FOREWORD FROM UNVEILING REALITY BY JOHN DE RUITER

        We humans have such an awesome capacity... we have a full spectrum of consciousness. Through the vehicles of the mind, body, emotion, will and intuition, we can experience endlessly expansive or endlessly intricate dimensions of inward and outward movement of being. Within that, as we can later come to know, we have the capacity to share in profound depths of oneness with the universe. And what we also have is power - the ultimate kind of power, the greatest power in the entire universe: We have the power to choose to be anything we prefer, real or illusory, unlike the rest of existence which can only be itself.
       
        As beings, we recognize what moves us and what we love most within those rich and diverse experiences of humanness. We clearly know the flow of goodness beneath the sensory wrappings, and we love it. It is the human heart - consciousness, finding itself in love with the Truth from which it originates, the Truth that touches it and nourishes it in so many different ways within.
       
        Those formless touches of being, which come wrapped in sensory experience, quieten and gentle our hearts and nourish us purely. They are beautiful and they are true. But instead of residing in that same true way of being, allowing those touches to move through us as easily as they moved into us, we find their beauty for ourselves. We identify with the vehicles of form through which those touches of being came, and we begin to create an identity. We isolate what brings us joy and peace, and we begin to desire that... begin to require that. We as consciousness actually have the capacity to hold onto those experiences, claim personal ownership of them, grasp anything we find pleasing and force away whatever is not. We have the power to abandon a complete and true way of being, for an inherently deficient path of self-gratification.
       
        And that is the beginning of our own distortion as consciousness. The more space we give for an illusory identity of want and need, the less room there will be for what is real. Soon, we cannot even identify what reality is. And then we begin to seek...