and continue evolving without being hampered by death and dying
I think it’s odd how the overcoming of obstacles is SO admired. We create our own obstacles with our mind, don’t we? So why is overcoming something we have created ourselves so admired?
My understanding is that the mind is analogous to an iceberg… 90% of it is submerged. So while we may want, say, prosperity… thoughts in our unconscious mind may well be creating the opposite. Or say we want an easy life… thoughts in our unconscious mind may start putting all sorts of obstacles in our path.
I thought I’d write about my thoughts on reincarnation.
I never use the word “believe” when I talk about these sorts of things. I like to say “I work with the idea”, or “I think in terms of”… something like that. I think the real, actual truth is something beyond what most of us are capable of understanding at our present level of consciousness, so saying I believe in any particular thing would seem a bit silly to me.
So I like to say I work with the idea of reincarnation, because I find it is a useful concept. If a better concept comes along, I will drop it in a flash in favour of the new concept.
Just as one example of how the concept could become outmoded… many of us like to try to live in the present moment, after being inspired by The Power of Now and lots of other writings on the subject. I like the idea, that I picked up somewhere, that time actually does not exist—time is an illusion that got invented to teach us to use the present moment better. If this is the case, the past does not exist… all the past and our past lives must be happening consecutively right now in the eternal present moment. We are both ourselves and Cleopatra at the same time! This reasoning could get very messy very quickly so I’ll stop right here… my point is that we just don’t know (in my opinion).
photo by Random Tree
I had a conversation with my mother the other night about the creative process, and I thought ah-hah!… I could write about this.
She was saying how she came up with a poem about apples a few years ago, while driving through apple orchards and then on homewards (she lives in the country). As she kept driving the poem came bit by bit… she said that the words “just slipped in”.
I thought that was a great way of putting it, and it’s how it happens with me, too. Then I was thinking about how I set things up to allow those words and ideas to “just slip in”. Being still or meditative in some way is necessary, but I’ve also noticed that if I provide a structure for my creative product, the goods are more likely to come to me.
photo by brightroyalty
I was saddened and alarmed a few years ago to hear a good friend of mine announce cheerfully she was making a practice of thinking “Today might be my last day—I might die tomorrow.” This helped her to “make the most of the day”, she said.
[Read more…] about Is Living Like Today Might Be Your Last A Good Idea?
I have a magic trick that always works for me in relationship problems.
This is a trick I mainly use in my relationship with my partner Frank. It applies to any kind of relationship, and I use it on other ones too, but for me this trick has come into focus from using it in our life-partner-type relationship. It’s something I’ve used when I have been feeling exasperated, sad or plain desperate about either a specific event or some ongoing thing I’m not happy about.
My experience from using this trick has been to see transformation of the problem… into a non-event or even into a miraculous opposite—some of the developments have amazed me.
[Read more…] about A Magic Trick For Relationships
photo by Frenkieb
I’d like to suggest that for some people “the world” is getting better and better, and for others it is getting worse and worse. And that we get to choose which group we are in.
I’d imagine that anyone dropping by here would be firmly in the “getting better” camp, as far as their own personal life goes, anyway, but I thought I’d still like to write about this.
[Read more…] about Is The World Getting Better Or Worse?
Recently Marelisa from Abundance Blog at Marelisa-Online wrote a great article about gratitude over at The Change Blog.
This gave me the idea of looking up The Door of Everything by Ruby Nelson, because I remembered it had something about gratitude. The Door of Everything is a channelled book, authored by “the guiding voice of Father consciousness at the centre of your soul”.
The chapter The Ascension Attitudes explains that love, praise and gratitude are the “keys to the kingdom of true Being”. It says these three attitudes are in fact inseparable, and suggests we could concentrate on all three or just one if we find it more natural. I found this about gratitude:
The vibration of gratitude is such a mighty creative force that it alone, if indulged continuously, could uplift you free of the sub-creation more rapidly than you realize.
I thought I’d try focusing on feeling grateful as much as possible—firstly for all the usual suspects like the house, Frank and my computer. Then I added in things like the ground I was walking on, the air I was breathing and the blue sky. All of this definitely inspired a warm glow, and I felt I was on target for being seriously uplifted.
Well… I haven’t really, exactly. In that I can’t prove it. I’m 55 at the moment and so have not proved one can live forever. But then it’s something that can’t be proven anyway—a person could live to be 300 years old and die the next day.
But I thought I’d tell the story of how I came across the idea of physical immortality.
In the mid-80s I lived in a household of musicians, and two regular visitors were Andy and Mike. Andy played bass and trombone, and Mike played saxophone. Both of them had their head completely shaved—the idea being that this allowed the cosmic rays to penetrate their scalp more easily, making them immortal.
Now Andy was quite a character. He had previously lived in our house and seemed to think he still did—he stored his bee pollen in our fridge for some reason (I don’t think he had a fridge) and he ate half our fruit after we had been to the market. He had a reputation for covering our kitchen with carrot pulp from juicing carrots, and having orange palms from drinking too much of the makings. Setting up our house for a 4 a.m. mini-golf game didn’t seem out of the ordinary. I don’t remember much about Mike—only that he had a nice girlfriend.
The point of all this is that the shaved heads, and the reason for them, was just one more entertaining weirdo occurrence in our house. [Read more…] about How I Found Immortality
Many people say old-age and death are natural… that these are the birth-death cycle of nature in action.
Perhaps this outlook comes from people thinking there are no alternatives to death.
People with a positive outlook on life will be inclined to think the set-up they see in the world around them must somehow be “right”, so it’s natural they will have a philosophy that death is natural and a “part of life”. I certainly thought this myself before I came across the idea of physical immortality.
Once people believe death is natural, they will look for all sorts of things that could be good about it. Why wouldn’t they! Like death means going to be with God, experiencing peace and love, experiencing great mystery, going to a “better place” and experiencing more than “just this life”. And it’s wrong to be “too wrapped up in this material world” anyway.
There are whole established spiritual traditions that teach it’s a worthy thing to feel good about our bodies dying, allowing us to go to a “better place” (or whatever).
[Read more…] about Is Death Natural?
