Favourite spiritual poems/qoutes/prose

[synergy777]

PLEASE POST YOUR FAVOURITE PIECES OF INSPIRING AND INFORMING PIECES OF SPIRITUAL WISDOM. THIS WAY WE CAN HAVE A GOOD COLLECTION FOR EVERYONE TO SHARE.

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Warrior of Light
by Paulo Coelho


From now on - and for the next few hundred years - the Universe is going to help warriors of light and hinder the prejudiced. The Earth's energy needs to be renewed. New ideas need space. Body and soul need new challenges. The future has become the present, and every dream – except those dreams that involve preconceived ideas – will have a chance to be heard. Anything of importance will remain; anything useless will disappear. However, it is not the warrior's responsibility to judge the dreams of others, and he does not waste time criticising other people's decisions.

In order to have faith in his own path, he does not need to prove that someone else's path is wrong. The moment that he begins to walk along it, the warrior of light recognises the Path. Each stone, each bend cries welcome to him. He identifies with the mountains and the streams, he sees something of his own soul in the plants and the animals and the birds of the field.

Then, accepting the help of God and of God's Signs, he allows his Personal Legend to guide him towards the tasks that life has reserved for him. On some nights, he has nowhere to sleep, on others, he suffers from insomnia. That's just how it is,' thinks the warrior. I was the one who chose to walk this path. In these words lies all his power: he chose the path along which he is walking and so has no complaints. A warrior of light knows that he has much to be grateful for. He was helped in his struggle by the angels; celestial forces placed each thing in its place, thus allowing him to give of his best.

His companions say: 'He's so lucky!' & the warrior does sometimes achieve things far beyond his capabilities. That is why, at sunset, he kneels and gives thanks for the Protective Cloak surrounding him. His gratitude, however, is not limited to the spiritual world; he never forgets his friends, for their blood mingled with his on the battlefield. A warrior does not need to be reminded of the help given him by others; he is the first to remember and he makes sure to share with them any rewards he receives.

A warrior of light knows that certain moments repeat themselves. He often finds himself faced by the same problems and situations, and seeing these difficult situations return, he grows depressed, thinking that he is incapable of making any progress in life. 'I've been through all this before,' he says to his heart. 'Yes, you have been through all this before,' replies his heart. 'But you have never been beyond it. Then the warrior realises that these repeated experiences have but one to teach him what he does not want to learn.

The warrior of light meditates.He sits in a quiet place in his tent and surrenders himself to the divine light. When he does this, he tries not to think about anything; he shuts himself off from the search for pleasure, from challenges and revelations, and allows his gifts and powers to reveal themselves. Even if he does not recognise them then, these gifts and powers are taking care of his life and will influence his day-to-day existence.

While he meditates, the warrior is not himself, but a spark from the Soul of the World. These are the moments that give him an understanding of his responsibilities and of how he should behave accordingly. A warrior of light knows that in the silence of his heart he will hear an order that will guide him.

The warrior of light knows that no one is stupid and that life teaches everyone, however long that may take. He always does his best and expects the best of others. Through his generosity, he tries to show each person how much they are capable of achieving. Some of his companions say: 'Some people are so ungrateful.', the warrior is not discouraged by this. And he continues to encourage other people because this is also a way of encouraging himself.

A warrior of light knows his own faults. But he also knows his qualities. Some of his companions complain all the time that 'other people have more opportunities than we do. Perhaps they are right, but a warrior does not allow himself to be paralysed by this; he tries to make the most of his virtues. He knows that the gazelle's power lies in its strong legs. The power of the seagull lies in the accuracy with which it can spear a fish. He has learned that the reason the tiger does not fear the hyena is because he is aware of his own strength.

He tries to establish what he can truly rely on. And he always checks that he carries three things with him: faith, hope and love. If these three things are there, he does not hesitate to go forward.

+++++++++++++++++++++++

From Manual of the Warrior of Light,
copyright Paulo Coelho 1997,
English translation copyright Margaret Jull Costa 2002,
published in the UK in 2002 by HarperCollins.

website - http://www.warriorofthelight.com/engl/index.html

blog - http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

postcards - http://paulocoelhoblog.com/postcards/
********************************

thanks to lightworker for the myspace message

[planetsadhana]

"The dual substance of christ- the yearning, so human, so superhuman,of man to attain God- has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me.My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh......and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met"

Nikos Kazantzakis

[infin8_possibility]

MY LAW - TIEME RANAPIRI
(Attributed to the Maori)

The sun may be clouded, but ever the sun, Will sweep on its course till the cycle is run. And when into chaos the sytem is hurled, Again shall the Builder, rebuild a new world.

Your path may be clouded, uncertain your goal, Move on, for your orbit is fixed to your soul. And though may it lead you through darkness of night, The torch of the Builder shall give it new light.

You were, you will be, Know this while you are, Your spirit has travelled both long and afar, It rose from the source, to the Source it returns, The spark which was lighted eternally burns.

It slept in a jewel, it leapt in a wave, It roamed in a forest, it rose from the grave. It took on strange garbs for long eons of years, And now in the soul of yourself it appears.

From body to body your spirit speeds on, It seeks a new form when the old one has gone. And the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought, On the loom of the mind from the fibre of thought.

As dew is drawn upwards in rain to descend, Your thoughts drift away and in destiny blend. You cannot escape them, for petty or great, Or evil or noble, they fashion your fate.

Somewhere on this planet, sometime and somehow, Your life is reflecting your thoughts of your NOW! My law is unnerring, no blood can atone, The structure you built, you will live in alone.

From cycle to cycle, through time and through space, Your lives with your longings will ever keep pace. And all that you aks for and all you desire, Must come at your bidding, as flame out of fire.

Once list' to that voice and all tumult is done, Your life is the life of the infinate one. In the hurrying race, you are conscious of pause, With love for the purpose and love for the cause.

You are your own devil, you are your own God, You fashioned the paths that your footsteps have trod. And NOTHING, will save you from error or sin, Until you have harked to the Spirit within.

[planetsadhana]

"what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul"

"yes i am with you always, until the end of time"

"blessed are the meek ,for they shall inherit the earth"

jesus

[synergy777]

me- my thoughts

This union with god, going back to the source is a thing i agree with. i also think there is the aspect of mukti/moksha from samsara, eg liberation from the cycle of birth/death/rebirth etc.

Why we are here is a huge question, are we here by choice to live, learn, and enjoy the blessings of earthly life. or are we lost souls who fell into the multi dimensional matrix created by the fallen/satan. is satan the gnostic demiurge, the creator of matter/illusionary reality/cosmos/heaven-hell and thus traps us here.

Are we trapped due to our free will/beliefs/actions. our free will being directed/influenced by our desires to have worldy gains, attachment to our desires/emotions. also our perception is being controlled by our beliefs eg data/religion/science/education.

However if satan/demiurge controls this multi dimensional matrix eg heaven/earth/hell, then why does he need so much control to just to keep us here, if we are trapped in his creation, then how come we are still able to recieve from the source/god.

There are numerous scenarios involving varying degrees of our purpose of existence, the scale of satans creation and his scale of control in/over them.

What we must at least aim to do is to educate and develop ourselves. to become awakened and empowered. to understand our desires, fears etc. to become compassionate, to do good. then we have the earth bit done, then after the death of the body, when we are in our true state, the spirit, we must learn to navigate/escape the higher dimensions eg heaven/hell/spirit realms, if they are controlled.

I think its a multi layered creation. hence why spirits consumed with anger hate etc become trapped eg ghosts/demons, why we reincarnate, why when people have nde's they/sprits/angels-demons always tell the spirit to come back to earth, thus constant birth/death/reincarnation.

Maybe satan controls these layers/levels/dimensions, and getting beyond them is breaking free from the control of satan and thus heaven, union with the source/god.

Thus wisdom, love and compassion is the only way.

[farros]

Through war and malice,
through hate and greed,
there is a choice.

No path need be taken,
no land to conquer,
just the self-
to feed and educate the soul,
and bring us closer,
to our liberation.

[lhaull]

Before enlightenment, Chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, Chop wood, carry water.

[armoured_amazon]

"Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Gospel of St. Matthew 5:3-10

[haukipesukone]

"Die monster you don't belong in this world
It was not by my hand that I was once again given flesh.
It was humans who called me forth with praise and tribute.
Tribute?! You steal men's souls, and make them your slaves.
Perhaps the same could be said of all religions.
Your words are as empty as your soul.
Mankind ill needs a Saviour such as you.
What is a man?
A miserable little pile of secrets!
But enough talk, Have at you!"

[anahata]

I like this parable...

http://www.sapphyr.net/largegems/littlesoul-thesun.htm


http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:Rz9ajpExpSEooM:http://www.iloveulove.com/

[armoured_amazon]

I like this parable...

http://www.sapphyr.net/largegems/littlesoul-thesun.htm


http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:Rz9ajpExpSEooM:http://www.iloveulove.com/

Aw, I enjoyed that. :)

[synergy777]

The Awakening : Moment of Clarity

by Denise M. "Sonny" Carroll

A time comes in your life when you finally get it... When in the midst of all your fears and insanity you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere, the voice inside your head cries out - ENOUGH! Enough fighting and crying, or struggling to hold on. And, like a child quieting down after a blind tantrum, your sobs begin to subside, you shudder once or twice, you blink back your tears and through a mantle of wet lashes, you begin to look at the world through new eyes.

This is your awakening...

You realize that it's time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change, or for happiness, safety and security to come galloping over the next horizon.

You come to terms with the fact that he is not Prince Charming and you are not Cinderella and that in the real world, there aren't always fairy tale endings (or beginnings for that matter) and that any guarantee of "happily ever after" must begin with you and in the process, a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.

You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are...and that's OK. (They are entitled to their own views and opinions.) And you learn the importance of loving and championing yourself and in the process; a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval.

You stop complaining and blaming other people for the things they did to you (or didn't do for you) and you learn that the only thing you can really count on is the unexpected. You learn that people don't always say what they mean or mean what they say, and that not everyone will always be there for you and that it's not always about you. So, you learn to stand on your own and to take care of yourself and in the process, a sense of safety & security is born of self-reliance.

You stop judging and pointing fingers and you begin to accept people as they are and to overlook their shortcomings and human frailties and in the process, a sense of peace & contentment is born of forgiveness.

You realize that much of the way you view yourself and the world around you, is a result of all the messages and opinions that have been ingrained into your psyche. You begin to sift through all the junk you've been fed about how you should behave, how you should look and how much you should weigh, what you should wear and where you should shop and what you should drive, how and where you should live and what you should do for a living, who you should marry and what you should expect of a marriage, the importance of having and raising children or what you owe your parents. You learn to open up to new worlds and different points of view.

You begin reassessing and redefining who you are and what you really stand for.

You learn the difference between wanting and needing and you begin to discard the doctrines and values you've outgrown, or should never have bought into to begin with and in the process, you learn to go with your instincts.

You learn that it is truly in giving that we receive and that there is power and glory in creating and contributing and you stop maneuvering through life merely as a "consumer" looking for your next fix.

You learn that principles such as honesty and integrity are not the outdated ideals of a by gone era, but the mortar that holds together the foundation upon which you must build a life.

You learn that you don't know everything; it's not your job to save the world and that you can't teach a pig to sing. You learn to distinguish between guilt, responsibility, and the importance of setting boundaries and learning to say NO. You learn that the only cross to bear is the one you choose to carry and that martyrs get burned at the stake.

Then you learn about love, romantic love and familial love, how to love, how much to give in love, when to stop giving and when to walk away. You learn not to project your needs or your feelings onto a relationship. You learn that you will not be more beautiful, more intelligent, more lovable or important because of the man on your arm or the child that bears your name.

You learn to look at relationships as they really are and not as you would have them be. You stop trying to control people, situations and outcomes.

You learn that just as people grow and change, so it is with love; and you learn that you don't have the right to demand love on your terms, just to make you happy.

You learn that alone does not mean lonely. You look in the mirror and come to terms with the fact that you will never be a size 5 or a perfect 10 and you stop trying to compete with the image inside your head and agonizing over how you "stack up."

You also stop working so hard at putting your feelings aside, smoothing things over and ignoring your needs. You learn that feelings of entitlement are perfectly OK and that it is your right, to want things and to ask for the things that you want and that sometimes it is necessary to make demands.

You come to the realization that you deserve to be treated with love, kindness, sensitivity, respect, and you won't settle for less. You allow only the hands of a lover who cherishes you, to glorify you with his touch and in the process; you internalize the meaning of self-respect.

And you learn that your body really is your temple. And you begin to care for it and treat it with respect. You begin eating a balanced diet, drinking more water and taking more time to exercise. You learn that fatigue diminishes the spirit and can create doubt and fear. So you take more time to rest. Just as food fuels the body, laughter fuels our soul; so you take more time to laugh and to play.

You learn that for the most part in life, you get what you believe you deserve and that much of life truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You learn that anything worth achieving is worth working for and that wishing for something to happen is different from working toward making it happen.

More importantly, you learn that in order to achieve success you need direction, discipline and perseverance. You also learn that no one can do it all alone and that it's OK to risk asking for help.

You learn that the only thing you must truly fear is the great robber baron of all time; FEAR itself. You learn to step right into and through your fears, because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and to give in to fear, is to give away the right to live life on your terms.

You learn to fight for your life and not to squander it living under a cloud of impending doom. You learn that life isn't always fair, you don't always get what you think you deserve and that sometimes bad things happen to unsuspecting, good people. On these occasions, you learn not to personalize things. You learn that God isn't punishing you or failing to answer your prayers; it's just life happening.

You learn to deal with evil in its most primal state; the ego. You learn that negative feelings such as anger, envy and resentment must be understood and redirected or they will suffocate the life out of you and poison the universe that surrounds you. You learn to admit when you are wrong and to build bridges instead of walls.

You learn to be thankful and to take comfort in many of the simple things we take for granted; things that millions of people upon the earth can only dream about; a full refrigerator, clean running water, a soft warm bed, a long hot shower. Slowly, you begin to take responsibility for yourself, by yourself and you make yourself a promise to never betray yourself and to never ever settle for less than your heart's desire. You hang a wind chime outside your window so you can listen to the wind, and you make it a point to keep smiling, to keep trusting and to stay open to every wonderful possibility.

Finally, with courage in your heart and with God by your side you take a stand, you take a deep breath and you begin to design the life you want to live as best as you can.


myspace message from lightworkers

[anahata]

The sun may be clouded, but even the sun, will sweep on its course till the cycle is run. And when into chaos the system is hurled, again shall the builder, rebuild a new world.

Your path may be clouded, uncertain your goal, move on, for your orbit is fixed to your soul. And though may it lead you through darkness of night, the torch of the builder shall give it new light.

You were, you will be, know this while you are, your spirit has travelled both long and afar, it rose from the source, to the source it returns, the spark which was lighted eternally burns.

It slept in a jewel, it leapt in a wave, it roamed in a forest, it rose from the grave. It took on strange garbs for long eons of years, and now in the soul of yourself it appears.

From body to body your spirit speeds on, it seeks a new form when the old one has gone. And the form that it finds is the fabric you wrought, on the loom of the mind the fibre of thought.

As dew is drawn upwards in rain to descend, your thoughts drift away and in destiny blend. You cannot escape them, for petty or great, or evil or noble, they fashion your fate.

Somewhere on this planet, sometime and somehow, your life is reflecting your thoughts of your NOW! My law is unerring, no blood can atone, the structure you built, you will live in alone.

From cycle to cycle, through time and through space, your lives with your longings will ever keep pace. And all that you ask for and all you desire, must come at your bidding, as flame out of fire.

Once list’ to that voice and all tumult is done, your life is the life of the infinite one. In the hurrying race, you are conscious of pause, with love for the purpose and love for the cause.

You are your own devil, you are your own god, you fashioned the paths that your footsteps have trod. And NOTHING will save you from error or sin, until you have harked to the spirit within.

[comawhite015]

Before enlightenment, Chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, Chop wood, carry water.

That is really great.

I like this. My mum wrote it down and now it's on my fridge =)

'O God, I am Mustafah the taylor and I work at the shop of Muhammad Ali. The whole day long I sit and pull the needle and the thread through the cloth. O God, you are the needle and I am the thread. I am attached to you, and I follow you. When the thread tries to slip away from the needle it becomes tangled and must be cut so that it can be put back in the right place. O God, help me to follow you wherever you may lead me. For I am really only Mustafah the taylow, and I work at the shop of Muhammad Ali on the Great Square.'

[lhaull]

That is really great.

I like this. My mum wrote it down and now it's on my fridge =)

'O God, I am Mustafah the taylor and I work at the shop of Muhammad Ali. The whole day long I sit and pull the needle and the thread through the cloth. O God, you are the needle and I am the thread. I am attached to you, and I follow you. When the thread tries to slip away from the needle it becomes tangled and must be cut so that it can be put back in the right place. O God, help me to follow you wherever you may lead me. For I am really only Mustafah the taylow, and I work at the shop of Muhammad Ali on the Great Square.'

Nice.
Hey play us some music brother.

[comawhite015]

Nice.
Hey play us some music brother.

You'll have to talk to my agent :cool:

[cafetimes1991]

Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.
Mahatma Gandhi

As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it.
Mahatma Gandhi

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
Mahatma Gandhi


Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi

Hate the sin, love the sinner.
Mahatma Gandhi

Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.
Mahatma Gandhi

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.
Mahatma Gandhi

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
Mahatma Gandhi

I cannot teach you violence, as I do not myself believe in it. I can only teach you not to bow your heads before any one even at the cost of your life.
Mahatma Gandhi

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
Mahatma Gandhi

I want freedom for the full expression of my personality.
Mahatma Gandhi

In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.
Mahatma Gandhi

Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy.
Mahatma Gandhi

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.
Mahatma Gandhi

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
Mahatma Gandhi

One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.
Mahatma Gandhi

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
Mahatma Gandhi

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Mahatma Gandhi

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
Mahatma Gandhi

When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it--always.
Mahatma Gandhi

You must be the change you want to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
Mahatma Gandhi

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.
Mahatma Gandhi, 'Satyagraha Leaflet No. 13,' May 3, 1919

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Mahatma Gandhi, (attributed)

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.
Mahatma Gandhi, 1931

I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization

[tinfoil tom]

Hello fellow freethinkers. First post from me.

Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration — that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.
Bill Hicks

A path without a heart is never enjoyable. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy— it does not make a warrior work at liking it; it makes for a joyful journey; as long as a man follows it, he is one with it.
Don Juan - In Carlos Castaneda

A warrior chooses a path with heart, any path with heart, and follows it; and then he rejoices and laughs. He knows because he sees that his life will be over altogether too soon. He sees that nothing is more important than anything else.
Don Juan - In Carlos Castaneda

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore, a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions. His decision to keep on that path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. He must look at every path closely and deliberately. There is a question that a warrior has to ask: 'Does this path have a heart?'
Don Juan - In Carlos Castaneda

Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.
Don Juan - In Carlos Castaneda

You don't comb the mirror, you comb your own hair and the mirror changes.
David Icke

[cafetimes1991]

http://www.davidicke.com/forum/picture.php?albumid=191&pictureid=1589

[pinkfreud]

What we think, we become.
-Gautama Buddha-


Truth is exact correspondence with reality.
-Swami Paramahansa Yogananda-


Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.
-Dag Hammerskjold-


He who is filled with love is filled with God himself.
-Saint Augustine-


You grow to heaven. You don't go to heaven.
-Edgar Cayce-


All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
-Edgar Allan Poe-


The last to be overcome is death,
and the knowledge of life is the knowledge of death.
-Edgar Cayce-


If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
-Mother Teresa-

[pinkfreud]

He who is drowned is not troubled by the rain.
-Chinese Proverb-


The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.
-Elbert Hubbard-


When you're through changing, you're through.
-Bruce Barton-


Whatever you are, be a good one.
-Abraham Lincoln-


I shut my eyes in order to see.
-Paul Gauguin-


Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.
-Goethe-

[detroit313]

However deep your
Knowledge of the scriptures,
It is no more than a strand of hair
In the vastness of space;
However important appears
Your worldly experience,
It is but a drop of water in a deep ravine.

Tokusan

Hell is not punishment,
it's training.

Shunryu Suzuki

The most important thing is to find out
what is the most important thing.

Shunryu Suzuki

Where beauty is, then there is ugliness;
where right is, also there is wrong.
Knowledge and ignorance are interdependent;
delusion and enlightenment condition each other.
Since olden times it has been so.
How could it be otherwise now?
Wanting to get rid of one and grab the other
is merely realizing a scene of stupidity.
Even if you speak of the wonder of it all,
how do you deal with each thing changing?

Ryokan

[always_rebel]

"Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about his religion.
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend,
or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light,
for your life, for your strength.
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living.
If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools
and robs the spirit of its vision.
When your time comes to die,
be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death,
so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time
to live their lives over again in a different way.
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home."

***

“Well, as the great chief is to determine the matter, I hope the Great Spirit will put sense enough into his head to induce him to direct you to give up this land. It is true, he is so far off he will not be injured by the war. He may sit still in his town, and drink his wine, while you and I will have to fight it out.”

***

"No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers.... Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Didn't the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?"

***

"The way, the only way to stop this evil is for the red man to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was first, and should be now, for it was never divided."

- Tecumseh, Shawnee War Chief.

My personal hero.

[tattooverb]

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
frank herbert

[comawhite015]

frank herbert

I love that book SO much. :D

[tattooverb]

I love that book SO much. :D

me 2

[synergy777]

http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/8743/buddhamantra.jpg (http://www.imagehosting.com/)

[hellosatellites]

Whatever the question, More Love is the answer.

can't remember where i picked that one up.

[pinnochio]

A verse form me against the world by 2pac shakur

With all this extra stressin
The question I wonder is after death, after my last breath
When will I finaly get to rest? Through this supression
they punish the people that's askin questions
And those that possess, steal from the ones without possesions
The message I stress: to make it stop study your lessons
Don't settle for less - even the genius asks-es questions
Be grateful for blessings
Don't ever change, keep your essence
The power is in the people and politics we address
Always do your best, don't let the pressure make you panic
And when you get stranded
And things don't go the way you planned it
Dreamin of riches, in a position of makin a difference
Politicians and hypocrites, they don't wanna listen
If I'm insane, it's the fame made a brother change
It wasn't nuttin like the game
It's just me against the world

[amethyst]

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

-Robert Frost

[amethyst]

The Road Not Taken


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost

[amethyst]

The Tuft of Flowers

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,

"As all must be," I said within my heart,
"Whether they work together or apart."

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim over night
Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly-weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

"Men work together," I told him from the heart,
"Whether they work together or apart."

-Robert Frost

[opulentview]

it would be typical to put "Dream within a Dream" but I think Poe has much more going on in some of his lesser quoted poems. Here is one by the great writer:

Israfel
by Edgar Allan Poe



IN Heaven a spirit doth dwell
"Whose heart-strings are a lute ;"
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell)
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.

Tottering above
In her highest noon,
The enamoured moon
Blushes with love,
While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven,)
Pauses in Heaven.

And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfeli's fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings —
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.


* And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and
who has the sweetest voice of all God's creatures. —
KORAN.

But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty —
Where Love's a grown up God —
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star.

Therefore, thou art not wrong,
Israfeli, who despisest
An unimpassioned song ;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest !
Merrily live, and long !

The ecstacies above
With thy burning measures suit —
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervour of thy lute —
Well may the stars be mute!

Yes, Heaven is thine ; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours ;
Our flowers are merely — flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.

If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.



-The End-

[synergy777]

thanks for all the contributions, keep them coming.


A verse form me against the world by 2pac shakur

With all this extra stressin
The question I wonder is after death, after my last breath
When will I finaly get to rest? Through this supression
they punish the people that's askin questions
And those that possess, steal from the ones without possesions
The message I stress: to make it stop study your lessons
Don't settle for less - even the genius asks-es questions
Be grateful for blessings
Don't ever change, keep your essence
The power is in the people and politics we address
Always do your best, don't let the pressure make you panic
And when you get stranded
And things don't go the way you planned it
Dreamin of riches, in a position of makin a difference
Politicians and hypocrites, they don't wanna listen
If I'm insane, it's the fame made a brother change
It wasn't nuttin like the game
It's just me against the world

2pac is my fave, this one of his best songs, nice 1.

[synergy777]

‘ History cannot be permanently falsified; the myth cannot stand up to the scrutiny of scientific research; the sinister web will be brought into the light and torn to pieces, however artfully it has been spun.’

Dr. Jacob Ruchti - 1916

[synergy777]

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Confucius/

Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Chinese philosopher & reformer

Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it.

It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do.

Respect yourself and others will respect you.

Study the past if you would define the future.

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.

[synergy777]

showing love and compassion to all, does not mean one cannot seek justice, it does not mean one cannot endeavour to become free, it does not mean one cannot try to overcome oppression, it does not stop the pursuit of liberty and equality for all. it is because of love and compassion for all, that one can do this. - synergy777

[sabr3]

A Small Consiousness
A Small Angle
A Small View
cannot see anything...

Life does nothing more than pass through your body...

You are a shard of yourself
AND a shard of the World.
AND the World is a shard of YOU.

Become the Flying Dragon and Journey the skies or
Become the Black Dragon and shake the Earth's Foundations
This is what your TRUE SELF will Decide.

Self is Everything
Everything is Self...

[anahata]

"Of all the things from this world, which is the longest and the shortest, the quickest and the slowest, the most shareable and the most extended, the most neglected and the most regretted, without which nothing can be done, which swallows everything that is small and gives life to everything that is grandiose?"

"That is time. Nothing is longer because Time is the measure of eternity: nothing is shorter because Time is lacking when we have something to do: nothing is quicker for those who are intensely enjoying themselves, nothing is slower for those who are waiting: Time extends to the Infinite and, because it is ETERNAL, it escapes us: all the stupid people neglect time: until the end, everybody regrets its passing: it gives to oblivion everything that is not important and IMMORTAL for the posterity and immortalizes the great and ETERNAL things".

[simplysimon]

Life is its own answer, accept it and enjoy it day by day.

[kurupted_flesh]

"The Less Effort, The faster and more powerful you will be!" - Bruce Lee

"Only the shallow know themselves." - Oscar Wilde

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." - Oscar Wilde

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." - Albert Einstein

“For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.” - Jean Debuffet

"I don't do drugs, I am drugs!" - Salvador Dali

"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." - George Bush


...and so on and so forth.

[synergy777]

i like the bruce lee and oscar wilde stuff. einstein is cool also.

------------------------------------

the message is compassion to all, to love one another, 1love.

to engage in self development and empowerment,

thus achieving gnosis/enlightenment.

this then leading to moksha/mukti from samsara.

to have equality and liberty for all in society.

to recognise the divinity in all of us, and all of creation/nature/space

[synergy777]

the most important thing about jesus in my view, is his message.

1: he said love the heavenly father/god/creator/infinite awareness etc with your heart, mind and soul.

2: love one another eg 1love.

surely no one can argue with these two commandments of jesus.

he spoke our against religous corruption eg the priesthood, overturning the tables in the temple etc.

he was for social equality, he stood up for the poor and oppressed.

he was executed by the political and religous elite, the romans and the jewish priesthood.

thus the elite hated him and his message of social equality, compassion and spiritual development.

we can argue the details of his life eg solar symbolism, parables etc. but his message is spot on.

[synergy777]

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.

Conquer the angry man by love.

Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness.

Conquer the miser with generosity.

Conquer the liar with truth

The Buddha

[gushen]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Hu-_OONIyw
4:40

Hello brothers, hello sisters. Good god. I'm Carl, and I am like I am, just like I am. Thanks God, I know now who I am. Yeah. I am love, I am Love and nothing else is love, like we all, like we all. I have nothing to assert, no. Nothing to blame, nothing to judge, nobody to accuse, nobody to accuse and nobody to convince. Just to be as I am, as an example, just an example. So I did advertising. I made commercials for products, which we need like cancer. Cancer, the materialized illusion, the materialized illusion around us. Yes I didn't know about cause and effect. I didn't know about the law of the echo. And suddenly I got it into me that we are all one, one with everything and we will unite each other like we never did before. Ha, the Artist, the Artist. And everybody last at least as an artist, yeah, and love artists we are. We are love artists. We come together as children as we are, just as children, because we are children forever, and forever, and forever. And we will play the Game, we will play, play, play, play. And the game called love, love, and nothing else as love, yeah, this is the Game. And we get free of the materialized illusion around us. The luxury, the materialism, which we need like cancer. No, no sickness anymore, no sickness anymore. And I got the message into me that fear is an illusion. Fear is an illusion, ha, that is wonderful to know. To be ill is an illusion, to hate is an illusion, to make profit is an illusion, and what you see materialized not in tune with the nature on Mother Earth is just a materialized illusion and will disappear very very soon. And this is just the law of the echo, the Law, the only law we have. It's the Game, yeah, it's the Game, but so many forgot about the Game, these periods of time, about the Game you know... So we played war, war, one after the other. And the war was rapid enough and we look around us, yeah, then we see war games, war games everywhere, everywhere war. It's just an illusion, yeah war is just an illusion. So we killed and the main part of us kill animals, animals, yeah, also our brothers, our sisters, yeah, and we did not know that we kill ourself, we didn't know. Whatever we kill, we kill ourself, and whatever we do with the Nature we do it with ourself, yeah, we do it with ourself, because we are the Nature, we are the land, we are one with everything.

[torus]

'light never condemns; its nature is to reveal, transform, and release.'
-Guy Finley

'calmness is increased by seeing the connection between insincerity and nervousness.'
-Vernon Howard

[torus]

'the stone will melt in tears...
because I can't remain closed to you forever.

I can't escape without being conquered.

From the blue sky an eye will gaze down to summon me in silence

I will receive death utterly at your feet.
-Rabrindanath Tagore

[jp13]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/94782165@N00/3589474884/

[jp13]

don't think it worked "Warrior of Light" by Paul Coehlo

[brio313]

Great thread synergy777!

There is only one truth, the wise describe it in different ways. - Vedic wisdom

Each particle that awakens contributes in service to the whole. - My beloved friend Bijj

[epic fail guy]

be like water

[enga]

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with an impure mind
And trouble will follow you
As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.
We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow, unshakable.
"Look how he abused me and hurt me,
How he threw me down and robbed me."
Live with such thoughts and you live in hate.
"Look how he abused me and hurt me,
How he threw me down and robbed me."
Abandon such thoughts, and live in love.
In this world
Hate never yet dispelled hate.
Only love dispels hate.
This is the law,
Ancient and inexhaustible.
You too shall pass away.
Knowing this, how can you quarrel?
How easily the wind overturns a frail tree.
Seek happiness in the senses,
Indulge in food and sleep,
And you too will be uprooted.
The wind cannot overturn a mountain.
Temptation cannot touch the man
Who is awake, strong and humble,
Who masters himself and minds the dharma.
If a man's thoughts are muddy,
If he is reckless and full of deceit,
How can he wear the yellow robe?
Whoever is master of his own nature,
Bright, clear and true,
He may indeed wear the yellow robe.
Mistaking the false for the true,
And the true for the false,
You overlook the heart
And fill yourself with desire.
See the false as false,
The true as true.
Look into your heart.
Follow your nature.
An unreflecting mind is a poor roof.
Passion, like the rain, floods the house.
But if the roof is strong, there is shelter.
Whoever follows impure thoughts
Suffers in this world and the next.
In both worlds he suffers
And how greatly
When he sees the wrong he has done.
But whoever follows the dharma
Is joyful here and joyful there.
In both worlds he rejoices
And how greatly
When he sees the good he has done.
For great is the harvest in this world,
And greater still in the next.
However many holy words you read,
However many you speak,
What good will they do you
If you do not act upon them?
Are you a shepherd
Who counts another man's sheep,
Never sharing the way?
Read as few words as you like,
And speak fewer.
But act upon the dharma.
Give up the old ways -
Passion, enmity, folly.
Know the truth and find peace.
Share the way.

From the Dhammapada

[synergy777]

we are one

We are the Extensions of God

God is the one presence, the one power, the one force and source of all. There are no competitors to God, no reality existent outside of God. God is omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing), and omnipresent (present everywhere). There is no place where God is not, simply because nothing exists without God.

God is neither a man nor a woman nor a thing.

God is no one's father or mother or benefactor. These terms are used only to help us understand relationships - ours to God - not to establish a more human type of parentage. We use such terms as a matter of convenience or because it is comforting to do so. We call ourselves children of God because we do not know what else to call ourselves, and it seems as good a term as any to use. We are made in the image of God, not in the sense of physical appearance, but with respect to the power of our souls and the potential of our minds.

God is the Creator; we are co-creators. It would be more appropriate and more in line with Truth, if we called ourselves extensions of God or, perhaps, thoughts in the Mind of God. It would even be appropriate to use another name for God, like The Force, The One, The All, The Is-ness, The One Mind, The Source, or whatever conveys that sense of deity that is without limitation or boundary, beyond what can be comprehended.

While God is more than any name, protocol, hierarchy, concept, or grandiosity could describe or define; God truly is as near as our next breath - as close as our next thought. We are part of God and existent with God. A belief in separation, that we could possibly exist and have our being apart from God, is the only real sin. This belief is of our own making. God has not decreed separation; this we did ourselves by our own perception that somehow, some way, we could transcend That Which Cannot Be Transcended.

God is not dependent on our belief, for our belief or disbelief in God does not affect God - only us.

God is not a member of any church or religion. It is the churches and the religions that are members within the vastness and the glory that is God. There is no one religion just as there is no "chosen" people or person, nor any single way of regarding what cannot be fully comprehended. We are all "sons" of God in the sense that we are all souls of God's creation, without gender, without form, without nationality, complete and whole and perfect as we explore the never-endingness of God's wonderment.

A spark from the essence of All God Is resides in each and every one of us has an unbreakable connection, that thread or cord that ensures we remain a part of That Which We Could Never Leave.

The splendorous joy of recognizing and acknowledging our special-ness, our greatness, as creations of God and as co-creators with God, is akin to being engulfed by overwhelming floodtides of God's Glorious Love.

MORE LIGHT!

thanks to zalmos for the message.

[synergy777]

http://www.marianne.com/

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

----from A Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson.
If you like the paragraph, you’ll love the book...!

[synergy777]

http://img20.imagehosting.gr/out.php/i1196319_1corinthians13.jpg

[synergy777]

http://www.4catholiceducators.com/bible_posters_archive.htm

some great wallpapers/posters.

[synergy777]

"Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world."

-- Harriet Tubman, Abolitionist

[rjmt2012]

You are what your deep, driving desire is.

As your desire is, so is your will.

As your will is, so is your deed.

As your deed is, so is your destiny.



- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5

[monitorlizard]

"There's perfect harmony
In the rising and the falling of the sea
And as we sail along
I never fail to be astounded by
The things we'll do for promises
And a song"

... Ronnie James Dio

[infinite tea]

The world is a mirror for your inner state of being both conscious and unconscious. Fear is repressed anger at your own inability to express the love you hold within which is in truth YOU. To express yourself fully is live in the peace of truth, when you do this the whole universe opens up to you.

[synergy777]

"The great creators-the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time."
-- Ayn Rand, writer

[pedsi]

In life it is wise to search for those who seek the truth...If you come across someone who has the truth,run like hell.:)

[synergy777]

although the bible has been corrupted via the elite eg various translations, edits to support elite agendas, the simple stuff is unarguably powerful.

Romans 5:3-4

More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,

whats weird is that good old dot cotton said it in eastenders last night, she is a legend.

heres a good wallpaper:

http://www.4catholiceducators.com/graphics/Romans5_3-4.jpg

[synergy777]

The message I stress:
to make it stop, study your lessons,
Don't settle for less
even the genius asks questions,
Be grateful for blessings,
Don't ever change, keep your essence,
The power is in the people and politics we address.
Always do your best,
don't let the pressure make you panic.
when you get stranded
And things don't go the way you planned it.
Dreamin of riches, in a position of makin a difference.
Politicians are hypocrites, they don't wanna listen...

- 2PAC

[jammasterj13]

I am neither the mind,
Intelligence, ego nor chitta.
Neither the ears, the tongue,
Nor the senses of smell and sight.
Neither ether nor air.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

I am neither the prana,
Nor the five vital breaths.
Neither the seven elements of the body,
Nor its five sheaths,
Nor hands, nor feet, nor tongue,
Nor other organ of action.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Neither fear, greed, delusion,
Loathing, nor liking have I.
Nothing of pride, or ego,
Or dharma or liberation.
Neither desire of the mind,
Nor object of its desiring.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Nothing of pleasure or pain,
Or virtue or vice, do I know.
Of manta, of sacred place,
Of Vedas or sacrifice.
Neither I am the eater,
The food or the act of eating.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Fear or death, I have none,
Nor any distincton of caste.
Neither father nor mother,
Not even a birth, have I.
Neither friend, nor comrade.
Neither disciple, nor Guru.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

I have no form or fancy.
The All-pervading am I.
Everywhere I exist,
Yet I am beyond the senses.
Neither salvation am I,
Nor anything to be known.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

[jammasterj13]

The Lord is in me, and the Lord is in you,

As life is hidden in every seed.

So rubble your pride, my friend,

And look for Him within you.



When I sit in the heart of His world

A million suns blaze with light,

A burning blue sea spreads across the sky,

Life’s turmoil falls quiet,

All the stains of suffering wash away.



Listen to the unstruck bells and drums!

Love is here; plunge into its rapture!

Rains pour down without water;

Rivers are streams of light.



How could I ever express

How blessed I feel

To revel in such vast ecstasy

In my own body?



This is the music

Of soul and soul meeting,

Of the forgetting of all grief.

This is the music

That transcends all coming and going.

By Kabir

[synergy777]

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/enlightenment.html

Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the great ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment.
Morihei Ueshiba

And as long as you're subject to birth and death, you'll never attain enlightenment.
Bodhidharma

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason.
Friedrich Durrenmatt

Borrowing knowledge of reality from all sources, taking the best from every study, Science of Mind brings together the highest enlightenment of the ages.
Ernest Holmes

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.
Ho Chi Minh

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.
E. O. Wilson

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.
Dogen

Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.
Wendell Willkie

Enlightenment must come little by little - otherwise it would overwhelm.
Idries Shah

Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment.
Morihei Ueshiba

History shows that our way of life is the stronger way. From it has come more wealth, more industry, more happiness, more human enlightenment than from any other way.
Wendell Willkie

If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.
Johann Most

If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.
Satish Kumar

Ignorance has always been the weapon of tyrants; enlightenment the salvation of the free.
Bill Richardson

It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.
Quentin Crisp

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.
Lao Tzu

Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.
Bell Hooks

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.
Robert Bork

My Lords temporal, today is the day to rise up against the regiment of Lords spiritual and proclaim the values of enlightenment, compassion and common sense.
Polly Toynbee

Not creating delusions is enlightenment.
Bodhidharma

Our freedoms were born in the ideals of the Enlightenment and the musket fires of an historic revolution.
John Boehner

Our sexual lives are maintained by the shadow side and the light side, so the more we can understand and embrace enlightenment, the less need there is for chemical enhancement.
Kyan Douglas

Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.
Jan Peter Balkenende

The Bible and several other self help or enlightenment books cite the Seven Deadly Sins. They are: pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, sloth, and gluttony. That pretty much covers everything that we do, that is sinful... or fun for that matter.
Dave Mustaine

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.
Steven Pinker

The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment.
Christopher Lasch

The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.
Michael Polanyi

The real meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.
Nikos Kazantzakis

The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.
Christopher Dawson

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.
M. H. Abrams

There is no fundamental difference between the preparation for death and the practice of dying, and spiritual practice leading to enlightenment.
Stanislav Grof

To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one's own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.
Buddha

Working with plants, trees, fences and walls, if they practice sincerely they will attain enlightenment.
Dogen Zenji

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.
Paddy Chayefsky

[consciousness]

From an Andromedan to Alex Collier - "The love that you withold, is the pain that you carry"

[om_tat_sat]

From my signature:

Within the prison of your world appears a man who tells you that the world of painful contradictions, which you have created, is neither continuous nor permanent and is based on a misapprehension. He pleads with you to get out of it, by the same way by which you got into it. You got into it by forgetting what you are and you will get out of it by knowing yourself as you are. -- I Am That, Nisargadatta Maharaj (http://www.nisargadatta.net/IamThat.html)

Also:

Om purnam-adah purnam-idam
purnaat purnam-udacyate.
purnasya purnam-aadaaya,
purnam-eva-avashishyate

That is infinite, this is infinite;
From That infinite this infinite comes.
From That infinite, this infinite removed or added;
Infinite remains infinite.

Finally:

"Whether it is word, or thought, or object, there is no state which is not Shiva." -- Spanda Karikas II.4

[shaivite]

The student who sets out to be an eclectic before he has made himself an expert will never be anything more than a dabbler.

.................................................. ............................................~ Dion Fortune

[shaivite]

"Whether it is word, or thought, or object, there is no state which is not Shiva." -- Spanda Karikas II.4

Tasmacchabdarthacintasu na savastha na ya sivah
Bhoktaiva bhogyabhaven sada sarvatra samsthitah

Indeed! ;)

[shaivite]

The little Sattva* you have got is much more important
for you than all the drawbacks,
difficulties and troubles you see in the world.

Iron is a cheap metal and gold is a precious metal.
There may be a lot of iron lying about
but a little gold is worth more than all the iron;
that little piece of gold, say an ornament,
you keep in a beautiful case;
you don't worry about the iron at all.

The little Sattva that you possess is already more than all the troubles of the world.
We should not consider it to be little.
It is much more useful than all the world you see around you.
This idea will hold if we really love the truth.
Loving the truth, even a little,
will help us through the journey of this life.


*Sattva - One of the three gunas; quality of purity, clarity, goodness, peace, balance and light.


From: Good Company, p112, by H.H. Shantanand Saraswati, published by Element (1992).

[shaivite]

I Have Learned So Much


I
Have
Learned
So much from God
That I can no longer
Call
Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
a Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me

That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel,
Or even a pure
Soul.

Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me

Of every concept and image
my mind has ever known.

From: 'The Gift'
Hafiz poetry translated by Daniel Ladinsky

[om_tat_sat]

Tasmacchabdarthacintasu na savastha na ya sivah
Bhoktaiva bhogyabhaven sada sarvatra samsthitah

Indeed! ;)I had shaktipat reading that page in the SK (Jaideva Singh's tr). :)

[shaivite]

Probably my favourite Hafiz poem. I think this so often applies to modern life and especially online forums.

What Should We Do about that Moon ?

A wine bottle fell from a wagon
And broke open in a field.

That night a hundred beetles and all their cousins
Gathered

And did some serious binge drinking.

They even found some seed husks nearby
And began to play them like drums and whirl.
This made God very happy.

Then the 'night candle' rose into the sky
And one drunk creature, laying down his instrument
Said to his friend - for no apparent
Reason,

"What should we do about that moon?"

Seems to Hafiz
Most everyone has laid aside the music

Tackling such profoundly useless
Questions.



From: 'The Gift - Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master'
translations by Daniel Ladinsky

[jammasterj13]

“Showing off is the fool's idea of glory.”

“Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.”

“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

“All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.”

“If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”

“If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of.”


Bruce Lee

[shaivite]

.
.
When you plant a tree
every leaf that grows will tell you,
what you sow will bear fruit.
So if you have any sense, my friend
don't plant anything but love...

...........................- Rumi
.
.
.
.

[shaivite]

Last two, both from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj -


"Instead of searching for what you do not have,
find out what it is
that you have never lost."


"All you need is to stop searching outside
for what can only be found within."

.
.
.

[eternal1stparty]

Make haste my beloved

and be like a gazelle

or a young stag

on the mountains of spices


Songs Of Solomon 8:14

[om_tat_sat]

"Give me love, give me love
Give me peace on earth
Give me light, give me life
Keep me free from birth
Give me hope, help me cope with this heavy load
Trying to touch and reach you with heart and soul"
-- Give Me Love, George Harrison

[shaivite]

http://universalshaivafellowship.org/usf/images/for-all-of-you_sm.gif

[nofuture]

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.
Bob Dylan

[dangerous]

Beware of the seeds of mistrust
planted among the masses
while the propagaters obscond
with a fools freedom
and a kings ransom.

[synergy777]

“We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give”
-= Winston Churchill=-


“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
-=Albert Einstein=-


“I believe that life is a journey, often difficult and sometimes incredibly cruel, but we are well equipped for it if only we tap into our talents and gifts and allow them to blossom.”
-= Les Brown=-


"This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; in its place is something that you have left behind...let it be something good."
-=Unknown=-


“Here is a test to find out whether your mission in life is complete.
If you're alive, it isn't. “
-=Richard Bach=-


“When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced.
Live your life so that when you die,
the world cries and you rejoice.”
-=Cherokee Expression=-


"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
-=Howard Thurman=-


“Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.
Life is beauty, admire it.
Life is bliss, taste it.
Life is a dream, realize it.
Life is a challenge, meet it.
Life is a duty, complete it.
Life is a game, play it.
Life is a promise, fulfill it.
Life is sorrow, overcome it.
Life is a song, sing it.
Life is a struggle, accept it.
Life is a tragedy, confront it.
Life is an adventure, dare it.
Life is luck, make it.
Life is too precious, do not destroy it.
Life is life, fight for it.”
-=Mother Teresa=-


"I have done my best.” That is about all the philosophy of living one need.
-=Lin Yutang=-


“Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve.”
-=Martin Luther King=-

[synergy777]

http://www.realitysandwich.com/simple_truths

Simple Truths vs. Esoteric Ones

Jay Michaelson

I've enjoyed being a contributor to Reality Sandwich, and meeting many in the RS and Evolver communities. But, as my readers have noticed, my posts often look like the Sesame Street game of "Which One Doesn't Belong." The reason is that, despite my own not-inconsiderable experience with esotericism, Kabbalah, and shamanic medicines, I tend to think that the simple stuff is more important both for personal transformation and for global evolution than the fancy stuff is.

In fifteen years of practice, all of my most powerful insights have been banal. Despite having spent two decades studying the baroque mysteries of the Kabbalah, the intricacies of postmodern philosophy, and the endless inversions of gender and queer theory, and despite four (count 'em) graduate degrees, I find that the insights which affect me the most, and last the longest, are maxims you might find on any hybrid-SUV's bumper stickers. Love and Let Go. You are Okay. Trust the Part that Loves. It's embarrassing, really; having written over two hundred essays and articles on the spiritual path, I'm at a loss to say anything original about what really matters to me. It all comes out sounding trite. Pale.

This is especially true of the latest stage in my spiritual journey, which has involved long silent retreats (two months, three months) in the Theravadan Buddhist tradition. I have, on these retreats, had wonderful profound/mystical/life-altering experiences, and sublime mystical states I've written about elsewhere. But these were not really the point, since these pass, and I've had plenty of them already. Nor was the point to get some new, secret information. Rather, what's stuck are the fundamentals.

Here's how I've put it to friends. For five billion years, life on Earth has evolved ever more complicated means of ensuring survival. Two of these fundamental methods are the basic idea of the self, and the basic drive to satisfy the self's desires. If we didn't have a sense of the ego, of Me, we'd surely have been eaten by predators aeons ago. Who knows, some of our ancestors may well have been -- and their genetic material has long since been lost to history. And if we didn't have this basic drive to satisfy our hungers and our desires, we wouldn't eat, wouldn't reproduce, wouldn't do much of anything, really. The mental constructions of ego and desire have long been essential, then, to our very existence.

And yet, as the Buddha realized 2,500 years ago (and many other people have realized since), these basic constructions cause a lot of pain. The ego feels alone. Desires are never satisfied -- we just want more. And life just doesn't cooperate; it's just not possible to always keep the pleasant and always avoid the unpleasant. Really, all of us want just a few basic things: success, love, power, meaning, purpose, pleasure. And, of course, we all don't want sickness, death, loss, pain, loneliness, and grief. This handful of basic desires is universal, natural -- and the cause of suffering.

See the conundrum? The needs most fundamental to our biological makeup are also the ones which tend to cause the most suffering. Is there another way?

The Buddha and I happen to agree that there is -- but we also agree that more esotericism, Kabbalistic coincidences, Atlanteans, Lumerians, crop circles, entheogenic visions, theorizing, cognizing, faiths, anti-faiths, whatnots, and whoozits aren't really it. They may or may not be true, and many of them certainly are interesting. But in my view, interesting is not going to change the world. Transformation of the ego, on the fundamental level I've been describing, will. And that doesn't depend on any gematria, Bible Code, Mayan calendar, or energy vortex.

The fundamental axis of the teaching is very, very simple: to understand, intuitively and deeply, that what Buddhists call "conditioned formations" -- i.e., stuff, ideas, people, emotions, and everything else -- are incapable of providing lasting, deep happiness. Formations change all the time. The joys they bring -- though often wonderful, profound, and amazing -- are short-lived. Even when we get exactly what we want, it gets old after a while, and we want something else. And, most subtly but also most importantly, formations just happen. They don't happen to you or to me. There's no one really minding your mental store -- it's running on auto-pilot. Stimulus, response; cause, effect. We say "I am angry" but really all that's happening is "anger has arisen." Sit quietly for a while and look for this self who's having all these experiences. If you find her/him, please shoot me an email.

So what's the alternative? Well, it, too, is easy to describe and hard to experience: just letting go. Now, at the further stages of the spiritual path, the letting go becomes quite profound indeed, as it comes to include letting go of everything, even thought and consciousness and self. But for most of us, it's just plain, ordinary letting go. Those things that have to get done -- don't really have to get done. The dream that you have, that if you don't achieve it, your life will be meaningless -- let it go too.

This is really not very profound. It does not involve angels, demons, neo-Platonic spheres, noetic experiences of the union of all life -- nothing. But it is "profound" in a different sense of the word, as in "profoundly difficult" or "profound change." It is a fundamental reordering of our most basic sense of the world. And so it does take a long time to really sink in.

Can I really be equanimous as between pain and pleasure, love and its lack? Can I really let go enough so that I can remember, over and over again, that, contrary to all indications, fulfilling my desires will not be as satisfying as lessening them? As one spiritual teacher has said, the path is "simple... but not easy."

One of the advantages of a long retreat is that, over time, the mind really does learn to let go, and real faith -- not blind faith in some idea, but confidence in one's own experience -- begins to develop. I didn't just read about the four noble truths in a book; I've seen them for myself. Without this kind of experience, it's just another idea. But with the actual, repeated-over-and-over-again experience, the mind really gets it. This is a very different kind of learning from the kind I did in graduate school(s), and also a very different kind of dharma that is the majority view here in this community which I value. But in my limited experience, it is the kind which transforms.

[synergy777]

the reason i posted this is that at the moment i am content with the stuff regarding nwo, illuminati, etc

the stuff that i have difficulty with is the personal/spiritual/ego stuff, i just seem to be stuck at the same level, eg egocentric, fear, regrets, hypocritical behaviour by myself.

there seems to be no real personal progress or new info.

i feel this is the most important and most powerful stuff, its really pissing me off to be frank.

i want improve, but i cannot find new stuff, or improve. theres loads of feel good stuff, eg essays on ego, overcoming the mind, simple truths v esoteric ones, is god irrelevant etc, but nothing that is real, nothing that can spark a change in me.

theres a vacumn within me, and a lack of real accurate spiritual/self improvement material.

i'm caught in a cycle, which i want to move out of.

i believe in a god/creator.

i just think organised religion has been controlled and corrupted by the elite.

thus organised religion is corrupted and serves the purpose of the elite.

we know the elite are luciferians/satanists, eg they adhere to egyptain/sumerian beliefs.

thus the regular person, a person who is not perfect, who has vices/weaknesses eg women, drink, ego, pride, etc, like me, can't really follow organised religion, as its full of contradictions, divisive and spiteful stuff.

in fact organised religion makes a regular person feel worthless, evil, and merely promises us eternal punishment if don't follow the corrupted rules, or on the other hand eternal salvation if we swap one dictator/satan for another dictator/god, and slavishly follow the corrupted rules with utter blind faith.

thus its all about enslavement, not empowerment/compassion/support/guidance/love.

thus if one wants to be free of the elite and their propaganda/mind control, one has no where to go.

[mahabaratara]

Religion and Spirituality are two very different tings.

Even the latter their is esoteric and exoteric.

Ie in case of the former (esoteric) something that you actually practice and **DO**.

I would suggest as I have elsewhere today looking at Yogani's Advanced Yoga Practices website/forum.

Somebody put me on to it 2 years back and I havent looked back.

In simple english he tells you what to do how to do and for me WHY you are doing it.

Also I came across these even further v=back but went down the Vedic instead of Huna/Kahuna route.

TRUST me you will find something for you in these Podcasts.

Pohaku has a quite the way with words and although I took a slightly different route I came back to these and Huna and its shone a whole new light on my/oue Vedic heritage.

Also Max Freedom Longs "Secret Science Behind the Miracles".

Rest Easy Maha

:D

[synergy777]

albert camus quotes

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/albert_camus.html

heres my favourite:

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus


some more:

Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
Albert Camus

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
Albert Camus

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
Albert Camus

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
Albert Camus

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.
Albert Camus

[synergy777]

http://thinkexist.com/quotes/ernesto_'che'_guevara/

che quotes:

“If you tremble indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”

“Until victory always”

“I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.”

“Many will call me an adventurer - and that I am, only one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.”

“Better to die standing, than to live on your knees.”

“Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

[synergy777]

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2010/08/20/a-message-from-me-to-me-which-is-you/

A Message From Me to Me, Which is You

Why have you forgotten how powerful you are?

Why have you allowed your own thought and ego mind to convince you you are not capable of creating anything you wish to create on this planet during this lifetime?

This control mechanism in place can bind you, but only if you continue to give your power to it and allow it to interfere with your own choice as alight being on this planet.

You have come here to grow, to evolve, to shift the planets consciousness and yet you get wrapped up in the game and all the seriousness that comes with it.

Why? You have come here to remember that it does not have to be this way and in your own way, you are finding this truth and discovering what you are at your pure essence –Love, and Light, in its most unconditional and pure form.

This idea that you cannot go beyond things and create anything you choose, especially that of the greatest good for humanity, at this time because of some control mechanism in place must be dissolved!

You are more powerful than it already!

There is nothing coming that’s going to take it away, you cannot wait and hope that one day it will come down and the day will be saved. You are the creator, the shift in consciousness, and the disempowerment of the control system, the moment you put your heart and soul into realizing you are what holds up and creates the control system and all of your suffering, and that you can step into a vibrational state where this control system and all doubt cannot even touch you.

It’s your choice, you know now, why put any limitation on the love and light that you are when that is what you are yearning to be while taking on this physicality on the planet.

Show the collective how powerful you are and create the planet we are all asking to create. I love you.

Love
Joe

[synergy777]

"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."

-- Harriet Beecher Stowe, author

[synergy777]

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2010/09/20/bottom-line-is-vibration/

Bottom Line Is: Vibration

Everything we can possibly feel and think of is a form and rate of vibration. Each atom, when observed with a powerful microscope, consists of one proton which is continually being orbited by an electron, generating a vibratory pattern. To bring in the bigger picture, we all are and emanate a rate of vibration, the planet is and emanates a rate of vibration, the whole Universe IS vibration. This is where all Humanity reaches common ground. No matter how divided we have become through this hierarchical type society goaded by money, separated by religious, political structures and illusionary barriers that exist to polarize the masses, we are all the same in essence; beings of light, of energy, vibrating with consciousness.

When we speak of a “higher perspective” to this collective challenge we are facing, we speak of creating what we want, instead of giving them what they want. As Einstein said, we cannot solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it, therefore we cannot free ourselves by emanating the same low vibration that enslaved us. An angry fighter mode is susceptible to trigger dense, reactive emotions and actions in ourselves and others because vibration wise, that is what it emanates.

There is a way of sharing information about the system’s corruption by presenting the facts as they are, without them being tampered by unsober emotions that distract from the main point of it all : Love, being peace, oneness, self-accountability… basically all that represents nonparticipation of what slows the process of the peaceful reality we wish to create. The media’s fear mongering, dumbing-down and distractions from fundamental human values, society’s materialistic propaganda and over-emphasis on money and looks, the chemicals in our food, water and air are actually orchestrated to maintain the mass consciousness grid in a low vibratory level. Being an angry and reactive “truther” actually attracts and emanates the same dense vibrations that keep humanity boxed in this control mechanism although the information is accurate and has the intention of raising awareness. Of course, I say it is up to us to filter the information we process and take in what benefits and leave what doesn’t, but if more of the information being spread out there could come from a place of peace and neutrality, or even better showing the higher perspective; the direct relation between this collective challenge and the fundamental construct of reality which is consciousness/vibration, how more relevant and constructive would that be to assist in a shift of consciousness!

I believe there is a difference in drawing the lines with what does not serve us any longer and embarking on an endless fight against it. Drawing the line represents standing firm in rememberance of the strong beings of light we truly are and shifting our awareness towards what we wish to create instead of depleting our infinite creative potential towards anger and fear. Fighting against dense vibes by throwing out dense vibes is fortunately not the definition of being “awake”.

Nature’s wisdom will tell you that being at peace is the one miracle that will have a ripple effect on your surroundings. Yelling and screaming also has a ripple effect on your surroundings. That right there is a good introduction to self-accountability ;)

Healing ourselves heals the world. So why not BE the change we wish to see in the world? “The world is our chance to create”

Peace

Elina

[water versus ice]

You live what you know

[synergy777]

http://www.imagehosting.gr/out.php/i1460274_plato-s-cave.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

The Allegory of the Cave, also commonly known as Myth of the Cave, Metaphor of the Cave, The Cave Analogy, Plato's Cave or the Parable of the Cave, is an allegory used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic to illustrate "our nature in its education and want of education". (514a) The allegory of the cave is written as a fictional dialogue between Plato's teacher Socrates and Plato's brother Glaucon, at the beginning of Book VII in Benjamin Jowett's translation and in chapter IX in Robin Waterfield's translation (514a–520a).

Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

The Allegory is related to Plato's Theory of Forms,[1] wherein Plato asserts that "Forms" (or "Ideas"), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Only knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowledge.[2] In addition, the allegory of the cave is an attempt to explain the philosopher's place in society.

The Allegory of the Cave is related to Plato's metaphor of the sun (507b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–513e), which immediately precede it at the end of Book VI. Allegories are summarized in the viewpoint of dialectic at the end of Book VII and VIII (531d-534e). This relates to the idea of forms as people struggle to see the reality beyond illusion.

[synergy777]

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2010/10/01/oneness/

Oneness

There is fighting against the bad and fighting against the good. Light, dark, wrong, right, better and worst. That is what we’ve been taught, that’s what makes sense after all. When we let our experience be guided by the countless polarised beliefs imposed on Humanity through society’s hate and fear mongering, we end up feeling separated from one another, labeling and judging our fellow brothers and sisters, criticizing ourselves and all of our experiences as worthy or unworthy. Competition, separation, choosing left or right, picking sides… is that all there is to life?

Let’s take a moment to take a few deep breaths. Feel the essence of peace within your heart as you set aside all judgements you hold onto others, yourself and your past and present experience. What we’ve all been through on both a collective and personal level has been an incredibly rich, unique, colorful and challenging experience filled with blissful joys and painful memories. But do we still need to identify the totality of who we are with our stories and hold on to them? Emotions such as anger, fear, resentment, sadness and regret are still being held towards them for we have been caught up in duality through our ego’s judgemental perception of situations which sees itself as a victim of our experience instead of it’s creator.

Truth is, every single experience, as challenging as they may seem, are being brought forth by nothing and no one else but our soul, for our soul. Forgetting our spiritual essence and being overruled by the ego is simply what our souls have chosen to explore. We have all judged ourselves and others, picked sides and criticized situations, but it is now time to open ourselves to this higher perspective and to see this earthly experience for what it is, just an experience, all for the purpose of soul evolution. To truly be the change we wish to see in this world is to let go of our ego’s dualistic perspective that is still being reflected outwards, creating a collective challenge ruled by separation and egoistical purposes rather than unity and Love which is the core essence of who we are.

We are now moving through a shift in consciousness and have agreed as souls to move beyond this collective “amnesia” to create a new, more conscious and peaceful experience. Only by healing ourselves within and embodying peace can we assist in raising the vibration of our planet, therefore having a beneficial impact on the collective consciousness. This is how society’s corrupted structures will begin to collapse, as fighting corruption with ego will do nothing but slow down the process of the peaceful reality we wish to create. It does not mean that we should perceive our ego as evil or bad, for this is but another trap of judgement which reinforces inner turmoil and dense vibrations. The ego is a lower yet highly serving level of consciousness that has simply allowed us to experience the illusion of what it is to feel separate from one another, therefore learning and growing through the friction of opposites such as right and wrong, better and worst, women and men, love and hate, allies and enemies etc.

The time has come for us to be grateful for this amazing experience and let go of how identified we have become with it. Living in unconditional Love means embracing all experiences as equal, understanding the totality of any situation and it’s lesson, dissolving the opposites and thus find Peace within. Evolving is the transcendence of duality back to it’s source of Oneness.

“When the power of love will overcome the love of power, the world will know peace.”

Be Love

Elina

------------------

Alanna says:
October 3, 2010 at 11:16 am

This is great Elina! I think that you explained this perfectly! :) Wonderful read!


----------------

Grimm says:
October 6, 2010 at 7:40 pm
Wonderful Piece.

“The way to move out of Judgement.. is to move into Gratitude.”

Namaste

[synergy777]

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2010/09/29/you-cannot-fight-for-peace-to-experience-peace/

You Cannot Fight for Peace to Experience Peace

You cannot fight for peace to experience peace. The man-made concept and energy of fighting, in any form, creates a low density vibration in which reinforces the energetic structure of what is being “fought”.

There’s many examples that you could look at to understand what exactly I mean by this. If you take a look at human history you’ll see that we’ve fought many wars and many battles in the name of peace, but where has that really gotten us? It’s 2010. We still have a “war against terror”, “war against drugs”, “war against disease”, etc. It seems as though we’re always fighting against something but yet we still haven’t made much progress in experiencing peace as a race. It’s because we’re going about it in a way that isn’t allowing us to move forward.

Take a minute and actually think about how the thought of “fighting” something makes you feel. Does it make you feel light and loving and free? Or does it make you feel heavy, stressed out and drained having to put so much energy into “overcoming” something?

Our experience here, at this point, is now about a purging process in regards to the judgements and labels that we’ve imposed on ourselves, have been handed down and been taught since birth. It’s about detaching, disengaging and dissolving these illusionary stories/thoughts that we have created within the mind in order for us to be able to see, feel and perceive our life and all aspects of our creation of this game on Earth for what it truly is. An experience. Nothing more, nothing less. It is what it is.

When we are able to see experiences as just experiences, it allows us to view the experience from a neutral standpoint, leaving us in a state of peace. Our natural state as souls is peace. Yes some experiences are viewed as being more intense than others but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s just another form of experience.

When we engage the mind stories of an experience being bad or good, or right or wrong it activates certain emotions and energies within us that we’ve attached to these stories. It also clouds our perception and clarity and can bring about misunderstandings. When observing an experience from a neutral standpoint it not only allows us to be in a state of peace, but also allows for our higher-self/higher-consciousness to flow through us bringing clarity to see something for what it really is and have a greater understanding and appreciation for it’s creation and purpose of existence. We tend to hate and fear things that we do not understand. The misunderstanding comes from the false stories that we have created. These misperceptions can lead to great suffering and confusion.

Are what we call “demons” or “dark forces” evil, bad and scary? Or are these just ideas, stories, that we’ve bought into?

They’re souls just like us. They come from the same source and are a part of “God” just as everyone else is. It’s the judgements and labels that we’ve created that has brought about fear, hatred and misunderstanding towards them. They are energy just like you and I. Nothing more, nothing less. Why is there a need to fear or hate something that is a part of you? This is just one of many examples showing you how differently we can perceive things and how this different perception can make us feel and react in certain ways when we don’t judge or label them.

To end this article I’d like to leave you with these thoughts…

We’ve been fighting for peace for so long on this planet but where has it gotten us? Still fighting, still suffering. It’s like being on a treadmill going nowhere. A never ending cycle. It just keeps creating fear, hatred, division, segregation, judgement, stress, etc. We’re banging our heads against the wall, screaming for a way out. Learning to be at peace with all aspects of our creation, no matter how intense it may seem, is the only way to dissolve the structure of EGO which has created imbalance and suffering within ourselves, the animal kingdom and the planet.

We’ve put ourselves in a very limiting “box” being wrapped up in that energy, disconnected and forgetful of who we are. Let’s move forward from here, remember that we are all connected, all one energy of the same source experiencing itself in unique and individual fragments and forms.

Through emanating peace comes love and through love comes compassion and truth. Let’s be ourselves. Peace.

Much Love

Matthew

---------------

Rebecka says:
September 29, 2010 at 4:19 am Rebecka(Quote)

Excellent insight here and I’m really appreciating it. I’d love some feedback on a basic scenario of being in a relationship with someone who is not able to get out of those old egoic mind structures. The soul love is there between the 2 people, but both people are on the treadmill together because one simply can’t “let go” and be lighter. It’s dragging the ‘lighter’ of them down because of having to maintain lighter energy and not ‘fight back’ against the heavy energy. It’s so complicated, emotionally, but seems there should be a fairly simple answer to establishing a balance. Any advice or insight on this?

------------------

Sam says:
September 30, 2010 at 5:31 pm Sam(Quote)

This has been a reocurring synchronistic theme for me lately. Ideas that have cropped up in my philosophy classes, various readings, and other insights are all pointing this direction. I think it all makes perfect sense – and on many levels.
In the act of meditation, when we try to force our mind to be quiet, it causes further restlessness within it. If we leave it alone and simply pay attention to it, we will gradually come to peace with our minds and gain clairty.
If we try to conquer our anger by force, we will grow even more frustrated at the difficulty in squelching our emotions. This will give way to even more frustration – at what it is we were initially frustrated with, at our inability to eliminate our emotions, and at the growing amount of frustration that arises as a result. All of our emotions are part of ourselves, and we must acknowledge them as so, treating them with patience and care, if they are to serve their highest purpose within us.
If we recieve violence in any form from another, responding with violence only perpetuates the cycle of aggression. To understand the “other” that is commiting the violence as a part of ourselves, responding with patience, compassion, and empathy, is to minimize the destruction that results from any violent act.

We are used to attributing the value of our actions in terms of what results it yeilds that are instantly recognizable. However, actions that provide instant gratification often have larger implications that manifest themeselves in a far more subtle, but grandr sense. For example, the early inhabitants of Easter Island hastily built a greta civilation on the Island, at the expense of many natural resources. They recieved the instant gratification given by the many houses and buildings they had constructed. However, they had deforested the Island at a very fast rate, and the forests could not regenerate nearly as quickly. The loss of trees held many implications for the rest of the ecosystem, of which the trees were a symbiotic component, and more devastation befell on the habitat of the Island. Soon, the Island was no longer inhabitable and the civiliztion could no longer sustain itself.

Fighting back against what holds us down often seems to be the best course of action because we look for results that are immediately attainable. But responding to violence and oppression with violence and oppression is in no way conducive to puting it to rest. We must deal with the state of our planet in just the same way we may best deal with our chattering minds, with our own emotions, or with individuals who do to us what they themeselves would deem undesirable. That is with patience, empathy, and love, as all of these things are inherently a part of ourselves. To struggle against these things is to struggle against yourself. Though the effects of this way of responding won’t present themselves in a way we will immediately detect, the implications will be conducive to attaining peace and unity on a scale much grander than what we instantly percieve before us.

Peace, Love, and Thanks
-Sam

[oneup]

"The only way to comprehend what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity." ~ Voltaire

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." ~ Philip K. Dick

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane." ~ Philip K. Dick

"Power over others is weakness disguised as strength." ~ Eckhart Tolle

"There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves." ~ Bill Hicks

"If you're looking to find the key to the universe, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is - there is no key to the Universe. The good news is - it was never locked." ~ Swami Beyondananda

"I dropped, I saw, I conquered" ~ :D

[synergy777]

http://oceanofmind.tumblr.com/


"In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke."

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf


"In my body and in my soul I realized that I greatly need sin, I needed lust, vanity, the striving for goods, and I needed the most shameful despair to learn how to give up resistance, to learn how to love the world, to stop comparing the world with any world that I wish for, that I imagine, with any perfection that I think up; I learned to let the world be as it is, and to love it and to belong to it gladly."

— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha


"We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being."

— Hermann Hesse


"i thank god for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees & for the blue dreams of sky & for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes."

— e.e. cummings


"Meet this transient world with neither grasping nor fear, trust the unfolding of life, and you will attain true serenity."

— Krishna Dharma


"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become."

— Maharishi Mahesh Yogi


"If you want to see the brave, look at those who can forgive. If you want to see the heroic, look at those who can love in return for hatred."

— Krishna Dharma


"Like the air, God’s Grace is available to us. It is permeating every fibre of Being and the Being of the entire universe. When we take our attention to that Being, finer than the finest, then we establish ourselves on the level of God’s Grace. Immediately we just enjoy. Life is Bliss!"

— Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

[synergy777]

http://www.viewzone.com/seethelight.html

Seeing the light.

By Gary Vey


Until quite recently, I thought that the term "enlightenment" was a metaphor. But I met an individual who suggested that the word accurately describes the sensation when one remembers that they are something other than their human body. The phenomenon of "seeing light" with the mind is what happens when the reality of our non-material being is interpreted by our brain.

That hiatus of irrational thought made me uncomfortable and I hurried back to the rational habits that I rely upon when I encounter anything weird -- more research. What I learned about the phenomenon of "enlightenment" was quite a surprise for me. I think you will enjoy this story.

We start this journey in Greece, about 3600 years ago, during the Bronze Age. Our focus is part of a secret cult called the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The Eleusinian Mysteries

Of all the mystery cults of ancient times, none were more celebrated than the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were the initiation ceremonies for the cult of Demeter and Persephone, held at Eleisus in ancient Greece. It is thought that these initiation procedures were passed to the Greeks by the Myceneans and originated sometime before 1600 BCE. We can't be sure because the punishment for revealing them was death.

The Eleusinian Mysteries endured for 2000 years because they provided their initiates with a glimpse of the afterlife which sustained them psychologically and spiritually, dramatically changing their lives. What we have learned about this initiation has been leaked by famous personalities in history who dared to write about it.

The highest level of initiation took place in a darkened chamber or cave. What went on inside the chamber hardly seemed significant. Telling about it was certainly not worthy of death. It was such a simple thing -- yet so powerful.

"The claim is also made that men who have taken part in the mysteries become both more pious and more just and better in every respect than they were before. And this is the reason, we are told, why the most famous both of the ancient heroes and of the demi-gods were eagerly desirous of taking part in the initiatory rite; and in fact Jason and the Dioscuri, and Heracles and Orpheus as well, after their initiation attained success in all the campaigns they undertook, because these gods appeared to them." -- (Diodorus Siculus V, 48, 49)

"...He who has succeeded in getting inside, and has seen a great light, as though a shrine were opened, adopts another bearing of silence and amazement, and 'humble and orderly attends upon' reason as upon a god." -- (Plutarch, Progress in Virtue 81e)

"...saw a vision...beholding apparitions innocent, and simple, and calm and happy as in a mystery, shining in pure light, pure ourselves." -- Socrates

Called the "Contemplation of the Ear of Wheat" [above, right], the initiate was made to stare at a flaming torch. After some time, his eyes were covered. In the blackness he was directed to focus on the mental image of the flame and to see it with his mind's eye.

Dr. Lefebure and Phosphenes

Dr. Francis Lefebure is a medical doctor and devout Zoroastrian who has studied the Eleusinian Mysteries. He saw the similarities of this technique in many ancient religions whose aim is enlightenment. According to Dr. Lefebure, this method would have produced an after-image on the retina which would have persisted for a time as the rods and cones regained their neural equilibrium. It would also have persisted in the stimulation of the brain's visual cortex -- a process he identified as "phosphenes".

In his research, he noted that when this method was combined with meditative thought and rhythm there was a dramatic psychological change. Short of achieving enlightenment, Dr. Lefebure went on to develop this discovery to improve concentration, help children study and allow troubled patients to relax. But a review of history shows that this phosphene technique is really capable of much more.

Nostradamus and the reflected flame

The phosphene method was used by Michel de Nostredame, Nostradamus, in the 1500s, to see the future. It is obvious that he did not invent this method himself but it shows that staring at a bright source of light was a legitimate way to connect with the "other side."

"Gathered at night in study deep I sat. Alone, upon the tripod stool of brass, Exiguous flame came out of solitude, Promise of magic that may be believed."

The brass tripod supported a bowl of water into which Nostradamus gazed in order to see the reflection of a candle in his dark room. Being reflected, the light reaching his eyes would have been polarized. It has also been mentioned that Nostradamus would gaze at the Moon's reflection on a silver tray -- again producing polarized light. This type of light seems to have been preferred by many ancient seers. The specific mention of the "tripod" probably echoes the Oracle of Delphi [right], who sat upon a tripod and gazed at a light, reflected in a shallow bowl of water, when she made her prophecies.

The technique is the same as phosphenes -- after staring at the light, the source is extinguished leaving an after-image that, together with meditation, results in the ability to have a vision of "the other side", from which we can "see" the true reality of our being and temporal circumstance. A bowl of water can be used, but a reflective mirror, crystal ball, a puddle of water, a stream or even the ocean can successfully reflect the light of the Sun or Moon and produce the same results with the proper meditation.

Often there is a degree of complicated ritual associated with this simple act. Nostradamus wrote of using a magic want to touch the bowl and the hem of his robe. Sometimes special incantations are said aloud or magical gestures are made. But these are irrelevant.

Zoroastrians: More Fire and Water

Zoroaster (Zarathushtra), the founder of Zoroastrianism, made reference to the mainyu athra - the spiritual fire - as one that illuminates the path of asha. Asha (enlightenment) is only available through individual choice (hence the necessity for proper meditation) and brings order to human thoughts, words and deeds. It does this by showing the initiate the real self. After this happens, a different hierarchy exists -- one which places greater value on compassion and righteousness.

Followers of Zoroaster worship fire, but not as a deity. They see fire as representing the energy of the Creator and as the messenger of truth. Devotees face the sacred flame in their ceremonies and practice the phosphene technique, mixing the light and after-image with "good thoughts". They also utilize water, which reflects the Sun and Moon. The Fire Temple of Yazd (Iran) [above] has a large pool of water for this kind of contemplation. In Mumbai (India) [right], Zoroastrian devotees worship while basking in the reflections of the sea, mixing meditation with the phosphene procedure.

Gazing at the Sun: Fatima

On May 13, 1917, three Portugese shepherd children spoke of experiencing a vision of the Virgin Mary in the Cova da Iria fields close to the town of Fatima. The eldest child was Lucia, aged ten, and she was accompanied by her two cousins, Francisco, aged nine and Jacinta, aged seven. They repeated the visions on the 13th day of each month until October.

On October 13th a crowd of 70,000 gathered [below] at the Cova da Iria in response to the children's claim that a miracle would occur on that day "so that all may believe." At the appointed time, in the middle of a rainstorm the clouds broke up and the sun was seen as a disk spinning in the sky, throwing off great rays of fantastic colors. As one columnist reported, "Before the astonished eyes of the crowd the sun trembled and danced."

Before the solar event the three children had continually stared directly in to the Sun when they had their visions, proclaiming that they were in communication with luminous woman they took to be Mary, the mother of Jesus. This bright apparition later gave the girls a prophecy about the future and pleaded for them to pray for world peace.

Certainly the Sun did not move. It was a local phenomenon. What happened in Fatima on October 13th, 1917 was an example of a mass phosphene. All of the necessary ingredients were present to enable thousands of people to experience the portal through which they could see their own true self: they had been staring directly at the Sun for several minutes; they were praying and meditating with good intentions; and they closed their eyes to witness the after-glow and its accompanying range of colors as their retinas and visual cortex regained equilibrium. For those that did these things it was a true spiritual and life changing event.

Thirteen years after the "dance of the Sun", the Catholic Church declared that the phenomenon was "worthy of belief."

Surprise... a white wall works just as well

Bodhidharma founded Chan Buddhism. Rejected by a local Buddhist monastary, he sat in meditation, staring at Shao Lin's whitewashed monastery walls, every day for years. Bodhidharma eventually became an enlightened master and discovered that the brightness and contrast coming into the field of vision could also produce enlightenment.

Modern psychologists have found that wall-gazing is a great way to induce alpha in both its upper and lower (and even upper theta) frequency ranges. It was the first hint at what was likely going on in the mind of the initiates and what these phosphenes were actually doing.

In this technique, called 'ganzfeld' -- a German word which means complete field -- alpha waves are generated by staring at a blank, preferably white, bright visual field and holding the eyes steadily upon it. A white-wall fulfills this condition. All that is necessary is that the wall occupy the complete field of vision so that distractions are eliminated. Once the vision of the bright wall has saturated the retina, the eyes are closed, revealing the phosphene. At this moment the appropriate meditation is introduced and the mind's eye becomes full of visions. This technique is so powerful a generator of alpha that it is practiced by monks even today. [right].

So what's going on here?

If you've read the Dan Eden's article on Left Brain : Right Brain, you’ll know that your brain is divided into two sides or hemispheres which are slightly different from each other. Each hemisphere can function independently and processes information in different ways. Our personality depends on which hemisphere is dominant, depending on the activities it is processing.

Here is a list of traits associated with each human brain hemisphere:

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS

uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe


RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS

uses feeling
"big picture" oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can "get it" (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking

When you measure the brain waves generated by both sides of your brain, you'll find that they're slightly out-of-sync or out-of-phase from each other. Scientists know that the more one-sided our brains are, the more erratic and higher the frequency will be.

In the 1970s, psychologists were experimenting with brain waves and discovered that "enlightened" individuals (i.e. Buddhist monks and Gurus) had a remarkable synchronization of their brain waves in both hemispheres. As a result, their overall brain wave patterns were slower.

As brain wave synchronization increases, the two sides of your brain communicate more with each other -- and that's what is important. If your brain waves slow down enough, you'll eventually enter Theta (a bridge to the subconscious and insight and creativity) and maybe even Delta brainwaves (a deep dreamless state or extremely deep meditation).

Further brainwave synchronization will lead to both sides of your brain being so balanced that your brainwaves will merge into a single coherent brain wave pattern. Some people believe that at this point, the normal conscious mind is bypassed and you finally achieve the "it", the "oneness" or enlightenment -- the awakened mind.

The theory makes sense because in order to know (left brain function) our real self, we must experience or feel it (right brain function).

"...it is like Aristotle's view that men being initiated have not a lesson to learn, but an experience to undergo and a condition into which they must be brought, while they are becoming fit (for revelation). -- (Synesius Dio 1133)

Others have described brain waves as like ripples on a pond. Only when the pond is smooth can it reflect the light like a mirror. Only when our brains are quiet can our real self be remembered.

Phosphenes and Enlightenment

As the knowledge about brain wave synchronization became known, an assortment of different apparatus were developed and marketed. Bio-feedback machines allowed the user to experiment with different meditation techniques to lower their brain waves and audio CDs promised to synchronize the hemispheres with subliminal sounds. A few apparatus tried to use blinking lights to do this visually -- but the results have been abysmal.

It makes sense to use visual stimuli to synchronize the hemispheres for a number of reasons. Humans rely primarily on their vision to survive. Our consciousness and attention is primarily in visual language and the brain devotes a significant portion (visual cortex) of its neurons to process the sensory data from our eyes. Just close your eyes for a few seconds and you will experience a dramatic change in your consciousness.

Each retina in our eyes is connected to both the left and right hemispheres of our brain. The left field of vision goes to one hemisphere while the right goes to the other. This division is un-sharp and a narrow strip of the visual field midline is represented in both hemispheres. This overlap of the visual field is important to our discussion.

Because depth perception requires the coordination of both eyes, communication between the two visual centers is usually made through the corpus callosum -- a bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres like a network cable. Recent experiments have shown that this inter-hemisphere communication is not necessary for visual data coming from the midline of our visual field, or macula. This central point in our retina is the focus of our vision and its information is hard-wired to both sides of our brain.

It is well know that our visual system has a high degree of specialization. Neurons in some areas of the visual cortex process information only from a restricted range of features. Things like form, color or motion are analyzed independently by separate processing systems. All of these processing activities require excitation of the brain waves as they try to interpret changes in our field of vision.

So here it is: The phosphene method saturates the midline visual field with intense light. It is almost an overload. Visual data is sent to both hemispheres simultaneously. The visual cortex stimulates the entire hemisphere. The visual data is coherent, with minimal variation in form, color or motion and the involvement of both hemispheres in synchronous. By closing the eyes, attention is shifted from the external world to the inner one and, with pre-requisite meditation and preparation to be receptive of the truth, the real self is experienced as light.

A Warning To All

First, don't look at the Sun for more than a few seconds. In fact, it is better to use an ordinary light bulb in a dark room. The results will be the same. In my research I have read that a 60-watt incandescent bulb placed two meters (about 5 feet) away is sufficient to produce the effect. Then, of course, there is always the white wall... (But the wall must take up the entire field of vision to avoid distractions of form, shape or color.)

Next, there is the matter of the pre-conditioning of the mind. Enlightenment is something you must allow to happen. It cannot be rushed or wished for. It requires a fertile environment brought about by good thinking, good living and good intentions. Some have said that this part of the quest for enlightenment requires the help of an enlightened teacher. Others say that good intentions will allow your own self to show you the way.

No one can tell you about your true self with words. We simply do not have an adequate vocabulary for this. The experience that one has is unique and unlike anything in this mortal experience. It is emotional and enduring. It is felt (right brain) and understood (left brain).

Let me know your thoughts on this.

[synergy777]

here's a good website some good quotes etc:

http://oceanofmind.tumblr.com/


What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden


The other day I was down by the Hudson River, and I see two nuns in full habit rollerblading down the street holding hands. And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I get it. The world is surreal and beautiful. And everything is fine.’
— Regina Spektor


you walk towards your fear, you embrace your fear - you don’t try to hedge it! A part of real living as a human being, as a spiritual being is to embrace and encompass your fear, your love, and not run away from anything because that’s the life experience. And it’s in that richness that I think we find the most beautiful art, the most beautiful music. We find the richness of what the human soul can offer and I see that richness buried under such bullshit!
— Michael Ruppert


What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet


A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.
— Gandhi


You have two reasons to smile and be happy. One for the moment which has gone, teaching you something and another for the new moment you have stepped into. So be full of gratitude for all the moments.
— Satish Kaku


You’re all geniuses, and you’re all beautiful. You don’t need anyone to tell you who you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace, think peace, live peace, and breathe peace, and you’ll get it as soon as you like.
— John Lennon


The real you is not a puppet that life pushes around, the real deep down you is the whole universe.
— Alan Watts


“It is impossible to have a problem when your attention is fully in the Now. A situation that needs to be either dealt with or accepted - yes. Why make it into a problem? Why make anything into a problem? Isn’t life challenging enough as it is? What do you need problems for? The mind unconsciously loves problems because they give you an identity of sorts. This is normal, and it is insane.

“Problem” means that you are dwelling on a situation mentally without there being a true intention or possibility of taking action Now and that you are unconsciously making it part of your sense of self. You become so overwhelmed by your life situation that you lose your sense of life, of Being. Or you are carrying in your mind that insane burden of a hundred things that you will or may have to do in the future instead of focusing your attention on the one thing that you can do Now.”

— Eckhart Tolle


Nonresistance, nonjudgement and nonattachment are the three aspects of true freedom and enlightened living.
— Eckhart Tolle


See if you can catch yourself complaining in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.
— Eckhart Tolle


Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.
— Eckhart Tolle


Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson


Life is beautiful. Life is a gift. Life is precious. Life is yours to enjoy. All life lives in God, for God is ALL THAT IS! All life is an extension of your Self, for we are all ONE! Celebrate the beauty of you!

How do you see 2012?

“As many of us may know, the purpose of the shift, the critical mass threshold crossing that is only a short time away, is to experience subjective reality. Everyone will experience something different than another as we are literally going to see 6.6 billion different paths emerging as reality becomes completely split.

How do you see 2012? Where do you see yourself going after the shift? What will your reality be?

For myself, I see a new world unlike anything I could imagine. A new earth vibrant with energies where everything that represents corruption or suffering is completely wiped away. There is equality, harmony and divinity amongst the planet. It’s like being part of a new Atlantis. To where you can communicate with spirits just as easy as we can communicate with each other now. To where you’ll be able to instantly manifest, teleport, heal, receive telepathic communication, levitate, bilocate, etc. To where there will be inventions to aid and nurture the planet, not destroy it. To where we can start exploring the stars both through our conscious mind and through interstellar travel. To where we are unified with an entire galactic community and our family is rejoined together.

This is how I see things after the shift. And I feel it will truly be the most incredible thing I will ever see.

How about you? What will your reality be past 2012?”

[ashangel]

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle” - George Orwell (aka Eric Blair, former Fabian Society member)


“Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.”- Bill Cosby

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” - Oscar Wilde

“Tears are words the heart can't express”

“Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.”

“All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. . . . Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.” - Beatrix Potter

[synergy777]

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle” - George Orwell (aka Eric Blair, former Fabian Society member)


“Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.”- Bill Cosby

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” - Oscar Wilde

“Tears are words the heart can't express”

“Being happy doesn't mean that everything is perfect. It means that you've decided to look beyond the imperfections.”

“All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. . . . Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.” - Beatrix Potter

the beatrix potter quote is good and spot on.

[211200]

Life Is Like A Circle

If we were to compare life to the twelve hours on a clock, then we would find that our time on earth would be indicated by the second hand, barely moving a mere fraction.
Many people spend their time on earth, grasping with both hands at materialism. How very likened they are to those who spent their time at school playing around in a care free manner, only to realise when they left, they had no real qualifications for their transition.

Life, like a circle, has no end, and no beginning. We have always been, and always will be, eternal beings.
All life is One, and One is All. All things are part of the whole.

We are born into this world from the vast unseen universe, and will return when the time is right.
We are all born with free will and personal responsibility. Our destiny is not fixed, though we are influenced to a degree by every part of the natural order of being.
You fix your own destiny according to your spiritual progress.
With a fixed destiny we would be nothing more than automatons.

[synergy777]

http://oceanofmind.tumblr.com/

The truth is: you don’t have a life, you are life.

Unconscious people – and many remain unconscious, trapped in their egos throughout their lives – will quickly tell you who they are: their name, their occupation, their personal history, the shape or state of their body, and whatever else they identify with. Others may appear to be more evolved because they think of themselves as an immortal soul or living spirit. But do they really know themselves, or have they just added some spiritual sounding concepts to the content of their mind? Knowing yourself goes far deeper than the adoption of a set of ideas or beliefs. Spiritual ideas and beliefs may at best be helpful pointers, but in themselves they rarely have the power to dislodge the more firmly established core concepts of who you think you are, which are part of the conditioning of the human mind. Knowing yourself deeply has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Knowing yourself is to be rooted in Being, instead of lost in your mind.”

— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

***

No one can depress you.
No one can make you anxious.
No one can hurt your feelings.
No one can make you anything
other than what you
allow inside.”

This magnificent Universe provides abundantly when you’re in a state of gratitude.

Act as if what you intend to manifest in life is already a reality. Eliminate thoughts of conditions, limitations, or the possibility of something not manifesting.
— Wayne Dyer

***


Spend five minutes at the beginning of each day remembering we all want the same things (to be happy and be loved) and we are all connected to one another.
— Dalai Lama

***

Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.
— Hunter S. Thompson

[hadaka_jimmy]

Together gloriously drunk, we no-longer know the meaning of unhappiness - Ryokan

[211200]

The Million Piece Jigsaw

Life on earth is a journey; albeit a very short journey, but one where there is so much to learn.
This is only one journey on the grand scheme – one very tiny piece of the jigsaw.
During your life on earth you may make a visit to the theatre. This is but one journey and you will make many more in your life.
Life on earth is that one small journey to the theatre; the rest are yet to come. What you don’t know is how many journeys you have already made.
Many of you on earth view your life as monotonous and feel it is leading nowhere. This life is only one small part of the jigsaw; for this reason you do not have much of the picture to go on.
Try and imagine there are a million pieces to this jigsaw; only when all the pieces are neatly in place will you see the whole picture.
Then, and only then, will your lives make any sense.

[211200]

Heaven's Baby Castle

In a baby's castle just beyond my eye
My baby plays with angel toys that money cannot buy
Who am I to wish his back into this world of strife?
No, play on my baby, you have eternal life
When all around is silent and sleep forsakes my eyes
I'll hear his tiny footsteps come running at my side
His little hand caresses me so tenderly and sweet
I'll breathe a little prayer and close my eyes and embrace his in my sleep
Now I have a treasure I rate above all other
I have known true glory - I am still his mother
(Doris Stokes)

[synergy777]

http://oceanofmind.tumblr.com/

So: enough of this terror. We deserve to know light. And grow evermore lighter and lighter.
— Joanna Newsom


“ Find thoughts that feel good, because it is inevitable that you are going to always be moving toward something. So why not be moving toward something that is pleasing? You can’t cease to vibrate, and Law of Attraction will not stop responding to the vibration that you are offering. So, expansion is inevitable. You provide it, whether you know you do, or not. The only question is, what is the standard of joy that you are demanding for yourself?
— Abraham Hicks


Fearlessness means faith in God: faith in His protection, His justice, His wisdom, His mercy, His Love, and His omnipresence… To be fit for Self-realization, man must be fearless.
— Paramahansa Yogananda


The only thing to lose in this life is illusion. The only thing to gain is the all of what you are.
— Brad Johnson


As your silence grows; your friendliness, your love grows; your life becomes a moment-to-moment dance, a joy, a celebration. Life should be a continuous celebration, a festival of lights the whole year round. Only then you can grow up, you can blossom. Transform small things into celebration. Let this sensitivity grow, and slowly slowly, as you become more and more sensitive, more and more sensuous, you will see more and more beauty around. The deeper your insight, the greater the beauty. And when you see this whole existence as a tremendous dance, a celebration, you are liberated by it. It is celebration that liberates, it is love that liberates, it is beauty that liberates — it is not metaphysics or philosophy.”

— Osho


“ God is not a thing, it is an attitude, an attitude of celebration and festivity. Drop sadness. He is so close by; dance! Drop long faces, it is sacrilege — because He is so close by. Forget your childish miseries and worries; He is so close by. Don’t go on brooding about immaterial things; He is so close by. Allow Him to hold your hand. He has been waiting for you for long.
— Osho


Miss the present and you live in boredom. BE in the present and you will be surprised that there is no boredom at all. Start by looking around a little more like a child. Be a child again! That’s what meditation is all about: being a child again — a rebirth, being innocent again, not-knowing.
— Osho


Science has become too predominant, art has almost disappeared. It is no longer thriving, it is no longer as alive as it always has been in the past. Science has taken over everything. Hence the great boredom felt in the world, because unless you are creative you are bound to be bored. Only a creative person knows how to drop boredom; the creative person knows no boredom at all. He is thrilled, enchanted, he is constantly in a state of adventure. And small things create such ecstatic states within him. A butterfly is enough to trigger a process in his being. Just a small flower is enough to bring a spring into his heart. A silent lake reflecting the stars, and the poet himself becomes a silent lake and starts reflecting millions of stars.
— Osho

[synergy777]

http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=13869

The Allure of Narcissistic Spirituality
2011 01 18

By Rabbi Alan Lurie

Several months ago, my wife and I attended a prayer service at a synagogue that is well known for its spiritual, and spirited, approach. As we entered, the rabbi was leading a meditation. "Close your eyes and breathe in the peace of Shabbat [the Sabbath]." she said. "And on the out-breathe imagine that you are sending healing love to all beings." We passed a man who appeared to be deep in meditation. His eyes were closed, and through a slightly opened smile he slowly breathed in and out. As we moved to our seats, I accidentally stepped on his toe. He quickly turned toward me; his smile vanished and he angrily hissed, "Hey, watch it, buddy!"

In the irony of a person being angry at a stranger for accidentally interrupting his meditation about universal, unconditional love, this man demonstrated the disturbing, alluring and all-too common phenomenon of "spiritual narcissism."

To understand spiritual narcissism we must first understand the word "spirituality." My acting definition is, "The experience of a transformative connection." In other words, spirituality is experienced -- it is not a concept or construct. It transforms us. It changes how we act, think and feel in all environments. And it is a connection -- a profound contact with something and someone outside of our selves.

All three of these components are needed in order for spirituality to occur, but the most essential is that it be a connection -- between a person and the Divine, or between one person and another. Spiritual practices are designed to facilitate these connections, and begin with the knowledge that we have two selves: an ego-self and a true-Self. The ego-self is built on our strategy for ensuring that we are physically safe, stemming from our interpretation of the experiences of our lives (primarily our childhood) in which we determined what was required in order to survive. The ego-self may need to impress, dominate or control and sees others as either threats or tools. There is nothing inherently wrong with the ego-self; it is a necessary structure put in place so that we can survive in physical reality. But it is not who we really are, and we can not make a spiritual connection from it. Our true-Self, however, which is often referred to as our soul, contains the very purpose that we incarnated, and is in constant connection with Spirit/Consciousness/Creation/God. It sees others as fellow souls with equally needed purposes, and has compassion for the suffering that comes from the ego-self’s attachment to things.

Spiritual practices help us to loosen the grip of the ego-self and to connect to the true-Self, so that we can live purposefully, be of service and participate in love. The central Biblical injunction to "Love your neighbor as yourself" is usually interpreted to mean that we must learn to love others, with the assumption that we already love ourselves. Literally translated, though, this line actually reads, "And you will [in the future tense] love your fellow in the same way that you love yourself." In other words, we will love another to the extent and in the way that we love ourselves. If you are harsh with yourself, you will be harsh with others. If you can not forgive yourself, you can not forgive others. In this way, this line is not a commandment, but is a statement of fact. The truth is that most of us do not love ourselves very well, and consequently we hurt others. This is why spiritual practices so often seek to teach us how to love ourselves, so that we can better love others. Real love naturally flows in two directions.

Spiritual practices becomes narcissistic, though, when the ego-self hijacks the process and assumes that it is the object of self love, becoming enamored of looking in the mirror and claiming that its reflection is the true-Self. Then we loose our way, forgetting that the purpose of learning to love ourselves is to become more open, kind and effective in interactions with others, and instead of opening our hearts with humility and compassion, we assume a position of superiority -- exactly what the ego desires for its safety. Spiritual narcissism sees self-love as the end goal. Spirituality to the ego-self is an object of attainment, much like fame, wealth, an expensive car and a sexy body.

Spiritual narcissism creates the pretense of holiness as an ego strategy to mask insecurity, receive approval, or avoid struggle and growth. "I’m a spiritual person" it proclaims proudly. "I travel to alternate realities, see auras, heal chakras, predict the future, talk to spirits, commune with angels, manipulate energies, meditate for three hours a day, harness the powers of the Universe to attract success. ... The truth is that I’m more evolved than you!" Deep spirituality makes us more sensitive to the feeling of others, encouraging an open stance of courage where we can drop our protective shields and accept the vulnerability to be seen as we are. Narcissistic sensitivity, however, is focused solely on the subtle nuances one’s own internality, and resists looking at hard, uncomfortable truths that may upset the self image. One who is narcissistically sensitive is easily offended by the "coarseness" of others, seeks to make his environment change to align with the contours of his needs, and gets angry or offended when this does not happen.

At a seven-day spiritual silent meditation retreat that I recently attended, devoted to nourishing equanimity, attendees routinely wrote messages to the retreat leaders with complaints about others: one attendee complained that two days of progress was "ruined" by another attendee, who sent a note with the words "I love you," and another complained about someone who was walking too loudly on the leaves outdoors. And the leaders publicly scolded an individual who broke the rules by reading a book in public (in Jewish tradition, embarrassing someone in public is considered a very destructive and violent act, and is strictly forbidden). While complaining about others and shaming a rule-breaker at an event intended to teach equanimity is -- like the story in the beginning of this blog -- ironic, it teaches an important warning: The desire to control others in order to create a "perfect" environment that nurtures our sensitivities is a calling card of spiritual narcissism. It is not a spiritual feat to feel equanimity only when everything is going exactly as one would like. True spirituality takes place in the holy messiness of the world, in open-hearted relationship with others, and in a kind smile to one who accidentally stepped on your foot. In that moment of connection, one can clearly see that the annoyances and upsets are actually wake up calls pulling us out of our self-involvement and in to relationship.

The holiest prayer in the Jewish prayer book is the Amidah -- the "standing" prayer -- in which we are in soul connection to God, so that we can praise our Creator for the beauty and bounty of the world, ask for peace, health and understanding and express gratitude for our lives. What is surprising to many is that most of these prayers are in the plural form; we do not pray alone and for ourselves, but for everyone. In this prayer are words that are, for me, the summation of an antidote to the lure of narcissism: "Purify our hearts to be of service in truth." With this one powerful sentence we yearn to move beyond our ego-selves, and to know our true-Selves so that we can be a blessing to others. This is why Judaism teaches us to focus on acts of kindness: inviting someone to your house for lunch, treating a stranger with kindness and giving money to charity are the highest levels of spirituality.

Spiritual narcissism can be very appealing. I know because I also feel the tug, and too often succumb. But once we see how we are tempted to use the guise of spirituality to shield us from criticism, impress others and make us feel wise, its appeal begins to loosen, and we even find the humor in this upside-down dynamic. Then, we slowly see this as an all-too-human inclination, and as we forgive it in ourselves we can forgive it in others, knowing that we are fellow suffering, struggling, holy beings. As Martin Buber, author of I and Thou wrote, "When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them."

Article from: huffingtonpost.com

[synergy777]

http://oceanofmind.tumblr.com/

With Synchronicity, all the resources we need are made available to us at the precise moment that is appropriate. The people who come into our lives are the ones we need at that moment in time. Everything is perfect. We only need to recognize this to tune into the flow. Everything happens for a Reason and Every Experience is a Learning Experience.
— Alex Chua

Though we can’t always see it at the time, if we look upon events with some perspective, we see things always happen for our best interests. We are always being guided in a way better than we know ourselves.
— Swami Satchidananda

Glorify who you are today, do not condemn who you were yesterday, and dream of who you can be tomorrow.
— Neale Donald Walsch

Go first to your highest thought about yourself. Imagine the you that you would be if you lived that thought every day. Imagine what you would think, do, and say, and how you would respond to what others would do and say… Do you see any difference between that projection and what you think, do, and say now?
— Neale Donald Walsch

FEAR is an acronym in the English language for “False Evidence Appearing Real.
— Neale Donald Walsch

The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed.
— Buddha

He who loves me is made pure; his heart melts in joy. He rises to transcendental consciousness by the rousing of his higher emotional nature. Tears of joy flow from his eyes, his hair stands on end, his heart melts in love. The bliss in that state is so intense that, forgetful of himself and his surroundings, he sometimes weeps profusely, or laughs, or sings, or dances; such a devotee is a purifying influence upon the whole universe.
— Hinduism, Srimad Bhagavatam

Happiness is not getting what you want, it is wanting what you get.
— Neale Donald Walsch

Attachment to being right creates suffering. When you have a choice to be right, or to be kind, choose kind and watch your suffering disappear. — Wayne Dyer

What angers us in another person is more often than not an unhealed aspect of ourselves. If we had already resolved that particular issue, we would not be irritated by its reflection back to us.
— Simon Peter Fuller

Remember your true self and realize the only real truth is love, everything else is an illusion.

If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.
— Peace Pilgrim

Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Knowing that I am of the same nature as all other natural things, I know that there is really no separate self, no separate personality, no absolute death and no absolute life.
— Tien T’ung-Hsu

[synergy777]

http://oceanofmind.tumblr.com/

“ Spiritual love is different. This unity is beautiful, even more inexpressibly beautiful than the beginning of love. The beauty and peace of this unity in love remains forever and ever. Love of this kind never dries up or diminishes. Always alive, both within and without, it is constant, and each moment you live in love. Love will swallow you up, eat you up completely until there is no ‘you,’ only Love. Your whole being will be transformed into Love. Spiritual love culminates in unity, in oneness. Sometimes a relationship between two people, if it is pure, can reach that union…
— Amritanandamayi Ma

“ In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you. Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real. Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.
— Deepak Chopra

When the time comes that nothing goes forth from you other than that which you would be glad to have return, then you will have reached your heaven.
— Ernest Holmes

“You are a volume in the divine book. A mirror to the power that created the universe. Whatever you want, ask it of yourself. Whatever you’re looking for can only be found inside of you.”
— Jalal Uddin Rumi

“ By spending time daily in meditation, we can discover the power of our soul, enriching our lives with wisdom, immortality, love, fearlessness, connectedness and bliss.
— Sant Rajinder Singh

“ In truth, everyone is a shadow of the Beloved – Our seeking is His seeking, Our words are His words. At times we flow toward the Beloved like a dancing stream. At times we are still water held in His pitcher. At times we boil in a pot turning to vapor – that is the job of the Beloved. He breathes into my ear until my soul takes on His fragrance. He is the soul of my soul.
— Rumi

“ I am through with everything but you. I am dying into your mystery, and dying, I am now no other than that mystery. I open to your majesty as an orchard welcomes rain, and twenty times that. I am rejoicing. I am a beggar given gold with no giver in sight.
— Rumi

“ In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans.
— Kahlil Gibran

“ If an iota of your inner Sun became manifest, it would sweep the Galaxy right off the celestial sphere.
— Rumi

“ The energy of the cosmos is surrounding you. All that is needed is a certain emptiness in you. So the emptiness is good; don’t fill it by beliefs, don’t fill it again by another kind of god, another philosophy, some existentialism. Don’t fill it. Leave it clean and fresh, and go deeper. Soon you will find from both sides, from outside and inside, a tremendous rush of energy, a tremendous rush of consciousness. Then you disappear, you are almost flooded with the cosmos. You are so small and the cosmos is so vast. You suddenly disappear into it, and that disappearance is the ultimate experience of enlightenment. Then you know you were neither an outsider, nor an insider; you are one with existence. Other than oneness with existence, nothing is going to help you. But that oneness is so easy, so obvious. Just a little relaxation, just a little turning in — not much effort, not much discipline, not much torture for yourself.
— Osho

“When you begin to understand Law of Attraction, and you understand that which is like unto itself is drawn, then it is easier and easier to understand that you are offering a signal, and the entire Universe responds. And when you finally get that, and you begin to exercise some deliberate control about the signal that you offer, then it really begins to be fun, because then you recognize that nothing happens outside of your creative control. There are no things that happen by chance or by circumstance. There is nothing that is happening because of something you vibrated a long time ago or in a past life. It is not about what you were born into. It is only about what you are, right now, in this red hot fresh moment emitting.”
— Esther Hicks

“ If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up somewhere else.
— Casey Stengel

“ I existed from all eternity and, behold, I am here; and I shall exist till the end of time, for my being has no end.
— Khalil Gibran

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
— Albert Ellis

“ Just finding that “I am nobody”… and that’s how existence is. What is a marigold flower? What is a rose? They are both nobodies. And we belong with them. Once this settles in you, the idea of nobodiness, silence starts descending on you. There is no idea, no picture — no Jesus Christ, no Krishna, no Buddha: You are utterly empty. And in this emptiness is the light. In this emptiness is enlightenment.
— Osho

“Man should be like a hollow bamboo, so that existence can pass through him. Man should be like a porous sponge — not hard — so that the doors and the windows of his being are open, and existence can pass from one end to another without any hindrance; in fact, finding no one inside. The winds blow — they come in from one window and they go out from another window of his being. This emptiness is the highest bliss possible. But you are like a hard, unporous rock, or like a hard steel rod. Nothing passes through you. You resist everything. You don’t allow. You go on fighting on all sides and in all directions as if you are in a great war with existence. There is no war going on, you are simply befooled by yourself. Nobody is there to destroy you. The whole supports you; the whole is the very earth on which you are standing, the very sky in which you breathe, you live. In fact, you are not — only the whole is. When one understands this, by and by one drops the inner hardness, there is no need for it. There is no enmity, the whole is friendly towards you. The whole cherishes you, loves you. Otherwise, why are you here? The whole brings you forth, like a tree is brought forth by the earth. The whole would like to participate in all your blessings, in all the celebrations that are possible. When you flower, the whole will flower through you; when you sing, the whole will sing through you; when you dance, the whole will dance with you. You are not separate.

Once you understand this, meditation becomes possible. Once you understand this, you relax. You throw off all the armour that you have created around you as a security. You are no longer afraid. Fear disappears and love arises. In this state of love, emptiness happens. Or, if you can allow emptiness to happen, love will flower in it. Love is a flower of emptiness, total emptiness — emptiness is the situation. It can work both ways.”
— Osho

“ A really wise man is feminine, receptive, passive. That’s why Buddha looks so feminine. That quality of passiveness, that quality of receptivity… He is just a receptacle. He reflects life: he allows life to reflect in him, to be reflected through him. He sings the song that existence wants to sing through him. He has no ideas of his own; he does not hinder.
— Osho

“ When you listen, you become just a passage, a passivity, a receptivity, a womb: you become feminine. And to arrive one has to become feminine. You cannot reach God as aggressive invaders, conquerors. You can reach God only… or it will be better: God can reach you only when you are receptive, a feminine receptivity. When you become yin, a receptivity, the door is open. And you wait.
— Osho

“ Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
— Dalai Lama

“ The wind blowing through your hair, the warm sun on your face, the cool ground beneath your bare feet, the heavenly rains against your skin, a sunrise, a sunset, a flower, a beautiful song. Simplicity at its best, beauty at its most. Take it in and realize just how wealthy we all are.
— Christina Galavizo

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is never putting it into a fruit salad.
— Janet Swerdlow

“ Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart… Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
— Carl Jung

“ Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don’t have any problems, you don’t get any seeds.
— Norman Vincent Peale

“ When ego is lost, limit is lost. You become infinite, kind, beautiful.
— Yogi Bhajan

“ No Buddhist, no Christian, no Hindu. Deeply religious people have no religion. They belong to no seat, theirs is the religion of the heart!
— Yogaswami of Jaffna

“ When birds fall from the sky and the animals are dying, a new tribe of people shall come unto the earth from many colors, classes, creeds, who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again. They will be known as the warriors of the Rainbow.
— Hopi prophecy

“ I appreciate all that I am and all that I have. Stop focusing on what you do not have, and shift your consciousness to an appreciation for all that you do have.
— Wayne Dyer


“A person who does not meditate does not know how to expand his consciousness.

He has narrow vision as if he is looking through a window, but when he learns to expand his consciousness, it is like going through a door.

It is exactly as if one were looking through a small window in a house. From the window his view is very limited, but when he goes out of the house, he has a much wider view. When he goes to the roof, he can see even more clearly.

As one’s consciousness expands, his vision becomes clearer, and he understands things as they are.”
— Swami Rama

“ Peace is absence of disturbance. The disturbance is due to the arising of thoughts in the individual, which is only the ego rising up from pure consciousness. To bring about peace means to be free from thoughts and to abide as pure consciousness.
— Ramana Maharshi

“ True wealth is the ability to let go of your possessions.
— Yogi Bhajan

“ Intentions compressed into words enfold magical power.
— Deepak Chopra

“ In my vertigo, in my dizziness, in my drunken haze,
whirling and dancing like a spinning wheel,
I saw myself as the source of existence,
I was there at the beginning and I was the spirit of love.
— Rumi


The Balance Affirmation

There is no possession, there is only passion.

There are no accidents, there is only experience.

There is no polarity, there is only balance.

There is no uncertainty, there is only knowledge.

There is no involvement, there is only observation.

There is no judgement, there is only serenity.

There is no identity, there is only the I AM.

There is no death, there is only the infinite.

[synergy777]

http://oceanofmind.tumblr.com/

“ When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
— Ernest Hemingway

“ Everything hinges on how you look at things.
— Henry Mille

“ You are Peace. Your inner nature, is Peace. Be still. You shall taste that perennial Peace. All things change. You are changeless Peace. PEACE is your name. It is abiding. May that Peace which you are in-fill every thought of yours and permeate your entire body and fill each pore in it.
— Swami Chidananda (via)

“ ‎Beloved Self, do not feel despondent. The little physical difficulty will soon pass away. It is only a little Karmic purgation. Feel that you are getting cured. Be positive in your thoughts and you will soon be well.
— Swami Chidananda

“ Anything of which you are cognizant has a relative vibration within yourself. One who is quick to see and judge evil in other persons has the seed of that evil within himself. The God-like person of pure and
high vibrational tone is always aware of the God-spark in all he contacts, and his magnetic soul vibration
draws to greater intensity that vibrational force in those who come within his vibrational range.
— Paramahansa Yogananda, Spiritual Diary

The body is a mirror for the mind. Think good thoughts & love your Self!

“ If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
— Henry David Thoreau

“ Close both eyes to see with the other eye
— Rumi

[jtarkey]

The theme repeats
thinner than the galaxy
in part to me
your wisdom and eventually
I'll float into the ether
another from another we grow
form some kind of code
of flesh and bone
we form some kind of code
of flesh and bone
no you're not alone

history bows and it steps aside
in the jungle theres columns of purple light
we're starting over

From the new Bright Eyes album. Some pretty spiritual overtones to the whole thing. It's pretty cool.

[synergy777]

http://oceanofmind.tumblr.com/

“ The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.
— Bob Marley

“ You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.
— Henry David Thoreau

“ Change yourself and you have done your part in changing the world…
— Paramahansa Yogananda

“ It is not a journey to some other point elsewhere; you are not going somewhere else. You are already there.
— Osho, Book of Secrets

“ We are the same as plants, as trees, as other people, as the rain that falls. We consist of all that is around us, we are the same as everything.
— Guatama Buddha

Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.
– yoda.

“ Wherever you are, and whatever you do, be in love!
— Rumi

“ The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

“ Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“ We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.
— Upanishads

“When the senses contact sense objects, a person experiences cold or heat, pleasure or pain. These experiences are fleeting; they come and go. Bear them patiently, Arjuna. Those who are not affected by these changes, who are the same in pleasure and pain, are truly wise and fit for immortality. Assert your strength and realize this!

The disunited mind is far from wise; how can it meditate? How can it be at peace? When you know no peace, how can you know joy? When you let your mind follow the call of the senses, they carry away your better judgement as storms drive a boat off its charted course on the sea. Use all of your power to free the senses from attachment and aversion alike, and live in the full wisdom of the Self.”
— Hinduism, Bhagavad Gita

“ You are the soul of the soul of the universe, and your name is Love.
— Rumi

“All major mystical traditions have recognized that there is a paradox at the heart of the journey of return to Origin. Put simply, this is that we are already what we seek, and that what we are looking for on the Path with such an intensity of striving and passion and discipline is already within and around us at all moments. The journey and all its different ordeals are all emanations of the One Spirit that is manifesting everything in all dimensions; every rung of the ladder we climb toward final awareness is made of the divine stuff of awareness itself; Divine Consciousness is at once creating and manifesting all things and acting in and as all things in various states of self-disguise throughout all the different levels and dimensions of the universe. The great Hindu mystic Kabir put this paradox with characteristic simplicity when he said: Look at you, you madman, Screaming you are thirsty And are dying in a desert When all around you there is nothing but water! And the Sufi poet Rumi reminds us: You wander from room to room Hunting for the diamond necklace That is already around your neck!”
— Andrew Harvey

“ Reality is always paradoxical: on one hand you feel vulnerable, on another hand you feel strong - that means a moment of truth has arrived. On one hand you feel you don’t know anything, on another hand you feel you know all - a moment of truth has arrived.
— Osho

“If we imagine that our mind is like the blue sky, and that across it pass thoughts as clouds, we can get a feel for that part of it which is other than our thoughts. The sky is always present; it contains the clouds and yet is not contained by them. So with our awareness. It is present and encompasses all our thoughts, feelings, and sensations; yet it is not the same as them. To recognize and acknowledge this awareness, with its spacious, peaceful quality, is to find a very useful resource within. We see that we need not identify with each thought just because it happens to occur. We can remain quiet and choose which thought we wish to attend to. And we can remain aware behind all these thoughts, in a state that offers an entirely new level of openness and insight.”
— Ram Dass

“ You are the unchangeable Awareness in which all activity takes place. You are eternal Being, unbounded and undivided. Just keep Quiet. All is well. Keep Quiet Here and Now. You are Happiness, you are Peace, you are Freedom. Do not entertain any notions that you are in trouble. Be kind to yourself. Open to your Heart and simply Be.
— Papaji

---

http://bodymindandsoul.tumblr.com/

The moment I realized everything is Love, I quit praying for what I wanted and began praising what is. - Jim Chapman

[synergy777]

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”— Henry Miller, Sexus


For as far back as we can remember, religion has been a source of contention, being the cause of many wars and countless deaths and sufferings in the name of God. Most religions say that they are the only true religion and that all others are wrong. This is a result of the false belief of separateness - separate from God and separate from each other and nature. We are all a part of God because we exist. God can be interpreted in many different ways. Religions tend to teach that God is a separate entity, whilst other belief systems speak only of a ‘Creative Force’. The notion that God is a separate external being, and that we are born ‘sinners’ who have to get back into the good graces of God (fear-based belief system to keep us in a powerless state), makes god a judgmental vengeful God. Yet, God (the creative force) is no such thing. God is LOVE, and there is no judgment. And the only ‘hell’ is the one we create for ourselves here on Earth. There is NO one true religion, each religion has its truths and there are many paths we can choose to take that will lead us to God. We are ALL God, each of us. Each a spark of the Divine Creative force (Love). We are here to experience life in the form of matter. We are all spiritual beings having an adventure, and we will all eventually return to the same place. There is no judgment and there is no separateness. Heaven and Hell are what we create for ourselves. It is time now to have respect for each and every different religion or belief system, and allow each person his/her right to follow the path or belief system of their choice - without preaching at them or trying to convert them, or even killing those of a different belief system. – Unknown


Divine Love is not human ‘romantic’ love. It is of a spiritual nature, it is all-encompassing and unconditional. Divine Love is often attributed only to God and/or spiritual beings. Yet as we are all sparks of the Creator (the Divine), and as the Creator IS LOVE, we are therefore also Love - Divine Love is who we really are, yet in our human state and using mostly only our five senses, we have forgotten this and we perceive other people and animals and nature as ‘separate’ from ourselves. But we are all made of the same ‘stuff’ and are all therefore “ONE and all connected. This is confirmed on a scientific level with Quantum Physics. It is our perception of separateness that causes all the woes we have in this world. What we do to one, we do to ourselves. There is NO separateness, only ONE-NESS. - Unknown


When we hide from the world in this way, we feel secure. We may think we have quieted our fear, but we are actually making ourselves numb with fear. We surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of behavior and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh grass. Instead, we wrap ourselves in our own dark environment, where our only companion is the smell of our own sweat. In the cocoon, there is no dance, no walking or breathing. It is comfortable and sleepy, an intense and very familiar home. In the cocoon, there is no idea of light at all, until we experience some longing for openness, some longing for something other than the smell of our own sweat. When we examine that comfortable darkness - look at it, smell it, feel it - we find it is claustrophobic. So the first impulse that draws us away from the darkness of the cocoon towards the light is a longing for ventilation. As soon as we begin to sense of the possibility of fresh air, we realize that our arms and legs are being restricted. We want to stretch out and walk, dance, even jump. We realize that there is an alternative to our cocoon: we discover that we could be free from that trap. With that longing for fresh air, for a breeze of delight, we open our eyes. To our surprise, we begin to see the light, even though it may be hazy at first. The tearing of the cocoon takes place at that point. Then, we realize that the degraded cocoon we have been hiding in is revolting, and we want to turn up the lights as far as we can. In fact, we are not turning up the lights, but we are simply opening our eyes wider. We catch a certain kind of fever. But again and again, we should reflect back to the darkness of the cocoon. In order to inspire ourselves forward, we must look back to see the contrast with the place we came from. You see, we cannot reject the world of the cocoon - which out which we may create a new cocoon. When we see the suffering that occured in the old cocoon, that inspires us to go forward in our journey of warriorship. It is a journey that is unfolding within us. - C. Trungpa


“ Why, sir, do you get angry at someone
Who is angry with you?
What are you going to gain by it?
How is he going to lose by it?
Your physical anger brings dishonor on yourself;
Your mental anger disturbs your thinking.
How can the fire in your house burn the neighbor’s house
Without engulfing your own?
— Hinduism, Basavanna


conquer yourself and don’t be taken over by your mind. you’re not your mind.
live in the heart because that’s who you truly are.


A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake. — Carl Sandburg


I no longer agree to treat myself with disrespect. Every time a self-critical thought comes to mind, I will forgive the Judge and follow this comment with words of praise, self-acceptance, and love. — Miguel Ruiz


Mind believes, judges, doubts and fears. Our self does not exist. It is just a concept. Our pure true nature does nothing at all. It just IS Love. Love is beyond all existence. Love just IS and so you are. — Gilles Chamboraire


“ Ignorance makes you believe that life functions haphazardly. Wisdom teaches you that everything that happens in this theatre of life has profound significance. What you see today is not the fruit of chance but a fruit from seeds planted in the past. Plant seeds of peace now and you will create a life of peace in the future. — Innerspace

‎Let go of what was or what may be and focus on what is… for now is all we have. — Adronis


“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass - grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence…We need silence to be able to touch souls.”


“All the philosophies are stories and quotes till you do not act on it or be with it. Make it your breath and let your wisdom live within you, for you and all within you. Love is the only common language in this universe… Be love and Live Love.”— Satish Kaku


all the knowledge that is not of the senses, not of the intellect, not of the heart but is the property that exclusively belongs to the deepest aspect of your being…the knowledge of your spirit”


“Happiness is nothing but total relaxation.”
— Yogi Bhajan


Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
- William Ernest Henley


The moment I realized everything is Love, I quit praying for what I wanted and began praising what is. - Jim Chapman

[synergy777]

Neil Strauss – the power of positive thought.

As some of you know, on Saturday, an article I wrote ran in The Wall Street Journal. I'm writing because there's a corollary to the article I wanted to share with those of you on this VIP list. I think it pertains to readers of both The Game and Emergency.

One of the things I did while putting together my forthcoming book Everyone Loves You When You're Dead (the details of which I'll share with you all shortly on this list) is I looked over two decades spent touring with rockers and rappers, and being thrust into some pretty intimate situations with some of the biggest stars in the world for Rolling Stone and other magazines.

And after compiling, studying, and analyzing all these experiences and interviews with people who live at the extremes, I realized that there were a few common lessons and themes that we can all apply to our lives.

One of these lessons was somewhat unexpected, so I wrote about it for the WSJ as a preview to last night's Grammy Awards:

To summarize the story, one of the many I noticed was that musicians who believed that they were destined to be famous, that being a celebrity was "God's plan" for them, were more likely to get famous and stay there. (And yes, I know what you're thinking right now.)

On the other hand, musicians who got famous, and then felt like they got lucky or didn't deserve to be there any more than other talented (but lesser known) musicians tended to fall out of the limelight pretty quickly.

Then I looked into the scientific literature in other fields--from sports to survival--and discovered similar patterns. Liver transplant parents were three times more likely to live if they sought God's help and intervention. And disaster victims in survival situations who prayed were more likely to live than
those who didn't.

Note that this observation has NOTHING to do with one's religion or morality. (For most of these celebrities, it's more about narcissism than piety anyway.) It is about BELIEF and the power of POSITIVE THINKING.

So here's the takeaway I wanted to share with you for Valentine's Day. It is yet another lesson in what, in The Game, we call STATE:

Success comes from acting out of confidence, conviction, commitment, and deservedness, no matter what critics, haters, and competitors are saying and thinking--with no fear of failure (and with no problem bouncing back undiscouraged if one doesn't succeed at first).

Conversely, walking down the path to your goals with fear, doubt, and uncertainty as your traveling companions is a sure way to slow down--if not completely bring to a halt--your journey. Even when successful, having a feeling of undeservedness when you reach your goal will ultimately lead to self-sabotage.

So whether you're looking at the person (or people or lack thereof) you're dating on this Valentine's Day or your career goals for the new year, ask yourself: WHAT DO I DESERVE?

And if you don't feel like you deserve the very best that life has to offer, than we've got a lot of work to do this year.

Best, Neil Strauss

[synergy777]

"Dont be afraid to fail. Be afraid not to try." – Michael Jordan

any races, religions, customs, nationalities and beliefs within our world bring us great richness and allow us the benefit and teachings of such diverseness. I know we each learn in our own unique way in order to bring that Love and Wisdom back to the whole. I know that if there were only one way to do something, there would need only be one person. I will not only love you if you behave in a way I think you should, or believe in those things I believe in. I understand you are truly my brother and my sister, though you may have been born in a different place and have different beliefs than I. The love I feel is for all of the world. I know that every living thing is a part of me and I feel a Love deep within for every person, animal, tree and flower, every bird, river and ocean and for all the creatures in all the world. I live my life in loving service, being the best me I can, becoming wiser in the perfection of Divine Truth, becoming happier in the joy of … unconditional love. - Sandy Stevenson

I turn away from the world about me to the world of consciousness that lies within. I shut out all memories of the past, create no images of the future. I concentrate on my being, on my awareness. I slide deep into the very recesses of my soul to a place of utter repose. Here I perceive fact in the making, am conscious of the one being from which all beings spring. I know that this is immortal Self, this is God, this is me. I am, I always was. I always will be. All men, all things, all space and time and life are here in the depths of my soul. Smaller than small, greater than great meet and unite in me. That which I thought I was, ego, I never was at all, for it was a changing thing, mirroring the seasons and the tides, a thing to be born and grow and die. I am not a thing of time or circumstance. I am spirit, pure and eternal, birthless, deathless and changeless. I am patient, for I am all time. I am wise, for I contain the knowledge of all things. I know not pain, for I see there is no beginning and no end, and who suffers pain must see beginning and end. I am rich, for there is no limit to the abundance I may create from my very Self. I am successful, for I need only think to achieve. I love and am beloved, for all things are myself and I am all things. I unite, I fuse, I become one with Universal Subconscious Mind. The mask of vanity and ego I shall never wear again. I perceive the magnificent Dweller at the centre of my consciousness, and I know Him to be my very self. Time and space, shadow and substance what matter these? I am God. - Uell S. Andersen

How often do you say or hear other people say “Well, we’re human..” or “That’s just what people do.” as justification for certain behaviors? Do you ever question such comments? Today is a day to evaluate and, perhaps, readjust your personal definition of being human. You are an amazing creature. You can be whatever you want to be. The only things that can stop you are your own beliefs about yourself and that is not intended in a corny, self-help sort of way. For example, you may have heard the claim that we are not meant to be with one person for our entire lives and it’s not logical to expect someone to be faithful forever. That is their belief and their choice. And yet, there are those who do fall in love once and make it last a lifetime. That is their belief and their choice. You may have heard someone justify another’s violent outburst by claiming, “They’re human. Anyone would be angry in that situation.” And yet, there are those who are able to remain peaceful and in control of themselves at all times. Are those people not human? Of course they are! But they have a different perception of what it means to be human. Challenge your definition of humanity today. … Does this definition allow you to become the greatest version of yourself? … Does it make you proud to be a member of this species? Before you go to sleep tonight, create a new definition of yourself, what you want to be and believe, however grand it may seem. - Tiffany Prochera

Oh Divine Universe, gather together to form one great ball of light and allow it to come forth with my Divinity. Let the power surge of energy enter my center core and rejuvenate all that is ailing. That which I can see and feel and that which I cannot. Let it mend cell by cell, getting rid of what is toxic to my human form and its tissue. Let each beam of energy run fierce through my veins and purify them, exiting out of each digit on my hands and feet. Let it shine out through the top of my crown to the limitless sky. Allow recharging energy to my center core. Out with the toxic, in with Divine Energy… rejuvenating, warmth, purity. Oh Divine Energy, my soul is open to you… come and sit in my core, Let rings of bright golden light circle my feet, hands, limbs body, neck and head. Over and over from the center core and outward, from feet to crown. Out with the toxic, in with the healing Divine Energy. Refreshed, renewed, relaxed, breathing slowly. Oh Goddess, wrap me in your Divinity and warm glow. Mother Nature, grab hold of my ankles and keep me grounded. May the trees keep me balanced and steady and the sky, day or night humble, and dreamy. Breathe… reaching up to the sky, feet firmly on the ground. feeling the warm glow on my head, I am whole. A part of the sky, the stars, the heavens of far away and a part of the ground, its grasses trees and roots. A part of all living things All that is breathing. All energy. Dear Divinity of Life, gather a force so strong I will feel a glow of that which you send. Surround my human “being”, help me with consciousness. Oh Divine Energy, my soul is open to you… come and sit in my core. - Halijo Webster

Can we all, for once, just be happy, satisfied, or content? We’re always reaching for the things we believe will fulfill our every desire, and then once we get what we wanted to obtain, it’s not even close to giving us the feelings our mind led us to believe it would have. And then that’s the cycle, over and over and over. We constantly repeat it, and never reach the state of happiness we wanted, and we blame others for it, when all it takes to be happy is to be content with what you had all along, from the very beginning, yourself. Objects, very rarely, give you genuine happiness, for the long run.+

Imagine living in a world where you’re free to explore the best in yourself and offer it to others. You’ve no concerns about where you’ll live or how you’ll live. Food, shelter, and transportation are free. Everywhere you go it’s safe to travel and everyone you meet is interested in who you are and why you’ve come. The Earth is clean and beautiful and life seems to shimmer with joy. Life’s a beautiful adventure and your body can’t wait to get up to greet another day. People are interested in what you’ve learned and what you can offer. They listen, attend, and consider what you’ve brought into their lives. They seek to truly understand and appreciate all that you are. You’re welcomed to stay and contribute or to move on and continue to share. Either way, love is surrounding, upholding and guiding you. Love is the basis of commerce and Creation is the sole provider of goods and services. Although this may sound like a fairy tale, it’s not. This is a vision of the new civilization of peace currently being co-created on Earth. Its infrastructure includes free technology throughout the planet, a culture of oneness, and music as spiritual transmission. These three elements offer humanity the opportunity to experience ourselves from the perspective of our Souls. Freed from the limitations of physical desire, emotional volatility and the mental greed for power, humanity can live from our spiritual core and co-create peace. - Ilona Anne Hress

Love, enjoy, celebrate, and you will be creating heaven — because whatsoever you are, if you are happy, if you are joyous, you share your happiness and your joy. You can share only that which you are — and when you share it, it rebounds on you. That is the law. Life reflects and echoes whatsoever you throw at life — it comes back, a thousandfold it comes back. Smile, and the whole existence smiles at you. Shout and abuse, and the whole existence shouts and abuses you. And you are the root cause; you create the whole process. It is not that the existence is interested in shouting and abusing you. The existence is neutral; it simply reflects, it is a mirror. You make an ugly face, and you see an ugly face in the mirror. And you smile, and the mirror smiles. And remember, the rewards and punishments don’t come from the outside; you create them. - Osho

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and ground for any experience we may wish to call “spiritual.” No myth needs to be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. - Sam Harris

For as far back as we can remember, religion has been a source of contention, being the cause of many wars and countless deaths and sufferings in the name of God. Most religions say that they are the only true religion and that all others are wrong. This is a result of the false belief of separateness - separate from God and separate from each other and nature. We are all a part of God because we exist. God can be interpreted in many different ways. Religions tend to teach that God is a separate entity, whilst other belief systems speak only of a ‘Creative Force’. The notion that God is a separate external being, and that we are born ‘sinners’ who have to get back into the good graces of God (fear-based belief system to keep us in a powerless state), makes god a judgmental vengeful God. Yet, God (the creative force) is no such thing. God is LOVE, and there is no judgment. And the only ‘hell’ is the one we create for ourselves here on Earth. There is NO one true religion, each religion has its truths and there are many paths we can choose to take that will lead us to God. We are ALL God, each of us. Each a spark of the Divine Creative force (Love). We are here to experience life in the form of matter. We are all spiritual beings having an adventure, and we will all eventually return to the same place. There is no judgment and there is no separateness. Heaven and Hell are what we create for ourselves. It is time now to have respect for each and every different religion or belief system, and allow each person his/her right to follow the path or belief system of their choice - without preaching at them or trying to convert them, or even killing those of a different belief system. - Unknown

Divine Love is not human ‘romantic’ love. It is of a spiritual nature, it is all-encompassing and unconditional. Divine Love is often attributed only to God and/or spiritual beings. Yet as we are all sparks of the Creator (the Divine), and as the Creator IS LOVE, we are therefore also Love - Divine Love is who we really are, yet in our human state and using mostly only our five senses, we have forgotten this and we perceive other people and animals and nature as ‘separate’ from ourselves. But we are all made of the same ‘stuff’ and are all therefore “ONE and all connected. This is confirmed on a scientific level with Quantum Physics. It is our perception of separateness that causes all the woes we have in this world. What we do to one, we do to ourselves. There is NO separateness, only ONE-NESS. - Unknown

The greatest thing I can do for you is work on myself, and the greatest thing you can do for me is work on yourself.
— Ram Dass

Heaven on Earth is a choice you must make, not a place you must find.
— Wayne Dyer

The religion of Love is a sea without a shore where the lovers drown without a sigh, without a cry.
— Rumi

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
— Marianne Williams

You are in physical existence to learn and understand that your energy, translated into feelings, thoughts and emotions, causes all experience. THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS.
— Seth

Sicknesses, disturbing dreams, emotional distress, uncertainty, confusion…From face value these seem disconcerting, from my perspective, this is a sign of great transformation leading to the dark night of the soul. See what is true within you, allow all those energies to be purged and free. Come to terms with the whole you through forgiveness and you will move into a higher frequency of being.
— Brad Johnson

“Truth is achieved only through awareness. It is not a mind process at all. You are not to think the truth; rather, you have to stop all thinking to know truth; you have to forget all about truth to know truth.

You have to unburden yourself of all the theories, hypothesizes, philosophies, and ideologies that you have learned. The process of achieving the truth is a process of unlearning, it is a process of unconditioning. Slowly, one has to get out of the mind, to slip out of the mind; and one has to become just a pool of consciousness, a pure awareness. Just a sheer watchfulness: Do nothing, just watch, watch all that is happening in the outside world and in the inside world. When one can just watch without any judgment interfering, without any old ideas coming in, then truth is revealed. And the miracle is that it does not come from somewhere else to you, it does not descend from above; it is found within you—it is your intrinsic nature.

It is really a great revelation to know truth, because you are it and you have never lost it—even for a single moment. You have always been it. It is impossible to lose it, because it is your nature and your nature cannot be lost. That’s why we call it nature. That which cannot be lost is the very definition of nature. That which can be lost is not nature but nurture. Truth is your nature, your very being, your very existence, your very center.”
— Osho

Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own,’ William Hazlitt wrote. One hopes that a poem will eventually arise out of all that hemming and hawing, then go out into the world and convince a complete stranger that what it describes truly happened. If one is fortunate, it may even get into bed with them or be taken on a vacation to a tropical island. A poem is like a girl at a party who gets to kiss everybody. No, a poem is a secret shared by people who have never met each other. Compared to the other arts, poets spend most of their time scratching their heads in the dark. That’s why the travel they prefer is going to the kitchen to see if there is any baked ham and cold beer left in the fridge.
— Charles Simic (via ortheisof)

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, so shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
— Thomas Mann

We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another, and no sunrise finds us where left by sunset. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of that tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind to be scattered.
— Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

We can let circumstances rule us, or we can take charge and rule our lives from within.
— Earl Nightingale

[synergy777]

Let my mind become silent,
And my thoughts come to rest.
I want to be
All that is before me.
In self-forgetfulness,
I become everything.
— Joeseph Campbell

"While shifting into the fifth dimension, you will increasingly see that space and distance are only illusions of the material plane. You are always and immediately connected to others who are your soul and heart family, no matter where they may be on the planet. The Internet has taught you in a physical way how the illusion of space can be bridged. You will soon understand that within yourselves you have the ability to maintain these links telepathically with those to whom you are connected." — Da Vid, M.D.

"Sexual suppression supports the power of the Church, which has sunk very deep roots into the exploited masses by means of sexual anxiety and guilt. It engenders timidity towards authority and binds children to their parents. This results in adult subservience to state authority and to capitalistic exploitation. It paralyzes the intellectual critical powers of the oppressed masses because it consumes the greater part of biological energy. Finally, it paralyzes the resolute development of creative forces and renders impossible the achievement of all aspirations for human freedom. In this way the prevailing economic system (in which single individuals can easily rule entire masses) becomes rooted in the psychic structures of the oppressed themselves." — Wilhelm Reich

"I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each of you, so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also." — Kahlil Gibran

“All the philosophies are stories and quotes till you do not act on it or be with it. Make it your breath and let your wisdom live within you, for you and all within you. Love is the only common language in this universe… Be love and Live Love.”
— Satish Kaku

"What a liberation to realize that the voice in my head is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that." — Eckhart Tolle

"If you really wish to change the world, you must first change yourself. Look to yourself to find your happiness within. Take time to do something for you. Something that will better your life, and the life of those around you. If we are not caring for ourselves, no one else will care for us either. Martyrdom is over rated. Climb your mountain, and find your bliss." — Christina

"Dont be afraid to fail. Be afraid not to try." – Michael Jordan

[decode reality]

Tao Te Ching. A great model of holistic thinking as well.

[reezie]

In life i feel a change of pace
has set upon our lands
hidden secrets now exposed
our future lies in our hands

so lets raise up together as one
for we are mighty
none exist as strong as the love of all

raise up with our hearts
and open our eyes
know we are the truth the heaven and the skys

eyes wide open heart ablaze
see the truth hidden in the maze
of deception illusion control and fear!
Materials trinkets fancy costumes to wear
take off your mask and you shall see
underneath theres just you and me

we love we laugh we hurt we cry
we make wishes underneath the very same sky

so why pretend theres more than that
deep inside we feel a need
it wont be filled with this and that
please understand its love we seek

so hear me now, i speak the truth
my brothers and sisters of the universe
put down your false identities
it will serve you well
in the bigger scheme of things

take my hand and i will yours
lets walk this path together and become a stronger force
against those who try to munipulate
lets embrace and raise up humanitys fate.

[paigetheoracle]

Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds (Einstein)

Great men cannot be ruled (Ayn Rand)

Intellectuals solve problems - genius's prevent them (Einstein)

The creator is he who goes against the current - he who stands alone (Ayn Rand)

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past (Fidel Castro)

Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible, make violent revolutions inevitable (JFK)

Anyone who fights for the future lives in it today (Ayn Rand)

I love agitation and investigation, and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error (President John Garfield)

People do not change until the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain to alter (I-Ching)

Before the beginning of something of great brilliance, there must initially be be chaos*. Before a brilliant person begins something great, they must appear foolish to the crowd (I-Ching)

Those who know how to think, need no teachers (Gandhi)

Intelligence is like a river - the deeper it is, the less noise it makes (Anonymous)

True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubts often and changes his mind. The fool is obstinate and never doubts - he knows everything but his own ignorance (Akhenaton)

It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust, sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again; who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat (Teddy Roosevelt).

Tough times never last but tough people do (anonymous)


* I call this The Chrysalis Effect or where peace gives way to revolution and a new ordering of society as we're seeing in the Middle East at the moment and might in China in the near future too, if the rumours of unrest are true.

[consciousness]

"You are Light" - a message to Drunvalo Melchizedek.

[synergy777]

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=21694

http://lesvisible.blogspot.com/2011/03/diggin-yourself-in-and-digging-yourself.html

Digging Yourself in and Digging Yourself Out


Dog Poet Transmitting…….

‘May your noses always be cold and wet’.

Earth is a training ground for souls. In order to live in the higher kingdoms of being you need certain built in qualities or you can’t enter. It’s like any club, where you need a membership and where the membership is based on something like; degree of wealth, political contacts, common occupation, or belief in certain principles. In the ‘clubs’ that one gets promoted to, after having graduated from Earth, what is required for membership, is part of you. What you are stands forth to be seen.

To succeed on Earth you need different things depending on the realm you want to operate in. In one area you need money. In another area you might only need the means to support yourself at a basic level, to do what you support yourself to perform; like being a surfer, or any avocation that is more important to you than the stability of occupations that others take (for that reason) but can’t leave very often. Generally, to succeed on Earth you need some combination of intelligence, wealth, contacts and influence, an understanding with the authorities, good looks and talent. I may have left something out but that’s the basic list.

There are certain limitations to success on Earth. The big one is ‘time limitation’. You are only here for so long and then you leave without your positions and possessions, unless you have them buried with you and they still stay here. Another limitation is the unpredictable that can come out of nowhere or the predictable that comes at the rate that your behavior and karma attracts it. Another limitation is confusion about what makes you happy so that, in many cases, you can acquire almost everything and still wind up wretched. This is a common result. There are all kinds of possible limitations and since the point of presence, is to learn and acquire qualities and contacts, for the purpose of migrating elsewhere, the basic state of existence here is suffering.

Life is very much like a video game or a movie and I say it often because it is basically true and not likely to change. The difference between a video game and a movie and real life is that you have a certain perspective of observation with the first two and can judge things in a way that is more difficult in real life. Often, in real life, people break the rules when they can, without realizing that it is the rules which allow them to play the game; meaning that our need to break the rules is due to our not actually understanding them and sometimes being confused about what is a rule and what is a construct, placed upon you by the society in which you live. When I say rules, I am talking about the real rules, not the ones that you actually should break if you ever want to have any idea of what’s going on.

The whole point of existence here is about somewhere else and you can look at it as a game because it is very much like that with strategies, points, rules, obstacles and this and that. Those who know that life here is about enduring existence somewhere else have to overcome all sorts of obstacles, while swimming in the opposite direction from that taken by the general population. To get to one of the ‘higher realms’ you have to be able to see through ‘everything’ down here. To get to generic heaven that isn’t necessary. You get to go there based on having lived a certain way that is rewarded by a short stay in one of the shining worlds, until you are dumped back down here. You can also go to other places, not so nice, if you have earned them instead. Whenever you leave here, you leave with the only things you actually possess, what has become a part of you and that is highly visible on the planes beyond this one and guarantee that you get the proper ticket onward. There are no mistakes. There never are; when it appears to be a mistake there’s a reason for that too.

Religions are like lens filters. Each one of them is a different color. The people under the sway of any particular lens see reality and spiritual truth as red, green, blue, orange or whatever it may be. Because of this they believe the whole world is naturally that color and that everything else is flawed or not authentic. Actually all of these colors are differentiations of white light that is shot through the prism that leads into this world. These are the rays that one can travel on back to the originating light.

Political systems are the same way and the only reason they are around, like cultures and social constructs, or anything else, is for you to have that experience and see the limitation of it. Everything in this world is set up to disappoint you so that you will be eventually provoked to look within. It can’t be found without. The only purpose of something like The New Shangri La, is to create an environment where that is understood by the residents. The answers aren’t provided the way you find out what you got wrong at mid-terms or your final exam. The answer is you, so the answer does differ, which is why there are a whole lot of celestial realms. You find that answer by removing the veils from your eyes and these veils all have to do with misapprehensions and shortcomings, concerning something to do with The World. As the veils fall, what is revealed is you. Just as when the Truth takes off her clothes, the world disappears.

There is nothing more to any religion, mystery school, collection of spiritual tests or anything else but the revelation of self to self. Most people are not into this because they have only a dim idea, if they have any idea at all, of what this means. If they did, they would care nothing at all for the things of the world because what comes with this cannot be explained. It is beautiful beyond description; eternal and endlessly revealing. It is an ecstasy and intoxication beyond any comparisons you can make. That is the destiny of the human soul and it can take many a kalpa or it can be achieved in a lifetime. Serendipitously, such an opportunity exists at this time, in this unique position on the cosmic clock. A whole lot of people are going to be kicking themselves in the ass for a long time for not catching one.

There are people who go from a time of major transformation like this to the next and the next and the next, always seeking more of what the world has to offer. After awhile they get really twisted and I think this is how psychopaths are born. They become dead and unfeeling and wind up having to mimic human expression and feelings, because they no longer have any. There are others who, once they see what can be gained, set out with a burning intensity to seize the prize and they move right on out of this world. Some of us come back as Bodhisattvas to provide a way out for those who might be interested in one. You might be surprised to find out how few people actually want to get out, given the opportunity.

There are reasons for this.

Personally, I have little concern for what’s going on here or in outer space, except for how it applies to the whole operation. I’ve no interest in spaceships or flying saucers, I am one. I’ve no interest in accumulating physical wealth or any of the other blandishments people sell their asses and their souls for. I personally possess more wealth than this entire world contains and so do you. I have more power, more talent, more ‘real’ influential contacts, more good looks and more fame than anyone in this world and so do you. This is potential in most and operative by degrees in a few. In these times, the chance for advancement is breathtaking and conditions here are also going to be breathtaking but after a different fashion (grin).

It’s a struggle at the moment because the whirlpool sucking everything downward is very strong. One has to get into ‘the pull’ of the other whirlpool. Most aren’t struggling. They want it to work out here but it never does. Even when it’s working out, it is only temporary and setting you up for a loss because that is how it works. That is the nature of the process.

I sincerely hope that each and every one of you takes advantage of this. You don’t need to hear about it from me. There are some others who are mentioning these things and there are those from time immemorial who have said pretty much the same things. Just as the objective of life is yourself, it is also up to you. Of course there are powerful agencies of assistance and you can call on them and they will answer; possibly not as quickly as you like or as dramatically as you might wish but you have to walk that road on your own two feet. Though you can’t remember, learning to walk was a tremendous accomplishment; babies see things upside down. They have to turn it around. That same principle applies now just as it did then. If you aren’t getting results and you are sure there is nothing in there, you aren’t trying hard enough and that’s up to you. You have to want it pretty bad.

Some of us do.

End Transmission…….

[synergy777]

In life i feel a change of pace
has set upon our lands
hidden secrets now exposed
our future lies in our hands

so lets raise up together as one
for we are mighty
none exist as strong as the love of all

raise up with our hearts
and open our eyes
know we are the truth the heaven and the skys

eyes wide open heart ablaze
see the truth hidden in the maze
of deception illusion control and fear!
Materials trinkets fancy costumes to wear
take off your mask and you shall see
underneath theres just you and me

we love we laugh we hurt we cry
we make wishes underneath the very same sky

so why pretend theres more than that
deep inside we feel a need
it wont be filled with this and that
please understand its love we seek

so hear me now, i speak the truth
my brothers and sisters of the universe
put down your false identities
it will serve you well
in the bigger scheme of things

take my hand and i will yours
lets walk this path together and become a stronger force
against those who try to munipulate
lets embrace and raise up humanitys fate.

thats awesome, inspiring, moving, profound and so true, fantastic post.

[synergy777]

Great Spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds (Einstein)

Great men cannot be ruled (Ayn Rand)

Intellectuals solve problems - genius's prevent them (Einstein)

The creator is he who goes against the current - he who stands alone (Ayn Rand)

A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past (Fidel Castro)

Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible, make violent revolutions inevitable (JFK)

Anyone who fights for the future lives in it today (Ayn Rand)

I love agitation and investigation, and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error (President John Garfield)

People do not change until the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain to alter (I-Ching)

Before the beginning of something of great brilliance, there must initially be be chaos*. Before a brilliant person begins something great, they must appear foolish to the crowd (I-Ching)

Those who know how to think, need no teachers (Gandhi)

Intelligence is like a river - the deeper it is, the less noise it makes (Anonymous)

True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubts often and changes his mind. The fool is obstinate and never doubts - he knows everything but his own ignorance (Akhenaton)

It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust, sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again; who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat (Teddy Roosevelt).

Tough times never last but tough people do (anonymous)


* I call this The Chrysalis Effect or where peace gives way to revolution and a new ordering of society as we're seeing in the Middle East at the moment and might in China in the near future too, if the rumours of unrest are true.

great posts bro

[synergy777]

i think unconditional love / love for all / compassion, is one of the most important things we can learn whilst on planet earth.

unconditional love includes loving your enemies, the elite, religous extremists/athiests, those you disagree with, don't like etc.

evil begets evil, evil only creates more evil

love conquers all, only love can conquer hate.

and love is unlimited, there is a limitless supply, eternal source etc.

thus there is no excuse not to endeavour to achieve it.

[synergy777]

"Therefore, since Christ has suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same purpose, because he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for the lusts of men, but for the will of God. For the time already past is sufficient for you to have carried out the desire of the Gentiles, having pursued a course of sensuality, lusts, drunkenness, carousing, drinking parties and abominable idolatries. In all this, they are surprised that you do not run with them into the same excesses of dissipation, and they malign you." (1 Peter 4:1-4)

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:2)

But prove yourselves doers of the Word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. (James 1:22)

"Jesus declared, 'I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again…For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.'" (John 3:3,16-21)


"The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron...Have nothing to do with godless myths...rather, train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come." (1 Timothy 4:1-2,7-8)


"Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."(1 Corinthians 15:58)

[synergy777]

"Love really is the answer to human problems: love of oneself, love of others, love of where one is, love of what one is doing, love of nature, love of life, love of the world, love of spirit in all its wonder and splendor. Love sets our energy free. It opens us and puts us in a flow with spirit and life on many levels. Love is the true secret behind manifestation." — David Spangle

----

promise yourself

To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.

To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet.

To make all your friends feel that there is something worthwhile in them.

To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.

To think only of the best, to work only for the best and to expect only the best.

To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.

To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.

To wear a cheerful expression at all times and give a smile to every living creature you meet.

To give so much time to improving yourself that you have no time to criticize others.

To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud word, but in great deeds.

To live in the faith that the whole world is on your side, so long as you are true to the best that is in you

[gaias child]

“Let us dream of tomorrow where we can truly love from the soul, and know love as the ultimate truth at the heart of all creation.” - Michael Jackson

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Mahatma Gandhi

"When the power of love overcomes the love of Power, we will know peace." Jimmy Hendrix.

"In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe." Michael Jackson
Albert Einstein quotes

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

"The only real valuable thing is intuition."

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."





Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin luther King

[synergy777]

Interview with Deepak Chopra
DR: How important is meditation in achieving and maintaining health?

DEEPAK CHOPRA: Meditation is a very important aspect of all the approaches that one can use in quantum healing, because it allows you to experience your own source. When you experience your own source, you realize that you are not the patterns and eddies of desire and memory that flow and swirl in your consciousness. Although these patterns of desire and memory are the field of your manifestation, you are in fact not these swirling fluctuations of thought.

You are the thinker behind the thought, the observer behind the observation, the flow of attention, the flow of awareness, the unbounded ocean of consciousness. When you have that on the experiential level, you spontaneously realize that you have choices, and that you can exercise these choices, not through some sheer will power but spontaneously.

DR: What aspects of contemporary lifestyles do you feel are most harmful to people’s health?

DEEPAK CHOPRA: The most harmful is the loss of simplicity, and the loss of trust. The experience of alienation, fragmentation, isolation….this ultimately leads to all of the problems, like contamination of our environment, hostility towards each other, poor nutrition, and hard work, too much work … A work-oriented society, a success oriented society, in which we believe that somehow, material objects are the only source of our happiness.

DR: How do you find time for medical practice, writing, travel and family life, and still get to bed early, as you recommend in your books?

DEEPAK CHOPRA: That’s a good question. I in fact don’t believe in the existence of time. That’s one thing I have to tell you, and the other is that I don’t take myself or what I am doing seriously. I believe in the ancient saying that this is a recreational universe, for those who want to share God’s one great passion, beauty. I feel that I’m having a wonderful time. I don’t look upon any of this as work. It’s a source of great joy and happiness for me.

I experience beauty in everything I do, and when I experience it emotionally, then I know intellectually that it must be the truth. So if I don’t go to sleep by ten, it doesn’t bother me, because I’m not tired. Most of my writing I do in planes, when I have plenty of time. I meditate whenever I have a chance, and that is actually more frequently than most of my patients meditate. I see patients about 50% of my time at this clinic. That too is a source of great joy to me, talking to people and interacting with people. In fact, I have learned more from my patients than from anybody else.

-----

"Self-awareness is awareness of your inner world, the kingdom of God. As you become aware of the tremendous beauty of your own being — its joy, its light, its eternal life, its richness, its overflowing love — you feel so blessed that you can bless the whole world without any discrimination." — Osho

"If your inner being changes, your whole outer life will be totally different. It will have a different fragrance, a different beauty, a different grace. And when your inner being is changed and becomes a flame of light, you will become a light unto others too. You will become a beckoning light, a great herald of a new dawn. Your very presence will trigger revolutions in other people’s lives." — Osho

"Buddha is rich because the inner light is there. Jesus is rich because the inner light is there. You are rich if your inner being is suffused with light, bathed in light. You are rich if you know that existence is divine. You are rich if you have experienced the exquisite beauty that surrounds, that permeates the whole. You are rich if you have tasted the nectar of your own consciousness. You are rich if you are capable of sharing your love unconditionally. Otherwise you are a beggar." — Osho

"Love is the only thing that transcends death, because love is the only thing that life exists for. Love is the very center of being." — Osho

---

"When you meet someone whose Spirit is not aligned with yours ~ send them love and move along."

---

"When you understand who and what you are, your radiance projects into the universal radiance and everything around you becomes creative and full of opportunity." — Yogi Bhajan

[synergy777]

Matisyahu - One Day lyrics


sometimes I lay
under the moon
and thank God I'm breathing
then I pray
don't take me soon
cause I am here for a reason
sometimes in my tears I drown
but I never let it get me down
so when negativity surrounds
I know some day it'll all turn around
because
all my life I've been waiting for
I've been praying for
for the people to say
that we don't wanna fight no more
they'll be no more wars
and our children will play
one day x6
it's not about
win or lose cause
we all lose
when they feed on the souls of the innocent
blood drenched pavement
keep on moving though the waters stay raging
in this maze you can lose your way (your way)
it might drive you crazy but don't let it faze you no way (no way)
sometimes in my tears I drown
but I never let it get me down
so when negativity surrounds
I know some day it'll all turn around
because
all my life I've been waiting for
I've been praying for
for the people to say
that we don't wanna fight no more
they'll be no more wars
and our children will play
one day x6
one day this all will change
treat people the same
stop with the violence
down with the hate
one day we'll all be free
and proud to be
under the same sun
singing songs of freedom like
one day x4
all my life I've been waiting for
I've been praying for
for the people to say
that we don't wanna fight no more
they'll be no more wars
and our children will play
one day x6
ooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!

[shocker]

http://www.welcomethespirit.com/spiritual.gif

[synergy777]

"I’ve stopped thinking all the time of what happened yesterday. And stopped asking myself what’s going to happen tomorrow. What’s happening today, this minute, that’s what I care about. I say: What are you doing at this moment, Zorba?… I’m kissing a woman. Well, kiss her well, Zorba! And forget all the rest while you’re doing it; there’s nothing else on earth, only you and her!" — Nikos Kazantzakis

"And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." — T.S. Eliot

If you think you’re free, there’s no escape possible." — Ram Dass

"We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being." — Hermann Hesse

"There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself." — Hermann Hesse

In my body and in my soul I realized that I greatly need sin, I needed lust, vanity, the striving for goods, and I needed the most shameful despair to learn how to give up resistance, to learn how to love the world, to stop comparing the world with any world that I wish for, that I imagine, with any perfection that I think up; I learned to let the world be as it is, and to love it and to belong to it gladly." — Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

"You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them!" — Hermann Hesse

"In a realm of constant change, no experience can bring real fulfillment and happiness. Searching for love and peace is like being a dog chasing its own tail. Drop the search and everything will just reveal itself! Oneness is always oneness, no matter what. It doesn’t require you to do anything if it’s only to still body and mind to realize it." — Gilles Chamboraire

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh - at yourself. Laugh as much as you breathe and love as long as you live!

"Though I might travel afar, I will meet only what I carry with me, for every man/woman is a mirror. We see only ourselves reflected in those around us. Their attitudes and actions are only a reflection of our own. The whole world and its condition has its counter parts within us all. Turn the gaze inward. Correct yourself and your world will change." — Kirsten Zambucka.

“Truth is truth, one, alone;

It has no sides, no paths;

All paths do not lead to truth.

There is no path to truth,

It must come to you.

Truth can come to you only when your mind and heart are simple, clear, and there is love in your heart;

Not if your heart is filled with the things of the mind.

When there is love in your heart, you do not talk about organizing for brotherhood;

You do not talk about belief, you do not talk about division or the powers that create division, you need not seek reconciliation.

Then you are a simple human being without a label, without a country.

This means that you must strip yourself of all those things and allow truth to come into being;

And it can only come when the mind is empty, when the mind ceases to create.

Then it will come without your invitation.

Then it will come as swiftly as the wind and unbeknown.

It comes obscurely, not when you are watching, wanting.

It is there as sudden as sunlight, as pure as the night;

But to receive it, the heart must be full and the mind empty.”

— J. Krishnamurti


"Never limit your dreams to only what you can see becoming reality. The universe has infinite ways of bringing desires into fruition, once you allow the possibility by removing your limitations." — Danielle Marie Crume

To trust in the force that moves the universe is faith.

Faith isn’t blind, it’s visionary.

Faith is believing that the universe is on our side, and that the universe knows what it’s doing.

Ultimatly, the universe and you are one, and it wants to know itself within you.

[synergy777]

http://www.illuminatedmind.net/2008/04/01/transcending-and-including-the-ego/

Transcending and Including the Ego

A lot of spiritual and self-help books you’ll find on the shelf in bookstores these days talk about transcending the ego. Ceasing to identify with a limited self.

What exactly is the ego? The ego is our feeling of “me” or “self.” It’s your basic identity as an individual that gives you a feeling of separateness with everything and everyone else. It’s the basic feeling of “I am.”

Your ego is what gives you the feeling of an individual identity, separate from everything else.

What does it mean to transcend the ego?

When we transcend the ego, we realize that we have a higher self beyond our limited view of our individual identity. It means that we no longer see our identity as simply an individual consciousness, but rather that we are the consciousness that moves through all things.

When we transcend the ego, it doesn’t mean we kill the ego. Transcending the ego does not mean waging a war against the ego. It means that we move to a higher context of self and include our individual self as well.

Egolessness does not mean the absence of a functional self, it means one is no longer exclusively identified with that self.

Moving beyond a limited self

Realizing our true nature, that we are not just our egos, enables us to engage the world more fully. It doesn’t mean we become some ultimate being free from all our humanly desires, pains, pleasures and basic instincts.

If that’s what you’re expecting, you’re looking for an escape.

Rather transcending and including the ego allows us to engage life more fully, with a deeper context of spirit, using the vehicle of the self to accomplish our goals.

Transcending the ego means does not mean killing the ego, it means plugging into something bigger. To lose the ego, is to become a psychotic, not a sage.

Liberation is found by complete immersion, not by escape.

The point of life is to be fully at home in the body, in the ego, with all its humanly characteristics. To be truly immersed in all the body’s desires and needs, the minds ideas and thoughts, our spirit and the light that shines through it. To embrace them fully, with verve and exuberance.

“In the stillness of the night, the Goddess whispers. In the brightness of the day, dear God roars. Life pulses, mind imagines, emotions wave, thoughts wander. What are all these but the endless movements of One Taste, forever at play with its own gestures, whispering quietly to all who would listen: is this not you yourself? When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you?” - Ken Wilber

[synergy777]

How the Mind Works

Here are some thoughts I find worth remembering…

1. Think good and good follows. Think evil, and evil follows. You are what you think all day long.

2. Your subconscious mind does not argue with you. It accepts what your conscious mind decrees. If you say, “I can’t afford it,” your subconscious works to make it true. Select a better though. Decree, “I’ll buy it. I accept it in my mind.”

3. You have the power to choose. Choose health and happiness. You can choose to be friendly, or you can choose to be unfriendly. Choose to be cooperative, joyous, friendly, lovable, and the whole world will respond. This is the best way to develop a wonderful personality.

4. The suggestions and statements of others have no power to hurt you. The only power is the movement of your own thought. You can choose to reject the thought or statements of others and affirm the good. You have the power to choose how you will react.

5. Watch what you say. You have to account for every idle word. Never say, “I will fail; I will lose my job; I can’t pay the rent.” Your subconscious cannot take a joke. It brings all these things to pass.

6. Your mind is not evil. No force of nature is evil. It depends how you use the powers of nature. Use your mind to bless, heal, and inspire all people everywhere.

7. Begin to think from the standpoint of the eternal truths and principles of life and not from the standpoint of fear, ignorance, and superstition. Do not let others do your thinking for you. Choose your own thoughts and make your own decisions.


"Whatever your conscious mind assumes and believes to be true, your subconscious mind will accept and bring to pass. Believe in good fortune, divine guidance, right action, and all the blessings of life." — Joseph Murphy

All quotes are from The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Dr. Joseph Murphy.

[synergy777]

“I am loved and loving. I am surrounded by love. I easily attract loving people and experiences into my life. I embrace and claim a life filled and overflowing with love. I am grateful for the love that surrounds me. My circle of loving friends continues to expand. Love is what I am. I am a magnet for more and more love. I joyfully express love everyday. I love myself exactly the way I am. I radiate love to everyone and everything. The more love I give, the more I receive. The love in my soul freely and fully expresses itself. Love is all around. Today I release the past and allow the healing power of love into my life. I am in love with my life.”

"There are no accidents… there is only some purpose that we haven’t yet understood." — Deepak Chopra


Deepak Chopra, Seven Spiritual Laws of Success:

There are seven of these, work with one for each day of the week.

1.) Potentiality:
a.) Meditate 30 minutes morning and evening every day.
b.) Commune with nature and witness the intelligence in every living thing.
c.) Practice non-judgment.

2.) Giving:
a.) Give a gift to everyone you meet.
b.) Be aware of the gifts that you receive.
c.) Silently wish every person happiness, joy, laughter and peace.

3.) Cause and Effect:
a.) Witness the choices that you are making in the present moment.
b.) Examine the consequences on yourself as well as others.
c.) Ask your heart for guidance.

4.) Least Effort:
a.) Accept the moment, don’t resist what is.
b.) Take responsibility for the situation.
c.) Do not be attached to your point of view, remain open to other views.

5.) Intention and Desire:
a.) Make a list of desires.
b.) Release the list of desires to creation, remain willing to accept something better.
c.) Accept the present as-is.

6.) Detachment:
a.) Allow yourself, those around you, and the situation to be as they are.
b.) Accept uncertainty and allow solutions to arise out of chaos.
c.) Remain open to all possible outcomes.

7.) Purpose in Life:
a.) Pay attention to the still voice in your heart.
b.) Make a list of talents and find ways to use them to serve others.
c.) Ask “How can I help?”, “How can I serve?”.

[prnkstr]

I think one of my alltime favorites must be the first cople of phrases from William Blakes Auguries of Innocence..

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

To me, it sort of helps me put think in perspective...

[smithers jones]

Much of suffering comes from wanting something before it's time or holding on to something after it's time.
From Survival into the 21st century-Planetary healers manual.Viktoras Kulvinskas

[synergy777]

"Whether you are suffering in this life, or smiling with opulence and power, your consciousness should remain unchanged. If you can accomplish evenmindedness, nothing can ever hurt you. The lives of all great masters show that they have achieved this blessed state." — Paramahansa Yogananda, Man’s Eternal Quest

"All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Positive thinking by itself does not work. Your embodied vision, partnered with vibrant thinking, harmonized with active listening, and supported with your conscious action - will clear the path for your Miracles." — Sumner M. Davenport

"Have a sense of humor with the problems you face. Even if you don’t solve them all, you’ll enjoy them much more." — Brian Piergrossi

I am dead because I lack desire,
I lack desire because I think I possess.
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:
Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.
— Rene Daumal

"Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree, in the midst of them all." — Buddha

"All people dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake in the morning to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, For they dream their dreams with open eyes, And make them come true." — D.H. Lawrence

[synergy777]

"What you focus on expands, and when you focus on the goodness in your life, you create more of it. Opportunities, relationships, even money flowed my way when I learned to be grateful no matter what happened in my life." — Oprah Winfrey

"When you are grateful fear disappears and abundance appears." — Tony Robbins

"I prefer to learn everything through music. If you want divinity, the music in every human being and their love for music is pretty much it. It’s the big indication of their spirituality and their ability to love and make love, or feel pain or joy, and really manifest it, really be real." — Jeff Buckley

"You are immortal. Your trials are mortal. You can unleash infinite powers and shatter your finite trials." — Paramahansa Yogananda

"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry." — W.B. Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
— W.B. Yeats

"Creativity comes easy to a man who is loose and natural. Whatsoever he does becomes a creative phenomenon. Wherever he touches, it becomes a piece of art; whatsoever he says becomes a poetry. His very movement is aesthetic. If you can see a buddha walking, even his walking is creativity. Even through his walking he is creating a rhythm, even through his walking he is creating a milieu, an atmosphere around him. If a buddha raises his hand he changes the climate immediately around him. Not that he is doing these things, they are simply happening. He is not the doer. Calm, settled inside; tranquil, collected, together inside, filled with infinite energy overpouring, overflowing in all directions, his every moment is a moment of creativity, of cosmic creativity." — Osho

"Unless a man learns how to create, he never becomes a part of existence, which is constantly creative. By being creative one becomes divine; creativity is the only prayer." — Osho

"The more I appreciate, the better I feel.
The better I feel, the more I am allowing who I am to flow through me.
The more I allow who I am to flow through me - the better I feel." — Abraham-Hicks

"Only those who live up to the highest light live in harmony. All who act upon their highest motivations become a power for good. It is not important that others be noticeably affected: results should never be sought or desired. Know that every right thing you do—every good word you say—every positive thought you think—has good effect." — Peace Pilgrim

"In the West we have a tendency to be profit-oriented, where everything is measured according to the results and we get caught up in being more and more active to generate results. In the East—especially in India—I find that people are more content to just be, to just sit around under a banyan tree for half a day chatting to each other. We Westerners would probably call that wasting time. But there is value to it. Being with someone, listening without a clock and without anticipation of results, teaches us about love." — A Missionary of Charity, from Mother Teresa, A Simple Path

"Remember that kindness begins with your thoughts. The seeds of kind thoughts about yourself and others will grow into kind feelings, which will bear the fruit of kind actions. Everything is born from a thought." — Dorothy Mendoza Row

"Transforming yourself is a means of giving light to the whole world." — Ramana Maharshi

"At the root of all things, behind all things, inside all things, outside of all things, and in the heart of all things rests the source of all things: divine love." — Sri Gawn Tu Fahr

"Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind." — Aristotle

…perhaps there is a pattern
set up in the heavens
for one who desires to see it,
and having seen it,
to find one in himself.
— Plato

"Time is not a line, but a series of now points." — Taisen Deshimaru

[vajradhatu]

The Bodhisattva of Compassion
When he meditated deeply
Saw the emptiness of all five skandhas
And sundered the bonds that caused him suffering.

Here then:
Form is no other than emptiness,
Emptiness no other than form.
Form is only emptiness,
Emptiness only form.

Feeling, thought and choice,
Consciousness itself,
Are the same as this.

All things are by nature void,
They are not born or destroyed.
They are not stained or pure,
Nor do they wax or wane.

So, in emptiness, no form.
No feeling, thought or choice.
Nor is there consciousness:
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind,
No colour, sound, smell, taste, touch or what the mind takes hold of.
Nor even act of sensing.

No ignorance, no end of it,
Nor all that comes from ignorance:
No withering, no death, no end of them.

Nor is there pain, or cause of pain,
Or cease in pain, or Noble Path to lead from pain.
Not even wisdom to attain.
Attainment too is emptiness.

So know that the Bodhisattva,
Holding to nothing whatever,
But dwelling in Prajna wisdom,
Is freed of delusive hindrance,
Rid of the fear bred by it
And reaches clearest Nirvana.

All Buddhas of past and present,
Buddhas of future time,
Using this Prajna wisdom
Come to full and perfect vision.

Hear then the great dharani,
That radiant peerless mantra
The Prajnaparamita, whose words allay all pain.
Hear and believe its truth!

gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha!