1. Wonderland

There are three ways to encounter a miracle: seeing, doing, or being part of it.

Miracles happen to us all the time and everywhere. We live among them, but we don't see them because we don't know how to look properly. Our conscious mind sees only its own interpretations, the versions created by our thoughts.

That's because we live in a world of concepts. They have become our truth, they are what we argue about.

What actually happens in the world, is undeniable, actual. We react to it with or without our ego. We need our ego to cope with everyday life, but we do not need its distortions.

When the ego takes over, we lose the connection to the miracle of life. We no longer see things correctly. Direct perception corrects this error. In that case, a fact is a fact, we don't try to twist it to our liking.

Every human being also has the ability to perform miracles. That happens when we do something that we thought to be impossible. We talk about transcending the self, but factually we are only using the potential we have.

The third form of a miracle is being a miracle. That comes when we feel we are part of the movement of life. Our everyday experience is coloured by ego. This is much more, beyond all words. This is something we cannot describe or prove

In Time and Right Now

We live in two worlds: one is actual and the other is created by the ego. What actually happens, is actual. The way we experience everything comes from our minds.

The ego is a creation of thinking and it presents its own version of what it experiences. Often the ego's reaction is quick and either a little crooked or completely wrong.

We know that the information about reality conveyed by our senses is always incomplete. With the right tools, we can see the stars or inside the cells, but the essence of life is a miracle and will remain so. We are part of that miracle, whether we see it or not.

In the world of time, ego is all-important. It is fragile and resilient at the same time, different in different situations.

We have an idea of ourselves, a self-image. It is always incomplete and distorted, often downright wrong. Most people belittle and underestimate themselves. This leads us to misuse our potential.

Self-image is the result of many factors. It is a mixture of our own experiences and other people's judgements of us. Many people are overly self-critical and lack self-esteem. They feel that they are somehow 'wrong' in certain ways. We try to cure it in different ways. Some remedies help, but most of them don't. To get rid of the whole process we need a radical tool.

The Endless Ego Adjusting

The ego is an essential tool in our understanding of life. We don't remember its beginning and we may not understand the end of it. The sense of self develops slowly and dies in due course. The episode we call life is an endless adjustment of our egos.

The essential question in this process is: who regulates what? What is the ego after all? We are conditioned to see the ego as the boss who judges and chooses what is right and wrong. If we look into this carefully in ourselves, we will find that this feeling is not correct.

The ego is an image based on flimsy information and ambiguous experiences, many assumptions, wishes, and beliefs, most of which are true only in our own minds. We live in a dream made of ideas. We can wake up, but that option rarely reaches the dreaming ego.

Watching with or without Ego?

In order to live our life, we don't need to know or be able to explain life. We feel it on our skin and in our minds. When we throw ourselves into the embrace of life, the ego shrinks, and time loses its meaning. It just is what it is. That's all there is, and it is enough.

When the ego gets - or rather takes - the lead, we lose our connection to the miracle of life and live only inside our minds.

We don't seem to see this happening!

We make a distinction between internal and external without realizing that they are one and the same exercise. It is impossible to draw an exact line between them.

Direct perception is seeing the world without ego. At that point there is no inner and outer, they are one movement.

The ego creates the concepts and lives in them. It looks at everything through the lens of mental images. Removing that veil from the mind creates a direct connection where things are as they are. The meaning of words changes. They just describe things.

For ego, words are all important. We identify with them and argue about them. Because of them, we all live in our own little world as separate beings, in our own precious bubbles. Words have the power to isolate us, from ourselves and from others.

The Mind Creates Us

There is only one world. Realizing this shatters the persistent myth we carry in our minds, that this is not so. It connects us to one another in a new way. This myth was programmed into the human mind thousands of years ago, and it is maintained by the worldview we have adopted, our own way of seeing the world incorrectly.

We see objects and the empty space between them. We recognize ideas and their differences. We feel we live in time.

What we don't realize is that the empty space between objects is full of energy and information. It is also difficult to realize that time is only a thought and that two opposite thoughts originate from the same reality. We are fooling ourselves dangerously.

The mind makes the interpretation and acts. We assume that seeing and doing are two different things. In the state of direct seeing, they are one and the same: seeing is doing.

The truth is what is actually happening. How we experience things, is our mind's interpretation of the event. That too is true, but only within our minds. This mechanism is part of what makes us human. Thanks to our mind, we have the ability to see and act in the right or wrong way, to do good or bad.

If we always did the right thing, the world would not be the mess it is now.

It is a waste of time to argue whether we human beings are basically good or bad. We are capable of both, good and evil. We have to face both kinds of people in our daily lives. Our brains recognize good and bad and react to them accordingly.

What our mind doesn't recognize is that we don't react to facts, but to what our mind holds to be true. All our lives, we have collected information and experiences in the mind's internal storehouse. There are all sorts of things there, original and not so original, smart and completely stupid.

The mind creates the content of consciousness by giving meaning to things. It decides what is important and what is not, what we give our time and attention to, and what we overlook.

In doing so, it exposes itself to self-deception and develops a structure in which the facts are overlooked. The ego lives in that world without knowing the miracle of life. Fortunately, this unhappy situation can be fixed.