Life without God's guidance is empty and aimless. Life with God's guidance - the guidance of being, God in you - is rich and fulfilling. Nothing can take the place of your own internal guidance; there's no book, no teacher, nothing that can be learned or acquired or told you by someone else that can take the place of God's guidance. Until you hear God's guidance and begin following it, you wander and get pushed around by whatever comes your way. When you follow God's guidance in you you can feel your progress. Nothing you ever do will be right unless you're making progress; if you're making progress, everything you do will glow.
All guidance comes from being, from God in you. External sources like teachers, books and this website can only offer potentially useful information. Anything you get from an external source must be tested and retested; never trust an external source. Almost everything from external sources is worthless; you have to use your own internal guidance to test what you hear or read to see if it's any good. Never rely on anyone else's testing or recommendation; that's meaningless to you. You have to find the truth for yourself.
Guidance is a manifestation of God's grace, which you enter when you choose to participate in creation. Here are some of the ways God's guidance comes to you.
The direct and immediate guidance of being via being pleasure is part of God's gift of being. You experience being pleasure at the moment of development: it means you're moving in the direction of being right now. Being pleasure is how you know you're doing the right thing; it's pure instantaneous feedback, a resounding YES! from being. As profound as this experience is, it can easily go by unnoticed or be misinterpreted because it's subtle, not as noisy as other things in your life. That's why you train yourself to recognize being pleasure when it happens by practicing the pleasure of breathing. Pay close attention to when and how being pleasure happens so you can figure out what you did right.
The guidance of being pleasure is unerring but purely present tense; it's about what you're doing right now. Being pleasure can't suggest new possibilities; it can't help you choose. But as you develop you slowly gain wisdom, and wisdom can lead you and help you choose.
When the work of development involves another being, you also connect with the other being; this leads to the development of wisdom. Wisdom is the web connecting you to other beings that develops as you interact with them in the process of development; wisdom enables you to know. As you gain wisdom you'll be able to grasp what's in front of you more and more resonantly and your actions will become more and more developmental. Being will no longer be limited to affirming that what you're doing right now is the right thing.
You have to learn to recognize being pleasure and patiently watch for it. Your life as it is right now is a source of guidance that's always available. The next step you need to take on the path to enlightenment is always right in front of you; all you have to do is pay attention to your life. Paying attention to your life transforms it from just a mess into a mess that's a blueprint for progress. The good and bad choices you've made in your life so far have gotten you to this point, and the way forward is precisely spelled out in the details of the present point, where you're at in your life right now. Every good choice has given you a certain amount of strength, clarity, or other quality you now have at your disposal. You're going to need all your resources. Every bad choice has created a bit of a mess you're going to have to clean up. If you pay careful attention to your life, you'll see a step to take. Don't try to figure the whole thing out; you can't. The step you're able to see is the step you're ready to take, and that's your only concern: the next step. Doing a good job of taking the next step, step after step, is living well. All development is a matter of living well; nothing else matters. So it's never a good idea to run away from your life; whatever it is you want to get away from is exactly what you need to turn toward and work on.
Everything you've done in your life so far is a source of guidance because all your actions have meaning. Humans possess godlike creative power, and like it or not everything you do leaves a permanent mark. It's either something beneficial or something you're going to have to fix.
Internal inventory is a being level tool you can use to examine your life and work on it in a larger context than whatever the next step happens to be. The essence of internal inventory is paying more attention to how the different things you do make you feel.
Internal inventory lets you compare being level responses to two or more experiences. Use the scenario below as a general guide and set up two opportunities to take internal inventories. Choose some aspect of your life you'd like to work on.
Try doing something you don't usually do that you suspect will make you feel better than something you habitually do, even if it's a bit of an uncomfortable choice. Just one night, for instance, instead of settling in with the TV, radio or a novel/newspaper/magazine, go out walking, even if the weather's not that great. Or do some other activity that's physically active but easygoing and relaxing and that you suspect might make you feel better than watching, listening or reading. Or pick some way you habitually spend your time that you suspect is not the best use of your time and replace that with something physical but easygoing that you suspect will make you feel good.
At the end of your walk or whatever, take inventory: really tune in to how your body feels, your mood, your breathing, and any other details you can notice. Spend a few minutes at it and get a clear, detailed snapshot of how you are. The next time you indulge in your habitual activity, stop afterwards and do the same thing, and really force yourself to look closely; you'll be naturally resistant to taking this inventory, whereas the other one was probably kind of fun. You're trying to bring together in your mind the experiences you have after two possible courses of action: one you suspect might not be the greatest, and one you suspect might make you feel good. Those suspicions, or hunches, are examples of positive resources you already have at your disposal.
Internal inventory gets more than just your mind involved in the process of finding the right thing to do. Internal inventory is not mental; it's an act of being. You may think you "know" what some of the better choices are for you, but you won't be able to break old, entrenched habits unless you mobilize more resources than just your mind; your mind is impotent. The difference between your two inventories is probably far more profound than your mind would ever let on. Your mind and thoughts are very much in the business of keeping you "comfortable," of supporting the conspiracy.
The subtle pleasure you feel after you do something that's right is a being level experience; like the pleasure of breathing, it has a similarity to being pleasure and is thus very much worth paying attention to. There may be other pleasures at that moment, especially if you've just done something that makes you feel good in less profound ways, e.g. endorphins resulting from hard exercise. That's why an easygoing activity is the best kind of alternative to choose when you're first learning how to guide yourself with internal inventory.
Once you choose to participate in creation, you'll begin to see that everything around you is geared to help you develop. Opportunities and resources present themselves at just the right time. No sooner do you become aware of needing to work on a particular part of yourself than a situation requires you to do just that. Inspirations for new projects or activities come out of nowhere, and you don't even realize until you've dived in how perfectly they fit your developmental needs. Everything conspires for your benefit. This guidance is God's grace manifesting in your life externally.
God's guidance emanating from grace is the only reliable guidance; nothing else deserves to be called guidance. The four kinds of guidance described above are all manifestations of God's grace; they're just mediated differently. Information that comes from outside, like from teachers, books or this website is not reliable, but it can sometimes be useful. Information from an external source can't be useful unless your own internal guidance calls you to it. Even then, it needs to be tested and retested. See if you can break it, put it through the torture test. Never believe, never act on information from any outside source unless being calls you to, clearly and unambiguously. Nobody knows what's right for you but you - God in you.
Approach external information cautiously, on high alert, using all your internal resources to keep from getting burned. Use your common sense, and pay close attention to guidance from being. Don't pay attention to internal bullshit; by now you should know the difference. Your likes and dislikes are irrelevant to being; ignore them. As soon as you've gotten what you're after, get out. Don't join, don't hang around. Get out and get on with your life; your life is your real teacher.
When you read a source of potential information, like a book or this website, look for your own truth, and go to the original version; never trust what someone has to say about what someone had to say way back when.
Oh, and a note regarding religions: avoid them.
A teacher should see and understand something of your unique needs, and be available to answer your questions. Working with a student is demanding, and anyone who has (or claims to have) hundreds or thousands of students is bogus. A teacher should work with you directly, not through an organization of underlings. Anyone who gives prepackaged advice or the same program to all students is bogus.
A teacher will require some kind of exchange, usually money, but won't impose a financial burden on students; the payment should seem sensible to you. Any teacher known for displays of wealth, or who requires extensive payment or commitment in advance is bogus. Anyone who's a celebrity is not a teacher, and vice versa; the two are mutually incompatible for many reasons. A teacher who asks you to give up your life is bogus; even if your life's a complete mess, it's what you need to work on. Running away from your life is always a bad idea, and it never works anyway.
Once you've ruled out candidates who don't meet common sense criteria, listen closely for guidance from being. If you're drawn to a teacher or other resource by being, it'll feel right through and through; no sense of guilt or shame. How does the information you're getting from an outside source feel in the very deepest part of you? Stay in touch with your deep feelings to see if anything changes.
Stick with guidance and cultivate your relationship with guidance; avoid relying on external sources if at all possible. The problem with information from external sources is that almost all of it is complete bullshit. Diving into it is like eating a mountain of manure to find a single nugget of anything worthwhile. Religion etcetera has always been a con, but recently it's blossomed into a monstrous industry. I'm talking about everything you'll find in the spirituality, human potential, self-help and related sections of your local bookstore, and all the workshops, classes, retreats and consultations that go with all that dreck. People write books, give workshops and hang out shingles to make money; that's what drives this industry just like any other. There's nothing there of value, unless you're in the early stages of development, and if that's the case I sure hope you're making money peddling bullshit, not spending it to buy some.
Bad information comes in two flavors: deception and self-deception. If you have to pick one, I recommend self-deception because it's cheaper and usually easier to fix when you finally decide you're done with deception. Deception includes all those wonderful things you can spend money on; self-deception includes the wisdom of your mind and the interpretation of dreams.
This category includes everyone you've ever heard of in this industry; everyone with a name. Two bits is way too generous; these quacks are more like a dime a dozen. Absolutely everyone who's famous for being enlightened or being a spiritual teacher is a phony; enlightenment and celebrity are mutually exclusive. Anyone who's made it to the later stages of becoming knows that being famous is a crippling impediment, a serious barrier to getting anything done. Sorry, there are no exceptions to this one; your favorite celebrity author is a fake, your modern saint is a fraud. If he wasn't, he would've managed to avoid being famous. If she was the real deal, she'd know better. Development can't be mass-marketed, and no one with anything to offer will try mass marketing.
Yes, there are those who have gone before. Some of them (not many) have celebrity thrust on them despite their best efforts to avoid it. If you tell the truth, people will find you eventually. You hope it's only the right people.
Your mind is not a source of information period. An example of what your mind is good for is comparing two internal inventories. Your mind is good at examining, analyzing, comparing and contrasting things once they've been abstracted into thoughts; that's it. This culture promotes a highly inflated opinion of the powers of mind; you've been taught that you are your mind. But mind is simply a tool or faculty of being. Your mind's an important tool, but its powers are quite limited. Your mind can't produce information; being or your other faculties have to do that part. Obsession is an example of your mind operating on its own: thinking something over and over again, getting more and more frustrated and upset. Another example is working yourself into a meaningless frenzy. Mental activity disconnected from being is shallow, repetitive, predictable and often destructive.
Your dreams are not a source of information either. The best way to think about dreams is that there are two of you: waking you and sleeping you, two persons. The two of you share the same equipment - body, mind, feelings, hopes, fears, etcetera - and take turns using it. You live the same life, deal with the same issues, but have very different ways of living and working. Your memories of dreams are accidental and of no importance; they're simply a side effect of having to use the same equipment. Sometimes sleeping you has a very active night of it, and you wake up physically exhausted from everything that went on. That exhaustion is the same kind of accidental side effect, a physical "memory" of what went on for sleeping you. The intense feelings you sometimes wake up with are a feeling version of the same thing.
The two of you develop in parallel, and you work together very closely; the waking and sleeping parts fit together perfectly, and support and enhance each other in many intricate ways. But trying to understand or interpret your dreams with your waking mind is like trying to guess the meaning of something in a foreign language that's completely unfamiliar - except the difference between waking and sleep is absolute and untranslatable. Your waking mind is incapable of working the way your sleeping mind works. Forget your dreams; focus on what you can do. I'm talking to you, waking you. Sleeping you will come along, don't worry.
Your life will guide you on the path forward only if you pay attention. Attention is the active principle that can transform your life into a finely tuned guidance system for development. Internal inventory is one example of using attention to guide you, but an effective guidance system needs a lot more attention than that.
If you want to learn how to pay attention to your life, study your attention patterns. Try taking walks in different kinds of environments: around people, alone in the woods, in a shopping mall, in a familiar neighborhood, in a slightly dangerous neighborhood, and so on. Watch where your attention goes. Study it hard. Get to know your habitual attention patterns very well.
Once you know your habitual patterns, come up with exercises to build muscle in directing your attention vs. letting it be drawn. Pay attention to ordinary-looking people and ignore attractive people. Pick something you almost never notice, and pay it a lot of attention, like the sky or the horizon or the color of dirt. Walk through a department store and pay attention to the shelves and racks and hangers, ignoring the goods on them (substitute the kind of store that sells whatever you find interesting). Pick a theme for the day: today I'm going to notice the shape of people's earlobes. Go deliberately against your grain, picking things you find uninteresting or unremarkable. It doesn't matter what you pick, as long as you're going against your grain; you're learning to direct attention by choice, rather than allowing it to be drawn, so intentionally pick things you find uninteresting. Work at this until you can feel that you're beginning to be in charge of attention, rather than vice versa. Then keep working at it; the ability to focus your attention is absolutely critical for making progress.
What you're working toward is the ability to focus attention on what's going on deep inside you, as in internal inventory, but while your life is in progress. Don't stop and close your eyes, work it into whatever you're doing. Going for walks is a good starting point for this work too.
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