The grand illusion

https://www.collective-evolution.com/2020/03/03/shattering-the-grand-illusion-the-power-of-human-thought/


This is an excellent article ,click the link above. 

The Heart

Each of us are on a spiritual journey, whether we realize it or not .


"The journey of personal discovery... may lead us away from what’s been familiar in the past, and it may take our entire lifetime to complete, but, the distance of our trip is a very short one. It only covers about 18 inches. The distance from our brain to our heart.
But the short distance can be deceptive. Depending on the beliefs of our families, our communities, our religions, and what happens in our life experiences, it can take months, years, or a lifetime to learn how to make the shift from the logical thinking of the mind to the intuitive wisdom of the heart..."    - paraphrased  quotes  by Gregg Braden, scientist , author , and spiritual leader.


The last post called 'The Road To Discovery' was an updated one from earlier in 2018 . It was the story of my road to discovery and the personal journey I have been through over the past few years. In order to go down this road of spiritual discovery we often have to break free of the restraint of preconditioned thinking. There has to be an open mindedness and a moving beyond beliefs set in stone.This has become my new normal. I greet each day not knowing what life is going to teach me. It is a life of unknowing outcome, yet, it is a living filled with anticipation of  the mystery of life lived in the moment.


I spend months sometimes trying to understand  certain subjects . Last year my main theme of study and learning was that of the ego, dying to the false concept of self  and discovering what is often called the true self. For me its not about destroying the ego, I am not sure that is possible, but, rather a taming of it. The goal is to get the ego, the thinking mind, the monkey chatter mind, under control, by taming it to be transformed into a servant rather then master. The mind does make a good servant but it is a terrible master. When Ego is in charge there is chaos. Ego has many different definitions. But I think of it as a part of the thinking mind that has set itself up as master and controller of the human organism. It is based in a false sense of self. Ego does not have a true existence; it arises as a result of thought processes which believes itself separate  from our core inner wholeness. It survives by concentrating thought on past, future, and a focus on perceived lack and problems. It loves drama and being the victim. It keeps us constantly focused on doing rather then letting us fall into a contemplation on being. It cannot survive in the 'Now' and it loses its grip when it is observed.  Here is a a definition of the egoic mind : its the state of being identified with the ego, the power which seeks to defend and glorify the separate and separated self, works for separation, unhealthy self rule, or determined independence, and it works to obscure or destroy the Divine true self and prevent it from becoming master over the whole. Plato was credited with the quote, "An unexamined life is not worth living". I will take it a step further and say that the unexamined 'mind' makes life not worth living. I wrote about becoming the observer of thought and  getting the thinking mind under control in other posts, here is one Become the observer.
And another  here :  Can you coax your mind from its wandering 


Lately I have been learning all about the possibility of living life from the spiritual heart center rather then living from the mind dominated mode. This shift from  the logical thinking of the mind to the intuitive wisdom of the heart seems to be the next step in our conscious evolution. Spirituality in the west  seems to have been focusing on techniques to get the mind and body disciplined in order to live a balanced and stress free life. Egoic mind diminishing is a big part of that. When the mind becomes still then it will be able to communicate more clearly with the heart and the  rest of the bodies intelligence centers.This is what I realize so far; the communication network from the heart is not through spoken language as we speak, but it seems certain limited  words and the stirring of emotion can activate what is  more like messages of feelings coming from the heart region. I find that a mantra such as saying thank-you repeatedly toward the heart seems to work. Generating thoughts of love and kindness along with forgiveness seems to be the communication the heart works with. I experienced this today on my daily walk. I kept repeating thank you  and concentrating on the positive emotions love, joy, peace. I was thinking of loved ones as I walked and forgiving those who I was holding minor grudges toward. After 45 min of this ,I started to feel subtle feelings of love coming from the heart region. So, this is my first glimpse of a whole new realization. The spirit is full of mystery and we humans have only just begun to understand the potential fulfillment of this relationship with the divine.

I will end this post with an article link that explains all this so much better than I could. This is all new to me and I will be focusing on this subject for a long time. As I learn more on this subject I may post more of my thoughts on it. The Heartmath institute at heartmath.org is the go to place for the science behind this subject but I will give the link to a site that takes this type of info and simplified it for us all to understand. click here:   Thinking with the Heart

Road to Discovery

This is an updated post with some added material at the end.

 

 

The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and the acceptance of love.

— MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

 
 Road to Discovery ( a painting I did in 2004 acrylic on canvas)

At around age ten, I began pondering deep questions about life. One day I was alone on a hill top over looking our small home town in Newfoundland. I asked myself a question that would interest me all through life....who am I ?  This question and many other philosophical questions would seem to pop into my young inquiring mind often as a young man. I have always been this way for as long as I can remember.

For most of my adult life I followed a path, a belief system, that seemed to demand that I live a life that strived after some divine ideal. It created great fear, guilt and anxiety in my inner core. Because I always felt that I was not good enough. I was trying to meet unrealistic expectations that I had set for myself in order to meet a certain standard, to satisfy external expectations. Over a period of years this developed into conflicting assumptions and beliefs that produced a feeling of discomfort and stress, along with anxiety. This condition eventually lead to a need for a complete re-examination of these assumptions, and beliefs in order to restore a balance. This started me on a very rewarding spiritual journey down the road of discovery into what is truth. In my case the truth has set me free, but not in a way most people would think. To use a computer analogy ...Truth is like a re-programming of your entire operating system. A deleting of the old information program system and installing the new.

I have spent the past six years slowly dismantling this belief system that held my spirit in it's grip, for so long. It involved peeling back the multiple layers of assumptions to test each one for truth. Finding truth and freedom is a process of learning what is untrue and then detaching yourself from all false beliefs and illusions. Perhaps the greatest untruth is the idea that we are separate from others, nature and "God". This belief is so ingrained in our psyche and it is perhaps the single greatest root cause of our fear, guilt and anxiety. This belief, when it is looked at deeply, seems to be in complete opposition to the realization of the love based intelligence, foundational to the principles and laws observed in the universe. It has been said that fear is the opposite of love, but perhaps a more accurate statement is, fear appears when there is the absence of Love. Fear is rooted in the thinking mind, its a thought form. Love comes from the intuitive heart and is a product of divine energy. When I view God as the source of all life, love and universal intelligence, how can we be separate from this life, this love? Why would we fear life, love and this super intelligence all around us?  Would this intelligence be for us or against us? It seems to be a system based on cooperation rather then competition. Its more like oneness then it is  duality and it may not have the good vs evil division that we imagine.

I realized that it 's our own thoughts that creates the sense of separation. When we allow our egoic mind (false self) to control us we Edge God Out (EGO) and then we cause in ourselves a perception of separation. When we see the illusion of the false self , it will slowly dissolve and our true self once again becomes who we really are. When we live from the true self, who we really are, called many names .. Spirit, essence, the soul, the heart, the center, the core of our being, there is now no perception of separation from our creator, our source, nature and others. Today the answer to that question "who am I "  becomes more like a realization that we are all one and we share that oneness with all life. If we move on in the spiritual journey, away for the personal "I " , away from false fear based beliefs, into the acceptance of a love based reality, we begin to get a glimpse of what  Jesus called the kingdom of heaven :and get this, ..... he said it was within us. Now ponder that for awhile.

I end this post with some quotes from an article written by ANNELOES SMITSMAN

click link below

The Evolution of our Ego Consciousness

'Ego and its shadow dynamics can only operate where there is inner division; when we believe ourselves to be separate from Nature, the Universe and others.'

'Remember, our ego is our wisdom in reverse. Its purpose is to benefit this false self-perception, rather than the greater whole. It generates small mindedness rather than big-heartedness.'

'...ego does not have inherent existence; it arises as a result of stretching away from and denying our inner wholeness.'

Liberation isn't about breaking out of anything , it's a gentle melting into who we really are  -Marianne Williamson