Habits of Spiritual Living: Abandon Ye All Fear

The fear of rejection reveals the fundamental emotional drive of unity. We have a quiet internal drive to be open to the divine, to feel unification. We know that deep within but we feel very separated. Overt personal rejection stokes that fear of being cut off but cut off from what? There are seven billion people on earth. One person saying "I do not like you," is not a big deal. But oh do we fear it and oh do we feel it when it happens. Why?

Because we have forgotten how big G-d is. We have forgotten how attached we are to G-d. This rejection FEELS like G-d is rejecting us. That which creates cannot reject you. You cannot be abandoned. Look at the people around you. They are all part of the body of G-d. So are you.

Habits of Spiritual Living: Finding the Truth in Lies

The Great Work comes in two parts. Discovering who you are not and discovering who you are. Technically you already know who you are but it is hidden by who you are not.

Years ago, I discovered that the truth is revealed by the lie. The person that shouts, "There is no God!" knows deep down that he fervently believes in God. Then why does he say this? It is only a partial lie. His conscious self mostly believes what he is saying. The truth isn't found by convincing this person that God does exist. The truth is found in the motivation for the emotion that inspired the statement.

He may be saying these things because he feels unworthy of God (fear), that he will lose you to your relationship with God (insecurity) or that he had a very bad experience on his quest to God (pain). Once his emotional base is healed, he rediscovers his connection deity and who he is.

Some lies are apocryphal stories people tell about themselves. These are reveal a person's own mythology and are used to share attitudes and beliefs about herself with others. These result in less self-damage than the type of lies mentioned above. They do indicate difficulty in direct communication and self-awareness. The latter because she allows herself to believe stories she tells that never happened.

The point of this isn't about the other guy, it is about you. You know when you are lying. Your job is to figure out why. The difficulty there is that too much of you believes you are telling the truth and only a small part is aware of the lie. So how do you ferret it out?

Clue number one is anger. If someone tells you that your god does not exist and you get angry, chances are that your identity has been confused with your deity. The lie here may be I have no spirit only belief. This runs so deep that if asked you could honestly say you don't believe it but it is revealed because your ego was so easily bruised by someone else not believing your belief. What you think of as your strength (your belief) is really a weakness. Belief is weak, easily doubted, and as useful as a paper sword. When you know, rather than believe, challenges to such things reveal more about the challenger than yourself, your demeanor is calm and your heart open. Anger doesn't enter into it save someone being particularly and persistently obnoxious. You cannot allow that caveat to be an excuse for not deeply examining your anger. If you are getting angry at a two-line Facebook post, a reasonable counter-point or simply a different perspective, it is you not the other person with a problem.

Clue number two is the need to qualify. Truths can be shared with simple direct statements. The universe unfolds with perfect beauty. Lies need qualifiers. The universe unfolds in perfect beauty but you shouldn't do that because it is wrong. The second part reveals the first part as belief, not knowledge. The lie here is that one knows when the statement is just someone else's truth is being repeated.

Truth is expressed in these simple statements but is often taught via the complexities of perceptions, the mind and/or systems such as the Kabbalah that are so complex that they busy out the robot. Also, the expression of the truth does not necessarily mean it is fully integrated. One can know but not know. Integration is revealed by one's state of being rather than a spoken truth.*

Clue number three is pejorative language. If you have to declare someone with a different view, set of traits or experiences is dumb, crazy, defective, or make marginalizing statements about that viewpoint or person, you are revealing a truth; My ego is too fragile to accept that I may be in error. This is insecurity. The truth could also be something like, "Only my experience is valid." This is a problem of ego inflation.

The healthy ego is in the Tao. One cannot be in the Tao while being angry, insecure or false. All of those negative expressions are the embodiment of who you are not.

The good news is that simply allowing yourself to see this stuff begins the healing process. Chances are you will stop yourself from saying it by telling yourself the deeper truth that you can't quite own. Oh, they just have a different perspective, that is okay. In time, your feelings will be of reduced intensity but you will still need to repeat the truth to stay composed. Eventually,  you will simply not react that way at all. That in turn opens the door to deeper understanding of yourself because everything up to this point is about the other guy and the deeper lessons are never so external.

*paragraph added shortly after initial posting

Habits of Spiritual Living: Believe Properly

Stop believing your past bad acts define you.
Stop believing what you want other people to believe of you.

Both of these things are half built of lies.

Start getting to know your fundamental goodness.
Start knowing your spirit so well you can share it, without a thought.

Both of these are more real than real.

Habits of Spiritual Living: Believe Everything

There are those that will tell you that you must read, digest, understand and be able to quote forth  from ponderously written tombs at parties before the spiritual intelligentsia. If you cannot, then perhaps you really do not understand. After all, the words of the Tsangyang Gyatso are particularly apropos to the discussion at hand. So glad that you get it, but you really don't.

Later, you run out and read what you can find on Gyatso and find that you have no idea how it applied, but you find other things and eventually learn to follow the conversations and eventually keep up...but, but how do you feel? Less, somehow, less.

This is what they intend you see. Those memorized passages are magick spells of superiority, a glamour needed by those that feel that less than they are. They above. You below. Now perhaps intend was a poor choice of words. Intent requires awareness and these folks are not aware. Learned perhaps, intelligent and even fully cognizant of many things but not, not fully, aware of the game they are playing.  

Which of you should feel less?

Neither. 

You see the game worked and if you were who you are the game cannot, could not, be played. If they were who they are, the game could not, would not, be played. 

What they don't see, is the game behind the game is the same one you are playing, only you use dice. Ninety pair. Roll, roll them again. How many sixes turned up? How many pairs can you match to equal six? How my triples equal six? Oh, six isn't your number yet? What about fives?

Oh, playing with dice they say? Simple fool, the knowledge is in books. He will get it though. He's a good chap. They might utter these things behind your back or in the quiet recesses of their superior minds but how do they feel?

Less. Sadly less.

And blessed are they that know not! More blessed are those that know they feel as they do. Cursed are those that hide it from you behind a cloud of mystic-speak but worry not for they are blessed too as curses and blessings are the same. And, so this one thing is true. Those books of theirs and knowledge rote, and your dice that float are one in the same.

You may have first noticed that all the dice are cubes and tossed in some gamers, eight-sided, maybe sixteen. Yet, they all bounce and roll, no difference there. Oh sure, there may be more or less hops and skips as they skid along the table and maybe onto the floor. They may have odd angles and many faces but never too much or too few. And in the end, in the end, they always present a number, face up, but there is more to the left, to the right, or some odd angle and even a number on the bottom, impossible to see. The dice, no matter the what they show, are whole dice.

 And what is the point of a die? The numbers of course. And, where do they come from? Well, they start with one. One. Just one but what was before? None. Just none. 

Nothing but everything, zero the mother of one the mother of all.

Books are much alike, pages, bindings, covers containing information, power, words, ideas whether you can understand or not...for some ideas are on the bottom and that is okay too. But these ideas, these sentences, these words, these letters, from whence did they come? From sound and what does sound come from? Silence. The deafening music of silence. Nothing but everything, silence the father of all. 

Books or dice it is all ONE.

So, when they covet their books and words, gematria, the Iwa, the Neteru, the earth itself and say, "Brother this is the way!" Know, know with all your being they are right but so are you, and your dice as they clatter upon the floor. 

Habits of Spiritual Living: Words Matter

This is the first in a series promised here. Please read the disclaimers in that post. 

I used to think that we needed to purify ourselves and put myself through alchemical hell. Yet something I wrote yesterday changed my perspective. I wrote:

This isn't necessarily meanness on the part of the other but more of a natural unconscious reaction. Often, there is some impure part of the personality at work here but that is all well as they are tugging at an impure part of the seeker's personality.

I wish I used the word ill-defined. Our misses or errors in life are not because we are bad people. If you look closer there is something intrinsic to our nature that contributes to that behavior. The fellow that is a workaholic may believe he is taking care of his family by earning 100K a year working 70 hours a week. The meaning of 'taking care' has been warped. When he realizes he hasn't taken care of but abandoned his family, he may feel like a bad human. That negative judgement is devastating as it piles on to the very real damage his behavior has caused. Yet, if someone shares that the core need to take care of is there but has been misapplied, he has a chance to heal. While he may never heal the damage he has done, he may find other outlets in a helping profession or volunteering. 

This is not about semantics or being emotionally pc. This is about what happens when core divinity hides behind learned behavior. When the inner divine is exposed, even the pain of causing pain drifts away like litter in a breeze. 

So when you look at your behaviors that you feel are hiding your divinity look to those same behaviors for answers. There is a clue there about who you really are. When you find that, you are living a spiritual life.

Habits of Spiritual Living (by request)

I received an anonymous comment to The Distance Between You and God post which read in part,

... I am unaware of the process you went through to achieve the state that you are in. Would you be able to share that with those who are new to your world? I also realize that if I take the same steps you did I might not reach the state that you are currently in, but still...a little outline might be good...

So, I am going to start a serious of posts called, Habits of Spiritual Living. These are things that I picked up along the way that I have found to be of value, even if I cannot pinpoint how exactly they helped. Posts will also contain items that I may have knew about beforehand, but really came to the for after the shard meditation. I will include magick that I have done as well. However, I am very convinced that magick is not necessary to reach more recognizable spiritual states.

I want to make it clear that these are things that I have found helpful. There is no guarantee they will work for you. If you try any part of what I posted under this title and and it doesn't work for you, print out the article, burn it and beat the ashes with a stick! Think no more about it. It doesn't mean anything, just keep going.

I suppose the first of the series was written yesterday before I knew I would be starting this. You can read Finding Peace here.

There will not be an ending to this series, nor will I beat it to death and only post on this topic. I will write as I am inspired. Habits for spiritual living will develop as I continue on my journey. I hope some of you will find these articles of value.

Finding Peace

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Peace is an elusive experience. Most of us do not know what what peace is. Though, we do know what peace is not: anxiety, lack of self-worth, worry, fear, distrust, arrogance, self-abasement, hate, dislike, and contempt. None of these things are of value.

Think of how hard you have to work to maintain those attitudes. You have to find something to be anxious about. You have to make up things to keep your self-esteem in the basement. You have to imagine things to fear. You have to seek reasons to distrust even people that you have never met. You have to hold on to the white hot coals of anger to maintain your hate. You have to twist your logic in knots to find 'reasons' to dislike something -- anything. These states are worthless and we maintain them with our random thoughts and imaginations.

Often we go so far as to borrow things from our past to prop up this nonsense! These memories are anchors keeping one in a tidal pool of insanity. You can untie yourself from the memories and step out of the pool. It is likely that you are so stuck in the past that there is a corresponding physical object that invokes that memory in your house. Do not go looking for it. You will find reasons not to find it.

Instead, look about you right now. Somewhere within your vision is something that is clutter, trash, dusty, present but forgotten. Get up and toss it in the trash. It has sentimental value? Really? Then why is it clutter, trash, dusty, present and forgotten? It has no value. Sentiment is an anchor to the past. Throw it away.

From that point forward move through your house every day and find something to clean up or toss out. You will come across things with negative attachments. You will find a scrap of paper that reminds you of that girl, a picture of a parent that reminds you of a traumatic time, a key chain given to you by a frenemy. You will be able to toss these objects out because you've already learned to throw away other debris from your past. Stuff means nothing but the memories attached to that stuff can keep you wallowing in a pool of unrest.

When you physically throw away these objects that action says more than, I am ready to let this go. The action is letting go. 

Will this cure all your ills? Will it be the magic salve that turns your life around? Probably not. It will help. You will have taken a bold step. You have stated that you have the will to move on, that you are willing to live in the present and that you are willing to do what is necessary to obtain peace.

Peace, my brothers and sisters, is being in alignment with G-d. Peace is being within that bounty, the unfolding. Peace is living in the now and you cannot do that clinging to yesterday.

-- Robert