Acts of love can only take place in the now.

Cluttered memory and intellect result in problematic patterns of thought and behavior. With debris piled up in these faculties, we start out on the wrong foot and things get worse from there. If you can't perceive a situation clearly, you can't manage it effectively. When the very mechanisms by which you perceive and respond to reality are cluttered with distortion, you can't possibly achieve your dreams. It will be very difficult even to know what your dream is.

The will is crucial to taking control of your situation. You must work. You must act. You must undertake the process of healing, of unlocking your dreams. This happens by engaging in reality. You do that by going where reality lives: the now. The will is the faculty by which you return to the now. From there, and only from there, you can address the clutter in all three parts of your perspective. 

But the will itself can contain impediments to its own effectiveness. Acts of faith and hope meet with resistance when the will itself needs cleaning out. Two examples of clutter relevant to the will are slave mindedness and blaming. Slave mindedness is when you insist you are trapped by your circumstances. Blaming is when you spend too much time trying to identify the source of your obstacles while doing nothing to change them. You always have a choice, and understanding your clutter is just another form of clutter if you do nothing about it. 

More broadly, clutter is anything that hinders communication and full life. If it provides you with a reason to linger in the past or fantasize (in a positive or negative way) about the future, it is clutter and it will have negative effects on your life and your day-to-day experience. Identifying your obstacles is crucial. And understanding their origins can be helpful in devising a strategy for dealing with them. But clearing away the clutter is the important thing and anything that hinders that is the result of a distorted, distracted will.

The accompanying discipline for this is love. 

Acts of love can only take place in the now. The old theological definition of love is "the efficacious desire for the well being of another." That should be expanded to include yourself, but efficacious means you do something about it. A real act of love cannot be mindless. It can't be distracted. As a discipline for adjusting your experience, the act has to occur in the now, without reference to the past or future -- that means you do it for the sake of doing it, not for some purpose of gain. 

As you perpetrate acts of love, real love, you will grow in the habit. That means you will habitually find yourself in the now, because that's where love happens. The clarifying effect this has on your perspective is a happy byproduct. There is an almost chemical effect when you start exercising love. It begins to dispel self doubt. It instills confidence (eventually). It overpowers fear, ascribes purpose, creates balance, and above all enables you to perceive yourself, and others, as you and they really are, but without judgement. Love and judgement cannot coexist in the same perspective. In place of judgement (which is the final justification for all distortion and the destination toward which all distortion tends), love injects compassion and forgiveness, empathy and conscience, which themselves have a vivifying effect on the perspective. 

Fueled by the momentum love generates, faith and hope become more possible, more sensible, more effective. The world becomes a place of possibility as well as of trial. The truth of things, the luster of reality, begins to reveal itself amid the twisted demon faces of fearful experience. The true substrate of reality becomes perceivable and invites the will deeper in. The will meanwhile becomes more and more capable of love, more and more inclined to it, and begins to reverse the cycle of fear-begets-fear to a new cycle of love-begets-love. 

The masters have always taught this. Love is a force of energy, an aspect of reality, a process found in nature every bit as actual as osmosis, gravity, or the fusion at the heart of the sun. Once unleashed, love splinters into myriad benefits each with it's own special effect on the world, on reality, on experience. And it all begins with the will. 

Ever forward.

You really need to make this trip, just like you really need to live your life, so you organize your emotional approach and go for it.

The degree to which hope is present in the perspective is determined by the experience of the past. In the three-part model of memory, intellect and will, memory is the place where all experience is contained and "remembered." Remembering can be actual remembrance, but more often it takes the shape of unnoticed thought patterns or behavior. It's the impression or echo of past experience repeated in our current interactions with reality. 

Distortions of the memory fall into two categories. First, the memory can be filled with actual negative or damaging experiences. More insidious are the potentially neutral or even positive experiences that were distorted as they came in through the cluttered intellect and stored in the memory as negative. In this way, self hate begets self hate. Self doubt begets self doubt. This ongoing distortion is an after effect of genuine negative experience. It's like a reverberation taking place in the perspective and it continues to run on until we do something about it. 

Hope is the discipline by which the clutter of the memory is cleared out. By exercising hope you can redirect the energy of your mind in a positive direction, a constructive direction that leads to peace and prosperity. In this respect, hope pertains to the past, because your outlook is based on past experience. 

It's very important to distinguish hope from hopes. Hope can save your life. Hopes can kill you. But hope is there to keep you grounded with respect to particular hopes because it's a means of relating to distinct possibilities. If you're trying to get a job, you have a particular hope. If you don't relate to this hope in a constructive way, you'll not only be devastated if you don't get the job, but your experience of life up until that moment will be grounded in an illusion, and therefore pass you by. By applying the discipline of hope, as opposed to entertaining hopes, you take stock of your attitude and ensure that it is not being influenced by past experiences. You hope for the best, for a particular outcome, without investing in it your identity or sense of well being. 

Where faith is like a method for navigation, hope is more of a particular point on the map. Where faith is a preparedness and willingness for whatever comes, hope pertains more to the specifics, it's a response to a particular detail. So, for example, when taking a road trip, you would exercise faith because you don't know how to get where you're going, and you would exercise hope because you've only got a quarter tank of gas. You really need to make this trip, just like you really need to live your life, so you organize your emotional approach and go for it. 

And that's what this three-part model is for: organizing your emotional approach, clarifying your perspective, knowing where you're coming from, working with what you've got. Of course there is a lot of overlap between faith and hope. You can always use the butt of a screw driver to drive a nail, or the claw of a hammer to open a paint can. But regarding faith and hope as tools, each with their own best use, can be amazingly helpful. 

Although hope is a means of organizing your relationship with the past so that it does not hamper your future, it does this by helping you reenter the now. The future does not flow from the past. The future flows from right now. That's why it's so important, more important than anything, to be grounded. No matter how bright your prospects all you really have is right now. The truth is, the future does not exist no matter how well you prepare for it. 

Real preparation, really aiming for your targets in life requires a clear understanding of who you really are. With the discipline of hope you can remove the hinderances of the past that clog the memory with fear and doubt. This takes a burden off the future. It will leave you focused, undistracted, quick to respond to opportunity and able to recognize it when it comes. It will allow you to genuinely believe that the best can happen and will leave you open to extraordinary possibility. And it is not possible to be open to possibility, except through hope in the now. 

Ever forward. 

The expectations we impose on the emerging now are decorated with our ideas about the future and shape our experience of life.

The three parts of the perspective -- memory, intellect and will -- each have a corresponding discipline by which they can be cleared of distortion. This is an idea from medieval patristic theology. Memory is cleared by hope. Intellect is cleared by faith. Will is cleared by love. 

The distortions that clutter the intellect tend to pertain to the future. Ideally, the intellect would be constantly occupied with the now, but when it's cluttered with particles of fear or insecurity or distracting desire it goes out of tune. Reality is always right now, but the now seems to emerge from somewhere. Now. Now. Now. That somewhere is the future. 

A cluttered intellect is more concerned with the future than with the now that emerges from it, because the clutter consists of harsh or happy ideas of what the future might hold. The expectations we impose on the emerging now are decorated with our ideas about the future and shape our experience of life. If the intellect is cluttered with negativity like self hate, self doubt, or fear for example, it will stamp each new experience with these characteristics as it comes through. This puts a negative hue on every experience we accumulate. 

That's no way to live.

Even worse is that it happens unconsciously. It's just there having its effect. It's amazingly subtle and works slowly, over time. Unchecked it will lead to bad decisions, painful situations, repeated patterns of abuse, neglect, complacency. It can perpetuate addiction or simply result in a general immobility in life which creates basic dissatisfaction. It can only be stopped on purpose and even then it takes a long time to truly make the adjustment. 

Enter faith. 

Faith is a tool for altering the intellect so that it no longer accumulates distorted versions of the emerging now, but the emerging now as it really is. Faith is doing. Faith is a sense of adventure. It means the willingness to experience the now as it is. The only way to do that is to return to the now and directly face any pain, fear or insecurity that lives there so that it doesn't create distortion. That's what clutter and distortion of the intellect really are, after all -- the difficult feelings that we leave unaddressed. They prevent us from seeing things as they really are.

A cluttered intellect will get stuck in the future, mired in some harsh or happy fantasy, leaving you ineffective. Faith is like a shout from the now, a message from your full self, calling out to the partial self in which you have become trapped. It says something like "Hey! There's more to you than that fear you're feeling! Come back and see for yourself!"  

The key is belief in the possibility of another quality of experience, belief in transformation through practice, and remembering your strengths. It's more than just thinking positively. Positive thinking has its place, but it can easily slip into denial or fantasy. Applying faith means experiencing what is really going on for you, in truth, here and now, and from that position of clear honest appraisal, determining to evolve out of weakness into strength, out of distortion into clarity, out of aimlessness into vision. Your full self, your whole self begins to emerge and lead the way. You address your entire perspective, the whole of your inner condition, not just some particular situation. (Although particular situations do provide clues for the work you need to do, they tend to be symptoms, effects of the distortions of intellect that can no doubt be found all across your experience if you look for them.)

Applying faith means you recognize the need to return to reality, to what is, to what you can say for sure, even if that means saying "I have no idea what's going on here." Applying faith means you detach from this or that feared or desired outcome, do your very best, and allow your situation to unfold. You proceed without an idea to rely on recognizing that you just can't know the outcome. 

This makes you more effective in coping with exigency, and it allows for unforeseen or extraordinary possibility. You stand there willing, ready to work with whatever turns out, diligently present in the now. If there is fear or distracting desire, you remember that you cannot know the future, so any notion of it is false. You recognize that the impulse to flee the now is just a reaction to difficult feelings that live there. If you stay and meet those feelings, you get your power back. You become effective on your own behalf. 

Ever forward.

You are the sorcerer and your life is this amazing, magical, powerful thing with no regard for itself.

Enhancing the sense of self is an act of housecleaning. With the clutter removed, what remains is who you really are. Much of the mental anguish we experience, the tension and anxiety, the lack of well being -- the difficulties we face while finding our place in life -- have their origins in this clutter. 

The clutter consists of small invocations, diatribes even, intended to get your attention. They pertain to four areas: yourself, others, the past and the future. It's interesting about the now that it can never be a thought. A thought about the now is not the now. So any time there is thinking in your head that is not needed, for some task or bit of recall, you are lost in clutter, you are elsewhere than in the now. 

Much of the time the clutter is painful. It may be a harsh memory or some fear about the road ahead. But it can also be a simple fantasy, a wish or hope that gains too much traction in your perspective. It's helpful to consider the perspective in terms of three parts: the memory, the intellect and the will. 

The memory consists of all the experiences you've ever had. It is the past, right up until one second ago. The intellect is the mechanism by which those experiences are gathered in. First you perceive it with the intellect, then it gets cached in the memory. The will is what you do about the information you take in through the intellect. 

Memory distorts the perspective by cluttering it with inaccuracies, and recalling those inaccuracies in the form of memories: about ourselves, about others, about the past, or about the future. Intellect distorts the perspective by twisting experiences as they happen. It is colored by distortions in the memory which contains confused versions of experience. The will is what you do about your situation at any given moment. With a distorted memory and intellect, the will is misdirected with faulty information, and we behave badly or in ways that do not serve us. 

Much of the time all this happens without our knowledge because we tend to live outside the now. While we're out, things get out of control. Think of the mops and buckets in the Sorcerers Apprentice. When the sorcerer steps out things go haywire. You are the sorcerer and your life is this amazing, magical, powerful thing with no regard for itself. It's up to you to manage it and you can't do that from outside the wizard's tower of the now. 

It all adds up to fallacy. Lies. About ourselves, about other people, about the past, about the future. These lies come to make up our perspective and we live cut off from reality, even while appearing to be reasonably functional. But the lies reduce our access to the now, the home of reality. The door closes on the only place where you can find the truth about yourself, cultivate it and allow it to show, in order to access the full range of your possibilities and experience your Utter Self. 

Imagine a world filled with Utter Selves. A world where everyone, or even just most of us, were living at full measure, using our talents, sharing our gifts, building our dreams, wielding God through acts of love and compassion, and holding these things as a priority. 

Ever forward.