Love Lived -- Finding Daily Inspirations and Presence Part 3

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

Much more can and will be said about love and loving, but for now I want to conclude this present series with something fairly simple – yet very powerful – to me.

To me, love is an unconditional acceptance, and sometimes even an enjoyment of others enabled by my conscious contact with my God. It is limited by the severity of my “humanitis”, but restorable by reestablishing and improving my conscious contact with my God, with my self, and with others.

So we decide that we “want” to love. And we are realizing our powerlessness over loving – that our relationships have become “unmanageable” –frequently or periodically uncomfortable. We experience consciously our own weaknesses so we can consciously experience our God’s empowering Presence to love. And now we are ready to surrender our wills and our lives over to care of our God’s love by loving others. What do we do?

For twenty-five years I have journalled – very nearly every day. My journaling began in a very troubled time of my life, with an assignment by a minister counselor to write a letter to God. After we had read and discussed it, he said, “Now I want you to write a letter from God to you.”

I was amazed at the assignment – and even more with the experience. I had never listened to my God in that way before. And from that time to now, I have written – journalled – to my God – my feelings, and my thoughts, and my reactions and my questions, and then I have taken a few deep breaths – listened with my heart – and began to write what I heard Them "say". It has been very powerful in my life.

One word that I have heard thousands of times over those years from my God was “Listen!” Our relationship – my conscious contact with Them – has been built on attentive listening as an “act of faith”. Listening – not really to just words or thoughts – but to Their loving caring Presence – Their still small voice in the middle of massive avalanches and sunamis of emotion and human consciousness. I have learned from Their listening to me how to listen to Them, to my self, and how to listen to others. And I have been loved, nurtured, supported, and cared for by my God. They have taught me, I believe,
the highest expressions of unconditional and conscious love – intimate Presence – that I am currently capable of.

As I was sitting in my spiritual group this morning, I was listening to Them, and They reminded me of four types of love-listening that I have given and been given:
1. Simple physical presence and visual attention.
2. Mental presence or listening to and hearing the others thoughts.
3. Emotional presence or empathically listening to others feelings through the medium of my own feelings.
4. Spiritual presence or listening to others from a place of conscious intimate connection with our God, with ourselves, and with other human beings.

When others are listening to me, I experience an heightened level of my God’s loving Presence – and theirs. When I am listening to others, I experience the same, and also an intuitive use of silence, words, and nonverbal gestures to communicate our presence.

Maybe along with any Valentines, cards, flowers, etc… maybe we can add the loving gift of an attentive ear, and a listening heart – not just on this particular day – but everyday – and with – nearly -- every person in our lives.

“Sincerely touching the soul of someone else can tap the well of happiness within each of us.”

Each Day a New Beginning

The first duty of love is to listen.

Paul Tillich

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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Reaching Our Grief

For more articles, please click here: Finding Daily Inspirations.

Consciousness Hurts Without Higher Presence -- Grief and Daily Inspirations

WARNING!

At lunch, I was telling Kathy about this article, and she jokingly said it should come with a warning label. So here it is:

The Surgeon General has determined that this article may be hazardous to your mental and emotional unconsciousness. It is recommended that you do not read this article while operating your life or any mechanical relationships. This article may cause mental irritation, cognitive disorientation, and interpersonal disruptions. Use only under the supervision of a qualified spiritual guide.

There Is a Threat

Last night I met and talked with a special friend who is really struggling with his experience of his life and himself. He helped me become much more conscious of my self -- which is, in my experience, the foundation of human and spiritual consciousness.

The biggest threat to the quality of human life on this material and mental plane is actually consciousness. As long as we can maintain a “comfortable” level of unconsciousness through distraction, thought, food, and sometimes chemicals, life can be reasonably manageable and livable. We can “do the time”.

But once our level of consciousness rises above a certain point, we are really in major trouble. We start seeing “dead people” (metaphor), and we are seemingly the only ones doing so, so we must be bad, really messed up, or just deliberately stupid.

Actually “None of the above” is true.

What’s “Wrong”?

We don’t “understand” what is “wrong” with us – and it has to be wrong because it gets in the way of our accomplishing “necessary” or at least normal life outcomes. And it separates us emotionally and physically from others who do not also “see dead people”. We feel abandoned, alone, weird – evil, not good enough -- deserving to be judged, condemned, and punished.

Our brains respond to our verdict by subjecting us to inhumane punishments of self abandonment and self abuse, in an attempt to rehabilitate us into normally unconscious members of the human species. Birth and death are the established reference points. The “successful life” is when the in between is just one giant blur.

Consciousness is totally unacceptable and wrong because it seems to threaten the entire survival structure of humanity, and of our brain’s functioning.

So, what our brain does is proceeds to try to destroy consciousness as it would a bacteria or infection.

Auto Immune Disease

A physical example of this form of self-punishing – self controlling -- process is auto-immune diseases. Auto immune diseases are where the body – at the command of the brain -- treats healthy living tissue as if it were actually infected cells, and proceeds to harm and destroy itself. A common example of this is arthritis. The brain has instructed the body to abuse and destroy a healthy part of the body – perhaps as some form of unconscious reaction to shame and a need for punishment -- in order to get control of outcomes – to limit one’s level of consciousness – and to maybe give a means of “redemption” from the shameful pain of being conscious.

Myths of Grace and Redemption

Notice how organized religion has built such an elaborate thought system of sin and forgiveness – resulting in the story and belief in the human sacrifice of one man to “pay” for the sins or misdeeds of the world. Organized religion has successfully created a myth of God built around man’s own illness of shame and separation by attaching “free will” and choice to our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Religion has established staunch resistance to human and spiritual consciousness as if it were an infectious organism.

The “business” of organized religion is to sell grace – the delusion of undeserved favor by a judging and conditional “God”, and redemption – forgiveness for the symptoms of being human from a “God” who supposedly sees our weaknesses as valid justification to abandon and abuse us.

Grace is a fantasy because my God has no conditions or rules – only love, affection, and Presence. They give me everything I am able to accept – that I can accept that they believe I deserve. They perceive, from Their perspective, that, as Their child, I deserve everything They can give me.

Redemption and forgiveness really has nothing to do with my God: it has to do with my shame/separation based perceptions of myself, and how I condemn and punish myself.

A religious explanation used to explain Jesus’ experience of separation on the cross from His Father, has been that “God could not look at sin – and Jesus represented all sin.” The truth is the only sin my God sees – that Jesus’ Father saw -- is through our eyes looking back at ourselves in the extreme moments of painful separation.

Reactivity to Consciousness

About now, the part of the brain that is responsible to maintain a livable level of unconsciousness is probably, in some readers, becoming activated, and there is a resistance of emotional energy forming. Probably it will erupt to the surface as some form of rage or anger, or blank irritated numbness. The brain will begin punishing and harming some of you to keep consciousness from increasing. And if this occurs you are totally and absolutely powerless – and totally perfect. You – like all human beings – are absolutely doing the best that you can – always have, and there is no room for judgment or criticism.

And to some, maybe, a light will come on that you can live with, and you will be enabled to hear what I am sharing.

Self-Destructive and Helpless

My friend’s human mental illness is destroying him – from the inside out – and today, at this moment, he is totally powerless to stop it. I feel an aching feeling inside me – the consciousness that he is “us”, and that if nothing can change he will continue dying the most horrible death a human being can experience: his own conscious self destruction, as a result of horrendous and terrorifying separation -- from his unconditionally loving God -- from the incredibly beautiful and gifted person that he is -- and from the care and love of friends and family who treasure and adore his childlike energy and spirit.

I feel my ache inside as I think about him.

Is there no hope? As Scrooge asked the ghost of the future, “Can not these words be sponged from this stone?”

Is There Hope?

The honest answer to this question is twofold: First, I don’t know. I have seen many people who suffered from my friend’s mental and spiritual “auto immune” disease, and die unmercifully.

And I have experienced people who found a spiritual Presence in their torment that began to lift them out of the pending tomb of their impending doom. What frequently stops me in my tracks is I don’t know which category any individual fits into. If someone is in the first category, my efforts to “help” can actually do more harm than help.

Do No Harm

Doctors have the Hipprocatic oath that they take which partly says simply, “Do no harm.” I struggle to not inflict people with more consciousness than they can manage and use to heal their separation and abandonment.

Spiritual Approach to Improving Consciousness

The spiritual process that I have learned and lived over the past 23 years is as follows:
1. First, I must have an increasing conscious contact with my wounded self. This means I have to experience – more and more consciously – the pain and fear, which results from my shame and separation. Without this improving consciousness I cannot have the needed motivation, willingness, and direction to move closer and closer to my God. I will not have an experiential awareness that without Them, I am totally powerless.
2. Second, I must have an increasingly conscious and intimate contact with my God. The “mechanisms” of will, and healthy decision making in my brain cannot work without a steady and strong flow of intimate Presence from my God. Most frequently for me, my God communicates through others who are also struggling with painful human consciousness.
3. Third, empowered by my God’s loving Presence, I must begin to actively participate in Their caring and unconditional will for me. The most basic form of this for me has been learning to just “breathe” – deeply, consciously, and deliberately. Living consciously and deliberately in the care and Presence of our God – our unconditionally loving Parents -- this is living faith.

Grief and Loss

My life experience is that grieving life losses -- known and unknown – is life threatening for the very reasons I have been describing. When we touch that inflamed and wounded parts of our selves, the resulting pain drives up to increased consciousness. Our brains try to regain control, and not only disallows our healing, but wounds us even more. To have healing from our God’s love, we must maintain a steady flow of their caring Presence. Our level of conscious contact with Them must be equal to or greater than our conscious pain in order to heal and regain our lost selves.

WARNING!
I am going to repeat Kathy’s warning label here:

The Surgeon General has determined that these articles may be hazardous to your mental and emotional unconsciousness. It is recommended that you do not read these articles while operating your life or any mechanical relationships. These articles may cause mental irritation, cognitive disorientation, and interpersonal disruptions. Use only under the supervision of a qualified spiritual guide.

Thanks for reading.

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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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