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What the Gods Made for Play

 

“Forget the future; it’s far too easy to dream. Forget the past, those chains only keep you bound in the realm of memory, as One cannot reach the new by dragging the limits of old” ~ Alistar Valadez

People hear this type of statement in one form or another frequently. While some understand what he is trying to say, many miss the depth of meaning such simple yet elegant statements can convey. The above statement, like others you will find in this essay, is from a short passage written by a young friend of mine, someone who is on the path of awakening. I chose this particular piece of that passage to open this essay because the message within it is something I have written about many times, in whole or in part, and for good reason. Grasping what it implies and putting it into practice is an integral part of the road to better balance in life, to happiness and healing and most certainly greater enlightenment and so forth.

Part of the reason many of us do not grasp the value of this statement is that we have so much mental and emotional baggage that while it seems fine and worthy or perhaps even right it is an elusive goal. This baggage is the “limits of old” that Alistar is referring to. Nor is it limited to past baggage as even ones dreams of the future are based on past thoughts or “the old”.

Each of us knows we have baggage, we are even consciously aware of some of it. We see some of it when it is exposed to us by our reactions to our experiences, but they are the tip of the iceberg or one of the loose threads in a knotted ball of twine. We have not built our knot of string (thoughts) in a day; it has taken our whole lives to develop the ones we have. Further, the way our mind processes our experiences increases the entanglement between our thoughts. As a result when we try to make progress in one area we find ourselves pulled back by another. This is in no small way part of why the knot is so hard to unravel.

 

 

The reality is we can be subject primarily to our past and live in that tangled web or we can forgo its illusionary safety and sanctity and walk a different path. As I’ve said before, neither choice is right or wrong. The choice taken, regardless of how one may view the choice, is the one we were capable of making at the time. This is not arbitrary, random or simply happenstance. It is another example of “could have, should have ... would have”. Almost invariably, we will end up doing just what we are doing for who we in totality attracts experiences for us to learn from. We move on from issues when we are ready to and not before.

This does not preclude us from doing something about it, something we will do when we are ready to or need to in order to attract the experiences we need. If we have this intent, to get to the new, to the now rather than dragging around the old, it simply becomes a matter of how to go about it. I do not use the word simply to make it sound easy to do, only because the choice to do something about it comes before the doing regardless of the challenge it provides. Developing the requisite intent is actually one of the most significant aspects of it, in some ways it is harder than going about doing it.

Yes, any of us who are trying to do this can still find ourselves getting frustrated with others, feel trapped by circumstances we cannot control or struggle with strong emotions or loneliness and so on. We can long for the new and the now we get from fleeting glimpses of it. We can want this, be seeking it, even while we struggle with facets of life, including internal ones. The question then is how do we forget the past?

In the essay “Listening to the Silence” (part 4 of the Awakening Our Gifts series (1)) I spoke about getting past the noise of our thoughts and emotions. In the below passage I spoke about what keeps us from doing so:

“See your mind as an incredibly complex crystal. When the mind is clouded, or occluded by poor programming, little light can pass through the crystal, either from outside in or inside out. Clear up the blockage and the light can pass through far more readily. What we want to do is learn to tune into the light that already exists. When we have cleared some of the programming and worked on how we interpret out experiences, the main block to our sensitivity is no longer primarily due to the programming of our minds, which in this analogy it is the structure of the crystal. It is due to the nature of the crystal, or the mind itself. That is to say the building blocks of the crystal (our mind) are not aligned with the nature of Cosmos itself. Without aligning our minds with the nature of the Cosmos the light may be able to get through but it is scattered.”

The programming I refer to is the legacy of our past, and a great deal of it is very necessary. We cannot function if we have to reprocess everything. We get so much input each and every moment that we do need our minds to correlate things, even to filter out what is irrelevant at a particular point in time. If not we would be overwhelmed by input and spend our time sorting through it. That said, while how we have programmed our minds is not the only challenge to being in the now but it is one of the biggest. This is because many of our mental programs are based on superficial observation, mistaken notions and erroneous reasoning. Good examples of this, ones I am sure most of can all relate to are found in how we stereotype people, jump to conclusions based on little or inaccurate information and in the filters and blocks we encounter as we try to grow and learn.

The past is not something we can actually forget. The experiences we have had remain with us in their raw essence though we cannot be conscious of them save through our thoughts about our experiences or if we have developed more of our higher awareness. The raw essence gets buried beneath the plethora of thoughts we have had about them but it is not gone. Our memories, even false ones, do not erase the actual experiences, they merely make them harder to get to. These thoughts are what I believe Alistar meant by “those chains only keep you bound in the realm of memory “.

The “newness” I have been referring to is only apparent when we are reacting to raw experiences or as close to them as possible. This most often occurs when we are using as few existing thoughts. Consider that if we only use previous thoughts every time we react to a new experience, that is we frame it in terms of the past, we cannot experience it as new and cannot get to the now.

Even though we cannot “forget” the past, we can change the thoughts we have created, and in many cases modified, as a result of our experiences. As we do this our mind clears, and we get closer to the actual experiences and become less encumbered by our thoughts about them. As I stated in the last essay Three Words (2):

“Do not grow old prematurely by forsaking your curiosity for the comfortable confines of what you know already, it is a prison.”

By this I mean once we experience the now only through our existent thoughts about now we are living in a house that is fixed and rigid. It cannot “see” the new save in terms of the old. This binds us to the past and becomes our prison. For those on a personal or spiritual growth path I think it is safe to say that we know we are not going to get to that “happy place” (whatever that may be for us) as long as we are stuck in the past and troubled by thoughts that bring about lower emotions. We want to be in a place where we are compassionate, caring and gracious and so forth rather than angry, scared, hurt or frustrated. Once again we are back at the question of “How do we go about it?”

 

“Keep your focus on the present moment, for that is the only place you have the power to make choices” ~ Alistar Valadez

 

Think about the above statement for a few moments.

 

What he is saying is if we are not in the present then we are letting our existing thoughts (which are from the past) handle our experiences. This means that we are not consciously making choices; our past is making them for us. Regardless of how we may feel about it, it really is that simple.

What we need to do is not contemplate this simple fact to the nth degree, save to come to terms with what it is saying. In addition, we need to accept that if we are not in the now, that is the present moment, we are not choosing. We need to make this a fundamental belief, not one subject to others, for this would render it ineffective. It would be like what I mentioned above, in how we can be making progress on one area only find something else holding or pulling us back. If we do not work to make it a fundamental belief then it will be overridden or restricted by some other belief(s) we hold.

I cannot give you a prescription for being in the now, if such a thing existed you would have heard about it long ago. We share a great many things, such as how our minds integrate experiences and why this tends to take us away from now, but the actual makeup of our mind itself is not one of them. Each of us must discover and unlock our own awareness our own way. My tangle of knotted thoughts is mine alone, as are my beliefs. They are different than yours and those of everyone else. That said there are definitely concrete steps one can take to work on their own knot. And we can and should approach it from the perspective of both our emotional reactions to and our thoughts about it.

 

 

The series on Awakening Our Gifts (found in the General Writings section of the Twin Powers website (3)) was written to share ideas about how to work on developing some of our non-rational awareness (not “mind” based). Being more in the now is the key to many of them. Enabling it requires one to shift from the external control based focus which is a basic element of the western mind, to one without such restrictions. It is certainly possible to do so without any formal training, though for many it remains elusive. This is especially true for those in the West where the need or desire to control remains strong, as Dion Fortune suggested in Chapter 2 of her book “The Mystical Qabalah:

“The dharma of the West differs from that of the East; it is therefore desirable to try and implant Eastern ideals in a Westerner? Withdrawal from the earth-plane is not his line of progress. The normal, healthy Westerner has no desire to escape from life, his urge is to conquer it and reduce it to order and harmony. It is only the pathological types who long to “cease upon the midnight with no pain” to be free from the wheel of birth and death; the normal Western temperament demands “life, more life”. “

For this reason the Western mind finds getting to “the now” a challenge. The urge to conquer and control is a product of the culture that has become part of its collective consciousness and the lessons to be learned lie in both doing this and learning to move past it. Those who are working on such things, at this point it is primarily applicable to those born in the West, are raised with this influence being a dominant one. As a result and again this is especially true of the Western mind, people do not concern themselves with putting their thoughts aside. They are far busier and have taken on a far greater interest in “doing rather than being”. Being is considering unproductive therefore one has to take deliberate steps in order to learn how to allow ourselves to set outside our thoughts, simply be with what is. This is one of the reasons the benefits of meditation has been largely ignored. We must start to see the value in acts that are often considered unproductive.

Examining and likely changing our beliefs facilitates this as the beliefs we have taken on guide and control both the degree of integration our mind goes through as well how it integrates experiences. When one is focused on control learning how to relinquish it is certainly not a priority. Do not assume that by stating this that I am suggesting in any way that there is something inherently wrong with having or sticking with this approach. We all have our lessons and this is one the West is working on; hence, it is merely the path many are on.

That said, each of us has the power to choose our path and there is no reason why we cannot work on learning “to be” rather than continually focusing on doing. While our beliefs can be restrictive, and we may be going through the process of examining them, we can still work on reaching the new, to get closer to the now and "being" more often than we have.

Given the Western minds propensity for control, one might be inclined to believe that trying to get to the new or the now is either not in the path or exceedingly difficult. Neither of these is necessarily the case. Being born in the Western world does not mean we are destined to follow the mindset that has developed. Certainly many are focused on learning to control and thereby learn about the consequences of this approach, but not all. There are those who are developing the awareness to both be and do. What they learn will eventually modify Western dharma. People such as Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts, for example, are contributing to this, though the shift will take some time.

In the meantime, we can work on this and need do so both in how we think and what we choose to do. We must modify our thinking processes to develop mental processes that are non-control based and in our actions seek opportunities “to be rather than to do”. And by being I do not mean relaxing on the couch and shutting off the mind. Doing this without having developed the though constructs to support it typically leads to one of two outcomes. First, the non-conscious or subconscious mind will continue to use existing thoughts, which are of the past, or it will shut down and the person will doze off or fall asleep.

Imagine that in your mind there are thoughts that act like a platform to support the rest of your thoughts. We spend a great deal of time developing a platform designed to support mental processes of doing. We do not build a platform designed to support mental processes that permit “not doing” or being. These must be developed and we develop them through modifying our beliefs and reinforce it through our actions.

How do we do this? Well, I have written at length in a number of essays about the nature of our mental house, developing our awareness and awakening our inherent gifts in this regard. What we all need to do is to continue to work on rebuilding our mental house and to start doing things in a different fashion. In many ways this means we must change our focus.

By living for outcomes, to attain something or to accomplish things and by being concerned about what happened in the past we allow such thoughts to become our focus. The consequence is that “being” is seen as having little value compared to “doing”, even when being in a perpetual state of doing is what leads us to the issues and challenges we face. We mistakenly think that by doing more and doing them differently we can change this. I believe that it is possible to do this but not only is it very difficult road it also tends to result in our losing more and more touch with our inner self and our true nature. Control is an illusion and the more we try to control the more knotted our minds become.

One of the best ways to get to being more and doing less is to shift our focus away from outcomes and towards what is going on right now. By this I mean we shift our focus away from thoughts about what we want and desire and how we can attain them and by examining our thoughts themselves. You may be inclined to think that in both these cases the mind is still seeking to control outcomes. Granted the difference is subtle, but there is a world of difference between them. Figuratively, one is living in our thoughts and looking out; the other is examining our thoughts, which is an act of looking in.

There is an old phrase about “taking time to smell the roses”. The idea behind this is that we need to take time to appreciate what is right here and now rather than always focusing on the next task or fulfilling our desires. This is in part what Alistar is referring to when he states “Life is about expression and expansion, not about longevity or achievements”.

To develop our capacity to “be”, we must let go of the thoughts that surface and, at times, force our mind to evaluate itself rather than continue running on the momentum generated by the past. Some can do the former, though they are the minority. Too few are able to ignore what is going on around them, the thoughts they have (baggage) or their reactions to their experiences and so on. There are many ways, for those who find it hard to simply “be”.

There are ways to accelerate the process of dumping the mental baggage that is in the way. One of the ways is to make it a priority to be more actively aware and pay greater attention to and examine what we are thinking and feeling. Another way is through meditation. The primary difference between them for the purpose I am referring to is that in one instance we are active and have lots of thoughts going on, which we do not have during meditation, and in meditation we have to go by memory of the thoughts and feelings we have greater clarity. I would add that even though we have to go by memory during meditation we can access the source of our baggage with far greater clarity and accuracy.

Doing either of these things does not come without challenges, but then again, few things worth doing can be done easily or casually. In order to start a fundamental requirement is that we make paying attention and examining our reactions important to us. If we do not do this first then our efforts to clear our mental noise will be hit and miss rendering it far less effective and lengthening the process. I recommend doing both. Yes, I realize that it seems like a great deal of effort; however, the results are worth the effort and if one is persistent it gets significantly easier to do.

So just what is the baggage that is getting in the way? What thought(s) is so important that it cannot be set aside for a time? Some people will say they just can’t stop their mind, I don’t believe in can’t, what I believe is that either they haven’t given it any serious effort or it has never been important enough to concern themselves with. I do not say this to be critical of people; it is perfectly acceptable to have other interests and pursuits. However, if you are trying to get to the new, then these are the kinds of questions we ask ourselves and these are the kinds of answers we seek. We will find it only when we release our bondage to the baggage of the past, even if only briefly.

We can do so when we notice our baggage and work on it at the time or do so by recalling it and then looking at it in contemplation or meditation. The process is not dissimilar to the one I outlined in the Honesty essay (4), when one is working on a specific thought when it occurs.

 

If you want to reconnect to newness in the moment one of the ways to do this is to observe a child under three playing. Do not concern yourself with what they are doing, try to feel their energy. Imagine you are them, doing the kinds of things they are doing, the sheer joy of discovery almost every single moment. Watch as the try to define their world for the first time. All they have to do is see something from a different angle and it becomes an entirely new thing!

They flutter about attracted to new thing after new thing with abandon. They will pick a dandelion and blow the seeds then marvel at how they float in the air. They do not understand why they do but giggle and laugh as the seeds shift and move in the wind. They will chase them and dance with them. Unlike older children and adults they are unconcerned about what others might think of their actions for their egos have not developed to the point where they put the brakes on their freedom to be as they feel.

A child does not yet have the ego that builds separation, for it is our ego that makes it hard to see the new, to be in the now. The duality it manifests is an illusion. The child doesn’t see it, everything is just there, and the separation does not yet exist, just wonder, curiosity and joy.

"As the One who is in union with the universe, finds that there truly is no division between the "You" and "Me", as we are continuous with the universe as a wave is continuous with the sea." ~ Alistar Valadez

Their energy flows freely, it envelopes them and radiates out … tap into it, allow yourself the freedom to be without concern for anything save the newness all around. See and feel it through them, let them remind you of what we have covered over with our programming so we may toss the covers aside.

Keep that feeling, try to remember it and carry it with you. Try to see even those you know or do things you are familiar with as if you are meeting them or doing them for the first time. Sometimes it is better to think of the process not as one of trying to get to the new, rather as changing so the new is revealed to us.

 

 

It is not easy, and it is not easy because what we are doing is not just learning to use something, like how to use our legs to walk. We are born with fully functioning legs, well most are. What we are not necessarily born with, to any great extent, is the ability to be conscious without thinking. Further, as I mentioned, in the process of growing up we cover over what openness to the now or the new that we do have. This is why many who try meditation tend to fall asleep or they get agitated and cannot stop thinking and be still; though this comes with practice.

In the first case their mind shuts down when it isn’t busy because we have not developed a mental platform for our mind to be active on. We have to train it so that we can slip into a state where thoughts are at a minimum. In the second it refuses to relinquish control, and so it gets restless, meanders and this can lead to anxiety, making it even more difficult.

To begin the process of working on the baggage that blocks us, once one has the requisite intent to work on their knot, we have to find or make time to pause and reflect as we go about our lives. I spoke about this in the essay “Three Words” (3), where I stated:

" And at all times remember that life itself is a gift and even when we are struggling, we can be joyful that we still have the gift of simply being alive ….”

We need to cease trying to get to the next moment as if we will somehow miss something if we do not, because ironically, this is what causes us to miss far more. This notion, of paying attention, was also examined in the essay Active Awareness (5), where I suggested this:

“Ones degree of self-awareness can be very challenging as many have allowed their experiences to block their awareness of what they feel in the moment. I have touched on this before. We should know exactly what we are feeling at any given moment in time. If we are asked how we feel we rarely if ever give anything more than vague generalities. We do not dig into our feelings and identify them. We have a mass of feelings and tend to label it with a generic term such as "I feel fine" or "I'm doing well" or... but we do not look into it, examine our feelings.

Most people have very little awareness of their emotional state at any given time. We often override and ignore our feelings and state they are not of concern or are unimportant or we will deal with them later. These avoidance techniques do not help us, they keep us locked in. If one is to develop their active awareness they must be willing to go deeper through self-examination or else their efforts will be for naught.”

When we are actively aware we do some form of the following:

Pay attention and notice what is perceived

  • Pay closer attention to what is going on now and not the past or tomorrow
  • Notice when we react in a negative way or with lower emotions to an experience
  • Make a “mental” note of the thought and the feel of our initial reactions as best we can

Consider and manage

  • Make sure we are grounded and if not do so (most important when reaction is strong)
  • Instead of living in the reaction observe our thoughts and emotions
  • Keep the thoughts and feelings in mind without focusing on them
  • Quiet our minds as best we can
  • Try to remember (even ask ourselves) why we might react as we have
  • If we do remember, reevaluate the experience using objectivity and reasoned thought

Resolve and remember

  • If reevaluating led us to resolution, reinforce and thereby empower the reevaluation of the experience
  • If reevaluation did not resolve the issue make note of the experience and the thoughts and feelings it evoked

 

To remember the above summarize it as: Notice, consider and resolve. This phrase can be helpful to remind us of what we are trying to do as “stop, drop and roll” is to those who may have the unfortunate occurrence to have part of their clothing catch fire.

 

For instance, if one is scared of spiders and sees one they certainly know they are scared of them, though maybe not why, by which I mean what experience(s) led to the fear. Outside of it being something we brought in with us in this lifetime, we are generally unaware of the original reason we took on a particular fear, phobia, like, dislike and so forth. Often it is simply because we took them on during our childhood, which is the stage where we were building our mental house. It could also be the case that the experiences solicited strong enough emotional reactions that the mind has blocked them in whole or in part from our conscious awareness.

As adults we have lots of thoughts and we use them without having to think about them. We tend to use existing thoughts, ones we manifested in past experiences. When we have a though it creates a track in space, figuratively speaking and once created (if sufficiently reinforced) we can then use it. When we are young we do not have such a mental house, and we spend a great deal of time integrating our experiences into thoughts, thoughts which gradually “gel” to create our mind. It is this mind we use as adults. The memories of early childhood experiences are part of the fabric of the house and become harder to access because they become buried by layers of experiences. In these cases the thoughts will need to be coaxed out, just like teasing apart a ball of knotted string.

You do not loosen a knot by tugging on what you can, you tease it, loosen it up. You work on more than one section of the string and gradually unravel it. The process with our mind is similar, though because of its nature the mind can be made to clear knots more easily, almost as if you could make a few of the knots in the tangle of them just vanish. This is what happens when we have an epiphany or a moment of clarity when old ideas just fade and the new settles in like it had always been there.

We can set ourselves up to have epiphanies if we work on what surfaces in our lives or we take on a higher level and hence more influential belief that override the others. We have to accept that every moment is new and not blindly move towards the next one and barely, if at all, notice the one that is occurring or just passed. We have to see the value in this and this is where we may find we have to evaluate what is important to us.

“We all know that clarity never comes to the One who has their EYE closed” ~ Alistar Valadez

Ones idea of self factors into this a great deal. Some have learned to open up to the world to a greater degree, and seek the new. They do not seek the comfortable confines of a regimented and “safe life”. Yet a great many are still stuck in the dharma of the west I referred to earlier. If you struggle with finding the now, perhaps start asking yourself some questions. You can come up with your own I am sure, but some might be ones such as:

  • Do I feel that it is important to exercise control in my life?
  • Do I believe that my focus should be to acquire what I  need to live comfortably?
  • Do I always have to be doing something?
  • Do I have to have be a reason for my actions or choices?
  • Do I care about what others might think of me or even I of myself if I act more "childlike and carefree"?

 

 

These types of beliefs and thoughts make it harder to find the new, that we have them shows we have baggage. In addition, the ones I have mentioned above are almost invariably accompanied by a fear of our own deaths and the great unknown beyond it. Fear of death is what has us chasing wants and desires; it forces us into the tight confines that lie between our birth and inevitable demise. This is in no small part why we seek to control and to be comfortable and to try to fulfill the desires of our minds: our minds are impermanent. If we want to be more "in the now", to see things as new and wondrous, we need to start to shed our views about and fears of our own mortality. Alistar’s composition started off with the below quote, which as you will be able to tell from the title of this piece, is what captured my attention when I came across his post:

“Far too many take too serious what the gods made for play, for One who knows that consciousness continues after death [has] a far different view from someone who views life as the end.”~Alistar Valadez

In the grand scheme of things control, acquiring things and doing things with a purpose or reason in mind are not important. It is we who have made them important. If we want to be more now we have to make them less important. By that I don’t mean we ignore them, for that would be foolish; however, for many surviving is not the challenge it once was. So, we just need to adjust to this, to make them less dominant. This will make room in our world for now.

There is one more thing that must be reinforced and is a common theme in my writings, namely the idea that our ego is not us, and that we are part of the ALL though we tend to view ourselves as separate from the world around us because of our ego. This also makes it hard to be now because we live in our minds, we exist in our minds and all we purview also exists there. If our mind were a hammer then instead of being able to wield the hammer, we have become it. This is our minds construction and what it does is keep our being from expressing itself freely, and unencumbered like a child does.

“As the One who is in union with the universe, finds that there truly is no division between the "You" and "Me", as we are continuous with the universe as a wave is continuous with the sea." ~Alistar Valadez

We have a hard time being in the now because of our ego, our mind. In order to see through the veil it creates we need to see it for what it is. This was why I wrote the Awakening Our Gifts series. We want to be childlike, as I spoke of earlier. We have few thoughts separating us from what IS. The below passage from the second last essay in the series, The One and the All (6), speaks of this:

“It is our ego that creates the illusion of separateness. Our ego is not some separate aspect of us, it is the result of the thoughts we have. If you are seeing a pattern here, namely that so much of our awareness relates to thoughts we have about us then you have been paying attention! In order to embrace ourselves as being part of the ALL, we must begin to examine our ideas around the notion of “personal will”. This is arguably the single most challenging belief to deal with. Everything in our lives tends to tell us that we have freedom of choice; that is we choose what to do and what not to do because we are individuals. This should immediately raise a red flag for if you have been working on the eliminating the separateness between yourself and the world around you then you should have already considered that what we see as self is an illusion.

Ask yourself this, “Can we have a personal will if indeed we are not separate from the world/Cosmos around us?” Do not take this question lightly for it goes to the heart of everything we believe about who and what we are. Indeed, it is something one must contemplate and even better, meditate on. What truly separates us from the world, Cosmos and even GOD, is the idea that we have personal will. Everything we do appears to tell us that we do. We appear to choose to do one thing and not another, we make personal choices even if we consider others in the choices we make, but do we?”

A young child has no little or virtually no notion of personal will, their mind is still evolving and so the child has not become separate from the ALL at all, it is fully immersed in and part of it. As adults we think too much, and only when we turn the lights off upstairs and our turn our inner spirit on is the mind still and we rejoice in the wonder that all around us!

 

There is mystery in the seeking,

A game of hide and seek with ourselves

We will poke and prod and see what we discover,

Until it’s time to step aside

So that the hidden can speak

And silence the hunger

That keeps us from being

 

© 2012 Allan Beveridge

 

Readers please note:

Below is the full text of the passage from which I extracted the quotes used throughout this essay. I provide it for you so you can read it as he wrote it and can enjoy without any further interpretation by me. Alistar Valadez, I thank you for the permission to use your passage in this essay, and for inspiring both me and this essay!

 

"Far too many take too serious what the gods made for play, for One who knows that consciousness continues after death is a far different view from someone who views life as the end. Life is about expression and expansion, not about longevity or achievements, to transcend the ego and evolve into true conscious BEings. That is what we ARE, this is to be discovered, for the time has come for a true rebirth of spirit. Forget the future, its far too easy to dream. Forget the past, those chains only keep you bound in the realm of memory, as One cannot reach the new by dragging the limits of old. Keep your focus on the present moment, for that is the only place you have the power to make choices that can co-create Today. There is definitely a current which flows between us, don’t try to define it, just feel IT, go with the flow and SEE what IT unfolds. People cross paths for a deeper purpose and meaning, we all can learn from each other, if we could but silence the mind and listen. Always look at the aspects in life which reflect, and that which One can see in them-self. For no amount of understanding comes without the direct experience of reflecting, which is BEing like the perfect mirror. We all know that clarity never comes to the One who has their EYE closed, but for the One who can SEE, comes a understanding the feels like a form of telepathy. As the One who is in union with the universe, finds that there truly is no division between the "You" and "Me", as we are continuous with the universe as a wave is continuous with the sea."

 

References (*- denotes essays only available to site members of TheTwinPowers.com):

  1. Awakening Our Gifts Part 4: Listening to the Silence
  2. Three Words
  3. Awakening Our Gift Series (six part series under the Developing Our Awareness category in the General Writings section)
  4. Honesty
  5. Active Awareness
  6. Awakening Our Gifts Series Part 5: The One and the All