Excerpt from the book Common sense of Magic

You are programmed to function in a certain way, but you are conditioned by your environment to function in another, and this is what is creating a tension field inside yourself, and in the world.

You are conceived to receive information that you can perceive.

Like a flower, you carry a seed of information, which will naturally unfold if you let it. What you are designed to receive and express of information is determined by the information in your seed; your genetics. The suffering occurs when there is a distortion between what you receive and what you express, and the distortion comes from the way you interpret the information that you receive. How you interpret what you perceive is based on what you havelearned to value and believe to be true in your childhood, which again is conditioned by the cultural environment in which you grow up.

Inside the womb you have a perfect DNA – the quantum instructions of your design – ready to go. When you take your first breath the concept of time and space is born. I am here and you are there. You are no longer entangled with your mother, but have become a separate individual ready to explore your creation. Your mother feeds you and teaches you everything with her boundless affection, love and concern. Your father becomes your second teacher and does also offer his affection, love and concern in boundless measure. Family situations may not be, as we know, as glorious as described here, but it is nevertheless the most wished for and natural way in which you are brought into this world. Your first teachers are of equal value and of equal importance.

In later years you become a student and you will learn many subjects from many teachers. You will eventually get an education and some work experience and become a man of knowledge. All these years may have brought you what you have worked for; satisfaction, more satisfaction and a deeper and more fulfilling satisfaction.

But in spite of that, you may experience a vague restlessness inside, as if there is something more to life than what you have yet discovered. You have got earth knowledge, you may have become an authority on a particular subject, you may know how to behave in various settings and you may even be financially wealthy.

Without really knowing why, you have been trying to become someone or something in relation to some external parameters. In order to keep that someone alive, you may have had to compromise your natural expression. Deep within you there is effort to try to hold on to whatever you have acquired or achieved in order to justify your existence; be it money, material possessions, title or image.

In order to become someone you automatically pursue a way to position yourself within the matrix of expectations founded upon pillars such as comparison and competition. If you take a closer look at this mechanism, you will find that this whole process of becoming takes place in the mind which is a measuring device based in the motivation of becoming better and becoming more. Your expectations are projected into some perfect image in the future, and your very existence is placed in the tension field between where you are now and where you want to be.

Where there is becoming, there is with no exception, comparison, competition and conflict.

What you do right NOW will then always be a mean to an end, which prevents you from fully experiencing the flow of the moment. Your constant drive to attain and achieve will leave you stuck in the realm of your mind, and there will always be problems to solve. When you begin to tire of this constant effort of becoming, you may want to take a closer look at your own drive and motivations. Your brain cannot perpetually live in conflict, so there comes a time when you want to give up the whole idea of becoming someone, to relax into the extraordinary thrill and beauty of just being yourself.

The real quest for self-knowledge arises when you see that your efforts does not bring you anywhere in terms of coming to peace with yourself. That no matter what you acquire, achieve or obtain, there seems to be no lasting satisfaction. When you begin to see through this repetitive pattern of desires, you may discover that your happiness does not lie in your mental achievements or in your outer achievements, but rather in you inner achievement, which is to be fully present in everything you do and have the courage to express your authentic self in any given moment.

The path of inner exploration is a path of surrender. It demands that you let go of what you have learned in the past and what you currently believe in! It does also require that you peal off protective layers and let go of habitual behavioral patterns that you have spent years building up to protect yourself.

To leave your old world structure to create a new sustainable one for yourself does not necessarily have to be a linear process. The intensity and the sincerity in your quest for self-knowledge may, and often will, create leaps in your awareness to give you insights that will completely change the way you perceive and interpret the world.

What I find so interesting about this path is that it guides you towards a life you unconsciously seem to be moving away from. If you are a person who gets easily excited and thrives on enthusiasm, you may think that a life lived in balance is a very boring life. However, through numerous experiences of being pulled into one experience after the other, you may eventually tire of this whole game of accomplishment and naturally seek a more relaxed and balanced life. To be fully present and pure in your relationships and activities becomes more important to you than the outcome of either one. Freedom is valued above all else – the freedom to respond with honesty and do what you believe is right, no matter what kind of system you work for, what kind of collective morality codes that are in operation, what kind of environment you are in and who you are with. When you get in touch with your own power, you become your own authority in terms of being your own judge, your own mentor and the sole creator of your own universe. Your concern about what others think of you disappears along with a need to take credit for what you do.

You cannot change how you function, the way you naturally want to respond, but you can use your free will to resist it, and you often do. Your innate sense of incompleteness drives you to want to complete yourself, and in this search for fulfillment, you develop a personal agenda, which will pursue that, which you believe you must have in order to be happy.

What you do not know at this point, is that lasting happiness does not depend on any attainment, but rather in the freedom to respond naturally according to your nature. When you are true to yourself, you will also be able to handle the consequences of your behavior.

Your very experience is therefore itself a mean to an end, because it does not and cannot give you what you are looking for. People and situations will rather make you aware of how painful it is to have a personal agenda, which is the main cause of your willingness to modify your behavior and go into compromise.

During your upbringing you learn that recognition and approval from others are important. As you begin to adjust your behavior to suit the opinion of others, you unconsciously sabotage your own life and the life of others.

To liberate yourself from the victimhood of this conditioned behavior, you must honor your natural responses and free yourself from thoughts of what you may gain or lose in any encounter.

To fully understand what you have been conditioned to believe, you must be willing to explore the reasons for why you behave the way you do. When you admit and embrace your own deeply felt needs you will naturally become vulnerable, and if there is anything you want to protect yourself against, it is your own vulnerable self, which in your acceptance and allowance is the very treasure that will empower you to be more of what you are. When you have the courage to question your own motivations in everything you do, you will discover what stands in the way for your honest expression.

In order to perceive this world with passion, curiosity and wonder you must be willing to face your deepest fears and explore every aspect of your being. The journey towards self-realization is an exploration of the power of the mind and its natural tendency to interpret your existence and be in charge of your life.

To get to know your self it is necessary to embrace every feeling you have with curiosity, gratefulness and compassion, whether the feeling is comfortable or uncomfortable. You must find out when and in which circumstances you tend to compromise and become a victim. You must dive deeply into your own vulnerability, which will tear you open and leave you completely and utterly helpless in your nakedness.

The power that emerges from this vulnerable state is nothing more than amazing. 

It is challenging and it hurts, but your tears will wash away your fears!

Heyoka – Reproduced With Permission From Author