I was permanent! Everyone in the newsroom turned to look at me as I said, quite out loud, All
right! A few of the old-timers smiled. They must have guessed, or maybe they’d been told al-
ready. I was one of them.
It hadn’t taken me long to remember how much I’d loved newspaper writing from my high-
school days. And now, here I was in a real newsroom, typewriters clacking (yes, manual
typewriters), the smell of ink and newsprint everywhere. Five months after I’d started, I was
given my first real “beat” covering the county government, which soon produced my first
Page One byline. What an exciting, joyful experience! I think that only a newspaper reporter
can appreciate what I was feeling in those days—a constant sense of exhilaration. Nothing
has topped it since, save the moment I first saw my name on the cover of a book.
Now I’ve had some friends advise me not to include anything about that in these pages. They
say that people will think less of me, and that it will invalidate what has come through me, if I
admit that I am thrilled to see my name stamped on the binding of a published book.
I guess I’m supposed to pretend that I’m very blasé about these things, that none of it has
affected me in the least, that I’m above it all because as a spiritual messenger, I should be.
But I don’t believe that as a spiritual messenger I cannot be happy with what I’m doing, or
thrilled to pieces that it is going so well. It seems to me that spiritual enlightenment is not
measured by how unaffected we are by rewards of the ego, but by how dependent we are on
them for peace and happiness.
Ego itself is not a bad thing—only ego run amok. We would do well to be wary of an ego that
controls us, but we might welcome an ego that propels us.
In life, we are constantly propelling ourselves to our next greatest achievement. The ego is
God’s gift to us, just as is everything else in life. God has given us nothing that is not a
treasure, and whether it shows up that way in our experience depends on how we use it.
I’m convinced that ego—like money—has gotten a bad name. It’s been given a bad rap. It’s
not ego, or money, or power, or unbridled sexual pleasure that is bad. It is the misuse of
these things which does not benefit us, which does not speak of Who We Really Are. If these
things, in and of themselves, were bad, why would God have created them?
So I am very okay with admitting that I was thrilled to see my first byline on the front page of
The Evening Capital, and with acknowledging that I am still thrilled today each time I see my
name on the cover of a new book—even though I still find myself saying that these books
were not written by me, but through me.
You have written these books, and it is very okay to say that you have. It is not necessary for
you, or anyone else, to hide your light under a bushel. I have made that point before. Unless
you learn to acknowledge Who You Are and what you have done, you can never
acknowledge others for Who They Are and what they have done.
It is true that you have been inspired by Me to put these principles into print. It is true that I
have given you the words to write. Does that make it any less your achievement? If it does,
than you should not honor Thomas Jefferson for writing the Declaration of Independence,
Albert Einstein for articulating the theory of relativity, Madam Curie, Mozart, Rembrandt,
Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, or anyone else who has done anything of note in the
history of the human race—because I inspired them all.