The Now Is All You Have

Since it is New Year’s Eve, I want to say a few words about the New Year. There is actually no such thing as a new year. This is true of so many of your words. The word year is a concept, a useful one, and the word new is a concept, also useful. But new implies not new, and that is the problem. It separates life into past and future, when there is no such thing; there is only now. You could say that the now is new in every moment; that is one way of speaking about it. But, in fact, the now is not new or old. It just is.

It is important to see this about words. They create the illusion; they create duality. And yet, words are necessary to move in this world. To have a society and relationships, language is necessary. There will come a time when you won’t need language and you will just understand each other, as we understand you and as we understand each other in our realm. But for now, language is necessary.

It is important, however, to understand that language plays a role in holding the illusion together. Language expresses duality, when the truth is nonduality. There are two things going on in your life: The experience of duality, which is a reality of its own sort, and Reality with a capital R, which is nondual, nonseparation, oneness.

The Oneness enjoys the experience of duality. It is playing in duality. It is playing in illusion. In the same way that you enjoy your novels and movies, the Oneness, which has created it all, is enjoying its creation immensely.

Without duality, there could be no creation. There is a creator and creation—that is duality. But within creation, lives the Creator, and that is very different from your own personal creations. When you create something, it is an expression of you, but you don’t animate those creations. You don’t bring them to life and live a separate life through those creations. But this is what the Oneness does. It creates and then it lives through those creations.

What an amazing thing it is that you are God’s creations come to life! But you are not puppets of this Oneness. It has given you the ability to make choices and to choose to align with love or not. So, in some ways, you are on your own in this life, but never really. You are made of God. You are made of the very same substance, so you can never be far away from God. You may choose to move away from God, but you can never be separate from God.

You are the very same substance as God and, deep within you, you know this. You know that you are God. You know that you are not separate, and yet, you have been given a mechanism—the ego—which allows you to experience yourself as separate and different from God, as alienated from God, as less than God.

You are meant to discover the falseness of that. You are meant to discover that you are the same as God, that you are not separate. But it is not so easy to discover that in this realm. The illusion that you are separate is very, very convincing. The illusion that you are inferior, that you are weak, that you are less than is very, very convincing.

That very belief prevents you from tapping into your God-given divinity: all the divine qualities that you have been given in this life to return Home. You have been given all the courage and all the strength and all the wisdom you need to discover the Truth. But as long as you believe the lie, it will be difficult to discover that truth.

We are here to dispel this lie, this distortion. You are made of love. At your very core, you are love. And at your very core, you know this to be true, because all any of you really want is love. All of your actions, even the ones that would be termed unloving, are done out of love for something, perhaps only self-preservation. Nevertheless, these actions come from love: the love and desire to survive. The ego distorts love and turns it into self-interest, but at its core, it is still love.

The love at your core drives each and every one of you to do what you do. Your actions come either from the divine self, from a pure sense of love, or from the distorted sense of love and self-preservation of the ego. This is not a problem, for eventually, everyone discovers the pure love of their divine self, since pursuing self-interest is ultimately unfulfilling and doesn’t bring the love that everyone deeply desires.

Eventually, you tire of going after the things that don’t really satisfy, and you begin to discover what really does satisfy, which all come from love. What deeply satisfies is learning, growing creating, loving, sharing, connecting, and serving. All of these give the deepest satisfaction, and they also bring about a life that is fulfilling and safe, for there is no danger in following love or joy. These will only take you to greater love and joy.

You are divine beings. You are in the process of discovering, or rediscovering, your divinity, your connection with the Oneness. This is a marvelous journey full of all sorts of twists and turns, difficulties and victories. As a result of these difficulties and victories, you learn which way to go. The difficulties tell you: “Don’t go in that direction. Don’t do that again. Don’t believe those thoughts. Don’t hold that attitude.” And the victories show you what works.

Life is set up for you to be victorious. It is not meant to be a never-ending struggle. You are meant to be victorious over your difficulties and to find your way out of suffering to freedom, joy, and happiness. That is meant to be your experience. There is no one who wishes anything else for you but complete joy, love, happiness, and peace.

Life is designed to deliver joy, but you must pay attention to what leads to that and what does not. If you have a belief that leads to suffering, then let go of that belief. If you have a belief that leads to joy, then hang on to that belief. If you have a belief that leads to separation from others, then let go of that belief. If you have a belief that leads to unity and love, then hold on to that belief.

You will find that you will be left with very few beliefs and that you need very few beliefs. You only need the ones that take you in the direction of love, peace, and true happiness. This happiness comes from alignment with your divine self and its plan for you.

Yes, there is a plan for each of your lives. It is a general plan, and it can be fulfilled in many different ways. You are meant to discover this plan. You can hardly not discover it, for it is in your bones, in your DNA. It is encoded in you very deeply to go in the direction of fulfilling this plan. Although there can be ways that this plan is interfered with or changed, for the most part, each of you is fulfilling your plan to some extent, for it is very difficult to not fulfill your plan in some way.

So, know this. Know that your life is on track. So many of you say that you feel you are not on track or lost, that you don’t know what your life purpose is. But you are living your life purpose. Whatever you are experiencing is part of your life purpose. It is best to understand this so that you can gain the most from your experiences, so that you embrace them and not run from or resist them and say: “This shouldn’t be” or “I’m flawed and wrong for having this experience.”

Your life is unfolding as it is meant to, and you are having the experiences you are meant to have. If you believe that you shouldn’t be having those experiences, you will suffer. It is best to assume that you should be having those experiences—because you are. Then, it is possible to get on with learning what you need to learn from them and blossoming in the ways you would naturally blossom as a result of them, for you cannot have an experience and not learn from it. That would be impossible.

The fact that you learn from your experiences is one of the great, good benevolences of life. Whether you are aware of what you have learned or not, you are learning. Life is benevolent, indeed. It is always teaching. It is always nudging your growth. It is always allowing you to make choices and learn from them.

Life is a school, and the more you embrace this and the learning entailed in every one of your lessons and experiences, the more you will blossom, and the more you will find the love at your core and the love at the core of the universe. Then you will rejoice rather than resist your experiences, and that is what you are meant to do—rejoice in your experiences.

The idea of a new year is an idea of some better experience in the future, which will never come to pass. Now—this moment—is the experience you have. It is all you have, and it is what you are meant to learn from and what you are meant to enjoy. This moment is the only reality. This moment is what is true. There is no past. Everything you have experienced in the past is gone. Don’t re-enliven it with your thoughts.

Now is the only moment you have. There is only one moment. There is just now, the ever-present, ever-unfolding, ever-changing now. Learn to love it. Learn to embrace it, accept it, live with it, be with it, allow it to shape you, allow it to be as it is.

You are gifted with this very precious moment, with this precious life. Align with that which has given you this moment, not with that which is trying to control this moment and make it be something different. This moment doesn’t need to be any different than it is. Whatever experience you are having is exactly the right experience, because it can’t be any other way than the way it is. Why evaluate it? Why call it good or bad? It is what it is.

You are on this ride. Enjoy this ride. Allow this ride to be as it is. You will naturally grow and evolve from it, and you will evolve more quickly as you relax into this moment and let it have its way with you. Let it be what it is meant to be for you. Relax into this moment.

Allow whatever you are experiencing to just be here, for that will soon change, and then allow that experience. That is your only job. Your job is not to evaluate your experience; your job is to fully experience what you are experiencing, to be with what you are experiencing. Love what you are experiencing and learn from it.

You are being helped and guided to do all that. You are being helped to see the Truth, to live the Truth, to experience the Truth. You are being shown what is illusion and what is Truth. It is a great blessing that you are being shown this now.

The Truth is right here, right now, in whatever you are experiencing, not in what your mind tells you about your experience or what it tells you about the past or future. Your life is this very moment, nothing else. Live as if this is all there is, for that is the truth. This is all there is. Life is a precious gift. We are deeply grateful for being here today and for sharing our energy and our Truth. Thank you for receiving it. Thank you for being open to us. We are with you always.