Still in the middle of the 2012 through 2025 “Cycle of Undoing”, the year 2020 continues much of the dynamic dismantling of culture and self that was prominent in 2019. However, as 2020 is past the midpoint of this cycle, there are likely to be at least a few glimpses of the new human/new world paradigm being generated.

Right now, your culture, dependent on shared values and connections, has a chasm in its middle, making the distance between people of differing belief systems seem greater than ever before. As this chasm continues to grow, there are new possibilities developing in its deepest regions.

Communication and Rapport
These are primarily possibilities for new forms of communication to develop, and greater understanding of the necessity of evolving and growing true rapport among all peoples. This could look like some new technology which allows greater sharing of the subtle and emotional content of communication, it could be a recognition of the value of old forms of communication, and an integration the old and the new. What seems to be missing in social media platform communication is the nuance of the feeling center’s voice. The feeling center, whether you call it the heart or anything else, has been partially missing as a contributor to most communication, with more and more people interacting via electronic devices and fewer and fewer people communicating in face-to-face exchanges.

This has caused a lack of empathetic connection and a loss of emotional information being shared. The chasm between people of differing belief systems is devoid of the neural, hormonal and electrical patterns which are the carriers of emotional information. Usually emotional information has been shared amongst all, now it seems to be shared only amongst those whose belief systems match, and only with a small bandwidth of understanding. You might think that all the violence and protest experienced most recently is an indication that a lot of emotional content is being expressed, yet we would say that this emotional energy is personal downloading of suffering and pain, and not the emotional energy that develops rapport.

​From our perspective, there is an evolutionary imperative at work here, and that is the imperative of new communication forms developing which foster greater rapport all over the planet. This development will be the emerging seed sown during much of the rest of the “Cycle of Undoing” (2012-2025). Once planetary rapport is established in some significant manner, during the “Cycle of Rapport” (2026-2039) it will be time for this rapport to extend into the galaxy. The focus of the following 13 year cycle (2040-2053) will be on the discovery of the worlds beyond the planet. This will be both for the adventure of the exploration, and for the necessity of expanding human colonization, connection, and influence, while also joining other beings to become a part of a larger federation of planets.

Super Heroes and Leaders
It is also from this chasm of separation that patterns for new archetypes emerge, and survival fears become assuaged by leaders who may at first seem unlikely heroes. Many of your movies of 2019 and 2020 and 2021 contain super-heroes and beings with special skills and “mutations.”  This is proof of the collective desire for new leadership archetypes to form. You want magic and integrity and super-human characteristics in your leaders as the old paradigm of leadership falls apart. New leaders will emerge in 2020 who may in some way seem to represent many of the fictional super-human heroes who will dominate the big movies of 2020.

For example, as the old archetype for President of the U.S. gets dismantled, a new archetype will advance, and this new archetype will have characteristics that have not been included in any other previous American president. A old paradigm leader who is autocratic and does not work with others will be no longer tolerated by the end of this cycle, and in 2020 many will awaken to the understanding that what might look like strength and power in leadership from one perspective, can be simultaneously deception and greed from another perspective. During 2020, those believing that strong leadership requires ruthlessness and a narrow focus will have their views challenged, as new leaders inspire rather than dominate.

Escapism
During any cycle in which there is a lot of pulling apart of old reliable paradigms, there is also a lot of escapism. In much of America, this has primarily taken the form of substance abuse, although there are many other forms of escapism being used by countless people. The common theme of this escapism is a desire to avoid the pain and suffering sensed in an entrenched view of separation and lack of rapport felt everywhere. There is a general fear that life is unfulfilling and a fear that it takes too much effort to survive. Many of you will want to give up and may feel exhausted at the thought of what it might take to build a new world.

Feeling exhausted is one of the clearest ways to recognize that something is unresolved within your being. If you are feeling exhausted, it's because energetically you are in a position of inner conflict and doing battle -- one thought against another against another against another. What becomes necessary is the unraveling those thoughts so that the inner conflict becomes basically dissolved. When the inner conflict becomes dissolved, you'll have an expansion in your awareness, and you'll feel a big sense of relief. Escapism will not be a likely choice if inner conflict is resolved.

Conflict: Inner and Outer
Resolving conflict cannot be forced or use contrived effort. Even though you might think effort is required to get something done, we would point out that effort is futile if there is no coherency of personal effort with an environment in support of that effort. In other words, effort that just pushes willfully cannot succeed. In this “Cycle of Undoing” anything contrived to create expected results through willful effort will meet willful undoing and conflict will likely arise. Conflicts that arise in 2020 as protests and aggressions tend to be driven by fear of letting go of what needs to be undone.

All the while, in this “Cycle of Undoing” it becomes clearer and clearer to everyone that what has been cannot continue. On many levels of experience and in many parts of the world, energy will start to move primarily away from what cannot continue. After several years of becoming clear as to what you do not want, you finally get glimpses of what you want in your reality. Once again, this all has to be effortless. So in some ways, this is about falling in love with your world again, even though there is conflict and a chasm between you and others, as you will be able at times to see beyond the fears that have arisen and view the Great Perfection of All That Is with a new clarity.

Fall In Love with Your World
Things get a little easier at the end of 2020 as the sacred collaboration you have with your world opens up a bit. A bridge may metaphorically be built across the chasm of separation by extraordinary people doing ordinary things, and by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Heroes are discovered everywhere. Being Present trumps escapism.
What may open up for you at the end of 2020 is an effortless responsiveness to all that you are, both internally and in the world. A new synchronization is taking place creating coherency between what lies deep within you as your knowing, and what you intuitively understand as the deep machinations of the world. This is a recalibration of self and world focused on the release of struggle and the yearning for rapport.

Your world can no longer be your enemy, and believing that you have to conquer in order to create what you want will no longer be a viable life strategy. You will see more evidence that really everyone wants the same thing: love. 2020 is when you are reminded that there is just One Life, and everything is about feeling loved, feeling fulfillment, feeling comfort, ease, grace, all of those things. This is the path of One Life Awareness. Be willing to listen, be willing to change, and allow this willingness to be love that changes the world.

​Let 2020 be your year of awakening to One Life Awareness. Experience the wonder of living life in a “Cycle of Undoing.” Trust what unfolds for you, and have confidence in whatever glimpses you have of the grander whole, the Great Perfection that Simply Is. Let your light shine and simply feel loved. It is always actually quite easy if you are willing to just let go.
 

An evolutionary development of rapport
Rapport develops as an evolutionary result of more and more beings encountering their natural state of One Life Awareness. Rapport is an experience of understanding and empathy for others, and facilitates communication. From our perspective, rapport occurs only when equanimity prevails.

​As challenging events unfold in the world, the development of rapport becomes necessary as a means of acknowledging the connectedness of all life. The realization that it will require all of you to contribute your unique perspective to ultimately overcome the political, economic, and climatic challenges ahead is also essential. Many of you want to turn and run, to hide from the challenges, as a result of feeling alone and powerless. Others of you are seeking change, yet have no sense of how to promote the change you seek. Yet we would say, inspiration, awareness, an awakening to One Life, leading to a realization of global rapport, is underway and you will recognize it as your deep knowing reveals this to you.

Your deep knowing, your instinctive intuitive center, may have had a hard time lately as it has been triggered by the non-specific collective anxiety that permeates your world. In the course of the development of global rapport, the anxiety felt by the displaced, the forgotten and all who have lost their way somehow, can penetrate any barrier you attempt to use as protection. At the same time, you can access all the greatest avatars, realized beings, and Bodhisattvas who exist on this planet right now, whose compassion and wisdom are always available to you. As empathic barriers dissolve, all of One Life, all the colors of the rainbow, can be experienced and understood as One Life unfolding as it must.

Become more aware of who you are and the nature of your influence and inspirational qualities. The world is not dividing into leaders and followers. Hierarchy is dissolving into holarchy and all of you are becoming sacred collaborators, equal aspects of One Life Awareness. Rapport is not developing just among your closest family members, or your community, or even the globe. It is the natural outcome of more and more beings, everywhere and anywhere becoming truly a part of each other, alive in the totality of All That Is.

In this process of developing rapport, you may feel as if you have several emotions, sometimes seeming contradictory, interwoven much of the time. This is actually an indication of non-attachment. Feeling one very singular emotion is usually the sign that you have determined, usually unconsciously, that emotion to be the “correct” one and most likely have an elaborate story convincing you to maintain that stance.

If you can stay open to many emotions simultaneously running their course through you, in your very open field of awareness, your experience and consciousness will remind you of your unlimited capacity to know that each moment is not only eternal, but also unlimited in its scope. After all, each moment is All That Is.

You will see many instructions for how to “build rapport” which include remembering to find common ground and shared experience, as well as to use good communication skills and be empathic. Those are good reminders but are unnecessary. Rapport is a natural human characteristic. It is a bit more like letting go of beliefs that have gotten in the way of this knowing and to simply continue relaxing into One Life Awareness than to attempt to “build” something.

So trust that Rapport effortlessly reveals itself to you. Have confidence that you are One Life, and All That Is unfolds before you in an unhindered and ultimately wonderful way. The evolutionary development of Rapport is naturally everywhere and in every moment. And in that moment, that magnificent moment, you are who you really are.

We would like to dive deep into a very common trope: “Thoughts are things that create your reality.”
You will find this notion stated in much of the self-help and abundance-creating information you come across. Usually in this schema, since thoughts are things that have the power to create reality, all you have to do is manage your thoughts, and you magically get the “reality” or more precisely, the experiences you want. That all sounds quite logical and very simple. The problem is, whenever you try to manage or control your thoughts, they seem to run even more fiercely away from you. We suggest that any thought, controlled, managed, or contrived, therefore not arising naturally, has no power to create reality. The managed thought arises out of fear. The fear that if you think something you deem to be negative, you will have a negative experience. A thought that arises as one thing, and is forced to assume the guise of another thing, actually becomes the beginning of a usually quite elaborate story. It is easy to get lost inside of these kinds of stories.
On the other side of the idea that thoughts create reality is the awareness that “thoughts are nothing—insubstantial, have no place in the creation of reality at all”—it is all One Life unfolding.
Both and neither considerations are entirely true.
But what does that mean for how you go about living your life? Of course, it feels better if you are in a positive thinking habit. A negative one is just self-undoing. But wait! Self-undoing? That is the point ultimately isn’t it? To undo the self so elaborately created over lifetimes of experience? To eliminate the elaborate stories you tell yourself to identify who you are?
From our perspective, you are always the creator and the created simultaneously and seamlessly. The moment you identify with one position, you limit the possibilities afforded by the other position. You can easily get fixed in one viewpoint and then you are engaged in maintaining that viewpoint, unable to see anything else clearly. The only choice is to remain impartial in the face of anything that seems positive or negative, and not identify with either. Thoughts then rise and fall, without needing to be controlled.
Thoughts have no power of their own. Only your investment in them can make them seem powerful. If you think a thought is something or is nothing, or is anything what so ever, you are assigning characteristics to that thought and its “thingness” seems then to take on form.
Once a thought seems to take form, it becomes fixed in time and space. Whatever characteristics have been associated with that thought are elaborated upon until that thought attains the guise of reality. It is however, just a thought, even though the edges that are formed around it with ideas and descriptions create an illusion that can be quite convincing.
Thoughts naturally appear and disappear in vast emptiness. When you try to manage them, they can easily become reified. They seem important and separate from what is simply One Life Awareness unfolding. Let go of trying to manage your thoughts, and attempting to bend them to your will. Stop grasping on to the “good ones” in hopes they will last and bring good fortune—stop pushing away the “bad ones” you fear will bring you difficulty. The thoughts you grasp and the thoughts you push away are not creating your reality, it is the deep perfect still space within that creates and is created in every moment in equanimity, that simply is reality. The grasping and the pushing away have no real influence on your experience, therefore, your reality. With deeper understanding you can see how fruitless it is to believe you can control your thoughts, or force yourself to think a certain way.
Test this for yourself. Notice that thoughts come and go on their own if you let them. Just be with them, and just be without them, with no preference whatsoever, and you will find freedom, liberation, from the burden of trying to manage and control thoughts. Find the freedom that allows thoughts to appear and disappear and your experience, your reality, will mirror the spaciousness and liberation of One Life Awareness.

​All of you have a view of your reality based upon your beliefs about the nature of reality, and hence the nature of mind. These beliefs are stories that are organized and interdependent, generally radiating from a core belief that is central to your worldview. How you see the world and how you understand the way the world works for you is your belief system—influencing your thinking, your doing and your perceiving. You might call it your philosophy of life, you might see your belief system as your religion, or you might not be aware of any underlying ideology or mindset that operates beneath the surface, guiding you on your life’s journey.
Yet, everyone has a belief system, comprised of strongly held convictions or beliefs which are interconnected and usually coherent. We say that these beliefs are stories because there is no objectivity inherent in a belief—your beliefs are always very personal. Most of you think your belief system is rational because it makes sense to you, but it may not make any sense to someone else. Your belief system can be very fixed or very flexible, and any changes that occur in any part of the system compel the whole system to rearrange itself.
Your core beliefs emanate from your core—the deep intuitive center of your being. This is where the nature of your reality is assembled and maintained. Generally, these beliefs become backed up by your perception of your experience. If your core belief is that life is difficult, you will likely experience a lot of difficulty in your life, or least life will appear to you to be full of difficulties. You experience your life through your perceptions which are uniquely yours, but also carry much commonality with others.
You are most comfortable when you are acting consistent with your belief system. If you find yourself acting in a way that does not comport with your core beliefs, at the center of your belief system, you will likely struggle and suffer. Until you resolve the incoherency, until you shift the belief or shift your behavior, life can seem quite untenable.
Acting in a way that is inconsistent with your core beliefs occurs when your ego is in charge of your actions. When the part of you we call the political self is desperate for love or attention, you may find yourself doing things that the deep core of you would not really sanction. This is common behavior, as everyone feels unloved from time to time. And everyone sees their reality in shambles from time to time. It is all part of being human. There are times of knowing without a doubt, the Great Perfection of All That Is, and there are times of doubting that. The doubting times are best handled remembering that somewhere, deep inside, you know you are absolutely loved, and that everyone else is loved, too. This is the knowing, or the deep recognition of One Life Awareness.
We would say that right now, many of you are struggling with your view of the world around you and its inconsistency with what you believe, and perhaps are feeling pressure to examine your beliefs and rewrite some of the stories you have been telling yourself about your world.
This could be in regard to relationships, politics, spirituality, creativity, really anything you have a strong belief around. Whatever you might be consciously or even unconsciously feeling, knowing or believing about your world right now, it has most likely been challenged in some way lately.
These challenges can activate lots of questions. Questions like: How can you reconcile a belief in the Great Perfection of All That Is, that everything is as it must be, when you look around and see violence and suffering everywhere? How can you continue to believe that love is everywhere in the midst of feeling outrage at the senseless way the planet is treated? How do you live in a world of duality while deeply knowing that there is just One Life?
The answers may at first seem as if they must be complex and abstruse. However, we would say the answer exists in the center of the question. You continue to act in alignment with your core belief that love is at the center of All That Is. You continue to have confidence in the Great Perfection. You continue to focus on who you are as the light that you are, and you allow One Life Awareness to simply unfold.
Yes, there is separation and duality, you experience duality all the time. Everything and anything you try to communicate necessarily requires an investment in separation. You can't talk about light without implying darkness exists. You can talk about right, without implying wrong exists. Yet we would say if you really dive deep, you'll also be able to sense from your core, your intuitive center, that there is another “not-thing” that is not dual.  It encompasses everything and nothing simultaneously. You cannot even talk about “it”, but you can feel “it” or intuit “it” or understand “it” or know “it” in some way as distinguishable from the world of duality.
You can't describe “it.” You can't give “it” a position. You can't identify “it” with labels and/or seeing “it” in the time and space continuum. You can just assume that there is this completely indescribable, absolutely unsubstantial everything and nothing simultaneously. The temptation is to be fixated on duality or fixated on getting out of duality, although neither strategy will bring you freedom. It’s this mysterious understanding or sense of knowing, this One Life Awareness as we call “it” that points you seemingly somewhere, which is paradoxically everywhere and nowhere, and frees you, even for a nano second, from the experience of duality.
It is about allowing the stories you tell yourself about the nature of reality to be the truth and not the truth simultaneously. It is about the nature of mind, not as something that is fixed and material, but as consciousness. All thoughts, even heavy and seemingly negative ones have the essence of clarity within them. Consciousness is spacious, and its fundamental nature is pure, so even dark clouds pass through the spaciousness of consciousness and never alter the essential nature of consciousness. Meaning that your core knowing, intuitive understanding, of the essential love and diamond like clarity that may at times seem to be shrouded by doubt and difficulty, is always Great Perfection, or One Life Awareness unfolding.
Whenever you find yourself in a dilemma, when it seems like what is occurring in your reality is not what you “want to create,” remind yourself that what exists ultimately is love at your core. Concepts may seem to obscure the pure essential light of your consciousness from time to time, but the light and love never cease, and furthermore are never afflicted by any momentary obscuration.
In challenging times, core beliefs of the pure nature of mind/consciousness are challenged as doubt and inconsistency seem greater than coherency. Let the stories you tell yourself about the nature of reality and the nature of mind simply assist you in being who you truly are: a compassionate, loving, kind, being driven by One Life Awareness. Remembering always that this is who you are, and acting with this knowing in the best way you can is all that is ever asked of you. You might even ask yourself from time to time, “if I knew without a doubt that I was loved, and that I am nothing but love, what would I say and do?” Then choose to do your best, underwriting your actions with One Life Awareness, and your essential intuitive knowing of all of this will set you free.

​Points of View

Notice the graphic:
Are the windows opening or closing? 
Is it sunrise or sunset?
Is the glass half empty or half full?
It depends on your point of view.

​THE TUTORIAL
 
Whenever we are speaking about One Life Awareness, we are speaking in some ways about that particular point of view, and yet we like to be absolutely clear that a particular point of view is a limitation. What we're really talking about is all points of view simultaneously interacting with each other in the grand display of phenomena which is not One Life Awareness but is life.
 
The Buddhists will often talk about the pure view and from our perspective, it is helpful guidance to find a path, to find a perspective that may be of great value to you. And yet we would suggest that you cultivate many points of view; because with more points of view you have more information about the nature of reality. You have the opportunity to see things from many different perspectives and many different sides. And it loosens your attachment to whatever point of view may become your favorite. If you find that you have a favorite point of view, we would say you found the nature of your natural mechanism for limiting your perception of life. You found the way that you draw boundaries around things, because your point of view necessarily means that another's point of view is outside of your point of view. It might interact and overlap here and there, but it is never going to be your point of view. But, if you have multiple point points of view, you have multiple ways to explore and experiment with the nature of your sense of reality. It is all of these points of view that construct your reality, and you are processing millions of points of view in every moment. So why limit yourself to what you perceive is your own point of view, or what you might think is the pure point of view? That view is just an opinion. Be an artist in your life, as artist has to take many points of view in order to understand the nature of an object or person that they might be painting or sculpting. An artist has to incorporate more than just one position in order to get a full representation that becomes their art. Even non-representational art requires many points of view to produce. We are using this as an example, wishing to suggest to you that you really are the artist that is generating the picture of your life. Inform it from many angles, from many perspectives. Let them all naturally weave together and have the biggest view possible. It is from that enormously open and free view that you will find who and what you really are, which is nothing but One Life, One Life Awareness.

​We look out into the world as it appears at this time, and there seems to be a lot of confusion over what is truth and what is not truth. Can all things be both true and not true? How can you understand “what is” if truth is relative and unreliable?
We suggest that to understand the nature of truth, you must first understand the nature of reality. While philosophers and teachers of all sorts have espoused many differing understandings of the nature of reality, all that matters is your perception of reality. It doesn’t matter if you can describe your notion of reality, it doesn’t matter if you cannot describe your notion of reality. Whatever might be real for you contains, or in a way simply is, everything that you perceive. Reality is not a thing, it is more like a condition, something like a state of being, within which all phenomena arises and disperses, perceived by the perceiver in whatever way the perceiver perceives.
Experience might be another name for reality. What exists for you as reality is mostly your experience of reality, with experience having no requirements. Any sort of experience is sufficient. This would necessarily include all thoughts, all feelings, all, that in any way is life. Reality is everything—imagined and illusory as well as tangible and seemingly substantial.
Then what is truth? We suggest that truth for any individual is a particular quality of reality—a particular frequency of reality that is contrary to non-truth, non-truth being what doesn’t feel right, what lacks integrity, what is flawed in some way. Truth is your label for whatever you believe. And you identify truth when you see it because you have a predisposition to believe truth based on your experience and evaluation of reality.
You have always had a deep understanding and knowing of truth, it has always fit into your notion of reality even if you have never contemplated any of this previously. Now, however, as the world seems to be divided as to what is true, it is especially poignant to recognize that your truth may not be anyone else’s truth. Also, to discover that truth is not a constant, or permanent, or absolute even though it might seem that life would be so much simpler if it were.
As someone who has traveled the path of paradox, discovered and uncovered One Life Awareness, you will probably align your sense of truth with deep, perhaps profound, connectedness and presence and innate perfection. Swimming through the ocean of everything that is, you will always be guided by your own particularly wise knowing of your truth. You experience both truth and untruth, generally ascribing the untruth label to whatever you do not believe, whatever you perceive to be disconnected, perhaps imperfect, and see truth in everything you believe is in alignment with you.
It all sounds quite simple—everyone has their own truth as a slice of their reality. Reality is everything, and your truth is the part of reality which is believable, reliable, and stable for you, and however else you which to define it, your truth is yours.
A struggle begins when anyone demands consensus around truth or insists that something is right and therefore something else is wrong. Whenever there is a right or wrong in a situation, the real issue at hand is truth, and which truth is the “real” truth. With the understanding that reality is subjective, a perceiver perceiving, requiring one truth that everyone believes in, agrees to and abides by simply will not work. When spoken in the abstract, one and only one truth seems irrational, yet in daily life the assumption is made that there is one truth and that it is absolute and permanent. An assumption of an objective truth is common yet logically, truth cannot be objective. Truth is unreliable and ineffable. Why? Because it is a part of a reality, a part of your individual perceived experience, determined by your ideas and thoughts which cannot exist independently from you, the perceiver of your reality.
The current collective experience of truth and untruth at all levels of governments and societies, all over the world, may actually be in service to becoming aware of truth and untruth as just concepts without any real essence. Remembering that truth cannot exist without the presence of untruth, and that it is all in the eye of the beholder frees you from the confusion generated by seeking the “one and only truth”.  What happens when this search is abandoned is that the argument over who is telling the truth and who is lying is over. When the argument ceases, and consensus around truth is found to be not just impossible, but unnecessary, the heart opens and One Life Awareness unfolds.
If you cling to the search for the one and only truth, you will be on a mission of evaluating everyone and everything according to whether they align with your changing definition of truth, because even “your” truth is impermanent.  And you will be constantly evaluating yourself.
Peace, from our perspective, is the end of evaluation as the center of the experience of reality. Without a constant evaluation of “what is” you experience life from an open heart of allowance and unconditional love. If you let go of labeling and rating everyone and everything, reality, operating as a condition of life, becomes a joyous condition.
We are One Life. All and everything is simply One Life unfolding. The only thing that separates you from another is any thought which you hold to be true, and seek to confirm as true. If all truths are truths for someone, then all truths are true. Even if they might seem different. Releasing your attachment to your idea of truth as objective and absolute is necessary to allow reality, your experience, to become clearly the perfection of One Life unfolding. Reality can be nothing other than perfection, a non-static experience of One Life—All That Is. If you argue with reality, you experience difficulty. If you hold on to a slice of reality, hold on to your truth, for example, you create ideas about nontruth which immediately invoke separation.
So what is truth and untruth? Whatever you believe it is. All things are both true and not true, depending on who is looking at them and what that individual is perceiving as reality in that moment. The key is to stop seeking the truth and instead to be the truth you seek.  
When you let go of holding on to what you believe is right, or true, when true and untrue become nothing special, your thoughts and ideas no longer intrigue you, therefore no longer distract you from the perfection beyond what the mind can describe or figure out. Reality becomes joy and joy becomes reality.
It doesn’t really matter who is telling the truth, and who is lying. Those are just thoughts. The thoughts perpetuate the idea of a you and your truth, of a right and a wrong. Truth and untruth only exist as ideas, and ideas which are liberated come and go easily. In this freedom, you can enjoy the drama of the stories of truth and untruth, not just the ones you think belong to the world, but also the ones you believe are yours. Stop believing they are important and necessary, but go ahead and enjoy the richness of the magnificent play of duality. It is all One Life unfolding. Truth and untruth are just words without meaning until you make them into something else. Let them be just words, keep it simple, love and be loved, remember who you are without all the labels, and just be.

Understanding the nature of doubt begins with seeing how doubt is associated with an attachment to a desired outcome or an attachment to a sense of forward movement in life.
Most of you seem to need to feel as if you are moving forward, evolving, growing, becoming more than you believe you currently are. It doesn’t really matter what part of your experience this sense of “forward” refers to; as long as there is at least one area of life seeming to improve and not fall behind, it seems to validate that life as moving forward.
If you are a contemplative person, you might be seeking a sense of gaining awareness and having deeper meditations. If you are more outwardly driven, you are likely to have career aims and monetary goals and seek forward movement with external measures. Most of you entertain both internal and external gauges, unknowingly always calculating where you are according to where you last evaluated yourself.
The moment you find yourself in evaluation mode, it is the moment you are entertaining doubt. We suggest that doubt, a kind of skepticism, or an inability to trust the moment, emerges out of evaluation which takes place because of an attachment to “moving forward” or achieving a desired outcome.
This attachment to moving forward is discomfort with the now, or at the very least, relies on a belief that staying in one place would cause you to feel as if you were stuck. Attaching to an outcome is just defining the forward movement more specifically.
This kind of thinking is common in the current culture. Most everyone wants everything to improve, to renew, to be great. However, what is covertly expressed in that sentiment is discontentment with whatever is occurring right now. There is a misunderstanding that contentment with right here and now could mean nothing should change, or that discontentment might imply that nothing can remain the same. Recognize that whatever is next is generally an unfolding and elaboration upon what is right now. Expecting what is next to be radically different from what is occurring right now, while of course possible, is generally an indication of the degree of displeasure with the present moment.
So where do doubts come in? Whatever you might contemplate, you will most likely evaluate. Whatever you evaluate, you will most likely want to improve. Whatever you want to improve, you most likely believe to be lacking in some way, and whatever you believe to be inferior somehow, you are most likely to doubt. You might doubt whether a peaceful experience of life can continue, or whether it's real or just some kind of figment of your imagination, or some kind of illusion. If your current experience is painful, you might doubt that it will ever end or change or lighten up in some fashion. Your doubts are always ready to arise in any moment that you think you are in charge of change. At any moment you think you can make things happen or not happen in your life, you will entertain doubt.
Experientially for most people, doubts seem to arise out of the blue. You are sitting in a in a beautiful place, feeling peaceful, happy and loved, and then suddenly a doubt, thoughts and misgivings show up. You think the ax is going to fall, the world will end, whatever doom and gloom you come up with, it is mistrust of the most likely natural unfolding of the now into what is next. The doubt stems from real knowing that all things are impermanent, but gets distorted into suspicion or doubt because of your attachment to “improvement” and only “good” outcomes. It takes courage to simply allow what is next to unfold. Culturally speaking, it is seemingly impossible to allow what is next—you have been taught to “seize” the moment, to “create your reality” and to move forward at all costs.
If you are feeling pain, doubts arise about whether the pain will subside, so the very notion that the next moment naturally unfolds from the now might seem to indicate that you will always be in pain. The doubt is an uncertainty and mistrust of life. We might even say that doubt is uncertainty posing as certainty if it is believed to be true.
The radical eradication of doubt succeeds only when all thoughts lose their power to enchant you. So while you were busy trying to distinguish doubt from other thoughts, you were actually making doubt really important amongst all your thoughts. All thoughts are the same. There are no good thoughts and no bad thoughts, they are all insubstantial, there’s nothing to them.
Now this is antithetical to many teachings that attempt to help you to hold on to the good thoughts and create your reality from them, and eliminate the doubts so you don’t create any reality from them. However, from our perspective, that keeps you in evaluation mode all the time. You are only adding to the cacophony of the thoughts in the mind if you are evaluating all of them and ranking them according to which ones will work and which ones will not work. We simply suggest that if they seem to arise from nowhere they will also seem to depart to nowhere, and its nowhere that is the true Now Here.
All doubt is thought, all thought is seemingly profound and real, but not to be believed or evaluated. Be fluid, you have the capacity to not believe anything you think, and to not make any thoughts important. It’s just allowing thoughts to rise and fall and to let those thoughts just become nothing. This is a profound time for diving deep into practices that will free you from thoughts which have no bearing ultimately on who you are. Life just gets easier and easier and easier, and becomes simple, peaceful, and happy.
Start to notice if you think you should be improving or if you think things should get better, or if you are telling yourself any story that encourages an attachment to forward movement or outcome. The deeper truth is that there is no forward movement that is absolute, the starting point and the ending point of life are one and the same, and there really only is right here, right now.

​The Illusion of Certainty
One Life Tutorial for April 2019
It is wise from time to time to contemplate the things you think are certain. “The sky is blue, the ground is stable, life is short, I am alive,” for example. Then ask yourself if there is any way that these certainties could be illusion.
What is illusion? Generally speaking, an illusion is something perceived or interpreted by the senses that is “wrong” or deceptive. “A figment of the imagination” is commonly called an illusion. “Appearance” is often another way of describing an illusion. It is easy to call something an illusion if you have already determined that what you are perceiving is false, or a hallucination, or has arisen from your imagination without any seeming connection to “reality” or “truth.” It can seem more difficult to discover the illusory nature of what you believe to be certain.
There are many sorts of illusions. The illusion we will discuss here is the illusion of certainty. Supporting any idea of certainty you might hold, there are usually beliefs that are primarily formed in the intellect, or the discursive mind, and thoughts describing reality, or “What Is.”  These thoughts tend to be thoughts of separation like “I am alone, separate, and this is mine.” These thoughts may seem to be real or true in themselves, but become even more seemingly correct when grouped together to support a belief. If you are really attached to these thoughts, it becomes difficult to even imagine that what you might think is real is not real, or that what you might think is true is false. You expend energy holding on to your conclusive thoughts about things and may even use them to attempt to convince others to believe what you believe. The very idea that rightness and wrongness is an absolute, something more than a concept, can contribute to this illusion of certainty.  We would suggest that illusions of certainty are illusions of no substance or presence taking on the guise of being real or substantial.
The current affairs of the day can be seen as a profound teaching on this subject. You may have been thinking that an investigation, a report, could be the very thing that can prove the beliefs that have been so importantly held as certainty or truth. There has been a big investment for the outcome of this investigation to result in proof of the rightness or wrongness of beliefs that seem to contradict each other. You may have felt invested in seeing the “facts” (proven beliefs) as a means of maintaining your well-constructed reality. However these facts were interpreted by you, you most likely continue to be driven to see what you continue to believe. If your beliefs were not proved to be “real,” you continue to hold on to your beliefs and look for another way to prove them. If your beliefs were proved to be real, you elaborate on the truth of the proof, making it seem even more substantial.
However you see information presented to you, it is through the lens of what you believe is “real” and “certain” and “true.” And, you will attempt to prove your beliefs with any thoughts that can support the beliefs. Notice how the beliefs stay fixed in the illusion of certainty, and the thoughts actually shift in whatever way is necessary to support the substantiality of the belief. Also notice, however, that the beliefs are inherently without substance—they rely on the ideas and thoughts that, like a house of cards, try to support them.
In what other ways are you “certain” of things and on a mission to prove the veracity of those things based on beliefs you are attached to which are supported by ever shifting thoughts? In your relationships, can you notice yourself seeing what you believe about another rather than more purely experiencing exactly what is in the moment unfolding before you? In your daily routine do you start with an idea that something will be either exciting or boring and then unconsciously thoughts arise in your mind that prove one or the other to yourself? Most people tend to forget how to experience life in the moment without preconceived notions of what that moment will be, and instead rely upon their habits and beliefs to determine the nature of their experience.
What is it about those notions you are most convinced are real and certain and true, and believe are not illusion? Why are you driven to be “certain” of things? These certainties are oftentimes the most important building blocks of your concept of reality. Yet all of these things can be seen as illusion if you are willing to look from a different perspective. As a practice, seeing anything from a different perspective expands your view and weakens your attachments, and attachments are at the core of suffering.
Illusions of certainty are not the only illusions you may indulge in. There are illusions of enlightenment as being dependent upon some process or practice based on beliefs of “no pain no gain” and the need for a progressive path. There are illusions around life and death with elaborate speculations about the nature of existence. All of these illusions are a part of the paradox of human life. What is real and true can never be proved beyond all doubt. Life has no substantiality, permanence, or certainty. Awareness is truly all there is.
To live in the now, to live in presence, in the moment, is to let go of the often times most dearly held beliefs of what that moment is to be. The tendency is to think you are living life, when actually you are thinking about what you believe life is, rather than living it. So take just a moment to contemplate something you hold to be true, or certain, or right. If you can find any way to loosen your grip on that belief, you may open up your mind beyond its fixation on thinking all the thoughts that support that “certainty.” The mind can then become spacious and empty. This liberated mind is the mind of Awareness, of presence and possibility. Let yourself find this freedom in seeing the illusory nature of all beliefs and allow your reality to contain more possibilities. It starts with contemplating whatever you believe is certain and knowing that you see what you believe. If the beliefs are illusory, then everything you see is illusion. And amidst it all, One Life Awareness unfolds, no certainty required.

​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!