The bookcover for Your Little Big You Adventure

Book excerpts Copyright © 2020 Lance Owen Paxton. All rights reserved.

The reproduction or transmission of this book in whole or in part in any manner whatsoever, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior permission from the author is prohibited except in the case of brief acknowledged quotations.

Book Excerpts taken from

Your Little Big You Adventure

Birthday Suit Life

The Secret To Discovering Your Enlightened Life


He asked, “Where’s your birthday suit?” She replied, “It’s always here, right behind my clothes.” Then he said, “What’s behind your birthday suit?” She thought about it, then said, “I really don’t know.” — Unknown

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born…and the day you find out why. — Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

One of them asked me, “Who are you?” I said, “I don’t know, but I can tell you my name.” — Anonymous

The root problem of human life is our false, limited, and inadequate sense of self, our fuzzy identity. Others have told us who and what we are. We need to be told that again but this time by and for ourselves.

For too long, the process of discovering and knowing our true identity has been hidden, presented in strange ways, and made to seem difficult or impossible to achieve. This book is the “made simple” version of discovering your one true identity. Your true identity is the key that will unlock your enlightenment.

This process of expanding your awareness can be likened to being in a dark space illuminated only by a 10-watt light bulb. You can only see outward for a little distance, but then you see another light bulb at the edge of the circle of darkness. You get this new bulb and use it in the lamp, replacing the 10-watt bulb. It’s a 40- watt bulb, and now you can see so much more of what is all around you. You see another bulb and use it. Now you can see much, much more with a 100-watt bulb. You are unbelievably joyful. You never knew you and the world were really all like this all along, and it’s fantastic! You just didn’t know it, couldn’t have known it before.

In the beginning, my parents taught me all about my birthday suit, about everything in the world, really. Your parents and others told you stories that you had no choice but to believe. They gave you what they thought you needed for your life to come. But they also gave you a false, self-limiting, and inadequate sense of self.

If you accept and believe what others have said you are, every decision you make from then on will be wrong for you. The life you could have had has been stolen from you. To fully live your life, you’ll need to discover your inner self, your true identity.

Who Others Think You Are — Your Outer (External) Identity

You are a brand-new birthday suit! Happy Birthday! You were born on planet earth at a certain place and at a certain time, and that has determined most of your identity.

Amazing, yet factually true: you can live out your entire life never knowing your true identity. The key questions are: How much better could your life be if you did know it? And what are you missing if you don’t know it?

It starts in childhood, the programming of your birthday suit. It’s what those around you showed to you when you were a near-blank slate. At a young age, you observed, conformed to, and accepted their feelings and thoughts. This is the reality of your situation. It was your total reality. You were taught, you were programmed. Those complex elements in the process of observation, interaction,rewards and punishments, shaming, praising, and on and on, have all shaped your mind and your feelings and your will; even the lack of some of them has done so.

When a child is born the child is full of curiosity, joy, compassion, and empathy, then we impose limitations. We say you are this type of person. We restrict the child’s identity. Where in fact you have infinite potential. The child is bamboozled into a restricted identity instead of its infinite potential. — Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Oz program, October 15, 2019

No, others don’t really know you, do they?

Others have no direct access to your inner world. Your mind, your thoughts, your emotions.

Appearances are the visible realities of your human life that you must either overcome or take advantage of when dealing with others.

This will be all that most people will ever know about you. They will know you as another human body in the world—they will know only the external you.

One Key to Personal Freedom

Never accept an externally defined identity/role as your true Identity.

Stay vigilant, stay aware, be conscious, to avoid slipping into this behavioral trap.

The Bigger Picture, Enter the Ego

Your ego desperately attempts to focus your attention on the outer world. The outer world is presented to you by your birthday suits five sensory organs: eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue. The brain processes the sensory signals that produce almost all that you know about your environment.

The result of your brain’s processing of your sensory signals is seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. In short, your familiar outer or external world magically appears.

The ego steps in here and seeks the best of each sensory input for you. This is what keeps you active in the outer world. Besides seeking and acquiring the life- sustaining necessities, the ego keeps you focused on finding pleasure and avoiding pain, based on your sensory signals.

That’s it, that’s your and everyone else’s outer life in a nutshell.

Sometimes all it takes is a tiny shift of perspective to see something familiar in a totally new light. — Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

Inner Life, Level 1

Level 1 of your inner life is what you’ve considered your mind, and you’d be right. It’s what the ego uses for command and control of your external birthday-suit life.

Level 1 is a place you are familiar with. This is what has been described thus far.

Level 1 is the ego’s playground, because the ego prefers that you don’t think about what you are thinking about! The ego prefers that you immediately act on the thought streams that it provides to you without questioning them, by keeping you unaware of them.

The Christian teacher, Joyce Meyer, advises wisely: “You need to think about what you are thinking about.”

Your first step up within your inner world is to become aware of your thought streams. The ego knows that if you become aware of your thoughts and the thinking process, it (the ego) will begin to lose control of you.

You will have achieved Level 2 knowledge of your inner world when you develop self-awareness, meaning thought awareness.

Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate. —Eckhart Tolle

What Are We, Then?

All this vast, complex, interesting knowledge now known about the physical universe appears to be useless in discovering the answer to the heart of our greatest human mystery: What is our true identity?

Why is this? Because most of the science-based disciplines are laser focused on the things being observed and not on the observer.

To quote Dr. Deepak Chopra:

Our science has devoted itself only to that which is observed, and then when psychology came along to the process of observation. But our science never devoted itself to who is observing! And a science that does not take into account the observer, who is so fundamental to the observation because without the observer there would be no observation, it is an incomplete science. We cannot call it a science. Unless we include consciousness, we cannot call it a science.

But the answer that observational, science-based knowledge has given to us is one astounding clue. We now know that our familiar earth-world reality is not, in fact, as real as we think it is or even anything like we think it is!

Just let that sink in for a bit.

We can only conclude that the truth of our human identity is not “out there” somewhere, no matter how many rocks we look under. Rather, it’s in here, within the inner world of us humans. We who are the observers, through our earth suits, of all of the physical-material phenomena.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it. —Max Planck, quantum physicist

What is My Birthday Suit, Really?

We human beings identify with things we are not, all the time.

For example, someone can identify with a sports team or player so strongly that they “become” them during the game. They then experience the highs and the lows, but it’s just an illusion. The super-fan shouts “We won!” However, what really happened was that the team won, the super-fan didn’t. But the fan, through an unconscious process of intense identification and boosted by strong emotion and desire, had an illusory experience of winning along with the team.

We, as birthday suits, identify with people, with sports teams, with the characters that actors play, etc. We see something in the outer world that we think about ourselves, and it touches our hopes, our dreams. For some reason unknown to us, we just identify with that outer something. The “identifying” can be a light passing interest or a complete obsession that could alter the entire course of our life.

The Evidence Has Spoken

The human earth suit is a biological, robotlike (automaton) creation. It is created by its parents. It is an incredibly complex, complicated, beautiful biological device. It has a limited duration of operation. It has a “default” life plan of its own that it will follow, running on automatic, under its ego’s control. This “default” earth-suit life plan can be modified by the owner, though most owner-operators are not aware that this is even possible.

The basic message of your ego is constantly flooded into your thought stream.

Note that the ego wants you to think “I” (I’m this, I think this, I am this) when it supplies this type of thought stream, which could be named the ego pledge of allegiance:

I am an earth suit, I am my ego, I will focus only on what my five bodily earth-suit senses and my ego tell me. This physical-material earth world and universe is the only reality. There exists nothing else, and there is no proof of anything else. I will spend all of my time seeking sensory pleasures and seeking the means to secure them while also attempting to avoid sensory pain. I will survive, and I will reproduce. This is all that I want and need.

The earth-suit ego wants you to see everything as though you are this “I.” It does not want you to consider that your “I” is really Little Big You.

The earth-suit ego doesn’t want you to become awake and aware of your true identity and to live out your inner life plan (Little Big You). Because you will likely put your earth suit’s ego under your control. The earth-suit ego will actively try to prevent you from awakening to your true identity.

We human beings identify with things we are not, all the time.

Words: Why They Are So Important

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.” —Rene Descartes (1596–1650), philosopher, mathematician, and writer

It’s important when seeking your true identity to cast off the misinformation that is commonly believed to be true in the outer world, the earth world.

Word meanings produce mental images. Some words are about concepts. Those mental images and the thoughts they trigger may not matter that much in the outer world but will matter greatly within your inner world.

Leave the poorly defined words of the outer world in the outer world. No outer- world definition of words like life, death, or consciousness can assist you in your inner-world search; they will just hold back your true identity realizations. Those outer-world definitions are meant to be vague placeholders for those who don’t want to know the real answers.

Earth-world Clues

Do you remember a time when you suddenly started thinking of a certain person? Then shortly thereafter that very person texted or called you?

Perhaps while driving, you felt a sudden need to stop or to change your route. Later, you found out that if you had not changed your route, you would have met with some disaster. You may have been killed or injured or had your vehicle damaged.

Are events like these just coincidences, or are premonitions a real thing?

These kinds of events are not easily explained by the common knowledge of our outer world.

Most say to themselves, Who cares, and just move on. A few of us will take notice and remain curious about these kinds of things. As these types of events keep occurring, maybe over the span of years, the curious begin to take the clues as a real, larger mystery, asking themselves, What’s going on here?

We Need a New Tool

Our outer-world ego-driven life experience leaves our mind a scattered mess. It’s impossible for a scattered mind to successfully navigate its inner world.

Unbelievably, though thinking is a critical life skill, no formal school curriculum exists that teaches students the basics of how the mind works: skills like how to focus, how to direct thought, how to keep your attention span, how to control emotions, etc. Learning anything from school subjects to sports involves having these kinds of mental disciplines. The more thought discipline, the more success at anything. And most importantly, your attention span must be under your personal control.

Few of us are taught any of the mind disciplines, to our own detriment. We’ll never accomplish much with our mind adrift. The huge lost opportunity cost is ours to pay. This is a central failure of a clueless educational system that ultimately promotes underachieving people and an underachieving society. What a waste.

This adrift mental condition is also known as having a “monkey mind.” This is a state of mind where the attention endlessly jumps from one thing to the next, based on any stimulus. Some examples of interruptions include glimpsing a shiny object, thinking a random thought, hearing a sound, smelling or seeing food, glimpsing movement, and so on. Along with the monkey’s mind, so leaps the monkey’s body from one activity to another, willy-nilly.

A tool is needed that will train your mind to focus and maintain an attention span. When you have developed the ability to focus, you may then enter your inner world with effectiveness. You will be entering into a mind-based world navigated by your directed thought.

Once you have learned, practiced, and become proficient in the thought skills, you will be able to discover the hidden knowledge that you will use to further expand your new state of expanding awareness and expanding comprehension of your true identity.

This process of expanding your awareness can be likened to being in a dark space illuminated only by a 10-watt light bulb. You can only see outward for a little distance, but then you see another light bulb at the edge of the circle of darkness. You get this new bulb and use it in the lamp, replacing the 10-watt bulb. It’s a 40- watt bulb, and now you can see so much more of what is all around you. You see another bulb and use it. Now you can see much, much more with a 100-watt bulb. You are unbelievably joyful. You never knew you and the world were really all like this all along, and it’s fantastic! You just didn’t know it, couldn’t have known it before.

Thoughts

Thoughts that appear and disappear in our mind determine the course of our life.

Until you become aware of your thoughts, those thoughts will control you. Once you become aware of thoughts, you will be able to accept or reject any thought stream and its attempted control of you.

The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. — Eckhart Tolle

Is it true that “I am this body, I am this mind,” or is it true that “I am that which is aware of this body and this mind?” Or both?

Prior Events to My Awakening Experience

Leading up to this transformational awakening experience, I had been taking actions in the hope that this or something like it would happen to me. But this was so much more than I had anticipated.

First, I decided to just talk into a portable voice recorder while driving to and from work. I could then play the recording back later and act like my own psychological analyst, which suited my budget perfectly.

I made just one rule for myself. I’d be totally honest and brutally truthful with myself—no avoiding what I knew to be the truth or lying to myself. Near the beginning, I realized when speaking into the recorder that I was lying, not saying what I knew to be my actual thoughts. I was providing a cover story for myself to myself! We humans are very good at self-deception. At that moment, though, I did at last become honest. I just began to speak it as I knew it, not as a cover story for others or even for myself. Just complete “stream of consciousness” talking.

And verbally expressing “the truth” of what I was really thinking and feeling about me, everybody, and everything I knew brought me a huge sense of relief. I realized then what confession actually means and how it can free you from your self-made mental and emotional prisons (ego-driven life). From then on, listening later to the playback of many recordings really shocked me even more into reality.

I continued with stream of consciousness rambling—just speaking whatever thoughts came into my mind into the audio recorder microphone. I’d reflect on what I liked in my life, what I wanted, what made me angry, happy, etc. I puzzled over what was motivating my behavior and that of my co-workers, friends, and enemies and my actions and reactions to all of it.

It became easier to do as time went on. My innermost thoughts had a voice now. They became my external dialogue with myself. I could then listen to them objectively and nonjudgmentally during playback.

The goal always being to express my thoughts, feelings, motivations with complete honesty. It was a kind of confession by me to myself. It was not easy.

The freedom lay in the honest confessing. I realized that some things that remain hidden from ourselves, because of our own self-deception and rationalizations, continue to have power over us and can make us unconsciously do things that are not in our best interest.

Insights from Self-Realization and Awakening

I experienced an exhilarating sense of freedom. Everything that was familiar became fresh, new, and full of possibilities. Don’t like something? Just change the thoughts in your mind—meaning, just think something else. Do something else. I was now aware that I did not have to think more about whatever thought happened to pop into my head.

Before that transformational moment, I was not self-aware enough to realize that I could separate those thoughts or any thoughts from myself. I did not have to accept or reject them. I did not have to automatically act on them. I could just let them go. Allow them to float off to wherever. If they were important, they’d be back. I finally had the freedom to live a self-directed life.

I had an ecstatic experience of real joy, true freedom, peace, and love, unlike anything before or since. The one remaining fear? It was that this newfound joy of self-remembering and self-realization of my true identity would end or somehow be lost to me, and my old state of being would return. I resisted going to sleep that night for fear of waking up to life in my old mindset.

When I woke up, I was not in the old mindset. I was still truly awake!

The following is a list of some of the startling self-realizations and insights that came immediately or within a short time after:

A New Identity Realized?

You are more than your physical body and ego. This book has presented powerful evidence that a permanent you exists. That permanent you, you the Person, will continue to exist past your current lifetime experience. This evidence is intellectual knowledge, which can either be accepted or rejected by you. If you accept this, then the authors sincere wish is that you will put the realization methods provided in this book into practice to make it real for you.

About the Author

L. Owen Paxton

A life-long learner and free thinker, L. Owen Paxton is devoted to the pursuit of truth in life and the living of it, wisdom of the ages, lessons of history as applied to the present, eternal truths and the way forward for humanity and the planet, and in human health. He attended the University of Miami, studying Finance and Philosophy, when quite by a chance recommendation of a friend, took an Engineering course in Computers and Programming. That began a long professional career as a consultant to business and government. After undergoing a deep personal transformation, he evolved into teaching and the study of human potential and personal development. He is married and has three adult children. Preferring to live in a natural setting, he lives in the northern Rocky Mountains within sight of the Grand Teton Mountains.