Choices

Today is Monday, March 25, 2013.  

A relative of mine who was raised Catholic wrote in her blog of her discomfort with the Christian notion that if you make the right choices you will go to heaven, but if you make the wrong choices you are consigned to an eternity in hell.  It was a bold statement from her, living as she does in a smaller Midwestern city, where the vast majority of her family, friends and neighbors are solidly Christian.  

Actually, I don't blame her.  I'm not comfortable with that idea, either, not because I'm afraid I'm headed for the fires of hell, but because the idea just plain doesn't make any sense.  

Think of your children, or of a child you know and love.  How many times already has that child made unfortunate choices?  If the child lives or lived with you, would you seriously lock him or her out of your house forever just for making a bad choice?  And what if he didn't intend any harm, or if he was too ill-informed to make the best choice?  Would you still lock the child out forever?  The vast majority of people would say no, of course not, and yet that is exactly what they suppose God does.  The last time I checked, humans were not more righteous or more knowledgeable than God, and still some people believe that God would do something so horrific that no loving human parent would consider it.  

These days, there are hundreds of stories told by people who have had Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and other out-of-body experiences (OBEs).  These experiences are overwhelmingly positive.  Survivors describe a beautiful place of peace and unconditional love, where they are often met by a loving entity who counsels them.  Some of them say they are given a choice to stay or go back; others are simply told that it is not yet their time to leave the physical body.  All the ones who have a choice obviously chose to come back, or we wouldn't have heard about it, and all of these people say that they came back because they realized why they had chosen to come into physical incarnation in the first place, and that they hadn't yet finished their task.  A few survivors have spoken of some places within the inner worlds that are unpleasant, but the consensus seems to be that these are places where Souls are "stuck," and as soon as they figure out that they no longer need to be there, they can leave. Apparently, then, there is no such thing as a "forever hell."  Once I had dismissed the "hell option," I began to consider other scenarios.

What is the purpose of life in the physical plane, anyway?  My spiritual path says that this physical plane is a training ground for Souls.  We can learn a lot here.  Because of the dualistic nature of the physical worlds, we are allowed to experience opposites: darkness and light, good and evil.  Here we can make choices, and we learn that all of our choices have consequences.  We realize that we are free to make any choice that we like, often from a number of options.  Free Will is a gift that we can use as a learning tool.  Once we make our choices, however, in order for learning to take place, we must experience the consequences of our choices.  As I explained in an earlier blog entry, those consequences don't always come right away if we are not strong enough to handle them, but they will come, eventually.  Sometimes the consequences are pleasant or favorable.  In these cases, we often praise God for the blessings received, unaware that what we are experiencing is actually the result of a favorable choice we made earlier.  Or we decide that the situation we are enjoying is sheer dumb luck.  When the consequences are unpleasant, we blame God for turning away from us, when in fact we are the ones who turned away from God.  Or we blame someone else.  It's never our fault.  

 As I've pointed out in earlier posts, blaming others for our misfortunes is tantamount to giving others power over us, because when we assign blame, then we make it someone else's job to make things right.  If that person doesn't solve our problem for us, then what?  We are doomed to suffer, with no recourse. How much better it is to accept responsibility for our choices, and have the power to make changes in the present that will improve our outlook for the future!  

So what if we make a choice that we regret?  Life here on the physical plane is for experience, because we  all learn best by first-hand experience.  We can learn something from every choice we make, if only that we had better make a different choice next time.  With this attitude, life becomes purposeful and meaningful.  No experience is a waste of time.  We can learn from a failed marriage and from a business deal gone sour.  We can learn from disappointments and losses.  We can learn from our mistakes.  Life tends to give us some of the same choices over and over again.  Each time, we have the option of making the same choice we did last time, or trying something new.  If we have done some growing, we will face the new challenge with a different state of consciousness.  Perhaps we will see more options, or we may see the same options as before, but more clearly.  As we go forward, we learn to make choices that have a positive or neutral effect on us, on our loved ones, and on society as a whole.  We become capable of making responsible choices that have a wider effect.  We learn to prioritize, and to evaluate our options on the basis of the possible effects of our choices on ourselves, on others, and on our environment.  In my humble opinion, this is a much more uplifting attitude about making choices than the view that predicts eternal damnation for wrong choices.  Together with my belief in reincarnation, this view of learning from my mistakes makes everything seem worthwhile, because even if I learn something the moment before I die, I can use what I have learned in another lifetime.  Nothing is lost or wasted.

There are many ways of making choices, but it's not how you make the choice that counts.  The main thing is to take responsibility for our choices and to learn how to evaluate the consequences.  As we move forward on our learning curve, we can more accurately predict outcomes of our decisions, so that we can avoid negative or unpleasant consequences.  We learn to make the choices that lead to the highest good for all concerned. 

There are any number of personality tests that can determine which style of decision-making a person generally favors.  It can be interesting to do this.  Besides learning what styles you favor, a side benefit of using this type of test is learning to appreciate other styles of processing information and making decisions that are not part of our repertoire.  This makes it a lot easier to make group decisions.  Some people like to make decisions quickly, while others hold out for as many options as possible before committing to one.  Some like to analyze a situation mentally, while others make decisions based more on their feelings.  Some people are more comfortable using their intuition to make decisions, while others like to stick to the facts. When we realize that group members are behaving in ways that are comfortable for them, that they are not intentionally doing something to bug us, we can relax and trust the process of group decision-making.

When I was a youngster, I was often told that I would have to make a lot of important decisions when I was an adult.  What I wasn't told – and what I wish have been impressed on me – was that even as a child, I was making important decisions, some of which would impact my entire life.  I wish more parents would help their kids learn to make decisions, as well as to accept responsibility for their decisions.

I once watched one of my sisters-in-law teach her child to make choices from a very early age.  The child was only about three years old, and the choice was which flavor of vitamin pill to take.  "You can have orange, cherry, or grape.  You can choose," she said to her child.  The child agonized over the flavor choices, but finally chose one.  As my sister-in-law put the other two vitamin pills back in the bottle, the child screamed, "No! No!"  It was hard to watch this child realize that, having made a choice, the other two options were no longer open.  "You can make a different choice tomorrow," my sister-in-law explained to her distraught child.  

Most of us have made at least a few decisions that we regret.  Some of these decisions were more or less permanent in this lifetime, and we can't re-make them.  What we can do is figure out what we have learned from our choice.  

Other choices that we have made were of a more temporary nature, and we may be given the chance to choose again, differently, next time.  Here again, we can figure out what it is we learned from our earlier choices, in order to better inform our future choices.

Lately I've been paying a lot of attention to the choices I've made in life, and how they have resulted in the situation I find myself in right no.  Some of these choices are ones that I made over and over again the same way.  Albert Einstein is reputed to have said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them."  Not only does the decision have to be different, the way the problem and the choices are framed in our minds has to be different, too.  This means that we have to change from the inside out first, and that       takes time.  Some things can't be rushed.

The good news is that we have all kinds of help available to us.  Those of us who believe in God know that we can have guidance from Divine Spirit just for the asking.  And once we have made our choice, it's as if the Universe itself conspires to make our dreams come true.  Whatever happens, we will live through it and learn from it.  In that sense, we can only benefit from whatever choices we make.  :-)

Time

Today is Sunday, March 24, 2013.  

I've been thinking a lot about time lately.  One research project revealed that the the most often-used noun in the English language is "time."  We use this word in any number of expressions and idioms.  We can do something ahead of time, on time, in the nick of time, in good time, or at the appointed time.  We can bide our time or have the time of our lives.  We can keep time, borrow time, have time, waste time, be pressed for time, or be out of time.  Expressions such as "when the time is ripe" or " for the time being" don't actually mean any time that two people can agree on.

Einstein once said, "Time is that which clocks measure," but it's got to be a little more complicated than that.  If you think about the way humans have historically measured time, it's easy to see that early humans were really measuring the movement of the sun, moon and stars.  Even modern clocks really only measure movement.  In fact, the "movement" is the internal mechanism of the clock that makes it work in the first place.  

Physicists are still arguing about the existence of time.  Those who believe time exists argue about the definition of time.  Most physicists today will tell you that time is not a constant, as was once thought, even though it may appear to us to be constant.   Monday is followed by Tuesday, and the atomic clocks that measure time for the whole world never stop.  Subjectively, though, most people can probably remember at least one instance where time seemed to expand or contract.  We even have expressions for this: there are instances when time stands still, as well as instances when time flies.

Scientists also tell us that at the subatomic level, time does not seem to exist, and that at a certain level, processes can work backward as well as forward.  It appears that time is a local phenomenon.

Scientists now recognize an entity they call "spacetime," where time and space are intimately intertwined.  Those who believe in an alternate universe have posited that there is such a thing as "timespace," as well, where Souls can move in time, but not in space.  

For most of us, time seems to involve the ordering of events in our lives, and a one-way movement from past to future. There seems to be no way that we can go back into the past, at least not physically.  Nor can we travel into the future.  Some people like to say that time is a succession of NOW moments, and that seems true, too, since the only time in which we can do any action at all is NOW.   However, we can also see time as a fractal, with a cyclic nature.  All you have to do is experience the changing of the seasons or the phases of the moon to grasp the reality of the cycles of time.  

There are those who say that time doesn't exist outside of the physical universe, and that the only place where time seems constant is right here on Earth.  Those who subscribe to the Big Bang Theory say that time came into existence when the physical universe did.  

Every religion follows some concept of time.  For ancient religions of India (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism) time is regarded as cyclic.  For Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), the dominant view is that of linear time.  My own religion, Eckankar, takes both sides into account.  We recognize the Law of Cause and Effect, which depends on a linear view of time, but we also recognize cycles in the concept of reincarnation, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.  We recognize, as well, that the part of God's Creation that we call the physical plane (including Earth and the entire physical universe) includes matter, energy, space and time, but that these elements don't necessarily exist in other planes.  There are a number of spiritual paths that recognize time as an illusion, with the reality being an Eternal Now, which can only be processed by our minds, while we are embodied, as linear time. 

Many Atheists argue that God does not exist because they have trouble with the First Cause, or whatever caused the Big Bang to happen.  They say that even if the Big Bang was caused to happen, that doesn't mean the cause was God.  Of course, they don't like to think of the reverse argument, that they can't prove that the Big Bang wasn't caused by God.  As one web site put it, science doesn't deal very well with first causes. 

Let's return to the idea of the Eternal Now.  Actually, whether you believe the moment we call NOW is eternal or endlessly repeating, there is no getting around the fact that the only moment we ever have control over, at least here in the physical plane, is NOW.  The present moment is where we can process what happened in the past and take action that will shape the future.  It is often said that we can't go back in time to undo the past.  However, one thing we can do now to process the past is to change our attitudes.  If you recognize that your attitude about something, the way you label it, can dictate whether you are content or miserable, then it stands to reason that if you change your attitude, even about something that happened in the past, then the way you process that past event will change.  I remember doing a spiritual exercise at one time where, in meditation, I went back into my past and connected with the person I was in junior high school.  I envisioned my junior high self as a separate entity so that I could talk to her.  I sympathized with her feelings of unworthiness and self-loathing, and I reassured her that all was well.  It was a very emotionally powerful exercise.  I recognized then that although I couldn't change the past, I didn't have to carry forward into the present moment all my attitudes and feelings from the past.  The sense of relief and freedom I felt were amazing. and very empowering.

A lot of people have weighed in on the question of how to describe change over time. Physical changes are easy to describe.  Emotional, mental and spiritual changes are a bit more difficult.  To describe the emotional, mental and spiritual side of ourselves, we can use the term "state of consciousness."  Our states of consciousness change over time, but they can also change instantly.  Those who argue that there is no such thing as time in heaven say that the only way we can express ourselves as Soul is through our state of consciousness.  Maybe we can only make changes in our state of consciousness when we are embodied in the physical world.  That would certainly be a good argument for why Souls come back again and again into physical bodies.  In many ways time is a great teaching tool.  It's just too bad that we don't tend to recognize this until we have been on the planet for a a number of decades.  If it is true that we cannot change our state of consciousness in any other realm but the physical, then it seems to me that it is imperative for each of us to try to attain the highest state of consciousness possible each time we come here.

Now that I'm retired, my life – and time – seems to have slowed down a bit.  Maybe that's only because I have fewer events on my calendar to measure the flow of time by.  When I'm driving on a city highway, such as I-94 in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, I always feel that I'm traveling very fast, even though the speedometer only registers 55 miles per hour, because there are so many landmarks whizzing by.  When I was driving on I-90 last fall, through vast areas of land with no cultivated fields and few trees, I was surprised that even when I was going at the speed limit, 75 miles per hour, it seemed as if the car wasn't moving that fast.  

Nowadays, it doesn't really matter what day it is, unless I have a specific appointment.  Weekends don't really mean much to me, anymore, because my weekdays are now free of time constraints, just the way weekends used to be.  While I'm now at leisure to notice the changing of the seasons more than I used to, the actual calendar month means much less than it did before, when I had the school year to use as a time marker. 

When I was 15, I remember standing in front of a mirror, putting on mascara.  Impatient by nature, I was annoyed by the amount of time it takes to put on mascara carefully, without getting any icky, black stuff on my face around the eyes.  I had one of those really lucid moments as Soul, where I realized that my time in this particular body was limited.  I asked myself whether I was willing to spend so much time on activities such as putting on mascara, and my answer was a resounding NO! I therefore perfected a much quicker method of putting on mascara: I simply put some Vaseline on the eyelids and the skin around my eyes and then slather on the mascara without worrying how much gets on my face.  When the lashes are well-coated, I simply wipe off the excess mascara with a couple of Q-tips.  Later, I gave up wearing makeup altogether, except for special occasions.  I still put on my mascara fast, though. Having avoided spending too much of this lifetime putting on mascara, I still can't say that I haven't wasted time in other activities.  These days, I spend more and more time playing little computer games. Is this what I really want to do with the time I have left here?  An excellent question.   And will I have enough time to complete those projects that I consider important, such as publishing my book?  That remains to be seen.


Meanwhile, I appreciate the time I now have to spend on whatever I choose.  I appreciate, also, the freedom to order my day as I please, Night Owl that I am.  I appreciate having the time to think about Time.  :-)

Holding Grudges

"Holding a grudge is letting someone live rent-free in your head."  –Anonymous

Today is Saturday, March 23, 2013.  

 This one has been going around the Internet for a while, and once again, it's one of those pithy quotes by that genius, Anonymous.

You can't very well stay angry with a person once you have forgotten about them, so it's true – the longer you hold a grudge, the longer you will retain the memory of whoever or whatever it is that made you mad.  The connection will remain. If you visualize that connection as a string that ties you to a person, it is a little easier to understand why it's important not to hold grudges.  There are some people who hold grudges against so many people that they are literally tied down and can't move forward.  Their anger creates a web of karma that must be balanced before the ties can be broken.

A friend of mine who was leading a spiritual study class for teenagers, was challenged to find a way to represent karmic ties in a visual way.  I thought her solution was very creative.  She went to the local ragstock store and bought several neckties.  Then she bought several pairs of scissors.  In the class, she paired the kids up and gave each pair one tie and one pair of scissors.  She told the kids these ties were "karmic ties," representing some issue between the two people.  For example, the two people might have had an argument, or one person was being unfair to the other, etc.  The pairs were to engage in a brief tug of war.  The person in each pair who was holding the scissors was to decide when to cut the tie, representing an act of forgiveness that would balance the karma between them.  Then they talked about how it feels to hang onto anger and how it feels to let go of anger.  Interestingly enough, the kids who had the scissors in their hands, and who had the option of cutting the tie felt that they had more power over the situation. 

Anger never really hurts the one you are angry with, or at least, not for long. Unresolved anger only ends up making you miserable, and that unresolved karma ensures that you will have to come back to the physical plane in another lifetime to resolve it, if not with the person you originally tangled with, then with someone else.

All religions teach that anger is not the way to solve our problems.  The Buddhists say, "You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger."   In the Christian Bible, in Job 18:4, it says, "You are only hurting yourself with your anger."

Why do people stay angry?  Anger is a child of fear.  People fear that if they let go of their anger, the person they are angry with will not be punished for whatever they did to make them mad.  They want the wrongdoer to apologize, or to at least admit that they were wrong.  They want the person they're angry with to acknowledge their suffering.

One thing about karma: it works.  Karma is an impersonal force built into the system.  It's also known as the Law of Cause and Effect.  Whatever you put out comes back to you in equal measure.  That's how Souls learn here on the physical plane. It's not really meant to be a mechanism for punishment.  Rather, it is simply a feedback device, to let you know how you're doing.  The problem is that sometimes the feedback doesn't really hit you until one or more lifetimes later.  That's why some people seem to get away with bad behavior.  Once you start having to deal with karma that you know you couldn't possibly have generated in your current lifetime, it is much easier to have faith that others will also get theirs, too, eventually.  This is not to say that we shouldn't put people in jail if they've broken the law.  Besides, if a miscreant can work off some of his negative karma in this life, so much the better.  The karmic view makes it easier not to waste our anger on someone we think might get away with negative behavior.  It also helps to answer the question of why "bad" things happen to "good" people.  A person may be "good" this time around, but he may still have a little karmic burn-off to accomplish.   One reason why people don't always get caught in the karmic web right away is that they may not be strong enough, spiritually, to handle the payback.  No problem – God has lots of time, and when the Soul is ready to learn, she will be given her lessons.  Once again, it's not really punishment.  Rather, it's a learning device.

As far as getting an apology goes, we may or may not ever get one.  For all we know, we might not have been as "in the right" as we think we were.  Also, it behooves us to ask ourselves whether we would rather make ourselves miserable because we didn't get an apology, or forget about the issue and move forward in a more peaceful frame of mind, knowing that the situation will right itself at some point.  When we wait for an apology that never comes, all we are really doing is handing over to the person we are angry with the power to make us happy or miserable.  I don't know about you, but I'd rather keep that power to myself.   Why give anyone else the power to make us miserable?

When we forgive, what we are really doing is just detaching or unplugging from our feelings of anger, hurt, resentment, etc. so that they can't dictate our responses to the situation.  Forgiveness doesn't mean that the person's actions or words toward us are erased.  Forgiveness doesn't even always mean forgetting.  Rather, it means not letting the memory trigger anger or other strong emotions.  Forgiveness doesn't mean that we have to allow the person into our life again.  And it definitely doesn't mean that we condone the person's actions or words.  What it means is that we are willing to "let go and let God."   Through the system of cause and effect, God has set in motion a perfect plan for dealing with every situation.  :-)

How to Keep Calm in a Storm

Today is Friday, Mach 22, 2013.

Years ago, I complained to a friend of mine about the atmosphere at the school where I taught in the spring.  The stress level in schools is incredible when spring rolls around.  It wasn't just that particular school, either.  This was a yearly occurrence, in my experience, no matter how long I had been teaching, and no matter what school I was teaching at.

I love kids and I love teaching, but it was tough going in the spring.  Some of my still-teaching friends have mentioned the stress level recently, so it's starting.  My friends love their jobs, too, and always feel obligated to mention that they love the kids.  Otherwise their remarks are apt to be misunderstood.

It's pretty easy to figure out why stress goes up in the spring.  The kids have been cooped up all winter, because city schools in the northern states nowadays don't allow kids to go out for recess if the temperature is below zero.  If you're from a rural area, you might not understand that, but you have to remember that there are a lot more truly poor students who can't afford warm clothes, and when kids go outside to play in the snow, wet clothes result, which lead to colds and flu going around.  It's just easier to keep them inside.  In the spring, the kids are understandably eager to be outdoors, and chafe mightily at having to sit in a classroom when the sun is shining and warm breezes are blowing.  Well, duh!  Most teachers would rather be outside enjoying the mild weather, as well.

By springtime, all the little idiocies of the school year start to creep up on a person.  For kids, this means being sick and tired of standing in line, sitting in an assigned seat, and taking test after test.  For teachers, this means trying to plan lessons using a crappy reading series, attending yet another required meeting after school - or before school, entering grades into a computer and having trouble saving the data, keeping up with all the paperwork, proctoring standardized tests, and dealing with all the discipline issues, which seem to mushroom as the weather gets warmer.  Plus, there is the added stress of playing "beat the clock" with the curriculum, trying to get it all in before school shuts down for the summer. 

For the poor kids, there is always an additional source of stress: a looming summer vacation.  Most people look forward to summer break, but it became heartrendingly obvious to me, the longer I taught, that kids from the poor families did not welcome the end of school.  They didn't have a bike to ride, to get out of the house.  Many of them did not have a yard or safe place outdoors to play in.  A lot of the kids were not allowed to use the telephone – especially the ELL kids whose parents did not speak English well.  (The parents simply did not want their kids jabbering away to someone on  the phone when they couldn't figure out what they were talking about, and to whom.  Sad, but understandable.  And those were the caring parents.)  For a great many kids, the breakfast and lunch they get at school were their only meals.  In the summer, they would have to make do with whatever they could get at home.  Their parents, meanwhile, had the added stress of having to shell out more money for food during the summer months.  And then there was the problem of finding something to do with no money to do it, staying clear of adults on drugs or alcohol who were prone to unpredictable and destructive behavior, and just generally staying safe from neighborhood gangs or drive-by violence.

A lot of my friends pointed out that people in other jobs were under stress, too.  What I couldn't understand was why it was so hard for us to deal with this problem in schools.  I quickly realized that if the adults weren't able to handle their own stress, they couldn't very well expect the kids to handle theirs.  At least adults are able to talk about and enumerate their stressors, whereas kids just don't have the vocabulary or the life experience to do this.  Many psychologists say that when we can't name what's bothering us, our feelings of anger, our worries, our fears, and the resulting stress only increase.

The friend to whom I complained about all this was sympathetic, but he also gave me some information that I'd never heard before.  He told me about the Law of Facsimiles.   If you're in business, you probably know what a fax is.  It's essentially a copy machine attached to a telephone line.  You put a piece of paper into the machine at your end, dial a special fax number, and a copy of your document comes out on the receiver's end.  The word "facsimile" itself means "copy."

My friend explained that all of us unconsciously broadcast our feelings and pick up on the broadcasts of others.  The stronger the emotions, the stronger the broadcast.  When we are in a room with a lot of people, then we pick up on a lot of broadcasts all at once, an emotional storm, as it were.  If everybody happens to be broadcasting the same thing, it can be pretty overwhelming.  It has been proven that our brains don't distinguish between a stimulus that is physically present and one that is not.  That's why we cry when we watch a movie or read a book.  The thing that makes us cry is not physically present; it's in the book or movie.

When we receive a strong enough broadcast, our brains react to it as usual, and we begin to feel that same emotion, whether it is joy, grief, anger, or fear.  That's why crowds of people can turn into a mob.  Only a few of them are leaders.  The rest of the people are really just picking up on the emotions of the crowd.

In schools, where hundreds of people are jammed into one building, and where the majority of those people are children, you can see how this works.  The kids are stressed, the teachers are stressed, and everyone broadcasts their stress to everyone else.  The kids act out inappropriately because they don't understand what is happening to them, which creates more stress for the adults, who are not helping by broadcasting their stress to the children.  See the feedback loop? 

So what's the solution?  My friend told me that this is one of those problems for which there is no one-size-fits-all solution.  Each and every individual must find his own solution.  But knowing what the problem is helps a great deal.  When you know that you are sending broadcasts to others and receiving broadcasts from others, you have a statement of the problem that lends itself to a solution - at least, for the individual who is aware.  The solution is two-pronged. 

First of all, you have to find a way to shield yourself from the broadcasts of others.  One way to shield yourself is to put yourself in a bubble of light.  The bubble can be any color, but white seems to work well for this exercise.  Inside the bubble, you are protected from the onslaught of emotions that others are broadcasting.  You begin to separate your true feelings from those that have been foisted on you.  Some of the stress you were feeling because of the broadcasts begins to melt away, and it's easier to deal with your own issues. 

You may think this is all just smoke and mirrors, but the subconscious mind is very powerful, as I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, and it reacts to visual images.  A visual mock-up such as a bubble of light can actually help us re-program the subconscious mind, telling it that it doesn't have to record all the broadcasts of others.  The effect is not necessarily immediate.  You have to feed your subconscious mind this same image for a while.  Dr. Maxwell Maltz, whom I mentioned in my blog post about the subconscious mind, found that it takes the brain at least three weeks to adjust to anything new, so if we are re-programming it, three weeks is a minimum amount of time to feed it the new data.  This has to be a consistent and continuous process.  A once- or twice-daily meditation lasting for only five or ten minutes each can do the trick.  When you visualize the bubble, see yourself going about your day as usual, but within the bubble.  Notice how you feel.  Notice the absence of "noise" from others.  Notice how relaxed and happy you are feeling.  Enjoy the feeling of contentedness.  Feel the peace. 

Once you have gotten the hang of the bubble of light, you have to find a way to broadcast pleasant thoughts and not broadcast unpleasant ones.  Everyone experiences fear, anger, and worry.  These will not go away, your bubble of light notwithstanding.  But you can learn not to let these thoughts take root and grow within yourself.  In her book, Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech created the character of an old blind woman who was given to collecting wise sayings, which she shared with the protagonist, a young girl of middle school age.  One of those sayings was, "You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair."  This quote contains great imagery, and is a perfect expression of what I am talking about.  The thoughts that people broadcast are the ones that are "nesting in their hair," as it were.  We don't generally broadcast everything we think, just the thoughts that stay with us.  If we can find a way to let go of the worrisome, fearful, and angry thoughts, we won't broadcast them.  This is not to say that whatever situation has caused worry, fear or anger will go away.  The situations will still be there, but we will no longer allow the emotions they generate to control us. Sure, there are things that worry us, but worry, itself, won't solve the problem.  We have to take action to solve the problem and make the worry go away.  Same goes for anger or fear.  There's no good reason to entertain these emotions on a long-term basis, because they don't solve any problems.  They just make us feel miserable, and when we then act accordingly, a vicious cycle ensues. The thing is to acknowledge the worry, the anger, the fear, and then let it go, realizing that the thought itself is only a reminder that we need to take some sort of action to correct the problem. This takes practice, but if we engage in simple meditation each day, we can train our minds to serve us, rather than be held in thrall to what the Buddhists call the "monkey mind." 

To ensure that I was broadcasting only pleasant thoughts throughout the day, I learned to quiet the chatterbox inside my head and substitute what you might call "musical thoughts."  I basically just let the music run inside my head as if I were listening to a Walkman (or an iPod, nowadays).  This worked especially well when the class was working independently and expected to be quiet.  While the kids worked, I would re-create some of the beautiful instrumental music that I listened to at home.  Other teachers would comment that I had a way of calming a classroom full of kids, and they wondered how I did it. 

One other thing that I do to calm myself is something that I learned from my spiritual training.  HU is an ancient name for God, from a time before organized religions.  Many African friends of mine tell me that they learned about HU from their mothers, before they ever heard of a religion called Eckankar.   All sounds carry a vibration.  When we sing or chant a name for God (in any language), we set up a vibration that is in harmony with the vibration from the Source.  We are in harmony with God.  When we achieve this state, our fears, worries and feelings of anger melt away, and we experience the "peace that passeth understanding."  You may ask why I don't just chant the word "God."  Well, if you think about it, the word God ends with a consonant, so it's harder to sing or chant this word.  It's much easier to chant something that ends in a vowel.  Besides, God doesn't really care what name we use; God understands all human languages.  I sing HU out loud at home, and in my mind, when I'm out in public.

The photo and quote I posted at the beginning of this blog entry reminded me of my experience learning about the necessity of protecting our inner worlds.  Sure, we come in contact with all kinds of people in our daily lives.  We can't make everyone disappear just so we can feel some peace.  But we don't have to let them into our inner sanctuary.  We don't have to accept their unconscious broadcasts.  We have the power to maintain our own inner peace.   :-)

Positive – or Neutral?

Today is Thursday, March 21, 2013.

The other day a friend of mine posted a famous quote from Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, one I've seen and thought about many times. 

"Keep your thoughts positive, because your thoughts become your words.  Keep your words positive, because your words become your behavior.  Keep your behavior positive, because your behavior becomes your habits.  Keep your habits positive, because your habits become your values.  Keep your values positive, because your values become your destiny." 

It's true that our thoughts have power to affect our behavior and thus, our lives.  But I've been wondering lately whether being "positive" is always the best choice.  I think the vast majority of people can agree that negativity is destructive and therefore counterproductive.   Certainly there's a place for positive thinking, but as one business leader put it, "by itself, positive thinking won't solve your problems." 

When I looked around the web for quotes on neutrality, I was surprised to find that the vast majority of people who weighed in on the subject considered neutrality a bad thing.  I think this is because people associate neutrality with apathy or neglect in the face of injustice, or holding with the status quo even when changes are warranted.   Many people also believe that neutrality represents indifference or lack of conviction.  Some people seem to believe that those who are "neutral" actually seek balance by aligning with one side one day and the other side the next day.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Individuals who are truly neutral do not lack interest, conviction, ambition, or passion. 

Neutral thinking at its best is unbiased, and objective.  It is moderation between extremes. It forces us to listen to all sides of a question and to take into consideration what other people think.  Neutral thinking does involve detachment from emotions, but that absolutely does not mean being unfeeling or uncaring. Instead, it means keeping our emotions in check, and not allowing our emotions to dictate our responses,  It means not allowing emotions to force us into snap decisions and knee-jerk reactions.  Neutrality doesn't mean that we never take sides.  Rather, it means examining all sides of a situation carefully and thoughtfully.  It means asking questions rather than rushing to judgment.  It means seeking more information and insisting on alternatives.  It means going with the flow and allowing situations to change naturally, rather than bending situations to our will.  Neutral thinking encourages us to respond appropriately, efficiently, and meaningfully to situations, rather than reacting to situations without consideration for how our reaction will affect them.

An ancient Chinese fable tells of a farmer who had some untamed horses that he allowed to graze freely, without being fenced in.  One day his son reported that one of the horses was missing.  Horses being valuable animals to farmers, all of the man's neighbors remarked on his misfortune at losing one of his horses.  The man did not seem concerned by this loss, however, saying, "We'll see."

Some time later, the horse missing returned, bringing with it a mate.  When the farmer's friends heard about this, they congratulated him on his good fortune, but the old man seemed unimpressed.  "We'll see," her remarked.

One day, the man's son was riding one of the untamed horses and fell off when the horse bucked.  The son's right leg was badly broken, and the son became crippled.  The neighbors once again commiserated with the old man, saying that it was such a shame about the son's injury.  Once again, the old man responded, "We'll see."

A few months later, military officials came to the area to draft young men for the emperor's army.  Seeing that the son was crippled, the recruiters passed him by.  The neighbors all congratulated the man on the fact that his son had avoided the draft.  But the man answered, "We'll see."

The point of the story, of course, is that we can't always judge whether a situation that we are in right now is good or bad, in the long run, because it may be the very thing that is necessary to move us to a better place, eventually.  Another quote going around Facebook expresses this very neatly.  "When things are falling apart, they may actually be falling into place." 

What the Chinese farmer did was refuse to label or judge any of his experiences as good or bad, positive or negative.  It's fine when we label something as good and feel happy about it.  But what about when we label things bad and then start to feel miserable?  Are we really feeling miserable because of the situation itself, or because of our judgment of the situation?

In business and problem-solving, neutral thinking means that we start by asking questions.  How did the problem develop?  What is blocking a successful outcome?  What are some options for solving the problem.  Neutral thinking means that we don't assign blame, but rather think in terms of causes and effects. 

Neutral thinking can be shown in the way we phrase our opinions, our ideas, and our questions.  When a neutral thinker states a fact, she is careful to phrase it in such a way that she is open to others' interpretations.  (Facts may be facts, but facts can be interpreted a number of ways.)  Saying that something "seems" to be a certain way, that something "may be" true, is a softer, more neutral way to make a statement, and gives the listener the impression that the speaker is willing to listen to others' observations.

So let's take Gandhi's quote and substitute "neutral" for "positive," to see how it fits. 

Keep your thoughts neutral, because your thoughts become your words.  So far, so good.  When our thoughts are neutral, we tend to use less emotional or judgmental language.  Our words show a willingness to consider others' perspectives.

Keep your words neutral, because your words become your behavior.  Certainly, when we are thinking neutrally, our responses to situations will be more thoughtful and therefore more effective.  We won't waste time pontificating or emoting.  Instead, we will consider the situation from all sides, including our own underlying beliefs and attitudes, our wants, needs, and fears, as well as the underlying motivations of others.  We will consider as many options as possible, and allow others to weigh in on the matter.  We will take into consideration possible outcomes for each solution, and remain aware of the situation as it changes from moment to moment, staying open to necessary changes in our chosen response.  We know that there is really no such thing as a wrong decision, or wrong response, because whatever happens, we have the opportunity to learn from every situation, even if the outcome is not as pleasant as we might wish.

Keep your behavior neutral, because your behavior becomes your habits. Neutral behavior means responding rather than reacting.  It means considering causes and effects rather than assigning blame.  When we respond to a situation, we do so having chosen it carefully, so there is less chance of regretting our actions later.  We know that we are responding in a way that will ensure the highest good for all concerned in the matter.  We do what we can and move on, knowing that it is easier to accept the outcome of a situation when we have done all we could do. 

Keep your habits neutral, because your habits become your values.  When we make a habit of seeking more information and insisting on as many alternative solutions as possible, we signal that we value others and their contributions to any situation.  In that way we show our love and appreciation for all Souls, everyone else being as much a child of God as we are.  Neutral thinking shows that we value diversity, cooperation and harmony.

Keep your values neutral, because your values become your destiny. What is our destiny?  My spiritual path says that all Souls are on a journey of growth and maturation.  There is always a plus factor, always something more to learn.  Souls come to the physical plane to interface with physical bodies so that they can interact with the physical world.  This physical universe is a school for Souls, a place where we can learn to give and receive love, solve problems, interact and work together with others.  We learn to set priorities and make decisions.  We learn to take responsibility for the way our words and actions impact the well-being of others.  We spend countless lifetimes here, learning at our own pace.  When we've learned all we can here on the physical plane, the cycle of rebirth into the physical plane is ended.  Soul goes on learning in the Worlds of Spirit.  No learning is ever lost.  We take everything we have learned with us as we move from experience to experience.  There is always something more to learn, and the learning will go on unto infinity.  As we move along, we are given opportunities to be of greater assistance to more and more people, more Souls.  We are given more and more responsibility to serve in God's creation, and we are given more opportunities to work with others to serve all life. :-)

Pull Them Into Your Peace

"Don't let people pull you into their storm.  Pull them into your peace."  –Anonymous

Today is Wednesday, March 20, 2013.

This quote has been buzzing around the Internet lately, and I've seen a couple of different photos used with it.  Nobody seems to know who said it first, but I guess it doesn't matter.  It's thought-provoking, no matter who said it.

My spiritual path teaches that anger is never a good option, unless you are in a teaching situation where you mock up anger to get a point across.  But then, mocking up anger doesn't mean you are angry inside.  Rather, you are speaking sharply to your students in order to get them to pay attention. It's very hard not to rationalize our anger as "righteous," especially when we are sure we are in the right.  Anger only gets one so far, though, and then it generates diminishing returns.  We can use anger to get ourselves and other people motivated to support a cause or oppose a wrongdoing, but later we only end up turning people away.  It may make us feel better in the short term to express our discontent, and it may even generate a feeling of pride in being "right."  It may allow us to feel sorry for ourselves.  It may create a little dramatic diversion in our lives.  It won't solve any of our problems, though.  Even when we wish to right a wrong, it's not our anger, per se, that heals the wound, but some other action, taken independently of our anger, that makes things right.

Another teaching from my spiritual path is that when others are angry, we should not take it personally, even if the anger seems directed at us, because when people are angry, it's "their stuff."  It's their feelings about whatever has happened.  Our own response to the situation should not be colored by the feelings of others.  We have our own feelings, and we have the right to express them.  In a vast majority of cases, when we express anger, the underlying cause is fear.  We fear that something may or may not happen.  We fear loss, reprisal, or change. 

Maintaining a sense of inner peace is very difficult in the face of someone's anger directed toward us, or in the face of our own fears.  It requires an inner awareness – awareness that the other person's anger is simply how he is feeling, that it isn't about us.  When we realize that anger is really an expression of fear, and if we can stay calm enough to figure out what the other person is really afraid of, we can respond in a way that addresses the person's fears, which generally has the effect of diffusing the situation and restoring harmony. 

Maintaining inner peace requires also an awareness of our own fears.  When we force ourselves to name our fears exactly, we can then decide if there is any specific action that we or another person can take to avoid or overcome whatever it is that we fear. 

In addition to awareness, in order to maintain inner peace, we must practice.  For those of us who find this discipline difficult to master, life gives us opportunity after opportunity to practice staying calm and focused, rather than lashing out in anger.  As we begin to master inner peace, the opportunities get more difficult and more complex, but the other side of the coin is that we are more able to handle it.

I remember waiting at a bus stop one summer day with two other people.  A fellow came by who looked like he was homeless.  This guy began to shout at us, hurling thunderbolts of anger toward us, so strong that his anger was actually palpable.  My body and mind actually sensed the man's hostility in a physical way, triggering a very real fight-or-flight reflex in me.  One of the other people at the bus stop started arguing with him, and I noticed that this only made the situation worse.  That day I remembered to say nothing.  I can't necessarily say that I was calm, but I was at least able to refrain from being drawn into this man's storm.

Another time, a colleague of mine became angry over something that I can no longer remember, but I remembered thinking that it was his stuff, and not mine.  I also remember thinking that he was trying to use his anger as a tool to manipulate people into doing things his way, or punish them for not agreeing with him.  Once again, I was silent, even though I was feeling a little scared. 

More recently, a friend of mine lost her husband to cancer, which is of course very upsetting.  Nobody wants anybody to die.  However, this woman's husband was much older than she was, in his eighties, and he had lived a long and fairly healthy life.  The cancer was in his organs, and therefore difficult to treat.  I recall that the husband had surgery, but I can't remember now whether or not he had any chemotherapy.  They made heroic efforts to use alternative treatments, which helped for a time, but ultimately failed.  This woman had been so smug toward those of us who chose the more standard chemotherapy treatment, insinuating that our decision was wrong and that theirs was the only right one. My hat is off, in general, to people who "fight the good fight," but there is a point where one has to recognize that the patient's quality of life has diminished to the point where it's necessary to let go of our efforts to save them, that we are only prolonging the patient's suffering. 

After she lost her husband, this same woman angrily and bitterly criticized any of her online friends' efforts to console her, no mater how carefully or circumspectly worded.  One thing I have learned in life is that nothing one says can really console a person who loses a loved one.  Nevertheless, people try to say something loving and kind to the survivors, because it's often the only thing they can do – to simply remind the survivors that they have friends who love them.  Just because a person is suffering a great loss does not make it OK for them to bite people's heads off, even if the people understand where the anger and bitterness is coming from. 

I should have just left well enough alone, but I was tired of walking on eggshells around this woman, and tired of the way she was treating her other friends.  I was tired of hearing her talk as if she was the only person in the world to suffer grief, and tired of her rebuffing her friends' offerings of kindness.  At one point, this woman wanted me to agree that she had been right to prolong her husband's life at all costs, and that it was OK for her to snap at people who tried to console her.  That's when I rebelled.  There was no way I was going to pull this woman into my peace.  Instead, she succeeded in pulling me into her storm.  I wrote her a candid message that expressed my feelings.  Instead of just letting go of my need to be "right" and quietly and gradually letting go of the friendship (because sometimes you just need to walk away, at least for a while), I just had to make my point.  That was my mistake.

She responded by writing me a long, long diatribe, calling me every name in the book and expressing every grudge against me that she had been "saving up," as it were, for things that I had said or done years earlier.  She informed me that she had already blocked my email, so there was no hope of sending a response of any kind.  She also blocked me from Facebook for a while, although she has evidently unblocked me recently.  When I realized that this same woman had blocked others – very probably for speaking out as I did – I decided that enough was enough.  I didn't block her. I simply erased her emails from my inbox and took her off my friend list. 

I understand why she said and did what she did.  I know, at least intellectually, how fearful it must be to lose one's life partner.  So for all that, I can forgive her.  I truly do wish her well, and  I don't mind being cordial if it is ever necessary to speak directly with her, but I don't believe I will ever accept an offer of friendship, because, as a dear friend reminded me, it is evident that this woman creates storms wherever she goes.  I'm not the only person she has tangled with, and I suppose I will not be the last. 

Sometimes you cannot pull a person into your peace.  Sometimes you just have to walk away.  :-/

The Power of the Subconscious Mind

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."   –Carl Jung   

Today is Tuesday, March 19, 2013, technically the last day of winter.  It's cold and windy, but the sun is shining brightly and the snow we just had has melted.  This morning the electricity went off just as I was making a cup of coffee, and realizing that I could not heat water in the microwave or the stove, I got dressed and headed to one of my favorite restaurants in Sioux Falls, Camille's Sidewalk Cafe.  Of course, it's too cold to eat out on the sidewalk, but they make great coffee and fabulous food, and they have free wi-fi.  As I opened my computer here, I realized that this is one of the images I had in my mind a few years ago when I contemplated retirement: sitting in a friendly, unpretentious restaurant and writing away on my laptop.  That was the reason I opted for a laptop instead of a desk computer the last time I made a purchase.  Of course, the reality is a little different from the picture I had in my mind.  Today I forgot to go to the bank first, so I had only just enough money to pay for my lunch, with a few pennies left over.  There's more in the bank, but the point is that I don't have money to do this very often.  Another reality: I'm on the Weight Watchers diet, now, so I can't take advantage of the decadent desserts offered at Camille's.  Such is life.

This picture I had in my mind is a great  lead-in to my subject for today, the subconscious mind, because the subconscious mind stores and reacts to information primarily in the form of visual images, as well as in the form of emotions, tactile sensations, sounds, tastes, and smells.  There seems to be a disconnect between our subconscious minds and language, which is the main thing that allows the conscious mind to effectively organize and recall information.  

The subconscious mind is like a video recorder.  It records not only all the sights and sounds of the events of our lives, but also information from our other senses, as well as the emotions that each event in our lives generates within us.  It never shuts down, even while the body is sleeping.  The trouble is that the information it contains cannot be accessed very easily, and this works to our disadvantage when we need to deal with a problem from our past in order to clear up an issue in the present.

The spiritual traditions that recognize the reality of past lives all know (although they don't express it in terms of modern psychology) that the subconscious mind is how Souls, who are eternal, record the the information from their various lives in physical incarnation.   Modern scientists say that we only use about 10% of our brains.  Well, duh!  If you have hundreds of past lifetimes worth of information stored in your brain, you need someplace to store it so that you can process the information as you need it.   The subconscious mind, then, provides the continuity for Soul from lifetime to lifetime.  Eventually, I'm sure a lot of information gets downgraded to very low priority in the interest of saving space, so to speak.  The illustration I chose for the top of this blog is a great representation of the subconscious mind (the part of the iceberg under water) versus the conscious mind (the part above the water.)

For those who don't believe in past lives, think about your early childhood.  You probably don't have any first-person memories of trying to walk, saying your first word, etc.  You probably don't even remember exactly how your first driving lesson went, for that mater.  The fact is that you don't actually need real-time access to that information anymore, because you have internalized it.  The learning (how to walk, talk, and drive) has stayed with you, even though you don't remember exactly how you went about learning to do these things.  In the same manner, much of what happened to us in our past lives is unremarkable enough that we don't really need to remember it.  

The problem, as I said earlier, is when there is some issue from the past – whether from our early childhood in the current lifetime or from a past life – that is affecting us today.  Many stories have been told about how people learned to fear dogs, water, heights, thunderstorms, etc. because of negative events in early childhood.  These days more and more stories are also told about how people were able to recall events in past lifetimes that triggered deep, but irrational, fears in this life.  When we realize that we are Soul, and that we are truly eternal and immortal beings, we can release a lot of deep-seated fears, including our fear of death. A sense of deep peace and a reassurance that all is right with the world can result.  

Back in the early 1960s, a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz wrote about patients of his who insisted that nothing had changed after plastic surgery, even as they looked into the mirror and compared their image with photographs of themselves before surgery.   Maltz discovered the power of the subconscious mind, and used imagery to help the patients heal negative self-images that held them back.   Others in the field of personal development, such as Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins, have used Maltz' techniques to help their clients build positive self-images. 

A photo quote going around on Facebook recently is by Zig Ziglar, who re-stated what Maltz found in his studies of the subconscious mind:  "You cannot behave in a manner inconsistent with the way you see yourself."   If you think you are a failure, then you will be a failure - your subconscious will see to it that you do, think, and say things that lead to failure.  

When you factor in past lives, it gets even more complicated.  Generally speaking, events from our past that generated very strong emotions – particularly strong negative emotions – are ones that tend to affect us in the current lifetime.  One psychologist who does "past life therapy" wrote of a patient who was terrified of bees.  It turned out that this woman had had a past life in which she was stung to death by bees, so of course her subconscious mind classified the information that she was to avoid bees as high-priority "survival"  information.   This sort of thing gets played out over and over in past life therapy, where clients discover that the manner of death in a particular lifetime (drowning, falling, being smothered, etc.) was especially unpleasant, and triggered anxieties in the current lifetime. 

It's not just fears such as these that need to be worked out.  Have you ever wondered why little kids 3, 4 and 5 years old will tell you what the "daddy" is supposed to do and what the "mommy" is supposed to do – even if their parents have a modern marriage in which they both earn money outside the home and both take responsibility for household responsibilities such as cooking and laundry?   Where did they get this information?   From past lives, of course, and not just one past life, but from many lives spent in times and places where the values that we label as "traditional" held sway.   This is also where people get their ingrained ideas of how women should be treated and  why marriage is better than being single.   We carry forward a lot of ideas from one lifetime to another.  This is why traditions are so hard to change, why they change so slowly. 

When we are able to access certain events or beliefs from our subconscious mind, it is possible to understand why we behave as we do, and why we seem to be drawn like magnets to certain negative situations over and over.  It has been said that when we can't explain how something works, we call it magic.  When we figure it out, we call it science or technology.   The same goes for our deep-seated beliefs (such as, "bees are bad and will lead to death") that are buried in our subconscious minds.  As Jung said, when we can't explain why things happen to us, we call it fate. Once we look into our subconscious minds, we are able to bring to light deeply-buried beliefs that trigger events in our current lives.  And when we are able to access our past-life memories, we are able to see how the Law of Karma works in our lives.  An example, once again from the case files of a past-life regression therapist, illustrates this.  A daughter was especially sensitive to her mother's controlling behavior, but a look at one of her past lives revealed that her mother in this life was her child, and that her subconscious belief, held over from that past life, was that she should be the one in charge. 

The good news is that the subconscious mind is infinitely programmable, and negative beliefs can be erased and a more positive self-image substituted.  In the case of the daughter above, all she had to do is realize that her situation with respect to her mother had changed, and the old belief was no longer valid.   Further, if such a person recognizes the Law of Karma, she might realize upon extended reflection that she might have been overbearing in the past life, and was then given a lifetime in which she had to "drink her own medicine," so to speak, in order to balance the karma and learn that being overbearing towards anyone is not a good idea.  

In my own case, I realized that for a very long time – certainly during the entire time I was married – I dreamed of myself as single, without a boyfriend, and living in my own place.  When I started thee daydreams, I was a smoker, but in the daydreams I did not smoke.  Sure enough, I am now a single woman with no boyfriend, living my myself – and I don't smoke.  So I have created my own reality.  

We all create our own reality, but as I said above, the good news is that we can alter that reality.  It may not happen overnight, but it is clear from reading the stories of others that when we do this consciously, the time it takes to make changes is much shorter than when we allow our subconscious mind to just do its thing without any help.  

So... was it my "fate" to be single?  No, I created it.  The question now is whether I want to change that, and if I do, then how to go about creating that change.    :-)