OPiE (“Oh-pee”) is my acronym for the ‘overly protective ego’. While our healthy egos naturally strive to keep us healthy and happy, the unhealthy portion of our egos (the OPiE) creates conflict and emotional pain for content that justifies its existence. The OPiE, like the overly protective parent, precludes the mind from learning the Truths of life. The vast majority of emotional pain you experience is a result of irrational fear-based illusions from your OPiE that provokes jealousy, resistance, denial, greed, judgment, scarcity, and numerous other negative mental sensations. A Highly Conscious person has learned how to recognize the inner voice of the OPiE and override it so that he or she can create more happiness by freely giving and receiving more love.

Rational fears, originating in your healthy ego, protect you physically, mentally, and emotionally by guiding you to make choices that keep you healthy and happy by constantly aligning your thinking with your stated rational values and goals. Irrational fears, on the other hand, originate in your OPiE and are untruths that create conflict and suffering. To recognize an irrational fear, ask yourself, “Is this the Truth of the moment, and is this fear destructive or constructive?” If the fear leads you to do something unloving (check with your Heart Spirit on this), then it is an irrational fear (is not consistent with your stated rational values and goals) and should be promptly dismissed before you react to it.

In the Now moment, when a thought you are having catches your conscious attention (or is obviously unloving), put that thought on hold and ask yourself, “Which voice is this?” When a thought originates in your Heart Spirit, the inner voice you hear guides you to choose loving thoughts, feelings and behaviors. However, when a thought originates in the unhealthy ego, it suggests an assortment of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that create pain and suffering. When you answer with “That’s the voice of my OPiE”, then you know to drop the destructive thought from your mind before you make a destructive choice.

When you drill down to the very base foundation of nearly every mentally uncomfortable issue, you will find that the basis of the issue is a lack of acceptance of All That Is in the Now moment. If each of us were able to achieve universal acceptance of reality, we would not have the ego-driven fears that empower hate, greed, self-pity, expectation, avoidance, and so on. Truth is the path to universal acceptance. I believe that a person who accepts 100% Truth (or at least attempts to) can heal any injury and resolve any problem.

I believe that The Creator (God, Holy Spirit, Oneness, Source, etc.) gifted each person with Divine essences including the will to live, grow, reproduce, heal, learn, stay healthy, create, share, and love. “Divine” because these mental traits mystically become embedded in our Beings at the moment we are conceived. I use the word “Divine” in front of words like Truth, Awareness and Courage (notice the capitalized first letter) to indicate that I am presenting the concept with utmost respect and acknowledgment, far greater than the mundane use of the words “truth” or “courage”. Going within the flow of Divine Energy is synonymous with spiritually residing within Unity Consciousness. I believe that The Creator gifted the Divine Essences to us so that we could learn how to manifest Heaven on Earth on our mortal plane.

There are several steps you can take that can cultivate your Awareness: 1) exercise mental control so that you re-center your Self into the Now moment as you block distracting thoughts and feelings about your past or future; 2) More deeply embrace—practically memorize—your rational values and goals (i.e., Truth, compassion, sharing) so that you can easily align them with your Heart and mind; and 3) keep your five senses open, constantly feeding information into your open Heart and mind, so that you can make connections and new, updated interpretations of what did happen, what is happening, and what can happen around you. The manifestation of your Awareness can be that you recognize your thoughts that relate to your values and goals and you confirm that relationship in the moment. Example: In your mind you become Aware that there is an opportunity at hand for you to practice the compassion value that you hold. Rather than allowing your unhealthy ego to brush it off as not convenient, you embrace the circumstances and apply a compassionate response (sharing, listening, loving). The essential point here is that you become Aware of an opportunity to give or receive more love, and that is what you do. Asking “What is the best thing to do from here” will heighten your Awareness of what the scope of your constructive choices are.

Like cultivating your Awareness, accessing the Now moment requires that you override the distracting issues of your normal moment-to-moment thinking and constantly refocus your attention on, “I’m right here, right now. I am free of my dead past and my imagined future. I experience the purity and clarity of my Divine Self in this very instant.” You should feel for a moment as though a weight has been lifted off of you as your distractions evaporate. You can now envision your Self in a clear bubble floating across the blue sky. With practice you will be able to hold this picture in your mind for longer periods of time. Free of the ephemeral distractions of life, you see that it is possible for you to gracefully go within the loving flow of Divine Energy. Since The Creator gave us this ability to pause and clarify, whenever you are in this frame of mind and spirit you know you will only make choices that ultimately give and receive more love.

You will know that you are moving into Higher Consciousness when you observe that you are experiencing reduced stress, emotional unrest, guilt, and untruthfulness while you experience an increase in peace of mind, emotional stability, Truth-based self-confidence, optimism for life, and a stronger connection to God. You will feel that the more strongly you embrace your commitments to your values and goals, the further you will evolve into your Higher Consciousness. It is a process, not a destination. The peace of mind you obtain from this growth is a self-fulfilling process.

Not forgiving yourself or someone else means that you are maintaining an attachment to a negative experience that is forever gone in your past, but you keep your negative energy alive around it by continuing to place blame for your discomfort on someone. The negative energy circulates in your mind just as a poison you ingest would circulate in your body causing illness and disease. When you sincerely forgive someone you remove the source of toxic energy from your memory and allow the natural healing of your healthy psyche to proceed. It has nothing to do with them and everything to do with you. When you use forgiveness to disempower anger, revenge, blame, punishment and violence you remove many of the causes of your mental and physical discomforts. A Highly Conscious person seeks to create a win/win through forgiveness.

Throughout this book I stress that Truth is the most stable terra-firma you can stand on. When you know this and become more fully Truthful, your self-doubt is replaced by Truth-based Self-confidence. With this realistic and high degree of Self-confidence you become blessed with Divine Courage—a will to think, feel and behave in ways that go within the loving flow of Divine Energy. You will stand fast in the midst of attack by disconscious minds (driven by their OPiEs), you will speak your Truths in every circumstance and you will stay open to learning and growth as you remain focused on sharing love.

Many spiritualists believe that each person is a “child of God”, so each person is a smaller version of God. I believe that this Divinity resides within our Souls, and its loving guidance is available to anyone who learns how to access their Spiritual Center. What I call the “Heart-Spirit” is the more powerful experience of what we casually call the “conscience”. Every thought, feeling, and behavior we have passes through the Heart-Spirit where it is assessed for its karmic value. While the Heart-Spirit nurtures loving intentions, it also sends up red flags in our minds when we are considering putting destructive unloving energy out into the world. A person of Higher Consciousness who senses a red flag going up when an intention comes into their mind immediately pauses to ask the question, “What’s the best thing to do from here?”. When they answer this question from their Heart-Spirit, they choose the loving, constructive response.

I believe that the words “vulnerable” and “fearful” are interchangeable: they mean that there is a significant level of fear of damage or pain present in an issue. Feeling vulnerable is a subjective fabrication of the OPiE that arises in your ego while being vulnerable is a physical reality that serves to protect you by alerting you to real danger. You want to be alert and responsive to anything that threatens your “being”, but you do not want to react to illusions and falsehoods put up by your unhealthy ego. Honor your “real” physical threats, and disregard the persistent yet powerless and empty irrational fears that serve to protect only your ego-inflated self-image.

To override you feelings of vulnerability, you need to learn how to distinguish your life-supporting rational fears from your destructive irrational fears.

It’s about me prioritizing how I spend my time and energy. I’m a simplest: I choose to lead a mostly organic carbon-based lifestyle while I strive to minimize having a silicon-based life with too much interfacing with technology. I am willing to miss out on some aspects of life (developing any more of a screen dependency, reacting to annoying text messages, gadgets beeping every five minutes, people expecting instant replies, and so on) in order to keep my time and mind clear with my energy being spent primarily on face-to-face relationships and communing with spiritual nature for the cleansing of my Heart and Soul. It’s certainly a challenge for me to keep technology from overrunning my life with synthetic attachments! I’m a free spirit that shuns electronic leashes, and I don’t bemoan whatever I am missing. As long as I am focused on giving and receiving more love, and as long as I honor my commitment to Spirit to nurture Truth and fearless living for all who seek guidance in this realm, I am confident God will provide me with everything I karmically deserve. I am very accessible, and my gifts are available to anyone who is open to receiving them.

Most prisoners traded the freedoms they now do not have for some reward that ultimately did not materialize for them. Every person knows that you can go to jail for a lot of different serious crimes. When anyone chooses to commit one of these crimes, they are aware that they could get caught and sent to prison. A choice was made: reap the benefits of the crime and still try to live life at large, or get caught, lose your freedom, and go to jail. They took a risk, made a trade, and lost. Their Freedom still exists “out there” but they lost access to it since their accountability was karmically called in.

Using this model, you can see that everyone takes risks, but few people realize that they lose access to their Freedom when karma holds them accountable for harm they’ve done. Most people do not understand that they trade their Freedoms for something else (money, sex, property, pride, etc.), then they don’t understand why they aren’t Free. A serious lack of vision, that’s the disconscious mind at work.

Any loss of Freedom ultimately is the result of a choice you made. Somewhere you traded some of your Freedom for something else (money, sex, property, pride, etc.) of value to you. You may be able to recover lost mental and physical Freedoms in issues where you can reverse the trade (give property or money back) or when you can renegotiate agreements so that you get your lost Freedom back. You need to closely examine each issue to learn if there is an opportunity for you to end or at least renegotiate agreements so that you recover—at a price—your formerly lost Freedom. In some issues your Freedom may not be recoverable (such as damage you did to a now deceased person) while in other issues there may be some flexibility (such as a marriage or employment contract). Being in Truthful Acceptance of the full implications of the related choices you’ve made in the past, and using this knowledge as a learning opportunity in the Now, is essential for you to make future choices from your Heart-Spirit that don’t compromise your God-given Freedoms.

Assuming that you value love, openness, optimism, enthusiasm, growth, courage, intimacy and other positive attitudes, in our coaching relationship I would first check in with how committed you are to recognizing, accepting and sharing the Truth. If you’re lacking here, then we would explore how you can authentically embrace more Truth in order to bring more compassion, integrity, and Love into your life. Simultaneously we would assess your “fear quotient” so that we can identify and dissolve your irrational fears that create so much emotional pain and distractions. My line of thinking and inquiry is very similar to The Work as it is performed by Byron Katie: through progressive inquiry we peel back layers of egoic illusions to expose your true Self that has been largely hidden from your consciousness. In order to resolve the illusions (disempower ego-generated negativity such as jealousy, defensiveness and selfishness), I will ask you to face and resolve many of your fears and truths that your OPiE does not want you to understand. When you embrace your true Self, you will become fully charged with Truth-based Self-confidence that inspires you to bust through your veils of ego-driven limitations. Once you realize that your God-given Freedoms have always been there for you, you can expand into the peace of your Higher Consciousness that aligns within the loving flow of Divine Energy.

As a Heart-driven Truth and fearless living coach, I am not here to take, I am here to give.

Yes, if you ignored any real threats (experienced as fear) to your physical body, then you could be injured or even killed. Most threats and their subsequent fears to the mind, however, are subjective illusions put up by the OPiE. They can do emotional damage only if you believe that they are the Truth and you also believe that you are vulnerable. Or they can have no impact on your life and pass right thorough you if you believe that they are not the Truth you are not vulnerable. If you step fearlessly into a busy street, there could be severe real consequences. Ignoring reality-based fear is dangerous. If what people might think of your hair is of no consequence to you, then you aren’t vulnerable to anyone’s criticism. I am sure you can see that the term “fearless” needs some qualification: fearless works to preserve health and happiness of a person who is empowered with Truth-based Self-confidence, but fearless is unimaginable in the mind of the disconscious person who is run by their fear-based unhealthy ego. If you believe that the world is an unsafe place, then it is. If you believe that the world is a safe place, then it is. Where so you want to live?

Hologram technology has advanced to the point where a synthetic holographic image in front of you can appear to be organically real. Imagine a screaming horseback warrior charging at you swinging a sword, threatening to slice you. Your untrained mind shouts “Danger!”, so with an adrenaline surge you scream and duck in terror. The threat produced a physical response in your body. A moment later you discover that the image was imaginary and there was no real danger.

This is one of the ways that your OPiE works: it creates illusions of danger that provoke fear and feelings of vulnerability where there actually is none. My guess is that if you think and feel with a disconscious mind, every day you feel fears that, when more closely examined, have no rational foundation. An enlightened mind that subscribes to the Truth, on the other hand, can quickly recognize an empty false threat and be completely transparent to it. If you lived in your Higher Consciousness, you would be able to better maintain your inner peace by assessing and dismissing ‘hologram swords’ (especially emotional ones) as they come up in your life.

I use the word “disconscious” (the state of being technically conscious while lacking the mental ability to utilize conscious mental faculties) instead of “unconscious” popularly used by other authors because the latter has too many alternative meanings and often implies some sort of mental incapability. A mentally healthy person who makes a disconscious choice, such as lying to his/her spouse, has the mental tools to make a loving choice, but chooses not to use them. This person is submitting to the destructive influence of their unhealthy ego by believing that lying will somehow be good for the relationship. A Highly Conscious person exercises greater vision and selects the right tool (usually Truth) for every task.

The general use of “selfish” means that someone takes more for themselves at the expense of someone else, which most people frown upon. “Self-ful”, a much less commonly used term, on the other hand, suggests that a person may seek fulfilment for themselves as long as they do no harm to others. All of us are morally entitled to be self-ful, but selfish is a form of greed, one of the seven deadly sins. Pay more attention to how you use these words so that you can be more accurate about describing your interpretation of someone else or your Self.