Your feelings make you think, and your thinking makes you feel; around and around you go in a squirrel cage of passion, rage, and confusion.

The culture of which you are so proud has deliberately “educated” you to look to your feelings and imagination for answers, the very places where answers can never be found and where you can only lose your real Self. You have been had.

It’s time for you to wake up out of your deep sleep, from dreams that lead to all those nightmare realities you are afraid to face and that drag you back to more dreaming, worrying, and escaping from reality.

My purpose in writing this book is to introduce you to an ancient Judeo-Christian meditation technique that will help you, the sincere seeker, to separate your conscious mind from the confusion of your thoughts.

When you learn to observe yourself calmly without resenting anything you see there, without struggling against memories of failure and weakness, you will see something marvelous happen.

Your problems will come to resolution of themselves, without your having to make any effort to resolve them.

The technique I teach is not a form of mind control, nor is it aimed at emotional suppression; its only purpose is to bring you to a state of awareness and objectivity.

Up to this point, your ambitions have led you into the habit of dreaming about what you want, and that fixation with dream stuff has blocked your awareness of what you were getting into. You have fallen into the machinery of your own mind.

Down there, you are fixated to self-destructive and self-defeating thoughts of relief. Your mind is running away with itself, dangerously trying to find answers that can reveal themselves to you only when you are fully awake.

You must realize that the mental/emotional and emotional/mental state you have fallen into is the direct result of your being lost in your thoughts. Only one remedy is open to you, and that is to become objective, so that you can see beyond the mental/emotional mist.

Only then will you be able to see clearly the part you have been playing in the creation of your problems.

Be aware that you do not gain mastery over your emotions by struggling with them, or with the thoughts you have been using to rationalize them. All you have to do is wake up and separate your conscious mind from the stream of unconscious thinking you have fallen into.

I am stretching out my hand to help you up to another level of awareness, above the ordinary conscious state, so that you may gain control over the way you feel and think.

All your bad reactions to life’s experiences are the result of your not being properly aware, being too preoccupied with your own mind and body, with study, goals, and the advice of problem solvers.

"The blind ego, fueled by the pride that made it ambitious in the first place, refuses to realize the error of its ways"

You are never more powerless than you are when you are immersed in a whirlpool of thought, especially when things go wrong, for then you step up your mental activity and get sucked in.

In your present condition, you cannot possibly realize how much power you would gain from being objectively aware.

Rarely, if ever, would you err in your judgments or your relationships with people if you were objective to your thinking. Your enlightened consciousness would develop perfect dominion over the course your life must take; unruly passions would be a thing of the past.

The moment something becomes too important to you or you allow yourself to get upset, you begin to lose awareness. When you are too ambitious, you tend to lose sight of real values; you forget what is wise as you become involved with thinking about what you want out of life.

Too much ambition always plunges your conscious self into a dreamlike state where you are unable to see to the right or to the left, and you begin to make errors of judgment.

The blind ego, fueled by the pride that made it ambitious in the first place, refuses to realize the error of its ways. How can a proud ego admit to error? So you solve that problem by turning your back on reality, by willfully losing all awareness of what went wrong.

You do that by giving all your attention to worry, fantasy, or dreams of a new goal.

Becoming lost in the machinery of your thinking makes you vulnerable to emotional stress from two directions. One, you start reacting with frustration, resentment, and fear to the mistakes you find yourself making from day to day; and two, you find yourself overreacting to memories of past mistakes that keep coming back to haunt you.

Stress is debilitating, whether it attacks from the outside or the inside, from the present environment or the memory of past failure.

Images that come to mind through daydreams or as the result of reacting badly to stress (temptation, really) can affect you every bit as much as the physical environment does. They can threaten, deceive, anger, excite.

They can even drain you of energy, leaving you run-down and subject to disease. Surely you have experienced the reliving of a past trauma in your mind, and reacting to it as though it were actually happening to you, over and over again.

Your thoughts actually triggered emotional reactions. No doubt you even resented the troublesome thoughts, and that made everything worse. Then, you probably tried to stay busy to avoid thinking about your problem.

You might even have suppressed the memories altogether, but the process continued on a lower level of consciousness. Sooner or later, you had so much to suppress that your thoughts and feelings bubbled up from below and overwhelmed you.

Bad feelings, carrying with them bad thoughts, are always stronger than your attempts at positive thinking; and there you go again, lost in thought, frightened, depressed, helpless, and hopeless.