You were designed to live a radiant, joyous, and fulfilling life. You know that inherently, because every time you’ve lived radiantly, you’ve been at peace, in a state of internal alignment, and at one with the world beyond you. These feelings are unavoidable; they are the natural and ineluctable result of a radiant posture.

The alternative–living reactively–is often painful and unpredictable. Basing your expression (i.e. your thoughts, words, and deeds) exclusively on what is going on round about creates a pillar to post existence. Living reactively, from the outside in, as opposed to living radiantly, from the inside out, goes against the grain of being and makes life tiring, tiresome, and ultimately unfulfilling.

You arrived on this planet with a single purpose. A concise description of this can be found in the Book of Matthew: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” (KJV Matthew 5:16) The term “light” is used to describe the “radiance” I am describing. “Men” is used to denote “mankind,” “works” means your “expression” (i.e. thoughts, words, and deeds) and “Father which is in heaven” means both the angel/specific focal point of deity within you and the larger pattern of “God” of which you in the internal sense are a specific focalization.

Notice in this remarkable verse that it begins with “let.” It doesn’t say, “try,” “strive,” or “struggle.” It says, “let.” Radiance comes naturally; it is the result of letting. You do not need to find yourself, make something of yourself, or create a life for yourself. The question asked of children, “What do you want to be when you grow up” is misguided at best. You already ARE something and you are here to reveal that resident, inner essence throughout your lifetime, in concert with the rest of humanity.

Manufactured radiance is artificial light. Most are aware that artificial light is much different than sunlight. Artificial light allows us to manipulate the cosmic rhythms and cycles of which we are a part, altering the natural oscillation of day and night, darkness and light. It has proven to be detrimental to mental and emotional health, despite the short-term boost in productivity it facilitates. Artificial light literally removes us from the “wheels” of the larger creative context of which we are an integral part, while making us feel more in control of the natural rhythms in which we are contained.

If you remove a wheel from a car’s drivetrain, it is much harder to move the wheel from one place to another. On a hot day, moving a detached wheel from point A to point B will be an exhausting, dirty, sweaty, frustrating struggle. That same wheel, when properly attached to a vehicle it was designed to carry, will move effortlessly from point A to point B when moved by a motor and drivetrain and not by hand. The moment mankind stopped “letting” in this sense was the moment that life became a sorrowful struggle.

In the world mankind has created for itself (voluntarily, if not willfully), we spend most of our time surviving and very little of it living. The world was not originally designed to be a stage setting for an arduous and painful game of the survival of the fittest; it became that way when we divorced ourselves from the cosmic rhythms that coordinate literally everything else in the universe.

The good news is that we can return to the state of coordination, integration, and alignment that was once our daily bread. But to do so, we must remember how to let. We must let go, but beware: letting go is a twofold process. We must let go of while letting go to. We must let go of the idea that we are here to make something of ourselves and let go to the source of Being that is present within each and every one of us. We must eschew the artificial, self-manufactured world that mankind has claimed as its own and let go to what is perhaps best described as reality.

Laboring under the ceaseless, manufactured light that casts flickering shadows in the sweatshops of human, self-motivated effort is a far cry from living in the the alternating brilliance of a sunlit day and the restful quiet of a moonlit night. True rest is only possible to those who stop laboring in vain. You have all the radiance you need within you to know peace, joy, and fulfillment all the days of your life. You are, in reality, an aspect of the light.

You can be you while you are here on earth. You needn’t wait until after your death to know yourself and your purpose, to know others and to assist them to their fulfillment, and to understand the larger context in which you are set.

You are light. You are here to let that light shine before your peers that they “may see your good works” and “glorify your father which is in heaven.” There is a father or mother within you; this is the eternal, perfect, unmarred, invisible, yet radiant Being that you are, were, and always shall be. Remember, you are a human Being, not “only human” as some might say. The being that you are is “in heaven,” that is, a permanent resident of the invisible realm of cause. The human part of you (which makes up the overwhelming majority if not the entirety of the sense of identity of most people) is meant to be the effect of that deeper cause, not a reflection of the environment around you.

The question is, will you let the light that you are, shine, or will you continue to cast a false light, a graven image of yourself in the performance of your life? Will you let go of the identify you’ve created for yourself and let the reality of you be known through you, as it finds its expression in the world around you through your service to others? You must let go of and let go to to let your light so shine. There is no other way.