Important Advice for Self-Help Folks...

The self-help world -- which embraces but includes far more than merely The Secret and its associated teachings -- is full of very helpful, encouraging and sage advice.

However, it's also full of things that aren't so great -- or, to be more specific and possibly more generous than we truly need to be -- it contains unconscious people with unconscious ideas which center around two things: identifying your money and then GETTING it, somehow.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the self-help field is overwhelmed by scam artists, liars, cheats, and folks who are out to get you. Yet I am saying that as you travel this path, you do yourself a tremendous service by being both alert and aware. That doesn't mean paranoid. It simply means, well, alert and aware.

You see, the self-help path -- regardless of the path that you're on, or the tradition or the school or the teaching -- is all designed to get you more in touch with reality. This is a subtle point to understand, because many people are in fact driven to the self-help field because they don't LIKE their reality -- and they want something better!

However, the core truth is, is that real self-help is about re-connecting you with reality itself; not the (bad) reality that you interpret or project out into the world and to other people, but the reality of your BEING. You had it as a small child -- all small children do -- but you lost it (as almost all adults to). Real self-help will always try and guide you BACK to yourself.

As such, you need to pay close attention to how you feel about things and whether it's taking you closer to reality or, paradoxically, sending you further and further away. Indeed, there are some -- and I won't mention names or products -- things to buy on the Internet that seem very self-help-friendly, and contain all kinds of great marketing (with a nice little price tag at the end!), but I simply don't feel that they're much at all -- they're more designed to get your money than to help you.

Stay alert and stay aware -- that's all you need. Self-help is not a fairy tale, nor is it somehow immune from the everyday laws of reality. Fire is hot -- you won't get "away" from that reality by reading books about how to "interpret fire in a more enlightened way." Similarly, ice is cold.

And a weird "deal" that wants to part you from your money is, more often then not, indeed a weird deal that wants to part you from your money.

Be alert, be aware.