god
Saved By A Mysterious Angel
Many people have in-person encounters with angels without ever knowing it. This is because angels do not appear to us in physical form with stereotypical accoutrements like ‘wings, harps, and halos.’ Fortunately, some people do realize when they come into contact with an angel…and live to tell the tale.
The most commonly reported modern instances are typically of strangers mysteriously showing up to save or protect drivers, passengers or pedestrians traffic incidents.
For example, early in 2021, Tracey and Dann Stadler were trapped in their burning car after they had been hit by a drunk driver. While desperately praying to God to not let them burn to death, they were miraculously lifted from the inferno by a mysterious man they both described afterwards as “a Heaven-sent person in angelic form.”
Later the same year, in December 2021, Candace Pimentel and her children were driving home from church, when her nine-year-old son Raylen started to choke on a piece of candy stuck in his throat. She immediately pulled off the road and tried to help her son, but was unsuccessful.
Then a mysterious man showed up at the scene in a pickup truck. He calmly stepped in and performed the Heimlich maneuver on the boy, effectively dislodging the piece of candy, enabling Raylen to breathe again.
The mysterious man then told the boy and his mother that he loved them, gave them a hug, got back in his truck, and drove off. Nobody knows who he was. Candice later said she felt that the “Heavenly Father sent an angel to help me.”
True Spirituality Is About Everyday Existence
It is often assumed that to lead a truly spiritually aware life we must increasingly distance ourselves from the material world and be more fully immersed in the spiritual world. We must reduce our involvement with all things physical, and instead focus exclusively on the non-physical or metaphysical.
This is, however, not what being truly ‘spiritual’ is about. True spirituality is in fact quite the opposite. It is about living this physical life to the fullest. It is about being present in every moment and living with joy, appreciation, and gratitude.
Spiritual living is about honoring and expressing the love, grace and compassion of God, Source, Spirit, the Divine in our everyday existence. It is about relishing in the divine beauty and abundance of creation, and embracing the unconditional love and light of divinity in our lives every day.
As spiritual beings in physical form we do need material things in order survive in this physical reality, and ensure a more fluid, comfortable existence. And while we are busy focusing our time and energy on acquiring those material things that we need, it does not mean we are no longer being spiritual, or not being ‘spiritual enough.’
For instance, most of us need to work to earn a living, to put food on the table and a roof over our head. Going to work every day and being of service is just as much a spiritual act as spending time in transcendental meditation, for example, or participating in a prayer circle.
Lessons From Nature Bring Light To The Soul
I recently had the privilege to attend a virtual seminar on a sublime spiritual book titled Light of the Bhāgavata. The experience powerfully reminded me of the incredible wonder of nature’s divine design, and how it relates to our spiritual purpose in this lifetime. With its beautiful metaphors from nature, Light of the Bhāgavata brings light to the soul in the darkness of this age of strife and quarrel.
The book is a unique spiritual text written in 1961 for a presentation at a world conference of the Congress of Cultivating the Human Spirit, held in Japan. At the time, the author, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, was living in a small, sparsely furnished room in the humble village of Vrindavan, India, where Lord Krishna had appeared 5,000 years ago.
The swami received an invitation to participate as a speaker at the conference and thus conceived Light of the Bhagavata for this purpose. Within just a few months, he wrote an inspired manuscript based on the timeless teachings of the Srimad Bhagawatam. Written over 5,000 years ago, the original Bhagavatam is a voluminous book composed of 18,000 verses.
The swami realized that it would not be practical for him to try and share all of its teachings with the conference attendees in one presentation. He therefore decided to only focus on the tenth canto, twentieth chapter of Srimad-Bhagavatam for his presentation, drawing spiritual lessons of life from nature. The twentieth chapter is a description of the autumn season in Vrindavan, the place of Lord Krishna’s appearance. He composed 48 commentaries to accompany each of the verses of that chapter.
Respect Is A Blessed Spiritual Practice
Nothing disturbs the existence of the person who is spiritually conscious and respectful. For the believer her faith is the rock that nothing shakes. The worst storms can come, yet she’s still there, firm in her belief.
A faithless, disrespectful life without higher consciousness is perilous at best, and rife with fears, and many tears. The days tend to get darker, and the future more and more uncertain. There is little to offer hope, and life seems meaningless and transient.
But faith makes life full, smooth, and blessed. Surrendering our fears and worries to God, Source, Spirit, the Divine is liberating and transcendental.
Of course, a fulfilled, spiritually aware life is not without challenges, problems, responsibilities, and effort. Idleness and laziness will delay our soul evolution. Spiritual growth and enlightenment require effort, dedication, passion, and commitment.
For all worthwhile achievements, victories, and successes in life, we must have faith, courage, and respect; be ethical in all our choices and actions; and clearly decide what we want to achieve.
Everything that unfolds in our life begins with our own attitude and our level of respect. Those who do not respect themselves, others, and nature, cannot demand any respect in turn. Respect must guide us every day in everything we think, say, and do. It is the most important moral value and duty of every soul in human form.
Faith As A Spiritual Science
It is generally assumed that all forms of ‘faith’ is merely matter of ‘belief.’ In other words, to have faith is seen as having belief that is blind; it is a belief without reason, evidence, or experience. However, there is another kind of faith that develops through a reciprocal relationship.
According to the Vedic teachings and the practices of Krishna Bhakti (awareness of, and affection for Krishna, the Supreme Person) faith begins with hearing spiritual knowledge from a liberated soul, who is beyond the four defects of material conditioning.
Ordinary people (or conditioned souls) have four defects due to their contact with material existence. These defects are:
- The tendency to make mistakes.
- To be illusioned.
- The propensity to cheat others.
- To have imperfect senses.
At the initial phase of faith, there is an appeal to the intelligence of the conditioned soul that evokes exploration of knowledge through hearing deeper spiritual insights, which in turn appeals to their intelligence to apply it.
From the experiment of applying it, comes observable experiential results that corroborate the truth of what was initially heard from the transcendental authority (liberated soul).
This confirming experience not only yields faith in the knowledge and process applied, but it also forms an evidential knowing beyond a mere baseless, ‘blind’ belief. Therefore, developing a relationship with God through Bhakti-Yoga or Krishna Consciousness is a spiritual science.
The Selfless Flow Of Divine Love
Love is a divine spiritual energy. It originates in the divine heart of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. The internal energy of his love is so strong that it emanates out of his body as love personified, in the form of the Supreme Goddess.
In the spiritual tradition of Bhakti, which is founded on the Vedas, a collection of religious texts originating in ancient India, the Supreme Goddess is identified by the Sanskrit term shakti, the primordial divine feminine energy, and the Supreme God as shaktiman, the divine masculine source of this cosmic energy.
She also bears the name Radha, meaning she who gives the greatest pleasure to him, whom she calls by the name Krishna, the ‘all-attractive.’ Together, they form the Divine Couple, an eternal reservoir of reciprocal divine love which ever increases.
Love is alive. It is a living, giving, and flowing force. Love, like God, is unlimited and ever-expanding. Divine Love offers its transcendence for us souls in this world to follow, serve, and ultimately return to our original, eternal spiritual nature.
Our spirit, soul or jivatma is therefore an expression of the primordial energy of the shaktiman, which emanates both from and for his love. Whereas Radha’s love is infinite, we individual souls are infinitesimal. We merely serve to enhance and celebrate with our supreme existence the Divine Couple’s infinite love, which in turn imbues our souls with joy.
One way our soul can serve the joy and union of the Divine Couple in this world is by allowing the spiritual energy of love to flow through our own heart to others. The beauty of true love is that it is never selfish and does not seek to satisfy the demands of the ego. Like a river rippling toward the ocean, divine love courses toward the one it fills with its own essence.
Divine Love Abides All
When we have love in our life we can keep negative entities away from us on the lower realms, as well as on the earthly walking realm. There are both malicious people and malevolent non-physical beings in this world. Divine Love protects us from their evil.
When we live our life with unconditional love in our hearts, and keep a calm mind and spirit, we are easily read by others as being very kind loving people – it shows on our faces. You sometimes can’t tell on some people’s faces if they are good or evil, because Satan, or the Evil One, is tricky and manipulative. The Bible tells us that Lucifer was a beautiful angel in the beginning, before he fell and became corrupt.
It is so important to live with the Divine Spark inside of us and be mindful of what we put into our bodies, as I’ve seen energy shift and people’s faces shift when they open the door to negativity and evil influences in their lives. Some are more susceptible than others. For example, people who abuse alcohol allow really low spiritual entities into their lives, to seek and ruin and destroy anything good that they have going on – especially by way of relationships. Some people should just stay far away from alcohol, as they become very aggressive and belligerent, and just not themselves when they drink. I have seen people ruin their lives because of alcohol.
Anything that can deter you from Divine Love is not of the Light. Everything is best in moderation. But for some the negative energy keeps them wanting more as the negative entities around them wants them to fail, so that they themselves can grow stronger while their victim’s life slowly goes in a downward spiral. In some cases, their addictions make them so depressed they even take their own life, and it hinders their soul from achieving soul growth in this current incarnation they are in.