Even before I left for Japan, I learned my first lesson. Obsessive-compulsive disorder and trip preparations do not necessarily mix.    
    It was apparently a huge lesson that my Expanded Self felt I needed to learn.
    It began the week before, when I attempted to liquidate my IRA to help finance the trip. (I'll give myself some credit, at least I'm not obsessing about retirement, huh?) I completed all the paper work for my broker, we talked about the exciting adventure I was about to go on and I left with instructions to email the routing number so the money could be deposited into my bank account the same week. That was Tuesday, a good week before I was to leave. Smart, right?
    Over the next few days, I did things like spend 30 minutes trying to figure out how to split up my travelers checks into different pieces of luggage and money belts, because I knew someone would go through my socks if I hid some of the money there.
    I worried about whether I should wear a back brace through check in at the airport, since under a shirt it looks like I could be a terrorist with a bomb strapped to me. I'd be detained interminably, miss my flight, be rendered to a dark hole somewhere in Eastern Europe and generally have my trip disrupted.
    Were the jars of salsa intended as presents for my Japanese hosts going to shatter in my luggage if they weren't triple bubble-wrapped, enclosed in a bag and nestled in a bed of styrofoam peanuts?
    It got crazier.
    The money still hadn't shown up in my bank account by Friday. My broker emailed, saying there had been some kind of delay within the banking system, so wait for Monday. I'm leaving Wednesday, no problem.
    Monday came and my broker called to say she had forgotten to submit the routing number I had e-mailed her, and the deposit had been denied. I re-sent it. The money arrived Tuesday. But the fun was just starting.
    Wednesday morning -- departure day -- with 99 percent of my preparations finished, about to drop off my car and get a ride to the airport from friends,  I worked on the coup de grace -- laptop computer security. For the first time since I've owned a computer, I decided it would be good to set up my laptop so that a user had to type in my secret password to use it. In the possible event that my laptop was stolen while abroad, (insert wailing and screaming here) at least the bastards wouldn't be able to log in and steal all my passwords and information.
    I was actually going to wait until the next day in Los Angeles when I had more time to mess with it and some help from someone who knew what they were doing. All this despite the fact that my laptop would be surgically attached to my hip the entire time, and that my son had told me on several occasions that Japan was the last place in the world my computer would be hijacked. In fact, if someone did steal it, they'd probably leave a better one in its place.
    But no. All I could envision was some young cyber-thug running down an airport terminal with my life in his hands. Besides, all I had to do was follow a simple procedure, and voila, the final protection would be finished.
    So I did it.
    Then I re-started the computer. I typed in my name and password. The little screen just jiggled and spit the words back at me. I tried, 30, 40 times. Nothing. I called my techie friend, Blaise, who had recently upgraded my computer.
    I told Blaise what had happened. We tried a few more things. Nothing. He knew the name and passwords were correct because he had just used them to do the upgrade.
    Blaise, who was just returning de-planing at the airport from a trip,  suggested he could look at it if I could meet him on the other side of town. He was waiting to be picked up and taken somewhere by his brother, though, and would call me back when he knew exactly where he was going to go.
    I still had to drive from the far reaches of Albuquerque to a bank to cash a check for the trip. and get to my friends' house. All in about one hour and a half.
    Shit.
    I borrowed a friend's laptop to search for possible solutions, but nothing looked remotely good.
    I'd either have to leave the laptop with Blaise and let him figure it out then FedEx it to me at some exorbitant cost, or have him burn a start-up disk for me and mail it to Japan, hope it arrived at the remote town where I'd be staying with my son, then have him walk me through the fix via phone.  For me, that's the equivalent of performing brain surgery on a fellow astronaut at the space station, with House giving me instructions on the phone. Did I mention, I'm not a surgeon?
    My blog posts, my internet businesses, my writing assignments and most of all, my presence on Facebook would all be horribly impacted. Double shit.
    I took off in my car, hit the bank, then did the Busting Loose process twice, as I raced across town to meet Blaise, who was in a cigar shop with his brother and a bunch of other people milling around.
    I immediately started up the computer and let Blaise take a look as thought of doom filled my head. We chatted nervously as I envisioned my Japan trip in ruins -- all because of me and my fear.
    As one attempt by Blaise after another to log in failed, I began my next OCD routine. I gathered the address where I would be in Japan, and other contact information. I calculated shipping costs. Blaise slaved away, typing in password combinations and checking instructions on his IPhone. After half an hour, even he was frustrated. I must admit, it's fun to hear geeks curse.
    Then Blaise let out an exclamation. "I'm not sure what I did, but I'm in." As we back engineered a solution, we realized he had accidentally typed in two spaces between my first and last name when entering them, instead of one. It was a mistake I had made when setting up my name and password upon purchasing the laptop several years earlier. A simple mistake we would have probably never would have figured out in a million years.
    Happy I was.
    Never mind that I subsequently misplaced my boarding pass and some other papers while driving to the airport. No big deal.
    The whole Japan trip has been an interesting mix of letting go and grasping. Living in reactive mode, then torturing myself over my decisions.
    The past few days have given me enough fodder for a few years of process and contemplation, so already the trip's a success.
    It was just one more exhilarating lesson about the fact that I'm still operating under the illusion that I -- the player -- have any control of anything. I still think I can foresee, and subsequently plan and scheme my way around any problem that arises. It's a good lesson and one that obviously needs to be reinforced frequently by my Expanded Self, because going on 53 years now, planning has not necessarily been my best friend.
    So today, I'm going to get out of bed, and that's all I'm committing to. Sayonara until tomorrow.
    
    

   

    Until this week, there was only one thing I've ever done in my life where I felt I could absolutely do no wrong -- ministering to the dying as a hospice volunteer. Now, I've apparently found a second -- taking a long trip to Japan.        Geez. If I had known, I would have done it sooner.
    (Now I know I can't really do anything wrong in the illusion. But believing that you can screw up is part of the game and that's one role I have embraced in the past.)
    As those of you who follow this blog know, it's been kind of a busy month for me. I celebrated my birthday in Las Vegas a couple of weekends ago, then came back to Albuquerque to find out that I had until the end of September to find another place to live.
    That was somewhat complicated by the fact that I had already planned to go visit my son, Teo, in Japan for 10 days this month, leaving me very little time to accomplish everything I needed to do.
    Instead of being a welcome chance to reunite with my son in an exotic locale, the trip was now becoming a nuisance that was getting in the way of my life here in New Mexico. I was already wondering whether I could really afford to go. Now I had to think about a bunch of other nonsense, like where would I live when I got back? What about the paying work I might miss out on while I was gone? How much would my rent get jacked up? Who would help me move shit, and when? And would I have to take a chance at "roommate roulette?"
    As I sorted through my options for living arrangements -- all fairly dismal to this point -- and agonized about how I could carefully stretch my money to the end of the year until the rest of my abundance (at least a paying job) miraculously showed up, I finally gave up. I realized that I was contracting by the minute, creating stories about my lack of abundance and choices and freedom faster than Obama switches positions on health care. And the judgment about it all wasn't helping.
    That's when my Expanded Self decided to throw another option my way.
    As I assessed the current state of my life, I thought to myself, what's keeping me here? Why not travel for a while? I already had a place to stay in Japan. A friend had offered to put me up in India. I have friends in Africa, Europe, South America. I could cash out what was left of my piddly 401K to get started.
    Then I had my 7-11 moment. The Big Gulp.
    The idea of chucking everything was both exhilarating and scary, of course. It brought up a batch of eggs around safety, survival, money and responsibility like nothing I've ever experienced before. Yet, I knew it was the right thing to do. Maybe not travel all around the world just yet, but get way out of my comfort zone and have an adventure.
    Now on the scale of things in my hologram, I'm not sure where to rate this. Friends of mine travel all of the time, all over the world, doing amazing things. It's no big deal.
    But the reaction to my decision was astounding.
    Even as I internally agonized over every possible reason not to do this, friends, family and even strangers were cheering me on like I was a runner in mile 25 of a marathon.
    It reminded me of Arnold Patent's "Mirror Principle." Arnold is one of Robert Scheinfeld's mentors.  In effect, he says that what we see and experience "out there" in our illusion is really a reflection of our consciousness. Robert's version is a little more expanded, but almost the same thing. The point being, if we want to get a look at where we are consciousness-wise, just pay attention to our environment.
    Now, in many other practices -- ones that I have experienced previously -- we are taught to look inward for the answers. The challenge is then to discern the mindless chatter from the voice of truth. Because of my addiction to listening to the voices in my head, I'm finding the Patent/Scheinfeld method a much easier way to gauge the state of my consciousness.
    That could all change in an instant in a Zen monastery in Japan. But from the reaction, I'm guessing my consciousness is in pretty good shape. Thank you all (and me) for the support. I feel truly blessed to be able to embark on this journey.
    I now get to mull over two more big questions.
    We all know Expanded Self has a sense of humor. But does it have a sense of boredom? I think it does and it's much more dangerous than the sense of humor. I mean, let Expanded Self sit around with too much time on its hands  and you might be guided to do something really insane like spend the last of your illusory money traveling around the world.
    Secondly, do guests, like fish, really  begin to smell within three days? I'm hoping in the land of sushi, they won't notice.

    The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said "You can not step twice into the same river." The river is different every time. At least that's one interpretation.
    In mathematical terms, a late friend once explained to me that Heraclitus' statement could be translated as "A" never equals "A," which is the opposite of the foundation for most of our mathematics and western civilization. Start with A never equals A, and where would we be today?
    I would offer that "I" never equals "I" either, because we as humans are always changing. We are never exactly the same person from minute to minute, and that change appears to accelerate when we enter the playground of Phase 2 in Busting Loose.
    In linguistic terms, our shape-shifting selves are striving to be verbs and not nouns.
    Instead of saying "I am a writer," to be more accurate and dynamic, I might say "I write," or  "I make symbolic marks in certain patterns that some people take the time to decipher." Instead of saying "I'm a filmmaker," I'd say  "I arrange sound and images and create packets of digital information to be viewed by others."  Instead of saying "I'm an entrepreneur," I might say "I create ways to make money flow."
    Granted, some people would think writer, filmmaker and entrepreneur are pretty sexy nouns, and I've taken great pride over the years in being able to hand the words out like dollar bills or stick them on business cards. But do they tell who I really am, in the hologram or as an infinite being? They're all an illusion, just like the other terms I might use for myself, like unemployed bum or spiritual surfer.
    The difference is that each noun comes with its own baggage. Each verb comes with a possibility. In quantum physics, nouns are the collapsed wave form. Verbs are the zero field itself.
    To integrate the metaphors, nouns tend to dam the river of life, while verbs tend to move it along.
    "I write" means I do that thing when I am moved to do so, and implies I can do other things like make homemade sauerkraut. "I am a writer" crystallizes whatever image and expectations of being a writer that you or I might have. That expectation might incidentally include actual writing, but most days may be just about wearing a tweed jacket, thinking great thoughts and smoking a pipe in my library while I stare at the books on the shelves hoping to release my writer's block.
    All the energy I put into being a writer that does not include the actual writing, is time taken away from the possibility of growing rutabagas, climbing Mt. Everest or playing with a puppy.
    I know a minor filmmaker with a famous name, which I won't mention here. But you've heard of the family.
    The kindest thing I can say about this person is that as a filmmaker, he's a great chef. But I've actually felt pity for him/me. Not only is he a noun-y filmmaker, he's got the extra added weight of the family name attached. What might have initially seemed like a crown is probably more like a ball and chain.
    I watched this person spend a lot of time creating an image of being a renegade filmmaker, dressing like an extra from "Easy Rider" and bossing people around as if his world was a real movie set, as if this type of behavior confirmed he was a filmmaker.
    This, instead of actually making films.
    He obviously feels compelled to follow in the footsteps of his family heritage and he occasionally has made a film, but as I said, his future is in cuisine. Maybe chef just doesn't sound as sexy as filmmaker.
    I understand that this is his life path and there's nothing wrong with it. I do hope he gets to open his own restaurant some day. But he is an interesting reflection to me about how we get caught up in meaningless roles.     
    I relate this all with a great deal more compassion now than I felt then because I see all my nouns being sucked into the black hole of meaninglessness as Phase 2 continues and I come face to face with all my discomfort and illusions. At this moment in time, what do the terms filmmaker, father, writer, lover, journalist, radio host, brother, son, SOB, TV producer, sports junkie, ex-husband really have to do with anything?
    Not much, as far as I can tell. They were simply nouns that I placed my power in for a time. I'm reclaiming my power from them -- even as I battle the tyranny of adjectives. But don't get me start on the judgment of adjectives.
    Living the "verb life" means living free, living reactively, living without the burden of expectation and letting others do the same thing. I'm liking the fact that I'm learning I'm not who I thought I was all this time.    



    


   

    We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive...” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
                        Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- Hunter S. Thompson

    When the late Mr. Thompson composed his savagely funny, drug-drenched indictment of the American Dream, he made it difficult for subsequent generations to write anything serious about Las Vegas, at least with a straight face. But I will try.
    When last we connected, I was on the road to the great mirage in the desert, to see what the next twist in my story line would be. I was neither light-headed nor seeing bats. But then again, that's probably due to the low-grade acid that was the only thing I could afford at the time.
    Otherwise, it was perfect. Here I was strapped for cash, headed for the place where money is a religion and the collection plate is shaped like a slot machine. Here I was, a firm believer that we live in an illusion of our own creation, headed straight for the city that is the epitome of fake.   
    The drive to Las Vegas from Albuquerque is about nine hours, give or take a pit stop or an orange barrel obstacle course. Unless you are an aficionado of the mesas and volcanic landscape of the high desert, it is a scenically unremarkable drive that veers sharply into ugliness by the time you hit the Mojave Desert.
    But once you wend your way through the hordes of lobster-colored tourists at Hoover Dam, past crystal blue Lake Mead and into the home stretch, and see the casinos gleaming in the distance, you must admire those who envisioned this sand-blasted Xanadu in the midst of some of the most coyote ugly terrain this side of Mars.
    I arrived at the New York-New York hotel in the late afternoon. For those of you, like me, who have not visited Vegas in some time, it contains not only a casino, but a fantasy version of New York City, meaning it's a humidity-free 68 degrees on a summer afternoon, there are no obnoxious cab drivers and the trash-filled sidewalks that make New York such an aromatic city in the summer are non-existent.
    It is truly a magnificent illusion and a dead-on representation of somebody's (mine) idea of what New York City might be like in a parallel universe.
    But that's why Las Vegas is not really a city, but a state of mind where anything is possible -- from a threesome with a midget hooker to a slot machine jackpot that changes your life forever.
    As much as I was wishing for the former, I came here to face my demons about money, as part of my Busting Loose process and the big payoff weighed heavily on my mind.
    I hoped against hope that I could do the Process a few times and then my Expanded Self would deem me worthy of receiving appreciation in the amount of say, 40 grand. Hey, I'm not greedy. But just that thought meant I was judging my current cash-poor hologram. And with judgment, inevitably comes disappointment. Damn. As Robert Scheinfeld loves to point out, to my great annoyance most of the time, you don't do the Process to change, fix or improve your hologram.
    On a deeper level, that kind of thinking means that I didn't trust the Truth of my infinite abundance. I was quickly watching the odds against my winning anything go sky high.

    What was I doing here? What was the meaning of this trip? Was I just roaming around in a drug frenzy of some kind? Or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story? Who are these people, these faces? Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used car dealers from Dallas, and sweet Jesus, there were a hell of a lot of them at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, still humping the American dream, that vision of the big winner somehow emerging from the last minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.
                                                                    Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas

    So it comes as no big shock that I didn't hit the super-mega-giant jackpot. I know you're all disappointed. In fact, I came away from Sin City a bit lighter in the wallet. (You did know that sin in Spanish means "without?")     
    In fact, the entire weekend was one long lesson on my stories about money. What did I learn? Nothing that the lot of you who have been to Vegas don't already know. If you're Busting Loose From the Money Game, Vegas is where it'll be in your face.
    Whether you have money or not, if you're not Busted Loose, it will bring up every discomfort you have about money, because no matter what you spend it on, somewhere in Las Vegas there is something better and more expensive to spend it on -- bigger pitchers of margaritas, swankier and more exclusive clubs, hotter nightclub acts, bigger-breasted escorts, more expensive hotel rooms and smaller midget hookers.
    Unless you're truly Busted Loose, Las Vegas will keep challenging you to really believe in your abundance and express appreciation.
    I wish I could say I trusted the Process. But I didn't. I realized, at least for this weekend, I preferred to bleed to death slowly at the 5-cent slot machines, than take a real chance on my abundance. I returned home, somewhat disappointed that I had not only not passed the test, I had not really taken it. I had feared and loathed instead of having the faith to take the great leap.
    But it turns out, Expanded Self is going to give me a second chance to trust.
    As I was recovering Monday morning from my trip, secure in the knowledge that I still had a roof over my head and an inexpensive place to live, my housemate and owner of the home where I live, let me know that I would have to be moving out by the end of September. Nothing personal, he needed the room for his daughter.  
    Another great adventure awaits. What can I say?
    In the meantime, at least I returned with the satisfaction that some things happened to me in Vegas that will have to stay in Vegas -- and for that I'm eternally grateful.    

    For me, Robert Scheinfeld's theory that we come to earth to play the Human Game because we like playing games didn't ring true.
    Sure, playing and winning challenging games is always fun. But why would we deprive ourselves of our power, wisdom and joy in the name of playing a game? Then, assuming we willingly jump to the physical world, why do we have a compulsion to struggle or make ourselves miserable? That just didn't make sense to me.
     But as I listened to the history of storytelling the other day from a screenwriting instructor, Robert's "Busting Loose" game metaphor started to come into focus.
    The instructor, Chris Soth, detailed the history of storytelling, from the first grunts around the campfire to the high art of such contemporary films as "Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector." It's so amazing to see how far we've come, huh?
    A key point in storytelling theory was Sigmund Freud's "Pleasure Principle." According to Freud, we are always seeking pleasure in the most broad sense, and pleasure comes from the release of tension. We eat to relieve hunger. We sleep to relieve fatigue. We have sex to, well, if I need to explain that one, maybe you shouldn't be reading this.
    Sure, we say we go bowling for the camaraderie of our beer-drinking buds and the chance to wear those really hip bowling shoes, but Freud would say it's really for the primal pleasure of waiting in anticipation as the ball rolls down the alley, then crashes in to the pins, knocking them flying. Secondarily, it's to whip the nacho-breath nerds from accounting.
    That's just how we humans are hardwired, or have created ourselves to appear hardwired.
    It's the same with screenwriting. In telling a cinematic story, you have to build the tension to make the climax worth experiencing.  
    In Chris' formula, tension equals hope vs. fear. We're hoping x happens, but we fear y will happen. Throw in some limits and restrictions. Repeat over and over and you've got a movie.
    So the challenge to the screenwriter is to ratchet up the tension by setting the expectations high and the consequences of failure even higher.
    "Will the boy get the girl?" "Will the career criminal pull off one last heist?" Will Arnold get save the planet?" (We'll settle for California at this point) "Will the slutty cheerleaders escape the axe murderer"
    Yet as compelling as the movies are, they obviously have nothing on our own stories in terms of tension, complexity, resolution and way too many sequels.
    I was reminded of just how talented a screenwriter our Expanded Self is while reading the Sunday newspaper recently.
    There was an article about a Nebraska man who stole a valuable painting of the Virgin Mary to finance an abortion in predominantly Catholic Mexico for a teen he raped. That has more layers than the late Tammy Faye's foundation makeup.
    In an even more tragic story, a man killed his swimsuit model wife and dumped her body in a suitcase, minus her teeth and fingers. He apparently assumed that police would never be able to identify his wife, thus he would not be caught.
    And except for the serial numbers they found on her breast implants, he might have gotten away with it.  
    Neither a million monkeys or a studio full of writers would have ever come up with those stories, and Expanded Self churns them out by the billions on a daily basis, all for our edification.
    So when it comes to the Human Game, the more interesting the game, the more at stake, the more tension, the more the pleasure when it's released. That's why I believe we Infinite Beings choose to play the game of limitation and restriction here as humans, at least until we get our fill and return to pure consciousness.
    It also makes sense when Robert says that Phase 2 is not about logic or planning, but about feeling and experience. If we repress emotion, chances are there won't be much feeling or experience. Thus, no tension, no release and no pleasure.
    I've been thinking about this a lot because my Expanded Self has concocted a suspenseful plot for the total immersion movie I'm starring in, one that's been building tension for a while and now is starting to get scary in one respect. It's also one that many of you are apparently playing a variation of now.
    Widely respected, multi-talented and extremely humble middle-aged writer, media producer and entrepreneur has created a hologram seemingly devoid of incoming appreciation (money), and is living on savings, which are quickly evaporating. He's lucky to have a roof over his head and he may not have a car by the end of the year. He thinks often about the embarrassment of standing in line at the soup kitchen with the other writers.
    At a loss as to how to overcome his predicament, he continues to do the Process to see what arises. The answer?
    A road trip to Las Vega$, of course.
    You see where this is going?
    A little fear, a little hope. And that's just Act 1.

In part 3 of my interview with Robert Scheinfeld, he answers a "fascinating" question from an Another Way fan, explains the purpose of limit and restriction, talks about "finger-snapping magic," and gives a sneak preview about his next live event and his newest projects, which will include live, interactive webcasts on the relationship game, the body game and when the going gets tough in Phase 2. Check out part 1 here and part 2 here, or go to the Busting Loose page and scroll to the bottom to listen to all three segments.

    In part 2 of this interview with Robert Scheinfeld, he discusses:
     -- Whether it matters if science proves his Busting Loose theories
     -- What it was like in 'no man's land" before Robert Busted Loose.
     -- The difference between Busting Loose and Fake it Until You Make it
     -- Collision learning vs. direct learning -- the value of bumping into illusions
     -- Living life wIthout (a bank) balance
     -- Whether he feels pressure to be "Robert Scheinfeld, teacher"
Listen to part 1 here.

     I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert this week. We talked about a lot of subjects during our wide-ranging discussion and I'll be presenting the interview in three parts this week. Among the topics we discussed in Part 1 were:
     Why he chose to write about the Business Game
     The process of writing the new book
     The important difference between changing your limiting beliefs to empowering beliefs, and exchanging your limiting beliefs for the truth, and why the former doesn't work
     He explains how the power of intention lies with Expanded Self and why most self-help practices don't work
     How judgment keeps us from expanding. If you think something is not okay in your life, you're creating an illusion, and keeping yourself limited and restricted. Thus, if you try to create a result, you're energizing the belief that you have doubts about your own power.
    This interview is geared toward Phase 2 players, although he does include an explanation of the Busting Loose concept. If you're not up to speed, you might want to refer to the Busting Loose page first and scroll to the bottom to find more information. Otherwise, click on the icon below to listen to part 1.

    Just how far are you willing to go on your journey of awakening? Are you ready to relinquish your life as you know it?
    These questions came to me as I listened to the words of Adyashanti, one of my favorite teachers, from his CD "The End of Your World." 
    It seems that the longer we follow our spiritual impulses, the more our ego dares us to play a game of "Chicken," like Buzz in the famous racing scene with James Dean in "Rebel Without A Cause."
    Will we have the nerve to make the jump to complete awakening, or bail out before we get there? I ask this question because I see this doubt reflected back to me from many practitioners of Busting Loose. Can you really never worry about money or taxes? Can you really create anything you want and do whatever you want to do without limitation? Can you really always be in a state of bliss?
    The ego is betting that we won't have the nerve to go all the way to find out, and it's got a lot riding on the outcome.
    But what is the ego, exactly? That gets tricky. Robert Scheinfeld would probably say that it's simply another false construct we've created in the hologram and given power to. And he would be right.
    In Adyashanti's words, it's the false sense of self that we carry within us. It's the aggregator of all the beliefs, opinions, concepts and thoughts that make up our identity, which manifests in a body at a particular point in space. And he would be right.
    Our ego likes the body. It gives the ego a sense of solidity and reality that the mind alone could not. And by collapsing the wave form into this one possibility, it keeps us from all the other possibilities. In truth, we are everything and everywhere. The ego just makes us seem separate.
    As we've learned, beliefs, thoughts and bodies are illusory. The ego knows that, too. Its answer is to just keep us thinking, worrying about the future and trying to make itself indispensable.
    To do that, our ego ditches our true self in line to make sure it gets first crack at filtering and interpreting everything we experience.
    "When we hear someone speaking, we actually hear what we think about what they're saying." Adyashanti states. We don't actually hear what is, until maybe two weeks later when we have that V-8 moment of realization.
    When we feel ourselves losing our sense of reality, the first thing we usually grasp for is a thought, like "This can't be happening, I'm Donald Trump."  A thought. Think about that. That's as ridiculous as the Donald's combover.
    When we have doubt, that's the ego speaking to us. Even Robert relates his "dark nights of the soul," when the ego let him know in no uncertain terms that the journey was way too challenging, intense and overwhelming. Fortunately, he persevered.
    As Adyashanti describes it, enlightenment -- the extended version of awakening -- is no longer believing what you think. By extension, if you are no longer believing what you think, then ego disappears, and light can enter, at least until we believe another thought. But do that enough times and ego really gets upset. That's why we seem to engender obstacles as we get closer to breaking through the cloud cover.
    What does unbelief look like? How can we remain undefined by thought and still live? Don't look at me.
    I know that at this point in my Phase 2 journey, no matter how many experiences I have of the process having an effect, I still want another one. I still want to be convinced. I still don't trust. I'm still grasping on to old beliefs. The ego's got me right where it wants me, for now.
    But I always know there is hope. I remind myself of what Robert says, that we're not here to exchange beliefs, but to exchange beliefs for the truth, by doing the process. In the meantime, we can't do anything wrong, no matter what the ego tells us, and some day, I'll just sit back and marvel at what a great creation the ego was.
    Adyashanti has a slightly different take. "Part of being awake is being willing to be crucified," he says. "The threat of death can't control an enlightened being."
    Either way, we have to be fearless, or we're just going through the motions.
    Speaking of V-8 moments, perhaps this scene from the end of "Thelma and Louise" of the girls going over the cliff in their Thunderbird is closer to the spirit of what I'm talking about. After all, Buzz didn't really want to take the leap. His sleeve got stuck.     

    Can we truly appreciate how wondrous our lives are?
    I was contemplating that last night as I drove home in my zippy red Hyundai, my Ipod blasting vintage Prince, fresh from enjoying a sumptuous dinner, watching the clouds turn a glorious pink as the sun set over New Mexico.  
    You've probably experienced some variation of this recently.
     There is not a religion or spiritual practice or Stuart Smalley desk calendar that doesn't tell us we should express appreciation for everything we're blessed with, whether it looks like we're blessed or not.
    With the exception of the sunset, we've experienced something that 99 percent of the beings who have ever lived on this planet would never know.
    But who's missed out, us or them? I think it's us. We've made true appreciation nearly impossible, at least in this country, in this time.
    There was a PBS show a couple years back, "Frontier House," that popped three modern families in the ol' Wayback Machine and transported them to 1880s Montana.
    As the cameras rolled, they built houses from trees they cut, made hay, raised livestock, hauled water, grew vegetables and wore uncomfortable clothes made from corn stalks. (I made that last one up.)
    Tensions ran high, in families and between families. Food supplies ran low. Wild animals threatened them. Then there was the woman who cried about not having make-up. Seriously.
    By the end of the show, it was determined that one of the families would not have survived the winter (most likely due to the great Make-up Famine of 1883). A second one had a chance. The third would probably have made it.
    It was good drama, as good as you can get on a fake reality show.
    An experience like that might benefit some of us. Instead of forcing everyone to buy health insurance, maybe the government ought to force us to re-live that show for a season or two. I mean the best survival story some of us have is about living on ramen noodles and Pabst Blue Ribbon in college.
    But let's take it a step further. How about we pretend we're a tribe of hunter-gatherers? We've got to traverse the steppes of central Asia and hunt down a mastodon with rocks and spears while we survive on ant dung.
    Assuming you weren't gored, and the 15 of you dragged the bastard back to camp, skinned it, carved it up and put it on a spit -- over a fire it took three hours to get going, not counting hunting for wood -- wouldn't that meat taste great? The best tasting meat you've ever had, right? Until next week, or next month, or whenever the next mastodon or the next squirrel, wandered by. In the meantime, you might pray to the mastodon god or sacrifice a virgin or two. That's how much you'd appreciate it.
    I can't say I've ever gone wanting, but I do recall a good lesson in appreciation. A few years ago, I was invited to participate in a Native American sweat lodge ceremony.
    Inside the structure, it soon became heatstroke hot, especially for a novice like me. I remember one of the other participants asking if anyone ever died during one of the ceremonies, and the leader replying matter-of-factly that he'd witnessed participants die, more than once.
    As I sat there braising, I remember curling my fingers beneath the edge of the enclosure, just to feel the winter air outside and know that if I could keep my fingers cool, I might just survive.
    About an hour or two into the ceremony, we each drank a few sips of water from a ladle passed around in the dark. Still the best water I have ever tasted.
    By the time we exited the sweat lodge, the temperature had dropped to below freezing and it was dark and snowing outside. I crawled out, sweaty, clad only in my underwear, hands and knees sinking into deep mud, dazed and nearly blind (without my glasses, I can't see shit.) It was the most primordial feeling I've ever experienced. I stood up, unsteady. I could not find my glasses or my clothes and I could feel the cold air, which for a few moments felt heavenly, begin to freeze the sweat on my back.  
    Someone managed to locate my glasses, or I would have known not only the spelling of hypothermia, but the actual meaning of it. I dressed quickly and joined the rest of my fellow lodge-dwellers in a warm house, with wall-to-wall food.
    But the feast was beside the point. After the sweat, I would have eaten bark beetles with ketchup and liked it.
    In a time when a life and death decisions revolve around what kind of Chardonnay to bring to the housewarming, things just don't seem as precious, or miraculous, as they really are.
    Nowadays it takes a death, or at least a near-death experience to register on our Richter scale of appreciation, and even that appreciation tends to fade with time.
    Which begs the question, if we can't appreciate the simple gifts of daily life, can we ever really appreciate ourselves in a spiritual sense?
    For many of us, that is the crucial question. If you are in the process of awakening you know that appreciation is a key.
    If you further accept the Busting Loose proposition that we manifest our own reality from consciousness, and that we are infinitely abundant, powerful and loving beings, then there is a lot to appreciate -- both the amazing illusions we've created and the Truth about ourselves. It seems pretty simple.
    But it also seems the bigger the miracle, the more we take it for granted.
    I'm thinking maybe the key to appreciation is in Robert Scheinfeld's statement that Phase 2 is about feeling and experience.
    No need to jump the Grand Canyon on a Harley. But do something simple. Men, next time you're in the meat department of your grocery store selecting steaks for dinner, take a moment and imagine you're picking up a slice of filet mastodon. Go back about 10,000 years and remember just what a thrill it was to kill that sucker, and just how good that meat tasted.
    Ladies, next time you're in the cosmetics department holding some Estee Lauder Turbo Lash Motion Mascara, think back to the old days and imagine how long it took to gather the plants to make the dyes to allow you to paint blue and red spots on your face for the solstice celebration.
    It's a first step.