Of the 100 talks I’ve given since the publication of The Essence of Reality in 2008, two of the most memorable have been for the London College of Spirituality.  Here I provide Voyager Spirit readers an overview of my perspectives.

 

The Essence of Reality

 

We learn to see the world as our parents and earlier generations saw it.  But the western mindset they delivered us – through heavy indoctrination, personal treatment as we grew through childhood and woven into language itself – was one of separation.  Referencing a confusing mixture of ancient pagan notions, Christian myth and latter day science, we invariably regard ourselves as removed and isolated from a world “out there”, relegated to meek manipulation to try to fulfill our intent in the face of opposing power or disregard.

 

The main difficulty – and the greatest hindrance in clearly perceiving the nature of one’s own consciousness – is this simple, core point: whatever you believe in seems to be true.  The mind firmly embraces its beliefs and definitions – notions often absorbed very early in life – such that they camouflage reality’s real function to confirm their tenets.  Believe in a god, he seems to be there; host science as true and the world seems a collection of meaningless, mindless particles and isolated objects.

 

But beliefs and definitions never clarify how life works; they only mask your perception of it. 

 

One absolutely critical element of your journey, then, involves finding fallacious beliefs and synthetic definitions within your mindset and consciously removing them.  The “Clear Awareness” of which I speak is not some grand level of higher consciousness you need to strive toward through secretive esoteric practices, but rather a clarity of perceiving your conscious nature untainted by the broad range of distorted notions you absorbed while growing up.

 

Religion – particularly mainline western ones, Christianity, Judaism and Islam – teach you that some god out there makes things happen.  That builds on top of more archaic notions of divine intervention, fate and luck as determiners of your life events, for our ancestors, as they picked up new ideas, never got rid of the older ones!  Ditto for science, a paradigm that began to build about 1600.  Science only sees causality in real-world forces and sources.  Disallowing any metaphysical roots to reality at all, science only features physical force as impelling motion to make things happen.

 

Lying at the base of all these explanations are truly ancient notions that a collection of gods out there dictate all events.  Our long distant ancestors, highly superstitious, attributed all causality to specialized gods.  Those early notions evolved to a single god, fate and ultimately science – all of which project determinative power to forces and sources out there, not to you yourself.

 

Key observation: the psyche can and does hold many, mutually exclusive notions at the same time with little regard to their conflictual nature. 

 

You could not possibly have a deity making things happen, yet have chance events take place, all the while dictated by fate and confused by luck.  Yet, as naïve children, we learn all these mechanisms as real and scarcely question them!  Indeed, often the act of questioning itself is forbidden, so that myth becomes built into our cultural mindset, commonly shared and popularly regarded as truth.

 

How Life Works

 

A mishmash of fallacies rife to the Western mindset separates the individual from the reality he/she engages.  The world unfolds, according to standardized thinking, caused by many agents – none of which happens to be you. Your only power would seem to be to manipulate things via force, money, persuasion, etc. 

 

But in reality, you are intimately tied to the events and relationships you encounter daily.  When you look closely at your life, you will notice you create patterns.  You attract certain types of people into relationships, incur various health issues and tend to succeed or fail – all in recurring patterns.  Phases of life and people you engage come and go, but the patterns persist.  And none of them are caused by fate, some god, luck, chance or external forces – all of which are illusory functions created by traditional beliefs.

 

So far as your life patterns don’t fulfill your will – either negating it (bad things happen) or neutralizing it (nothing happens) – you will find specific inner mechanisms that correspond to outer issues.  When you delve inward to change negating structures within your mindset – finding and eliminating self-defeating mechanisms – detrimental patterns in real life abate in response.  If you don’t understand the inner connection, don’t find the inner roots or don’t change them, you will continue recreating the same patterns repeatedly, because experienced Reality always reflects your inner nature.  Details might change – conflict in romantic relationships might switch to conflict at work, struggle with health might morph into struggle in a social setting – but overall patterns featuring non-fulfillment will persist.

 

Most people, so programmed with common cultural assumptions and shared viewpoints – all of which create illusions of validity to the believing mind – don’t grasp the connection between self and life.  Childhood lessons of gods and fear carry the weight of motherly love and personal security to help embed them into the subconscious.  Indeed, it was Mom we first learned to manipulate, and we apply those controlling gestures throughout life – no matter how poorly they work. 

 

Learned notions of external causality are strongly ingrained, reinforced with each story, each movie, each television drama that shares the notion that some nefarious god, bacteria, the government, conditions, the wealthy and powerful, spouses, children and many more sources cause us problems.

 

Those sources may be involved as triggers, but only you are causal.

 

My Angle

 

I grew up with the same batch of synthetic explanations you did.  But I’ve always had the trait of questioning, with an intellect capable of discerning fallacy in canned explanations – coupled to self-reliance that precluded my bowing to any vaunted expert just because of tradition, fancy costumes, grandiose titles or other phony determiners.  By age 10, I’d seen through the fantasy of Christianity – it clearly didn’t describe reality.

 

Despite an education in engineering and long appreciation for various sciences, the validity for science as an overall explanation of life crumbled later.

 

While traveling through Europe as a young man (still young, I’ve been so for a lot longer now!), I had a mystic experience.  For a fleeting while, I could see clearly that I wasn’t one “thing”, peering out into a field of separate objects, but that I was a Oneness, perceiving itself from within its own being. 

 

While that direct cognition passed, it cued awareness of a mindset that was not only possible, but valid and desirable.  Although it took a long journey over years to regain that clarity of vision, I did so.  It came principally through various techniques, all oriented to delving inward.  Key among them was recognizing the body-mind connection.

 

While living in San Diego, gaining perspective through exposure to many new ideas, I took a workshop in self-hypnosis.  From reading Self-Hypnotism by Leslie LeCron, I came to see his valid points that physical issues always have inner components, such that elimination of mind-based root elements to health problems would lead to permanent healing.  Step-by-step, as I cleared up many health issues, I gained confidence in that inner-outer connection – even identifying two significant mechanisms LeCron hadn’t documented.

 

But then, facing other problems in life, I realized that the inner-outer connection didn’t stop at my skin – that negative patterns in relationships and general fulfillment of one’s intent were also rooted within the psyche.  They involved the same mechanisms and could be corrected by the same introspective efforts.

 

So I went on from there to restructure my life from the inside out, scouring my psyche for negating, inner components to problems in my relationships, difficulties in succeeding in avenues I desired and many other issues.  With each step, I improved my life and came to see ever more clearly the innate connection between Self and experienced reality.  Highlighting the journey, I gave psychic readings for a time, able to access that same mind-reality connection to directly read others’ core nature.

 

So my message never spouts off superficial truths I gained from some grand teacher, ancient or modern, philosophical constructs from academia or some vaunted, traditional discipline.  My perspectives communicate a personal, intimate awareness of the inherent Oneness of Consciousness/Reality.  I illustrate how your inner nature manifests real events and relationships that constitute your life – and precisely how to change them to improve your life. 

 

Along the way I provide a wide range of perspectives on aspects of life that are distorted by common fallacy.  And to effectively debunk invalidity tied to traditional explanations, I point out the myth and erroneous belief on which they are founded – including the strengths and shortcomings of great teachers of the past.

 

Delving Inward

 

As a conscious entity existing in an ever present now moment, unique and highly individualized, you bring your nature into an incarnation.  From earliest times of life, you attract situations and relationships that reflect precisely your own core psychic content.  But the intangible values and interwoven meaning that constitute your core qualities aren’t visible in themselves – you can’t see disappointment and joy directly.  However, all inner elements can be clearly discerned woven into meaningful outcome of episodes of your life.

 

So to discern the workings of your psyche and specifically to root out inner elements that lead to pain and failure, you explore the value content of your memory.  Patterns that reflect your nature will echo throughout your life – current painful situations will be seen reflecting childhood issues.  From early recollections – less painful than the current, as they are long since passed – you can discern the Mechanisms involved, when the issue began and who was involved.  Once clearly identified, that issue can be dispelled and the mindset revised positively.  Reality, which always reflects the inner state, will subsequently change, mirroring the new inner status.

 

With Meditation, you begin to establish inner peace.  But meditation as practiced in traditional Eastern disciplines won’t eliminate negating and neutralizing mechanisms.  Self-hypnosis, a similar, inward-delving practice, but with a specific focus on inner content, is needed to deal with specific aspects of your mindset.  Add to that Ideomotor Responses to bypass the rational pseudo-self and attain explicit, pinpointed meaning from the subconscious – and Dream Analysis to help decipher inner strata of values.

 

Mind-Matter Specifics

 

Specific Mechanisms of Mind lie within your psyche at the root of real problems in your life.  Principal ones are: 

• Through Suggestion, you learned a plethora of facts – most invalid, but all seeming real if accepted as true.
• By Emulation, you copied traits and mannerisms from parents and siblings, later heroes and idealized characters.
• Facing Punishment by parents, you learned to distrust your own impulses and structure your life around rational guidelines.
• Rewarded for behaving as expected, you lost self-trust and self-reliance via Motivation, coming to depend on pleasing your parents and accepting external forces as having power over you.
• Struggle and Conflict, psychological elements of separation, produce an apparent duality between you and the world out there.  Often forced on you during childhood, you were made to fight and struggle to get your way.

 

Some combination of these components underlies each real life event and relationship that doesn’t fulfill your intent.  To accomplish real change, you need to delve into your own mindset, identify them, then eliminate them.  To discern them, use the techniques I illustrate. 

 

Once you clearly perceive inner roots to a given real problem, you dispel them via auto-suggestion: you rewrite your subconscious with desired attributes in place of negating ones.

 

Past Teachings

 

Once you see clearly the inner-outer connection, you will grasp the gist of what Lao-Tzu meant by the Tao, Buddha with his Nirvana and Jesus in picturing the “Kingdom of Heaven”. 

 

You become aware of what various mystics through the ages could only glimpse. Lao-Tzu didn’t grasp the malleability of the Tao – how its flow could be changed.  Gautama didn’t realize the shortcomings of his Four Noble Truths – life is not inherently painful based on desire, but a mixture of good and bad, the latter rooted in conflict and disposable – though not through his Noble Eightfold Path.  Jesus’ Kingdom within was highly insightful, but it doesn’t rely on a remote deity, rather on one’s mind content itself.

 

You can only see the shortcomings of any teaching by growing beyond the standpoint of the discipline and initiating teacher.  My purpose is not to attract followers or gain financial benefit from my message, but to free you from such previous bondage.  You won’t gain Clear Awareness while following anybody, bowing to ancient masters or seeking other-worldly features of consciousness – but by becoming free to your core: free from illusory external forces, free from self-promoting teachers, free from scientific limitations. 

 

Indeed, spirituality itself is not about grasping at idealized, ethereal perfection, but rather recognizing – simply, but intimately – your nature as a conscious entity encountering a life flow that reflects your own nature.  Becoming aware of that, you understand how life works.  And you will have passed other visionaries, greater and lesser, to see life even more clearly, beyond the myth and fantasy now built into their ancient messages.

 

All of my public expressions communicate greater understanding of How Life Works.  Using them, you spring beyond archaic notions woven into modern thinking and fallacious definitions of religion, science and even most spiritual ventures.

 

I wish you all my best on your journey…

 

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Questioning cultural “truths” of small-town Middle-America, Tom jettisoned religion early in childhood, already aware of its inaccuracy in describing how life worked.  In his early twenties, he left a career in Chemical Engineering to travel widely seeking to understand more about life.  His mystic experience on Corfu – during which he clearly perceived that he wasn’t a separate entity sensing remote objects, but a “Oneness” experiencing itself from within its own essence – shattered his adherence to science.  Always sensitive that concepts regarding life correspond to Reality as experienced, Tom explored many disciplines, philosophies and teachings – absorbing valued perspectives, but never bowing to self-aggrandized masters, popular myth or single-explanation truths.

Giving psychic readings for a time in his thirties, he gained direct exposure to the realm of meaning and value that underlies the Real.  But only his long inner journey, penetrating all facets of his own mindset – its innate values and distinct mechanisms of realizing them – could restore the immediate awareness he’d experienced on Corfu.  Perfecting self-hypnosis and meditation technique, Tom undertook to clear away all limiting definitions and beliefs absorbed from cultural input during his childhood.  He came, step-by-step, to see life without the limiting haze of a belief structure.  During the process of inner change, Tom regained “Clear Awareness” – but now as an ongoing capacity, not a fleeting glimpse.

From his thirties on, Tom chose not to commercialize his message, preferring to advance a career in software development and eventually project management while perfecting his outlook and delivery.  By 1996, with the Internet emerging into common use, Tom created his EoR website, which, always free to readers, has been accessed worldwide.  At the unsolicited offer of a British publisher, though, Tom expanded his online writings into book form.  While finishing the book, he retired from active business concerns to devote time to promoting his valued perspectives.  Tom’s health and abundance, vastly improved through inner cleansing, allow presentation of EoR without charge or donation.  

 

Background

 

EoR, online since 1996, had attracted worldwide readership by 2005.  British publisher O-Books, impressed with my message, offered – unsolicited – to publish my writings in book form.  While I preclude making money out of my perspectives – EoR is personal statement, not a commercial venture – publication is the best way to communicate with society in general.  So I expanded web content into book form: EoR came to print in March of 2008.  Since then I’ve driven 37,000 miles across the US and Canada, plus many more throughout the UK, to speak to many open-minded groups.

 

 My purpose is sharing valued, beneficial perspectives with open-minded listeners.  When you really understand “How Life Works”, you don’t need to extract money from those who ostensibly don’t.  Far too many people glimpse enlightenment, then rush off to commercialize their new-found, entry-level truths journey.  (Book revenue, should it exceed expenses, will be preserved in a family trust to maintain public access to my perspectives in perpetuity.)

 

For specifics on techniques and much greater detail on the interwoven Mechanisms, access EoR online at www.nehrer.net.