Enlightenment Insights on Tragedy

In view of the recent horrific tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, and the continuous murders in our inner cities, we have another opportunity to wake-up our minds to the suffering caused by violence.

Most of us ignore the warning signs of trouble in our lives. We anesthetize our minds with massive dosages of toxic beliefs to help us rationalize that our angry outbursts  toward a loved one or stranger is just aberrant behavior. It's not something we need to work on, because no one was seriously injured.

For us to heal ourselves of violence, we must unlearn the beliefs and values that make us all potential perpetrators of violent acts. And this healing of our minds begins with our addressing the small, seemingly innocuous things we do in our everyday lives.

Some of things we do and say to others when we are driving on the freeways are warning signs that we need some help with healing our toxic beliefs and values. Although many of us believe we have mastered control of our violent tendencies, unfortunately we won't know the answer until we are confronted with certain situations.

In moments of great distress, when we feel powerless to handle our problems, violence is one of the options in our beliefs and values.  Many of us are quick to point out what we would do if someone tried to attack our families. We wouldn't hesitate to kill them.

When it comes to killing people to protect ourselves and our families, we believe our actions are morally defensible. The same logic applies to lethal injections and similar forms of killing.

Meanwhile, those of us who have appointed ourselves as morally qualified to judge others' behavior have a tendency to  forget our own addictions to violence.  Our mindfulness toward our own actions disappear in the miasma of the little,  innocuous trail of angry outbursts defining who we really are without our self-righteousness judgments.

Nearly everyday of our lives we seek some form of violence to satisfy our addiction. A good illustration of this seemingly innocuous violence is manifested in our behavior during a boxing match.

During a boxing match, we want our favorite boxer to knockout his opponent. The more he hits him, the more we jump up and cheer. Some of us even imagine ourselves doing this to someone who messes with us. The sight of bloody noses, lips, faces distorted by swelling and cuts make us feel good for days.

After years of inculcating toxic beliefs and values, our minds trick us into cherry-picking which violent acts we want to focus on. A good illustration of this is that there are thousands of people dying everyday from violent acts. We ignore most of them..

Nevertheless, when we see them on television, they become knowable. Unfortunately, most of us don't feel a deep angst over their deaths unless we know them or they died in our hometowns.

Meanwhile, there are steps we can take to overcome our inherent violent beliefs and values. First, we   must go within our minds -- intuitive unconditioned consciousness -- for the answers. Second, we must trust ourselves enough to acknowledge that we were born into a violent, toxic world.

Third, we must accept and believe that  we have  the power to overcome what others taught us about ourselves and the use of violence And fourth, we must create a clear, nontoxic vision of ourselves with the power to overcome the illusions distorting our perceptions of the self and our relationship with others.

On our enlightenment journey, some of us gain the sagacity to know that we can evolve our minds to express a deeper potentiality for nonviolence than what we are currently doing. This awareness is the clarity we need to imagine a world without violence.

 Now is the time for us to address our own  violent beliefs and values.

"Therefore get wisdom; and with all thy getting get understanding."

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Creating Healthy Minds

There are some things in our lives that we don't want to share with others. These surreptitious experiences, things we don't want to face,  have great power over the way we want people to see us. 

Many of us don't realize that it's our secrets that prevent us from freeing our minds of toxic beliefs and values. And those who do know, find it difficult to accept responsibility for things -- behavior, addictions, children, poverty, and so on -- that we believe lessen who we are today.

We imagine that people like us the way we have projected ourselves to them. And if they should discover that back in the day we did some things we're not proud of, they might not like us.

Many of us constantly enter into relationships -- personal, business, and marriage -- without revealing who we really are. In other words, we don't really tell people we are holding back certain things in order to impress them.

We live in a society where secrets and lies are expected. So people establish criteria to help them decipher what we tell them. Many of us know people are not telling us everything, we just hope and pray they're not holding something back that will cause us to regret ever meeting them.

Meanwhile, for those of us who are removing the secrets from our minds, we know that it's important to have this freedom if we are to express enlightenment. We are the ones working to free our minds of the distortions causing us to devalue who we are in the present moment.

Some of us have reached the point in our work where we are willing to acknowledge that we have an illness. We are working daily to achieve the power to accept that we are responsible for everything that ever happened in our lives. Obviously, we are not speaking of people who have been raped or physically and psychologically victimized by others.

Our awareness of inner-mind power enlightens us to know that we have the power to heal ourselves. We are able to see that most of our deceptions come from the judgments we have about right and wrong. And to know that the more we judge our actions, the more mistakes we create in our lives.

Nevertheless, over time, these mistakes entangle us in a seemingly hopeless psychological quagmire. And it is in this seemingly hopeless situation that we all must begin our work. This is the starting point for those who desire to do the work to enlighten our minds. 

For us to create healthy minds, we must release ourselves from the things causing us to devalue who we are now. We must believe, without doubts, that in this moment in time, we are complete, whole, and perfect.

Today is now. This is where we begin the work to heal our minds. We don't dwell on the past, nor do we devalue ourselves because of the judgments we have about it.

So let's get the wisdom to give us the understanding to know that our minds are unhealthy. And with this wisdom, we can seek succor within our own minds to make them healthy.

Understanding our Mind's Relationship with Prayer

During these times of financial uncertainties, we are constantly searching for something to sustain us. Some of us are turning inward for the answers. And as we do, we need to know that in minds exist all the power we need to overcome life's uncertainties. This power is our unconditioned consciousness or the I AM.

There's nothing new about this power. Most of us have heard about it all of our lives. Unfortunately, few, if any, of us have been able able to access this power and use it effectively. 

Similarly, many of us have relied on books and people to guide us in our search for this elusive power that's purportedly in our minds. One of the tools used by the spiritually enlightened men to access this power was prayer.

They recommended that we pray to an invisible God or Creator for solutions to our seemingly insoluble problems. They also taught that this power we sought was within us.

The great and wise men of yesteryear all understood this powers of mind philosophy and used it very effectively. Unfortunately, they have departed from the visible world and we have forgotten what they taught us about powers of mind. So here's a little reminder about the hidden secrets of powers of mind:

"When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

In other words, when we go into our minds, we need to shut out the powers of our senses. This means we cannot allow ourselves to be controlled by our beliefs and values. We must believe that what we seek is already given to us by our commitment to the process of creation.

As we know, there are many other teachings by the Christ, Buddha, Krishna, the Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, Koran, Kabbalah and other books written to remind us to search for our power within our minds. 

Most of their muses confirm what some of us know about our own powers of mind. We know that our minds are the source of our prayers. And that we typically pray whenever we doubt our powers of mind. 

Furthermore, in spite of our doubts, we must remain mindfully that we are endowed with the powers of mind to imagine things not yet present in the visible world. And when we have the commitment to nurture our vision through the necessary time interval to its fruition, we produce miracles in our lives.

In some cases, prayer is one of the tools we use to inspire us to believe that which we seek will be   provided to us by sources known and unknown. So what we believe are miracles coming from our prayers are nothing more than individuals mastering the powers of mind process.

So at the core level of our existence, prayer is part of our powers of mind. It is not something that exists on its own. We created prayer as part of our beliefs and values.

For us to use prayer effectively, we must first understand why we pray. And when we pray, we must understand who we are in the prayer, and what type of power we are possessing in our prayers. Otherwise, our prayers are just another tool in our arsenal of toxic beliefs and values.

Regardless of how many enlightened people advocate for power within us, many  of us don't believe we have this great power in our minds. We continue to believe it exists outside of us in the vastness of the universe and we're not directly connected with it. 

There's a part of our minds, our unconditioned consciousness, that remains free of the illusions. This is the consciousness of I AM. The power we have to exist without existing as something. In other words, this power is similar to imagining ourselves enlightened while our senses confirm us as powerless.

We are always imagining ourselves as such and such person with all types of characteristics. And depending on our powers of mind, we embody the beliefs and values that confirm this new identity.

A good illustration of imagination is to perceive ourselves free from all forms of oppression.

First the thought of freedom. Second, the embodiment of the thought as a reality, and we begin to express freedom. Third, the faith or commitment to do the work to nurture the thought or vision through the necessary time interval between conception and expression. And fourth, the daily action required to produce a clear vision of freedom and stick with it when confronted by the doubts of our beliefs and values.

Meanwhile, if we want to understand  our powers of mind, we must be willing to lose ourselves (beliefs and values) in order to find ourselves (enlightenment).


"Far greater is He (unconditioned consciousness) that is in you than he (powerless ego) that is in the world."


"Therefore, get wisdom; and with all thy getting get understanding."

Powers of Imagination

When we reach the "darkest hour," the time when our pain becomes intense, we inevitably turn to our minds for assistance. Some of us focus our thoughts only on the impending doom and gloom, while some of us focus on imagining ourselves overcoming the problems causing the doom and gloom.

Imagination is a powerful tool for expressing enlightenment. For us to use this great power, we must have a disciplined mind and unwavering confidence in ourselves. And at the basic core of our beliefs, we  must believe in our own abilities, independent of the judgments and criticisms of others.

For many of us, this means we must recognize that everything that happens in our lives comes from our beliefs and values. Some people refer to them as "stored consciousness" or subconsciousness.

Nevertheless, our beliefs and values control our imagination. And most of us are always imagining something. It seems that our desultory desires keep us in a perpetual state of motion, which affect our powers to imagine.

For those of us who are able to discipline our minds to imagine ourselves with great power, we awaken this great power within our minds to remove the distortions created by our toxic desires. And this power is all we need to rebuild our minds with enlightened beliefs and values.

The mythologies of religion and spirituality, at least religion and spirituality born from toxic beliefs and values, confuse us about our own identity and power. Some of us become too dependent on the teachings and forget that all power comes from our minds.

All of the great ones have taught that the "Kingdom of Heaven is within you." And not to look for it in another person. This means that each individual has within his or her mind the power of a sleeping Jesus Christ or Buddha.  However, some of us continue to search for this great power outside of us.

No one can give us what they don't have to give. Who can give us peace other than the beliefs and values in our minds.

Nevertheless, when we clear our minds to imagine goodness in others, we unleash the power of transmission within our minds. This is the power that will attract into our lives that same goodness we imagine in others.

Unfortunately, the converse is if we imagine others as being deceitful, angry, greedy, and so forth, then we attract these types of people into our lives. So it's not an accident when we meet people that cause us to suffer. We brought them into our lives by imagining their type of behavior in others.

Similarly, we can always image ourselves with great power. We don't have to assume that the outcomes in our lives will always been less than what we are capable of producing with the proper mindset. In other words, we can imagine having a hefty bank account just as easy as we can imagine having a paltry one.

Meanwhile, if we begin to imagine ourselves as being already enlightened or with the Christ-Buddha-Krishna power in our minds, then we become that which we imagine ourselves to be. This is similar to imagining ourselves being poor or rich, handsome or ugly, and other toxic manifestations.

All we are doing is using our imagination to confirm what we already believe about ourselves and others. The power we seek is found within our minds. We can never find it in another person.

Now is the time to search for enlightenment within our own minds. We know it's there, but we must gain the confidence to imagine ourselves with this power.

"Therefore, get wisdom; and with all thy getting get understanding."

Self-Condemnation Epidemic Facing Us

When we begin to understand the powers of mind, we stop feeling sorry for ourselves. There are far too many of us wallowing in our own self-condemnation. The world seems to have defeated us or turned us into helpless victims of our own beliefs.

There is a quote in Seeds from the Ashes that says, "Who is responsible for changing the way someone thinks, acts, works, and lives?"

And when we think about this question for a few minutes, it doesn't take long to realize "..that each individual, regardless of his or her state of affairs, is responsible for changing the way he or she thinks and lives."

Regardless of how many times we hear that we are personally responsible for the conditions in our lives, many of us find that it's too difficult for us to accept this responsibility. We continue to blame outside sources for being responsible for the decisions we make.

In other words, our environment, parents, racism, poverty, and so forth are the culprits.  For example, we are alcoholics or drug addicts because of the way our parents treated us. Or we believe we are uneducated, unemployed, or misinformed about politics, government, economics, and religion because of limited opportunities available to us.

Many of us use this heuristic methodology to remain in a perpetual state of self-condemnation and victimization. We seek solutions for our problems by blaming others for the way we feel about ourselves. And the more we condemn ourselves, the more power we give to others to maintain their power over us. 

It is time for some of us to stop kidding ourselves and open our minds to clearly see what's happening in our lives. This process begins with our awareness that we cannot find power in another person, because our power comes from within our minds.

When we search for power in others, we become victims of Hero worshipping, which contributes to self-condemnation. Whenever we worship the accomplishment of others, we denigrate our own accomplishments.

In many instances, we trick ourselves into believing we are proud of what others have accomplished. Yet, at the deeper level of our awareness, we wish we could have made these accomplishments. And by wishing and hoping, we remain on a desultory path with our enlightenment work.

There are only so many ways to talk about enlightenment. And most of us have heard them all. So it is no longer about talk, but doing the work. Some of us like to talk too much about problems and illusory solutions. We find enjoyment in dancing with the illusions like drunks slurring on  bar stools.

Let's wake-up our minds  to become curious about what is unknown. The time for waking up the mind begins with our feeling the sharp points of the pain in our lives. In other words, we feel our suffering and our fears about it.

Meanwhile, with intense suffering comes feelings of liberation. We want to rid ourselves of suffering, but we don't believe we have the power to do so. Some of us seek a Messiah to do the work for us. And while we rationalize that this power is in us, our minds, we search for it within the illusions.

Now is the time to recognize that we are the Messiah for our lives. In other words, we must liberate our minds from the darkness created by the illusions.

It's important to know that we must do the work ourselves. We cannot continue to wait, when we have been endowed with all the power we need to free our minds from the illusions. The paradise we seek is found in our own minds.

Beyond the Fears of Failure

It's not difficult to fail. Most of us at one time or another in our lives have felt the sting of failure. It's a pain that we feel for a long time.

When we think about failure, we understand that failure is not preplanned. In other words, we don't consciously plan to create situations that cause us to fail.

Whenever we plan for something, we do so with expectations of accomplishing our goals. We create goals to make us feel good about ourselves. And we feel good when we achieve them, and not so good when we don't.

 Nevertheless, many of us never achieve the success we planned for, or in many instances, dreamt. And whenever we don't achieve our dreams, we question our abilities to make it in life. These questions or doubts are responsible for our failures.

Let's face it, most of us feel badly whenever we fail to accomplish our goals. We want so very much to feel noticed by others because of our accomplishments.

Unfortunately, our need for recognition only plunges us deeper into the abyss of failure. The more we try to keep up or compete with others, the more failures we create in our lives. Sometimes we create failures and believe they are successes.

Some of us have never done much in this world to even be noticed by people outside of our families and friends. Our obituaries highlight our mediocrity or, in the case of most of us, our failures.

It's unfortunate, but most of our failures exist because of our reluctance to examine our beliefs and values. We are afraid of what's in our minds. We don't want to face the beliefs and values responsible for our mediocrity. 

While we eschew beliefs of mediocrity or anonymity, most of our beliefs and values produce these results in our lives. And when we realize our minds are adrift in a sea of mediocrity, we become afraid of ourselves. We don't like what we see.

A little clarity goes a long way in assisting us with understanding our relationship with mediocrity and anonymity. And whether we like it or not, while we travel unnoticed on invisible vessels of failure, we must not allow ourselves to drown in the sea of life.

Similarly, we must be willing to admit to ourselves that deep inside of us is a burning desire to be great, successful, even powerful icons for others to aspire. And this unfulfilled desire is greater than  the vacuous platitudes coming from those whom we expect to say them.

At the core of our being, we want people to know we're alive, and proud of who we are. And we want them to know we're greater than their judgments of us.

Nevertheless, most of us must change our attitudes or the way we think about ourselves. We must stop condemning ourselves for our perceived mistakes or failures.

Unfortunately, whenever we condemn ourselves for not measuring up to others' expectations of us, we cripple our minds with illusions of failure. In other words, we condemn ourselves for being ourselves.

Yet with a little clarity, we can clearly understand that success and failure are judgments we use to define our actions, and compare ourselves to others.   We must remain mindful that enlightened minds cannot comprehend failure.

Powers of mind or enlightenment is nothing more than seeing ourselves without the distortions coming from our beliefs and values. And without the distortions, we can clearly see ourselves with the power to overcome our beliefs and values.

Meanwhile, regardless of our present conditions -- unemployment, poverty, obesity, addiction, avarice, insatiable cupidity, so forth -- we are successful whenever we accept ourselves as such. The mind games begin and end in our individual minds.

The mind has the power to go beyond what we have been taught by others.

Enlightenment Insights on Power

It is important for us to remember: The search for power begins with our minds. 

Many of us use our minds to search for power in different ways. Some of us use books, schools, bombs, guns, churches, movies, money, and so on. While some of us use meditation, prayer, mind-body practices, and so forth.

What is important for us to remember in all these situations; we are using our minds to guide us. And that our minds are filled with beliefs and values acquired primarily from outside sources.

When we acquire a lot of information about history, politics, religion, and so forth, we use this information to navigate our way through the illusions of people, places, and things. And unfortunately, as we navigate the treacherous challenges of overcoming the illusions distorting our clarity, we become powerless to the illusions we are seeking to overcome.

After awhile, we believe that our beliefs in religion and politics, for example, are sacrosanct. So if we are born into a Baptist-Democrat family, we accept these beliefs as being who we are. And for most of us after we do this, we eschew ideas about pursuing other religious and political beliefs.

Similarly, some of us understand and accept the rights of others to have different religious and political beliefs, but we do so believing we have superior ones. We are quite content believing we are who our beliefs tell us we are.

In the main, once we embody certain beliefs and values, we keep them. And this intransigence philosophy keeps us going around in circles. In other words, we are searching for our inner-power by using the light from our illusions to guide us to this power.

Nevertheless, we continue inexorably on our spiritual journeys with flickering lights of illusory beliefs and values guiding us in our search for the ultimate power of The Creator.

Unfortunately, many of us, despite pronouncements by the enlightened ones, believe this power exists outside of our minds.  So our searches are limited by our beliefs. That is, it's too difficult for us  to believe that such power exists in our minds.

Meanwhile, it's not easy for many of us to enlighten our minds. And whether we know it or not, it wasn't easy for others either. It takes a lot of courage to free our minds.

For us to achieve enlightenment at the level of those we now worship and believe did so, we must be willing to move beyond our family-societal beliefs and values. This means we must have the courage and commitment to enlightenment to withstand the inevitable criticism from them.

The commitment to enlightment requires us to lose ourselves (the illusions) in order for us to find ourselves (enlightenment).

Enlightenment Insights on Stacey Dash Brouhaha

Several days ago, actress Stacey Dash created a maelstrom of social media fodder by endorsing Governor Mitt Romney for president. Some of the tweets, posts, and blogs castigated her for this endorsement. 

Based on the work I am doing on my own mind, I usually don't comment on political machinations. However, sometimes there are circumstances that illustrate some of the challenges we face on our enlightenment paths. This is particularly true in the case of Ms. Dash.

When people have been conditioned to bond together because of oppression, there's a commonality of passions about the beliefs and values most of us adhere to. And whenever someone from the oppressed class goes outside of these beliefs and values, others in the group are quick to pounce on them.

On the enlightenment road, we have the opportunity to change our beliefs and values. This means we must diligently work on creating an awareness that allows us see beyond the illusions we are using to liberate our minds. And it's this level of awareness that allows us to perceive Ms. Dash without personal judgments and vituperative language.

Today, those of  us with the clarity to understand that the source of our power comes from within our minds, we must share this awareness with others. This means we have the opportunity to tell Ms. Dash and others who are exploring other paths, particularly political and spiritual ones, that she has the power to support whatever ideas she chooses. 

And whether people like it or not, there are no right or wrong paths to travel in our illusions. There are only illusions, which distort our perceptions of ourselves and others..

Nevertheless, for us to grow in our own awareness, we must move beyond our self-righteous condemnation of ourselves and others. This means accepting personal responsibility for the beliefs and values causing the judgments.

Moreover, as we accept personal responsibility for our own suffering, we must be willing to admit to ourselves that the beliefs and values we are clinging to have not liberated us. Regardless of how much we believe in what others tell us, there's little denial that this information is sufficient enough to make us feel whole, perfect, and complete.

In other words, we are just as flawed in our beliefs as others around us. And we will remain in this position until we do the necessary work to overcome our illusions. This entails our awareness that liberation of the mind cannot emanate from the illusions we embodied during our oppression.


Some of us on the enlightenment path believe now is the time for us to rise above our pettiness. We must open our minds to create the space to clearly see that Ms. Dash's actions are not any different from most of our own. We all acquired our beliefs and values from others -- society, parents, and life experiences.

Meanwhile, many of us are busy destroying our minds by ingesting and expressing pernicious dosages of beliefs and values that only creates more suffering for ourselves. And, unfortunately, we suffer each time we attack someone for doing something they desire to do.

No human being has ever been able to stop or prevent the suffering of others. We can only enlighten others with information and actions that have the potential to awaken their minds. They, however, must do the work to fully understand what was said years ago: "you must be born again."

For us to be reborn does not mean engaging in rituals and personal pronouncements; It means being born with the awareness that we are greater than what the world has taught us.

Similarly, if we desire to attain sufficient power to conquer the illusions of this world, we must first begin with our own minds. That is why some of us advocate for Powers of Mind. It is the source of our power to perceive ourselves and others outside of us with power.


Meanwhile, enlightened awareness is the recognition that we are born with the powers of liberation in us. So we don't have to search for another person to express this power, because it's a part of our divine birthright.

 Many of us forget that it's our confusion about the Powers of Mind that tricks us into believing others have power to give us enlightenment. And with a little clarity, we can see that this power already exists in our minds. 

So let's be clear here: enlightenment is not born of this world. What we are experiencing now is what others experienced before us. And unless we conquer this world of illusions, we will continue searching outside of ourselves for someone to liberate us.


It's important for us to be mindful that Stacey Dash's beliefs and values come from the same sources as our own. And when we attack her for expressing them, we are also attacking ourselves without realizing that we are doing so.


All power comes from "Powers of Mind."

Faith and Reason

Most of the confusion about ourselves and our relationship with the outside world comes from faith and reason.

This is most vividly expressed in our lives whenever we find ourselves in difficult situations. When we discover suffering in our lives, we treat it as if we don't know where it came from. It's as if we magically manufactured our suffering while being asleep.

Similarly, while we're half-awake, sleepwalking through our actions, we are unprepared to deal with the turbulent storm of stress coming from our unexpected problems. Some of us become paralyzed with fears and doubts. While others react by not having  a clue about what to do.

Whenever we reach points in our lives when powerlessness overwhelm us, we seek solutions from powers outside of us. In these situations, many of us turn to our faith to rescue us.

Our faith is that invisible force existing inside of us, awaiting to help us overcome difficult problems.  For many of us, faith is our belief in God, The Creator, or confirmation of the utility of our religious beliefs.

So what is faith and how does it compare to the reasons we use to place ourselves in difficult situations?

For our purposes here, let's say, "faith is our belief in an invisible power, who, when presented with the right approach -- prayer or meditation -- will empower us to overcome our problems."

Reason, on the other hand, is based on our knowledge of mathematics, science, language, philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, which include moral and spiritual principals, and so forth. And we typically use our faith to supplement our reasoning capabilities.

Similarly, we can imagine people who don't belief in traditional faith. In other words, they don't believe in the existence of God, or believe that God doesn't play any part in our lives. For them, faith is irrelevant. However, they too rely on reason, which means they are victims of their beliefs and values.

Meanwhile, there seems to be a natural conflict between faith and reason that transcends the spiritual and logical beliefs. The conflict arises when we attempt to communicate with our higher power while holding on to our core beliefs and values, which are the primary source of our actions.

Nevertheless, it's important for us to remember that the powers of  minds mitigate faith whenever it's convenient for us to do so. This is not an egregious exculpation of our power. It's simply our recognition that we are powerless to overcome the beliefs and values acquired from our parents, society, and confirmed by our life experiences.

Unfortunately, for many us, faith is nothing more than an escape mechanism we use to escape personal responsibility from problems caused by our reasoning. And it means that the more we cling to our faith, at least in a public sense, the more we ignore our responsibility to change our beliefs and values.

Whenever we rely on our faith, we must be cognizant of it as being a part of our beliefs and values. At least, we should be aware that we are using it in the sense that's consistent with our core beliefs and values. 

In other words, our interpretation of faith, or the lack thereof, is based on our current beliefs and values. This means that when we define God, our invisible power, we are using language and other information from our existing beliefs and values to do so.

We have become too accustomed to going along with the crowd, to get off the crowed road of life and search for the higher power in our minds. This intuitive power, our invisible power, is the God in us that we praying to.

It's what keeps us feeling that there is something greater in us than we are currently aware of being. We have this power in all of our minds because it's the source of our connection to the God that we are praying to, or meditating on, for assistance with our problems.

Now is the time for us to stop settling for less when we have within us the power to have more. The Christ, the Buddha, Mohammad, Krishna, and others found this great power in their minds and used it to overcome what they had been taught by others.

Meanwhile, for those of us who seek to become one with our intuitive consciousness, we must use our faith to inspire us to continue to do the work to remove everything from our minds that's distorting who we really are in this moment.

We are Already Complete as we Are

We spend a lot of time looking for things to change in our lives. And it doesn't take much for us to panic at the thought of gaining weight, bulging stomachs, hanging wrinkles, and thinning hair.

Some of us try to change things based on what others tell us. We even react to friends, strangers, even passersby, who don't tell us we look great or fine.

The bottom line for most of us is we need one more thing to make us happy and complete. And then another, and another, and so on.

Basically, most of us cannot find enough things -- money, people, places, and power --to make us feel complete in this world.

We feel incomplete because our beliefs and values confirm it. They limit our perspective to embody our completeness as we are right now.

As long as we can remember, we have been adding things to make us better -- smarter, handsome, pretty, wealthier, important, and so forth -- without ever reaching a point of completeness.


So unbeknown to us, the turbulent beliefs of incompleteness keep us in a perpetual state of searching for things to make us feel better. And also unbeknown to us is that one of the side effects from our searching is self-condemnation.

 By definition, our search for things confirm our self-condemnation. In other words, we condemn ourselves for being who we are. And the more we condemn ourselves, the more we crave for things to make us better.

Nevertheless, as difficult as it might be for many of us to admit, we condemn ourselves because of our beliefs and values: The ones taught us by parents, society, and life experiences.

We were taught to believe we were born incomplete, and they -- parents, society, and life experiences -- were responsible for teaching us how to become complete.

The challenges facing most of us are to learn how to unlearn what we have been taught. Or more succinctly, to stop relying on the information we have embodied as being sacrosanct.

Self-condemnation produces powerlessness. It weakens our resolve to discover the unconditioned power in our minds. It makes us dislike ourselves and believe that things outside of us are greater.

The key to enlightenment is the freedom from self-condemnation. In other words, we must like who we are now.

This doesn't mean we must like the actions caused by our beliefs and values. It means we must like the unconditioned consciousness in minds that holds our enlightenment. .

Regardless of how many roads we travel on our journey, we never escape from ourselves. We are always present in all of our activities. So if we travel down a road where we create intense suffering, we can condition our minds to travel down a different one.

Similarly, if we search for things to make us better, we can always stop and accept ourselves as we are now. Unfortunately, for some of us, this is difficult because of our reliance on our current beliefs and values, which tells us things -- people, places, status, and so forth -- will make us better.

Meanwhile, at some point in our lives, we must face the illusions causing us to condemn ourselves and question our completeness. And when we do, we will know that the real culprits for this type of thinking are our beliefs and values. They are totally responsible for how we perceive ourselves and the outside world.

Our minds are both the death and resurrection of our illusions. We use them to create both intense suffering and exhilarating enlightenment.

So when we stop searching for things outside our minds to make us feel complete, we will understand that all power, including the power to perceive and understand heaven and earth, exists only in our minds. This clarity will allow us to know that consciousness is the source of all of our power.

Nevertheless, even with this information on enlightenment, some of us still find it difficult to believe that this power exists in our minds. Yet if we stop and think for a moment, we will quickly realize that everything we know, or don't know, about ourselves and the world is caused by our clarity.

Clarity of mind allows us to know that we are born whole, perfect, and complete. And there's nothing wrong with us, except the toxic beliefs and values we use to perceive ourselves and the outside world.

Powers of Mind to Free us From the World's Power

If it's actually true that people are basically flawed by their own beliefs and values, then who can teach us about ourselves? How do we discover and unleash the untapped, unconditioned power in our minds?

Today, many of us seek power from outside sources simply because that's the way we were taught. Since day one, we have developed our minds to satisfy our Guides (parents, teachers, and ). In other words, we have developed our minds to conform to existing beliefs and values.

Many of us are taught to believe that our existence in the world is an accidental occurrence. It's simply a sperm fertilizing an egg. It can be any sperm and any egg; however, we have no say in where or how we are born into the world.

So, in the main, we are all accidental births, who can only know what others teach us. And whatever situation we are born into, we have to accept our fate from this starting point. Unfortunately, for many of us, these are the beliefs and values that keep us in a continual search for enlightenment in people, places and things.

The search for enlightenment is within our minds. It's not the mind defined by psychologists, spiritual sages and others, but the mind beyond what we have learned about ourselves from others. And it's the awareness that there's something, not yet discovered, in us that is greater than the current awareness we have of ourselves and the outside world.

Too many of us have been taught to accept our limitations or beliefs and values. And by doing so, confine our search for enlightenment within the scope of acceptable beliefs and values.

This means that whatever we do, it must fit in or conform to the broader beliefs and values of our society. Unfortunately, after we condition our minds to fit in with the prevailing beliefs and values, we become victims of the world's limitations.

Nevertheless, for us to change, we first must know how to change. And we must be willing to go beyond our current beliefs and values, which is frightening to most of us. We are frightened of the untapped powers in our minds.

Meanwhile, when we trick our minds into believing we have changed, we manipulate our beliefs and values to create illusions of change. This type of manipulation happens with people, things, and places.

Personal manipulation of our beliefs and values is the source of the illusions we embrace as change. While many of us never really change from our original beliefs and values, we interpret changes in relationships, careers, religions, and so forth as change.

We even believe we have changed when we overcome drug addictions or other deleterious addictions. We forget that we became addicted because of our need to satisfy our desires for pleasure. And when we stop one addiction, we turn our attention to satisfying others.

In other words, we might become addicted to money, politics, religion, and so on. We believe these new things will help satisfy our desires -- desires born from our original beliefs and values -- for enlightenment or empowerment.

So the answers we seek cannot be found in another person, but only within our minds. Nor can they be found in money, politics, religion, universities, and so forth. The answers we seek are found only in our minds, our unconditioned consciousness, which some of us call Spirit.

Whenever we think about Heaven or a similar place of eternal bliss,  we think about it as place that frees us from our current beliefs and values. WE will have reached a place where there is no deception. Well, that place is within our unconditioned consciousness, which is beyond the powers of our current beliefs and values.

We must clearly recognize that our enlightenment journey places us in conflict with the rest of the world. The world of illusions is holding steadfast to the beliefs and values we are working to escape from.

Nevertheless, it's this awareness of the inherent conflict between enlightenment and traditional beliefs and values that prevents most of us from ever truly discovering who we are. We are too afraid of the loneliness caused by the inner mind journey.

Yet most of us know, at least we know it rationally, whether we accept it or not, that the enlightened ones -- Jesus Christ, Buddha, Mohammad, Krishna and others -- actually did what we are afraid to do for ourselves.

Meanwhile, if these individuals were able to free themselves from their taught beliefs and values and express enlightenment, then we must do the same if we expect to achieve enlightenment. Anything less, means we will remain forever powerless in the darkness of other peoples' beliefs and values.

Forgiving our Parents

Now is a good time for us to forgive our parents, and to accept personal responsibility for our own lives.  Regardless of what our parents taught us, we now have the responsibility to teach ourselves.

Many of us don't know how to teach ourselves without relying on what we have been taught by others. So we begin our re-education by searching feverishly in our childhoods for reasons to blame our parents for not being good parents.

Conversely, some of us search for reasons to praise them for their parenting skills. Nevertheless, either way, blame or praise, we are limiting ourselves to judgments about our parents'  beliefs and values. 

Our challenges lie in the development of our egos, our self-awareness of being a separate individual, which we attribute to our parents. Unfortunately, we ignore our role in developing our own minds, which causes us to believe someone else developed them for us.

The most obvious people to blame for this development are our parents. We believe their whippings, beatings in many instances, are responsible for our success.

For example, if they hadn't whipped us, then we wouldn't have become the fully developed individuals we are now, and we might have become casualties of the street life.

Similarly, some of us blame them for our shortcomings, particularly those of us who have not successfully assimilated into the mainstream. We are the ones struggling with ourselves to understand why our parents neglected us by leaving us with babysitters, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, and others.

Moreover, we don't understand how to translate our parents' excessive partying, drinking, using drugs, and sexual exploits of bringing too many daddies into our lives for us to even remember their names. Surely, we opine to ourselves, this had a profound affect on us.


As we go deeper into the blame-game, some of us want our parents to mirror the illusory parents we see in movies and television programs. And when we believe they don't measure up to the illusions, we create our own illusions for them to exist in a manner that makes sense to us

In our illusions, we want them to be greater than what they believe is possible for them to achieve. Unfortunately, unbeknown to us, our parents created their own illusions to define themselves.

While we can assume that their illusions did not empower them as parents in the same manner as those in movies, we don't know because we never asked them. We judged them by our own illusory beliefs and values.


Moreover, in our illusions, we place them on psychological and emotional pedestals. We even create scenes in our minds for them to find success in low-pay, unskilled, and dead-end jobs. And we absolve them of the responsibility for creating their own suffering by blaming others for it.


The more we cling to our illusions about our parents' suffering, the angrier we become toward the people we believe are responsible for it. This anger distorts our clarity to understand that our parents had the powers in their minds to make different choices about how they chose to live.


Meanwhile, like most things in self-discovery, it's difficult to examine our parents' actions without  adding colorful anecdotes to make them exist as we desire to see them. And like ourselves, it's difficult to admit that, in most instances, our parents, and us, too, could have done better with using the powers in our minds.

While some of us may find it difficult to believe, but our parents chose to live the way they lived.  And there's no right and wrong judgment about how they chose to live. We don't have the clarity of mind to judge them without relying on illusory beliefs and values.

Nevertheless, with all their perceived shortcomings, they are still our parents. And when we commit to going  deeper into our minds, we free ourselves of the right and wrong judgments about them. This is the freedom of forgiveness.

We must never forget that all power is in our minds. When we discover this wonderful truth, we also discover the power of forgiveness. This forgiveness, unlike what we have been taught by others, comes from our unconditioned consciousness or inner mind power. 

At this level of awareness, forgiveness begins with ourselves and expresses itself in others. We are able to perceive ourselves and others with our toxic distortions.

Now we are able to perceive our parents with clearer vision. We are thankful to our parents for not killing or maiming us as children. We are also be thankful for all the little things: love, compassion, hugs, chastisement, fixing our lunches, taking us to school on the first day, motivating us through our doubts, and tucking us in bed at night.

There are so many things our parents gave us, even those parents who were victimized by anger, drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, illiteracy, menial jobs, and lack of visible ambition to succeed in the world. They gave us examples, which we can  choose to follow or choose another path.

All powers are in our minds.
.

Overcoming Intense Feelings of Anger

Some of us are so angry that we have become time-bombs of self-destruction. Our anger has become so intense that it's difficult for us to control.

We begin our days with anger and end them the same way. And during our waking hours, we focus our anger on people we don't know anything about, except from their images on our television or computer.

It's important for us to remember that while anger is treatable, it is also a deadly disease of the mind. And like other deadly diseases, if we leave them untreated, then we have to be prepared for their deadly consequences.

Similarly, we cannot ever forget that anger is a psychological disease transmitted to us by our parents, society, and our life experiences. It begins with the development of our ego or individual awareness of being an individual.

 Moreover, as individuals we seek to protect our uniqueness by fighting others who challenge our beliefs and values.

We protect our anger by protecting our beliefs and values, which are responsible for our anger. And in doing so, we insulate our minds with toxic distortions about ourselves and others.

After awhile, and after years of playing mind games with ourselves, we become numb to our actions.

Unfortunately, some of us believe we're too civilized or spiritually awakened to become killers. And  when our lives explode in fits of anger and rage toward others, we misinterpret this behavior as an anomaly.


Nevertheless, whether we like it or not, if you place us in certain situations where we have to protect our children, loved ones, and ourselves, then our moral perspective on killing becomes different.

Furthermore, if we are placed in positions for our anger to explode in murderous force, we would undoubtedly not hesitate to use deadly force against a car-jacker, robber, or even purse snatcher. While we are taught to control our anger, most of us are not very good at it.



For some of us, anger is just another form of victimization to rationalize our feelings of powerlessness. So the shock some of us feel over the rampant murders in Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities represent many of our own fears about killing another person. 

Nevertheless, for those who are fighting to control our own anger, we just want others to stop killing people for apparently no reason. 

We assume that since they live in the same country, and were taught similar beliefs and values to our own, they should know it's sinful or amoral to kill people without some fears of losing their own lives or the lives of their loved ones.

The problem we face is that the individuals who are murdering people senseless, at least according to our beliefs and values, are operating from beliefs and values that are diametrically opposed to our own.

In other words, they might believe it's okay to kill someone who has challenged their beliefs and values about respect, love, and social order

We cannot stop the killings by wishing them away. Nor can we stop them by incarcerations. They can only be stopped by those who are willing to do the work to remove the toxic beliefs from their minds.

This means that those of us who have worked on our minds to the level where we can control our anger enough not to kill someone over petty disagreements about drugs, respect, and social order, we must begin the process to develop new beliefs and values.


When we can teach others that our anger comes from the development of our egos, then our conversations, our efforts, and our perspectives on anger are  transformed. This means we have reached the point where others are willing to listen.


Now we are ready to develop effective neighborhood organizations and groups to teach children and wayward adults enlightenment beliefs and values.


Whenever we spend too much time judging others without understanding ourselves, we neglect the work we must do on our own minds.

Our minds are the source of our anger, and also the source of our liberation from it.

Searching for Power in our Minds

It's never too late to trust ourselves. Even after lifetimes of searching for power in things -- money, people, fame, places, and so on -- we can remain confident that the real power is in our minds.

This power, our unconditioned consciousness -- that part of our mind that remains free of human illusions -- is what connects us to our Creator. Some of us distrust our unconditioned consciousness, because we don't understand how it works,

Nevertheless, it's our unconditioned consciousness, sometimes referred to as intuitive consciousness or inner-power, that allows us to free ourselves from the illusions that are ruling the world. This consciousness exists as just being. It doesn't have to be anything. Yet it can become anything it imagines itself to be.

Throughout human history, we have been taught by the great ones that "The Kingdom of Heaven is within."  Or that to end suffering, we must accept personal responsibility for it, and to clear our minds so that we are able to perceive life without distortions or illusions.

The greatest barrier to clarity or spiritual awakening is found in our beliefs and values. We draw our psychological and emotional sustenance from the beliefs and values taught to us by our parents, society, and confirmed by our illusions.

When we embody confusing beliefs and values honed from centuries of illusory teachings, we lose our connection to the unconditioned consciousness in our minds. And the more we believe in things -- money, people, fame, places, and so on, the greater our struggles become with the illusions.


Similarly, it's important for us to know this world and its illusions cannot provide us with the clarity we seek. It can only provide us with what it has to give to us, which are the illusions it has created for us.

We must remember that the illusions exist to remind us that there is no power, except that which comes from the illusions. Everything we know about ourselves and the outside world came from them. This includes, education, language, religion, ethics, and so forth.

Some of the great teachers of the past taught us to accept that we were "born into a world of sin or suffering." Today, some of us know and accept this as an universal truth. We know we must find the clarity to perceive ourselves with power and remove the prism of distortions causing us to believe the illusions are the only possible reality

Meanwhile, the teachings of the enlightened ones remain plain and simple: the power we seek is within our minds. Some of us make their teachings complicated or out of reach by coloring them with our own beliefs and values.

We must remember that the power they used thousands of years ago is also available and present in our minds today. And contrary to what the illusions tell us, this power is in all of our minds. It is not limited to the few people defined by the illusions.

So as we search for our inner-power, we must also remember that The Creator is not bound by human illusions nor by our interpretations of who can receive this power. We are the ones limiting ourselves by embodying beliefs and values that define us as less than others.

When we gain the confidence in ourselves that is sufficient enough to understand the illusions we believe in, we will know that unconditioned consciousness is not controlled by the illusions, nor by the beliefs and values we hold as sacrosanct.

Unfortunately, too many of us believe we must look to others for our enlightenment. We worship other people and elevate them above ourselves without ever asking ourselves: Who are we? We forget that discrimination is a human illusion.

Similarly, it's our forgetfulness that causes us to play mind games with the illusions. We worship them by denigrating ourselves. In other words, we mitigate the great power in our minds so that we can pretend to be helpless and powerless.

There are no rewards for those of us who allow our minds to be conquered by the illusions of this world. The rewards are for those who are able to conquer the illusions. And to do this we must lose ourselves (beliefs and values) to find ourselves (enlightenment, without the illusions.)

Each one of us has the potential to express this power, if we stop searching for it in things outside of ourselves. The enlightenment we seek is found in our own minds.

Keeping Our Power

Today is a good time for us to remember that we have great powers. With so much uncertainty about our well-being being discussed by the media, it seems that too many of us have forgotten who we really are.

As we live with the financial meltdown of home foreclosures, rising unemployment, and burgeoning debts, it's easy for some of us to slip into a psychological coma of self-denigration. And before long, we begin to believe we are powerless, helpless, and unable to live our lives without calamities befalling us at inopportune moments.


Many of us doubt ourselves because we have been taught to denigrate ourselves. We have become victims of our own toxic beliefs and values. And it's from this confusion that our beliefs in powerleness originate. 

Nevertheless, whenever we believe we are powerless, we are in that moment actually powerless. We are powerless because we have abdicated our mind power to the illusions of the world.

Yes, over time, we gave our power away.  And until we achieve the clarity of mind to become aware of what we've done, we will continue to give our powers to the illusions in exchange for hope. 

Power is a form of imagination or visualization.  It's invisible, unborn, and nothing until it empowers itself to become aware of being something. And fortunately for us, we can become aware of being anything we dare imagine ourselves being.

Similarly, in it's purest form, our power always remain with us. It's always available for our use to empower ourselves to express whatever we are aware of being. For example, if we are aware of being poor, we express our awareness of poverty effortlessly.

Meanwhile, some of us express our awareness of being in ways that we believe do not represent or reflect our true awareness. Yet whatever we are expressing in our lives now is identical to the images we have created of ourselves.

Sometimes we forget that we are actually the way we are acting. It's difficult to believe we created the nightmares in our lives. So we attempt to place the blame on others.

In other words, someone other than us is responsible for the debts, addictions, anger, suffering, failure, unemployment, home foreclosure, unhealthy foods, and so forth. And after we create these illusory things in our lives, we find them so unreal, so out of character, for us to do this to ourselves.

It's unfortunate, but most of us create undesirable results in our lives all the time. This is particularly true when we abdicate our powers to the beliefs and values produced by the illusions. And all of this confusion is caused primarily by our social and spiritual disquietude about the existence of our inner power.

Nevertheless, whether we are aware or not of the powers in our minds, we are the beneficiaries of  enlightenment. This means it's our God-given right to possess and use this power and not seek permission from others to do so.

So as the world reels from uncertainty, we must remember that the great powers in our minds are capable of creating new languages, discovering cures for pernicious diseases, and enlightening our minds to see ourselves without the distortions concealing our true identities.

Enlightenment Objectives

This blog is devoted to discussing ideas that might make some of us feel uncomfortable. And when we feel this way, it's a great opportunity for us to explore new ways of expressing the enlightenment within our minds.

We frequently become obsessed with the means we use to achieve enlightenment. And it's this obsession that causes us to worship people, engage in rituals, and forget that they are only the means or tools we use to accomplish our ultimate objective of enlightenment.

Nevertheless, some of us find it difficult to trust our inner-mind power. We are constantly searching for enlightenment outside of our minds. Unfortunately, this is all part of the conditioning of our minds by society, our parents, and confirmed by our life experiences.

Meanwhile, there is some valuable information in Seeds from the Ashes that opens our minds to perceive  other ways of liberating our minds of toxic beliefs and values. The following quotes from the book are shared for your illumination:

"Whatever you think about your present living conditions, one thing is absolute: You are what you think of yourself. If you don't like your present lifestyle, you have the power to create many different ones.

"Today, you are strong enough so you don't have to accept mediocrity as your goal. All that is required of you is to know you have all the power you will need to change your life whenever you choose to do so.

"To develop your mind to express great power, you must first repair the estranged relationship between your illusions-ridden mind and your freethinking mind. Anyone who has become victimized by the illusions feels powerless to think of himself or herself as being greater than the illusions.

"The illusions of lack, limitation, and struggle are very powerful when they interfere with your actions to change the way you think and live.

"The moment you conquer the illusions in your life, you immediately change the way you act. These new actions reflect a new person. This type of behavior is is similar to what some people say is being 'born again.' And in a certain sense, at least consciously, you are birthing a new person into the world.

"The new person you are creating will no longer think of himself or herself as a victim of unforeseen circumstances. Once you free your mind of the illusions, you will be able to see clearly where you are going."

We must always remain mindful that books are only tools to stimulate our minds to go deeper into our intuitive-unconditioned minds. They are, however, valuable tools to assist us with understanding different viewpoints on beliefs and values and enlightenment.

From Powerless to Freedom 2

As we continue our discussion from my last blog, it is important to remember that many of us deeply and firmly believe what we have been taught by others. So it's not easy to let go of this information and search for solutions in our own minds.

The book, Seeds from the Ashes, challenges our minds to read ideas that make some of us feel uncomfortable. This feeling comes primarily from our being too accustomed to reading books that only confirm our own beliefs and values.

Similarly, some of us even place pre-conditions on the type of information we will expose ourselves to. In other words, we eschew ideas and points of view that we find objectionable. So we listen to viewpoints that we believe confirm our own.


Nevertheless, for us to go beyond where we are now, we must open our minds to discover the great powers we have to remain empowered, even when we listen to or read things that might cause us to examine our own beliefs and values.

The following information from the book, Seeds from the Ashes, will provide us with ideas that came from the mind of a writer who had been conditioned to think and live as a victimized person in this country. And it will illumine our minds to understand the powers of our minds, and how this power can liberate us from believing we are powerless.

"To search for a great power somewhere in the sky or from another individual is to deny that you have the power within your mind to solve your problems. The freedom to think beyond societal restrictions is not found in an abstract, unknown universe, but in your mind.

"One method to use to free your mind of restrictive thoughts is meditation, prayer, or visualization. While you are in a prayer-meditative-state of consciousness it is easy to envision yourself as a colorless, faceless, and formless being.

"When you remove the limitations of color and form from your life, you open your mind to go beyond the illusions creating all the pain and suffering in your life.

"Remember: when you pray, you are seeking a solution to your problem from a higher source, which must respond in such a way that your mind can receive and interpret the answer.

"If you write on paper the dialogue occurring in your prayers, it might assist you with understanding that everything you say and do is occurring in your mind."

The powers of mind information in Seeds from Ashes are mind stimulants to arouse the mind to become curious about life.

This stimulation assist us with committing ourselves to believing and knowing that we were created from a source of power that endowed us with everything we need to succeed in this world. And that our pain and suffering, even our failures, come from the beliefs and values we learned after we arrived in this world.

The freedom to know more is contained in our minds.

All power comes from our minds.  Seeds from Ashes

From Powerless to Freedom

It's very difficult for us to accept that most of us are powerless. We try to manipulate our minds to convince ourselves that our work in jobs, ones we dread going to, is actually empowering our lives. 

It's easy for many of us to forget that our beliefs and values tie us to powerlessness. And this is  also  responsible for our searching outside of ourselves for our power and freedom. 

Let's face it, we want to be happy, successful, and have all the other things we believe will make us feel good about ourselves. So it's not uncommon to see some of us besieged by low self-esteem attempt to claim our freedom by believing we have been given special powers from the Creator that others do not possess.

Some of us do  these things because we cannot accept the fact that we cannot empower ourselves in this world by any other means.

Meanwhile, our minds keep us powerless by confirming our lack, limitation, and struggle. This type of thinking keeps us feeling incomplete and in search of something outside of ourselves. We limit our minds by believing we don't already have everything we need to express the great power we were born with.

A powerful, insightful, and thought-provoking exposition on understanding the powers of mind and the freedom we have to perceive ourselves as being whole, perfect, and complete is in the book Seeds from the Ashes.


"...When the pain in your life becomes unbearable, you will try just anything to help free yourself from it. Since religion is an acceptable source of power to assist those with seemingly insoluble problems, it is what many people use to overcome their problems.

"The point here is not for you to rely solely on religion so that you don't take the necessary action to solve your own problems. Religion is just one source for you to use. There are many others. The bottom line is: your problems must be solved by the actions you take. Where you get the inspiration and motivation to act is not as important as the actions.

"The freedom to think means you have the power to act. The problems in your life were created by your actions and your actions alone. This means you cannot turn your them over to religion or someone else to solve for you.

"When you create outcomes in your life that you don't particularly like, you must accept the responsibility for your behavior. Why as Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius or any other deity to solve your problems when you have the power to solve them yourself? The power you give to someone else must also be present in you. If you perceive others to be greater than you, then how do you perceive yourself?

"For you to think of yourself as being less than someone else is to demean and belittle your own great power. In other words, you burglarize your own power and give it to someone else. This type of thinking reduces you to a common burglar who robs yourself of power in order to please others."

All power comes from our minds!    Seeds from the Ashes

Power of Clarity

After many years of self-condemnation, it's easy for us to forget that we were not born this way. So it is important for us to remember that we were born fully awaken, whole, perfect and complete. And what's causing us so many problems are our beliefs and values, which are responsible for the illusions distorting our perspective of ourselves and the outside world.

Unfortunately, too many of us contine to search for answers outside of our minds. We are constantly going hither and yonder searching for the next miracle. And until we accept that the search for power is in our minds, we will continue to be victimized by the illusions.

We are responsible for our own beliefs and values regardless of where we got them. The more we ignore this fact, the more we condemn ourselves for having to struggle for freedom when it's not necessary for us to do so.

For some of us, our greatest fear is to examine the origins of our beliefs and values. To go deep into our minds and understand that the beatings, abuse, all sorts of molestations, and self-condemnation originally came from others. Unfortunately, when we claimed them as our own, we forgot the powers of mind we have to remove whatever we allow into our minds.

Similarly, some of us choose to remain victims of our illusions. We are too busy running away from ourselves to spend the time understanding the great power we have in our minds.

We want books, people, history, ancestry, and visual information to liberate our minds. Unfortunately, only we can liberate our own individual minds.

It's important for us to remember that our time on this planet is all that we have. We cannot add to our time. So we must use our time to unleash the power in our minds so we can see ourselves, and others without our toxic beliefs and values.

The things -- money, fame, and power -- we are chasing with our time cannot provide us with the clarity we need to see ourselves without our toxic beliefs and values.

Things only take us further away from our already awaken and completed mind. We become prisoners or slaves to our beliefs and values because we believe they make us feel like we are somebody.

As slaves or victims of toxic beliefs and values, we are always searching for answers outside of our minds. In other words, we want someone to liberate or remove the suffering caused by our own unwillingness to accept ourselves as already complete.

All we need to do to express our awareness of completeness is clarity of mind. We must commit ourselves to doing the work to remove the toxic distortions about who we really are, and unleashing the limitless powers of mind within us. 

Freedom from Confusion

Even on our good days, some of us continuously struggle with our beliefs and values. They keep us constantly searching for things -- money, power, fame, and respect -- to make us feel good about ourselves.

It seems the more we search for things outside of our minds, the more we embrace our beliefs and values. This makes our search for enlightenment or clear mind an outside one, because we want to know how we fit in with the outside world.

On our inexorable search outside of our minds for clarity, we move further away for our consciousness of enlightenment. The further we go from our essence, the more we rely on our existing beliefs and values to provide us with the clarity to perceive ourselves and the outside world without distortions.

One of the greatest calamities that we face in our lives is the loss of self; our unconditioned mind. In the darkness of our minds, we only see what our beliefs and values tell us we're seeing. We are blinded by the darkness, which prevents us from perceiving ourselves as already possessing completeness.  

Most of us find it too  difficult to accept our completeness, because our current beliefs and values confirm our incompleteness. And it's our lack of awareness of our completeness, I AM, that causes us to perceive ourselves as needy, unworthy, and incomplete. 

When we become overcome with self-condemnation, we want to change something about us to make us more acceptable to the outside world. Unfortunately, the beliefs and values telling us to change are dulled by toxicins.

Each time we condemn ourselves, we destroy some of the power we have to revalue our lives. And we also further denigrate our perceptions of power by diminishing the I AM in our minds. In other words, the I AM we are aware of being becomes helpless, powerless.


The I AM is the awareness that I AM always greater than what I am aware of being. It's the unconditioned consciousness in our minds, which has no limitations and exists as just being. It doesn't have to be anything to exist within our minds.

Unfortunately, whether we are aware of it or not, we are always expressing our awareness of I AM. On some occasions, we believe I AM poor. I AM rich. I AM ill. I AM black, brown, yellow or white. I AM successful or a failure. I AM all that my beliefs and values allow me to be.

Similarly, whether we like it or not, the I AM power we believe is outside of our minds is actually in our minds. We can never separate ourselves from this limitless power, even as we conceive ourselves to be less than the power inside our minds.

Our powers of mind free us from self-condemnation and powerlessness. We are free to detach ourselves from historical machinations designed to confuse us about who we are. This is the freedom that's required for us to go beyond our current beliefs and values, which are responsible for the confusion.

The powers in our minds can free us of the distortions causing us live in the world's darkness. We can enlighten our minds simply by accepting that we are responsible for our beliefs and values. It's not the world and its leaders that are responsible for our confusion about ourselves and the outside world, it's our beliefs and values.

We must remain mindful of our awareness of being to know that others are powerless to free our minds. This is something we must do for ourselves. There's no mystery to the way we think and live. We are always expressing who we are according to our beliefs and values.


Whenever we accept that everything we currently know came from our Guides -- society, parents, and life experiences -- we place ourselves in the position to free our minds of this knowledge. And to accomplish this freedom, we cannot use the same beliefs and values responsible for our confusion.

Nevertheless, for us to free our minds, we must unlearn or remove the beliefs and values causing the confusion and our suffering.  And in our doing so, we must be willing to face the problems we are busy running from while collecting things to conceal our pain and suffering.

This search must be to the deeper parts of mind where the pain and confusion exist. There, in the midst of our pain and suffering, we must have the courage to feel the pain as part of our beliefs and values, and then understand and accept it as our own creations.

When we sit with our minds in complete silence, we clearly know there's no amount of money in the world that will remove the pain from child abuse, self-condemnation, rape, abandonment, shame, and the anger of feeling economically and socially defecated on by others. Our pain and suffering are personal.

Meanwhile, the secret to unleashing the powers in our minds is a simple one. All that is required of us is our willingness to let go of the beliefs and values causing us to seek freedom outside of our minds or from another person.

We also must be willing to accept that no other person in this world is greater than who we are in this moment. This requires us to take the action ourselves to remove the toxic belifes and values responsible for our confusion.

When we can accept the realization that all of the power in the universe is in our minds, then we can become one with the power responsible for creating the universe. 

So stop looking for another person to do for us what we already have the power to do for outselves.

The Truth as we Know It

Our consciousness is the only truth we will ever know. And without our consciousness, there is no truth.

Many of us are confused about our consciousness. We frequently forget that our consciousness exists in our minds. It's not something separate from our beliefs and values; it is our beliefs and values.

Meanwhile, many of us believe in the existence of a universal truth. We cannot accept that our consciousness is all that we have to live our lives. So we believe that a greater consciousness exists outside of us that is holding everything together. And we define this consciousness as God, the Creator, Allah, and by many other names.

Many of us even tell ourselves and others that we have established personal relationships with this consciousness. We talk about voices talking to us, visions, and so forth to validate our claims of having a personal relationship. And most of us accept these pronouncements from others, as well as from ourselves, as being universal truths.

Most of our lives are spent trying to mesh our own interpretations of the truth with this universal truth, which we know very little about. In our quest to make our truths congruent, we  have forgotten how the beliefs originated in the first place; from our beliefs and values.

Nevertheless, without becoming deeply involved in philosophical propositions, most of us understand that the real truth exists without our beliefs and values. It is what is without human distortions. Some describe this as forms existing without interpretation.

The truth about who we are exists only in the beliefs we have embodied as true expressions of ourselves and the world. For example, we identify with race, gender, religion, class, and so forth, and this identification determines the truth about who we are, and how we interpret the outside world.

Today, as we seek to understand our purposes, we search for this truth with the same beliefs and values that's concealing it from us. We have forgotten that the search for the truth is an inward one. The clarity we seek exists in our minds.

Similarly, the more we search outside of our minds for this universal truth, the more we condemn ourselves for not finding it. It's important for us to remember that all the great ones we have read about told us to look for this glorious  power within our minds. And that it cannot be found in another person.

The more we embrace negative perceptions of the truth about our power, the more we succumb to the distortions that we believe represent the truth.

Unfortunately, many of our beliefs and values are nothing more than make-believe things we accept as truths. We don't  personally know any of the people we have been taught or know anything about their accomplishments. We accept what we have been taught as true and build from this point.

In other words, we accept what we have been taught about others' historical accomplishments like we accept mathematical axioms. We assume they have already been investigated and proven to be valid or true. Unfortunately, people and their accomplishments are not as easily verifiable as axioms.

The inward search for the truth begins with understanding our powers of mind. This means our understanding of the power we have to search for universal truths within our minds. We have powers in our minds to create new definitions about race, gender, religion, class and so forth.

To understand our powers of mind, we must be willing to free our minds to travel beyond our current beliefs and values. And to know we don't have to rely on yesterday to determine what we can do today.

Many of us have been taught to use prayer and meditation to still the mind and clear away the distortions concealing our powers. However, some of us forget that when we pray and meditate, we are working on our minds. We are communicating with our unconditioned consciousness to assist us with claiming the power we were born with.

Some of us find it's too  difficult to accept that all powers exist in our minds. We want it to exist outside of us. So we continue to search for others to give us the enlightenment we already have within our minds.

As the great ones told us thousands of years ago, The Kingdom of Heaven is within the mind. And before that, another enlightened one told us the truth to free the mind from suffering is within the mind itself. And whether we believe it or not, it is the only truth we will ever know.

Whenever we reach the clarity of mind to stop devaluing  or condemning ourselves, we will clearly know that the truth exists only in our minds.

And when we accept that all power comes to us from our mind, we will have discovered the glorious truth we have read about others possessing.

Illusions of Hope

Some of our illusions are more harmful to us than others. One of the more pernicious ones is hope. It's pernicious because it prevents us from living in the present moment, and from accepting ourselves as complete.

Hope is one of the numerous illusions produced by our beliefs and values that distort our perception of ourselves and the outside world. And it's this distortion of powers of mind that cause us to believe our present conditions are worse than what they really are.

At some point in our lives, we all hope things will get better. Sometimes we just feel powerless. We daydream by creating fanciful images of a better future. This is all part of the mind game played out everyday by our beliefs and values.

Whenever we rely on hope, it means we believe we don't have the power to obtain the things we desire to possess in our lives. And by our reliance on hope, we diminish the powers of mind to produce the things we desire.

In other words, we stop working on discovering the power in our minds and beginning  hoping for miracles to make us feel good about ourselves.   And regardless of how much we hope our lives will get better, we still must empower our minds to do the work to make it so.

Some of us hope that the world will change and people will all get along with each other. While some of us hope everyone will be able to get a job, own a home, and live the ideal dream. Yet it is this hope to change things outside of us that's responsible for our illusions.

Whenever we gain enough clarity in our minds, we can clearly see that there's nothing right or wrong with the world. What we perceive as right and wrong come from our beliefs and values.

Our judgments about ourselves and the outside world are nothing more than interpretations produced by our beliefs and values. In other words, we are using illusions to interpret illusions.

There is a reality that exists independently of our beliefs and values. This is the reality we cannot see because it's distorted by our beliefs and values. It's a reality that everything is all right in world.

There are no great problems facing us, except those produced by beliefs and values. Our minds  manufacture problems to inextricably tie us to the illusions expressing themselves as realities.

This causes us to establish spiritual and moral principles, which are products of our beliefs and values, to assist us with interacting with the outside world.

After we play the outside mind game for awhile, we begin to accept less in our lives than we are capable of producing for ourselves. This limited perspective of ourselves cause us to desire things we see others possessing.

It's rather obvious that from these beliefs and values we begin to hope. So our hopes become desires for things outside of us. This means we can stop hoping for things by searching within our own minds for our completeness.

We were born complete and perfect to express what we need to do on this journey. We have in minds the blueprint for everything we will ever need on this journey.

We just have to learn how to know that we are, for example, apple trees and not orange trees. And to be who we are, we don't need to compare ourselves to others.

So today we bury hope and resurrect the powers of mind. All the power we need is in our minds. And when we discover this wonderful truth, we will no longer have to hope to get better. We will know that we are already complete, but we can't see this in ourselves because of our beliefs and values.

All power is in our minds. This is where prayer, meditation, faith, hope, and our interpretations of ourselves and the outside world exist.

Our Thoughts are Killing us

There's not much difference between being opinionated and being addicted to toxic beliefs and values, except our mind. Whether we like it or not, our  mind is the source of the beliefs and values we use to determine what's true, bad, sinful, good, and sacred.


Some of us go through life without ever questioning our beliefs and values, because we are too afraid. Unfortunately, most of us have been taught to believe that it's sacrilege, or something bad will happen to us if we question what we've been taught.

Our fears keep us blinded by our illusions. This is the darkness responsible for the distortions we have about the outside world.

Unfortunately, we respond to our illusions as realities or universal truths. We tend to forget that our faith in God, at least the one we have been taught by others, comes from our beliefs and values. And so does our religion; even our social and political affiliations come from others.

Most of us are defensive about our faith in God and religion. We are too afraid to even ask questions. We're afraid to examine why we became a Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and so on.  And in our disquietude, we rationalize our faith -- belief in something -- as the source of our power. 

At this level of understanding, it's difficult to understand, or even accept, that faith exists only in our individual mind. And unfortunately, for many of us, sagacity died a long time ago. That's when our mind   became a cesspool of illusions.

Nonetheless, from the darkness of our mind, we seek succor in careers, education, history, religion, and other things outside of our mind. This means we are guided by our illusions in our search for clarity.

It's during our search for clarity that our illusions cause us to have a blackout,  a sort of memory loss.  We temporarily forget that our beliefs and values caused us to perceive ourselves as Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, and so on, come from our minds.

Similarly, our forgetfulness keeps us searching for answers in the illusions outside our mind. And whenever we discover what we believe is new information, we immediately manipulate it to fit comfortably with our existing beliefs and values.


When we try to manipulate new information, we become active players in the illusion game. We become so blinded by our beliefs and values that we believe sin and righteousness actually exist in time and space according to our beliefs. 

In other words, we believe things happening outside of our mind are godly (good) or sinful (bad)based entirely on our beliefs and values.This type of reasoning makes it easier for us to hate people or dislike them simply because of our beliefs and values.

As active players in the illusion game, we manipulate our beliefs to fool or deceive others. Unfortunately, when we manipulate our minds to deceive others, we only create more illusions and suffering in our own lives.

To manipulate our minds requires a lot of energy and self-deception. And after playing this game for long periods of time, our minds become feeble, powerless, and disinterested in understanding the illusions.

We must constantly practice mindfulness so that we know our minds are responsible for the thoughts killing our essence. And unless we are committed to understanding the origins of our beliefs and values, we will remain victimized by the illusions. 


Meanwhile, for those of us living outside of our minds, we believe enlightenment is another mind game. It's another form of something to give us relief from our out-of-control mind. We expect it to come from another person., one who we believe has already achieved it.


We must reach the point of clarity in our mind to know that enlightenment is arduous, time consuming, and not born of this illusory world. Enlightenment is more than a word confined to a specific language.

Enlightenment is the not-yet-discovered power in our minds. It's our inner power, our unconditioned consciousness, awaiting to be discovered by those who seek its power.

Commitment to the Powers of Our Minds

All power exists in our mind.

Our existence is confirmed by our minds. So are our goals in life. And even our religious and spiritual beliefs and values come from our minds. Everything that we are capable of doing in life come from our minds.

Some of us find it difficult to believe that everything we know about ourselves and the outside world come from our well-developed beliefs and values. And even when we get inklings or inspirations to awaken our minds, we choose to hang on to what we already know.

We even trick our minds into believing our beliefs and values come from a source of power other than society, parents, and life experiences. And we frequently forget that when we meditate or pray, we do so with beliefs and values  received from others and embodied as our own.

In other words, we seek power of clarity by using beliefs and values that distort who we are, and how we perceive life. Whenever we seek liberation or enlightenment in a power outside of our minds, we are relying on beliefs and values that are toxic and deleterious.

All power exists in our mind.

Obviously, this power doesn't exist in a toxic mind or one imprisoned with beliefs and values that distort our perception of ourselves and the outside world.

Nevertheless, in spite of our toxicity, we think and embody beliefs and values. And what we think and believe, determine who we are now, and who we can become later. Our minds determine the outcome of our lives. 

Whatever we cherish or desire in our lives come from our minds. Our education comes from the information we are taught by others. So does religion, and to a larger extent spirituality. We know about the existence of things because of our beliefs and values, which existed in the world before we were born.

Although many of us crave knowledge and, in some cases, knowledge of the self, we search for the self with the beliefs and values responsible for distorting the self.  Unfortunately, this is a fruitless search. All that we can find in our search is what we already know, or more aptly, what is already known by the collective world consciousness.

This means we search for ourselves handicapped by our illusions of language, religion, moral and spiritual principles, and our incessant need to fit in with others by denying who we are.

Nevertheless, our search for the self is a necessary one, if we desire to enlighten our minds.  It's during our search when we become aware that all we know about ourselves is nothing at all. And unfortunately, there's no one in the world, other than us, who can ever define who we are.


Many of us are taught to worship other people, places, and things. And after awhile, we begin to think so little of ourselves that we believe nearly everyone is more powerful than we can ever become. These beliefs confirm we are lost in the search for the self, and that we have forgotten our search is inside, not outside of the mind.

Whenever we forget that all power is in our minds, we fall deeper into the abyss of human victimization and powerlessness. It's important for us to remain mindful of our power at all times. Mindfulness is a form of clarity necessary for the inward journey.

Even in those moments of intense desires for something outside of us, we must remember most of our desires come from toxic beliefs and values. And the things we desire are fulfilled by the powers of our minds.

In other words, we can conceive specific desires and use our mind powers to express the desires into the visible world. This mind power becomes limitless when we remove the veil of distortions preventing us from having a clear and clean mind.


Similarly, we must remain steadfast in our commitment to remove the toxic beliefs and values distorting our vision of ourselves and the outside world. There can be on letup on our work. We must to committed to working everyday on understanding the development of our beliefs and values.

In other words, we must have a strong, unshakable commitment to working on our minds. And if our commitment is easily shaken by others, then it's not a real commitment. Our commitment to enlighten our minds must be strong enough to ignore what we hear and see from others.


For us to think less of ourselves, other than what we were created to be, mean we don't truly understand the limitless power in our minds. We must believe and know we are greater than our present beliefs and values. However, to accept this awareness of power we must be willing to go deeper into our minds, beyond judgments of right and wrong, and discover who we really are without our current beliefs and values.

Meanwhile, even at the level of intense suffering, some of us know  we are more than what we have been taught. Something in our mind reminds us of the existence this yet-to-be discovered power. This undiscovered power is our unconditioned consciousness or our inner power. It's all the power we need to express who we are on this journey.

All power exists in our mind.