Are you willing to wake up, really wake up? 

In these times of great change, chaos and overwhelm for
many, more and more are asking the question, "How can I
move beyond living like this?"  The answer is not nearly
as complicated as it may seem. 

First, it's important to fully recognize that the way
your life is going is not working for you.  You've
heard that one definition of the word "insanity" is doing
the same things over and over again but expecting
different results.  What  you have been doing and
thinking has not been paying off for you with higher
levels of calm, wisdom and happiness.

For many who want a more satisfying life, it's very
important to get to a place where you are completely
fed up with how your life is going.  I am not
suggesting that you should get angry, hopeless or
frustrated; what I am asking you to do is to simply
say to yourself: "Enough  is enough."

Get fed up!

Getting fed up is a motivator, as long as you are
not also loading your mind up with thoughts of present
overwhelm, fear, depression or suffering.

So the second key is being present.  It's so common
for people to focus their attention on self-judgment
for past actions or fear for what is coming up soon.
True empowerment is only possible when one is willing
to be with each moment as it is while having trust in
one's own ability to deal with whatever life will bring
to you in the future.

The third key to waking up is shifting the way that you
identify yourself.  Identifying with the body or mind is
a very direct way to confuse and frustrate yourself. 
Both the body and the mind have inherently insane ways
of responding to life.  Each has sets of demands that,
when followed, tend to be destructive.  The body and
mind can both have addictive and destructive demands. 
When you cave to those demands, you weaken yourself. 
Those who give in to such demands on a frequent basis
are more and more integrating a sense of mistrust in 
themselves.  It is not possible to have a sense of
true personal power if  you are regularly doing or
thinking things that prohibit trusting yourself!
Please think about that.

It takes courage to move through the challenges of
life in a powerful way.  How do we build courage?
Trust is necessary.  If you don't trust that you can
deal with what is to come, and if you don't trust
that your life is simply a series of opportunities
to integrate a more loving way of being, then you
are allowing your life to be run by your fear.

If you are living in fear, you really are being run
by your head, by the imaginary egoic self that
exists only as it is fed.  Please contemplate this.

There is a simple way that you can move beyond the
fear-based, head-run life:  You can recondition
yourself.  We tend to be conditioned to certain
patterns in how we live our lives.  Many of these
patterns are based upon sets of lies that we have
heard so much in our lives that we think they are
true.  We've been conditioned by the propaganda of
religion, governments, educational institutions, the
mass media, and our families and friends to think
many lies are truths.  The lies are virtually always
based on somebody's fear.

When you take the radical step of identifying
yourself as the will and the wisdom of your heart
and soul, you open up for yourself an entirely new
way of dealing with the world with spiritual sanity.
By finding clarity about the loving intent of the
heart, you open the door to creating more calm,
happiness and wisdom in your life.

Once you are clear on your beliefs, you are then
able to prioritize your actions so that they are
more and more consistently loving.  Just as you may
have become conditioned to the fearful life by seeing
hearing, reading and otherwise experiencing
falsehood, you can recondition yourself to a more
loving way of living by practicing action and thought
that is consistent with the loving will and wisdom of
your own heart and soul. 

This is what we have all come into this life to do.

So my challenge to you today is to consider
prioritizing your loving reconditioning as the most
important purpose of your life.  NOthing could be
more important than becoming what you came into this
world to become.

LIfe is just a process of unfolding your love fully,
and I have a deep sense that we all can keep coming
back into new lifetimes until we fully realize our
loving nature.  As we prioritize this process, living
becomes a more vibrant, happy and calm experience.

When you trust, it's so much easier to wake up.

Are you willing to consider prioritizing your own
realization of your love?  What could ever be more
important?  As you prioritize this realization, all
the challenges of life lose the harsh edge that you
may have experienced at times. 

Please read this article a second time, pausing at
least briefly at the end of each paragraph as you
ask your heart if what has been expressed is true for
you.  "Click on" your internal pause button.

Feel your own truth.

All Love,
Carlo Ami

Heart Propaganda-Debugging Your Operating System

by Carlo Ami

Like our computers, we all have an operating system.  Think of your body and brain as part of your hardware.  Think of the mind as housing your data files and memory.  You might also consider, for a moment, that harbored in your heart is a great anti-virus program, something that can clean up incorrect or polluted data.

All your life you have been inputting data into yourself: experiences, emotions, assessments, and the judgments of your own self and of others.  Much of the input has been false data that has polluted your hard-drive, that part of you that stores your beliefs, your understanding of what is true.  Whether innocently or purposefully, the institutions in which you have placed your faith have been feeding you data about yourself  and your world that is often false.   The truth about the most important facets of life---who you are, why you are here, and what comes next when this life is over---has been corrupted.

Most of our religions on this planet feature a wrathful, commanding and judging god who can be very unhappy if you break “His” rules or if you happen to have chosen the “wrong” religion.  Most religious propaganda is very unforgiving.  If you mess up, you could end up frying forever on the rotisserie of some god’s eternal barbeque pit.

While heart sense might tell you that the purpose of any worthy religion would be to unite and empower people, most religion does exactly the opposite of that.  So many hold onto religious scriptures as the word of some omnipotent god when the truth is that most religious scriptures as we see them today are the product of men with an agenda that is spiritually blood-sucking.  The only reason people hold onto believing in a wrathful god is fear of that same non-existent god.

Likewise, we would prefer to see our governments as institutions that protect, respect and serve us while the reality of it is that most of our governments act in direct opposition to their originally-stated intention.  In the United States, our consitition is in tatters.  It is government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.  We have allowed their propaganda to keep us collectively docile, sleepy, and powerless.

Our religions and our governments tend to be very much like the human ego: judging, condemning, confused and afraid of losing their sense of power.  The input of faulty data into our personal operating systems, repeated frequently over the course of our lives has resulted in the reality of our not thinking too highly of ourselves, and in our not having a lot of faith in a better future.  For many, life is something to get through, to tolerate, and is often seen as probably a punishment for not living consistently with some moral or religious doctrine.

The mechanism of any propaganda is repetition.  Our religions, governments and media know this truth and how effective it can be.  It is now up to us to more and more consistently employ the secret weapon of Love: Heart Propaganda.  Being in touch frequently with what I call the Propaganda of the Heart is a fruitful path to a more enlightened you and a more enlightened world.

Disavowing the faulty input of religious, governmental or media propaganda does not work.  There is something strange but very true about the workings of the human mind: When it is fed data that has a negative word in it (“stop smoking”, “quit nagging”, “not do drugs”) the output of our inner computer is anxiety.  Affirming what we do not want can make us feel a little crazy.  When one thinks of something that one doesn’t want, one is still picturing what that thing or experience is.  This is a form of self-torture, a hallmark of futility and confusion. Please use your “pause button” and ponder what has been expressed here so far before continuing to read this article.

The human civilization sits largely asleep at a crucial crossroads in its history.  We have slugged along our collective path in a state of ignorance about what is important, about why we are here.

Most of us do not know what true power is.  We do not understand that we have defined it as something totally other than what it is.  Many see power as the ability to manipulate others, to dominate, to instill fear in others.  One cannot truly evolve until one sees that true power is based in love and respect for self and all other creatures.

Think about it: Who are you?  The heart will tell you that you cannot be your body.  The body is obviously quite temporary in nature and has all kinds of challenges, demands and breakdowns.   You cannot be your mind, either.  The mind has all kinds of obviously idiotic demands and constructs.

To put it simply: It helps to conceptualize who you are as some combination of heart and soul.  Operating with this as a belief can be very productive in all areas of your life.

I see my soul as infinite and fully connected to everything.  It lives forever.  There is no book that can convince me of this, no charismatic speaker who can instill this belief in me.  I just intuit it.  I trust my intuitive self.

If this is true, I have no reason to ever fear.  Of course, that has nothing to do with the motivation to be prudent.  It’s not that I fear running a red light; it’s that I am present and wise enough to intend to do things that preserve my life.  Please stop here for a moment, and ponder that idea.

So let’s get back to how to move beyond the bugs in your operating system.  Just as the propaganda—often “bugs”---of the world have corrupted the “hard drive” of your operating system, the propaganda of the heart is capable of debugging that system, cleaning it up.

These are the basic steps you can take to do that:

• Get clear on your beliefs and intentions concerning what is important to you.  Envision what you intend for your life to be.
• Create and practice ways of reminding yourself of the importance of these beliefs regularly and frequently.  Write down the most important aspects of your vision and read them daily when you get up and when you are ready for sleep.  Create a one-sentence power statement that you print and put in places where you will see it frequently.  My power statement: I am calm, humble, loving, trusting power now.
• Choose to be more and more aware of opportunities you get to practice these more loving beliefs.

Eventually, you will get to a point when you will have no more use for beliefs of any kind.  You will just be.

You are where you are now not because of the experiences you have had in life but because of how you have reacted to these experiences.  By utilizing heart propaganda, you can move beyond all the ways of reacting to life that have not worked for you.  I urge you to experiment with the ideas in this article as a way of being more kind to yourself, as a way of becoming the more loving being that you are at depth.

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For more ideas and tools on how to use heart propaganda in your life, see the homepage at YourPauseButton.com

Much of what is written below is written with line breaks that are there for a purpose.  The end of each line is an opportunity to pause and to contemplate what you have just read before moving on to the next segment.

The world seems a mess.  Anxiety seems to be running rampant. The world seems to be imploding.

Is it time to wake up from the ignorant dream?

Has the time come to claim our fully loving nature?

How do we do this?

How do we become what be came here to become?

In the claiming of love comes the release of the imaginary ego,

That counter-productive imagination that sucks our loving energy, but only if we feed it.

Collectively, we have fed it by identifying with it, as if it is who we are.

We are challenged to see and feel and know that we are not that ignorant ego.

To do this, the true challenge---positively-stated---is to claim our true power.

Ego perverts the definition of true power.

For true power can only be an aspect of that which is based in love.

What is it to be in one’s true, full power, all the time?

It is to see, feel, taste and hear and trust the love in every experience,

And then do our best to practice always the fully loving response, in every moment.

It is too see the love in the most beautiful of creatures just as you see the opportunity

To practice it when confronted with the face of an angry, violent zealot.

It is to hear the love in the silence of meditation which is a ticket, of sorts,

To loving consciousness when practiced with optimum frequency and duration.

It is to hear it in the drone of a loud ambulance or fire truck siren,

As an opportunity to send love to someone who may be injured.

It is to taste the love in the most flavorful culinary delight just as you can choose loving patience and presence when you taste something extremely bitter, spicy or otherwise challenging.

It is trusting that whatever occurs in my experience can be accepted with grace,

Allowing  me to be more fully at peace with myself and my world.

We are collectively on our way to integrating this trust.

This is what I trust: That there are basically two kinds of experiences along the path.  One is the kind of experience that is easy to enjoy, easy to appreciate: the caress of your lover, the witnessing of the most kaleidoscopic of sunsets.

That brand of loving experience is easy to love unless you have bought into the foolish idea, fomented by misguided parents, political leaders and religions, that you are unworthy of experiencing joy and contentment.  I challenge you not to condemn those who would have you believe such lies, but to simply steer your life clear of their influence.

The other kind of experience that has been not so easy in the past to deal with is the emotionallychallenging one.  It’s when your world seems to scold you, judge you, manipulate you, ignore you, hate you or otherwise challenges you to be with what is just as it is. It is usually the opportunity to practice giving love to either yourself or another or both of you, or to just be calm in your response.  It’s your opportunity to respond to life with love.

While the term “enlightenment” can be defined in many ways, here is a simple way that might make sense to you:

There are three steps to it.

(1)  First is to deeply understand what true love and true power are.

Artificial love is a product of pity, guilt, obligation, condition, domination , manipulation or repression of the heart’s expression.  True love is unconditional.   False power is based in the false self of ego, enforced by the same factors shown above that make artificial power unreal.  All real power is loving power.

(2) Feeling worthy of living completely as a reflection of that kind of power.

(3)  Prioritzing your practice of fully loving power.

This means more and more ruthlessly choosing awareness, discipline and trust.

Are you willing to choose this, or would you just rather remain oblivious to your own deep power?

Please close your eyes now and contemplate what you have just read.

Press your pause button now and ask your heart: "Is it time for me to wake up from the ignorant dream?"