Problems on the path, and Steve’s solutions
Dr Steve Whiteman’s teaching and spiritual practice return again and again to one very simple thing—noticing.
Noticing is the elemental human awareness, and yet to survive our fast-paced, stressed-out lives we regularly practise blunting our senses so we don’t notice. In his writing and teaching, Steve demonstrates that freedom from stress, worry, guilt, anger—from the suffering created from all human effort—lies in noticing what is, as it is.
‘‘People who have spiritual experiences regularly say there are no words to describe it,’’ Dr Whiteman says. ‘‘They heard, saw, felt something, but the words don’t measure up to what they experienced. The experience had a freshness, aliveness that words don’t get to. You can have this alive, fresh experience all day long when you pass from knowing the leaves are green to noticing the shades, hues, textures, highlights, and shadows of leaves in all their variation.’’ From the perspective of enlightenment, everything is perfect as it is… including you. Yet most people take it quite seriously that a lot of change need to take place in themselves and the world. The paradox is that you’re perfect just as you are AND you have to change.
How can this be? Because your personal reality is an illusion.
You can’t improve reality. There are no tricks, methods, techniques, or conjuring that will have any affect at all on reality. You can, however, create your own illusion. It’s when you mistake the illusion for reality that you suffer.
What Dr Whiteman wants is for people to become a master of their illusions. Beginning with your personal reality exactly as it is real for you, he notices deeply where you are flexible and where you have confused aspects of your life, then works and plays to show you how to become a magician of your illusions. When you get it in your bones that having money, great sex, material wealth, satisfying relationships, spiritual accomplishments, and more are all illusions, it becomes enormously easy to have all of that. Life will become a game, and the work of life will become play.
Once you perceive your illusions and become a magician of your personal reality, an interesting thing happens. You begin to lose interest in something as trivial as fancy card tricks (manipulating your illusion), and you naturally, organically experience spiritual growth.