We are all on a journey to learn, grow and improve. We do this by opening up to and experiencing spiritual truths and insights that have always been around and then applying these guiding principles in our daily lives to grow and improve our humanness in the quest to be successful in getting what we want and helping others do that too. This is frequently called living a good life.

     Much of life is searching through this and that to find the most useful stuff from all the rest of the useless nonsense. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack. There is a lot of hay that has to be gone through and sometimes it gets like snakes on a plane.  The chaos distracts us from finding the needle and sometimes even from remembering what we were doing.

     One of the biggest sorting processes occurs in our relationships with other people—trying to get past the visible, annoying differences to get to the more enjoyable, invisible commonalities and have a magical meeting of being. The important commonalities we all share are the needs we all have and the common successes and failures we have in meeting those needs. An important realization is that these needs all come from different parts of us, but they interact with each other like a pretzel and that can get very confusing. Sometimes, where one stops and the other starts, is not clear. Neither are causes and effects. And of course they never happen in any predictable way, just to keep things interesting.

    Here is a useful way to understand what is actually going on inside with the four cornerstones of our human being and what each needs:

WHAT OUR MINDS NEED:

• To know what time it is.
  
• To comprehend the meaning and utility of important experiences we have.
  
• To distinguish between moments of opportunity vs. moments of danger.
  
• To continually grow the size of our treasure map piece by mixing both concrete and abstract meanings from many sources.
  
• To form a more accurate and complete viewpoint that gets positive results in helping ourselves and others progress in reaping an abundant harvest.
  
• To understand our private purpose and how to best live it.
  
• To remember all the wisdom that was planted in our unconscious minds.
  
• To understand these other three cornerstones.
  
• To be as certain as we can about the realities we see and act on, in sorting the 5% sense from the 95% nonsense.

WHAT OUR HEARTS NEED

• To love and be loved and be safe and protected from fear and rejection.
  
• To understand and accept others and be understood and accepted.
  
• To be fully free in both our unique individuality and common equality.
  
• To experience the relief of loosening our control grip and letting go and giving in (taking the Nestea plunge).
  
• To feel empathy with others and give generously and unselfishly.
  
• To express the level of creativity that solves life’s most difficult problems.
  
• To sense the grand satisfaction of replacing our pride and ego’s achievements with gracious humility and anonymous selfless service.
  
• To feel comfortable in taking leaps of faith in growing our hearts.
  
• Breathless moments of romance.
  
• To dream and imagine no boundaries. 

WHAT OUR SOULS NEED:

• To experience and understand our whole self, including our dark shadows, so we can become who we think we already are.
  
• To know wisdom and apply it for good purposes.
  
• To be surprised.
  
• To experience God directly in nature, relationships and dark times.
  
• To join and be re-connected with other souls in the oneness of God.
  
• To reconcile opposites for the peace of understanding and more perfect completion of the creative process.
  
• To go from thinking and feeling and doing, to being.
  
• To expand awareness of everything by unfolding our potential.
  
• To experience life without judgment or expectations.  

WHAT OUR BODIES NEED:

• To live and die and breathe much in between.
  
• To be treated like a holy temple rather than an amusement park.
  
• To make passionate love with life with our whole being—mind, heart, soul, body and spirit.
  
• To be healthy, fit and appealing with our physical uniqueness.
  
• To be fully alive with a driving positive zest for life.
  
• To eat well, work hard, play enthusiastically and sleep peacefully.

     The bottom line is that life is the process of satisfying all these needs. Of course they are all different for each of us and even different at different times for all of us. The first step to getting what you want is to learn to want what you have. This safe oasis is a good place to rest and take an honest inventory of what you do and don’t have, so that you can begin to learn why. This where you stop doing and start being in giving to get. And each time you become better equipped to deal with greater adversities and obstacles in the climb up the stairs.

     Once you are clear on what you do or don’t have from all these basic mind, heart, soul and body needs, then you can begin to set your priorities—to actively pursue what you are closest to from where you are right now or are otherwise able to get to, adding other people’s treasure map pieces to your own in gradually getting a bigger map and closer to the treasure.   And fortunately you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time because lots of people have useful treasure map pieces to help you enlarge the one you have to close the gap between what you have and what you want and help others do that too. And there are plenty of treasure hunt success clues available for the asking.

     Now here is the semi-bad news. All this can change from moment to moment and that is why it is so important to know what time it is.  What time is it for you?