The flow of this energy is not personal to us. Rather, it follows immutable laws that are built into life. When the conditions are right, the spigot opens up and life force flows. When conditions aren’t compatible because we’re not in truth, the flow is blocked. Self-realization means we’re making good use of the power we have available to us.

Moreover, the only way for us to achieve self-realization is through our freely made decision to adopt spiritual laws. We must take full responsibility for this decision to follow natural, universal laws and not just give our allegiance to hand-me-down values or unnatural cultural standards.

Sometimes natural and unnatural laws look like identical twins. But there’s a world of difference between choosing for ourselves to abide by a certain standard versus blindly obeying. The two may look and sound exactly alike on the surface. But to the inner ear, they’re singing totally different tunes.

Here’s the thing: if we only follow laws that come from outside us, that’s not real spirituality. Consider the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. The deeper meaning here is not a directive about how to spend our weekends. Rather, it’s an invitation to keep balance in our activities. So part of our lives should be devoted to our jobs, our responsibilities. Part of our lives should involve spiritual development. And part should go toward pleasure and relaxing. There is no “must” here. And certainly there is no clear-cut criteria about when and how to do our work and connect with God.

For us to fully realize our true selves, the thinking and doing functions of our egos—over which we have direct control—must let go and integrate with our as-yet involuntary processes of feeling and intuition. This process of becoming self-realized then will bring forward all our dormant potentials as we tap into the creative force which freely follows the most meaningful and lawful foundations there are.

As we do this, whatever ingrained ideas we have will become the motor that drives this power. Whether our ideas are conscious or unconscious, truthful or untruthful, they will become self-perpetuating. The only thing making these forces dangerous is our own wrong thinking. But if we challenge our mistaken assumptions that we find are untrue, this same power can become totally trustworthy.

Instead, what we usually do is decide we can’t trust our intuition, and our brilliant solution is to rely solely on our egos. Then we work to vigilantly guard ourselves against anything we can’t control, like our involuntary processes.

But if we want to give our best to life and to everything we do, we must go beyond our egos and see that we have nothing to fear in our involuntary processes. We need to convince ourselves of their self-regulating nature, which means they know how to take care of the self. There are laws that are being obeyed and that in no way make us an innocent victim. As it turns out, we are the only thing standing in the way of crafting a better life for ourselves.

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