29. July 2010 by admin.

People around you will affect the mental environment for you. Because of this, you must become selective about who to be with and what to say. Do not see this as a constraint on your freedom, for this is protecting an emerging awareness that needs protection in a world where it is not valued or honored. Life will teach you this over and over again in difficult situations where you will find yourself recoiling from other people and from situations where you don’t belong or where you have committed an indiscretion.

Remember, you are learning spiritual wisdom as well as spiritual knowledge. Wisdom has to do with how you carry knowledge in life — how you express knowledge, where you share it and how you hold it in regard to yourself and other people.

People are eager to share because they want self-validation. They want somebody else to tell them that they are wonderful and that they are doing the right thing. Avoid this and avoid idle conversation. Avoid talking about spiritual ideas and great things with people who cannot receive them and avoid someone else’s spiritual journey.

Do not dabble in different religions because you will only be a dabbler. You can only know a religion if you immerse yourself within it. And if you immerse yourself in it, how can you be studying everything else?

There are many people who take a very eclectic approach, who try to gather a little of this and a little of that. They have postcards from all over the spiritual universe, but they have never been anywhere. They think they understand what Christianity or Buddhism or Islam or any other religion means, but they have never immersed themselves in any of them. They have never lived them fully. They have lots of big ideas and no Wisdom. Avoid this. Avoid trying to tie in what you are doing with what someone else has done in the past or in the present.

Do not make your way spiritual by saying that it is in keeping with Christianity or Buddhism or any other religion, for you don’t really know. You have not yet gone far enough.

Power is concentration. If your power, your concentration, is spread out over many things, you will not have enough power for anything. Become focused on a few people, a few things and a few ideas. Don’t try to collect all the spiritual information. Don’t try to gather anything that is unnecessary. Let spiritual enlightenment move you to choose the things that you need rather than filling yourself with ideas, with books, with people, with experiences, with places to go and with things to do. In other words, don’t clutter yourself with things that just have to be given up.

Live simple. Let your life be unexplainable. Let your life be inexplicable, for it will be inexplicable to those who cannot share it with you. You are being governed and guided by a greater power within you now, a greater power that you are coming to know through experience, a greater power that you are choosing by making wise decisions. Let there be big gaps in your understanding. Then you will be honest with yourself and honest with others, and you will be a refreshing presence in the world. Do not join with others in their odes to themselves, in singing their songs of self-assurance and self-validation. Remain silent and move on.

Prepare, then, with the right curriculum, the right attitude, the right instructor, the right companions and the right evaluative skills. The correct attitude is based upon your feeling your deeper need, which is necessary even at the outset. You need to discern, and your discerning will take you beyond the conventions of human education, which are limited and specific.

You need to become conscious of something greater in life, and this requires a different kind of preparation. This consciousness lives within you. It is the very essence of your spirituality. It represents the greater part of you that is bonded intrinsically with all life. You do not seek this. It is within you already, but only will you be able to gain access to it in the present moment, never in the future.

Posted in Links | No Comments »

20. July 2010 by admin.

Those living the Mystery, carry a spiritual presence with them that has been able to grow because they also honor the Mystery. They have been discreet.

They have not tried to use their spiritual experience for personal gain, and instead have let it grow stronger and more intense within themselves.

You will not find this in idle dabblers or in people who are like tourists in a spiritual universe. However, you will find this in those who have had to face their own thresholds, who have had to cross their own rivers, and who have had to experience and face their own doubts and fears and the wasteful consequences of their mistakes.

These are people who are following something inexplicable that they do not attempt to define or use. Their silence is profound and inviting. They are with the Mystery. And the Mystery is with them. Through them a greater comfort and a greater power can emerge and abide. Someone who is with the Mystery can share the Mystery without words, without conversation, without debate and without self-glorification.

To attune to a spiritual presence you must first recognize a certain fundamental need within yourself. You must feel this need and separate it from other needs that may be more personal or immediate in nature. This basic need represents the yearning to discover your real purpose in life.

Along with the recognition of this need must be the realization that your many attempts to fulfill this need through love, through affluence, through excitement or through stimulation have not satisfied the greater yearning of your heart.

Something greater must be given to you to satisfy this — something that you cannot invent for yourself, something that you cannot piece together from all the various teachings and religious practices that you may encounter in life. Here you realize the limits of even your own independence, for in truth you need life tremendously. You need others tremendously. Realizing this, instead of becoming dependent, you will learn to become interdependent.

As you proceed down your chosen path to spiritual enlightenment you will value things that others do not value, see things that others do not see and know or will not know. What seems obvious to you will not be obvious to them. You will see both their gifts and their disabilities. They may see neither. You will have higher standards for yourself, but these standards will not be shared by other people. You will value a deeper experience of honesty, but you will not be able to communicate this freely with others.

Again and again you will find out the limits that other people set before you and around you. And again and again you will feel other people’s influence. You will feel yourself being pulled into idle conversation. You will feel yourself being pulled back into a state of mind that you have worked hard to emerge out of. You will feel the weight of their concerns and preoccupations, but you will not want to be encumbered by them.

Something has changed at the very core of you in a way that you cannot describe. You feel different. Your values are changing. Your priorities are changing. Your emphasis in life is changing. This steers you away from people who are not experiencing this and towards those who are. It brings you specifically towards certain individuals who share your journey. Some of them will only go a short way with you; others will travel with you for a lifetime.

You’ll find yourself avoiding many people and situations, and in fact, after a time you will look at the general activities of most people with disinterest. Perhaps you will feel lonely and estranged. Congratulations! You are beginning to find your freedom. You are starting to value something that is valuable. If this sets you apart, great. You need this freedom. You need this liberation. You need to be free of the bondage that other people place upon themselves and inadvertently place upon you.

To be continued…….

Posted in Links | No Comments »

10. July 2010 by admin.

Our inhumane treatment of livestock is becoming widespread and more and more barbaric. Six-hundred pound hogs — they were pigs at one time — are raised in two-foot-wide metal cages called gestation crates, in which the poor beasts are unable to turn around or lie down in natural positions, and this way they live for months at a time.

On profit-driven factory farms, veal calves are confined to dark wooden crates so small that they are prevented from lying down or scratching themselves. These creatures feel; they know pain. They suffer pain just as we humans suffer pain. Egg-laying hens are confined to battery cages. Unable to spread their wings, they are reduced to nothing more than an egg-laying machine.

A twenty-three-year-old federal law requires that cattle and hogs to be slaughtered must first be stunned, thereby rendered insensitive to pain, but mounting evidence indicates that this is not always being done, that these animals are sometimes cut, skinned, and scaled while still able to feel pain.

A Texas beef company, with twenty-two citations for cruelty to animals, was found chopping the hooves off live cattle. In another Texas plant with about two dozen violations, federal officials found nine live cattle dangling from an overhead chain.

Secret videos from an Iowa pork plant show hogs squealing and kicking as they are being lowered into the boiling water that will soften their hides, soften the bristles on the hogs and make them easier to skin.

The law clearly requires that these poor creatures be stunned and rendered insensitive to pain before creatures be stunned and rendered insensitive to pain before this process begins. Federal law is being ignored. Animal cruelty abounds. It is sickening and is infuriating.

Barbaric treatment of helpless, defenseless creatures must not be tolerated even if these animals are being raised for food. Such insensitivity is insidious and can spread and is dangerous. Life must be respected and dealt with humanely in a civilized society.

According to laws passed by congress, the Secretary of Agriculture is to report on cases of inhumane animal treatment in regard to livestock production, and to document the response of USDA regulatory agencies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies have the authority and the capability to take action to reduce this disgusting cruelty, knowing that Congress expects them to do even better at enforcing the law, and also in their research for new, humane technologies.

Let us hope that in the future, those enforcing the law will not tolerate unnecessary, abhorrent, and repulsive cruelty to animals any longer.

Posted in Links | No Comments »