Thursday, March 31, 2005
Long quote
This isn't actually my writing... but it's something a dear friend (who I've since lost touch with) put together for me....
Creativity and Expression
Express: If you have no means of expression, who will experience the beauty of your heart?
Be Yourself: Can you imagine an owl trying to be an eagle, or an eagle trying to be an owl? Can you imagine an owl attempting to hunt like an eagle in the bright light of day? Can you imagine an eagle trying to hunt in the dark of the night? Can you imagine an owl trying to glide gracefully on the thermals? Can you imagine an eagle in all its majesty, closeted in the darkness of a barn? Both birds beautiful in their own sphere, but outside of it, inept and awkward. So then, why do people who are owls try to be eagles, and eagles owls?
The Power of Words: The power of words to move the listener is not simply in their truth but in the emotion and spirit with which they are imbued and which they evoke.
Value
Self -Worth: Who is more valuable than you? Who has a more Divine Soul?
Value: There are superior and inferior personalities but not superior and inferior people: some people have superior minds, some superior bodies, some skills, creative talents and emotional dispositions, but all people, by virtue of being people, have a Soul which is of infinite value.
Gauging Self-esteem: In the act of doing something, ask yourself, “If I had complete self-esteem, that is, if I regarded myself as being completely valuable, how would I be thinking, feeling and acting now? Then make the necessary adjustments to reflect and reinforce this truth.
Courage
The Capacity To Succeed: If something is truly right for you to do, then it can be done.
Be Yourself: Be Yourself, Be Real. Don’t let one person move you one fraction of anything from who or what or where you must be. Stand your ground.
Freedom
Strength: No one has any power over you unless you allow it.
Freedom: Freedom is just to be, fully in the moment, on the current of conscience.
Lightly and Rightly: To hold rightly is to hold lightly.
Centring
Direction: Most of the time, the direction we should take is clear enough, therefore, most of life’s effort lies not in the deciding, but in the doing.
Intuitive Guidance: Repeatedly, I have found that it is not that I lack intuitive guidance, but rather, I lack the courage, discipline or humility required to express that guidance and put it into practice.
Perspective: One way of gaining a deeper and more accurate insight into yourself and your life is to view yourself as someone else and your life as that of someone else. In this way it is easier to separate wisdom, as a combination of reason and intuition, form the clouds of emotion. What do you see now? What would you advise?
Conversing With Your Soul: A technique which you can use to tap into your intuition, is to imagine that beside you is a person of great wisdom, love and peace, a person that wants, without reservation, for you to attain happiness, insight and love, and for you to realise your full potential. Now, discuss your problem with that person. As he speaks, you understand that he does so without the distorting influences of fear, anger, hate, desire, sadness, jealousy and similar hues of black and grey - he speaks the truth. He says only what is true, and it resonates within you as the truth when you hear it. He confirms what you already know in those moments when you are calm, at peace, and when you have stepped back from, and above, the events of life. This person is, of course, the personification of your Soul. And by projecting your Soul, through your imagination, into the person beside you, a person who is without negative emotion, you help to free your own intuition from the distorting influences of emotion; you hear only your own inner wisdom.
Being True and Conscience
The Key: Following the Conscience, this deepest sense of duty, this primary sense of virtue or goodness, is the key which opens the consciousness to deepening love, truth, beauty, power and virtue, in short, the many facets of the unity which is the unity of the Soul. Any attempt to artificially and externally contrive, attain and force these traits of God is useless, rather, abide within your sense of Righteousness, and they will develop naturally and organically.
Ordinary Conscience and Divine Conscience: There is a world of difference between the belief that conscience is the voice of God and the belief that it is not. In the latter case, it is simply another voice within the mind whose transgression will cause a degree of suffering; in the former, it is the voice of God expressing, and supported by, all the power, wisdom and love of God. Accordingly, the power bestowed by each will be vastly different.
Being: We need to be exactly what we want to attract to ourselves, including from within.
Spirituality
Sunsets and God: Sometimes it is better to behold a sunset, or perhaps, better still, a sunrise, than to ask, “Does God Exist?”
The Significance of Dreams: If there is a Higher Power ‘behind’ life orchestrating its events, is it unreasonable to assume that dreams, which come and go in sleep which accounts for approximately one third of our lives, are Spiritually inspired and/or have a purposeful role in life ?
Life and Vocation: Life prepares you for your vocation, or calling as Jung might say. With what capacities and motivations have you been blessed, and, what types of opportunities and challenges does Life consistently throw at you to push you and your development in a particular direction ?
Well-being
Help In A Crisis: In a time of real crisis everything in your life will be speaking to you; Life will not neglect you when are in most need and ready to make the most progress - look particularly to the people around you, even if they remain silent.
Dissolving Fear: When walking into a breeze or the wind, imagine it flowing through you and carrying away with it all your fears.
Imagined Fears: Most fears are imagined.
Philosophy
Inescapably Philosophical: Life, particularly its suffering, coupled with our innate capacity for abstract thought, compels us to engage in philosophy - the search for progressively deeper meaning. Hence, we are philosophers by necessity and design. More succinctly, life coupled with a thinking mind means we are by necessity and design, philosophers.
The Necessity of Philosophy: We are, from early childhood to death, giving time and energy, consciously or unconsciously, to working out our philosophy of life. Just how important our beliefs are, and the power they have in determining our lives, is evidenced by our strong emotional reactions to their violation or even the mere questioning of their truth. Being so important, why do we spend so little time and effort in developing our system of belief into something deeper, clearer and more comprehensive? To object that rational thought can give us no definite answers has not stopped, and will not stop, us from continuing to reflect on our lives; we are designed to search for meaning - this is irrepressible. So why not make the inevitable process of reflection more productive by giving it more time and energy?
A Life’s Lessons: Each life revolves around a few lessons; over and over, deeper and deeper, gradually they are learnt.
The Danger of Knowledge: Knowledge is a dangerous business - once you know the truth, your conscience will command that you live it, if you don’t, the compromise will cause you to suffer. No longer can ignorance be bliss and a refuge.
The Subtle Mind: The subtle and intuitive mind sees mystery and possibility in things which are accepted as commonplace and unworthy of consideration by the obtuse mind. The obtuse mind simply accepts the emotion of love or beauty, the subtle mind asks and searches for their source. The obtuse mind accepts time and space, the subtle mind perceives that they are mysteries, the resolution of which may lead to great revelations about the nature of reality.
Too Great A Demand: People who attribute the creation of consciousness with its capacities for free will, intelligence, creativity, love, compassion, and beauty, to matter or energy, do not understand what they ask form this senseless stuff; and if they reply that matter or energy are not senseless - lacking in intelligence and feeling - and therefore, can produce consciousness, then, is it not being asserted that consciousness already exists in matter or energy, and is not produced by them, and aren’t we are beginning to return to God or Spirit in nature ?
Patience and Faith
Faith: Faith is the certainty that a way will be found to what the heart rightly longs for, where the mind can see no way, or even, any possibility of a way.
Readiness: When we are ready, the person, thing or experience we need will come to us, and we can no more keep that moment from arriving than we can hold back the sea with our hands or keep the sun from rising in the sky. When that person, thing or experience arrives, then, often, we have a choice - to embrace it or let it pass. But, if we attempt to forgo what we need, it will return - for it is needed. In essence, Life will always bring us who or what we need, and therefore, we should not worry about whether or when a person or experience will arrive. Our only concern is to nurture what is right and good in our lives - in this way we attract what will give us love, beauty, happiness, peace, power and wisdom - the qualities of the Divine - and not their opposites. This is to cooperate with Life .
Commitment: Life responds to commitment.
Suffering
Gifts: A gift may become suffering, suffering may become a gift - the choice is yours.
Purification: Purification requires experience, for it is through experience that we endure loses, and without actual loses or separations, there is only the semblance of purification. All talk of purification without actual experience and loss is simply that, talk. All experience of purification without pain is simply that, talk. If we understood the value and necessity of purification, then we would more easily accept our loses and suffer less. The path of self-development, of Enlightenment, is pain, of being forced, and forcing oneself, to let go, accept and surrender. Naturally, most people are not really interested in Enlightenment. Naturally, most people do not become interested in Enlightenment until forced.
Blessings: All my curses have become blessings.
Compassion and Love
Steps To Evil, and Steps Back To Love: Beneath evil is hate. Beneath hate is anger. Beneath anger is hurt. Beneath hurt is love - the need for love.
Not For Oneself Alone: One’s life is not for oneself alone: a woman reaches a turning point in her life when he realises that all her efforts to improve herself are not only for herself alone but for everyone whom her life touches; its not just the quality of her own life which is at stake here .
Nurturing Love: Not enough love? Express what little you have and it will grow - within you and around you.
Strength and Gentleness: So far as the conduct of life is concerned, strength must be balance by gentleness, and gentleness by strength. Without each other, pain and suffering will result, with each other, peace and happiness. Still more is required: strength must have some gentleness, and gentleness some strength. Strength without gentleness is weakness, and gentleness without strength is weakness. This is the expression of egoism and desire. Strength with gentleness is true strength, and gentleness with strength is true gentleness. This is the expression of the Soul or Spirit.
The Learning of Compassion: To be compassionate, we must experience the pain or suffering of the other person (or animal) to some degree, without this connection, we will feel nothing. We are only able to do this by drawing on our own experience of what it means to suffer - without having endured our own suffering, we cannot understand, or feel, what the other person is experiencing. However, if our own past experience is unresolved and our suffering still strong, then the sight of another’s suffering may well evoke our unresolved experience and our great suffering in a way which is overwhelming, causing us to be submerged in pain or to withdraw in self-defence.
Children
Children: “Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.” (Mark 10:15). Children teach us and re-teach us awe and wonder, the beauty of innocence, to be present in, and live for, the moment, to unfold spontaneously and not to impose our false pre-conceptions on the world thereby veiling its reality and shutting out its possibilities, its mystery. But these qualities must be tempered and balanced, just as we see this need for our children: innocence, the state of being which sees the world as good and beautiful, must be balanced by an appreciation suffering and evil, albeit, temporal and apparent; living in the moment, must be balanced by the need to set goals, albeit to hold them lightly; spontaneity must be balanced with temperance of the passions, more generally, temperance of excess; there is a need to drop false preconceptions but also to develop an accurate rational understanding of reality as part of guiding one’s life wisely; a need to balance possibilities with realities; and while feeling the mystery of life with its possibilities, to find an end to the yearning for understanding through realisation of the Truth.
fon @ 3:24 AM link to post * *