community
Resting In The Nothing-ness
A friend and I were chatting the other day of our personal experiences about the realization of the nothing-ness, or the eternal. Just like in the movie The Matrix, the mind can have little moments or blips in time where it pauses long enough for us to clearly see the comings and goings of life are merely that… they’re coming and going from our awareness.
During these pauses something opens up that allows us to notice the obvious – what is blatantly there when we see through the busy mind and how it clouds over the eternal. Our mind gets fixated on whatever is temporarily happening, and it rarely notices the backdrop or container that remains the same or constant amidst the change.
Satsang is a Sanskrit word that breaks down to Sat, which means ‘talking about the truth of my being,’ or the recognition that ‘I am the truth,’ and Sangha, meaning ‘with my community.’ Continue reading
All Aboard The Train Of Life!
I recently heard someone say he was a passenger on “the train of life” and what immediately came to mind was what a glorious opportunity we have to evaluate our own particular role in coming into this existence.
So, let us start at the beginning. First of all we would need the individual who came up with the concept of a train, no more traveling long or short distances by foot or horseback or car, embark on your journey in comfort and ease, knowing there is someone who will endeavor to get you safely to your destination while you sit back and relax.
What manner of being would even venture to come up with such a plan? That would have to be the dreamers, or visionaries. They are the ones who often have their heads in the clouds and envision a better quality of life for us all. There is an abstract thought somewhere inside of them that must find a way of arriving at a viable workable plan. Continue reading
Context, Context, Context
In the sales and marketing field they often talk of ‘location, location, location’ (no matter how good your product or service is, how successful you are often comes down to location). Perhaps in our communication with others we should think of context, context, and context?
We have entered a period of time in the world that communication is misconstrued, even fake and has more opportunities to be interpreted as confrontational, biased, and not politically correct. On top of that put an individual’s personal style of communication – introvert, extrovert, analytical, emotional subjective and all the other styles, and the matter becomes more thorny.
Then, add even another layer, such as email and social media, which does not involve the other person being face-to-face. Now communication becomes even more complex, because body language and the human expression energetically is not a resource available to us to can pick up on the subtle options for interpretation. We will initially respond to the email from our frame of reference, and our reference alone, which is biased by our experiences. Continue reading
The Legacy Of Limiting Beliefs
So many people live their life with the beliefs of their ancestors. Others just follow like sheep whatever their spiritual community, or the culture that they grew up in, or now live in.
Some people never question or challenge any of the things they have heard since childhood. Some of these limiting beliefs and ideas have been passed down from generation to generation, and have remained the same for thousands of years. Unless we question some of these outdated beliefs or information, we will stay stuck in limited thinking – always inside the box.
Sometimes we stay stuck thinking or feeling only how our parents of grandparents felt and thought. For example, people whose parents or grandparents lived through a great depression, or have had to endure a scarcity food or heat supply, the primary survival necessities, may feel they have to save everything. What if I will need it someday? I paid so much for it and its too perfectly good to discard. What if, what if.
We Need A Critical Mass Of Love And Kindness!
In the 1950’s, Japanese researchers were studying a group of monkeys located on several Japanese islands. The scientists would regularly drop food onto the beaches for the monkeys.
One day, a female monkey picked up a sweet potato and washed the sand and dirt off in a nearby stream. Soon after, the mother of the juvenile monkey was also washing her sweet potatoes in the stream. In this unusual case it was a youngster had taught an adult and not the other way around, as is more commonly observed.
Over the course of the next five years, one by one, several of the other monkeys of the group also picked up the habit of washing off their sweet potatoes. The exact number is unclear, but something amazing is said to have happened – as if overnight, all of the monkeys were washing their potatoes in streams, and in the sea. Even monkeys on the other islands, crossing natural barriers. Continue reading
Group Consciousness
We are all different. Each person is a piece of the puzzle that creates a group. All people are raised different. People may have different spiritual beliefs, different educational backgrounds, jobs, nationalities. Yet, if the common goal is the same, there is no reason why we cannot achieve much more in our world. Some of us simply need to find a way to respect diversity.
Spiritual groups tend to be the especially challenging when it comes to diversity. Too often spiritually-minded people are expected to always agree with everyone about everything, in order to promote goodwill among group members and keep the peace. But in any group people have to learn how to agree to disagree. It’s always okay to have your own opinion and express how you feel. One must just remember that not all of the group may agree with your thoughts. Continue reading
The Courage To Live And Let Live
The only way we are really going to make the future work is by allowing others to do their ‘own thing’ in their own way. Our future survival and evolution as a species will not be found in sameness, alikeness, similarity, or coercion. Instead, we must build a new global civilization based on expanding diversity, variety, assortment and multiplicity. Yet, there is one fundamental condition – for it to be successful it must be achieved in harmony with others and our planet.
From the perspective of the old mainstream view of our world, such a future world of unhindered diversity appears quite impossible and non-sensical, because that would mean that everybody does their own thing in their own way. And that seems really counter-intuitive… even dangerous. A disaster waiting to happen!
History has taught us that individuals doing things their ‘own way’ eventually manifests itself as selfishness, greed, creed, personal preference, chauvinism, dogma and ego-centered beliefs – which has caused most of our wars, the establishment of our borders, the separation between the rulers and subjects, and the division between rich and poor. Continue reading