It is not useful to try to silence the mind. Instead, become curious about how much you could expand your consciousness, how much more intelligence you could activate, and what new wisdom you could download. Or perhaps you might wonder how it feels to encounter the Presence of God. Or you might want to know the experience of divine grace, or becoming divinized. Any of these interests will lead you beyond thought to the Stillness of the Absolute.

The ego is the shadow of fear that haunts our lives and creates our suffering, increased by the ego’s addition of the compensatory defenses of anger, envy, hatred, avoidance, and other emotional tendencies that produce unhappiness. Inner work culminates in the recognition that the ego is unreal and obsolete as an operating system. Consciousness is then free to realize its unborn, formless, loving, and infinite nature.

The childhood wound from lack of love or toxic versions of affection can only be healed by the willingness to love oneself, and by contemplating deeply the nature of one’s I-am-ness to discover its true essence is none other than the infinite Self. Because the Self is all, the heart naturally opens to love the Self in all beings, and thus the wound is healed.

The ego suffers from nostalgia for the lost pseudo-paradise of the womb and the adoring mother at birth. The soul suffers from gnostalgia for the lost ecstasy in the Heart of God. The God-Self laughs, as nothing real was ever lost.

Once you recognize that you are not your wounded ego narrative, your natural curiosity about your real nature will reveal the divine light and love shining behind the clouds of egoic affect and noise. Your love for happiness and freedom become the courage to realize the Self.

In this opening class on the analysis of a Buddhist book of poems on the attainment of enlightenment, we learn to focus on the unspoken implications of the text, to unravel metaphors, and to perceive contradictions and points of incoherence.

In answering a question about the relationship between tapas (heating sanskaras with the inner Light) and shunyata (emptying out all projections and turning within), it becomes clear that by returning to the Source of the Light, the power of tapas increases exponentially. Thus, the two are complementary aspects of meditation practice that ultimately are recognized as the same.

The different wavelengths of the mind transmit a wide spectrum of levels of consciousness and thus of happiness and freedom. You can change the station you are currently attuned to, and that will change your life. The sky is the limit of how high you can choose to fly into the Infinite Intelligence of the all-encompassing Self.

Given that the two global power blocs are now both on a hair trigger and Israel has just attacked a Russian base in Syria—or at least an ammunition depot near their base, depending on your news source—and revealing how vulnerable the world is if Israel decides to enact their so-called Samson option, we are offering prayers and a guided meditation for all souls to help in preparing spiritually to return to the Eternal Light at any moment. We pray for peace, but we must surrender to the will of God. In any case, our bodies are mortal, and our souls will all depart at the appointed time for the Great Beyond. Before that, may we commit our hearts to divine love and silence the ego chatter, in order to hear the Word of God, and receive the Grace of Liberation and Salvation.

The mind creates the illusion of its own subjection to the introjected superego Other. But in fact it is always a choice to continue to enjoy the double jouissance of self- and other-sabotage, revenge, and fulfillment of the fantasy of domination and sexual conquest of the m(O)ther. There is no longer any Law of the Father. Thus, the soul must take the initiative to surrender to God, the Supreme Father, in order to receive the grace and power to overcome the seductive embrace of the ego/superego fusion—in order to truly individuate and thus to discover and embody the true Self.