Sleepy Night of the Soul

Hello everyone. I have missed writing on here. I have received some topics that I would like to develop and publish on here, but I simply have not made the time as yet. And that's ok, too. Yesterday while flying from Salt Lake City to Dallas, I was reading an excellent book I just bought entitled The Power of Now by a man named Eckhart Tolle. There was a statement in there that pointed the light of my consciousness directly at a part of my being I all too often resist:

There will be times of low as well as high energy. There will be periods when you are highly active and creative, but there may also be times when everything seems stagnant, when it seems that you are not getting anywhere, not achieving anything....Many illnesses are created through fighting against the cycles of low energy, which are vital for regeneration. The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be. Thus, the intelligence of the organism may take over as a self-protective measure and create an illness in order to force you to stop, so that the necessary regeneration can take place. (184)

Many of us (including me) have known the pain of pushing ourselves through these low energy cycles. However, I have never quite looked at myself doing that in this light. There is a summer and there is a winter. Everywhere we look in nature and in the physical world in general, we find a period of great vitality followed by (or, rather, following) a dormant stage. This "low energy cycle" is absolutely essential for all living things, and it the acceptance of the necessity of both cycles that enables all living beings in nature to surrender to this cycle without anxiety over the inactivity of the season and without judgment of this natural process, and for this unconditional surrender, all of nature returns each spring more splendid than ever. All living creatures except, of course, human beings. No, we are drawn along by a compulsion of the mind to keep doing, doing, doing - to force ourselves to work longer, to accomplish more, to be the best, to achieve success, to look good in the eyes of others, and other such nonsense. If only we were to hear the lessons of Nature, to look deeply into the barren winter and know that it is the seed of magnificent spring and summer, we would then know the beauty of winter and the joy and wonder of the winter of the heart.

I think of all the times I force myself into "doingness" even for supposedly good deeds. Such as experiencing mental and physical fatigue but feeling compelled to be active with the kids in order to keep my mind from judging me a "bad father." Is not this nonsense? Can I not be an excellent father by showing my children that activity does not equate with success? Is it not more important to lead them by example into a state of freedom from the throes of judgment - either self-judgment or the judgment of others. This is just one example, but I think it acutely emphasizes what Tolle is saying. In those moments, I am "identified" with the mind, yet I am a "house divided against itself" because my energy level is very low while my thoughts tell me I'd better get moving or they will judge me. And, taking it a step further, I am actually decreasing the quality of my interactions with my children and what we "do" together by not heeding and accepting the guidance of this lower energy state.

Tolle is not advocating laziness, and, at the same time, he is not condemning it either. His point is that we should be aware of these states and accept them. The only way this is possible is to stay awake to the present moment through acceptance of what is. As indicated by my personal example above, we are in perpetual denial of our dormant stages - because of an unconscious negative pressure within that drives us to go, Go, GO! - and it is because of this that we are so zombified as we live lives of dreadful routine in which creative positive action and real change cannot be fathomed by our burnt-out thoughts nor by our worn-down feelings due to our glossy-eyed exhaustion.

Winter is approaching. Stop for a moment each day just to notice the incredible love and compassion that provides all physical forms with such a period of gentle repose. Apply this same love and compassion you observe in nature to the wintry bare moments in your life. Know that these stagnant moments within you hold within them the seeds of magnificent creation and glory. Like nature (and we are a part of nature), accept with full gratitude and blessing the cycles of low energy that flow through you. I know deep in my heart - already! - that if we all practice this unconditional acceptance of what is, we will begin to change our world in a cosmically significant way.

Meditation On The Body

Breathing in, I am thankful for my body.
Breathing out, it is a wonderful gift.

Meditation On The Mind

Breathing in, I love my mind.
Breathing out, I calm its thoughts.

Meditation On Oneness

Breathing in, I choose to be One with You.
Breathing out, We are Together Now.

Purpose, Mr. Anderson, Purpose

Purpose, that ever-evolving idea we hold about Who We Are, preoccupies our minds in every moment. I have recently undertaken a very interesting and enjoyable step-by-principal-by-step approach to declaring some of the intentions I have for this life as I see it at the moment with the guidance of a nifty little book entitled Bringers of the Light by Neale Donald Walsch. I just wanted to share these with the .25 readers of this blog. Just to make clear, this is, as I said earlier, an ever-evolving process as we define our purpose anew in every moment. Thus, I realize that these are not "goals," which tend to be limiting and ambition-driven. Rather, as you will see through the process, this expression of intention is just that, and I work in each moment to empty myself of any preconceived notions I have about the physical form of these purposes (and, by the way, I wrote the following expression of purpose in my journal on 10/22/2006, so I am just now, for the first time here exclusively, revealing my purpose to the public, which waits with bated breath).

CHOOSING THE PURPOSE OF MY LIFE:

1. I intend to write - both fiction and non-fiction - in order to:
a. Fulfill the love I have for this art form and express my passion for language.
b. Present to the world, through what I write - a new way of seeing Life and the Love, Freedom, and Perfection inherent in It.
c. Channel my creative instincts into a form that will, I hope, reach and touch many people in a way that will stimulate them to aspire first and foremost to realize the glory of Who We All Are, which then inspires them to create a change for the better of the world that perhaps they always knew they would make but that they were hesitant to put in motion because of the enormity of its implications (i.e. fear of rejection and being misunderstood).

So writing, it seems, is something I choose to do so that I can be a Messenger of God's Love, so that I can be creative, so that I can be a positive force of change to the world, so that I can be an inspiration to those in need.

1. My purpose is to be a Messenger of the Love of God that now permeates my being. In fact, my purpose is to be this Love so that, through me, Love's message will have the opportunity to find it's home in each person I come into contact with.

2. My purpose is to be creative at all times, entering every moment looking only to myself (through God) to develop the reality I choose.

3. My purpose is to be an energy of positive change in each moment of this life, transforming any "negative" event, situation, relationship, or person who desires a new life into the Magnificence it/him/her is through the message and creativity with which God has blessed me, and, indeed, the entire world.

4. My purpose is to be an inspiration to those who desire a new life in a new world that they help create, a change that they may have been unable to initiate each time their minds show them pictures of how big a mess is the world today while also lying to them about the feebleness of their personal efforts to clean up that mess. I, too, have lied to myself in this way, and now I choose to be unbound from the chain of lies.

These are the purposes of my life translated from statements of "doing" into statements of "being." These intentions are what I am, and I will be these in whatever form of "doingness" I find myself from moment to moment.

Mysterious Ways

I sat today alone in a conference room at work that is too large for one person. The length of the table at which I sat was littered with piles of charts and paperwork waiting patiently for me to give them my seal of corporate approval. I was looking very intently at a business email I was typing up, engrossed in communicating coherently with the receiver of the email. Then, without hearing a word, I looked back and to my right at a woman who was standing outside the conference room in the space between the door of the neighboring office and the conference room door. This woman asked the man in the next room if he was talking with me over the computer. He seemed (from the mumblings I heard coming from his office) to have no idea what she was talking about (I am working in one of the company's Florida locations, which means I am relatively unknown here), and without missing a beat, she began talking to me in a Spanish accent as if she'd known me for years:

"You are filled with creativity. You have so many wonderful ideas, and your aura is very powerful. You are like a genius or something. You are very shy and quiet and unfriendly. Not that you are nasty or mean or anything, but you live and keep yourself in a box, but your box is filled with amazing ideas and creativity. You are a genius. I can sense your energy is very creative, very amazing...."

She continued on in this vein, and I found myself completely absorbed in what she was saying. I was (and still am) quite literally bursting with awe and love and excitement for this woman and for the chance to hear her speak even if only for a couple of moments. Not because she was heaping this praise on me (she was not telling me these things to boost my ego; she also seemed to sense, quite accurately, what I would consider to be my faults - read that: my attachment to being quiet and staying distanced from the masses) but because she was expressing her intuition about me without fear of me potentially rejecting her and her message by applying such a label as "psychic mumbo jumbo" to her message for me or by patronizing her with my words, tones, and actions and/or air of superiority that so many of us defend ourselves with when confronted by someone expressing some aspect of enlightenment that for its beauty and power and energy frightens that darkness in which we most often abide. She felt a deep truth come to her about me, and she expressed it without regard for all the possible "outcomes" of her expression.

I do agree with her that there is an "aura" of creativity about me just as I experienced intuitively the very powerful, creative consciousness of this woman who chose quite deliberately to express herself to me. Such people are an inspiration to me. I feel emboldened by the perpetually renewed sense of purpose and gratitude I experience in every moment. Yet, connecting with "another" soul, as that woman allowed me to do today, that has already been where I am and that has done the work, and continues to do the work, to transcend all self- and worldly-inflicted boundaries seems to speed the evolution of my soul light years ahead of where it was in the moment before that connection.

Then, I consider that my soul called this woman to me today at that exact time. And her soul, that already knew (and knows) me because it is really "our soul," brought her lovingly along to fulfill its and our creative purpose for each other. I am just so thankful and blessed to have had the presence of mind to have been there to receive that gift she and I gave to each other. I know in the past I would have blown off such talk - dismissing her intuitions out of fear for my own lost instinct for truth - or I simply would not have listened, being so involved in the worldly pursuit of the perfect business email communication as I was at the time.

I am a new being now, even different from the being who began typing this sentence. I do not want to define this experience or ask what it means or draw some conclusion about this woman or our short, but powerful and soul-challenging conversation. Rather, my only intention here is to declare the perfection of this Life as embodied in the microcosm of this one encounter. I am not here to explain what that perfection is as it must be experienced by each individual lest any attempt to summarize the perfection of the process through the use of limiting language come across to the reader as meaningless as words are anyway. I just know that all is perfection, and there is no moment, no person, no relationship, no circumstance, no anything that is not included in that perfection.

However, I will offer this: we can all experience this perfection of God/Life anytime we choose. In order to do this, there must be a letting go - through whatever method of meditation, prayer, or other technique of quieting the mind - of our deep-rooted desire to remain in our cozy, but painful, hypnotic state. We must confront, without fear or judgment, the preconceived, conditioned ideas we normally bring into each moment. We must see clearly that all such ideas have led us into a dull existence with their comfortable, but limiting, definitions of what that moment means. And we must decide, without hesitation, that, in order to break free of the spell these ideas have cast over us since birth, our only intention in each moment is to enter the moment empty of these ideas or any conclusions about that moment (which spring from the ground of these ideas) in order to receive what our souls (God) give us in that moment. Trust the process, and you will find an experience of perfection - an experience of God - in everything.

Thank you anonymous, but known, gentle woman for the reminder of our Oneness. Thank You, God, for the infinite experiences of You that we are given in each moment of Now.

Something Biblical

Aha! Now that should interest some people. This title. It's time for all of us to save ourselves, and that is what this particular post is all about.

Ah, the Bible. People have killed and been killed for this book. Not just for the messages within it but also for the messages that were excluded from it. A very poignant fact about the Christian Bible (that goes along with most of the thoughts and insights that have been published on this blog) is that it was created by man. This just further supports my understanding that creativity is the very essence of this physical existence.

"Life is to build up a definition of what Life is."

I love this idea (insight). It is a lyric to the Gorillaz song "Clint Eastwood." This lyric was written and performed by Del the Funky HomoSapien. This man gets it. He recognizes what we are all meant to see. The evidence is all around us, gently splashing against us every moment, a wave carressing the beach.

The Bible is one of humanity's many attempts to "build up a definition of what Life is." For the most part, it is an excellent book, particularly the New Testament Gospels - in which several different authors (and many more than we actually find in the canonized Holy Bible) attempt to bring us the "good news" (although in some instances, this news may be a bit slanted toward reinforcing each author's beliefs - which is quite okay because we are all here doing the same thing) of Christ's enlightenment and our potential for the same. The words in this book are, again, for the most part, divinely inspired. This I truly believe. However, we rarely reflect on the manner of this divine inspiration. We simply accept it - through years of conditioning from our parents - as The Definition of what Life is.

As a former atheist (Thank You, God!), one of my arguments against the Bible was that it was man-made, and thus, full of contradictions, littered with quotations from an imperfect God, violent, mythical, shallow in some cases and beautiful and inspiring in others. All of this supported my view that, at the very least, the God depicted in the words of the Bible is not real. Now, however, I realize a very subtle reason why my view was incorrect.

The God(s) in the Christian Bible was/were very real for the men who wrote of Him/Them. This is why even a small child can point out the contradictions of what we find within the whole of this book. Yet, we need not fret about this or seek to find scripture to justify our beliefs. We only undertake such behaviors when we have built our faith on a house of sand, and I say this right here and now: if you have established your faith in the Bible only - and many, many of us have - then it is destined to crumble at the smallest signs of resistance. You don't believe me? Just look at the heinous acts of violence, persecution, and destruction that have been perpetrated under the banner of the messages found within this book. Was not even Christ hated because he, in the view of the Jewish leaders of the time, "contradicted" so freely the "laws" found in the Old Testament? This is just one example, but it should help to bring home to us all what I hope for us all to understand here.

The time has come for a new perspective on reading and understanding the Bible. I think each book in the Bible has something powerful to offer any sincere seeker of Truth because, like all true, spiritual books, each one reveals the grand vision of Life as it was experienced by the authors and the subjects of their writings. It seems to me, though, that we have damaged the value of what is found within the Bible by trying to force each other to accept it as a whole. Only, this is not the worst of it. After men put it together by deciding which writings were "divinely inspired" and which writings were not, and even after trying to assert that all the writings must be taken as a whole which only confuses anyone who tries to reconcile the many contradictions found in viewing the Bible in this way, we devalued the Bible the most by labelling it "The Source of Truth" and then preaching the message that those who do not follow its messages (no matter how contradictory these messages may be) are doomed.

The psychology that explains why we have done this with this book for thousands of years is actually quite simple: when one discovers something that he/she feels is valuable, many times, one will then seek others to agree with the value of this "thing" (whatever it is) in order to feel reinforced in his/her belief. Thus, we build our house on sand. And when others do not agree with one's own assessment of value for this "thing," one's house of faith begins fall in upon itself. And to stop such a catastrophe, one will then use fear to intimidate these others (who disagree) into submission to one's ideas of what is valuable. Hey, we've all done this, everyone of us. So let's not deny it because our denial precludes our transcendence of these base behaviors.

I propose, therefore, that we all come together to understand the Bible for what it truly is: it is a collection of spiritual writings written by men who were inspired by the God that they experienced within. Does this make these writings above reproach? Of course not. We all experience God in different ways (which is further proof that we create our reality), and each individual one of us even experiences God in different ways from day to day. Moreover, when we make our experience of God our priority in this life, we find our understanding of God evolves, and our experience of God, thus, evolves on a moment to moment basis.

Observing and studying the words found in the Bible in this way literally means there is something in it for everyone. Rather than trying to fit the round ideas of one book in the Bible into the square hole of the insights of another book in the Bible, we can utilize the contrasting ideas to go within ourselves to discover which one (if either) is true for each of us as individuals. We do not even have to look at the contradictions in order to have this very powerful, spiritual experience. If you do not notice contradictions between authors of the books, that is excellent as well. I simply advocate the idea that we discontinue forcing the Bible upon others as "The Definition of What Life Is" because it is through this manipulation of it that we have become shallow and fearful and mere shells of what we are meant to be.

I observe on a daily basis individuals who seem incapable of deciding for themselves what is true without using some quotation from the Bible to rationalize their thoughts, motives, and actions. This is fine for these individuals, but I also observe how limited they are in their experience of God. These individuals believe that God "divinely inspired" the words in the Bible, but they do not believe that they can be divinely inspired. They are bound in their experience of God to what the transitory words on the crumbling page tell them can be their experience of God. Are not words the least reliable medium of communication? What of instinct? What of feelings? Do not we always "regret" not trusting our instincts? I have experienced that my true instincts (once I transcended all the false, conditioned instincts of fear) always lead me right where I need to be. Yet, when my thoughts "talk" to me, I usually find myself lost again. We have buried our instincts underneath the "Word of God" as found in the Bible, and, in doing so, we have created a Bible with little value outside of being a tool of manipulation of the masses.

I heard a very striking comment once by a man named Guy Finley, whose works and words have been a guide (more on this in a moment) to me during my journey to remembrance of Who I Really Am. Someone asked him what was his source of truth, and the questioner stated that his own source of truth is the NIV Bible. He then asked, is the NIV Bible (or the Bible in general) the source of all truth. And Guy, without hesitation (which is simply amazing to me), said, "No, God is."

Can any of you feel that idea reverberate within you, coming from the very center of your being and penetrating the outer realms of your physical body? If you can, then you are experiencing God. God is what you already know but what you only need to remember that you forgot that you know. That is what the writers in the Bible were doing: they were trying to communicate what they remembered that they forgot that they knew. Because each of us are creative, we remember and perceive God in our own unique ways, and this is true freedom. This also means no one person's experience of God is "better" or more "true" or more "meaningful" than anyone else's. So we can just stop trying to force our beliefs and values on others in order to help ourselves feel more certain about what we find valuable. It is this idea that "our religion, our God, our ways of worship, our morals" are "better" than another individual's or group's that has allowed us to rationalize our wars and our mistreatment of other human beings. We can end the spirit of fear and agression that pervades this world by simply doing away with this idea of "better" and "superior." With our ability to create comes our ability to un-create any creation that no longer works for us.

Everything I have said here can be applied to any true, spiritual writing (e.g. the Koran, Buddhist writings, etc.). The Bible, like all other books of its type, is meant to be, as I understand it, a guide in our search to create and discover Who We Really Are. However, it is a very weak substitution to your personal experience of what is True about God and Life (these are one in the same). When we read the words of any one of these books, it is our instincts that we must trust. If we do that, and read without the conditioned instinct of fear (why do we fear the words, thoughts, and ideas of others?), then when we read a message that is true, we will know that we have always known that and that we only forgot that we knew. It is with this knowledge that you build your faith on a rock that you will find cannot be destroyed no matter who chooses to disagree with your experience of God.

With this said, I want to acknowledge some of the spiritual writings that have guided me to the "Kingdom of Heaven...within" - regardless of whether I agreed or disagreed with all the messages found within the pages of these writings: the many books of the Bible - particularly the Gospels and some of the letters from the apostle Paul, Conversations with God Trilogy, Friendship with God, Communion with God, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, Let Go and Live in the Now, The Secret of Letting Go, Apprentice of the Heart: Lessons in Life only Love Can Teach, Living Christ, Living Buddha. There are, of course, many others. But my final acknowledgement is to God, who guided these individuals from within to express their experience of Him/Her/It so that I might see the Joy, Freedom, Contentment, and Love in discovering my own Connection to All That Is. We can all be Grateful for this opportunity to create - collectively and individually - "a definition of what Life Is." We can all be Grateful, most of all, that Life Is.

Stephanie

I would just like to take a moment out of the day - a moment that I always make difficult to find - to express the honor, love, joy, and passion I feel for my partner, Stephanie. She is a loving wife who expands my understanding through her selfless devotion to her family (in which I am so grateful to be included), her amazing artistic creativity, and through our wonderful late-night conversations.

Stephanie, you are an inspiration to me. I will always cherish our time together. I Love You.