Face Up to F.A.C.E
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With the way the world is going, it's clear that ego has been the guiding force in everything -- actions and outcomes of lives of individuals, groups and societies stem from unconscious connections to the acronym FACE.

F-A-C-E are four tools that our small ego personalities use to block our transformation towards freedom. It means: FEAR, ATTACHMENT, CONTROL and ENTITLEMENT = FACE. And don't we know this all? Fear of growing old and the future, of financial security, of being lonely or alone in life, of death. Then there is the attachment to all the trappings that define our personalities, our possessions, our relationships that we are attached to and perhaps are not even growing from or with. And how we know control! When it has got to be our way or the highway. Then entitlement, where our ego constructs, has defined a false sense of importance! Many of us live daily with FACE and don't even think there is anything wrong with this because we are asleep to our inner spiritual core, or to the process of our transformation and evolution?

A friend asked me, "What if I really don't care to transform?" I responded jokingly, "Then you suffer! But the truth is that when one remains asleep, unwilling to make changes, suffering will be the companion to life. Courage, detachment, surrender and humility, the opposites of FACE, are what bring us towards peace in knowing our petty selves are exactly that: petty.

"What is the purpose of life?" a priest-friend once asked me. "It's not the pursuit of happiness, but the pursuit of meaning!" he states. This phrase really got me because I was always pinpointing my life goals towards happiness. And now I learn something new: It's not happiness... but meaning, meaning. As a son or daughter, sister or brother, mother or father, wife or husband, as a leader, as a contributor to society, our journey is to find meaning as we move through the many roles we play. Once we capture meaning, the happiness and peace will follow.

Facing up to FACE is the first step. Attempting to work it out to slowly phase out some of those fears, attachments, control issues and entitlement dramas make us move into the journey of unfolding to our real selves. What will we experience beyond FACE? It allows us to touch a deeper, purer, expansive space. We enter the subtler levels -- of imagination, of the original source of creativity. This space has also been described in a number of ways: as the great mind, the collective unconscious, the field of all possibility, divine intelligence, the Tao. Acts of imagination can connect us to that place where insight and inspiration arrive unbidden -- as an out-of-the-box idea, the first line of a poem, an insight. It connects us to a direct recognition of who we are beyond our ordinary self-defined personality. In this space, we meet Self and the understanding that we are so much grander. It is the realization that deep within each of us is a part more noble, more divine, pure, clear and loving. Because of these, we can affect change beyond our wildest dreams not only in our own lives, but in our families and communities. Once the wheels of change begin to roll, transformation won't be too far behind.

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