Monthly Archives: March 2015

BULLOCK: THE THOUGHT OF CHANGE

Photo credit: Ana Cernivec

A bullock trudged along a dusty path, which harbored the occasional sharp stone just where he least suspected it. The stiff wooden yoke was positioned just so that he could not look easily from side to side, and though he must necessarily look then to the front, the cruel engineering of the yoke decreed that he could not raise his line of sight enough to see the path ahead. Added to that, his burden weighed heavily, occasionally shifting uncomfortably. The bullock had no control over any of this, and there seemed nothing to look forward to.

From where did his next thought come? Surely not from the recesses of his previous thought patterns, which, like a factory, could churn out only more of the same. It alit suddenly, like a butterfly from a far off place. Who knows whence it came? Perhaps it was wished on him from some long-dead person’s prayer, or was the winged remnant of some past good deed, now finding form.

A brown and orange butterfly perched on a bright orange flower

Photo credit: Yuichi Kageyama

The thought: there is another way. It did no more than fly into his thought patterns and let itself be recognized. There is another way. It occupied his thought pattern for an entire heartbeat. It was enough.

I throw off all restrictions now

There was then seen a glimpse of green off to one side. As he allowed his eyes to stray there, he no more noticed the yoke. It let go its hold like releasing hands; without missing a beat his footsteps swerved straightly towards the green. Then his burden fell off, melted away, and was no more, as before him a vista opened itself.

Below the path and spreading out into a far infinity of soaring mountains, there lay a green and grassy meadow. There was a stream, a pool, and a fountain of sparkling fresh water. Grass grew sweet and long.

Everything I want is here, he realized. I can stay here forever. The air smelled of flowers, animals, and earth. Trees gave shade.

He ate and drank unhurriedly. There would always be plenty and abundance; what need to hurry? He lay down under a tree. He sank into thankfulness and peace.

The thought of change is change

REALITY WORTH CHOOSING

What is reality? Is it this day to day world that you live in, that you call life? Waking up to vague anxieties, raging fears, or black sadness, limping through the day with this heavy crow of misery on your shoulder? Look at the faces you pass in the street; are they happy faces? They are pinched in despair. Is this reality? Do you want it?

A grandmother and her three young granddaughters, carrying bunches of bananas on their backs. The colors are grey and muted; the faces are hesitant, open yet unsmiling.

Photo credit: Zeyn Afuang

Many of you go to work you did not choose, working long hours with no choice of your own as to how you spend your days. Is this life? Is this why you were born here? Fear, despair, pain and suffering; they seem to be universal. Is this what you want?

Photo credit: bantersnaps

Is reality only what can be apprehended by the five physical senses? Is reality only what you can see, hear, smell, taste and touch? Why do you give so much validity to the physical body, as though it should always know more validly than the other part of you? The other part of yourselves is everything you feel to exist, but which is not physical. That would be your minds, your psyches, and your souls.

Why have you set the body’s little knowledge higher than the knowledge that the soul has? This is truly backwards. It must be the work of the ego. The body says, “Trust me that only the evidence of your senses is real.” Who is the body speaking for but itself?

Photo credit: Richard Jaimes

But the body always follows the mind, friends. The mind is stronger than the body. Therefore, we should define reality as what can be perceived by the soul alone. That would be love, hope, compassion, peace and joy. This is a reality worth choosing.

Reality chosen by the soul

Photo credit: Gus Howie

FAITH IS INNER VISION

Faith is belief in things unseen. Do not rely on the body’s eyes to see. They seek out only what the mind has sent them to find.

If you believed in only what you could see with the body’s eyes, nothing would ever change. You would be telling yourselves that only what the physical eyes can render is real, that only what you see before you, on this plane of experience, is real. This is just a way of continuing the status quo. It is a way of keeping you eternally at square one.

Who would want this?

Smash it today, this idea that reality consists of only what you see before you. It is too limiting for you. You are a creator. You belong to the species that made “War and Peace”, the Panama canal, “The Marriage of Figaro”, non-violence, meditation, and all healings that ever took place.

At one time none of these wonderful manifestations existed to the body’s eyes or ears. It took someone not using the physical eyes to see and hear them first, and, becoming quiet, to tune into them, becoming their essence by simply thinking about them, creating with thought. Then they became sound, word and deed, visible to the body’s eyes and audible to its ears.

This is how creation is done, friends. Repair into yourself, close out the distractions of this world, quiet yourself, and be at ease. Summon to your mind images of what you want to create. How will the finished creation look? Spend time there.

The mind of the world can render only the sight of the present world.

Faith is belief in things unseen

Treat yourself to vision. Describe what you want to see, lovingly and carefully. Be at home here. What are the feelings that will surround your finished creation? Ah, here is a lovely place to be. Be consumed with love. How will you feel when you look upon your finished creation? Let yourself be transformed in thinking of it.

You can live in whatever world you want. When you call on higher help, a way is made.

Faith uses inner vision

BELIEF IS YOUR CHOICE

What is a belief but a practiced thought? It is an idea you picked up some time ago, and accepted. Once you accept an idea, your mind, your vision, your physical eyes, all are now primed to find confirmation of the belief. So primed, you see it everywhere. This makes it seem even more true to you, since it is constantly confirmed.

A statue of a cheeky cherub, chin resting on hand, lying among pine needles, as though he is observing humans with amusement

You choose what you see

Did you ever have the experience of learning about a new concept, such as “cognitive dissonance”, or “survival of the fittest”, or “magical realism”, and then see examples of it everywhere? Friend, these examples were there all the time. Remember that everything exists all at once but you choose what you see.

You didn’t see them before because you didn’t have a name for them. Now that you know what to call them, you will see them. This is how ideas are formed, and given birth into conscious recognition. You name something, you frame it, define it as you wish. Secondly, you practice it in your consciousness. It takes only seventeen seconds for a new connection to form.

Of course you choose your beliefs. If you didn’t choose them, it would not be possible for people to have differing beliefs. You have to assent to them before you can start giving them form and repetition. The longer you have held a belief, the more obvious and irrefutable it will seem to you. You will wonder how any reasonable person could disagree with you. You will find many opportunities to reaffirm your beliefs. Most of you will do this for a long time.

You can challenge any belief

The problem is that you often choose your beliefs in a very flimsy, haphazard way. Some other person may say or act out fearful thoughts: one race is better than another, violence can be used in the service of peace, compromise is weak. Very often, without one second of conscious examination, without holding them up to the light, you accept these ideas. After that, it is all about the polishing of them into firm beliefs.

We all think our beliefs are right and true, and that the one who disagrees with us is wrong.

How dangerous it can be to pick up an unexamined belief! It’s like eating any old piece of garbage you found on the ground. You don’t know where it came from.

A large question mark looming over a dark background

All questions enable consciousness

What if you picked up, “All men are cheats”, or, “I can’t do anything right”? You would be programmed to see evidence of those beliefs everywhere you looked. How chaotic and upsetting life would be. If you have a belief that is not serving you well, hold it up now to examination for seventeen seconds, or even longer. All questions are good, because they all enable consciousness.

Take the belief, “I never have anything to say.” Have you always thought this? Can you remember a time when you didn’t know this? Have you heard any other person voice this belief about you? In what situations do you notice this belief? Perhaps at gatherings where there are people you don’t know. How do you appear to others at those gatherings? What are you thinking in those moments? Do you have fearful, paralyzing thoughts? Could you see yourself without this belief?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see it as something separate from yourself, a piece of ragged, useless clothing that you could easily discard? You could be free of this thought, if all you do is invite it out into the light and examine it every time it occurs to you.

Apply the same examination to every new belief that suggests itself to you. Ask yourself: will this belief serve me well? Take only the beliefs that will serve you and your brothers well. “Together we can do anything.” “Inclusion is always better than exclusion.” “Peace in the world will come when we have inner peace.”

And polish them.

I want to be different

Multi-colored night sky merging with sea and receding fingers of land.

Photo credit: Kristopher Roller

ORIGINAL SIN: THE START LINE

Original sin is not something frightening and biblical; it is just the condition into which you were born. It is what you agreed to, when you came to this plane. It is the starting line.

“Original” means “from the beginning”, meaning the beginning of physical life on this plane, as you know it. It’s as though you just woke up here. This is all you know.

“Sin” doesn’t really mean what you take it to mean. It sounds like something bad that you did and need to be punished for. But “sin” has a simple and precise meaning: “to miss the mark”, as an arrow does. To make a mistake, to see things wrongly, not to realize, to be blind, oblivious, unknowing. These are all meanings of original sin. It is what you have to wake up from.

You have all had that moment of complete and sudden understanding about something you had been getting wrong, and now see rightly, and in that seeing alone is the behavior dropped. If you like them, these little wakings up, epiphanies as you can call them, then it can easily be arranged that you will have them more and more. Dwell on the insights you have been given, give thanks for them and pay attention to them. Each time you do so, you are creating a channel of energy between these happy enlightenments and the Sender of them.

Original sin is nothing to be afraid of. When you fear something, your instinct is not to deal with it, thus ensuring your slavery before it forever.

Is this a way for an enlightened being to exist?

When you fear something, you should rather wish to disable it instead, to shine the light of your holy, dispassionate attention onto it, and question it. Why are you here?

Name your worst fears now. What are they? Your husband is an alcoholic, your son wants to live as a woman, your wife is leaving you, someone else is going to jail, or does drugs, or is not normal, will never be able to support himself. Find out your worst fear and ask it: why are you here? I cower before you: why? You keep me subservient and afraid. Why am I choosing this? Let me see you for what you are, just a set of well-practiced thoughts that I polish every day by my constant attention.

Oh, stop. When fear presents its arguments to you, question them. What is the worst that can happen? Imagine a thought pattern as a three-legged stool. One of the legs of this stool is your constant attention to it. Right now, the thought pattern is strong and balanced.

What do you think would happen if you withdrew some of the attention you are giving? If you withdrew all of it? With one leg missing, the stool would topple over uselessly. You would have disabled it completely, so that it could not stand. This is how to break out of original sin. By conscious attention.

When I have learned the lesson, I will stop seeing it

FEAR: THE WORST DEVIL

This is the big one on everybody’s list. This is everybody’s worst devil. This motivates you to do almost everything you do.

Just think of all the ways you serve your fears. Every drug you keep in your house represents a different fear. You have anti-depressants, tranquillizers, and recreational drugs to control your moods. You keep Ibuprofen so you won’t have to feel pain. You keep Nyquil in case you get a cold. You keep Neosporin and bandaids in case of injury. Behind the fear of injury is something bigger: fear of infection, illness and death.

Fear of death motivates you to do many things. It makes you afraid to go into hospitals and nursing homes, even doctors’ offices where you could see sick or crazy people. This renders you of course completely unable to help any of these people, and makes you no more well than any of them. Fear keeps you weak. Because of your fear, you are unable to really listen to them. Everything they say only confirms your deep belief that these are places to be avoided.

If you had no fear of death, could any place scare you?

Think about how radically different life would be if you had no fear of death, if you knew it was no more than taking a step into another room.

In my Father’s house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. John, 14:2

Would you always stay in the same place out of fear? Every fear in fact is the fear of death. All unease can be traced to that. So to lose one’s fear of death would be to lose all fears.

Who would not want this?

How would life be once you had lost all fear of death? You would know that every moment is eternal, part of God’s creation. Knowing that every moment would go on forever, you would want to consciously and joyfully participate in each moment, noticing everything wonderful, inspiring, beautiful, quiet and peaceful, enjoying, giving thanks. Who would not want to live tucked under Life’s wing, ever with her, the great mother hen whose heartbeat comforts us eternally?

You can practice letting go your fears one by one, like a hoarder hating to give up one iota of junk. Or you can let them all go together, a murder of crows.

How free would you be if fear could no longer motivate you? What if you remained quiet in the face of fear and observed how quickly it crumbled to bits? When someone else at work did something that you couldn’t do, you wouldn’t have to remind yourself how wonderful and valuable you really are; you wouldn’t have to rationalize that what he did wasn’t that great. You wouldn’t have to feel inferior, worthless or devalued at all.

I want to be real

You would be unable to fear they would discover your lack of value, that you would lose your source of protection, your job with its ego and money rewards. That couldn’t happen, since your source of protection is always with you. You are in its heartbeat. You would know your every need was answered before you could think of it.

Every jealousy would melt like wax before a flame. Jealousy is only an expression of fear. You are jealous of someone because you think they have what really belongs to you. But if you knew your every need was anticipated and abundantly filled, what would you have to be jealous of?

Fear is behind every attempt to control the outcome. You fear bad grades for your kids because it means they won’t get into a good school, will drop out, do drugs, or whatever other meaning you give to bad grades. So you try to control the outcome, rewarding, punishing, worrying, helping your kids too much, and sensing unfairness all around them.

How would a parent with no fears look? That would be a very evolved being because your children provide an intense focus for your fears that most of you can hardly let go of in this lifetime.

Photo by Muhammadtaha Ibrahim Ma Aji on Unsplash

A parent with no fears would be interested in whatever her adult children chose to do; interested to know the reasons and see where it would go. A parent with no fears would be available to help if needed, but satisfied also not to. A parent with no fears would not project negative futures for her children.

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