The ego looks around and says, “Okay, there’s this. Now, what else?” The ego doesn’t notice what is here but what isn’t here. It overlooks the potential for enjoying what is here and, instead, imagines the enjoyment it might have in the future over something else. The ego fantasizes about better things and better experiences. This is just how the ego is designed. It is designed to be future-oriented and goal-oriented. It isn’t designed to appreciate the way things are.

It’s a good thing that who we really are does appreciate life just as it is, or there would be little chance for happiness. The happiness we do experience comes from our true self, Essence, which is in love with life. We also experience brief bursts of happiness when we get what we want, but this kind of happiness never lasts because the ego soon wants more or wants something different. It is never satisfied for long.

Here is a 10-minute video from a DVD of a weekend intensive called "Moving from the Ego to Essence," with Gina Lake channeling Theo, a sixth-dimentional being. The 2-DVD set can be purchased for $29.95 on Amazon.com. Or you can get 30% off by going to http://www.radicalhappiness.com:

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When spiritual teachers suggest that you accept something, they tell you this because to do anything other than accept what already is makes no sense, since it already is the way it is, and that fact can’t be changed. And yet, the egoic mind so often refuses to see this, and this refusal is a prescription for suffering. Some things can’t be changed because they already happened. That’s a fact of life. The egoic mind may try to change things that can’t be changed through thought, but that doesn’t work. It imagines and desires something different than what has happened, but that doesn’t change what has happened. It makes no sense to cling to ideas about things being different than they are. The only effect these thoughts have is to make us miserable.

The only thing that can keep you from being happy is a thought. What a revolutionary truth that is! The kind of thought that interferes with happiness the most is a thought of lack, which is at the basis of all desire. If you didn’t think something was missing or lacking about you, someone else, your situation, or life, you wouldn’t be unhappy. Unhappiness is the belief that something is missing that you need in order to be happy. It is this belief that makes you unhappy—not the fact that something is or isn’t here right now.

One of the reasons we reject being in the now, or the present moment, is that we overlook the details of what we are experiencing. Many moments are ordinary and seem similar to other moments we’ve experienced: You get up and do the same thing every morning, you walk the dog on the same path, you cook the same food, you drive the same roads. The routines of life seem boring to the ego. It assumes those moments are like every other similar moment, and it overlooks what is going on and draws you into thoughts about something else that it deems more interesting and exciting. The egoic mind tries to take you out of every moment and into its world of thoughts, and we are especially willing to go along during those moments that seem like ones we’ve experienced before.