This post is a chapter pulled out of my book titled Nourishing Our Potential.
Love is what makes this world work. Without it we would fall apart. The more we open to it the more we are. We open to love by allowing ourselves to feel pain. If I feel pain over the departure of a friend or loved one, is it rooted in love or confused with love? If I feel the pain of emptiness where is the love in that? If I am suffering the pain of ridicule, lambasting, shame, where does my suffering to all this open me to love? And, if I feel the pain of being less than I want to be, what does love have to do with that?
Asking the question is a perfect start. Whatever we allow and accept becomes glued to us. If anything breaks free from that glue we tend to allow and accept something else to take their place because we are magnets—we draw things to us and we allow what we draw to us to stick. They stick to us, they stick to each other. What sticks to us starves or feeds our potential. What is sticking to you?
Pain always wants to stick on us and then victim comes along and sticks to the pain. Anger loves pain and victim and sticks to the victim that is sticking to the pain. Pain and victim and anger and revenge have found homes on many of us starving our potential.
We want to attract right things to us. Interestingly, our conscious mind naturally fears not being right. Subconsciously or emotionally we naturally fear not being accepted. Physically, we naturally fear physical and emotional pain.
If love sticks to us it is because love uniquely sticks to love. Power sticks to love and force sticks to fear. If we attract other things like control, self-interest, fear, hate, jealousy, ownership, and the like, we feel pain as we go through life’s situations. The pain helps us understand what is sticking to us.
We need to recognize the pain and understand it. There are ways of doing this but it starts with a decision to change, a decision that has no grey areas, a pure black or white decision. So write that decision with black ink on white paper so we can clearly see it.
I am changing!
I am evolving!
The first step is recognizing that pain is our signal that we need to change something, we might not know what to change yet, but we do know that our next step is to start exploring.
We might already consciously know what it is we need to do or think differently, or we might need our subconscious minds to help us figure it out. There is so much power in our subconscious minds where there is an unlimited amount of information about us.
Our subconscious minds can tell us, can show us, what is sticking to us and we can release what is not serving our highest good once we have been shown.
There are things that are sticking to us that dog us and we often do not even realize it. We have learned to live with the pain and we no longer recognize it as pain, we get used to it, yet we are not happy, not as happy as we could be, for it is there lying hidden, perhaps sticking to something several layers away from our core magnet.
While I am sure that we determine what sticks to us by what we think and do, I also believe that the situations we encounter are dictated by what is sticking to us. It is like we are in a giant lab and we are the rats. The tester wants to know what will stick to us and what will not and in what situations will that hold true.
Imagine with me that an energy form is introduced to our magnet and we begin to react. One of us lab rats will notice the energy as if it were a light rain over the ocean that will soon evaporate and return to the tester. Another of us lab rats will feel that energy hang on us like a storm digging into and prying up the ocean causing all sorts of havoc. And, there are lab rats that react in all ways in-between.
We create our own storms and until we can figure out what we are doing that creates these storms we continue to be tested upon; or said in another way, the more the system presents us with situations that allow us to figure out what we are doing wrong. If we don’t notice the cloudy day, maybe we will notice the hail, lightning, and thunder.
We can complain about being in this lab or we can participate in the science of reinventing ourselves. If it is pain that we are experiencing let’s look at it as a clue to finding our highest good.
Let’s go back to the pain, victim, anger, revenge circle that sticks to some of us. The concept of karma would suggest that we have dues to pay. What goes around comes around; do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Philosophically, east seems to agree with west and west with east about payback; at least we have ways of saying the same thing. So for every time we were a victim or a savage do we have an equal number of situations where there is payback?
Or is bad karma not so much payback but self induced pain from making repeated bad decisions derived from habit and instinct imbedded in our subconscious minds and cells of our bodies that causes us to again be victims and savages? And could our behavior be so strong in our subconscious that we are unable to appreciate perspective from someone else that is different from ours? And, do we repeat over and over again the pain until we find a way to release it?
Likewise for good karma, the more we are loving souls providing service to others, the harder it is for us to make bad decisions and the less pain we have in our lives. But let’s face it, as long as we are in body, we have not evolved to the point where we have subconsciously accepted that we are the infinite even if we have consciously done so, and we decay.
There are over 6 billion people on Earth and souls therefore have entered bodies that were born into many different situations and conditions. Some of our souls are in bodies born into wealthy and perhaps very materialistic families while others are born into poor but perhaps spiritual families and everything in between. Some of our souls are in bodies born healthy and some are born weak and deformed and everything in between. Some of our souls are in bodies born in a land of opportunity and hope and others are born in the land of repression and famine and everything in between. Why?
Could there be a system that puts us where we can add to our subconscious minds a little more up when it is dominated with down, a little more support when it needs a little boost, a little humility when it needs perspective? That does not sound like karma payback. That sounds like in a free will planet there is a system that helps us clean our magnets. If this were true, shouldn’t we be spending more time finding out what might be in our closets and cleaning out what does not serve our highest good? Or do we want to let the system put us in the situations that help us get fed up with our behaviors, lets us sink to the low point if necessary so that the only direction we can go is up?
Why is it so important to clean our subconscious? Freud and Jung tell us the contents of the subconscious perpetually seep into conscious awareness. Eventually they came to realize that when rage, lust, revenge, etc. are denied access to the civilized conscious mind, they do not disappear but continue to live out an entirely independent psychic existence in the subconscious. There they drain away energy from the conscious system, causing depression, anxiety, neurosis, phobias, etc., or else they erupt as physical symptoms, irrational moods, or slips of the tongue.
Both Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud concurred on this fundamental picture of the human psyche: that each of us carries within us a whole other world, shadowy and fantastic, to be sure, but teemingly alive with inner figures, melodramas, grievances and fears, that are constantly exerting their influence over our every word and deed.
So while it feels that we have a clean conscious mind, a civilized conscious mind, that mind can be corrupted just like data on a computer and this usually becomes visible under stress. A sports car might handle nicely until it is pushed to its limits and then it spins out. Occasionally we may get out of control and then get right back in control.
Sometimes we act out because of what is seeping into our conscious minds that is still a part of our subconscious minds. And, if we find ourselves in more stressful situations we might see that our civilized conscious minds do not stay civilized as whatever is in our subconscious mind begins to flow instead of seep. When that happens we add more dirt to our closets. It is extremely important to clean our closets while we are in our civilized conscious minds. As the advertisement goes, what’s in your wallet (closet)?
There are ways to clean our closets. Be warned though from this quote from Edgar Cayce: “…There are no individuals who haven’t at some time been warned as respecting that that may arise in their daily or physical existence! Have they heeded? Do they heed to that as may be given as advice? No! It must be experienced!”
If we want to be a better friend, spouse, supervisor, parent, leader, manager, artist, whatever it is that we want to be, we need to look inward and clean our closets before we can truly reach our potential. Then what creeps into our conscious minds from our subconscious minds nourishes our potential instead of starving it. Sometimes all we have to do is tune our brains through neurofeedback to change our behaviors and this motivates more people into introspection.
Norman Vincent Peale declared, “Change your thoughts, and you change your world.” Caroline Myss, medical intuitive states, “Every choice we make, every thought and feeling we have, is an act of power that has biological, environmental, social, personal and global consequences.” Wayne Dyer states, “We are responsible for everything in our lives, including whether the chemistry in our body works or doesn’t work.”
Metaphysically speaking, health and wellness is not luck of the draw. Metaphysical perspective might say that we are placed in our gene pool based on what we have collected in our subconscious as well as what we want to work on in this lifetime and who we want to work with in trying to achieve our life plan. Just the same, being in a gene pool gives a proclivity for certain body disorders but doesn’t guarantee a body disorder.
Norman Vincent Peale, Caroline Myss and Wayne Dyer have written that our choices, thoughts and feelings are an act of power, and that we continue to be responsible, and are in control of our health. What we choose to say and think today creates our tomorrows.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity says matter and energy are interchangeable. Mass is nothing but a form of energy. Matter is simply slowed down or crystallized energy. Our bodies are energy.
Can pain be reversed by simply revising mental patterns? Louise L. Hay says it can. In her book Heal Your Body she says that cancer comes from a pattern of deep resentment that is held for a long time, until it literally eats away at the body.
She says most people with cancer are probably totally unaware that they harbor deep resentments. They would be blind to their own patterns. She asks: “ever get stiff necks? It could be cell memory or it could be representative of your inflexibility on issues, your unwillingness to see both sides of a question, to appreciate another viewpoint.”
Typically we believe cancer results from a complex interaction of genetic and environmental factors, in which lifestyle choices, such as diet, use of alcohol, and exposure to estrogenic toxins, may have much more influence than emotions. Dr. Larry Dossey has compiled an impressive catalog of saints, both Eastern and Western, who have died of cancer; so many that cancer seems almost to be an occupational hazard of sainthood. Make what you want of this, I included it for reasons of balanced reporting.
Each of us have three billion letters describing our genetic code or DNA and 99.9% of those letters are identical within all of us. What makes us unique as individuals is a combination of environmental effects and the genetic differences in the last 0.1% of the human genome. (Source: Creation of Health: Merging Traditional Medicine with Intuitive Diagnosis by C. Norman Shealy and Caroline M. Myss)
Those genetic variations, mostly consisting of changes to single letters of DNA scattered throughout each of our genome, may explain exactly how genes influence biological traits—everything from height and eye color to the likelihood that an individual may one day face cancer or heart disease. Although our DNA’s are almost the same, their difference could also explain why some people respond positively to certain drugs while others do not. And, it also helps us believe that if we were to use our minds to influence the healing process that we may only have to tweak the last 0.1% of the human genome through our positive thoughts and visualizations, diets, and prayers.
In 1995, the National Institute of Health reported that meditation and other relaxation techniques are often better treatment for a variety of illnesses than is medicine. They call this approach New Age or Alternative Therapy medicine. Dr. Julia Richmond of the Harvard Medical School reported that current medical treatment (drugs & surgery) is not near as effective for some illnesses as is the New Age/Alternative Medicine Approach. I personally believe that the body can heal itself if we get out of its way. It knows how to do it. We just need to figure out how to get of its way.
A close encounter with death can bring a real awakening, a transformation in our whole approach to life. One of the most important revelations to a near death experience is how it transforms the lives of those who have been through it. Researchers have noted a startling range of aftereffects and changes; a reduced fear and deeper acceptance of death; an increased concern for helping others; an enhanced vision of the importance of love; less interest in materialistic pursuits; a growing belief in a spiritual dimension and the spiritual meaning of life; and, of course, a greater openness to belief in the afterlife.
Himalayan Yogis believe that illnesses like cancer can be a warning, to remind us that we have been neglecting deep aspects of our being, such as our spiritual needs. If we take this warning seriously and change fundamentally the direction of our lives, there is a very real hope for healing not only our body, but our whole being.
Historically, Tibet has had its own traditional system of natural medicine, and its own particular understanding of disease. We all know things are changing in Tibet, but historically Tibetan doctors have recognized that certain disorders are difficult for medicine alone to cure, so they have recommended spiritual practices along with medical treatment. Patients who have followed this practice have in many cases healed completely; at the very least they became more receptive to the treatment they were given.
Dr. Andrew Weil tells us that seeing pain or illness as a misfortune; especially one that is underserved may obstruct the healing system. Coming to see illness as a gift that allows us to grow may unlock it. Accepting ourselves as we are represents surrender to a higher will. Change seems more likely to occur in this climate of surrender than in a climate of confrontation with the universe. When we are ill we still maintain hope of renewed health and also accept the circumstances of our life in order to move beyond them.
Fretting over our weight or health allows our mind to block our body’s ability to heal itself. Giving in to our weight or disease allows our mind to block our body’s ability to heal itself. But when our mind says stop or should I say when our mind is ready to say stop, and we focus on higher energy thoughts like love, joy, peace, and enlightenment and release lower energy thoughts that include shame, guilt, apathy/hopelessness, grief, fear, anger, and pride, we begin to get our mind out of our body’s way.
Once our mind is out of the way and if we want to work with our powerful imaginations, we can imagine divine protective white light and divine healing pink light entering through our spiritual eye and then mixing together and swirling throughout our bodies. This swirling goes everywhere and especially to our trouble spots. These lights are our hope and with 100% faith and a willingness to accept the illness as a message that there is something we need to change about ourselves will lead to remission and if we change will lead to healing. Some have meditated on this light twelve hours and more each day until they were healed. A good twenty minutes in the morning and again in the evening while keeping an awareness of it in your body all day long might be enough.
For those interested in guiding meditative energy to other things like abundance, they might use their imaginations to visualize a beam of divine protective white light and a beam of divine yellow-gold light entering through our spiritual centers, mixing together and then swirling throughout our bodies. Just keep it swirling and send out loving positive thoughts and feelings to everybody—EVERYBODY! During this meditation on these two lights give Yogananda’s prayer: “Teach me to feel that Thou art the power behind all wealth, and the value within all things. Finding Thee first, I will find everything else in Thee.”
The greatest gift we may give ourselves is an open mind.
Paramahansa Yogananda has said: “The human system is the product of the mind. The mind is the chief factor governing the body. We should avoid suggesting to the mind thoughts of human limitations or unworthiness. Instead, we should tell ourselves this truth: I am the infinite which has become the body. The body as a manifestation of spirit is the ever youthful spirit.”
“The mind, being the feeling, the brain, and the perception of all living cells can keep the human body alert or depressed, loving or resentful.”
“Just as we should concern ourselves with the nutritive value of our daily food menus, so should we consider the nutritive potency of the psychological menus that we daily serve the mind.”
Our thoughts may amuse us and what we say may position us where we consciously and unconsciously think or feel we need to be, but those words and thoughts have created our life and experiences up to now. If we continue to think and say similarly, our future will be like our history. Been there, done that, do we really want to do it again?
Could it be that for every condition or pain in our lives we have created a need for it? The willingness to release the need for a condition has to come first whether it be a need for cigarettes, or the headache, or the excess weight, lack of abundance, or whatever. When the need is gone, the outer effect dies.
Most diseases are initiated in the energy fields around us and are then, through time and living habits, transmitted to the body, becoming a serious illness. Many times the source or initiating cause of this process is associated with psychological or physical trauma, or a combination of the two.
Again quoting Yogananda, “Metaphysically speaking, we experience more physical and emotional pain the more we have allowed ourselves to move away from the infinite toward the finite. Instead of realizing ourselves to be living immortal waves of the cosmic sea of life, through delusion, we have become isolated, separated from the cosmic dream of life, and we, our bodies, have origin/birth and decay/death. We have become attached to the concept of birth and death and this attachment is painful.”
It is essential that we deal with the deeper meaning of our pain. We need to ask, what does this pain mean to me? What can I learn from this illness or pain? Pain or illness can be seen as simply a message from our body to us that says, wait a minute; something is wrong. We are not listening to our whole self; we are ignoring something very important to us. What is it?
A return to health requires much more personal work and change than simply taking pills prescribed by a doctor. Without personal change we will eventually create another problem to lead us back to the source that caused the pain in the first place. The root is the key. We can find it in our subconscious minds.
Physicists are saying there is no such thing as a “thing.” What we used to call “things” are really “events” or paths that might become events.
The mental thought patterns that cause the most pain or disease in the body are criticism, anger, resentment, and guilt. Again, according to Louise Hay, “prolonged self-criticism leads to arthritis, anger turns into things that boil and burn and infect the body, long held resentment festers and eats away at the self and ultimately to tumors and cancer and guilt always seeks punishment and leads to pain.”
A trusted friend of mine did some Internet research and found an interesting article about our body and water. According to my friend, the hydrogen atom makes up sixty-three percent of our body. Water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom which means the hydrogen atom makes up sixty-seven percent of water. An MRI was done on potable water and non-potable water. The MRI showed that the water molecules in the non-potable water were shaped differently than those in the potable water. The non-potable water molecules changed shape to look more like the potable water molecules when exposed to soft pleasant music—no change occurred when exposed to louder harder music.
There are two core emotions, love and fear; all others can be called sub-emotions. When we fill our cells, our entire being, our magnets, our closets with love, we automatically approve of ourselves, and we believe in the divine power to provide for us. Then fear cannot take our peace nor prevent joy from filling our lives. The more love we accumulate on our magnets the harder it will be for illness and uncomfortable experiences to find a place to stick.
Remember in Chapter 1 I mentioned there can exist a gap between our material and spiritual selves. Well, that gap can be closed either by our spiritual consciousness moving toward our material consciousness resulting in poorer health and harder life situations until we find ways to move our spiritual consciousness away from our material consciousness. When the material consciousness instead moves toward the soul consciousness, we become full of joy, peace, health, and love.
To have peace within oneself, the material consciousness must be made to move toward our spiritual consciousness. When the gap is closed, when the material consciousness becomes one with the soul consciousness, our closets stop collecting clutter. We can do this by using our free will. Our free will however, has to be found for it is often buried in our habits and instincts that can perpetuate and justify our existence in the material consciousness. If our deeds and thoughts are negative, it will not be until our will, if ever, is strong enough to recognize them as a bad habit or behavior and stop.
Bad habits feed unending material desires. Good habits feed spiritual aspirations. Bad habits will make us do things that hurt us and good habits always help us. Our actions, good or bad, feed one or the other. We should feed or starve our habits appropriately with our deeds, actions and thoughts. We have a choice. We can use our free will to escape our poor habits and instincts or we can continue with those situations that we seem to perpetually experience.
Eventually we are all going to evolve—some faster than others—some willingly—some kicking and screaming, but evolve we will. For those bodies and minds that are hooked on drugs, alcohol, sex, power, greed, ego, hate, and fear or are starving, wet, cold, diseased—evolving is most difficult. Just surviving another day is the challenge. So we have a world where people are advancing spiritually and actually pulling others up and a world where people are declining spiritually and pulling others down.
If we choose to be ruled by our choice rather than habit, every such choice is liberating. Each one broadens our understanding and strengthens our will power and our ability to live in harmony with self and others.
Each time we refuse to give in to some temptation against our highest good, we are resurrecting our original soul consciousness from the control of the desire-bound body and mind and closing the gap correctly. Whenever we resist the inclination to retaliate when misunderstood, or set aside a personal desire in order to benefit someone else, we are reaching beyond the confines of self toward our true soul consciousness and correctly close the gap.
When we seek more of the win-win relationships and serve the global perspective we are resurrected into the larger more evolved aspect of caring and self-sacrifice, by which others are felt as a part of our expanded self, and we correctly close the gap.
With all the free will and absent minded habits and instincts running around this planet paying attention to material aspects of life, there would seem we would all be having to live with our gaps. Let’s look at that pain thing again. Pain has been made available to us to help us see a greater wisdom and joy outside the material world that is available in the spiritual world if we seek it. If we don’t know something better exists and the inferior product isn’t giving us any trouble we go along with the motto of if its not broke don’t fix it.
Many of us do not recognize the roots of our pain but we see the material results and wonder why me, or why not me, or why them? For those who cannot connect the misfortune to their or others’ situations, the System is invisible.
So what is the System?
It is to love God, eschew evil, and love thy neighbor as thyself.
We have all heard the phrase: The truth shall set you free. But free of what–Of enforcement? Yes, but better put would be: from our subconscious minds and primitive parts of our brains.
Our original soul consciousnesses want to give charity to all, love to all, finding fault with none, being patient with all, showing brotherly love and brotherly kindness. Doing these in thought, purpose, and intent will set us free—free of the creep from our subconscious minds—from the negative things that would cling to our magnets, free from the clutter that otherwise would collect in our closets.
Is there order in our life or is there chaos? Is there order in this world or is there chaos? Is there some chaos? Being in total compliance with our original soul consciousnesses brings order to our life and to the world. Being out of compliance, disregarding or not recognizing our original soul conscious desires, brings chaos and destructive forces into our lives.
If our lives are disturbing, if we have sad hearts or have pain in our bodies, we are in some way creating our gaps or still living with gap created cluttered closets perhaps from prior lives or other dimensions that have yet to be fully recognized or corrected.
We can all do better and we are blessed when we, let’s say this again, get a friendly nudge or even a hard poke. Is it not better to recognize the friendly nudges and act upon them rather than requiring the hard pokes to make changes in our thinking, purpose, and intent? We should not think of the body as a haphazard machine or that things that happen to us are chance. It is all part of living with gaps or having allowed our gaps to close by moving our original soul consciousness toward our material consciousness!
What is the power behind our thinking, purpose, and intent? Let’s put it this way: according to Edgar Cayce, “that which comes or begins first is conceived in spirit, grows in the mental, manifests in the material”. We must develop our original spiritual consciousness and use it.
If something is going to come about materially, let’s let it be from the seed of original spiritual consciousness. If we don’t like our current material situations we need to explore our spiritual consciousness. We can ask ourselves why me but only if we also ask what might this nudge or situation I find myself in be all about. If we are to have more noble things come our way, not that we have all the wisdom needed to discern which things are the most noble, we need to be introspective and wake up.
When we begin to develop our intuition we allow ourselves to be guided through our spiritual consciousness. We must be able to distinguish intuition derived through spiritual guidance from habit derived through our subconscious mind. If we haven’t taken care of what we have chosen to consciously do and think about, our intuition could guide us wrong. Yogananda, Jung, Freud, and others have told us: “Once repeated thoughts and deeds stick in our subconscious mind we might have to live with them repeatedly and compulsively as a habit or instinct”.
We need to read. We need to learn. We need to allow ourselves to open to the spiritual world that is not defined by our five senses. Start by reading without judgment. Allow new ideas to sit off to the side until we are ready to be open to them, to explore them with a more evolved mind that evolves through persistence and openness and stagnates with quick judgments.
When we sincerely seek to be led by our spiritual consciousness, when we truly are willing to be led by our souls, we are guided and begin to notice our guidance. Our job in receiving this guidance is to concentrate and attune ourselves to those spiritual forces.
Just because we might only use one consciousness, our material consciousness, we still have others. As we open to those various spheres of understanding, we attain an insight and feeling into these various planes. Once we have access to a new plane, use it, and we will attain the next plane of evolvement, of potential, of consciousness. Use it or lose it.
We have all had restless moments where we have felt that we needed to get out and do something. During these times some will say they need a good stiff drink or maybe a double cheeseburger, fries and a shake. Some may feel the urge to take a run or a brisk walk, work out, climb a rock. Some might experience anxiety for the first time and be scared by it. There is a good chance we are reacting to the gap. People that have participated in neurofeedback can experience these gap triggers as well because there has actually been a gap change. For those that feel anxiety don’t just sit there and be frightened, start doing some yogi breathing.
There are two gap triggers. If we are moving along with our evolvement and something has entered into our lives that we have reacted to in a way that our spirit consciousness truly wanted to handle differently we get a gap trigger. Also when we make a major jump in our evolvement and our spirit consciousness is more consistently directing our lives and reactions to events, people, and circumstances we get a gap trigger. We will always be temporarily out of our comfort zone when we change, for the good or for the bad.
Where do we begin in our commitment to regain our original spiritual consciousness? We begin by reading and we spend time in nature. When we can escape to the peaceful quiet of beautiful nature we are where the Spirit of Creation emanates. It is in nature that we need to try to attune our minds to the divine that is within us all.