Soften your mind to know what is real. The One Life you do not see or hear and cannot touch, is fully present. Do not be loud. Do not continue to think and feel as you have come to think and feel―it isn’t telling you who you are.

The wisdom you need for living speaks only in hints. Be soft in order to sense this silent hinting. Your eternal origin speaks to you and brings guidance to the temporal human understanding. Invisible Spirit inspires right order. It inspires being free to create, to express, to give forth without constraint and condemnation of self. Soul is the sacred inner authority in the midst of conformity.

You no longer see yourself as free, but not seeing is nothing. Not hearing is nothing. These say nothing of loss. You cannot lose your substance and actuality. You are an infinite being and it is revealed in what appears simple and plain. You are the unchangeable nature of Self. You are this now and nothing has interfered. While in the dream you decided you must join the world and not go within, but go within. It is where the truth lives in you. That is all you need do to perceive a meaningful world. Only that: Listen to the source of Life.

All that this truth has ever required of you is a gentle softness of mind. This softness came with you into the dream. It waits for you to rest in it and see your life from its perspective. The tumultuous human world is created only from a point of view, not from the Source of being. You are standing on hallowed ground. That ground is silent and invisible and need only be acknowledged. Act from mere acknowledgement. The Infinite will fill your every movement.

There can be seen in the human world, fireflies that illuminate the night skies. They dance and twirl and the Joyful patterns formed by their movements tell of the wonder of a deeper Reality … if one can believe in such a thing.

I can, and I feel something vibrant stir within me as I watch these tiny creatures that have been merely scientifically portrayed to me.

I am so glad I don’t believe all the things I’ve been told by other people.

I live in a world made of symbols. Symbols that I see, hear, taste and touch … and am seduced to believe. Yet there is a place in this world where undisguised Truth is quietly standing, waiting to be found by being understood for what it is. This quietly standing one, is All.

For me, who perceives only symbols now, there exists a word which, being only a word, “symbolically” directs me to this quiet Truth. It is a word I know well and use often. If I make this word an actuality, I am brought to the ineffable, to the unseen realm of goodness and happiness. When I’m there, deep knowing no longer withstands mere beliefs.

Beliefs possess no Light and Love. Beliefs are symbols―symbols keeping life remote and indifferent; cold, even―at least to my mind. An accumulation of mere beliefs has formed a world hard and intransigent around me. Beliefs are from intellectual separation―concepts held as reality, binding me to the fleeting and unreachable. A mind separated from Self must rely on symbols, they are its currency and reduce experience to the “good” or “bad.” But as I search through my collection of beliefs and utterances, I find a little word signifying something so unlike my outer world that I have walked past it and not seen it is a guidepost.

When I am where this little word takes me, I am fulfilled of Being and complete in Self. I am more than free―I am Freedom. Heeding no external certainty, needing no acceptance from without, Life’s River flows from me and appears to come to me with the bounty of all my deepest wishes come true―of course, I wish only for the meaningful. Then as if by magic, the symbols my human mind still encounters have no power to constrain my giving of my Self. I clearly hear and make heard the song I am, when I come from the … Silence.

Now isn’t that an important little word to have in one’s possession?

To have encountered so much contrariness and being of so sensitive a disposition explains to me why I feel I’d better be perfect in all I do, say, and think. I enter each new day determined to straighten out the crookedness I feel exists in me—surely each new effort will put my life to rights.

In doing this, I fail.

I have seen wonderful things pour out of me, but gentle and kind thoughts given no credibility, seem to not carry the weight of the disapproving ones. This is amazing, is it not? I go to myself bringing everyone I’ve ever met to judge me with the judgments I, myself, have given them to have of me. I do not even argue with the perspective they are convinced I share; I cannot displease. I bring a bossy crowd with me to the table of my daily bread. I can’t seem to find my own true self at that table. What kind of daring do I need? It is daring, as I perceive it, to side with myself.

I mislaid my connection to my inner knowing by paying attention to external directives. Even only pretending to be paying attention to the world, leaves its mark―I now no longer trust myself. How can I side with a self who has become empty? How can I listen to what no longer has authority for me? Hasn’t what is told to me by others become the authority; the voice needing to be obeyed? Isn’t “God” a fixture made of rules? In this world, “spirit” is bound in words. Just the act of hearing words causes doubt, making the mind a teeming place and the inner quietness not felt. So subtle is the separation this causes that I have not stood guard against it. Creeds and dogmas pull me outward and entice me into dance steps not original to my Self. But the reality is: my true self has no equivalent out there.

Loud external discussions never let up. Where has peace and quiet gone? What is reality? I no longer am what I simply am: a deep wordless thing needing no explanation of self. I must become seen and made comprehensible to someone other than myself. How can I be at rest in this rather adversarial experience of life? Something vast is missing. And that something vast is a Closeness that cannot be found outside my innerness. Oh, I need to find my daring. A rapturously beautiful world lives inside me. I know, because my Creativity shows it to me. It is born by my Imagination, that subtleness that is real as nothing in this world is real. The world that lives in me is true. I don’t have to hide it from myself or feel that other people have a right and the power to reduce it to their understanding and therefore shut me up that I not contradict them.

As I write this, I begin to see that the daring I need is to love in another way. To love in this world, is not about agreeing with this world and making others comfortable by my acquiescence. To love is to value myself even as I do not fit in and never will. I have sold my Soul to live agreeably in a dreaming world. But Souls don’t wither and die. Souls speak their presence in their own way and require a different kind of “paying attention.” Thank God for my discomfort, it keeps reminding me that nothing held forth out there is my Soul.

A luminous River flows through my heart. It contains my life’s nourishment. On its banks I sit and listen to the Piper from the Hills Above. He comes to fill my cloudiest days with Light. In his music I hear the echoes of all the promises I forgot I made to myself before I fell asleep to my Soul.

I’ve been lonely in a mind that is not made from contentment. Enticing threads of many colors have unraveled me from myself. They are absorbing and intriguing in their brightness. In their company I find myself no longer mistress of my own wanting. I’ve gone far away from myself to engage in an outer reality that holds me in its thrall.

Why do I do this? I ask myself this question all day long and find no answer that satisfies. It is so odd to not be at peace with myself and I am not the only one in this dilemma. All about me everyone is being something other than what they really are. They’ve become what is … expected … or suffer for not doing so. We are all fitting into a separatedness that has us in its grips and our solution is to be unhappy about it all. Why do we do this?

There is another reason to be alive, the Piper’s music tells me; there is a joyful order of expression for me to stand within. In the Great Silence I am, I contain the Stars of the Infinite Magnitude of Heaven. They appear to be outside myself now only because I follow enticing threads of color not made by me. And I don’t need to be doing that.

I know I am not alone in being of this magnitude of Goodness or thinking it lost to me. That is why I am telling you about the Piper from the Hills Above.