that enlightenment becomes the way of your life. Being independent of the good opinion of others and being detached from the need to be right are two powerful indicators that your life is shifting toward a consciousness of trust in yourself and trust in God. Yet there are many people in our lives who disturb our state of peacefulness. Then, the question is how to handle those who consciously or unconsciously disturb our experience of trust and peace.
I once wrote an essay in a somewhat facetious tone titled “Your Soulmate Is the Person You Can Hardly Stand.” The essence of the essay was that the people in our lives who we agree with and share similar interests with are easy to accept and actually teach us very little. But those who can push our buttons and send us into a rage at the slightest provocation are our real teachers.
The person who is most capable of disturbing your state of peace is a person who is reminding you that you are not truly in the state of peace or enlightenment that results from trust. At that moment, this person is your greatest teacher. This is the person whom you want to treasure and thank God for sending into your life! When you can transcend the rage, anger and upset which that person appears to provoke, and instead say, “Thank you for being my teacher,” you have acknowledged a soulmate relationship.
Everyone in your life who can still push your buttons and send you into that frenzied state is a master teacher disguised as a manipulative, inconsiderate, frustrating, non-understanding being. The peace that is enlightenment means that you are not only at peace with those who share your interests and agree with you, and with strangers who come and go, but also with those master teachers who remind you that you still have some work to do on yourself.
Give thanks for those great spiritual masters who have arrived in your life in the form of your children, current or former spouses, irritating neighbors, co-workers, obnoxious strangers and the like, for they help you stay in an enlightened, peaceful state. They let you know each day how much more work you truly have to do and in what ways you have not mastered yourself.
Peace occurs when your highest self is dominant in your life. When you begin to feel peace as the result of trust, you are enjoying a healthy soul. Keep in mind that there is only one real soul, and that your personality is a vehicle for the whole. You cannot divide the infinite. There is no division. You must trust this awareness.
When you divide, you have moved out of identification with the God force and have taken up shelter in the ego. It is here that you will find an absence of peace and also an absence of trust in the wisdom that created you.
There are many things that you can do on a regular basis to make this second principle of trusting in the oneness a reality in your life. Here are a few suggestions to nurture trust in yourself and in the oneness.
HOW TO TRUST IN YOURSELF AND THE WISDOM THAT CREATED YOU
• Begin by admitting your confusion or failures. When you do this, you are dismissing any illusion of trust, which is in reality a false self-trust. Remind yourself that genuine trust involves letting go of all conditioning that teaches you that trust in yourself is based on being special or separate.
When you are honest with yourself about every aspect of your life, you discontinue identifying with separateness. You then become ready for the insight that trust in yourself and trust in ultimate truth are one and the same. Remind yourself often that you are a child of God and that you have the God force within you. Let the statements “I am it” and “It is me” rise from your inner being.
• Keep in mind that you cannot go to a higher ground if you are hanging onto a lower level. You cannot leave the physical world if you are so attached to it that you refuse to let go. The concept of trust involves surrendering and trusting the God force.
Imagine yourself falling from a precipice while clinging to a huge rock, believing that it will protect you. Letting go of the rock is a metaphor for surrendering and trusting. You will continue to live and breathe in the physical earth plane, but you realize that you are not only your body and mind, and that the rock is not your salvation. Your needs and demands cease, and you are one with the manifest consciousness.
Of course, you are literally still in the body, but you have also joined the manifest consciousness. This trust allows you to participate in the act of creation. Your current world will be experienced anew. The freedom and respect you receive from God will be bestowed by you on the circumstances of your world.
• Acquire a rebellious attitude toward the philosophy that preaches a style of God-as-boss who is authoritarian and a benevolent tyrant. Rejection of this model does not mean that you are an atheist, but rather a believer in the true meaning of divinity.
You are not required to feel inferior, to view yourself as a sinner and to prostrate yourself before idols and dogma in order to believe in God. Study St. Paul in the New Testament where he says, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.” This is the kind of trust you must adopt in order to know your divine self.
• Trusting does not mean you never experience life’s valleys. There will be peaks and valleys as long as you live on this physical plane. There is no happiness without the opposite experience of unhappiness. Opposites are the way it is in the physical plane. Expect that this is also your reality.
Do not abandon trust when your ego thinks things should be different than they are. It is better to embrace trust when darkness is present, knowing that light will follow. Begin to look for the lesson in the darkness rather than cursing it. Trust allows you simply to observe the dark and unhappy times rather than identifying totally with those aspects of life. From this perspective you are not at the mercy of your ego energy, insisting that everything must be perfect, and that when things are not, you have reasons to give up your trust in the divine.
The valleys are merely the way of the physical plane, but they are not who you are. You are part of the unseen wisdom that created this entire physical plane and you can trust in it uncategorically.
• There is timeless wisdom in this old idea of trust. Any person can sense that problems are within, but the spiritually trusting person realizes that the solution is also within.
When you trust in yourself, you are not looking for solutions to your life problems in someone or something outside yourself. Instead, you remain in a state of trusting. Then, in a trustworthy manner, you can proceed to attract the energy to you that provides the solution.
• Take your most serious problems and turn them over to God. Say something like the following: “I have not been able to resolve these issues in my life and I have used every technique I know. I would like to show my trust in the divine force by simply turning them over to your divine hands. As I do this I know that the divine force that is you, God, is also me, and I trust that this action will lead to a resolution of these problems.”
I can assure you that this method puts you into direct contact with a higher power than can ever be found in a bottle, a bank statement, a contrary partner, an illness or anything on the earth plane that you believe is external or separate from you. I left all of the addictions of my life behind me with the simple words “I’ve tried everything else, now I am trusting God.”
It was not as though something outside myself was now doing it for me. I simply trusted that force, and it began showing up in my daily abstinence program. I trusted in the eternal wisdom and I also trusted in myself to receive that wisdom and apply it. This same process has been the source of all of the manifesting that has occurred and continues to transpire in my daily life.
• The presence of complete trust is evident in your life when what you think, feel and do are all balanced
