Let’s begin this fourth and final installment with a quick review of the three keys:

  1. Surrender to Divine Will, Your Highest Self, Your Most Fully Conscious and Enlightened Self, or whatever other label you ascribe to what I am referring to here.
  2. Move from partial truths to full Truth, and let go of illusion altogether.
  3. Begin to develop and/or further develop your capacity to use the force of your own compassion as a tool to bring more healing and goodness into your life and the life of humanity.

Where are you with regards to these three keys? Have you already surrendered to your Highest Self? Are you concerned that you could spend an entire lifetime obtaining truth? Perhaps you have decided that the best place to start is with compassion – I mean who wouldn’t want to learn to be more compassionate in a way that benefits themselves and others, right?

Regardless of where you start, the important thing is to start. To start today. Or at least make a commitment to start soon – pick a day later this week, for example. The three keys are mutually reinforcing and lead to one another, which means regardless of which doorway you enter, you will ultimately find the whole prize inside.

And, what is the prize? Happiness? Enlightenment? Everlasting peace?

Yes, these are among the prizes you will find inside right along side their tangible manifestations that will both signal and contribute to your degree of happiness and spiritual evolution. Tangible manifestations like greater physical health & well-being, a joyful marriage/love life, life-giving relationships with your closest connections, meaningful work, financial freedom, and all the rest.

And, perhaps the greatest prize will be who you become.

Becoming your Highest Self, experiencing the depth of your wholeness and true completion, fully embodying your highest aspect, your True Self in each and every moment, being and spreading Truth, Love and Joy – this is the pinnacle of human experience. There is nothing greater we can hope to do or experience in these human bodies.

In the past we might have thought that this degree of Self-Actualization, this degree of spiritual development was only for the very few, the saints, the mystics, those who fully dedicated their life to spiritual achievement and nothing else. We might have thought that these types of spiritual aspirations are not for bankers, lawyers, doctors, elected officials, auto mechanics, schoolteachers, nurses, stay at home moms, or anyone else fully engaged in the ordinary, “non-spiritual” aspects of life like earning a living, taking care of the kids, participating in community activities, and leading businesses, government and other institutions.

While this type of thinking may have made sense at one point in human history – that the highest heights of Self-Actualization are only available to the few – it no longer applies. We can all have access now to the whole Truth. We can all develop deeply compassionate hearts and learn how to use our compassion as a practical tool that brings about great healing in our own lives and in the life of humanity. It is quite simple, in fact, for each of us to surrender to our Highest Self, to hand ourselves over to the best aspect of ourselves, and to make that choice again and again as we continue to go deeper and get lighter.

Not only are these experiences more broadly accessible now, but also, this type of large-scale spiritual awakening is what human kind needs at this unique moment in history. Thanks to great advances in technology – military technology, computer & information technology, bio-technology & nano-technology, and good old fashioned chemical, mechanical & industrial technologies – thanks to technological advances in a wide variety of fields over the past century, never before have we humans had so much power to create or destroy. Never before have our choices held such great consequence.

We can no longer leave it to the saints, mystics, priests and religious leaders to be the guardians of our souls and the conscience of humanity. We can no longer leave worldly leadership exclusively or even primarily in the hands of elected officials and people higher up on the org chart.

As the world of hierarchy crumbles around us, and as the flattening of the world and decentralization of information and power continues, we must all wake up now to a greater degree than ever before. In this increasingly interconnected world in which we live, each one of us is our own keeper and our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers to a greater and greater extent all of the time. And this is true whether we like it or not.

We have a greater responsibility than ever before to address our individual challenges and achieve happiness for ourselves by bettering ourselves spiritually, and in so doing we automatically become part of the bigger solutions that want to emerge in our forever more enmeshed and entangled world. How do we end war and realize peace on earth? How do we address climate change, a toxic food supply in the U.S. and not enough food to eat elsewhere?

While there are certainly policies and institutions that can support these outcomes, ultimately we will not leap frog up to the next level of human existence, we will not transform local and global systems, break our many-thousand-year-old habits while operating from the same level of intellectual understanding and spiritual enlightenment which got us here. We must move further up the evolutionary chain, further away from humans as pretty smart animals to humans as fully conscious, Divine Creators. Not just a few of us, a small number of enlightened humans pulling everyone else up, but all of us must make this transition now. This is a big leap for our species for sure, and we are, in fact, making this leap right now at the exact moment in history when it is necessary for us to do so.

Now more than ever, “Be The Change” is more than a bumper sticker. It always has been, but even more so today, it is a phrase of great importance. Michael Jackson was a prophet. Starting with the man in the mirror is a wise choice and the best and only way to effect positive change in the world around us. When making that choice in your life, I hope you will strongly consider looking to these three keys as a starting point.

Surrender to your Highest Self. Move into full Truth. Develop your compassionate heart.

If you commit to doing these three things, and if you consistently apply yourself towards these ideals, you will have and be everything you want – and more – and the world will be a better place for it.

Click below to view Michael Jackson’s Man In the Mirror video. Happy listening.