There are those among us who support and nurture and delight in our progress.
There are those among us who sabotage and manipulate and grow envious of our successes.

There are those among us who think clearly and speak the truth as they see it.
There are those among us who impose their dark, cloudy confusions on others and distort the truth with lies and manipulations.

There are those among us who live in the present and know grace.
There are those among us who are trapped in past or future and know only illusion.

There are those among us who listen quietly to their inner wisdom.
There are those among us who shout out their discomforts as they scream at the agony within.

Once a wise master had four students who exceeded all others in ability. One day the five gathered, and the master spoke to the first student, “Tell me what you see when you look into the world.”

“I see savagery. The planet is raped. The world hides from the truth. Contaminating material is released everywhere. There is particulate matter in the heavens and acid rain. The rain forests are being destroyed, and so is the ozone. There is such ignorance and selfishness. The world needs so much correction.”

The master replied, “You are right, and I shall call you Correction, for you by your vision have committed to a world of need.”

Because the word “consciousness” can be used in so many different ways, confusion often arises around statements about its nature. The way I use the word is not in reference to a particular state of consciousness, or particular way of thinking, but to the faculty of consciousness itself-the capacity for inner experience, whatever the nature or degree of the experience.

A useful analogy is the image from a video projector. The projector shines light onto a screen, modifying the light so as to produce any one of an infinity of images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we experience-what I call the “contents of consciousness.”

Step 3 – Give Every Experience its Rightful Place

Scientific experiments have shown that the mind does not know the difference between that which is experienced and that which is imagined. This suggests that every time you re-live a negative experience in your mind, adding some extra sauce as you go along, your mind believes you are experiencing it again. So instead of living an experience just the one time, you live it a hundred, a thousand or even countless times.