What is the real value and power of perhaps the most common advice we hear on a development journey, and generally in our lives — to know thyself? Why is self-awareness so core in the pursuit of purpose and meaning? Then once we answer why, what about how? 

The process of self-inquiry or self-appraisal is one of the most powerful tools we have on a journey of refinement, connection and transformation. It’s how we sense and recognize the invisible shape of our inner awareness and consciousness.

Through self-appraisal we integrate new perceptions and knowledge, which adds potency to our core conductivity, rewires our inner technology, and brings online new capacity for higher intelligence and meaning. Self-inquiry can update and elevate the purposeful journey to more fully express the emerging wave of new universal possibility.

In this conversation, Aviv Shahar is joined by two longtime Portals friends who embody an openness and ongoing self-inquiry. Jeff Vander Clute is a consultant and author of three recent books, including Beyond Every Teaching, a collection of transformative spiritual transmissions; Grace Boda is teacher, consultant and executive coach. 

The three share their inquiries and insights, and several brief transmission excerpts (in quotation marks) from Beyond Every Teaching:

• Our fear of power does more damage than power itself; it's our fear that is problematic. Use power in the right way, an aligned way, which is life expressing itself, then we can't go wrong.
• These are not simply definitions in the sense of understanding what a word means, but invitations into a deeper network, like mycelium in a rainforest; it's all interconnected.
• “The inner power of enlightenment is a hungry flame that burns every fictional identity to the ground and reduces to ashes all impulses to be someone or be something.”
• “Paths out of ego, even if well-trodden and sincerely recommended, tend to reinforce the fundamental idea of what is not really there. Every system of belief that involves the ego is a game of chance that cannot be won.”
• “Drop the pretense and observe well all that unravels and falls away. Accept upset and welcome the disruption that is the last gasp of the false, upend apple carts and topple the tables of the ego's commerce.”
• “Enlightenment is subtle, silent, and all-powerful. Enlightenment is readily recognized as a curious mastery of doing by non-doing and an effortlessness that accomplishes all.”

As you will see in the recording, the writings from Jeff are carefully and creatively formatted on the book's pages, which is part of the transmission experience.

This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel.