11-11-12 -

There's No Right Way to Live - by Robert Fritz

From the time we were infants, we were told that there is a “right” way to live your life.  Therefore, your job is to find that right way.  Everyone has an opinion about how you should live.  Some think you should pursue spiritual growth, personal development, and perfect yourself.  Some think you should get involved with acts of kindness.  Some think you should save the world, or have the right politics, or adopt the right belief. We have been sold a bill of goods.

Most everyone has, somewhere in the back of his or her mind, an image of the correct way to live.  Most people are not aware of how much they have taken on the concept of how they should live their lives, so the concept remains unnoticed even when it is a major influence in how they think of goals, values, symbols of success and failure, where they should be at certain ages, the types of relationships, family, career, home, organizations of which they should belong.

Good chance, you have an unknown image in the recesses of your mind. This image will plague you until it is confronted.  Sometimes the image comes from role models you admired in your youth.  For some, it’s James Bond, for some, it’s their favorite Rock star.  Maybe it’s an astronaut like Neil Armstrong.  Maybe it’s Mother Teresa or Amelia Earhart.  Maybe it is a combination of several role models, all mixed up, all vying for your attention and acquiescence.  One thing that is important to know is that you will never be able to live up to that concept. 

Of course, many like to put themselves in a position of authority about how you should live.  For some, it’s a business opportunity given they sell their theories with the promise of happiness, success, and rewards.  For others, it is a calling in that they feel compelled to spread their hypothesis of how life should be lived.  For others, it is confirmation of their own belief systems, because they feel that the more people who agree with them, the more validity their beliefs have.  For others, it’s a way to pass the day, as they think about their friends and families lives, and how they would change the way those people would live.  As they say about certain parts of the human anatomy, everyone has got an opinion about the right way to live.

Who can say to what you should aspire, or what you should hold dear, or who you should love, or what you should think.  Of course, this can be a scary thought.  Freedom is a hard issue for most people.  One thing that makes it hard is a common confusion which can be captured in this one common reaction to the idea that often comes up when freedom is discussed, “No one is free to throw their garbage on my lawn.”

Throwing your garbage on someone else’s lawn is not a question of freedom.  It is a question of sovereignty.  It is about ownership and jurisdiction.  But, when pursing that line of attack, the deeper issue of your freedom to live your life anyway you see fit gets lost.

The basic misconception that generates the dogmatic pronouncements about how you should live comes from society’s notion about people.  The underlying assumption is that people can’t be trusted, and, therefore, left to their own devices, they will be destructive.  So, therefore, people need to be controlled.  If you thought this, you would feel that it is critical to tell others how to live.

Yet, when people are truly free to make their own choices, they choose health over sickness, love and relationships over hate and strife, productive and meaningful work over meaningless and fruitless endeavors, and to join together to support each other for the common good rather than isolate themselves in a survival of the most selfish game-theory paranoid vision of a hostile world.

What does it take to enjoy such freedom?  It takes freeing the mind from the chains of all concepts.  Concepts are not reality.  That’s why they are concepts.  You don’t need a concept to know what you are tasting, or smelling, or touching, or hearing.  Your senses are designed to perceive reality so that you can make decisions about what you will do in the circumstances.  Yet, so much of our world is in love with concepts.  And why not.  You never have to prove a concept in reality.  And if a concept turns out to reflect reality, it is no longer a concept, but a known fact.  Freedom, like life itself, happens in reality, not in your mind.  And freedom of thought is a building block for organizing your life based on your highest aspirations and deepest values.

The next thing it takes to enjoy such freedom is mastery of the creative process.  If you can’t create what you truly want, you can wish all you want, but your chances are slim.  Not all things that people want are possible.  But we have been taught from our earliest moments on this planet that you can’t have what you want.  At least, not what you REALLY want.  And, of course, all the experts in how we should live have their lists of what we should want.  But, if you are free of concepts, if you no longer have to uphold the image that is in the back of your mind about how you should be, you can reinvestigate what you might really want.  But this is more than discovery.  It is an evolutionary process.  And here is where the creative process becomes so essential.  You can learn how to think in terms of what you truly want by creating the small things you want first.  A meal, a look for a room, a dinner party, a blog you write, a small flower bed, and on and on it can go.  You become decisive by making decisions.  You build your creative muscle by creating.  Soon you will find that, while many things you may want are not possible, many more are.  Over time and experience, your vision of your own life becomes more your own.  And while many people might have an opinion, no one has a vote.

There is no right way to live your life.  But there is YOUR way.  And that’s all that counts.

© Robert Fritz 2012

11-12-12 -

Thinking is the biggest and most destructive addiction on this planet.

How to Listen to Your Life - By Mark Nepo

Listening is a personal pilgrimage that takes time and a willingness to lean into life. With each trouble that stalls us and each wonder that lifts us, we're asked to put down our conclusions and feel and think anew. Unpredictable as life itself, the practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous and challenging art forms on earth. Each of us is by turns a novice and a master—until the next difficulty or joy undoes us.

In truth, listening is the first step to peace. When we dare to quiet our minds and all the thoughts we inherit, the differences between us move back, and the things we have in common move forward. When we dare to quiet the patterns of our past, everything starts to reveal its kinship and share its aliveness. And though we can always learn from others, listening is not a shortcut, but a way to embody the one life we're given, a way to personalize the practice of being human.

In real ways, we're invited each day to slow down and listen. But why listen at all? Because listening stitches the world together. Listening is the doorway to everything that matters. It enlivens the heart the way breathing enlivens the lungs. We listen to awaken our heart. We do this to stay vital and alive. This is the work of reverence: to stay vital and alive by listening with an open heart.

Yet how do we inhabit these connections and find our way in the world? By listening our way into lifelong friendships with everything larger than us, with our life of experience and with each other.

Our friendship with everything larger than us opens us to the wisdom of Source. This is the work of being. Our friendship with experience opens us to the wisdom of life on earth. This is the work of being human. And our friendship with each other opens us to the wisdom of care. This is the work of love. We need to stay loyal to these three friendships if we have any hope of living an awakened life. These three friendships—the work of being, the work of being human and the work of love—frame the journey.

In a daily way, listening is being present enough to hear the One in the many and the many in the One. Listening is an animating process by which we feel and understand the moment we are in, repeatedly connecting the inner world with the world around us, letting one inform the other.

All of this helps us hear who we are because our identity and the reach of our gifts can only be known in relationship. The wave would not exist if not for the reach of the ocean that lifts it, and the mountain would not exist if not for the steadfastness of the earth that supports it. Listening helps us discover our relationship to all that supports us in life. Listening helps us find our place as a living part in a living Universe. And each moment is a new place to start, no matter how overwhelmed we might feel. For the living Universe can be entered at any time by listening to our inmost self. This begins by meeting ourselves and opening our minds to silence. It helps to think of silence as the connective tissue for all life. By listening to silence, we can be nourished by everything that is larger than us.

It is giving our complete attention to the silence that holds our self that awakens us to both the soul's calling and the call of the soul. While the soul's calling is the work we are born to do, the call of the soul is the irrepressible yearning to experience aliveness. The center of our aliveness doesn't care what we achieve or accomplish, only that we stay close to the pulse of what it means to be alive. In doing this, we stay close to the energy of all life.

The deeper we look at listening, the more we find that it has to do with being present, because a commitment to being fully present enables us to listen more to others, to their dreams and pain, to the retelling of their stories. It deepens our compassion. And listening to the history of our heart allows us to hear and feel the sweet ache of being alive.

Each of these ways of listening—to our inmost self, to the silence that joins everything, to the soul's calling for meaningful work, to the call of the soul to simply be alive, to the complete presence of others that holding nothing back opens in us, and to the tug of life and its sweet ache of constant connection—is a practice that deepens our understanding of who we are and of the precious life we're given in our time on earth.

Please visit MarkNepo.com and ThreeIntentions.com.

The One Thing You Can Do to Honor Your Inner Voice - By Gary Zukav

Multisensory perception is life changing. It allows us to see what is nonphysical as well as what is physical. Everyone's life is changing in this way. We are becoming more aware of intuition. We have more to pay attention to.

There is no single way to experience intuition. It is different for everyone. Do you know anyone who is exactly like you—who weighs the same, has the same color hair and the same length arms? That is not possible because each of us is different.

The same is true of intuition. Some people have hunches. Some get ideas. Some people hear music, and others see pictures. Some people get sensations, like the feeling of a crisp winter day. Others hear words, like I did with Grandmother Libby. None is the correct, or the only, way.

You can find your way by paying attention to what is happening inside of you. This is the biggest difference between five-sensory perception and multisensory perception: The five senses require you to pay attention to what is outside of you. Intuition requires that you pay attention to what is happening within.

Gary Zukav is the author of Spiritual Partnership: The Journey to Authentic Power. This article is from his book, Soul Stories.

10:30pm -

The problem with beliefs is if you don't believe what others believe, there's something wrong with you. Perhaps there's something wrong with the need to believe at all costs. Being has no need to defend anything what so ever...

There's no believing in awareness. One is either aware or unaware...

In order for pain and suffering to exist, one has to believe in lies. Beliefs (lies) are dependent on things being a certain way. Awareness/BEING has no need of anything being one way or the other. That's the problem with believing, it takes one away from the present moment of what is.

Being's truth is not the same thing as beliefs. Truth has no need to defend itself; it just is. Beliefs on the other hand require diligence to correct those who are not obedient to the beliefs. Ironically, the obvious is overlooked for something more intellectually stimulating and there in lies the rub.

11-17-12 -

"The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it." (Oneness With All Life) Eckhart Tolle

There is only one Being. We are not separate from Being nor Nature, nor Earth, nor Solar System, nor Galaxy. There is only One and you will never know this. There is only the experience of Being in every pristine present moment. Be present and you experience the wonder. Let go of the present and you enter hell. It's that simple.  The conditioned mind likes to hold onto cherished ideas (beliefs), thinking it knows better than the presence of Being. And as long as one IDENTIFIES with the mind as their Being, they will never experience Being.

Perhaps one has glimpses of this Oneness, but realize it is the mind that blocks awareness. The many like to think Being/God favors their cause or their ideas, but this is only the delusions of the mind pretending to KNOW better than Being/God. The mind prefers hell over heaven, and has conveniently convinced the many that hell is heaven. There is nothing to repent except thinking you know; thinking you know is the punishment, is the suffering. But oh how the mind must convince you. The suffering is indicative of its success!