Access your emotionally neutral, higher thinking, cosmic vision. Ironically, what farseeing vision often reveals are the obvious truths that are right in front of our faces, but which are nevertheless hard to recognize. The personal view can trap us in the forever chaos of he said/she said. An impersonal or cosmic view requires fiercely looking into things without emotional entanglement. Avoid significant decisions and actions while in a state of emotional agitation. Get past the point of view of internal considering where everything is viewed by the ego as a blessing or a curse. Cut through to the core of what is going on. One way to do this with your life is to ask yourself the question: What will I remember well on my deathbed?

We live in a money matrix where so much of life is affected by buying and selling and the ebbing and flowing of money. Most people on the planet wish to have more money and feel money stress. Don't let money stress define your existence. There are ways to use money without money dominating your life.

Our money attitudes and habits are often as irrational, self-sabotaging, and established almost as early as food attitudes and habits. Working on money issues is often a catalyst for general maturation.

As with eating or sex, money is a complex process of energetic transactions. Often our patterns with one type of energetic transaction will parallel our patterns with others. For example, someone who throws caution to the wind with money may also be imprudent with their diet and/or sex.

This card relates to poverty consciousness which is not necessarily exclusive to money, but may also relate to other areas where you feel impoverished. You may feel deprived of the relationships you need, physical intimacy, time, creative opportunities, etc. The deprivation feelings are not necessarily illusory, for most of us there are real deprivations in significant areas of life. There is a very blurry boundary, however, between authentic suffering and self-pity/ victim consciousness. See Resource Fluctuations Happen — Working with Scarcity and Abundance for some ideas on how to thrive while feeling challenged for resources.

"There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;" — T.S. Eliot

You are not your persona or social self. We all put on social masks and in some circumstances they are quite necessary. But they are not who you are. If some old masks no longer serve, let them melt away.

Sometimes we put on masks to meet the outer world — we act differently at work or school than with intimate friends, adopt specialized demeanors when interacting with police or on a job interview. But some people — some police, for example, or people forever trying to be cool — come to identify with the persona. They believe they are the persona, the uniform or cool clothes wear them, and authenticity and their essence become ever more submerged. I once saw a magazine ad that showed a generic square-jawed male model looking very self-satisfied. The caption of the ad was something like this: "Underneath his Yves St. Laurent shirt, his Pierre Cardin jacket, his Porsche designer sun glasses, John Lance wears Brut." In other words, under his exoskeleton of brand names is just one more brand name. An ad for Seiko watches still currently in print says (approximately), "It's not your clothes that say the most about who you are, not your shoes, not the car you drive, not the music you listen to. It's your watch." Of course it is your self that says the most about who you are, not the brand name consumer goods, but the Babylon Matrix wants you focused on surfaces, appearances and objects. It wants you to believe that buying stuff is the key to forming an identity. Cars are especially marketed as ways to buy an identity.

I was once walking down the street at lunchtime on a weekday and saw one carefully groomed yuppie after another passing me. There was not a hair out of place, and they seemed dressed up to look just like ads they had seen in glossy magazines. In my mind's eye I saw that their energy had formed a kind of exoskeleton, their identification with persona, clothing, accessories and bodily appearance had formed them into a kind of full body helmet, polished, blow dried, glazed with subtle cosmetics, while somewhere the self, a shriveled, malnourished, somnambulant embryo lay dormant.

Molt the persona that has become attached to you through identification and feel yourself grow larger. Don't wait, like Darth Vader, for the exoskeleton to fall away on your deathbed.

It is not your brand names, not your clothes, not your car, not your hair, not your weight; it is you that says the most about who you are.

Get in touch with your essence to find out what you came here to do, or what will most fulfill you now that you are here. Youth, in this sense, is mostly metaphorical. It means that which is of your essence, your birthright, as compared to that which is imposed upon you by circumstance. Reclaiming the promise of your youth is a core task whether you are young, old or in between. The promise is that which you will remember well on your deathbed, the mission implicit in your soul. When I am fulfilling my promise, I feel a depth of well being, but when I neglect it, even for short periods of time, I am consumed by anxiety. Anxiety can sometimes be helpful as the spiritual version of pain. Just as bodily pain is crucial to keep you from harming yourself, anxiety and depression are sometimes crucial in telling you that you have "departed from the experience of meaning" (the Eranos I Ching) and need to move toward the experience of meaning, toward that which is intrinsically significant. This is easier said that done as we live in an extrinsic world that makes constant demands on our attention, time, energy and resources.

To ground this in practicality — is there a "big dream" you've had but are now neglecting? If the big dream is truly connected to your promise, you need to fulfill it. A good rule of thumb for fulfilling your big dream is that, at a minimum, any big dream needs at least two hours of focused work every day. Two-hour-plus blocks of time are hard to find. My answer is to get up early in the morning and do the high-value work before the distractions of the day set in and the low-value mechanical tasks take over. The big dream is not necessarily a creative or artistic task, it could be anything that fulfills your soul — friendship, raising children, gardening — only you know what your big dreams are.

Consider this a propitious time to fulfill the promise of your youth.

Human beings are prone to distorted self-images. Nervously we study ourselves in the carnival fun house mirrors of self-appraisal. Some mirrors make us look larger and return a grandiose and inflated image, while others make us look small and twisted. Often we judge ourselves based on body image. But we are much more than our bodies, and our bodies are much more than their topographical reflections. We also tend to be highly inaccurate in appraising our own topographical reflections.

One of the most absurd lies ever uttered is the common statement: "I don't care what other people think." Inevitably, this statement is made to other people in an attempt to persuade them of the speaker's independence creating an absurd self-contradiction. As social mammals, unless we are in a coma, are autistic or have reached some rare state of inner independence, we care very much what other people think. Typically we care too much what they think. We may arrive at a social occasion worried about our self-image and how others will appraise us. Meanwhile, the others may be much more preoccupied with their own self-images to notice much about us.

Fortunately, there are some reliable ways to get out of the neurotic prison of distorted self- image. One is to shift from internal considering to external considering in social situations. With internal considering you are evaluating everything from the perspective of your wants, needs, desires, feelings and status. If you are locked into internal considering you are on the timeline of the princess and the pea, the whole world is your irritant and everything seems to be conspiring against your comfort. With external considering you are empathically focused on others. The benefits of external considering, however, are not just for the others. External considering is often the shortest path from a thousand forms of neurotic torment which are always based on internal considering. In modern parlance this principle is sometimes referred to as: "If in doubt, focus out."

Another way out of the distorted self-image trap is to focus on what I call "existential impeccability." This is the path of the Warrior, your focus shifts from self-evaluation and anxiety about how others evaluate you to impeccability, to dealing with what the moment presents with as much efficiency and grace as possible. Acts are done for their own sake, not to appear a certain way to yourself and others.

Finally, there is the principle that William James developed called "act as if." Essentially you move toward a quality you wish you had by acting as if you already had it. James had a few versions of this principle such as:

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does."

"Act the part and you will become the part."

The modern parlance version of this principle is: "Fake it till you make it." This principle is, however, morally neutral, so it is crucial what qualities you choose to act as if. Often people act as if they were cool, and therefore they become the kind of obnoxious jerk who does everything to be cool. The best applications of act as if are when the desired qualities serve transpersonal aims — e.g. acting as if you were compassionate. If you combine act as if with external considering, existential impeccability, and a commitment to make a contribution to the world, you have a royal path out of the disempowered prison of distorted self-image.