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   Article 2                The first step

                                                                                               Part One

Tibetan teachings tell us to write this list right now and to fight with all our strength to do what is written on it. Only then will your life be full, when that sheet has become white again, and then will be able to accept death because you feel sated by your days.

Your life will no longer be a misfired shot, something that has escaped from your hands, you will have held it, you will have fed upon it, so you will feel more able to let it go. Learning to live today is the only way to learn to die tomorrow. We do not know how to live, that's why we are afraid to die. We do not know how to live because nobody has ever taught us. At school they taught us about the life of Mazzini and Garibaldi, historical characters who died centuries ago, without explaining their inner dramas, or showing us their humanity. And so we didn’t realise that we can become heroes too, special individuals, they made us feel more isolated.

They didn't teach us these things because nobody taught them.

For example, they didn't teach you that you are mechanical and that you tend toward mechanicalness. That you repeat models of behaviour, that you don't live in the present but you are constantly projected into tomorrow and into its worries, or into yesterday and its regrets. They never taught you that anxiety, tension and nervousness are the origin of many illnesses. Medicine and immunology have confirmed this theory, and this has opened new horizons for treatment and prevention. They didn't teach you to love your body but, on the contrary, they taught to you to hate it. They forbade you to touch it, to look at it, to love even the most secret areas, and so they created perversions, the sense of sin and guilt. 

They never taught to you to become an individual, and so they created divided beings in conflict with themselves, with a thousands egos and ten thousand masks. They taught you to strengthen your personality instead of what lies beyond it. They taught to you always and constantly to defend yourself and to trust sometimes your heart and sometimes your head.

They made individuals who are not unitary, sometimes too cerebral, sometimes too emotional.

Religion has taught you to see God as the source of the worst negative emotions. God, who asks us not to commit sin, and who prepares the oven to put us in if we do sin. God, who always asks too much and who condemns us at every turn. The new generation, who understand the deceit hidden behind this psychological domination, have stopped having ideals and a personal spirituality. Television has become their God, and VIPs their idols. The entire mechanism has turned to the advantage of depersonalisation.

You are depersonalised and you're not aware of it. You are not the master of yourself, even if you think you are. You can see it simply by observing yourself. They always taught you to consider the world, to envy those who have more, to put on your best appearance... they never taught you that there is no more interesting performance than yourself. Had they taught you this, you could have widened your inner sky. Instead, you have only learned to make your image look better, but you misunderstood the way to become better. What does being better mean? It means having the capacity to understand ourselves and to overcome our fears and our conflicts, developing new strength, new energy, a boost of life.

You have huge potential, and yet you reduce yourself to using only a miniscule part of it. That's because, in order to use your resources, you don't just need to know how, but, above all, you have to dig to draw upon them. You have to acquire new tools and use them, excogitate new plans and change the way you think, question your mental schemes and drum up the courage to walk towards new horizons. I invite you to build a new you rather than a good image of yourself in the eyes of the world. I invite you to do some practical work. Don't put it off till tomorrow, start it now, so that you can develop the wonderful potential which lies inside you, the force you don't believe you have, but that in actual fact, you do have, even if you don't use it.

I invite you to try and make some efforts in this direction because, in this field, even the smallest effort leads to everlasting results which no thief in the world will be able to steal. Where should you start? You can start from here and now, if you do the things I am about to tell you. First of all you must decide to start today, with me, a new life, a new relationship with yourself. The root of the world "relation" comes from the Latin relatio, from referre, which means "to refer".

I would like you to achieve a new way to refer to yourself; I would like you to communicate with yourself in a completely different way. Sometimes we decide to start a new relationship with others, from another point of view, to put aside all the grudges and to start again under a new light of respect, love and listening. I would like to ask you to make peace with yourself, to begin to love and respect yourself more, to listen to yourself, to observe yourself, to remember yourself. The more you learn to do this, the more you will surround yourself with a new energy, with a positive aura which will surround your family, your friends, your life. The more you love yourself the more your capacity to love others will grow.

You can start immediately if you want. You only have to shut your eyes now, together with me and begin to listen to your body. Did you know that the first step towards love is listening? Start to senseyour own body and start talking to yourself. Tell yourself: You are all right. I neglected you during all these years of life together. I treated you badly, both physically and by feeding you with bad thoughts and destructive emotions. I often allowed the surrounding environment to possess me and I died away instead of shining in the dark. That's because I sharpened my physical ear instead of my inner one. Now I will listen to you, and I sincerely wish to start a new relationship with you. I have decided to love you".

This self-projection will help you; it is only a handy stratagem, a means, you don't have to become schizophrenic. You only have to start to respect yourself in the same way that you would respect your best friend. Now that you have made this promise to yourself, you have to keep it. Aren't the promises we make to ourselves the most important ones? And yet they are exactly the ones that we tend to break most easily. That's just the way we are, we prefer to betray ourselves.

Do you realize how radical this change is that I am urging you to make?

Continued....