Friday, January 31, 2014

The Power Of Our Own Nature

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw, the Irish born playwright, focused on the social issues that existed during the 20th century. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, and an Oscar in 1928. Most of us believe we do have to find our self in order to be happy. To us, the word find means we must confirm our worth through things, and validate our subjectivity using the opinion of others. The word create to us is a sacred word. Creation is an idea that’s reserved for the artists, and the mystics of the world.

We ignore our ability to create what we think about. We undervalue our innate energy. We don’t believe we manifest what we want to experience in life. Our educational system has made us believe that we are separated from the power of our own nature. Our families have unknowingly kept us in a cage of fear. We turn the keys to our life over to self-serving hypocrites that serve no one but themselves.

Those hypocrites teach us something about creating life. They teach us that thoughts are energy, and that energy intermingles with energy of the same kind. The pushers and takers show us the value in believing a truth even though that truth is a self-created lie. They create life according to their specifications, and in the process they find the self they so desperately seek. They find that self, and they believe in that life. They don’t judge that life. They live it.

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

The Light Of Agelessness

Traceless, no more need to hide, Now the old mirror Reflects everything, autumn light Moistened by faint mist.

Those thoughts were written, in Chinese, by Suian over eight centuries ago. We could say old age is that mirror. In the fourth quarter of life there are reflections everywhere. The faint mist of our memory covers the present with the tainted truths of the past. Our autumn light grows in the uncertainty of what we term our limited future.

We have low expectations of the self. Years of narrow-minded and judgmental facts immerse us in a pool of mystery. The unknown becomes one of our biggest fear. We hide one self from another, so the ego can play tricks on us as we act out our physical play. Traceless energy moves through the corners of our mind. We believe that energy is from some almighty entity. We are all part of that almighty energy essence, and that essence knows no boundaries.

The self-created boundaries of old age fall away, when we realize that we don’t acquire a spirit at death. We are always a spirit, and that spirit’s mirror reflects light of agelessness.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

A Sliver Of Our Identity

The woods would be silent If no birds sang there Except those that sang best.

John Audubon, the naturalist and painter, published his collection, Birds of America, in the first part of the 19th century. The collection consists of 435 life-size prints of birds. Audubon became an instant hit in England and Scotland during his 1826 tour of Europe.

If we focus on birds in their natural habitat, we would discover a personality within each one of them. Just like us, they possess certain qualities that make up their personality. And just like the birds our personalities are different, so our reality is never quiet.

Personality is one of those words we use to describe something about a person, but we really don’t do the word justice. We use terms like great, vivacious, wonderful and other words to explain what we see in others, but those words only express our feelings about different personalities. They don’t actually define what personality is.

We often think that our personality and our identity are one and the same, but there are differences. Our personality is a reflection of certain aspects of our identity. Those aspects are actualized in our three-dimensional reality. Personality is molded by physical circumstances, and identity operates in many dimensions.

The personality we consider the whole part of us is just a sliver of our identity. What we see in the mirror is just a drop of our true identity. We don’t see the ego, our subconscious, or our spirit in the mirror, but they are part of our identity. We see what we consider to be the whole self, but the whole self is much greater than our reflection.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

The Twirling Wind Of Hypocrisy

Empty-handed I go and behold the spade is in my hands; I walk on foot, and yet on the back of an ox I am riding; When I pass over the bridge, Lo the water floweth not, but the bridge doth flow.

Nothing can be more illogical and contrary to common sense than those four lines.

D.T. Suzuki, the 20th century professor of Zen Buddhism, translated those Zen thoughts in English. His objective was to make us aware of the folly of logic. Logic is a valuable tool for the ego, but it is worthless when trying to understand the nature of consciousness. The common sense approach to solving the mystery within us is not logical expression. Common sense is just a stepping stone to the comprehensive truth that exists without logic.

.In order to sense the Zen within us, we must escape every day phraseology, and the tyranny of logic. When we adhere to logical explanation for non-logical truths, we find the self in the twirling wind of hypocrisy. We give our power to that wind, and expect logic to guide us. We forget that logic, like our perception of time, only has validity in this reality. Other realities have other means of expressive knowing. We are capable of understanding those expressions once we recognize that empty-handed we travel through time, but we can still see the spade of another reality in our hands.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

The Layered Cake Of Existence

Man can say nothing of what he is incapable of feeling, but he can feel what he is incapable of putting into words, and he can know something which he is not aware that he knows.

Augustine, the 5th century Bishop of Hippo, wrote those words. We all know that unknown feeling. The feeling with no name that blinks in and out of our reality like a strobe light on steroids. We know there is more to the self we identify with, but we don’t know how to maintain an awareness of this more-ness.

When we talk about our identity we use words like body, mind, spirit and all the other terms that describe the ingredients of a physical being. We throw in the word soul now and again to demonstrate our knowledge of the spiritual aspect of being, but the word soul is a very misunderstood term. Perhaps the soul is our identity, and all the other words we use to describe us are the icing on our layered cake of existence.

Our entity or soul may be like a tree that continues to produce off springs that grow in awareness. Our entity tree thrives in more than one reality, and the roots of our entity grow from all the experiences of its off-springs. Just like the trees we expand from the experiences we feel in all of our limbs. The interesting thing is we don’t realize that growth because our ego, which is the lens by which we see what we create physically, is only focused on one part of our tree. The ego is able to feel what it can’t put in words, and know something which it is not aware of knowing as it maintains a singular focus. But, our soul knows the whole tree. Our soul is aware of the slightest growth from our whole identity, and enjoys every part of that action.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

We Are The Question

The poet's world is a puzzle, full of wonders, full of questions. All poetry offers answers to questions, though only the poet knows what the questions are.

Shinkichi Takahashi, Japan’s 20th century Master Poet, expressed those thoughts in an interview before his death. Most of us believe that life ends and some eternal rest begins when we leave our body. We believe we stop having experiences, but experiences are a type of energy, and energy is in a constant state of motion.

Our perceptions within the context of time create physical matter and our physical reality, but in our dream reality our perceptions, as we understand them, don't exist. Plus in dreams, our ego doesn't exist and time is psychological rather than temporal. We do have a body image, and we do have a type of perception, but that perception is inner sense perception. Dreams really don't have a beginning or ending. We think they end because we wake up, but all we are doing is changing our focus from one reality to another. (The dream reality to the wakeful reality.)

In the dream reality we create our own time. We are younger at times, older at times and the past present and future blend together. We have experiences in that state. So, in a sense, the afterlife reality is similar to the dream reality. The afterlife has layers or regions, so can experience portions of our life any way we want. That's what we do in dreams.

In this life we are a composite of our experiences. In the afterlife we get to expand our experiences and create new ones. We are the question, and we know the answer.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

A State Of Knowledge Remix

Information (the stuff of the imagination) not only transforms the material world, it becomes it. The adage “you are what you eat” has changed into “you are what you know” and since your knowledge depends on what information you accept as “fact,” you are what you believe!

Fred Alan Wolf, the quantum physics guru, wrote those thoughts in his book, Dr. Quantum’s Little Book Of Big Ideas. Fred is able to put esoteric thought into simple terms. We are what we believe. But the issue is we don’t really know the scope of all our beliefs.

We all have obvious beliefs, which have been passed down through the generations. Those beliefs are considered truths, and they cannot be questioned. But as we know, most of those truths are under scrutiny at this point in physical time. We forget that our belief structure is not a solid structure. It can change as we change. Associations and influences constantly influence our beliefs, so our belief structure is a state of knowledge remix almost every day.

Most of us believe certain truths can never change. We take those solid truths to the next life with us. What we don’t know realize now is those solid truths will be rearranged, reorganized and reassessed at some point, not only by those we leave behind, but by us as well.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Blessing Our Madness

Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness provided the madness is given us by divine gift.

Socrates, the Greek philosopher, is considered one of the founders of Western philosophy. Everyone has a philosophy. Some of us follow logical explanation and established beliefs, while others follow the philosophy that exists within us.

The philosophy within us can be called madness by those separated from it. In that madness, dreams become our reality. In those dreams, we search for the meaning of our waking consciousness, and its existence. In our dreams there is only one self. That self focuses on several dimensions. Logical thinkers say that the self only focuses on our physical reality, but every night these logical thinkers find the self focused in another dimension.

Our divine gift is that flexible self. The madness is our ability to move through different dimensions and stay in the same location. Philosophy is the understanding of that madness, and the urge to make sense of it. But, our senses betray us. It is only when we use the power of our inner senses that our madness becomes clear. Our madness is our blessing, and it is our innate philosophy.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

The Time Within Us

Down Time’s quaint stream without an oar, We are enforced to sail, our port a secret, our perchancea gale. What skipper would incur the risk? What Buccaneer would ride, without a surety from the wind or schedule of the ride

Emily Dickinson wrote about time because she thought a lot about it. But what really is time? We could say time is a state where thoughts become perceptions and choices. But, only one aspect of our personality adheres to this state. Our inner personality does not operate in time as we know it. That aspect of our personality actually ignores time.

The past exists in present time as a group of electromagnetic connections. These changing connections are held in the brain, and in the non-physical mind. The future exists as a group of electromagnetic connections in the brain and the mind. The past can be as real as the present. Past actions can be perceived in the present and acted on. Past and present actions can change the future, so present actions can also change the past.

The past is no more independent or objective from the perceiver than the present. The electromagnetic connections of the past were made by individual perceivers, and those perceivers are also participators. These connections can changed, and we often do change them as we relive them. The past is not exactly as we remember it. Associations and attitudes are always rearranging it the moment we bring it into the present.

The child we were is always within us, but the child within us constantly changes.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Somebodies Beneath Our Nobody

I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us- don’t tell! They’d banish us you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public like a frog To tell your name the live long day To an admiring bog!

Emily Dickinson, the 19th century recluse, thought she was a nobody and she like that title. She knew her personality contained several nobodies, and she used each and every one of them to write over 1800 poems during her lifetime.

The whole self is made up of several layers. The operating ego is the obvious layer. Beneath the ego is the layer we call the subconscious. That layer contains personal subconscious material. Beneath that layer is the racial layer. That personality contains all material concerning the human species as a whole. Beneath that layer is the inherent knowledge of the composition, laws and principles pertaining to reality as a whole. That information is always available to us if we use our inner sense to retrieve it.

So we are layers of nobodies filled with knowledge of not only our reality, but the other realities that exist around us. When we discover the somebodies within our nobody we begin to understand the nature of our own reality.