There are some days when we feel powerless in spite of the work we are doing to change our lives. These are the days when we think about stopping or changing directions.
For some of us, we choose to sit with the feelings of powerlessness to help us gain a greater understanding of what's happening in our lives. And by doing this, we will achieve the clarity to perceive our lives existing without confusion and conflict.
When we have clarity, we perceive purposefulness with mindful attitude, especially in pursuit of our goal to achieve enlightenment. This frees us to think and live life more abundantly. Nevertheless, for some of us, whenever we believe we are free, we seem to discover new, more innovative ways to imprison ourselves again.
To become imprisoned by our thoughts is live in a cesspool of doubts. This is a petri dish for victim consciousness. With each action we take, we create more and more doubts. After awhile, our doubts become the prison we are seeking to escape from.
When we are working to escape by freeing ourselves from our doubts, we begin by imagining what freedom looks and feels like. This allows us to create images of ourselves existing without doubts. These mind games become puzzles with hundreds of disconnected pieces of doubt floating aimlessly in our minds.
For some of us, we become overwhelmed by the number of pieces missing from the image we have created of our freedom. The images manifesting themselves as space, money, power, fame, health, and so on, are what victims believe represent freedom. We give these things form and life while encapsulating ourselves in prisons of doubt.
From a victim's perspective, doubts are very powerful judgements about who we are and the world we live in. They exists because we exist. They are powerful because we are powerless. They demean us because we demean ourselves. They enslave us with victim beliefs and we believe we are slaves to our thoughts. They weaken our resolve to change the way we think and live. And, most importantly, they destroy our will to live with happiness.
To overcome our doubts require us to become aware of who we are and the power we have to change how we think and live. If we believe we are in a prison cell, enclosed by bars of doubts, then we have to do a considerable amount of work to change how we're perceiving the power we have to solve our own problems.
On the other hand, whether we like it or not, we are whoever we believe we are. If we believe we are free to express thoughts and beliefs that empower us to change how we think and live, then we are much closer to gaining the necessary clarity we need to achieve our goal of enlightenment.
Meanwhile, for us to grow and achieve the freedom of true enlightenment, we must first gain clarity about how to use the power we have now. Some of us misuse our powers by constantly believing we are victims while denying ourselves to be empowered. Unfortunately, our doubts cloud our vision of empowerment. This causes our power to overcome to wilt, to become weak and become an albatross destroying our will to change how we think and live.
Similarly, our power to overcome must be greater than the power we use to imprison ourselves with doubts. To access this power, we must still the mind to gain the necessary clarity to perceive the space or gap existing between our problems and our desires for freedom. This the space where we find the clarity to understand how pain and suffering exists. And it is where we learn how to think without burdening ourselves with self-imposed doubts.
For us to reach the level of space we must first believe in its existence. That is, that there's an existence of consciousness between the problem (pain and suffering) and the solution (freedom). And in this consciousness, we clearly understand that freedom can only be achieved by action. It's our actions that connect us to our beliefs. Moreover, it's our actions that guide us to the space or gap between thinking like victims or acting like we are empowered.
The power to change is within the clarity we seek. It is present in the space beyond the problems, near the solutions.
We can get further insights from: "Seeds from the Ashes" and "Let There Be Life" available on http://www.amazon.com/ and bookstores.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Working Without Attachments
Today, with rising unemployment rates, it's probably difficult to find anyone who's willing to work for free. Most job-seekers are driven by the need for money. They need money to pay for the necessities of life such as, clothes, food, shelter, entertainment, and so forth. These are the things that motivate us to sell our life hours for money.
There are some people who believe they are willing to work for free, because of their commitment to enlightenment. For those of us who believe this way, we are thought by others to be a little kooky. And, perhaps, rightfully so.
Some of us are painfully misguided by our concept of enlightenment and what it means for us to exist with others in the world. When we take the time to think about it, working for free or working for a higher awareness seems painfully naive for those providing for their families. Yet, if we look a little closer at what enlightenment means, we are able to see that naivete is based on our beliefs.
By working to achieve enlightenment, we must also change the criteria we are using to evaluate our lives. This requires us to go beyond the comparisons and evolve to another awareness about power and success. At this level of awareness, we use a criteria that clearly delineates the utilitarian value of enlightenment in our personal lives.
To work free is analogous to working without expecting or attaching ourselves to the results. We are working for the sake of working. This type of working is different from just working in a mindless sense. Now it's connected to working with an enlightened consciousness.
As enlightenment-seekers, we just work. In some cases, our work is more theoretical than we desire it to be. Sometimes we forget what we are doing because we become unclear about the meaning of enlightenment. Enlightenment becomes abstract, intangible, imaginary, and far away. It exists in another place like we think about Heaven and Hell.
For those of us working on achieving enlightenment, we struggle at times to make sense of what this actually means. A few of us, overcome with enlightenment fervor, believe it means just what it says: a fully awaken person. So we will ourselves to believe when we are writing, conducting workshops, public speaking, meditating and praying, we have no expectations about the outcome of our work. We are just working.
Nevertheless, like it or not, we are working with expected results. To illustrate this perspective, let's use the example of preparing for an empowerment workshop.
To prepare for the workshop we must do the marketing, including various types of advertisement, rent the facility, develop workshop handouts, and so on. We do this because we want to get people to attend our workshop. This means we are attached to the results of the workshop. In other words, we are not just working. We are working to have a successful workshop.
Meanwhile, to understand the concept of "just working," we must go to another level of awareness; the awareness found only in intuitive consciousness. At the intuitive consciousness level our awareness of life beyond words and deeds becomes clearer. Now we're able to clearly understand how to work without expecting or trying to control the results from our actions.
For most of us, if not all of us, intuitive consciousness is something we talk about, but know very little about. While we believe it exits, we cannot prove it the way we prove the validity of mathematical equations. In other words, it's epistemological unprovable, especially in a manner we can accept. So, in the main, we are left with our beliefs about the existence of something, intuitive consciousness, which is similar to our beliefs about the existence of Heaven and Hell.
Meanwhile, where do we get the beliefs that intuitive consciousness, heaven and hell exist in the first place? Yet we work everyday to achieve entry into or escape from these places.
Similarly, to discover intuitive consciousness, we must be prepared to do things that will clear our minds to become aware of things we previously believed didn't exist. This requires us to search deep within our beliefs to find the clarity to free ourselves to travel to unknown levels of awareness. There, deep within the bowels of our unconditioned thoughts, we will discover the existence of intuitive consciousness.
In intuitive consciousness we are fully awake. We clearly perceive life beyond suffering, aging, and dying. We are no longer using a victim criteria to interpret our actions. We see life beyond the arbitrary benchmarks we use to evaluate our progress during the different societal epochs of the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and so forth.
For now, let's acknowledge we are attached to controlling the results from our work. And we continue to do this because this is our level of awareness now. This acknowledgement provides us with the opportunity to search for enlightenment, without clearly knowing exactly what enlightenment means.
Now our work is devoted specifically to the search for a different awareness than the one we are currently using to define who we are.
For additional information on enlightenment, please read "Seeds from the Ashes" on http://www.amazon.com/
There are some people who believe they are willing to work for free, because of their commitment to enlightenment. For those of us who believe this way, we are thought by others to be a little kooky. And, perhaps, rightfully so.
Some of us are painfully misguided by our concept of enlightenment and what it means for us to exist with others in the world. When we take the time to think about it, working for free or working for a higher awareness seems painfully naive for those providing for their families. Yet, if we look a little closer at what enlightenment means, we are able to see that naivete is based on our beliefs.
By working to achieve enlightenment, we must also change the criteria we are using to evaluate our lives. This requires us to go beyond the comparisons and evolve to another awareness about power and success. At this level of awareness, we use a criteria that clearly delineates the utilitarian value of enlightenment in our personal lives.
To work free is analogous to working without expecting or attaching ourselves to the results. We are working for the sake of working. This type of working is different from just working in a mindless sense. Now it's connected to working with an enlightened consciousness.
As enlightenment-seekers, we just work. In some cases, our work is more theoretical than we desire it to be. Sometimes we forget what we are doing because we become unclear about the meaning of enlightenment. Enlightenment becomes abstract, intangible, imaginary, and far away. It exists in another place like we think about Heaven and Hell.
For those of us working on achieving enlightenment, we struggle at times to make sense of what this actually means. A few of us, overcome with enlightenment fervor, believe it means just what it says: a fully awaken person. So we will ourselves to believe when we are writing, conducting workshops, public speaking, meditating and praying, we have no expectations about the outcome of our work. We are just working.
Nevertheless, like it or not, we are working with expected results. To illustrate this perspective, let's use the example of preparing for an empowerment workshop.
To prepare for the workshop we must do the marketing, including various types of advertisement, rent the facility, develop workshop handouts, and so on. We do this because we want to get people to attend our workshop. This means we are attached to the results of the workshop. In other words, we are not just working. We are working to have a successful workshop.
Meanwhile, to understand the concept of "just working," we must go to another level of awareness; the awareness found only in intuitive consciousness. At the intuitive consciousness level our awareness of life beyond words and deeds becomes clearer. Now we're able to clearly understand how to work without expecting or trying to control the results from our actions.
For most of us, if not all of us, intuitive consciousness is something we talk about, but know very little about. While we believe it exits, we cannot prove it the way we prove the validity of mathematical equations. In other words, it's epistemological unprovable, especially in a manner we can accept. So, in the main, we are left with our beliefs about the existence of something, intuitive consciousness, which is similar to our beliefs about the existence of Heaven and Hell.
Meanwhile, where do we get the beliefs that intuitive consciousness, heaven and hell exist in the first place? Yet we work everyday to achieve entry into or escape from these places.
Similarly, to discover intuitive consciousness, we must be prepared to do things that will clear our minds to become aware of things we previously believed didn't exist. This requires us to search deep within our beliefs to find the clarity to free ourselves to travel to unknown levels of awareness. There, deep within the bowels of our unconditioned thoughts, we will discover the existence of intuitive consciousness.
In intuitive consciousness we are fully awake. We clearly perceive life beyond suffering, aging, and dying. We are no longer using a victim criteria to interpret our actions. We see life beyond the arbitrary benchmarks we use to evaluate our progress during the different societal epochs of the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and so forth.
For now, let's acknowledge we are attached to controlling the results from our work. And we continue to do this because this is our level of awareness now. This acknowledgement provides us with the opportunity to search for enlightenment, without clearly knowing exactly what enlightenment means.
Now our work is devoted specifically to the search for a different awareness than the one we are currently using to define who we are.
For additional information on enlightenment, please read "Seeds from the Ashes" on http://www.amazon.com/
Monday, November 9, 2009
Participating in Life
Today, with rising unemployment, out-of-control deficits and growing personal debts, there's a deep feeling of anger and rage overwhelming many of us. It's difficult for us to understand why we feel this way, because it seems like nearly everyone is feeling this way. Even so, we don't like how we're feeling.
Whenever we have too many problems, we tend to have these nagging, empty feelings of doubt gnawing away at us. Some of us frequently seek ways to handle our problems without complaining too much about them. It seems easier to keep them to ourselves. So we quietly close the doors to our emotions and allow the suffering to exist painfully within the silence of our minds.
Similarly, as we suffer with our deep emotional pain, we desperately want someone, other than us, to accept responsibility for causing us to feel so badly. This pattern of behavior -- seeking to place responsibility for our problems on others -- keeps us inextricably tied to victim beliefs. And whenever we don't know exactly what's bothering us, we find that it's easy to blame others -- society, leaders, employers, spouses, relatives, and so on -- for the way we are feeling about ourselves.
The phenomenon of emotional overwhelming is the essence of why we feel powerless to confront our problems. To feel powerless is to feel overwhelmed by out-of-control emotions. And none of this happens without problems. Our problems dictate how we response to things.
Deep within our emotional pain and suffering is an awareness of who we are in any given moment in time. And regardless to what we tell others, we cannot change who we are. The more we try to control the anger and rage, the more we suffer in silence, and the more anger and rage we feel.
To feel your emotions as they really are means acting on them. To do this requires a strong desire to change our belief system. This also means we must make a serious commitment to stop suffering from the pain caused by our willingness to face our problems and emotions.
When we decide to change and begin our search to achieve enlightenment, we become mindful of our behavior and the thoughts producing this behavior. This allows us to move beyond intellectual skepticism to intuitive exploration. This is when we begin to feel and accept our pain.
To feel something is to know it. The closer we get to it the more we're willing to examine what's there before us. In other words, we're no longer afraid of our emotions.
Nevertheless, try as we do to ignore our feelings, we return to what we are most comfortable with: blaming others for our problems. After awhile, we believe this is the way life is supposed to be. By blaming others, we absolve ourselves. We do this by not becoming actively engaged in our lives and relationships with others in the world. We lose ourselves in emotional apathy.
For some of us, sitting on the sidelines of life is a comfortable place to be. We can observe what's happening as spectators. From this position, we are able to criticize the activities of others while we sit idly by perpetuating a culture of silence and disassociation from life.
In the meantime, we don't plan to do anything about the problems and issues others are passionately fighting for. Although we might feel very strongly about some the problems and issues others are fighting for, we don't want to risk further pain by becoming involved ourselves. So we continue to suffer in silence, fearful of our emotions and their overwhelming affect on us.
Some of us want to do something, but we don't want to upset others, particularly our parents, friends, children, and loved ones. WE find it satisfying to remain victimized by our feelings than risk losing or changing our relationships with those we respect and love. So we silently trod along through life, suffering from the cancerous emotions destroying our will to live successful lives.
Meanwhile, as enlightenment-seekers whenever we feel empowered, we also feel free. To achieve this freedom we must be willing to not only face our problems and emotions, but accept them for what they represent to us. And like it or not, they are a part of us.
To be clear here, power and powerless are not being discussed in accepted societal definitions of the words. We are using them to express feelings produced from beliefs acquired over years of believing ourselves to be victims (powerless).
It's very difficult for some of us to ever accept ourselves as victims. To be a victim in this world is to accept ourselves as failures. Victims live on the bottom of the hierarchical rung of class distinctions. This also means it's very difficult to face our problems and emotions and welcome them into our lives.
For further insights on this subject, please read "Seeds from the Ashes." It's currently available on http://www.amazon.com/
Whenever we have too many problems, we tend to have these nagging, empty feelings of doubt gnawing away at us. Some of us frequently seek ways to handle our problems without complaining too much about them. It seems easier to keep them to ourselves. So we quietly close the doors to our emotions and allow the suffering to exist painfully within the silence of our minds.
Similarly, as we suffer with our deep emotional pain, we desperately want someone, other than us, to accept responsibility for causing us to feel so badly. This pattern of behavior -- seeking to place responsibility for our problems on others -- keeps us inextricably tied to victim beliefs. And whenever we don't know exactly what's bothering us, we find that it's easy to blame others -- society, leaders, employers, spouses, relatives, and so on -- for the way we are feeling about ourselves.
The phenomenon of emotional overwhelming is the essence of why we feel powerless to confront our problems. To feel powerless is to feel overwhelmed by out-of-control emotions. And none of this happens without problems. Our problems dictate how we response to things.
Deep within our emotional pain and suffering is an awareness of who we are in any given moment in time. And regardless to what we tell others, we cannot change who we are. The more we try to control the anger and rage, the more we suffer in silence, and the more anger and rage we feel.
To feel your emotions as they really are means acting on them. To do this requires a strong desire to change our belief system. This also means we must make a serious commitment to stop suffering from the pain caused by our willingness to face our problems and emotions.
When we decide to change and begin our search to achieve enlightenment, we become mindful of our behavior and the thoughts producing this behavior. This allows us to move beyond intellectual skepticism to intuitive exploration. This is when we begin to feel and accept our pain.
To feel something is to know it. The closer we get to it the more we're willing to examine what's there before us. In other words, we're no longer afraid of our emotions.
Nevertheless, try as we do to ignore our feelings, we return to what we are most comfortable with: blaming others for our problems. After awhile, we believe this is the way life is supposed to be. By blaming others, we absolve ourselves. We do this by not becoming actively engaged in our lives and relationships with others in the world. We lose ourselves in emotional apathy.
For some of us, sitting on the sidelines of life is a comfortable place to be. We can observe what's happening as spectators. From this position, we are able to criticize the activities of others while we sit idly by perpetuating a culture of silence and disassociation from life.
In the meantime, we don't plan to do anything about the problems and issues others are passionately fighting for. Although we might feel very strongly about some the problems and issues others are fighting for, we don't want to risk further pain by becoming involved ourselves. So we continue to suffer in silence, fearful of our emotions and their overwhelming affect on us.
Some of us want to do something, but we don't want to upset others, particularly our parents, friends, children, and loved ones. WE find it satisfying to remain victimized by our feelings than risk losing or changing our relationships with those we respect and love. So we silently trod along through life, suffering from the cancerous emotions destroying our will to live successful lives.
Meanwhile, as enlightenment-seekers whenever we feel empowered, we also feel free. To achieve this freedom we must be willing to not only face our problems and emotions, but accept them for what they represent to us. And like it or not, they are a part of us.
To be clear here, power and powerless are not being discussed in accepted societal definitions of the words. We are using them to express feelings produced from beliefs acquired over years of believing ourselves to be victims (powerless).
It's very difficult for some of us to ever accept ourselves as victims. To be a victim in this world is to accept ourselves as failures. Victims live on the bottom of the hierarchical rung of class distinctions. This also means it's very difficult to face our problems and emotions and welcome them into our lives.
For further insights on this subject, please read "Seeds from the Ashes." It's currently available on http://www.amazon.com/
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