Changing Consciousness

Changing consciousness is not a matter of a desire that can be fulfilled. Instead, it’s a growth process that occurs from within. You cannot make a flower bloom – it will bloom when it gets to that particular stage of unfoldment. But just as the flower needs nourishing and support to get to that stage, so too every person needs nurturing and support to move through the stages of unfoldment.We can assist people to fulfill their needs. If a person is dependent, we can help them to become more independent by supporting them to recognize and meet their own needs. We cannot help people take responsibility for their choices, which is part of the process of becoming independent, but we can encourage them to take responsibility.If a person is independent, and is ready to move on to soul growth, we can assist them to understand what those stages of growth involve. We can also invite them to participate in group activities that are soul-based. This might involve group meditation or service of some kind. We can also exemplify through our living the qualities of soul consciousness, which then creates a resonance within others.Every step of the soul journey necessitates a free and conscious choice for GREATER INCLUSIVENESS. And therefore, there is a letting go or sacrificing of something personal that might inhibit one from being more inclusive. This would be some thoughts, ideas, attitudes, or behaviors that are exclusive, separative, self-centered or judgmental.No one can help another to make such shifts of perspective. We cannot force such shifts in ourselves, either. One arrives at that stage when the choice is a natural step based on the loving, intelligent unfoldment of heart and mind.The step toward inclusiveness is inspired and supported by the soul within rather than based solely on personality efforts. When the personality releases its blocks to soul expression, the choice is simply a consciousness assent to the life and impulse of the soul within.

~Andrew Schneider

Form and Formless

Whatever takes form is false. Only the formless endures. When you understand the truth of this teaching, you will not be born again. For God is infinite, within the body and without, like a mirror and the image in a mirror. As the air is everywhere, flowing around a pot and filling it, so God is everywhere, filling all things and flowing through them forever.

- Ashtavakra Gita

Stumbling into Life

I stumbled into life this morning.
I was dragging a used up Christmas tree
to the curb.
God leaped on me and dragged me to the
ground.
I turned to shout at him. "What is your problem
old man?"
But before the words left my mouth, I was
astounded by the frozen tangerine display,
against a vibrant teal blue.

Tangerine cotton balls of frozen ice crystals
with that particular orange from the sun just as
it breaches the sky.

"What a whale of a mornin', don't you think?"

I nodded my head, because my heart had
been seized, my mind lay stunned.

My head in her lap, I revered the sky.

Sam Roberts

Changing Consciousness

Can we change our consciousness? We cannot change who we are, but we can shift our identity from being the personality to being the soul. This is a shift from identifying oneself as one’s self-image to identifying with one’s essence. In truth, we really ARE the essence, the soul. And we HAVE the self-image or personality. To say that we ARE the personality is tantamount to saying that we are our sensations, our emotions, and our thoughts – which we are not. We do not HAVE a soul. We ARE soul and HAVE a personality. In ages past, people did not speak of changing consciousness. It was not relevant. Consciousness is identity. In the past, people were their personality. And still today, the majority of people identify with their personality as who they are. However, there are more and more people able to disidentify from their personality and identify with their essence, the soul. In many ways, these two levels of self, of ‘I,’ are opposites. It requires an extremely radical shift in perspectives to make the change from identifying with the personality to identify with the soul. One must re-evaluate all previous ways of understanding, of thinking, of acting, and of being motivated.The change in consciousness from personality identity to soul consciousness can only occur when a person is ready. Readiness is determined by:
Having sufficient experience from which one has learned a great deal about oneself.
Being willing and able to face the subconscious realities that one has previously repressed.
Having built up a strong ego, so one is able to withstand the vicissitudes of life.
Being independent and responsible for one’s own well-being.
Taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s choices.

~Andrew Schneider

Awakening to the Possible

When you have the profound awakening that you are part of a cosmic process that's going somewhere, you find yourself falling more deeply in love with what's possible than you are with what has already happened. And this shift inevitably challenges almost all of your values and beliefs, including your ideas about what it means to love another person. What are the conscious and unconscious values that inform your relationships with other people? Are those relationships primarily based on the past—on shared personal history and outdated cultural ideals? Or are they evolutionarily inspired, informed by the understanding that we're part of a process that's ever-aspiring to go somewhere new? Are your relationships alive with the evolutionary impulse, with a shared love for what's possible? Once we awaken to them, these future-oriented spiritual values are going to impact, in the most profound way, every notion we have of what life is supposed to look like.—Andrew Cohen

The Magic of Christianity (and Christmas)

You see for me the magic of Christianity is not in the miracles, or in the beliefs, or in the written word. It is not even so much in having the correct information about the historical Jesus. The magic of Christianity is in the living and being. It is more about the way we live than it is about belief. It is more about trust than it is about blind faith. The transformative “magic” can only be discovered in the doing, by opening, not closing, by letting go, and not by clinging. It is not about trying to decide what is divine and what is not. It is about discovering the divine in all things. Or as Lloyd Geering suggests, only when the sacred and the secular are made one, will the Kingdom of God have come. We can find the “magic” of Christianity by taking Jesus’ teachings seriously and by “living” the compassionate path toward self discovery. That is the way we uncover the essence of the Christianity. That has always been the way we can discover who Jesus really was and in the process discover who and what we are. ~John Plumer

Christmas Meditation

Contributed by Catherine Crews, author unknown:


If we consider ourselves so unimportant that we must fill every moment of our lives with action, when will we have time to make the long, slow journey across the desert as did the Magi?  or sit and watch the stars as did the shepherds?  or brood over the coming of the child as did Mary?  For each one of us, there is a desert to travel, a star to discover, and a being within ourselves to bring to life.

Inner Awareness

Contributed by Gary O'Connor:


I wish to be conscious of this unknown energy that is in me. For this I need to get rid of the idea that I know my body. I must see that the memory of my body, of the known sensation of my body, imposes itself as an answer at the moment of questioning who I am, the moment of incomprehension. And because this answer appears spontaneously, I remain passive and do not wake up and look. I must see this constant tendency to let the memory of sensation preempt the direct perception. I need to see that my body is also unknown.

I feel my essential "I' like an echo of a distant vibration of which I am barely aware. It is as though submerged in my body, and because it is submerged, it cannot differentiate itself. I need to dissociate myself from my thoughts, ordinary emotions and movements, my sensations. Their vibrations of inertia, which condition me, are an obstacle to the consciousness of 'I'. Yet I have the power to ignore them and not let them invade my consciousness if I concentrate on 'I,' this echo of a powerful vibration that could transform me."

~From Jeanne de Salzmann's new book, The Reality of Being

The World to Come

An excerpt from Charles Upton's book, Knowings (224), on the coming world order:

When you find yourself in a state of fear or grief over the evil of the world, the degeneration of humanity and the ruin of the earth, know that this evil, ruin and degeneration are nothing but the mass resistance of the world to the impending advent of  ... the Messiah--and that the fear or grief you are presently experiencing are your way of participating in that resistance. Knowing this, simply stop resisting Him, and let the Messiah come. Stop trying to maintain the world in existence by the power of your ego; let it go. Let it end. Let your ego end. You've been fight off the Messiah: cease hostilities now, 'resist no evil' (which is how your ego experiences Him), lay down your weapons, and let Him break through 'the clouds of heaven,' the clouds of individual and collective egotism which have separated earth from its divine Source ever since the fall of man. 

God Lovers

God Lovers
magnify each crack
of light in night’s monotony,
arouse the dawn,
intone: Allah, Allah from the wooden bench.

God Lovers

graze camels on la illaha il’Allah,
water vast herds with life-giving sound,
drizzle it across
an afternoon sun nothing is new under.

The grit and zeal of God Lovers
bring Zaynab to tears. She
feeds them her own modest supper.

Dhikr and the desert air at nightfall
oversee and instruct the darkness.

God Lovers
don’t stop for anything. The angels
hold hands with them night and day;
so said Muhammad, and someone
wrote it down.

~Tamam Kahn


Contributed by Gary O'Connor

Bursting with sunbeams

The portal to my soul opened and grounded all of my
heartache. My sigh aroused my Being.

With a loving look, the Beloved had answered my prayers
becoming the "plumber" of my experience.

I answered her knowing look with ineffectual words.
"I would have found it, eventually."

Laughter filled me up and over flowed. I was buoyed
up and shown pictures of wonder in the wings of a
cloudy morning, bursting with sunbeams.

Sam Roberts

If you learn to wait

Wait with blazing desire, deep humility, and much
eagerness. If you learn to wait, you'll surely
receive our King, who comes to us humble and meek,
and seated on a donkey. O endless love! You
confound human pride. We see You, the King of kings,
approaching humbly, seated on a beast, disgracefully
rejected. Let those who seek worldly honor and glory
think on this and blush for shame.
- Catherine of Siena, Letters

The Image of the Reality

You alone have been made the image of the Reality
that transcends all understanding, the likeness of
imperishable beauty, the imprint of true divinity,
the recipient of beatitude, the seal of the true
light. When you turn to him you become that which
he is himself.
- Gregory of Nyssa,
Second Homily on the Song of Songs

The grace of contemplation

The grace of contemplation is granted only in response
to a longing and importunate desire: Nevertheless, God
will not present Himself, even in passing, to every
soul; but only to that soul which is shown, by great
devotion, vehement desire, and tender affection, to be
His bride, and to be worthy that the Word in all His
beauty should visit her as a Bridegroom.
- St. Bernard [12th C], On the Canticle of Canticles

I have nothing more to say

There come times when I have nothing more to tell
God. If I were to continue to pray in words, I would
have to repeat what I have already said. At such
times it is wonderful to say to God, "May I be in
Thy presence, Lord? I have nothing more to say to
Thee, but I do love to be in Thy presence.
- Ole Kristian O. Hallesby

Raising of the inward eyes

If faith is the gaze of the heart at God, and if
this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to
meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows
that it is one of the easiest things possible to do.
- A. W. Tozer (1897-1963),
The Pursuit of God [1948]

When we are powerless

You may rest assured that God will not allow you
to be tried beyond your strength. It is when we
are powerless that God does all, and thereby
manifests His power and goodness in a striking
manner.
- John Baptist de La Salle

Why Are We Here?

Here we are in the world--a patchwork of darkness and light. A shadowland of amazing beauty and love, of cruelty and ugliness. And so why are we here?

The Qur'an says we are here because we were given the Mandate to come, and we accepted the responsibility as Covenant, and our work was (is) to be here ... really be here in this amazing underworld and to bridge heaven and earth, not in principle, but in fact, in our very being.

One poet says that we are to be here and not deny the stark and cruel mystery of the world (Oliver). Another poet says we are to add our lone song to a chorus of music which sings and is being sung by the Creator, for in the end, we have fallen into the place where all is music (Rumi).

Another poet says that we are "bees of the invisible" gathering the nectar of the world and storing it up as golden honey for the great living hive of future humanity. So why are we here? ... our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, "invisibly," in us (Rilke).

Closer than our own breath

When our hearts are tenderly responsive --- and it
suits His greater plan, then the Lord will lift the
thin veil that separates us. And we will be stunned
to realize that He has been closer than our own
breath all along.
- Patsy Clairmont