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24 May 2013 - 5:44pm
Treat each change as if it’s an unpredictable friend
Ascended Master, Serapis Bey’s Weekly Message ~ May 24 – 30, 2013
Received by Julie Miller
May 24, 2013
Each day is a new day, one to be celebrated and greeted with love and gratitude. As each day begins, so does your ability to choose every part of your day in all areas. It is true, some of the changes you make may appear to be small, but even the smallest of change that is filled with optimism and hope cultivates within each of you dependable characteristics that are nourished through your choices and the nourishment dear ones is the love you give your Self that is felt by those around you. Embrace all the changes that upon you and rejoice in the changes that are yet to appear.
It is essential to the current path of your incredible life journey to learn how to be unaffected by some of the changes that you are creating. Yes, we encourage you to notice them, but let them pass as more are coming and we encourage you through our love and support to be confident with how you learn to cope with any new development that may change the course of any situations you may currently be involved in. How you react and respond to sudden obstacles does affect how your journey will proceed – by remaining positively filled with Hope and Faith you will succeed and liberate your whole being into contentment.
It is important to once in a while to observe yourself and how you handle sudden change, or any kind of change. By carefully observing yourself, you will recognize any particular method that requires fine-tuning or replacing with more efficient and effective methods that will help you handle all changes in a positive manner.
We encourage each of you to simplify your views and attitude in regards to your life’s journey and all the areas you actively take part in every day. We observe many of you being swallowed by the bombardment of information that is coursing all around you. Allow your heart to guide to what is important right NOW – focus on one or two things at a time and stay with what your heart has drawn you to for as long as you need; there is no rush to your journey. Don’t compare your development and growth to those around you, you will grow and develop at your own pace in your own way. Your decisions dear ones affect the changes you bring, so does your mindset and how you handle the change even if you know and accept the change is good. Stay in control of each situation, not allowing any changes to get the better of you.
It is essential dear ones to already accept that change will come – always. Your life is about changes and choices and how you adapt and react to each one. Changes will never stop occurring; they will always be a part of your life. We support your ability to bring balance and renewed Hope and Faith into each instance whenever things go not according to what you planned or envisioned. Even when things are going great, always be prepared for those “just in case” scenarios when plans begin to show signs of deterioration. You elevate the amount of stress and disappointment by how attached you become to the success of any outcome. Sometimes things do get out-of-control and there is not stopping once certain things are set in motion, but how you deal with the sudden change will provide you with much insight to your own inner self that will later develop into wisdom. Hold on tight to the changes, sometimes they bring bumpy rides, but once over the growth you have received is immense and deep joy settles in from the depth of your soul and filters into your heart that glows from the outside in the form of self-satisfaction and happiness.
When you add a new addition to your routine, it is good to reflect occasionally on how to respond to possible changes that may arise. Take time to think about possible changes and how they could cause issues in other areas that you are part of. Think honestly and truthfully, how you would react to a sudden change and how you would cope to bring about a positive solution.
It is important dear ones to truly accept that there is no way for you to anticipate everything that is to come up along your journey. Embrace the unknown as it brings much of the changes that are important for your Spiritual Growth and Personal Development. There will be changes you will face from situations that are not to your liking, but they help build who you are becoming. Begin building a non-defensive strategy that is aimed at all changes and treat each change that approaches as a friend that can be disruptive and loud, but you love them anyway.
For many dear souls, they tread on change with trepidation yet change is good, never bad. Once you move away from the fear, you will soon realize that with each passing step you take, you will begin to feel more confident and your Inner Strength will supplement your energy to continue. We know how easy it is for many dear souls to see changes as doom but when you change how you look at life and embrace all changes as friends with love, this fear of change diminishes and what is replaced is a fervor of positive and optimistic thinking that everything will be fine. Be prepared dear ones for anything, and you will benefit when all commotion has settled.
Make the changes you bring about become a necessary instrument for your growth to help better yourself. Allow the approaching changes gauge your journey and direct which course you are going to take that resonates with your spiritual heart. Recognize which areas in your life that would benefit most with changes. We ask you to try to visualize possible outcomes knowing already that there is an infinite amount of possibilities. When you visualize you can add possible obstacles and the methods you would use to diffuse the obstacle efficiently and effectively. By visualizing possibilities, you provide yourself with certain knowledge on how to fix any problem that may come your way instead of trying to correct your symptom to the problem.
Remember dear ones, the changes you make are partnered with your choices and will have a great effect on your health, your home and work life. As you bring in positive changes to your life, treat your Self with compassion and love. Your body is your temple. Nourish this temple with sustenance that is pure and untainted. When you are able to Unconditionally Love your whole Self, then you will be able to Unconditionally Love all others. Bringing change doesn’t begin with any other person but you. Recognize and admit that change is necessary and will promote positive growth in all areas of your incredible journey.
When positive change and HOW you react to change is balanced and you are living from a peaceful state, the love that is your life will blossom into new levels that were not there before. Within relationships, sometimes changes can seem quite drastic to the other person. Introduce changes slowly and include the other person or people that are closest to you. You cannot force your beliefs on others, but by including them, and through your peaceful but active demonstrations that radiate Love and Light, they will see the changes you bring are good.
This is one area which we encourage you to “expect” and that is change. Expect changes because they are relevant and always occurring. Remember your journey never stops changing – embrace each change and rejoice in the unknown, even if the unknown brings unexpected changes to current situations. Teach yourself how to cope positively and always be prepared. There is nothing in your journey to regret as each step you take is filled with endless learning opportunities and each one is helping to develop and redevelop you into the beautiful being you are constantly becoming.
And so it is…
I AM Ascended Master, Serapis Bey through Julie Miller
Teaching
24 May 2013 - 11:14am
~ Typed from the book: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle ~
'Dreamless Sleep' and 'Other Portals'
DREAMLESS SLEEP
You take a journey into the Unmanifested every night when you enter the phase of deep dreamless sleep. You merge with the Source. You draw from it the vital energy that sustains you for a while when you return to the manifested, the world of separate forms. This energy is more vital than food: "Man shall not live by bread alone." But in dreamless sleep, you don't go into it consciously. Although the bodily functions are still operating, "you" no longer exist in that state. Can you image what it would be like to go into dreamless sleep with full consciousness? It is impossible to imagine it, because that state has no content.
The Unmanifested does not liberate you until you enter it consciously. That's why Jesus did not say: the truth will make you free, but rather: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." This is not a conceptual truth. It is the truth of eternal life beyond form, which is known directly or not at all. But don't attempt to stay conscious in dreamless sleep. It is highly unlikely that you will succeed. At most, you may remain conscious during the dream phase, but not beyond that. This is called lucid dreaming, which may be interesting and fascinating, but it is not liberating.
So use your inner body as a portal through which you enter the Unmanifested, and keep that portal open so that you stay connected with the Source at all times. It makes no difference, as far as the inner body is concerned, whether your outer physical body is old or young, frail or strong. The inner body is timeless. If you are not yet able to feel the inner body, use one of the other portals, although ultimately they are all one. Some I have spoken about at length already, but I'll mention them again briefly here.
OTHER PORTALS
The Now can be seen as the main portal. It is an essential aspect of every other portal, including the inner body. You cannot be in your body without being intensely present in the Now.
Time and the manifested are as inextricably linked as are the timeless Now and the Unmanifested. When you dissolve psychological time through intense present-moment awareness, you become conscious of the Unmanifested both directly and indirectly. Directly, you feel it as the radiance and power of your conscious presence - no content, just presence. Indirectly, you are aware of the Unmanifested in and through the sensory realm. In other words, you feel the God-essence in every creature, every flower, every stone, and you realize: " All that Is, Is holy. " This is why Jesus, speaking entirely from his essence or Christ identity, says in the Gospel of Thomas: "Split a piece of wood, I am there. Lift up a stone, and you will find me there."
Another portal into the Unmanifested is created through the cessation of thinking. This can start with a very simple thing, such as taking one conscious breath or looking, in a state of intense alertness, at a flower, so that there is no mental commentary running at the same time. There are many ways to create a gap in the incessant stream of thought. This is what meditation is all about. Thought is part of the realm of the manifested. Continuous mind activity keeps you imprisoned in the world of form and becomes an opaque screen that prevents you from becoming conscious of the Unmanifested, conscious of the formless and timeless God-essence in yourself and in all things and all creatures. When you are intensely present, you don't need to be concerned about the cessation of thinking, of course, because the mind then stops automatically. That's why I said the Now is an essential aspect of every other portal.
Surrender - the letting go of the mental-emotional resistance to what is - also becomes a portal into the Unmanifested. The reason for this is simple: inner resistance cuts you off from other people, from yourself, from the world around you. It strengthens the feeling of separateness on which the ego depends for its survival. The stronger the feeling of separateness, the more you are bound to the manifested, to the world of separate forms. The more you are bound to the world of form, the harder and more imprenetrable your form identity becomes. The portal is closed, and you are cut off from the inner dimension, the dimension of depth. In the state of surrender, your form identity softens and becomes somewhat "transparent," as it were, so the Unmanifested can shine through you.
It's up to you to open a portal in your life that gives you conscious access to the Unmanifested. Get in touch with the energy field of the inner body, be intensely present, disidentify from the mind, surrender to what IS; these are all portals you can use - but you only need to use one. (shared from pg.110 to pg.112)
Teaching
24 May 2013 - 10:07am
GOD HASN’T GIVEN UP ON US YET
http://realpowermaxingoutongodslove.com/Counterfeit%20Love%20Lacks%20Power.htm
Love is the most enduring sign that God hasn’t given up on us yet. We will know if God ever stops loving his world. If He stops pouring his love into our hearts, we will devolve into Humanosaurus Rex. We will become the ultimate predator, dominating and destroying the earth. Nothing will be safe from our loveless grasp. Armageddon will become a reality, and we will be without hope in a world without love.
COUNTERFEIT LOVE LACKS REAL POWER
Most people live in survival mode starving for love. They accept counterfeit forms of love instead of the real thing. There are many problems with counterfeit love, but the main one is that it lacks real power. Not only is it weak, it doesn’t heal your hurts, and it often makes your problems worse rather than better.
When someone sends the smallest flicker of love in your direction, you go head over heels and become disoriented. You are so hungry for love that you accept inferior substitutes, because you have never experienced the real thing.
DON’T WORSHIP AT THE TOWER OF PSYCHOBABEL
Nothing is more powerful than God’s love in its ability to transform the human heart and mind. Psychologists and psychotherapists have created dozens of therapies that approach the mind from different directions. Their advice proliferates endlessly, but they are long on advice and short on power. Too many of them worship at the Tower of Psychobabble, when they could experience the real thing.
What distinguishes psychobabble from God’s love is real power. God’s love has enough power to heal your heart and transform your mind. Nothing can do what God’s love can, and nothing can do it as well. Furthermore, the positive effects last for eternity. You have a new mind and healed emotions, and the cure lasts forever.
God’s love isn’t a pipedream that promises one thing and delivers another. The final test of all forms of treatment is whether it works. And it must work on the hard cases just as well as it does on the easy ones.
When all therapies have failed and fallen by the wayside, God’s love endures. It never gives up and never surrenders to despair. Nothing is too hard for God. He created the human heart and mind and knows everything that can go wrong. He doesn’t need to do research or ask anyone for advice. You don’t have to wait for someone to discover the cure. God already has the cure for what ails you. He is the powerhouse of unconditional love and He has an endless supply that will restore health to your heart and mind. Real power is available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
All you need to do is max out on his love.
Affirmation: God loves me and accepts me the way I am, but He loves me too much to let me stay that way. God loves me from the top of my head to the tip of my toes, and it doesn’t get any better than that. There is no limit to how good my life can become when my heart and mind are full of God’s love.
Teaching
24 May 2013 - 9:59am
The New Physics of Love: A Spiritual Approach to Relationships
Excerpted from: Mindful Loving: 10 Practices for Creating Deeper Connections
By Henry Grayson, Ph.D.
Web Source: http://www.enotalone.com/relationships/6405.html
The Illusions of Counterfeit "Love"
Like the Golden Buddha, we are all made up of layers of clay. The body and the ego cover our loving core, and we are usually only given rare glimpses of the infinite potential inside of ourselves or others. Stuck in this limited perspective of the counterfeit self, we think that our clay ego body and its counterfeit "love" is all that we have-and we believe the same is true about everyone else as well. Just as the illusion of the ego disguises the infinite capacity of our Divine Nature, so too does this counterfeit self cut us off from our knowledge that we are Love. Remember the story of Sir Gawain and his bride? The kind of love that characterized their marriage is what I call Empowering Love, a form of love that is unconditional; that is about giving and not about receiving, that is about being in touch with the Love that we are.
Sadly, much of what we think of as love is not love at all, but the ego's counterfeit "love." And many of our culture's films and novels actually reinforce this misconception. Authors and singers continue to misguide us by describing forms of counterfeit love in films, plays, novels, and songs, and asking us to buy into this fragile, impermanent, and ultimately false idea. We leave the theater or put the book down thinking that someday this imaginary love will arrive and change our lives into the life we've always dreamed of. Or we return to our present relationship certain that it could never be the special kind of relationship that we know will be possible if only we were with the right person.
This counterfeit "love" not only undermines joy in all of our relationships, makes us miserable, and is the basis for discord, but it also actually weakens us physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and can even make us sick. On the other hand, genuine, or Empowering Love, the central aspect of our True Self, is dramatically different from most of the common behaviors, feelings, and attitudes that are associated with the word "love." This Love actually makes us stronger physically, boosts our immune system, heals emotional wounds and fears, transforms troubled relationships into ones that are joyous and fulfilling, keeps us from being adversely affected by any negative energy around us, and helps us find our core Spiritual Self, all at the same time.
In this chapter, we will begin to question the familiar meanings that we give the word "love." And we will see that our customary experiences of romantic love, passion, sexual attraction, and infatuation, when looked at more closely, often resemble manipulation, yearning, possessiveness, neediness, control, or barter. Even love we experience for our children may often include an underlying demand for control or certain expectations that they fill our own sense of emptiness, which is tied to our quest for happiness. The various forms of counterfeit "love" actually act as barriers to love. They make us feel emotionally bankrupt inside ourselves and in our relationships, and further sabotage our efforts to connect with our natural ability to love in an empowering, unconditional way.
Counterfeit "love" results from fear, scarcity, and need-all arising out of the ego belief that we are separate. On the other hand, the love from the True Self comes out of a feeling of abundance and completeness, for you know that you are part of the Divine in the universe, and thus can never be empty of Love. Empowering Love, the genuine form of Love, is spiritual love and forms the basis for a spiritual marriage. Since this love always strengthens and brings joy, it never results in pain or diminishes anyone in any way. When expressed sexually, it is a powerful experience of intimacy and of joining as One. On the other hand, weakening "love"-the counterfeit "love" of the ego-may bring temporary elation and excitement, and even a flash of sexual passion, but it never brings lasting joy. And when this form of "love" is the main basis of marriage, it inevitably leads to disappointment, despair, and misery-and often divorce, emotionally if not physically.
The Forms of Counterfeit "Love"
To be happy in our various relationships, it is of utmost importance that we become highly adept in recognizing the barriers to love that are blocking us from our loving core and our ability to love fully in our relationships. The barriers to love are illusions, just as all the thoughts and beliefs that stem from the ego are illusions. Therefore, they can be removed and replaced with thoughts and beliefs about Empowering Love. Once you recognize the forms of counterfeit love for what they are-false-then they no longer have any power over you. But that doesn't mean that it's always easy to stay aware and cognizant of their false nature. Instead, you have to be constantly vigilant, asking yourself frequently, "Am I being loving from a counterfeit perspective or an empowering perspective?" That may be all it takes.
1. Infatuation or the falling-in-love syndrome that we discussed at length in Chapter One is the first form of counterfeit "love." Based on the illusion of separateness and a fantasy of the beloved, instead of a real knowledge of the self or the other person, this form of love can hardly be anything but counterfeit. As long as we confuse such a state with love, it will serve to block our awareness of the real and Empowering Love that we are.
When we are attached to illusions of what we want to see, we don't see anything else. As is characteristic of perception, it is always colored by what is inside us. Jennifer, for example, wanted a partner who would take good care of her-materially and emotionally. When she met John, she knew he was the one. It was love at first sight. John was a successful lawyer, and seemed to have a very good chance of becoming a partner in the prestigious law firm he worked for. Blinded by her desire for financial security, Jennifer was oblivious to John's inability to be with her emotionally. She confused his sexual interest with loving and caring. Therefore, Jenny had unwittingly picked a partner who could be familiar to her-much like her father who was financially successful, but remote, self-involved, and unavailable. She could now repeat her lifelong quest of yearning for love, trying to get it from one who could not supply it. She fulfilled what Freud called the repetition compulsion. She didn't know John for she saw what she needed/wanted to see in order to repeat her lifelong struggle for love. Of course, she was also unable to see the divine spark within John, and therefore did not know him psychologically or spiritually. By relying on the falling-in-love syndrome to choose a partner, she not only unconsciously chose to ignore John's True Self, she also set herself up for disappointment. She married her fantasy, not the real person, and fell in love with the feeling of falling in love.
In the thrill of being "in love," it is very difficult to see the other person's True Self. We confuse our feelings of intense sexual attraction and excitation with love, and we think that by getting to know another's body we have gotten to know the person. Passion, so often associated with love, is most commonly associated with a strong and sometimes desperate attempt to possess the other person or to get something from the other person. Sometime it is a desire for the excitement of being with someone new, or other times it is for someone who is not fully available-as in the case with Jenny, above.
The excerpt Creator chose for me to share is something like a teaser, makes you want more. But there is good and necessary information here for those that live within what the Ego determines to be love.
It is all this that Chris and I (Knight Shadow) are learning to let go.Because of we are both twin flames and soul mates, our love for one another is pretty intense but we have had to learn to let go of the clingy emotional style love that still exists today. We do not live in a world with attachments. Master Buddha took me under his spiritual wing and taught me much along this path where I openly embraced Emptiness which is a way I have always lived, just didn't know there was a title.
I had to learn to let go of all attachments early on this part of my journey and I have taught this to my children as well. Expectations are also not encouraged to keep as they hold the potential for disappoiontment that also stem from attachments created with any expectation. We have learned to love from a purer and divine way that is deep and incredibly profound unlike anything else known. The messages and images he leaves for me here and on Facebook are magical just as our love is.
I am eternally grateful to Creator for blessing this journey and forseeing each step with his love and light. Ifeel him and/or Jesus with me nearly every night and their hand on my forehead blessing me before I sleep.
Blessings of Divine Light and Love
Blog entry
23 May 2013 - 1:31pm
New Members: It is recommended you read from the beginning of the archive, as previous lessons are prerequisite to this one. The first lesson is, "Why This Discussion?" at http://aypsite.com/10.html
Q: I wanted to let you know that the Sambhavi you have described is very powerful. It is a lot more powerful than Mulabandha. Is this really true or does it vary from person to person?
A: I'm glad sambhavi is working well for you. It is a very important mudra, because the ajna (third eye end of the spinal nerve) is the master controller of the entire nervous system from the standpoint of ecstatic conductivity, both in cultivating it and in advancing it after it starts to come up. Then, with the nervous system wired together ecstatically like that, it is all one whole body mudra led by sambhavi. Mulabandha/asvini is then part of sambhavi, as are uddiyana/nauli, kechari, and many other visible and invisible movements occurring in the body. All the mudras are part of a whole body ecstatic stimulus/response, with sambhavi leading. In this situation, when the eyes go up as the brow furrows slightly, everything goes up.
When the eyes move devotionally, all the mudras will subtly move by automatic reflex. Ahhh... That is why we nudge all of these mudras along in practices until ecstatic conductivity comes up, building the habits, setting up for further evolution in the nervous system. Then, with ecstatic conductivity, there is only one mudra -- the whole body mudra, made up of all the parts. Sambhavi is the leader of it. That's why we see pictures of the sages with their eyes raised. They are in whole body ecstatic bliss just from that, with divine energy radiating out in all directions.
The rise of the whole body mudra reflex is further evidence of the connectedness of yoga throughout our nervous system. It also demonstrates that human spiritual transformation is a neuro-biological process, not ruled by any particular philosophy or belief system. Anyone can do this!
The guru is in you.
Note: For detailed discussion on mulabandha, sambhavi mudra and whole body mudra, see the Asanas, Mudras and Bandas book http://aypsite.com/books.html#amb
http://aypsite.com/212.html
Teaching
23 May 2013 - 10:07am
Excerpt from book: The Heart and Soul of Spiritual Practice
by Swami Krishnananda
Chapter 3: The Approach to God
Also can be found: http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/heart/heart_03a.html
Often it appears that the world is totally different from us and we bear no relation to it. For instance, if someone is felling a tree in a forest, we do not feel that anything is happening to us at all. If someone dies somewhere, we do not feel any effect of the demise of someone far away. Many events take place in the world, but we are unaffected by those things. All this observation may make us feel that we are totally independent individuals because the world was there even before we were born and it will be there even if we leave it. These observations may make us conclude that the world is totally independent of us. But, if we go deeper into the circumstance of life, we will also observe that we are dependent on the world. We are not as independent as we may assume. Our very existence in the world is totally determined by the operation of nature.
We are determined by the society around us and we cannot disassociate ourselves from society. We cannot live alone, literally, disconnected from human society; social cooperation is necessary for our survival. Apart from this fact, there is a more important issue which makes it obvious that we cannot live in the world without cooperating with nature. We breathe the air that is outside us, and we breathe it in such a way that it appears to be part and parcel of our very existence itself. So is the case with other things like water, air, sunlight and food, which are not manufactured by us from within our body. That there is an organic relationship between ourselves and the world is very clear on a deeper analysis of the situation. This is another side of it. The third truth that will come out from a further, deeper analysis is that the world and ourselves are not merely interdependent; we are just one only. The world is existing in us, and it is the world that is operating through our so-called individualities. There is no totally independent existence of anything. It is the world that exists, and we are just it. These three points of view, all of which are absolutely correct in their own way, have given rise to three schools of philosophy known popularly as Dvaita, or dualism, Visishtadvaita, a qualified monism, and Advaita, absolute monism.
The approach to God, which is the principle aim of life, has to take into consideration these three facets which we have to encounter in our daily life, whether it is personal, social, or, carried further, universal. We live in a dualistic world; we also live in a cooperative world, an organically connected world, and finally a time comes, on the deepest analysis of things, that there is only one surviving Being. It is not qualified by anything else, because anything else does not exist. The world is, and it need not be qualified by something outside the world. Even society is a part of this creation. One Being alone is.
These three aspects are highlighted in our operations every day, whether we are able to pay sufficient attention to it or not. Because of this threefold impact that the world seems to be having upon us, we have different moods in life. We do not think in the same way always. There is the dualistic emphasis which makes us feel that we are, out and out, centralised individuals with no concern whatsoever with the world in any way; and often we feel that there is a vital relationship. These days there is special emphasis laid on the preservation of nature. Ecological considerations are now coming to the surface of man's awareness – how even the trees in the forest, the plant kingdom – has a vital connection with our own selves, apart from animals and human beings. Though these facets of our life operate every day, we generally, with a blinkered view of things, look at the world only in one way at a time and shift our point of view according to our convenience. We are not always philosophical in our life. Nobody thinks philosophically in practical day-to-day life, though one has to accept that it is necessary to think philosophically because to think philosophically is to introduce the element of Ultimate Reality into our existence – without which, or ignoring which, life would wither into shreds of lifeless pieces.
We love the world. We want to preserve creation. We wish that humanity should survive. But, at the same time, we become careless about the events that take place in the world, and we mind our own business. When things come to brass tacks, we mind our own business; let the world go to hell. But that it cannot go to hell so easily is not acquiesced due to the ego, the central nucleus of our personality, asserting itself vehemently in terms of this bodily existence. The body is everything. It can survive by itself. What we need is physical comfort and biological security, mental peace in an individualistic sense, though often, with tongue in cheek, as it were, we accept that other people should also survive and they should be as happy as ourselves. But this is not taken seriously when matters come to a crisis; then we feel that we are more important than other people. Each person feels, "I am more important than others. I have to survive, even if another may not survive!"
These issues that I am presenting before you have relevance to the subject that we are discussing, namely, our attitude to God. We cannot jump on God suddenly, like a fruit falling from a tree. We have to pass through various stages of experience, even suffering and unexpected thunderbolts of experience, because of our variegated relationship with the degrees of reality manifest in creation. It is not that we just think God and He comes. It is not so easy a matter, because we cannot think God unless we know our relationship to God. We have a difficulty in knowing even our relationship to the world – to people outside and the trees and plants – so how will we know our relationship to higher realities?
Considering these aspects of spiritual practice, seers have taught us that there are three ways of looking at things, looking at reality itself. One aspect is that the world is perpetually active. We are also continuously active. Every cell in our body is active. Every atom is vibrating, and no atom can be quiet. Due to the impetus of cosmic activity continuously taking place, directed towards some destination which one cannot easily decipher, we are compelled to act. You act in this world not because you are pleased with the work that you are doing; you have to work because of the impulse that is planted in you by the very structure of the universe that is part and parcel of your existence. Is it very pleasant to work – to do hard work in the world? You would like to have more and more holidays from the necessity to work. Why do you want holidays? Because work is not pleasant. You want recreation and want to be yourself, and not to be identified with work. Yet the compulsion from nature demanding you to cooperate with it in its purpose of the evolutionary process requires that you have to work in a dexterous manner. This dexterous working is called karma yoga: yoga karma sukoshalam. It is not enough if you merely work; you should work dexterously. Adroit and very wise should be your movements. What is wisdom in action? It is buddhi yoga, on which the karma is to be supported, as the Bhagavadgita puts it. You have to work with understanding. Dexterous, wise action based on understanding, which is called karma yoga, is a cooperation on your part in the work of nature rather than an independent working for your own personal benefit. There is no such thing as personal benefit; this has to be understood first of all. There is no personal benefit accruing to any organ of your body; the benefit goes to the entire organism which is the personality. There is no personal benefit, so-called, because all benefit that may accrue to you is a consequence of the cooperation of multifarious forces of nature. You must know that you cannot even breathe unless the whole world operates through you and cooperates with you in many ways. You cannot lift a finger if the organism is not in harmony with the forces of nature.
Knowing this fact that you are part and parcel of the evolutionary process of creation, while you feel compelled to act, do not act as if you are doing it, because nature abhors 'you' and 'I' issues. There is no 'I' in nature, no 'you' in nature, no 'it' and 'this' and 'that'. These are all concoctions for our human convenience. It is just what it is. Can you imagine how difficult it is to do a wise work in this world, with no reaction following? Do you know that every action produces a reaction? What is reaction? It is the Bhagavadgita's doctrine that it is possible to act without producing reactions. You must know this. You must have read the Bhagavadgita several times, but I do not know how far you have understood the secret of this non-reactionary action.
Usually, every karma produces a result. Why should it produce a result? The result is nothing but a kick struck upon you by nature outside when you are not in harmony with it. When nature reacts against you, it pulls your ears, pinches you and makes you feel a certain pain and, like a good schoolteacher, punishes you, as it were, when you are not a good student in the school of life. The whole of the Bhagavadgita is the wondrous gospel of cooperative activity in terms of the participation required on your part in the universal evolutionary process. You have to work. Nobody can sit quiet without work, but that work is not meant for your benefit, because you cannot stand outside nature. The bodily insistence on its importance, from which even a saint cannot be free, requires that some work is necessary in this world. But work is not everything. Why do you work? Because nature compels you, as you say. But why does nature compel you? Because it has a purpose. What is the purpose?
Now comes the next step of understanding in your spiritual career. It is correct – accepted – that nature propels us to act. But why does it do that? Is it crazy, or has it any understanding? Nature is very wise. It is all eyes, all ears, and all mind, knowing everything in every way. It is moving in one direction. The movement of the cosmic process in that given direction, which you cannot understand, is the next step in the way of living a spiritual life. It is accepted that you have to work; but, you cannot work purposelessly. You may have a selfish purpose such as earning a salary, maintaining a family, becoming a wealthy person. This is a foolish idea of the purpose of action. The purpose is to satisfy nature – to be one with it, and to move with it for the fulfilment of a purpose which is its purpose, and not yours. Where does nature take you? It takes you to the Self-realisation of itself. All evolution is a process of the Self-realisation of the universe. It is moving towards God. This movement towards God is an ardent feeling present, as it were, in the whole of nature. Nature – the world – loves God, as it were, and it is rushing towards it.
Aristotle told us that the pull that God exerts over the world is like the lover pulling the heart of the beloved. The lover-beloved relationship seems to be between God and the world. Restlessly the movement of nature takes place, as a lover would restlessly work, sleeplessly be active and never keep quiet until his purpose is fulfilled. What is this impetus to move towards the fulfilment of the purpose of life? It is an action of the soul taking place for the realisation of its own higher dimension – God. What is God? Where is God, actually speaking? Can you imagine? It is the highest dimension of your own self. You are asking for your own higher nature – the higher Self being sought by the lower self. As Bhagavan Sri Krishna mentions to us in the sixth chapter of the Gita, the Atman is being pulled by the Atman. The higher Self is the beloved. The lower self is the lover. He is restless. Why should you not be restless when your real nature is calling you: "Come on! I am here!" And you are here, wretched, creeping on the surface of the earth as a lower nature. If your own higher nature calls you, will you keep quiet without responding to it? You are calling your Self. This is love. It takes a dualistic form as two persons – two things. At one stage it takes an organic relationship, and at another stage, finally, it takes one unitary face, indescribable in its nature.
There are feelings described in the Bhakti Shastras, scriptures on devotion to God. Devotion is a kind of feeling – not an ordinary psychological operation in a reckless manner, in a careless way, but a deep root of your personality surging forth to reach up to its own state of perfection. These feelings, in regard to the higher Being, or call it your higher Self, or God Almighty – these feelings are called bhavas, emotional attitudes. Do you love anything in this world? I have touched upon this subject a little before. There is no one who cannot love. You love a tinsel, a corpse or something worthless, or you love something better – but, nevertheless, you love something. At least, you love yourself.
The bhavas, or the feelings generated by the operation of love, are multifold. Whom do you love in this world? Think over this matter. You must be a little wise, and not be simply a work addict, only doing things but not feeling anything. You have love for your father, is it not? You have love for your mother. You love also a good boss in your office who is a perfect gentleman. You like him. "Here is a wonderful man." Like the headmaster of Rugby in Tom Brown's Schooldays – a perfect schoolmaster. The students like him. They love him; they adore him. They offer presents to him; they observe his birthday, and so on. You love your father and mother. You love your boss, your master. You love even a good servant who serves you. There was a judge in the High Court of Allahabad who had a servant from Bihar. This servant served the judge so affectionately, considering him as more than his father, that even after the judge retired, the servant clung to him. "Master, whether or not you are a judge, it does not matter. I love you. I will serve you till death." I have seen the judge when he came here, and the servant also. The servant clung and served this judge until he died. That is the love of the master. Sometimes we are given the analogy of Hanuman loving Rama – love of the master. You love your child. You know how intensely you love your child. If the child is not visible for some time, especially if you have only one, you experience how intensely you love your child. The wife loves the husband and the husband loves the wife. In what way do they love? There are cadences – differences – in the intensity of affection. The love for the father is one kind of love. It cannot be identified with the love for the child.
There is a limitation in certain forms of love, and there is no limitation in certain others. Love is an action of the soul; it is not a mental activity. To the extent the soul operates, to that extent your love is unselfish and genuine. Often commercial love may take hold of us and we may find ourselves in a tragedy later on when the business fails. It is impossible not to love your father. It is impossible not to love your mother. It is impossible not to love your superior. It is impossible not to love your child. It is impossible for the husband and the wife not to love each other. But these loves, in the mortal world, have limitations. If the father dies, you weep. If the mother goes, you feel even worse. If the child is dead, you do not know what to do. So is the case with all other things. Tragedy follows from mortal affection. In order that this affection may become immortal, you are supposed to divert it to a form of sublimation to God Himself.
You do not know where God is – maybe, accepted. But you can imagine that God is your father, and love Him in the same way as you love your father. This is called shanta bhakti, shanta bhava – the perfected, philosophical love, which you have towards your father. Even in your love for your father and your mother, there is a difference. You do not love your father in the same way as you love your mother. You know what it is; I need not explain it. Though both of them are objects of your affection, there is some difference. There is a difference in all these affections. Because of the fact that loves end in travesty, tragedy, bereavement and sorrow, teachers of the bhakti marga – love of God – have pointed out ways and means by which we can turn our affection to God. You can love the Almighty God as much as you love your father. He is really your father; it is not merely an imagination. Mata dhata pitamahah (B.G. 9.17): "I am your grandfather; I am your father; I am your mother," says the Almighty Lord, as we have it in the Bhagavadgita.
The scriptures point out that you can move along these bhavas in a graduated way or you can take them all together, at the same time, if you are an adept in the path. Sometimes it is also possible to choose one aspect of the bhava, and not all of them together. Consider. You love so many things – father, mother, child, wife, husband, and so on. Among all these things, which one attracts you most? Think over this matter. It is not that you love all of them in equal measure. You will not be able to decide this issue so suddenly, so quickly. You will make a mess in thinking. If you are unselfish in the analysis of your personality, you will know there is something which takes you above yourself. The nearness of the object of love to yourself is the test of your intensity of affection. Is your father closer to you, or is your mother closer? Who is closer? Decide for yourself. Is the spouse dearer, or is the child is dearer? Is your office superior a better object of affection, or is your spouse a better object of affection? Think over this matter. Do not make a mess of your analysis. Be careful in this matter.
We pass through all these experiences in our life. No one is free from them. Every one of us has these bhavas, these feelings of affection, every day. Often they are smothered by certain pressing activities which are of a personal nature. We have to go by the injunctions of the great masters who lived intense spiritual lives. It is better to follow the path of these great men than try to understand things by ourselves. Follow the path of the great men. Maha-jano yena gatah sa panthah (C.C. 17.186): Which is the way? The way that was trodden by the great masters of yore, that is the way. You cannot independently judge yourself. You do not know which you love more, which you love less. You make a jumble of all things every day, and you are unhappy from moment to moment because of the impossibility to judge what you want, finally. You like your spouse, you like your boss, you like money, you want wealth, you want prestige, and whatnot. You do not know what you want, finally. You want everything. Is it true, or is there something more?
The transmutation of human affection into spiritual affection, which is called devotion, is a great art of psychological operation. This psychology of the human being is what is called the work of the antahkarana, or sometimes known as chitta, the root of our psychic activity. In the language of yoga teachers like Patanjali, the root of our psyche is called chitta. But in other cases we classify the functions of the antahkarana, the inner organ, into four facets: the thinking, the self-asserting, the understanding and the memorising activities. But there is a root of these fourfold activities. The root has to be taken into consideration and get transmuted completely. It is not sufficient if you merely think of God, or remember God in a psychological fashion, or accept that God exists. Your root has to accept that it is so. When you love anything, it is the root that loves. It is not the ego that loves, not the memory that loves, not mere logical understanding that loves. There is a root in you which comes up to the surface of action and wells up in great intensity. Very rarely can people bring this principle of affection and love to the surface of their activity.
Wholly we cannot love anything. Partially we love. Our love is finite. Devotion to God is an entirely complete form of affection, outside which nothing can be. It is all-in-all! You may feel sometimes, "My child is all-in-all; I may die for the child." Your father is all-in-all. Your mother is all-in-all. "My wife is all-in-all." "My husband is all-in-all." You may say that, but they are not really all-in-all if you go deep into the matter. There is a condition put on this affection. These affections are limited by certain circumstances. The father loves the son – accepted. The son loves the father. But they are conditioned by certain circumstances. The son would expect the father to behave in a particular manner. The father would expect the son to behave in a particular manner. Otherwise, there is a great rift between father and son. The father asserts independence. "You quit this place!" he tells the son. And the son does the same thing to the father when there is no collaboration of feeling and attitude between them. You may say the love of husband and wife is very intense, but even that is conditional. There is a reciprocation, a give-and-take policy even in the husband-and-wife relationship. It is not true that they love each other one hundred percent, because if the condition necessary for that love is broken, see what happens.
This should not happen in the case of love of God. Inasmuch as in all objects of love in this world there is a limitation imposed upon these objects, they are not complete in themselves. God is complete Being. We may define God in this manner. Whatever complete Being is, that is God. Complete Being means a Being that has nothing outside itself, because if there is something outside, then the Being becomes finite and it is not complete Being. You have to adjust your consciousness with dexterity to place before your vision the presence of such a complete Being, and then move towards it. The bhavas, or the feelings of love to which I made reference, are categorised in five or six ways, as I mentioned, but some are more intense than others, as you yourself may feel.
In mortal affection – human love of persons and things in the world – there is an expectation from the object of love. Unexpected, total affection is not seen in this world. When I love you, I expect you to love me also in some way. It is not that I unilaterally love you, whatever be your behaviour. That is not seen. If there is a give-and-take commercial policy in affection, naturally it ends in tragedy, bereavement. Can you love anything unconditionally – let that do anything, let it be anything, in whatever way? Have you seen such affection in this world? No. The partners in affection can separate on the littlest of suspicions and doubts arisen between themselves in their relationship. This can happen everywhere – in the office, in the family, and in every way of your life. Bereavement is the necessary consequence of worldly love. But, love being an essential ingredient in one's nature, it cannot be set aside. Though it does not work well in this world, it has to work somehow, as in the case of your activities in the world. Though every action has a defect, you have to act somehow by freeing it from the limitations that may be imposed upon it.
Though every love in the world is defective, it has to be there somehow. You cannot exist without it. In a morbid form of affection which finds that everything that is its object of affection is lost, it turns itself upon itself and becomes narcissistic love. You love your own self, afterwards. You become a maniac of self-love – a megalomaniac, sometimes.
It is a great art to turn the affections of human circumstance to God. I mentioned to you to choose one form of your affection which will be turned towards God. "Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come…." is one form of prayer. Usually religions consider God as a father, for whatever reason. Sometimes God is considered as a mother also, especially in Indian circles. God as mother, God as father. Sometimes God is treated as a brother-companion-friend, as in the case of Arjuna who had the companionship of Bhagavan Sri Krishna, whom he knew as divine and yet he was a colleague and a friend – an equal, as it were. How will you turn your love to God?
Story
23 May 2013 - 8:05am
Sunday, 19 May, 2013 (posted 22 May, 2013)
My friends it is time to look at your heart emotions. I have spoken a great deal on the need to release the belief that you require material possessions and a level of status on your path of awakening to soul.
What I speak of now many will find most difficult. Some will deny, only to discover at a future time that true freedom involves the full understanding of your heart emotions. Even those on a path of enlightenment still seek control over flow. The control can be subtle or strong. One can control what they will seek to learn, to understand and more importantly, how much control they are prepared to release. This will of course determine the level of flow in any area. What is flow? The flow I speak of is a letting go through understanding, a release of fear, a new confidence. Therefore your energy will flow with an ease and create a feeling of peace within.
There are many areas in your life where you will have managed to achieve that level of flow. Flow will be greater in some areas than others. Still you must continue your path toward enlightenment. Breaking down the ‘walls’ you have so patiently built to house what you think is the real you.
The Real You
Who is the real you? Do you know? Of course you may say, “ Oh yes, I have a home and children. I go to work there, I like this and that.” Indeed. Very admirable, but I asked about the real you. The inner you. That part of you that is protected so deeply on a sub-conscious level. Many will protect this most vulnerable part of their being without truly realizing. This deep protection is part previous experience and part of
your sub-conscious at work.
You are able to get up and go to work, play with your children, cook your food – many activities on a daily basis without giving this part of you a second thought. That is until an experience begins to hammer and poke holes in your carefully built facade. I ask you to be open and honest with yourself now. The part I am speaking of is your inner heart emotion. That very deep part of you that you feel is so vulnerable. You can tell yourself to love another. Be compassionate to another. Help where you can in life. This is the way of the soul also. Yet I tell you, this is the outer path of the soul. It is where you can still have control over your inner emotions. You still feel protected. But your inner emotions are the ones that reveal the real you! How you truly feel. More importantly how you are prepared to truly love another. So let me ask you also, how are you going with your partner? The one you love and are personally close to. How much do you give of yourself? How much do you reveal of your inner thoughts and feelings of your experiences?
Can You Fly?
This is a deep level you will agree. It is also a level few are prepared to look at in order to create the deepest flows of energy and love. It may take time to understand the inner you. That matters not. What does matter is that you begin with a willing intent to understand yourself fully. From this a new and happier you will emerge. This is an inner journey where you will indeed finally reach your true treasure, your own inner gold.
It is this inner soul path that will bring you confidence in yourself, in your ability to share and to truly love one another on an intimate level. Your human structure requires touch. Loving touch. You thrive on this. However as you journey through your linear years each time this emotion is threatened or damaged it is stored away in your sub-conscious. Your sub-conscious mind also remembers and begins creating walls of new behavior patterns to protect this most vulnerable part of you. And so each hurt builds on the previous and the protection becomes stronger.
Break Out Through Communication
So you now begin to understand what I am saying to you. Many of you will relate to this. I cannot do this work for you. Nor can your angels or spirit guides. We can stand by and support you, try to guide you lovingly along this inner soul path, but it is you who must do the work to gain the understanding and the greater freedom available.
It is time to love yourself. You can only truly achieve this by understanding and healing your heart emotions. You achieve this through communication. Honest communication with yourself and your loved one. Begin, step by step. I ask you to keep going forward with this inner journey.
You know some years ago I gave a meditation to this channel to help many open the door to their heart – even for just a peek. I said then that many would find this very difficult to do. I gave that meditation the title of The Emerald Heart Meditation. Much teaching and knowledge has been given since then to help many on their spiritual path by myself and other Light beings. Now it is time to go deeper on a human emotional level. Higher on a soul level. So I ask you, “are you ready to begin?”
More importantly perhaps, do you have the correct intent to begin?
May the Light be with you.
Kuthumi
Copyright © 2011 Rev, Lynette Leckie-Clark - All rights reserved. You are welcome to share with a friend but Not for sale in any form.
Blog entry
23 May 2013 - 7:36am
Namaste dear Friends ~
Continuing today with the theme of previous days - sharing from opening randomly my book:
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle ~
Today I have opened it at p.110 - 'Dreamless Sleep' and 'Other Portals'
DREAMLESS SLEEP
You take a journey into the Unmanifested every night when you enter the phase of deep dreamless sleep. You merge with the Source. You draw from it the vital energy that sustains you for a while when you return to the manifested, the world of separate forms. This energy is more vital than food: "Man shall not live by bread alone." But in dreamless sleep, you don't go into it consciously. Although the bodily functions are still operating, "you" no longer exist in that state. Can you image what it would be like to go into dreamless sleep with full consciousness? It is impossible to imagine it, because that state has no content.
The Unmanifested does not liberate you until you enter it consciously. That's why Jesus did not say: the truth will make you free, but rather: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." This is not a conceptual truth. It is the truth of eternal life beyond form, which is known directly or not at all. But don't attempt to stay conscious in dreamless sleep. It is highly unlikely that you will succeed. At most, you may remain conscious during the dream phase, but not beyond that. This is called lucid dreaming, which may be interesting and fascinating, but it is not liberating.
So use your inner body as a portal through which you enter the Unmanifested, and keep that portal open so that you stay connected with the Source at all times. It makes no difference, as far as the inner body is concerned, whether your outer physical body is old or young, frail or strong. The inner body is timeless. If you are not yet able to feel the inner body, use one of the other portals, although ultimately they are all one. Some I have spoken about at length already, but I'll mention them again briefly here.
OTHER PORTALS
The Now can be seen as the main portal. It is an essential aspect of every other portal, including the inner body. You cannot be in your body without being intensely present in the Now.
Time and the manifested are as inextricably linked as are the timeless Now and the Unmanifested. When you dissolve psychological time through intense present-moment awareness, you become conscious of the Unmanifested both directly and indirectly. Directly, you feel it as the radiance and power of your conscious presence - no content, just presence. Indirectly, you are aware of the Unmanifested in and through the sensory realm. In other words, you feel the God-essence in every creature, every flower, every stone, and you realize: " All that Is, Is holy. " This is why Jesus, speaking entirely from his essence or Christ identity, says in the Gospel of Thomas: "Split a piece of wood, I am there. Lift up a stone, and you will find me there."
Another portal into the Unmanifested is created through the cessation of thinking. This can start with a very simple thing, such as taking one conscious breath or looking, in a state of intense alertness, at a flower, so that there is no mental commentary running at the same time. There are many ways to create a gap in the incessant stream of thought. This is what meditation is all about. Thought is part of the realm of the manifested. Continuous mind activity keeps you imprisoned in the world of form and becomes an opaque screen that prevents you from becoming conscious of the Unmanifested, conscious of the formless and timeless God-essence in yourself and in all things and all creatures. When you are intensely present, you don't need to be concerned about the cessation of thinking, of course, because the mind then stops automatically. That's why I said the Now is an essential aspect of every other portal.
Surrender - the letting go of the mental-emotional resistance to what is - also becomes a portal into the Unmanifested. The reason for this is simple: inner resistance cuts you off from other people, from yourself, from the world around you. It strengthens the feeling of separateness on which the ego depends for its survival. The stronger the feeling of separateness, the more you are bound to the manifested, to the world of separate forms. The more you are bound to the world of form, the harder and more imprenetrable your form identity becomes. The portal is closed, and you are cut off from the inner dimension, the dimension of depth. In the state of surrender, your form identity softens and becomes somewhat "transparent," as it were, so the Unmanifested can shine through you.
It's up to you to open a portal in your life that gives you conscious access to the Unmanifested. Get in touch with the energy field of the inner body, be intensely present, disidentify from the mind, surrender to what IS; these are all portals you can use - but you only need to use one. (shared to pg.112)
** L O V E ** P E A C E ** J O Y **
Story
22 May 2013 - 2:42pm
A New Message From VERONICA
WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT
~ Channeled by April Crawford
www.innerwhispers.org
"Take a clear look at the life you are living.
Determine what is most important to you in ways that are truthful to your soul:
not often an easy task, but one that is necessary to live an evolving life.
Remember that each moment of each life has relevance.
Dismissing experience as an error or mistake is often misleading.
Each experience, whether positive or negative, leads you to the perspective and spot you are at right now.
Always honor the experience. No matter what.
Remember that the yin/yang of positive and negative is always present.
It is your responsibility to determine the value... and apply it."
-VERONICA
Blog entry
22 May 2013 - 1:11pm
New Members: It is recommended you read from the beginning of the archive, as previous lessons are prerequisite to this one. The first lesson is, "Why This Discussion?" at http://aypsite.com/10.html
Q: I need a small clarification. While doing deep meditation I automatically go into Jalandhara (chin lock). If I try correcting the posture the feeling of "being-in" which gets built since I start meditation goes away. If I don't come out of Jalandhara I don't get distracted but I am concerned that I will not stick to the "just meditation" routine while meditating. Please advise.
A: Automatic yoga of the physical variety is common during meditation, and also in samyama. The reason is because we are deep into our pure bliss consciousness and then the nervous system gets urges to facilitate the purification process. You have the right approach favoring your meditation practice with your attention. If our body is going in a certain direction, we don't fight against it, nor do we cling to it. It is the same way that we treat thoughts or anything thing else that comes up in our meditation. So, we don't have to be concerned about the jalandhara (chin lock) being there or not. It will take care of itself as we take care of our meditation.
I can tell you with certainty that the automatic yoga will change as we continue our practices day in and day out. We just are easy with whatever is happening. It is purification. The jalandhara will give way to some other energy event. Others have written in about the head going back, the torso going forward, shakes, fast breathing (automatic bastrika), sobbing, and you name it.
With samyama it can get even more dramatic -- like hopping around on the bed, or roaring like a lion. We always treat it the same, just easily favoring the practice we are doing. Early stage siddhis (powers), which are inevitable with samyama practice, should be handled in the same way -- when they come up we just easily go back to the practice we are doing. It's purification happening in the nervous system.
Automatic yoga is a symptom of practice, not the practice itself. We will do best to stick with the primary causes, which are our meditation, pranayama, samyama, and other practices. Automatic yoga is an indicator of progress on the road to enlightenment, and will ease up as our nervous system becomes increasingly purified. The less friction (obstruction) there is in the nervous system, the fewer the physical movements will be, and the more pleasurable it will be inside.
Eventually we will be sitting there looking pretty ordinary, filled with oceanic waves of ecstatic bliss. Only the glow of divine love will give us away.
The guru is in you.
Note: For detailed instructions on building a balanced daily practice routine with self-pacing, see the Eight Limbs of Yoga Book at Q: I need a small clarification. While doing deep meditation I automatically go into Jalandhara (chin lock). If I try correcting the posture the feeling of "being-in" which gets built since I start meditation goes away. If I don't come out of Jalandhara I don't get distracted but I am concerned that I will not stick to the "just meditation" routine while meditating. Please advise.
A: Automatic yoga of the physical variety is common during meditation, and also in samyama. The reason is because we are deep into our pure bliss consciousness and then the nervous system gets urges to facilitate the purification process. You have the right approach favoring your meditation practice with your attention. If our body is going in a certain direction, we don't fight against it, nor do we cling to it. It is the same way that we treat thoughts or anything thing else that comes up in our meditation. So, we don't have to be concerned about the jalandhara (chin lock) being there or not. It will take care of itself as we take care of our meditation.
I can tell you with certainty that the automatic yoga will change as we continue our practices day in and day out. We just are easy with whatever is happening. It is purification. The jalandhara will give way to some other energy event. Others have written in about the head going back, the torso going forward, shakes, fast breathing (automatic bastrika), sobbing, and you name it.
With samyama it can get even more dramatic -- like hopping around on the bed, or roaring like a lion. We always treat it the same, just easily favoring the practice we are doing. Early stage siddhis (powers), which are inevitable with samyama practice, should be handled in the same way -- when they come up we just easily go back to the practice we are doing. It's purification happening in the nervous system.
Automatic yoga is a symptom of practice, not the practice itself. We will do best to stick with the primary causes, which are our meditation, pranayama, samyama, and other practices. Automatic yoga is an indicator of progress on the road to enlightenment, and will ease up as our nervous system becomes increasingly purified. The less friction (obstruction) there is in the nervous system, the fewer the physical movements will be, and the more pleasurable it will be inside.
Eventually we will be sitting there looking pretty ordinary, filled with oceanic waves of ecstatic bliss. Only the glow of divine love will give us away.
The guru is in you.
Note: For detailed instructions on building a balanced daily practice routine with self-pacing, see the Eight Limbs of Yoga Book at http://aypsite.com/books.html#8lim
For detailed instructions on samyama practice and the implications of siddhis, see the AYP Samyama book at http://aypsite.com/books.html#sam
http://aypsite.com/210.html
Story
22 May 2013 - 1:03pm
By Ann Heifets
A health improving meditation is being offered now for everyone.
- Dear friends, we invite everyone now to join this work in receiving light and improving the health of all your bodies, your physical body and the whole system of fine bodies.
Inhale deeply and deeply exhale, three times... (pause)
I am starting to receive into myself white-purple light, which passes through my crown chakra and through all my internal organs; it dissolves all dense negativities, all unhealthy contaminants, all, which interferes with the light working in me.
I trust the light to create in me those forms, which it thinks are necessary, which it thinks are correct; I trust my whole being, my whole self to the light and I join my free will with the will of the light inside me.
And now, I feel such strength, which I've never felt in me before, and my whole being is being filled with light, the white light of service.
And in it there is no place for illness, no place for contaminants, hardnesses, or negativity.
In it, there is only presence and service. And all my blood vessels, blood, my bones, all, which is inside my physical dense body, all organs and the immune system - it all becomes light, and all is made to receive light, the whole organism is made to work for the light, is made to receive light and give light.
I see how the white-purple light is continuing to flow into my crown chakra, the organism is even overflowing with it, and it starts to give it back, through what I think, through what I feel, combined with my free will.
Now a golden ray came, such active gold joined this white-purple ray, not through the chakra, but somehow in the whole, I don't know how. He says that to this white-purple service, a spiritual knowledge is joining.
And this passes thorough all my being, through my soul, through my Spirit, because I and my soul and my Spirit - are one, and they are constantly working now.
And I now breathe in this golden-knowledge in me and breathe out. And I now see the golden brothers, who help me with this work, who help us all in this work..
This is a spiritual exercise, but it's even bigger than an exercise, because it goes beyond the frame of an exercise, it goes into life itself, it is the very course of life, like life passing through us, and we are the vehicles of a spiritual life, all of us who is now working with us.
And this is the reason why now Mother Mary appeared here, who has been observing this work, and now she came closer, and I think wants to say something.
She says:
- My children, I am with you all the time, I watch all the time how you are growing, I watch how you are developing, and if I go away, or distance myself, it is only to give you freedom, to give you the opportunity to grow, to give you the opportunity to feel yourself big and grown-up. And you are already not infants; you are teenagers, spiritual teenagers.
But I want to say to you something and maybe even to warn you, because growing up, spiritual growth - is a complex process.
I see, something like a bamboo sick, it consists of these parts, and one part grows from another. What is it that I see now?
- While growing from inside yourself, be true to your core, do not leave this.
She says:
- Maybe you do not understand it now, but simply remember it.
She says that she closely observes every one of us, each one who is growing into the Spirit.
And with each new move, when there is a new sprout, a new bud, or a new leaf from this spiritual plant, she is present at each of this new kind of movement, and not for a second looks away from this, even though you may not feel it.
And so is the Father present at all of this, because, do not think that you are alone, even though the feeling of loneliness accompanies growth, no matter how paradoxical it may be.
She says:
- We are present in the space of quietness, in the space of self-contemplation and self-discovery.
She asks now everyone, who is doing this work with us, to look inside himself and see with the inner eye the spiritual path, which he has passed... (pause)
And see now, that you and the Father are one.
We now continue this work (Mother Mary stepped aside) of receiving light, this exercise of your spiritual development, of your spiritual growth.
We invite now those people, who have not joined us yet, to join us - new people, new participants, everyone who wants to join your will with the will of the One, with the will of the Source and to start your spiritual light path.
We ask now everyone to open your spiritual eyes and to see that in reality we did not go anywhere, we did not go anywhere from the Father, we did not go anywhere from the Source, to see this in reality now, that we are present in Him, that we are present in the Father, even being present on the ray, we are present on a mission, and in reality we are present inside the Father.
A state of complete oneness, complete joining of self and the Father - is very important, so that this will be fixed in each one.
The energy of the Father now is being fixed in each, the energy of free creation, the free creative energy, the energy of giving, the energy of joy...
We now came back from a mission inside the Home, each with what he found, understood, while present on the ray, while present on a mission, now we came back and we are inside the Home.
It's hard for me to describe this state of being.
I think, that everyone experiences it very individually.
For me it is some kind of a heat, a warmth, when everyone exchanges everything, lets be present now in this space...
when we share the new that we learned, working on the rays...
Energetically we are now exchanging, we are absorbing that information, which we all collected, while being present in different points of Creation, doing different tasks...
I see angels, they are taking something in their hands, some kind of a gold sphere, and are flying out from this space. Who are these angels?
Are those ourselves or someone else? Yes, it seems that it is ourselves, our Spirit, most likely, who is exchanging all this. And what is next?
And next our service on the rays is continuing, but at the same time we are present in the Father, and at the same time we serve on the ray, simply for a moment we returned to the Source.
We return into ourselves, into our enlightened self, into the new self, so that we can continue the work already started.
We love ourselves, we love our brothers in Spirit, we love our children, and we love everything that surrounds us, our New Earth and our old Earth.
And we now embrace the whole Universe, and thank the Father and thank each other for everything, which He did for us. And we leave this meditation. And amen.
video
22 May 2013 - 1:00pm
A health improving meditation is being offered now for everyone.
- Dear friends, we invite everyone now to join this work in receiving light and improving the health of all your bodies, your physical body and the whole system of fine bodies.
Inhale deeply and deeply exhale, three times... (pause)
I am starting to receive into myself white-purple light, which passes through my crown chakra and through all my internal organs; it dissolves all dense negativities, all unhealthy contaminants, all, which interferes with the light working in me.
I trust the light to create in me those forms, which it thinks are necessary, which it thinks are correct; I trust my whole being, my whole self to the light and I join my free will with the will of the light inside me.
And now, I feel such strength, which I've never felt in me before, and my whole being is being filled with light, the white light of service.
And in it there is no place for illness, no place for contaminants, hardnesses, or negativity.
In it, there is only presence and service. And all my blood vessels, blood, my bones, all, which is inside my physical dense body, all organs and the immune system - it all becomes light, and all is made to receive light, the whole organism is made to work for the light, is made to receive light and give light.
I see how the white-purple light is continuing to flow into my crown chakra, the organism is even overflowing with it, and it starts to give it back, through what I think, through what I feel, combined with my free will.
Now a golden ray came, such active gold joined this white-purple ray, not through the chakra, but somehow in the whole, I don't know how. He says that to this white-purple service, a spiritual knowledge is joining.
And this passes thorough all my being, through my soul, through my Spirit, because I and my soul and my Spirit - are one, and they are constantly working now.
And I now breathe in this golden-knowledge in me and breathe out. And I now see the golden brothers, who help me with this work, who help us all in this work..
This is a spiritual exercise, but it's even bigger than an exercise, because it goes beyond the frame of an exercise, it goes into life itself, it is the very course of life, like life passing through us, and we are the vehicles of a spiritual life, all of us who is now working with us.
And this is the reason why now Mother Mary appeared here, who has been observing this work, and now she came closer, and I think wants to say something.
She says:
- My children, I am with you all the time, I watch all the time how you are growing, I watch how you are developing, and if I go away, or distance myself, it is only to give you freedom, to give you the opportunity to grow, to give you the opportunity to feel yourself big and grown-up. And you are already not infants; you are teenagers, spiritual teenagers.
But I want to say to you something and maybe even to warn you, because growing up, spiritual growth - is a complex process.
I see, something like a bamboo sick, it consists of these parts, and one part grows from another. What is it that I see now?
- While growing from inside yourself, be true to your core, do not leave this.
She says:
- Maybe you do not understand it now, but simply remember it.
She says that she closely observes every one of us, each one who is growing into the Spirit.
And with each new move, when there is a new sprout, a new bud, or a new leaf from this spiritual plant, she is present at each of this new kind of movement, and not for a second looks away from this, even though you may not feel it.
And so is the Father present at all of this, because, do not think that you are alone, even though the feeling of loneliness accompanies growth, no matter how paradoxical it may be.
She says:
- We are present in the space of quietness, in the space of self-contemplation and self-discovery.
She asks now everyone, who is doing this work with us, to look inside himself and see with the inner eye the spiritual path, which he has passed... (pause)
And see now, that you and the Father are one.
We now continue this work (Mother Mary stepped aside) of receiving light, this exercise of your spiritual development, of your spiritual growth.
We invite now those people, who have not joined us yet, to join us - new people, new participants, everyone who wants to join your will with the will of the One, with the will of the Source and to start your spiritual light path.
We ask now everyone to open your spiritual eyes and to see that in reality we did not go anywhere, we did not go anywhere from the Father, we did not go anywhere from the Source, to see this in reality now, that we are present in Him, that we are present in the Father, even being present on the ray, we are present on a mission, and in reality we are present inside the Father.
A state of complete oneness, complete joining of self and the Father - is very important, so that this will be fixed in each one.
The energy of the Father now is being fixed in each, the energy of free creation, the free creative energy, the energy of giving, the energy of joy...
We now came back from a mission inside the Home, each with what he found, understood, while present on the ray, while present on a mission, now we came back and we are inside the Home.
It's hard for me to describe this state of being.
I think, that everyone experiences it very individually.
For me it is some kind of a heat, a warmth, when everyone exchanges everything, lets be present now in this space...
when we share the new that we learned, working on the rays...
Energetically we are now exchanging, we are absorbing that information, which we all collected, while being present in different points of Creation, doing different tasks...
I see angels, they are taking something in their hands, some kind of a gold sphere, and are flying out from this space. Who are these angels?
Are those ourselves or someone else? Yes, it seems that it is ourselves, our Spirit, most likely, who is exchanging all this. And what is next?
And next our service on the rays is continuing, but at the same time we are present in the Father, and at the same time we serve on the ray, simply for a moment we returned to the Source.
We return into ourselves, into our enlightened self, into the new self, so that we can continue the work already started.
We love ourselves, we love our brothers in Spirit, we love our children, and we love everything that surrounds us, our New Earth and our old Earth.
And we now embrace the whole Universe, and thank the Father and thank each other for everything, which He did for us. And we leave this meditation. And amen.
Blog entry
22 May 2013 - 12:59pm
13.01.11 Exercise for spiritual development and improving the health of bodies
by Ann Heifets
A health improving meditation is being offered now for everyone.
- Dear friends, we invite everyone now to join this work in receiving light and improving the health of all your bodies, your physical body and the whole system of fine bodies.
Inhale deeply and deeply exhale, three times... (pause)
I am starting to receive into myself white-purple light, which passes through my crown chakra and through all my internal organs; it dissolves all dense negativities, all unhealthy contaminants, all, which interferes with the light working in me.
I trust the light to create in me those forms, which it thinks are necessary, which it thinks are correct; I trust my whole being, my whole self to the light and I join my free will with the will of the light inside me.
And now, I feel such strength, which I've never felt in me before, and my whole being is being filled with light, the white light of service.
And in it there is no place for illness, no place for contaminants, hardnesses, or negativity.
In it, there is only presence and service. And all my blood vessels, blood, my bones, all, which is inside my physical dense body, all organs and the immune system - it all becomes light, and all is made to receive light, the whole organism is made to work for the light, is made to receive light and give light.
I see how the white-purple light is continuing to flow into my crown chakra, the organism is even overflowing with it, and it starts to give it back, through what I think, through what I feel, combined with my free will.
Now a golden ray came, such active gold joined this white-purple ray, not through the chakra, but somehow in the whole, I don't know how. He says that to this white-purple service, a spiritual knowledge is joining.
And this passes thorough all my being, through my soul, through my Spirit, because I and my soul and my Spirit - are one, and they are constantly working now.
And I now breathe in this golden-knowledge in me and breathe out. And I now see the golden brothers, who help me with this work, who help us all in this work..
This is a spiritual exercise, but it's even bigger than an exercise, because it goes beyond the frame of an exercise, it goes into life itself, it is the very course of life, like life passing through us, and we are the vehicles of a spiritual life, all of us who is now working with us.
And this is the reason why now Mother Mary appeared here, who has been observing this work, and now she came closer, and I think wants to say something.
She says:
- My children, I am with you all the time, I watch all the time how you are growing, I watch how you are developing, and if I go away, or distance myself, it is only to give you freedom, to give you the opportunity to grow, to give you the opportunity to feel yourself big and grown-up. And you are already not infants; you are teenagers, spiritual teenagers.
But I want to say to you something and maybe even to warn you, because growing up, spiritual growth - is a complex process.
I see, something like a bamboo sick, it consists of these parts, and one part grows from another. What is it that I see now?
- While growing from inside yourself, be true to your core, do not leave this.
She says:
- Maybe you do not understand it now, but simply remember it.
She says that she closely observes every one of us, each one who is growing into the Spirit.
And with each new move, when there is a new sprout, a new bud, or a new leaf from this spiritual plant, she is present at each of this new kind of movement, and not for a second looks away from this, even though you may not feel it.
And so is the Father present at all of this, because, do not think that you are alone, even though the feeling of loneliness accompanies growth, no matter how paradoxical it may be.
She says:
- We are present in the space of quietness, in the space of self-contemplation and self-discovery.
She asks now everyone, who is doing this work with us, to look inside himself and see with the inner eye the spiritual path, which he has passed... (pause)
And see now, that you and the Father are one.
We now continue this work (Mother Mary stepped aside) of receiving light, this exercise of your spiritual development, of your spiritual growth.
We invite now those people, who have not joined us yet, to join us - new people, new participants, everyone who wants to join your will with the will of the One, with the will of the Source and to start your spiritual light path.
We ask now everyone to open your spiritual eyes and to see that in reality we did not go anywhere, we did not go anywhere from the Father, we did not go anywhere from the Source, to see this in reality now, that we are present in Him, that we are present in the Father, even being present on the ray, we are present on a mission, and in reality we are present inside the Father.
A state of complete oneness, complete joining of self and the Father - is very important, so that this will be fixed in each one.
The energy of the Father now is being fixed in each, the energy of free creation, the free creative energy, the energy of giving, the energy of joy...
We now came back from a mission inside the Home, each with what he found, understood, while present on the ray, while present on a mission, now we came back and we are inside the Home.
It's hard for me to describe this state of being.
I think, that everyone experiences it very individually.
For me it is some kind of a heat, a warmth, when everyone exchanges everything, lets be present now in this space...
when we share the new that we learned, working on the rays...
Energetically we are now exchanging, we are absorbing that information, which we all collected, while being present in different points of Creation, doing different tasks...
I see angels, they are taking something in their hands, some kind of a gold sphere, and are flying out from this space. Who are these angels?
Are those ourselves or someone else? Yes, it seems that it is ourselves, our Spirit, most likely, who is exchanging all this. And what is next?
And next our service on the rays is continuing, but at the same time we are present in the Father, and at the same time we serve on the ray, simply for a moment we returned to the Source.
We return into ourselves, into our enlightened self, into the new self, so that we can continue the work already started.
We love ourselves, we love our brothers in Spirit, we love our children, and we love everything that surrounds us, our New Earth and our old Earth.
And we now embrace the whole Universe, and thank the Father and thank each other for everything, which He did for us. And we leave this meditation. And amen.
Teaching
22 May 2013 - 10:12am
Acceptance: The First Law of Spirit
written by Judith Johnson
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-johnson/acceptance_b_1589391.html
Just as there are laws of the physical universe such as Newton's laws of gravitation and motion, there are five sequential rules that govern spiritual consciousness. They are acceptance, cooperation, understanding, loving, and enthusiasm. Each one is a doorway to the next. Our awareness of the presence of spirit in our lives is governed by these five laws. As we become able to comprehend and align ourselves with them, we gain access to the treasures they guard.
I think of spiritual consciousness as our ability to know our divine nature and to let that inform how we function in our lives. No matter what one's beliefs are regarding God, spirituality, or religion, the laws of spirit represent a passageway to mental and emotional freedom. When we do not work in cooperation with these laws, our consciousness typically operates in a reactive mode to external conditions -- perceiving ourselves to be victims or winners in the game of life.
The first law of spirit, or stepping stone along this path to freedom, is acceptance. Real acceptance is not for wimps, nor is it a wishy-washy passive way of making do with whatever is present. It is not a "whatever" attitude of resignation either. Acceptance is a conscious choice to drop all forms of resistance to whatever has come present in the moment and making the most of it. Acceptance isn't about liking or approving of something. It is about letting life flow and unfold without getting in the way. It is about being receptive rather than exerting resistance to what comes present. Instead of focusing on the past or the future or wanting things to be different than they are, we open to what is true in the moment. This absence of "againstness" allows us to engage our reality in such a way that we can learn from it and strengthen our ability to function in this world.
For many of us, our first impulse is to resist something that we do not like that comes our way. Acceptance requires overriding this impulse and choosing to breathe into and through the experience, trusting that it has value that is for us and not against us. The truth of the matter is that resistance prolongs the negative experience, and acceptance allows for the possibility of changing our experiences by changing our attitudes.
Consider the bride who had her heart so set on having an outdoor wedding that she didn't make a solid plan B in case of inclement weather. As her wedding day arrived, the storm clouds were rolling in and the forecast was not promising. She was the one who would make the final judgment call about whether or not to move the ceremony indoors. She woke up worrying about the weather, and was distracted by her concerns throughout the entire day leading up to her 6 p.m. ceremony. She missed out on all the available joy and excitement of spending her wedding day with her bridal party. She didn't realize that while the impending storm was out of her control, the internal weather in her heart and mind was entirely up to her. Instead of deciding to play it safe and give her team time to set up the ceremony indoors, she waited until the very last minute. Finally, I went to encourage her to move the ceremony indoors. She was sitting there sobbing in her wedding dress, with makeup dripping down her stubborn face. Just then, the sky blackened and there was a torrential downpour. All the chairs were soaked, the guests ran for cover in a panic and the staff was out in the rain gathering the chairs, whisking them into the reception tent, toweling them dry while sliding over the wet and treacherous floor. Imagine how different this bride's day would have been if she had been able to accept that she had no control over the weather.
Here are two things to watch out for next time you have preconceived notions about how you want things to be and then reality presents you with something very different:
If you hold on to your desire, you create a mental and emotional tension between your desire and reality. The distance between the two will be connected by a stream of negative emotions. Alternatively, if you choose to accept reality, all that energy that would have been spinning around in negativity can be invested in figuring out how to make the best of your situation.
As in the example of the bride described above, no amount of wishful thinking or attachment to a desired outcome makes it any more probable than it is. Consider only truly viable alternatives. If there is a 70 percent chance of rain, attaching yourself to the idea of sunshine merely sets you up for unhappiness and blinds you from seeing, appreciating, and investing in the real options that are available to you.
Ultimately, acceptance is about trusting yourself to rise to whatever occasion presents itself to you. It is about being open to ALL of life, knowing that it all has value whether you like it or not.
Here are two of my favorite quotes on the subject of acceptance:
The reason more of us are not spiritually aware people is that we often don't or won't accept what is happening. Acceptance is a flow of consciousness that continually moves on to the next thing.
So accept whatever comes your way, and don't grumble against anything that happens to you. If it happens, it happens. Go on about your business. Keep flowing. You cannot control circumstances from the outside, so instead of resisting pain or failure and defending against it, you can embrace and encompass your pain and your failures, fully accepting them so that they become part of you.
You then can let them go because they are part of your inner environment -- they are within your domain -- and the loving of your Soul can dissolve them. -- John-Roger
Accept -- then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it ... This will miraculously transform your whole life. -- Eckhart Tolle
Blog entry
22 May 2013 - 6:15am
GETTING DOWN TO ESSENTIALS
~ John & Patrice Robson
www.higherawareness.com
"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials."
~ Lin Yutang
Do you feel a desire to simplify your life?
If you say 'yes,' then set an intention to reduce the demands, stimuli, interruptions and busyness in your life.
We each have the power to do this - we simply have to begin to say 'no' to those activities that don't directly serve what we want for our lives.
Everyone of this planet deserves to have some free time to think, relax and have fun.
If you long for this, begin now to clear your plate and allow a new level of experience to happen in your life.
Take charge.
Eliminate time wasters.
Make some decisions about what matters to you.
"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."
~ Hans Hofmann
Blog entry
22 May 2013 - 6:07am
Hello all.
:)
I am wanting to do readings for other people. It is kind of a first for me, so please bear with me.
If you would like to recieve a reading please send me a private message, with a question you need help with, and I'll get back to you. (It is with no charge since I am beginning at it)
Thanks and much Love :)
Yonatan
P.S. If you want to tell me something then you can comment here :)
video
22 May 2013 - 6:00am
13.01.02 New Earth 3: Formative light, love as dominant
Story
22 May 2013 - 5:57am
Ann Heifets
13.01.02 New Earth 3: Formative light, love as dominant
What do they want to transmit through me now?
- You are on the ray, you are in Presence, you are in the vision of the Heavenly plan, in the vision of what is happening, in the vision of the spiritual processes, which are happening with the Earth – with the newborn Earth, and with the old Earth, which is under transformation, not an easy transformation but a heavy transformation, and with the New Earth, which is so clean, newborn, new, and exists above all this.
In essence, each one of us, people, is repeating the path of the Earth, when a light person is born out of him and old shells are falling off, - this is what is happening with the Earth, i.e. in that sense the processes are very similar.
- What do they want to transmit regarding the new system of the world, about the new spiritual schools, about the New Earth?
- Listen to yourselves, listen to those processes, which are happening inside of you, because these processes are deeply and finely spiritual, they are not double natured, they are sublime, and with your inner attention you speed up and make them more active.
- What are these processes, and what is involved here?
-You are growing into a new spiritual person.
-And what is he like, who is he and what is he?
-Much has already been said about this topic.
-And what do they want to transmit to us now, new people on the New Earth?
-Learn to receive light, learn to listen to light, learn to take information from the ray of light, learn how to be from light, learn unconditional existence from light, learn how to be invulnerable, how to be on the one hand straight and simple-valued, and on the other hand totally unattainable.
-The unique properties of light are now being given to you as something to which you need to open up to, to receive in you and to absorb in you, and through this absorbing to learn from the property of this light: to be one-character with light, one-quality with light, to be the same in your vibrations, in your qualities, as light.
- Now the Light itself, I think, will speak…
-No, - he smiles. He says that he does not speak in words; he speaks individually in each person in a language understandable to him.
I have a question:
- Life, it’s generally hard and it continues to be hard, and even though we talk about all this, life continues to remain as it was. What does light want to say to us about this, what does the Source want to say to us about this, our Heavenly parents do?
- Really it’s not true, because life turns with the side that you choose yourselves, i.e. you choose the direction, then in your chosen direction, life starts to open its doors and opportunities.
That’s why, trust your right to choose and choose light in your life, and do not display a half-hearted position, because it is very hard, this I say from my own experience, that it is very hard to choose a half-hearted position, when you are both here and there; choose pure light, so that light will show itself to you in any situation, in any person, in any circumstance.
Therefore, this thought that life remained the same as it was, is incorrect, it’s not functional, it’s not real, and it’s not life-like.
Continue that with which we started this work: to learn from light, because light is universal, it is unattainable, it is universal and at the same time always open and always is in everything until the end, it displays itself always and in totality, but our vision, our level, is open to the degree that it is open; therefore, we take in as much as we are able.
Simply now we are offered to open our eyes wider and to fit in more light.
-What other characteristics does light have? What does he want to say to us?
- On the New Earth, Light is the formative beginning, it is an actively formative beginning, and on the old Earth it is the formative, but on the old Earth it is hidden by our notions, it is hidden with all kinds of our mental constructions, but on the New Earth it is all manifested, it is all open.
This is studied at school, each being knows this, that Light is the basis of everything, light is formative, light is the main actor in what’s happening, and light is individual in each one, and light, which comes from the Father…
- And what do they want to tell us about building a new life on the New Earth by light?
- It is all very individual, light works within each one individually, especially on the New Earth. Light forms new forms, creates new spiritual arteries, new organs of perception, which a three-dimensional person, that we were before, had all of this, but it was hidden, packed in a such way that we could not even guess of its existence. On the New Earth all of this is opening.
- What are these organs?
Immediately, wings appeared. It seems that it is figurative, but what are these wings?
- It is the ability to move through space.
I see arteries and veins inside a person with light, with spiritual light.
- And what is this?
- It is a new light circulatory system, which allows a new human being to exist comfortably and well in different surroundings and in different conditions.
Since he will be moving across the Universe and will be sociable, then he will need the means and such structure which will come in mutual relationship with other beings – different other light beings, so that he will feel well everywhere, spiritually comfortable and properly.
Therefore a new light circulatory system is needed, which will allow him to feel comfortable in any conditions, as guests of different beings and in different environments; now I will not list them, because different conditions may arise, different situations may be arising.
They are saying that this light system is not new, and on the old Earth it was known. But now – I feel it in myself, how strongly it is activated - it will allow us to more actively take part in different events of the light life and will allow us to be more mobile, more light weight, more agile, so that we can participate in other events of spiritual life, from which we were closed off on the three-dimensional Earth.
- And what else does light form?
It forms a new heart, which will not be on the left side, but I see that it will be more in the center. Do I see that correctly?
- Not, not exactly.
- And what is correct?
- It is not important where it will be located. This heart is not from flesh and blood, but is a spiritual heart; it is a transparent light organ, in which all the information about Creation in general is gathered.
It was also in our heart, but it was there on the account of the density of matter, on account of blood, on account of density of material and it was hard for us to see it and it was hard to reach. But now the light heart is simply built inside us, an organ of active light work, which includes in itself codes of the Father, all creations and the whole Universe in microform.
And it is a reflection of a thought of the Father - simultaneously a projection of the whole Creation and at the same time a projection of the Father.
And the new lungs, which breathe a spiritual air is also a light organ. The stomach will not exist.
-What will be in its place or how can it be understood?
-- Because the food is spiritual, then physical food will not be needed, and the lower chakra will unite with the throat chakra, it seems.
Unfortunately I do not see a visual form of a new human being.
What do they want to say about the structure of a new human being?
- There is no sense in listing, because there will be many changes on a visual plan, but this is not important, now we are not talking about that, we are talking about the essence.
Love as the main energy, present on the planet will form necessary organs, which will be able to perceive it, i.e. love as defining, as a dominant, will form that which is necessary for her expression, for her realization, for her manifestation on the level of the New Earth.
- I see that from above a kind of a planet Saturn with her orbits is descending on the New Earth.
- What is it I see?
It is a space ship and from it some kinds of beings are descending.
- Who is this and what is this and what is happening?
It is for confirmation of that thought, that I saw it correctly, that love is the defining and dominant thing on the planet, and with the confirmation of this a ship with beings now already descended to us.
- What do they want to tell us?
Somehow I see them as white, like in films, in space-suits. What is this?
- Visually so far you cannot imagine everything; you are using the models that your brain gives you.
- But what is this in essence?
In essence they are spiritual beings, which came to greet us and to mix with us, because having determined on our planet as dominant, our planet immediately attracted them with her vibrations.
They came to greet us and to thank us for that movement, which we made, that love is dominant on our planet, and to receive us into their embrace, so that we will receive them into our embrace, as a sort of a spiritual fraternization, I see, is happening.
They are not talking about themselves, because it feels that it’s too much, some kind of information is extra.
Simply that this strong vibration of love attracted them here.
This is such an exciting moment, that there is not even some kind of information, no words, which may be transmitted, because for everyone who is listening now to this work and at least to some degree trusts this, it is happening. It is happening through love, this uniting is happening with other light beings, which came to our expressed intention, to our expressed love.
And what is so interesting, I see, that each is fraternizing exactly with that being which is close to him, which is accessible. That is how I see it.
This ship is ascending and these beings remained on the New Earth. Who is this?
They are saying that they will help us. They came here for the purpose of helping us get up on our feet.
They are saying that long time ago they took inside the ray of the Father and took inside love as formative, but also it was not so simple, and also many changes were happening to them and they lived through many difficulties, but now they are preoccupied that they are like a team, which helps their light brothers.
They are helping in their development, in their becoming. They, as I see, are encamping somewhere here, as a camp, near to us.
They will help us in our building; they will help us in our creation of ourselves.
And by that, they are creating themselves, i.e. they are also learning from this, from this helping.
And again, in the meaning, that love is formative, which will form those organs, which are necessary for us, that will form those light forms, which are necessary for love’s perception, they, with their coming, again confirm that it is very precise, very correct; because that - where love is not involved, that will not exist, that will not be.
And this is why, with some common matrix, when there is the light heart, there is a new light system; each being is very different spiritually, of course with some common characteristics, but many parameters are very different.
This is because light is individual, and light forms that vessel, which is necessary for it. Love creates those forms, in which it can maximally manifest itself.
They are smiling, because we are all so different.
They are saying:
- Let’s return to our children.
To our light children, which are near us and inside us.
- What do they want to say about this?
They are saying that in some meaning, any being of light is a child, and you know this, and all of Creation is a child of the Father, but learn to be good children, learn to be attentive children, learn to be a vessel, I get, not a prodigal son..
They are saying:
- Your new light organism, it has not grown strong yet, it, of course, needs a huge amount of love from its Heavenly parents and from its brothers, like us, and from the whole system of the world; therefore, collect, breathe deeply, feel yourselves free, feel calm, feel yourselves in the arms of your Heavenly parents, and of course do not be afraid of anything, it’s strange to say it, but still, do not allow to you any measure of the energies of fear or the energies of mistrust, it has all been left behind, it’s strange for them to say it, but still they consider it correct to say.
They are saying that the building of your spiritual life already exists, as a project, but it is still not realized on the New Earth, it only exists as a project; it exists at some distance away from Earth.
With your intention, you will create it, enter it and build it.
There is a lot of work, the work is large, and Creation awaits your labor; therefore, take care of yourselves, love yourselves, live by love, live by giving.
And give thanks to the Father, to your Heavenly Father and Mother, for creating you the way that you are. Send them your love in the same way as they constantly send you their love.
And we are with you, our Divine brothers. Amen.
Teaching
22 May 2013 - 5:54am
LEARNING TO STAY
~ Pema Chodron
www.shambhala.com
"Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called "maitri" - a simple, direct relationship with our being."
~ Pema Chodron
"Meditation practice is regarded as a good and, in fact, excellent way to overcome warfare in the world: our own warfare as well as greater warfare."
~ Chˆgyam Trungpa Rinpoche
As a species, we should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort. To be encouraged to stay with our vulnerability is news that we definitely can use. Sitting meditation is our support for learning how to do this. Sitting meditation, also known as mindfulness-awareness practice, is the foundation of bodhichitta training. It is the home ground of the warrior bodhisattva.
Sitting meditation cultivates loving-kindness and compassion, the relative qualities of bodhichitta. It gives us a way to move closer to our thoughts and emotions and to get in touch with our bodies. It is a method of cultivating unconditional friendliness toward ourselves and for parting the curtain of indifference that distances us from the suffering of others. It is our vehicle for learning to be a truly loving person.
Gradually, through meditation, we begin to notice that there are gaps in our internal dialogue. In the midst of continually talking to ourselves, we experience a pause, as if awakening from a dream. We recognize our capacity to relax with the clarity, the space, the open-ended awareness that already exists in our minds. We experience moments of being right here that feel simple, direct, and uncluttered.
This coming back to the immediacy of our experience is training in unconditional bodhichitta. By simply staying here, we relax more and more into the open dimension of our being. It feels like stepping out of a fantasy and relaxing with the truth.
Yet there is no guarantee that sitting meditation will be of benefit. We can practice for years without it penetrating our hearts and minds. We can use meditation to reinforce our false beliefs: it will protect us from discomfort; it will fix us; it will fulfill our hopes and remove our fears. This happens because we don’t properly understand why we are practicing.
Why do we meditate? This is a question we’d be wise to ask. Why would we even bother to spend time alone with ourselves?
First of all, it is helpful to understand that meditation is not just about feeling good. To think that this is why we meditate is to set ourselves up for failure. We’ll assume we are doing it wrong almost every time we sit down: even the most settled meditator experiences psychological and physical pain. Meditation takes us just as we are, with our confusion and our sanity. This complete acceptance of ourselves as we are is called maitri, a simple, direct relationship with our being.
Trying to fix ourselves is not helpful. It implies struggle and self-denigration. Denigrating ourselves is probably the major way that we cover over bodhichitta.
Does not trying to change mean we have to remain angry and addicted until the day we die? This is a reasonable question. Trying to change ourselves doesn’t work in the long run because we’re resisting our own energy. Self-improvement can have temporary results, but lasting transformation occurs only when we honor ourselves as the source of wisdom and compassion. We are, as the eighth-century Buddhist master Shantideva pointed out, very much like a blind person who finds a jewel buried in a heap of garbage. It is right here in our smelliest of stuff that we discover the awakened heart of basic clarity and goodness, the completely open mind of bodhichitta.
IT IS ONLY WHEN WE BEGIN TO RELAX WITH OURSELVES AS WE ARE THAT MEDITATION BECOMES A TRANSFORMATIVE PROCESS. WHEN WE RELATE WITH OURSELVES WITHOUT MORALIZING, WITHOUT HARSHNESS, WITHOUT DECEPTION, WE FINALLY LET GO OF HARMFUL PATTERNS.. Without maitri, renunciation of old habits becomes abusive. This is an important point.
There are FOUR MAIN QUALITIES that are cultivated WHEN WE MEDITATE: STEADFASTNESS, CLEAR SEEING, EXPERIENCING ONE'S EMOTIONAL DISTRESS, and ATTENTION TO THE PRESENT MOMENT. These four factors apply not only to sitting meditation, but are essential to all the bodhichitta practices and for relating with difficult situations in our daily lives.
STEADFASTNESS. When we practice meditation we are strengthening our ability to be steadfast with ourselves. No matter what comes up—aching bones, boredom, falling asleep, or the wildest thoughts and emotions—we develop a loyalty to our experience. Although plenty of meditators consider it, we don’t run screaming out of the room. Instead we acknowledge that impulse as thinking, without labeling it right or wrong. This no small task. Never underestimate our inclination to bolt when we hurt.
We’re encouraged to meditate everyday, even for a short time, in order to cultivate this steadfastness with ourselves. We sit under all kinds of circumstances—whether we are feeling healthy or sick, whether we’re in a good mood or depressed, whether we feel our meditation is going well or is completely falling apart. As we continue to sit we see that meditation isn’t about getting it right or attaining some ideal state. It’s about being able to stay present with ourselves. It becomes increasingly clear that we won’t be free of self-destructive patterns unless we develop a compassionate understanding of what they are.
One aspect of steadfastness is simply being in your body. Because meditation emphasizes working with your mind, it’s easy to forget that you even have a body. When you sit down it’s important to relax into your body and to get in touch with what is going on. Starting with the top of your head, you can spend a few minutes bringing awareness to every part of your body. When you come to places that are hurting or tense you can breath in and out three or four times, keeping your awareness on that area. When you get to the soles of your feet you can stop or, if you feel like it, you can repeat this body sweep by going from bottom to top. Then at any time during your meditation period, you can quickly tune back into the overall sense of being in your body. For a moment you can bring your awareness directly back to being right here. You are sitting. There are sounds, smells, sights, aches; you are breathing in and out. You can reconnect with your body like this when it occurs to you—maybe once or twice during a sitting session. Then return to the technique.
In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away. This can be so uncomfortable that we feel it’s impossible to stay. Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but also about what it is to be human. All of us derive security and comfort from the imaginary world of memories and fantasies and plans. We really don’t want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. It goes against the grain to stay present. There are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down.
The pith instruction is, Stay. . . stay. . . just stay. Learning to stay with ourselves in meditation is like training a dog. If we train a dog by beating it, we’ll end up with an obedient but very inflexible and rather terrified dog. The dog may obey when we say "Stay!" "Come!" "Roll over!" and "Sit up!" but he will also be neurotic and confused. By contrast, training with kindness results in someone who is flexible and confident, who doesn’t become upset when situations are unpredictable and insecure.
So whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to "stay" and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Discursive mind? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What’s for lunch? Stay! What am I doing here? Stay! I can’t stand this another minute! Stay! That is how to cultivate steadfastness.
CLEAR SEEING. After we’ve been meditating for a while, it’s common to feel that we are regressing rather then waking up. "Until I started meditating, I was quite settled; now it feels like I’m always restless." "I never used to feel anger; now it comes up all the time." We might complain that meditation is ruining our life, but in fact such experiences are a sign that we’re starting to see more clearly. Through the process of practicing the technique day in and out, year after year, we begin to be very honest with ourselves. Clear seeing is another way of saying that we have less self-deception.
The Beat poet Jack Kerouac, feeling primed for a spiritual breakthrough, wrote to a friend before he retreated into the wilderness, "If I don’t get a vision on Desolation Peak, then my name ain’t William Blake." But later he wrote that he found it hard to face the naked truth. "I’d thought, in June when I get to the top…and everybody leaves…I will come face to face with God or Tathagata (Buddha) and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering…but instead I’d come face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it, but face to face with ole Hateful . . . Me."
Meditation requires patience and maitri. If this process of clear seeing isn’t based on self-compassion it will become a process of self-aggression. We need self-compassion to stabilize our minds. We need it to work with our emotions. We need it in order to stay.
When we learn to meditate, we are instructed to sit in a certain position on a cushion or chair. We’re instructed to just be in the present moment, aware of our breath as it goes out. We’re instructed that when our mind has wandered off, without any harshness or judgmental quality, we should acknowledge that as "thinking" and return to the outbreath. We train in coming back to this moment of being here. In the process of doing this, our fogginess, our bewilderment, our ignorance begin to transform into clear seeing. "Thinking" becomes a code word for seeing "just what is"—both our clarity and our confusion. We are not trying to get rid of thoughts. Rather we are clearly seeing our defense mechanisms, our negative beliefs about ourselves, our desires and our expectations. We also see our kindness, our bravery, our wisdom.
Through the process of practicing the mindfulness-awareness technique on a regular basis, we can no longer hide from ourselves. We clearly see the barriers we set up to shield us from naked experience. Although we still associate the walls we’ve erected with safety and comfort, we also begin to feel them as a restriction. This claustrophobic situation is important for a warrior. It marks the beginning of longing for an alternative to our small, familiar world. We begin to look for ventilation. We want to dissolve the barriers between ourselves and others.
EXPERIENCING OUR EMOTIONAL DISTRESS. . Many people, including long-time practitioners, use meditation as a means of escaping difficult emotions. It is possible to misuse the label "thinking" as a way of pushing negativity away. No matter how many times we’ve been instructed to stay open to whatever arises, we still can use meditation as repression. Transformation occurs only when we remember, breath by breath, year after year, to move toward our emotional distress without condemning or justifying our experience.
Trungpa Rinpoche describes emotion as a combination of self-existing energy and thoughts. Emotion can’t proliferate without our internal conversations. If we’re angry when we sit to meditate, we are instructed to label the thoughts "thinking" and let them go. Yet below the thoughts something remains—a vital, pulsating energy. There is nothing wrong, nothing harmful about that underlying energy. Our practice is to stay with it, to experience it, to leave it as it is, without proliferating.
There are certain advanced techniques in which you intentionally churn up emotions by thinking of people or situations that make you angry or lustful or afraid. The practice is to let the thoughts go and connect directly with the energy, asking yourself, "Who am I without these thoughts?" What we do with mindfulness-awareness practice is simpler than that, but I consider it equally daring. When emotional distress arises uninvited, we let the story line go and abide with the energy of that moment. This is a felt experience, not a verbal commentary on what is happening. We can feel the energy in our bodies. If we can stay with it, neither acting it out nor repressing it, it wakes us up. People often say, "I fall asleep all the time in meditation. What shall I do?" There are lots of antidotes to drowsiness but my favorite is, "Get angry!"
Not abiding with our energy is a predictable human habit. Acting out and repressing are tactics we use to get away from our emotional pain. For instance most of us when we’re angry scream or act it out. We alternate expressions of rage with feeling ashamed of ourselves and wallowing in it. We become so stuck in repetitive behavior that we become experts at getting all worked up. In this way we continue to strengthen our conflicting emotions.
One night years ago I came upon my boyfriend passionately embracing another woman. We were in the house of a millionaire who had a priceless collection of pottery. I was furious and looking for something to throw. Everything I picked up I had to put back down because it was worth at least $10,000. I was completely enraged and I couldn’t find an outlet! There were no exits from experiencing my own energy. The absurdity of the situation totally cut through my rage. I went outside and looked at the sky and laughed until I cried.
In Vajrayana Buddhism it is said that wisdom is inherent in emotions. When we struggle against our own energy we are rejecting the source of wisdom. Anger without the fixation is none other than mirrorlike wisdom. Pride and envy without fixation is experienced as equanimity. The energy of passion when it’s free of grasping is discriminating awareness wisdom.
In bodhichitta training we also welcome the living energy of emotions. When our emotions intensify what we usually feel is fear. This fear is always lurking in our lives. In sitting meditation we practice dropping whatever story we are telling ourselves and leaning into the emotions and the fear. Thus we train in opening the fearful heart to the restlessness of our own energy. We learn to abide with the experience of our emotional distress.
ATTENTION TO THE PRESENT MOMENT. Another factor we cultivate in the transformative process of meditation is attention to this very moment. We make the choice, moment by moment, to be fully here. Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward other, and toward the world. This quality of attention is inherent in our ability to love.
Coming back to the present moment takes some effort but the effort is very light. The instruction is to "touch and go." We touch thoughts by acknowledging them as thinking and then we let them go. It’s a way of relaxing our struggle, like touching a bubble with a feather. It’s a nonaggressive approach to being here.
Sometimes we find that we like our thoughts so much that we don’t want to let them go. Watching our personal video is a lot more entertaining than bringing our mind back home. There’s no doubt that our fantasy world can be very juicy and seductive. So we train in using a "soft" effort, in interrupting our habitual patterns; we train in cultivating self-compassion.
We practice meditation to connect with maitri and unconditional openness. By not deliberately blocking anything, by directly touching our thoughts and then letting them go with an attitude of no big deal, we can discover that our fundamental energy is tender, wholesome, and fresh. We can start to train as a warrior, discovering for ourselves that it is bodhichitta, not confusion, that is basic.
Excerpted from The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times, by Pema Chödrön, Shambhala Publications, Inc. 2001. Reprinted by permission.
[my caps]
Teaching
22 May 2013 - 12:43am
The world may talk about equality but, in fact, all living creatures are born unequal because the
machinery of power uses inequality as its fuel. Some people are more unequal than others.
Equality will only come about as the karmic patterns in this planet lose their grip and transmute
into new ways of interaction.
Generosity of spirit, mind and action is the first step in enabling all living creatures to become
equal because implicit within true generosity is compassion, and that is inescapably linked to
the necessity of acting with responsibility to all things.
Every little kindness that you do is a powerful step towards the gradual equality of all life on earth.
How to develop generous energy ~
Be generous in the way your heart tells you to be. Never be generous because you think you
should. This is an unskilful mental action that will create clumsy events in the world around
you and complicate your karmic patterns.
Do not expect generosity to be returned. If you do, it becomes a business transaction, and you
start to develop the habit of weighing up value and worth. This diminishes your emotions, life
force and mind, and creates further confusing karmic situations.
Typed from:
The Tibetan Art of Living
by Chris. Hansard ~
Story
21 May 2013 - 5:15pm
The SOUL-DEEP Movement of Faith
Ascended Master, El Morya’s Weekly Message ~ May 21 – 28, 2013
Received by Julie Miller
May 21, 2013
When you fully believe with all your trust in an unknown outcome; you are demonstrating Pure Faith. When you exercise Faith in others that you work with, even if those dear souls are far and your communication means is through technical devices is found through your belief in them, without knowing the full and complete details. To give faith, you must have complete trust in the other person or with the current situation that all will come about as it should.
Understand dear ones Faith is a dominant Power of Truth. It is direct and can often be described as spur-of-the-moment kind of Inner Knowing which demonstrates fluently your truest perception of your emotions and what you consider to be Truth. When you are acting on Faith dear ones, this great Inner Power is found from within, never from external sources. The benchmark of Faith is having an uncanny Inner Realization without any concrete facts; trusting whole heartedly that all will come to be. Your Faith will always be replenished when you acquire more knowledge through all new experiences. When you exercise Faith dear ones, you are also connecting to the Spirit of God, which in turn engenders a deeper Belief and Faith in His omnipresence. When you are expressing such Spiritual Faith dear ones, you are illustrating that you have Faith in the Wisdom and Love of God and that His presence is always working through you.
We remind you dear ones; your Faith is not discovered from any word that is spoken or written. To believe in already proven facts is not demonstrating Faith. Faith is trusting and believing in what you do not know; to accept another dear soul as they are without the need to know every detail of a particular situation is also Faith.
We encourage you dear ones to see Faith as a soul-deep movement. Faith is felt as an essential component to your journey especially when your entire Self incorporates this profound Inner Confidence with your Heart, body, mind and spirit. When you freely let go of any expectations to any particular outcome yet at the same time remain confident on its result regardless of what it will be, clearly speaks of Faith dear ones.
How do you know you have acted by sheer Faith and Trust? You will discover a deep sense of peace and satisfaction wash over you once a certain situation has passed. Even if the outcome wasn’t exactly as you pictured it to be, you see its resolve with clear acceptance and you are content.
When you apply Faith and Trust in all areas of your life and journey dear ones, you are accessing more opportunities of peaceful solutions and creating the Right conditions for your life that will positively affect all those closest to you. Please comprehend that the Highest of Faith is not from trusting just in God to create the perfect conditions for you to live, but from experiencing the Joy when you finally completely open your Whole Self and surrender to the Will of God.
Throughout your journey, you will be faced with various obstacles that will test your Faith and your Trust in yourself and in God. Remember dear ones, all obstacles, trials and tribulations are your opportunities to develop a higher application of Faith. You are already well aware that problems are a part of life. They hold much growth potential and spiritual development. Each problem or challenge you face provides you with the ability to seek your answers by going within in order to reflect and discover the appropriate solution after you have quieted your busy mind and focused through your heart. As you discover your solution you are all raising your Faith in God as you are working through the interconnectedness of His Divine energy.
When you transcend your challenges dear ones through Faith and Trust in your Self and in God’s Love, you are quietly permitting yourself next time when there is a problem, to seek His guidance and by working together your own Trust, Inner-Power will intensify as you see regardless of the size of your situation, Faith is always essential and a divine component.
As you move along your current path in your life, it’s important once in a while dear ones to stop and ask yourself, “What is it that you truly believe in?” Discover where Faith fits while you seek pure happiness and fulfillment. Understand dear ones that Fear and Faith are completely opposites. When you are able to conquer fear, you are growing in Faith, Belief and Trust in your Self and in the omnipresence of God. When you exercise continual Faith and Trust during difficult moments you are ensuring a positive outcome. Maintaining cheerfulness and being able to smile when times are exceptionally rough create the best foundations that support your ability to achieve greater Faith in the unknown outcome.
We witness many dear souls that demonstrate deep, profound faith in all they do, regardless if they are experiencing a difficult situation, or exercising great patience for an unknown outcome illustrates high levels of genuine sincerity and dedication. Understand dear ones, when you believe whole-heartedly in complete Faith and Trust that God will come through for you, even if it takes a certain amount of time illuminates the Wisdom of your Soul.
Your true TRUTH-ful Power is derived from the Spirit of Faith that is inside each of you. There is no guide book, no written rules to follow other than your own heart and trusting what you find. Let us remind you dear ones, what is understood as truth for one dear soul, will not always be the same for another. Your truth is based on what you have experienced and what you feel from trusting your heart and soul in all things. We do not encourage belittling others for having a different understanding of what is true, but we do encourage you to accept other dear souls for who they are regardless of what they believe. You are all here to guide one another; through mutual respect so much can be gained. Love unconditionally and discover from all the differences you have, that love will always bind you as One if you truly allow it.
And so it is…
I AM Ascended Master, El Morya through Julie Miller
Blog entry
21 May 2013 - 2:30pm
New Members: It is recommended you read from the beginning of the archive, as previous lessons are prerequisite to this one. The first lesson is, "Why This Discussion?" at http://aypsite.com/10.html
Whatever system of spiritual practices we are following, chances are that we have heard, or figured out on our own, that daily practice is the key to success. The journey of human spiritual transformation takes time, and the inner changes that lead to our enlightenment require daily cultivation. Daily spiritual practices are also needed when we already have spiritual momentum, meaning we have some degree of dynamic inner opening occurring either through previous practices or a "spontaneous awakening." If we rely only on the energies that are moving in us spontaneously, then we can be prone to imbalances that will make our journey homeward toward unending ecstatic bliss and divine love considerably less comfortable, and potentially longer than necessary.
So, no matter what our approach or level of attainment is, reaching our destination in a reliable fashion depends on having daily spiritual practices firmly in place. This was emphasized in these lessons with the first instructions on deep meditation, and with many reminders since then.
Way back in the lessons on meditation and spinal breathing, some suggestions were given on how to fit these practices into a busy schedule. Wherever we may be, we can close our eyes and meditate – in trains, airplanes, waiting rooms, just about anywhere. The same is true of spinal breathing. In fact, light spinal breathing can be done with eyes open while on the way home from work in the car, without taking our attention off our driving. So, by the time we are home we can go right into meditation. It is not ideal practice, but can be done if the clock is pressing us at home. If we are willing to be flexible and compromise on our practices from time to time, we can keep up the habit under the most adverse circumstances. There is great value in this, for it assures us of a continuation of practices over the long term, which is the key to enlightenment.
We do not live in an ideal world. Even with the best plans for regular practice in our meditation room, it can all go out the window with a family emergency or other intervening events. Does this mean our daily practices have to go out the window too? Not if we have a strategy. That is what we will cover in this lesson. Ways to keep our practices going, no matter what is happening.
As our routine of yoga becomes more sophisticated, involving more practices, keeping it all going in a busy schedule presents both challenges and opportunities. With so many pieces to work with in an advanced routine, we can be pretty creative in compressing our practices when time is short. Where there is a will, there is a way!
Let's talk about the basics of establishing and keeping a habit of doing daily spiritual practices. One of the easiest ways to do it is make a rule for ourselves that we will do our routine before we eat breakfast and dinner – twice a day like that. If the time of one or both of those meals isn't stable, then we can tag it to be done upon awakening in the morning, and as soon as we arrive home in the evening. If we are traveling, it gets a bit more complicated, but practices can be done to some degree under just about any circumstances, as long as we honor our habit.
Keeping the habit is not only about doing a full routine. It does not have to be "all or nothing." The habit is an urge we build into ourselves to do something about spiritual practice at the appointed time that comes twice daily. Having the habit is having the "urge to practice." This cultivated urge is the seed of all daily practice. It is like getting hungry at meal times. It just happens, and we want to eat. If we have the urge for spiritual practices cultivated like that, then we will do them. Most days we will be doing our whole routine. On other days, we may be doing less. But we will always be doing something every session. This "always doing something every
session" is very important.
To illustrate what we mean by having the "habit," let's suppose we are hurrying down a busy street. We are on our way to a business dinner appointment that will tie us up until bedtime. We are walking quickly, weaving our way through the people we are passing on the sidewalk. The restaurant is just around the corner now. Almost there. But wait! We see a bench, an empty bus stop bench on the sidewalk in the middle of all the people hurrying this way and that way. We have that urge built into us to do practices. It is time. So what do we do? We stop and sit on that bench for a few minutes and meditate. It might be only for two minutes. But why not? Who will miss us for those two minutes? And we have kept our habit to sit. It is amazing how doing something small like that can renew us for an entire evening – centering for just a few minutes, picking up the mantra just a few times. The nervous system says, "Thank you!" And we are calmer for the rest of the evening.
But it is not just about centering for a few minutes. It is also about keeping our habit of twice daily practices. If we are in a crazy schedule for days or weeks like that, and can just sit for a few minutes before breakfast and dinner, then when we recover control of our schedule we won't be struggling to find our practice routine again. The habit will be there, and then we can indulge it with our full routine, which we know will fill us to overflowing with inner silence and divine ecstasy.
So that is the first thing, you know – keeping the habit, even if it for two minutes on a bus stop bench. It does not matter where it is, or what is going on. We can keep the habit if we are committed. Then it will keep us committed, because it becomes a hunger that comes on its own at the appointed time. Then we will not have to struggle to restore our commitment to yoga once we are free to do twice-daily full routines of practice again.
It is more likely that we will be faced with compromises in our practice time that are not usually as extreme as having to take a few minutes on a bus stop bench. Let's talk about those.
If we are doing spinal breathing and meditation, followed by a few minutes of rest while coming out, it is not difficult to tailor our practice to a time limitation. Say we are doing 10 minutes of spinal breathing, 20 minutes of meditation, and 5 minutes of rest. That is a 35 minute routine. Then one day we may find ourselves with only 15 minutes to work with. We can just do 10 minutes of meditation, rest for a few minutes and get up. We can also put a few minutes of spinal breathing in front. If we know we will be short on time, we can start with some light "walking" spinal breathing before we get to our seat. If we have to choose between spinal breathing and meditation, we always choose meditation. One thing we do not do is combine spinal breathing and deep meditation at the same time. The reasons for that are discussed early in the lessons.
Let's suppose we are doing a "full plate" of practices -- everything in these lessons to a moderate degree. So let's lay it out. It is a typical routine. If you are doing more or less of any of the practices, then you can make the necessary adjustments in translating the suggestions on what to do when the schedule crunch hits you. The idea is to develop some strategies that will enable us to keep our routine together when time is short. Think about it in advance – "What will I do if my practice time is cut in half?" There is no absolute right or wrong answer. Beyond a few basics, keeping practices going when time is short is an art. So here is our moderate "full plate" routine:
Asanas – 10 min
Spinal breathing – 10 min
Chin pump – 5 min
Spinal bastrika – 5 min
Meditation – 20 min
Samyama – 10 min
Yoni mudra – 5 minutes
Targeted or crown bastrika (optional) – 5 min
Rest – 5 min (or more)
That is about 75 minutes – an hour and fifteen minutes. There is nothing sacred about the times in this routine. Maybe you are doing 20 minutes of spinal breathing, and no samyama. Or maybe no asanas. Maybe no spinal or targeted bastrika. Whatever the combination is, it is up to you. Just make sure you are not skipping meditation or rest. Those two (cultivation of inner silence, plus a stable transition to daily activity) are the foundation of all spiritual progress. Spinal breathing is right behind meditation and rest in importance. So, spinal breathing, meditation, and ending rest are a powerful and full routine of practices. All the rest of the practices are for enhancing and building on the effects of these.
This "pecking order" is what we use as a guideline when we begin compressing our practices into a tighter schedule.
So, let's say we have this wonderful one-hour-plus practice routine, and all of a sudden due to circumstances beyond our control, we find ourselves with only thirty minutes to do our afternoon routine. Without a plan, the inclination might be to just bag it for the afternoon and try again tomorrow. All or nothing, you know. That is not a good strategy. Not only will we lose the benefit of a skillfully compressed routine, but we will also dilute our habit to practice twice daily. The urge to practice needs twice daily reinforcement. Just remember the bus stop bench. If it was good enough to keep the habit going, isn't thirty minutes in a relatively quiet room a luxury? It really is. So here are some suggestions on what we can do.
First, we hang on to meditation. That is always the first priority. But we'd like to do some of the other practices too, so let's trim the meditation to 15 minutes in this 30 minute plan. We know we need up to five minutes of rest at the end for a smooth transition back into activity, so that is 20 minutes, leaving us with 10 minutes to work with. Next is spinal breathing. We can do five minutes of spinal breathing in front of meditation and then use the last five minutes for other things. Which practice should the last five minutes be for?
At this point, it depends on our preference. If we love our samyama, then we can go for five minutes of that and leave asanas, chin pump, spinal bastrika, and yoni mudra for tomorrow. Or, if we want chin pump and spinal bastrika, there is a trick we can do. We can marry spinal bastrika and chin pump together for three to five minutes – that is doing spinal bastrika while doing the chin pump at the same time. It is not ideal, but it provides a combined injection of bastrika and chin pump. Two for the price of one, you know. With this scenario, we are giving up the kumbhaka in chin pump, and probably won't have time for yoni mudra either. It is also possible to incorporate chin pump into the last few minutes of spinal breathing. You will recall that this is called "chin pump lite."
Additionally, in less than one minute before we sit for practices, we can do a "sun salutation- style" stretching routine that includes bending back, twisting left and right, and bending forward and touching toes. A little uddiyana and/or nauli can be done also. All of the elements of an asana routine can be touched on in this way in about a minute. It is far from optimal, but it is something in the asanas department we can do before we sit.
So, in this way, we can do a pretty good routine in 30 minutes if we are faced with a time limit like that. It can be done in less time too. Of course, then we are dropping more practices off. But we can always do something, even if it is sitting on a bus stop bench for a few minutes, picking up the mantra and dipping into pure bliss consciousness.
Is should be mentioned that we don't have to give up any of the "parallel" practices we do while sitting. These are siddhasana, mulabandha/asvini, sambhavi, uddiyana/nauli, and kechari. To the extent we are practicing these, they can always be incorporated with our core sitting practices in every session, no matter how short the time is. Indeed, they will be found creeping into our everyday activity as ecstatic conductivity is coming up in our nervous system. By then, mudras and bandhas have become part of our normal neuro-biological functioning, and we will never lose them.
Of course, we have to be mindful about practices we are doing in public view. Doing full-blown chin pump in a busy airport waiting room could lead to a call for the rescue squad. Either that or an exorcist! A vigorous bastrika session might lead to a similar call. But most of our practices can be done discreetly. That certainly applies to light spinal breathing, meditation, samyama, mulabandha, mild uddiyana/nauli, and kechari. Sambhavi is not noticeable if done with eyes fully closed, which is recommended anyway. Even siddhasana can be done discreetly in a public place if one shoe is removed and our heel is slipped up under our perineum. Sometimes where we happen to be will determine what practices we will do. As the old saying goes – "Discretion is the better part of valor."
There are many ways to piece together practices if we are faced with a short schedule, or less than ideal location. After spinal breathing, meditation, and ending rest are taken care of, it is up to our personal preferences. Give it some thought. When the need arises, we can find interesting and creative ways to keep our practices going. With bhakti, we will find a way.
In this busy world, we will all be faced with the challenge of having limited time for our practices. As we continue with yoga, our spiritual desire (bhakti) will become stronger, and we will find ways to keep the necessary time available. Even so, there will be things that come up occasionally that will limit our time, so it is wise to develop an attitude of flexibility and a willingness to compromise when necessary to make sure that we are always honoring our habit to practice twice each day. If we do that, there won't be much in this world that can keep us from reaching our divine destination.
The guru is in you.
Note: For detailed instructions on building a balanced daily practice routine with self-pacing, see the Eight Limbs of Yoga Book at http://aypsite.com/books.html#8lim
http://aypsite.com/209.html
Teaching
21 May 2013 - 12:20pm
What the Buddha Taught
The Buddha taught not to establish a theology or philosophical system but to liberate beings from their suffering.
Here, Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche explains some of Buddhism’s most important principles.
With great compassion and incomparable skill, the enlightened master Buddha Shakyamuni taught in any way that would lead beings on a correct path to liberation and, finally, to buddhahood. Sometimes the Buddha taught in a way that led his disciples gradually to an understanding of the absolute nature of reality, and in these situations, he taught about relative reality first. At other times he taught the ultimate nature directly and explicitly.
Over the course of his forty-five years of teaching, the Buddha turned the wheel of dharma three times, initiating new cycles of teachings for the benefit of sentient beings. These three turnings are commonly known as the dharmachakra (“dharma wheel”) of the four noble truths, the dharmachakra of essencelessnessor non-characteristics, and the dharmachakra of full or thorough distinction.
The first turning of the wheel of dharma took place in Deer Park at Sarnath, not long after the Buddha’s enlightenment. At this time, Buddha presented teachings on the four noble truths, karma, and the selflessness of the person. These teachings form the basis for what is called the “common vehicle,” also known as the Hinayana, or the vehicle of the “listeners” or “hearers.”
The second and third turnings form the basis of the vehicle known as the Mahayana. The second turning took place at Rajagriha on Vulture Peak Mountain. There the Buddha taught the Prajnaparamita Sutras, or the Sutras of Transcendent Knowledge. In this phase of his teaching, Buddha emphasized the emptiness or lack of true existence of both self and phenomena. The third turning took place in various cities, beginning in Vaishali. At this time, Buddha presented the teachings on tathagatagarbha, or buddhanature. These focus on the luminous nature of emptiness and reveal that the potential for buddhahood has always been present within our hearts. At the same time, in the final turning of the wheel of dharma, Buddha clearly distinguished between the indicative and definitive meanings of his various teachings.
First Turning: The Four Noble Truths
In his first sermon, addressed to his five previous students, the Buddha taught the four noble truths: the truth of suffering, the truth of the origin of suffering, the truth of the cessation of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to cessation. Buddha presented these four truths in sets of two: the cause and result of samsara and the cause and result of nirvana. Samsara refers to a state of existence that is characterized by a predominance of suffering, and nirvana refers to the state of liberation from suffering as well as to the cessation of its causes.
When we examine these four noble truths, we see that the first truth is the result—suffering—caused by the second truth, the origin of suffering. The third truth is the result—nirvana—which is realized through the fourth noble truth, the path that leads to cessation of suffering. We see that the four noble truths are causes and effects: the first two truths are the cause and effect of samsara; the second two truths are the cause and effect of nirvana, or enlightenment.
The Truth of Suffering
The clear message of the first noble truth is that all of samsaric existence and all of our experiences of it are characterized by suffering, regardless of the type of life we may be leading. However, as human beings, we have both the opportunity and capacity to work with our suffering.
The first step to bringing suffering onto the path is to recognize and acknowledge it, instead of denying it. Once we can do that, we have some ground for developing the further recognition that all our experiences, whether pleasurable or painful, have the same nature of suffering. Denial does not alleviate our suffering, nor does it help to free us from suffering and its causes. Obviously, if we do not recognize the presence of suffering, we will have no reason to seek liberation.
Why is suffering the nature of existence? Everything that exists or can be experienced on the level of relative reality is composite in nature; therefore, it is impermanent and subject to birth and death. The fundamental logic here is that since impermanence is found at every level of existence, accordingly suffering is inherent in samsaric existence.
It is easy to understand the coarse level of impermanence—that, for instance, the house you have built will eventually start to decay and at some point will exist no more. However, there is a very subtle level of impermanence as well. When we perceive this more subtle level, we see the impermanence inherent in continuity itself: when we look closely at our experience, we see that each moment arises, abides, and ceases. In order for the next moment to arise, the present moment must cease. When we perceive the momentary nature of all our experience, we see that we are rendered helpless in matters of choice. Do we have a choice to remain in this moment for another moment? No. We have no choice but to let go. We cannot hang on to any living experience for more than a brief moment, whether that experience is a blissful or agonizing one.
This is very difficult to understand fully and requires a gradual understanding through the threefold process of hearing, contemplation, and meditation. However, if this subtle impermanence is understood, then one is very close to understanding emptiness, which is the ultimate nature of all things.
The Truth of the Origin of Suffering
Once we have realized the truth of suffering, then the question is, “What are the causes of this suffering?” In the second noble truth, Buddha taught that our suffering originates in our false belief in a truly existent, permanent self. This fixation is the basis for the arising of certain mental afflictions, or destructive emotions, called the “three root poisons”: passion, aggression, and ignorance. From these three poisons, we experience the development of further negative emotions and all aspects of suffering. Since these poisons result from ego-clinging, the root of all our suffering is our ego-clinging.
When we examine our experience of suffering further, we also see that it is connected to our actions. Therefore, it is important to understand the relationship of our actions to our suffering. In Buddhist terminology, when we speak of “actions,” we are speaking of karma, the natural relationship of cause and effect. Simply speaking, karma, which means “action,” refers to action within our mind; it refers to the movement of thoughts, intentions, and motivations. This mental action leads us to or results in physical action—either the physical action of speech or the physical action of body. Thus, in a genuine understanding of karma, actions take place in our mind rather than on the physical level.
We are constantly involved in accumulation of karma, and in Buddhism, this accumulation is divided into three basic categories: negative actions, positive actions, and neutral actions. From this perspective, whatever thoughts we might entertain and whatever actions we might be engaged in, these will all leave a karmic impression in our mind that is either positive or negative. A negative impression is left by any action that harms either the one who commits the action or the one who is the object of the action, or both. These are generally actions arising out of hatred, jealousy, aggression, and passion—the negative aspects of our emotions. A moment when your thought is involved in aggression has tremendous energy and power, and the resultant negative seed that is planted in the mind will manifest as aggression again. This is as certain as the fact that planting the seed of a chili will lead to the result of a chili plant.
When we are under the influence of mental afflictions, we are incessantly planting the seeds of confusion and restlessness in our mindstream, which, fundamentally, is pure and without any confusion. Thus, engaging in harmful actions that leave negative impressions in our mind is like walking with dirty shoes into a beautiful, clean room. We leave our tracks all over the clean floor wherever we walk. In this analogy, our mind is the spotless floor, our karmic action is our mindless walking with dirty shoes, and the negative impressions left in our mindstream are the footprints we track across the clean floor. In this way, we perpetuate the cycle of samsara and increase our own unhappiness and suffering.
The Truth of the Cessation of Suffering
The third noble truth is the cessation of suffering. Although the Buddha taught that suffering pervades our entire experience of samsara, he also taught that this suffering is temporary and that we can go beyond it. When we have discovered the origin of suffering and have relinquished its causes, then our samsaric ego-clinging and disturbing emotions cease. “Cessation” in this context refers to the state of nirvana, in which all delusion and mental afflictions have been overcome and the mind is unconditionally liberated. It also refers to the state of meditative absorption accomplished by the arhats, those beings who attained the highest level of realization in the Hinayana path.
The Truth of the Path
The fourth noble truth is the path that leads to the cessation of suffering. When Buddha demonstrated the cause and effect relationships that pertain to the four noble truths, he showed us that neither our suffering nor our liberation is a random occurrence. „ There is a cause for our suffering and, equally, a cause for the end of that suffering—for liberation. Therefore, we can direct the course of our actions toward the result we wish to obtain. When we enter the path that leads directly to the cessation of suffering, we are following the methods for realizing inner peace and wisdom recommended by Buddha.
The path that Buddha presented in this context is known as the noble eightfold path. In general, the eightfold path consists of perfecting our training in the three areas of discipline, meditation, and wisdom (in Sanskrit shila, samadhi, and prajna). Specifically, the eight branches of this path are the trainings in right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Altogether, the path provides us with many methods for working with and overcoming our ego-clinging and disturbing emotions. This is called the path of individual salvation and it is the path of the arhats.
Renunciation and Egolessness
When we are following this path, it is important to develop a genuine sense of renunciation, of wanting to free ourselves from samsaric existence altogether. True renunciation is the result of understanding the truth of suffering and recognizing its pervasiveness—that wherever you are born, whatever your circumstances are, samsara is basically an experience of suffering. In the sutras, samsara is described as a “nest of poisonous snakes” and “a valley of lava.” Shantideva calls it “a party given by an executioner.”
Of course, it is not an actual physical location that we are trying to escape but a mental state—the convoluted and tortuous quality that is inherent in our individual experience of samsara. It is the wish to be free of such suffering that is the basis of earnestly seeking liberation.
While there are many practices that will lead one gradually to liberation, the Buddha said that the principal cause for achieving liberation is the realization of egolessness. That is what frees us from suffering. Therefore, without realizing egolessness, there is no way one can achieve any degree of real freedom.
In the first turning of the wheel of dharma, the Buddha began to teach the view of emptiness. When he taught the four noble truths, he said, “Suffering is impermanent, impermanence is emptiness, and emptiness is selflessness.” This can also be stated as, “Impermanence is suffering, suffering is emptiness, and emptiness is selflessness.” In this way, Buddha taught emptiness in a way that was very accessible. While it is generally difficult to experience emptiness directly, right away, it is not so difficult to recognize our own suffering, which is a very vivid experience. Once we have seen the truth of suffering, then it is also not so difficult to see its momentary, impermanent nature. This leads to a deeper understanding of the impermanent nature of all phenomena, which is the basis for realizing emptiness.
The way in which the Buddha taught emptiness in the first turning accords with the gradual, or indirect, way of understanding the ultimate nature of reality. Buddha simply taught that “the self,” or entity identified as “I,” is impermanent in nature and does not exist inherently; it is empty of any true, solid existence. Therefore, in his first teachings on emptiness, Buddha taught the nonexistence of a personal self or individual ego on the ultimate level.
Second Turning: Selflessness
When the Buddhaturned the wheel of dharma for the second time, on Vulture Peak Mountain, he taught the Perfection of Wisdom sutras to an assembly of bodhisattvas. This is the turning known as the “vehicle of non-characteristics.”
At this time Buddha presented the complete teachings on emptiness: not only is the individual self empty of inherent existence, but all phenomena are empty as well. This means that the totality of our experience—both subjective and objective—is empty of true existence. All living experiences—from our thoughts, emotions, and perceptions to the appearances of external forms and events—have no solid basis in ultimate reality. Relatively speaking, things do appear and function; however, there is no self-nature anywhere to be found on the level of ultimate reality. When we fully transcend ego-clinging, when we realize the state of egolessness or selflessness, then we completely cut the root of samsara and of suffering.
The emptiness teachings of the second turning are known as “the great mother prajnaparamita” because the perfection of wisdom, or transcendental knowledge, to which they refer is nothing less than the complete realization of emptiness. This view of emptiness is taught very clearly in prajnaparamita sutras such as the Heart Sutra, which says: Form is emptiness; emptiness is also form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness.
It is just this realization that is the source of all realizations, of liberation or enlightenment. Therefore, the essence of prajnaparamita is known as the mother of the four noble beings: the Shravakayana arhats, Pratyekabuddhayana arhats, the bodhisattvas on the bhumis (levels, or stages of the bodhisattva path), and the buddhas. From the perspective of some Mahayana schools, the second turning of the wheel of dharma is seen as the most ultimate, or definitive, teaching of the Buddha.
In addition to the teachings on emptiness, Buddha also presented teachings on bodhicitta, which literally means “enlightened attitude” or “awakened heart.” It is the heartfelt wish that all sentient beings—not just oneself—may be established in the state of enlightenment, and it is the commitment to help lead them to that state. Developing bodhicitta is viewed as the key to entering the Mahayana path, which is characterized by the greater vision of liberating all beings and transforming this samsaric existence into an enlightened world.
However, in order to possess such a pure motivation and such vast compassion and love for others, we must have some understanding or realization of selflessness. If we have compassion or love with an egocentric view, then that compassion and love will not be genuine. When the experience of selflessness is combined with compassion and love, it becomes the perfect Mahayana expression of bodhicitta, which is not just emptiness, but compassion and selflessness unified into one experience.
Third Turning: Buddhanature
In the discoursesof the third turning, taught to a retinue of bodhisattvas, the Buddha went further into his teachings on the ultimate nature of mind. At this time, he taught that the true nature of mind is not merely emptiness, a state of nonexistence. Rather, our fundamental nature of mind is a luminous expanse of awareness that is beyond all conceptual fabrication and completely free from the movement of thoughts. It is the union of emptiness and clarity, of space and radiant awareness that is endowed with supreme and immeasurable qualities. From this basic nature of emptiness everything is expressed; from this everything arises and manifests.
With these teachings on the absolute nature of mind, Buddha introduced the notion of tathagatagarbha, or the buddhanature theory. This declares that the fundamental nature of mind is utterly pure and primordially in the state of buddhahood. It is the absolute buddha. It has never changed from beginningless time. Its essence is wisdom and compassion that is inconceivably profound and vast. The term tathagata is an epithet for the Buddha and refers to one who has “gone beyond” the ordinary world to the state of perfect enlightenment. Garbha is sometimes translated as “womb” or “seed.” Thus, tathagatagarbha points to the enlightened potential that is inherent within all sentient beings, whether they exist as humans, animals, gods, or even demons.
However, this potential is covered over by certain temporary obscurations, in the same way that the sun may be temporarily concealed by clouds. Therefore we do not apprehend it directly. Instead, we see only what is perceptible by means of our dualistic consciousness: a stream of sense perceptions, mental constructs, thoughts, and emotions that arise and dissolve ceaselessly. It is these appearances of relative phenomena that obscure the direct recognition of the open, brilliant, and dynamic reality of genuine mind. Nevertheless, our buddhanature itself has never been diminished by the presence of such adventitious phenomena, just as the sun itself is never diminished by the presence of clouds.
Indicative and Definitive Meanings
The third turning is called the dharma-chakra of thorough distinction because, at this time, Buddha made clear distinctions between his various statements. He divided them into indicative statements and definitive statements, or statements relating to relative truth and absolute truth. Statements with “indicative meaning” are those that indirectly indicate the path to awakening without being a direct or definitive statement of the final nature of awakening. These statements are not misleading; they lead you in the right direction in a manner that is appropriate to your particular concerns at that time. For example, in his initial presentation of dharma, Buddha did not present the complete teaching on the selflessness of persons; instead, he taught that the self had a composite nature, consisting of the five aggregates.
These teachings were not direct statements of or about absolute truth; they were concerned with relative truth or relative reality. By contrast, statements with “definitive meaning” are those that pertain directly to the absolute truth and do not require interpretation. They are final and, to some extent, literal. They do not indirectly lead to the meaning but are direct statements of it. Included in this category are the teachings on twofold selflessness, bodhicitta, the causes of final awakening, and buddhanature.
Three Turnings, One Path
The Buddha taught only one dharma, but people heard it in different ways. The Buddha’s teachings have been heard and repeated for many hundreds of years; different understandings have developed, and with them, more and more schools. The teachings of the three yanas (vehicles) and turnings, however, all play a vital role on the path. The Hinayana is the foundation for the Mahayana; Mahayana literally cannot exist without it. Similarly, Mahayana supports Vajrayana (Buddhist tantra) and is indispensable to it. Hinayana also has a close and direct relationship with Vajrayana.
In terms of practice, however, we need a certain amount of structure and a clear view of this path; otherwise, we will become confused and lost. In each of the three turnings, Buddha taught the “right view” of emptiness for each stage of the path. It is necessary to understand this at the beginning because, without having the right view, we cannot find the right path. Without discovering the right path, we will not meet with the right experiences and realizations. Without realizing the nature of mind correctly, we have no way to free ourselves from samsara. This is why the correct view is so important: to go beyond conceptual understanding to the direct realization of the absolute, awakened state.
Namaste ~
http://www.mindful.org/in-your-life/spirituality/what-the-buddha-taught
Teaching
21 May 2013 - 9:45am
The Buddhist Perception of Humility
Chen Yu-Hsi, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Fo Guang University, Taiwan
Like other spiritual traditions, Buddhism sees humility as a virtue. In the Buddhist text on Maha-karuna (great compassion), humility is one of the ten sacred qualities attributed to Avalokite Bodhisattva, or Buddha of Compassion. Within that context, it appears to be a natural by-product of supreme spiritual attainments that transcends the ego, just as are the four noble states of mind -- love, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity.
However, Mahayana Buddhism also advocates humility as a moral precept. As such it is often expressed in terms of exhortation against an arrogant or haughty attitude. Being a sign of ego-centeredness, pride is seen as impeding acceptance of the Buddha's teachings and progress towards spiritual liberation. Buddhist practitioners believe that only a humble mind can readily recognize its own defilements of craving (or greed), aversion (or hatred) and ignorance, thereby embarking on the path of enlightenment and liberation.
The Platform Sutra tells a story about how the Sixth Patriarch, Master Hui Neng, of the Chinese Zen Sect reprimanded a follower for his arrogant attitude. That follower felt self-conceited about his knowledge of a major Buddhist sutra and knowingly or unknowingly kept his head above the ground while bowing to the master. At that point the master gave him a lecture that his lack of humility suggested that having a great knowledge of the sutra fettered his mind rather than liberating it. In other words, when religious knowledge, like other knowledge, adds to "intellectual arrogance" and self-conceit, it becomes an impediment to what religious practice is supposed to attain. Elsewhere in the Platform Sutra, the Sixth Patriarch teaches that behaving humbly and according to propriety is a merit and a desirable moral quality that comes from insight into the spiritual reality. Humility in this sense is both a prerequisite for liberation and salvation from the deluded ego and a manifestation thereof.
The quintessence of humility is manifested in a practitioner's realization that he is nobody or nothing. This state of enlightenment comes when he transcends all worldly desires, illusions and mental constructs and labels associated with the ego. Buddhism refers to this as "emptiness" - empty of the contents of an illusory ego. On an in-depth psychological level, when one realizes that one is nothing, one is also everything. That means that through unconditioned love and compassion, one is now connected with all things and all beings. There is no more "I" and "mine." We are all one.
Some Buddhist practitioners place so great an emphasis on humility that they are prepared to yield to others in any situation that involves a dispute or contention. A Buddhist master writes that he always considers himself to be the least knowledgeable and capable as compared with other people. This approach is seen as a way to "humble" the ego so that spiritual liberation can be facilitated. Whether this is the right way of practice is open to questions. Within the Chinese cultural milieu, such a humble attitude is doubtless regarded as a virtue commensurate with the Confucian ethics of social order. Chinese Buddhism accepts it as a norm rather than an anomaly.
In fact, the Buddhist principle of "no contention" (wu-cheng) requires that a practitioner refrain from quarreling or contending for personal interests, including intellectual interests. "No contention" implies a humbled ego through which the light of enlightenment may shine. In this connection, a parallel can be drawn between the Buddhist approach and the Christian teaching that one who is humble before God is exalted by Him.
Outsiders, however, may dispute the validity of such an approach. For instance, a junior lama from Tibet once told me that it was wrong to behave humbly because humility suggests that one is "smaller" than he/she really is. He thought that self-depreciation was as counter-productive as self-aggrandizement when it came to mental cultivation. He did not touch upon psychological repression, but I think that would be a relevant point to make if humility becomes a moral norm superimposed by social institutions, whether religious or otherwise.
Some spiritual masters such as Osho argue that a repressed ego makes it difficult for a practitioner to be liberated from the ego. Psychologist and Buddhist meditation teacher Jack Kornfield makes the point that only when one develops a healthy self along with a deep realization of the empty nature of the self identity can one fully discover "true self," which shines through our whole being with all its divine spiritual qualities.
Humility or modesty as practiced in traditional Chinese society is often criticized as being less than honest or even bordering on hypocrisy. A morally cultivated person is supposed to refrain from talking about his/her own merits and strengths, or to talk about them in a round-about way that suggests modesty. Furthermore, the norm of humility demands that one use stereotyped language that depicts oneself as being worthless but is nevertheless understood to be mere ceremonial courtesy. Even today, a scholar is supposed to refer to his/her publications as "my clumsy works", and an entertainer would beg "excuse" for a "homely and plain" feast and "less than satisfactory hospitality," even though deep down he feels very proud of what he has offered to the guests. Such superficial courtesy appears to be a strong value in societies on which Confucianism has left its mark, including Japan and Korea.
Although humility is important to Buddhism, ultimately spiritual attainments are associated with such personal qualities as the "middle way," a balanced personality that is neither arrogant nor "humble" in the sense of self-abasement. Thus a semantic question may be raised as to exactly what we mean by humility. Does it necessarily imply an under-evaluation of one's own worth and merits that led the Tibetan lama to reject humility as a virtue for practitioners? From a true Buddhist perspective, the answer is "No." And we may add the following criteria to define genuine humility:
Behave without arrogance, self-conceit and other egoist tendencies such as jealousy and an impulse to show off.
Respect others and show a genuine human interest in them without a desire to please or to impress.
Come up with an objective and honest understanding of our own strengths and weaknesses, with a realization that we are far from perfect and have a lot more to learn, to improve and to accomplish.
While we do not recognize self-depreciation or self-effacement as part of humility, we must recognize that our biological self is fraught with frailties and ignorance and that a true self characterized by such divine qualities as love, compassion, joy and wisdom is innate in everyone of us.
With the above understanding, it is safe for Buddhists to speak of humility as a norm of personal conduct and a mark of supreme attainments that is consistent with the Buddhist "middle way."
Reference
Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.
Sharon Salzburg, Loving-kindness: A Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1995.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1991.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Random House,1994.
The Sutra of Hui Neng (Platform Sutra). Hong Kong: Buddhist Youth Association Ltd., 1994.
Mahayana Buddhism is a major school of Buddhism being practiced in China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea.
Teaching
21 May 2013 - 9:31am
Managing Your Emotions at Work
Controlling Your Feelings... Before They Control You
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_41.htm
Choose how you react to frustration.
© iStockphoto/gocrawford
Everything can be taken from a man but the last of human freedoms – the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one's way.
– Viktor Frankl, 'Man's Search for Meaning'
We've all been in one of 'those' situations before. You know... when your favorite project is cancelled after weeks of hard work; when a customer snaps at you unfairly; when your best friend (and co-worker) is laid off suddenly; or your boss assigns you more work when you're already overloaded.
In your personal life, your reaction to stressful situations like these might be to start shouting, or to go hide in a corner and feel sorry for yourself for a while. But at work, these types of behavior could seriously harm your professional reputation, as well as your productivity.
Stressful situations are all too common in a workplace that's facing budget cuts, staff layoffs, and department changes. It may become harder and harder to manage your emotions under these circumstances, but it's even more important for you to do so. After all, if management is forced into making more layoffs, they may choose to keep those who can handle their emotions, and work well under pressure. As the above quote shows, no matter what the situation is, you're always free to choose how you react to it.
So, how can you become better at handling your emotions, and 'choosing' your reactions to bad situations? In this article, we look at the most common negative emotions experienced in the workplace – and how you can manage them productively.
Why are we focusing only on negative emotions? Well, most people don't need strategies for managing their positive emotions. After all, feelings of joy, excitement, compassion, or optimism usually don't affect others in a negative way. As long as you share positive emotions constructively and professionally, they're great to have in the workplace!
Common Negative Emotions at Work
In 1997, Bond University professor of management Cynthia Fisher conducted a study called 'Emotions at Work: What Do People Feel, and How Should We Measure It?'
According to Fisher's research, the most common negative emotions experienced in the workplace are as follows:
Frustration/irritation.
Worry/nervousness.
Anger/aggravation.
Dislike.
Disappointment/unhappiness.
Below are different strategies you can use to help you deal with each of these negative emotions.
Frustration/Irritation
Frustration usually occurs when you feel stuck or trapped, or unable to move forward in some way. It could be caused by a colleague blocking your favorite project, a boss who is too disorganized to get to your meeting on time, or simply being on hold on the phone for a long time.
Whatever the reason, it's important to deal with feelings of frustration quickly, because they can easily lead to more negative emotions, such as anger.
Here are some suggestions for dealing with frustration:
Stop and evaluate – One of the best things you can do is mentally stop yourself, and look at the situation. Ask yourself why you feel frustrated. Write it down, and be specific. Then think of one positive thing about your current situation. For instance, if your boss is late for your meeting, then you have more time to prepare. Or, you could use this time to relax a little.
Find something positive about the situation – Thinking about a positive aspect of your situation often makes you look at things in a different way. This small change in your thinking can improve your mood. When it's people who are causing your frustration, they're probably not doing it deliberately to annoy you. And if it's a thing that's bothering you – well, it's certainly not personal! Don't get mad, just move on.
Remember the last time you felt frustrated – The last time you were frustrated about something, the situation probably worked out just fine after a while, right? Your feelings of frustration or irritation probably didn't do much to solve the problem then, which means they're not doing anything for you right now.
Worry/Nervousness
With all the fear and anxiety that comes with increasing numbers of layoffs, it's no wonder that many people worry about their jobs. But this worry can easily get out of control, if you allow it, and this can impact not only your mental health, but also your productivity, and your willingness to take risks at work.
Try these tips to deal with worrying:
Don't surround yourself with worry and anxiety – For example, if co-workers gather in the break room to gossip and talk about job cuts, then don't go there and worry with everyone else. Worrying tends to lead to more worrying, and that isn't good for anyone.
Try deep-breathing exercises – This helps slow your breathing and your heart rate. Breathe in slowly for five seconds, then breathe out slowly for five seconds. Focus on your breathing, and nothing else. Do this at least five times.
Focus on how to improve the situation – If you fear being laid off, and you sit there and worry, that probably won't help you keep your job. Instead, why not brainstorm ways to bring in more business, and show how valuable you are to the company?
Write down your worries in a worry log – If you find that worries are churning around inside your mind, write them down in a notebook or 'worry log,' and then schedule a time to deal with them. Before that time, you can forget about these worries, knowing that you'll deal with them. When it comes to the time you've scheduled, conduct a proper riskanalysis around these things, and take whatever actions are necessary to mitigate any risks.
When you're worried and nervous about something, it can dent your self-confidence. Also, don't let your worries get in the way of being appropriately assertive.
Anger/Aggravation
Out-of-control anger is perhaps the most destructive emotion that people experience in the workplace. It's also the emotion that most of us don't handle very well. If you have trouble managing your temper at work, then learning to control it is one of the best things you can do if you want to keep your job.
Try these suggestions to control your anger:
Watch for early signs of anger – Only you know the danger signs when anger is building, so learn to recognize them when they begin. Stopping your anger early is key. Remember, you can choose how you react in a situation. Just because your first instinct is to become angry doesn't mean it's the correct response.
If you start to get angry, stop what you're doing – Close your eyes, and practice the deep-breathing exercise we described earlier. This interrupts your angry thoughts, and it helps put you back on a more positive path.
Picture yourself when you're angry – If you imagine how you look and behave while you're angry, it gives you some perspective on the situation. For instance, if you're about to shout at your co-worker, imagine how you would look. Is your face red? Are you waving your arms around? Would you want to work with someone like that? Probably not.
Dislike
We've probably all had to work with someone we don't like. But it's important to be professional, no matter what.
Here are some ideas for working with people you dislike:
Be respectful – If you have to work with someone you don't get along with, then it's time to set aside your pride and ego. Treat the person with courtesy and respect, as you would treat anyone else. Just because this person behaves in an unprofessional manner, that doesn't mean you should as well.
Be assertive – If the other person is rude and unprofessional, then firmly explain that you refuse to be treated that way, and calmly leave the situation. Remember, set the example.
Disappointment/Unhappiness
Dealing with disappointment or unhappiness at work can be difficult. Of all the emotions you might feel at work, these are the most likely to impact your productivity. If you've just suffered a major disappointment, your energy will probably be low, you might be afraid to take another risk, and all of that may hold you back from achieving.
Here are some proactive steps you can take to cope with disappointment and unhappiness:
Look at your mindset – Take a moment to realize that things won't always go your way. If they did, life would be a straight road instead of one with hills and valleys, ups and downs, right? And it's the hills and valleys that often make life so interesting.
Adjust your goal – If you're disappointed that you didn't reach a goal, that doesn't mean the goal is no longer reachable. Keep the goal, but make a small change – for example, delay the deadline.
Record your thoughts – Write down exactly what is making you unhappy. Is it a co-worker? Is it your job? Do you have too much to do? Once you identify the problem, start brainstorming ways to solve it or work around it. Remember, you always have the power to change your situation.
Smile! – Strange as it may sound, forcing a smile – or even a grimace – onto your face can often make you feel happy (this is one of the strange ways in which we humans are 'wired.') Try it – you may be surprised!
We all have to deal with negative emotions at work sometimes, and learning how to cope with these feelings is now more important than ever. After all, negative emotions can spread, and no one wants to be around a person who adds negativity to a group.
Know what causes your negative emotions, and which types of feelings you face most often. When those emotions begin to appear, immediately start your strategy to interrupt the cycle. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to pull yourself away from negative thinking.
Teaching
20 May 2013 - 12:00pm
12 Elements of Emotional Intelligence
By Marcia Sirota MD FRCP
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/marcia-sirota/emotional-intelligence_b_994141.html
Intellect and emotional intelligence are very different things. The former is the cognitive ability to synthesize and analyze data; to problem-solve and make associations based on available information. The latter is a set of innate and learned skills which facilitate relationships and enable a person to negotiate more easily through all areas of life.
Intellect can be measured by standardized IQ tests but there is no actual measure of the “EQ,” or Emotional Quotient. Even without a test, it’s obvious when someone has a high IQ and it’s just as obvious when someone has a high EQ. Rather than try to measure it, though, it’s more useful to look at the various elements that go into emotional intelligence.
While the IQ remains stable over a person’s lifetime, the EQ can be developed. Acquiring and practicing the following elements will enable you to boost your EQ.
Practicing the following elements will enable you to boost your EQ and improve your life.
1: Empathy. The ability to understand what other people are feeling will make you more sensitive and aware, resulting in more meaningful relationships.
2: Associating actions with consequences. This understanding will enable you to make conscious choices in your life, so as to avoid unnecessary difficulties.
3: Good judgment. The gift of making well thought-out decisions and seeing people for who they really are will maximize the possibilities of success in all areas of your life.
4: Personal responsibility. When you hold yourself accountable and don't blame anyone else for your mistakes or misfortunes, you're empowered to change things for the better. Other people respect you because you own up to your part in your relationships.
5: Insight. The ability to see yourself clearly and to understand your own motivations allows for the possibility of personal growth. Insight into others makes you more empowered in your relationships.
6: Mental flexibility. Being able to change your mind or to see things from different points of view makes it possible for you to navigate all sorts of relationships and to succeed where other, more rigid thinkers would fail.
7: Compassion. Being honest with yourself or about the people in your life can be painful. With a kind and gentle attitude, seeing the truth is much easier. Compassion towards yourself facilitates personal transformation, and compassion toward others supports deeper, more loving connections.
8: Integrity. Following through on commitments and keeping your promises creates good-will in your personal and professional relationships, promoting success in both arenas.
9: Impulse control. Thinking before speaking or acting gives you a chance to make deliberate, even sophisticated choices about how you present yourself to others. Not acting out of primitive impulses, urges or emotions prevents social consequences.
10: Deferring gratification. Empowered individuals are able to tolerate waiting for the things they want. Mastery of your needs allows you to to prioritize around life goals.
11: Perseverance. Sticking with something, especially when it's challenging, allows you to see it through to completion as well as demonstrating to others that you're dependable and potentially a high achiever.
12: Courage. Emotional courage (as opposed to the physical variety) enables you to do the right thing, see the truth, open your heart and trust yourself enough to be vulnerable despite any fears. Others hold you in high regard, as a result.
All these elements combine within you to make up your emotional intelligence. With a high EQ, even a simple person is at an advantage in life. Without it, even someone with the most brilliant intellect is at a distinct disadvantage.
Blog entry
20 May 2013 - 11:48am
Hi Everyone ~
Continuing my daily theme of choosing a book and opening it randomly without a thought of what I would like to share. Today I have chosen Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now; opened randomly at pg.39 Chapter 3, Moving Deeply Into the Now ~ Don't Seek Your Self In The Mind.
" I feel that there is still a great deal I need to learn about the workings of my mind before I can get anywhere near full consciousness or spiritual enlightenment. "
Eckhart: No, you don't. The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind. Once you have understood the basic dysfunction, there isn't really much else that you need to learn or understand. Studying the complexities of the mind may make you a good psychologist, but doing so won't take you beyond the mind, just as the study of madness isn't enough to create sanity. You have already understood the basic mechanics of the unconscious state: identification with the mind, which creates a flase self, the ego, as a substitute for your true self rooted in Being. You become as a " branch cut off from the vine, " as Jesus puts it.
The ego's needs are endless. It feels vulnerable and threatened and so lives in a state of fear and want. Once you know how the basic dysfunction operates, there is no need to explore all its countless manifestations, no need to make it into a complex personal problem. The ego, of course, loves that. It is always seeking for something to attach itself to in order to uphold and strengthen its illusory sense of self, and it will readily attach itself to your problems. This is why, for so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems. Once this has happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them; that would mean loss of self. There can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.
So once you recognize the root of unconsciousness as indentification with the mind, which of course includes emotions, you step out of it. You become 'present.' When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it. The mind in itself is not dysfunctional. It is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are. It then becomes the 'egoic' mind and takes over your whole life. (end of chapter).
*~* Have a most wonder-filled day *~*
Blog entry
20 May 2013 - 11:38am
LEMON BALM
Melissa officinalis [mel-ISS-uh oh-fiss-ih-NAH-liss]
FAMILY: Labiatae
Names: Common balm, lemon balm, melissa, sweet balm; bee balm; heart's delight; honey plant; Zitronenmelisse, Melisse, Herztrost (German); citronelle, baume, mélisse, Herbe citron (French); melissa (Italian); Sidrunmeliss (Estonian); Badrangbuye, Farandj moschk (Farsi); Sitruunamelissa (Finnish); Mézfû, Orvosi citromfû, Macskaméz, Anyaméhfû (Hungarian); Sítrónumelissa, Hjartafró (Icelandic); Sitronmelisse (Norwegian); Melisa lekarska, rojownik (Polish); Melissa limonnaya, Limonnik (Russian); Balsamita maior, Toronjil (Spanish); Citronmeliss, Hjärtansfröjd (Swedish); Melisa, Ogul out (Turkish)
Description: Bushy, rounded herbs. Height 3 feet; width 2 feet; flowers: small, white, tubeshaped, 1/3 inch long; leaves: oval, coming to a point, serrated around the edges and strongly lemon-scented, 1 to 3 inches long.
Blooms May to August and into the fall in the Southern United States. May go somewhat dormant during very hot, humid summers.
Cultivation: Perennial Zone 3. Performs best in a fertile soil with a pH of 5 to 7. Seeds may be sown in the garden, either broadcast in one spot or in rows, as soon as the ground can be worked in the spring. It will germinate rapidly (7-14 days) in light in a flat at temperature of 70 deg.F in the medium.
Seedlings should be transplanted, when they have 4 true leaves, to a deeper flat or small pots and hardened off before setting out. Lemon balm will grow well in partial shade or full sun. It hottest climates, lemon balm definitely needs afternoon shade.
It probably exhausts the soil after two or three years because it makes such a large clump so it must be fertilized annually especially with nitrogen. The old plants may die off in a wet winter, especially where they do not have adequate drainage, but seedlings volunteer from any plant that is not cut down completely at the time of flowering. The roots do no seem to put out runners as do mints, but they increase into a hard-to-divide clump.
There is a variegated form, called "golden Lemon Balm", which has not been as hardy for many growers. Full sun or partial shade for lusher plants.
If you wish to confine its growth, don't hesitate to cut into the plant to within a 6 inch diameter in late fall of the second year and every two years thereafter. Flower spikes form in midsummer, which stops leaf production. Cut off these flowering stems 6 inches from the crown.
The first cutting from a new plant can usually begin 10 weeks after transplanting. Do not cut more than half the plant at a time. Harvested stems can be hung in bundles in a dark, dry, wellventilated room for 4 to 7 days and is approximately 80% water, then stripped and stored in an opaque container for later use. Yields of dry herb are 1,500 to 2,500 pounds per acre.
Constituents: essential oil includes cintronellal and geranial with neral; citral, citronellol, eugenol, geraniol, polyphenols, flavonoids, triterpenoids; caryophyllene, caryophyllene oxide, linalol, limonene. Energetics: cold, dry, sour, slightly bitter Actions: sedative, anti-depressant, digestive stimulant, promotes sweating, relaxing restorative for nervous system, antiviral (possibly due to polyphenols and tannins); antibacterial, carminative, antispasmodic.
Language of Flowers: Social intercourse; pleasant company of friends; memories; a cure; "Don't misuse me.".
History: The botanical name, melissa, is Greek for "bee". Lemon balm has been cultivated in the Mediterranean region for about 2000 years. The Muslim herbalist Avicenna recommended lemon balm "to make the heart merry". Paracelsus claimed this herb could completely revitalize the body and called it the "elixir of life", and 14th century French King Charles V drank its tea every day to keep his health. The famous Carmelite Water, first made by 17ty century Carmelite nuns to treat nervous headache and neuralgia, combined lemon balm with lemon-peel, nutmeg, coriander and angelica root. Sacred to the temple of Diana, lemon balm was called "heart's delight" in southern Europe. Its virtue of dispelling melancholy has been praised by herbal writers for centuries, and it is still used today in aromatherapy to counter depression.
Aromatherapy Uses: EXTRACTION: essential oil by steam distillation from the leaves and flowering tops.
CHARACTERISTICS: a pale yellow liquid with a light, fresh lemony fragrance.
BLENDS WITH: lavender, geranium, floral and citrus oils
USES: Skin care: allergies, insect bites, insect repellent Respiratory: asthma, bronchitis, chronic coughs; useful for colds and influenza
Digestive: colic, indigestion, nausea; good for vomiting and indigestion of a nervous origin, relieving spasms and flatulence
Circulatory: a tonic for the heart, slowing its action, relieving palpitations and lowering blood pressure Genito-urinary: menstrual problems especially painful periods
Nervous: anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, migraine, nervous tension, shock and vertigo
Emotion: melissa is vivacious and provocative, revitalizing the inner self and calming the senses. Makes the heart merry and joyful. Also helpful in dispelling a sense of dejection in times of grief or bereavement. Melissa calms raging emotions, engendering a state of quiet peace.
Other: used extensively as a fragrance component in toiletries, cosmetics and perfumes. Employed in most major food categories including alcoholic and soft drinks.
BLENDS:
Digestive: 5 drops melissa, 3 drops peppermint, 3 drops cardamom
Circulatory: 4 drops melissa, 4 drops ylangylang, 2 drops clary sage Nervous: 4 drops melissa, 3 drops vetivert, 2 drops Roman chamomile
Emotion: 4 drops melissa, 4 drops orange, 3 drops frankincense
Culinary Uses: Fresh lemon balm imparts a subtle lemon flavor and fresh lemon fragrance, making it especially nice for fruit dishes, custards, and tea. Early fresh leaves can be chopped and added to salads; just cut down somewhat on the vinegar or lemon juice. Cut the leaves into slivers and sprinkle over fish or add to poached fruit where a lemony flavor is desired. Lemon balm can be used in stuffings, sauces, or any dish in which you would use lemon thyme. It enhances the flavor of vegetables, light grains, roast chicken, steamed vegetables and fruit salads. Lay fish or chicken over a bed of lemon balm leaves before baking: you won' need any other seasonings. Stir the minced leaves into cooked rice or into clarified butter for dipping artichoke leaves. Try stuffing a handful of the leaves and some minced green onions under the skin of chicken breasts, then sprinkle with lemon pepper before baking or grilling. Stir chopped fresh lemon balm into plain yogurt and sprinkle with any kind of fresh berries. The minced leaves can be added to a cooked soft custard to pour over fresh fruit.
Add the leaves to iced tea or place sprigs of fresh lemon balm in a tall chilled wine glass with white wine; add a splash of sparkling water for a summer spritzer. Spread cream cheese blended with a small amount of mayonnaise on slices of whole-grain bread, then add lots of lemon balm leaves and generous slices of juicy nectarines, strawberries, or peaches. Or try some of the leaves in an omelet with fresh strawberries and creme fraiche.
For a late-night soothing tea, steep lemon balm leaves in a cup of boiling water. Stir in honey and lemon juice, to taste.
Dried lemon balm is mainly used for tea. For other uses, it's better to freeze the leaves for later use, packed into plastic bags. They'll keep well for up to 2 months. Chopping with a knife usually bruises the leaves, causing them to discolor so tear the leaves into small pieces instead.
Known as a traditional wine herb, lemon balm is used to flavor many liqueurs Use 1é2 oz of the fresh leaves late in the boil in a home brewed beer to add a strong lemon scent and flavor.
Energetics: sour, spicy cool Meridians/Organs affected: lungs, liver
Medicinal Uses: Lemon balm's main action is as a tranquilizer. It calms a nervous stomach, colic, or heart spasms. The leaves are reputed to also lower blood pressure. It is very gentle, although effective, so is often suggested for children and babies. The hot tea brings on a sweat that is good for relieving colds, flus and fevers and an antiviral agent has been found that combats mumps, cold sores and other viruses. The tea has also been shown to inhibit the division of tumor cells. Studies indicate that the herb slightly inhibits the thyroidstimulating hormone and restricts Grave's disease, a hyperthyroid condition.
Lemon balm's antihistamine action is useful to treat eczema and headaches and accounts for the centuries-old tradition of placing the fresh leaf on insect bites and wounds. Lemon balm has antipyretic, refreshing, cholagogic and stimulating properties. Use a pad soaked in the infusion to relieve painful swellings such as gout. Use as ointment for sores, insect bites, or to repel insects. Use hot infused oil as ointment or gentle massage oil for depression, tension, asthma and bronchitis.
A clinical multicentric study in Germany offers evidence of the antiviral activity of a specially prepared dried extract of lemon balm against herpes simplex infections. The extract was a concentrated (70:1) dry extract of lemon balm which was included at a level of 1% in a cream base. Patients applied the cream 2-4 times daily for 5-10 days. In the group receiving the active Melissa cream, there was a significant improvement in symptoms on day two compared to the placebo group and on day five over 50% more patients were symptom-free than in the placebo group. To be effective, the treatment must be started in the very early stages of the infection.
Research has clearly demonstrated the plant's ability to impact the limbic system of the brain and "protect"; the brain from the powerful stimuli of the body and should be part of any ADHD formula. Combinations: Digestive troubles: hops, chamomile or meadowsweet Stress and tension: lavender and linden blossoms Formula for ADHD: 70 ml Bacopa monneira; 50 ml Ginkgo biloba; 30 ml Valerian; 30 ml Panax ginseng, 30 ml Melissa officinalis. Dose is 5 ml t.i.d.
More can be read here: http://www.theherbcottage.com/Plant_facts/lemonbalm.html
My Lemon Balm
Blog entry
20 May 2013 - 2:56am
Part 1
As I imagine (see) reflections of self
encapsulated at about 12 feet (relative) distance
and layers of progressively larger
encapsulations each with its respective eye,
I asked my son if he thinks it is possible that
one day man will build that computer
capable of reproducing a 3-4D reality such as ours.
And he responds without hesitation: "Absolutely!"
Then I asked, "Will the characters in this new
creation be capable of eventually creating
their own computers, each capable of new
creation (new dimension); and, if so, how far can this
chain (explosion) of creations be extended?"
With a mild look of surprise my son said:
"Odd that you should ask that, as we have
been discussing this same line of thought
in class (college computer engineering classes).
And yes, this scenario can happen as long as
the original computer can hold the framework for all."
Part 2
Who will create the next generation of walk in, live in, stay in, reality
lives for interested humans who might prefer something else to try, in place of
that which they already have?
Whatever the uses, realities will be among the greatest
resource saving ideas imaginable.
Blog entry
20 May 2013 - 2:51am
In this mind game of Universe, I am God's Player.
I am eyes and ears and heart and soul for God.
I am the keeper of God's Player.
I am the keeper of the keeper of His Player.
I am the keeper of the keeper of the keeper of His Player.
Player is as much God as Player can be.
God is as much Player as God can be.
God watches over me.
I observe for God, reporting directly to God.
Together, God and I create.
Teaching
20 May 2013 - 1:04am
I AM ONE WITH THE DIVINE
I AM HERE ONLY TO BE TRULY HELPFUL
I AM AN INSTRUMENT OF PEACE AND LOVE
I AM LOVE IN ALL ITS DIVINE FORMS
I AM AT ONE WITH UNIVERSAL ENERGY
I AM FORMLESS AND LIMITLESS
I AM A FREE SPIRIT
I AM THAT I AM
~~~~~~~ ** o O o ** ~~~~~~~
AUM ** AUM ** AUM
May the Peace and Love that is within All Beings
Radiate in One United Glow Across the Planet
And bring all Beings back to their Center Core
So Peace and Love will Reign Supreme
As the One United Force
That drives Humanity back to Living
In Awareness of their True Nature
And Their Inter-Connectedness
To All Life on Earth
May Peace, Love and Divine Light
BE Returned to Earth
N*A*M*A*S*T*E
Blog entry
19 May 2013 - 6:13pm
THE SPIRITUAL EYE: HOW TO DECALCIFY AND ACTIVATE YOUR PINEAL GLAND
~ Christina Sarich, Contributor
Waking Times - May 16, 2013
www.wakingtimes.com
This article will presume you have a basic knowledge of the pineal gland, an important endocrine gland that is said to be the seat of enlightenment. If you need to back up a little and inform yourself more about what the pineal gland is, you can start here before reading further.
Activating your pineal gland, or spiritual ‘eye’ and detoxing it are two different things. In essence, the detoxification allows you to remove the crystallized deposits, which keep the gland as a caged bird, or a princess jailed in her own ivory tower. Once the pineal gland is decalcified, you can start to practice things which will help to ‘turn it on’ and amp up natural production of your body’s own psychedelic drug DMT. The actor, Jim Carrey, talks about how thought is responsible for almost all of the suffering we experience, and how he realized this through an activation of his pineal gland.
In his book, and documentary The Spirit Molecule, Rick Strasssman talks about how the chemical DMT allows a deeper understanding of ‘reality’ as we know it. Many shamans and yogis have practiced different means of awakening the pineal gland for centuries. So, without further ado, here is what you need to do to start to detox and awaken this shining gem of an endocrine gland:
Stop the calcification of the gland by reducing halides. These come in the form of fluoride, chlorine, and bromide, all of which come into your body primarily through the water you drink and bathe in. Install a water purification system. Drink only de-chlorinated and de-fluorinated water.
Remove the use of pesticides, fungicides, and mercury (from toxic fish primarily), and other toxins from your diet. Only purchase organic, non-GMO foods. It is no mistake that Monsanto and companies like them have invested so heavily in keeping you ‘unrealized.’ Not only do GMO foods cause cancer, but they inhibit the functioning of the pineal gland.
Stop using sugar, caffeine, and alcohol to numb yourself. While these ‘drugs,’ and yes they are drugs if you consider how they affect your brain chemistry, can give you a temporary fix, they also impede the pineal gland’s functioning and add to its calcification.
Reduce refined starches, they turn to sugar in your body any how, and can impede the functioning of the pineal gland. Instead eat complex starches like brown rice, or spelt flour.
Reduce stress. Cortisol and Adrenaline, as well as other hormones that are created by the adrenal glands when you are stressed can interfere with melatonin and serotonin, the sister hormones to DMT, or the pineal elixir that helps us wake up. Interestingly, we make more melatonin when we are in complete darkness. This is what allows the ‘inner’ light to shine more brightly. While you can sleep for three days straight, this is hard to do without some kind of sleeping pill. The ancient yogis and shamans would sit in caves in meditation in order to induce higher levels of melatonin, and thus awaken their pineal glands.
Stop Smoking. Tobacco smoke is toxic for the body in general, but has extremely detrimental effects on pineal health. This is true of marijuana as well.
Drugs like cocaine, heroine, etc. cause the pineal gland to falter and can awaken portals of spiritual reality prematurely, or cause them to be very distorted. They can also shut down our faculties for ‘higher awareness’ altogether.
Eat raw cacao – or dark chocolate. Chocolate in its pure form can help to decalcify the pineal gland.
Consume neem extract. Neem is one of India’s super herbs. It has been used for thousands of years and purifies almost every system of the body.
Reduce meat and dairy.
Reduce acidic beverages like soda, and energy drinks (also due to sugar and caffeine content).
Enhancing the Inner Light
There are many ways to enhance the inner light of the third eye, and to elicit higher concentrations of DMT. Drinking Ayahuasca is one of them, practicing yoga is another. Inversions are particularly helpful because they increase blood flow to the pineal gland when you are upside down. Professor Watts once said this about DMT, “Load Universe Into Cannon. Aim at Brain. Fire.” Our brains actually yearn for DMT.
Inversions are great for other reasons, too. According to David Coulter, Ph.D., who taught anatomy at the University of Minnesota for 18 years, when one inverts, tissue fluids of the lower extremities drain-far more effectively than when one is asleep. Areas of congestion clear. In a 1992 Yoga International article on Headstand and the circulatory system, Coulter wrote: “If you can remain in an inverted posture for just 3 to 5 minutes, the blood will not only drain quickly to the heart, but tissue fluids will flow more efficiently into the veins and lymph channels of the lower extremities and of the abdominal and pelvic organs, facilitating a healthier exchange of nutrients and wastes between cells and capillaries.”
The most profound affect of yogic inversions is on what the gurus in India call the ‘amrit’ or nectar of Brahma. There are countless yogic practices, which aim at helping this nectar flow. The nectar they are referring to is the very same chemical DMT which helps us awaken to the more expansive Universe.
Yoga Nidra
There are additional yogic practices that help to awaken the pineal gland. They include yoga nidra, discussed extensively in the book Pharma Sutra, and third eye meditations as practiced by yogi, Amrit Desai.
“Yoga Nidra is the marriage of science and spirit-a transformative technique whose powerful healing qualities transcend all aspects of your being. Modern research has proven the benefits of meditative techniques on lowering stress and promoting overall health:
Electroencephalograph studies (EEG) demonstrate the increase of alpha brain waves, which are directly linked with the relaxation of the nervous system
Stress hormones are reduced, blood pressure and heart rates decline and the metabolic system slows down
Regular practice adds years to your lifespan (5-12 years if practiced daily)
Reactivating the pineal gland secretes melatonin, which helps prevent illness, retard premature aging, induce more restful sleep, boost the immune system, and promote healing” (AmritYoga.org)
Khecarī Mudrā
Another yogic technique for stimulating the pineal gland is an advanced yoga mudra involving placing the tongue in the upper palate to make it more flexible, then eventually guiding it into the nasal passages (like I said, usually only advanced yogis can do this).
A Hatha Yoga text, the Khecarīvidyā, states that kechari mudra enables one to raise Kundalini and access various stores of amrita in the head, which subsequently flood the body. Siva, in the same text, gives instructions on how to cut the lingual frenulum as a necessary prerequisite for the kechari mudra practice.
Binaural Beats and Meditation: More Theta Waves
When the pineal gland is awakened, we experience vivid imagery and complete relaxation. We usually only experience a theta brain wave state just between wakefulness and sleep, as we drift off from the ‘edge’ of consciousness. In this state we are extremely receptive to the wisdom of the Universe. We can literally tap into higher intelligence and other dimensions.
In a yogic or shamanic state of consciousness, marked by high theta brain wave activity (an often induced by meditation, drum playing with a steady beat of four and one-half times per second, or with binaural beats meant to entrain the brain waves for theta activity) we can access a ‘trance’ state which is more likely to come from an opened pineal gland and result in feelings of absolute bliss.
“Theta waves have been identified as the gateway to learning and memory. Theta meditation increases creativity, enhances learning, reduces stress and awakens intuition as well as other extrasensory perception skills. Theta consciousness allows us to connect with our creative inspirations, spiritual guidance and peak experiences. Through theta wave meditation, we can open our Third Eye and access the delta waves that unite us with Universal Energy and Cosmic Consciousness.” (multidimensions.com)
The pineal gland truly is our gateway to other worlds. It needs to be cared for and nurtured back to its true health to allow us access to our highest wisdom, peace and joy.
If you know of other ways to awaken the pineal gland and help it to become detoxified, please add your comments below, with corresponding links where appropriate.
There is also a great two-hour lecture on this subject, the pineal gland, courtesy of the Terrence McKenna forum.
About the Author
Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and See the Big Picture. Her blog is Yoga for the New World.
Additional References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khecarī Mudrā
http://yourawakening.com/dmt_the_spirit_molecule.htm
http://dherbs.com/articles/pineal-gland-331.html
http://EzineArticles.com/1807458
http://www.multidimensions.com/Conscious/con_thoughts_6chakra.html
http://decalcifypinealgland.com/how-to-decalcify-the-pineal-gland/
Teaching
19 May 2013 - 3:07pm
THE EGO AND THE SOUL
~ © Heather Carlini
Carlini Institute for Therapy, Research & Transpersonal Education
www.carliniinstitute.com
Over the years while doing therapy with clients I have gravitated towards doing Soul work, which is my favourite subjects, so I present this article to those who are interested in the subject.
We are born into life as a pure little spirit full of life and love. As we begin to experience life we create an Ego (personality) that is part of our outer persona. It is the part of us that is programmed according to what we experience in life and stores is as a “reference point” for all future experiences that we encounter in life. I must add also that much of the programming comes down in our ancestral programming that is stored in our cellular memories and in our DNA.
The Ego is the part of us that is conditioned by our childhood programming. It is a kaleidoscope of ever-changing energies: thought energies, emotional currents, instinctual forces, the energetic tensions in our personal history. These energies are stored in our cells, DNA, chakras, meridians and aura.
Although the Ego relates to both higher and lower emotions, it relates more to the lower emotions, which are negative such as fear, anger, jealously, hatred, resentment, betrayal, abuse, etc.
The Ego seeks to find meaning in life: who it is, where it came from, why it is part of the physical family, what lessons it is here to learn and what is its life’s mission. It forgot how to find this knowledge so it tries to find ways to “re-member” what it forgot.
The Ego is aware that there is a Soul, but it doesn’t know how to connect to it until it first clears the past. The Soul watches over and guides the Ego without interfering. It tries to get our attention but we forgot how to listen. The Ego filters everything through fear and the Soul filters everything through Love. These are two different energies with different frequencies. I can measure them by using an aura program called Resonant Field Imaging. This program measures frequencies around the body which relates to a colour in the aura as I have shown in the article on “How We Hold Trauma in the Energy System”
By Soul, I mean the part of us that is in spirit form. It is the part of us that always was and always will be.
The Soul relates to balance and harmony, in absence of conflict and separateness. The Soul is part of a higher consciousness, awareness and centeredness. The Soul relates to the higher emotions of unconditional love, gratitude, joy, peacefulness, and compassion. The Soul is often called the Higher Self, Essence, Oneness or Spirit.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE EGO INTEGRATES WITH THE SOUL?
When the first three chakras are cleared and the Ego is integrated with the Soul, the pineal gland is the activated and it produces the chemistry of anandamide (bliss hormone) that washes over the cells freeing the blocked emotions — leaving the past memories for our learning, but the emotional energetic charge of the memories is processed and gone.
We then experience moments of peace, harmony and balance. We can go for a walk in nature and feel that we are a part of it with no separateness. Watching a sunrise or sunset can touch us on a Soul level and allow us to feel this same oneness. Without conflict we experience “knowing” in the sense of feeling a situation out on an energetic level. We sense the energy fields of others and know their intentions and their thoughts. We look into the eyes of another and see their Soul. We honour others for their differences and we don’t judge them because they have their life’s lessons to learn also. Our senses are heightened and we have a sense of discernment (knowing) that comes from the Soul.
Ego states and Soul states are two different energy levels. The Ego filters everything through “fear”, and thus it resonates to the frequencies of the lower emotions. Soul filters everything through “love” and it resonates to the frequencies of the higher emotions.
As we heal the past through the first three chakras, we begin to calibrate to the Soul and follows its guidance and wisdom. I have watched on biofeedback when a client in hypnosis lets go of elements of their past and they allow their Soul to guide them. I watch the heart rhythms change, the brain waves change and the entire continence of my client changes. They feel lighter and taller. They feel like the weight of the world has been lifted off them. They feel a sense of inner peace and love.
Healing the past isn’t just about words that we say. It also isn’t about just talking about the injustices done to us in the past with a therapist for years on end. It has to be an experiential event that happens on four levels: the mental, the emotional, the physical and the spiritual. We have to “feel” the healing affect happen on all levels. It is about reframing the past and seeing it through a different set of eyes so we can take back our power and finally live fully in the present, rather than the past. We go from seeing life through the “subjective” eyes of our Ego — to the “objective” eyes of our Soul. We see the full picture — rather than just the parts. Wayne Dyers says: “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” When we heal our past, we have what I call a “phase-shift” happen inside us where our thoughts change, our chemistry changes , and our cellular energy changes along with the energy in our meridians, our chakras, our aura and our DNA opens new codes of consciousness that connect to our Soul.
We don’t forget what happened in the past, as it is there for our learning – we simply make a different choice to no longer let the past dictate who you are in the present by continually running our life through our “Soul wounds”.
It has been my experience while helping many others on their healing journey that their life’s lessons are to reverse the content of their Soul wounds. For instance, if you experienced abandonment in your life, then your life’s lesson is to find connection, which is the opposite of abandonment. If you experienced betrayal then you need to learn how to have compassion for yourself and others. If you experienced abuse - your life’s lesson is about kindness.
You always need to experience the opposite emotion on your Soul’s journey as we live in a place of duality. As you move away from duality, you experience triality, in which you allow your Soul to guide you through its discernment of new experiences you encounter. The Soul then opens you up to new experiences in triality (higher consciousness) where you use the higher senses to guide you. It then feels that you are swimming with the stream, rather than against it, and life is much easier.
Healing is about going from the energy frequency of the Ego to the energy frequency of the Soul.
This material is copyrighted. © 2010,2011, 2012 Heather Carlini www.carliniinstitute.com – You are free to share, copy, distribute and display the work under the following conditions: You must give author credit, you may not use this for commercial purposes, and you may not alter, transform or build upon this work.
Teaching
19 May 2013 - 2:37pm
Lojong - Training the Mind
http://kadampa.org/buddhism/training-the-mind/
In these spiritually degenerate timeswe encounter many obstacles to our spiritual practice but rather than being discouraged by them we can learn to transform them into the spiritual path by practicing training the mind.
Children get very excited when they make sandcastles, but when the sea washes them away they become upset. Buddha said that we are like children in this respect because we are happy when things are going well, but become miserable and depressed as soon as we encounter difficulties.
Samsaric pleasure is necessarily impermanent, and sooner or later turns into suffering; we would be foolish to expect anything else. Therefore we need to develop equanimity with respect to good and bad situations. We need to think `If things go well, fine; if they do not, that’s fine too.’
Turning difficult circumstances to our advantage
Whatever comes up, we can turn it to our advantage. As Shantideva says, suffering has many good qualities because it purifies our negative karma, increases our renunciation and compassion, reduces our pride, and helps us to overcome bad mental habits. If we think in this way we will feel that difficult circumstances are our best friends. When our mind is balanced in this way it becomes as stable as Mount Meru, and nothing can cause it to shake.
If through training our mind we find that we can keep a peaceful and happy mind at all times, even in difficult circumstances, this indicates that we have been successful in our training. If we train our mind in this way, everything we encounter will increase our Dharma realizations.
Making every second of our life meaningful
There are three types of object: attractive, unattractive, and neutral. Normally, when we encounter the first we develop attachment, when we encounter the second we develop hatred, and when we encounter the third we develop ignorance.
For a successful practitioner of training the mind, however, these objects have the opposite effect. Instead of giving rise to the three poisons – attachment, hatred, and ignorance – they give rise to the three virtuous roots – non-attachment, non-hatred, and non-ignorance.
The three virtuous roots are not simply the absence of the three poisons, but are their direct opposites. Thus non-attachment is a virtuous mind that is the direct opposite of attachment. Renunciation is a type of non-attachment.
We can generate non-attachment through wisdom, and also through other minds such as faith or concentration. Whenever we contemplate the faults of attachment and generate a distaste for ordinary objects of desire, seeing them as harmful and deceptive, we are practicing non-attachment. Skillful practitioners of training the mind try to generate this mind whenever they see attractive objects.
Non-hatred is a virtuous mind that is the direct opposite of hatred. We generate this mind by contemplating the faults of anger and hatred.
Non-ignorance is a virtuous mind that is the direct opposite of ignorance. It is a type of wisdom. We generate this mind by resisting the ordinary appearance of objects and contemplating their empty nature.
Since we encounter attractive, unattractive, and neutral objects all the time, if we learn to generate the three virtuous roots rather than the three poisons we can make every second of our life meaningful. For practitioners of training the mind, this is the most important practice when they are not in meditation.
Story
19 May 2013 - 12:07pm
Indecision is a Choice
Melchizedek’s Weekly Message ~ May 19 – 26, 2013
Received by Julie Miller
May 19, 2013
How each dear soul thinks, behaves and engages in all the many aspects of their life are derived from certain beliefs and truths. In order for each of you to reach your highest potential in all areas, including your spiritual journey some of you may need to make a few necessary changes or adjustments.
There are many dear souls that live upon your earthly home that literally run on an autopilot sort of way. They go about their life, with little to no concern of others – they are mindless. We encourage each of you, even those working by spreading the Love and Light of God to be more mindful of everyone on a Global scale. The more mindful each of you can become, the more aware you also become of certain higher truths that will resonate with both your heart and your soul. When you reach these Divine truths, you grow more in ways that are meaningful and provides satisfaction in every area of your life.
Meditation is a great way to apply focus on any one area that you know is weak and needs adjustment. Through meditation, many answers to solutions will be discovered once you learn to quiet the mind and let go. It is also possible to meditate on spiritual principles such as gratitude, humility, optimism, generosity, forgiveness, intention and expectation.
Keep in mind dear ones, each day is given to you as a gift from God just as every breath you take, nothing is to be taken for granted, yet many forget the simplicity of their journey and become easily annoyed when reminded the necessity to be grateful for all things regardless how big or small. When you consciously fill your Self with the air of gratitude you are providing yourself with very uplifting and rewarding energy. Many dear souls do this throughout their day from the moment they wake until they retire to bed for the night…they live within the spirit of gratitude.
It is understood that many dear souls do not understand what humility is. Humility has nothing to do with being an easy target for others to walk over, or to act better than the next dear soul. Humility provides you with the opportunity to be unbiased. When you demonstrate humility you are telling those around you in a quiet yet noticeable way that you have no need to think of yourself better or less than the next dear soul; you are able to let go of petty squabbles and carry on. We have witnessed many dear souls that have taken the stance of Humility have discovered that this way of dealing with situations that would have normally brought out heated words to be very liberating. Many have successfully reclaimed creative and productive energy that was derived from situations that they consciously chose to not take sides or engage heatedly. This is a time of great growth and development, when you are able to liberate yourself from the need to be better than others.
Optimism is a word that describes much of your attitude and behaviour when you are setting goals to reach certain outcomes. All things will turn out dear ones once you learn to make the best of the way things do turn out. Each outcome is mainly in your control. There may be outside influences that you are unable to predict but when challenges arise it is up to you to choose the best solution that is optimal for all. You will always reach your outcome when you apply positive action from your positive thinking. By working with positive action you begin to capitalize on your ability to creative, innovate, discover or rediscover specific strategies that will assist you on achieving the goals you have been working towards.
Even in your modern world there are many dear souls among you that live within the pockets of their Ego. They often exercise bitterness, resentment; sometimes they demonstrate negative self-pity, and for the most part describe a narcissistic attitude. It is essential that as you age, you are able to remove yourself from such ways of being and thinking. A life that is filled with happiness and fulfillment is a life that is filled with gratitude for each person that is a part of your life, even if that person occasionally annoys you.
When you are able to let go of old history of disagreements and welcome a lighter and more upbeat attitude you will dear ones become more happily engaged in the simple act of giving yourself to others. You will feel stronger and content. Even if what you give is saying something nice to your waiter or waitress, or offering supporting words to a weary cleaner, you are generously giving yourself to others and these little things will bring joy to your heart and to the people you choose to interact with and give yourself to. How wonderful you will feel when you agreeably do small favours for someone without being asked. If you have a disgruntled neighbour greet them with a generous hello and even if that person doesn’t reply in kind you still gave of yourself and showed that you cared and this is pleasing to both your heart and your soul. Giving of yourself is another area filled with great growth and development.
There are many people who say sorry so much dear ones that they have forgotten what it means to forgive or why they are sorry. Forgiveness has nothing to do with being appreciative or ungrateful towards another person’s actions. Forgiveness is all about letting go of what has happened. When you are drawn into the negative vengeful pool, you are actually attaching yourself to the actual source of what has caused you to feel hurt and miserable. When you make the choice to react and respond in anger, resentment, revenge and even childish retaliation you are not gaining anything dear ones, but you are losing a precious part of yourself.
Any one person that brings out such strong and negative reactions does provide you with much to learn from and with the opportunity to let this person go. Yes they can teach you much of yourself and you will grow with more knowledge and wisdom, but it is vital that you also surround yourself with people that support and influence you in positive ways that bring calm and balance to your emotional state. Remember dear ones, forgiveness is your ability to act and react responsibly without any amount of spitefulness. Forgiveness allows you to reclaim your creative spirit and energy and direct it in healthier ways that provides you with many growth potentials for your journey.
When you move along your journey passively and path will lead you. It is important dear ones to make decisions and to choose what you want and how to get there. Don’t allow passivity to keep you stuck. Not only realize but recognize the necessity of choosing a goal as a focal point of your creative energy. It is understood that many dear souls remain stuck because they fear letting go of what is commonplace and known. You must break away from what is known and embrace the unknown in order to grow. There is always the possibility that any choice you make could be the “wrong” choice, but each choice you make is yours and each one has multiple lessons that provide incredible learning opportunities that will enrich your entire life. Comprehend dear ones, when choose to not decide to do something you are actually making a choice. It is important to make conscious choices and to commit to them, and claim them, as they are yours to own. Appreciate each choice you make and remember your intent that is fostered with great Will, will provide you with the outcome you are seeking. We encourage you to focus your attention and precious energy on what is important in your life and if there are areas that need a little tweaking then follow the guidance of your heart.
Anytime you have succeeded or not succeeded in reaching a specific goal you realize it has much to do with the effort you put into each step. Please realize dear ones whenever you succeed or fail you are demonstrating the intentions of your effort. When the methods to reaching a certain goal doesn’t work out, don’t look at this a failure, see it is an opportunity to try again, but applying different methods, visualize its outcome and see it through each step of the way.
Even if you do not realize this dear ones, you are continuously programing and reprograming each segment of your life. When you begin each step towards your goal to achieve with clarity of your intention you increase strength and focus and with your applied energy your outcome will demonstrate this collaboration of total working togetherness of your Whole Self. We remind you dear ones, where your energy flows is also where your attention will go. If your energy is all over the place, so will your attention.
Your journey is filled with so much learning potential. The choices you make determine the course of your path. You must learn from all your experiences and figure out the lessons that come from each one, even if the experience came from difficult trials and tribulations. There is growth to be found even from the most tragic of circumstances. It is up to you dear ones to see this potential and learn from all that has crossed your path.
I AM Melchizedek through Julie Miller
Story
19 May 2013 - 10:35am
Channeled Ascension Message from
the High Council of Orion
May 19th 2013.
Channeled by Holly Hawkins Marwood
Transcribed by Paul Marwood
Audio file is available at http://www.akashahealingstudio.com/high-council-of-orion-channeled-message-19th-may-2013/
INTIMACY
“Greetings Dear Ones,
We are the High Council of Orion, and we greet each one of you with heart awakening energies, wherever you may be in your life, wherever you may be physically on the planet, wherever you may be on the spectrum of human emotions, wherever you may be in the spectrum of your understanding of your life and your incarnation.
Today we’d like to share with you the idea and concept from our point of view of intimacy. The word has narrowed its scope in your world at this time to often just reflect the close connections between people who are intimately involved, and while that might be a love relationship or a lover relationship, we want to look at this word of intimate and intimacy and take it to an even greater level.
For at the heart of our message today we want you to become very intimate with yourself, very intimate with who you know yourself to be. In an intimate relationship all the details are known, the nuances are known about an individual person or situation, and we ask to turn that focus of intimacy to yourself.
How well do you know yourself?
How well do you know what motivates you?
What opens your heart?
What excites you?
What you're here for?
What you choose?
What your visions are?
For it’s this place of very intimate knowing of yourself that you can respond to the world. Respond to the world in very accurate exacting clear ways, for when all the intimate details are known of who you are, ambiguity falls away, confusion falls away, “right-action” steps in front of everything, “right-knowingness”. For that intimate understanding and connection with who you are and what you're here for, allows everything around you to go more smoothly.
What we invite you to do is, if you have areas in your life where perhaps you would like to see them “differently” in one way or another, perhaps the energy doesn't feel like it's flowing, perhaps you have confusion, perhaps overwhelm. What we ask you to do is really start spending that time sitting with yourself, and really getting to know yourself in relationship to that situation, not in relationship to how you want that person, or a situation to be. But how you are in relation to that situation.
Turn the spotlight back on you within the situation, instead of the situation and how it interacts with you. It’s a very subtle yet significant difference, and as you spend that time to intimately examine and understand your relationship to it, and how you feel about it?
Maybe you hope to have felt aligned, or it seemed like everyone else's best idea that you were aligned with it, and wanted it, but perhaps as you intimately connect with yourself you see it's not really what makes your heart sing, it's not what your choice on your own would be. And as you intimately connect with yourself and come to that greater level of understanding, you have that opportunity to interact with, make decisions, change on many levels, to allow it to be inline more closely with who you are, where you're going.
Explore the intimate details of your life beginning with the areas of greatest concern for yourself, perhaps it's your body, perhaps it's how you think about a relationship, perhaps it's about other relationships in your life and how you feel about them, perhaps it's feeling uncertain about a particular direction to go or a change to make in any area of your life.
Start really asking yourself those intimate questions just as you would an intimate relationship, to really find out more. Be that person on the quest to know as much as you can about yourself. For as you understand yourself then you can understand yourself in relation to the situations you have around you, instead of expecting the situations to change. For often times they don't change in ways you wish, because you haven't gotten aligned with those intimate details of yourself.
Do you see how that can flow starting with you first, and then the energy flows outward to the situations. Instead of looking at the situations and looking at them hoping, wishing, desiring, maybe even getting angry with them not changing, have the energy flow from you first to really understand yourself, and that's your greatest place of power, it's your greatest place of alignment, it is your greatest place of change of acceptance of understanding, and ultimately your freedom to fully express your soul's purpose, fully express yourself and the world through your heart.
We see and feel each one of you listening to this message, connecting with the openness within the energy that has the potential to connect with yourself intimately.
Be Blessed.
We are the High Council of Orion.”
============================================================================
© 2013 Copyright Holly Hawkins Family Trust www.AkashaHealingStudio.com
This channeled message may be reproduced in it’s entirety provided it is kept in it’s original form and not altered or changed in any way, with the Author and website clearly included.
Blog entry
18 May 2013 - 10:27pm
Published on 18 May 2013 by PeterSiNeh
Forgetting about what you love to do can be a form of self-sabotage - get back to what you love.
_/|\_NAMASKAR_/|\_
SiNeh~
Teaching
18 May 2013 - 7:22pm
Fohat–The Great Transformer
[Reprinted from THE THEOSOPHICAL MOVEMENT, March 1964.]
http://www.teosofia.com/Mumbai/7208fohat.html
Fohat is a Tibetan term for the energic or motion aspect of the Supreme Spirit. It is usually considered in its metaphysical aspect, which is rather difficult to understand; therefore, side by side with the metaphysical, the ethical and practical-application aspect should also be understood.
Every form of life is made up of a certain grade of matter expressing a certain degree of intelligence or consciousness, and the connecting link between the two is the vital force of Fohat. It links spirit and matter, subject to object, as explained in the First Fundamental Proposition of The Secret Doctrine. It is the "bridge" by which the Eternal Thought in the Eternal Mind is objectivized as univeral Nature. The process is from within without. The slumbering energy awakes and a gradual transformation takes place from the spiritual to the ethereal, the semi-ethereal, until gross forms of matter come into existence. Primordial matter is formless and colourless. It is Fohat which translates or rather transforms the universal, archetypal ideas into various forms at various levels and becomes the guiding force. The Laws of Nature exist because of the impression of Divine Ideas on Divine Substance. It is interesting to note that some thinkers have, unconsciously to themselves, admitted the existence of the propelling force of manifestation, as stated by Madame Blavatsky in a footnote on page 649 of Volume II of The Secret Doctrine:
The "principle of perfectibility" of Nägeli; von de Baer's "striving towards the purpose"; Braun's "Divine breath as the inward impulse in the evolutionary history of Nature"; Professor Owen's "tendency to perfectibility," etc., are all veiled manifestations of the universal guiding Fohat, rich with the Divine and Dhyan-Chohanic thought.
Fohat is the constructive power that causes the formation of planetary systems, of earth chains, of nature and of man. In the second verse of the Fifth Stanza from the Book of Dzyan it is stated: "Fohat is the steed and thought is the rider." Not only does it serve, like the steed, as a means of transportation from one place to another, from one plane to another, but it also has the power to change and transform that which was subjective into the objective, that which was noumenal into the phenomenal. Thus, an ideal image in the mind of man may be reproduced as a concrete form.
This can be understood by taking a simple illustration—that of a potter and his pot. He may have an image or images of various types of pots in his own mind. He may have the clay, the water and all the necessary ingredients in front of him, but unless and until he wills to use his own energy and with his hands moulds and shapes the clay according to the image formed in his mind, there will be no objective formation of an earthen pot. This illustration should enable the student to have a clearer understanding of what Fohat is, and how it functions at various stages of evolution. The Will of man is one aspect of Fohat in the human kingdom, on the plane of mind; the potter's use of the energic force to create a pot with his own hands and make of it an objective reality is another aspect of the vital force on another plane.
In Nature, the Fohatic principle is working all the time. A continuous transformation of forms from one state into another is taking place. What transforms water into ice or steam, its two opposite aspects? Heat and cold, rooted in Fohat, the energy of the One Life. What makes vapour gather into clouds in the sky, and the clouds to burst into rain, and the rain to fructify the seeds under the ground and bring about the growth of plants and trees, flowers and fruits, in all their changing forms? The motion aspect of the Divine Life. Motion conquers cold, rest conquers heat. When the body is cold, the mind passive, hands inactive, then motion on all planes is needed. When the body is restless, when the heat of anger rages in the mind and in the heart, a change of polarity becomes necessary to bring about calm and quiet, and this change of polarity is yet another aspect of life.
In The Theosophical Glossary Fohat is defined as Daiviprakriti, Primordial Light, the essence of Cosmic Electricity, and in the manifested universe it is "the ever-present electrical energy and ceaseless destructive and formative power." This indicates how from the one homogeneous substance-principle differentiation takes place and grosser and grosser forms of life come into manifestation through the stairway of the seven worlds or planes. It is the same vital power which creates and destroys, to re-create once more. Fohat is "the universal propelling Vital Force, at once the propeller and resultant." Attraction and repulsion, levitation and gravitation, are all caused by this universal propelling force.
What brings atoms and molecules together, what separates them? The opposing forces of cohesion and of dispersion both spring from Fohat. What but the dynamic energy of life turns a germ into a foetus in the mother's womb, and later on into a baby which becomes a man or a woman? What brings about old age, decay and death? The destructive aspect of that same energic force. What brings the body daily from the waking to the sleeping state and from the sleeping to the waking state? The unbalance caused by the impact of the universal life-energy upon individual energy. When the equilibrium is restored, it wakes up the individual for another day of work. So all growth and expansion, all decay and destruction, the play of opposing forces through a change of polarity, are brought about through one or another aspect of Fohat—the great Transformer. Thus, naturally, life is looked upon as a drama, a dance, or a song, where each being is expected to play his part, to dance or to sing in tune with the Infinite. This can only be done through a clear understanding of Deity in its triple aspect of Creator-Preserver-Destroyer, or Spirit-Matter with the connecting link of Fohat.
Human beings dissipate their energy in a thousand ways, through the avenues of thought-word-deed, because they are bound down by a hundred cords of desire. Therefore the practical lesson is to conserve one's energy for the highest work on the physical, mental, moral and spiritual planes, and, instead of following impulses from without, to follow the right principles and act from within. Krishna defines Yoga as equanimity of mind and skill in the performance of action. This can only be achieved through constant vigilance and self-control.
The way winds up-hill all the way, from the valley of mire to summits of glorious light Nirvanic, and it is necessary to use one's energy in the cultivation of virtues. One of the paramitas is "VIRYA, the dauntless energy that fights its way to the Supernal TRUTH, out of the mire of lies terrestrial." This will transform man into a god, enabling him not only to enjoy Nirvanic peace and bliss, but also to use his energy on all planes to elevate his fellow pilgrims and relieve their suffering. Thus, to propel life from the unmanifested to manifestation, from the atom to man and man to god, is the work of Fohat, the great Transformer, at first through natural impulse and then through the self-conscious effort of man.
Karma may not be acquired like money in a bank; it cannot be deposited; but a store of merit may be laid up to the account of anyone who acts so as to lay it up. If the law is looked at from the selfish side as something that one may lay up for himself, of course it will tend to self-seeking; but it is hardly possible for one to believe in and act under the law and fail at the same time to see that if he does so selfishly he limits his store and sometime will nullify all its effects. It is not good karma to act selfishly; hence he makes bad karma by so acting from a self-seeking of benefit under the law.
Good karma is that act and thought which is pleasing to the Higher Self. Hence sorrow and pain and discipline may be good karma. Bad karma is that act and thought which displeases the Higher Self. Hence all self-seeking acts, no matter how high and outwardly virtuous they are, are bad karma, since the Higher Self desires no such acts for its sake.
—W. Q. Judge
Story
18 May 2013 - 6:55pm
Each Relationship is A Gift from God
Message from Ascended Master, Lady Nada
Received by Julie Miller
May 18, 2013
Precious Hearts how pleasing it is to be with you through your Divine sister on this magnificent day.
All relationships are important and we are not only speaking of romantic ones, but even all the interactions you have each day from the most basic of interaction between two people that are merely passing each other, to relationships between parent and child, friendships, professional relationships, etc. Each precious soul you meet is considered a divine encounter. With each person you come across you are provided with the opportunity to see your Self within him or her. Through each interaction you are presented with the opportunity to communicate and how you react and respond is also an indication on how you will treat yourself. How you treat others does have a major impact on how you treat yourself. By choosing to express from your heart, you will always demonstrate the pureness of your whole Self each and every time.
One of the most fundamental of divine principles in regards to relationships is the ability to discover yourself in others, what it is within each precious soul that you find endearing and recognize what you consider to be unappealing. And this simple understanding appears in all relationships dear ones. Each relationship, even if it is between a salesperson and customer has the potential of providing you with the great spiritual growth that is productive and has the power to affect many areas of your life. It is from the Egoic stance that many dear souls continue to seek power and glory for themselves when each relationship, each interaction is a gift from the God, provided to each of you to teach you who you and what you can become. Even though you walk your journey alone, it is through others you discover your whole self.
When you only look at just yourself you cannot find your whole self. It is true you will discover much of who you are through meditation and from going within, but it is through your relationships that you really begin to understand and see your Self. When you are on the search to know thyself you will learn best when you include other dear souls, as they are your brothers and sisters as you are all children of God. Remember precious hearts, each person you meet and interact with is a part of you and you are a part of them.
Try to comprehend Precious Hearts; your true Self is not isolated as you may think. You are interconnected with ALL. Your true self dear ones is shared through this interconnection. If you are only looking at yourself, with Egoic eyes you will not see this Precious Hearts, just as you will not be able to recognize the ocean by looking at its drop of water under a microscope. Each person you meet is your chance to look beyond the normal appearance of two separate people and discover the common Self that both of you equally share. This describes a relationship that is blessed and divine. But those relationships that are ungodly will still have the two people but they will remain separate because they will compete and/or bargain with the other for their own personal and selfish advantage. Remember dear ones each of you holds a piece of the fragment that is part of the ALL that Is, part of the universe and all that includes. No one’s piece is larger than another, each of you hold an important piece that is essential for your whole evolution.
It has been a long time precious hearts since you have unveiled your magnificent self. For too long you have hidden your sacred self, buried your ability to see beyond selfish ways and see that your role here and NOW is not alone but connected. Each passing person, each interaction is your mirror. It is your own Ego dear ones that will cause you to send away the truth of your Self through the relationships you have. It is important to see and learn from the positive and negative effects from all interactions. By denying your Self to learn your whole self through the many dear souls that cross your path, you are also blocking your total awareness of them – you are in a simple yet profound way denying yourself to become the person, the being you are meant to be. Balance is essential for your journey precious hearts. You will not be completely happy and content if you only look for the light. You are combined of polarities, light and dark, masculine and feminine. Being able to learn from both sides and balance what you learn will propel you further along your journey that just focusing on one aspect.
The path of your journey is filled with many challenges and each one you must face before you can begin the next phase. Yes you must walk your own journey and choose your own decisions, but each step you take is the product of certain interactions that have either encouraged and inspired you or demotivated you. Learn to recognize your truth through your relationships. When you look for yourself in others dear ones, it’s important to be honest and self-honesty can be incredibly painful because it means you must drop all false pretenses and truly see with eyes fully opened. When you look back at previous encounters, recognize how judgemental or critical you may have been, and learn why this negative reaction occurred without passing blame. Look honestly. And when you discover the truth of this interaction you can learn how to improve your interrelationship skills, and how to interact with others without causing harm. All communications that you have reflects how you feel about yourself. If you are feeling happy and joyful you will express this way to others, but if you are feeling ill, upset or out-of-sorts you will also express this in your interactions. Even if you do not say a word, your energy will be felt.
Grievances come into your life dear ones and they hold valuable information that pertains to your own growth and development. It is important dear ones to learn to let go of all past grievances as they will only prevent you from loving completely, the changes you bring even if they are positive will not be as complete. What you perceive dear ones, negative or positive of another person you have interacted with is only a projection of your own thoughts of your Self. We remind you that your thoughts, feelings, words even if they are written, and action all holds powerful energy and this energy you are each accountable for. You may not be able to determine how another will react but what comes from you is your responsibility.
We encourage each of you to make your relationships productive and from them become aware once again of your negative thought forms and turn any self-destructive thoughts into goals to achieve and to become positive. You can turn your negative thoughts and actions into positive ones by merely wanting to. The change must begin with you and becoming aware that your own Ego has created certain measures to prevent you from succeeding in many of your goals. Through your Ego dear ones you discover your separateness, instead of your interconnectedness. Remember precious hearts your Ego knows nothing. It is your responsibility to learn by looking at your Ego and what it is trying to make of you. When you ask yourself, “How do I want to treat myself?” you are being honest and searching for honest answers then these answers will be found through your heart dear ones which is filled with unconditional love. The Ego cannot survive when you apply each thought, feeling, word and action with love. It is through your answer to how you want to treat yourself; you will discover as well how you will treat others.
It is your responsibility to change how you treat yourself and others, to remove yourself from feeling guilty and feeling unworthy of respect and love. When you finally are able to see precious hearts your whole truth, you then will be able to atone for your attitude and behaviour. When you are able to clearly see how your own self-destructive thoughts have caused harm and disillusion you will face the opportunity to choose to be gentler with your Self and with others. This shift of thought forms and behaviour brings you onto the path of forgiveness.
We remind you Precious Hearts, when you choose to judge and criticize another dear soul, your brother or sister of God you are treating yourself the same way. Stop criticizing yourself and others, end the self-sabotage and treat yourself with loving kindness. Relationships are filled with many important and necessary lessons that will help you to discover your whole true self.
Learn to give yourself in kindness, love and respect. Be responsible and accept any harm you may have caused, even unknowingly and forgive yourself. Forgive those that may have done you harm and heal precious hearts. When you give yourself through unconditional love to all people and things you are fulfilling a divine mission that God Himself has given you and to remember you and He are also connected. Your true Inner Power and magnificence originated from your Creation in God’s Divine image. Just like God, each of you are Love, a love that is pure and completely unconditional. And the main purpose of love is to give and through giving your true potential is revealed.
When you relate with others, you are provided with the opportunity to give of your Self. Within each of you is the capability to deliver love to others regardless of how they may think of themselves through the creation of their Ego. When you are able to see the magnificence in all others, even those that live through their Ego, you are truly remembering and being your true self that God created. The purpose of giving love cannot be fulfilled if you still hold within your mind that you are alone on your journey. Even if your home only consists of you, you are not alone precious hearts. When you greet the cashier with a smile you are fulfilling the giving of yourself as you are demonstrating Love. The simplest of caring and loving gestures are your cues, telling you how NOT alone you are.
Your true and divine self is LOVE. Love in itself is also a relationship. Without the interactions with other people you cannot discover your whole divine self, it is through love that you do. When you deny loving your brothers and sisters of God, you are also denying yourself love. It is up to you dear ones to see your relationships as productive means to strengthen your ties with God and follow the path love will lead you to the home of God’s beautiful heart. Exercise your own love through all your actions, words, thoughts and feelings and together working as ONE you will help heal the world.
I AM Ascended Master, Lady Nada through Julie Miller
Story
18 May 2013 - 5:41am
Hi everyone,
This is the dragon.
The Brian can be quite prolific at channeling sometimes, then silent for a while, can't he? He's quite connected but still limited by time, fatigue, not connecting, and other factors.
Some of you like to soak up channeled information like sponges, regardless of the sources you are interested in. Everyone has their favorites, depending on what energies you bring, your interests, and what is appropriate. Yet, it never comes fast enough, does it? You can soak soak soak and just can't fill the sponge. You are built that way, and for a reason. And channelings will never be enough.
That doesn't mean people should stop channeling, nor will the Brian, because it serves a purpose. However, many of you who have been reading channelings for a while, it's time to build your own connections if you haven't yet to the collective of beings watching and guiding. It's time. And we will say "they", but we also mean "we". We just don't want to make this about us. This is about you.
They are there, when you decide to make that connection. We cannot say they are patiently but enthusiastically waiting for it because they are already aware of the time in your future you make that connection. They are already there as well. But for you, for your ability to bring in information faster. For you to feel connected, and more whole and less alone. You, there is no reason to wait.
Why would you? Well, we know the answer, but this is meant to provoke thought for you.
If you are a sponge, and you like to soak soak soak... Well, soak away. Waiting many many of your days or more between some channelings from various people, why? Make your own connection, just as the channelers have done. The volume of information will be much larger.
Then the information will flow fast. You will keep the sponge fuller.
It is very natural for you. It is part of your abilities. Everyone has this ability. You exercise it sometimes without knowing it. Now do it consciously.
Hold yourselves back no longer. If you are stuck, there's many who have already talked about how to connect. Like they say sometimes on your world, just do it.
The final thing we wish to say is the greatest spirit to connect to is that which is inside of you, which is inside all of us.
With love.
The dragon.
Story
18 May 2013 - 5:18am
This is the dragon,
We want to talk today about a topic that you may have thought about before, but maybe shrugged it off. On the other side, where you are more free and more connected, there is less separation between beings. So, a lot of times you channel one particular being or another, be it plaeidians, or arcturians, or on and on. Or you listen to those channelings.
Have you noticed a similarity in the energies? The plaeidians and arcturians are two different sources of energy. However, as far as they interact with Earth, they are one source. That's why directed Brian to give the topic of this channeling "One source"
For, many of these beings are working together to guide you in your ascension. So, they have blended their collectives. That brings on more of that oneness, which helps you connect to oneness as well. Then, when you connect to the beings, you choose a personality, and you attract those energies of the personality you attribute to it. You name it, and the name helps attract certain energies. However, the source of much of the information, are like arms of the octupus, with the same center. For they are all working together. Their own flavor, but much of the time the same purpose.
And they are working with your souls, for you are often times part of that combined collective.
You have given this collective names as well, for you sometimes see past the personality to the combined nature of all these entities.
We want to say that channeling the personality, or more specific energies doesn't make these beings deceitful or the message wrong. They are wise beings, and these personalities are as real as their collective is. And they do their best to avoid corruption of the message, as do you.
Just remember, that we're all one. That these personalities are still part of a collective. And that collective is something you are working to join.
You will be more connected. That is your shared path.
With love,
The dragon
Story
17 May 2013 - 5:53pm
RADIATE with Positive Energy, FLOW with Optimism
Ascended Master, Serapis Bey’s Weekly Message ~ May 17 – 24, 2013
Received by Julie Miller
May 17, 2013
The power of adding optimism to your journey empowers your ability to bring in more positive light and change into whole life that will be demonstrated in your health, your career path, and other areas of your life will be greatly affected. By including optimism, you bring yourself so much closer dear ones to not only realizing your goals, but achieving them.
When you are flowing with optimistic energy, your perception on life changes and becomes much more vital and dynamic. One of the greatest ingredients to add to your journey dear ones is optimism and through this positive energy flow you are telling without vocalizing that your hold on faith is strong and your belief that all will turn out well has increased power. Your health will improve dear ones when you make the conscious effort to be more optimistic; you will let go of unnecessary stress and develop a stronger physical body that will become more immune and resistant to lingering illnesses.
Being optimistic does require you to be fully conscious of what you are doing. We see many of you practice your mantras, and say prayers that remind you of the importance of being positive in all areas, but the transformation from adding optimism takes place within the conscious mind through reflection and self-discovery to honestly and truthfully comprehend why you may be susceptible to be more of pessimist. Through this introspection you will discover what is necessary to discard in order to free yourself into the empowering energy of optimism.
You can determine on your own through your own ability to rationalize circumstances through your self-talk and any explanations you provide yourself. From observing yourself, you will recognize if you are more prone to be optimistic or pessimistic. You can learn when you are pulled either way; what your triggers are and from examining yourself you provide yourself with ample opportunities to bring helpful change that will provide you with the necessary Inner Knowledge for future challenges and how to deal with them instead of feeling like an ostrich with its head in the sand. Within each of you, is an endless well of power that is nurtured by courage, love and determination. Each decision you make all plays an important role on your path and where your journey will lead you.
Understand dear ones when you are truly coming from an optimistic centre, realize that nothing can stand in your way…you have fueled yourself with the power to succeed. You have already proven to yourself and to many others, spiritual and physical alike that you have the tenacity to persevere especially amidst the toughest of obstacles. When you push yourself ahead and suddenly find a stumbling block do not despair, find other ways, other solutions that help bring you out of any stagnation and back on the path of success. All around you are clues, means to your journey being successful. Being able to recognize them and make use of the gifts your loving Father leaves you every day is something we encourage you to do as they hold many answers that will bring you to the best possible outcome.
Optimistic dear souls are always motived to succeed and are constantly ready. Ambitions become goals and plans are created in order to achieve all goals. Remember dear ones the more effort you bring and the more you are willing to apply will reduce the amount of risks you may face and the level of success will be determined. Being optimistic tells in silent language that you are ready, curiously aware and prepared for any unexpected challenges that may come your way.
The dear souls that include optimism as a necessary part of their journey are able to highly motivate others by their own examples. And dear ones this will happen naturally and automatically; this kind of energy is felt without the use of words. When you radiate positive energy, you will begin to draw people to you like a magnet. And yet, to be optimistic you must make the conscious choice to see the proverbial glass half full instead of half empty. Just the slight of words and thinking makes all the difference. Dear ones if you truly wish for your efforts to result in positive outcomes, we urge you to change your thinking and adopt a more optimistic approach in all you do. It is well understood dear ones, how you think will govern the direction of your future. If you have a pessimistic mind, your goals will barely be recognized.
You are encouraged dear ones to think about where your focus is placed. Remember your concentrated focus applied with optimism will provide you with attractive positive outcomes. Dear souls that illuminate optimistic energy often demonstrate confidence, they are cheerful and positive, and they tend to be more productive and high achievers. An optimistic dear soul will also demonstrate resiliency; they are devoid of judgements and do not criticize others. Optimistic dear souls will also exhibit enthusiasm; they often encourage others and are self-motivated, etc., this list of high quality characteristics can be expanded on your own.
Quite often dear ones, much of your optimism and even pessimism is carried over from your childhood; how you were raised. It is extremely important to employ a positive and optimistic environment for all people including children in order for them to thrive and develop well in. By observing yourself in a non-biased manner you will quickly come to realize what level of success you wish to reach and how to attain this success in order for you and your family to benefit. Through your decisions to better your attitude you are in a way changing for the optimistic better that each of you deserves.
We are well aware of the difficulties you have faced. The challenges that you face each day arrive with both positive and negative information. Because of the lack of positive news and positive information, much of your human nature has become swayed to the negative side of things. It is up to you dear ones to discover ways that will raise your optimism to healthier levels. There are many ways that will raise your optimism and we will discuss a few with you today, providing you with the opportunity to learn on your own.
When you make the conscious effort to strengthen your emotions, resolve any old issues that have had the power to prevent you from progressing as you should, you are adding more optimistic energy into your actions. It is okay to ask for help, sometimes help is needed and asking for help isn’t a weakness but a strength.
Look for ways that will positively change your faith and how you attach expectations to thoughts, things and people. Discover the healing properties of laughter. Learn how to include laughter as part of the start of your day. Many dear souls purposely wear something, maybe a certain colour that inspires positive energy or a special piece of jewellery. There are endless ways on how to add more positive optimistic energy into your life. I am positive dear ones you will discover the ones that are best for you and while you search on methods to bring solid improvements into your whole life you will continue to take in adequate rest and good nutrition.
It is only natural to meet disappointments even while you are adjusting your thought-forms and redeveloping yourself to be more optimistic. When disappointments come your way, instead of panicking, look at the disappointments as wonderful learning opportunities as that is exactly what they are. Don’t allow the disappointments to control your life; through them you will discover new ways of doing things. How you tackle disappointments will separate you from your pessimist self.
The dear souls who have adopted an optimistic way of being refrains from complaining, continues with positive, up-beat self-talk and finds ways of reinforcing self-confidence and self-esteem. When you come from an optimistic attitude you will easily demonstrate thankfulness and gratitude. Each day you wake dear ones you are greeted with many gifts and with each gift you recognize we encourage you to give thanks. As you give thanks to all the gifts and blessings you have received, you are choosing to begin your day optimistically. Beginning your day fresh and filled with optimistic is one of best frames of mind you can begin your day in.
Your journey derived of your choices. Empowering yourself with an optimistic attitude is one of the best choices you can make and we will guide, support and love you each step of the way.
I AM Ascended Master, Serapis Bey through Julie Miller
Blog entry
17 May 2013 - 4:07pm
SOUL DOES NOT LABEL
~ Bonnie and Andrew Schneider
www.thesouljourney.com
SOUL perceives WHAT IS.
The labels of right and wrong, however, are never part of SOUL PERCEPTION and never part of HEART KNOWING.
Reflection
The labels of right and wrong that we attach to things arise only from a conditioned and biased personality view of reality.
The personality always wants to be right.
And whatever it accepts, it calls right. Whatever it rejects, it calls wrong.
When the personality ego eventually learns that the rejected and repressed aspects are also right,
it will be responding more to the soul than to its conditioning.
One of the results of this is -- GREATER LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE TOWARD SELF... AND OTHERS.
Obviously the ego needs to be educated by experiences of heart knowing.
And we need to be conscious when we are viewing and experiencing from the ego or from the heart.
When responding from the ego we are typically responding from conditioned mind supported by emotional attachments.
* Examine some of the situations that you have labelled wrong and see if you can detect your conditioning, bias, and attachments behind it.
* Then view the same situations from a soul or heart perspective and notice the difference.
[my format & caps]
Teaching
17 May 2013 - 9:39am
The Five Principles for Manifesting Your Desires, Spirit Junkie Style
by Gabrielle Bernstein
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gabrielle-bernstein/manifest-desires_b_1404543.html
We are always manifesting. Each thought we have creates an energy flow within and around our physical beings. This energy attracts its likeness. So if you're thinking, "I suck," then your energy kinda, well, sucks -- and you attract sucky experiences.
The opposite experience occurs when you think high-level thoughts like, "I rock!" When you think and feel, "I rock," you exude an energy of confidence and in turn attract great experiences into your life. Each thought you have informs your energy, and your energy manifests into your experiences. Your thoughts and energy create your reality.
Manifesting Mishaps
Manifestation has become a buzzword lately. Though it's totally awesome that the law of attraction is now trendy, it also can be a bit misleading for folks who are unwilling to do the heavy lifting. If you truly want to use your energetic power to manifest greatness, you must clear all that blocks you from believing in your greatness.
A Course in Miracles teaches that on some level, you've asked for everything that happens in your life. Your intentions create your reality. There's no need to beat yourself up: Simply recognizing how your low-level thoughts negatively affect your life is the first powerful step toward changing your experiences. Begin your manifesting process by getting honest about how your low-level thoughts, energy and feelings of disbelief block you from receiving what you desire. Once you get clear about the blocks, you can begin to clean them up to clear space for positive manifestations to occur.
Many people, when trying to manifest, focus too much on the outside form rather than the internal condition. From A Course in Miracles' perspective, what's important is our internal experience -- whether we choose to experience love or fear. When we commit to our internal experience of love, we begin to attract more love. Many people approach manifestation from a place of "How can I get something to feel better?" Instead, the focus should be: "How can I feel better and therefore be an energetic match for attracting more greatness into my life?" The emphasis must be placed on healing the internal condition, not getting a hot new car or boyfriend.
The Five Principles for Manifesting Your Desires
Below are my five key principles for genuine manifesting. When practicing these steps, make sure to stay committed to the goal of feeling good first and attracting stuff second. Continue to remind yourself that when you feel good, you energetically attract goodness into your life. When your primary function is to be happy, then whatever comes to you is irrelevant. Happiness is your true manifestation.
Principle One: Clear Space
Before you begin the manifestation process, you must take the necessary time to release all your disbelief in your power to be happy. One of the best ways to clear the blocks of disbelief is to pray for release. Begin a daily prayer practice of asking the universe to set you free from all the limiting beliefs that block you from believing in your greatness. Stay open for signs from the universe, and show up for the assignments that are brought to you. Universal assignments come in many forms. Maybe you're guided to the relationship that brings up all your shit so that you have to finally heal your fear. Or maybe you lose your job so that you can learn the lessons of self-reliance and strengthen your self-love. Trust that these assignments, however tough at times, are incredible opportunities for you to clean your energy and clear space to call in what you desire.
Your job in this step is to pray for guidance to clear all that blocks you from believing in your greatness. Then allow the universe to help guide you to whatever assignments you need to aid in the healing process. Show up for the assignments, and trust that the more you clean your thoughts and energy, the more positive experiences you will attract into your life.
Principle Two: Get Clear
Clarity is king when it comes to manifesting your desires. You must have clear intentions for what you want to call in -- otherwise you can manifest a lot of what you don't want. Focus on what you desire and then make a list of all that goes along with it. If you're getting clear about the job you want, make a list of all the things about the job that make you happy: the office, the people, the salary, etc. Be unapologetic about what you want. This list helps you clarify your intentions and access a vibrant mental picture of what you desire.
The most important part of this step is to clarify how you want to feel. When you get clear on how you want to feel, you can begin to access that feeling. That feeling is what makes the manifestation come into form. You can write a thousand lists and make a million vision boards, but if you don't clearly feel what you want to experience, it will never truly manifest into form.
Principle Three: Think It, Feel It, Believe It!
Now let's put these steps together. Take your clear intention and spend time every day sitting in the feeling of what it is that you desire. You might access the feeling through meditation and visioning exercises, or call on the feeling when you're in nature or doing a form of exercise you love. Let the thought inform the feeling and let the feeling take over your energy. The more you feel the feeling of what you desire, the more you believe it is on the way. From a metaphysical perspective, if you believe it then it is already here. So make time for contemplating, thinking, feeling and believing.
Principle Four: Chill!
The next step is crucial to the manifestation process. In order to truly manifest your desires into form, you gotta chill out! A Course in Miracles teaches: "Those who are certain of the outcome can afford to wait and wait without anxiety." Take this message with you and allow your faithfulness to guide you into the belief that what you desire is on the way. Also trust that the universe has a much better plan than you do. Though you are clear about what you want, you cannot control the timing or the form in which it comes. Stay calm, relax and trust that the universe has your back!
Principle Five: Know the Universe Has Your Back
When you're in the know, you're deliberate about what you want. When you're in the know, you no longer vibrate energy of fear or disbelief. You just know. As your disbelief wilts away, wanting is replaced by knowing. Getting into the know happens naturally. When you diligently practice steps one through four, you will clean house, get clear and feel happier. This process is healing and powerful, and it leads to a deep inner knowing that you are right where you need to be. Accepting your greatness in this moment, right now, is what manifests more greatness. Being in the know helps you accept that you already are living in your desired manifestation. When you feel it, you live it -- regardless of what is happening on the outside. In time, the universe catches up with your energy and your desires come into form. This process of allowing the manifestation to follow your internal faith is the true process of co-creation.
Stay Committed to Happiness
Stay committed to this five-step process and trust that you're exactly where you need to be. Is your main desire to feel good? Trust you will be given everything you need to create that feeling. Know that feeling good is the true manifestation -- and everything else is the icing on the already delicious cake!
Gabrielle Bernstein
Featured in the New York Times Sunday Styles section as “a new role model”, speaker, and author Gabrielle Bernstein is making her mark. Expanding the lexicon for the next generation spiritual seekers, Gabrielle is a #1 bestselling author of the book Add More ~ing to Your Life – A hip guide to happiness. Gabrielle recently launched her second book, Spirit Junkie – A Radical Road to Self-Love and Miracles. In January of 2013 Gabrielle launches her third book, May Cause Miracles, published by Random House. Gabrielle is also the founder of the social networking site HerFuture.com for women to inspire, empower and connect.
Gabrielle has a weekly radio show every Wednesday on Hay House Radio and is a featured curator for Opensky. She has been featured in media outlets such as the New York Times Sunday Styles, ELLE, Oprah Radio, Marie Claire, Health, SELF, Women’s Health, Glamor, Sunday Times UK, Forbes List: 20 Best Branded Women, Covers of Experience Life and Self-Made Magazines (top 50 Women in Business), US Weekly, People and many more.
Blog entry
17 May 2013 - 8:44am
My highlight of the day for some reason, I keep returning to those words: "Actions speak louder than words."
I've been stuck in limbo on this physical plane for so long, I almost forgot what it truly meant to live and strayed away from my path, only to experience what some call "The Dark Night of the Soul" but I call it an important lesson I needed. I needed to hit rock bottom in order to go higher up.
My feet finally led me to a place I needed to be at. It enabled me to finally open myself up to the Source, and I'm now finally able to experience, intense, but also beautiful and unique experiences as I continue to elevate myself, and I'm extremely grateful for that.
I've always been very sensitive to energies, even as a kid. But, because I pulled the plug for a little bit, I'm having to relearn to trust myself and what I'm feeling. Thus, the solar flares from a few days ago affected me greatly, and I found myself unable to shield from negative energies nearby, as I would have done almost automatically, a few months back. I was presenting what people have been claiming are symptoms from those solar flares; physically and mentally exhausted, yet restless inside, ready to burst. My heart chakra was going out of control. However, there was this "little voice in the back of my mind" telling me it was time to travel, so, I finally gave in, and laid down to get some rest.
Unusual, and odd for me, because it takes me a while before I can sleep... I fell asleep in almost no time. And I experienced one of the most intense travels I've had in quite some time. On this material plane, I was perhaps asleep for an hour, an hour and a half at the most. My travel spanned through several hours, that I'm certain of.
I was in a world, vibrating at a lower frequency than ours. A world ascending as well. I was at a gathering of Souls, and I was assigned some responsibilities. Despite the chaos surrounding us all, I felt a level of detachment so high, it was liberating, and I was at inner peace. And it ended with a beautiful lesson from another healer in shamanic healing. It was brutal in its practice, yet very powerful and efficient. He unblocked all of my chakras, and I came back here, soon after. But before I left, I told him these words, that still echo in my mind "I screamed so loudly, I rendered myself deaf." I feel these words are very important, yet I'm struggling to find a meaning to them. (feel free to post your opinions!) I felt so energized, I got up, grabbed a pen and paper and wrote every single detail I could remember, down. I couldn't go back to sleep until much later that day.
My conclusion... These symptoms were not due to the flares entirely. I had experienced an attack as well.
Not for lack of protection, because I am protected. But some energies can still go through the most protected of us, and I didn't have the presence to close my heart chakra momentarily and preserve myself as I would have done before; and I was starting to believe all these symptoms were due to the flares.
So moral of this...
1) Detachment and developing it is crucial in those times we're going through.
2) Whatever you're experiencing, do not lose hope, like I did, for some time. Whatever personal hell or "Dark Night" you're going through, know that it won't stay like this, and you'll grow much stronger from it all.
3) Love, but do not let your guards down.
Namaste,
-B
(PS: I am aware these writings can be a little hard to follow. I'm not writing using my mind, I'm writing with my Heart. Use yours to read them, and it will start making sense.)
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Blog entry
16 May 2013 - 7:35pm
Dimensional Trappings of a Soul thru Mind Matrix
I want to share something that I very recently underwent.
In another one of my "Awakening, Revelations" I was shown a depiction of how heaven, earth and hell....would be created or invisioned by many.
In MANY religions there is said of Pergatory, Hell and Heaven and many Culture Beliefs as well. Now if you take for example there are 7 groups/entitys/ mass's of people that HOLD a belief for something then what do you suppose THAT would be able to "Create" ?
For Example do you seriously think that Creator/GOD would sit and say as in thee creation "You, I will make bright, awake and aware" and to another say "You, I will make dark, negative and evil" ??? Does anyone think that a GOD/Creator would ever ever Split, Seperate or Divide or make ones HIGHER or LOWER than another ?
NO, its US here in our FREEWILL 3d Lives that construct these things. I call those, LEVELS....the high's and lows, the better and worse etc.....
When really in TRUE its STAGES of growth that ALL souls undergo here upon our Earth Plane. We are given thee breathe of Life and we start our growth / journey from there.
Now in this fashionism mankind created "Religions", wrote books, had teachings etc.... Where there was then "Implanted" seeds that carry impact on MANY more than just those that follow in that creation and belief structure. This I feel was done for Power, Control, Fear etc....
When ones HOLD such beliefs they actually CREATE this!
Did GOD possibly only create ONE universe having only ONE dimension ? Think about that for a moment................
When I say that, I AM giving alot of power of manifestation.....as WE are creators and truely DO have power!
When people HOLD a belief or structuring it can and does MANY different things! When a belief started on thoughts of "Hell, Purgatory, Heaven" that is when the "Constructions" started the BUILDING of these many different "Dimensions"
SO now back to my exorcise..... In working with my Higher.......I ordered the complete closing of ALL dimensions that are in HOLDING or BARRING of souls....I ordered FULL Provisions to those souls immediatly and them to be RELEASED!!! In doing this I closed my eyes...........A large Ship or Arc came into view, it was golden with a white mist about it....I watched MANY people get into this arc/boat/ship and then noticed a PALM TREE of all things in it. As the souls loaded up in this ship I felt a massive tingle run through my body and was over come with joy and relief....knowing ALL of these "Souls, People" that had "Crossed the Veil" in that belief are TRAPPED in a Matrix or Binder within that belief....NOT being able to move forward where their soul needs to progress and move to.
You see........MANKIND creates their OWN demons, hells, negatives, darks etc..... and with the POWER of THOUGHT can CHANGE ALOT.
Now when ones speak of a "War for the Souls" This is VERY TRUE!!! As you can see those that hold a certain "Belief" are trapped within that belief and as some say are "Stuck" in a Cycle.
This is where your "Known" Lucifer or Satan or some call him Beezlebub....and of course MANY other known names and identities come from.....There has to be a "Care Taker or Guardian" for these "Created" dimensions doesnt there ? I AM surely thinking that I would be worn out and tired withering in holding down that type of matrix/binder/holder or Grid. BUT as LONG as Mankind KEEPS creating these manifested thoughts/patterns/seperations/divisions etc we shall continue to SEE and FEEL the outcome of these patterns or choices!
I truely believe that GOD sits and waits patiently for the day that ALL awaken to this! Then ALL will know the ABSOLUTE FREEDOM in ABUNDANCES that were provisioned and given unto ALL of thee creation! None higher and none lower than another. You know you ALL are BEAUTIOUS BLOOMING FLOWERS OF GOD/Creator!
WHAT SHALL YOU CREATE ??? This is an INdiviDUAL life journey each and everyone of us are on. However what we do or choose not to do can have a direct immediate impact upon another! A simple unconditional lesson for me in life is to LOVE each and everyONE as a POSSITIVE creation OF GOD....as it was GOD in my opinion that brought that soul and breathed life unto this soul to start its OWN journey of lessons and experiances!
My point to this however is with so many that hold this OLD structure and beleif system, when they cross over they are STUCK persay.......so if ones here upon this earth start to make changes in beliefs and structurings I feel this will better serve in the UPliftment of these trapped souls for them to RElease back to their Creator and all that is!
To JUDGE another in a belief or to all another "Dark" is simply WRONG to me.....NOT all are going to be on the SAME stage of growth! It would be like comparring a 1st grader to a 6th grader on on up from there....You see, you simply cant rightfully do that! ALL grow in their OWN time, understanding and ways.....and to "Label" or "Tag" a Logo upon ones for this to me is absurd! Would a loving mother do this to her "Children" I would certainly HOPE NOT!!! Hence GOD does NOT do this to US .........WE do this to OURSELVES!
Lighten up on your fellow brother/sister.......FELLow HumanKIND .........Bring back a Mothers TRUE LOVE and HEART which is UNCONDITIONALLY LOVING, Nurturing, Healing, Teaching, Acceptance, Kindness, Reverance......you know where I AM going BRING BACK THE LOVE!!!!
SET YOURSELVES FREE
May you ALWAYS see thru the BEAUTIOUS HUES of HUEmanity thru RAINBOW EYES upon your GOLDEN PATH
Blessings to you ALL
MysticBlack
Blog entry
16 May 2013 - 2:00pm
New Members: It is recommended you read from the beginning of the archive, as previous lessons are prerequisite to this one. The first lesson is, "Why This Discussion?" at http://aypsite.com/10.html
Q: I have been doing Kundalini yoga for about a year now and have recently taken a teacher training program where I first did a Sadhana. I have been practicing on my own and in class and have done my first Sadhana at home yesterday. I found myself feeling fine until later on at night. I was suddenly enraged in anger and wanted to punch something. This is not my usual tendency and I felt it this morning as well. I was wondering if it had to do with doing too much Kundalini or maybe my system is cleansing too much too fast. I'm really not sure and wanted to run this by you to see what you thought. It was as if something took over me and my emotions were so overwhelmed and this is unusual since I usually take things easier andhaven't gotten enraged like that since I was a child.
A: Strong emotions can come when inner energy collides or is having excessive friction with obstructions in the nervous system. Interestingly, ecstatic experience is created in the same way. It is just a matter of degree of energy flow and getting the inner dynamics of purification in the right order.
This is obviously not a static situation. If we increase energy flow without sufficient removal of obstructions first, there can be unpleasant collisions and friction. If we are releasing obstructions too fast, then our ordinary inner energy flow can run into the loosened and lingering obstructions, causing irritability.
In the lessons we have a variety of strategies built into and around the practices to avoid the uncomfortable aspects of this situation. For the most part it works, and we can move ahead smoothly and quickly with purification and opening of the nervous system.
In the case of kundalini yoga, what I keep running into with people that are having symptoms like what you described is premature crown openings. I don't know what you are doing in the way of practices, but these symptoms are often associated with practices at the crown. You may wish to read lessons posted in the past few weeks on crown opening.
With a premature crown opening, the energy flow is often too much for the matrix of obstructions still embedded in the nervous system. A prematurely opened crown and a more or less average nervous system are not a good match, and, if pressed, can lead to years of misery. Gopi Krishna is the classic authority on this kind of "doing it the hard way" road to enlightenment.
Traditionally, the smoothest path to enlightenment has been via purification and opening of the third eye to root spinal nerve. This is the approach in the lessons, and we hit it from every angle with an integrated system of practices. By this means, the crown is opened by indirect influence, and the extremes of an energy flow/obstruction matrix mismatch are usually avoided. Instead, the path is filled with steadily rising inner silence and ecstasy, which is what we want from our yoga.
So, with the little you have shared, that is my best guess -- you may be moving too much energy up with the crown instead of working it through the third eye to root spinal nerve first. There is much more detail in the lessons on this, particularly in the past month or so.
I wish you all success on your chosen path.
The guru is in you.
Note: For detailed instructions on building a balanced daily practice routine with self-pacing, see the Eight Limbs of Yoga Book at http://aypsite.com/books.html#8lim
http://aypsite.com/208.html
Teaching
16 May 2013 - 9:57am
The Answer to Anger & Aggression is Patience
By Pema Chödrön
http://shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1309&Itemid=0&limit=1&limitstart=0
We can suppress anger and aggression or act it out, either way making things worse for ourselves and others. Or we can practice patience: wait, experience the anger and investigate its nature. Pema Chödrön takes us step by step through this powerful practice.
The Buddhist teachings tell us that patience is the antidote to anger and aggression. When we feel aggression in all its many forms—resentment, bitterness, being very critical, complaining and so forth—we can apply the different practices we’ve been given and all the good advice we’ve heard and given to other people. But those often don’t seem to help us. That’s why this teaching about patience caught my interest a few years ago, because it’s so hard to know what to do when one feels anger and aggression.
I thought, if patience is the antidote to aggression, maybe I’ll just try that. In the process I learned a lot about what patience is and about what it isn’t. I would like to share with you what I’ve learned, to encourage you to find out for yourself how patience works with aggression.
To begin with, I learned about patience and the cessation of suffering. It’s said that patience is a way to de-escalate aggression. I’m thinking here of aggression as synonymous with pain. When we’re feeling aggressive—and in some sense this would apply to any strong feeling—there’s an enormous pregnant quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved.
So what do we usually do? We do exactly what is going to escalate the aggression and the suffering. We strike out; we hit back. Something hurts our feelings, and initially there is some softness there—if you’re fast, you can catch it—but usually you don’t even realize there is any softness. You find yourself in the middle of a hot, noisy, pulsating, wanting-to-just-get-even-with-someone state of mind: it has a very hard quality to it. With your words or your actions, in order to escape the pain of aggression, you create more aggression and pain.
At that point, patience means getting smart: you stop and wait. You also have to shut up, because if you say anything it’s going to come out aggressive, even if you say, “I love you.”
Once, when I was very angry at a colleague of mine, I called him on the telephone. I can’t even remember now what I was angry about, but at the time I couldn’t sleep because I was so furious. I tried meditating with my anger and working with it and doing practices with it, but nothing helped, so I just got up in the middle of the night and called him. When he answered the phone, all I said was, “Hi, Yeshe.” But he immediately asked, “Did I do something wrong?” I thought I would very sweetly cover over what I was really feeling and say something pleasant about all the bad things he had done, whatever they were. But just by the tone of my greeting to him, he knew. That’s what it’s like with aggression: you can’t speak because everyone will feel the vibes. No matter what is coming out of your mouth, it’s like you’re sitting on top of a keg of dynamite and it’s vibrating.
Patience has a lot to do with getting smart at that point and just waiting: not speaking or doing anything. On the other hand, it also means being completely and totally honest with yourself about the fact that you’re furious. You’re not suppressing anything—patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself. If you wait and don’t feed your discursive thought, you can be honest about the fact that you’re angry. But at the same time you can continue to let go of the internal dialogue. In that dialogue you are blaming and criticizing, and then probably feeling guilty and beating yourself up for doing that. It’s torturous, because you feel bad about being so angry at the same time that you really are extremely angry, and you can’t drop it. It’s painful to experience such awful confusion. Still, you just wait and remain patient with your confusion and the pain that comes with it.
Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express themselves, while you don’t react, even though inside you are reacting. You let the words go and just be there.
This suggests the fearlessness that goes with patience. If you practice the kind of patience that leads to the de-escalation of aggression and the cessation of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really get to know anger and how it breeds violent words and actions. You will see the whole thing without acting it out. When you practice patience, you’re not repressing anger, you’re just sitting there with it—going cold turkey with the aggression. As a result, you really get to know the energy of anger and you also get to know where it leads, even without going there. You’ve expressed your anger so many times, you know where it will lead. The desire to say something mean, to gossip or slander, to complain—to just somehow get rid of that aggression—is like a tidal wave. But you realize that such actions don’t get rid of the aggression; they escalate it. So instead you’re patient, patient with yourself.
Developing patience and fearlessness means learning to sit still with the edginess of the energy. It’s like sitting on a wild horse, or on a wild tiger that could eat you up. There’s a limerick to that effect: “There was a young lady of Niger, who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They came back from the ride with the lady inside and the smile on the face of the tiger.” Sitting with your discomfort feels like riding on that tiger, because it’s so frightening.
When we examine this process we learn something very interesting: there is no resolution. The resolution that human beings seek comes from a tremendous misunderstanding. We think we can resolve everything! When we human beings feel powerful energy, we tend to be extremely uncomfortable until things are resolved in some kind of secure and comforting way, either on the side of yes or the side of no. Or the side of right or the side of wrong. Or the side of anything at all that we can hold on to.
But the practice we’re doing gives us nothing to hold on to. Actually, the teachings themselves give us nothing to hold on to. In working with patience and fearlessness, we learn to be patient with the fact that we’re human beings, that everyone who is born and dies from the beginning of time until the end of time is naturally going to want some kind of resolution to this edgy, moody energy. And there isn’t any. The only resolution is temporary and just causes more suffering. We discover that as a matter of fact joy and happiness, peace, harmony and being at home with yourself and your world come from sitting still with the moodiness of the energy until it rises, dwells and passes away. The energy never resolves itself into something solid.
So all the while, we stay in the middle of the energy. The path of touching in on the inherent softness of the genuine heart is to sit still and be patient with that kind of energy. We don’t have to criticize ourselves when we fail, even for a moment, because we’re just completely typical human beings; the only thing that’s unique about us is that we’re brave enough to go into these things more deeply and explore beneath our surface reaction of trying to get solid ground under our feet.
Patience is an enormously wonderful and supportive and even magical practice. It’s a way of completely changing the fundamental human habit of trying to resolve things by going either to the right or the left, calling things right or calling things wrong. It’s the way to develop courage, the way to find out what life is really about.
Patience is also not ignoring. In fact, patience and curiosity go together. You wonder, Who am I? Who am I at the level of my neurotic patterns? Who am I at the level beyond birth and death? If you wish to look into the nature of your own being, you need to be inquisitive. The path is a journey of investigation, beginning to look more deeply at what’s going on. The teachings give us a lot of suggestions about what we can look for, and the practices give us a lot of suggestions on how to look. Patience is one extremely helpful suggestion. Aggression, on the other hand, prevents us from looking: it puts a tight lid on our curiosity. Aggression is an energy that is determined to resolve the situation into a hard, solid, fixed pattern in which somebody wins and somebody loses.
When you begin to investigate, you notice, for one thing, that whenever there is pain of any kind—the pain of aggression, grieving, loss, irritation, resentment, jealousy, indigestion, physical pain—if you really look into that, you can find out for yourself that behind the pain there is always something we are attached to. There is always something we’re holding on to.
I say that with such confidence, but you have to find out for yourself whether this is really true. You can read about it: the first thing the Buddha ever taught was the truth that suffering comes from attachment. That’s in the books. But when you discover it yourself, it goes a little deeper right away.
As soon as you discover that behind your pain is something you’re holding on to, you are at a place that you will frequently experience on the spiritual path. After a while it seems like almost every moment of your life you’re there, at a point where you realize you actually have a choice. You have a choice whether to open or close, whether to hold on or let go, whether to harden or soften.
That choice is presented to you again and again and again. For instance, you’re feeling pain, you look deeply into it, and you notice that there’s something very hard you’re holding on to. And then you have a choice: you can let go of it, which basically means you connect with the softness behind all that hardness. Perhaps each one of us has made the discovery that behind all the hardness of resistance, stress, aggression and jealousy, there is enormous softness that we’re trying to cover over. Aggression usually begins when someone hurts our feelings. The first response is very soft, but before we even notice what we’re doing, we harden. So we can either let go and connect with that softness or we can continue to hold on, which means that the suffering will continue.
It requires enormous patience even to be curious enough to look, to investigate. And then when you realize you have a choice, and that there’s actually something there that you’re attached to, it requires great patience to keep going into it. Because you will want to go into denial, to shut down. You’re going to say to yourself, “I don’t want to see this.” You’ll be afraid, because even if you’re starting to get close to it, the thought of letting go is usually very frightening. You may feel that you’re going to die, or that something is going to die. And you will be right. If you let go, something will die. But it’s something that needs to die and you will benefit greatly from its death.
On the other hand, sometimes it’s easy to let go. If you make this journey of looking to see if there’s something you’re holding on to, often it’s going to be just a little thing. Once when I was stuck with something huge, Trungpa Rinpoche gave me some advice. He said, “It’s too big; you can’t let go of it yet, so practice with the little ones. Just start noticing all the little ways you hold when it’s actually pretty easy and just get the hang of letting go.”
That was extremely good advice. You don’t have to do the big one, because usually you can’t. It’s too threatening. It may even be too harsh to let go right then and there, on the spot. But even with small things, you may—perhaps just intellectually—begin to see that letting go can bring a sense of enormous relief, relaxation and connection with the softness and tenderness of the genuine heart. True joy comes from that.
You can also see that holding on increases the pain, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to let go, because there’s a lot at stake. What’s at stake is your whole sense of who you are, your whole identity. You’re beginning to move into the territory of egolessness, the insubstantial nature of oneself—and of everything, for that matter. Theoretical, philosophical, distant-sounding teachings can get pretty real when you’re beginning to have an inkling of what they’re actually talking about.
It takes a lot of patience not to beat up on yourself for being a failure at letting go. But if you apply patience to the fact that you can’t let go, somehow that helps you to do it. Patience with the fact that you can’t let go helps you to get to the point of letting go gradually—at a very sane and loving speed, at the speed that your basic wisdom allows you to move. It’s a big moment even to get to the point where you realize you have a choice. Patience is what you need at that point to just wait and soften, to sit with the restlessness and edginess and discomfort of the energy.
I’ve come to find that patience has a lot of humor and playfulness in it. It’s a misunderstanding to think of it as endurance, as in, “Just grin and bear it.” Endurance involves some kind of repression or trying to live up to somebody else’s standards of perfection. Instead, you find you have to be pretty patient with what you see as your own imperfections. Patience is a kind of synonym for loving-kindness, because the speed of loving-kindness can be extremely slow. You are developing patience and loving-kindness for your own imperfections, for your own limitations, for not living up to your own high ideals. There’s a slogan someone once came up with that I like: “Lower your standards and relax as it is.” That’s patience.
One of the Indian Buddhist teacher Atisha’s slogans says, “Whichever of the two occurs, be patient.” It means that if a painful situation occurs, be patient, and if a pleasant situation occurs, be patient. This is an interesting point in terms of patience and the cessation of suffering, patience and fearlessness, and patience and curiosity. We are actually jumping all the time: whether it’s pain or pleasure, we want resolution. So if we’re really happy and something is great, we could also be patient then, in terms of not just filling up the space, going a million miles an hour—impulse buying, impulse speaking, impulse acting.
I’d like to stress that one of the things you most have to be patient with is, “Oops, I did it again!” There’s a slogan that says, “One at the beginning and one at the end.” That means that when you wake up in the morning you make your resolve, and at the end of the day you review, with a caring and gentle attitude, how you have done. Our normal resolve is to say something like, “I am going to be patient today,” or some other such set-up (as someone put it, we plan our next failure). Instead of setting yourself up, you can say, “Today, I’m going to try to the best of my ability to be patient.” And then in the evening you can look back over the whole day with loving-kindness and not beat yourself up. You’re patient with the fact that when you review your day, or even the last forty minutes, you discover, “I’ve talked and filled up all the space, just like I’ve done all my life, as long as I can remember. I was aggressive with the same style of aggression that I’ve used as long as I can remember. I got carried away with irritation exactly the same way that I have for the last...” If you’re twenty years old, it’s been twenty years that you’ve been doing it that way; if you’re seventy-five years old, it’s seventy-five years that you’ve been doing it that way. You see this and you say, “Give me a break!”
The path of developing loving-kindness and compassion is to be patientwith the fact that you’re human and that you make these mistakes. That’s more important than getting it right. It seems to work only if you’re aspiring to give yourself a break, to lighten up, as you practice developing patience and other qualities such as generosity, discipline and insight. As with the rest of the teachings, you can’t win and you can’t lose. You don’t get to just say, “Well, since I am never able to do it, I’m not going to try.” You are never able to do it and still you try. And, interestingly enough, that adds up to something; it adds up to loving-kindness for yourself and for others. You look out your eyes and you see yourself wherever you go. You see all these people who are losing it, just like you do. Then, you see all these people who catch themselves and give you the gift of fearlessness. You say, “Oh wow, what a brave one—he or she caught themselves.” You begin to appreciate even the slightest gesture of bravery on the part of others because you know it’s not easy, and that inspires you tremendously. That’s how we can really help each other.
video
16 May 2013 - 3:42am
Most of us, at some point, have experienced rejection either personally or professionally when we have set our sights on some goal and things don’t work out as we had hoped. When our expectations aren’t met we are disappointed. But what if we viewed the circumstances in our lives from a different perspective? What is we believed that we live in a friendly universe that is always conspiring in our favor and that everything (irrespective of how things may seem in a given moment) unfolds with divine perfection and timing, all for our greater good. With this mindset, we would be able to perceive that ‘man’s rejection is God’s protection’.
Blog entry
16 May 2013 - 12:41am
The dark night of the soul
The dark night of the soul comes when one has mentally prepared it's higher self. For years I have studied spirituality, meditated, and prayed and I felt my superior progress over the past several months. Doors were opening around me for my intellect to gain insight to the higher powers above me. I've experienced what it is to be completely in the now with higher conscious through meditation. I learned a significant amount of knowledge and felt at peace and centered and at one with myself. Perfection. Then abruptly, chaos. The light suddenly disappeared and I felt nothingness. The peace I found so easily I suddenly couldn't find any more. The positive vibrational frequencies that so easily permeated my being suddenly became void. Any and all mistakes I've made or guilt I've held over the past 23 years have all risen to the surface. Things I thought would never bother me and some things I've forgotten rise for me to face. Why? When a soul sincerely wants to connect with it's higher self it takes the necessary steps to do so. There is a point though when the soul has risen above normality and a major shift needs to take place to transform the soul from the beginning phase it started in to the intermediate phase it will reside in. This is the dark night of the soul. The self has sincerely connected with higher self and now it is intelligent enough to move to a next level. The soul gets to a place where it can't learn anymore in it's current state therefore transformation needs to take place in order for the soul to continue growth. This is your transformation. It is a lonely feeling where one feels helpless, hopeless, and has a lack of faith in life itself. Everything feels as if it's slipping away and life itself doesn't make sense somehow. What you once know, now you know nothing. Remember though the dark night only comes when the soul is ready and prepared to move forward. It is a cleansing of Karma, re-balancing, renewing of the life. The darkest hour before the light is now. This time of purification can last days, weeks, months, and sometimes years. It's a time where you can't run or bury your demons anymore. The only thing you can do is rest. This is a sign that one phase has ended but the new phase has yet to start. While you're in limbo.. rest. Lay in silence and face your demons. Lay and observe. Do not fight or try to bury. Observe the emotions running through you. It will hurt but out of great pain comes great wisdom. Patience is the key. The more you fight the darkness the longer it will take to release your enemies. When you face your demons, accept them and they will begin to fade away from you. Just as when you're sick your body feels discomfort as it tries to fight the sickness so what do you do? You rest and let the body care for itself. The same is with your soul in this time, let your soul clean out the garbage that's risen and while this cleansing takes place, rest. Do not dwell, take responsibility and accept what has come. This too shall come to pass. When the light comes it will be magnificent. A place of great beauty and enlightenment.
Blog entry
15 May 2013 - 6:22pm
I had to share this quote from a friend:
Te Guy
Car Wash Wisdom
"Please put your car in neutral, and take your foot off the brake."
As I deliver mail to an apartment box across the street, I listen to this mantra. Spoken in a computerized voice, it instructs drivers as they enter the automated car wash. Today those instructions became a nugget of wisdom from the Universe. The tingles hit my scalp as the realization dawned upon me that this was advice for life! Stop resisting and trying to control everything! Let the Universe guide your life. It knows even more about what you need than you do. It also knows how to get you where you need to be and will do so in the most perfect way possible. Our path will be perfectly guided if we can just release our grip on the steering wheel. :-)
Blog entry
15 May 2013 - 1:30pm
New Members: It is recommended you read from the beginning of the archive, as previous lessons are prerequisite to this one. The first lesson is, "Why This Discussion?" at http://aypsite.com/10.html
Q: Three weeks ago I had an intuitive flash while meditating. I was in the attic of a very large and luxurious house. I had been cleaning this house from top to bottom until it was immaculately clean. It sparkled! It was perfect. Then when I reached the attic I found a door. When I opened the door I discovered that there was an entire wing of the house that I had not know about. It was in horrible disarray. Everything was covered with an inch of dust. Wood rot, water damage, mildew, broken windows... It was bad! I just wanted to close the door and forget what I had just seen.
The house is me and the attic in my third eye. At that moment I realized that the right side of my body is very energetically strong but my left side is thin, weak and blocked. I was floored!!! The magnitude of this was like looking in the mirror for the first time and realizing that I have been walking around for the past 30 years with an elephant strapped to my back! How could I have missed this? For the next few days I felt as if I was two different people joined together at the center of my body.
With effort I have been able to direct energy to the left side of my body, at first with great physical pain on the left side of my third eye. I can tell that this balance from right to left is going to take some time.
What does this indicate?
A: The obstructions in the nervous system can take nearly any form and sometimes can be skewed to the left or right side of the body. It is difficult to know how it got that way, but yoga practices can gradually dissolve it all at its source, and bring us back into balance. The fact that you are seeing these things more clearly now is an indicator of purification going on from your practices, particularly in the third eye. The thing to do is continue with your practices as you have been doing them and let the process carry forward naturally.
Generally speaking, it is not a good idea to try and direct the purification process in a specific direction outside the third eye to root spinal nerve, or the well-rounded (global) effects of deep meditation and samyama. We just can't know intellectually what the natural order of purification will be, whereas, inner silence and our ecstatic energies will find the purification channels of least resistance. How the purification happens will depend on so many karmic factors unique to each person. It can all be taken care of in a balanced way by eliciting the natural processes of purification from within with our advanced yoga practices.
If we think we have an imbalance on the left side and focus attention on fixing that, we could cause more imbalances. Better to use meditation, spinal breathing, mudras and bandhas, yoni mudra, spinal bastrika, chin pump, and so on. All these work up and down the central nerve and will not lead to left or right side imbalances, which can be destabilizing. If you have a left or right side imbalance, the best way to resolve it is to do practices in the middle. That is the focus in the lessons. If you go the middle way with spinal breathing, meditation, and the other practices, you will find increasing balance from top to bottom and from left to right. The spinal nerve (sushumna) between the third eye and root is the master key. All is balanced by purifying that.
The practices that have brought you to this level of seeing are the same ones that can safely clear out the obstructions that are becoming more visible.
Remember the guideline on visions – if we see something, we do not try and push it out or become overly attached to it by engaging in it excessively. We just easily go back to the practice we are doing and continue the purification process.
By staying with a twice-daily routine of advanced yoga practices, balanced with an active life in line with our interests, we will be moving steadily toward enlightenment.
The guru is in you.
Note: For detailed instructions on building a balanced daily practice routine with self-pacing, see the Eight Limbs of Yoga Book at http://aypsite.com/books.html#8lim
http://aypsite.com/207.html
Teaching
15 May 2013 - 9:32am
The Desire of the Soul in Spiritual Darkness
A Sermon (No. 31)
Delivered on Sabbath Morning, June 24, 1855,
by the REV. C. H. Spurgeon
At New Park Street Chapel, Southwark.
http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0031.htm
"With my soul have I desired thee in the night."—Isaiah 26:9.
NIGHT APPEARS to be a time peculiarly favorable to devotion. Its solemn stillness helps to free the mind from that perpetual din which the cares of the world will bring around it; and the stars looking down from heaven upon us shine as if they would attract us up to God. I know not how you may be affected by the solemnities of midnight, but when I have sat alone musing on the great God and the mighty universe, I have felt that indeed I could worship him; for night seemed to be spread abroad as a very temple for adoration, while the moon walked as high priest, amid the stars, the worshippers, and I myself joined in that silent song which they sang unto God: "Great art thou, O God! great in thy works. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" I find that this sense of the power of midnight not only acts upon religious men, but there is a certain poet, whose character, perhaps, I could scarcely too much reprobate: a man very far from understanding true religion; one whom I may, I suppose, justly style an infidel a libertine of the worst order, and yet he says concerning night in one of his poems:—
"Tis midnight on the mountains' brown,
The cold round moon shines deeply down;
Blue roll the waters, blue the sky
Spreads like an ocean hung on high,
Bespangled with those isles of light,
So wildly, spiritually bright;
Who ever gazed upon them shining,
And turning to earth without repining,
Nor wish'd for wings to flee away,
And mix with their eternal ray."
Even with the most irreligious person, a man farthest from spiritual thought, it seems that there is some power in the grandeur and stillness of night to draw him up to God. I trust many of us can say, like David, "I have thought upon thee continually, I have mused upon thy name in the night watches, and with desire have I desired thee in the night." But I leave that thought altogether. I shall not speak of night natural at all, although there may be a great deal of room for poetic thought and expression. I shall address myself to two orders of persons, and shall endeavor to show what I conceive to be the meaning of the text. May God make it useful to you both. First, I shall speak to confirmed Christians; and from this text I shall bring one or two remarks to bear upon their case, if they are in darkness. Second, I shall speak to newly awakened souls, and try if I can find some of them who can say, "With my soul have I desired thee in the night."
1. I am about to address this text to the more confirmed believer; and the first fact I shall educe from it—the truth of which I am sure he will very readily admit—is, that THE CHRISTIAN MAN HAS NOT ALWAYS A BRIGHT SHINING SUN: that he has seasons of darkness and of night. True, it is written in God's word, "Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace;" and it is a great truth that religion—the true religion of the living God—is calculated to give a man happiness below as well as bliss above. But, notwithstanding, experience tells us that if the course of the just be "as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day," yet sometimes that light is eclipsed. At certain periods clouds and darkness cover the sun, and he beholds no clear shining of the daylight, but walks in darkness and sees no light. Now there are many who have rejoiced in the presence of God for a season; they have basked in the sunshine God has been pleased to give them in the earlier stages of their Christian career; they have walked along the "green pastures," by the side of the "still waters," and suddenly—in a month or two—they find that glorious sky is clouded: instead of "green pastures," they have to tread the sandy desert; in the place of "still waters," they find streams brackish to their taste and bitter to their spirits, and they say, "Surely, if I were a child of God this would not happen." Oh! say not so, thou who art walking in darkness. The best of God's saints have their nights; the dearest of his children have to walk through a weary wilderness. There is not a Christian who has enjoyed perpetual happiness, there is no believer who can always sing a song of joy. It is not every lark that can always carol. It is not every star that can always be seen. And not every Christian is always happy. Perhaps the King of Saints gave you a season of great joy at first because you were a raw recruit and he would not put you into the roughest part of the battle when you had first enlisted. You were a tender plant, and he nursed you in the hot-house till you could stand severe weather. You were a young child, and therefore he wrapped you in furs and clothed you in the softest mantle. But now you have become strong and the case is different. Capuan holidays do not suit Roman soldiers; and they would not agree with Christians. We need clouds and darkness to exercise our faith, to cut off self dependence, and make us put more faith in Christ, and less in evidence, less in experience, less in frames and feelings. The best of God's children—I repeat it again for the comfort of those who are suffering depression of spirits—have their nights. Sometimes it is a night over the whole church at once; and I fear we have very much of that night now. There are times when Zion is under a cloud, when the whole fine gold becomes dim, and the glory of Zion is departed. There are seasons when we do not hear the clear preaching of the word; when the doctrines are withheld; when the glory of the Lord God of Jacob is dim; when his name is not exalted; when the traditions of men are taught, instead of the inspirations of the Holy Ghost. And such a season is that when the whole church is dark. Of course each Christian participates in it. He goes about and weeps, and cries, "O God, how long shall poor Zion be depressed? How long shall her shepherds be 'dumb dogs that cannot bark?' Shall her watchmen be always blind? Shall the silver trumpet sound no more? Shall not the voice of the gospel be heard in her streets?" O! there are seasons of darkness to the entire church! God grant we may not have to pass through another! but that, starting from this period, the sun may rise ne'er to set, till, like a sea of glory, the light of brilliance shall spread from pole to pole!
At other times, this darkness over the soul of the Christian rises from temporal distresses. He may have had a misfortune as it is called—something has gone wrong in his business, or an enemy has done somewhat against him; death has struck down a favourite child—bereavement has snatched away the darling of his bosom, the crops are blighted; the winds refuse to bear his ships homeward; a vessel strikes upon a rock, another founders, all goes ill with him, and, like a gentle man who called to see me this week, he may be able to say, "Sir, I prospered far more when I was a worldly man than I have done since I have become a Christian: for, since then, everything has appeared to go wrong with me. I thought," be said, "that religion had the promise of this life as well as of that which is to come." I told him, Yes, it had; and so it should be in the end. But he must remember there was one great legacy which Christ left his people; and I was glad he had come in for a share of it—"In the world ye shall have tribulation; in me ye shall have peace." Yes! you may be troubled about this, you may be saying, "Look at so-and-so: see how he spreads himself like a green bay-tree. He is an extortioner and wicked man, yet everything he does prospers. You may even observe his death, and say, there are no bands in his death. "They are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men." Ah! beloved! ye are come into the sanctuary of God this morning, and now shall ye understand their end. God hath set them in slippery places, but he casteth them down to destruction. Better to have a Christian's days of sorrow, than a worldling's days of mirth. Better to have a Christian's sorrows than a worldling's joys. Ah! happier to be chained in a dungeon with a Paul than reign in the palace with an Ahab. Better to be a child of God in poverty than a child of Satan in riches. Cheer up, then, thou downcast spirit, if this be thy trial. Remember that many saints have passed through the same; and the best and most eminent believers have had their nights.
"But oh!" says another, "you have not described my night, sir. I have not much amiss in business; and I would not care if I had—but I have a night in my spirit." "O sir," says one, "I have not a single evidence of my Christianity now. I was a child of God, I know; but something tells me that I am none of his now. There was a season when I flattered myself that I knew something about godliness and God; but now I doubt whether I have any part or lot in the matter. Satan suggests that I must dwell in endless flames. I see no hope for me. I am afraid I am an hypocrite. I think I have imposed on the church and upon myself also. I fear I am none of his. When I turn over God's Scriptures there is no promise; when I look within, corruption is black before me. Then while others are commending me, I am accusing myself of all manner of sin and corruption. I could not have thought that I was half so bad. I am afraid there cannot have been a work of grace in my heart, or else I should not have so many corrupt imaginations, filthy desires, hard thoughts of God; so much pride, so much selfishness and self-will. I am afraid I am none of his." Now, that is the very reason why you are one of his, that you are able to say that: for God's people pass through the night. They have their nights of sorrow. I love to hear a man talk like that. I would not have him do so always. He ought at times to enter into "the liberty where with Christ hath made him free." But I know that frequently bondage will get hold of the spirit, But you say, "Surely no one ever suffers like that." I confess I do myself constantly, and very often there are times when I could not prove my election in Jesus Christ, nor my adoption, though I rejoice that for the most part I can cry,—
"A debtor to mercy alone
Of covenant mercy I sing."
Yet at other seasons I am sure the meanest lamb in Jesu's fold I reckon ten thousand times more in advance than myself and if I might but sit down on the meanest bench in the kingdom of heaven, and did but know I was in, I would barter everything I had, and I do not believe there ever existed a Christian yet, who did not now and then doubt his interest in Jesus. I think, when a man says, "I never doubt," it is quite time for us to doubt him, it is quite time for us to begin to say, "Ah, poor soul, I am afraid you are not on the road at all, for if you were, you would see so many things in yourself, and so much glory in Christ more than you deserve, that you would be so much ashamed of yourself, as even to say, 'It is too good to be true.'”
2. The first part then is fully established by experience, that Christian men very frequently have their nights. But the second thing here is that a Christian man's religion will keep its colour in the night. "With my soul have I desired thee in the night." What a mighty deal of silver-slipper religion we have in this world. Men will follow Christ when every one cries "Hosanna! Hosanna!" The multitude will crowd around the man then, and they will take him by force and make him a king when the sun shines, when the soft wind blows. They are like the plants upon the rock, which sprang up and for a little while were green, but when the sun had risen with fervent heat straightway withered away. Demas and Mr. Hold-the-world, and a great many others, are very pious people in easy times. They will always go with Christ by daylight, and will keep in company so long as fashion gives religion the doubtful benefit of its patronage. But they will not go with him in the night. There are some goods whose colour you can only see by daylight—and there are many professors the colour of whom you can only see by daylight. If they were in the night of trouble and persecution you would find that there was very little in them. They are good by daylight but they are bad by night. But, beloved, do you not know that the best test of a Christian is the night? The nightingale, if she would sing by day when every goose is cackling, would be reckoned no better a musician than the wren. A Christian if he only remained steadfast by daylight, when every coward is bold, what would he be? There would be no beauty in his courage, no glory in his bravery. But it is because he can sing at night—sing in trouble—sing when he is driven well nigh to despair; it is this which proves his sincerity. It has its glory in the night. The stars are not visible by daylight, but they become apparent when the sun is set. There is full many a Christian whose piety did not burn much when he was in prosperity; but it will be known in adversity. I have marked it in some of my brethren now present, when they were in deep trial not long ago. I had not heard them discourse much about Christ before, but when God's hand had robbed them of their comfort, I remember that I could discern their religion infinitely better than I could before. Nothing can bring our religion out better than that. Grind the diamond a little and you shall see it glisten. Do but put a trouble on the Christian, and his endurance of it will prove him to be of the true seed of Israel.
3. A third remark from this to the confirmed Christian is, all that the Christian wants in the night is his God. "With desire have I desired thee in the night." By day there are many things that a Christian will desire besides his Lord; but in the night he wants nothing but his God. I cannot understand how it is unless it is to be accounted for by the corruption of our spirit, that when everything goes well with us we are setting our affection first on this object and—then on another, and then on another; and that desire which is as insatiable as death and as deep as hell never rests satisfied. We are always wanting something, always desiring a yet beyond. But if you place a Christian in trouble you will find that he does not want gold then—that he does not want carnal honour—then he wants his God. I suppose he is like the sailor, when he sails along smoothly he loves to have fair weather, and wants this and that to amuse himself with on deck. But when the winds blow all that he wants is the haven. He does not desire anything else. The biscuit may be mouldy, but he does not care. The water may be brackish, but he does not care. He does not think of it in the storm. He only thinks about the haven then. It is just so with the Christian, when he is going along smoothly he wants this and that comfort; he is aspiring after this position, or is wanting to obtain this and that elevation. But let him once doubt his interest in Christ—let him once get into some soul—distress and trouble, so that it is very dark—and all he will feel then is, "With desire have I desired thee in the night." When the child is put upstairs to bed it may lie while the light is there, and look at the trees that shake against the window, and admire the stars that are coming out; but when it gets dark and the child is still awake it cries for its parent. It cannot be amused by aught else. So in daylight will the Christian look at anything. He will cast his eyes round on this pleasure and on that! but, when the darkness gathers, it is "My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?" "O why art thou so far from me and from the word of my roaring?" Then it is,
"Give me Christ or else I die;
These can never satisfy."
4. But now one more remark before I leave my address to confirmed saints. There are times when all the saints can do is to desire. We have a vast number of evidences of piety: some are practical, some are experimental, some are doctrinal; and the more evidences a man has of his piety the better, of course. We like a number of signatures, to make a deed more valid, if possible. We like to invest property in a great number of trustees, in order that it may be all the safer, and so we love to have many evidences. Many witnesses will carry our case at the bar better than a few: and so it is well to have many witnesses to testify to our piety. But there are seasons when a Christian cannot get any. He can get scarcely one witness to come and attest his godliness. He asks for good works to come and speak him. But there will be such a cloud of darkness about him, and his good works will appear so black that he will not dare to think of their evidences. He will say, "True, I hope this is the right fruit, I hope I have served God but I dare not plead these works as evidences." He will have lost assurance and with it his enjoyment of communion with God. "I have had that fellowship with him," perhaps he will say, and he will summon that communion to come and be an evidence. But he has forgotten it, and it does not come, and Satan whispers it is a fancy, and the poor evidence of communion has its mouth gagged, so that it cannot speak. But there is one witness that very seldom is gagged, and one that I trust the people of God can always apply, even in the night; and that is, "I have desired thee I have desired thee in the night." "Yes, Lord, if I have not believed in thee, I have desired thee; and if I have not spent and been spent in thy service, yet one thing I know, and the devil cannot beat me out of it, I have desired thee—that I do know—and I have desired thee in the night, too, when no one saw me, when troubles were round about me."
Now, my beloved, I hope there are many of you here this morning who are strong in faith. You do not, perhaps, want what I have said; but I will advise you to take this cordial, and if you do not want to drink it now, put it up in a small phial, and carry it about with you till you do; you do not know how long it may before you are faint. And as Mr. Greatheart gave Christiana a bottle of wine to take with her that she might drink when she was fatigued, so you take this, and do not laugh at a poor despised believer because he is not so strong as yourself. You may want this yourself someday. I tell you there are times when a Christian will be ready to creep into a mouse hole if he might but get into heaven; when he would be glad to throw anything away to get into the smallest crevice to escape from his fears; when the meanest evidence seems more precious than gold; when the very least ray of sunlight is worth all the riches of Peru; and when a doit of comfort is more sweet than a whole heaven of it may have been at other seasons. You may be brought into the same condition, so take this passage with you and have it ready—have it ready to plead at the throne: "With desire have I desired thee in the night."
II. The second part of my sermon is to be occupied by speaking to NEWLY AWAKENED SOULS; and as I have made four remarks to confirmed Christians, I will now endeavor to answer three questions to those who are newly awakened.
The first question they would ask me is this. How am I to know that my desires are proofs of a work of grace in my soul? Some of you may say, I think I can go so far as the text—I have desired God; I know I have desired to be saved. I have desired to have an interest in the blood of Jesus, but how am I to know that it is a desire sent of God, and how can I tell whether it will end in conversion? Hear me, then, while I offer one or two tests.
1. First, you may tell whether your desires are of God by their constancy. Many a man when he hears a stirring sermon, has a very strong desire to be saved; but he goes home and forgets it. He is as a man who seeth his face in a glass, goeth away, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he is. He returns again: once more the arrow sticks hard in the heart of the King's enemy; he goes home, only to extract the arrow, and his goodness is as the morning cloud; and as the early dew it passeth away. Has it been so with you? Have you had such a desire? Will to-morrow's business take it away? Are you wanting Christ to-day? and will ye despise him to-morrow? Then I am afraid your desires are not of God; they are merely the desires of a naturally awakened conscience, just the stirrings of mere nature, and they will go as far as nature can go, and no farther. But if your desires are constant ones take comfort. How long have they lasted? Have you been desiring Christ this last month or these last three or four months? Have you been seeking him in prayer for a long season? And do you find that you are anxious after Christ on the Monday as well as on the Sunday? Do you desire him in the shop when the intervals of business allow you to do so? Do you seek him in the night—in the solemn loneliness, when no ministers voice breaks on your ear, when no truth is smiting your conscience? Is it but the hectic flush of the consumption that has come upon your cheek? which is not the mark of health. Or is it the real heat of a true desire, which marks a healthy soul? Are you desiring God constantly? I admit there will be variations even to our more sincere desires, but a certain measure of constancy is essential to their real value as evidences of a divine work.
2. Again: you may discern whether they are right or wrong by their efficacy. Some persons desire heaven very earnestly, but they do not desire to leave off drunkenness: they desire to be saved, but they do not desire salvation enough to shut their shops up on Sunday morning; or to bridle their tongues, and leave off speaking ill of their neighbors. They desire salvation; but they do not desire it enough to come sometimes on the week-day to hear the gospel. You may tell the truthfulness of your desires by their efficacy. If your desires lead you into real "works meet for repentance," then they come from God. Wishes, you know, are nought unless they are carried out. "Many; say unto you, shall seek to enter in, but shall not be able" "Strive to enter in at the strait gate." Seeking will not do; there must be striving. Our prophet here informs us, that whilst he desired God in the night, that desire was very efficacious. For, in the 18th verse, he declares, "In the way of thy judgments, O Lord, we have waited for thee." This desire made me wait for thy judgments. How many do I hear say I am waiting for God, it is all I do: there I lie at the pool of Bothesda, and one of these days an angel will come and stir the pool. Stop! How do you know you are not deceiving yourself? There is a friend waiting for me to tea: I will step into the room. There is no kettle on the fire: there is not a bit for me to eat. "Sir, we have been waiting for you." But there is nothing ready in the house! I do not believe them; they could not have been waiting for me, or else they would have been ready. And waiting for God always implies being ready. Says a man, "I am waiting for God." But he is not ready for God at all: he still keeps on his drunkenness, the house is still unswept; he is as worldly as ever. He is waiting. Yes, but waiting implies being ready; and nobody is waiting that is not ready, You are not waiting for the coach until you have your coat and hat on ready to start, and are looking out at the door for it; and you are not waiting for God, until you are ready to go with God. No man ought to say, I am waiting for God. No, beloved, it is God who is waiting for us generally, rather than any of us waiting for him. No sinner can be beforehand with him. But the prophet waited "in the way of God's judgments:" that is, waited in the right place—waited in the house of God—waited under the sound of the gospel. And then this desire led him to seek. "With my spirit within me will I seek thee." It led him to seek after God. Oh! the poor pitiful desires of some of you are very little good. An old writer says, "Hell is paved with good intentions." I was not aware that there was any pavement at all—because it has no bottom, but at the same time I believe that the sides of the pit are hung round with good intentions; and men will feel themselves pricked and goaded from side to side with good designs that they once formed but never carried out—children that were strangled at the birth—desires that never were brought into living acts—desires that sprang up like the mushroom in the night, and like the fungus were swept away—like smoke from the chimney, that stopped as soon as the fire had gone out. Oh! brethren, if these are your desires, they are not practical, they do not come of God. But if your desires have made you give up your drunkenness—have compelled you to renounce your theatre-going—have constrained you to seek God with full purpose of heart—have brought you to give up one lust and another—take comfort, you are in the right road, if your desires are practical desires.
3. Again: you can tell these desires by their urgency. Ah! you want to be saved some of you, but it must be this day next week. But when the Holy Ghost speaks, he says, "To-day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts." It must be now or never. "To-day give me grace; to-day give me mercy; to-day give me pardon." Some of you hope to be saved before you die, before the pit closes on you; you hope Jesus Christ will look down upon you in some years to come. You have not set down how many years, I suppose; but it is always in the distant hazy future. But the true desire is now. Does the poor man who stands upon the scaffold with a rope round his neck say, "Pardon me in a year's time?" No, he is afraid he shall the next minute be launched into eternity. He who feels his danger will cry, "Now!" He who wants Christ really, will cry, "Now!" He who is spiritually awakened will cry out, "Now or never!" What! sinner, will it do to postpone salvation? Doth thine heart tell thee it will do by-and-bye? What! when the fire is just coming through the boards of thy little chamber? What! when thy ship has struck upon the rock, and is filling? Yes, she is filling, while the fire at the other end is rushing up; and fire and water together are seeking thy destruction. Wilt thou say, "To-morrow?" Why, thou mayest be dead ere to-morrow's sun has risen. To-morrow! where is it? In the devil's calendar, it is not written in any book on earth. To-morrow! It is some fancied islet in the far-off sea that the mariner has never reached. To-morrow! It is the fool's desire: which he never shall gain. Like a will-o'-the wisp it dances before him, but only lands him in the marshes of distress. To-morrow! There is no such thing. It is God's. If there is such a day, ours it cannot be. Tillotson well remarks:—"To be always intending to live a new life, but never to find time to set about it; this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking, and sleeping, from one day and night to another, till he is starved and destroyed"
But you say, "If I have desired God, why have I not obtained my desire before now? Why has not God granted my request?"
In the first place, you have hardly a right to ash the question; for God has a right to grant your petition or not as he pleases; and far be it from man to say to God "What doest thou?" He is a sovereign, and has power to do what he will. But since thine anxiety has dictated the question, let my anxiety attempt to answer it. Perhaps God has not granted thy desire, because he wishes thine own profit thereby. He designs to show thee more of the desperate wickedness of thine heart, that in future thou mayest fear to trust it. He wants thee to see more of the blackness of darkness and of the horrible pit of sin, that like a burnt child thou mayest shun the fire for ever. He lets thee go down into the dungeon, that thou mayest prize liberty the better when it comes. And he is keeping thee waiting, moreover, that thy longings may be quickened. He knows that delay will fan the desire, and that if he keeps you waiting it will not be a loss to you, but will gain you much, because you will see your necessity more clearly, seek him more earnestly, cry more bitterly and your heart will be more in earnest after him. Besides, poor soul, God keeps thee waiting, perhaps in order that he may display the riches of his grace more fully to thee at the last. I believe that some of us who were kept by God a long while before we found him, loved him better perhaps than we should have done if we had received him directly, and we can preach better to others, we can speak more of his loving kindness and tender mercy. John Bunyan could not have written as he did if he had not been dragged about by the devil for many years. Ah! I love that picture of dear old Christian. I know when I first read that book, and saw the old woodcut in it of Christian carrying the burden on his back, I felt so interested for the poor fellow, that I thought I should jump with joy when, after the poor creature had carried his burden so long, he at last got rid of it. Ah! beloved; and God may make you and me carry the burden for a long time till he takes it off that we may leap all the higher with joy when we do get deliverance; for depend upon it, there is no poor penitent who loves mercy so well as he who has been ferrying for it for a season. Perhaps that is the reason why God keeps you waiting.
One more thought here. Perhaps it has come already. I think some of you are pardoned and you do not know it. I think some of you are forgiven; though you are expecting something wonderful as a sign which you will never receive. Persons have got the strangest notions in the world about conversion. I have heard persons tell the queerest tales you could imagine about how they were converted; though of course I did not believe them. And I fancy some of you think you will have a kind of electric shock—that a sort of galvanism, or something or other, will pass through you, such as you never had before. Do not be expecting any miracles now. If you will not think you are pardoned till you get a vision, you will have to wait many a year. Some people fancy they are not pardoned because they have never heard a voice in their ears. I should be very sorry to have my salvation dependent on a text of Scripture applied to my heart; I should be afraid that the devil had applied it, or that it was the wind whistling behind me. I want something more sure than that. But perhaps you are forgiven, and you do not yet know it. God has spoken the tidings of mercy to your spirit, and you have not yet heard it, because you are saying, "It cannot be that." If you could but sit down and think of this:—"This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief," methinks you would find that after all you are not excluded. There is no great need for any of these miraculous things that you are reckoning upon. God may have given them to some of his people, but he has never promised them. Perhaps, then, the question may be answered by saying, "The pardon is there, but you do not know it." Oh! may God speak loudly in your soul, that you may know really and certainly that he has forgiven you!
But there is one more serious enquiry: and it is, "Will God grant my desire at last?" Yes, poor soul, verily he will. It is quite impossible that you should have desired God and should be lost, if you have desired him with the desire I have described. For I will suppose that you should go down into the chambers of the lost with the desire still in your spirit: when you entered within the gates you would have to say, "I desired mercy of God, and he would not give it me: I sought grace at the hands of Jesus, and he would not give it." You know what would be said at once. Satan would be so pleased. "Ah!" he would say, "here is a sinner that perished praying: God has not kept his promise, he said, 'Whosoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved:' "and here is one that did it, and he is lost!" Ah! how they would howl for joy in hell! They would sing a blasphemous song against the Almighty God—that one poor desiring soul should be there! I tell you one thing: I have heard many wicked things in my life—I have heard many men swear and blaspheme God, till I have trembled, but there is one thing I never did hear a man say yet, and I think God would scarcely permit any man to perpetrate such a lie, I never heard even a drunken man say, "I sincerely sought God with full purpose of heart, and yet he has not heard me, and will not answer me, but has cast me away." I scarcely think it possible, although I know that men can be infinitely wicked, that any man could utter such an abominable falsehood as that. At any rate, I can say I never heard it; and I believe there are some of you who can say, "I have been young and now am old, yet have I never seen one penitent sinner who could say, in despair, I am not saved. I have sought God and he will not hear me, he has cast me away from his face and will not give me mercy;" and, I think, as long as you live you will not meet a case. Then why should you be the first? Why, poor penitent, shouldst thou be the first? Dost thou think thou art a chosen mark for all the arrows of the Almighty? Hath he set thee for a butt against which he will direct all the thunderbolts of his vengeance? Art thou to be the first instance in which mercy fails? Art thou to be the one who shall first out-do the infinity of love? Oh! say not so. Despair is mad; but for one instant gather up thy reason thou despairing one. Would God wish to see thee damned? Hath he not said, "As I live, saith the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, but would rather that he should turn to me and live." Do you think it would be a pleasure to the Almighty to have your blood? Oh! far be it from you to conceive it. Do you not think that he loves to pardon? Hath he not said himself he delighteth in mercy? And is it not written, "As the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." What advantage would it be to God to destroy your souls? Would it not be more to his honour to save you? Ah, assuredly; because you would sing his praise in heaven, would you not? Yes, but recollect, the best argument I can use with you is this: Do you suppose that God would give his Son to die for sinners, and yet would not save sinners? It is written in the Scriptures, that "Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners," and you are a sinner; you feel that you are a sinner; you know it. Then he came to save you? Only believe that. As a poor penitent you have a right to believe it. If you were a Pharisee you would not have that right; but as a penitent, humble, contrite soul, you have a right to believe in Jesus. The Pharisee has none for it is never written that he came to save the righteous; and if he believed he did he would believe a lie; but every man who is a sinner, every man who lays claim to that title, has a right also to believe that Christ died for him; and not only so but it is the truth. He came into the world for a certain purpose and what he came for he will do. He came into the world to save sinners, and now it is written "Whosoever believeth on the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved; he that believeth not shall be damned." When, last Friday, I had the honour of preaching to many thousand persons in the open air, such an assembly as I never dreamed of seeing and such a vast number as I could scarcely have fancied would have met for any religious purpose, I noticed a most singularly powerful echo, constantly taking up the last words of my sentences and sending them back, as if some great giant voice had spoken to confirm what I had said. When I had repeated the words, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved," echo said, "Saved!" and when I proceeded, "He that believeth not shall be damned," I heard the echo gently say "Damned!" Methinks this morning I hear that echo: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;" and the saints above cry, "Saved!" Hark! how they sing before the throne! Hark! how your glorified parents and your immortalized relatives, cry, "Saved!" Hear ye not the echo, as it echoes from the blue sky of heavens—"Saved!" And, oh! doleful thought, when I utter those words, "He that believeth not shall be damned," there comes up that dread word—"Damned!" from the place where there are "hollow groans, and sullen moans, and shrieks of tortured ghosts." God grant that you may never know what it is to be damned! God give you to believe now; for, "to-day, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts."
Blog entry
15 May 2013 - 12:42am
Thought it a Special Moment to Witness the Beauty and Power of Our Sun ToDaY
take some time, and feel this Awesome Being ..... COMMUNE with this Being
with Love, in Peace, Trust, Assurance & ThanksGiving *
solarimg.org/artis/
SDO 171
PROBA2/SWAP 174
Blog entry
14 May 2013 - 8:48pm
FAST-FORWARD BUTTON
Moving in Real Time
~ by Madisyn Taylor
www.dailyom.com
We all want to push the fast-forward button, but in these times is where we find the juice [y?]stuff.
We all go through times when we wish we could press a fast-forward button and propel ourselves into the future and out of our current circumstances.
Whether the situation we are facing is minor, or major such as the loss of a loved one,
it is human nature to want to move away from pain and find comfort as soon as possible.
Yet we all know deep down that we need to work through these experiences in a conscious fashion rather than bury our heads in the sand,
because these are the times when we access important information about ourselves and life.
The learning process may not be easy, but it is full of lessons that bring us wisdom we cannot find any other way.
The desire to press fast-forward can lead to escapism and denial, both of which only prolong our difficulties and in some cases make them worse.
The more direct, clear, and courageous we are in the face of whatever we are dealing with, the more quickly we will move through the situation.
Understanding this, we may begin to realize that trying to find the fast-forward button is really more akin to pressing pause.
When we truly grasp that the only way out of any situation in which we find ourselves is to go through it,
we stop looking for ways to escape and we start paying close attention to what is happening.
We realize that we are exactly where we need to be.
We remember that we are in this situation in order to learn something we need to know,
and we can alleviate some of our pain with the awareness that there is a purpose to our suffering.
When you feel the urge to press the fast-forward button, remember that you are not alone; we all instinctively avoid pain.
But in doing so, we often prolong our pain and delay important learning.
As you choose to move forward in real time, know that in the long run, this is the least painful way to go.
[my format]
Story
14 May 2013 - 3:23pm
Waken the Springtime that is Within your Being
Ascended Master, El Morya’s Weekly Message ~ May 14 – 21, 2013
Received by Julie Miller
May 14, 2013
On the surface dear ones, there are many dear souls that reflect and present imperfect images that demonstrate a lack of harmony, limitations, belief and faith among other things. It is well understood that some of these discovered imperfections that often carry dis-ease are the overlays from past experiences from various circumstances and from conditioned beliefs that have been accepted as truth. Many dear souls are waking from conditioned illusions that were thought as truth and from false images and consciously making changes in their life that will replace the old ways of being and doing with new essential and real ways that resonate with not only the heart but with the soul as well. Remember dear ones, underneath all conditioned beliefs and what you have carried from previous experiences is where you find your true Divine Beautiful Inner Being and this being has always been with you.
When you take the time to remove your conditioned beliefs and old ways of doing things and living, you will come home to your true self and nature and from what you discover you will be able to define your WHOLE Self…a self that is not created by other people’s perceptions but from what you discover on your own. Often we observe the opinions of other dear souls making an impact on an individual life when in fact each of you must walk your own journey. No matter what the wisdom is being spoken, even if this wisdom is sound and true, you must find understanding from your own experiences. The more you allow others to define your life, the less likely you will discover your true Divine Self and you will in time dear ones become a victim to the views and opinions of others. When you allow this to occur dear ones, it is then you often feel yourself as small and insignificant when we know this is not true at all and deep down so do you.
Waking from this state is similar to waking from hibernation. It is as if you have been in a long sleep, functioning through routine. You manage to accomplish your mundane tasks but your Inner Power remains in deep slumber until a circumstance brings you into wakefulness. Your hibernation from discovering your True Divine Self is a temporary condition that will inhibit the expansion of your beliefs and hinder your Self from becoming unlimited in ALL ways until you finally wake. Once you learn how to fully think, then dear ones you will begin to learn how to truly live. It is essential to your spiritual growth and development on all levels to understand the Divine Power that flows within you. Just as there are seasons upon Earth, there are seasons within your being and it is you that must waken the Springtime within your Self and rise to the Inner Sun that has never gone out because this beautiful Divine Light is our connection to the Great Spirit of God.
Knowing and accepting the Spirit of God being within you, in the Light of your Being will help bring your Inner Power into His glorious Light which He will infuse with Great Love and direct your journey as you renew your Hope, Faith and Love with your Self, with God and every other dear soul that shares this beautiful Earth you call home in this lifetime. Understand dear ones within your precious mind is where your discover your Creative Processes and all the personal experiences you have had is where your own Inner Power rests, yet it is here dear ones where you explore how to constructively and positively make use of this creative energy for the betterment of your own journey that inspires Light and Love in all. When your own Truth starts to make the upward climb from the Inner Depths of your Whole being, you find yourself being propelled by the creative force that you have made from your own applied effort. The outcome of your efforts will bring you much delight and satisfaction that will inspire you to apply this healthy and love-filled energy in all areas of your life.
Through your personal experiences you learn the importance of constructive thinking. It is your own constructive thinking that will provide you with the opportunity to dissolve all negative thought patterns. It is through your Creative energy dear ones that you learn to direct and control your journey and the life you live. Through your mindful thinking, you explore how and what you need to fulfill your life, what areas need to be changed, how you can bring total improvement one step-at-a-time. Each process and method you apply also provides healing dear ones. Nothing is ever one-sided. When you are applying a certain method that brings optimal results you are also healing those areas that you have let go, you are changing the way you think and feel and through this important healing you are evolving into a new You. There is great Inner Power at work during your growth period and you will experience more than one growth period along your journey and each one is worthy of being celebrated because it demonstrates to you on a soul level that you have increased your level of awareness and you REALIZE what is truly important in your life. This is power dear ones and it is yours.
As you proceed along your current path it is important to make time to reflect and question your goals, examine the steps you have chosen to reach them and discern if changes are necessary. This is your journey, you are the one who must be in control of your thoughts and really understand where you are going. Many will guide and support you, but they cannot walk your journey for you. Comprehend dear ones your efforts will either positively or negatively influence your progress. Don’t be overcome by greed, allow your heart to guide you to what is best for you and trust in its guidance.
Even though you do have your own Individual Personal Inner Power, there is also a Universal Power that is felt by all as you are all interconnected and this power is infinite. The source of this infinite power stems from the Spirit of God and it is there for you to use when you learn how to fully locate this power and how to incorporate it into your life. When you are able to embrace the largeness of the source of this great Universal Power, you will open yourself to the potential and opportunity of understanding what is true at a deeper and more profound level.
The journey before you dear ones is a great one. There is much to learn and to understand. Each of you will discover many new truths and let go of old truths. It is important dear ones to be respectful of what others consider to be true. Not all truths that are found through personal experiences will necessarily be exactly the same for another. Yet this does not make individual truths wrong, just different. And there is nothing wrong at being different. Through your differences you have the potential of learning, and loving more. Each interaction you have provides you both with the opportunity to be teacher and student – as I have already mentioned; nothing is ever one-sided. How you proceed on your path is of your own choice based on your own thoughts and what you want to achieve. Understand dear ones we are here with you and will guide, love and support you when you ask through your beautiful hearts.
And so it is…
I AM Ascended Master, El Morya through Julie Miller
Story
14 May 2013 - 3:22pm
A PLEIADIAN MESSAGE ABOUT OUR INNER GUIDANCE
~ Via Bella Capozzi:
www.cupcakesandangels.wordpress.com - May 12, 2013
Bella Capozzi: As healers and intuitives, I believe that the some of the most common questions we get from our friends, family and clients are in relation to opening the lines of communication between themselves and the higher realms. They want to know why they can’t hear their angels, or they want to sharpen the skills that they already have in order to understand them better.
What most people don’t realize is that they already are getting this information, and they just need to learn how to recognize and interpret it. This type of communication can manifest itself in such a variety of different forms, as is explained in the message from my own team of guides, below. While I did originally receive the message last summer, the information seems to me to be even more appropriate right now.
SEEKING GUIDANCE FROM WITHIN
Originally received by Bella Capozzi on July 8, 2012.
There is no guidance more trustworthy than that which comes from within. This is the voice which speaks to you from the heart. It is the sudden warning you receive in times of peril, an inner knowing of where to go and how to get there, or an unexpected answer to a nagging question. It is all of those things and so very much more
Over time, you came to know this gentle guidance as angelic intervention or a loving guide coming to your aid; and yes, you were quite correct in assuming that it was indeed our voices you were hearing. Yet have you ever considered that this wisdom is not originating only from a source outside of yourself, but also from someplace much closer? Is it possible that this is knowledge that you have had all along, but has been kept hidden from you by the lower vibration and limitations of the 3rd dimension?
Entertain the notion that you are without limits and wise beyond anything you could ever imagine. That you are your higher-self. The higher-self is not some lofty, separate persona existing far away and apart from who you are at this exact moment – this you, who are alive and whole and thriving within the confines of the human bodysuit. It is not a finer, happier being living a carefree life across the galaxy, while you do battle on the denser planes of Earth. Not at all. The higher-self is the portion of your being which exists in wait for the time you are able to merge with it as one. Indeed, it is conscious and timeless, and it experiences everything you have ever done. Behind the amnesiac veil is where you will find it, and it is becoming increasingly integrated in your human consciousness with every passing day.
You are seeing this integration in the wider opening of your channels and the newfound effortlessness with which you ease into the meditative state. You call to us and instantly we are there. Visions are clearer, messages are cleaner, and you are swiftly becoming more and more claircognizant. Think about it: do you not just know things, but have no idea how you knew or where they came from? Concepts once considered confusing and beyond your ability to comprehend come easily to you now. You have an innate understanding of universal concepts and of why you are here and where you came from. Nobody else has to tell you. Deep inside, you simply know. You feel that you have always known. Understand with an absolute certainty that this knowing is the voice of your own higher self come home. And now the challenge becomes not in the receiving of the information, but in the trusting of it.
Yes, of course, we are still here and are eager and ready to help you. We love you dearly. There is nothing that warms the hearts of your beloved guides more than to converse with you and to assist you in your journey along the pathway to ascension. It is our deepest wish to be of service. However, the time has come for us to loosen the reins a bit and allow you to test your wings. Never doubt for a single moment that we will be here to catch you, should you falter. But we know that you will not.
Look to discover this precious gift, which has been given to you at a time when we feel you will most need it. You must seek before you are able to find, so go within and find yourself. We advise that you take time often for meditation, and if the silent type is not for you, then do so to the strains of soft music. Delicate tones and vibrations will transport you to the place of stillness more quickly, and is most beneficial in preventing your mind from breaking through with it’s aimless wandering. While at home, try turning off the television and partake of the silence. In a quiet place the voices of your higher-self can be clearly heard coming from within your own consciousness, and you will be amazed at the revelations that materialize before you.
Lastly, we strongly suggest that you read and do so often. Reading is a fun-filled and exciting vacation for the senses. Without relying on outside stimulus, immersing yourself in a book requires you to exercise your imagination. You must create the appearance of the setting and the characters, and you must look ahead and wonder what will happen next. Even though the words and the plot are another person’s creation, the unique imagery you give it is all your own. We find this to be a most enjoyable way for you to sharpen your visualization skills.
Be in peace, Dear Friends, and endeavor to know yourselves as flawless jewels in the crowns of the Divine.
Copyright Bella Capozzi. All rights reserved. You may copy and distribute this material as long as you do not alter it in any way, the content remains complete and you include this copyright notice.
Blog entry
14 May 2013 - 2:53pm
New Members: It is recommended you read from the beginning of the archive, as previous lessons are prerequisite to this one. The first lesson is, "Why This Discussion?" at http://aypsite.com/10.html
Q: What are the different variations of the spinal breath? There are two different kriyas revealed by Paulsen; one of Sri Lahiri Mahasaya's original kriya is also available over the web (this involves breathing up and down the spine with chanting of OM at the spinal plexuses). It would be worthwhile to know the different varieties of kriya, as I think that everyone's optimal kriya is different.
A: The number of versions of spinal breathing is limited only by the imagination. The essential ingredient in all of them is the brow to perineum route of attention with slow breathing. 90%-plus of the results come from that. It is that simple. It is easy to make it complicated, and risk watering down the results by adding chakra imagery, sounds, colors, mantras, etc. Any or all of those additions don't contribute much. In fact, all that can distract from the essential function of purifying and opening the spinal nerve between the third eye and the root.
As you know, these lessons put separate attention on deep meditation, and we don't divide the mind by trying to do both spinal breathing and deep meditation at the same time. Of course, anyone is free to do as they wish in spinal breathing, and may have been taught spinal breathing differently elsewhere. In the lessons, we try and keep it to the least common denominator in all practices, so as many as possible can benefit from a straight-forward approach. That is why spinal breathing is taught in the simple way that it is here.
Assuming one is doing deep meditation right after, there is little that can be added to substantially improve the effectiveness of this simple form of spinal breathing. It would be very easy to add a few twists, and say, "Here is the best form of spinal breathing." Well, maybe we have done that. What you get in these lessons is spinal breathing without all the bells and whistles, and it works just fine. This is the essential practice that marries the root and third eye. That is what spinal breathing is about. Energetically, everything else in the nervous system flows automatically from that. There is no need to fiddle around much in the middle when we are effectively merging together both ends.
In this approach, instead of bogging ourselves down with a lot of detail in spinal breathing, we stick with the basics, and then take the opportunity to move quickly into many other practices (mulabandha, sambhavi, siddhasana, chin pump, spinal bastrika, etc.) that make a huge difference in our spiritual progress. So, instead of "gilding the lily" of spinal breathing, we bring in a lot more lilies. By doing this, we are able to develop a powerful and well-rounded integration of practices in a reasonably short period of time, without a lot of tedious and unnecessary detail.
So, I don't agree that each person needs a different form of spinal breathing. Certainly, each person may have a preference based on tradition, personal whim, etc., and that's okay. Just keep in mind that it is going between the third eye and root that produces the results. In the end, those two divine poles are merged and we are drowned in ecstatic bliss.
The guru is in you.
Note: For detailed instructions on spinal breathing, see the AYP Spinal Breathing Pranayama book at http://aypsite.com/books.html#sbp
http://aypsite.com/206.html
Blog entry
14 May 2013 - 12:22pm
by Sharon Janis
http://www.nightlotus.com/
Some spiritual traditions suggest that even before you were born on this earth, the divine creator put deep into your heart the knowledge of what you’re supposed to do in your life, including what you’re meant to give and receive from this world.
From a spiritual perspective, it doesn’t matter if your deep calling is to be big or small, famous or publicly unknown, loved or feared, a leader or a follower, or any combination of these and more. What matters most is to find the avenues of experience and expression that are right for your soul’s journey in this world at this time.
The challenge is to find your soul’s deep calling beneath all the layers of outer experiences and expectations that have been piled upon you throughout your life — from friends, family, schools, television, music, writings, movies, and more.
Spiritual wisdom and practices help you clear away the cobwebs of mediocre, unenthusiastic living so that you can experience joyful, passionate inspiration and discover and fulfill why you are here. Taking time to pay attention to your soul’s deep calling is a good use of that time!
Discovering Your Dharma
What are you here to do? What is your job in life? The Sanskrit word dharma can be helpful in contemplating the deep calling of your soul.
Dharma doesn’t have an exact English translation, but it can be paraphrased as “righteous living”. Dharma is the way you are meant to live — in general as a human being, and also as an individual with a unique set of lessons to learn, experiences to have, and gifts to give. In a way, your dharma is also your mission in life.
When you have a sense of what your mission is, you make better choices about what to do and not do during your time in this world as you. When you live in accordance with your greater destiny, you are naturally guided to do what is right in both large and small situations.
All human beings share certain big-picture dharmas, such as to take care of this planet and one another, while discovering, expressing, and honoring the divine nature of life. Some spiritual sages say that the ultimate dharma is to live so that you go to Heaven or to follow practices that will bring spiritual enlightenment or liberation from this illusory world of limited experience.
Along with common group dharmas that should be followed by all human beings, each person also has his or her own individual set of dharmas. For example, someone may have the personal dharma of always being as honest as possible, regardless of the possible repercussions. Another person may feel deep inside that it is her responsibility to help when she sees someone who is in need, regardless of whether others would expect her to take responsibility in those circumstances.
Sometimes people find their dharma through challenges or tragedies. For example, many celebrities and others who have experienced certain illnesses come to sense that helping to find cures for these illnesses would fulfill their mission by helping to heal their loved ones, themselves, and the greater good of humankind. Their dedication to a good cause gives meaning to their suffering and helps remove the suffering of others, which is a great dharma for anyone to follow.
Discovering your Righteous Path of Living
A musician must make music, an artist must paint,
a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately
at peace with himself.
What one can be, one must be.
-- Abraham Maslow
Your dharma is what fulfils you. It’s what floats your boat, buoys your spirit, and opens your heart. Following your dharma may not always be comfortable or easy, but it brings a sense of underlying serenity and rightness that stays strong behind even difficult or challenging times.
When you’re following your dharma:
Even if obstacles arise, they don’t overwhelm you.
You feel yourself flowing with time rather than resisting its flow. You are neither pining for the
past nor waiting anxiously for the future.
You have a sense of fitting comfortably into yourself and your life as if you are sitting in a seat
that fits perfectly.
You trust that the challenges and temptations that come your way are helping you grow and
giving you an opportunity to strengthen your commitment to following your dharma.
Finding Your own Style
Finding, accepting, and enjoying your own personal style is a great achievement and a wonderful blessing. Spiritual wisdom allows you to step into a higher vision of your life as an expression of divine universal creative spirit.
From this higher viewpoint, you can look at yourself with a bit more objectivity. You can even look at your faults and mistakes without feeling too much ego discomfort. You can be like a comedian who appreciates and uses even his faults to get big laughs.
Knowing your inherent greatness increases your self-respect and also sets a foundation for exploring, refining, and weeding out any aspects of your expression that are not in harmony with your greater self.
See how it feels for you to say and think these words: “I am great just as I am.” Say the phrase aloud and then repeat the words mentally as you breathe in, and again as you breathe out.
Here are some possible reasons why you may not be fully appreciating and expressing your own style:
You may think that your style is boring.
However, thinking that you‘re boring doesn’t mean you really are boring. I used to think I was totally boring during my years of monastic life, where the people around me seemed to have a lot more dramas and opinions than I did. Even now, on a day-to-day level, my life is generally quiet and not so outwardly exciting. But looking from a larger perspective, my life has been pretty creative and interesting. Sometimes you may think you are boring when you’re really percolating into a more fragrant cup of you. Your creative spark may be growing silently under a simple surface just as colorful flower seeds germinate quietly under a blanket of white snow.
You may think that your style isn’t good enough.
Maybe you don’t think you’re clever enough or considerate enough. Maybe you’re not a good listener or a caring son, daughter, mother, father, sister, brother, worker, or friend. Even if you find these kinds of shortcomings in yourself, you can still accept and love yourself while also taking steps to improve your personal style. Take a respectful inventory of your style. See which of your personality traits are natural, which have been created by imitating other people, which have come from the environments and cultures around you, and which aspects of your style and personality are serving you well versus creating obstacles to your greater good.
You are the artist of your life. Choose your colors. Choose your topics. Choose your modes of expression. If you don’t want to have so many dark colors in your life-painting, then stop mixing so many dark colors and start opening up tubes of brighter yellows, oranges, and reds.
Teaching
14 May 2013 - 9:54am
LIGHT AND DARKNESS: THE COSMIC DANCE OF TRUTH
http://www.spirituality-information-101.com/light-and-darkness.html
In the history of our experience as human beings, we have come to accept the notion of a struggle between light and darkness. We believe that light is good and darkness is evil because that is the perception we’ve always had and there has never seemed to be a need to challenge it. The simple reason behind this perception is that when the light is on, you can see things and understand what’s going on. Light from sun provides warmth and it is the giver of life. Darkness, on the other hand, makes us afraid as we stand in it because we can’t see and we don’t know what’s coming at us. At a primitive level, it is obvious that the light is considered good and the darkness is considered evil. On a deeper level, the lack of understanding between the spiritual nature of light and darkness has created an energy and behavioral pattern of mankind’s sexuality which is not the way it was designed to flow. The human race is caught up in a bottled up state wherein the consciousness of our sexuality is caught in a sinister psychological booby trap. When the subconscious identity inside of us understands the true meaning behind the mystery of spiritual light and spiritual darkness and what the myth about that relationship has done to us, there is a relaxation that occurs deep within the subconscious and the true spiritual energy of that human being starts to come into the body and mind in such a manner as to create a transformation. In order to accomplish this, we must first understand what light and darkness truly are and what the relationship between them is.
The reason behind our perception of the light being good and the darkness being evil is physical, and the philosophers and early theologians based their philosophy and religion on the ideas of the physics around them that they were able to observe. Physics is the study of natural philosophy, and the study of physical phenomenon is the study of the spirit, and this is a belief founded in Western Philosophy. Emmanuel Kant first spoke of the concept when he talked about the idea that the spirit world and the physical world are related and that they are mirrors of one another. What is true physically is true spiritually. It was always a belief and an obsession of Albert Einstein to understand the physics with such a great level of detail that he would find higher meaning and therefore understand the psycho physics of the spirit world, or the spirit physics. It was an obsession of his to understand how the spirit plugged into the physical. Modern physics and the advent of quantum mechanics has led to a whole new group of theories – grand unified theories, string theories, meta brain theory, and many others as well as new ones yet to come, but the idea remains and always will remain that physical light can achieve a dense state of existence. For instance, in a black hole, much of the light is trapped inside of the actual black hole, so there is a massive amount of light inside of it. The perception of a black hole is that it would be a physical manifestation of darkness, and yet, the black hole itself is filled with dense light. The vacuum of space, which we perceive as darkness, is filled with matter and anti-matter which is a form of storing light. In this sense, the darkness of the vacuum is just a state of light that is standing still. So it turns out that all of the physical perceptions of darkness around us are just another form of light. This brings us to the fact that the physics, if it is mirroring the spiritual, is telling us that the darkness itself is another form of the light and that darkness is dense light. Darkness is light that is standing still and is stored in a state of readiness to become light. Darkness is potential light and therefore, darkness is the source of light.
Physics dictates the idea that darkness is not evil, but another form of light. This single idea dismantles the duality of good and evil and the accompanying labyrinth that surrounds and traps the human mind within it. We also find this idea of light and darkness supported in scripture. Isaiah 45-7; “God forms light and creates darkness.” The first book of John 1-5 states, “God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all.” Let us examine this last passage. If God is everywhere, then most certainly God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all, because even when it’s perceived as darkness, for instance, a black hole, there is still light inside of these things in a different state. If the universe is the body of God, and we believe this to be so, then most certainly wherever there is perceived darkness in the universe, there is God, and where ever there is God, there is light. If there is darkness, there is light. In Matthew 6-23, we find, “In reality, the light that is in you is darkness, and how great that darkness is.” None of these ideas are in conflict and they support the physical fact that even in places in the universe where there is perceived darkness, such as black holes and the vacuums, there physically is light. Physical darkness is another form of light, sometimes existing in a dense form of light, and at other times, it’s a stored form of light or just light that is standing still.
If we apply this new knowledge of light and darkness toward the question of evil, we must ask, where is there a place for evil to exist? There is no physical allegory of evil and there is no physical symbol of it anywhere in the universe. So where does evil exist except in the belief of man? The truth is this is the only place that it does exist because it cannot exist in the physics; it cannot because there is no place for it in the body of God. Evil only exists in the imagination of man, but this fact does not make it any less real to those who believe that it exists. Going a bit further, the idea that spiritual darkness, which is a dense form of light and is a gift to every human being from God, is evil is a trick and a sinister way of getting a human being to give up the very power he needs to manifest his own spirit. Once a human being believes the lie of spiritual darkness being evil, he becomes spiritually castrated, and this dense form of Divine Light, which is dense Divine Darkness, is given up to the idea of evil and the human being is left to search for it, and he only gets a chance to touch it now and again when the force of procreation drives that energy temporarily into his body. It is and was always meant to be a gift from God, this dense light which is Divine Darkness, and the validation of this idea can be found in Isaiah 45-3, “And God will give you treasures in the darkness, and hidden treasures in the concealment places in order that you may know that He is the Once calling you by your name.” Treasures in the darkness – light that is so powerful and so densely packed that it is in the darkness and you can’t perceive it, you can only completely know it through faith.
These ideas of light and darkness form the foundation of a grand knowledge designed specifically to teach us a way to unleash the unlimited potential of the human spirit and mind, and plug that potential into the physical personality systems here in time and space of the human body. And this is where it really all begins. There are, for instance, many meditation techniques which utilize visualizing light, and these have their roots in Hindu technique. Many of the Christian Science techniques derived out of the Bible and used the idea of visualization of the Great Light. There are other meditation techniques that use the ideas of darkness and evil, and these techniques have their roots coming out of the Renaissance in the different forms of witchcraft and black magic. With this new wisdom of the relationship of light and darkness, we’re led to a new method which incorporates the idea that the darkness itself is dense light, and the light is light, and the interplay between these two bring about the greater good. It is critical that every time we say, ‘Spiritual Darkness’, we categorize it as Divine Darkness. The dense darkness, the dense light of God, is the gift from God – the hidden treasure in the darkness and concealment places. It is equally important that when we think of the word, ‘light’, we don’t have a picture in our mind of some glamorous light that is going to take care of all our problems, but rather we incorporate the idea of the Divine Light, and we personalize these two ideas into getting in touch with our spirit, and thus, the Almighty. When we say the word, ‘God’, if you have any specific religion, incorporate in your thoughts and feelings that you are getting in touch with God in the context of what is comfortable to you. This is not specific to any religion and there is nothing to prevent any human from accessing their spirit and the experience of their spirit and the Almighty through this knowledge. As we do this, we dismantle the lies propagated by the falsehood that light and darkness are separate from each other and good and evil are at constant odds with each other.
Blog entry
14 May 2013 - 7:07am
CHANGING CONSCIOUSNESS
~ John & Patrice Robson
www.higherawareness.com
"Every human has four endowments -
SELF AWARENESS,
CONSCIENCE,
INDEPENDENT WILL and
CREATIVE IMAGINATION.
These give us the ULTIMATE HUMAN FREEDOM...
The POWER TO CHOOSE, TO RESPOND, TO CHANGE."
~ Stephen R. Covey
Why should we care about raising our consciousness?
When we set an intention to change and grow,
we begin a journey in which we move from coping,
to learning and finally,
to the enjoyment of living.
Here are some of the shifts we move through:
From dependence on the clock,
to charting a direction,
to moment-to-moment guidance from intuition.
From doing things right,
to doing the right things,
to being your true self.
From lack of self discipline
to having personal willpower
to being completely willing to express our essence.
From being out of control,
to being in control,
to trusting and letting go of the need to control.
WITH EACH STEP, WE EXPERIENCE GREATER FREEDOM, FULFILLMENT AND JOY.
Worth going for, don't you think?
[my caps and format]
Blog entry
13 May 2013 - 7:58pm
The Four Thoughts- from Pistis Sophia - a discourse between Jesus and Mary Magdelene
15 August 2008 - 5:52am | sierra
Four Thoughts from a discourse between Jesus and Mary Magdelene in" Pistis Sophia" Pg. 629-633
The four thoughts do not emanate from the intellectual or rational mind - they come from you Light Overself, which gives the insight as well as the desire to become an exalted Light Body, in relationship and in fusion with Christ.
First Thought- understanding of the difference between physical and spiritual consciousness; showing the choice of allegience one must make to either the higher hierarchies or to Adamas (the physical). A Disconnection with material nature.
(YOD)
Second Thought- the soul must walk through chaos and deception, but without lingering among mundane realities.Christ said,"We must break through our old patterns of destiny and astrological influences to reach the light...for we also have the Divine Spirit within us." (HE)
Third Thought- We must realize that deep within our being there is a negativity that does not stem from us, but from energies which surround us and are with us TO THE DEGREE THAT WE ARE IN THE WORLD. Thus, the third thought process is the Divine which as part of the Divine Name is our spine of strength.It permits us to know the (HE) our higher archetypal image, which overshadows and purifies the second thought; Transforming Self-Will into Divine Will.
(WAW)
Fourth Thought- We have a great opportunity, being in this world, to petition the Divine for true karmic release from the lower realms. It is the essence of who we are in this world that allows us to connect back into the higher worlds. We have the ability to break bonds and seals of the mental-emotional body with the power of the right thought-forms of Light.
(HE)
Thoughts are the essence of our being: they can be our angelic clothing or our destruction. They are the basis of creative power within all life. With right thought-forms, we can participate in the higher reality.
The four higher thoughts come together preventing the counterfeiting spirit or lower hierarchies from causing the soul to complete it's last circuit.
The thoughts restore our life energy-even for the material vehicle.
" The choice is always ours to utilize the Light Consciousness or to cast it aside;this is the power of free will that is offered to each soul in this realm of duality." pg.657
Mary acknowledges the Light power within is like a radiating salt crystal. Salt represents the natural crystalline growth of molecules. Salt is the combination of an acid and a base that become neutral when brought together into a six-sided "davidic" geometry,,,symbolizing perfect balance.
The one who is the salt crystal is the one who uses their light to become a "bonding" or preserving force, holding the micro- or macro- orders of creation together.
Teaching
13 May 2013 - 7:13pm
DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
By Graham Ledgerwood | The Mystic
www.themystic.org
"Dark night of the soul" sounds like a threatening and much to be avoided experience. Yet perhaps a quarter of the seekers on the road to higher consciousness will pass through the dark night. In fact, they may pass through several until they experience the profound joy of their true nature.
Many seekers would encourage the dark night experience if they knew what it was. However, to one engaged in the dark night, suffering seems unending.
The dark night occurs after considerable advancement toward higher consciousness. Indeed, the dark night usually occurs like an initiation before one of these special seekers is admitted into regular relationship with higher consciousness. The dark night also occurs to those who do not seek relationship but immersion or unity in the higher consciousness. While the term dark night of the soul is used broadly, its general meaning — in the field of higher consciousness — is a lengthy and profound absence of light and hope. In the dark night you feel profoundly alone.
YOU CAN'T FIT IN
The dark night usually develops this way:
You, as a genuine seeker, have gone through many significant phases as you progress toward higher consciousness. Your faith is strong. You have kept loyal companionship with fellow seekers and perhaps you have already found a special teacher. You’ve experienced indications of the reality of higher consciousness and yearn to be more deeply in communion with it. You see the principles of a higher power at work in your life. Yet, all in all, you find yourself somehow painfully on the outside. You feel caught between your old way of living, your old tendencies and associations, and this nebulous, unreachable realm of higher consciousness.
You feel an exile in both places. You don’t belong in the old pastimes. in the old empty or numbing way of life, yet you somehow can’t fit in or feel at home in the fellowship of those who talk naturally of the higher consciousness and its reality. They are experienced, they are absorbed in it. They are loving, giving people. But you are unable to live, with full heart and mind, the way they do. They’re able to apply the principles of higher consciousness easily, yet it’s so hard for you. They have manifestations and proofs on a regular basis. You only stretch like a human mule after a receding corncob while pulling the heavy weight of your old tendencies behind you.
You try to be good, and often you can’t. You try to be loving and find at times your heart is hard like stone. Sometimes your projects fall down around your ears. You keep struggling and still you don’t break through. You understand the path is one of joy and yet your life seems to have been barren for a month or two, perhaps longer. Where did that early joy and zest go?
HANGING ON
Up to this particular time there was joy, there was delight. But now there is only a hanging on, a dogged hanging on. You persist because you can’t conceive of going back to your old way of life. That seems impossible now. That would be like going to prison, living as if with a transorbital lobotomy.
You deeply want to have joy and fulfillment, easily manifest prosperity, but something’s not working. You don’t know what it is but something’s awry, and your meditations have lost their luster. Sometimes, during rare meditations, you do experience brief moments of peace. Your agonizing mind and heart rest from their turbulence and even these fleeting times of calm are so deeply appreciated. Your light dance of life, which had gone on for some time, is now a trudging in what seems a devastated and alien land.
Your fellow seekers look at you and show their concern. Their words of kindness are valued but you feel you’re somehow incapable of responding well. Your heart is numb. At these times your friends try to cheer you up. They invite you to dinner. You seem to perform fairly well, despite the emptiness you feel inside. What else is there to do? You wonder if you have any right to be in their fellowship at all. You think of leaving town, but where would you go? What good would diversion be?
A number of your friends in the fellowship of this great path know what you are going through for they have been through it themselves. They feel the main thing to do is encourage you to go on. They know if you keep it up and do not quit you will succeed. They know if you quit you will be a self-reject and will return to the old life, forever a foreigner, being neither at home with it nor at home anywhere else. They recognize that your own higher self, out of love, is lifting you up into its embrace. They see you are being drawn into your dark night because:
your inner potential has great stature
your crusty, old ego requires you go through the dark night in order to be transformed.
You Feel Totally Alone
Other seekers, for various reasons, do not have to pass through the dark night. However, the dark night is your way.
Your night is a very difficult time. While others may one day envy you for the marvelous growth you experienced in such a short, intensified period, you will, because of the pain of your experience, always feel profound compassion for those whom you one day see going through a similar night.
Being caught between the old way of life and the new possibilities, your sense of alienation intensifies. Your sense of inadequacy and not knowing what to do next becomes gnawingly constant. You feel you would do anything to get out of this state, yet it is only your ego which is keeping you in it. However, this insight is impossible for you to grasp while going through your long night.
And you feel so totally alone. Sure, you have friends and you appreciate them, but you are keenly aware they are not capable of feeling what you are feeling or knowing what you are going through. Sometimes they seem like clowns, sometimes they seem empty-headed, caught up in meaningless pursuits. They do not understand, you think, how much you are suffering or how you cry out and pray deep into each midnight. You try their advice but it doesn’t seem to touch the heart of the matter.
You begin to enter the dark night in earnest when you feel completely stranded. In the fullness of the dark night you don’t know where you are spiritually. You’re separate from God and man. You do not know where to turn. Your friends love you and wish you well but your condition does not improve.
The dark night is a very private matter. The person in the dark night is generally able to function quite well despite inner suffering. Often your acquaintances never suspect that you are going through the dark night — they probably do not even know what it is. Only people close to you — especially friends along the path — can recognize your pain.
You feel like a hollow person doing the activities of life with no motivation except expediency. Your eyes seem deeper in your head. You are profoundly aware of the suffering of humanity and the cruelty of one person to another. You feel that cruelty and negativity far outweigh love and constructive action.
YOU ENTER MIDNIGHT
Alone, and not wishing to be, unable even to express yourself to others, you enter midnight and the greatest intensity of the dark night. Here you have finally come to the time of sovereign solitude. In this precious time, which has no apparent prospects of love or happiness, you clearly perceive that nothing in the outer world has proven adequate to heal your condition. Nobody, not even your dearest friends and loved ones, can make you whole. Even if they have tried, and love you enough to try loving you forever, they can’t give you peace.
You eye your books and consider all the benefit you have gained from these extremely wise vessels of truth. Yet not one book, not one thought, goes deep enough inside you to where the affliction abides.
You look at your possessions, your money container. No material thing has been able to help you. No material means have worked. Nothing, no one, in the outer world has enabled you to come out of this dark night.
In your loneliness, you next — in a seemingly random process — notice that none of your thoughts have proven adequate to your suffering. Not one — even repeated fifty thousand times — breaks the inner storm and lets in light. God and higher consciousness seem so far away that perhaps they are unreal. Neither one has, despite your protracted exposure of yourself, done anything to ease or remove your agony. Nothing appears efficacious. Nothing works.
Clearly, there is nowhere to turn. There is nothing to be done. All actions you considered have been tried. There is nothing to think, nothing to feel, nothing to do, nowhere to go. It seems you have to accept this defeat — or, you can persist in struggling against it. For awhile longer, you go about thinking, feeling, and doing other options that occur to you. But you realize in the midnight of your soul that you have tried every option you know of.
THE PEACE COMES
Helpless, totally helpless, as well as ever so alone, you abide in this condition. And you accept your predicament. You accept that there is really, except for a murmured prayer to a remote Lord and a remnant of a shredded faith, nothing else left.
Suicide would be absurd. Suicide would be an act of arrogance and vanity. You have grown far beyond such primitive responses to your private agony. No, nothing to do. Nothing remains in this lonely helplessness. There is, without question, nothing you can do.
You abide. You accept your state. How have you gotten to this place? That’s insignificant. Musings and feelings aside, you wait. You feel you may have to stay this way forever, doing the regular day-to-day things, but in this mood of emptiness. Nothing. Nothing.
Then, it happens. A holy presence comes into your room — sweetly, softly. You feel it filling you. Your mind is filled with mellow or bright light. Your heart, your still heart, is permeated with peace. This peace moves through your body like a cold spring of mountain water. It flows in your spine, your brain, and under your skin. Everywhere.
Also, this presence, this comforter, moves like a breeze across your arid mind and numb heart. Then, or a few days later, the fire of joy begins to smoulder. Here, abiding with nothing more to do, your ego drops away! Your ignorant, arrogant, fearful sense of self falls away from you. You stand in light — a new being, a free being — transformed.
YOUR EGO SENSE
Believe it or not, that’s what the dark night is all about: transformation. Your ego, your limited sense of self, your inadequate complex of ideas about who you are had to be dissolved. Your ego was, you begin to see, eclipsing higher consciousness and your true nature. Your old sense of self was inadequate to your new hopes and proper state. Your suffering intensified because of a major misapprehension. You were too used to thinking of yourself based on inputs from your previous experiences in life. On and on through life, you gathered information and responses from the world which indicated to you what kind of person you were and are. These superficial units of related inputs became integrated in what is called the ego — your sense of self, your sense of who you are. As long as you allowed this inaccurate or only partial sense of who you are to dominate, you could not know or abide in your true nature.
Your ego sense is so powerful — you invest it with so much of your thought and feeling — that your attitudes of life become based on an egocentric perspective. The ego gains a progressively greater foothold on your entire life because your basic attitudes about your existence and essential nature are strongly linked with ego.
Then, your ego sense, due to your suffering or your limitations in life, wants to have more power over circumstances and a more pleasant life. The ego sense often becomes motivated to seek higher consciousness and, thus, greater ability to dominate in life. Not always, but often, it is the ego sense which most eagerly pursues higher consciousness. It wants to be in charge; it wants to manipulate events and make life come out more to its satisfaction. But, as long as your ego dominates, it is on a collision course with your true nature and your higher consciousness. There’s going to be a showdown. There has to be a confrontation sometime if your higher consciousness is ever to emerge, if you are ever to know truly who you are and what your human capabilities are.
Furthermore — and this is extremely important, especially in understanding the dark night of the soul — your ego, as it develops from childhood onward, has the conviction that it is the doer. Generally, your ego assumes that it chooses what your mind will think, and chooses what your heart will feel. It feels it selects the various actions and activities you are going to undertake. Your sense of self, being convinced it is the doer, feels it accomplishes anything and everything in your life. Do you see, then, how the dark night develops? A false sense of self has been ignorantly and manipulatively standing in the way of enlightenment.
Additionally, until you are consolidated in higher consciousness, your ego can return and reestablish control if you let it. Sometimes when you’re fatigued or when you have special, new opportunities in life, you are vulnerable to the reestablishment of your ego and its opinion that it is in charge of doing everything. It will again eclipse the higher consciousness until you recognize what has happened. Then you must courageously and consciously reaffirm your true nature, and deal with the upstart, old ego. Otherwise, another dark night phase will again develop.
ATTEMPTS OF THE EGO
A person seeking higher consciousness is, in effect, and with intensity, seeking the transformation of his own ego. He is seeking to end the tyranny of the ego and abide in his true nature,instead of a false nature concocted through experiences and emotional inputs during the process of life. While it is true these inputs have a value in subjecting you to new experiences and so offer unique learning situations, they often give you a delusory sense of self. You are not your mistake. Even a murderer can change and become a new being.
Still, as you progress toward higher consciousness, your ego may not be humbling and daily transforming itself. You may, instead, have a highly developed ego which is sure that it is causing the events of higher consciousness to unfold bit by bit. Your ego, after all, can be very interested in the attributes of higher consciousness, in meditation and association with enlightened beings. Your ego feels gratification and satisfaction in moving on down the road toward higher consciousness.
Your ego may also have the opinion that, because of its grasp of matters, it will one day establish or — by its thought process and feelings —bring about enlightenment and awakening. It is convinced that it will achieve higher consciousness. This is ironic because by the time of the dark night, the ego is the main obstacle; it is the obstruction of the light of consciousness. It stands between you and your fulfillment. In fact, the length of your dark night is based on the truculence and cunning of your ego. It can fight a very lengthy battle if it fears it’s going to be destroyed or will have to give in to something so much greater than it knows itself to be.
Incredibly, your ego wants to be in on the act of enlightenment. Ego wants to bring about higher consciousness by its own dramatic means. Certainly, it doesn’t want to be granted fulfillment by a power outside of itself. Convinced that it is the doer, your ego holds on for dear life — until that event called the dark night of the soul, when your ego awakens to the profound fact it cannot cause or bring about higher consciousness.
Ego cannot, by its will or any other skills whatever, create the wholeness of heart which will end your deep suffering. In a sense your ego recognizes itself — in the dark night — to be the disease. It recognizes that its foothold on your mind and heart has, at an advanced stage on your path, proven a great numbing agent and a high stone wall against the light. Ego stands against the fulfillment of your faith and the realization of your profoundest yearnings. Finally your ego has found something it cannot do and, in the dark night of the soul, it becomes totally convinced it is inadequate. It cannot deal with your suffering or the fulfillment of the heart’s yearning. Nothing it can do, think, say, buy, or travel to, will in any way suffice.
DAWN OF A NEW LIFE
Here in this dark night, the lifelong ego sense dies: impotent. Having fulfilled its part, now weak and incompetent, it is dissolved — transmuted. From a higher sense now awakening within you, you slough off your false sense of self. You now know yourself to be a different person than you thought you were. Your ego was merely experiencing some of the attributes, some of the qualities, of your true nature, while at the same time obstructing others.
You, in passing successfully through the dark night, enter the realms of higher consciousness. You’ve been cleansed of the most deep-rooted sickness: your ignorance of your true nature and your inadequate, often totally wrong opinion of who you are. You now cease your inner conflict and abide serenely in your true nature. The night is over. The dawn of a new life in higher consciousness transforms your bleak life of the past few months into one with a heavenly nature. You have been delivered of the intolerable bondage to ego.
Henceforth, you will walk the earth seeing others afresh, living a new life, and abiding in your true nature. You have become a son or daughter of higher consciousness. Now your words and actions will be attuned with your true self. Now you express inspiration and comfort.
The dark night has passed. It is over.
Blog entry
13 May 2013 - 6:39pm
ENERGIZE YOUR INTUITIVE INTELLIGENCE - IT LIVES IN YOUR HEART
~ Christina Fisher
www.the goldenheartdialogue.wordpress.com - May 10, 2013
Ask your Over Lighting presence to lead, guide, and direct you into your intuitive intelligence.
It is time to muster up. We are being encouraged now. The crossing has taken place It is the crossing of choice points—-timelines are shifting. Time to go inside for self-reference now.
Go inside where our congruency lives. Sit in the quiet, drop into the heart and bow to the light of love within.
Energize love. Be the prayer. Let your prayer pray you.
Utilize practical tools to ground and balance each and every day.What do we want to energize at this time? Were do we want our thoughts to drift to as they do anyway all day long?
We want them to drift to congruency, to the middle way. We want our thoughts to reflect our heart. We know our heart is clear and in harmony with the truth of who we are.
Surround yourself with people places and things, to support, encourage and empower you. Shift what you are doing and take a break in your day to touch in with and drop into the true person you are. Your lumanity-your divine/human form– is just beneath the surface invisibly hidden under your two-piece suit or uniform.
The Golden Heart Mantra is perfect for settling into the heart. This is a code for energizing the heart where our intuitive intelligence is. Our intuitive intelligence is the master of our being. There is no confusion and no second guessing with regard to our heart intelligence.
The Golden Heart Mantra
I align to the Heart
I align to Truth
I align to my I Am Presence
I am Thou
I am Now
As we engage at this level we provide ourselves with a safe intent. An intent free of angst and discord. These choice points are crucial to our transformation and the ascension of our heart consciousness. What we choose now is pertinent to our future.
Timelines are real. It is best to be aware of this so you are coherent and are able to choose the timeline of your true destiny. Choose the timeline that will support your divine purpose and select the choice point that facilitates your merging with Divine Consciousness and the Heart of Love.
Many of the metaphors I apply in my writing are encoded. These lines of text carry the frequency of love. They are often written in step-ladder sets. I often write and receive them through my intuition in all capitals.
You may visit this archive for many posts similar to this one. I was born into a Writer’s Guild of Light. A guild that contains the writings of the Living Light of the Ages. This writing is being laid down in a body of work for the future. Those who find these writings provide a vehicle for others. As these writings are read they are transmitted throughout the Cosmos. Just like everything else that is expressed. We forget how powerful we are. Out thoughts our words and all else that comes through us, goes out into the Ethereal Realm.
We are creating as we go. I received the following mantra two years ago. I suggest the following mantra.
Amma Aya, Amma Aya, Amma Aya
This is the sound of Love. This is for planetary and personal protection. I was provided this mantra two days after the Japanese Tsunami in 2011. I have offered this mantra in a free MP3 3-minute download previously. I offer this again at this time. The mantra was sung through me in a one time recording to capture the tone, cadence and intonation.
Our multiverses and our planet operate through sound harmonics. We surely do impact our earth and beyond through our intent with our words and language. Think Aum. Any mantra that is also sung in silence has the same effect. Sometimes I am taking a walk and the mantra sings through me automatically.
This is our new level of engagement. Engage with your congruency.
If you have wondered what ascension is, well this is it, going up the ladder of consciousness through the doorway of your heart.
Be clear when the choice of awakening more of your intuitive intelligence is before you and remember the basics.
Who you truly are
Why you are here
And where you are going
Teaching
13 May 2013 - 9:54am
The Thunder, Perfect Mind- The Divine Feminine Speaks
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wrestlingwithyourself/2013/05/the-thunder-perfect-mind-the-divine-feminine-speaks/
” ‘Thunder Perfect Mind’ is a marvelous, strange poem. It speaks in the voice of a feminine divine power, but one that unites all opposites. One that is not only speaking in women, but also in all people. One that speaks not only in citizens, but aliens, it says, in the poor and in the rich. It’s a poem which sees the radiance of the divine in all aspects of human life, from the sordidness of the slums of Cairo or Alexandria, as they would have been, to the people of great wealth, from men to women to slaves. In that poem, the divine appears in every, and the most unexpected, forms….
‘Thunder Perfect Mind’ may have been written in Egypt. It’s probably written by somebody who knows the traditions of Isis, knows the traditions of the Jews. It shows that this movement grew up in a world in which Jewish, Egyptian, Greek, Roman traditions are mingled and mixing and well-known to many sophisticated people. All you had to do is travel around a city, like Carnac, and you saw all these images, and these various religions and these various cultures mixing.’
– Elaine Pagels, from her interview in FRONTLINE’s From Jesus to Christ
The Thunder, Perfect Mind
(found in the Nag Hammadi Library)
Translated by George W. MacRae
I was sent forth from the power,
and I have come to those who reflect upon me,
and I have been found among those who seek after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,
and you hearers, hear me.
You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.
And do not banish me from your sight.
And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing.
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!
Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am <the mother> and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom,
and it is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father
and the sister of my husband
and he is my offspring.
I am the slave of him who prepared me.
I am the ruler of my offspring.
But he is the one who begot me before the time on a birthday.
And he is my offspring in (due) time,
and my power is from him.
I am the staff of his power in his youth,
and he is the rod of my old age.
And whatever he wills happens to me.
I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the voice whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
and hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,
and you who confess me, deny me.
You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,
and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.
You who know me, be ignorant of me,
and those who have not known me, let them know me.
For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am shameless; I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and peace.
Give heed to me.
I am the one who is disgraced and the great one.
Give heed to my poverty and my wealth.
Do not be arrogant to me when I am cast out upon the earth,
and you will find me in those that are to come.
And do not look upon me on the dung-heap
nor go and leave me cast out,
and you will find me in the kingdoms.
And do not look upon me when I am cast out among those who
are disgraced and in the least places,
nor laugh at me.
And do not cast me out among those who are slain in violence.
But I, I am compassionate and I am cruel.
Be on your guard!
Do not hate my obedience
and do not love my self-control.
In my weakness, do not forsake me,
and do not be afraid of my power.
For why do you despise my fear
and curse my pride?
But I am she who exists in all fears
and strength in trembling.
I am she who is weak,
and I am well in a pleasant place.
I am senseless and I am wise.
Why have you hated me in your counsels?
For I shall be silent among those who are silent,
and I shall appear and speak,
Why then have you hated me, you Greeks?
Because I am a barbarian among the barbarians?
For I am the wisdom of the Greeks
and the knowledge of the barbarians.
I am the judgement of the Greeks and of the barbarians.
I am the one whose image is great in Egypt
and the one who has no image among the barbarians.
I am the one who has been hated everywhere
and who has been loved everywhere.
I am the one whom they call Life,
and you have called Death.
I am the one whom they call Law,
and you have called Lawlessness.
I am the one whom you have pursued,
and I am the one whom you have seized.
I am the one whom you have scattered,
and you have gathered me together.
I am the one before whom you have been ashamed,
and you have been shameless to me.
I am she who does not keep festival,
and I am she whose festivals are many.
I, I am godless,
and I am the one whose God is great.
I am the one whom you have reflected upon,
and you have scorned me.
I am unlearned,
and they learn from me.
I am the one that you have despised,
and you reflect upon me.
I am the one whom you have hidden from,
and you appear to me.
But whenever you hide yourselves,
I myself will appear.
For whenever you appear,
I myself will hide from you.
Those who have [...] to it [...] senselessly [...].
Take me [... understanding] from grief.
and take me to yourselves from understanding and grief.
And take me to yourselves from places that are ugly and in ruin,
and rob from those which are good even though in ugliness.
Out of shame, take me to yourselves shamelessly;
and out of shamelessness and shame,
upbraid my members in yourselves.
And come forward to me, you who know me
and you who know my members,
and establish the great ones among the small first creatures.
Come forward to childhood,
and do not despise it because it is small and it is little.
And do not turn away greatnesses in some parts from the smallnesses,
for the smallnesses are known from the greatnesses.
Why do you curse me and honor me?
You have wounded and you have had mercy.
Do not separate me from the first ones whom you have known.
And do not cast anyone out nor turn anyone away
[...] turn you away and [... know] him not.
[...].
What is mine [...].
I know the first ones and those after them know me.
But I am the mind of [...] and the rest of [...].
I am the knowledge of my inquiry,
and the finding of those who seek after me,
and the command of those who ask of me,
and the power of the powers in my knowledge
of the angels, who have been sent at my word,
and of gods in their seasons by my counsel,
and of spirits of every man who exists with me,
and of women who dwell within me.
I am the one who is honored, and who is praised,
and who is despised scornfully.
I am peace,
and war has come because of me.
And I am an alien and a citizen.
I am the substance and the one who has no substance.
Those who are without association with me are ignorant of me,
and those who are in my substance are the ones who know me.
Those who are close to me have been ignorant of me,
and those who are far away from me are the ones who have known me.
On the day when I am close to you, you are far away from me,
and on the day when I am far away from you, I am close to you.
[I am ...] within.
[I am ...] of the natures.
I am [...] of the creation of the spirits.
[...] request of the souls.
I am control and the uncontrollable.
I am the union and the dissolution.
I am the abiding and I am the dissolution.
I am the one below,
and they come up to me.
I am the judgment and the acquittal.
I, I am sinless,
and the root of sin derives from me.
I am lust in (outward) appearance,
and interior self-control exists within me.
I am the hearing which is attainable to everyone
and the speech which cannot be grasped.
I am a mute who does not speak,
and great is my multitude of words.
Hear me in gentleness, and learn of me in roughness.
I am she who cries out,
and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.
I prepare the bread and my mind within.
I am the knowledge of my name.
I am the one who cries out,
and I listen.
I appear and [...] walk in [...] seal of my [...].
I am [...] the defense [...].
I am the one who is called Truth
and iniquity [...].
You honor me [...] and you whisper against me.
You who are vanquished, judge them (who vanquish you)
before they give judgment against you,
because the judge and partiality exist in you.
If you are condemned by this one, who will acquit you?
Or, if you are acquitted by him, who will be able to detain you?
For what is inside of you is what is outside of you,
and the one who fashions you on the outside
is the one who shaped the inside of you.
And what you see outside of you, you see inside of you;
it is visible and it is your garment.
Hear me, you hearers
and learn of my words, you who know me.
I am the hearing that is attainable to everything;
I am the speech that cannot be grasped.
I am the name of the sound
and the sound of the name.
I am the sign of the letter
and the designation of the division.
And I [...].
(3 lines missing)
[...] light [...].
[...] hearers [...] to you
[...] the great power.
And [...] will not move the name.
[...] to the one who created me.
And I will speak his name.
Look then at his words
and all the writings which have been completed.
Give heed then, you hearers
and you also, the angels and those who have been sent,
and you spirits who have arisen from the dead.
For I am the one who alone exists,
and I have no one who will judge me.
For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins,
and incontinencies,
and disgraceful passions,
and fleeting pleasures,
which (men) embrace until they become sober
and go up to their resting place.
And they will find me there,
and they will live,
and they will not die again.
Story
12 May 2013 - 11:09am
Remove yourself from being Limited and Become Limitless
Melchizedek’s Weekly Message ~ May 12 – 19, 2013
Received by Julie Miller
May 12, 2013
Every day is an opportunity to look deep into the areas of your life that brings dissatisfaction. When you focus on these areas, you are greeting a potential to expand these areas by increasing the distance of your comfort zones, making them wider and possibly dropping them altogether. It is important dear ones to comprehend dissatisfaction is not a new concept for you to learn, you have experienced this more than once. We have seen many dear souls become indifferent and oftentimes stagnant in their own growth as a person and dissatisfaction also has created delays in your ability to make healthier decisions. When you are feeling dissatisfied, feelings of woe take over, and a sense of hopelessness becomes a companion. Remember dear ones, even your thoughts are choices. If you ever feel hopeless, it is only because you have thought it and made it so. When feeling dissatisfied, you are expressing that there is no way out of the current situation and causing limitations within your own Self when in fact you are limitless.
If you are truly dissatisfied with how your journey has progressed so far, look at it as a positive opportunity. This is a time dear ones instead of feeling helpless or hopeless, you have ample opportunity to let go of all the old and embrace new Light and Love bringing ways into your entire life. Letting go, and embracing the new removes you from the feeling of being limited to being limitless. Understand dear ones; limitations will affect your logic and the understanding of your own well-being. It is important dear ones to sit back and see how you actually participate in all areas of your life and through your self-observation you will recognize where the dissatisfaction comes in and from this observation you will be able to determine just how dissatisfied you are. Any challenges that you are currently in or just passed through didn’t just occur out of thin air, they were created from feelings of dissatisfaction and when you become uncomfortable in a certain area and your Self responds through these heavy feelings of woe. When you learn to let go of any limitations that you discover, you propel yourself out of feeling dissatisfied and back into a calmer state of mind.
Instead of seeing the negative experiences as unpleasant, look at them as opportunities filled with positive steps that will help you overcome the many obstacles you yourself created. It is through your own decisions and choices that are created when you judge yourself, that dissatisfaction is born. You cannot bring change into your life dear ones until you are ready to admit and accept that change is required. Bringing change is simple dear ones. It requires no complicated steps or procedures; just a decision that you commit to in order to stop a cycle that demonstrates clearly that it’s no longer inspiring or motivating you. Every time you take the brave step beyond your comfort zone, you enhance the quality of your whole life. Moving forward does require courage, acceptance and faith that in time from your hard work and applied patience will bring you to a happier and peaceful state of mind.
Once you make the conscious decision dear ones to leave behind your dissatisfaction and feelings of woe, all possibilities for your journey becomes infinite. Every time you decide to devote time to your Self, you are being accountable for the situations that you have recently experienced. When you can accept that you do have the Power and the Strength to improve your life you are showing your whole Self the way out of your current moment of suffering. There is no other person that can do this for you. This is your journey. Yes there are others that can support you, love you and offer you guidance, but each step is yours to take. Only you can end the dissatisfaction and increase the amount of Light and Love from God into your life which will aid in expanding the quality of your life. Each time you decide to work on your Self in areas that you know require further development you are increasing your own self-esteem and confidence. Because this is your life, your journey dear ones, it’s important to be an active participant in order to make choices that will create satisfaction.
When you decide dear ones to interact more with others, instead of avoiding them, you are helping your self-esteem. And when your self-esteem is increased, you are able to make better, healthier decisions and you demonstrate to your Self that you are ready to learn something different – go beyond your comfort zones. And this dear ones is a big step because you are learning to triumph over your dissatisfaction. Remember dissatisfaction is only a feeling. When you hold onto these feelings dear ones they create the situation out of what you dislike. But when you allow your Self to move forward and progress, you will understand deeper depths of being satisfied. Just remember dear ones, how you do anything is how all is done, through your thoughts…you change your thoughts you change your direction. Every time you make a conscious choice that supports and empowers you, you are bringing in more opportunities that will influence better choices and bring in more feelings of satisfaction.
After you take the time to truly see with all honesty the areas of your life that create feelings of dissatisfaction, you provide your Self to envision the current situation as it could have been. Think more often, that you can instead of thinking you can’t. When you see the simplicity in things rather looking at situations and creating complexity you will recognize what it is you need to do in order to make your goals a success. Even if it takes baby steps you will reach them. Change the way you self-talk and see your Self as worthy and commend yourself for all the hard work you have accomplished, the tough storms you have weathered. Remember dear ones, each time you tell yourself, I can’t you are limiting yourself and preventing yourself from letting go of old behaviours and ways and this is where the feeling of being stuck often comes in. It’s essential to the development and growth of your whole self and of your journey to create positive thought forms – your thoughts do help to create your decisions…they will either hinder or facilitate your success.
When you finally let go of your dissatisfied feelings, you will experience and begin to learn what it feels like to be satisfied. The easiest way to move beyond any dissatisfaction is through your own permission to Release these feelings. When you release any discordant feelings you challenge your fears and from your release you dissolve dissatisfaction from each area of your life. Accepting where changes need to be added and releasing all dissatisfied feelings will show you how to be truly satisfied with your own Self. This is a gift you Release to your Self and we think each of you are truly worthy of such a divine gift.
And so it is…
I AM Melchizedek through Julie Miller
Blog entry
12 May 2013 - 3:47am
~ Emotional Transformation - Spiritual Emergence Defined ~
" When personal growth becomes a crisis of transformation ."
The following is an extract from "The Stormy Search for the Self" by Stan and Christina Grof.
They coined the phrase 'spiritual emergence' for this phenomenon,
and this is one of the best books available on the topic.
"In the most general terms, spiritual emergence can be defined as the movement of a individual to a more expanded way of being that involves enhanced emotional and psychosomatic health, greater freedom of personal choices, and a sense of deeper connection with other people, nature and the cosmos. An important part of this development is an increasing awareness of the spiritual dimension in one's life and in the universal scheme of things.
Spiritual development is an innate evolutionary capacity of all human beings. It is a movement towards wholeness, the discovery of one's true potential. And it is as common and natural as birth, physical growth, and death - an integral part of our existence. For centuries, entire cultures have treated inner transformation as a necessary and desirable aspect of life. Many societies have developed sophisticated rituals and meditative practices as ways to invite and encourage spiritual growth. Humanity has stored the treasure of emotions, visions and insights involved in the process of awakening in paintings, poetry, novels and music, and in descriptions provided by mystics and prophets. Some of the most beautiful and valued contributions to the world of art and architecture celebrate the mystical realms.
For some individuals, however, the transformational journey of spiritual development becomes a "spiritual emergency", a crisis in which the changes within are so rapid and the inner states so demanding that, temporarily, these people may find it difficult to operate fully in everyday reality. In our time, these individuals are rarely treated as if they are on the edge of inner growth. Rather they are almost always viewed through the lens of disease and treated with technologies that obscure the potential benefits these experiences can offer.
In a supportive environment, and with proper understanding, these difficult states of mind can be extremely beneficial, often leading to physical and emotional healing, profound insights, creative activity and permanent personality changes for the better.
When we [the Grof's] coined the term spiritual emergency we sought to emphasize both the danger and opportunity inherent in such states. The phrase is, of course, a play on words, referring to both the crisis, or "emergency", that can accompany transformation, and to the idea of "emergence", from the Latin emergere: 'to rise' or 'to come forth'. This name thus indicates a precarious situation, but also the potential for rising to a higher state of being. The Chinese pictogram for crisis perfectly represents this idea. It is composed of two elementary signs, one of which means 'danger' and the other 'opportunity'.
The potential for spiritual emergence is an innate characteristic of human beings. The capacity for spiritual growth is as natural as the disposition of our bodies toward physical development, and spiritual rebirth is as normal a part of human life as biological birth. Like birth, spiritual emergence has been seen for centuries by many cultures as an intrinsic part of life, and, like birth, it has become pathologized in modern society. The experiences that occur during this process cover a wide spectrum of depth and intensity, from the very gentle to the overwhelming and disturbing."
Why does Spiritual Emergence happen?
It seems that at the core of this experience our Soul/Spirit is demanding recognition, healing and transformation. It is the healing crisis of the whole Being. From the core of our Being there is a cry for freedom and true expression. We are being asked to awaken to the Truth of who we are - to know ourselves. It demands we shed limiting beliefs and old ways, and strip away the illusions and false images about ourselves and life.
The wide range of triggers of spiritual emergence suggests that our readiness for inner transformation is by far the most important factor. For some people it can be very intense and frightening, for others it may be a gentle unfolding. This experience is not only confined to those engaged in regular spiritual practices, such as meditation, prayer or yoga, which are specifically designed to activate spiritual energies. It can happen to anyone at anytime.
It may begin as a sense of longing for something more, a longing that leads us to explore our inner depths or to embark upon a quest for meaning. It can also be triggered by emotional intensity or stress, physical exertion, disease, intense sexual experience, childbirth, shock or other forms of trauma, exposure to psychedelic drugs and artistic or creative practices. These are all powerful experiences that have the potential to open us fully, and open a way to the hidden depths of our psyche.
For anyone undergoing this process, the crisis is often due to the intense activation of the psyche involved. Psychological upheaval can happen as a result of the radical clearing of various old traumatic memories and imprints. The process is by its very nature potentially healing and transformative.
Forms Spiritual Emergence can take
Ego death and dark night of the soul: These states can arise as a stage in a particular spiritual practice or as a result of life circumstances that challenge one's sense of identity, self-image or status. They centre on the dissolution of the self - our inner and outer worlds - and a consequent loss of reference points.
The awakaning of Kundalini: This refers to the spiritual energy that arises from the base of the spine. Some symptoms are - tremors of energy rising up the spine; sensations of extreme hot or cold; perception of flashing lights; psychological upheaval.
Shamanic crisis: This typically involves images/sensations/dreams focused on a quest or journey to the underworld where demons or animal spirits are often encountered, culminating in experiences of death, dismemberment and annihilation before a rebirth.
Near-death experience: These experiences often involve an unusual and profound shift in the experience of reality. This usually includes an out-of-body experience and can involve profound lessons about life and universal laws.
Episodes of unitive consciousness: An experience of transcending the ordinary distinction between object and subject and experiencing ecstatic union with humanity, nature, the cosmos and God.
Crisis of psychic opening: This may involve channeling, telepathy, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences and meaningful coincidences.
Past life experience: People can behave irrationally because they are experiencing something from the past as part of their current life, or else a person can be haunted by physical feelings and emotions that are seemingly unconnected to anything in the personal history.
Possession states: This is characterized by an uncanny sense that one's body and psyche have been invaded and are being controlled by an alien energy or entity that has personal characteristics. It can be another type of 'crisis of psychic opening'.
Psychological renewal through the central archetype: This usually involves themes of death and rebirth, battles of opposing cosmic forces (eg good and evil), and a conviction of being the world saviour. If properly understood and treated as a difficult stage in a natural developmental process, spiritual emergence/emergencies can result in emotional and psychosomatic healing, deep positive changes of the personality, and the solution of many problems in life.
For further information on Spiritual Emergence
The Spiritual Emergence Network of Australia
Bragdon, E.A. A Sourcebook for Helping People in Spiritual Emergence
Greenwell, B. Energies of Transformation: A guide to the Kundalini process Grof, C. &
Grof, S. The Stormy Search for the Self: A Guide to Personal Growth Through Transformational Crisis
~~~~~~~~~~~ ** ^ ** ~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.emotional-transformation.com.au/spirit-emer.html
Blog entry
11 May 2013 - 11:00pm
Published on 11 May 2013 by PeterSiNeh
The longer we sit on pain the harder it is to allow it to surface and begin healing.
_/|\_NAMASKAR_/|\_
SiNeh~
Teaching
11 May 2013 - 11:09am
The Mind Gets Emptied and Quiet With Spiritual Surrender
By Maria Erving
http://mariaerving.com/mind-gets-emptied-with-spiritual-surrender/
Spiritual Surrender means to let go of everything, but we can’t do it by will.
It’s not about using will power but to let go of will power, because that’s the only thing that keeps you in bondage, the belief that you somehow can control life.
Spiritual surrender is not about “giving up” while throwing your hands up in the air with frustration just because you don’t get what you want – fast enough. That’s the ego’s game.
Spiritual surrender means to surrender to Life – oftentimes through utter defeat – when everything else has failed and you are on your wit’s end, not in an aggravated way, but with you being on your knees, crying your heart out, surrendering to a greater power, which you soon find out is your True Self.
It’s about letting go of the false self, but because most people take their false self to be their real self, this process can take years and years before its final.
We surrender more deeply for every time, and every time is sincere but also immature at first.
In the beginning, when we aren’t really sure of what surrender means, we think it’s about making a wish-list for the Santa for the grown-ups which is the law of attraction with all its vision-boards and so on, and then when we have handed over our little wishes and goals to the Almighty Genie, we sit back and wait for things to come to us; aka ‘letting go of the outcome’.
We let go of our wishes, we wait with great expectations (just like kids at Christmas) and we take action with the attitude of “surrendering the outcome to the universe” (with a “go after what you want”-mentality; another one of the egos game, who always stresses us to grasp and strive) but that’s not surrendering at all!
Spiritual surrender means letting go of EVERYTHING – yourself included.
That’s often times the final let go; the letting go of all the ideas you have about yourself, and all the things you want yourself to be and become.
You know that whatever is meant to stay, will stay, regardless of what your opinions are about it, so you relax into that – into trusting that life knows how to express itself without your help.
The purpose of life is this moment – are you letting Life express itself fully as you, or are you trying to control it by imposing your little plans and desires on it?
This is what life is now – and no one knows what tomorrow brings – that’s freedom and liberation!
This is what life is – right now. This is how life expresses itself through me – right now. How it will express itself tomorrow I have no clue about. All I really know is Right Now.
All your expectations of life will fall away also, and this is not something that is done by will power – that would be like trying to manipulate life.
The ego thinks that surrender means to surrender with an agenda (“If I surrender this I will receive that”), but that’s not how life works.
To let go thinking you will get something is to manipulate – it’s not sincere.
True surrender really means to let your mind be emptied from all concepts and beliefs, not to “create better feeling beliefs” but to let go of them all. It will happen when you come to the point where you sincerely ask God to take over because you know there’s nothing else you can do.
Spiritual Surrender means complete surrender and letting go.
It means total empty-handedness. (Which include empty-mindedness; you are realizing that You are beyond mind).
The mind gets quiet and cleaned out, and with time you will discover and experience for yourself how the mind tries to make sense of the silence because it’s so used to be active all the time.
Just to make an example; you will find that it fails to find the words to use to gossip, and you can watch it happen with amusement, with an attitude of ‘that’s interesting’, but you don’t get attached to the interest of what’s happening (you kind of stand outside watching it all), and you drop that too.
It’s like being totally relaxed into being and Life – and being totally and utterly OK with whatever is and comes, because you know without a doubt that this moment is your whole life and this moment is the purpose of your life too, so there’s nothing to figure out anymore.
There is no longer a past or future or the need to make plans. Except for practical reasons obviously, it’s great to know when the next train goes and so on, but the personal will is no longer what runs your life. (It never was to begin with).
There’s a sense of not caring anymore. Not in a “I don’t give a crap”-attitude/way, but in a very relaxed and peaceful way – as a matter of simply stating a fact.
Nothing seems to be important and significant that once was. You know that everything is exactly as it’s supposed to be and nothing is wrong. You feel lived, not as if you ‘have a life’, but that you are Life.
This moment becomes so precious that nothing of the old is significant or important in any way.
This is how it feels to really love life. This moment is perfect and unspeakably beautiful. (I’m even all emotional now, can’t find the words that can explain the beauty of this moment).
Surrender means to let go of everything you thought yourself to be and what you believed life was about, and let Life itself live and express itself through you, as you.
Teaching
11 May 2013 - 3:28am
We are in an amazing time filled with new potentials that offer each person the possibility to experience their highest visions and gift the world with amazing new ideas, innovations, works of art and discoveries.
The key to living along timelines where our highest and best exists is to unite our physical and energetic selves. As we become one within ourselves, we're able to unite with the gifts and talents we have cultivated throughout the history of our soul. Cultivating inner oneness allows us to do all this and more.
The greatest challenges we face are those that arise from a state of inner separation. This is what happens when we choose to see ourselves solely as a physical being. When we limit our experience to only that which we can observe with our physical senses, we cut ourselves off from a great amount of the assistance we would otherwise receive from our energetic self. It is through the union of our physical and energetic selves that we're able to access fifth-dimensional timelines aligned with our highest visions and dreams.
Unifying the Physical and the Energetic Bodies
We have a physical body we're able to observe through our five senses. Working in conjunction with the physical level is our energetic body which exists beyond the physical. Our energetic self is not confined to the boundaries of time and space. It is able to ride waves of energy and pick up the vibration of realities crystalyzing in our near future. Our energy body can access portals and time openings, receive and send information to and from the vast libraries of all-time and all-knowing. This information and assistance can be used to restore balance to all levels of our being.
Dream States help Assimilate Universal Knowledge
Once our energy body brings us what is needed, this information is assimilated in various ways, including dream states and deep levels of meditation. As we allow ourselves to put these understandings to use in our daily lives, we're able to restore balance at all levels of our being. When we restore balance in this way, we're able to bring about healing and regeneration of our physical system. Universal knowledge accessed by our energetic self helps us heal emotional wounds and unite with talents and abilities from past and future life selves. It allows us to experience deeper levels of self-realization in this lifetime. One lifetime fully realized has the power to entrain past and future life selves to their highest potentials and set us on the path of ascension.
We are More than our Physical Selves
Keys to unifying our physical and energetic bodies is to accept that we are more than our physical selves. This sounds simple but throughout time people have set intentions that effectively closed them off from receiving the blessings derived from the unification of these aspects of themselves.
Thought Viruses Seek to Conquer and Divide
Those divided within themselves are easy to control and enslave. When a person is shut off from receiving assistance and understanding from their energetic self, they are disempowered, their energy easily preyed upon. This leaves them subject to scarcity, struggle, suffering, disease and death.
Thought viruses are passed from one person to another. They are encoded into certain belief systems in much the same way that viruses are encoded into computer programs. When our physical and energetic selves work together, we are able to see through the thought viruses we encounter. We can be grateful for thought viruses because they provide us with important feedback as to where we're at with inner unification.
Intention Filters Block the Union of the Physical and Energetic Bodies
Our energetic self is always going out, bringing us what we need to carry out our mission here. It always brings us everything we ask for at the moment we ask for it. If we are not receiving the things we ask for, we can examine if we're blocking ourselves from receiving the love, information, abundance, assistance and resources we're asking for.
Some people limit their receptivity through beliefs about what they feel they deserve or don't deserve. Some people limit their receiving capability due to unhealed or unresolved emotions. There's an array of filters a person might place on their existence, each tied to a wound, intention or limiting belief that serves as a filter for their experience. Ironically, these filters block the very things that empower and enrich experience.
As we observe our own consciousness and bring awareness to any filters we're placing on our potentials, we're able to burn through anything that stands between our physical and energetic selves and the magical synchronicities that are the natural result of these two aspects of ourselves working together in perfect peace and harmony.
For more on timeline shifts, see Timeline and Identity Shifts: the New Science of Reality Creation by DL Zeta http://www.celestialvision.org/timeline-and-identity-shifts-e/
For more information, visit http://www.celestialvision.org/
Teaching
11 May 2013 - 3:21am
One of the keys to older or intergalactic souls and as well those souls who orient from the Angelic Kingdom is an astrology chart with the fewest lines of definition.I’ve done charts with no trines, two squares, one semi-square and a two sextiles. There were barely enough lines to define the soul. Angels love to place this limited glyph in the upper heaven. They also favor the 11th and 12th houses.
Another key to an older soul is the use of conjunctions and having several power points for transit definition. Still another key is loading up the ascendant or mid heaven with multiple planets. The mid heaven allows the use of the higher self during the lifetime and the ascendant allows the personality and character to exact their spiritual nature.
Grand Trine and Grand Cross Configurations
Two very important aspects are the Grand Trine and the Grand Cross. Pleaideans will use multiple Grand Trines as they are graced with abundance and most often fall in career fields that include health care and teaching.
Grand Crosses are different in that they are earned through past lives. Although a Grand Cross in the chart can offer as much burden in the life as grace, it does, however, serve as an indicator of an older soul’s efforts throughout many centuries.
Excerpt from Discerning Planetary Origin and Soul Age through the Astrology Chart by Peter Phalam http://www.celestialvision.org/planetary-origins-ebook/
For more about Peter, see http://www.celestialvision.org
Story
11 May 2013 - 3:02am
As science continues its search of subatomic matter, we in the metaphysical community can gain insight into the meaning of many of our tools. To understand ‘The God Particle’ simply accept the idea that all electromagnetic energy is connected through subatomic particles. All electromagnetic energy has dimensional levels and creates our dimensional reality. It is the only part of matter that transcends physical matter. Archangels and ascended masters are made entirely of ‘God Particles’. Our light bodies and merkabahs are completely composed of subatomic matter.
I am an astrologer, and when I talk about the current transit of Saturn through the sign of Scorpio and its effect on the natal planets in a person’s chart, I am examining the subatomic magnetic influence of Saturn upon our subconscious minds. Thought processes are therefore subatomic energy which can be arranged in sacred configurations or irreverent formations. When crystals are placed on or around a person how is the connection to the spirit created? When Reiki or basic energy work is performed the alignment of irreverent subatomic energy occurs.
Our food source also contains subatomic energy. A live vegetable still on the vine has a tremendous spiritual energy. When a vegetable is picked, the life force stays in sacred subatomic alignment for a short time then begins to deteriorate. Live foods are the only true manner of spiritual diet. Fruits and vegetables deteriorate quickly in terms of life force and subatomic energy so try to purchase them only for a few days’ use.
Water is the most essential element in our diets and is misunderstood on many levels. Rain falls and is often ionized by lightening fields and falls into fairly clean aquifers and reservoirs. What happens next is the problem. When water enters a “purification” process and chlorine type products are entered into our water source, the life force is dramatically reduced. When water is placed into a plastic container, the life force drops even more. If you ionize tap water and place it into glass, you have full subatomic energy and your body hydrates properly. All other processes potentially dehydrate the body and create increased aging factors.
The crystal tribes are here to create new alternative energy on the planet. They will understand how to create a collector of subatomic energy that will be much stronger than solar collectors. One tube that is ten feet long and 6 inches wide will power a small town. They created these on Telos in the Pleaidean star system. The environmental experts on Earth are still only 12 to 14 years old so this is still a ways off. The best way to understand subatomic energy is to obtain two dowsing rods that look like an L handle with rotating handles in your hands. Hold them in front of a friend and they will cross. Walk slowly away and they will gradually open up until they both point directly at the heart. When the rods cross, the subatomic energy is low; as we move into the light body the subatomic energy increases and the rods straighten.
Finally, your clairvoyant abilities expand when subatomic energy in your pineal gland is in place. Sunlight is the most fervent source for subatomic energy coming into your brain. Deep breathing exercises increase life force flow to your brain. This also strengthens clairaudient ability. Wear sunglasses less when you can. Drink one gallon of water every day and sit silently, breathing deeply for 15 minutes. As we develop more understanding of subatomic energy, we become masters of our spiritual evolution.
Blessings, Phalam
For more information about Peter, see http://www.celestialvision.org/
Teaching
10 May 2013 - 6:45pm
SOUL NOURISHMENT AND SELF-CARE
~ by Jane Alexander
www.smudging.com
"When you recover of discover something that nourishes your soul and brings joy, care enough about yourself to make room for it in your life." ~ Jean Shinoda Bolen
How do we care for our souls?
Where do we find nourishment for our innermost being?
If we have belief in a religious faith we tend to look to the time-honoured sanctuaries of the soul--church, synagogue, temple, mosque, perhaps the sacred grove. Other seekers try to nourish the soul with meditation and ritual, by talking to angels or walking with power animals. And yes, these certainly can nourish the soul, and nourish it well.
But I also feel that in our hunt for spiritual meaning, we can lose track of simpler ways of soul nourishment and self-care. Sometimes we can touch the soul just as deeply with a carefully prepared meal as we can with an intense sweat lodge. A genuine conversation with a neighbour can be as nourishing as an hour of prayer or meditation.
I suppose I'm talking about soul nourishment as a daily practice. It shouldn't be a chore, yet one more thing to squeeze into an already overcrowded day; but a pleasure, a break, a moment aside. It's about loving yourself--even the bits you don't like.
It's about being kind to yourself. It's about accepting that life is not all angels and transcendent experiences, but also about disappointment and routine--but that our souls can find treasure here too. It's about looking out for our bodies; it's about being kind to our feelings.
It's a kind of coffee break for the soul.
I can almost hear a collective cynical intake of breath and a rather ambivalent "hmmm". I know what you mean: finding the soul through the humdrum, particularly in the body, sounds a contradiction in terms. Surely our souls are as far removed from our earthy, mundane, physical bodies as the sun from the earth? Not so.
One of our greatest mistakes is to shun the body and seek the soul only in other, more "elevated" places. After all, who out of us truly knows where the soul lies, where it makes its home? We tend to think of our souls as residing somewhere in or above our heads, glittering in our auras or floating gracefully at a discrete, rather coy, distance from our fleshly being.
But other cultures claim the soul lies in the heart, that steadily pulsing great muscle deep in our chests. Others believe it hides in the liver, the great detoxifier; or in the stomach, the great processor; or in the lungs, the great inspirers; or in any number of corporeal places: the spleen, the gall-bladder, the solar plexus.
Who is right? Maybe they all are. To my mind, we can do far worse in our soul nourishment than to look within, to discover the wonder of the body.
HEY, YOU HAVE A BODY!
Try this exercise.
Stand naked in front of a full-length mirror. Quietly look at your body. Really look at it. At first you will probably only notice what you see as imperfections: you're too fat or too thin; a funny shape; too short, too tall; you have a horrible nose or breasts or stomach or feet….. Accept that everyone has parts of their body that they don't consider perfect and let the thought go. A practitioner of Huna massage I knew advised that you do this exercise every day until you start to FEEL TRUE ACCEPTANCE OF YOUR BODY.
You should start to notice the parts you actually like. Appreciate the parts that work for you - your strong legs that carry you; your wonderful hands that write, draw or work machinery; your belly that has carried or could carry a baby; your breasts that could feed a child. Your buttocks that cushion you…… I'm not going as far as to suggest you write affirmations to the tune of "I love my beautiful bowels" as some people prescribe - frankly, that makes me crease up with laughter. But accept that they do have a point--your bowels are pretty amazing, actually. So is your lymphatic system. So is everything within your body.
SOUL EXERCISE
BODIES ARE MEANT FOR MOVEMENT. There is nothing more wonderful than a fit healthy body moving freely, flexibly, to its full potential. Yet remarkably few of us exercise regularly and, strangely enough, those of us that do often inflict almost more harm on our bodies than good. Everyone has seen the exercise addict, pounding the Stairmaster every night for hours; doing three aerobics classes on the trot; running until they are gasping for air and their joints are pleading for mercy. This is punishing the body and it does as little for the soul as it does for the tendons, muscles and bones it mercilessly pounds.
Soul exercise is not about pushing your body to the limit. It's not about proving anything. It's not about being the best, the fastest, the thinnest. It's not about wearing the latest trainers or doing the trendiest class or fad. It's about DISCOVERING THE JOY OF MOVING YOUR BODY. It's like moving meditation.
It doesn't matter what form of exercise you choose. All that does matter is that you should choose something you enjoy. Why waste hours and a fortune going to a gym when you hate weight training and loathe aerobics classes? Why run if you hate running? Don't pick a sport because it's fashionable or because your best friend does it. PICK SOMETHING THAT MAKES YOU SMILE WHEN YOU THINK OF IT.
Of course, if you are very unfit or haven't exercised in years, you will have to be patient with yourself. It might take you a while to get into your chosen exercise and to begin with, it could well be tough. The key is to do it slowly, carefully and gradually build up your strength and stamina. You can do it.
The great news is that, if you haven't exercised for ages or ever, you will see real results really quickly. And you will discover the pure joy in feeling your body working--and enjoying the work. Aside from enjoying what you do, the other key factor in this "soul exercise" is that you need to KEEP IN TOUCH WITH YOUR BODY AS YOU WORK OUT.
I see people going around my gym with headphones clamped to their ears, music blasting out or cycling away, nose deep in the paper or a book. That defeats the whole point. Try instead to CONNECT WITH YOUR BODY , really feel the muscles working, check out how your heart is coping; how you're breathing. BE IN YOUR BODY, not evading it. Use your exercise time as mindfulness time: focus on how your body feels; become aware of your heart, listen to your breathing.
SMALL SOUL BREAKS FOR THE BODY
MOST OF US LIVE IN OUR HEADS. We can go virtually from one end of the day to the other without really thinking about our bodies. Sure we stop for lunch--or to gulp down a sandwich at our desks. OK, we get up once in a while to go to the bathroom--our bladders are one part of our bodies it's pretty hard to ignore.
But how often do we stop and sense our bodies, think about how they feel throughout the day? Probably not much, if at all.
So stop this very moment and take an inventory. Sense how your body feels. Is it stiff? How's your neck? Tense? Are your shoulders relaxed or up around your ears? Are you clenching your teeth so hard that when you think about it you realise your jaw is hurting?
Does your body need anything? Water perhaps (we easily become dehydrated and tea, coffee and fizzy drinks don't do the trick)? Food? (often our bodies are just plain hungry or hungry for food that really sustains. Some fruit maybe instead of a chocolate bar… or a proper lunch of soup, whole wheat bread and salad rather than a limp supermarket sandwich.)
Have you been sitting so long that your back aches or your buttocks are numb? Do you need a good stretch? A quick run up and down stairs? Do your eyes feel bright and clear, or sore and itchy? If you stare at a computer screen all day, do your eyes need to rest or to focus on something long distance for a change? Are you tired? Does your whole body need a quick catnap or a longer rest?
Of course it won't always be possible to give your body precisely what it needs but try to give it something, even if at times it is just a quick fix. Learn to listen to your body and try to help it any way you can.
MAKE-UP FOR THE SOUL
Even your daily cleansing and make-up routine can be transformed into a small but important ritual. Don't race through it--do it mindfully, carefully, thoughtfully. You are preparing yourself for the day ahead so think about how you want to face the day. What do you want to achieve? How do you want to feel? What do you want to remember throughout the day?
Use the time to ground yourself, to look at yourself in the mirror and think about who you really are. Will you act with integrity today? Will you give your best? Will you be kind - to yourself and to others? You may not feel your face is perfect but it is you, your outer self, so be gentle to it. Cleanse it gently, thoughtfully. Choose carefully the products you use on your skin. Cheap ones may be drying or coarse, pulling the skin. But equally expensive "designer" products may be full of unpleasant additives. Some are even cynically designed so your skin becomes dependent on them. While you use them, the skin looks wonderful but as soon as you stop, it loses its glow and looks stressed and strained.
Instead try to find pure, natural products which are made with integrity. "Soul" cosmetics need not cost the earth either. After all, why buy expensive toner when you could use rose water or witchhazel or orange-flower water instead? When I go to Italy I head for the nearest supermarket and stock up on bottles of rose-water. They cost next to nothing and are as good a toner as any fancy name product.
Above all keep it simple. Cosmetic companies would have us believe that we need a whole bathroom full of fancy products to keep us beautiful. The most effective beauty regimes in the world come from the East, particularly Japan. There they say that for a beautiful face you first need a good diet. Second you need to protect your skin from the ravages of the sun. Then you need to cleanse thoroughly and finally protect your skin. So choose your products with care. But also pick things you love. If you can't afford fancy pots there's nothing to stop you transferring the product into a different pot. Rummage around junk shops and car boot sales for old-fashioned jars, cut-glass or crystal pots and attractive bottles. Clean them thoroughly and decant your new products into lovely old-fashioned receptacles.
BATH BREAKS
Make bath-time soul-time--a time to lie and soak, and dream and muse and ponder. Run the bath, add your favourite herbs or oils or unguents. Light candles. Prepare warm fluffy towels for when you emerge. Lock the door and demand peace. You might like to play your favourite music, or you might like to relish some peace and pure quiet. Now undress slowly, step in, sink down--and relax. FEEL THE WATER HOLDING YOUR BODY. Feel the tensions sinking out of your body and into the water where they simply melt away. Stay as long as you like, topping up the water to keep warm.
You can buy expensive bath-soaks and unguents but the very best are the ones you make yourself. You know then they are totally pure and, by investing love and care in the making of them, you are providing your body with the extra knowledge that you are prepared to make an effort on its behalf. Try these…..
WARMING WINTER BATH: This is a recipe I've used for years for staving off colds and flu and generally strengthening the body.
Take 3 large spoonfuls (tablespoon size) each of thyme, rosemary, basil, marjoram, hyssop and salad burnet (I grow these in my garden but you can use dried herbs - use a small teaspoonful of each instead).
Crush four tablespoons of fennel seeds with a pestle and mortar and put all the ingredients in an enamel saucepan with five pints of water and simmer for about half an hour.
Strain the herbs and add the water to a bath with a teaspoon or two of wheatgerm oil and two tablespoons of honey. (Note: do not substitute essential oils for the herbs in this mix).
SOOTHING SUMMER BATH: Make a decoction of the following:
three large tablespoons of chamomile flowers; violets; cowslips; sweet woodruff; vervain and linden blossom (if fresh--or a teaspoon of each if dried). Strain the herbs after about half an hour and add the liquid to a warm (not hot) bath. Float rose petals and borage flowers on top.
CLEOPATRA'S SECRET BATH: Cleopatra bathed in asses' milk, so the tales go, but any milk makes a soothing bath.
Add a few drops (no more) of your favourite essential oils--try lavender, geranium, chamomile, jasmine, rose or neroli for a soothing, mood-improving bath.
If you want to feel energised and invigorated go for rosemary, sage and pine. If you feel you have a cold coming on, add a couple of drops of black pepper and tea-tree oil to help you fight the infection.
EAT MINDFULLY
It's no coincidence that in all the great healing traditions of the world, FOOD IS TREATED WITH GREAT REVERENCE , as a great healer in its own right. In the past, when we only ate by our own efforts, by the hard work of hunting, farming and husbandry, food was treated with respect and eaten with grateful thanks.
Now we buy whatever takes our fancy from supermarkets, in boxes and packets, neat and precise, cling-filmed and clean. Ready meals and convenience foods are pushed into the microwave. After a few minutes, we transfer it to a tray and sit spooning it into our mouths as we watch television.
What has happened to our daily bread?
It's a long way from the idea of food to nourish both body and spirit--what the West Indians so rightfully call "soul" food. It's not practical for us all to become hunters, or self-sufficient market gardeners. We can't all tend our own crops or raise our own livestock. But we can REGAIN A FEELING OF RESPECT FOR OUR FOOD. We can care for what we eat, and how we eat it. There are very simple steps we can take to give food back its rightful place in our lives.
Think about where your food comes from and choose it carefully. Soul nourishing food is good food--food that is healthy both for you and for the earth. Try wherever you can to buy organic--vegetables and fruits which have been grown without chemicals are good for your body and good for the environment. Organic food is more expensive, at the moment, but try to support it if you can and then demand will gradually bring prices down. If you eat meat, insist on only choosing organic, free-range meat.
Put yourself back in tune with the rhythm of the year by buying food that is produced locally, food that is in season.
We've grown so accustomed to having whatever we want whenever we want it that we have forgotten the joy of the first taste of the new asparagus crop, or the first strawberries, the soft gleam of chestnuts in their proper season. Seasonal produce is the food we need for each time of year: light fresh foods for the hot seasons; warm, nourishing foods for the cold.
Prepare food with love, care and attention. Cooking is an art, the first creative art of all.
Cooking in a race, with irritation and annoyance at the "wasted time" turns your meals into sad, soul-less sustenance. FOOD PREPARED WITH MINDFULNESS , with an idea of truly nourishing your self, your friends, your family, becomes a SOUL-FEAST.. It isn't about concocting lavish repasts all the time--it's more about imbuing your cookery--from the smartest dinner party down to the quickest sandwich--with a sense of care.
Make cookery and the preparation of food a small homely ritual--the food you create will be transformed into your very fabric, into your skin and bones and blood. It will give you the gift of energy and vitality, of peace and comfort. So choose food that your body loves--honest healthy food, not dead empty calories.
There a hundred and one other ways you can nourish your soul on a daily, hourly, moment by moment basis. These ideas are just the tip of the iceberg but I hope they have given you some pointers.
Copyright © 2001 Jane Alexander
[my format and caps]
Story
10 May 2013 - 5:49pm
Being a Self-Reliant Independent Thinker
Ascended Master, Serapis Bey’s Weekly Message ~ May 10 – 17, 2013
Received by Julie Miller
May 10, 2013
Dearest Children of God, as you learn to rely on yourself you discover you are able to bring forth the strength needed to stamp out any of your day-to-day challenges. At a young age, as children the teachings many of you have received surround learning how to problem solve, discovering a workable resolution that is filled with positive energy. As young children, learning to be self-reliant helps to develop Inner Strength and to create Self-Reliance as a productive personal trait and skill. Even as a child who has been learning to rely on themselves for simple problem solving, they are nurturing themselves and creating at the same time great coping skills and enhancing healthy confidence that will lead them to fine-tuning their survival skills for daily life and challenges as they mature and grow into adults.
The era which you are now maneuvering in is filled with instant satisfaction, and quick fixes to solve challenges. We have observed many dear souls quickly and readily medicating themselves and their families to fix certain vulnerabilities that 10 or 20 years ago didn’t require so much pharmaceutical fixing. Yes we do see many dear souls being more aware of themselves and the global world around them, but we also witness many have become less able to rely on themselves and more extrinsically dependent.
Relying on yourself dear ones permits your Self to fight any crisis that may cross your path with the heart and courage of a lion. One that is Self-Reliant, even when facing discouraging obstacles will reach down and bring forth more power, more courage and strength that will enable them to continue the battle until all is complete. Rarely dear ones, an individual that is self-reliant will use medications or drugs of any kind to enhance their own coping skills. What these people do is inspire themselves, reaffirm to themselves the importance of the current challenge, and sometimes with their head held high they seek non-judgemental people for support, and many times Divine Guidance for peace building resolutions.
The more you become self-reliant, you will discover and learn more about who you are. You will see before you with little digging, what your strengths and weaknesses are. After a little self-exploration you will come to know yourself better and learn how to strengthen any weaknesses and make the most of your strengths. A dear soul that demonstrates Self-Reliance is silently telling those that recognize this trait that they are an Independent Thinker – they are confident to make their own decision without input coming from another.
Independent Thinkers are always mature and have the ability to create more happiness through self-satisfaction and from their own efforts they will feel freer as they have not conformed to someone else’s perception or way of thinking. Over time each of you have conformed to one person or another beginning as a young child when you Mother or Father told you to do something. Even though you are all grown adults, many of you are still under some form of control; we see this daily from the clothes you purposely choose, how you decorate your home, the books you read, etc., has helped form your way of thinking and being.
Dear ones, we ask you to be honest with yourself, “How often do you seek another person’s suggestion instead of trusting your own initiative?” or “Can you only make a decision after you read something clever written in a book or viewed in your media source?” As Independent Thinkers, you are well informed, mature and educated enough to make clear, concise and rational choices on your own. Self-Reliant individuals instantly understands the responsibility of their decisions and of their actions – they have learned to trust themselves and in the Love they receive from God that has supported each step they have taken.
It is crucial to begin learning self-reliance early in your life journey. As children, those not taught to be more self-reliant have lower self-esteem and because they are not supported to hone this necessary skill, these beautiful children are less confident and their success rate to become a higher achiever is dramatically lowered. Providing children with luxuries doesn’t teach them how to be self-reliant. It is vitally important to motivate and inspire young minds, instead of fostering laziness and the idea everything will be given to them.
Even as mature adults there are always ways to bring in more positive change that will influence your own ability to be self-reliant and more capable of handling your own issues and dilemmas. On the road to strengthening this skill you will discover where you need to make necessary adjustments and re-strengthen your Faith and build up your courage because the dear soul that is self-reliant understands what it means to face fears – they do this head on and there is little to no procrastination.
As you progress more into being an Independent Thinker, you will learn to pay less attention to what others are thinking and more attention to what is important to you, what your heart is drawing you to. Explore yourself dear ones and truly know what your fundamental values are, restructure them if necessary and begin to trust your intuition more. The more you trust yourself and become more confident you will see yourself being able to make better decisions without the need of other people’s influence. You are doing the work, applying the effort to learn what is needed and from what you discover you make your decision and you trust what you find through your gift of intuition. The more apt you become at relying on yourself and being an independent thinker the higher your confidence goes and this dear ones removes yourself from being dependent on others to think for you.
When you are more Self-Reliant you will recognize a new you beginning to emerge – one who is more emotionally strong and capable. Good emotional strength dear ones will develop strong independence that will carry you through many tough storms. If a dear soul tends to be emotionally insecure, they often will withdraw themselves from being accountable for their efforts and actions. It is understood the more emotional energy a dear soul has, a higher and more optimistic attitude is revealed.
This is your journey dear ones. Each part of it you are accountable for. We encourage you to be in control of your life and journey. Realize the importance to build and maintain the energy required to meet all your needs as well as within your new Self-Reliant skill. As you are able to see your growth and development from all the hard work you have applied on your own, a great feeling of peace and self-satisfaction will fill your entire being with a profound calmness that was never there before. Give yourself the essential tools to further your journey’s growth and development. You have what you need already; it’s all right there inside of you.
When you know how to be Self-Reliant dear ones you will know true freedom as you become your own Person.
And so it is…
I AM Ascended Master, Serapis Bey through Julie Miller
Blog entry
9 May 2013 - 11:44pm
From the Hindu Vedic Cosmology and Mahayana Buddhism.
The story goes that the Supreme Deity, Indra, created a net that filled the Heavens. A pearl was placed at each intersection of the threads. Within the reflective surface of each pearl's luster are the images of all the pearls in the net.. This is a metaphor for the interconnectedness of all things.
This is my own personal journey into Indra's Net:
Some years ago, while living in Colorado, I attended a shamanic journey. We were given a cup of potentized water of the energy signature of Grandmother Ayahuasca. I began to fall under the hypnotic spell of the rhythmic beat of of the shaman's drum. I awoke to find that I had been transported to a jungle. A large, powerful Jaguar came towards me. I knew him as my Spirit guide. I climbed onto his back and he raced through the jungle and it became a blur.We stopped at the base of a shear cliff. Before me, a vertical line appeared on the rock surface. It expanded until it became a doorway. Unafraid, I stepped through the portal into another dimension. As I did, my mind and body exploded into billions of particles. These small particles of light was flung to the far reaches of the universe. Each point of light was aware of its self and each other. Like a dream, I awoke to reflect on the meaning of this experience. I quickly wrote it down while it was fresh in my mind. I was puzzled by it and it's abrupt end. "Is this all there is ?" I asked myself.
INDRA"S NET part 2
Shamanic Journey with the Grandmother:
In my disappointment, I did not go back for any more shamanic journeys. After about two months, my curiosity got the best of me, and I went back. As before, I lay comfortably on the floor, allowing the Shaman's drum to take me into an altered state of consciousness. Again, my Spirit Guide came for me and I climbed on his back and we went racing through the jungle, until we came to the clearing at the base of the cliff. I thought to myself, "We have already done this before, what is the point of repeating it?" The portal appeared on the face of the cliff and opened up into a doorway and I stepped through. As before, my mind and body explodes into billions of tiny particles, each particle aware of it's self as each expression of life:
I am the bloated, starving baby laying naked in the dirt:
A mother sheltering her children with her body, as the bomb rips through the house;
A man in the crowd, pulling the lever on his bomb strapped body, yelling, "God is Great."
The woman laying on the ground, who has just been raped.
I am the man running down the street, who had just raped her;
I am the child kneeling by his bed, asking God to bring his father home from the war;
The serenity of an old woman, who lays dying in a hospital bed;
The homeless man living under the bridge, who does not believe in God.
I am a deer who lays dying from a hunter's bullet;
A robin singing from a tree branch;
The cool breeze that blows through the mountain pines;
A flowering dandelion;
A crystal spring bursting through the rocks.
I AM the six billion expressions of humanity;
The life force permeating the Earth;
I AM the sun, moon and stars;
The Golden Sea of Consciousness, that has no end.......
Therefore, how can I judge anything.
This was another life changing experience in compassion and a true understanding that we are all connected.
I was not prepared for what Spirit would show me at this second Shamanic Journey. I did not witness these visions, I experienced them. When I read about the suffering from events that are taking place, I no longer judge, I feel compassion and I offer prayers for those suffering.
NAMASTE
Teaching
9 May 2013 - 7:29pm
During this transformational time, you are free to tap into high-vibrational energies now flooding the Earth plane. The highest and best use of these energies is to build the vision for your highest future. Your highest future is fully accessible as you step more fully into your field of possibilities. As you harmonize with elevated frequencies, you're able to manifest from the greatly expanded feeling states of your higher self.
Fine-tuning Your Vibrational Frequency
Your feeling states and your "vibrational frequency" determine your level of abundance - not others and not circumstances out in the world. Those who believe the economy is responsible for any challenges they are experiencing around prosperity are perceiving "in reverse," so to speak. You are always the source and cause of your experience of reality. What you manifest directly correlates with the essence of your energy. Your feeling states are barometers for your thoughts, beliefs and spiritual understandings. If you hold negative feelings toward anyone or anything, this pulls down your feeling state and your energetic resonance. When you manifest from a low-vibrational energy, you will experience roadblocks, disappointments, illness, accidents, and overall feelings of being out of sync with the universe. These experiences are not a "punishment", but wakeup calls to help you see that you need to examine the beliefs, intentions, motivations, visions, and identities you currently hold.
By contrast, when you step into a place of taking 100% responsibility for all your experiences, when you have accepted the power and authority of your role as a Divine and infinite being, you open to receive all the joy and blessings the universe has to offer. You know that you are holographic to all that is. As a spark of infinity, you contain the entire energetic spectrum. Because you contain it all, you can choose to focus on any aspect of yourself that exists along the spectrum of human potential. In other words, you can choose to focus on any aspect of your being and energize that into your physical reality.
Opening to a New Vision for Your Future
In order to wield cosmic energy to create realities, you will need to build the vision for what you wish to create.
To move beyond what you have experienced, you will need to step into the unknown and surrender your consciousness to your higher self. Ask for clarity around visions of your highest probabilities. Keep receiving and building the vision until you have a clear picture of what you wish to manifest. In this place of the unknown, you're able to merge your energies with the vision for your highest future, programming it into your DNA. As you move forward, you will receive daily guidance and assistance to bring this vision into being.
Releasing the Need for Linear Progression
In the physical world, you receive programming that says you must manifest in a linear and incremental fashion. While this understanding may be helpful in certain areas of your life, it can also be a hindrance in manifesting your highest future. During this time, more than any other, you are able to step free of the need to progress in this way.
The greatly expanded energies accessible on the Earth plane now allow you to take great leaps and experience quantum growth. As you adopt new and expanded identities your energetic resonance "amps up". It is in this way that you attract people, resources, experiences, ideas, information, and everything else you need to step into new ways of existing. From this heightened state, elevated feeling states naturally flow. This allows you to align with the wealth and abundance of the universe.
Excerpt from Abundance Magic: 44 Steps to Manifesting the Future of Your Dreams by DL Zeta http://www.celestialvision.org/abundance-magic-ebook-by-dl-ze/
http://www.celestialvision.org
Blog entry
9 May 2013 - 7:15pm
MAKING FRIENDS WITH YOUR REPTILE BRAIN
~by Penney Peirce
www.penneypeirce.com
Ask people how they recognize intuitive guidance and some will say they depend on their sense of good or bad “vibes,” while others swear by their “little voice.” Many suddenly have a “flash,” “get the picture,” or “see the light.” Still others, though more rare, rely on their sense of taste, like the chairman of the board of Sony Corporation, who solves problems by pretending the potential solutions are pieces of food, then tries to “eat” them. Though receiving insights via the five senses is a large part of intuitive perception, you can pick up cues from your internal and external worlds much earlier in the game.
When intuition first speaks to us, it’s in a language that is preverbal, nonlinear, and often so deeply sensual that we can’t even hear the little voice or see visual images. Just as animals sense an imminent earthquake, your body knows what’s happening in the world long before your mind does and it transmits instinctual signals directly to your reptile brain. Learning to recognize these primitive body messages can give you the edge in knowing who to trust, what’s true for you, or when it’s time to take action.
Intuition, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t usually descend from above. I experience it almost always occurring in the body first, then percolating up into consciousness. I jokingly tell the people in my classes that “your mind is the last one to know”! So if you’re boxed in by rational thinking, as I was some years ago when I was writing my book The Intuitive Way, you may need to look to your deeper animal nature to jumpstart your creative, intuitive process.
Back then, I needed a snappy anecdote to open a new chapter, something that would demonstrate the body’s important link to intuitive ability. My impatient mind wanted the perfect story to instantly appear out of the recesses of my brain and march in an orderly progression onto the page. After a prolonged period of staring blankly at my computer monitor, I realized I was actually daydreaming about a special hiking trail near my home. Managing to overcome my “shoulds,” I took a break to play hookey for a few hours.
It wasn’t until I was three quarters of the way through what had become a truly magical nature walk that I realized I was once again totally alive and absolutely involved with my world. By noticing my body’s immediate responses to the environment—sometimes attraction, sometimes repulsion—and by allowing myself to become engrossed with the elements of nature I encountered—the delicately-marked baby snake on my path, the regal, high-stepping water birds, the sound of the dry grasses in the wind—my body was giving me a message. It is only through deep connectedness and a personal, physical resonance with life that we know what is real and true for us, that we derive our sense of direction. Lose your body’s live connection to the world and intuition and creativity stop. No wonder my creativity was blocked sitting at my computer—my body was literally bored to abstraction!
As you begin to open your intuitive perception, or your “direct knowing,” the first rudimentary messages will always come to you from your body, your instinct, and your reptile brain. Learning to pick up data at this earliest stage of perception can save you time, energy, and worry. When you learn to trust your first responses to new people, situations, places, and ideas you’ll discover an important truth: your body never lies to you. “First thoughts,” as writing teacher Natalie Goldberg calls them, are fresh, accurate, and full of genius.
EXERCISE: LET YOUR BODY DECIDE
The next time you go out to dinner, pick three or four different possible restaurants. Head off in the general direction of food, without deciding which one you'll go to. Let your body and natural instinct make each choice along the way. If one restaurant is to the north and the others are south, when you get to the intersection where you must turn, see which way your body wants to go. At the next juncture point, perhaps you'll find yourself not being able to get off the freeway at the exit that would take you to the Chinese restaurant. Continue on, realizing that it's probably the Mexican restaurant downtown that your body prefers tonight. Yet, as you park the car and start toward the restaurant, you might happen to notice a cozy little cafe down the block that you've never seen before, and as you do, your body perks up with enthusiasm. Go for it! And thank your intuition for leading you to a brand new experience.
TRUTH AND ANXIETY SIGNALS
How do you know when something is really right for you? Or when you hear the truth? How do you know that you want to do something, and that you’re actually going to do it? Conversely, how do you know when someone’s lying to you? Can you tell when timing is off? When a situation is being forced? When there’s a high possibility of failure or danger?
Your body communicates with you constantly, giving you feedback about the relative safety and appropriateness of every option you consider. Its messages contain either survival information that comes from the body’s rapport with the natural environment, or higher guidance about your optimal self-expression that comes from your soul and the collective consciousness of the planet. Most of us never take the time to know how we know or what we know; we just act. Yet our bodies are speaking volumes—just not in a language we immediately recognize. To develop intuitive skill, we need to be able to decipher our body’s information cues, to know quickly and directly, without taking time to “figure things out.”
The body’s language is a simple binary one—there are only two modes, two “words”: yes and no. You will recognize these messages through feelings of expansion or contraction in your body. When a choice or action is appropriate and safe, you’ll experience expanding energy: you may sense energy rising, becoming active or bouncy, or perhaps you’ll “warm” to an idea, get “light-headed,” or feel flushed with enthusiasm. Have you ever had the “hots” for someone, or had “butterflies” of anticipation, or been “up” for a new adventure? Perhaps you’ve felt magnetically drawn toward someone or a new situation. Have you ever said, “I’m leaning toward this option”? The body’s yes often feels like health and vitality, even good luck: “I’m rarin’ to go; let me at it!”
When I ask people how they know something is true for them, and exactly where they experience the feeling in their body, many describe a warm, spreading sensation across their chest. Others feel energy bubbling up from below their diaphragm into their chest, or from their chest into their throat. Some even feel it bubble up further, resulting in tears of happiness. Some feel the blood rush to their neck and face, making them blush. Still other people describe a variety of “clicks and clunks” as if something out of alignment suddenly snapped or dropped back into its rightful place. These feelings most often occur along the vertical center line of the body and seem to be related to that other oft-described sensation of something “ringing true,” where the body silently “gongs” like a huge reverberating bell. One of the other most common truth signals is the sudden movement of energy up the spine or along the arms and shoulders, giving the sensation of “chills” or gooseflesh.
But what about when something is not true or not appropriate for you? When the body answers no, the message is unmistakable. In fact, most people are more aware of their anxiety signal than their truth signal. When an option or action is unsafe or inappropriate, you’ll experience contracting energy: you may feel energy drop, recoil, darken, or tighten. Maybe you’ll act coolly, even coldly, to someone, or get a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. When something is not true for you, your body will try to withdraw and back away. You may feel repulsed, or become “leaden” or “turn to stone.” Instead of blushing, you may blanch as the blood drains from your face. You may get tired, feel gray, blue, even depressed. You may actually feel pain in a specific area of your body. Common anxiety signals are: a stomach ache or nausea, a “pain in the neck,” chest pain, headaches, or a feeling like a tight fist in the solar plexus area. Yet another anxiety signal is a prickly feeling of the “hair rising” along the upper spine and neck.
Why is it important to know your truth and anxiety signals? First, you need a fail-safe way to discern which options in life are best for you, to be able to make authentic choices, straight from your soul’s wisdom. Truth and anxiety signals are your inside pipeline to the highest knowledge. Second, by learning to discriminate clear answers more quickly and directly, you won’t waste so much time, energy, and so many opportunities for happiness. Third, by learning to absolutely trust your body’s first response, you will soon find the guidance you get is of a very high quality. Goethe said these deceptively simple words: “Just trust yourself. Then you will know how to live.”
EXERCISE: YOUR TRUTH AND ANXIETY SIGNALS
1. Start a journal or diary, and write about the different ways you know when something or someone is true, safe, or purposeful for you. Where in your body do you experience the signal? Does the signal move from one area of the body to another?
2. Write about the different ways you know when something or someone is false, unsafe, or not purposeful for you. Where in your body do you experience the signal? Does the signal move from one area of the body to another?
3. Notice the truth and anxiety signals you get today and write about them.
MAKING AUTHENTIC CHOICES
Tonight you may make dinner for yourself, or go out and choose food from a menu. What will you eat? How will you know what to pick? Perhaps instead of having what you usually have, you might question your body. “Body, what’s your feeling tonight about fresh lettuce? Tomato soup? Pasta with cream sauce? Steak and potatoes?” Let your truth and anxiety signals inform you of your body’s preferences, and see if you can pick up on the most subtle signals. Maybe your body would prefer a handful of crisp, cold radishes or half a grapefruit.
Perhaps you’re thinking that you “should” move from an expensive house you’re renting, and 1) find a less expensive neighborhood locally, 2) move out of state, 3) get a roommate, 4) get a studio apartment, 5) try to buy a house, 6) move back in with your parents. As you ask your body about each option, your stomach contracts, you get a headache, you want to take a nap, you get nervous and irritable. What is your body telling you? Perhaps it’s not time yet to make a decision. Can you let it be for now?
Maybe you’re job hunting and you’ve turned up several possibilities for work. Each one looks feasible to your mind, in a variety of ways. One job will let you use your people skills, another will pay more but you’ll be stuck at a computer all day, a third option will give you a chance to be innovative and work with a team of creative people. When your body responds, it gives you instant feedback: imagining sitting at a computer gives you a pain in the neck. The job with people skills feels lukewarm; there’s no tension yet no real excitement either. The third choice, working with the creative team, makes your body sit up at attention and almost salivate. What are you going to do? Will you override your body’s direct knowing with “yes, but’s” about not making enough money, or not knowing anyone there, or never having done this before, or not thinking you have enough talent? Or can you trust that your body will give you an answer that’s just right
EXERCISE: VALIDATING YOUR BODY
Several times this week make a point of noticing when your body sends you a message. Maybe you instinctually pulled over to a slower lane on the freeway and just ahead in the fast lane is the debris from a blown-out tire. Or, perhaps you got a sense to leave the house ten minutes earlier than you normally would for an appointment, then encountered an unexpected delay on the way—and were right on time for your meeting! Thank your body out loud, and pat or stroke it tenderly, like you would a favorite pet.
DISCRIMINATING NONVERBAL INFORMATION
Nothing in life is really that complicated, especially from your body’s point of view. For the body, it’s always just a matter of one moment, one piece of information, one motivation at a time. And in each moment, there is just one choice, one solution that’s a perfect fit. In the next moment the choice may be different, so don’t be impatient and jump ahead. You’re not there yet. Anticipating future choices is a fruitless waste of time. When you need intuitive guidance, relax. Ask the body’s key question: What’s most interesting and crucial for this moment? Let that answer lead to the next most interesting thing. Choosing to work with the creative team might lead you to take a new training program the company offers, which gives you a new skill set, which leads you to greater confidence, which leads to a promotion, which brings you new clients, who offer you an opportunity to start your own business.
EXERCISE: YOUR BODY’S KEY QUESTION
1. Get quiet, centered, and breathe. Ask your body: What are you most worried about right now? What would you like to feel reassured about? Wait expectantly, and a “knowing” will begin in you, perhaps with feelings, sensations, images. Write about your body’s preoccupations and what you can do to help relieve these concerns. In what specific ways did your body make the answers known to you?
2. Ask your body: What are you most excited about right now? What activities would feel the most rewarding and engrossing? Wait expectantly, and a “knowing” will begin; notice feelings, sensations, images. Write about your body’s most real motivations and what you can do to help manifest these experiences. In what specific ways did your body make the answers known to you?
You may have noticed in the previous exercise that as you paid attention to your body you became aware of subtle sensations and perhaps had fleeting, ghostly images that all blended into an instinctual “knowing” that couldn’t be traced by logic. The answer just popped up into your awareness like the answers in the window on one of those magic eight-ball toys for children: “By all means,” “Highly unlikely,” “Try again later.” Perhaps your body was concerned about having enough protein to function properly, since you’d only had coffee and a sweet roll for breakfast, and during your morning meeting it gave you an image of a chicken breast sandwich, complete with the experience of smell and taste. You got a strong hankering and couldn’t wait to take an early lunch break and rush over to the fast food restaurant.
Or your body may have transmitted to you that it was most excited today about creating a new flowerbed, and it released to you a feeling of “hunger” for the feel of soft, well-turned dirt, for the moist smell of the nursery where you’d go to buy plants, for the thrill of the colors you would combine, and for the pure enjoyment of being in the sunshine and fresh air. You might even have had glimpses of the design of the bed, the placement of the flowers and how they might look in a year’s time. And yet, all this probably came to you in such rapid sequence that it seemed almost simultaneous, with little separation between ideas, sensory triggers and images. Because of the body’s shotgun-style, nonverbal way of communicating, we often miss its messages, especially if we’re caught up in purely mental preoccupations.
To help make your body’s intuitive messages more conscious, you might develop the habit of talking with your friends about “interesting perceptions I had today” or “interesting similarities I found between experiences I had this week,” or asking, “What do you think this means?” Assume that you have the right to feel “at home” in your own body, that you do not have to live with even the most subtle levels of discomfort.
You might become conscious of the data in the tissues of your body by simply having conversations in your imagination with various parts of your body. Personalize your belly, or the bottoms of your feet, or your thyroid. Let them tell you what they know about life. Make an agreement with yourself that the moment you notice an anxiety signal, you’ll stop and discover what the message is. Make it a way of life to keep your body clear of blockages, ignorance, and negativity. Follow your truth signals!
Practice dropping below the surface of your normal daily distractions to find a deeper, more direct experience of knowing. Cultivating the habit of including your body in every decision-making process, even trying to feel your cells talking, will help you honor your body as a living being. By respecting its innate consciousness, and “conversing” with it, you’ll have a reliable source of intuitive guidance and a new best friend.
©Copyright 2010 Penney Peirce.
Blog entry
9 May 2013 - 1:40pm
New Members: It is recommended you read from the beginning of the archive, as previous lessons are prerequisite to this one. The first lesson is, "Why This Discussion?" at http://aypsite.com/10.html
Q: Namaste: I want to request you to provide a picture with the different stages of kechari clearly shown. Your verbal description of kechari mudra is very elaborate; still a picture would make it more easier to understand (after all a picture is worth a 1000 words!)
Someone who underwent the cutting of the frenum told me that he had difficulty speaking clearly when the tongue became very long - is this true in your experience? He also said that elements (the five elements in the body) became unbalanced (not sure what exactly it means other than it does not sound very nice)
Your description of kechari mudra is superb and unparalleled compared to what I have come across so far. I am very grateful for this.
A: Yes, a picture is worth 1,000 words, and for kechari they have been hard to come by. Illustrations for kechari stages 1-4 are provided with Lesson 108 at http://aypsite.com/108.html. Additionally, you can find several images by others listed under “Kechari” in the AYP links section at http://www.aypsite.org/Links.html
Very gradual tiny snipping (I prefer that description to "cutting") does not lengthen the tongue. It only gradually frees it from being tethered to the floor of the mouth, so it is able to go back and up. In the lesson on kechari, I pointed out that the tongue is already long enough to accomplish all the stages of kechari, and how you can measure that for yourself.
Milking, or stretching of the tongue does lengthen it, but I don't regard it as the best means to achieve kechari, and have only engaged in it to a modest degree myself. There are stories about yogis who have lengthened their tongues to the extent that they can touch the point between their eyebrows from the outside. It is not necessary. It is only another version of extremism in yoga, which I am not for.
I first entered stage 2 kechari 20 years ago, and have never found any difficulty with speech, swallowing, or anything else physical because of it. I won't say it was completely easy all the time either. It does rearrange the inner energies substantially, and perhaps that is what your friend is referring to about the elements. But it is a natural rearrangement that leads to much more enlightenment in life, and that is why we are doing yoga, right?
As with all yoga practices, some self-pacing may be required from time to time to keep temporary energy imbalances associated with purification in the nervous system from becoming too extreme. Kechari is no different in that respect. In time, the energies readjust at progressively higher levels of functioning, which correspond to higher levels of spiritual experience. Then we can stay in kechari throughout our sitting practices, and beyond, with nothing but waves of whole-body ecstatic bliss coming from it. Who would avoid kechari when it gets to be like that? Not me!
Kechari is a long journey with many challenges and rewards along the way, and it requires a lot of bhakti to undertake and carry through. It is well worth the effort. It is an important aspect of our journey to enlightenment. Can we do without kechari? Perhaps. I can't really say for sure, as I am one of those who chose to go the way of
kechari, and I don't know where I would have ended up without it. Certainly with far less spiritual transformation than I have experienced.
Kechari is one of those natural spiritual abilities we all have. When the time is right, it happens.
The guru is in you.
Note: For instructions on kechari mudra, see the Asanas, Mudras and Bandas book at http://aypsite.com/books.html#amb
http://aypsite.com/205.html
Blog entry
9 May 2013 - 10:39am
Tao of Jonathon pt. 1
The energies have been rapidly changing the earthplane since 1-1-2012. A quickening is taking place that is affecting all expressions of life in this physical earth plane.Time as we know it, seems to be rapidly speeding up, but time is an illusion created by the linear mind. We look around us and it appears that the world is becoming progressively worse in the chaos of war, violence and suffering, but that is not the case. The influx of Light is causing the negative fear based energies to become condensed. It is part of the process of forcing the disease of society, to come to the surface so that it can be healed. Many of us are experiencing this process in our individual lives, as old wounds and buried conflicts are surfacing so that we are forced to deal with them and to let them go. We are physically moving into the crystaline structure and these old unhealthy mindsets can not come with us. What is happening in the earthplane should not be judged as good or bad, nor should we allow ourselves to become involved in the drama. Compassion is the result of non judgement and detachment. The awakening process is moving from linear mind, to the heart center as "seat of power." This process is changing the cellular structure of our bodies. Our diets, habits, addictions are changing. Many of us are finding that we no longer crave certain foods. Some of us are experiencing radical changes, such as a sudden dislike for meat, stimulants, alcohol and tobacco. The vibration of our physical bodies are being raised so that we evolve more rapidly into a fifth-dimensional state of being. In this evolving state, we will find ourselves more at peace and thinking less and less, with little or no desire to have answers.. Some of us may experience intense health issues as part of the process of change. We are becoming more detached from our memories as personal history of our identity that is collapsing. Some may experience from time to time, walking through the earth dream with our eyes open. This is a conscious awareness that this physical plane is only an illusion. It is important to not be in judgement on the events of the world drama. Each soul has chosen to play his/her role on life's stage. It is now time to focus sending healing energies to the planet. All that is needed is LOVE.
Our understanding will be excellerating where we will no longer need words to define. The linear mind is easing up in needing to know answers and solve problems. We are at various stages of remembering and accessing our own information from the infinite wellspring from which we came. We are beginning to understand the phrase, "If you can think it and define it, then that is not IT." It can only be experienced by the heart. When we fully realize this, then we can relax and know that this metamorphis is completed in it's own time frame and not ours. Be reassured that we will not be left behind in this awakening process. Know that some souls are ahead of us and some souls are behind us. We each move at our own pace according to our needs. The conscious practicing of gratitude on a daily basis will help accelerate the awakening process. Gratitude for everything in our lives as well as gratitude for what is not in our lives, that we wanted and tried to bring about. This will lessen the impatience of the "I want it now!" that so many of us have suffered from. Our linear mind has been used as the focus of a single linear thought and being oblivious to all else around us as the mind categorizes, defines and judges. This method is part of the survival mode of our carbon based bodies that are changing. This method has kept us in a state of fear/suffering for eons.
Many of us are feeling a sense of excitement that "It has arrived" and that we are really here and not crazy, as we sometimes thought we were. We chose to come into the earthplane to participate in the planetary rebirth. Many of us are feeling a strong kinship towards nature as though it was pulling us in, as if it holds a secret to reveal to us. It really does, because of it being in harmony with the cosmos. Even nature is going through it's own evolutionary transformation along with the planet's ascension. The raising of the vibratory frequencies of the planet is altering the illusion of time. Those in the awakening process, are more focused in being in the present and not concerned with the past or future. We are seeing many friends and acquaintances leave our lives and new ones coming in. We are less interested to be involved with friend's and family member's drama. Many of us are Star Seed and we are beginning to remember life beyond planet earth and the choices we made to come here to assist with the rebirthing of the planet. Many souls have come from all parts of the universe to assist in the Ascension. As this awakening deepens within us, we become more and more aware how powerful our thoughts are and how we can focus them to manifest our dreams and goals. It is important that we release our "fear thoughts" and "anger thoughts" because we know the destructive nature they represent. This physical plane is only a dream and not reality. We are learning to walk between the two worlds.
Some of us have experienced increased anxiety from time to time, the feeling we have lost our mind. In a sense, we have. We feel that things are not going according to our plans. Some us have lost financial support as well as social status. All of these things are happening for a reason so that we can let go and surrender to a Force greater than ourselves. Our attachments to social status financial and material well being are no longer of importance to us. Many of us are becoming aware of the role our pets have in our lives to help ground us and teach us unconditional love.
Teaching
9 May 2013 - 10:05am
How To Remember Things
by Alex Lickerman, M.D.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/200911/how-remember-things
I once came up with a metaphor I thought perfectly captured the sheer mass of material my classmates and I were expected to memorize in our first two years of medical school: it was like being asked to enter a grocery store and memorize the names of every product in the store, their number and location, every ingredient in every product in the order in which they appear on the food label, and then to do the same thing in every grocery store in the city.
When I look back now I can't imagine how any of us were able to do it. And yet we did. The mind's capacity to store and recall information is truly wondrous. Since I attended medical school we've learned a lot about memory and learning. Though much of what follows are techniques I used to survive my first two years of medical school, much of the science that proves they work is new.
STRATEGIES FOR REMEMBERING
Become interested in what you're learning. We're all better remembering what interests us. Few people, for example, have a difficult time remembering the names of people they find attractive. If you're not intrinsically interested in what you're learning or trying to remember, you must find a way to become so. I have to admit I wasn't so good at this in medical school. The Krebs cycle (I provided the link only to prove how immensely boring it is) just didn't excite me or relate to anything I found even remotely exciting (though I made myself learn it anyway).
Find a way to leverage your visual memory. You'll be astounded by how much more this will enable you to remember. For example, imagine you're at a party and are introduced to five people in quick succession. How can you quickly memorize their names? Pick out a single defining visual characteristic of each person and connect it to a visual representation of their name, preferably through an action of some kind. For example, you can remember Mike who has large ears by creating a mental picture of a microphone (a "mike") clearing those big ears of wax (gross, I know—sorry—but all the more effective because of it). It requires mental effort to do this, but if you practice you'll be surprised how quickly you can come up with creative ways to create these images. Here's another example: how often do you forget where you left your keys, your sunglasses, or your wallet? The next time you put something down somewhere, pause a moment to notice where you've placed it, and then in your mind blow it up. If you visualize the explosion in enough detail, you won't forget where you put it. Remember: memory is predominantly visual (unfortunately, I can't think of a good image to help you remember this fact right at this moment).
Create a mental memory tree. If you're trying to memorize a large number of facts, find a way to relate them in your mind visually with a memory tree. Construct big branches first, then leaves. Branches and leaves should carry labels that are personally meaningful to you in some way, and the organization of the facts ("leaves") should be logical. It's been well recognized since the 1950's we remember "bits" of information better if wechunk them. For example, it's easier to remember 467890 as "467" and "890" than as six individual digits.
Associate what you're trying to learn with what you already know. It seems the more mental connections we have to a piece of information, the more successful we'll be in remembering it. This is why using mnemonics actually improves recall.
Write out items to be memorized over and over and over. Among other things, this is how I learned the names of bacteria, what infections they cause, and what antibiotics treat them. Writing out facts in lists improves recall if you make yourself learn the lists actively instead of passively. In other words, don't just copy the list of facts you're trying to learn but actively recall each item you wish to learn and then write it down again and again and again. In doing this, you are, in effect, teaching yourself what you're trying to learn (and as all teachers know, the best way to ensure you know something is to have to teach it). This method has the added benefit of immediately showing you exactly which facts haven't made it into your long-term memory so you can focus more attention on learning them rather than wasting time reinforcing facts you already know.
When reading for retention, summarize each paragraph in the margin. This requires you to think about what you're reading, recycle it, and teach it to yourself again. Even take the concepts you're learning and reason forward with them; apply them to imagined novel situations, which creates more neural connections to reinforce the memory.
Do most of your studying in the afternoon. Though you may identify yourself as a "morning person" or "evening person" at least one study suggests your ability to memorize isn't influenced as much by what time of day you perceive yourself to be most alert but by the time of day you actually study—afternoon appearing to be the best.
Get adequate sleep to consolidate and retain memories. Not just at night after you've studied but the day before you study as well. Far better to do this than stay up cramming all night for an exam.
WHY MEMORY MALFUNCTIONS
One of the most common complaints I hear in clinical practice is about memory loss. Unfortunately, as a normal part of the aging process, many people start to find they can't bring to mind names, places, and things as easily as they used to be able to do and worry they're facing the beginning of dementia. "Benign forgetfulness" is the name we give to a process that occurs with normal aging in which a memory remains intact but our ability to retrieve it becomes temporarily impaired. Usually we try to describe the name or thing we can't recall and when someone names it for us we instantly remember the word we wanted. As long as this is age-appropriate and doesn't significantly interfere with normal functioning, there is no increased risk for progression to dementia. However, the trick lies in assessing what is and isn't "age-appropriate." Formal testing is sometimes necessary in ambiguous cases. Reassuringly, in one study, patients over the age of 50 who initially presented with what was considered to be benign forgetfulness had only a 9% chance of progressing to dementia. Unfortunately, cognitive impairments other than memory loss are correlated with a higher risk of progression to dementia.
Another reason people often have trouble remembering things is because memory is a function of concentration. Which means when you multi-task you tend to forget more easily. Have you ever entered a room only to forget why you did so? More likely you'd remember if you weren't simultaneously planning your dinner for that night and trying to remember the phone number of the person who just left you a message. This also explains why people who suffer from depression or anxiety have a harder time remembering things: both conditions interfere substantially with the ability to concentrate. The strength of a memory is also determined by the emotional state that accompanied the original event. Emotion, negative or positive, tends to embed events in our memory like a chisel carves lines in stone. A double-edged sword for people suffering from PTSD.
DECREASING THE RISK OF DEMENTIA
Here are three things you can do that have been shown in studies to decrease the risk of mental deterioration as you age:
Exercise your body. Evidence suggests this not only retards normal age-related memory deterioration but reduces the risk of developing dementia. It doesn't even have to be vigorous exercise. Just 150 minutes of walking per week has been shown to be of benefit. Whether more intense exercise results in a greater risk reduction remains unknown.
Exercise your mind. Evidence also suggests that doing things that work the mind may delay or prevent memory loss. This research is just in its infancy, so here's as good a guide as any to figuring out what activities will work: if an activity requires you to take breaks, it probably qualifies. We can watch television, for example, for hours on end without becoming mentally fatigued, but solving math problems, learning to knit, or even reading all require effort that tires the mind.
Take ibuprofen. Though one study suggests a daily dose of ibuprofen decreases the risk of developing dementia, the risk reduction appears too modest to justify the increased risk of stomach bleeding that accompanies ibuprofen's daily use and I do NOT recommend this. However, if you're already taking ibuprofen for some other condition, like arthritis, here might be an added benefit.
If the mind is indeed like a muscle (and research is validating that model more and more) then memory may very well be like muscle tone: the more the mind is used, the more robust memory may become. As I've moved on from my medical school days to reach early (very early) middle age, I've found myself experiencing benign forgetfulness far more than I like. As a result, I find myself comforted that the old adage "use it or lose it" is seeming more and more not just to apply to the body but to the mind as well.
Story
9 May 2013 - 8:24am
Monday, May 6, 2013
>Adama
yes
>Quiet today?
yes
>You too?
yes - evolution in the balance, we are at a tipping point as they say. So everyone here is waiting with "baited breath", it is a bit like watching those coin games, where the coins build up and build up. You add another coin to the pile, but it doesn't fall. You add another, and another... the time leading to the point where the coins tip seems like forever. Then there is a huge reward as the coins fall in a split second. And then - shall we put in another coin? Shall we start building our investments once again? It is very difficult to put that first coin in the slot, knowing you will not see a return on your investment. But so many others contributed to your winnings.
So we're taking a step back to allow the creativity of humanity kick in and do its thing. It is only a relatively small number required to get the stone rolling down the hill.
> Will we see you guys soon? There are many of us waiting to meet you now.
A relatively small number, but enough to carry a tune. To sing in harmony even if that song might be inaudible to the human ear.
>Frequency?
In a manner of speaking, yes, it is a beautiful song to those who can hear it. And subconsciously all humans can hear it - it is one of the more direct effects of carrying the light.
>How about financial relief - I understand this is in the works.
It is indeed. Yes there is an energetic change in the works and may happen sooner than you think. The idea of water - that it must have a way to flow from and to - is indeed important. If you can visualize value and energy as water, this is something that is around you at all times. Connecting to all. And easily manipulated / played with should you desire a certain outcome. But first the ties that bind need to be broken, so that is the first step.
>What ties would that be?
Financial ties. Financial shackles. It's part of a hierarchical system. The value is currently tied up in the hierarchy of the nested doll. This template is being dismantled as we speak, which will shortly be replaced by a different more direct template. This is a direct access to value rather than a nested access to value. The nesting of value was a control system. Diminishing returns at the center of the egg. This was also called a "nested risk" approach. The more risk, the greater return. But also increasing / constricted control on value. The big squeeze.
How this will change is a leveling out, a tree or river analogy is applicable here. The tree of life. This is a more fluid approach and value will increase exponentially as more branches are added to the trunk of the tree, with a good support at the trunk. Your value will be considered prime value, it's the root that supports the trunk of the tree. And your activities will be considered the trunk. And then the derivative activies of those activities will be considered the branches. So the One People will have the most value. Corporations will have less value, because those are derivative activities. They will depend on the creative activities of individuals to thrive (or even exist).
It is difficult to explain this concept to CEOs because they tend to place so much value of self on their annual salaries. It is equated with "responsibility". Yet we all take equal care of our responsibilities as humans, so shouldn't everyone be valued the same for this amount of care / effort alone?
>I don't see why not. I'm not sure how that translates to a changed system.
It doesn't without creative expression. And that's happening now. Creativity tends to fill the void left by anyone.
The process of creating a painting - the analogy - also applies here. These seem like separate activities, but take a step back and you will see that the painting is starting to take form. You can start to see how everything fits together.
>There is more than one activity happening at this time?
Yes, that will be announced in time, at the right time, so that further connections can be made. There will still need to be a short period of incubation. Could be very close now. Step back a bit and you will see a few activities in the public eye that may seem unrelated but connect at a different level. The players may not see the connections themselves, but the connections are there for those who wish to see.
For example, spiritual growth is tied to well-being, is tied to disclosure and getting along with others, is tied to world peace and accepting others, is tied to accepting those who would consider themselves above or below your "station" - accepting each other as equals. Equal with the pope, for example, and the pope equal with you. Because you are. And equal with us too, since our goal is to be equal because we are. The physical form is simply one expression of self.
In negotiations you know that the best way to get your way is sometimes to remain silent. This is because creativity will naturally fill the void. And really the void is not a true void because all is energy in either a potential or an active state. Will happen and did happen. And then the now of all is the quantum "both" state. So the more you are in the now the more you can experience both states. What would you like - vanilla, chocolate, or both?
>Seems like both would be the best choice.
You see how limitation is only an illusion. You think you only have one choice when really you have both already. Although you may prefer one or the other, it's just ice cream. Flavors of reality - not good and bad choices.
>Thank you Adama, I think I understand.
Thank you Troy for your understanding.
Source: dreamwalkerdiaries.blogspot.nl/
Blog entry
8 May 2013 - 8:15pm
RAIDERS OF THE LOST HEART
Posted on December 29, 2012 by Soren Dreier
Author: Soren Dreier
www.zen-haven.com
We live in the final hour of the Matrix.
No doubt that it knows this and it’s trying to hurt as many as possible in its death struggle. The collective abuse scale is so blatant it basically targets all, from infants to the elderly.
Which would leave us pretty vulnerable. And it does. But there’s a way of fighting this “sitting duck“ syndrome and returning it to the core of The Matrix itself.
In order to transcend this vulnerability, it might be an idea to look at our own designs in that department, our own patterns so to speak, and give them a tune-up.
I strongly believe that we cannot beat the external matrix without beating the internal matrixes we all have. If you think you have none, you don’t need to read any further: You are flawless.
Since I, in the last postings, have touched upon Transcending the Love Conditioning in The Matrix, I would like to stay in that flow. So let’s talk about love since we all agree that love is what will bring The Matrix down.
But my point being: If we stick to the old matrix conception of “love”, it will take us nowhere:
- The guard your heart issues:
Why would anyone want to guard their heart and hand this protected heart over to anyone? It doesn’t make any sense, but rather only in The Matrix divide and conquer scheme of things.
- The transcending the divorce conditioning issue:
Why would anyone fear a breakup? It’s like fearing death and not living your life fully.
We are here: Here and Now, and as awakening kicks in, the thought of living a raw and genuine life everyday becomes evermore vital and the only road worth traveling. So maybe your lover divorced you and is doing fine. It´s the “doing fine” that bugs you, think? Take ownership, he / she is not you.
- The outpost of fear in love is: Vulnerability.
That goes for “love everybody and everything”, without that being a stinky new age cliché, or romantic love: engaging and disengaging it. I actually know folks who won’t engage in love because they conceive themselves to be: Too vulnerable. Sad.
The most vulnerable position we can put ourselves in is: romantic love. We have to go in honest, open and lay our complete trust at the mercy of our partner, or it seems that way. It is the most naked situation we ever will find our true self in, if it’s in the raw, a force of nature and not the misconceptions of love that the guarded heart matrix will give us.
“But I had so many downfalls in love – I can’t trust anyone”.
- You don’t have to trust anyone, you have to trust yourself and go consciously vulnerable.
There’s a difference here that is very much worth taking in, both as goes for The Matrix and for your personal life. It is a state of mind and not emotions. But the state of mind is in fact an emotion.
To be in a state of mind the emotion has to be stretched out in time and it has to be connected to the mind.
Let me explain that:
We know all about the feeling of being sad. It’s an emotion. It comes and goes. That’s why mystics can say: Emotions are illusions.
Because they come and go.
I agree, but states of minds stay. That’s why we call them States. So if we take the feeling of being sad and stretch that: It can evolve into a depression. It’s fair to call a genuine depression a state of mind since it statically takes 2.5 years to alter without drugs.
It also goes for vulnerability.
It’s an emotion and for some a state of mind. That’s where the “sitting duck” kicks in. Whether it’s The Matrix or a potential lover. You become vulnerable because you bought in on the belief system that you should guard your heart.
Don’t. Open it. And tap into the field of being: Consciously vulnerable. Yes : Awake.
Life has many hidden layers that will only reveal themselves to the open hearted.
You are the only one responsible for your emotions. If you think that The Matrix or another person can hurt them, you are bloody mistaken because: Not a single soul on this planet can provide you with any emotion. They cannot give them to you and they cannot take them away from you.
The “only” thing The Matrix and a lover can do is they can raise emotions in you that you already have.
That’s one of the reasons why psychopaths can’t be treated by therapy. You cannot raise a single emotion in them, you cannot give them empathy, and since they don’t have it: abandon project. It serves no purpose. It´s a no-go.
And that’s why you can’t engage The Matrix and tell it to behave. They are on another planet. The cold shit one. That could be one argument for understanding why The Matrix stirs up so much vulnerability Kung Fu in the Heart People of this planet. You cannot address the nasty entity on a heart level, but you sure can threaten it by your mere existence.
I see, as more and more Heart People are coming out of their life in the bush, and really getting that. They become so empowered. So very empowered. But not by pussyfooting around their protectiveness of their own heart, which they found to be a matrix construct, but by becoming:
Consciously vulnerable. Raiders of the lost heart.
You go into a relationship in a consciously vulnerable state of mind and you partner does too: Whoa, two vigilant loving souls merging.
And please: You're about to divorce The Matrix, aren’t you? So stop grieving about break ups, divorces; it’s you own mirror you’re looking in, not the other person’s psychology. Stop the blame game and grow up and acknowledge: It’s all your emotions you’re complaining about, and complaints are like prayers, be careful what you wish for in that department.
You take that Kung Fu to the Institutions of The Matrix well knowing that you are vulnerable. No you are not! That`s The Matrix emotional mechanics, not yours anymore.
When you spot them: you got them.
Take responsibility for your emotions, transform them into: States of Mind and you are untouchable. As long as we don’t realize that, we will reduce ourselves to emotional lab rats, whether it’s in our private lives or in the designs of The Matrix.
Why do we think they are so strongly enforcing emotion-altering drugs on such a massive scale? Get the picture? No one transforms anything doped up on Matrix induced “keep your cool drugs”.
Be vulnerable, but know that you are. That is the empowerment in this field.
©2012 Soren Dreier / Full repost with permission.
Teaching
8 May 2013 - 7:41pm
Using Affirmations
Harnessing Positive Thinking
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/affirmations.htm#
Use positive thinking to your advantage.
© iStockphoto/hometowncd
"I'm never going to be able to do this job; I'm just not smart enough."
"Why does my boss want me to present at the trade show? I'm a terrible public speaker, and I'll just embarrass the company."
"I wish I could stick up for myself at work; in every meeting, I let the others walk over my ideas. I'm never going to get ahead."
Many of us have negative thoughts like these, sometimes on a regular basis. When we have these thoughts, our confidence, mood and outlook become negative too.
The problem with these negative thoughts is that they can be self-fulfilling. Inside our heads, we talk ourselves into believing that we're not good enough. And, because of this, these thoughts drag down our personal lives, our relationships, and our careers.
This is why consciously doing the opposite - using positive affirmations - can be helpful. In this article, we'll explore how you can use affirmations to drive positive change, both in your career, and in your life in general.
Why Use Affirmations?
Affirmations are positive, specific statements that help you to overcome self-sabotaging, negative thoughts. They help you visualize, and believe in, what you're affirming to yourself, helping you to make positive changes to your life and career.
While there's limited research into the effectiveness of using affirmations in a general setting, there is evidence that the use of positive affirmations can successfully treat people with low self-esteem, depression, and other mental health conditions.
For instance, in a study by researchers at Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, people who used positive affirmations for two weeks experienced higher self-esteem than at the beginning of the study.
Also, in a study published in the Journal of American College Health, researchers found that women treated with cognitive behavioral techniques, which included use of positive affirmations, experienced a decrease in depressive symptoms and negative thinking. A study by researchers at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, had similar results, and came to a similar conclusion.
Of course, it's important to realize that although some people have successfully used affirmations to overcome depression and negative thinking, the technique may not work for everyone. Some people may view affirmations as "wishful thinking," or simply looking at the world with an unrealistic perspective. Quite a lot can depend on your mindset.
So try looking at positive affirmations this way - many of us do repetitive exercises to improve our body's physical health and condition. Affirmations are like exercises for our mind and outlook; these positive mental repetitions can reprogram our thinking patterns so that, over time, we begin to think, and act, in a new way.
Note:
There has also been research that says that the higher your self-esteem, the more effective affirmations can be. This research also found that affirmations can actually have a negative effect if you have very low self-esteem. If this applies to you, work on boosting your self-esteem before you use them.
When to Use Positive Affirmations
You can use affirmations in any situation where you'd like to see a positive change take place. These might include times when you want to:
Raise your confidence before presentations or important meetings.
Control negative feelings such as frustration, anger, or impatience.
Improve your self-esteem.
Finish projects you've started.
Improve your productivity.
Affirmations are often more effective when they're paired with other positive thinking and goal-setting techniques.
For instance, affirmations work particularly well alongside visualization - instead of just picturing the change we'd like to see with visualization, we're also saying it aloud using a positive affirmation.
Affirmations are also useful when setting personal goals. Once you've identified the goals you'd like to achieve in the short and long term, you can use positive affirmations to help keep yourself motivated in order to achieve them.
How to Use Affirmations
Remember - affirmations are positive statements that help you challenge and overcome negative thinking and self-sabotaging behaviors. They're usually short, positive statements that target a specific area, behavior, or belief that you're struggling with.
Start by thinking of the areas of your life you'd like to change. For instance, do you wish you had more patience? Or a deeper relationships with your friends or colleagues? Or do you want a more productive workday?
Write down several areas or behaviors you'd like to work on. Then, for each of these, come up with a positive, present-tense statement you can repeat to yourself several times a day.
It's also important that your affirmation is credible, believable, and based on a realistic assessment of fact. For instance, imagine you feel bad about the level of pay you're currently receiving. So you begin to use affirmations to raise your confidence about asking for an increase. However, it probably wouldn't be wise to affirm to yourself that you're going to double your salary: for most people, and most organizations, doubling what you're earning in one go just isn't feasible. Keep it realistic!
After all, if you can't believe the affirmations you're repeating to yourself, it's highly unlikely that they'll have any impact on your life.
Tip 1:
Affirmations should be formed in the present tense, as if they're already happening. This helps you believe that the statement is true right now. For instance, "I am well-prepared and well-rehearsed, and I can give a great presentation" would be a great affirmation to use if you often feel nervous speaking in front of a group.
Tip 2:
The power of affirmations also lies in their repetition. It's useful to recite your affirmations several times a day (have them pop up in your computer diary). You also need to repeat your affirmation as soon as you start to engage in a negative thought or behavior.
Tip 3:
Affirmations are more effective when they're thought or said with feeling. Every affirmation you choose to repeat should be a phrase that's meaningful to you. You need to want this change to happen.
Here are some examples of positive affirmations:
I have plenty of creativity for this project.
My work will be recognized in a positive way by my boss and colleagues.
I can do this!
My opinion is respected and valued by my team.
I am successful.
I am honest in my life, and my work.
I like completing tasks and projects on time.
I'm grateful for the job I have.
I enjoy working with my team.
I'm bringing a positive attitude to work every day.
I am excellent at what I do.
I am generous.
I am happy.
I will be a leader in my organization.
Tip:
The use of affirmations is just one way to make positive changes to your life. You can also use techniques such as Thought Awareness, Rational Thinking, and Positive Thinking, and Cognitive Restructuring.
Key Points
Affirmations are positive statements that can help you overcome self-sabotaging, negative thoughts.
To use affirmations, first analyze the thoughts or behaviors you'd like to change in your own life and career.
Next, come up with positive, credible, present tense statements that are the opposite of these thoughts. Repeat your affirmations several times a day, especially when you find yourself slipping into a negative thinking pattern, or engaging in a negative behavior.
Remember that affirmations are most effective when used alongside other strategies, such as visualization and goal setting.
Blog entry
8 May 2013 - 3:22pm
New Members: It is recommended you read from the beginning of the archive, as previous lessons are prerequisite to this one. The first lesson is, "Why This Discussion?" at http://aypsite.com/10.html
We have covered a large amount of information over the past six months, and now we have come to the point where all of the main advanced yoga practices have been shared. Does this mean there is nothing else to add in the way of practices? I don't think we could ever get to that stage, because yoga is a vast subject with innumerable details that we could discuss indefinitely. There are many supporting and incidental practices we can get into. Maybe we will as the discussion continues. But the primary ones have been covered already here in the main lessons and in the tantra group. Using the advanced yoga practices given so far, so much purification and opening deep in the nervous system can be achieved that everything else that is necessary for enlightenment will come automatically through the connectedness of yoga.
That is the goal in these lessons -- to provide the essential means to stimulate the nervous system to purify and open itself, which it is very inclined to do when given the opportunity. Once the ball gets rolling, many aspects of our natural inclination toward human spiritual transformation will kick in. The goal here is to assist you in becoming self-sufficient in yoga like that.
Way back in the beginning of the lessons, we talked about natural abilities contained within all of us that only need some stimulation to move us toward conscious inner openings to the infinite. These abilities are rooted in several fundamental principles that are inherent in our nervous system. We are all designed and built to experience unending divine ecstatic bliss!
In this lesson we will review the fundamental principles, the natural abilities that stem from them, and the practices that have been given that stimulate these natural abilities. The essence of yoga science is discovering and applying the simplest and most powerful means for leveraging the natural abilities we have to hasten our spiritual transformation. That is what these lessons have been aiming to do.
The fundamental principles of human spiritual transformation are simple enough, and we have touched on them often in the lessons, discussing from many different angles. There are five of them:
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES
1. Attraction – To truth and/or God, expressed as desire – It is Love.
2. Purification and opening – A process every human nervous system is naturally inclined to go through.
3. Inner silence – Pure bliss consciousness, our native state that shines though our nervous system as purification and opening occur.
4. Ecstasy – Experienced when our nervous system is stimulated by the awakening our inner life-force.
5. Union – our transformation to a permanent state of compassionate unity, the fruition of the merging of our inner silence and ecstasy – It is Love.
These fundamental principles of enlightenment begin with love and end with love. It is love that leads us through human spiritual transformation involving the purification and opening of our nervous system, which reveals the principles of inner silence and ecstatic conductivity in us, and their merging. To accomplish this, love employs the methods of yoga, which take advantage of natural abilities we all have that are associated with the five fundamental principles. Let's list those abilities now:
NATURAL ABILITIES
1. The ability that desire, consistently applied toward an objective, has to move our inner and outer expressions of energy (life-force) in ways that fundamentally change our experience of life.
2. The ability our mind has to move naturally toward stillness. This is awareness without any objects – also called inner silence, or pure bliss consciousness.
3. The ability of the mind to effortlessly refine the thought of a sound, naturally bringing the mind to stillness over and over again. Certain sounds resonate with certain aspects of our nervous system. These sounds can be used selectively to stimulate the nervous system toward an orderly transformation.
4. The mind-body connection that enables naturally cultivated stillness of mind to induce stillness of our body, metabolism, and breath. This is the connectedness of yoga, experienced in many ways through our opening nervous system.
5. The ability of our nervous system to naturally sustain the quality of stillness, our silent blissful inner consciousness, even when it is not being cultivated. This is called a state of "silent witnessing," among other things.
6. The ability of restraint and regulation of breath to influence the flow of life-force in the nervous system, producing a sensation of relaxation and, ultimately, feelings of ecstasy in the body.
7. The ability of inner silence and the flow of life-force in the body to remove obstructions lodged deep in our nervous system, purifying and opening our awareness gradually to an expanding experience of inner peace, creative energy, happiness, and love.
8. The ability of restraint and regulation of breath to "awaken" the vast storehouse of life-force located in our pelvic region -- sexual energy that is drawn upward in our nervous system to compensate for a reduced intake of oxygen when the breath is gently restrained.
9. The ability of attention to influence the flow of the life-force in the body, especially when combined with restraint and regulation of breath.
10. The ability of certain nerves and nerve plexuses to be stimulated physically to enhance and direct the flow of life-force in the body.
11. The ability of the neuro-biology in the center and front of the head (the third eye) to connect with and direct (control) the neuro-biology near the base of the spine and the vast storehouse of life-force (sexual energy) in that region.
12. The ability of the nerve in the center of the spine to conduct the life-force and ecstatic energy between the pelvic region and the third eye. This is called the spinal nerve.
13. The ability of the spinal nerve to radiate life-force and ecstatic energy throughout the entire body, enlivening every aspect of the higher neuro-biology within us in a smooth and orderly way. This is the rise of permanent ecstatic conductivity.
14. The ability of the nervous system to amplify the power of a thought when the thought is initiated deep in inner silence, yielding great purifying effects in the body and surrounding environment.
15. The ability of inner silence and ecstatic energy to merge and be sustained as one self-conscious presence in our nervous system. This is experienced as ecstatic bliss. This we come to know as the expression of our Self.
16. The ability of ecstatic bliss to flow out from us to our surroundings as divine love. Then we find our Self in the form of all we encounter. This is the natural flowering of divine love in service to all beings.
All of these abilities exist in us, and only need some nudging to begin to manifest changes in how our nervous system is functioning. With the full range of advanced yoga practices, we can do a lot of nudging, stimulating every natural ability we have that can move us along the path of human spiritual transformation.
Everyone reacts a little differently to the processes of stimulation through yoga practices, due to the differences we each have in the structure of inner obstructions that are to be steadily and safely dissolved. We all can make the journey of transformation through yoga. It is only a matter of managing the conduct of our practices. This we call, "self-pacing."
We have built up an integrated system of practices that stimulate the activation of the abilities listed above, bringing to our conscious experience the fulfillment of the five fundamental principles.
Let's now list the practices for review.
PRACTICES
1. Cultivation of desire for practices – bhakti (love of truth and/or God in the heart). Bhakti/desire is the engine that drives all yoga practices. We accomplish it by favoring a chosen high ideal (ishta) with all of our desires and emotions, whether they are positive or negative. In this way, a huge momentum driving us toward enlightenment is created within us and around us. Then everything we need to progress on our journey is drawn to us magnetically, including the willpower to engage in daily advanced yoga practices for as long as it takes to complete our journey.
2. Deep meditation with the mantra "I AM" (plus two mantra enhancements along the way). Meditation involves easily favoring the mantra to bring the mind (and body) to stillness over and over again twice daily, stimulating deep purification in our nervous system, and yielding permanent inner blissful silence.
3. Spinal breathing pranayama – the primary practice for awakening and balancing the life-force in the spinal nerve between the third eye and root. The life-force is also called kundalini.
4. Enhancements to spinal breathing using throat opening on inhalation, restricted epiglottis during exhalation, and tracing ascending cool currents and descending warm currents in the spinal nerve during inhalation and exhalation. These enhancements increase stimulation of the life-force in the spinal nerve.
5. Mulabandha/asvini – manipulations using the anal sphincter muscle to awaken the life-force (kundalini) at the root.
6. Sambhavi – a means for producing direct physical stimulation of the neurological mechanisms of the third eye in the head, involving raising and centering of the eyes toward the point between the eyebrows, and slightly furrowing the brow. Controlled and stable stimulation of kundalini at the root and throughout the nervous system is achieved in this way.
7. Asanas (postures) – systematic bending and stretching of the body that is a natural complement to spinal breathing pranayama and deep meditation. Asanas help cultivate and purify the nervous system.
8. Siddhasana – a powerful way of sitting during practices for awakening kundalini at the root. The heel is placed firmly at the perineum, and constant stimulation of sexual energy is achieved. Over time, the entire nervous system is illuminated by this procedure, performed effortlessly during all sitting advanced yoga practices.
9. Yoni mudra kumbhaka – a practice that helps open the third eye with air pressure in the nasal passages and sinuses, and awakens the life-force/kundalini in the entire nervous system through kumbhaka (breath retention) and associated mudras and bandhas.
10. Tantric sexual relations (the holdback method) – similar to the dynamics of siddhasana and used during sexual relations with or without a partner. Tantric sex is a powerful way to enliven and distribute the life-force (kundalini) throughout the body.
11. Kechari mudra (four stages) – raising the tongue upward in stages to (1) the roof of the mouth, (2) above the soft palate to the spiritually erogenous edge of the nasal septum, (3) to the top of the nasal pharynx cavity, and (4) to the point between the eyebrows through the spiritually sensitive nasal passages. Entering stage 2 kechari is one of the most dramatic transitions in all advanced yoga practices. It is a primary stimulator of kundalini, and a major cause of the rise of permanent ecstatic conductivity in the nervous system.
12. Uddiyana bandha and nauli – stimulating the upward movement of kundalini using the diaphragm and abdominal muscles. Nauli involves twirling the abdominal muscles, and is highly stimulating to kundalini.
13. Dynamic jalandhara (chin pump), with or without kumbhaka (breath retention). This is rotating the head while systematically dropping it toward the chest with each rotation, stimulating ecstatic energies between the heart and head, and throughout the body.
14. Samyama – the process of initiating and releasing particular thoughts (sutras) deep within our inner silence, producing powerful purifying effects throughout the nervous system. The effects can manifest as so-called supernormal powers, which are called siddhis. Samyama is done for spiritual purification.
15. Spinal bastrika – rapid breathing in the spinal nerve between the third eye and root, which dramatically accelerates the purification of the spinal nerve, and the entire nervous system.
16. Targeted bastrika – for the third eye, throat, heart, abdomen, or pelvic/root area. This rapid breathing method is for focusing on and clearing out stubborn karmic obstructions lodged in particular areas of our spiritual anatomy, as needed.
17. Crown to root bastrika – This is also rapid breathing in the spinal nerve, going between the crown flower cup and root. It is best undertaken only after extensive purification of the nervous system has been achieved through third eye to root spinal breathing, deep meditation, and other methods that cleanse the nervous system of karmic obstructions in a smooth and progressive manner. Premature opening of the crown can lead to much difficulty, discomfort, and distraction on the path, so this advanced practice is best undertaken only when tests of stability have been succesfully conducted at the crown.
18. Loving service to others – a conscious practice, and a natural result of the increasing outward flow of divine love resulting from the purification and opening of the nervous system produced by advanced yoga practices. This is our natural state of being – an endless overflowing of ecstatic bliss and divine love. Nothing on this earth, or beyond, is more real or more powerful than this great truth that is inherent in every one of us. The reality of divine love is the ultimate truth in us. As we become advanced in yoga, this becomes crystal clear. For some it is known right from the very first sitting in deep meditation.
This lesson has been to summarize all that we have covered so far, including the fundamental principles of human spiritual transformation, the natural abilities we have within us that bring about our transformation, and the key advanced yoga practices that stimulate our natural abilities into action.
With a twice-daily routine of practices, we place ourselves on a "fast track" to enlightenment. It is potentially so fast that it is essential that we develop skill in regulating the practices we are doing each day, measuring each practice by the clock. We adjust practice times as necessary to maintain smooth and steady progress without incurring excessive discomfort due to too many obstructions being released in our nervous system.
This regulation of practices is called "self-pacing," and it too is a practice – one of the most important practices. For, without good self-pacing, we are not likely to get very far on the road to enlightenment.
Another aspect of advanced yoga practices is the prudent handing of experiences, whether they are mundane or extreme. This is a path of enjoyment, and we are entitled to enjoy the "scenery" we encounter on our journey to enlightenment. However, the scenery is not what will advance us on our path, It is our practices that will move us ahead. So, after an admiring look at the passing scenery, no matter how beautiful or attention-grabbing it may be, we easily go back to the practice we are doing. If spiritual experiences come while we are in our daily activities, as they certainly shall, we then can continue to enjoy the experiences, or go back to whatever it is we are doing.
We always have a choice. Spiritual life is not something that must be hijacking us from ordinary life. If it is, we have probably engaged in some kind of excess in the past, and a stable routine of practices can correct this. Spiritual life is something that can be cultivated to fulfill our daily activities in everyday life, whatever they may be. We are free to live our rising spiritual experiences in a way that is compatible with our needs. It is our life, our journey, and our enlightenment. We have no one to become but our Self.
Enjoy!
The guru is in you.
Note: For detailed instructions on building a balanced daily practice routine with self-pacing, see the Eight Limbs of Yoga Book at http://aypsite.com/books.html#8lim
http://aypsite.com/204.html
Blog entry
8 May 2013 - 6:18am
Channelled by Shazi
----The Emerald Path-----
I see myself looking at me
I see Jesus smiling besides me
I see my face and it is looking back, but it is getting younger
I see my skin colour changing, the texture the tone
I see my lips getting younger and my eyes too
I see Jesus say ‘now go little one’
I see a path open up, which is different then before
I see it unfold like a hidden path
I see it is green, like emerald green
I see green everywhere along this path
I see when I walk the path radiates energy and healing
I see I am barefooted and the green emeralds are going rising through my feet and into my BE-ing
I see that I am slowly turning green, but I am not afraid
I see that I have stopped as I see a circle
I see it is in front of me hovering, a blue circle, turquoise in colour
I see it is hovering but I am puzzled
I see that I am staring at the circle and then notice it has eyes
I see that they are kind eyes and they give a warmth feeling in me
I see I am still looking at the circle and notice my body has turned back into my original self
I see the circle come nearer and circle around faster and faster
I see it is like a whirlpool and I am in the centre
I see it continue to circle fast around me
I see my hairs of my body tingle
I see my hairs rise up
I see it slowing down and stopping then disappearing
I see myself feeling tired a little
I see myself recover and be back at my path
I see Jesus waiting for me
I see him being pleased and he embraces me
I see and feel warmth generated by his hug
I see that I am back where we started
I see that my journey has finished.
The sight of the soul travelled by Shazi
video
8 May 2013 - 3:24am
All of us are on the spiritual path, whether we know it or not. But once we commit to doing the work to breaking down aspects of our ego mind so that we can express our authentic self, our life might feel like it’s falling apart. When you surrender your life over to the universe, you might experience the circumstances in your life getting much worse before they get better. Why is that? You will start to peel back the layers that you have built throughout the years that you identify with. And letting go of anything, even the dysfunctional aspects of who we are can be very painful. But once we have cleared the aspects of our lives that are no longer working for, we begin to make room to express the new. Then we can begin to experience the career, the relationships, the health and the wealth that is an expression of who we truly are and not we were taught to believe we are or who we think we are. So perhaps committing to the process of expressing your authentic self is no walk in the park, but the gifts of self-love and self-acceptance are priceless.
Story
7 May 2013 - 9:20pm
The powerful energies of this week's solar eclipse (May 9/10) will likely bring up any unresolved emotional energies from the past. This clearing can assist us in stepping more fully into the new time. Regardless of what comes up this week, it will be helpful to remain calm and in a place of gratitude for the help we receive in stepping free of the past.
Past Emotional Baggage Binds us to the Past
Past emotional baggage exists in our consciousness as weak points or triggers that have a way of pulling us back into the energy of old dramas. If we still hold childhood emotions around not being loved or if we we're still hurting from the long ago loss of a loved one, we are easy prey for thought viruses that can anchor us into lower-vibrational realities. By working with energy, we are able to facilitate our own healing.
Thought Viruses Rob us of Life-Force Energy
Thought viruses bind and enslave us to physical reality. They feed on life-force energy by continuously pulling us into lower frequencies where old ideas and ways of being are deeply entrenched. Scarcity is a primary thought virus.Thoughts of scarcity tell us we are small, disempowered, impoverished and unloved. When a person falls prey to a thought virus, their beliefs are modified by the virus and they begin acting in ways consistent with the false reality propagated by the virus.
The Moment when we Take a Leap of Faith
It is obvious there is a vicious cycle that entraps the conscious mind. The thought virus convinces a person they are small and hapless. These thoughtforms draw new traumas that reinforce old ones and help the thought virus retain its hold. The point at which a person is able to step free of thought viruses is the moment they awaken and see through this cycle. Upon awakening, we are able to see that the thought virus is actually helping us by bringing us to the brink of despair - a point that prompts us to become still and ask questions about the situation we are in. These questions crack open the door and the light shines in. This is when we realize everything that happens holds the power to assist us on our journey of awakening if we are willing to sit in gratitude with it.
As we see through scarcity, we are able to replace disempowering thoughts of scarcity with thoughts of abundance, unconditional love, and gratitude. These thoughts lift us to high-vibrational timelines where our highest potentials manifest.
Love and Gratitude are Antidotes to the Scarcity Thought Virus
We are always able to counteract scarcity thoughtforms with thoughts of love and gratitude. Meditate on love whenever these feelings arise. To get in touch with feelings of unconditional love, hold before you the image of someone or something that evokes this unconditional feeling within you. Once you connect strongly with this feeling for a loved one, practice extending it to yourself and all others.
Gratitude can also help break the spell of a thought virus. As you meditate, bring your focus to everything you're grateful for. Keep expanding the list of things you're grateful for by finding the silver lining in every situation in your life, both past and present.
During times when powerful eclipse energies bring our awareness to old emotional dramas still hooked into our emotions, we can sit in gratitude for the assistance they represent. When we sit in love and gratitude during the time of an eclipse, we are able to harness the most powerful energies in the universe to facilitate emotional healing and freedom.
For more information, visit http://www.celestialvision.org/
Story
7 May 2013 - 5:50pm
Harness the Positive Power of Your Words
Ascended Master, El Morya’s Weekly Message ~ May 07 – 14, 2013
Received by Julie Miller
May 07, 2013
By now dear ones you are quite aware of the enormous power behind your spoken and even from your written words. The person on the receiving end will either be inspired or discouraged just from the words you choose to express. And if you are vocalizing these words, how your tone, and volume all provides unspoken information that many are able to pick-up on. We have witnessed many of you being both the speaker of encouraging words and the recipient of inspiring wisdom rich words, and we have also seen many of you express yourself in a condescending way, or received words that managed to dissolve your light filled spirit very quickly.
It is vitally crucial that you choose your words wisely, regardless if you are speaking them or putting them in writing to ensure all aspects in your communication interactions are successful. Understand the detrimental effects associated with the words you choose, they can greatly alter the results of the goals you had planned and how well you achieved those goals. When words are chosen without thinking, they have the power to quickly destroy passion, decrease your self-esteem, and disrupt your natural level of enthusiasm. Poorly chosen words dear ones can cause regression along your journey and any progress will create weak results from any activities you were part of. On the other hand, words that are chosen well, even in written form have the capability to excite your spirit, refresh your enthusiasm; well-chosen words have the potential to produce more understanding and clarity; in addition well-chosen words create an increase of positive results from activities and tasks you were part of.
Comprehend dear ones, the words you choose does create an instant impression of yourself. How you want people to see you will be from the result of the words you choose to speak. When you want to influence others, or make new friends it’s essential to wisely think and choose the Right words or what will happen dear one is that you will sabotage any new relationship before it even begins.
Since you are already well aware of how your words can affect others, it is up to you to examine your self and the words you choose – pay attention dear ones. Becoming more consciously aware of your words and how you express them will help you harness their power and put that power to positive use. If you already know you are weak with your words, this is your time then dear ones to work a little more to bring your verbal and written expression into a more articulate manifestation of yourself and of God.
When using words negatively, they have the power to destroy like a bomb. When words are chosen unwisely, they can inflict incredible damage to those on the receiving end. Realize and remember dear ones, your words have lasting power, and to someone who is especially sensitive, the damage can have long lingering effects that can create harm to their physical body. We encourage you dear ones to always be aware of the power behind your words.
We witness many dear souls that share your earthly home use their words to smear, to lie, to gossip and eventually to destroy another person’s hard-earned reputation. When a dear soul uses their words in such a negative way, they will rarely think about how their own negative actions against another will also have implications to their own life. We have observed many such people and after a time, these dear souls become trapped inside their own negative mind-set and discover they cannot find inspiring words to share with other people. When you choose to insult and hurt another person with your words dear ones, what you are also doing is causing harm to yourself and this harm affects everyone that is closest to you. If this behaviour isn’t controlled quickly it can spin out-of-control and begin to repel people instead of attracting them.
It is no secret that mere words have destroyed many good relationships. Communication is so important in any kind of relationship, regardless if it’s romantic or platonic. But if words are not chosen wisely, they can easily become misunderstood and those precious relationships that you put so much energy into are swiftly destroyed. Many dear souls have lost jobs because of poor chosen words, and many customers have left department stores out of anger and upset because of ill chosen words. All relationships dear ones have the capability of encouraging the success of your journey. How you speak, the words you choose, even if written are your choice. We cannot urge you enough to understand their impact.
Your words are filled with so much power dear ones that they have the ability to bring great change into the world you live. Your choices of words have the power to influence others in Light-Positive ways, which will result in achieving more peace and an abundance of success into your life. We suggest you to exercise this power often, to speak positively with those that cross your path, even if you do not know them. When you are standing at a bus stop, or in line at a checkout make the time to give a compliment to who is standing there with you or to the cashier. Your choice to be kind and to say kind words have the ability of changing a person’s day. If you know of someone that is working hard to achieve a goal, make a point to motivate them by saying something inspiring. Remember your words are incredibly powerful. Your words can express remorse for someone’s recent loss of a loved one; your words can express appreciation and respect. Don’t be awkward with your words; they are yours, so that means they are a part of you. Embrace this power dear ones, it is yours and we have great faith in each of you that you will use your words wisely. Bring light humour into your conversation, laughter is very healing and it will help brighten all spirits that are involved. Use your gift of words when you speak to God from your heart, thank Him for all the blessings He has given you thus far in your life.
Today is a good day to begin observing the words you choose. When you choose to bring friendly words into every relationship you will develop healthy responses that will help spread positive Light-filled energy into the global world around you. Never forget the power that you have with the words you choose to express. Use the power of your words to empower yourself and others.
Because of cultural diversity, age, etc., the words that are available within your vocabulary can easily express and create negative emotions instead of positive ones. Even if you do not say the words out loud, even while keeping them under your breath, they do hold negative energy and some dear souls are quite capable of picking up this negative vibration. Your words dear ones have the potential of defining your success rate on any task or goal that you have planned to achieve. As you choose your words, try to envision the impression they will have to the one who is to receive your words. When you are working towards achieving your goals, think about increasing more positive self-talk and less negativity and watch how your plans will rise in successful completion.
Challenge your own self-talk. Instead of making excuses with “I can’t”, change those words to “I can” or better yet to “I will”. To us dear ones there is no such thing as can’t until you have tried. Sometimes this may mean having to try achieving something more than once to figure out the best working solution. All you do dear ones is change your words when you are encouraging yourself. When you choose to use the word “could” instead of “should” you remove any possible guilt or other negative feelings that are often associated with certain wordings. Remember dear ones, there are no such things as mistakes – only opportunities to try again differently.
We suggest that you keep in the back of your mind or written down and kept with you a positive affirmation that helps to encourage you when you find yourself not feeling too inspiring. We understand your energies can go up and down and we encourage you to be nice to you. When you bring positive affirmations into light and with regular use they help change your Inner Thinking and your awareness is increased. Remember dear ones your words have the power to destroy or construct. What flows from your mouth does impact those around you – this power is yours and we encourage you to use it wisely.
And so it is…
I AM Ascended Master, El Morya through Julie Miller
Blog entry
7 May 2013 - 3:23pm
New Members: It is recommended you read from the beginning of the archive, as previous lessons are prerequisite to this one. The first lesson is, "Why This Discussion?" at http://aypsite.com/10.html
Q: I am going to an ashram in India for almost a month. My guru will be there, the one who I truly resonate with.
I want to talk to you about some things that have been going on. I am grateful to have someone who will respond with something other than a hearty laugh at my "goings on." (My guru always just smiles or laughs.) He told me less than a year ago that I was resisting. I do not wish to resist Truth. Why live in ignorance? But still, I
must have some resistance.
I have had all sorts of crazy things happening. I'm the one who'd written you a while back about always having the kundalini - even as a little child - seeing the lights, feeling the buzz, hearing the hums, etc. etc. But what's going on now is even more. I need to tell someone who does not know me or anyone around me this. A lot of it is stuff I've already experienced, but some of it is new. I'll list it:
Seeing flashes of light of all colors now and then - especially around animals and people and some trees.
Feeling energy coursing through my body - highly erotic, but not sexual (not exactly...)
Stiffness and pain around the bottom, back of skull and into back of neck and jaw. Lots of popping going on along the spine there - especially during the spinal breathing you gave me (which I incorporated into my yoga pranayams).
My right hand has been doing a lot of sporadic shaking and if I get any extra energy surges, I start squeezing it and then releasing it by flexing it backwards quickly - as if the energy were just pouring out of it. A lot of vibrating in the hands and feet.
A general feeling of excitement.
Sobs come when I think on my gurus' compassion. People keep telling me what you have told me, that the guru is within... that brings me to the next thing - I hear my gurus in my head. Yes, I know it sounds crazy, but they tell me the answers when I need one. I could actually go to them with all of this - but I want external validation.
If I need an answer, I open up Beyond Words, and it speaks of exactly what I need to hear - in the precise words.
My guru's picture seems to move and the expressions actually change while I am looking at it, communicating with him.
I can tell what people are feeling - and seem to know before them why they are feeling this way.
If someone asks me a question on spirituality, I can move aside and someone else seems to answer through me.
At certain times, it's like I'm detached, like a balloon, floating in the air, watching myself down below. During these times, if I look at the ground, it seems so far down there...but there is a general unconcern during these times about most things.
Things are seeming to manifest - without any stated intention on my part. I only have to sort of unconsciously think it, and it happens.
I am meeting people on the "path" a lot now.
I am still having fits where I shake - especially if I go inside to certain places where I feel a lot of intensity.
I started having those things again where energy explodes through my system (that I've had my whole life off and on) where it shoots out everywhere, but my solar plexus is disturbed and I feel like I have to swallow a lot, and I also feel like I need to use the bathroom (and often have to find a restroom very soon afterwards). I am then tired and have a hard time communicating anything - sort of in a daze.
When I'm talking to people that I feel free with (at my church or in my yoga group), I've found that my body starts doing things to express its bliss. It will start waving its arms in the air in a dance, or doing tree posture, or outright dancing!
When I meditated with a man from our church - doing a tantric meditation - I started a lot of the shaking - energy going up the spine and out the top or around the mouth or third eye.
If I ever just lie there, still, my awareness of the energy increases heavily. During meditation, I feel surges coming, Grace from above, descending down, down, down, through me. (Thank you God and Guru!)
Third eye is doing a lot of whirring about.
Often, lately, in the car, I will begin feeling my Guru(s), or having a conversation with them, and this inwardly exciting thing starts happening, and I feel I have to scream! So I scream a scream that is penetrating and shrill and sort of blissful. My right hand starts doing its thing and/or my spine starts lurching about - but I'm perfectly OK and still in control of the car.
At times, I will move my hand in a certain fashion, or flip my hair, and I feel as if I AM my guru. Yes, strange, I know. Is this something to do with merging? It's literally as if I can't tell the difference between him and me for that short instance. It's nothing I'm thinking about, really, it's more like for a flash, I feel no difference between us.
I'm feeling like I need to meditate with others a lot lately.
During my meditations, I used to be able to go into them without even remembering anything. Now, though, I have jerks in my body often.I have had two dreams/visions, where I am not at all afraid of death. One, while standing on a plastic tarp in the middle of the ocean as large waves rolled around. The other, a man was burying my orange dress. The dress stood for spirituality and seemed to be synonymous with my skin. I did not feel anything as I watched him covering it with dirt. I am willing to drop every concept I have had of "spirituality" and begin anew.
I seem to have picked up a hoard of spirit guides or teachers on the astral plane. I don't even know how I am aware of this.
I have recently spoken with an "Indigo." I could feel him very strongly over the phone, although I've never met him. Beautiful.
Picking up vibes of lower entities and also seeing one in my classroom door. He lurks about there often as a dark silhouette - opening my cabinet door, etc. to get my (and my students') attention.
Longing is intense. I feel this "place" which I've known before, but cannot seem to find and hold. It visits like a flash and then is gone. My guru told me, "You have not done this before."
Anyway, I'll be seeing my guru coming up, but I am unsure if I should tell him about these things and talk with him about them. I don't know what will happen next. Never do. I don't care. I am here for it to happen. If it is unnecessary emotion and commotion which helps nothing other than convincing me, then I want to fast forward to the part where I no longer need these things to be convinced. As Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee says of the 2 yr. old girl's prayer, "God, I know." and God said, "Yes, and I know." My guru knows. But I could use some sort of explanation, still. Do you have one for me? Or is it all part of the mystery and will be spoiled by another telling me? Or will I not understand anyway?
Should I be doing meditations? I've met a new man who I want to do meditations with. He goes to my church. Also, should I do reiki swap outs? Or is this not good for me at this time?
I was speaking with someone who I know has been working on himself for a long time. He is one of the very few I confide in, and actually I'd not told anyone this outright, but I was telling him that I could communicate with my teachers in my head and that one of them comforts me and another is more of a motivator, but that the essential core of them felt the same. (It gets confusing. Are they me?) And he said he does not have this. I doubted for a second my experience when he said it because of him and you - always telling me the guru is within. I don't know who I am anymore - I seem to be expanding into something else. Maybe my guru and others are within as aspects of my inner guru...
Maybe it's the pranayams, meditation, and asanas that are speeding things up. I still don't feel as if I've reached where I once "was."
Despite all of this, my life is pretty balanced/ordinary. I'm still teaching and planning to make more trips to India. (I'm testing the waters on this trip. If it feels right, I'll come back for a while, and then move to India for two years (as my guru has suggested.) On the other hand, I'm having to do extra alternate nostril breathing for inner balance. Family still doesn't like my yogic stuff, but church and yogic family does. Still have some time for my dog and 3 cats.
I also make time to read your Advanced Yoga Practices often. Still not anywhere near finished with them...
Sorry such a long letter! I had a lot going on and I needed to release it! We are all so blessed to have someone to respond to us and give us the attention you have given us. I hope you are taking care of your physical body and not overly exerting yourself.
A: It's good to hear from you again.
Much of what you are experiencing falls under the category of purification in the nervous system. As such, it is a mixture of truth and the karmic "exhaust" of obstructions being dissolved and burned up. That is perhaps why your guru is not responding on the details. It is impossible to do so and make sense of everything that is happening. Nor will it matter for the karmic combustion parts of it. And what is true will stand on its own. Truth is what is left when all the rest has been burned off.
There are a few points I'd like to mention.
To the extent you are doing practices, you are hastening the process. That is good, but excessive practices can lead to excessive symptoms, and then prudent "self-pacing" should be applied. There is no point to be doing practices to the extent where life becomes chaos and one cannot function. I know that is not where you are, but if you press too hard with extra practices, and all the other things you are considering, it could become like that. So, a little moderation and measurement of daily practices would not hurt. We want to go fast, but not so fast that we shake to pieces or burn up.
Keep in mind that the most balancing practice you have from the lessons is spinal breathing. Too much or too little of it can leave you either short on balancing or short on progress. Doing the same amount of spinal breathing at each twice-daily sitting is important, whether it be 5, 10, 15 or more minutes, depending on your comfort level. The same goes for meditation. The rest of the practices in the lessons wrap around those two. If you are "doubling up" on practices in each sitting, like doing two or more kinds of meditation, or multiple pranayamas beyond what is recommended in a single approach, or adding additional group practices on a regular basis, all that will contribute to the potential for excessive releases. So it is best to stick with a steady routine of complementary practices, paced for maximum progress with good comfort. I mention all that just as food for thought. You seem to be doing okay, though you are pushing the envelope a bit there. No doubt the envelope will get pushed even more in India, though you will be under good supervision there, right?
The two most important experiences you mentioned from my perspective are the witnessing, which is the rise of inner silence, and the erotic/ecstatic sensations moving up through your body. These two are at the heart of the enlightenment process, its foundation actually, and are what advanced yoga practices cultivate. To be honest, all the rest is just a passing show, and ought not be given more than casual notice, and definitely not favored over practices. A recent Q&A covering this in detail is called, "The drama of a premature crown opening." With limited inner silence/witnessing, one can be prone to identify too much with experiences. Enlightenment is not about experiences. A few lessons earlier is one called "Managing the opening of the crown." You might find these two discussions pertinent to your situation. Not that all of it applies to you, but you will see some of the same elements, benefits, and risks you have had or are facing now.
On seeing the guru(s) inside, that is along the lines of what is described in lesson #57, "The guru is in me?" (http://aypsite.com/57.html) The guru begins in us as desire, goes out to link with outer knowledge and/or physical guru, and then goes back inside and is seen there. So seeing your guru(s) inside is a natural part of the bhakti process. Eventually, he/they will dissolve into your rising enlightenment and it will be your own Self that is radiating out. All of this is part of the process of purification also, so your guru may not focus on it because the details of karmic release are unfathomable. It is all going on in you, leading inevitably to your enlightenment. That is the most important thing.
It sounds like you are doing very well. Just favor stability in your routine of practices, and try to avoid jumping whole-hog into new ones until you develop an understanding of how they will complement your overall practices. Otherwise you could be "doubling up" on things and overdoing. It takes a certain amount of ordinary everyday activity to stabilize the energies we stimulate in practices, so sometimes less practice and more activity can bring more progress. You have all this in your busy routine already, of course. These are just reminders.
Thanks for your concern for me. Just so you will know, the posting of core lessons on Yahoo is almost done. All that is left is a posting summarizing all of the principles and practices, and a lesson on tips for keeping a regular practice going within a busy schedule - a big challenge for most of us in this workaday world. After covering those things, there may be less activity on Yahoo for a while (emails will be answered to the best of my ability and Q&As will be posted, as appropriate). Then I will be focusing on publishing two hard copy books, both which are in good draft form already -- one being an enhanced version of these lessons, and the other being a spiritual/adventure/romance novel with the actual advanced yoga practices woven into it. If anyone knows a good literary agent with a strong interest in spiritual/new age book publishing, let me know. That is the next step.
Also, the Yahoo lessons will be mirrored to a free access web site. All of this will be to make sure the knowledge is secure and widely available for whoever wants it.
Have a wonderful time in India! I'd love to hear from you when you get back.
The guru is in you.
Note: For detailed instructions on building a balanced daily practice routine with self-pacing, including retreat guidelines, see the Eight Limbs of Yoga Book at http://aypsite.com/books.html#8lim
http://aypsite.com/203.html
Teaching
7 May 2013 - 10:00am
Building Healthy Emotions
Written by Audrey Marlene
http://www.audreymarlene-lifecoach.com/emotions.html
The depth of one’s spiritual experience is directly related to the strength and capacity of their emotions. Our emotions are a dimension of our spirituality, which play a significant role in how we perceive all aspects of our lives and how we benefit from them. Emotions are triggered through our senses-- touching, seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting and how we perceive the world around us. Our brains interpret the incoming messages from our senses but sometimes these messages can be misinterpreted giving us a false impression of what is happening. Our perceptions are not always perfect. What we sense can move us to react in some of the following ways:
Anger, Rage, Contempt
Fear, Guilt
Anxiety, Anticipation
Sadness, Despair, Hurt
Shame, Humiliation
Joy, Happiness, Love, Desire, Pleasure
Pride, Satisfaction, Fulfillment, Sense of Accomplishment
Jealousy, Greed, Suspicion
Hope, Faith, Courage
Emotions such as shame, guilt, anxiety, hurtfulness and sadness are most often caused by the thoughts we perceive. They can affect our mood, cloud our judgment, and influence our decisions. A lot of what we perceive determines the limits we place on our lives. The mind feeds on what we perceive and any misconceptions can become compulsive, preventing us from finding emotional peace and strength. Our thoughts can create unnecessary pain and suffering, or a life of hope and promise for the future. By changing our perception we can change our emotions and how we feel. When you are emotionally healthy you are in control of your thoughts, feelings and behavior. When in this state of mind, you feel good about yourself and can readily engage in good relationships. Without a doubt, emotions must be sound in order to have a healthy mind.
How would you rate your emotional state? A large part of my responsibility as a life strategist is to help you to recognize your emotional condition and give you the tools necessary to build strong and healthy emotions. Without emotional balance and stability, your efforts for achieving great things in life are compromised. Healthy emotions are essential in maintaining a clear, objective perspective in order to rise above mediocrity and ultimately achieve the greatness within you. Healthy emotions indicate a more meaningful life.
Are your emotions stable?
We are highly emotional beings. We feel emotions, we communicate emotions, and we remember emotions. Our emotions drive us to feel good or bad, feel more or less in control, or more or less powerful. When we feel strong negative emotions, it’s our body’s way of alerting us that something in our lives requires attention; this is our built in alarm system warning us that changes need to be made. Naturally, we need to feel emotional balance in order to feel good inside. Here's your chance to investigate and diagnose your emotional health. By clicking on each link below, you can begin to identify the emotions that need attention and how to address them. You can acquire a better understanding of your emotional limitations and strengths and take the first steps toward achieving emotional equilibrium
No matter how intelligent, educated, wealthy, or beautiful you are, if your emotions are unbalanced, you are at a disadvantage regarding your capacity to reach your desired goals or, put simply, that good feeling inside. I urge you to begin cultivating emotional balance. Once you have achieved it, your emotional intelligence will exponentially increase, allowing you the energy and power within to take the next step towards reaching anything you aspire to.
It is important to recognize the extent to which one’s emotions can enhance or hinder their development. I, personally, have had my share of emotional setbacks, but with perseverance, I have discovered emotional balance and a kind of happiness that I never ever expected to enjoy. It's amazing how we can go through life year after year wondering why we feel the way we do -- faced with issues of sadness, depression, fear anxiety, doubt and that dreadful feeling in the pit of our stomachs-- never knowing when the feelings will pass. Everyone longs to feel confident, to be able to hold their head high and feel great about who they are as a person.
Now it's time to stop longing; it's time to take action to feel those good emotions you deserve to feel every day of your life. Once you can understand and diagnose your emotional state and learn to manage them, you move closer to experiencing true happiness.
Blog entry
7 May 2013 - 6:13am
Teachings of Ascended Master Saida Khatoon
submitted by Shazi
-----Vision 042 - The Limits of Human Knowledge----------
During Meditation, I saw myself far away in heaven and standing over water. I realise that this was the highest zone of heaven (Hijab-e-Mehood). I could see this place from a distant.
A strong desire arises in my heart to see this place closer. Thinking of this, I saw the way filled with rivers of fire. The fire was flowing and melting in these rivers. I was not afraid of seeing the fire; in fact I started to make plans of getting through these rivers of fire.
I think of Ascended Master, Baba Auliya firstly and feel that he is a great spiritual scholar and healer and without his help I could not get through these rivers. In that very moment he came near to me from one side.
He said, “Why are you standing here?”
I replied, “Master, how can I get through these rivers of fire?” In that moment, my spirit guide also came.
Ascended Master Baba Auliya then asked, “Why do you want to cross these rivers?”
I pointed far away towards the heaven and said, “I want to see Hijab-e-Mehood (The highest zone of heaven, from near.”
Ascended Master Baba Auliya asked surprisingly, “OK, so you can see that far.” Then he said to my spirit guide, “She can see up to Hijab-e-Mehood. What do you think? Shall we help her?”
My spirit guide nods and smiles. Ascended Master Baba Auliya also seemed to be happy. Then he turned his face towards the left. A handsome man appeared holding a big tray. He gave the tray to him with great respect. He then picked up a dress from it. It was a dress of holy lights. It was very beautiful. He then gave it to me and told me to put it on. He also said, “This dress is the dress of God’s lights of attributes. Beside every river, this man will give you a dress to put on.”
Wearing these dresses, I would be able to move in the river of fire and I will be protected from it. Likewise after crossing ten thousand rivers I would reach where Hijab-e-Mehood was situated.
The Creator was protecting me and I had nothing to worry about. Then Ascended Master Baba Auliya gave me his best wishes and my spirit guide did the same. By their permission I stepped in the river. After moving a few steps in the river, in appearance it looked horrible, but I did not feel any heat at all. Thinking to myself about the dress, it must have been fire proof.
I inspect my dress carefully to find which material it was made up of. I looked at it and thought of a dress like the astronauts would wear; it was silver in colour from the outside and very soft from the inside. I assumed that this silvery outer surface repels the heat waves of the fire. Also there was a spongy layer inside.
The coolness coming out of my body was filling the spongy inside layer. This prevented the dress from heating up. As I was satisfied with this technique, I start moving in the river of fire rapidly. Similarly when I cross one river I saw another one, at the end. At the end of every river, a man gave me another dress. The colour of every dress was different at each time. Likewise I cross ten thousand rivers of fire and ultimately reach the river of water.
I saw myself that even after wearing ten thousand dresses, my body was very light, why, I did not know? I noticed that my body was made up of lights and that there are ten thousand different coloured lights on that body of light.
I thought what could be the weight and width of the lights. I saw these lights in the form of dresses. Then I saw again ten thousand dresses of lights. Then I realise that there are two types of minds working inside me. One is the thinking of Noor. This understands and sees God’s light. The other one sees everything on worldly means. I wondered that both of my minds were working together.
To experience this I thought my dresses which were made of silk and I then saw ten thousand silk dresses on my body. Then I thought that my dresses were made up of lights. Then I saw ten thousand dresses all made of lights. Seeing these lights I realise that which light made a particular dress. I tried to find out the properties of each light.
Now I entered in the river of water and reached Hijab-e-Mehood. This place was like a huge palace. It seemed to be like a whole world. I entered inside the palace and pass through a number of beautiful corridors. There were colourful works of architecture in these corridors. After passing these I reached a big hall. This hall seemed to be bigger than the whole world. There were a lot of big mirrors everywhere in the hall. Firstly, I went to the middle of that hall and look around surprisingly. Then I saw my image in every mirror moving all around joyfully. It felt good to see my image in the mirror for a while.
In every mirror my image was of a different colour. I was happy to see these colourful images of mine. After some time, I thought why God would put these millions of mirrors here? Is it just because I can see my image in them? Thinking this I find myself bored of seeing my image in the mirrors. Instead of looking in the mirror I look upwards. As soon as I looked up, a light came and got bright as it reached to the middle of the hall. Then a voice came, “Alasto-birrabbikum” (Am I not your provider)
As soon as the light came and got very bright I could see the mirror. There was God’s magnificence in every mirror. I start saying spontaneously, ‘Bala-ya-rabbul-Alamin’. (Indeed you are my Lord God)
In every moment, lights came and said Alasto-birrabbikum and said it in a state of a trance, Bala-ya-rabbul-Alamin. Every time, the speed of the light became more and more instanced. I was about to fall due to my state of consciousness. At that moment a light came from above and gradually entered my head and spreads all over in my body. A voice came in my head, ‘Nahno-Aqrabo-Ilaike-Min-hablil-wauid. (I am closer than your rage).
All of my movements got slower as I fully concentrated on that voice which is coming from inside of me. I knew that I’ve seen the light entering in my body so I waited to see what would happen. Thinking of that, I saw my heart.
First of all I saw all of my body which was very bright, and my heart appeared to be a room. Looking carefully I found that the room was a selection of the halls of Hijab-e-Mehood. There were mirrors everywhere in that room, similar to the hall. I could see all their scenes inside of me and thought that there were so many lights coming outside of me.
My eyes couldn’t withstand all the lights. These lights were destroying my consciousness, but inside I felt very cool and relaxed. There were the same scenes inside, but this didn’t give me any pressure to my consciousness. I felt so much love and admiration for God and thought how loving He was. God knew that I could not withstand all these from outside, so He put a selection inside my heart.
I praised Him and continue for a long time.
(Adapted from the teachings of Ascended Master Saida Khatoon)
video
6 May 2013 - 8:04pm
All of us are on the spiritual path, whether we know it or not. And all of us are evolving at our own pace. By having an understanding of the four stages of spiritual consciousness, we can have a better idea of where we have been, where we are at now in our lives and where we might be moving towards. The four stages are:
1) Experiencing life as a victim with no control over your circumstances
2) Recognizing that we have the ability to create our reality with our thoughts and can therefore control our destiny
3) Surrendering to the flow of the universe by allowing the will of God to be expressed through us
4) Being one with the divine
video
6 May 2013 - 8:02pm
Everything in the universe is energy. Who we truly are, our soul, vibrates at a signature frequency that is representative of pure bliss and love. However, we have adopted beliefs that affect our energetic frequencies and block us from experiencing endless abundance in all aspects of our lives. By peeling back these layers, we can access our core, that allows us to experience all that IS.
Teaching
6 May 2013 - 10:03am
How Vulnerability Holds the Key to Emotional Intimacy
By Brené Brown
Issue: 2012 November-December of Spirituality & Health
She may not be a household name just yet, but when you refer to “the woman who talks about vulnerability,” the seven million viewers of her TEDTalks videos know you mean Brené Brown. A research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, Brown has been studying shame, fear, and vulnerability for 12 years. She has presented her findings in three books, on national television, and in lectures across the country. A mix of no-nonsense Texan and best-friend warmth, Brown shines a light into the inner chambers of our hearts—and illuminates a reason to hope. She discusses her new book,Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, with S&H’s Karen Bouris.
S&H: In your new book Daring Greatly, you introduce the idea of a shame-based emotion that seems unique to our contemporary society. One aspect you name is the “fear of being ordinary.”
Brené Brown: The overwhelming message in our culture today is that an ordinary life is a meaningless life unless you are grabbing a lot of attention and you have lots of Twitter followers and Facebook fans who know everything you know. I use the shame-based fear of being ordinary as my definition for narcissism. I definitely see it in younger generations, where people fear they are not big enough. No matter how happy and fulfilling their small, quiet life is, they feel it must not mean very much, because it’s not the way people are measuring success. Which is just terrifying.
So there’s excess, but at the same time, you talk about a culture of scarcity. Can you explain what you mean by that?
The root of the scarcity issue is fear. The questions we are living by—what are we supposed to fear, and who is to blame?—are exhausting for us spiritually, emotionally. Fear consumes an enormous amount of energy in our lives, and to me that’s probably the greatest casualty of the scarcity culture. We are spending so much time and energy being afraid that we are not fully walking into our power and our gifts.
During your 12 years of research, you found people who do feel adequate; you coined the term “wholehearted” for this feeling, a feeling of being enough. How did they arrive at that emotional place?
There are two things they shared in common. The first is a sense of worthiness—they engage in the world, with the world, from a place of worthiness. Second, they make choices every day in their life, choices that almost feel subversive in our culture. They are mindful about things like rest and play. They cultivate creativity, they practice self-compassion. They have an understanding of the importance of vulnerability and the perception of vulnerability as courage. They show up in their lives in a very open way that I think scares most of us.
Why should we foster vulnerability in our relationships?
When I asked people “What is vulnerability?” a large percentage of them used the example of “initiating sex with my wife” or “initiating sex with my husband.” Yet there can be no intimacy—emotional intimacy, spiritual intimacy, physical intimacy—without vulnerability. One of the reasons there is such an intimacy deficit today is because we don’t know how to be vulnerable. It’s about being honest with how we feel, about our fears, about what we need, and, asking for what we need. Vulnerability is a glue that holds intimate relationships together.
How does vulnerability relate to our capacity for joy?
As someone who spent more than a decade studying fear, vulnerability, and shame, I never thought in a million years that I would say that joy is probably the most difficult emotion to feel. It’s hard to feel joy because we are so keenly aware that it’s fleeting. When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, we lose the courage to be joyful. Joy is a daring emotion! We are going to let ourselves stop in a moment that won’t last forever, that can be taken away. We feel almost that “you are a schmuck if you let yourself feel too deeply because the bad stuff is going to happen.”
Is that because we feel undeserving of joy?
I think what drives it, even more than feeling undeserving, is “if I let myself feel this joy, pain will be all that much harder. If I let myself just really sink into the joy of my child, something is going to happen to him or her, and I will be devastated.” It comes back to the idea that it’s easier to live disappointed than feel disappointed. And yet we are starving for joy. I have never met anyone who doesn’t want more joy in their life.
You use a term, “the betrayal of disengagement.”
Before I started this research, when someone used the word “betrayal,” I thought of high drama, of cheating or mistrust. During the interviews, though, the most hurt and the deepest hurt I saw, over and over, was when people would talk about relationships— whether it was with a friend, a parent, with adult children—where people had just stopped trying. Where at some point, they threw their hands in the air and said, “it’s not supposed to be this much work or this hard.” Our capacity for wholeheartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be brokenhearted; again, it goes back to the idea that we are so afraid of feeling pain and feeling loss that we opt to live disappointed rather than to feel disappointed. We are never fully in; there is no raw engagement.
A lot of your work examines how humans experience the emotion of shame. Can you explain how shame relates to vulnerability?
If vulnerability is the willingness to show up and let ourselves be seen, shame gets in the way. How can we be authentically known when we are paralyzed with fear about what people might see? Setting boundaries is a great example; it’s something that people don’t think about as vulnerability, but saying “no” and protecting our time—whether it’s family time, our creative time, whatever our self-care time is—that’s a huge act of vulnerability in a culture where productivity is so highly valued.
Where does shame come from? Are we born with it?
We are born with the hardwiring for connection, and I think we learn shame. It starts as a parenting tool. It’s also a tool for social control; it’s a tool in classrooms; it’s a tool in synagogues and churches and mosques.
But if it’s everywhere, how can we overcome it?
Shame needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. And when you start naming [the cause of your shame] and talking about it with people who have earned the right to hear these stories in your life, it dissipates, because shame only works when it keeps you in this false belief that you are alone. The good news is that the men and women I have interviewed who have high levels of shame resilience share things in common that we can all learn from.
You first studied women, then men. Did you find that the genders experience shame differently?
Shame is a human experience, but the expectations and messages that fuel shame are definitely organized by gender. I would say that men have a tendency, and this is painting with a broad stroke, but men have a tendency to have one or two responses to shame, which is anger or disengagement. Women have a tendency to turn against themselves. We tend to join the choir of the gremlins and engage in some destructive self-loathing.
Does that shame affect our bodies and health?
I think we carry shame in our bodies just like we carry trauma in our bodies. One of the interesting studies on this was from James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin. He studied trauma, expressive writing, and physical wellness. What he found is that for people who held on to a secret of trauma—because of shame or because of guilt—keeping that secret had a worse effect on their physical well-being than the actual traumatic event.
In Daring Greatly, you also address how many men have feelings of shame surrounding sex. Can you share what you found in your research?
There is so much pressure on men. In the book I share some of the conformities I found in female norms and the conformities in male norms. Women [are supposed to be] thin, nice, pretty, and quiet. For men, the norms are emotional stoicism, primacy of work, and control over women. It’s still about “don’t be perceived as weak,” and men have a lot of shame and fear around rejection and criticism. So sex can become a very scary thing for them because it feels like their worthiness is on the line.
You gave me some fresh insight into our culture’s obsession with pornography.
I remember interviewing this man who was a therapist, and he’d worked with men for years. He said that what people don’t understand is, pornography is looking for connection in all the wrong places. [People think] it’s five dollars, five minutes—no rejection, no shame, no criticism. Then when they’re engaging in that behavior, that drives shame and then it becomes cyclical. That shame trigger bumps right up against women’s body-shame issues, so it just becomes the perfect storm. Imagine the vulnerability barricades that go up when that starts to play out between a couple. What everyone is really looking for is worthiness, and the belief that they are worthy of love and belonging.
You share in your TEDTalks and your books about having a breakdown, and you call it a spiritual awakening. What does that mean to you?
For me, it was reconnecting with my vulnerability and letting joy back in my life, practicing gratitude, and letting go of perfection. My faith life is my greatest act and source of daring. I am a believer; I am all in! I believe in God, I believe in the goodness of people, I believe that we are all interconnected by something deeply spiritual and profound that’s bigger than us, and so for me, personally, my path to engaging with the world and having the courage to be vulnerable was strictly the result of reconnecting with my faith life.
Is your faith an internal or external expression?
It’s fully both. I am engaged in a faith community; I go to an Episcopal church here in Houston, and I am very involved and my family is very involved. That’s part of it. But there is the deeper part of it that is just my relationship with God. At one point in my life, the organizing principle was acceptance and approval. Now, the organizing principles in my life are my faith and my values, which are driven completely by my faith. It’s about doing my work in service to my beliefs, as opposed to doing my work for gold stars—and I am so crazy about a gold star every now and then! I am not that evolved. However, it’s not the guiding principle anymore. I also don’t have the fear of failure I used to have. Because of grace. You know, grace allows for failure.
What do you hope people will get from Daring Greatly?
That we need what everyone has to bring to the table. If we are so afraid of what people think, we’re not going to show up in the way that we need to show up for ourselves and for the people around us. We’re all in this together, and time is short. So get the show on the road! —S&H
Stop Shame in Its Tracks
Everyone is going to experience feelings of shame, yet we can become more “shame resilient,” says Brown. She observed that some people have higher levels of what she calls shame resilience, and that this characteristic can lead to deeper connections with themselves and others. There were four traits that she found shame-resilient people had in common, and she shares them with us here:
THEY KNOW WHAT SHAME IS. “They talk about the feelings, they ask for what they need,” says Brown. “And they don’t call it embarrassment, they don’t call it guilt, they don’t call it self-esteem—they call it shame.”
THEY UNDERSTAND WHAT ACTIVATES THEIR FEELINGS OF SHAME. “For example, I can expect to be triggered as soon as I feel like I have disappointed someone or let them down,” she says. “I am going to hear a mental tape playing ‘you are not enough.’ Because I am expecting it, I can greet it and say, ‘I get it, but not this time.’ ”
THEY PRACTICE CRITICAL AWARENESS. Brown might, for example, ask herself, Is it really true that my worth hinges on making someone else happy?
THEY REACH OUT. “I might call a good friend and say, ‘Hey, this guy has been asking me to speak at a conference, but it’s on Charlie’s birthday. I said no and he got upset. I know I did the right thing, yet I am feeling like I am not good enough.’” Shame can’t survive being spoken, says Brown. “Talking cuts shame off at its knees.”
Story
5 May 2013 - 7:27pm
The True Power of Your Spiritual Journey is what YOU create that is new
Melchizedek’s Weekly Message ~ May 05 – 12, 2013
Received by Julie Miller
May 05, 2013
We have witnessed how easy it is for some dear souls to become angry – how quick this emotion can rise is quite incredible. Angry and frustrating emotions have caused many dear souls deep challenges along their journey. LEARNING TO CONTROL emotions has never been easy but it is necessary. We have also observed how much harder it is to direct anger correctly to the correct person, done at the correct time and for the correct reason, and all achieved in the best possible way. Directing your emotions is not an easy task but nothing is impossible. Learning to control your emotions brings you into becoming more aware of the need to practice discernment that is highly required for your emotional intelligence.
Yes, emotions are part of your nature and it is true that many of you find this area quite difficult to maintain. How often has your emotions caused you trouble? Can you remember when you lost your temper extremely fast because your stress level became suddenly high? We have seen many of you at the mercy of your emotions. Uncontrolled emotions have been a cause for many debilitating health issues, relationship disturbances and the inability to make good decisions. Yet, at the same time dear ones you cannot just wipe emotions from your life. Obtaining a productive emotional state of mind is an essential component to the success of your spiritual journey and in all other areas of your life. It is important dear ones to learn how to capture the energy derived from your emotions and use this energy productively.
There is a certain amount of stress that each of you need in order to motivate yourself, to meet crucial deadlines, achieve goals, etc. But when this stress becomes out-of-control, emotions creep in and they can incur disabling circumstances and create havoc that quickly depletes your energy reserves.
It is during such hectic times where having emotional intelligence is advantageous. Rather than emotions being always controlling, learn to redirect their energy into helpful steps to achieve the outcome you have been working on. It is true dear ones, to be better at communicating, to improve relationships, to be a better problem solver and other areas where emotions can create problems you have the power to change all that you do not like. Remember dear ones this is your journey.
It is required dear ones for you to understand what it means to be emotionally intelligent. Quite simply, emotional intelligence is your own ability to identify your own feelings and those feelings of others in order to motivate and inspire yourself; emotional intelligence allows you to effectively manage your emotions within yourself and in your relationships. By inspiring yourself to be more in control of your emotional faculty you will dear ones inspire others.
Learn to feel your emotions on a physical level. This requires you to be extremely observant. When you feel rise of any kind of emotion can you identify what or how your body is responding? Does your heart race, can you feel sudden muscle tension, or possibly an uneasy feeling in your stomach. Being aware of your body’s signals is a fantastic beginning for you to recognize your own emotions and the affect they have. As you learn to identify your emotions on a physical level, you then will come to a few conclusions on what their triggers are. Pay attention dear ones. What kind of people causes you the most frustration? Is there a particular place that causes a rise or low of emotion? When you have had a distressing experience, try to determine the cause of your upset and identify the emotions that were at work. To become better acquainted with your emotional triggers, we suggest to you to keep a journal and note when you are feeling a flux of emotions, what it was you were doing, where was your state of mind, who was all involved, rate how intense your emotional feeling was. Really focus dear ones when stress greets you. Your best feedback is not from others, but from your own signals. Learn to identify even if you find yourself under a great deal of stress to learn how your emotions manifested. Your journey dear ones requires you to have a great sense of Self. Besides God, no one knows you better than you.
It is important dear one to have personal emotional goals to meet. Through the discovery and awareness of your behaviour and how your feelings have a major role you are find you are ready to make necessary changes in the areas that create the greatest struggle for controlling your emotions.
We have seen so many dear souls with intense emotional outbursts where their own mind races and creates many negative in-the-mind conversations. We suggest to you, during moments where your emotions are running rampart to use peaceful visualizations to bring yourself back into a more peaceful state. FOCUS on your breathing and redirect your energy to a calm and peaceful place. Finding a way to bring laughter into your life during such times will definitely help reduce the tension of out-of-control emotions can cause. When you focus on your breathing, you are helping to re-center your whole self and bring calmness to your body. When you are visibly aware that difficult feelings are beginning to spill out all you need to do dear ones is stop. Right there, stop – close your eyes, slowly you begin to breathe deep, exhaling all your stress and worries. Allow the re-centering moment to briefly transport you to a place where worry does not exist and discover peace. When you leave this peaceful moment you will discover a wonderful feeling of being refreshed and revitalized.
A lot of your emotional instability comes from negative self-talk. We are encouraging you to take the brave step forward to change the way you feel about yourself. It is understood dear ones that the majority of your emotional upsets is derived from internal signals and how you perceive a particular situation. Making a decent effort to concentrate on your internal self-talk will provide you with much needed knowledge that will help you to reframe your thoughts in a more positive and up-beat way.
We also witness and understand how your physical health determines how you feel emotionally. It is important to take care of you. Ensure you are giving your body optimal nutrition, water and rest. Remind yourself dear ones; balance is essential in every area of your life, even with emotions. Learn to eliminate as much of the worry and stress out of your life. Take the time to work through any issues that you know you can change by reselecting the appropriate solution, weighing all the advantages and disadvantages before you come to a final decision.
It is important to be focused on each part of your journey but it is just as important to allow leisure to have a part. Because the busyness of your day can be stressful, it’s important to find ways to bring amusement and joy into your life. Allowing yourself to wander aimlessly even in a bookstore can really help you let go of emotional struggles. Give yourself the time dear ones to do what you enjoy. Your journey does have room for fun and merriment.
Your day is filled with choices. From the moment you open your eyes you choose to rise or to turn over and go back to sleep. You also have the choice to allow the dawn of a new day to motivate you. A great way to end debilitating negative emotions is by adopting an increase of positive thought forms and activity. Be energetic when looking for new and positive ways that will help you cope with overwrought emotions. From your own searching capability you will discover many ways to improve your thought forms and how to respond in a better way that illustrates the genuine love that is evident in your delightful spiritual heart.
Your WILL does have a conscious mind role that many of you apply through determined focus and attention. The problem is dear ones, not being able to remain focused. We observe this dilemma with many – their attention is varied. A challenge is created when trying to focus too long on one area because there are too many distractions. This is when WILL is applied. Sometimes you become unaware of how difficult it is to remain purely focused. Meditation is a great way to determine how focused you truly are. We have observed many of you have trouble holding onto lasting calm because your mind begins to wander. WILL is a strength that can be improved on through practice. Meditation is an excellent way to increase the power of your concentration. Even through your busy day, you can develop a higher awareness of your focus and where it is. It is through your WILL that you decide what it is you will focus on and from your WILL you also decide for how long your concentrated focus will be. Understand dear ones a lack of focus will create a lack of productive results and we know you already comprehend the importance of a successful completion is based on the effort you applied.
Another important mental faculty for you to become master of dear ones is your power of PERCEPTION. It is well understood that your PERCEPTION dominates what you are to become conscious of. Understand dear ones perception contains both conscious and sub-conscious mental functions. It is through your conscious mind that you find choices. It is through the conscious mind that you choose and decide to see the good/bad, or positive/negative. The choice you make holds a great influence on your ability to respond and react through your feelings. Your life is about balance dear ones. You can’t just choose to be one way because you will create an imbalance such as Light/Dark. It is important dear ones to be aware of all sides not just one or the other.
Many people have a hard time understanding that good can come from a bad situation. That is because they are still wrapped up in emotions that have not been dealt with. Even within the saddest tragedy there is good to be found. Sometimes to see the good among the bad, you have to unclutter your mind and choose what it is you want to focus on. Your heart will guide you dear ones – it does have a tendency to speak softly so we encourage you to listen closely. In your subconscious mind, your ability to PERCEIVE is determined what you have become conscious of. From great amount of information that comes your way at all times of the day, comprehend dear ones that only a small amount of what you receive is actually processed. What gets filtered through your sub-conscious is decided by what resonates with your beliefs and what your thinking mind understands as important. Each of you are moved by information that you yourself allow to be filtered which provides each of you to have different experiences even within the same event. Establishing clear goals, using positive self-talk and other uplifting and self-inspiring methods are essential for instructing your mind what is important to you. What you choose to concentrate on is what you will get the most out of and this dear ones is the power behind your ability to PERCEIVE.
Your MEMORY, which is also an important part of your mental faculty also, has a conscious and sub-conscious part to play. Any new information you receive you already know is contained by your short term MEMORY of the conscious part of your mind. And while this information is there it remains easy to access and to remember. It is however unfortunate that new information does not remain within the short-term MEMORY for very long. This new information only remains until you have chosen what to do with it, if anything. We have seen many dear souls gain new information and sit on it for so long that it merely fades away.
Your ability to REASON is a small but essential part of your thinking mind and part of your mental faculty. It is here where you understand what you normally mean when you speak with what you are thinking. The better your ability is to REASON demonstrates the maturity of your conscious mind. Understand dear ones, your ability to be REASON mainly stems from the conscious part of your mind and its main duty is to observe, associate and assess ideas. It is how you make many of your decisions and through your ability to REASON you also have the opportunity to create new ways of bringing more positive light into every aspect of your life.
The real true power to your spiritual journey is not from what you have done before, but from what you can create that is new – you have always had the choice at every stage of your life and the power behind reason has allowed you to choose wisely before and you will choose wisely again. Ideas are not created through your sub-conscious mind dear ones. Your sub-conscious mind can only proceed from ideas that are shared from your conscious mind then choose how to make them work. Sometimes your sub-conscious mind may protest if your new idea is big and holds the potential of disabling the sacred balance of your beliefs and life experiences. When this struggle is apparent dear ones is up to you to continue your focus and persist. Remember dear ones, the bigger your new idea is, the more discomfort you may feel, but you are expanding beyond your normal comfort zone and this is good dear ones. Don’t fear the unknown; embrace it with the beautiful love that fills your delightful spiritual heart.
IMAGINATION is an important mental faculty. It is through your IMAGINATION where you can examine each aspect of your dreams that speak of endless opportunities of your approaching future. When you can intensely imagine what it is you wish to achieve, you create an emotional intensity within your conscious mind and this excites your sub-conscious mind to produce certain reactions within your body that will in time help you gain the actual experience. Manifestation works within your ability to visualize what it is you are aiming to achieve. Understand dear ones of the importance of sensory specifics. Even if you are visioning something good or bad the power within you is already at work. Don’t visualize what you don’t want to happen. Visualising dear ones can become a form of planning when you use this method carefully and correctly. It is a very essential and powerful tool within each of you. So much has been accomplished because of those with the ability to put their visions to work.
INTUITION is a very powerful faculty within the mental state of your mind and it is very important. Each of you, men, women and children all carry this gift but not all of you have honed this gift into a skill or talent. INTUITION does work between both conscious and sub-conscious mind. Your conscious mind is your verbal and your sub-conscious mind is your emotional part of your being. Your sub-conscious mind is where you receive certain feelings about something that is about to happen, but if you were to get sudden idea that becomes verbalized then you know it’s your conscious mind intuitively speaking to you.
It is well understood by now dear ones by many that the main substance of the vast universe is CONSCIOUSNESS. Each of you are the expression of this Divine Consciousness and your INTUITION ability is your connection to central core of consciousness and through your consciousness you have the ability to glean all the knowledge you need for each segment of your journey. The force behind your drive to succeed within your emotional and mental faculties is merciful and kind. This force is divine by nature and He has spoken to many of you through the way of the heart. God is with you during each experience that crosses your path. As you practice on listening, you will hear His voice become louder and easier to recognize as He speaks through your heart. Your Will, perception, memory, reason, imagination and intuition have been given to you as gifts – use them intelligently and discover a whole new world of possibilities open as you learn to master each part of your Self.
I AM Melchizedek through Julie Miller
video
5 May 2013 - 4:54am
This video is a technique that I do to help me stay grateful each day.
Teaching
5 May 2013 - 3:24am
In the future each person will channel. It’s a skill that will be taught to grade school children. In this future time, we will no longer need an Internet as its spiritual component, conscious channeling, will be fully activated and engaged within each being. I doubt we’ll be calling it channeling in that timeframe for this term carries the burden of too many misconceptions. It has become attached to the idea of allowing foreign entities to take over one’s consciousness.
There may well be a new term for this process of reaching at will into our subconscious mind and beyond that into our superconscious, which contains the codes and keys to all the universe. In that time, we won’t even think of naming the process we use to access knowledge, guidance and information; that would seem as foolish as naming your big toe. Channeling or whatever term we will use to describe the skill of “universal access” will someday be accepted as a process as natural as breathing. In fact, it already is, but at present many subscribe to belief systems that block this ability from their reality. Like anything else, it's a skill that must be accepted and developed.
Even if your belief system can't yet embrace the concept of channeling, you'll find exercises here such as automatic writing, dream work and interpreting the symbols of your waking life valuable in sharpening your ability to receive intuitive guidance. Over time, the guidance that comes through will help you build a belief in your own abilities and subsequently transform the course of your life.
Excerpt from Channeling into the Next Dimension: A Handbook for Opening Your Psychic Senses by DL Zeta & Peter Phalam http://www.celestialvision.org/channeling-into-the-next-dimen/
For more information, visit http://www.celestialvision.com/
Teaching
5 May 2013 - 3:21am
There are signposts that signal our arrival into fifth-dimensional consciousness. Love and kindness are two signposts upon which our foundation for inter-dimensional experience is based. Love is the highest vibration in the universe; kindness is a natural manifestation of love. Embracing and cultivating love and kindness carries us through the gates of higher dimensions.
We may have a sense of knowing and the ability to access certain forms of higher knowledge but without the ability to live from our heart, we are unable to realize this knowledge in our daily life. Without love, higher knowledge is stillborn and unrealized.
Healing Emotions Allows Communion with our Soul
Practicing love and kindness unites our conscious mind with our heart. When we allow ourselves to experience our feelings, we are able to sit with feelings that may not be comfortable at first. In time, we work through emotional baggage and are able to experience emotional communion with our soul. Our soul expresses itself in feeling states; our mind communicates in words. We need both working together to enter a state of oneness within ourselves.
Getting our conscious mind to embrace our soul may be difficult if we are overly identified with physical reality.
Releasing Physical-Based Identities
When our identity - who we believe ourselves to be – is solely derived from that which is measurable by the conscious mind, the tendency is to gaze with suspicion on anything we can't physically measure. Since the soul resides in the realm of the unseen and speaks to us in feelings through the doorway of the subconscious, a conscious mind entrenched solely in physical reality distrusts the feeling states transmitted via the soul. Without the soul’s loving and gentle guidance, the mind is able to rationalize most anything. This sometimes sends one’s life down paths that are further and further from its purpose.
An identity that embraces concepts such as meditation, natural healing, service, an active creative imagination and unseen realms is able to free itself of the shackles of physical reality. When we free ourselves from enslavement to the physical, we have much more to share with others. When we are free, we tend to act more from soul desires than from the struggle to survive. When we are free, we love more and treat others with kindness.
Asking for Assistance Opens the Door to Spiritual Wisdom
Identity is one window through which to understand how the soul and mind work together. The conscious mind in some individuals naturally opens to the soul due to spiritual understandings acquired over many lifetimes. Often a physical event inspires one to reach out and ask for assistance. When one reaches beyond the physical for help, they gain access to the rich storehouse of wisdom contained in their higher self. This knowledge and wisdom is held in escrow until they're ready to receive it.
This wisdom is accessed when the conscious mind “asks” for help through the heart feelings and opens to receive it. This is also a formula for manifesting desires into physical reality. The moment our identity shifts so we see ourselves as “one who asks for and receives divine guidance” we begin to access all that our soul holds in “escrow”.
Receiving and Right Use of Trust
The "opening to receive” part of this equation can pose a barrier if there are trust issues. Left to its own devices, the conscious mind places trust according to its own criteria. For example, we depend on another person so we must "love" them. And because we love them, we must "trust" them. If, at some point, a person proves unworthy of our trust, the conscious mind then computes that trust itself is not worthy. The fact is, each person can be trusted to act in accordance with their level of spiritual understanding within the moment. No more and no less. It may be difficult for the conscious mind to arrive at this conclusion without the loving guidance of the soul.
Misunderstandings around the issue of trust are one of the major reasons why some people distrust their soul and higher self. When we banish trust, our sole source of information and guidance is the conscious mind.
When a person misunderstands trust, this often triggers feelings of anger and betrayal. Anger bars access to the soul, the higher self, and the soul’s rich storehouse of wisdom and knowledge.
Discernment Teaches Right Use of Trust
Practicing discernment allows us to clear any misunderstandings we have around the issue of trust. Discernment is a province of the union of the mind and soul. When our mind practices the right use of trust, it understands that we can always trust the love and guidance of our soul and higher self. A conscious mind that opens to this source of loving guidance is able to enter feeling states that allow deepening spiritual communion. It is this communion that allows one to live a heartfelt existence. The natural outgrowth of a heartfelt life is the practice of love and kindness.
Love and Kindness Unite us with our Soul
When we unite our mind and our soul, we perceive how our words and actions affect others. We see how a leaf quivers at our touch, how the energy of our words affects all those we encounter. A conscious mind with this awareness chooses a path in life with the intent to harm none. This is the path of the heart and the path of the soul. When we see with our heart, we perceive our path and our truth within each moment. All that is not aligned with our path falls away. This is discernment.
Through the practice of discernment and right use of trust, we are able to develop a stronger communion with our soul and higher self. Love and kindness, as the outer manifestation of this communion, hold the power to carry us into the fifth-dimension and beyond.
For more on identity shifts, see Timeline and Identity Shifts: the New Science of Reality Creation by DL Zeta http://www.celestialvision.org/timeline-and-identity-shifts-e/
For more information, visit http://www.celestialvision.org/
