Today’s reading says:

Each of your brothers is one with you. And so each of your brothers has one purpose, and that is the purpose given him within the mind.

In this sentence, “mind” is synonymous with consciousness. This sentence is another way of saying that light is spreading within one mind (consciousness). If we use the cake batter analogy, the moment the blue food coloring was put in the cake batter, it became one purpose for all of the cake batter to become blue. In that same way, it is one purpose for all of consciousness to awaken to itself.

Since all of consciousness has the purpose of awakening, awakening is the true purpose of every heart. Of course, it is easy to look at the world and see that not everyone lives by this purpose. In fact, most people don’t. However, our hearts communicate with us all of the time. When a person is, in the moment, in harmony with the true purpose of the heart, that person experiences joy. When a person is not, in the moment, in harmony with the true purpose of the heart, that person experiences some type of suffering.

Let’s look at an example:

Let’s imagine a man who lives in a self-centered way. He is a businessman. His primary objectives in life are to make money and enjoy himself. However, he experiences stress and anger at work regularly. Stress and anger indicate that he is out of harmony with consciousness’ purpose, which is a purpose he hasn’t consciously discovered yet.

One day a friend recommends a book called Busting Loose From the Business Game: Mind-Blowing Strategies for Recreating Yourself, Your Team, Your Business, and Everything in Between, by Robert Scheinfeld. He is motivated to read this book, because of his desire to make money. As he reads the book, he recognizes some of his self-limiting beliefs. Since he sees them as obstacles to success, he uses the process in the book to let them go. As he does, he begins to experience more joy at work.

Why has stress and anger been replaced with joy?

Even though he doesn’t have a conscious goal of awakening, he is beginning to live by the principles of awakening. Through these principles, he is falling into harmony with the true heart, and the effect is joy.

Everyone is joined in one purpose, because it is consciousness’ purpose, and everyone is consciousness. When one is in harmony with the purpose of the heart, one experiences joy. When one isn’t in harmony with it, one suffers.

What about your suffering? You have chosen awakening as your purpose. Doesn’t that mean you are in harmony with consciousness? Shouldn’t you experience joy?

Let’s look at another example:

Let’s imagine a woman who is committed to awakening. She is in Gentle Healing. She contemplates the Thought of Awakening each day, and she reads the daily tip, reads from NTI and meditates for 30 minutes. She feels at peace each morning as she does this. However, when the woman moves away from her morning contemplation and meditation time, and into her day, the peace fades. She begins to experience other emotions, especially worry and annoyance.

The woman experiences peace during contemplation and meditation, because in those moments she is in harmony with the true heart. As she moves into her day, she lets other ideas enter the mind, and she begins listening to them. She worries about her children. She unconsciously believes ideas that indicate she is unworthy if her children’s lives do not look a certain way. She also listens to ideas of blame. She believes the reason she isn’t happy is because of her husband, and so she finds herself annoyed with him freqently.

In other words, the woman experiences worry and annoyance during the exact moments  that she is not in harmony with the true heart.

This can change for her, if she learns to look immediately whenever she is not happy. If she learns to look immediately to see what she believes in that moment, and then learns to let it go because it isn’t joy, she will learn to remain in harmony with the true heart throughout the day, and she will begin to experience joy in her daily life.

Peace, joy, and contentment are the signs that you are presently  in harmony with the purpose of consciousness. All forms of suffering indicate that you are not currently in harmony with consciousness.

How can anyone be out of harmony with consciousness if everyone is consciousness?

Consciousness is life-awareness-freedom. The freedom aspect can never be removed from consciousness, because that is what it is. Therefore, even though awakening is the purpose of consciousness, aspects of consciousness can choose to be mentally  out of harmony with that purpose. This is the hallmark of freedom. Freedom can choose to experience itself any way it chooses, even if that choice is different than its truth.

Note:  Before reading today’s tip, read Acts 10:9-22 from the Bible or watch all of Acts 10 from the Visual Bible movie, Acts.

Today’s reading is about the undoing that occurs through guidance. Our personal self-identity—our attachment to who we think we are, to the mind-made laws we believe, and to other personal beliefs and values—is undone through guidance. It is important to realize that, or else we may expect guidance to be something it isn’t.

Guidance is not God’s way of meeting our expectations and giving us what we want.

For example, imagine that you work as a professional computer programmer, but your dream is to be an off-the-grid hippie-like farmer. You may hope that God’s guidance will give you the money you need to become financially self-sufficient, so you can buy some land, build a farm and live your dream without worrying about money. However, what you want from guidance comes from your ego—from your idea of who you are, what you want and how you want it done. Guidance will not reinforce your ego.

Peter was raised as a Jew. He was taught to follow Jewish law. He identified with being Jewish. Yet, guidance came to Peter asking him to break Jewish law by eating animals that Jewish law prohibits. He was also guided to associate as an equal with gentiles. All of this guidance was part of undoing Peter’s identification as a Jew.

If you have always dreamed of being an off-the-grid farmer, it is possible you will one day be guided to off-the-grid farming. Sometimes our dreams and our callings are one. However, the way it comes about through guidance will be a path of undoing, not the dream exactly as your ego envisions it.

For example, all my life I dreamed of being a writer and a teacher, but I did not imagine it the way it has worked out through guidance. I thought I would write best-selling novels and teach elementary school children.

I also dreamed of living in Colorado. I gave up that dream years ago, because I realized it was a personal attachment. I settled in North Carolina in a town that I swore I’d never live in. I moved there when guidance took me there. I lived there four years and was prepared to stay in that town happily for the rest of my life when a dream came unexpectedly with guidance to move to Pueblo.

We cannot predict guidance, but we can expect it to be an undoing of who we think we are. It’s best if we take all of our hopes, dreams, desires, values and attachments, and toss them to the wind. If something blows back as the gift of guidance, it is meant to be a part of this unfolding; if it doesn’t, it was merely ego.

It reminds me of a saying that was on a poster that hung in my room when I was a teenager:

If you love something, set it free.
If it comes back, it’s yours.
If it doesn’t, it never was.

Don’t play the game of imagining what guidance might be for you. That imagining will come from ego. Instead, focus on letting go of ego. Let guidance be a surprise, and follow it even if it seems to be different from what you want, just as I followed it to a little town in North Carolina where I had sworn, more than once, I would never live.

Note:  Before reading today’s tip, read Acts 9:1-31 from the Bible or watch all of Acts 9 from the Visual Bible movie, Acts.

Most people have heard of the Apostle Paul, but many do not know that Paul, previously called Saul, was a leader in the persecution against the Christian sect. When people read the story of Saul’s conversion in the Bible, they may not understand why someone like Saul would be called to become a leading teacher and apostle. If we have trouble understanding, it’s because we are focused on humans instead of consciousness, and we judge some humans as worthy and some humans as not worthy.

As we saw yesterday, consciousness sees only consciousness. Consciousness is not concerned about human stories and what one human has done or has not done. Consciousness is awakening, and the light is spreading within consciousness. That is all that is happening from consciousness’ perspective.

From the human perspective, the way the light moves may not always make sense. For example, we may not understand why some people have spontaneous awakenings and others don’t.

From consciousness’ perspective, the spreading of light is natural within awakening consciousness. It’s just like blue food coloring spreading through white cake batter as it is stirred into the batter.

Some people may ask, “If awakening is random, like blue food coloring mixing with white cake batter, why should I engage in spiritual practice?”

Here’s the answer:

It’s our spiritual practice that stirs up the light. As we engage in sincere spiritual practice, the light extends through consciousness awakening consciousness. We are the batter (consciousness), the food coloring (awakening light) and the spoon (the energy that spreads the light). The spiritual practice that we do benefits all of consciousness. All awakenings come from the spiritual practice of those who are called into spiritual practice.

NTI guides us to trust that the light is spreading within consciousness. Our role is to remain focused on awakening, and let everything else take care of everything else. When we adopt this attitude toward the world and other humans, we are living in trust that everything is consciousness, and consciousness is in the process of awakening to itself.

Note:  Before reading today’s tip, read Acts 8:9-25  from the Bible or watch all of Acts 8 from the Visual Bible movie, Acts.

On Day 113, we learned how to be with an ego attack. Today’s reading reemphasizes the technique of not giving energy to an ego attack when it arises. There may be a temptation to see ego resistance as a battle—possibly a battle between you and the ego or a battle between you and Spirit. It is not helpful to see resistance as a battle, because then you are tempted to fight the battle or fear the battle. If you fight or fear the ego attack, you feed it with energy. Today’s reading encourages us to see it as a storm, and realize that the storm is passing.

Today’s reading also reinterprets a story about Peter and a man called Simon the Sorcerer. In the Bible story, Peter sees Simon as wicked, bitter and captive to sin. NTI points out that this way of seeing is not how the Holy Spirit sees. Peter’s way of seeing comes from the wrong-mind, not the right-mind. NTI says:

When the Holy Spirit looks at the world, it does not see holy men and men of darkness. It does not see men at all. It does not see men who are right in what they do and men who are wrong. It does not see men at all.

“Holy Spirit” is a symbolic term for spiritual wisdom. Spiritual wisdom is an aspect of the Second Principle of God, consciousness. Consciousness does not see separate people, some good and some bad, some righteous and some ignorant. Consciousness sees consciousness. Consciousness is aware of an awakening within consciousness—NTI calls it “the spreading of Light within an awakening mind”—but consciousness is not aware of separate parts.

To illustrate, imagine a bowl of white cake batter. Now, imagine that we want the cake to be blue, so we add blue food coloring to the batter. As we begin to stir in the food coloring, some of the cake batter is white and some is blue. As we continue to stir, more of the batter becomes blue. We see swirls of blue batter within the white batter. We do not see separate batter—it is all one batter—but we do see the spreading of blue within the batter. That is how consciousness sees awakening.

Just like the white batter will become completely blue, all aspects of consciousness will awaken to itself.

We allow ourselves to be awakened by the light that is spreading through consciousness by surrendering and willingly following intuition. That is how we are stirred. That is how the merging occurs.