The Heartbook of Healing Wisdom shared here is a draft entitled Let’s Assemble the Puzzle to End Personal Violence and Planetary Exploitation by Nurturing Wholeness as Our True Nature.  (Click on the link to access a .pdf version for you to review.)  It promotes deeply penetrating healing for all heartaches caused by the ego’s harmful misrepresentations about life.  Since all violence is rooted in false ideas, we can unite to most effectively end violence by introducing true ideas and learning how to practice them in our own lives.

This short booklet summarizes core material from The ABCs of Love helpful to anyone who desires to live with courage and conviction as a citizen of a culture in which love overcomes all fears and empowers everyone to recover from the harmful side-effects of living as if ego were our true identity.  Ego is a false identity that forms in our minds as we lose heart under the relentless onslaught of the egos around us.  While we raise children in an ego-dominated, fear-subservient culture, generation after generation of us inevitably adopt ego as our false identity just to survive and get along.  The ego threatens to punish us with isolation and loneliness unless we conform to the ego’s ways.  To gain the rewards of social approval, the ego convinces us that we must do things the ego’s way.  Many of us become addicted to social approval and struggle to stand up for ourselves while we keep believing that we must please everyone.  Developing the habit of always being controlled by what others think of us turns out to be unhealthy — depressing and anxiety-ridden.  We are not satisfied with living as puppets who dance on strings of social approval.

The ego’s ways are cruel!  We can let go of our ego-based habits and their downward drag and instead rise upward beyond the cruelty, tyranny and violence of the ego.  To do so, we must stop addressing merely the symptoms of the ego’s reign over our lives and instead focus directly on the ego as the cause of all forms of personal violence and planetary exploitation.  The ego is an invasive species in the human ecosystem.  We must remove it entirely by soaking ourselves in unconditional love that dissolves all of the fears that gave birth to the ego in the first place.  Once we taste the nutritious benefits of humility we will be hooked on an alternative way of life.  We will be hooked on limitless, all-inclusive love — a life-sustaining energy for which there is no scarcity nor need to compete.

In forming our own ego early in life to protect us from this onslaught, we adopted the motto “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”  Behind our ego’s walls we learned to hide the tender-hearted, innocent and creative qualities with which we are naturally endowed.  We learned to avoid vulnerability and transparency.  Eventually, because we invested so much time and energy in developing our ego, we came mistakenly but logically to identify with it as if it were “who we are” instead of merely a system of mental defenses.  The ABCs of Love now offers us opportunities to learn to nurture our true nature and share it in the safety of love’s presence.  In this way, the debate between “nurture” and “nature” is resolved as unnecessary.  As we learn to nurture our true nature, we realize that it’s all one process that promotes the best outcome for us all without need to feel either superior or inferior to each other.

The ego leaves us stranded amid puzzling appearances of conflicts that are not necessary.  These scattered pieces frustrate our powers of reason because they are illusions born of the ego’s dualistic, fear-driven way of thinking.   Every issue need not be divided into a separate piece and analyzed as either “this or that” as if everything has something with which it must be in competition or conflict.   We are gradually realizing the fallacy of such limited thinking and accepting that, for many elements of life, there is a continuum or spectrum within which many possibilities exist.  In the field of quantum physics, we are even realizing that many aspects of life are more inter-connected and in unity than ego allowed us to imagine.  As we practice the principles of The ABCs of Love, we discover this inter-connectedness, unity or “oneness” within humanity as well.

With this revised perspective, we will become more aware of the natural synergy and synthesis of life.  We will become eager to explore the full breadth, height and depth of the creative, multidimensional possibilities we’d not previously sensed were available to us as alternatives to the destructive, flat-lining options we’d accepted as inevitable.  The ego put blinders on our minds.  We can remove them.

We can put the puzzle pieces together to avoid being stranded as egos once we realize how misleading our egos are and cease to listen to their foolish ideas.  Wisdom’s guidance delivers us from the ego’s foolish ways.  Wisdom shows us how to recover our natural capacity as Authentic beings to Bond within the unifying atmosphere of love and Cooperate to establish an alternative culture to the ego’s distorted one.  Within this alternative culture, each of us, without exception, is a valuable asset as a contributor to the healing and sustaining process.  Through love’s power to redeem and transform us, even those of us who feel the least social approval will demonstrate our value and validate our journeys through life as “lessons well learned.”

On ego’s terms, we allow ourselves to feel proud of some aspects of ourselves and ashamed of others.  We reveal and share what we’re proud of and do our best to hide what we’re ashamed of.  Under the ego’s rule, pride and shame, along with guilt and blame, guide our decisions and counsel us to be false to our true nature.  As a result, we fail to enjoy the love, liberty and laughter we’re meant to enjoy.  Under the ego’s rule, we also exploit Nature in wasteful ways.  In short, we adjust to being used and to using others and Nature as our “normal” way of life.

The Heartbook of Healing Wisdom presents a summary introduction to a set of materials that empowers everyone to fulfill Martin Luther King Jr’s dream of living in a society where we can judge ourselves and others by the content of our characters (rather than by the color of our skin, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality or any other subset of humanity) because we’ve learned to intentionally nurture our authenticity and integrity as our character, with mutual Appreciation, Benevolence and Compassion.  Our strength of character will empower us to resist the temptations that plague the ego’s society — such as greed, lust for pleasure and power, laziness and other corrupting influences.  We will be able to live on higher ground morally because we’ve intentionally nurtured ourselves to greater maturity developmentally.

Likewise, in honor of Gandhi, the Heartbook presents a way for everyone to “be the change in the world” that we all want to see.  Our hearts desire that our loved ones be safe and healthy and awash with heartfelt love that endures forever.  We each can become a means to achieving that outcome.  This material opens our hearts and minds to evolve, each in our individual way, along the universal way that mystics of all paths of faith have encountered and espoused for centuries.  Because it contains principles and practices that we can each carry out in our ordinary daily lives while living within our communities — without withdrawing to a monastery or living in a cave apart from others — the Heartbook outlines the “common citizen” or “householder” mystic’s perspective on life, love, learning, liberty and laughter – the Five Great L’s.  By implementing its teachings, we move forward together as a society beyond hell on earth by diligently practicing heaven’s L’s on earth.  Our current dilemmas born of arrested development are readily overcome by nurturing our maximal development.

These materials about Authenticity, Bonding and Cooperation (Love’s ABCs) are as yet incomplete and in need of further development to become the tools they have the potential to be in helping us all learn to be true to ourselves according to our divine nature and cease to cater to our own ego or anyone else’s ego.  Because the ego uses conflict to prove the necessity of being defensive and ego-oriented, the ego knows nothing about how to undo itself and allow peace to reign.  Free of the ego, we can all share a peace within which all appearances of conflict can be resolved to everyone’s mutual satisfaction.  Use of the tools and ideas contained in this heartbook leads to the ego’s undoing.  That’s why the ego resists their use.  If you want to live as a humble yet joyfully loving, loved, helpful and productive human being and no longer allow pride and shame or guilt and blame to limit you, here’s your golden opportunity.  You, too, can be the change in the world you want to see, as Gandhi admonished us all to be.

The tools contained in this document are conceptual tools by which we can retrain our minds to think of ourselves as whole persons, not merely as fragmented egos.  They help each student who uses them to imagine life beyond his or her ego’s limitations and to envision life’s expansive possibilities anew.  They also teach students how to resume awareness and appreciation for our heartfelt emotions and express and share them caringly.  Since ego’s existence depends upon our denying our emotions and burying them unexpressed except as fits of anger, self-pity or other self-defeating emotions, learning to be competent in relating to our own emotions helps us set our egos aside and live as free beings.  In that freedom, we can face life with a renewed awareness of our life’s purpose and passions.

These tools also help us move from lifestyles dominated, oppressed and exploited by fear to lifestyles freed and made creatively productive by truth and love as truth and love are defined by their Divine Source.  After reading this summary, please share your feedback with me.  Your feedback will help me to improve these materials.  If you have ideas about how to improve upon and/or share these materials more effectively through any medium, please let me know.  I welcome others to join me in co-creating diverse teaching materials that reach broader audiences in more  effective ways.  Perhaps you are a writer, illustrator, animator, graphic artist, musician, composer, dancer, choreographer or other creative being who can help to bring these materials to life!  If your heart resonates in response to The ABCs of Love, you may be helpful in sharing them with others.  Feel free to let me know what ideas come to mind.

Copyright Art Nicol 2020