Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Going Beyond the Mind Games

When we see dysfunctional behavior in others, it makes us sick. However, when we see it in ourselves it's usually only after we have lashed out with a venomous attack against someone.

It's easier for some of us to believe that so-and-so is responsible for our behavior. Yet, we find it difficult to believe we are actually messy, the propagators of the hurtful gossip and the envious verbal daggers plunged into the backs of our friends, family members, and strangers.

Many of us find that it's also easier to feel victimized by the mind games perpetrated on us by our leaders than to take the time to find out what's happening inside our own minds that's causing us to feel this way. We sometimes forget that during our lifetime, we have filled our minds with so much intellectual garbage that they are cesspools for breeding dysfunctional behavior.

Nevertheless, on some occasions, when some of us get the courage to look inward and try to find out what's going on, it's downright shameful to discover all the toxic beliefs we have acquired over the years. They're stacked on top of each other, fighting for supremacy of our minds.

And some of them, such as anger, envy, jealousy, hatred, and addictions, have taken over. They own the space in our minds. While we try all types of things -- religion, prayer, meditation, money, fame, and so on -- to get rid of them, they continue to remain responsible for expressing the dysfunctional behavior in our lives.

After spending considerable time searching within the clutter, the toxic beliefs dumps, and the intellectual stench scattered throughout our minds, we get faint glimpses that most, if not all, of our beliefs came from our society, our parents, and our life experiences. And once we discover this fact, we usually don't want to go any further in our self-discovery, because we don't want to cast aspersions toward our parents.

Similarly, many of us actually feel badly even considering that our hardworking parents actually introduced us to our beliefs. Some of us feel like we're being ungrateful to our parents for all they did for us when we couldn't take care of ourselves.

Unfortunately, the deeper we go in our minds the clearer our understanding of life becomes. At some level,  we're able to see our lives without the illusions causing our dysfunctional behavior.  Some of us call this the level of clarity. 

When we gain the clarity to understand the origins of our beliefs, then we're able to stop playing mind games with ourselves. We can see our behavior as nothing more than reflections of our beliefs. And we are also  able to understand that our parents, acting as surrogates for society, were as victimized by their beliefs as we are now.

Meanwhile, for us to go beyond the mind games of blame, we must be willing to perceive ourselves with power that's independent of what we have been taught by others.

This means we must unlearn the toxic beliefs and develop the necessary clarity of mind to express the colorless, formless, and faceless awareness in our minds awaiting to be born into the world. This is a twenty-first century example of being born again.

When we stop playing mind games with ourselves, being reborn is nothing more than removing the dysfunctional behavior from our lives. Unfortunately, since we are the ones who are acting dysfunctional,  then we must be the ones responsible for changing the behavior.

So for this period of time when we are living as part of the holidays, let's begin to celebrate by being mindful of our mind games. And to commit ourselves to overcoming the dysfunctional behavior that's spewing from our minds.

Peace and enlightenment to all!

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Life Beneath the Middle-Class

Our beliefs are responsible for our powerlessness. They prevent us from perceiving the world as it is.

This point is illustrated clearly by the current debate in our society about the wealth disparity between rich and poor people. While this is the main focus of the debate, the greater concerns seem to be about the middle-class people, or those whose income falls somewhere in between the two polar opposites. 

Some of us who are struggling to make ends meet are more concerned about obtaining a well-paying job so we can pay the mortgage or rent, pay down some of our debt to get rid of the debt collectors, and buy the kids some decent clothes so they'll feel good about themselves, and not have to listen to other children tease them.

We're the other group that's excluded from the debate. We're the ones living beneath the middle-class, somewhere between the homeless and middle-class. For us, the debate is just another distraction in a day filled with too many distractions. We have piled too many negative beliefs into our minds that distort who we really are.

Nevertheless, in spite of our beliefs, some of us are aware of something in us that wants to come forth and express the hidden desires of greatness we so desperately want to accomplish. This something we feel is the enlightenment within our minds that's concealed by doubts, fears, and worries.

Unfortunately, we have bought into the class distinctions and our own powerlessness. And it is from the prism of our class distinctions that we perceive our lives and the world.

We victimize ourselves by believing we belong to a certain class of people, in this particular case a class beneath the middle-class. It could just as well be the middle or upper-class. Either way, this distinction is one of the primary obstacles preventing us from seeing the world and ourselves as we really are.

On the road to enlightenment, we see many things. We see people suffering beyond believability. We see people struggling to make sense of their lives. We see people living luxurious lifestyles with money, power, and fame. And we see people searching for their inner power. We don't know them, but we see them, and we identify with them.

We believe we know quite a bit about the upper-class people because they are the ones who supposedly control our lives. We believe we know even more about the middle class, because it's closer to us. And some of us, at one time or another, were middle-or upper middle-class.

Now we find ourselves, seemingly overnight, living beneath the middle-class, just a tad or paycheck away from the dreaded homeless people.And we know everyone is afraid of becoming homeless and joining a group that doesn't warrant a class distinction of any importance from society.

By living beneath the middle-class we receive all types of offers from ministers, politicians, social activists, self-help gurus, and so on. They offer us programs or pay-for-results inspirations. We are the ones that produce civil rights leaders, prosperity religion, mega-churches, government programs, welfare reform, healthcare reforms, and so forth.

We don't really have any leaders among ourselves, because most of us believe we're too powerless to have any influence in the society. We suffer from a leadership/dependency syndrome.

We need someone to liberate us from our own behavior. We believe we're powerless to help ourselves or incapable of freeing ourselves from the cyclical behavior causing the powerlessness in our lives.

Most of us have given up on ever becoming successful or making any type of meaningful contribution to the world. We have settled in to living beneath the middle-class, and rationalizing some form of success among people deemed by society to be unsuccessful.

It's a nightmare, but it's one we created. We believe these are the cards we have been dealt by our society.

Meanwhile, some of us are waking up our minds. And by doing so, we have discovered the power we have within ourselves to give us whatever we desire. We have discovered the enlightenment within our minds.

And with our new found friend, enlightenment, we are able to clearly understand why we live the way we do. We understand why our beliefs victimized our behavior. We understand how to unlearn what we have been taught to believe about ourselves. And we know that class distinctions are some of the beliefs that distort the enlightenment within us.

The truth about who we are is not found in the material status of our lives, but it's found in the spiritual clarity of our behavior. When we can see the world and ourselves as we truly exist, we can live freely from labels and characterizations such as class distinctions.

As we begin to do the work to develop our minds to unleash the enlightenment existing therein, we create a new paradigm for living. At this level of clarity, we begin to perceive ourselves as we really exist: colorless, faceless, and formless.

In other words, we see ourselves without societal labels and distinctions. We remove the labels, the distinctions, by changing our beliefs or unlearning what others have taught us about ourselves.

The power we seek is found beneath the beliefs defining us as something that we're not.

Now it's up to us recreate and revalue ourselves with the power and attributes that allow us to exist in this world with power and oneness.

Friday, December 2, 2011

The Power to Choose how we Want to Live

Can we become the person we dream about?

For many of us, it's difficult to believe we actually chose the lives we are currently living. How many of us would consciously give ourselves the problems of burgeoning debts, home foreclosures, anger, angst, and deep-seated powerlessness? Yet, whether we like it or not, these are the gifts we give to ourselves.

Many of us never dreamed as young children that we wouldn't become the exact images of our dreams. We talked endlessly of having a waterfront apartment in the City of our dreams, and having all the material possessions we craved from watching movies and television.

Some of us found great comfort in playing the mind games of living vicariously in illusory tales of success and fame. And depending on our living conditions, some of us had the power to play more sophisticated games than some of our less illumined contemporaries.  

Nevertheless, the mind games we play with ourselves can be both rewarding and punishing. During the course of a day, we imagine or dream about all sorts of things. Most of what we imagine or dream remains buried in our minds. We feel too powerless to move them from our minds into the visible world.

Whenever there's a death in our lives we mourn the loss. And in the death of our ideas, we mourn their loss too. We go through a grieving process that causes us to regret how we treated our ideas. And in some instances, we try to resurrect them from the dead.

Meanwhile, when we fail to resurrect our dead ideas, we begin to focus our attention on the outside world by looking for problems that resemble our own. We soon discover that the world's problems overwhelm us with more suffering.

At some point in time we began to judge the outside world and its people. We place people in categories according to our hallucinogenic perceptions of life. These are the times when we want the world to change so that we all can be liberated from our self-imposed powerlessness.

We believe that by changing the outside world, we are able to create a better life for ourselves. If people would only stop treating us so unjust, then we would be able to free our minds of the toxic beliefs causing us to feel powerless all the time. We could act on our dreams.

Similarly, during those moments of great angst when we suddenly believe it's unfair for people to be poor, or to be treated unjustly by the political, judicial, and economic powers, we decide that it's our responsibility to do something about it.

By changing the world, we believe we somehow remove the toxic beliefs that directed us on this course of action. Unfortunately, we have ignored doing the work on ourselves by working on liberating others. And in the process of changing the outside world, we have created more toxic beliefs in our minds.

 As we embrace more powerlessness in our lives, we crave more and more for a just society. We want the system to be fair so that everyone can express their dreams without interference from society. And most of all, we want a system that will liberate us  from the nightmarish lives we have created for ourselves. 

Meanwhile, at the core level of our dreams, our visions of living more abundant lives, we want to be the person we daydreamed about as children. The person we were reluctant to tell others about because we feared they would mock us.

This is the person that's causing us all the problems. And until there's fairness in the world, we cannot be that person. In other words, we believe we cannot be the person we want to be until the world changes to a more just one.

Whenever we feel this way, there's little space in our minds for us to see what's happening to us. Our minds are so cluttered by the illusions that we have allowed to consumed our lives that we're unable to perceive the world as it really is. A world free of illusions we have created to interpret our lives.

At some point in our lives, we forgot that we are the producer, director, writer, and actor in the movie we are creating of our lives. We have the power to produce whatever actions and outcomes we choose. We can create a happy-ending movie, or a horror one where we are fearful of everything around us.

The bottom line is that we can make ourselves into any person we choose. When we remove the toxic beliefs from our minds, and our clarity of the world improves, we are able to create the powerful person waiting to be born into the visible world.

Regardless to the number of times we try to change the outside world, we remain powerless to change the actions of the people who're not in our movies. This life is our movie. And until we clear away enough space in our minds for us to explore new choices, we remain as actors in our own horror movies.





Monday, November 28, 2011

The Limitless Power Beyond Race, Politics, and Religion

Let's face it, most of us are just waking up everyday. We're not living our lives with any passion or purpose. We are just working hard on not dying, or at least we think we are.

The thought of facing life each day makes us reach for something to motivate us to get out of bed. Perhaps it's money, a project, school, work, or even meeting someone for a romantic rendezvous. Whatever it is, it's not satisfying our desires to liberate our minds of the toxic beliefs disguising themselves as illusions.

 For us to find the clarity and peace we desire to have in our lives, we have to focus on ourselves. We must ask ourselves: why do we act the way we do? Is it because we have been trained to act this way? Are we doomed to live a life of suffering?

Sadly, we don't really know why we concern ourselves with trying to liberate other people from their suffering when we have so much suffering in our own lives. Perhaps it's our way of handling the suffering. And what's even sadder is how many people listen to us when we tell them we can solve their problems for them.

The power we seek is within our minds. It's the only connection we have to ourselves and the world. All of our ideas, decisions, and actions come from our minds. Even the beliefs we have about race, religion, politics, money, values, status, government, and other people come from the data we have stored in our minds.

At the core level of our existence, we don't really know who we are, or what we have been taught to believe about ourselves. In this miasma of dogma and egoism we struggle to make sense of our existence.

Nevertheless, the quality of our existence is determined by our minds. If we don't take the time to examine and remove the illusions that's preventing us from discovering who we are, then we must accept how others define us.

And if we desire to change our conditions, we must reach higher into our minds. We must work to free the mind so it can go beyond our current limitations. It's similar to going from basic mathematics to calculus or symbolic logic. If we stop at the basic mathematics level, we will never discover the existence of calculus or symbolic logic.

Similarly, because we don't know something, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It also doesn't mean we don't have the power to discover this existence and use it to either guide us deeper into our minds or treat it as an obstacle to the clarity we seek.

In my book, Seeds from the Ashes, I write about how to begin the process of self-discovery of the mind. The following informaton highlights this process:

   "On your journey to achieve enough power to change your life, you must continue to search for it within your mind, which is where your intuitive (unconditioned) consciousness is found.

   "This power must not be confused with illusionary powers found in societal positions such as the president of a country or a major corporation.

   "Whenever you think about achieving power, it means that either you are in an unpleasant situation or you have doubts about your abilities to obtain something that you desire to possess.

   "Regardless of your level of awareness, the desire for power is always present in your consciousness. What you think and know about yourself determines what you think and know about expressing power.

   "The purpose of changing your life is to assert that you have the power to do it. When you do, you open mind to see limitless possibilities; however, you must be willing to open your mind."

The choice to seek the power within our minds is ours to make.


Monday, November 14, 2011

Letting go of the Dysfunctional Behavior

Today, amidst the great pain and suffering in us and around us, many of us are searching for something outside of ourselves to make us feel whole, complete.

As we search for the answers to our self-made problems, some of us even feel a certain joy in watching others fail, or seeing them being publicly humiliated.

We have become victimized by the images of others. And, unfortunately, it is our beliefs about what's happening in the outside world that inextricably tie us to feelings of uncertainty, doubts, fears, and worries about what's happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, China, Occupy Oakland, politics, and so on.

It's important for us to remember that there's more to our lives than our interpretations of world  events. We are much greater than our current behavior. And there's so much information about ourselves that we don't want to know.

Nevertheless, to get to the point of knowing ourselves, we must let go of our dysfunctional behavior that's creating the illusory perceptions we have of the world and its people.  Some of this behavior goes unnoticed because we've become accustomed to it.

Yet, as we read "Seeds from the Ashes," we clearly see that behavior is transitory. It depends on us for its existence.

     "Many individuals who desire to live life more abundantly are unable to do so because they don't believe they will ever achieve it. It is easier for them to focus on the small , insignificant things in life that lead them to mediocrity and complacency.

    "When you focus on the small things in life such as anger, envy, jealousy, and hatred, you can't see the big picture. A small-minded individual expresses an aura of pettiness in his or her actions.

    "This type of thinking produces a cancerous mind that destroys your will to be successful and live life more abundantly.

    "Anyone who constantly focuses on the small things in life will find it difficult to believe in empowerment (enlightenment). This lower-level thinking is where victims live, in the shallow parts of the ocean among the reefs of lack and limitation and the barges of worry and fear.

    "For you to overcome victim consciousness (dysfunctional behavior), you must train your mind to go farther into the ocean where you will find the limitless thoughts of empowerment (enlightenment).

    "The goal of anyone who feels restricted by circumstances is to free himself or herself from the restrictions. To change your life, you must first leave the small things behind and swim toward your goal.

    "This means you must empower your mind to stop daydreaming and wishing for something magical to appear in your life. You must know, absolutely, that you are the source of all your actions. There is nothing that can ever happen in  your life without your knowing about it."

We have the power to discover the enlightenment within us.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Finding my Place in the World

Many of us at some point in our lives become curious about who we are or what's our purpose. It's as if we believe we are not the person others -- society, parents, and life experiences -- have taught us to be.

We cling to our beliefs and values that identify us as such and such. We believe we are of a certain race, gender, nation, state, and so on.

We even believe we are handsome, beautiful, ugly, fat, skinny, successful, important, failures, righteous, sinful, and so on.

Some people believe the truth about who we are is probably never known to us. And that it's our destinies to  live our lives never discovering our true identities. 

Similarly, we seem to be forever tied to the societal beliefs taught to us. We are always black, white, yellow, brown, African, European, Asian, Latino, and so forth. It's difficult to stop seeing ourselves and others in this manner.

And after awhile, we don't want to see ourselves any other way. These beliefs make us feel like we belong in the world. They make us feel proud about ourselves.

And at the end of our lives, our societal-made identities are personified by: Born on such and such date and died on such and such date. That's it!

Nevertheless, our self-made illusions remain with us even as we pass away from this world. We do so believing we are such and such person who's expecting to meet such and such person. 

Meanwhile, if we are nothing more than what we have been taught to believe about ourselves, then why should we search for something else; such as our true essence or purpose. And to make matters worse, why do we search for an alternative identity by holding on to our current  beliefs and values.

In other words, we search for our other identities by using the beliefs and values that caused us to question ourselves in the first place. For example, if we believe we are of a certain race or gender, we continue to cling to this belief even as we search for what we believe is our true self.

Unfortunately, it is these types of beliefs that victimize us. They represent the illusions imprisoning our minds with powerlessness, doubts, fears, and acceptance.

Nevertheless, some of us on the enlightenment path believe we can see ourselves and the world differently. We believe we can let go of the beliefs that define us according to the beliefs and values of others. And we believe we can gain the clarity to perceive the illusions as they really exist within our minds.

When we gain the necessary clarity of mind, we're able to  perceive our existence at the core level as colorless, formless, and faceless. We know that it's our beliefs that add the color, form, and face to our identities. And we know that these are the illusions we must work to overcome.

When we are truly reborn, or when we gain the clarity of mind, we are freed of the illusions defining us as such and such person.

This is our moment of clarity and rebirth; the moment when we see the world as it is, not how we have been conditioned by others to see it.

We end our search for who we are the moment we understand that our identification of who we are must come from us.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The Myths and Illusions of Victimization

Today, it's difficult for some of us to even admit we have toxic beliefs, much less think of ourselves as being victims of the myths and illusions we have embodied as our realities. 

So, let's set the record straight from the outset: Victims are created. We are not born victims, we are born into a victimized world of myths and illusions.

It really doesn't matter where we are born, the world provides us with its own wisdom. We get it from society, parents, and our own life experiences. We accept this information because it's all we know at the time.

Unfortunately, this information is toxic. It causes us to become dependent on certain beliefs that define us according to race, gender, color, country, and even states or cities.

It even causes us to add victimization to the adage" Nothing is certain in life but death and taxes." In other words, it's inescapable.

Nevertheless, if we are all born into a victimized world, then how do we free ourselves from what we have been taught? How do we unlearn victimization?

After we settle in to calling the world our homes, it's difficult to imagine anything else. We don't want it to change because the change would alter our perceptions of ourselves.

We learn to feel good about ourselves. We even rationalize that even though the world seems unfair, that's just the way it is. And only the strong survive.

The idea or notion of survival itself comes from our lack of understanding about ourselves. Most of us think of survival as the opposite of dying. So we're basically afraid of dying or ceasing to exist in the world we have come to know and love.

Most of us don't know why we want to live. We are constantly asking ourselves and others about ways to determine our purposes for being in the world.

And because we seem not to know our purposes for being in the world, it follows we also don't know why we seek the things -- money, fame, power, wisdom, and so forth -- to help us define our purposes.

Life as we know it is a myth. It is nothing more than our beliefs in illusory concepts of human behavior, societal wisdom, and ignorance about our purposes.

Meanwhile, if life is a myth, then are we also myths? Well, most of us know that we are not myths. We know that we have been conditioned to think, act, and live a certain way. The problem for us is we just don't know what to do about it.

We want to change, but change to what?  What else can we become other than what the world has shown us.

We even clog our minds with semantic debates about freedom, dualism, and going to a mystical place we know even less about than the world we are in now.

Well, some of us believe the key to understanding the myths and illusions victimizing our minds is found in our minds. At least that part of our minds that has not been conditioned to think and act as victims.

This is the clarity of enlightenment that will free the mind to perceive the other limitless possibilities available for us to use to overcome our toxic beliefs.

For us, enlightenment exists only in our unconditioned consciousness -- the timeless awareness of life itself. From this consciousness we can imagine ourselves to be whatever we choose. There are no limitations placed on our being.

To imagine ourselves as free means we are free of the myths and illusions ruling the world. It's that simple.

Enlightenment, once you gain the awareness, is clear and easy to understand. And, unlike victim-laden changes; where we go from one illusion to another, it's real clarity of purpose.


Monday, October 17, 2011

"Seeking Permission from Others"

Regardless to what people say, it's difficult to trust ourselves. We have been trained to seek outside information before we make the tough decisions. This is all a part of our human development.

One of the primary goals of enlightenment is to free the mind of the toxic beliefs we have been taught by others. And to do this, we must be willing to examine the formation of our beliefs. So, trust in ourselves is key to this process.

Several weeks ago, I read a great chapter in "Seeds from the Ashes," which I will share with you. The part I am sharing focuses on "Seeking Permission from Others."

"On your journey to discover the power you have to change the way you think, act, work, and live, you will have moments when you distrust yourself.

"During those moments when you feel isolated and unsure of yourself, there will be a tendency to seek guidance from others on whether you should continue on your journey.

"There are usually some people in your life that you respect and admire for their accomplishments. You value these individuals' opinions about you. You seek their advice on matters of great importance to you.

"If they say it is okay to move forward with an idea, it gives you comfort and confidence. Conversely, if they say you shouldn't move forward with your idea, it might cause you to second-guess yourself."

"These individuals represent your support system.

"There is another support system available to you. This one is far greater than your current one, because it advises you on how to change your life. This is a support system of one, you.

"You can use it whenever you want because it is within your mind -- intuitive consciousness -- where you will find this great support system that will give you the necessary power to change the way you think and live.

"You must know that you do not need permission from anyone, except you, to change the way you think and live. Someone told me a few months ago, 'It is better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.'

"It is better for you to take action based on your ideas rather than asking someone else's permission."

Oh, the joys of enlightenment. We find so much information within our minds.


Monday, October 10, 2011

Looking Inside for the Answers

When we are troubled and feel victimized by our problems, we find it difficult to search within ourselves for the solutions. For one thing, we don't know where to look.

All of this talk about inner power has little meaning when we are faced with delinquent mortgages, credit card debts, and prolonged unemployment. All we can think about is how to get the money to pay our bills.

And if we believed there is something actually within us that would provide us with the money we need, we would have already discovered it years ago.

Looking within ourselves for answers is for most of us similar to our praying for rain. The rain comes whenever it comes and there's nothing we can do about it.

So there is little need for most people to even take the inner-power statement seriously. And when we do take it seriously, many of us turn our attention to finding someone to help us discover this power.

WE typically go to people who profess to have discovered inner power. We cling to their every word, almost begging them to lead us to this power so we can pay our bills.

There's usually a price for this information -- time, money, commitment, and loyalty -- if we want to get the full benefit of  it. The more we give of ourselves, the greater chance we have of discovering our inner power.

Meanwhile, when we get a job, pay our bills or save our homes, we naturally attribute the results to our inner power. We opine that we stuck with it and look at us now.

After we believe we have discovered our inner power, we think this is the answer to all our problems. Unfortunately, unbeknown to us, we must return again and again and seek guidance from the people who taught us how to find our power.

Now what we find interesting about inner power, and our search for it, is that it's nothing more than great clarity within our minds to free us of our powerless beliefs. This clarity can be accessed simply by taking the time to understand how we first came to distrust ourselves as the solvers of our own problems.

Inner power or unconditioned consciousness has a limitless capacity to go beyond our current awareness of ourselves, the power we have, and our relationship with others.  It's within us as a fail safe mechanism to protect us from the illusions we believe in and worship with our time and resources.

For many of us unconditioned consciousness is just as elusive as inner power: We don't know how to find it much less use it to enlighten ourselves.

At the practical awareness of life, we can only believe in the realness of the illusions we have given life to. So the first thing we must do is create enough space in our minds to clearly understand that our problems come from us.

We endow them with the power to live in our lives as long as we want them to. They endure because we allow them to.

For us to remove the illusions from our lives, we must first have the clarity of mind to understand their origins and how and why we created them.

This process allows us to perceive our illusions of debts, unemployment, and home foreclosures as being the results of our actions, whether we were aware of them or not.

When create the space for clarity in our minds, we have the awareness of the transformative power in us. At this level of awareness our minds become active with transformation.

We now know the illusions exist only within our minds. And their realness is there because of our lack of understanding about what we have created in our lives.

When we become aware of what we are doing, we also become aware of the power we have to create pleasant and unpleasant results in our lives.

This awareness of the undiscovered power within our minds is what it means to discover our inner power or unconditioned consciousness. It's something we can do without charge, except for our commitment to trust our own power.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Development of a Toxic Mind

One day, and usually without any warning, we realize our minds are overwhelmed by toxic beliefs. They're there, creating all kinds of havoc in our lives, but we don't know exactly where they come from.  All we really know is there's something unknown within our minds that's responsible for the suffering in our lives. 

The first place some of us look for answers is outside of our minds. We do so because it's difficult for us to believe our suffering comes from inside of us.  So we search for answers outside of ourselves.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons for us to believe that most of our toxic beliefs came from outside of us.  Since we're born into a highly toxic world, and since our beliefs came from this world, we believe the world is responsible for our suffering.

And for most of us, this is valid. While it is valid, it is not the complete reason for our toxic minds. We also participated willingly, in the sense that we were unaware of any alternatives, in our own development of toxic minds. 

Unfortunately, even our absence of alternatives don't clearly reveal to us exactly how and why we were taught these beliefs. We didn't see any warning signs that what we were being taught could be harmful to us later on in life. Everything in our development seemed like an innocuous learning process.

Our learning process to become human is entrusted to society, parents, and our own life experiences. So there's little reason for us to believe or fear language and history, spiritual and cultural values, racial and class distinctions as being harmful to us. We just continue to accept all this information into our fertile, nontoxic minds.

At some point in our development, we begin to perceive ourselves as individuals with certain physical and psychological attributes that separate us from others. We begin to believe we are unique.

And within our uniqueness we believe we have free will, special God-given talents, and a purpose in life that others don't necessarily possess. We translate our uniqueness into individualism, which allows us to believe we are somehow different from others.

Meanwhile, we begin to observe that others have this uniqueness, too. Some of them have different language and history backgrounds, different spiritual and cultural values, and they belong to different racial and class groups.

After awhile, we begin to accept the toxic beliefs as part of our uniqueness. They make us different from others, even though others have toxic beliefs, too.
Similarly, from our life experiences, we also accept that there are few, if any, alternatives to the beliefs and values we use to confirm our uniqueness. So, even after we have the power to teach ourselves new beliefs and values, we continue to hold on to the toxic ones. 

For some of us to go beyond our uniqueness, we must be willing to explore alternative knowledge to create a new awareness of ourselves that's void of ego-driven uniqueness. In other words, we have to create a new person; a sort of psychologically rebirth of our minds.

To go beyond the illusory uniqueness that's caused by our toxic beliefs, we must believe and search  within our minds for the unconditioned awareness that remains unaffected by toxic beliefs.

This inner power or unconditioned consciousness is there for us to use to teach ourselves limitless beliefs and values to liberate our minds of toxic beliefs. The price for this awareness is the willingness to search for the inner power or unconditioned consciousness within our minds.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Understanding Inner Power -- Part 2

Every time we decide to blame people and circumstances for our problems, we move further from ourselves and the power we have within us. Many of us believe this inner power can do all sorts of things that we're unable to do for ourselves.

Similarly, some of us believe our inner power is our secret weapon we use to free us from difficult situations. Regardless to our various interpretations of this power, for most of us it's real.

So if it's real, what is it really.

Some of us believe inner power is simply our unconditioned consciousness. The consciousness that remains free of the illusions distorting who we are without our beliefs.

It is the state of awareness where we are colorless, faceless, and formless. And it is from this awareness, we are able to truly liberate ourselves from the toxic beliefs responsible for our suffering. 

For us to move beyond the intellectual gymnastics of comparing unconditioned consciousness with innate ideas, we must first feel we are something other than what we currently believe ourselves to be.

And to a larger degree, we must know that creativity or intuitiveness provides us with the introspection to know that it's possible to go beyond the limitations of our current beliefs.

Many people believe this inner power is our Creator existing within us. It really doesn't matter what we believe about this power, what really matters is how we use it to overcome our suffering. After all, whatever it is, we believe it's somewhere within our minds.

All of our actions come from what we think, which comes from our mind. Prayer and meditation are acts occurring in our minds. In other words, we are using our minds to connect our thoughts to power source we believe can assist us with our problems or challenges in life.

Meanwhile, some of us begin to equate prayer and meditation as solutions to our problems rather than tools we use to gain the clarity and courage we need to act.

All of our power comes from our mind or the consciousness that's aware of itself as a mind. So all of our work must focus on liberating the mind of the toxic beliefs causing us to believe we are powerless or victims of life itself.

When we do the work of liberating our minds of the toxic beliefs, we provide ourselves with the freedom to use our inner power or unconditioned consciousness to create a new person.  This the essence of being reborn again.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Understanding Inner Power

When believe our problems are insurmountable, too difficult for us to solve ourselves, some of us turn to prayer or meditation for assistance. At the deepest level of our suffering is the cause of our suffering: our actions.

Some of us believe inner power is a magical place within us where we can go whenever we dislike the results we are creating in our lives.

So to understand inner power, we must first understand ourselves prior to having our minds conditioned to think and act according to the ways others want us to think and act. In "Seeds from the Ashes," we understand the true nature of inner power and how it resonates within each of us.

Here are some cogent tips from "Seeds from the Ashes" to assist us with understanding inner power:

"Each day the morning sun brings with its light your vision to change. Within the sun's rays is the solution for all your problems. This day contains a bountiful supply of creative ideas sufficient to solve any problem you are facing.

"The question for you is: Do you treat these ideas with contempt, disdain and familiarity because they come to you so freely?

"Try, try, try, but you will quickly discover that an unhappy person cannot ignore his or her desires to change. They are too powerful for those besieged with lack, limitation, and struggle to ignore.

"Your desires exist to serve you and only you. They are the essence of your life. Without desires, you would cease to exist as a viable person. They represent your spiritual DNA.

"If you feel weak spiritually and materially, it is because you are manifesting weak and unfocused desires. If you feel strong and powerful, it is because you are manifesting strong and focused desires.

"During moments of great despair in your life, you will find a plentiful supply of strong desires willing to step forward and lead you out of your despair. You must be willing to allow these desires into your life and treat them as your warriors.

"Like all great leaders, you need strong warriors to follow you into battle; however, they need you to guide them.

"The power to change exists only within your mind. You truly are what you think. If you think you are weak and powerless, you act like it. If you think you are strong and powerful, you act thusly.

"Your thoughts express themselves within your desires. If you have no desires, it is because you have ignored your thoughts.

"Today is the moment you make the decision to change your life. You want to do it now rather than putting it off for a later time. By acting now, you take the first step toward proclaiming your worthiness to express greatness."

For us to clearly understand inner power, we must liberate our minds from the toxic beliefs causing us to believe we are powerless to solve our own problems.

We'll continue our discussion on inner power in our next blog.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Self-Imposed Obstacles

When we finally decide to do something about changing our behavior, we awaken the desires in us to become actively engaged in our actions. Now they want to do something different from the boring work of creating lack, limitation, struggle, low self-esteem, fear, anger, and so forth in our lives.

This new awakening that occurs in our lives every time we want to change brings with it the energy, the power, and the knowledge of expression. This gives us the courage to take action.

At the moment of change, when we're feeling jubilant, energetic, and courageous, we also awaken the illusions of self-imposed obstacles, which, up to this point, have been the dominant forces in our lives.

And as we can see from the insights in "Seeds from the Ashes," they are formidable foes.

" When you discover you are responsible for the problems in your life, you also know that to overcome those problems you must remove the obstacles that keep you tied to them.

"You discover the obstacles in your life by examining the cause of your problems.

"As the creator of everything in your life, including the obstacles expressing themselves as lack, limitation, fear, doubt, and struggle, you are also responsible for removing them from your life.

"You can develop a plan, a strategy, and a commitment to achieving success.

"The thought of achieving success is a daunting one for someone who believes he or she is powerless. When you confirm your poverty, you confirm the lack in your life.

"When you confirm your obstacles, you confirm the limitation in your life. When you confirm the fears in your life, you confirm the doubts in your life. When you confirm the struggle in your life, you confirm the powerlessness in your life.

"These beliefs become the bases for your self-imposed obstacles, while your new actions become the bases for you to achieve a new way to think and live."

We are always present in all of our actions. This makes us responsible for creating them and for taking the actions to change them.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Eliminating the Victim Mind

'Your memories of the past prevent you from seeing today clearly."

Some of us want to change our lives without entering in to self-discovery where we must take the time to uprooted the toxic weeds (thoughts) choking the life out of our desires.

Today presents us with another opportunity to do something about how we're feeling about our present living conditions. And regardless to whether we believe we are victims of our own thinking or not, none of us has achieved the required enlightenment that provides us with the insights where we don't have anymore questions.

So, in keeping with enlightenment recipes for the mind, let's take a peek in "Seeds from the Ashes" and see what's cooking today.

"The desire to change is a powerful force that you must reckon with if you want to change the way you think, act, work, and live. The undercurrent of power producing your desires connects you with a much higher power.

"If you search for this power, it not only transform your life, it will lead you to your unconditioned, uncluttered, intuitive consciousness: a place where all things are possible. Unfortunately, far too many people believe this consciousness exists outside of them.

"Nevertheless, the desire to change is the first step in the self-discovery process: a process you use to examine your life and develop an action plan to change it.

"The self-discovery process empowers you to go beyond the boundaries imposed on you by family, friends, and society. It leads you into another level of consciousness where you will face the challenges of establishing new, more complex relationships with other people.

"The moment you feel overpowered by illusions of poverty, unemployment, failure, addiction, and fear is the moment for you to discover why you feel this way. For many, the way to begin is by acknowledging that they have a problem. 

"It's a problem to be treated with a sense of urgency, similar to the way you would treat a cancer spreading through your body. If it's left untreated, you can expect pernicious results.

"The time it takes to change your life is your time, not someone else's time. You cannot turn your challenges over to seminar leaders, spiritual deities, or political leaders, because they do not have the power to change your life. They can talk about the resources that you can us to assist you with overcoming your problems.

"They tell you success stories, make promises, and extol you to believe everything will be all right. However, after awhile, you will realize that it is you who know exactly what's bothering you and what you need to do to solve the problems you are facing.

"When you become uncomfortable with your life, you will seek a way to change it. Most people seek ways to change their lives when they become uncomfortable with their present situation.

"The greater your discomfort, the stronger your desires to change. So ask yourself: Are you ready to change today, or will you wait until tomorrow? The answer depends on the present intensity of your desires.

"If you are truly unhappy with your present condition, then you are ready now to take the first step to change.

During moment of great despair in your life, you will find a plentiful supply of strong desires willing to step forward and lead you out of your despair. You must be willing to allow these desires into your life and treat them as your warriors.

""Like all great leaders, you need strong warriors to follow you into battle; however, they need you to guide them."

The toxic beliefs victimizing our minds are the illusions we accept as reality. When we remove them, we are able to see clearly enough to create a new reality.

Monday, August 29, 2011

"The Awareness of Individual Power

There are some pertinent points on accessing our inner power or unconditioned awareness in "Seeds from the Ashes." And for those of us who are searching for the answers to eliminate the toxic beliefs from our minds, we can find solace in knowing that the answers are found within us.

There's no need to search for answers outside of ourselves. Within us is the source of our own human power.

"Whenever you feel powerless to do something that you want to do, stop and ask yourself why. Why don't you have the power to achieve the things you desire to have?


"The obvious answer is that you don't believe you are strong enough to achieve them. If this is the case, then the solution to your problem is attaining the necessary strength or power to solve your problems.


"How do you attain this power? You attain power the same way as you attain anything else: you work for it. The harder you work, the greater your reward.


"If you desire to have a well-conditioned body, you must exercise  regularly and monitor what you eat. If you desire to have a well-conditioned mind, you must exercise it regularly and monitor what you allow to enter into it.


"For you to begin to acquire the power you need to change your life, your exercise program must begin now with you acting as your own personal trainer.

"As a trainer, you assume expert status as someone who is eminently qualified to guide you during your mind-conditioning training.

"This type of thinking requires you to assume two roles: first, as someone who knows what you need, and second, as someone who willing to listen.

"The two roles occur within your mind as your intuitive (unconditioned) consciousness and your victim (powerless) consciousness. The former is free of the illusions that victimize the latter.

"The similarities between power and powerless are  present in all of your activities. Unfortunately, those who think of themselves as victims (powerless) seldom recognize  the distinctions between the two. It is this lack of recognition that stifles your empowerment training.

"Nevertheless, power or the beliefs you have about power are simply what you think about yourself. So train yourself to know that its important to think that you are powerful rather than thinking of yourself as powerless."

The power we seek is always found within us. So let's stop looking for it in others.






Monday, August 15, 2011

"It's Never too Late to Change"

Sometimes, when the road becomes bumpy, our hearts become weary, and the battles overwhelm us, these are the times to focus on what's really important to us. It's not the time to cling to worn out beliefs about time and failure.

Regardless of our present situations, we are still alive. And while we're alive we are going to spend our time doing something. So, why not spend it doing what we enjoy. Now is not the time to succumb to the vicissitudes of the years.

Someone said to me a few days ago at a meeting for positive thinkers that she was too old to learn anything new. She was pretty much set in her ways. I asked her age and she said in her 40s. Wow! That's heavy.

Nevertheless, there are many of us fixed in our ways:  our beliefs and habits. We cling to traditional beliefs and time tested actions. This means there's little space in our minds for anything new.

So we don't attend meetings that offer new or insightful information. Nor do we reach out to explore what's happening outside our small circle of people who think and act the way we do.

Similarly, by reaching out to others to learn about their ideas and beliefs, we create the space for growth within ourselves. We lose our fears of the unknown by releasing our judgments about people whom we don't agree.

Some ways to examine our willingness to go beyond our comfort levels and check out what others believe and how they acquired their beliefs are:

KEY BELIEFS:  Religion. Politics. Race. Nationality. Gender. Beauty. Materialism, and Others.

It's difficult for us to discuss these beliefs with people who don't believe the way we do.

So the challenge is to talk with someone with different religious, political, and of different races and nationalities. That's when we get the opportunity to discover the level of our willingness to change.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Liberating our Minds of Toxic Beliefs

Some of us have been stuck in the same position for quite some time. We seem to always come up a little short in accomplishing our goals.

Many of us are still struggling with self-identity and purpose issues. Most of our time is spent chasing after something -- money, happiness, status, power, and so on -- but never finding it.

Similarly, some of us continue to believe our suffering is divine fate: it's our destiny to suffer. While a few of us eschew this type of thinking, we too are unwilling to engage in serious self-discovery.

Nevertheless, for those willing to delve a little deeper into our thinking process, we find that somewhere beneath the layers of beliefs concealing our essence, there are some dormant thoughts yet to be used.

These thoughts exist only in our unconditioned consciousness; that part of us that maintains the clarity of purpose.

However, for us to effectively use these thoughts we must remove the toxic beliefs causing us to search outside of ourselves for answers to our problems. There are many of them; however, we're going to only focus on six primary ones.

We will discuss them over a period of time due to the amount of information that we're required to cover.

So, what follows are some of the troubling toxic beliefs poisoning our minds with powerlessness.  

1.  Fear  --  "Fear is a state of consciousness one uses to escape from doing something one desires to do"
Some examples:

       1.  Fear of losing.
       2.  Fear of peer ridicule.
       3.  Fear of success.
       4.  Fear of failure.
       5.  Fear of living.
       6.  Fear of dying.
       7.  Fear of rejection.

Some suggestions for overcoming our fears:

1.  Create a vision of ourselves with complete power over our actions.
    
2.  Imagine ourselves living completely free of all fears in the present moment.
    
3.  Act as if you are free of fears. Write a minimum of five things you can do to ensure you maintain your freedom.
    
4.  List at least five fears that constantly occur in your life: for example, fear of losing your job, home, spouse, clothes, business, or life.
    
5.  Identify the sources of your fears. Examine what causes you to believe your present challenges (problems) cannot be removed. Exactly what do you anticipate happening if you take action to remove the fear?
    
6.  Imagine the best-case scenario and the worst-case scenario. Which one has the greatest power in your life?
   
7.  Remove the fears one at a time until their individual and collective powers are harmless to you. Challenge every fear with a positive action of empowerment (enlightenment). To do this requires that you deny the existence of the illusions (beliefs) created by the senses.
 
8.  Go within yourself and tap into your intuitive-unconditioned consciousness to make your decisions. Continue to do this, even if your senses tell you that your actions do not make sense.

We will continue to discuss the following toxic beliefs by incorporating them in future articles.

Worry -- "My face displays no worry because I have seen the face of empowerment (enlightenment) and it is mine."
   
Doubt -- "My thoughts are free and I see the path with great clarity."
   
Lack --   "I am complete in myself."
   
Limitation -- "I have the limitless power within me to express all of my desires."
  
Struggle --  "My power of creativity frees me of all struggles."

Friday, July 22, 2011

Talking About the Good Old Days

It's never too late to change. For many of us, this is easier said than done. Unfortunately, it's more difficult for some of us, because we place too many restrictions on ourselves.

 Some of us are watching our lives slip away as we grow more detached from what's happening in the world. We spend considerable time reminiscing about the "good old days," as if they were really good.

And while we continue slipping deeper into apathy, society constantly remind us that we're growing older and apathy is one of the conditions facing us.

While growing older or becoming labeled "seniors" is downright frightening to many of us, however, it's not nearly as frightening as watching our lives sink into social, economic, and political irrelevancy. And as we do, we become victims of a self-fulfilling prophecy about aging in this country.

Meanwhile, for those of us who don't dwell on or fear aging, we continue to live in the present. We recognize that these are the good old days.

We are working on creating healthy minds and bodies to assist us with expressing enlightened actions.  And by doing this everyday, we; are too busy to cling to the dead memories of the past.

When we look in the mirror, we see ourselves without deficiencies of age, beauty, weight, and other physical identities that inextricably connect us to victimization. This awakened to life helps us to remain free from trying to look the way we look in the past.  

And with this clarity, we're not rushing to get a face lift, tummy tuck, toupee, wig, and other types of implants to correct how we look. We clearly know that changes mean changes.

Similarly, for some of us, what's even worse than aging is aging without enough money. We thought we would never face layoffs, unemployment, business failures, and so forth.

We believed our education, experience and qualifications made us marketable into our retirement years.  So we either didn't plan for changes or we expected they wouldn't really affect us that much.

This mindset places some of us in positions to become victimized by regrets, and blaming ourselves for being, basically, stupid for living our lives like "candles in the wind."

Meanwhile, just the thought of not having what we want at certain points in our lives is cause for intense suffering. Not to mention having deep fears over health care and intense regrets about our lack of accomplishments.

Many of us constantly moan about what we could've done if we hadn't done so and so. Unfortunately, and without ever giving it much serious consideration, we had bought into the victim age-game. And by doing so, we had abdicated our powers to change the rules of the game.

Nevertheless, to free ourselves from the age-game, we must be mindful that there are no age or income restrictions on change.

Change is a state of mind. It's our inherent abilities  to connect with, and use, the endless flow of ideas existing in our minds.

For us to change or even participate in change, we cannot have cluttered minds searching blindly for solace in the past. We must have the clarity to perceive our lives existing in different states of change.

At each level of change, we add another action and experience. So, regardless to our present conditions, whatever they might be, they only represent another piece of an incomplete life. We can still add other pieces.

The key to adding more pieces or experiences to our lives is to have clarity. This means we must detach ourselves from longing for the good old days. We must let the dead (past) bury itself.

Our memories of the past are nothing but an obituary read over and over again. And it reminds us that someone (us) close to us has passed away, and will never be with us again.

Today, regardless to what we think about our lives, this is the greatest opportunity we have to change our behavior. However, we must be mindful of what change means.

Mindful change doesn't mean we make a list of the things that are bothering us and set out to work on them one at at time. It means having the awareness and clarity to accept ourselves with limitless power.

To achieve this awareness and clarity, we must be willing to participate in self-discovery -- the process of discovering the origins of our victim beliefs. And the awareness to know that victim minds can only produce victim results.

For us to create enlightened results in our lives, we must have enlightened minds (consciousness).

Friday, July 15, 2011

Life Beyond The Fears

Today, the victims (powerless) of the world are finding it difficult to suffer in silence. We can no longer ignore  the cancerous surge of uncertainty spreading rapidly through our minds.

This is  our wake up call for action. Whether we like it or not, we know it's time to do something about our feelings or succumb to our fears of victimization.

Regardless to the numbers of us who are unemployed, losing our homes to foreclosures, drowning in credit card debts or simply unable to cope with the vicissitudes of the economic calamities around us, we somehow, incredulously, find it difficult to believe what's happening is real.  This all seems so surreal.

This surreal perception of reality is another example of why we continue to perpetuate victim beliefs and values. And why we have learned to live with the illusions defining us as victims. Unfortunately, too many of us find this as acceptable. 

Meanwhile, the fears we have about the power of the illusions inextricably tie us to the confusion we're seeking to escape. So we remain powerless because we're too afraid to accept personal responsibility for creating and embodying the beliefs that sustain our powerlessness.

Our powerlessness or victimization is the way we perceive our existence in this world. And while we complain about our living conditions, we continue to search for solutions outside of ourselves. We don't trust ourselves to have power.

From a victim or a powerless perspective, many of us expect society or its designates  to fix our problems. We have been taught to believe we're powerless and that authentic power exists in others.

So the truth about us has already been confirmed by our beliefs and values. This iinescapable truth is always present in our actions.

After awhile, we believe our problems were created by others. And because of the magnitude and duration of them, we cannot imagine that we're responsible for creating so much suffering. So, in a certain sense, we're sleepwalking in our lives, and we're never fully awake

Similarly, as sleepwalkers, we're always struggling to make sense of what's happening in the world. We want to know if this or that policy will harm us. This is the cave-like existence of victims who live in darkness, not fully awake to see where we're going.

Nevertheless, even with our pain and suffering, many of us believe we are powerless, because society and its surrogates taught us to think and act as victims.  We don't really believe we chose to live on the bottom of  society. No, someone placed us this position.

Some of us perceive our existence in society as minor contributors dependent on others to tell us what to do. We are here, but we're not here to do anything about unemployment, home foreclosures, credit card debts, senseless wars, and the untold violence against each other.

We are here, but we believe no one will listen to what we have to say. So we don't say anything. We're here without the vision to develop ourselves beyond the perceptions of powerlessness.

We're here, but we're afraid to be here. We're afraid to wake up from our illusory dreams.

Similarly, in a certain sense, we are living in the spiritual dark ages. While the world we live in has made gargantuan strides in science, medicine, electronics, and so forth, many of us have not worked on making strides in our spiritual lives.

For us to overcome our fears, we must revalue ourselves with creative power. While we can use the information from our spiritual  and personal growth books to guide and inspire us to change, we must be the catalyst for the actions. 

Unfortunately, some of us devalue our own power by believing our Creator (the unconditioned consciousness) is not present in our lives now.  As victims, we're too afraid to believe it's not sacrilege to claim the divine power within us, and to use this power to revalue ourselves.

It's never sacrilege to use what we already have within us. It's foolish to suffer when we have the power to free ourselves from it. And if we don't use this great power within us now, then when do we plan to use it. 

As humans, asleep or awake, our greatest strength is the power of our minds. This power allows us to conquer our fears.

 It allows us to create things -- cellular phones, computers, airplanes, heart transplants, and so on -- that were not available to our predecessors. It also allows us to live enlightened, fully awake, lives.

Now is the time to use this great power within us to wake up and perceive the world as it is, and not according to our current  beliefs and values.

In other words, it's not our divine birthright to be powerlesss, we choose to live this way. 

Friday, July 8, 2011

The Power to Liberate our Minds

Let's begin this day by pledging to wake up from the nightmare of victimization and powerlessness.

For us to become enlightened about who we are, and the power we have to overcome pain and suffering, requires an awakened mind. This awakened mind, which comes from self-discovery, provides us with the clarity to perceive ourselves without victim beliefs of powerlessness.

Some of us are aware of the great powers we have to envision ourselves as enlightened individuals free of lack, limitation, and struggle. We are cognizant of the brief moments of clarity we get unexpectedly during certain times of the day. These are the moments when are not focusing on our doubts, fears, worries, and so forth.

Similarly, some of us ignore these moments of clarity, because it's easier for us to deny that it's possible for us to be greater than what we're currently perceiving ourselves as being. And it's this lack of acceptance that inextricably tie us to our current beliefs preventing us from expanding our level of awareness.

As victims of powerlessness, it's never easy to accept ourselves as powerful. We have lived on the bottom of our societies for long that we feel its natural for us to live in this manner. So it's easier for us to accept our powerlessnes than to search for other possibilities to expand our awareness of ourselves and our roles in the world.

Nevertheless, after awhile, and after intense suffering, some of us find it difficult to continue ignoring the sporadic insights of clarity silently exploding within our consciousness. Now we want to know more about these moments of clarity. So we decide to pursue the meaning of this clarity.

As we go deeper into our inquisition, some of us get sidetracked by believing enlightenment comes from others. We want them to tell us how to get enlightenment. And after much time and effort, we begin to believe that it's impossible to completely enlighten ourselves, because we're too besieged by victim beliefs.

While the truth about power is found outside of our victim beliefs, it's still within the vast space of our minds. And unbeknown to many of us is the untapped power we have to conceptualize ourselves in any manner we choose. This is the power of creativity.

The power of creativity is simply the awareness to understand that we are the creators of all our conceptions. A good illustration of this power is to know that we are the ones creating ourselves as victims. The power creating and the created expression, in this case victim, are one; however, the power creating is greater than what it has created.

When we achieve the necessary clarity, we have the limitless power to conceptualize ourselves in any manner we choose. We can envision ourselves with enlightened or victim minds. Unfortunately, many of us are so limited by our current beliefs that we're unable to envision ourselves with power. 

For us to move beyond this point of confusion, we must be willing to enter into self-discovery and understand, basically, what makes us tick.

For us to succeed, we must remain mindful that this is an inner search, not an outer one. Nevertheless, it's one all of us must make if we ever want to discover the limitless power within us.

Meanwhile, our search for authentic power always leads us to self-discovery, which is the path to enlightenment. While enlightenment is our goal, it is also something we already have within us, but we're unaware of its presence.

It's difficult to believe we were born enlightened and taught by our guides to become victims. Yet this is basically what some of us discovered about ourselves after spending several years in self-discovery.

And this is why it's important to remember that we are searching for something we already have within our intuitive (unconditioned by human beliefs) consciousness.

Similarly, we must also remain mindful that the enlightened awareness we seek to express doesn't have its roots in victim consciousness. So it's important to remember we must have compassion for ourselves as we go off on tangents by seeking enlightenment from society or from understanding the environment where we became victims. 

While this type of information is useful in confirming victimization, it's true value is found in leading us to self-discovery. 

Whatever paths we are currently on, we must become mindful of the actions we are expressing to achieve our goal. The intellectual gymnastics of victim beliefs are games we play with ourselves and others who believe in the same things we do.

When we achieve the clarity to understand that there's more to us than what we are currently aware of  being, then we will have found the boundless creative space within our consciousness to express our great power.  For us to  discover this divine treasure, we must search for it while we're in self-discovery.

We cannot overcome victim beliefs by using these same beliefs to liberate our minds.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Rising from the Ashes of Pain and Suffering

Sometimes we find it difficult to get up after having been knocked down so many times. Sometimes the impact of our actions are so devastating that we want to quit. These are times when we have the greatest opportunities to stop and learn why we are suffering.

Many of us are unwilling to take the time to understand our behavior. We continue to search aimlessly for the next project to fulfill our illusory beliefs about success and failure. We, unfortunately, don't have the presence of mind to know that we are responsible for creating our own suffering.

It's very difficult to accept that we're truly responsible for our own suffering. And while we say we understand that we're responsible, we are somewhat timid in our convictions. It's a major transition for us to  accept total ownership of our actions without believing others did not also contribute to the results.

Nevertheless, when we think about it calmly and clearly, we really don't want to claim responsibility for our failures or disappointments. This is due partly to our beliefs that there's always someone else involved in our actions.

We have been on the blame game journey for so long that it's difficult to stop. Many of us don't want to stop, because to do so invalidates our good actions. When we blame others, we believe our actions were commendable, and that we were victimized by others.

After having lived for a few years, many of us, at one time or another, find ourselves wallowing in our suffering. We have accepted our powerlessness and resigned ourselves to our fate.

We believe we're powerless because of the beliefs we're using to interpret the results of our actions. We have become too dependent on using our beliefs to determine the way the world really is.

Some of us forget that success and failure exist because of our beliefs and values about ourselves and others. However, in many situations, it's difficult for us to ignore the realness of the results before us. And it seems that we're always trying to interpret what's actually happening in every moment of time.

Those of us who are somewhat mindful of our actions have begun to face the facts that we really don't know the difference between our reality and our expectations. This is due, in part, to the way we interpret the results of our actions.

Whenever we do something, we expect some type of results. In many instances, we expect pleasurable or successful results. And if we don't get them, we immediately condemn ourselves. We complain over and over again about our stupidity.

Nevertheless, the real truth of our reality is hidden from us because of our beliefs. For us to perceive our actions and results from a clearer perspective, we must first change our beliefs. And to do this, we must be willing to enter into self-discovery.

We rise from our pain and suffering by our willingness to enter into self-discovery and taking the time to understand why we're acting with such powerlessness.

Self-discovery is where we come face to face with the creator of our suffering.  And it's where we must face the fears preventing us from accepting personal responsibility for our actions.

Even though society and its surrogates taught us the beliefs we now claim as our own, in self-discovery we gain the insights to know that we can change them.

Similarly, for those of us who want to rise above the suffering, we must be willing to spend the time and energy working on understanding and changing our beliefs.

If not, we will continue to live with the pain and suffering while seeking things -- money, power, people, and so forth -- to lead us to an unknown blissful destination.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Searching for an Identity

Many of us who have been conditioned to think and act from positions of weakness, find it difficult to accept self-transformative ideas.

After awhile, we find it more palatable to remain as victims and fight for a mythical freedom than expand our minds to pursue other ideas. We're at the point where, sadly, we've stop thinking for ourselves.

When we reach the point in our journey where complacency sets in, we are forced to deal with the suffering causing us to believe we're powerless. At this level of awareness, we are no longer satisfied with being victims of the illusions.

From positions of powerlessness, the illusions are real. And it's from this conscious awareness that we learn to reward ourselves with chimeras of happiness and myths.

Similarly, the more confused we become about ourselves, the greater our desires for mythical freedom. We begin to hallucinate about power by abdicating our power of creativity to the illusions.

It seems that we are constantly searching for something to give us power or something we can identify ourselves with that has power. It is from these actions that we create an identity crisis, which weakens our resolve to create spaciousness: the clarity we need to perceive the world as it really exists.

When our minds overflow with powerless beliefs, we feel the wrath of victimization. And we respond by seeking something to remove the pain and suffering. We call this freedom, empowerment or enlightenment.

Many of us seek freedom, empowerment or enlightenment because we have been told to do so. Unfortunately, we don't really know what they mean or what they look like in the complete state of existence.

As prisoners of our beliefs and values, we become victims of the illusory expressions of reality. Yet this is the only reality most of have ever known. And the thought of being able to envision freedom, empowerment or enlightenment without our illusions is unthinkable. 

The illusions used to define us as victims are also the ones we are using to search for the mythical freedom others have defined for us as our life's purpose. Unfortunately, this is a difficult process because the illusions are responsible for our education, experience, and aspirations, which we use to create our beliefs and values. 

Similarly, the awareness of ourselves as powerless victims distort our interpretation of the world. This awareness causes us to believe the world we live in is unfair, because it appears to reward some people and punish others.

Nevertheless, the awareness of ourselves as victims of world events inextricably tie us to the illusions  This is the relationship we are working to extricate ourselves. And regardless to the intensity of our pain and suffering, we must work continuously on creating space in our minds for new ideas to be born.

For some of us, the mere suggestion that we don't know who we are is reason for us to defend our illusions.  And by embracing our illusions of powerlessness, this opens the door to allow anger, fear, worry, struggle, and the other emotional culprits to take over our lives.

Meanwhile, there are some of us working to overcome the deleterious effects of the illusions. Although we were guided by the illusions for all of our lives, we seek to know life before we became victimized by them. And we want to know who we are and what's the reason for our suffering.

After we do some work on ourselves, we begin to believe we know who we are and what's our purpose. This false sense of awareness deceives us into believing we are free of the illusions. We feel free, exhilarated, happy.

We anxiously tell everyone we come in contact with that we are now empowered. This is such an euphoric feeling that it causes us to believe we are functioning at a higher level of awareness than other victims.

Whenever we create a new identity or awareness of ourselves, we believe we have achieved freedom or some advanced state of empowerment or enlightenment. This usually makes us happy or at least feel a great sense of accomplishment.

As individuals we crave uniqueness. We respond to our names, the way we look, act, and the way we approach life itself. And regardless of our social status, most of us don't want to think of ourselves as helpless victims.

Some of us try all types of all shenanigans to connect ourselves to legacies of power. If we are descendants of slaves, we imagine our foreparents as being strong slaves -- the freedom fighters.

If we are descendants of the holocaust, we imagine our foreparents as being the ones who were the strongest defenders of freedom. And if we are descendants of other ethnic or racial groups, we imagine our foreparents were all powerful, and made some type of contributions to the world.

Whenever we identify with a group or race of people, we search for ways to give power to the group or race, and thereby giving power to ourselves. We believe this identification gives us the power and uniqueness we need to satisfy our cravings for power.

Meanwhile, by identifying with groups and people we become victimized by the illusions-- world beliefs. These actions further lessen our powers of creativity and tighten the shackles of victimization.

The freedom we seek must be defined without the illusions. To do this successfully, we must take the time to understand the origins and nature of the illusions, which exist in all of us. This is a lifelong process.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Spiritual Materialism

Today many of us  typically confuse spirituality with religion. With the growing influence of Eastern Religion on many of the "New Thought" religions, the two terms have become synonymous.

It's now considered chic for some of us to claim we are spiritual, but not religious.  Nevertheless, for now, in order to illustrate our point here,  let's separate them by defining spirituality as the part of us that seeks religion to fulfill our hunger for pure enlightenment.

Similarly, we can argue that religion is the structure we use to express our spirituality. And let's acknowledge that religion is not the only source available for us to express our spirituality.

Meanwhile, there's also a great deal of confusion regarding the relationship between spirituality and materialism.This confusion is bred, undoubtedly, from our living in a capitalist society.  For many of us, materialism is the antithesis of spirituality.

On the other hand, materialism is something we can touch feel, enjoy. And if we tie it to our spirituality, then we will have the best of both worlds.

Materialism causes us to desire material possessions -- houses, automobiles, jewelry, expensive clothes, lavish lifestyles, and so forth -- while we seek spiritual fulfillment by relieving ourselves from these attachments. And, unfortunately, many of us become victims of our desires.

The purification or freedom from our desires for materialism is the primary cause of our suffering. We suffer because we spend our time working on achieving materialism.

The more we have, the greater our attachments, the greater our suffering, and the further we move away from spiritual enlightenment.

Meanwhile, as more and more people seek innovative ways to acquire wealth and remain spiritually fulfilled, some ministers have embodied and teach their congregants a so-called "prosperity religion."

They preach that the Creator -- God-Allah-Krishna-- wants them to be wealthy. It's the Creator's way to bless us for having adhered to our spiritual practices.

According to them, the greater our spiritual awareness, the more the Creator blesses us with material possessions. They illustrate their points by showcasing large homes, expensive cars, clothes, jewelry, and so on. They claim the gifts come because of their spiritual practices and their devotion to the Creator.

It's difficult to explain or enlighten ourselves when we are focusing all of our energies on become wealthy. It's even more difficult for us to recognize that we are confusing spirituality and materialism. The former is free of suffering, while the latter is the cause of our suffering.

For many of us new on the path, spirituality is too vague, too hard. We can't pinpoint just what it means and exactly where it is. It's not like a picture of a place where we've never been, but would like go someday.

Spirituality, at least enlightened spirituality, is found within each of us. It's our invisible, faceless, formless, and colorless unconditioned consciousness.

Our unconditioned consciousness is our being without beliefs or limitations. It's the unchangeable within us, conditioning a part of itself to be us. This unchangeable awareness of being, without being anything, is in all of us. It contains the blueprint for how we are to live our lives.

As we seek more and more materialism to fulfill us, we sell our lives (irreplaceable time) to the highest bidder. These actions plunge us deeper into the victimization morass.

And as victims of materialism, it's difficult for us to believe there's something as powerful as an unconditioned consciousness within us. We don't dare even consider something like this as a viable option for living our lives, especially when it's compared to materialism.

At the heart of our contentment is materialism. We feel good with it and lousy without it. And there's little we can do to satisfy our thirst for it.

Nevertheless, by selling ourselves for materialism, and by listening to others telling us about ourselves, we move further away from our unconditioned awareness, the enlightenment which we seek.

And as we do, we are constantly searching for something to make us feel good about ourselves. This is the search for spiritual fulfillment, which some of  us confuse with religion.

The victims of materialism or capitalism are usually the ones willing to believe and accept promises of spiritual rewards. We are confident that we're on the path that leads to spiritual rewards. At this point in our awareness, we have settled the discussion between spirituality and religion.

 There are some of us who believe there's more to achieve, and there's more work to do on overcoming victimization  before we can feel fulfilled. So we continue to work on creating an enlightened consciousness.

We believe an enlightened mind will free us from our limited beliefs that's causing us to suffer an insatiable thirst for material possessions. This is the clarity we need to understand why we devote our lives to accumulating material things.

Whether we like it or not, we're nothing but expressions of our beliefs. The truth about us is found in our beliefs about spirituality and materialism. They're not the same, even though we want them to be this way.

Friday, May 20, 2011

Knowledge of the Self

Today, one of the greatest tragedies in the world is that we don't know who we are or why we use other people's beliefs to define us. It's as if we choose to abdicate our  power so we can claim we don't know what to do about our lives.

Some of us are content with experiencing life from the prism of victimization or powerlessness. We perceive life in this unclear, helpless state of consciousness, because we choose not to wake up and define ourselves with power.

We are accustomed to the visions created from within our darkness. These incomplete, unclear visions of what we want for ourselves inextricably tie us to a permanent state of victimization.

We are constantly asking ourselves over and over again: What's the meaning or purpose of our lives?

We want to know why we constantly have these empty feelings, and regardless of how many things we bring into our lives, they're still present. We seem to always have these  feelings that we should be doing something else with our lives.

There are some of us who believe we obtain the answers, at least we achieve a greater degree of clarity about life, by engaging in self-discovery. Self-discovery basically means examining the origins of our beliefs and their utility in providing us with the answers we seek regarding our questions about life itself.

Many of us know we want to feel happy rather than sad. We seek success, whatever that means to us, rather than failure, which we interpret to mean unsuccessful. Obviously, we can continue with this vein of thinking ad infinitium and never truly understand why we desire certain things versus those we don't.

Unfortunately, this type of reasoning only confirms our victim beliefs about life, it doesn't really tell us anything about the essence of our existence.

Most of us, practically all of us, perceive life from limited awareness. We are limited by what we have been taught and accepted as being accurate descriptions of our lives. If we are of a certain race, we perceive the world from this perspective, and by whatever societal descriptions are used to validate these beliefs.

So when we say we love everyone equally, we mean it only from the limited beliefs we have about ourselves.  We don't, in fact, believe everyone is equal to us anymore than we believe all people have the same skin color, gender or social status.

By saying something like this, we tell ourselves that we have broken free of our traditional beliefs. While we know this is not true, we trick ourselves into believing it is so. We want to believe we can change while remaining the same person.

To change from one set of beliefs to another requires first an understanding of the former. We must understand that all of our beliefs are expressions in the intellectual gymnastics game we play with each other. And in this game, we are not really searching for the origins of our beliefs, but seeking new ones by holding on to the old ones.

We really want to hold tightly to our carefully crafted self-images and build from this foundation. We don't want to become no-thing. We need reference points: family, friends, society, and so forth to confirm our existence. Otherwise, who are we without our beliefs?

From a different perspective, we are trying to build a new house with the same materials. So the end results have us  believing it's a new house while it's really the same house that we're perceiving to be a new one.

Meanwhile, we have all types of beliefs. Some of us believe Heaven and Hell are places existing in time and space, while some others believe they're simply something we have been taught by others. And regardless to which beliefs we hold, we argue fervently that our beliefs our correct.

Similarly, some of us believe we are victims, while some believe we're not. We judge ourselves and others according to our beliefs, which means the true answers lie outside of our limited and biased definitions.

Nevertheless, none of this stops us from searching for the answers to the questions we have about our feelings that something is missing from our lives.

We are forever searching for something to make us feel complete, fulfilled, and adequate. Unfortunately, this search is usually conducted outside of ourselves.

Self-discovery is one, some of others believe it is the primary method, process of searching that leads to an understanding of the self.  This self is described by its lack of beliefs and by its knowledge of the world itself.

Self-discovery illumines our consciousness with the clarity to see the world without traditional beliefs. It helps us to awaken from the darkness preventing us from seeing where we are going and what we are doing.

Knowledge of the self comes from within each one of us. It's not something anyone can teach us. We gain this knowledge by taking the time to understand how we acquired our beliefs, and the power we have to overcome them.

At some point in self-discovery, we clearly know that it's our thoughts and beliefs that's causing us the problems. The more beliefs we acquire, the further we move away from the Self.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

"Wake up to Enlightenment"

It's our awareness of life that's responsible for our suffering. And it's our unwillingness to be mindful of our actions that's imprisoning  us in the cesspool of darkness and preventing us from find the unconditioned power of being within us.

From a practical, rational perspective, we are always aware of ourselves as being something. We are constantly conjuring up all types of images of ourselves. And without question, we intend for all of them to make us feel happy.

This little mind game of intellectual gymnastics is our way of playing with ourselves.  It's what we use to assuage the suffering and deny its existence. This keeps us inextricably tied to the darkness of victimization.

On some occasions, we use our self-awareness to create images of ourselves as victims:  individuals without adequate power in any given situation. Some of us do this because our images of happiness didn't turn out the way we wanted.

Similarly, we sometime create images of ourselves as sycophants aimlessly drifting from one situation to another in search of the next injection of pain and suffering. We do this to confuse our awareness, to make it more illusory. This is our way of remaining asleep.

There are times when we create images to anthropomorphize ourselves as spiritual teachers. These are the images where we cloak ourselves in an elevated awareness -- an awareness greater than those with whom we interact -- to conceal our own suffering.

After we create so many images of ourselves in different forms and states of awareness, we fall into a coma of darkness, overcome by suffering. While in this coma, we continuously relive our images by engaging in past-living scenarios. 

By reliving our past images, we remain in a dream-like state all the time. Even though, we believe we are actually awake and free of the illusions causing us to dream, we are still consumed by the darkness created by years of conditioning our minds to function as victims.

For us to awaken from our comas, we must create an awareness of being that's not contingent on anything we have been taught about ourselves. It's the awareness of ourselves as being  faceless, formless, and colorless. This is the awareness that allows us to become anything we desire to be.

The light of enlightenment is available to all of us who find ourselves living in the darkness of victimization. And while we might call it awareness, it is so much more than that. It is awareness without the limitations of our victimized beliefs and values.

Nevertheless, most of us go through life without ever living our lives in clarity. We struggle for freedom, when we already have it.

We struggle for love, when we already have it. And we struggle for happiness, when we already have it. All of these things and more are contained within the limitless states of clarified awareness available to each of us.

The happiness we seek is found in our interpretations of our actions and the actions of others. When we find the clarity to change our knowledge of ourselves and others, we will use different information (an enlightened mind) to interpret our actions.

Some of us are already living in the space of clarity, which allows us to accept personal responsibility for all of our actions. This is the clarity we need to go further into the deeper levels of light to guide us as we remove the darkness of victimization from our lives.