Rush out into holy life and shine...

God gave you legs but you have to do the walking. 

God gave you a back but you have to stand-up straight. 

God gave you a head but you have to hold it high and use it. 

This is not a message about saved by grace or works. 

Believe what you desire about salvation. 

If you fall in the mud, stand-up and go take a shower. Don't pray to be delivered from the mud. There are some things you can do, and you should certainly do whatever is in your power. 

God's favourite type of prayer is action. 

Get off of your knees and pray with action. 

God loves a prayer of action. 

Move your ass. 

Be grateful. 

Do something. 

Be something.

You were given the tools to thrive. 

Don't live your whole life on holy crutches. 

Don't be a lifelong spiritual welfare recipient. 

Don't be a lazy spiritual beggar, similar to constantly asking a parent for money and handouts. 

God's prayer-line is not a wheel of fortune or lottery for the indolent. 

God helps those who help themselves.

Faith doesn't work if you don't even believe it. 

Show up. 

Believe. 

Have faith. 

Show up for yourself. 

Believe in yourself. 

Have faith in yourself. 

Don't you realize who and what you are? 

Why do you deny your own incredible power? 

Who convinced you of the lie that you are weak?

You are a child of the most high who set the stars in the night’s sky. 

With all respect to your religion or world-view thank God, 

thank the universe, 

thank evolutionary processes the keyword is "thank"  just have some gratitude and be thankful. 

While the ingrates duke-it-out about the true God, you take each breath in holy gratitude. 

I think God would appreciate a little appreciation. 

The best way to be thankful for the gift of life is to not throw it away. 

Please don't waste-away in front of a TV waiting to win a lottery during the precious few hours you are not imprisoned in corporate shackles. 

Life is calling you. 

The other life. 

The analogue life. 

The real. 

Nature is calling you. And people too. 

Wondrous royal souls are waiting to meet, appreciate and experience you. 

We are all royal heirs of the divine unknown. 

Meeting another person is always a sacred event. 

Life is a sacred event. 

You are sacred. 

You are a blessed miracle of almighty creation. 

You are pure wonderment. Look at the majesty of  you! 

You are art in motion. 

You are incomparable. 

Your perfect life is matchless. 

Your precious gift of life is unrivalled like each snowflake. 

You are inimitable; so fine and unique that it is impossible that there will ever be another like you. 

Give thanks!

This is your moment; 

this transient, ephemeral instant is your unfolding life. 

Make your life a tribute equal to the magnitude of the gift of life. 

Rush out into holy life and shine. 

Witness each moment in astounded jubilation. 

Take every holy breath in gratitude. 

Rejoice in life!

ps/smoh

If you embrace the unknown, it becomes your home. It's like closing your eyes and falling backwards into the arms of LOVE. Go ahead. Let go. It'll be okay.

I am my phenomenal presence and absence. I am my phenomenal presence and... I am my phenomenal... I am my... I am... I... ....... live in a prison of my own design and am the only warden. 

Nothing surpasses the sacred landscape of the human heart.

There are no answers. 

There never have been any answers. 

There never will be any answers..... 

That is the answer.

Answers are a form of death. 

Questions are a form of life.

Answers tend to settle an issue and close it off to further inquiry. But life is open, dynamic, and ever-changing and cannot be adequately explained, summarized, or understood by any collection of words or theories or answers, regardless of how eloquent or articulate they may seem. 

Questions, on the other hand, open up the path of inquiry which leads to deeper and deeper levels of experience and wisdom.

Questions and answers have a complementary relationship, to borrow a term from quantum physics. 

This means that they are mutually exclusive, just as you cannot know both the position AND the velocity of a quantum particle (say an electron) precisely and at the same time. 

You can know one or the other, but knowing velocity precisely means you can only estimate position, and vice versa. 

So, to risk straining the analogy to the breaking point, the process of questioning excludes or is complementary to settling for answers just as the process of settling for a specific answer excludes the process of further questioning.

You can't ask a question and propose an answer at the same time. 

Eventually the questions also fall away.

Life answers us in each moment. 

We have but to open our eyes and our hearts to what beauty lies all around and within us.

ps/smoh

A world within a world...

Everyone’s life is story. 

Everyone born on Earth has physical characteristics. 

Everyone is a character, and everyone has a personality, and everyone is an actor in a play, a very convincing play. 

As you play your part, you take it seriously. 

You really get into the part you play. 

Your acting ability is great. 

You fool everyone. 

You believe the edges of your story, and so does everyone else. 

This is called True Life when it is nothing of the kind. 

It is a picture of life, a photo taken through a special lens. 

Within this photo, lies quite a different image, often unacknowledged.

The point I would like to make today, as much as you believe in daily life, it is unbelievable. 

Somewhere within you, you know very well this perceived life is not real. It is not real to you, and yet you give great service to it. 

You play the part you play very well, and you take it seriously. 

You take as fact that which is, indeed, a mirage.

A mirage of water in a desert does not give you water to drink. It is not your sustenance, nor does your bounded life on Earth give you sustenance. 

Oh, yes, it feeds the body. 

It fills the bill for activity, yet Truth it is not. 

There is a world within a world.

Just as a great novel or poem can be read on different levels, so can the novel of your life be read on different levels? 

You, the portrayer of events, get caught up in the actions. 

You become entrenched in them as it were. 

You are sure your actions and all the events are indisputable. 

This is one level of life. 

It is external and limited while you, you are unlimited. 

You are certified unlimited.

We can see that your vision is microscopic rather than telescopic. 

So far as you can see, you are living apart, and I tell you that you are living an illusory part as an actor on a stage. 

You believe this part you play is the substance of you. 

The stage you play on is an interlude. 

It cannot be held onto. Attached to the role you play, you hold on to the role for dear life, and it is as serious to you as serious can be.

In truth, you are as much an observer of your life as an actor in it. 

You go through motions, and call the motions your existence. 

I keep telling you that you are being. 

You are Stillness even within your role in the theatre of life. 

This role you play is erasable. 

At some point, the fiction is done, and you are no longer the actor who portrays a person on Earth. 

You became attached to a role and think that this role is the extent of you. For a while, you are a squatter. You live in a body that is not yours and really has nothing to do with you, for you are Vastness, and not limited to the part you play.

The part you play can be marvellous and beautiful, and, still, you are greater than the part you play.

It is not essential that you take the part you play and the events that occur as seriously as you do. 

You have been holding on to the actions and events as if for dear life. 

You are immersed in the story called Life on Earth, and, yet, ultimately, you hold onto nothing, beloveds, and you let go of your grasp of it. 

All the tension no longer holds you. 

Let go of the tension now. 

No need to be so tense about illusion. 

A story unfolds, and, yet, you are not the story. 

You exist on another plane. 

This Life on Earth is not the end-all and be-all. 

Let go of the seriousness of it and release the tension. 

You don’t have to be uptight now as if you are holding onto a life line. 

You are an expression of the Unseen. 

You are an expression of love on Earth

Namaste *__*

The more spiritually aware you become the more you will focus on your own self and less on others.

( •_•)
\) (> 
/ \ Respond;

One of the most sincere forms of respect is actually listening to what another has to say...Change will never happen if you lack the ability and courage to see yourself for who you really are.

Don't change just so people will like you! 
Like yourself and your relationships will change. 
There are people who will love you for — YOU.

You cannot save people from themselves. All you can do is stand firmly in your hopes for them, with compassion.
You cannot save everyone. Some people are going to destroy themselves no matter how much you try to help them.

Your job is not to judge..
Your job is not to figure out if someone deserves something or decide who is right or wrong. 
Your job is to lift the fallen, restore the broken, and heal the hurting.

Stop holding-on to the wrong people. 
Let them go on their own way; if not for you, then for them. 

Haven't you been listening to your inner-voice? 

Be honest, your gut has been screaming but you have been ignoring it. 
How much more of your life are you going to throw-away for a lie? 
Accept it. 
Some people never change. 
Some people have abusive, negative, controlling tendencies in their blood; they are wired for havoc, bickering and deception. 
They know of no other way to interface with others except through their created chaos. 

Chaos is their home-court advantage where they play their mind-games so they can have power over you; it's a rigged game you can never win. 
They will wear you ragged and bring you to your knees emotionally and physically. In time they will destroy every wonderful thing you have in your life. 

You are in danger: your health, your peace of mind, your happiness and maybe even your life. 

There is more than one way to lose your life; quickly through violence, or fettered-away and wasted around dreadful, toxic people. 
You must take control of your life and make good decisions for yourself. The insanity must end, for your sake and for theirs.

Some of the most amazing people in the world were not perfect; they were scarred by suffering, hardships, losses and imperfections. 
But, when they recovered, they were stronger, wiser, and more loving and compassionate. 

Your life is going to get better in the proper time, and you will be stronger and more at peace than ever before.
The truth is that life can be very difficult at times. 
There can be a lot of pressure to keep it all together, to be smart and beautiful, to be so good and perfect. 

But sometimes we don't have it together at all. 
Sometimes we make mistakes. 
Sometimes we don't feel good or look our best. 
Sometimes things are not good at all and we feel miserable, lonely or depressed. 

If you have lost your way and feel down, that feeling belongs to you. 
If you feel miserable — it's yours, and no one should take it away from you. 

Maybe things really aren't very good at all right now. 
Maybe you have good reasons to be depressed, and the last thing you need is someone telling you to be happy.

But one thing you do need, is at least the respect from others to let you sit with your valid feelings. 
You don't always need a cheerleader, but just someone to be a friend and acknowledge where you really are, and how you really feel. 

Real problems can't be fixed with a motivational poster, a cute quote or a pat on the back. While you are in your pain, 
it does not matter how intrinsically special you are, or 
how beautiful life is, or 
how precious each moment is if you don't accept and respect your suffering, it isn't going anywhere. 

Submit to your pain; don't suppress your pain. If you can sit with your pain, listen to your pain and respect your pain in time you will move through your pain.

Pain is like a healing emotional fever. 
Allow your pain to cleanse you and burn away what needs to die. 
A new and better you will grow from the ashes. The most important parts of your life will be marked by pain. 

Some of the most amazing people in the world were not perfect; they were scarred by suffering, hardships, losses and imperfections. 
But, when they recovered, they were stronger, wiser, and more loving and compassionate. 

Your life is going to get better in the proper time, and you will be stronger and more at peace than ever before. 
Out of our suffering we emerge. 
Our struggles are really our only hope. 
Stay strong.

ps/smoh

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good being and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

( •_•)
\) (> 
/ \ R:

Even those who consider themselves totally against violence will savagely fight when the cause and conditions are right. 

That is not a question of debate. 

The only question is whether or not an individual will be prepared to be successful in that fight when, or if, that time comes.

No one go in search of a fight. 

They are not violent people or savages who enjoy inflicting pain on others. In fact, they don't want to fight at all. 

But they are prepared to fight if and when they are forced to by the right cause and circumstances. 

The true true being is a good person because the cause that one is willing to fight for is always just.

ps/smoh

The antiquated idea of turning bad to good is akin to rearranging furniture

( •_•)
\) (> 
/ \ Respond;

Cognitive psychology has been teaching people to replace bad stories with good stories for the past 30 years. 

While this may lead to a happier and healthier life but it will NEVER lead to awakening. 

What I love about Cognitive psychology is that at least they figured out that these stories were thoughts. 

Search for the storyteller instead, diligently day and night in every circumstance. And keep searching until the searching drops away of itself that’s all. 

Then go back to simply living your life as you see fit. 

If you can get to a place where bad thoughts aren't torturing you and you can replace/refute them, that space at least allows you the pause to ask 

"Wait, who is it that thinks any kind of thought is?" 

Going beyond-the next step while you're on top of the flag pole

ps/smoh

ps

If you smile when no one else is around, you really mean it, Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love...

In clinical psychology and positive psychology, self-acceptance is considered the prerequisite for change to occur.

Recognize the patterns around you and in you.

What you are is what you have been. 

What you'll be is what you do now.

Sometimes you need to take a step back to get forward, other times you need to step forward to finally come back.

We know what we are, but not what we may be.

What’s your very best idea in life?

Mine: 

That I can always choose my response.

Whatever happens, you can always choose your internal response to it. 

Be it situations, other people or your own thoughts.

What arises may be unavoidable, but the attitude you move through it with  is all up to you.

Your thoughts become the house you live in.

Normally we are so identified with our thoughts and emotions, that we are them. 

We are the happiness, we are the anger, we are the fear.

We have to learn to step back and know our thoughts and emotions are just thoughts and emotions. 

They're just mental states.

You can complain because rose bushes have thorns or rejoice that thorn bushes have roses. 

It’s all how you look at it.

Believe in love.

Believe in magic.

Believe in others.

Believe in yourself.

Believe in your dreams.

If you don't, who will?

ps/smoh ^__^

The beautiful path is not a place outside of yourself, but rather a place you carry with you everywhere you go...

The worst bullies you will ever encounter in your life are your own thoughts.
Your future begins with your next thought.
A better life is waiting for you to show up.

If resisting has failed and frustrated you, try to accept what is. As hard as it is to believe, acceptance can open different opportunities for change than resistance.
It is never too late to love yourself again.

You are the observer who watches your emotions as they push, pull and stretch you. The beauty inside of you is unmovable. 
Your deepest and most truthful self does not care about trends, times, struggles, losses or worries. Your deepest self is free from the world's petty, made-up demands, judgements and expectations. You love yourself and you are happy, and what you perceive as self-loathing and misery are really outside of you. 

Quit trying so hard and sit quietly with yourself and you will see that there are no demands within you. Only your surface is disturbed; in your deepness there is stillness and total tranquillity. 
Only your surface feels empty and longing; in your depths there is a firm weight of fullness.

Beneath your burdensome regrets and who you think you are through the lens of past mistakes, there is someone beautiful who wants to emerge. 

You are not your mistakes and your mistakes are not you. 
You are so much more than your mistakes. 
Allow your truth to emerge. 

Your truth cannot emerge buried under a mountain of guilt and regret. 
Your past is like a bag of bricks; set it down and walk away. 
Quit collecting every painful word, memory and mistake. 
Collect hope. 
Hope is lighter.

ps/smoh

THE MYTH OF PERMANENT BLISS...

The experience of Emptiness or No-self does often result in a state of bliss, lightness, and love. But existing in a state of constant bliss is not possible and really not the goal of spiritual life. 

The desire for unending bliss is just another way the ego has of staying "alive" and asserting its agenda of being dissatisfied with what is and seeking something better. 

Remember, seeking is suffering and vice versa.

 What changes after awakening is not that we enter into a permanent state of bliss. ALL mind states are fleeting by definition. 

Rather, we loosen our identification with ego consciousness and the world so that none of the passing phenomena created by thought can fool us into believing that it is real ever again. 

We come to identify ourselves as non personal, awareness itself. 

In other words, we simply come to understand deeply who we are and what we are not and that nothing is at stake since we are safe and secure as ALL OF IT.

     

While subtle bliss states certainly do accompany such insight, they are never permanent nor do they need to be. 

What IS permanent is our awareness that we are Awareness Itself, living life through the perspective of individual identity. 

After that, life goes on pretty much as before "chopping wood and carrying water." 

And what drops away is the desire to be or do anything other than what we are being and doing at this moment. 

Why seek anything else when we have always been that for which we seek?

ps/smoh

THE WORLD AS I SEE IT ~ an essay by Einstein

"How strange is the lot of us mortals! 
Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. 
But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. 

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving...

"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves -- this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts -- possessions, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude..."

"My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality... The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.
"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

Abridged; originally published in "Forum and Century," vol. 84, pp. 193-194, the thirteenth in the Forum series, Living Philosophies. 

The world needs you now.

More than you know.

More than you can imagine.

The world needs your gifts.

Your heart.

Your compassion.

Your understanding.

Your ability to listen

To speak

To feel

And to act.

The gifts that only you can give,

In the way that you and you alone can give them.

The time for holding back is over.

The time for believing that you are not good enough,

Not ready enough

Not wise enough

Has passed.

The time for fearing that you are too good,

Too powerful

Too magnificent

Too intelligent,

No longer exists.

You have run out of excuses.

You have exhausted every reason why you cannot be

Exactly who you were placed here to be.

Your usual distractions no longer distract.

Your strategies for staying small

For resisting the call to awaken

Are dead.

The world needs you now,

More than you know.

In the Great Circle of Life,

A space has been held for you

Since before Time began.

As you wandered, as you explored,

Your shoes waited, marking your place.

No one else approached,

For these shoes could only be filled by you.

You agreed to step into them when you were ready

To take your rightful place on the Circle.

And now, you are ready.

You are bored with your own self-absorption.

You choke and gag on your endless self-reflection and

Your belly is filled with an urgency

To leave jobs behind and embrace your real Work.

Now, at the exact moment that the world needs you,

You have uncovered and recovered and discovered enough

So that your authentic self can see the light of day.

So that you can step into the shoes that have been

Waiting for you since before time began.

Every moment that you delay,

Widens the hole in the web of existence.

For you are an essential ingredient,

Without which Creation is incomplete.

Global harmony rests in the palm of your hand.

Planetary peace will simply not be attained without

Your heart

Your mind

Your spirit.

The world needs you

And the world needs you now.

More than you know.

More than you can ever imagine.