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Life is complicated. It can be overwhelming to make decisions with incomplete information, such as how best to spend our time, which career path to choose, how to manage our health, and how best to strike the balance between productivity and rest.

What if there was an easy mode, where someone would tell you exactly what you should be doing during every minute of the day? What if this person had access to complete information and always chose the action that maximized your benefit? Sounds like the plot of some near-future science fiction book, right? The spiritual teacher, Bashar claims that this is how our reality works if you know how to play the game. When I first heard this, I got excited because this is a testable hypothesis. I and many others have been running this experiment, and I can testify that this does in fact seem to be how the universe works. This all-knowing advisor is your higher self or higher mind—some component of your soul that lives beyond space and time and sees a broader perspective of your life path. It communicates the right actions to take through intuition and the feeling of excitement. If you follow these hints, you will get exactly what you need at the exact time you need it.

Let’s get a better picture of how this could play out. You wake up on a Saturday morning and feel drawn to read a book. You read happily until the thought occurs to you, “I guess I should put the laundry in”. You feel good about having been productive and become motivated to do the dishes and pick up a few things that are scattered around your house. Everything is now clean and taken care of and you feel satisfied. You walk over to the window because something outside catches your eye. When you’re there you think, “It’s a nice day! I’ll go for a walk”. Before you leave, you load the laundry in the dryer. Outside, you start down the route you usually take but then something attracts you to a street on the left you normally don’t go down. You decide to go, and on that street, you run into a friend you’ve been meaning to reach out to. They invite you to go swimming in the river. That sounds great, so you agree. You invite them back to your house so you can change into your bathing suit. When you arrive, your house is spotless and ready for company. Your bathing suit has just finished drying in the dryer. You change, and as you’re walking to the river, your friend mentions a problem they’re working through. Coincidentally, you have the answer they’re looking for because you were just reading about it in your book this morning.

Bashar’s formula for how to achieve this state is as follows. 1) Act on your excitement in the moment. This could be working on big goals, or it could be as simple as deciding which direction to walk or which stretch to do next. 2) Do this to the best of your ability for as long as you feel motivated to do so. You were excited to read until you felt like you wanted to do the laundry. 3) Act on your excitement with no insistence on what you think the outcome should be. You don’t really know what the optimal outcome will look like so you have to remain open to whatever comes your way. In the example above, if you countered the thought about walking down that side street with the thought “well I never go that way, so why should I go now,” you would miss out on the opportunity to see your friend. 4) Choose to remain in a positive state no matter the outcome. This is critical, as we will see in a minute. 5) Constantly investigate your belief systems and release/replace fear-based beliefs with those that are in alignment with who you prefer to be. Pay attention to what motivates your thoughts. Thoughts like, I haven’t painted in a while, so I guess I need to paint or else my skills will waver, are fear based rather than excitement driven. When you are meant to paint again you will be excited to, rather than afraid of the consequences of not painting right now.

It’s worth digging into these last three steps. You’ll notice that in my river example everything works out in a positive way for all, but rules three to five of the formula imply that acting on your excitement may not result in the outcome you hope for. It is critical not to ignore this. Following your excitement sometimes brings about objectively negative outcomes, but if it does, this is because the present time is the optimal time for you to deal with the negative outcome. Your higher self is bringing something to your attention that you need to deal with in this moment.

For example, yesterday I felt compelled to get tickets to a baseball game. I looked at the list of available dates and realized the one that was most exciting to me was later that same night. I asked my wife if I could go. She hesitated because that would mean she had to take care of our two-year-old son alone all night. She said yes and I bought the tickets, but I was immediately hit with guilt. I felt like I was a selfish, terrible person. How could I abandon my family to do something that only I enjoy? Parents of young children will be extremely familiar with this situation. I hated how I felt, but my higher self was directing me to encounter this difficulty at that time because it was the best time to deal with some issues I’ve struggled with for most of my life—the fear of being selfish and the fear of asking for what I truly want when it’s not what others want.

When you follow your excitement and encounter an outcome you don’t prefer, which elicits a strong negative emotion, Bashar suggests you ask the following questions. “What would I have to believe is true about myself to experience this emotion?” and “What am I afraid will happen if I follow this excitement?” Asking these questions allows you to find the negative beliefs that underpin the emotions, and once these are found, you will see that they are nonsensical. In this case, I would have to believe that it’s not okay to occasionally do things for myself. This is nonsense. I am an involved father, and I love my family. Everyone needs a break sometimes to pursue the things they find truly exciting. If it were my wife asking to go do something she loved, I’d have no problem giving her that gift, just as she gave it to me. Like many of us, I have a harder time receiving gifts than giving them. To answer the question, “What am I afraid will happen,” I was afraid my wife would believe I only think about myself and that she wouldn’t love me. I was afraid that taking care of myself in this way would make me a bad person. All these beliefs are nonsense, and going through this investigative exercise made them appear so. I went to the game and had an amazing time.

As I mentioned, I’ve been using the formula in my life. I applied it while writing this blog post, and it helped in several ways. First, I felt genuinely excited to be working on the post every time I sat down to write. When that excitement faded, I followed it elsewhere. Life is much easier when you’re engaged in an activity you’re excited about instead of forcing your way through it. Second, it calmed my mind to trust that the post would be completed when it was meant to be and would contain exactly what it was meant to contain. The formula helped me bypass the inner critic that constantly evaluates how things are going and whether a task is done “well enough.” I relied on the belief that my higher self would guide me to finish it at the right time, with the right content. Third, it took some time to settle on an image to go along with the post, but again I trusted that the right one would appear when it was meant to. I can’t explain why I like the one I chose—but I do—and the anxiety I might normally have felt about the decision was completely bypassed.

If these ideas resonated with you, Bashar covers a lot of the nuances that might come up in different situations. I highly recommend checking his content out. If you enjoy this post, check out my other blog posts here and my YouTube channel, where I post guided meditations and audio versions of my blog posts.