
 
Sometimes it takes a while for this new reality assemblage point to be comfortable. If it becomes too comfortable, however, it has probably become habitual. Another shift will emerge compelling you to let go of any comfort zone you may have constructed that is actually in the way of your awareness. It is natural to hold on to whatever you might believe is comforting, but aliveness demands impermanence and constant change. So you move from one frequency, become comfortable, then another frequency calls you to change, you let go, and on and on it goes. Awareness is the natural state, and its only requirement is to just let go. This means letting go of everything, not holding on to anything you believe is necessary, but rather believing in just this moment, the here and now.
 
All that is reliable is the deep respect for the mysterious presence that always supports you and that always takes you to wherever you're going next--whether you have any sense of where that is or not. You can't actually communicate where you're going, because the only way you could describe where you're going would necessarily use all of the old tools and terms of the old reality that you're leaving. And so it just can't work. You can't use the old terminology to describe something that you've never experienced before. What this does for you, is it forces you to let go of perceiving that there is some destination that you are heading to. The deeper understanding is that the destination and the beginning are always one and the same thing-the present moment.
 
Jumping out of linear time and linear thinking is part of the frequency shift. The transition from a linearly constructed notion of reality to something much more profound, much deeper, is indescribable. And that may be the hardest part, because the current cultural languaging tends to describe any deviation in the norm as pathology. So when you start operating and functioning in ways that are completely different from what you perceive others are doing all around you, the immediate "go to" reaction is to think that this is pathology, something is going wrong. You may believe you have either got to fix things, or turn back to a previous state of reality.
 
So it's almost as if the rug is been pulled out from under you. But what you're discovering is there wasn't even a floor under that rug. You are expected to fly and you are able to fly, but if you let fear get in the way, flying is going to be difficult. The most important thing is to stop comparing yourself to an idea you have about who you are, usually based in who you think you once were. You can't compare yourself now to who you were even 10 seconds ago. Whatever you believed to be an accurate description of who you were is complete fantasy. In the midst of a frequency shift, you get incredible training for absolute presence in the now. You discover how to experience your reality as constructed in every moment, completely new and alive. The new sense of self is indescribable, functioning at a completely different frequency. And as you relax into it all, it will just become clearer and clearer.
 
As we speak about you, and your ever changing reality and fluid self identity we wish to make it clear that all of One Life is in movement. Nothing is fixed or static. Even a moment, in which you see "a slice" of One Life, does not stand still for any duration of time, and does not represent a location in space. Three dimensional reality is not fixed or static, even if it appears to conform to physical laws and rules that are mostly reliable. These rules have been developed and agreed to by cultures and other groups of people in order to feel safe and secure in a world that can be shared by language. It is really the conforming languaging that is being shared, not the individual experience. In other words, we suggest that the ideas about physical reality and self identity that you share with others emerges out of a shared language and refers to your experience of life, but of course, can never really fully describe your life or your experience of life to another.
 
So let go of trying to describe what may be called a frequency shift, and just imagine that your comfortable way of being and knowing has always been a "house of cards".
As the house of cards tumbles, be patient and do not rush to reassemble it. It might seem like the most natural thing to do, but if you instead relax, the pile of cards in space will gently get up and dance. That is the moment that you fully appreciate that everything is going right, nothing is wrong, and it is One Life, in its constantly shifting, ever impermanent, completely liberated from all prescribed notions of reality. Let go, have confidence in the perfection of every moment, be comfortable with the mystery, and just allow the frequency shift to unfold.

When you're investigating any relationship, you are really investigating yourself. Everyone that you are in a relationship with is a projection of you, a reflection of you, and in some ways a creation by you. Now we don't say that to be flippant and avoid discussing any sense of another person’s contribution to the experience, we say that because as you continue to dive deeply into this notion of who you are, it becomes very clear that others are who you think they are, and you learn about you in relationship, not about anyone else.
 
All that you really have as information about another person is your own thoughts and feelings that are occurring in the moment attempting to describe the nature of that relationship. All that is available to investigate is who you perceive yourself to be in that moment, and everything about the other person is pure speculation. This speculation is often not very accurate or useful. It tends to be based on historical information rather than present experience. It is totally subjective, biased and full of expectations and assumptions.
 
Usually your initial sense of someone is related to the role they seem to play in your life, and your ideas about people who play that role. This is totally normal. You have an idea about what a landlord is like, so you see your landlord through the schema you have which describes “landlord.”  Your mother is supposed to be whatever you have developed as an idea of “mother” and so on. This is true for even the most intimate relationships. You evaluate how well they play the role you have ascribed to them and lose touch with a bigger view of them—hence you lose touch with the bigger sense of yourself. Everyone plays a million roles throughout their lifetime, but are seen by others with just a few of these roles defined. Assumptions and expectations are a product of the way you evaluate how someone else is playing a role in your life. “You are supposed to do this, be like this” are the most common assumptions we are speaking of. Assuming anything about another is unsatisfying for everyone. As both people engage in this, it is impossible to make anyone the cause of it. If you feel like someone is assuming things about you, you might just notice if you have evaluated them according to a role you believe they are supposed to be playing in your life.
 
Of course, no one is supposed to be anything. There are no absolutes about what a relationship should look like, how a person should function, communicate, operate, what actions they should take. These are things that are overlaid upon the present moment experience as idea structures because structure makes you comfortable. Many of you are uncomfortable in the wholeness of a moment and just experiencing the moment. There is an absolutely new display of phenomenon in every second, but it can seem much more comforting to expect something that your mind his conjured up and made into a story about what is real. This is this is the way that you get stuck in your life. You think it's so much more comfortable if everything just meets your expectations--your expectations are reliable and they don't change. Yet just the opposite is the result. You can experience great discomfort because those expectations can't be met, and the fixation on your expectations ultimately limits the opportunity for spaciousness and true liberated experience of reality. This can be very subtle. Subtle or not so subtle, expectations can get you felling stuck in some way.
 
There is a way out of this stuck place. It is actually quite easy. In the process of relating to someone who in that moment you are perceiving as a separate individual outside of yourself, you are projecting an image of a person and interacting with your projection. What you perceive as the space between you and the other person, the space you believe separates you, is actually the space that connects you and the other person. This is of course just a shift in your perspective. The shift in your perspective is what compels you to feel separate, but it can also allow you to feel connected. Separation and connection are just two sides of the coin—the coin being the idea of relationship. Because relationship is the primary aspect of duality, there always seems to be two things relating, however, it is all conjured up by you in the moment. This is not a bad thing—this is the delight of the play of all life. In fact, we would suggest that the reason you live in duality is to enjoy the experience of relating. 
 
Just get the sense that whatever space you think is separating you from anyone else is actually a space that is joining you. Imagine looking through a microscope and suddenly you see that there are all sorts of things in motion and all sorts of space and unless you have some kind of scientifically trained eye you can't really tell what is space and what is some thing. It's just a whole lot of different happenings in some seeming order and some seeming chaos and the divisions between things are constantly in flux. From the deepest level of investigation, you and everyone else are just organisms in a much bigger, more profound, both completely organized and totally chaotic expression. It's important to be able to tune into that notion from time to time because it helps you then to understand anything that happens in the course of a relationship is just part of the One Life expressing.
 
The difficulty in relationships, generally speaking, is that different kinds of emotions and thoughts get triggered in the midst of communicating. You can get invested in the absolute reality of the experience of your thoughts and feelings and believe those thoughts and feelings are caused by the other person. Of course, another person cannot cause anything in you. You react to your own ideas generated about someone—their actions are evaluated by you to have some greater meaning or importance—and you react to your ideas. It becomes easy to ascribe the responsibility of your reactions to someone else, giving the other person the power to “make you” happy or “make you” sad. The moment you believe that in any way, you have lost your perspective and are no longer in the delight of the duality. The delight of the duality needs both sides to have power, to be absolutely equal in any arbitrary sense of cause and effect. One side cannot have the power to cause another side to be a certain way. So there you are stuck in the separation—the space between you and the other—without the capacity to see the connection.
 
Trust that all relationships are really more about self-discovery than anything else. You are not really discovering something about another person, you are discovering something about One Life, about the totality and your own self, completely in the moment you investigate, because you can't really discover anything other than that. It is always the big picture, the pure view, and your awareness of that knowing that is revealed over and over again in relationship. One Life awareness is present even if it seems to be in the background momentarily. In every interaction in every relationship that you have, allow that knowing to become more visible as you become more transparent or spacious, as you let go of holding onto your view in favor of having what we can call the primordially pure view—One Life, no separation, all light.
 
Choosing to live your everyday life mindfully, and that means putting attention on the everyday circumstances, the everyday communications, and the everyday exchanges, having some kind of mental, emotional, or spiritual flexibility, there's an ongoing awareness of the big picture the pure view and that allows for real freedom.
 
Your experience of discomfort in relationship comes from the small story, the small picture, the narrow view.  Have a flexible assemblage point where you can sense the way that you are assembling your reality as being one way in this moment, and another way in another moment, not fixed, not stuck.  You can never be absolutely certain that things are this way and only this way. You must be willing to recognize that things can seem important and significant in this moment exactly as is and the next moment really could be completely different. That is respect for the impermanence of the moment, but it's also a flexibility in understanding that you're putting your reality together on the fly in every moment and it's not something that is absolute, fixed, or static.
 
Upon investigating a relationship, remember you are investigating yourself. Always remember what you learn about you, and keep the biggest view possible. There you will find that love underwrites everything. Love is a noun and a verb, a thing and all the space between things that connects them. Be as loved as you are, and, of course, just be.

YOU ARE A SACRED COLLABORATOR with your world, with spirit, with other, with whatever momentarily seems to be separate from you. The relative nature of the world is an expression of the unlimited and infinite arisings of this sacred collaboration. You are not all alone creating everything you experience. You are instead a magnificent collaborator who moves from the position of being the creator to the position of being the created in less than a blink of an eye and without effort. Just as your breath is effortless and reliable, so is this oscillation between creating and being created. In truth, everything experienced is what it is and what it is not, blinking on and off in a sacred collaboration.

The nature of this sacred collaboration is cooperative, effortless, and respectful. You can collaborate with anyone and anything, yet you cannot name in any concrete manner what that “anyone” or “anything” actually is. Your sacred collaborator might be called by you Spirit, or God, or the divine, but the reality of whether that is accurate or not can never be known. It is part of the great mystery of life that you will only have an inkling of this sacred collaboration in moments when you are the least interested in defining or identifying it.

In the relative experience, you perceive things to be distinct from you, and co-create and conversely co-un-create all things, all the while, being co-created and co-un-created yourself. This is not to say that you are not whole as you are, nor to say that the world around you is incomplete. But, to remind you that as a human being functioning in the world, you are never completely independent. There is interdependency inherent in the sacred collaboration that is the relative world of duality.
How best to navigate in the world in this sacred collaboration? Acknowledge the mystery, the unknown in your sacred collaboration on your journey, and begin to experience an expanded relationship with who you are. You can allow much more understanding and acceptance into your experience if you can acknowledge that whatever might seem momentarily separate from you is actually collaborating with you in the creation of that experience. Life in duality becomes much more magnificent, and your practice can become one of acknowledgement, gratitude, and loving kindness. If unknown, mysterious, “Spirit” is a sacred collaborator, experience becomes an expression of that relationship. Your experience of life constantly reveals to you the nature of your participation in that experience, while also revealing precisely and exactly the counterpoint to that.

Take a look at your thoughts. It is easy to see in every thought, every judgment, every label ascribed to every action and idea, that inside of that thought lies its opposite, ready to challenge your initial opinion. This is how duality entices you to believe in it. It presents everything it is and everything it is not almost simultaneously. The collaboration becomes more obscure the more you hold on to your ideas. If you latch on to one side or the other you are stuck, but if you notice one side, then see the other instantaneously, the “belief” that you have it all figured out will give way to an uncertainty that is more appropriately “real”. Relaxing in this uncertainty refines your state of One Life awareness.

Letting go of what you think comprises reality, in favor of allowing this notion of it as always a collaboration with unknown and unknowable forces will liberate you from asking the question “why” which has no answers. It is quite easy to get all hung up wondering why something has happened, rather than accepting that whatever has happened is the result of an unknowable sacred collaboration. Your collaborator in the creation and un-creation is guidance—always giving you information about what is next, but never answering the question, “why?”.

We bring this idea of the sacred collaborator to enhance your capacity to live life vibrantly. Just be willing to experiment with your view of your life. The more flexible you are, the more energy flows and the less likely you are to get fixated on some pattern of thinking reflected outwardly as chaos in your life. Try on new ideas and concepts as a means of staying unfixed, open and free. Life is a moment-to-moment unfolding of all that is. Be willing to change and you become flowing with all that changes. Stay stuck in your concepts and you will find no answers, no peace, and likely feel more restrictions and limitations in your inner and outer experiences.

It is true that it takes a little courage to change, to trust and to give up control. But the courage needed is nothing compared to the resulting sense of freedom obtained from just changing your mind even in the smallest of ways. A shift of 1/8 of an inch in your thinking can change your whole world dramatically. Knowing you are in the flow and in a sacred collaboration in this life is a choice you can make right here and right now. It may mean letting go of what is familiar, what is routine; the thoughts you are so used to thinking may disappear if you make this choice to change. You might feel as if you have lost yourself, but it is an outdated self that is lost. You might feel as if you are out of control, and that is a good thing, even if it is a bit disconcerting. For when you are out of control, your sacred collaborator can guide you. Just allow yourself to acknowledge that there is only a transparent you in each moment that exists, and in every other moment there is another transparent you that arises. Your opportunity is to be all that you are, One Life, full, whole, complete, compassionate and loving in every moment. As a sacred collaborator in the experience of the relative world, remember it is a loving collaboration--so just be who you are and be loved as you are.

As it is One Life, everything is present always, everything and everyone is living One Life with Shadow and Light everywhere.
 
For every shadow and darkness there is light and brilliance, all is alive, arising and dissolving in the rhythm of life. Everyone has challenges and everyone has gifts. You cannot avoid your challenges, nor can you hold on to your gifts. One Life unfolds in an unknowable fashion, and you perceive what you cannot know as shadow and light.
 
Your perception is a perception of appearances. A subject viewing an object. You contrast and compare everything you think, see, hear, taste, smell and feel. Amongst those contrasts and comparisons lie many, many stories developed over many, many lifetimes, elaborating on the appearances of the world of duality. Sometimes the stories of the shadows frighten you, sometimes the stories of the light invigorate you, but almost always they fascinate you. The stories keep you believing in your world of appearances. You usually believe these stories as truth or reality and forget over and over again that they are just stories.
 
This is not said to diminish the value of the stories, or to make them seem foolish or inappropriate, but to remind you that shadow and light are fascinating aspects of the perceived reality story, but cannot be held as absolutes. Detaching from the notion that shadow and light are necessary attributes of everything perceived can engage you in a more profound view of your life as One Life.
 
Imagine that every perception you experience is precisely held by someone else, in precisely the same moment as precisely its opposite. If you perceive shadow, someone else, somewhere, is in the same moment, perceiving light. Would one person be right and the other be wrong? Or would both of you be in service to each other’s perception by merely, effortlessly, and without consciously knowing it, participating in One Life arising and dissolving?
 
We ask this question simply to awaken in you the loosening of your grip on reality as being composed of shadow and light in an absolute sense. Anything can be shadow in one moment and from one perspective, and the same is true for light. Everything is real and un-real, manifest and un-manifest, alive and dead, happy and sad in every moment. In every lifetime there is a natural inclination to experience as much as possible—as much shadow and as much light—as possible. There is no way to avoid or promote anything other than a full range of experience. You cannot protect yourself from shadow or suffering, nor can you guarantee yourself joy and all light. This does not mean you cannot prefer one thing over another, and make choices to align yourself to experience what for you would seem to be the best possible. Of course, this is how you lead your life. You learn over the course of your life that one choice is more likely to lead to happiness, while another is more likely to lead to unhappiness. But, you can never ensure a particular outcome. There is always room for a random occurrence, for life to bring you the unexpected light or shadow. Then you generate a story around the perception of the experience and learn to modify your choices the next time something similar arises. We would call this a reality strategy. A way to try to control your reality, all the while realizing there is no way to control anything absolutely. All the while, One Life arises and dissolves around you and through you.
 
It takes a great deal of awareness first to notice this reality strategy. Then, to step out of the conditioned and habitual parts of this process, your awareness must be coupled with the courage to see that no reality strategy can work to give you complete control of your life. It is after all, One Life unfolding. Your life is the story of your perceptions, One Life is All That Is.
 
If this idea that ‘in One Life awareness, All That Is unfolds’, is difficult to accept, you are probably feeling a loss of control or self-identity which are necessary for your stories of your life’s experiences. Losing your self can be quite disconcerting, however it can also be truly liberating. Forgiving yourself for past ignorance can be excruciating if you hold on to your identity and control, but can be really simple if you do not hold on. Trusting that everything is always present everywhere allows you to loosen your grip on any suffering you experience by reminding you that suffering is everywhere and cannot be avoided, but can become joy in a nano-second, because joy is everywhere also. All shadow becomes light, and all light becomes shadow. Such is the promise of duality.
 
All shadows and lights are manifest all the time. All of it is appearing somewhere. In all of your lifetimes you will experience it all. There is no one spinning the wheel of life and determining what the challenges will be ahead of time. It is not like you are climbing a ladder from one lifetime to the next to get to the top where there are no more challenges. There is nothing ultimately making a lifetime better or worse, more fruitful, or more appropriate, or more necessary or unnecessary than another lifetime. The human inclination is to incarnate for experience and it isn't to pick and choose those experiences. The spinning wheel of lifetimes just lands where it lands and there is exactly the same opportunity in every single lifetime to abide in the natural state of enlightenment. This opportunity is the same for everyone throughout all all time. Some lifetimes may appear as if they are full of difficult challenges while some lifetimes appear as if they are easy, but each person living that lifetime is living at their 100% experience level. Shadow and the light are present for everyone in every lifetime. There is no hierarchy in One Life—no being and no lifetime is better or worse than another.
 
Understand all lifetimes as perfect without attachment to any stories attempting to describe the appearances of these lifetimes. There is simply One Life that everyone is living together and everyone is doing their part, experiencing whatever their challenges and karmic inclinations are in service to everyone else. Just living your life is your service to humanity and all sentient beings.
 
Absolutely everyone is doing their part to create all experience and all experience includes all perceptions of that experience. It includes everything you can imagine, and more than you've ever imagined, and it just is what is occurring all of the time across all this universe with no limits or boundaries to any of it
 
If there are floods in one place, there are droughts in another. If there is poverty in one place, there are riches in another. If there is shadow here, there is light here, too. One Life Awareness pervades the perception of shadow and light. One Life is everything all at once, and when you have the capacity to expand beyond the limits of your immediate perceptions and your habitual stories your blinders come off and your view becomes inclusive of All That Is.
 
Open to the purest and largest view that you can imagine in any moment to have the greatest sense of One Life. A greater loving kindness and compassion fills you when you expand your view. This view is omnipresent, timeless, and cannot be conceptually created or become another reality strategy.
 
On the one hand, appearances seem to suggest that you are separate. Yet the deeper wisdom is that all are one, that there is no divisibility whatsoever amongst anything other than the temporary momentary designation that is made through the discursive mind. The mind encoded sense of duality identifies this and identifies that, but cannot in any way limit the capacity to additionally and paradoxically “feel though” the duality to One Life consciousness. One does not eliminate the other. In other words, you don't eliminate duality by knowing One Life, nor do you eliminate One Life by knowing duality.
 
One Life speaks to the wisdom that everything that is shadow is also light. Love it all exactly as it is. Respond as you respond, with compassion and love. Let go of your reality strategies in favor of a simple, yet profound deeper wisdom. As it is One Life, everything is present always, everything and everyone is living One Life with Shadow and Light everywhere.