Watching children be told by their parents to tell someone that they love him/her is a clue to how we are conditioned not to respond from our own feelings and learn to become facades. From the beginning of most of our lives, we were told what to feel and what not to feel. Children learn very early that we are expected to lie, to put up a fake front. We all learned that if we said certain things to others we got a predictable response. We would tell this or that relative we love him and he would express happiness and do something nice for us. We had no idea of what love was; yet we knew the word had power. Not that, children do not know love that is real, but the way they are taught to use that word is misguiding them.

Children are helpless when they are small and it is natural for them to try to find ways to control their environment and protect themselves, both physically and emotionally. The parents were raised the same way, so it was all so normal to let these mind games go on.

By the time we can talk, this process of lies has already conditioned us. We are conditioned into becoming false people. We have built a façade of lies and we try to respond to life from that conditioning. We have made a separation between the real world and our imagined self. We wonder why we feel so cut off, why we cannot feel what we are supposed to feel.

With the false use of the word love, we have built up a complex idea of what it is. Most people do not really feel it, although we all use that word with great expression of feeling. Of course, most of us do have some feeling for what love is at some times in our lives with certain people, things or places.

A clue that most people really do not know what love is, is in always hearing them say they wished someone truly loved them. Not that we cannot be loved and that there are not people who care for us, the problem is thinking that to feel love, it has to come from someone outside of us. Real love can only come from within us. It needs no one else to express it for us.

Of course, this is not just an issue with love. What we are feeling when we say we want someone to love us, is that we are inadequate and insecure and we need validation to feel like we are truly worthy and cared for. This is the ego. It is that false image of what we think we are. It is insecurity itself. No amount of love from the outside can fill that void of being. Images cannot be made whole by other images.

Most of us have grown up in families that exist on lies. As images, it seems legitimate to try to control our lives with other images. We are rarely aware of what degree we are lying to one another. We are walking lies. We say one thing while we mean something very different. At some level, we know we are lying and then guilt comes in; which is another expression of ego.

My family, as I was growing up, always lied. None of them would admit to themselves or anyone else that they were liars. It was always too painful for them to face the facts and be honest. I was the black sheep of the family. Not because I was evil, but because I told the truth. I knew all the ways to keep the family doing what I wanted them to and it would have been very easy to be in complete control. In this society, I was handicapped by my unwillingness to play the game. Most of the time the family was angry with me. I learned to live with that and even enjoyed it.

I am not saying I was not also conditioned and responded according to that conditioning. We can see certain lies in others, yet be blind to our own lies. The ego was there and made life a living hell.

It did protect me from getting into things like religion. It was clear from an early age that people were always trying to find something to believe in no matter how insane it was. I was also lucky that my family was not religious. Except for my grandmothers. They had both seen too much pain to go on not believing in something beyond their suffering.

Most people go through their whole lives and never really question what is really going on within them. They could not stand to face themselves in complete honesty. However, it is in being truly honest about ourselves that we can start to become free of this fog that keeps us from direct contact with life.

Of course, most of us do feel a direct contact with life from time to time. As we walk alone in nature, we can sometimes open to that primal suchness that life is. Or when we hear children's laughter, or see a newborn baby. When we let go of ourselves while listening to or playing music, then life can be felt deeply and directly. As when we look into the eyes of someone we care deeply for. We are not totally lost by any means. However, all too often when we have these feelings, the mind comes in and wants to repeat the experience. As soon as that image comes up in the mind, the contact is broken and we find ourselves back where we were. It is the ego that wants to repeat an experience and when it does, it creates time, which is separation. Life is an ever-changing nowness, and that is the only space where we can meet it, as It. It is not easy to step away from countless generations of conditioning and get beyond the sense of separation most people feel, but it can be done.

This is the most painful part of that sense of separation most people feel: we are not really in touch with life. We go through the motions of living, but in a very real sense, we are already dead. Most of us have been dead since childhood. The wall of lies we call our lives numbs us. Everything becomes a facade of our ideas about what is real. If we did not live that way we could not do the things we do to cause such suffering in other people and creatures that share this life with us. We could not be conned into going to war over something that has nothing to do with the average person's life. All through history, the little people have had to give their lives and the lives of their children to those in power in order to fight for some nationalistic beliefs or just plain greed. We are so easy to control. If you stand up against those in power, you are called a traitor and risk your own life. If we were awake, we could not be controlled by any power.

If we really want to change this world of madness, we need to find out just how asleep we are and why. Then try to raise our children to be honest and fearless. We need to honor the truth and see beyond the imaginary world of ego. If we want a direct experience of life, we need to get beyond the ego fog that blinds us. To see directly sounds so simple. We all think we do that, but by looking deeply into this whole process, we start to see how little we really see.

It seems like the world is starting to be open to something new. In my lifetime, I have seen many changes that would not have been possible in the distant past. People have started to question and really want to understand why the world is in such a mess. There is hope. During the over of a quarter of a century that I have been talking with people about this, very few really wanted to understand; in the last few years that has changed. Now there are thousands of people visiting my website each month and many people writing to me. It is becoming very clear we are heading towards a major shift in the way people see life. It may well be the beginning of a new age for humankind. However, there could be an ego backlash that will make life on this planet worse for a time. Each one of us has a responsibility to do our best to come to understand what is going on and see through the eye of sanity. We do not have to go on being walking facades; we can be Life Itself.