As a reminder, NTI Mark is a fictional story that provides helpful symbols. Our role is to derive meaning from the symbols, and then live from the example provided by those symbols. In this way, Jesus of NTI is our role model.

Today’s story begins by saying, “With each day, Jesus felt his closeness to the Holy Spirit growing. … A merging seemed to occur.”

How did this merging occur? Through discernment, surrender and kindness. These are the three practices of Jesus of NTI.

Discernment is determining the difference between personal thought and self-will, which is ego, and thought and will that arise from beyond the personal self.

Surrender is choosing to ignore personal thought and will, and following the thought and will that arises from beyond the personal self. Follow it just as it is, without adding to it or subtracting from it. In this way, one becomes the witness of life, playing his part while letting the rest be as it is.

Kindness is living and acting from love instead of fear. (e.g., the Loving All Method)

Today’s reading tells two brief stories. The first story is a story of kindness and a story of faith plus action. Jesus is kind to a woman who feels worthless. Her sense of worthlessness has affected her health. Jesus asks this woman to go home and find her inner brightness. She has faith in his teaching, and she goes home and does as he asks. In this way, she is healed.

Imagine if the woman had been happy in the moment to meet Jesus, had been grateful for his words, but then did not follow up with his guidance when she got home. She would not have experienced the same result.

This demonstrates that faith in the teaching is not enough. One must combine faith with action.

Here are two quotes to contemplate along with this teaching:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? … faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. ~ James 2:14-17

I can only tell you what I know from my own experience. When I met my Guru, he told me: ‘You are not what you take yourself to be. Find out what you are. Watch the sense ‘I am’; find your real self’. I obeyed him, because I trusted him. I did as he told me. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon! It took me only three years to realise my true nature. My Guru died soon after I met him, but it made no difference. I remembered what he told me and persevered. The fruit of it is here, with me. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

The second story in today’s reading is a story about Jesus following intuition under extreme circumstances.

Jesus of the Bible was able to raise the dead. However, Jesus of NTI doesn’t have this special power. He simply discerns, surrenders, and lives from love. In today’s story, Jesus’ faith in these simple practices is challenged when he is told by a witness that a little girl is dead. The witness has seen the girl. Jesus has not seen her. Yet, when he feels intuitively that she is not dead, he trusts his intuition over the witness and others. He also follows intuition and breathes into the little girl’s mouth even though he had no knowledge of CPR.

Imagine the faith Jesus had, to trust his intuition over the witness, who was certain the girl was dead. Imagine the faith it took to see the girl, who appeared dead, and then to breathe into her mouth—to pass on the breath of life—without any knowledge of the medical practice we call CPR.

This story is told in this way to encourage us to trust our intuition over personal knowledge and over the urging of others.

I have learned from my own experience that intuition knows more than the human thinking mind. Intuition’s source is consciousness. As such, it knows everything about this moment, and it knows truth too. For this reason, intuition is much more reliable as a guide than the limited, biased thinking mind.

Here is a quote to help you consider your relationship with intuition. This is a powerful quote that can reveal a lot of clarity. I recommend contemplating this quote slowly, in parts and as a whole.

That which sees all this, and the nothing too, is the inner teacher. He alone is; all else only appears to be. He is your own swarupa (true Self), your hope and assurance of freedom; find him and cling to him and you will be saved and safe. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

There are two ways to view the story from today’s reading. We can view the story as an example of how to be with others, and we can view the story as an example of how to be with ourselves.

Today’s story is about fearlessness and kindness. Fearlessness and kindness go together. You can’t be afraid and be kind too. You might be afraid and act nice, but that’s not the same thing. If you have a personal agenda—a desired outcome—you aren’t being kind; you are being manipulative. (Note: Whenever you have a personal agenda, there is an underlying fear.)

In today’s story, Jesus demonstrates kindness. He is not afraid. He interacts with the man in the story with no fear at all. He is present and genuinely responsive.

It’s fair to say there isn’t enough kindness in the world today. If we see kindness and fear as opposites, we can also say there is too much fear in the world today. That negative energy is recycled in our world through the loop of experience—What I think, I see; What I see, I experience; What I experience, I think—and unspeakable atrocities occur as a result. Genuine kindness can help release some of that negative energy, and some atrocities can be prevented.

When you read the story, notice that a woman shares a fearful story with Jesus and the apostles. The apostles pick up on the fearful energy and believe it. As a result, they are incapable of being kind. Jesus dismisses the fearful energy as meaningless, so he is able to meet the situation without fear and with kindness.

I mentioned that there are two ways to view today’s reading, as an example of how to be with others and as an example of how to be with ourselves. If we see the man in the story as the ego and the legion of demons as thoughts, then Jesus demonstrates how we can be kind with ourselves.

The same rule applies: we can’t be afraid and be kind too.

There’s no reason to fear the mind. The mind can make a lot of noise, but if we don’t give it meaning, it is a noisemaker and nothing more. You don’t have to fight against the mind. In fact, fighting it isn’t helpful. Instead, be kind to the mind.

For example, if the mind is worried about a future situation, you might say, “I know you think there’s a lot to worry about, but we don’t actually know how things are going to turn out. Relax. Let’s watch and see what happens. We’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

With kindness, you can help the mind relax and let go of distracting thoughts. That places the mind in the present. A mind that is in the present is aware, surrendered to intuition and effectively responsive in the moment.

There are two primary points shared through the stories told in today’s reading.

The first point is related to a quote I shared recently from Nisargadatta Maharaj. Here is that quote again:

All you need is to listen, remember, ponder.
It is like taking food.
All you can do is to bite off, chew and swallow.
All else is unconscious and automatic.

When the apostles asked Jesus to describe the kingdom of Heaven, he shared two parables. Both were about seeds growing into plants. At another time, Jesus describes the kingdom of Heaven as being like yeast put in dough.

Jesus’ parables point to this:

Truth realization dawns upon the one who is willing to take time for contemplation and meditation. The one who rushes through life, always doing but never contemplating, misses the truth that is everywhere waiting to be seen. It’s like living locked within one’s skull, instead of opening up to existence and seeing, “I am that.”

We need time alone—quiet, contemplative time. If we allow ample room for that in our lives, realization will occur naturally, “unconscious and automatic.” But if we are too busy to slow down, “bite off, chew and swallow,” the seed is not planted, and it is not watered, and so it cannot grow.

The second point from today’s reading addresses confusion about what we are.

In today’s story, Jesus and the apostles are in the middle of the Sea of Galilee when a storm comes and frightens the apostles. They are afraid of losing their lives. The apostles do not see themselves as anything more than body-personalities.

In the story, Jesus is aware that:

Just as sure as the storm began, it will end.

This is a metaphor that points to truth. Let’s look at the metaphor more carefully.

Here is a story that I call The Journey of Water:

In the hot summer sun, some water evaporates from a lake known as the Sea of Galilee. The evaporated water forms a cloud. The cloud journeys through the air and drops rain in another location. The rainwater flows on the downward slope of the land and joins a creek. The creek flows southeast and merges with the Jordan River. The Jordan River flows south and dumps into the Dead Sea, where some of the water evaporates in the hot desert sun and becomes part of a small cloud. The cloud drifts northward and is drawn into a powerful storm system. The passing storm tosses a small convoy of boats on the Sea of Galilee, and raindrops fall to merge with the lake.

In this fictional story, we see that the water is ongoing and the storm is a temporary manifestation.

When Jesus refers to the “Son of God” in today’s reading, he is not referring to a single temporary body-personality. He is referring to what we are, the Great Ongoingness, of which the body-personality is a temporary manifestation, just like the storm is a temporary manifestation.

We are the Great Ongoingness—ongoing like the water in The Journey of Water. Transcending everything in form, ongoingness has nothing to fear.

In today’s story, people clamor after Jesus seeking physical healing, but Jesus doesn’t want to heal a never-ending crowd of ailing bodies. He wants to teach spiritual clarity, which he perceives as true healing.

Others may see Jesus of NTI as a master, but he sees himself as a student. He knows he is still awakening, and so he pays attention to himself. When he notices an error in his thinking, he corrects it.

Today’s reading says, “… it was the good news he yearned to share.” And then it goes on to say, “Jesus bowed his head to give the circumstance to the Holy Spirit.”

In other words, Jesus noticed this yearning to teach as self-will. “I” wanted to teach. Jesus knew “I” was ego, so he bowed his head to let go of self-will and to surrender.

When he surrendered, Jesus made sure that self-will was completely dissolved—dissolved to the point that he was willing to do anything  he was guided to do. He was willing to go back into the crowd and heal bodies. He was willing to teach. And he was willing to leave without doing anything. Having no conditions on what he would or would not do, Jesus knew he was genuinely surrendered.

Surrender yourself to the universal
and you will be absorbed in the universal.

~ Ramana Maharshi

The heart of today’s tip comes from three sentences in today’s reading:

A house divided cannot stand.

A house divided cannot stand.

Look within yourself and find what keeps you from being healed,
that you may overcome that thing and be healed.

Today is another day of self-examination. As Nisargadatta Maharaj said, we tend to “do and undo at every step.” We need to get in the habit of looking at ourselves to see how we are out of harmony with our desire to awaken. Where do we “undo” our own good work?

As a reminder, self-examination isn’t about judging ourselves to be good or bad. It’s about realizing what we want, and then looking to discover how our current way of being is in our own way, hindering us instead of helping us. It helps to see self-examination as a process of ongoing gentle refinement.

Just as a house that’s divided can’t stand, a ship that’s divided sinks. Let’s find where we are divided against our own purpose, and then see where we are willing to “tighten the portholes and batten down the hatches.”

Ohhh! The previous reference to leaking water reminds me of a Sufi story about Nasruddin, the comical spiritual master:

One day, a student of the legendary wise fool, Mullah Nasruddin, went to visit him at his home. Already expecting some crazy behavior on Mullah’s part, the student reminded himself not to react. Another spiritual teacher once told him, “If you react unconsciously, you push the lesson of the moment away.”

When Mullah opened the door, he was overjoyed to see his student.

“My friend! Just in time! You can help me draw water from the well! Here, take this bucket and follow me!”

The student followed Mullah to the well and watched while he began to pull water from the well and splash it into the bucket that the student held.

After a few minutes, the student noticed that the level of the water in the bucket was not rising very quickly. Where was all the water going?

The student glanced underneath the bucket and saw that the bucket was leaking almost as much as Mullah put in each time.

Not appearing to notice, Mullah continued to put water in the bucket. The student was exasperated.

“Mullah, you idiot! Can’t you see that the bucket is leaking?”

My friend,” Mullah responded, “I was only looking at the top of the bucket. What does the bottom have to do with it?”

Many spiritual students get confused between the purpose of awakening and the purpose of an improved life in the world. As NTI Revelation, Chapter 1 says, “The two purposes are not the same.” Today, we will revisit the difference between them.

If we were in a physical classroom together, I might lead you in an exercise that would demonstrate the difference between these two purposes. However, since we are not in a physical classroom, I will lead you through an imaginary exercise. Please read the following steps and imagine with me. Be sure to fully imagine one step, before proceeding to the next. If you read all of the steps without using your imagination along the way, this exercise may not have the same effect.

1. Imagine that you have a can of children’s molding clay, like Playdoh, in front of you. Imagine taking the clay out of the can. Set the clump of clay on the desk or table in front of you.

 

2. Close your eyes, and look at your life. Consider your health, your relationships, your financial situation, your job or other daily responsibilities, and etcetera. Look at your life as it is in your mind’s eye. What’s not perfect about your life? What’s missing? What would you change? What do you desire? Think of one way that your life could be improved. Think of something that would bring additional happiness, satisfaction, freedom or safety into your life situation. (Note: Don’t consider awakening right now. Think of a life improvement.)

 

3. Pick up the clump of clay in front of you. Use the clay to create something that symbolizes that improvement to your life. See yourself working with the clay to create that symbol. Feel the clay in your hands. Imagine the smell of it. Watch yourself work with the clay until the symbol is completed to your satisfaction. Set the completed form on the desk or table in front of you.

 

4. Look at the clay symbol of your life improvement. Imagine the symbol as the actualization of your desire. Imagine that whatever you have asked for is given. See your life with this improvement as part of it. Live with this improvement in your mind. Feel what it is like to have this improvement actualized as part of your life.

 

5. Having lived the improvement in your mind and feeling fully satisfied with it, imagine that time moves on. Things change. New desires are formulating in your mind. You do not need to imagine those desires specifically. Simply feel the notion of movement, change, a new outlook and new desires.

 

6. Pick up the symbol in front of you, which you created from clay. Using your hands, turn it back into a formless clump of clay. Set the clump of clay on the table or desk in front of you. The clay is ready to form a new symbol, a symbol that represents new dreams that are being born.

 

7. Look at the unformed clump of clay in front of you. We aren’t going any further with this exercise. We won’t create anything new right now. However, notice the unlimited potential of the clay. It can become anything.

 

Now, here’s the difference between the purpose of awakening and the purpose of an improved life:

Any improved life that we can imagine is temporary. What is made, will at some point be destroyed. Manifestations of form never last forever.

Awakening is becoming aware of the clay—of the essence as reality. People, things and circumstances come into being and go out of being. Essence is unlimited potentiality, unaffected by potentials, unaffected by the temporary actuals, and unaffected by whatever came that now ceases to be. That’s why it is called eternal.

Realizing that you are the essence, not a temporary actual, is awakening. The temporary actual will go out of being. You are eternal.

In today’s reading, we will see that the essence is manipulated, like clay, in order to change the form of a temporary actual. The purpose of this change is to demonstrate “that distortion can be replaced with newness when willingness is given for newness to be received.”

In other words, the intention of the demonstration in today’s reading is to set people on the path of questioning everything they’ve ever thought, experienced and believed. However, for most people, the demonstration does not have that effect. Instead of questioning everything and opening to a reality beyond their experience, they begin to seek more improved actuals. Not recognizing the purpose of the demonstration, they remain as lost after the demonstration as they were before the demonstration occurred.

The fact is, what we perceive as physical miracles sometimes happen. They do not happen all of the time. Even when they do happen, they are only temporary actuals. If one is invested in the form of a temporary actual, that person will be disillusioned at some point, because the actual is only temporary.

Be willing to set your sights higher than temporary life improvements. Seek to know the essence. One who knows the essence will never be disillusioned, because the essence is eternal.

Today’s reading is very short, so there is time to listen to a story about a “miraculous healing” that happened to me. Listen either before or after the reading.

Listen to this 7½ -minute audio

NTI Mark, Chapter 2 opens with, “Jesus’ great love attracted many, …”

Let’s take this opportunity to review Michael Langford’s 5 steps regarding kindness:

1. Every time you speak to a human being either in person or over the phone, make sure the content of what you are saying and the tone of your voice are loving, caring, and kind.
2. Every time you write something to a human being, make sure that what you are writing is loving and kind. Pause before you send someone an email or a text message and make sure that your email or text message is loving, caring and kind.
3. Never do any harm of any kind to any human being or animal.
4. Treat even the people who you think do not deserve your kindness with kindness.
5. Treat even people you only see briefly with great caring and kindness.

As Jesus followed inner guidance, he lived by kindness. Even when he felt tired, he chose to be kind. However, it’s interesting to notice that as he learned to follow guidance and live by kindness, he also dropped the habit of living according to outward expectations.

In Jesus’ time there were many religious laws. Many of these laws had no useful purpose. They were cultural laws, and people followed the laws because they were Jews. Non-Jews did not follow those laws.

As Jesus began to drop his identity as a Jew, he naturally began to drop the habit of following laws that had no purpose except to say, “I am a Jew.”

This is not a small point. As we awaken, we need to sort through our cultural conditioning. Which conditioning is useful and practical for human life, and which conditioning is based on imaginary roles and points-of-view?

An example of useful cultural conditioning is traffic laws. Traffic laws are meant for safety, and they are not tied to a specific false identity. We could see traffic laws as an extension of kindness. It is kind to follow traffic laws and help keep everyone safe on our roads and highways.

An example of cultural conditioning that is unnecessary is the expectation that your spouse remember your anniversary. That is tied to your identity as husband or wife. It’s also used to identify your spouse as good or bad, or to identify yourself as loved or unloved.

If someone spontaneously feels to celebrate an anniversary, fine. If the day passes and someone doesn’t notice the date as an anniversary, that is equally fine. A rule that says an anniversary must be remembered is useless conditioning that serves no purpose except to maintain false identities. No one is made safe or unsafe by the remembrance of an anniversary.

We use unnecessary conditioning (laws, traditions, expectations, etc.) to maintain our false identities and the false identities we have for others. In today’s reading, we will see Jesus as he begins to drop the habits of cultural conditioning.

Today, we begin reading NTI Mark. If you haven’t read NTI before, you may notice a change of tone in NTI Mark. NTI Mark is a story, a fictional story. It is not meant to be the factual correction regarding the life of Jesus. Some people have told me that they think this story “is what really happened.” They are making that up and believing their own imaginations.

This story was written because it provides symbols that are more helpful than some of the confusing symbols in the Bible. Our role as reader is to derive the meaning of symbols that are helpful to us, and then live from the example provided by those symbols. In this way, the Jesus of NTI is our role model.

NTI Mark, Chapter 1 is the beginning of the story. Like any beginning, it lays out the details needed to begin the story. Some of the details regarding our role model, Jesus, are:

• Jesus has decided on the purpose for his mortal existence. It is truth realization. This purpose is the leading factor in his life.

 

• Jesus knows that God is found within, so his focus is within, which includes focus on spontaneous guidance. Jesus lives a surrendered life. He is led. He does not make decisions for himself.

 

• Jesus went through a purification process during the 40 days and 40 nights in the desert. This left him with a lot of clarity, inner confidence and a sense of peace, but his journey is not over. In NTI Mark, we will observe Jesus as he walks the path from the initial purification to final awakening.

 

• Jesus lives from kindness and love. He is the servant of everyone he meets and the servant of Spirit within. Through service, which is not self-will, Jesus of NTI will follow spontaneous guidance to the end of the sense of self.

NTI Mark, Chapter 1 opens with this statement:

Before truth can dawn, there is work that must be done. This work must be done in faith and out of a desire for truth.

That opening statement is our guidance as we begin reading the story of Jesus of NTI. Jesus of NTI is our role model. Watch him, and you will know what to do. Model yourself after him, and you are doing the “work that must be done.”

Note: You will also learn from the apostles and other characters in the story.

NTI Matthew closes with a discussion about doubt. We have doubt, because we have memory. Our brain stores perceptions from this lifetime as memory. With each memory stored, this lifetime seems more and more to be reality.

Doubt comes from the belief that this lifetime as this body-mind-personality is reality. However, this lifetime as this body-mind-personality is not reality. There is so much more to reality than this! If we had even an inkling of an idea how much more there is than our limited experience, we would put no value in our perceptions or memory at all.

Recently, in a teaching from I Am That, I shared about an experience I had. That experience is only one example of something that is beyond our perception and completely denied by our memory. To hear that story, advance this audio to 53:45, and begin listening there. The audio from that point to the end is only a little over 6 minutes long.

In order to progress on the spiritual path, we need faith. Faith is the antidote to doubt. With faith that there is more than the lifetime of perceptions that our memory points to, we apply ourselves to truth realization. Without faith, there is nothing to pull us forward. Without faith, we believe the limited, biased, self-centered memory, and we think it is omniscience.

Yesterday we saw that the false self is not a being. It is an activity. Today’s reading looks at one activity that upholds the false self, the activity of guilt.

Here is a summary of the cycle of guilt:

A baby is born. The baby is pure unconditioned awareness. As the baby grows older, it begins to crawl. Typically, once a baby becomes mobile, it begins to reach for things or do things that the caretaker does not approve of. Although a caretaker may sometimes say “no” to the baby with a kind voice, invariably the caretaker has days when she is caught up in her own mental concerns, and her tone of voice is not kind. The baby feels the vibration of the caretaker’s voice, and begins to develop the idea, “I am bad.”

As the baby grows into a child and then into an adult, this idea, “I am bad,” is reinforced by other caretakers, by teachers and by other children. The child’s religious training may even reinforce this idea. Soon the idea is fully developed in the brain, and it replays in the mind over and over, continually reinforcing itself again and again. However, this idea is unbearable. One cannot exist with any sense of peace, happiness or well being if he fully experiences the self-hatred that is caused by the “I am bad” thought. So, the child learns to see the “I am bad” thought outside of himself. He sees other children as bad. He may see the family pet as bad. By the time he’s reached adulthood, he has learned to see guilt and sin in many others, whom he perceives as separate from him. This alleviates his own feeling of guilt and self-hatred, and he is able to bear the belief, “I am bad.”

This is a sad story, because the “I am bad” belief is learned mental activity only. The original caretaker, suffering from the belief, passed it on to the baby. Others who believed it, reinforced it. Yet, there was never any truth to it at all.

If you can’t see that guilt is merely mental activity and not fact, practice the awareness-watching-awareness exercise from yesterday’s tip again. It doesn’t matter what the body does or how strong the feeling of guilt is, the fact remains that we are pure awareness itself, and pure awareness is completely unaffected, always only itself.

We cannot let go of awareness, because it is what we are, but we can let go of mental activity, because it isn’t what we are. That means you can let go of the “I am bad” belief. The “I am bad” belief is the root of many other false ideas. Let go of that one idea, and you will feel significantly freer than you did before.

I would also like to comment on another teaching from today’s reading. The last paragraph of the reading says:

You who feel safe within the illusion of form fear death. But there is a fear that is greater than your fear of death. It is your fear of Life. It is your fear of Self. It is your fear of truth. It is this fear that you protect, hidden beneath your fear of death, by accepting death as your final reward.

How do we live out our fear of truth? We do not give all of our time and effort to truth realization. We may give some time and effort to truth realization, but we don’t give all. Even though we know this body-personality-mind is mortal, we prefer to ignore that fact, waste time and die than dedicate ourselves to truth realization.

Please read Matthew 27, verse 38 to the end from the Bible before reading its interpretation in NTI.