73 Awakening, Illusion vs Delusion, Manifestation, Letting go - Q & A

Periodic live Q&A sessions are to give the listeners a forum to ask questions they have about their process of awakening.   In this edited session we discussed the process of awakening, letting go, Maya, illusion vs delusion, grief, trust, manifesting those things you want and don't want, books supporting the awakening process, etc.   "The Infinite Way" by Joel Goldsmith on seeing clearly.  And, "In Search of a Secret India" Paul Brunton, "Bhagavad Gita", Jack Hawley. Etc.

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

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Hello everybody. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. So good to see you today. I'll just talk a little bit what we're going to do today, as we do on all of these live podcasts. They're designed to support your own path to awakening, and everybody's got a different path. In the podcasts that I've done, I think there's a little over 70 now on every platform, including Insight Timer. On those podcasts, they're designed to step-by-step bring your awareness to different perspectives on awakening. And you may already know these different perspectives and be way past that, but they're a nice reminder. And if you're not, they help perhaps guide you and save you some time. They're from my direct experience at this point, and I'm doing them because that's what I would have liked to have seen when I started meditating. Guidance was few and far between, so I worked on it on my own and made a lot of missteps. Went to India and got a lot of guidance. I've been there 13 times. I think my quickest trip was about nine weeks or something like that, maybe less, but generally I've stayed there a good bit. So I've taken what I've been guided and my experiences and put them in the podcast. Each podcast is good all by itself, but they build one upon the other. So if you were going to do it either way, I'd just say start with the first one and work your way up. If you have any questions for me, as soon as your question comes up, let me know and that'll guide us for our talk today. And different people have questions, just type them in the box and I'll see them and I'll try to answer all of your questions. Because the podcasts that are already posted may not answer everything that you're experiencing, or maybe they do and you have another question. Maybe you've never listened to any of these podcasts at all and you just have your own question. That's good too. I live at the beach and I love to walk on the beach every morning. Today we're having a thunderstorm. Right now it's raining and you might hear thunder in the background from time to time. Not sure. But it strikes me that nature is much like our deepest self, isn't it? You probably maybe saw that study where somebody I guess spent millions of dollars and came up with a study that says that actually if you're in nature two hours a week, it does you a lot of good. You're healthier and your mental health is much better. And it's true. Joseph Campbell, he worked with myths and archetypes, but he said man's goal in life is to match his heartbeat with the heartbeat of nature. And I think that's true. We are, speaking of nature, like the clear sky. Isn't that true? When we meditate, we see our thoughts. We see and are aware and experience our emotions. But that part of us that's aware of it all is like the clear sky. The sky isn't affected by trees or dogs or cats or clouds or lightning or thunder. It's just there and it allows everything to drift through just like we do in meditation. Isn't that true? We see the thoughts. We see our emotions. We experience them and they come and they go just like the clouds come and go in a thunderstorm like I'm going through right now here at the beach. Also, it's kind of funny, but life presents us in so many ways. It just keeps showing us right in front of our face our path, who we are. We're the sky. But we have clouds from time to time and we might take them seriously. They're big and dark, but can be light and heavy and have lightning and major thunder. And just like in meditation, as we watch our thoughts and we experience our emotions, they release, they relax, and they dissolve just like the clouds in a thunderstorm. Clouds in a thunderstorm have lots of energy, just like our emotions do. We've compressed a lot of consciousness into our emotions as we've created them. And now we haven't discreated them until we meditate and shine the clear, gentle energy of the sky, of the awareness, on these inner clouds. And they release, relax, and let go. In a rainstorm, the clouds, boom, they release, they relax, and let go. And all of their energy dissipates as the rain floods out. And in our meditation, the energy dissipates as the energy floods out of our emotions and our thoughts wind down. At first, they spin around and they expend lots of energy, don't they? But as we sit with them and we don't get involved in them, if we get involved in our own thoughts, we just perpetuate them. But if, like the sky, we just allow them to do what they want, they dissipate their energy, and boom. So that's what happens in a thunderstorm. And when things let go, they dissipate, don't they? They're gone. When a cloud completely lets go of all the water that's in it, all the lightning and the charge of the ions that are in it, suddenly it's gone and there's a rainbow. There's nothing there. Same on inside of us. It's gone and there's a rainbow, right? Our emotions, when we're aware of them and we let them run their course. Now, isn't it true that relaxation is the same as awakening energy? Isn't it the same? Think about you're getting a massage and you have tension and it kind of hurts good. You know, that feeling of, oh, that hurts, but it feels good. You're getting a massage. Why is it that suddenly those muscles let go? Because they receive relaxation. They receive awareness. They receive pure, beautiful energy, don't they? We call it relaxation, the process of the muscle relaxing and us receiving the good energy. And that teaches us a lot about our awakening path as well, doesn't it? Because it's not enough to sit and meditate and just experience the emotion that's there. That would be like getting a massage and having the tension, but not letting go and receiving the awareness, the purity, the pure energy. When we let go and receive, we call that relaxation. And what happens to the knot in your muscles? When it receives, it relaxes. It lets go and it's gone. It's not like, oh, well, there's still this tension. No, in a total letting go, it's gone. Same with our meditation, right? Our emotions, when they receive the energy of the sky, of our awareness, which is very quiet, the sky is quiet, right? It's not a big movie production. We're used to in the West, lots of bells and whistles. And we think, we don't know what we think sometimes. You do, but in our society, we often don't. But just like the muscles receive the relaxation, the beautiful energy, and they relax, our emotions receive the energy, the quiet energy of the sky or our awareness, and they relax. And the emotions, when they relax, just like our muscles, they're gone. The emotions are gone. They have discreated what we previously created and perhaps repressed because it was painful and it's been blocking us. And there are like a million of them piled up inside and we can't even think straight. We're depressed and anxious all the time, have PTSD, all of the things we have in the West, I suppose, all over the world. They start to come up one by one as we meditate and reveal themselves and they receive that energy. So it's, we want to feel it just like you do in a massage. And the second part is you want to soak up the good energy, just like you do in a massage. When you do those two things, they eventually release, relax, and let go. And those, that creation is gone. That complex is gone. That emotional complex that you've been working on in therapy for a million years, it's gone. Now, therapy is very valuable. That's another way to loosen it up. So I'm not saying no therapy. Don't get me wrong. It can be valuable. And at the same time, I'm not saying you have to have therapy. You follow yourself. What I'm saying, stop. That's called meditation. Be aware and receive. Just like what happens in a thunderstorm. The clouds receive, they relax, release their rain and lightning, and they're gone. All that's left is a rainbow. When all that's left in your awareness, when all that's left is the sky, it's both receiving, but when it receives, just like in the massage, it feels good. And then it emits, it radiates the rainbow, and that's called joy and bliss and love. So in the quiet, you experience joy, bliss, and love, as well as infinite emptiness. And that's why you're beyond this creation, that's the emptiness, and you're in this creation, that's the bliss, joy, and love and peace. The reason we know it's in creation is because you can feel it, and you can only feel the things that are in creation. The sky is so quiet, and in a way you can't feel it. It's in a way just on the border of creation. Anyway, thunderstorm, that's what I'm talking about. Christine wrote something. I love these metaphors, so perfect. It seems like for me, grief is the one emotion that doesn't completely go away, does it? Well, Christine, what a beautiful question, and thank you all for asking your questions. And Christine, thanks for asking yours, because I can guarantee you there are people out there that have that same question, and it's such a good one. It comes from the heart. There's different kinds of grief, and they all react differently. When you're attached to somebody, and I mean in a good way, they're your spouse, they're your partner, they're somebody that you love, they're your child. There's a biological connection, and just like a tree, when you saw off the branch of a tree, there's a phantom limb for a while, and there's no amount of meditating or philosophizing it away. It just takes time, and I don't know that it will ever completely go away. I think on some of our PTSD, some of it can become very faint and echoes, but maybe traces of it remain. And the grief is a tricky one, because if it's about a person, in a way, don't we almost want, doesn't it almost feel disrespectful if it just went away completely? It would almost mean they didn't mean anything to us. I mean, that's how we interpret it. That's not true, but emotionally, that's often how we interpret it. So we hold on without even knowing that we are holding on sometimes. So there's all of that, and that's last part, the holding on. On the deepest level in oneness, and this happens bit by bit, and you're experiencing it in your own life, everybody is, little at a time until it's complete, but in pure oneness, you are the universe. You are the person you let go of. You are the person who you broke up with or who passed away. Also, it's all one, and there's deep trust, infinite trust. Everything is okay. Now, this is not a philosophy. I'm not, it could be, sure, but I'm not talking now as a philosophy. I'm talking about you feel it, you know it, and it's beyond mental knowing. If you try to figure it out, that's a start. You can figure it out in your head, fine, but on the deepest level in awakening, you actually experience, you are one. There is no you. There's only everything, and in that radiance, these questions disappear. They melt because there's complete trust, and it's even deeper than that. It's deeper than the complete trust. It is that you are. Trust is almost like, here I am, and I, oh, thank God I'm trusting now. You know, that does happen, but I'm talking about you have completely let go into well-being. It's like that muscle we talked about in the massage. When it completely lets go into well-being, it's gone. In awakening, you're gone when you've completely let go, and all of these issues are gone, and you know that your loved one, it's okay. You know it. Now, this cannot happen mentally. Yeah, we can kind of get close to knowing it, maybe, and there is the psychic realm in the realm, and you can talk to these people, and they do exist in different realms. That is true, but what I'm talking about is deeper because even if you talk to the person in a different realm, what happens when you don't do it forever? Maybe you do, but it still makes two of you. It's not as complete as in the oneness, and I've done it both ways. Christine says, yes, I see. Thank you. It's a smiling rainbow fitting with our thunderstorm analogy metaphor. Wow, what a good question. I hope I answered it completely. Maybe to somebody else I haven't completely answered that question to your satisfaction. If so, let me know. Some of you have been meditating for a long time, and some of you just started, or you just like have gotten on to, say, the insight timer, and you're doing guided meditations, and you have the simplest of questions you feel, and maybe it's embarrassing. Hey, no one asked that question. Everybody else, they already know the answer. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but I don't care. It's your question. It does us all good to just hear good stuff, so if you have a question, bring it up. I'm going to throw out a couple other questions that you may want to select from. I had somebody ask me, what's the difference between indifference and detachment? Okay, I'm no longer attached. Some people become indifferent, and they call that non-attachment, and other people are truly not attached. What's the difference, and how do you navigate that? Another person said, okay, hey, you talk about Maya from sometimes in your podcast, and you talk about delusion and illusion, the difference between delusion and illusion. What is all of that? Anyway, what is Maya? What is delusion? What is illusion? Some of you might be interested, well, you've mentioned the Tao Te Ching. What's that, or what's the Bhagavad Gita? What are all those, and why are those important, or are they important? What about the Bible? Does it even make sense when you read it? Does that include grooming? Ah, Sharon, I'd like to hear about Maya. Good, thank you. Good question, good comment. Okay, Maya, well, in awakening, in full awakening, as I experience full awakening, and as you experience full awakening, it's basically you without your problems, you without your distractions, you without your addictions. By addictions, I mean psychological thoughts, emotional thoughts, things that grab us and use our mental energy. And haven't you had a time in your life when somebody did something, and you had a perspective on somebody, and you didn't like that person, and you think, oh, they're this way and that way, and then come to find out years later, perhaps, they make a good comment, and suddenly you like that person, and you see that they've changed, or that you misunderstood the whole thing in the first place, and they're not the person you held them to be. I think we've all had that kind of experience, or something like it. Maybe there's a thing, an experience in life, and we don't want to do this, because we know we won't like it, and then somehow we get forced into it, and it turns out, oh, we do like that. Well, Maya is the thought that is not accurate. It's the lens that we've been looking through that is not an accurate lens, and it portrays the world in a way that's not true and accurate. So an Indian is considered a power, actually, as odd as that sounds. It sounds like it's troublesome here, when we talk about it, and it really is a lot, but it's also considered a power, that we have the power to delude ourselves, to block things out, to see things as they're not. Now, how could it be a positive power? It could be a positive one, because we can use our minds, and, you know, thoughts are simply hallucinations. They are Maya. They don't really... we picture the future, but the future does not exist. So what we picture is an illusion of the future, and it's a positive one, can be. We might picture, how do I solve this problem? How do I invent something? How do I start a business? How do I talk to my friend? How do I handle this situation? So that's a positive power in creating a hallucination that we call thought. A 3D hallucination, of course, is called an emotion. So now we can feel what it might feel like. So Sharon has added something that I want to include in our discussion. She says, ah, yes, that's cool. I also heard that it is as an illusion, and the gods playing with our thoughts. That is the crux of where I'm going, so thank you for bringing it up. So Maya, there's another part of Maya, and it fits with your second comment, Sharon, that when I look at reality, and I've mentioned this many times, I actually see it come in and out of existence like a strobe light. There is nothing there, and then everything there. Nothing there, and then everything there. Very fast, rapid vibration, and I'll say a million times a second. I don't really know how fast, but really fast. So it seems like it's solid, but it's not. This reality that comes into existence comes from what's beyond this world. It comes from the infinite. That's the emptiness that I see, and then it comes into creation. That's the fullness that I see, but the fullness is not fully solid. It evaporates a million times a second. So in that sense, life is an illusion, but I'm going to go a little deeper, so bear with me. It's an illusion in one sense. Everything out there is made of consciousness, and consciousness is the part of you. We're all like a rainbow, and when you meditate, you get in touch with this when you sit quiet enough, and many of you are in touch with it, but your deepest self is outside of creation, and you can only know that intuitively, and that's what we call emptiness. That's what I call the emptiness that the world strobes in and out. That's one end of the rainbow, so to speak. Then as that rainbow comes into the world, it is light, and sound, and dogs, and cats, and bliss, and joy. That is creation. So both are two sides of the coin, but if I think there's only creation, that's a bit of an illusion. It goes deeper, because when... We are the ones that shape our world. We are many creators. It's like we're all one. There's all the one God, but there's a lot of fingers, and each finger is having a different experience, yet each finger is related to the other finger, and our individual fingers, the oneness is coming through us and creating a sphere through our fingers. It seems like I have the ability to manifest. Well, kind of, but I as the one have the ability, and we've talked about that in past podcasts. So I create my world around me. I create my world around me. I, the little I, but it's really not... The little I doesn't really exist, so it really is the big I. If I'm deluded, if I... If I, my little I, is governed by hurt, fear, and anger, which always happens when I feel separate, when I'm not awake. That's what forms my personality. Then I have a slant in the lenses that I use, and that slant is deluded. It's based on a falseness, on hurt, fear, and anger, and that's why you meditate, is to relax all of that out of your system, so that you can see straightforward and clear. But if I create through a slanted lens, hurt, fear, and anger, I create kind of a strange world. If you look around us, there's a lot of strange and crazy things going on in the world out there. I also perceive things through my lenses of hurt, fear, and anger. You did that, and you must have meant that. Well, that's just going through my PTSD, my emotions. I'm filtering things. That's a delusion. So, really, this is a question that's been debated through the centuries, and Adyashankara, about, I think, 2,000 years ago, 1,000 years, I'm not sure, he is an Advaita master, the very first one, Adya, Shankara. Adya means first, and Shankara is a great teacher. Adyashankara, he wrote a very clear piece on this whole issue, and I remember, I was at Ramana Ashram, and I was coming down from Ramana's cave, and I passed a little group that was doing a reading, an Indian man was reading in English to some people, and he was talking about this issue of Maya, illusion versus delusion. I always felt like there's really delusion, not illusion, because the world does exist. When a bus comes, you do get out of the way of the bus. Even the greatest masters that say, oh, it's an illusion, the gods are playing with us. Well, is it really an illusion? You're jumping out of the way of the bus. You think that's real. Why? Because it is real. It's, there is not an illusion. There's only a delusion if we see crookedly, and in pure awakening, we see the world as it is, and it's a beautiful painting, and it strobes in and out of existence, and it does exist, and we can create, and we can discreate. So, I would say, I come down, everybody here is free to have whatever thoughts they want, but you ask me, and I'll say that, in my experience, it's a, the world does exist. There is no illusion. There's no gods playing with us. We create our world. If you want to know how you're doing on the inside, just look around on the outside. Your world, you created it. As you clean up your inside, your world looks differently. Two people living side by side, sure, they influence each other, but one person may experience the world as wonderful, while the other one is in great pain, because one is more awake on the continuum, perhaps, than the other, and we're all on different levels and continuums, but that is a good question, and good comments. There is the other side of it, to address your second comment, Sharon, and that is, in order to have a creation, in order to have a painting, in order to have all the beauty that we have in this world, and it's called creation, right, or you can call it whatever you want, existence, how about that, call it whatever you want, but for this to be out there, it has to be separate from the infinite, that is, nothing that's outside of creation, so it's not known by the five senses. It's beyond creation, but in creation, everything, as I said, is made of love, like a knife is made of love. It's just like you can have frozen water shaped in a knife, and then when it melts, it's water. Well, everything is made of consciousness, and consciousness is love, so there is this illusion, you might say, or delusion, depending on how you want to say, that this creation is separate from where it comes from, and it has to be separate to a degree, although it strobes in and out, and it's a continuum on a rainbow, it has to be separate for it to be out there for you to touch it. It has to be an object, which means it had to be made separate, so for that to happen, there has to be a separation. For separation to happen, there has to be a separation, and when there's separation in our world, there's separation anxiety, so that's where anxiety comes from. There's a feeling of abandonment. I'm alone in this world, and I've been abandoned, and nobody loves me, and I need love. I need you to love me, and what if you're an individual, and you don't have the resources to love me? Now I feel really bad, and I form a personality to get stuff. I want to get safety, because I don't want to feel anxious. I want to get love, because I don't want to feel abandoned, and I feel angry. Why? Because I'm separate, and this is a heck of a mess down here on this world. I'm angry, frustrated. I don't just think things, and they quickly happen. Maybe I haven't mastered manifestation, and even if I have, it typically takes a while for the thing to manifest, doesn't it? So I'm frustrated. Why doesn't it happen now? I go to McDonald's, and they give me my hamburger fast. Why can't I manifest fast? I watch TV, and that's fast. I can just turn it on, so I get frustrated. So in a separate world, I have hurt, fear, and anger, and then I form a personality to get a solution. Now the personality itself, as well as all these feelings, are blocking me from the fact that on the far end of the spectrum, I am awakening. I am the one that created this beautiful creation, so there is no problem, and I trust myself. If I want it to be different, I'll make it different. I'm not stuck with what's in front of me. I just change my mind, and poof. Have you seen people do miracles? Some people can, and it's poof. Why aren't I seeing them all the time? Because most of us are blocked. We're deluded. That's the delusion. We've blocked ourselves. Well, I don't believe in miracles. Well, that's a block. That disbelief itself is a lack of trust and a block. Well, how do I trust? I mean, that's... I remember a man came up to Jesus and said, Please heal my son, and Jesus says, I can't. He says, Can you heal my son? And Jesus said, Can I? If you have faith, sure I can. And the man said, Oh, I have faith, but help my unfaith. Help my... I have belief, but help my unbelief. And Jesus says, Okay, your belief has made your son well. So it doesn't require a completeness in the real world. We don't have to be perfect. Somebody asked me a question. There was a family matter going on, and their mother is in a nursing home and had broken and fallen and hurt and broken her hip. And the mother has issues. She isn't like you, working on her issues. She had some that weren't resolved. And so she's become at times, she can be a bit nasty at times, apparently. And therefore, some nursing homes won't take her because she's hard on people. So it's a bit of a mess. It is going to work out. But the temptation is to get into the thought of what will happen if this one doesn't accept it? What would happen if this one won't accept it? And when you start ruminating on that, what happens? You put all of your energy through that lens, that lens of delusion. Anything but the clear sky is a delusion, is a tension, isn't it? It's made of hurt, fear, or anger. The clear sky, when it's clear, it does radiate joy and happiness as we talked about, as it feeds on itself, as it's released from all of its troubles. The clear awareness that's you feels good when it's clear. But when it's attached and looking through the telescope of fear and hurt or anger, that's a delusion. And so when we do that, when we put all of our energy into our worries, and in this story, it's about the mother, worrying about the mother, which is natural. But when I put all my energy in there, I'm actually putting my energy behind that fear. It's like I'm praying for that fear to happen. I'm not trying, but I am actually manifesting my worst fears for the mother. And that's called a curse. I'm cursing my mother, inadvertently. Not my mother, but the mother. I don't mean to. I don't know what I'm doing. It's what everybody else does. We all worry. I mean, never thought about it. I'm not trying. I have the best of intentions. That's why I'm worried for the mother, right? But that is a curse. Curses, you get an intention, you get a chicken foot or something, and it helps focus, and it brings the mojo, and you focus on negativity, and you make a curse. Well, I can do curses. You can do curses through our worries. We don't need a chicken foot. We just do our curse. What's the opposite of a curse? That's called a prayer or a good intention. We let go of our fear for a moment, and we see what it is that we want for our mother. We see clearly. If you want a good book on this, Joel Goldsmith wrote a book called The Infinite Way. I think he wrote it in about the 50s, and you can get it on PDF. Just Google Joel Goldsmith, The Infinite Way. It's a PDF. You get it free, or just order it. It's a great little book, $4 or something, and they use books. But he says, just see what it is that you want, and in a sense, I think he captures so clearly. It's a tough book to read because it's so clear. It demolishes your illusions or your delusions, and you can only read about a paragraph at a time. You got to put it down because it's like everything inside of you is going, what, what, what? It's reordering just by reading the book because we're so used to our culture, and that's cultural karma. We're, you know, our culture is a cult. It is like hypno- cult-ture. We're in a cult that's a group hypnosis of delusion, and that's what creates our world. Could be good delusion or bad delusion. That's called karma, right? We create our own, but we're also influenced by those around us, our culture. There's country karma. There's city karma. There's world karma. Anyway, that's the hypnosis, and we hypnotize ourselves, so that's maya. To break through the maya, in this case in the story of the mother, picture what it is you want for your mother. I want her to be happy. I want her to be at peace, and you picture that as if it's already happened. I see her in peace. Why? Because you don't want to picture, you don't want to put your energy for something in the future and then keep picturing it happening in the future, happening in the future. You want her to experience that starting now, right? So you picture it as happening now. Susan asks, what was the name of the book again? The book's name is The Infinite Way by Joel Goldsmith. Very powerful little book. You can google The Infinite Way, and you get the PDF if you want, and just read it on your computer. I'm going to do a podcast on good books, I think, that would be helpful, but that's going to take a while. I'm piled up on podcasts right now, but I'll throw out a few since we're talking. Definitely read the Tao Te Ching. That is the most elegant, beautiful book ever written from an awakened perspective. I think it's 81 verses. I would just read a verse a day. You can google it, and you get an app on your phone, and you can just get it free. Probably all read it, but if you haven't, oh my goodness. And if you have, it tells you what you already know without any filter. To read it and to be with it, you have to be awake. It's beautiful, and they're short little verses. I like Rumi, Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. I would read In Search of a Secret India by Paul Brunton. If you want to have a very good book that gives you the experience of being in India, he wrote it in the 1950s. It's his biography of his experience in India. When I read that book, I felt like, wow, this is the most accurate book on being in India, and he talks to different gurus. He's a newspaper reporter trying to figure out in real life if gurus really exist, and is there anything to them, or is it just a bunch of positive thinking? The Bhagavad Gita, and I particularly like the translation by Jack Hawley, H-A-W-L-E-Y, I believe, Jack Hawley. He wrote it while he was in India seeing Sai Baba, and I love the little blurb he writes at the very end after his translation of the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is the distillation of all of the knowledge of the Vedas, and the Vedas are the distillation of all of the knowledge of the Upanishads, and the Upanishads are a distillation of all of the knowledge in the India for thousands and thousands and thousands of years of spiritual connection. So, it's the gem, the Bhagavad Gita. You've heard of it. I read like a page a day, a paragraph a day, again with the bookmark, because there's a lot to absorb. Of course, Yogananda's book, Autobiography of a Yogi, you've all probably read that. Amazing. Okay, Sharon asks, is self-doubt on a decision a sign of a wrong decision? Well, wow, that's a good question, and we've all been there. Here's the thing. Sometimes it is a sign, and sometimes it's not, and I'll make the distinction. Sometimes you make a decision, and something inside of you can't rest. There's a deep clarity deep inside that says, no, no, no, no, that is not the right decision, and that's painful, and we don't want to think about it because it's troubling. We just got it settled. We made the decision. We want to move on, and we don't want to be nagged and hounded by this feeling. Just give yourself time, and decide not, unless you have to, decide not to proceed on this quote-unquote decision until you are clear. Meditate. Walk on the beach. Walk in the forest. Walk in your neighborhood. Do whatever, and take time to let the silt settle out of the water until there's just clarity, and then you'll hear this inner voice more clearly. That inner voice is you. What's listening is the deluded part that's trying to listen through the delusions, so that's one answer. Another answer is, I said that there are many realms, and there are, and sometimes we have angels and guides that are talking to us, and they're saying, do this, do that. Some of you believe that. Some of you don't. That's fine. I'm not pushing them, just offering it as a something to talk about we should not ignore, so trust that, but again, you have to sit with it and see. Now, if that's the case, you have to also sit because your deepest inner self is the one, and it will know if this information from the guide is true for you. Sometimes you get information that's not true, not just because somebody's disembodied in another realm. Are they always smart or aware? They're just beings like us. Some of them are more advanced than Jesus, but others aren't, and that's why you're not striving to be with the angels. You know, you want to be the one, not the angels. They have issues. They're beings. Anytime you're separate, you're separate, so you want to be awake to your truth, to the truth that's flowing into your incarnation, your incarnation. This is you. These are the other incarnations. They have different tasks. You have one in this world. I don't mean it has to be one task, or it can change. You can change, but your incarnation has something that you're clarifying and working out, and Sharon continues to say, I hear what you're offering. It's opening me to other ideas. Thank you. I was thinking I wanted something, and maybe I'm now seeing that it's not the best for me. Yes. Ramana said something like, what will happen, will happen, and what won't happen. What will happen, will happen. Try as might to change it. What won't happen, won't happen. Try as you might to influence that. So, he says the best course is to sit silent. Now, that's an extreme, but from an awake perspective, from the place of oneness, your life is being orchestrated in a good way. By who? By you. When I say your life is being orchestrated, I don't mean by this one God way over there. I mean, God has become you, and that one person, or not person, but the one that's orchestrating it, is you. Why can you trust? Because it's you. You are orchestrating it, and yes, when part of us is a little bit cut off, what appears to be a good thing, because we're looking at it from our cut off self, might not be the best thing for us, and as Ramana said, when you sit still and just let trust life to work it out for you, you don't have to work out everything, do you? It's not all on our shoulders. We don't control the universe. We're not expected to are, and what a mess it would be if I had to control the whole universe, right? So, how do I reconcile myself with all this trust? There's a saying, what is it? God's unanswered prayers are the greatest gifts, something like that. There is no problem. Now, you have to act as if there is a problem, if you feel that there is, perhaps, and inch by inch, you can begin to awaken through your meditation and spiritual practices, and to the degree you feel relieved and released, act from that place, and then the next day, you go a little bit deeper, and then you act from that place, and then the next day, deeper, and you act from that place. What I'm saying is you don't want to make it up. You don't want to be a phony person, like, yeah, that sounded good. I'm just going to be awake. No, don't work that way. You are what you are, and there is a natural unfolding in your life, and it's perfect. So, the same in this. I'll just say one other thing because it occurs to me. Sometimes, you're guided by your intuition to know the difference, and what is your intuition? That is your deepest self telling you, telling your incarnation what the proper course is, and what I used to do is I just started small because, you know, I was really blocked, and still, you know, I got my days, but I would ask questions to myself like, should I turn left or right when it didn't matter? Like, I'm jogging. I'm coming to the end of my jog, and I was just like, do I do this or that? Who cares, but I did it, and I listened, and I would ask on little things I didn't care about. Should I do this or should I do that, and I would just listen, and I would wait and see, and a lot of times, I said, oh, I don't want to do that because if I'm wrong, then it's painful, and I don't have good intuition, and I'm so blocked, and so therefore, I don't want to do it, but I did it anyway just to start to open up my intuition on a deeper level. Now, if this is a big decision going on for you right now, why wait? Ask your intuition. Trust it. I did it often with colors also. If the answer is yes, I want to see green. If it's no, I want to see red. I need it to be simple. I'm practical. Later, it developed, and I could start to see scenarios, and I could maybe not even see the future. I was the future. I became one with the future. All that business, that's another podcast, but you got to start somewhere. Yeah, colors. Sharon says, wow, love that, colors. Yeah, because that was, and I still do that. I still do it because it's easy, right? Red, green, just like a stoplight. Yellow in between. You know, some things, it doesn't matter so much, or they're in the process of developing, so yellow happens. It's like, well, neither good nor bad. Something like that. And trust it, and be willing to change. Sometimes, you're guided four steps forward, and then suddenly it's no, go to the side now. So don't think, well, once I got my answer, that's the answer forever. It might be the answer for this hour. In awakening, you're totally aware and connected to yourself at all times, and so you can walk and change directions when you need to, right? Okay. Yes, Sharon, it's called, the podcast is called Awakening Together, comma, Relaxing into Happiness, William Cooper, and then put podcast. Even if you go Awakening Together podcast, I'll be in there somewhere, but there's about 10 Awakening Together podcasts, believe it or not. So put my name, William Cooper, and you'll get this podcast. Okay. Thank you so much. Take care.