There is a secret that lies in plain sight, for all to see.
Yet it remains mysteriously hidden to most people.
It’s a secret that the world’s prophets, sages, and religious leaders have known for
eons.
And it can enable you, no matter who you are,⁠ to live a life free of all negative thoughts,
feelings, and beliefs.
Though right in front of our noses, this secret remains unseen by most people.
The chaos and endless distractions of the modern world have blinded us to the truth:
that everlasting peace is possible for everyone, not just an enlightened few.
So what exactly is this elusive secret?
Well, buckle up, because you’re about to find out.
Let’s kick things off with a simple question: Who are you?
Well, that’s easy, you may be thinking.
You’re a person with a name, an age, an ethnicity, a profession, and a particular
set of memories.
But what if you learned that you aren’t a person at all?
What if who you really are is something else entirely?
What if your identity is an illusion – an illusion that’s causing all the pain and
suffering in your life?
You might not feel as if you’re suffering.
Sure, you might get upset, anxious, or stressed sometimes.
But doesn’t everyone experience those things?
Actually, they don’t!
If you experience any negative feelings whatsoever, you’re suffering.
But it doesn’t have to be that way –⁠ you can actually live a life of constant, complete
happiness.
And it all starts with realizing who you really are.
Right now, you’re almost certainly having an experience that feels like being a person.
You feel like you have a body.
You feel like you have a mind.
But these feelings are actually illusions masking the truth.
Let’s start with the body.
You can think of it just like a car –⁠ a thing you use to move from place to place.
When you’re inside a car, you never say that you are the car.
The same is true for your body –⁠ it’s just a vehicle that carries the real you.
Your mind isn’t the real you, either, though it can often seem like it is.
After all, you have a voice in your head that talks like you, knows all about you, and refers
to itself using the word “I” But that voice belongs to your mind –⁠ not
you.
If there are no thoughts, then there is no mind – but you are still there because you
are neither a thought nor a feeling.
You also aren’t a collection of personality traits.
How could you be?
Your personality constantly changes over your lifetime.
And these different versions of you can’t be the real you; if they were, a bit of you
would disappear each time your personality changed.
The real you is not a body, not a mind, not a personality.
So what, or who, is it?
That’s the greatest secret!
Here’s another question to get you thinking: Are you aware?
There can only be one answer to this question.
You must be aware because if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be aware of the question itself.
And you have always been aware, from your childhood all the way up to this very moment.
Your awareness is the one thing that remains constant, even as your body changes, your
personality shifts, and you experience new sensations and emotions.
And that is the greatest secret.
You – the real you – are Awareness itself.
The real you is the one who is aware of everything else you experience.
To understand your true nature –⁠ Awareness –⁠ try a very quick thought experiment.
Imagine that you have no body.
Then, imagine that you have no mind, name, or life story.
Take away every thought, memory, and belief that you have.
What’s left?
Only Awareness.
Awareness goes by many names: consciousness, infinite being, true nature.
All of these are just different ways of talking about the same thing.
Awareness is the innermost part of you –⁠ the part of you that always feels the same, even
as you age or as your moods change.
It is pure love and infinite peace.
Even more remarkably, Awareness is shared by everyone in the world.
There is only one Awareness, but your mind and body act like a localized funnel for it.
This prevents you from experiencing the entirety of Awareness at a given time.
But be certain: the vast, formless expanse of Awareness is contained inside you and it
exists all around you.
Awareness is also immortal.
It existed long before your body or your mind ever did.
You probably fear death because you believe, mistakenly, that when your body dies, you’ll
die along with it.
But that just isn’t true!
All material things die, yes –⁠ but your real self, Awareness, is eternal.
Accessing the power of Awareness doesn’t involve attaining or becoming anything.
In fact, you can’t become Awareness, because you already are Awareness!
Instead, you just need to live in the knowledge that you are Awareness.
Once you do, your mind, thoughts, and all the torment that comes with them will fade
into the background.
You’ll no longer experience suffering, and the pure bliss of happiness will be yours.
To stay as Awareness, the author uses something called the Awareness Practice.
It consists of three steps.
The first step is to ask yourself, Am I aware?
But don’t try to come up with an answer using your mind.
Instead, just feel the presence of Awareness when you ask the question.
If your mind tries to intrude with an answer or a thought, just ask yourself the question
again.
And don’t desperately try to hold onto Awareness, either.
Just sense the feelings of relief, peacefulness, and happiness that come with it.
Over time, your mind will start to become quieter.
Once this happens, you’ll be ready for step two: noticing Awareness.
After your mind begins to quiet, you’ll start to notice Awareness more automatically,
without needing to ask yourself if you’re aware.
Try to focus on the feeling of Awareness as many times throughout the day as you can.
Doing this should leave you with a deep sense of peace.
The third and final step is to practice staying as Awareness.
To do this, you need to modify the way you direct your attention.
It can help to think of your mind as having a zoom lens, like a camera.
Normally, it focuses your attention on narrow, specific things –⁠ as if you’re taking
close-up photographs.
But to take a picture of a wide-open space, you need to zoom out as far as possible.
In the same way, you want to keep your attention open and wide to stay as Awareness.
Try it for yourself right now.
Look around and find something to focus on.
Train all your attention onto that specific thing.
Next, zoom your attention out.
Take in as much of your surroundings as possible, and don’t focus on anything in particular.
You should feel an immediate sense of relief and relaxation since you’re no longer expending
energy to maintain directed focus.
By practicing staying as Awareness, your mind will continue to become quieter and quieter.
Difficult tasks will feel easier, more effortless.
You’ll feel calmer and become much better at weathering storms of negative emotion.
After all, nothing can disturb Awareness.
At the moment, however, your mind is probably still running the show.
Its power rests in your continuing belief that negativity comes from somewhere outside
of you.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
Did you know that you have a computer program inside of your head?
Yep, that’s right!
It’s called your mind, and you probably still give it far more authority over your
life than it deserves.
Your conscious mind –⁠ your thinking mind –⁠ accepts everything it sees.
All of that material ultimately gets stored in your subconscious, which acts like a container
for all of your experiences.
The subconscious recycles that material and turns it into beliefs, which may be true or
untrue.
Those beliefs then get converted into thoughts, which are just programs that run in your head
on a loop.
And far too often, these thoughts are limiting thoughts –⁠ things like I don’t have
enough money or That person doesn’t approve of me.
Most people operate under the false assumption that negative situations exist somewhere “out
there” in the world.
But, in actuality, all negativity comes from your thoughts about those situations.
As Shakespeare once wrote: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
This process is a vicious cycle.
If you have a negative feeling, it will be translated into a negative thought about that
feeling.
Your negative thoughts will cause you to have even more negative feelings.
Soon enough, you’ll be looking at your entire life through a veil of sadness that blinds
you to reality.
Not only that, but your negative thoughts will also manifest negative situations in
your life.
The more negative thoughts you have, the more you’ll attract negativity in general.
If you let your mind continue to tell you that you lack money, time, or love, then you
will come to lack those things.
Like thoughts, negative feelings limit you unnecessarily.
And you have a lot of them, saved up from the time you were a child, when you first
learned how to suppress your feelings rather than express them immediately.
As an adult, all of the bad feelings you’ve experienced are still within you.
They’re trapped within the subconscious, where their negative energy can wreak havoc
on your health.
If you don’t feel happy right now, it means there’s some negative feeling preventing
you from experiencing the happiness that is your true nature.
Fortunately, you can overcome all negativity –⁠ forever! –⁠ just by using the power
of Awareness.
When you feel good, it seems like you’re on top of the world.
Your energy is limitless, and yet, miraculously, you’re also relaxed!
This good feeling is your true nature because Awareness is your true nature, and positivity
flows from Awareness.
Negative feelings, on the other hand, stem from resistance to a situation or event.
When something happens and you react negatively with the word “No!
I don’t want this!” – it creates tension and resistance in your body and mind.
This causes the negative feelings to stick around even longer.
Positive feelings are effortless, while negative feelings require lots of energy to maintain.
The good news is, there are a few ways of dropping this resistance and no longer wasting
your energy on negativity.
Next time you experience a negative feeling, be very aware of it.
Let it flow through you; don’t resist it.
You’ll find that when you stop resisting your negative feelings, they simply drop away
and disappear.
You can also try the practice of welcoming, which can be a powerful way to rid yourself
of negative feelings both past and present.
To do it, just open your attention to your negative emotions.
You can even physically open your arms out to the sides, as if you’re about to embrace
a loved one.
You’ll feel your heart start to open, and the tension in your body will begin to melt
away.
The author once used welcoming to overcome the painful emotions connected to a childhood
memory.
Amazingly, she now no longer remembers what that childhood experience was!
By releasing the negative energy associated with the memory, she was able to banish the
memory entirely.
So that’s how to take care of negative feelings.
But what about the negative thoughts that often cause negative feelings in the first
place?
You can get rid of those, too, simply by becoming aware of your thoughts.
This will cause you to stop believing in them automatically.
Observe your thoughts carefully.
Acknowledge that they’re coming from your mind; they’re not really you.
From this detached perspective, you’ll be able to make a choice –⁠ to either believe
each thought or not.
Instead of letting your thoughts run the show, be the Awareness that is aware of your thoughts.
Just through this one simple practice, your mind will begin to manifest positivity in
your life.
Beliefs are very similar to thoughts.
Actually, beliefs are just thoughts that you’ve had so often that you now consider them facts.
Consider the thought: The only way to make more money is by working longer hours.
The first time you hear this sentence, it comes from someone else.
Then, you start repeating it yourself.
Before long, you’ve accepted it as fact.
And then you start seeing evidence of it everywhere.
But this belief is not objectively true.
It is simply creating the experience you’re having.
Your belief actually prevents you from having experiences that contradict it!
In this example, your belief has made it impossible for you to receive cash windfalls from any
other sources.
We’ve simply got to eliminate limiting and disempowering beliefs like this one.
The process starts with becoming deeply aware of all the beliefs that you hold.
To dissolve your beliefs, you need to become consciously aware of them.
Now, it’s not always immediately obvious which of your beliefs are beliefs.
So give your subconscious mind an instruction.
Tell it: “Show me all of my beliefs, one by one, so I can become aware of them.”
Then, stay very aware as your beliefs are revealed to you.
Be on the lookout for statements beginning with “I think,” “I don’t think,”
“I believe,” or “I don’t believe.”
What follows is usually one of your beliefs.
Another way to spot your beliefs is by becoming aware of your reactions.
Reactions are just beliefs in a different form.
For instance, let’s say that you’ve just received your monthly electric bill.
It’s a lot higher than you expected, so you react negatively –⁠ perhaps with anger
or sadness.
That reaction might stem directly from the belief that you were overcharged, or that
you don’t have enough money.
When you spot a belief or notice a certain reaction of yours, just become aware of it.
By doing so, you’ll completely take the power out of it.
Once you accept that each of your beliefs is just a story you’ve told yourself, they’ll
all dissolve –⁠ along with the thousands of limiting thoughts that your subconscious
mind has attached to them.
As you use your Awareness to dissolve your beliefs, you will actually feel your body
becoming lighter and less burdened.
Whatever you want, you’ll have –⁠ no more limits.
The world is often a turbulent, violent place.
Wars rage, people go hungry, and poverty causes desperation.
Yet mystics and sages proclaim that all is well.
How can they possibly think that when there’s so much bad?
It’s because they know a truth that’s difficult for most people to grasp: everything
is an illusion.
Sure, it seems like everything exists in definite, concrete forms.
But the key word is seems.
In fact, science tells us that the world is really quite different from how we perceive
it.
When we hear sounds, we’re really just hearing vibrations converted into sounds by our brains.
And quantum physics tells us that when we leave the room we’re sitting in, everything
in it returns to a mere wave of probability.
Science can cut through much of this illusion, giving us a better understanding of objective
reality.
But it relies on the world being material and separate from us –⁠ which means it
will never be able to answer two big questions: “What is the universe made of?” and “Where
does consciousness come from?”
Scientists might not know the answers to these questions.
But the sages do.
To them, it’s quite simple.
The universe is finite –⁠ we know this because it began with a big bang, and it will
end at some point in the future.
However, since the universe is finite, that means it must have come from something infinite.
And that infinite substance, according to the sages, is Consciousness.
Consciousness doesn’t come from anywhere.
It simply is.
It’s both within us and all around us.
And guess what?
You yourself are this infinite Consciousness of which the universe is made!
Your life is just like a movie, with everything you see projected onto the vast screen of
Consciousness.
Imagine looking up at the seemingly endless expanse of stars on a clear night.
It sure seems like it’s outside of you.
But the image you see is a result of light particles hitting your retinas and being translated
by your brain into images.
So, really, what you see outside of you is in fact taking place within you.
You are the universe –⁠ as is everyone else in the world.
And the power in that reality is yours for the taking.
The key message is: Everlasting happiness is available to everyone
in the world.
Yet most people are unable to achieve it because they continue to mistakenly identify with
their bodies and minds instead of their true nature, Awareness.
By using the practice of staying as Awareness and welcoming all of your feelings, you can
rid yourself of negativity forever.
When you experience a negative feeling –⁠ say, sadness –⁠ you’re probably accustomed
to saying or thinking something like, I’m sad.
By phrasing it this way, you identify yourself with your sadness, feeding the emotion with
even more energy.
Instead, next time you feel sad, ask yourself this question: Am I sadness, or am I the one
who is aware of the sadness?
Just asking the question will take a lot of the energy and power out of the emotion.
You’ll realize that you, Awareness, are present before and after the sadness comes
and goes.