Spirituality Guide

Yet another possibility is they have an opposition, a team of enlightened or en-knowledged beings who have been opposing their control since it started - a battle for Man across time, hidden in the lost annals of our race as (perhaps) the Seven Rishi, or the Seven Lords of Light fought against the powers of Darkness, handicapped by their desire to allow us to develop our path to Light by choice.

But there is another thought… If our reality truly depends on what we perceive, then maybe they need us to be despondent, to see the negative of life, to lose hope and foresee only an ever deepening loss of freedom and advance, where our world is so circumscribed we can hope only to be good servants of the poor overlords trying their best to keep us all alive. Then, they get the world they want, possibly forever.

And if 2012 is really a crux, truly a time of growing energy as we pass from Kali Yuga into a more enlightened Age, maybe if they can make us hopeless, the energy will not be used to bring a new age of enlightenment but instead to confirm into the darkness, our lives, our hopes and our futures and leave them as absolute rulers of an endarkened people, with the Darkness being powered by the very Light that was meant to bring us out of the mire.

This possibility is rather nasty to think upon – we should all make a determined effort to find ways to be positive in our lives, to see good things, to find hope for ourselves and others, if for no other reason than to ensure this doesn’t come to pass. Just the possibility of this being in our future should be a goad sufficient for us to stop playing the doom and gloom game and to work at bringing a little glow of positive feeling into our lives

And we will be surprised at how such a glow can infect those around us.

Be a little bud-light in your own life.

How can they do such things? How is it, in the (ex) land of the Free, the government can so plainly act in such totalitarian fashion? When did you and I allow our rights and freedoms to vanish so that people, who are self-evidently NOT acting in our interests, or even in a moral fashion, can reach into our lives and take them over. Why do they think they can get away with this?

I think they are becoming confident, although I am not sure I know the right reasons.

On one level, they have been running more than a century of the vastly mis-named ‘Education’ program on us all. We are taught to ‘not think’ and to compete for approval of Authority and to conform to the norm of those around us and to pull down to the common herd all those who might strive to stand above or beyond the crowd. They have a programming tool that captures almost all the public in a snare of symbols and triggers disguised as Entertainment. They are so scared that Entertainment might fail them, they keep upping the ante of shock, to the point where even minor accidents are hyped as ‘horrific’ or ‘Deadly’ and the slightest international altercation is built into a world-threatening disaster for the modern world.

So effective is their game that they can ignore situations that moral people would normally take deep umbrage at and demand action - children starve around the world while the average citizen worries about whether s/he can afford this year’s version of a t-shirt. We eagerly go into debt to buy the latest model of a car that is designed to break down and be obsolete shortly before we have it paid off.

Those who are more than 40 years of age tend to look at the learning of the up and coming generation and wonder what they learn in school these days and how some of them seem to be so dumb about basic things. We tend to blame the modern system, or lazy/incompetent teachers.

But the dumbing down began in other ways, a long time ago. We have been detached from our salvation - the Buddha, the Christ and others have all taught that enlightenment, advancement and salvation is about a personal relationship between a person and the sublime (whatever name you wish to give it) But the majority of people grow up within a system where the personal relationship has been superseded by an oversight, someone to tell us what is right and wrong, to tell us the exact minutiae of the path to the Godhead.

All this begs the question of why they do all this. I think the reason is so they can perpetrate other iniquities in relative safety. A population largely untrained in critical thinking processes, uneducated in basic symbolism, and trained to listen to authority as a source of knowledge, can be manipulated and maneuvered, indoctrinated and controlled with little chance of the majority reacting.

And they have that nice little ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ conspiracy theory to take care of those who might see through the curtain. (the CT theory is one I’ve spoken about before – by setting up ridiculous figures to spout all kinds of nonsense about UFOs (for example) the general public has been conditioned to respond to anybody labeled as a Conspiracy Theorist with ridicule, hilarity and derogatory comment. Now, if someone comes forth and tries to explain how ‘group A’ is manipulating things for their own benefit, ‘group A’ simply calls them a Conspiracy Theorist and the general public will obediently ignore any facts that might show group A’s work.

It’s a nice little protection against being found out, and keeps the Powers That Be safe from the exposure that would cause even the dumb sheep of the general population from finding their freedom.

A topic on a site was about gurus, talking about people with ideas and concepts, such as the Celestine Prophecy. While the Celestine Prophecy is fiction, it contains some valuable insights into how perhaps we ought to view life and maybe even how to grow in a real sense.

And somebody mentioned, in talking about gods of the past, that maybe, if someone got the people to believe in them, such as the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt did, the subject of all those beliefs might actually rise about normal human capabilities.

I try not to mention that possibility in public - we have quite enough wacko sects and cults out there already. All we need is for nut-jobs to get the idea they can get a few folk to ‘believe’ in them and it makes them God. Scary idea isn’t it?

It was something I thought long and hard about as I looked into ancient Egypt - that maybe the reason for the God-cult for Pharaohs had a basis in reality - that the people honestly believed their pharaoh was an incarnation of Ra or Atum and this made the Pharaoh (and his sister, something normally ‘overlooked’ by the male-centric historians) something more than mere human.

If we are energy beings or even something more ineffable such as fields of Consciousness, then the belief of others could easily ’strengthen’ or otherwise alter a field - and fields don’t need direct contact, they can operate at a distance, something for which we still do not have any explanation, let alone an adequate one.

If all the ‘fields of Consciousness’ that make up a group get together with one undistracted mind, of what might the focus of that group be capable? Maybe the only reason we don’t see it in daily life is the congregations are too distracted by the outside world to truly focus? Might that be the very reason for the ongoing media and entertainment blitzes? If the Christ came back, would He be more than a 30 second wonder before the people who might empower Him ‘changed the channel?’

And it’s working. The American experiment is all but dead in the water - the people no longer govern the people (if they ever did, given the overwhelming percentage of US leaders who have European royal genes)
While the rest of the world has a variety of Education system that seemed to be less and less effective over time, the US system is a standout among the crowd for producing people with few of the basic skills their grandparents had from fewer years of schooling.

As someone who went to school in the 60’s I find it bemusing anyone could spend 12 years at school and not be able to do basic arithmetic, be able to spell or at least duplicate the words they see in front of them and be unable to find even approximate locations of most countries on an unlabelled globe.

I’m not picking on Yanks here - virtually all the West is heading down the same path - we seem more concerned with teaching political correctness than personal self-worth, with making sure our kids know how to spend instead of how to add up. One has to wonder why the Governments INSIST all children ‘get an education’ when it has proven so ineffective - and one looks at the conformity and the undermining of the ability to apply critical thought and one begins to get an inkling of purpose.

The movies are just another tool - we get inured to things that a generation back would have had people on the streets in horror-provoked marches. We live in a society where a woman’s breast in public raises shocked headlines but the daily murder of thousands gets a brief mention on page 10.

With the use of movies and TV shows, we become accustomed to the shocking and the media knows it - they see it in how they constantly have to increase the shock value in headlines to get the attention of the masses. We look back and laugh at the simplistic adverts from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, forgetting that [i]those adverts worked![/i] because the people back then had not been traumatised by the violence and daily assault on our sensibilities that modern generations are born into.

psychicI stepped away from the church as a youngster. I had no idea of where I was headed but I knew the church wasn’t along my street. Briefly I tried Scientology but soon ran into disagreements and failures there. I’m not sure if auditing didn’t work on me or whether the practitioners weren’t skilled enough or whether maybe the excuse given to me after I left was correct, but failures of the techniques combined with failure to agree with the money-tree approach and I walked.

When I left the church as a teenager, I wasn’t aware I needed a path; I was reacting against, not walking towards… When I left Scientology I pretty much gave up on the spiritual idea. I got into a life of letting things happen. I had little in the way of personal morals but I don’t think I was a bad person, just lazy and cynical.

But over time, little things came to my attention. Some were things out in the world while others were internal to me or based around me. There were new insights into the world that didn’t fit in with a pragmatic solidly materialistic view of how things are. And I pretty much had to accept them – they were coming from Science.

There were events in my life I can only describe as psychic, strange things but not major things. I had dreams that came true, some coincidences that eventually became too much to remain in that category and a developing awareness that the physical could not explain all these things. And I pretty much had to accept them too – they were happening to me.

I had an online conversation recently on the Karma subject and found out how (apparently) confused I am. Other people joined in & it appears that many people aren’t as confused as I am because they all have very definite ideas as to what Karma is – the fact their ideas are backed by certainty and different each from the other seems to escape their notice.

I’m not sure I understand why karma should be a difficult thing to understand. It seems to be either (depending on to whom you speak) a reward/punishment system or a balancing system or a keep you on track system. I don’t think the system itself is complex so much as those who believe in it seem to advocate their favoured version of it.

But the whole ‘emotions’ subject is a strange one if we begin to separate out the being & the body. Maybe we need a new definition - how about emotions are the body thing that is linked into peptides & the basic brain & autonomous nervous system & the equivalent ‘feelings’ for the being we can call ‘Values’ rather than getting confused between the setup we arrive here with & that engendered by being within the chemical system of the body.

That way, we can have emotions which are attached to experience & which we, ideally, should use as extra information coming in with the event data, & we have values which come as part of the considered (or not :grin:) response to the event.

So, because of an event when we are children, we may feel anger when something similar happens to us as adults. The emotion is anger, but the spiritual emotion, the value we use to react might be indignation as our core inner values are violated, or it might be amusement as we recognise how we might have been manipulated had we not seen how the event pushed against our sense of fair play.

So emotions are things which we should be able to stand away from, to consider simply as additional information in our responses, while values can be a basic to our character, a colouring of our personality that comes from the lives we’ve led & maybe the mix of beingness we came here with.

Dreams are ephemeral things, phantasms of the night, sometimes sensual, sometimes violent, mostly disturbing and almost always strange. In them we sometimes see ourselves, often see things we do not wish to see and on occasion see familiar things in very weird ways.

There are careers, books, and websites devoted to dreams, to trying to figure out what they might mean or to interpreting the symbolism in them or even to just why we have them. Dreams seem to be necessary – they’re perhaps the major reason why we sleep and if someone is deprived of sleep for an extended period, their functioning becomes, to say the least, erratic.

In dreams our bodies seem disconnected mostly. The link between brain and body seems to be blocked, so that even though the same brain areas that, during waking times, will cause us to run, move and react may be firing, the body doesn’t normally move.

On occasion the severed link seems to get overwhelmed and the body moves – often this brings us out of the dream into wakefulness. Sometimes even stranger events occur as we rise and begin to do apparently normal activities even though our minds aren’t aware of them – sleep walking is poorly understood and while some experience it consistently throughout their lives, others might only go through it once or for a brief time.

I wonder how many of you have had strange experiences with dreams? Are there any readers who have had dreams come true, or who have gained new knowledge or understanding because of a dream?

Imagine The Matrix world - what if the computer simulation already had characters running around, operating according to basic programming. Neo wants to join the game, so the computer ‘models’ him and then overlays that model onto a generated character within the Matrix. Neo would need points of interface to be able to make the character do things other than its programming, but when Neo relaxed, the programming would run the body for him.

What would it be like to be Neo? Necessarily he would need to be unaware of his ‘greater’ life or he would not actually be ‘playing’ the Matrix game. In very short order he would become adjusted to using the model to do things - like driving a car, very soon you cease to think through the steps necessary to drive. Neo could even get to the point of wondering about and perhaps reasoning towards a knowledge of a greater life, but until he dropped the body and model imagery, he’d be unaware of the existence of something above his Matrix world.

The model would be like an astral body – a copy inserted into this reality by the original or perhaps by a ‘higher self’ to play and learn. The links back through the astral body might account for some of the mystery things that occur – there have been numerous cases where people have somehow ‘known’ of future events. There is no satisfactory explanations for this, although there have been numerous attempts.

Maybe the reason we have so much trouble identifying who we are and how things work with us is because we are trying to encompass two varieties of life within one description?

From Kirlian auras, through to electric fields, people have attempted to show that, if we are not just bodies living in a purely physical realm, our ‘spirit’ can be measured or shown to have reality within this cosmos. So far, as far as I know, nobody has yet managed to definitively show that the effects showing up in science have any relationship to what we term ‘spirit.’

I don’t know if what we term spiritual substance has anything to do with atoms and molecules. How I view it is that spirit is the reality, the thing that underlies everything we experience, and that spirit comes to play in the created environment but is not actually a part of it.

Bruce Lipton’s ‘field’ that owns a body isn’t it I think (spirit) but it might be. I keep having the thought (and I am not sure where it originated) that Lipton’s body-owning field is simply the intermediary, a phantasm created to allow spirit to interact with the physical universe. I think Sheldrake’s field is maybe a field ‘grown’ here in this reality by perhaps the life force that maintains it all.

It’s complex I guess but I seem to have found a view that suggests there is more than one growth happening. The Reality Life is growing towards sophistication while we come as avatars of THE ALL to learn from the game. The Gaia life forms are vehicles available for spirit to inhabit to experience. As spirit evolves in knowledge, experience and awareness, so Gaia has been driving in the same path - Gaia is running, if you like, her own God program, using physical bodies of ever increasing abilities to extend her own awareness and sophistication and in a symbiotic relationship with Spirit, is growing towards her own Godhood.

Mind you, it is also quite feasible Gaia IS our ALL, and that the bits of spiritual beingness that we are actually derive from Gaia. But that doesn’t seem to resonate with me as does the prior idea.

I am far from having it all worked out, but conversations here and on other sites are helping to coalesce the nebulosity into what might be insight… one day perhaps

I think maybe ‘lack of self awareness’ creates automatisms - when one is at all self-aware, there is little that is automatic. When one isn’t, almost everything is automatic. Lack of knowledge limits choices, reduces free will and allows manipulation - but it doesn’t automatically generate automatic behaviour.

I seriously doubt betrayal generates an automatism - I think there are too many people betrayed who stay with the betrayer, who line up to allow it to happen again, who defend the one who hurts them, for it to be ‘automatic.’ The love and hate relationship would seem far more active and complex than can be explained by mere automatism.

I’m also not sure hate is emotional - I think maybe the expression of it can be emotional but true hate is cold and reasoning. Rage is hot and unreasoning. Hate allows the use of reason to find satisfaction; rage will lash out even at risk to self.

I also don’t think empathy is the ‘connection between knowledge and emotion’ as empathy doesn’t seem to bring knowledge with it - it instead relies on the experience of the receiver for informational content - normally it is just ‘feeling’ not data.

I see emotions as being at one end of a scale - I don’t think they have opposites, just flavours. Emotions come from peptides, chemical environments added into informational input based on previous experiences being associated with aspect of current environment. Emotions are meant to be informational, but because we have so little training and education in who we are, mostly they become motivational at the expense of reason.

The opposite of the various emotions is Rationality, where the informational input is shown to the being and decided upon based on content and awareness.

And one last thing - ignorance is not necessarily a lack of knowing - only in a rational person is that definition always the case. For a variety of reasons, people may know but still remain ignorant. The Christian with Evolution comes to mind - Evolution as a result of random mutation may not be the ultimate theory nor even well supported by fact, but to willingly line up Creation against it shows a willingness to ignorance that no amount of education can ever overcome.
(in case you’re wondering, Creation and Evolution are not even opposite sides in the same argument)

As I read recently - ‘It is impossible to reason someone out of a position they were not first reasoned into’

Knowing something and allowing it to change your view are two VERY different things.

I was in a discussion recently about Apathy. A person was saying that because of trauma, they were deep in apathy for a good part of the past few years. That raised my interest – I don’t know if shutting off because of pain or trauma can be defined as apathy.

Apathy is a not caring, a no interest, a position so low in level that nothing registers as interest. Being shut off is a situation maintained by pain, a wall (and I know a little of walls) built to cut out the caring - in short it is an act of will or even an act of desperation.

To me, the one thing apathy cannot be or be the result of is an action of any kind - action is the result of motivation and apathy is the negation of motivation. Apathy is not caring and the wall is erected to prevent caring. shutting out all personal feelings is an action, a deliberate (or otherwise) act of consciousness, usually for protection. apathy is the result of nothing left, no path, no hope and no care for anything. An apathetic person doesn’t need a wall.

Love and hate are not, (I think) polar opposites but rather two faces of a coin. Both are feelings and both are positive feelings - I do NOT mean they have positive effects but both will result in actions, in motivation and in direction. apathy is their true opposite because again, love and hate are about caring. It may not be possible to hate someone you couldn’t love - not sure about that but it seems to ’snick’ into place.

I don’t know if being in the presence of an apathetic individual can be harmful - unless the need radiating from said individual results in a draining of the one who responds. In such cases one would need to be a channel for the energy, not provide it from one’s own storage. The very need of such a person may be attractive to one who lives to help - maybe that’s why we see people locked into user relationships?

Standing in front of a fire place on a cold night is a comfort – we watch the flames leap and cavort, we hold out hands to get warm and we relish the time spent with loved ones in such a room.

A cold burn set by humans to clear the undergrowth can be scary – watching the flames track you as you move along the line, using wet hessian or pigs (water tanks of several hundred gallons) on the back of a Land Cruiser to control the spread of the flames brings realisation of how easily it could get out of hand.

Being closer than miles to a raging inferno of a bushfire is an experience out of this world. Fires such as those which have devastated Victoria are living monsters, demons of heat, noise and awesomeness that can leave the strongest quaking in fear.

The fires rage so hot they suck air in across the front, creating a gale that threatens to suck you into the flames.

The air rises fast as it is heated and feeds the flames. The roar of the fire is deafening, so loud you can feel it in your bones. The doof-doof of the suburban youth has nothing on this. Standing right behind a 747 jet engine might come close.

The heated air reaches for the tree tops, exploding leaves into flames, tearing them from their branches and speeding them across the untouched bush ahead of the fire front.

The heat radiating from the front makes you wonder why you ever thought heat was a good thing. You can almost feel your face peeling off as the blast hits you.

What most people don’t get is that, when you get close to the fire, it is hard to think, let alone reason out what to do. That’s why they only allow trained personnel on the fire line

In our world it seems everything is becoming more and more geared towards safety. The government passes laws almost daily to curtail injury, to allow them to fine people who might put themselves in harm’s way.

Our children are coddled and swathed in safe environments to prevent anything bad happening to them, yet somehow previous generations were not only able to struggle through such horrendous risks, they seem to have thrived on them.

Some of the sickliest people I have met have come from a coddled environment where they were prevented from having exposure to the world outside. Recent research suggests such exposure is needed to kickstart the immune system. It’s the same principle under which we vaccinate – exposure to a small risk will stimulate the protectiveness that will fend off the potentially fatal version.

When disaster comes, when massive trauma arrives unheralded as nature smacks down the impertinent humans, those who cope best are those who’ve learned early that the world can be a harsh place. Those who’ve never experienced hardship are often the ones most in need of help as they wilt under pressure when they find there is no real haven from disaster.

But sometimes, just sometimes, the least likely people will shine under adversity, while the ones we expect to cope, show they don’t have the grit to function.

Have you been through trauma on a scale that affects entire communities? Have you watched the people around you when all the normal coping mechanisms fail and they stand exposed to the raw power of the world around them?

I want to interrupt the normal flow of posts about the spiritual world. I want to talk about tragedy, drama, disaster because I think sometimes, the only way to see the real people out there, is when events so large they push aside the normal day-to-day masks we wear, that the deep down person hiding inside is visible

It is in times of major events when we see the unexpected, when heroic behaviour arises and when humans can be at their worst or their best. It is hard to face catastrophe, extremely difficult to behave well in the face of overwhelming events, yet over and again we see apparently normal people not only do it, but do it so well they can only be called Hero.

Living in the world around us it is easy to get into the viewpoint that people are pretty much fucked. They cheat, lie, steal, indulge in casual violence for the pettiest of reasons… the list seems endless. It can be a source of depression, a cause for apathy as we look around and see a world where the least common denominator seems to be controlling the state of play of our society.

Yet on occasions of terror, of trauma so massive it is hard to imagine much less face, we often find the apparent scum of our society are those who rise to magnificence.

Recent events here in Australia have once more brought out the best in people. The Aussies have come out to support and cherish those who have suffered hardship and loss when the bushfires showed us Nature’s February Fury as they destroyed lives and towns.