The advertising industry knows very well that in order to sell things people don’t really need they must convince them that those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen by others. Advertising makes people think that what they buy will add something to their sense of self. This is done by telling them that they will stand out from the crowd by using a certain product and become more than what they are already.

Or advertising may create an association in the mind between the product and a famous person, or a youthful, attractive, or happy looking person. Even pictures of old or deceased celebrities in their prime work well for that purpose. The unspoken assumption is that by buying this product, through some magical act of appropriation, people become like them, or rather the surface image of them. And so in many cases we are not buying a product but an identity enhancer.

The things we identify with vary from person to person according to age, gender, income, social class and so on. It all has to do with the content. The unconscious compulsion to identify is inherent within us and is one of the basic ways the ego operates. Paradoxically, what keeps the so called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find ourselves through things doesn’t work. The ego satisfaction is temporary and so we keep looking for more and keep consuming.

Of course we need housing, clothes, food, and other basic items. There may also be things in our lives that we value because of their beauty or inherent quality. Each thing has its origin within the one energy of all being, the source of all things. In traditional cultures, people believe that everything has an indwelling spirit. But when we live in a world deadened by mental abstraction, we don’t sense the aliveness of the universe anymore. Most people don’t inhabit a living reality, but a conceptualized one.

If we try to find ourselves through things we will become miserable. Our identification with things creates attachments and obsessions which create our consumer society where the only measure of progress is always more. The unchecked striving for more is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part. Some economists are so attached to the notion of growth that they can’t let go of that word, so they refer to recession as a time of negative growth.

A large part of many people’s lives is consumed by an obsessive preoccupation with things. This is why one of the ills of our times is object proliferation. When we can not feel the life that we are, we are likely to fill up our life with things. It can be useful to investigate our relationship with the world of things through self observation and how things that are designated as belonging to us. We need to be honest to find out whether our sense of self worth is bound up with things we possess.

When there is nothing to identify with any longer our sense of beingness is freed from its entanglement with form and spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter. We realize our essential identity as formless and as an all pervasive presence of being prior to all forms and identifications. We can realize our true identity as consciousness itself, rather than what consciousness had identified with.

When we come to the realization that we are perfect expressions of life and truth, there is nothing that can be added to or taken from us to make us complete. We rest in the peace and inner stillness that is the essence of our being.

When I was at the store the other day, I noticed a little plastic tray on the counter for all the spare pennies that people give and take to make their purchases easier. Most places have a container like that so we don’t have to go digging for exact change or for when we don’t want to carry pennies around. This tray had lots of pennies in it and was well worn from all the years it had sat on the counter. In the front area of the tray were printed the words “Positive Change”, which got me thinking.

It’s about contributing to change, and then having a source for change when we need it. Within ourselves there is an impulse to change things, to make them better than they are. Even though the present moment is perfect as it is, there is constant change happening at all times in the universe. Change is the natural order of things. It is the ever present creative force.

Because of our need to love, we seek to change things for one another. How many times have we made suggestions or urged someone to do a certain thing because we think it is right? This is our love in action, trying to help one another. Of course, the suggestions we make are usually not completely correct. We are simply demonstrating the impulse to change that is inherent within us.

We also seek to change ourselves so that we can help one another more effectively. How often have we made a comment to someone and then realized how wrong we were? When this happens we require assistance from others to comprehend situations and facilitate change and understanding within ourselves. Once again, it is the relentless urge to align ourselves with the never ending change that is all around us.

It is the nature of the universe to change at all times. Just as the sun rises and sets to cause change in all things, we are continuously adapting to everything around us. Once we see and accept the transience of all things and the inevitability of change, we can enjoy the pleasures of the world while they last without fear of loss or anxiety about the future.

Awareness is the greatest agent for change. It is where positive change comes from. When we are still and aware of everything in the present moment, we become receptive to the the true nature of what we are and all that exists, including change. Becoming aware of the changes that occur within is like practice for the enormous changes that are going on outside of ourselves at all times. 

These changes can be overwhelming and it is easy to take on a negative attitude about them. However, some changes may look negative on the surface but we soon realize that space is being shifted in our lives for something new to emerge. It is important to take on the change and open ourselves to exploring the creative energy of the universe rather than shutting ourselves off from it.

Positive change is much more likely to come into our lives if we can enjoy what we are doing already, instead of waiting for some change so that we can start enjoying what we do. It’s like that tray of pennies that is always being added to and taken from. Sometimes there are lots of pennies in it, while at other times it is empty. The change is inevitable, and it is positive change. It says so right on the front.

Sometimes I think about what it would be like to envision what I’m doing as though it were happening in fast motion. Like one of those stop action movies where everything was recorded at one frame per minute then played back at regular speed. I imagine myself waking up, running around all over the place and going back to bed in three seconds, an entire day in an instant.

Essentially, this is what an entire life is. In the grand scheme of the things, it’s a fast motion movie. All the things that were ever experienced, relative to the infinity of the universe, are instant. Every movement, thought and accomplishment is a small blip on the radar. This lends an insignificance to life and makes one realize the true nature of our selves, that we are not existing in time, but that time is existing in us.

This illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only in to the reality of space and time but also into human nature, referred to as an optical illusion of consciousness. That illusory self then becomes the basis for all further interpretations, or rather misinterpretations of reality, all thought processes, interactions, and relationships. Reality becomes a reflection of the original illusion. 

Time is a mind structure needed for sensory perception and is indispensable for practical purposes, but the greatest hindrance to knowing the self. Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. Then there is the vertical dimension of depth, accessible to you only through the portal of the present moment. The elimination of time from consciousness is the elimination of ego and is the only true spiritual practice.

When we speak of the elimination of time we are not referring to clock time, which is the use of time for practical purposes, such as making an appointment or planning a trip. It would be almost impossible to function in this world without clock time. What we are speaking of is the elimination of psychological time, which is the endless preoccupation of the mind with past and future and its unwillingness to be one with life by living in alignment with the inevitable beauty of the present moment.

Whenever a habitual no turns into a yes, whenever we allow the moment to be as it is, we dissolve time as well as ego. For the ego to survive, it must make past and future more important than the present moment. The ego cannot tolerate becoming friendly with the present moment except briefly just after it got what it wants. But nothing can satisfy the ego for long. As long as it runs our lives there are two ways of being unhappy. Not getting what we want is one, getting we you want is the other.

Whatever is or happens is the form that the life takes. As long as we resist it, the world is an impenetrable barrier that separates us from who we are beyond form, separates us from the formless singularity that we are. When we bring an inner yes to the form the moment presents to us, that very form becomes a doorway into the formless. The separation between the world and God dissolves.

Theologians and philosophers have ascribed a number of attributes to God, including omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence. God has been described as incorporeal, a personal being, the source of all moral obligation, and the greatest conceivable being existent. These attributes were all claimed to varying degrees by the early Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars.

Many medieval philosophers developed arguments for the existence of God, while attempting to comprehend the precise implications of God’s attributes. Reconciling some of those attributes generated important philosophical problems and debates. For example, God’s omniscience implies that God knows how free agents will choose to act. If God does know this, their apparent free will might be illusory, or foreknowledge does not imply predestination, and if God does not know it, God is not omniscient.

The last centuries of philosophy have seen vigorous questions regarding the arguments for God’s existence raised by such philosophers as Immanuel Kant, David Hume and Antony Flew, although Kant held that the argument from morality was valid. The theist response has been either to contend, like Alvin Plantinga, that faith is properly basic, or to take, like Richard Swinburne, the evidentialist position. Some theists agree that none of the arguments for God’s existence are compelling, but argue that faith is not a product of reason, but requires risk. There would be no risk, they say, if the arguments for God’s existence were as solid as the laws of logic, a position summed up by Pascal as “The heart has reasons which reason knows not of.”

Most major religions hold God not as a metaphor, but a being that influences our day-to-day existences. Many believers allow for the existence of other, less powerful spiritual beings, and give them names such as angels, saints, djinni, demons, and devas.

Through the present moment we have access to the power of life itself, that which has traditionally been called God. As soon as we turn away form it, God ceases to be a reality in our lives, and all we are left with is the mental concept of God, which some people believe in and others deny. Even belief in God is only a poor substitute for the living reality of God manifesting every moment of our lives.

Our minds reveal themselves as essentially formless when we go deeper into them. They become a doorway into inner space. Although inner space has no form, it is intensely alive. That empty space is life in its fullness, the unmanifested source out of which all manifestation flows. The traditional word for that source is God.

So when we think we can sense our thoughts, that is a misperception created by our minds. What is really happening is that the consciousness that appears as the mind is becoming conscious of itself. When we no longer confuse who we are with a temporary form of ourselves, then the dimension of the limitless and the eternal can express itself through us and guide us. At each moment, we can sense the presence of inner space, which really means we can sense our own presence within the presence of God.

The present moment is what happens. Since this changes constantly it seems that life consists of thousands of moments in which different things happen. Time is seen as an endless succession of moments. Yet, if we look more closely we find that there are not many moments at all. Life is always now and unfolds in the constant present. Even past or future moments only exist when they are remembered or anticipated.

Scientists, the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and the universe, often work like detectives. They make a guess, called a hypothesis, about what might be true. They then say to themselves, “If that were really true, we ought to see so and so”. This is called a prediction. For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller, going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back where he started.

We use evidence to learn about the world and the way it operates. It is much more clever and complicated than that, however. It is based on cause and effect and the internal processing of this material to convince us of what is true or not. Evidence is a good reason for believing something, but there are three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called tradition, authority, and revelation.

Tradition means beliefs handed down from generation to generation, or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing. Perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they’ve been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over the centuries. That’s tradition.

Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call that feeling revelation. We all have inside feelings from time to time, sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don’t. People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside. Sometimes people have a strong inside feeling that somebody loves them when it is not based upon any evidence, and then they are likely to be completely wrong. Inside feelings must be backed up by evidence, otherwise you just can’t trust them.

Astronomers have discovered evidence to suggest that the universe came into existence fifteen billion years ago in a gigantic explosion and has been expanding ever since. Not only has it been expanding, but it is also growing in complexity and becoming more and more differentiated. Some scientists also postulate that this movement from unity to multiplicity will eventually become reversed. The universe will then stop expanding and begin to contract again and finally return to the unmanifested, the inconceivable nothingness out of which it came, and perhaps repeat the cycles of birth, expansion, contraction, and death again and again. 

For what purpose? “Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” asks physicist Stephen Hawking, realizing at the same time that no mathematical model could ever supply the answer.

If you look within rather than only without, however, you discover that you have an inner and an outer purpose, and since you are a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosm, it follows that the universe too has an inner and outer purpose inseparable from yours. The outer purpose of the universe is to create form and experience the interaction of forms. The play, the dream, the drama, or whatever you choose to call it. Its inner purpose is to awaken to its formless essence.

Then comes the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose, to bring the essence of consciousness into the world of form and thereby transform the world. The ultimate purpose of that transformation goes far beyond anything the human mind can imagine or comprehend. And yet, on this planet at this time, that transformation is the task allotted us. That is the reconciliation of outer and inner purpose, the reconciliation of the world and God.

The true meaning of love is a wonderful thing. It is the desire of the soul to express itself in terms of creation. It is brought about only through the generosity of the lover to the object of the love. This is why, when we love people, we will go to the limit to help or serve them. Nothing is too great, no sacrifice is enough. The true lover gives all and is unhappy in not having still more of himself to give to the object of his adoration.

Because of our emotional nature, love is generally expressed through the sex desire. But too great an expression of this desire is destructive, for it depletes the vitality and demagnetizes the one who overindulges. Love is the most wonderful thing in the world and creates the highest form of energy known to the mind of man. It will be expressed at the level of passion or become transmuted into artifacts of real and lasting value.

What is commonly called falling in love is in some cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. One becomes attracted to another person, or rather to the image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.

Our culture has a long heritage of the individual learning that they are unworthy children in need of discipline by religious hierarchies. Many religions condition people to believe in their sin and inadequacy. Christianity historically has emphasized the benefits of suffering and the sin of pleasure. We are conditioned with an emotional conditioning of pleasure anxiety. Our fearful contraction prevents our liberation.

In Byron Katie’s book I Need Your Love, Is That True? she states:

“When you say or do anything to please, keep, influence, or control anyone, fear is the cause and pain is the result. Manipulation is separation, and separation is painful. Another person can love you totally in that moment, and you’d have no way of realizing it. If you act from control, there’s no way you can receive love, because you’re trapped in a thought about what you have to do for love.”

Some people, if they cannot get love or admiration, will settle for other forms of attention and play roles to elicit them. If they cannot get positive attention, they may seek negative attention instead by provoking a negative reaction in someone else. Children already do that by misbehaving to get attention.

Love is the wholistic feeling of attraction and is an integrative force. On a personal level it is an expansive giving force. The aspect of love as a communication of energies need be emphasized. There is no reason in the quest for enhanced states of joy that we cannot acculturate the enhancement, technique and knowledge of love to a more sophisticated degree. Finding ways to enhance the enjoyment of life is a pleasurable task and is a legitimate focus of attention.

When one looks elsewhere for the love that is within their own being, it creates a cycle of unsatisfied need that is never resolved. Love and admiration are not really emotions at all but states of being. They emanate from within as the love, joy, and peace that are aspects of all true nature. Knowing the oneness of the self is true love, true admiration, true compassion.

The universe is alive with action and power, with energy and life. We experience it only in fragments, but from these parts we catch a glimpse of the nature of the whole. We know that matter and energy are indestructible and eternal, but we also know that within them change is forever taking place. When one is immersed in the unlimited field of life energy one never becomes tired, because the energy which holds the universe in place is tireless. 

In our bodies, chemical bonds are broken and created during metabolic processes, and the available energy is stored by cells in the form of carbohydrates and lipids which release energy when they react with oxygen. The energy differences between all substances determine whether they can be converted into or react with other substances. Weather phenomena like wind, rain, hail, snow, lightning, tornadoes and hurricanes, are a result of energy transformations brought about by solar energy on the planet. Energy transformation in the universe is characterized by various kinds of potential energy which has been available since the Big Bang, later being transformed to more specific types of energy.

All culture embodies translations of energy. These interactions inform each individual about what one eats, how one gains shelter and how one uses the materials of the earth for culturally important purposes. The encompassing cultural context is known as the cosmology. This framework of ideas is called by many names, legends, stories and religions. It gives an account of how creation came to be and the purpose of the human lives and destiny within it. This is the creation myth that sets the framework for that which has value and meaning.

In the remnants of Australian aboriginal culture or the existing Pueblo culture of the southwest, we see beautiful and elaborate ceremony dramatizing the life energy of the earth in cultural form. The themes of ceremony relate directly to the living reality of the earth and cosmos. In Pueblo culture there is the buffalo dance, the green corn dance, the deer dance and so forth. In Australian aboriginal culture there are equally complex rituals related, as are the Pueblos, to participating with the creative force in the natural cycles of existence.

In the natural world, each species carries an immaterial form of energy. This is the energy code of the species that informs by generational transmission the individual processes of adaptation and survival. From the rainforests, the womb of humans and their culture, people ventured out onto the grassy plains and beyond. As they moved, their adaptation became refined to areas as difficult as the arctic and the desert.

Human culture has an organic energy of its own, independent of any individual member of the cultural group. The culture and its teachings are the effective means by which the individual members maintain life. The culture sustains itself over time, though a succession of individuals is born and dies within it. Culture is a body of knowledge, a framework of ideas, and an energy form, held in the consciousness of individuals.

The culture of humans and certain other mammals, we know without dispute, is held in conscious memory and it is suggested that the culture of other biological forms result from morphic resonance of energy. Life forms are a psychobiological phenomenon. Culture, whether it is plant, mammal or the culture of any biological form, is an organic and natural part of the energy of the earth. Culture is part of the planetary life. Many types of animals have an individually transmitted culture. That is, parents or older individuals of that family of beings transmit the culture to them.

Culture is a reflection of the energy of the earth, which is itself a reflection of the effect of cosmic forces and all of the energy forces that have resulted in the planet earth being what it is and where it is. It is a manifestation of the solar, magnetic, atomic and other forces that sustain the planet. No one has ever seen the energy that is the manifestation of life, and perhaps no one ever will. But we know that such principles exist because we can use them. The only proof we have that energy really exists is that from it we receive life and consciousness.

We who are the life of the earth are increasing our being. Our nature as humans allows us to amplify and potentiate what now lies dormant, waiting to unfold. Like the unused capacity of our brains, there are other potential abilities that can be cultivated. The clarity and strength of our communication is one of those.

Communication between humans on a verbal level uses the tool of language. Language reflects the focus of attention of the culture. In the language of the Inuit of the far north it is said there are more than thirty descriptive words for snow and its different conditions. In the ancient language of the Greeks there were many descriptive words for love and the various qualities of its manifestation. Language carries the culture and becomes a tool of thought. As we learn language we learn the culture.

We find that in English as well as many other languages of civilization there is much confusion. In many cases similar sounds mean different things, and different word sounds mean the same thing. Language, as we know it, has become indistinct from what is being described. To add to this we are now coming into the age of double speak in which government employs psychological operations and media manipulation teams to confuse and disinform the masses.

A type of intuitive language has been formulated by John W. Weilgart. “aUI” is the name of this language, which means ”mind space sound” (in aUI). It is not the type of language that we are accustomed to. Abstract symbols like letters do not denote or connote abstract meanings. Instead there are a set of thirty basic symbols that reflect the intuitive realities of our existence. These are such things as space, movement, light, human, life, time, matter, sound, feeling, round, equal, inside, quantity, quality and so forth. Out of these basic categories thoughts are put together intuitively.

The symbols for each of these categories is congruent with their meaning so that the symbol for “inside” is a circle with a dot inside of it. “Feeling” is a heart shaped symbol and “active” is a lightening shaped symbol. Weilgart created the sounds for each symbol so that the sound is intuitively similar to the meaning so that the sound for “inside” is a guttural sound coming from deep inside the throat. Weilgart has also created a sign language in which the arms and upper torso form the symbols. This provides an additional level of congruence of meaning for each symbol.

In creating aUI, Weilgart has discovered something of the nature of language in its primitive state and something essential about human communication at its beginning stages. This language is not a concocted language like esperanto. It is a rediscovery of the basic categories of human thought and expression.

By working with basic categories of meaning and a simple set of aural and visual symbols for each, Weilgart has succeeded in making language definitive rather than merely denotive or conative. Basic categories are communicated through single symbols and new concepts are created by merely combining the basic symbols by way of a simple, intuitive logic. The result is language which has the simplicity of archaic speech plus the sophistication of modern thought.

There are a number of cultures known to modern anthropology that use several languages within their cultures. Among the Apache of Southern New Mexico there existed a war language that was only used in expeditions of war. Among other cultures there are known to have been spiritual languages, used primarily for discourse on spiritual subjects.

aUI is so intuitive and simple that Weilgart was able to teach it to many different groups. Individuals of diverse groups such as military servicemen, children of tribal societies, and school children were able to begin communicating in the language within a few minutes. Weilgart, among other talents, was a professor of psychology. In this capacity he used this language to facilitate communication with people classed as schizophrenic. These people, who ordinarily experience confusion in communication, were able to improve their communication significantly because of the precision and clarity of the language that they learned after a brief introduction.