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I'm beginning to realize how deep all this stuff runs.

Transitioning is the key because our wants and desires can spin on a dime. For me, this means trusting my feelings 100%--including if I really, really don't want to go to they gym. Really want to take a holiday off. Am tired and so want to leave place x, y, or z.

You get the idea. Social convention has us stuck doing what someone a hundred years ago thought someone wanted them to do: stay, work harder, be polite, whatever.

But the truth is a moment to moment thing. And what's really polite--what's really right--what's REALLY SAFE--is a work in progress. And requires a freedom that can feel like ruthlessness (a loving ruthlessness) to those of us who are accustomed to acting on principle, or keeping up appearance.

But let's keep focussed on what we want. I'm reading some great books right now--all about consciousness and magnetizing for what you want. Half are from a physics perspective and half from a new age perspective. What they're saying is the same, essentially. That we are direct and precise creators of our own experience, reality and even world. That this ability is hard-wired into our beings.

How, then, do we seem to be surrounded by that which we don't love? By focusing on it.

The key, it appears is focusing on that which we do want--the feeling of already having it, the joy of already being in that state--and ignoring the temptation of entertaining the feeling of not having it, focusing on what its lack.

I first got a glimpse of this method when I was getting treatment for depression and was doing exercises from a book called The Feeling Good Handbook. The book was all about getting people liek me at the time from negative fourteen to zero--getting us back to content.

But, why spend time, why intend to get to zero? To normal? Normal is what got me depressed in the first place.

Where was the technology, the inspiration to go straight to happiness, rapture, relaxation and feeling it-ed-ness? That's where I am now.

Before I was worried that by not working hard enough, by not being nice enough, I would be poor and/or offend someone. Now I wonder what riches await me once I can live relaxedly enough to enjoy them.

I wrote in my last post that love was about taking. Let me explain.

The old world says that the world is entropy--falling apart, and must be constantly maintained by us to have even a semblance of order, stability, peace, love, plenty, happiness. It is a chaotic and random place.

To be a good person in this world--to even survive--one must work like a dog. One must give of themselves over and over. One must sacrifice. And the gains are felt by future generations: your kids have a better life. You eventually retire and have some fun.

But what if this was short-sighted. What if, just like the evolution from the old testament to the new (a more ruthless god who picked favorites to one of forgiveness and love), we were now, 2000 years later, at a place where the new, new testament was ready to flip the script once again.

The world is order--one we may not completely understand--but it is order. Health is a natural condition. Plenty is a natural condition. Or should I say that consciousness creating what it wants to is a natural condition. Consciousness gets what it focuses on.

This means the world is like a Kinkos, Library, secretary and support staff for each of us. We are constantly being given what we need to create what we want.

In this environment, it is very easy to overgive. We say that life will be better for our children, but teach them not to take, not to be 100% responsible for what they create either. We pass on what we do--not what we say.

This is why we idolize the takers. The Trumps, the famous, the womanizers. More than likely they overtake, but that's none of our concern, we just know that we want to take, rest, cash the damn check, lean back and there are times that we don't.

The answer, of course, is not just to take, just as it's not just to give. It's to be able to do what you want--move in any direction at any time. But to get to 50% it's very likely that you'll have to risk APPEARING (or at least feeling like you appear) difficult. Good.

Because what are you doing it the universe is constantly supporting you and you are constantly deflecting--re-giving--it? You are just doubling up on other people. Making it so that they have no reason to move--and having them think that their creation is passive--and that there is nothing left to do.

Because you are doing--giving--twice as much.

I realize this seems like a strange faith--to take more. But ask yourself if giving more requires faith for you--or is it a normal condition? Do you give more when you feel fear or do you give more when you feel love?

--Do you give more when you feel full or do you give more when you feel empty?

Do you not have what you want in your life because "they" won't reciprocate with what you give--because you're not being properly compensated for what you give out--or because you won't take it--because you haven't made it a priority and demanded it?

We're the richest people in the history of the world, and from where I stand, if someone doesn't start getting what they want soon, the planet is just about done for.

And what does even the most spurious investigation yield? The folks with all the money want to relax like never before. But they "can't". The folks with not enough money are dying--literally--to work and learn.

The materially rich, but spiritually poor get wide-eyed at how the spiritually rich but materially poor live. And visa versa.

Wouldn't it all rectify itself if we just let go? And don't we want to let go? Won't we have to before we feel any kind of lasting peace or comfort?

The fear, of course, is that we'll lose all our money!!!!!!!! And time, and energy and love. And power.

But we know that's not true. no one has ever lost anything they've worked for. And everyone who's ever put it all on the line to become happier, more relaxed, and more enlightened has not become less valuable but more. And has not felt less secure but more.

Oh, you mean the old bank account. That kind of rich.

Well check this out: you're going to get that kind of rich too. I guarantee it.

When I was young I watched my mom make a radical choice: with three kids, a mortgage, a car and freshly divorced, she decided to go into the non-profit world. To do what she felt called to do: improve education for children.

A rational advisor might have warned her off. This was, after all the early 80s and the middle of a serious recession. Thousands of people made the same choice around the same time, however--and ended up on the leading edge of a non-profit boom that has infused spiritual values into everything from our food to our computers.

And made plenty of money.

These days, the people who have been in it for even fifteen years, let alone twenty five, have done very well. And many have the business tycoons of the day: the Gates', the Bransons, the Buffetts, the Turners--the richest people on the face of the earth--now turning to them for what to do with their money.

Many of the others, the cultural leaders like Bono, Oprah, Hollywood actors, etc., work overtime to infuse their work and life with the ethics they pioneered.

This is all love. But there is a more loving love just waiting, dying, jumping, crying to swoop down. This is not either/or love. This is and/and love. This is not making money blindly and then trying to ameliorate its downside by giving it away--taking too much and then giving too much. (Or, viewed from a spiritual perspective--giving too much then taking too much).

Whoa! That's the whole thing right there! I just hit it. Business traditionally takes too much materially and gives away too much spiritually. Non-profit traditionally gives too much materially and takes too much spiritually. Which is why I'm sure welfare recipients can come away feeling as screwed as sweatshop workers.

And why white folks, having taken so much materially and given so much spiritually, can't just give their way materially and take theri way spiritually back into harmony.

The way to avoid all this muck and meck--be yourself. Give when and how you want to. And take when and how you want to. You actually are a holy person. And your desires--your feelings will lead you right there.

This new paradigm, this third way, I guarantee, will be the future. And it won't take 20 years for its practicioners to be rewarded. (That was for people eschewing money at a time when culture moved much more slowly--folks didn't even have a fax machine, yo!)

These folks will be Warren Buffett and Bill Gates-sized van Goghs. Oprah-flavored RZAs with banging "commercial" (read undistorted and pure--loving) beats and concicse, spiritual (read loving) lyrics.

All the leading forms of art and commerce are moving this way: Kanye West, Whole Foods, Apple, Washington Mutual, Oprah, Extreme Makeover Home Edition. Which is not the same thing, at all, as saying they've made the leap. Almost none have escaped playing with these loaded old world dualities, I would argue.

There are a million more hot cultural and commercial stocks that are placing their bets on resistance: Ultimate Fighting, Borat, Jackass, Girls Gone Wild, Fox News (a guess really, I don't watch it) and Jon Stewart, anyone who's raising the bar on irony and meaninglessness (as what they're serous about and have faith in, of course), the horror movie about Christmas released on Christmas.

And as hard as I can say it, I don't besmirch this latter catagory any more than I idealize the former. And I think honesty about what one is doing is as important as anything. And there are many left-handed paths to what is right. I came out of a certain, concentrated form of this left-hand route.

And anyone who's doing what they want is doing exactly the right thing.