Have fun with observation. Lighten up. If every time you close your eyes, all you see is blackness, play a game with it. See what it looks like today. Observe what it does. Ask it if it is always black, or can it change color? The process of observing can be fun. People complain, "I close my eyes and I want to see God. I really want to, but He doesn't show up." Come on! You can't even control your own mind. Do you think you can control God? Do not waste your time with such thoughts. Observe. Watch. See what happens.

One becomes acquainted with the Self through the process of spiritual exercises. Many of us have been asleep to ourselves for eons of time. When you take the time each day to sit down and do your spiritual exercises, you allow time to become awakened to yourself again. No one else can really tell you who you are.

The only thing many people get out of meditating is calluses on their bottoms -- and maybe not even that because they won't sit still long enough! If this describes you, your meditation has taught you at least one useful thing: How not to do it. If 25 or 30 years of study have not brought you anything but this, you might want to consider a change.

When you have established the familiarity with Spirit, it's an easy transition from this level to the next. At some point, you will just let this world go, and the physical reality will drop away from you. You'll realize your physical body is no longer present, and in the perfection of spiritual reality, it won't matter much to you whether you come back into this physical world or continue your path of evolvement on the other levels.

Q: How does one control the wavering thoughts while doing meditation? A: With practice. The natural tendency of the mind is to wander and the process of meditation or spiritual exercises will help to discipline the mind and keep it directed the way you want it to go. If you are a beginner to meditation or spiritual exercises, it's a good idea not to try to "keep the mind quiet." The mind can continue to chatter but you just place it off to the side and continue to meditate. Don't be real concerned at first if your thoughts are all over the place. As you practice and continue to discipline yourself, you will experience the results. It can take time, so be patient with yourself.

The value in spiritual exercises is that you make the Spirit familiar to you, so you can replace the familiarity of the world's distractions, activities, and excitements with the familiarity of the Spirit inside. You have proven time and time again that you will not move out of the familiar into the unknown; it's too threatening. So we are working with those proven patterns of behavior and creating a new familiarity so you can move into that.

One of the values of spiritual exercises is that they give you a chance to attune yourself to the Spirit inside you and become aware, once again, of the loving that is extended to you through Christ. All you have to do is follow the loving back into the heart of God, your home in Spirit.

Spiritual exercises are a tremendous key. They may not solve anything for you, but they give you the altitude to see more clearly. And as you see more clearly, the solutions often appear.

Waking up means observing yourself to find out what you are doing. This is really the easiest process in the world. It is called meditation. People complain to me that they have been meditating for many years and all they see is darkness. They get irritated and angry. But remember, you don't have to do anything with that darkness. Get rid of your false expectations of what spiritual experience means: Just be silent, and observe your darkness. If you could just realize it, God is speaking through the blackness that you see. But you are so busy being uptight and resenting it that you fail to hear God's voice.

It's much more difficult to have the inner experience of Spirit if you're running around in the world lying and cheating and getting into all sorts of trouble. Many times you get the inner experience of your own sacredness by sitting down and detaching yourself form the physical world in a form of meditation, contemplation or spiritual exercises.