Taking a Good Look -- Remembering to Live in Precious Moments

Every now and again, take a good look at something not made with hands – a mountain, a star, the turn of a stream.

There will come to you wisdom and patience and solace

and, above all, the assurance that you are not alone in the world.

Sidney Lovett

This inspirational life quote is a reminder of some simple truths of spiritual enlightenment. First, we need to stop-- ever so often – maybe, more often – and remember, that we have forgotten something. The material world screams at us in no uncertain terms to pay attention to its useless chatter and clatter. And our brains react with screaming fierceness – “we have to avoid the present moment – human consciousness is not acceptable.” Together the material world and our brains whip up storms of illusion and confusion that keeps us from remembering – to remember – to stop and experience and reside in just this precious moment.

Take a look – open the eyes of our hearts – take a good look – at something – experience fully our experience of who we are – in something we are not – in something that is not demanding our attention – but in something that carries the subtleness of life’s inexhaustible mystery – within each precious moment – within each atom of human and spiritual experience.

Nature – natural -- not made by man -- uniquely transcendent compared to all the illusions we can create – “what is man that thou art mindful of him” – touch the face of God in moments of Their handiwork – because there are gifts hidden in their simplicity.

Wisdom – spiritual enlightenment – where our brains begin to clear of the wreckages of our pasts – where a higher Presence begins to glow in the darkened synapses of our brain – clarity of experience and intimate Presence adjusts our perceptions and reactions – and we are free to be more wholly present – in life’s precious moments. Wisdom is where human experience and God’s Presence join to become consciousness and intimacy into being.

Patience involves the absence of obsession with material outcomes because we have the guarantee of God’s Presence that all is planned and prepared for our best. The neural energy of our brains diminishes and we are no longer driven to control what will not make us happy anyway. Holding their hands – we have no need to be responsible for our outcomes, only for our presence within Their Presence.

Solace – relief from pain and grief. “Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted”. Their Presence comforts us. We are able to flow through our current and past pain and fear and sadness – and find rest. “Come unto me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give your rest.”

When I first began to experience rest, I experienced being a very young child, being held by a very attentive Parent and being gently rocked – safe, nurtured, and unconditionally loved and admired. The cares of my mind’s woundedness flowed out and away, and being replaced by a loving stillness – far beyond my brain’s capacity to create.

All of these gifts – nature, spiritual enlightenment, confidence and serenity, and restful spiritual healing – all these are part of the massive and emerging assurance – the personal experience that we are not ever alone – never abandoned or rejected, except by our own injured brains.

Gifts – from someone who likes us and loves us – without conditions or possibility of rejection – precious moments of God’s love becoming spiritual enlightenment.

No longer alone in our world.

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Remaking our World Through Daily Inspirations

The world doesn’t need supermen or women, but super-natural people. People who will turn the self out of their lives and let Divine Power work through them. Let inspiration take the place of aspirations. Seek to grow spiritually, rather than to acquire fame and riches. Our chief ambition should be to be used by God. The Divine Force is sufficient for all the spiritual work in the world. God only needs the instruments for His use. His instruments can remake the world.

Prayer for the Day

I pray that I may be an instrument of the Divine Power. I pray that I may do my share in remaking the world.

Twenty Four Hours a Day (Hazelden Publishing)

Love Found -- Part Two -- Finding Presence and Daily Inspriations

For Part One, click here: Love Lost

(This is my experience, strength and hope. Please do not misunderstand the energy or passion of my words to indicate any level of authority – except perhaps about my own experiences, strength and hope.)

The Journey Begins
Imagine for a moment, that we are on exploratory expedition, with the intent being to find a strange new place called “love”. Where would we look? What would be indications that we were close – or far away -- from our destination? What resources would we use to find clues and directions? Who could we turn to for help?

We could “Goggle” the internet using the word “love”, and \we would find many, many links to sites dealing with the subject. We would find tons of information and stories about, and descriptions of “love”. And I believe we could be no where closer than we were before.

Maybe the place to do an “internet” network search is in our own hearts.

Following our Hearts
Let’s start our pursuit with the consciousness that love cannot be found by or in our brains. It can be only be experienced in an area called our “hearts”, and then shared – experientially – through the medium of words and thoughts – which must be experienced also. Using our brains to experience and pursue love is like trying to see a sunset with our ears – it is not the medium of perception that can be used on sunsets.

Where Is Love Hiding?
There are several places where love becomes hidden:
1. The Trees of Distraction: what most people, including myself, have interpreted as love is the relief we have felt when a relationship distracted us from ourselves – partially anesthetizing our senses. Relief from the conscious or unconscious pain of being human and being separated is most frequently perceived by humans as “love”. In romantic relationships, for example, opposites attract because they distract.
2. The Forest of Intimacy: when relationships have gone on long enough or gone deep enough, the inebriation caused by the initial distractions of the relationship begins to wear off, and we begin to experience increased consciousness – and historical unresolved pain and fear. At this point, our brains conclude that the closeness and connection is not real or acceptable, and initiates a relationship destruct sequence.

So if real love is not the pleasurable feeling of relief from others distracting us; and if true love improves our conscious contact with ourselves to the point that we can experience overwhelming unhealed, historical pain; and if our unconscious brains are programmed to protect us from the pain of increasing consciousness with others, where are we left in the pursuit of love.

A Different Place
My first spiritual adviser taught me relentlessly page 417 in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous as the basis for relationships, living, and love:

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, thing, or situation – some fact of my life -- unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing , or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s world by mistake.

The writer later describes the effects of acceptance on his relationship with his wife.
His emotional illness had caused major disruption and disturbance of his perceptions and reactions – to the extent that the beautiful person he had married had become perceived as a flawed and unacceptable person. In his disturbance, he had judged, rejected, and abandoned her – he had lost his inner place of “love” for her.

As he began to heal with improving conscious Presence with his God, he was given a “new pair of glasses” – he was restored to his truer self, and in that experience he rediscovered the wonderful person he had met and loved before – and more.

In learning to live in unconditional acceptance, we begin to realize that acceptance is the truest “location” of love. And it is only possible when we are personally and consciously connected to our God’s unconditional acceptance -- love – of us. The new pair of glasses is beginning to see others – and ourselves – through Their eyes. We are all wonderful, exciting, and perfect in Their perception – and They know all our secrets – even the ones we don’t know.

A GPS Prayer

God, grant me the Presence to accept and love others without their having to change, the Presence to be changed by your acceptance and love, and the Presence to know the difference between love and distraction. Amen

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Love Lost -- Finding Presence and Daily Inspirations Part One

The paradox is that looking for love is not the way to find it. Abundant love will find us when we make the decision to attentively and unconditionally give it to all the people God has invited to share our life. Our primary purpose is to know and give love. In God's Care

As human beings we are looking for love – frequently, “in all the wrong places” – but we are still looking – because we are really so incredibly alone. The complexities and detail of modern culture with its blasting medias, ultra- virtual video and computer worlds and with its frenzied and pulsating artists of entertainment –have created alternate universes of numbing irrelevant thought—a culture no longer dependent on chemicals to be stoned out of our minds.

We are separated and alone – disconnected – and basically stripped of the emotional and spiritual securities of any real Presence that would enable us to unconditionally offer and receive loving connections to others.

So – alone, in this massive darkness – we humans tend to grope for any fleeting touch of warmth or human presence – finding that every rose of hope has thorns of disappointment and ultimate abandonment.

The obstacles, in my experience, are the absence of clear experience of what “love” is, the inability to maintain a steady and conscious spiritual Presence beyond physical form and sensation, and the confusion about what human relationships are really about.

Our culture seems to use the term “love” with unconscious ease – as if everyone knows and has agreed on what it means. As I have listened to my own inner voices, and the inner voices of others, I have heard the word mean everything from “I like you” to “I need you” to “I will like you if you will give me what I need”. It seems to be used like a magic word that should somehow immediately create closeness where none to little actually exists.

It is seemingly a word of attempted mastery over the stifling darkness of separation, and over the emotional starvation for human and spiritual Presence. For me, without my God’s higher Presence, human presence has been only a mental fantasy, a legend or a fairy tale. But what exactly does “loving Presence” mean? Where and how does it exist? How do we find the invisible in the blinding glare of what is visible?

Love seems to be an attempted mastery over increasing human consciousness – the feverish awareness of past and pending abandonments by others, our selves – and seemingly by God. We “fall in love” as a moth is drawn to a flame – we are starving for intimacy and become filled with the euphoria of distraction – and are finally burned by loss of the beloved delusion.

And when consciousness blinks briefly into existence on the screens of our minds, we shut it down with the most convenient and available distractions we can find. And we are powerless to stop – the genetic programming of our primitive, reptilian brain is simply doing its unconscious best to protect us from harm and pain. We do not have a conscious choice.

Disconnected from the “loving” and caring Presence of our God, we are damned to incredible separation and loneliness – wandering the darkness and silence of human existence – attempting to hope for and experience a “love” that does not ultimately destroy and maim our human hearts – even more.

See Part Two.

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Grief -- How Do We Find Daily Insprations Within Inspriations Life Quotes?

Let's start with this inspiring life quote. How do we experience these words as a door to increasing daily inspirations, and spiritual enlightenment.

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.

So suffering must become love. That is the mystery.
Katherine Mansfield


“Everything in life” – I experience that everything in this room, every thought and reaction in my brain, every event that has occurred or is anticipated has God’s energy and meaning all in and through it. Nothing is wasted. And everything is personally meaningful by higher design.

“Everything in life that we really accept” – I experience acceptance as the insertion of higher Presence -- through daily inspirations -- into every thought, experience and event of my life. This provides the sense of meaning and purpose for “everything in life”

The opposite of acceptance, for me, is control. As I breathe and experience
Control, I experience separation and abandonment from my past, the expectation – within my brain’s programming – that this pain will continue. I experience a constriction of neural energy aimed instinctively at “controlling” the pending outcomes of my life.

Constriction of neural energy hurts – “suffering” – mentally, emotionally, physically, and socially. In the absence of Presence, my brain resists what is, and I suffer. The solution for me is acceptance -- the loving and caring Presence of my higher Power.

Everything in my life that I suffer must go through change. For me, daily inspirations and meditations – including inspiring life quotes -- have created filters of caring Presence through which the sewage of my past can be changed from pain to love. Love for me is the intimate and unconditional connection and participation with my higher Presence, others, and ultimately myself.

“This is the mystery.” This is an exciting sentence. I experience my life beginning to change without my understanding and intellect -- exceeding all the expectations that my brain can produce.

My child self calls this “magic”. There is a personal energy swirling around and entering my brain that is creating a better “story” – the exciting adventures and stories of my life. Everything is enormously unpredictable, and as I surrender to Presence, and listen to their voices, wonderful unexpected “things” happen – within my perceptions and reactions. And life is incredibly never the same.

Life and spiritual healing begins with suffering – because I am human. Life mysteriously arrives at spiritual enlightenment and loving Presence, through the practice of daily inspirations – the experience of inspiring life quotes – each moment, each breath of my day.

With each new day I put away the past

and discover the new beginnings I have been given.
Angela Wozniak

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Grief -- How To Find Daily Inspirations in Inspirational Life Quotes

Daily inspirations – especially through inspiring life quotes -- involve finding openings within the material world through which intimate energy – higher Presence – can flow, and spiritual enlightenment – transformation of the neural processes of the brain – can occur.

The spiritual world is all around us. We are blinded by the broken neural programmings of our brains. The past – the separations and abandonments perceived and recorded in the neural network of the brain – forms a reservoir of unprocessed sewage, which leaks constantly into our current perceptions of and reactions to current life events.

Developing the skills of finding daily inspirations through inspiring life quotes begins to build a spiritual treatment “facility” in our brains and hearts, which begins to process the sludge of the past. We begin being restored to clear, flowing spiritual experiences of higher Presence – spiritual awakening. Spiritual awakenings form more and more collections of Presence-filtered neural pathways, which eventually create warm flowing light – spiritual enlightenment. Daily inspirations and inspired life quotes maintain and increase this spiritual enlightenment.

How can this work? Consider with me the following inspiring life quote:

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become love. That is the mystery.
Katherine Mansfield

What do you hear in these words? Take a few moments to breathe deep, and absorb the energy and Presence of the words. My God or higher Presence (or whatever name you use) speaks wherever, and whenever I am listening. This has been my experience over the years.

The starting point is to slow down -- admit and experience the darkness of my brain – its inability to hear a higher Voice. My brain operates in digital data called thoughts, which are formed with words. Thoughts cannot hear or experience Presence.

The darkness is created by the wounding experiences of my past that exist in my brain for which there was never spiritual healing, and therefore are current and reoccurring.

Next, I breathe deeply – in my powerlessness – and connect with my higher Presence – or “God” to most. I have learned to use my breathing to slow down and nurture my brain, allowing it to quiet its chatter.

At first, hearing this higher Voice was like a faint rustling in the background of my thoughts. As I have practiced, this connection has become clearer -- yet wordless and intimate – an experience of personal Presence. What I hear is like a still small voice – someone very close by – speaking softly to my heart – the emerging spiritual part of me that begins to connect softly to my brain.

Then, I take the action to trust this Presence by writing down, or sharing with someone else what I am experiencing. This actions seems to bring my human experience of unknowing, and my spiritual experience of a personal and caring Presence together into a growing spiritual enlightenment. I experience a peace and serenity which exceeds the neural capacity of my brain to understand. It becomes living, dynamic, flowing, and life changing.

Daily inspirations through inspiring life quotes open my heart and my brain begins to experience spiritual enlightenment.

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Love and Grief -- Touching Hearts

What most of us want is to be heard – to communicate.

Dory Previn

The greatest gift we can give a person is rapt attention.

Unknown

Why?
Recently I have been asking my God and my selves why I want to write, express, and communicate. As I have listened, what I have heard is that I want to reach out and touch others with my experience, strength, and hope – because in those moments, I feel most clearly the loving life changing touch of my very Present God. To have Presence that transforms my life with new and loving energies, I must give Presence to others. I want “to be heard”.

The Golden “Principle”
Consider the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Religion has made this statement into a moral mandate about how we should not mistreat others. I experience that the Golden Rule is actually a loving suggestion related to improving our conscious contact with God and ourselves by “loving others” – unconditionally. It gives us a principle of intimacy with others that benefits us, not a warning that we will be punished if we are bad.

The Apostle John wrote, “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. He that loves not, does not know God: for God is love.”

“Understanding” Inspirational Life Quotes
Before I discuss this quote, I want to reference something that is important to me about how I “understand” Biblical inspirational life quotes. I will be writing more about this later.

Having studied the Bible and religion academically and intellectually since I was a child, I have experienced how worthless and even harmful this specific method of understanding scriptures can be. So I had to be given another way to experience spiritually related words, and their energy and life meanings. The way that I have been given is what I presently call “experiential intimacy”. This involves having a personal and interactive relationship with my God, where I come to “know” by being with Them, and by listening to their words and responses. So when I share my perceptions of scriptures or other inspirational life quotes, I am sharing my personal experience with my God – He and She -- , and I am sharing what I “hear” them saying as I listen and speak to Them.

The Love Principle
Let’s look at this Biblical quote again: “Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God. He that loves not, does not know God: for God is love.”

First, I am aware that religion makes “love” a rule and not a spiritual life principle. Love cannot be legislated. If it is not there, it is not there. And we are only using warm fuzzy masks to cover up the separation and loneliness we are experiencing with others and ourselves. We can only give what we have.

Next, what in the world is “love”? It is a term that we humans use frequently arbitrarily as if everyone knows and agrees on what it means. Not really true.

I have experienced that my God’s love is Their unconditional and unending caring for me – without rules, conditions, judgments or any form of separation by Them. I experience that they see me as being perfect and wonderful – you, too – and They are only concerned about our inability to see ourselves as they do. And, by the way, they know everything – there are no secrets with Them – and They still see us as perfect and wonderful.

Love as Action – Touching Hearts
Another part of “love” from my experience with Them is that it involves action – being actively Present. They are emotionally attentive, courteous, thoughtful, encouraging, playful, humorous – and very honest and direct. They actively “touch” my heart and I can feel Their unconditional warmth and Presence.

“Let us love one another” – as our God does – for love is our God’s gift of intimate Presence to us. When we give our presence to others – when we touch others -- we experience a higher Presence of our God than we are capable of by ourselves.

Gifts of Loving
Every one who gives unconditional Presence is given two gifts:
1. First, we are “born” of God. I experience this as a rebirthing transformation of my being. In the warm and unconditional loving womb of their Presence, I began to be reborn out of my human, shame based, conditional genetic makeup. I began to become transformed into the loving truth of Their being. And as I “touch” and love others, I become increasingly reborn into Their loving “image” – I begin to take on their spiritual genetic makeup. They are spiritually, in fact, my real Parents.
2. Second, we come to “know” God. Mankind, religion, and the human brain makes this word mean, “we come to understand God intellectually, with our brains.” For me, “knowing” is an intimate experience of growing conscious closeness and interaction. My experience is that the “kingdom of God is within us” – within the sacred intimacy that They offer and that is infinitely possible for us.

When we do not lovingly “touch” others with our spiritual presence, we become disconnected from God, from ourselves, and from other human beings – not because our God is punishing us, but because our humanness has separated us.

The essence of my God is “love” – total, unconditional, caring, “touching” and interactive Presence. That is who They are. That is who we really are. Life more abundant is the active sharing of that “love” with others – which reconnects us to our God and ourselves.

Love – Grief and Loss
Because grief and loss is something that I help many people with, I like to reference this topic in each of my articles. What actually creates “loss” is a loss of presence – loving connection with others. It can occur with death, where we experience a loss of conscious contact with the person who is deceased. And it occurs every time someone was unable to “love” us – and whenever we were unable to love them. In my experience, there is a collective effect of losses over time, and there are violent and sudden losses of presence, for example, divorce and physical abuse. The most effective way I have found to grieve and “digest” loss is by finding others who want and can accept my “love” , and give them my presence and attention on a steady and regular basis – while receiving the same from available others and my God.

Love and Finding Daily Inspirations
Another important topic related to each article is “finding daily inspirations”. In order to available for, and in order to maintain spiritual awakenings, we must have steady, dependable, and effective sources of our God’s Presence. Otherwise, we go as far as our spiritual resources, and have to stop. Or we find ourselves losing what we have gained. I encourage you to find your own spiritual words, persons, and groups that give you optimum connection to your God – daily inspirations – and live with them rather than just visit.

To be continued…..

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