L.A. Reid offers some beautiful words:
“My greatest advice is: I don’t see obstacles. I just see the destination and I charge toward the destination.”
“My secret weapon is my mom. Yea, motivation, confidence. My mom told me, when you’re in a room, the room is a better room because you’re in it.”
Human evolution, maturity, is about the integration of thoughts, emotion, and soul. Success in this arena is very much a physiological state. When the heart and mind do not function in unison, life becomes a mess. The mind may get triggered by a notion or occurrence. The individual, if not well integrated, spins out. It’s like an instinctual knee-jerk reaction over which that person has no control. For some, this happens in a moment and it passes quickly. A minimal degree of emotional incontinence such as this is normal and understandable. After all, we are all human.
However, some people seem to be in a permanent state of emotional incontinence. Once an experience triggers an emotional upheaval, they are unable to get past it. Their emotional bias is never ending, intense, and overrides any level of rational thought. The mind then is used as a tool to justify the emotionally incontinent state.
So, how do you overcome emotional incontinence? Of course, number one is proper meditation. Through proper meditation the physiology normalizes (integrates).
Secondly, personal process is important, which is why I developed the whole field of Transgradient Counseling™. All personal process is not integrative. Some forms of personal process even breaks down integration, offering nothing more than a belief system or justification to cling to.
Number three, is cultivating a healthy second response. After the initial spasm of emotional incontinence, you can learn to take a step back and reevaluate, question your perspective, and explore how it may be improved upon.
Lastly, in my lectures and classes, I offer an understanding of life that helps people wisely navigate the ocean of life. It is invaluable to get some understanding of what you’re doing and how you’re functioning in a context of how life works and what it actually is.
Ever since I was a little boy I have loved reading quotes. They provide inspiration without manhandling the mind. The other day I came across the following quote about courage:
“A lot of things can happen if you have the will and courage to do it.”
So many people have had the courage to stand together and help me create Mount Soma. Without their courage to stand beside me and face the wind together, Mount Soma would have remained only a dream. I am eternally grateful for their stepping forward and facing any fear to support what we believe in. May none of us ever give in to cowardice. May we always move forward, forward, alway forward.
I understand the quote above was said by a Macedonian resistance fighter during WWII. While unsuccessfully trying to find the source of this quote, I came across many quotes about courage. Perhaps it is somehow more fitting that i could not find his name. If anyone knows, please provide it in a comment. Here are several quotes about courage I found in my search:
Everything is born of and gravitates back to Oneness
Just as every drop of rain comes from and returns to the ocean
This natural flow of existence is called the Cosmic Stream
moving all life in a positive, positive, always positive direction.
Can you hear it? Can you feel it? Do you live it?
What you hear, feel, see, and live is already inside you.
Just as everything is colored by the color glasses you wear, perception is really projection.
If negativity is inside you, then you believe in and resonate with the negative and see that as truth.
To you, the Cosmic Stream then is more a lofty ideal you long for but can not have… a dream, a wish…
In this time of humanity, negativity is considered smart… street smart.
Positivity is considered naive.
One negative perception (projection) outweighs years of positivity, as if finally, the truth be known.
Negativity resonates with negative notions and quickly turns against the positive, the good.
What dwells on the inside defines what is believed about the outside world, about others.
To know, see, feel, and live the Cosmic Stream is to remove the tinted glasses and see the world for what it truly is.
Truly, all things gravitate back to Oneness, back to God. The natural flow of life is positivity.
Truly the Cosmic Stream carries us in the direction of good, of God.
To know this nature of life, is to trust in life.
Come on…
Do not be dissuaded by negativity.
Life is Divine.
What is inside you determines what you believe about the outside, about others.
Free yourself from negativity.
Otherwise, though you may long for God, you will not walk with God.
The Divine awaits you.
The Divine lies within you, free, trusting, loving, see the best in others, in the world.
Spiritual liberation means freedom. It is just that simple.
Perhaps the greatest human tragedy, the one tragedy that feeds all others, is hatred. It is remarkable to see how long people hold on to their hatred. Of course it comes in various forms like resentment, anger, and that which underlies all anger, hurt—usually hurt feelings. In spite of the effort to heal or move past hatred, many prefer to hold on to the negative feelings year after year.
Take a moment to reflect upon the people you have known through your life. Likely you have seen this sad human tragedy of hatred many times even in your personal life. Why is it that people prefer to hold on to the hatred? Why is it that they prefer to continue to assault the other party one way or another throughout time? Is it some sort of pride or identity with what is deemed principle? Is it just a physiological state of emotional collapse into an irretrievable state of wounding? The damage that is, has been, and continues to be done as a result is a great scourge upon humanity. Not only are friendships destroyed and cities divided, but even wars are fought as a result. Harmony and good will is replaced with tension and cruelty. It is like a heavy, dark, relentless cloud that hangs over families, communities, and nations.
And how are such things healed? No matter how many people with heartfelt sincerity request healing, it seems that once the collapse into hatred occurs, the hater will not, cannot, let it go. It almost seems that attempts to heal only inflame the hatred. People sometimes prefer to leave and take their emotionally collapsed state of hatred with them, only to inflict it again wherever they may go. It is as if they insist that the emotional collapse does not exist within themselves but it is those they hate that are the only problem.
What can one do when at the receiving end of such hatred? It seems that walking away and avoiding the hater only enrages the hater further. It is as if they insist upon you being there to provide them a target upon which to unleash their scorn.
What can one do if they are in fact the hater? Can they find it within themselves to acknowledge their state? Can they bring themselves to deal with their inner state and heal it?
As I write this, I think of many people throughout my life who would no doubt think I am referring to them. Perhaps I have thought of them while writing this and perhaps I have not. But the point here reaches far beyond one individual or another. I am referring here to the treacherous shadow cast upon all people as a result of the cloud of hatred unhealed and seemingly perpetual.
If the stress and strain within people would be released, the hatred would go away with it. To let it go is doable, but not all that easy to accomplish in this world. The technology exists to release those stresses and strains. My life has been dedicated to offering that technology to humanity. But it is a tough sell. The arrows of hatred, anger and resentment continue to fly. At times, it is all one can do to continue standing and keep moving forward. One feels the hatred can no longer be stomached for another moment. When will the time come when this scourge upon humanity leaves us? Sometimes the Dylan song comes to my mind and it feels the answer is “blowin’ in the wind”. Yet all we can do is face the wind and continue moving forward, forward, always forward.
In time, the world will live in peace. Harmony will prevail.
What does it mean to go deeply within your being? It’s a place far beyond thoughts and emotions. It’s like the silent depth of the ocean—quiet and still. The deepest place you are capable of functioning from is probably not the deepest place it is humanly possible to function from.
Oftentimes, feeling deeply is confused with feeling intensely.
Emotions can be quite intense. The depth of your being is eternally silent and calm. It is called the finest feeling level. But ‘feeling’ in this sense of the word is not an emotion. It’s not even a physical sensation. It’s like the sound that remains in the room after the ring of a bell dissipates into silence. It is a physiological state of pure Is-ness—not a thought, not an attitude, and not a mood. The sound of one hand clapping. No-thingness. Finer than the finest, pure emptiness, yet completely full with eternal unbounded being.
On Dec. 20 I wrote a blog about Free Will vs. Predetermination that you may wish to reread before proceeding. In this blog I illustrate what it is like to experience it, not as a theory, but in the here and now.
Consider the notion of ‘effort’. At first glance effort can seem to be the assertion of free will. You use free will to make something happen. Such effort is an attempt to overcome karma. Such effort is tiring. It is a struggle.
On the other hand, such effort is also predetermined karma. All action resides at the interface between free will and karma. The question becomes your relationship with that interface, that edge. When the edge is ridden, free will and karma are experienced as one. Effort and effortlessness become the same thing. You are doing and not doing at the same time.
At first, this is experienced as ‘witnessing’. You are doing, but it is as if you are watching the doing happen. There is a separation, a gap, between you, the doer, and you, the witness. It is sometimes described as if there is a movie camera in your head watching everything happen.
However, in time, the dichotomy of the doer and the witness are experienced as one. Your effort just happens while you are fully engaged in the doing as coming from your own free will. At the same time, you carry your actions while nature carries you. It is all the flow of nature… superfluid. Karma and free will are experienced as the same thing simultaneously and without contradiction.
When that dichotomy is experienced as one, other contradictory notions also merge as one… for example; past, present, and future. The sequentiality and simultaneity of time merge as the same thing. Paradoxes resolve within you as a moment to moment experience.
The following points may assist reflection:
Just don’t get caught up in petty little things.
Take the high road.
It is natural to feel negative things from time to time, but just don’t give in to them.
Do not let them take you over.
Act from a wiser place.
Then people will respect you.
Then you will inspire them to behave well toward you.
Then you will gain much.
You will be supported not opposed.
That makes life easy.
Acting poorly evokes opposition.
Then life becomes a battle.
Then life is hard.
Take the high road.
At first glance, it may seem hard to not act from your petty impulses.
But it is in fact the easy road.
Nature supports when you live in harmony with the high road.
That is the simple formula to greatness.
It is easy to be great.
You’ve seen rubber bands that get bunched up and twisted into tight little balls. You can stretch it out flat but when you let it go, it springs right back into its bunched up and twisted little ball. A person’s awareness is like a rubber band. It is programmed to view everything in a particular manner. It is a real stretch to see things another way. Even when you do stretch your awareness to view things in a new way, your awareness springs right back to how it was. And how much better it feels to get things back to ‘normal’!
When presented with Knowledge of how everything really works, it can be a stretch. At the same time, it touches that deeper place within you where you are eternally one with Truth. It makes sense. Yet like the rubber band, the tensions remain in the awareness and it soon springs right back to the familiar old comfortable way of seeing things.
By repeatedly revisiting Knowledge, the tensions in your awareness are eventually released. The release of stresses and strains in your awareness is what evolution is all about. Unfortunately, people often trade one set of tensions (one way of bunching up the rubber band) for another. They just replace one world view with another.
Truth dwells within you as you. To discover Truth, you only need to release the tensions in the rubber band of your awareness. It is really so simple.
Yet the old familiar way of bunching up the twisted, tight, little ball of awareness that is the sum total of all your life experiences is very stubborn. It is the notion of truth you cling to, rely upon, and identify with. The path of freedom from those habitual patterns is true spiritual growth. It is indeed illusive.
I am really excited to offer pages from Look Deeper Live Better on Google+ free of charge. In the future, I would like to also add quotes from The Dharma Sutras. When I first heard someone described those books as poetry, I was taken aback, having never considered myself a poet. Enjoy!
Learn more about the book, Look Deeper Live Better.
The Truth about Religion and Flatlining
