Spiritual Growth – Keywords to Optimise Your Life: Joy
A Song of Springtime
When I wrote the spiritual growth article entitled “Spiritual Growth – Keywords for an Optimised Life” I did not realise that it would create such interest. My partner Bee had just finished her A-Z of Things to See in Ireland and was looking for some new writing inspiration. The idea of using keywords as a spiritual practice, allied with your core values, intriged and exited her to share one of her keywords that allows for the optimization of her one Wild and Precious Life. I hope you enjoy this guest post from Bee Smith.
This spiritual growth practice invites what I now refer to as Spiritual Energy Optimization (SEO). It is a play on the words Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the name given to the technique of using key words and phrases in order to rank highly within major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. I have taken this idea and turned it around to invite you to use keywords in optimizing your spiritual growth.
Guest Blog by Bee Smith
I was greatly intrigued by the blog “Spiritual Growth – Keywords for an Optimised Life” and decided to take up the challenge to consider what keywords I would be plugging in to optimise my life. Two keywords popped into my head straight away. Love. Well, of course, love! This is what Mary Oliver answered in an interview about what she had done with her one wild and precious life.
To love and to be loved. And it wasn’t always easy!”
But once I dug a bit around the ‘L’ word I realised that one tiny three letter word is really key. And that is ‘Joy.’
Now the dictionary defines this as the expression of pleasure and happiness. It refers to ‘rejoicing’, a word that is redolent of childhood Christmases, for me at least. But when I put it to the ‘conscious choice’ test I decided that we may not always feel in control of our choices about love, but we do always have free will when it comes to joy. Joy may seem an odd choice in a world that is characterised by uncertainty and strife. You would be a rare person to have got to middle age without having had a significant loss whether from separation, estrangement, job loss, divorce, death or shattered cherished wish. These are all grief making circumstances. But if we get stuck in the mourning phase then we make a decision to reject joy. Our sadness becomes a conscious choice as much as Queen Victoria’s choice of widow’s weeds for forty years or more of widowhood. It is an attitude to be struck. It becomes axiomatic. Sadness becomes a ruling principle by choice. Yet we can choose to affirm joy even in a life that will be touched with sorrowful, even grievous, circumstances.
It was at such a life defining loss when I was confronted with that choice. I spent nearly a decade of my life trying to achieve a long cherished wish. As I approached forty I asked myself if I was going to define myself by what I did not have or to accept the wonderful gift of life and love that was already part of my life’s condition. I think it was at that moment – and I can remember when it struck me, the street I walked, the mizzling rain, the descending twilight – when I realised that I had everything I needed to be happy. I let go of that wish, which I had put a lot of time, effort and commitment into, and watched it drift off into the overcast sky. It was a very conscious moment. There have been other times in my life when I’ve had to make a similar choice, to embrace happiness in what is, rather than dictating how things must be in order for me to be happy or feel pleasure. This is not a case of sugaring the lemonade. More, it is like realising that salt in tears can be for sorrow or joy. But salt is what we need to savour life. This is an important distinction.
Most often joy strikes in moments of being when I am in a state of open witnessing. Sometimes this is a meditative space, whether I am staring out a window or walking the dogs. Once I looked up from my computer screen to see a flock of linnets sweep into the hawthorn outside the office window. This gave me great joy. Walking along the lane in a soft rain chasing rainbows on the way home fills me with joy. Sitting beside my partner in bed, each of us companionably absorbed in our own reading, fills me with joy. It seems that paying attention to these small moments, the details and ‘is-ness’ of daily life – soup making, talking with a friend, watching the little dog chase invisible flies, laying words and sentences across a computer screen. All are occasions of joy. To live is a constant occasion for joy.
Reflections on Spiritual Keywords
Where joy intersects love is when one realises that all these moments of joy are inside love – the nurture that goes into making soup, the deep satisfaction of a long, loving relationship, the blaze of realisation that gets shared in a piece of writing, the amused affection for the little dog, the expansion of lungs and breath when singing harmony in a group. Joy is what happens when you are deep in the skin of love and life. But to savour that pleasure you must choose to sup from the cup of life and love and choose joy. So if I was to say what one keyword – other than love, of course – to use as a search toward optimising life, joy would be the single most important keyword.
To read more of Bee’s writing you can visit her website at
http://www.irishblessingstours.com
OTHER GREAT CONTENT
Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
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THE ENTHEOS ACADEMY – Online teaching that integrates everything you might have wanted to study: from old school philosophy and spirituality to modern day positive psychology, nutrition, creativity, conscious business and general self-development–all the
SEVEN STAGES OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION – n his spiritual evolution, man passes through different stages, each of them having some specific characteristics. Recognizing these characteristics can open the path toward superior levels which leads us to perfecti
MIND PERK – More personal and spiritual development articels from leaders in the field of spiritual development and spiritual growth
Spiritual Growth – Keywords for the Optimised Life – (A Series)
In order to promote the awareness of the various maps of spiritual growth and development I have put together a marketing plan that I intend to use to rank for a top position in Google for one of my key words and phrases. When I have proved the effectiveness of this marketing strategy then I will use this to rank for other key words related to the process of spiritual growth and personal development. Choosing the right keywords is essential for what is referred to as search engine optimisation, or SEO.
This SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the science of ranking for the No 1 spot in key search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. When I was reflecting on this approach to the importance of keywords it struck me that this is a practice that we could effectively put to use in ranking for the most important search energies in life. This is the search that many of us want to rank for. This is our search for at-one-ment with Love.
So it is that idea of keyword ranking that I have decided to do a series about what might be regarded as high ranking spiritual growth keywords. I will focus on the keywords that I use, and which I spread out into the world wide web of relationship in an attempt to rank in the search engine of Love’s becoming. Let me say at the outset that this attempt at ranking for keywords is not a competition but a process of revelation. There is a paradox within this process of revelation. What is revealed already is and ever shall be. I, like you, are a unique expression of Love’s intention. The purpose of this expression of Love’s intention is to know it’s own unique character. I am Love’s work and the work I am here to facilitate is Love’s knowing of itself.
It would be an interesting spiritual growth exercise to imagine that you became a professional SEO. I have played around with that term to come up with the idea of your becoming a Spiritual Energy Optimizer. Another way of looking at this practical way of searching is that you are already optimized for Love’s purpose! You are connected to the Source and your heart’s deepest longing is to return to that knowing and being at one with this Source. This Source is always ranking you as number one in its’ search for you
The world is full of words. The world is filled with people talking in words. There is no hiding from words. Everywhere you go there is an absense of silence. What is also absent is the essence that words are intended to invite and be allowed to radiate through you. Mystics are people of the essence. They are connected to what is essential. Their approach to words is to move ever more deeply into silence.
It says in the Bible
In the beginning was the Word.
Many people take this literally. They think that an old man in a white beard spoke the world into existence. They think that words in a holy book are the words that God spoke into the world. They think that they if they know the words that they know the experience of the Source of the words. Now, words are important. I hear the words that some friends speak into the world and their words create havoc in their lives. They live a life script (more words) written for them in their childhood; they replay this old script every day of their lives. It is their real ‘scripture’; it isn’t in any sense holy because it leads to a deep sense of separation from Source.
One of Buddhism’s precepts is called ‘right speech.’ It is a practice whereby you commit to paying attention to the words you use in everyday interactions. It means that you are committed to ceasing from gossip but it also goes deeper than that. You commit to paying attention and to become a witness for your thoughts and how your speech reflects your thinking. Various studies have shown that the average person’s mind is filled with 95% negative thought. For the most part, this is unconscious. We are back to the ‘script’ that is followed out of habit. The walking of the spiritual journey is to make the unconscious conscious. It is the work of making the destructive scripts that you play in you head into the holy and creative scripture that is your very essence.
It helps to be around people who are conscious and who are consciously aware of the power of words. It helps to be around people who use words that empower and expand from a sense of Love rather than from fear or for a need to control. In the end, you are responsible for your own words and whether they expand who you are or contract you into a deeper sense of separateness from Love. The key to this process is to be aware of what is contained within your mind. We are all script writers. Most everyday we write the same old script, which we replay out of habit. It takes courage to write a holy scripture that becomes aligned with essence – the essential Self. It takes courage to be willing to realise the power, beauty and grace that is potential within you. This potential is always awaiting to be birthed in new ways of creative expression. This process begins with the thoughts you allow to occupy your mind.
Are you feeding your mind with junk food ideas? What are the thoughts that you allow to enter your mind? Are you cultivating the Guardian at the Threshold through some form of meditation practice or body awareness practice? For many people the Guardian at the Threshold of their mind is asleep or has been shamed or disempowered. What keywords do you consciously put into your mind on a daily basis? I read mystical poetry most every day. These are words that connect me to the essence. Mystical poetry contains words of power, beauty and grace – all inherent in this experience of Love expressing through form. My mind becomes clear and my heart becomes filled with joy.
Is your mind filled with the latest news or celebrity gossip? Is you mind filled with fear for national security or the latest product on the market that you don’t have, nor have the means to buy? Is your mind filled with soap opera plot with the drama a 95% negative reflection of the collective mind? The choice is yours. In the opening to one scripture we are told that in the beginning was the Word.
The paradox is that this in the beginning never began and never ends because it never did begin in the realm of time. It is the forever becoming of Love. You are not separate from this process. You are created to facilitate it. In order to do that you need to become more conscious of your words and choices that your words invite. The result of operating from unconscious impulses is suffering. Outward speech reflects inner dialogue. Is your speech the speech of a lover? Does it reflect a healthy loving regard for yourself, which expands into a healthy, loving regard for others and expands more deeply into the knowing that Love is who you are and why you are.
But to get back to being a Spiritual Energy Optimiser. Choose your keywords consciously. Pay attention to how they allow you to rank for the number one position. In this case that position is the at-one-ment with Source. Remember too, that this is a dialogue. As the German mystic Miester Eckhart tells us, “Love longs to know you just as much, if not more so, than you long to be the knowing of Love.” You and Love are never separate although we may go through life for the most part feeling separateness from Love as your primary life experience.
So, choose your keywords well. Make this choice of words a spiritual growth practice used for the purpose of optimising your life. Focus your life around those keywords that lead to your expanding your awareness and the direct knowing of your essential Self. Commit to revealing the essence of the keywords you choose. Align those keywords with your core values. Sometimes your ranking will slip down the scale. Yet in the end, which is also the beginning, your focus will become more about how to help others rank for the number one position. Your focus will tend to expand into a point where there is less of your and more of Love. Your focus then becomes on how to assist the revelation that every individual is here to become as a unique expression of Love in form.
Prepare for this to be a slow process. There are search engine optimisation experts who will tell you that you can rank highly in the search for at-one-ment by simply accepting their keywords. This is basically how authoritarian figures – whether religious or political – operate. Metaphorically speaking, this is what is called a ‘black hat technique’ to rise in rank as opposed to what search engines designate ‘white hate techniques.’ In matters of spiritual growth it is essential that you become your own authority.
You are responsible for what you allow to enter your mind, which then impacts your body. The demons and gargoyles that are carved at the entrance to churches and cathedrals are symbolic representations of the Guardian at the Threshold. This is the guardian of sacred space. This sacred space is the space of your mind, which is also the sacred space that the One Mind expresses through you. Consider your mind a cathedral space. Consider yourself the keeper of that space. You are the one that allows the light to shine through the stained glass windows of the body’s chakras. The choice is for you to decide to maintain the sacredness and the sanctuary of the mind? If you choose to do so then then you make that sanctuary available to others whose threshold guardians are sleepy.
The essential keyword that you are here to rank for is your name. This is not the name that you are called by in the everyday world. It’s not the name listed on your birth certificate. This is your existential vibration, your unique signature created by Love from beyond time and space. This is your Heavenly name known to all the angels.
When you search for it in the search engine of Love your work is to ensure that it ranks as at-one-ment. Pay attention to the words and images that you allow to enter the sacred space of your mind. Choose to make those images and words loving, inspirational, purpose-filled; allow your threshold guardian to be vigilant. Awaken this Guardian within you and align it in service to the highest good within you. Make this Guardian within available to serve Love’s purpose, which is, of course YOUR purpose. It is in this way that you become a superhero in your own right living from the direct knowing of your true name.
Remember too – this is not a competition. Using keywords as a spiritual growth practice is a win/win situation. Even if you never get to the No. 1 spot you are, paradoxically speaking, always No. 1. You have never left that No. 1 spot because you never left that place. You can never be separate from the Creator that is forever creating forms that are Love’s unique expressions through you, within your space and time dimension. I’ll be continuing my spiritual energy optimisation techniques for my life and also applying them to my website. These are SEO techniques and practices that will will reveal themselves as No. 1 – but not in a narcisstic, self-centred way but in an existentially centred-Self knowing. I intend to write a series about the keywords that I use in my own life. This would be with the intention of sharing the essence of such words. In this way I hope to demonstrate how one can maintain the sacred space of the mind and perfume it with the beauty of the language of the heart.
I hope that you will help me in my search and my search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is important to any writer trying to promote their work. You can do this by simply tweeting this article or sharing it with those who you want to optimise with Love. The retweet button is to the right of this post ending. Thanks for the support. This allows me to share the invitation to the radiance that is always potential within you and which you are birthed into form to realise and share as the true gift of who you are and why you are. If you like the material contained in this blog you might wish to sign up for the weekly newsletter that contains material that does not feature in this blog that invites well-being in all areas of your one Wild and Precious Life. This FREE weekly newsletter takes you through a series of maps of the spiritual journey from various traditions. The sign up box is at the top left of the page.
OTHER GREAT CONTENT
Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
spiritual growth and development
STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS – Video about the various states of consiousness.
SPIRAL DYNAMICS – Another map of personal and spiritual development for your consideration
SUPER CONSCIOUSNESS MAGAZINE – SuperConsciousness is an inspiring, content-rich, evidence-based science and spirituality magazine focused on exploring innate human potential.
Root Chakra Healing and the Atonement with the Father
Root chakra healing includes our relationship to security. One key issue around security for many people is the issue of money. The root chakra is, however, related to abundance. Abundance, as I have written before in this blog, is the way in which the individual is in alignment with and allows the life force to flow and freely express through them as it is intended. Abundance is not simply an issue about money and wealth. One might be extremely wealthy but from an energetic point of view they could be the living dead.
I have issues around money. Some of my more materiality focused friends have asked me if I have ever taken a vow of poverty. In a very real sense part of me did and finds it hard to let go. My Reiki master tells me that in relation to this issue I should cut the ties but not the love. I have always resisted that advice and now at the age of sixty one years I am getting ready to do what I have resisted. This willingness to let go has been prompted by a dream I had last night. In this dream I am running with another man. We are running in a wide open field. He is supporting me. He lets me go and says that I must now run on my own. This dream man is a kind of mentor.
I have root chakra issues I need healing around the issue of my father and money. The longer I live the more loving of him I become and my focus on what we had together is now more on gratitude rather than on loss. I realise that in many ways I am very like him. I used not to want to be anything like him. Now I appreciate who and what he was and the best of who he was. In some way that begins to mirror how I feel about myself.
I have an image that I keep in my mind that connects me to my father and my relationship to money. This is an image that I do not want to let go off. It is one image that when I recollect it connects me to my love for him. Even as I remember this recollection now a tear comes to my eye. My father was a working class man from the tough side of Liverpool in England. He fought for the rights of the working man. In his heart, however, he was an artist but he was forced to work at a job that was essentially soul destroying. He made money wherever he could and worked all the hours that he could in order to make ends meet. I never remember us, as a family ever going without except that I always remember going without the love I longed for him to express to me but never did. He was not a demonstrative kind of man. In that sense he and I are not alike.
My remembered image of my father takes place late one night. I had come down from my bedroom to use the bathroom. There was a light on in the living room and I look in. My father sat at a desk counting money. He was counting union dues from the men whose rights he upheld as their union representative at the place he worked at for most of his life. I remember most of all that he looked tired and sad. I remember too that I wanted most of all to take away that tiredness and sadness because of my intense love for him. He wasn’t aware of my watching him. I didn’t disturb him but left to go back upstairs to bed.
That memory connects me to him still, and in healing the root chakra and the sense of abundance, I have begun to let it go. I have, as my Reiki master advises cut the ties but not the love. This image is one connected to working in the dark late at night. It is an image of counting little sums of money that becomes a symbol of the men who, in a very real sense, are fighting for their souls. My father becomes a kind of guardian of that energy. I don’t want to let that go of this image of him but in a sense it keeps me tied into a relationship to money that does not serve what I am here to serve.
Like my father I am a union man. I am a writer who invites the ultimate union. I do not fight for this union. I invite surrender rather than fight. I pay my union dues through the spiritual practices that are part of my real work in the world. I work in the dark out of choice. I choose to work in the shadow lands of the human mind. I choose to do and practice dreamwork. I work to align the invitations from my dream life into the life that I express in this everyday world of form
Root chakra healing is about healing your sense of security. Money and security are deeply related. As a child my images around money are ones about struggle, doing work you hate, not earning your livelihood by giving up what you would love to do. It includes images of counting pittances that allow a struggle for the rights of the working man to go on. All of these images are a representation of my father doing his best with the situation that he was presented with. There are many such fathers in the world who are doing their best.
The question for me is how do I run on as the image of the dream invites me to do. It invites me to run into the wide open field. In this regard I am reminded of a poem that invites union within a field. It is by my beloved Rumi.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.—Rumi
The answer is that I let go the connection to the images of struggling in the dark with too little light. In order for root chakra healing to take place I let go the images of struggle but not the love that is and was inherent within that struggle. I change the image to one of honouring what was given by my father even if it wasn’t given in the way I most wanted. My father was a provider. He wasn’t a lover. He was too wounded by the blight of his own fathers alcoholism and the times through which he lived. Although in a way I see how he, in his own ay, late into the night, worried and sorrowful, risked for Love in ways I am privileged not to have to do.
Atonement with the father is root chakra work. It is the work of healing the roots of your family dynamic that will in all likelihood impact you throughout all of your life. I am beginning to open up to a real sense of abundance. I have learned new skills that I intend to take into the marketplace. I have learned new skills that I will take into my community. My community is everyone who reads this blog and all the various healers who are connected to each other through an invisible thread of intention.
I am intending to bring a union of the masculine and the feminine into the world of healing in the way I seem most graced to be able to do. This involves the work of teaching technological skills to healers so that they can promote their work to the world and in the process learn to integrate the power of the masculine as represented by the Goddess Techne with the power and grace of the Divine Feminine. This is my work. It is soul work. It is work that I am able to do and in doing it I am able to honour the sacrifice that my father made on my behalf and others so that we might be more empowered to follow the life we love. My father eventually got to do the soul work his heart longed for. He founded an art club that is still in existence long after his death.
OTHER GREAT CONTENT
Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
chakra healing
SPIRAL DYNAMICS – Another map of personal and spiritual development for your consideration
THE SOUL JOURNEY – Spiritual growth programs guide you on The Soul Journey. It and many spiritual ebooks will support your growth by developing more soul consciousness.
BLISSITATIONS – At this site they are committed to making it easier, more enjoyable and more effective with guided meditations, visualizations, affirmations and other goodness to help turn your meditation into Blissitation!
Stages of Spiritual Growth – A Series of Reflections
There are many maps of spiritual growth and many steps along the spiritual journey. Any one map will take you into the experience of the wonder you are intended to become. Unlike the assertion from many in various religious traditions there isn’t simple one way up the mountain of personal and spiritual development.
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old,
Seek what they sought.
Matsuo Basho
Some of the maps that I find inviting and encouraging within my own spiritual growth experience include:-
- The Way of the Chakra’s.
- The Way of Love.
- The Way of the Spiral.
- The Way of the Lodge.
- The Way of the Road.
- The Way of the Hero (including the way of the Heroine).
- The Way of the Seer.
- The Way of the Force.
Each of these maps allows you to become aware of the vastness of the potential that lies dormant within you. The benefits of having a map of the spiritual growth process is that
- You know at any time where you are.
- You are given a sense of direction.
- You have a starting point from which to begin.
- You have the confidence that the road has been travelled before.
I will be compiling a Newsletter that will focus on all of the maps above and more. Each of these maps will become a complete reference source for any one who wishes to find a sense of spiritual direction. These maps will allow you to give up following old worn out paradigms that are destructive to oneself and to the collective called humanity. Let me begin by giving you an over view of the main stages of spiritual growth that are understood by the map makers of the spiritual journey.
The stages of spiritual growth are divided into the stage called the personal and the impersonal. You can call these two stages the development of the human and the revelation of the Divine. Each of these stages are represented by a triangle and the work of spiritual growth is to integrate these two triangles into a star. This is the star you are here to be and to shire. The base triangle of the personality involves the integration of the body, emotions and the will. The upper triangle which points downward has to do with the allowing of the purpose, intuition and revelation of the Divine will. What connects the two triangles is the heart. This is the work of bringing Heaven to earth. It is the work of bringing sacred unity into direct awareness within a body living in time and space.
One aspect I return to again and again is that the journey of spiritual growth is, in the words of the modern mystic Eckhart Tolle, through the body and not away from the body. The experience of spiritual growth is the play of energy within the body and the play of sexual energy within the body. For far to long sex has been seen as a sin of the flesh and not the blessing it is intended to be. Much unnecessary suffering is caused by sexual shaming, body shaming and other forms of shaming. Shaming is a killer and kills the spirit within the body. This in the words of the modern mystic Andrew Harvey speaking in the Sounds True recording Radiant Heart, “Has got to stop.”
The stages of spiritual growth I invite you into are stages of body awareness. This is body awareness that takes you into the experience of feeling sexy and feeling alive in a delightful way and into radical self acceptance. This is acceptance of the myriad of feelings that are your way of being able to express your needs and more importantly give you the ability to express your gifts. Whatever map of spiritual growth you choose to follow your life’s direction by it is best to start the journey with your feet on the ground. The way to do this is to begin each day with a very simply body awareness exercise. This allows you to follow the deep spiritual wisdom contained within the words of the poem by Mary Oliver. I personally use this within my own spiritual growth process. This is the spiritual direction that tells you
You only have to allow the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
The problem is that the soft animal of your bod has all too often been taught that it’s free flow is wrong, it is shameful, it is not quite nice or has been demonised by religious teachings’ and hidden under a form of cultural repression. This creates what is called body armour. The body loves attention. It loves conscious attention that is given without judgement. This conscious body awareness exercise teachers you to become a master of subtle energy within the body. Over time you become more sensitive to the subtle energy messages that come from the body. The body becomes the guide to your direction home. You begin to feel more grounded. You have your feet on the ground and you have a sense of your own direction. You become an expert in living your one wild and precious life. Again the poet Mary Oliver helps tremendously here when she writes in the Journey.
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.Mary Oliver
Listen to the inner body. Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. To assist you in this matter I have found a guided meditation that you can use to learn this art of body love and appreciation. This is a free guided meditation that you can download. Gift yourself a step in the right direction. Listen to the voice on the guided meditation that invites you to listen to the only voice that can truly unfold the wonder of who you are. This begins within the softness of the body that has shed the body armour we all use to protect ourselves. Let this softness develop within you and in time you will access the still small voice within. Here is a body awareness meditation that gives you some idea of the process.
Learn to use modern technology in service of spiritual growth. This will allow you to learn this technique in the comfort of your own home and deepen into the comfort of your own soft animal body that knows how to love what it loves. Bookmark this page (Control D) as it is my intention (when I finally resolve the recording issues) to record a mediatation to take you on the first step to higher ground.
OTHER GREAT CONTENT
Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
spiritual guidance
BLISSITATIONS – At this site they are committed to making it easier, more enjoyable and more effective with guided meditations, visualizations, affirmations and other goodness to help turn your meditation into Blissitation!
MIND PERK – More personal and spiritual development articels from leaders in the field of spiritual development and spiritual growth
SEVEN STAGES OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION – n his spiritual evolution, man passes through different stages, each of them having some specific characteristics. Recognizing these characteristics can open the path toward superior levels which leads us to perfecti
A Spiritual Awakening Beyond Belief
In developing this personal development and beyond blog, that takes the reader through various maps and stages of spiritual awakening, I experience some highs and some lows. Yesterday was what I call a high day. I worked long hours and had such immense fun. At the end of the day my partner Bee said to me, “Your inner graphic artist has had lots of fun.” The answer was a resolute Yes. I could honestly say
Thank you God for this most amazing day – e.e. Cummings.
I was so thankful for the ability to create images that brightened up my day and I will be using these images, I hope, to brighten up your day. Those who are familiar with the postings on this website/blog will know that I love paintings with neo-classical themes. These are paintings that inspire me and invite within me a transmission of the energy of the symbols contained in such paintings. When I write a course on spiritual awakening I tend to introduce people to the power that is inherent in such art. This is because such art invites, and is intended to invite, your opening up to higher centres of beauty, grace and refined energy.
Yesterday I put together a cover for a book that I intend to write. This book is provisionally entitled, “Beyond the Purpose Driven Life.” The cover of this book will show the beautiful painting opposite that signifies a spiritual awakening. The invitation from this Beyond the Purpose Driven Life book is the living of a life beyond belief. This is both a literal and a transformational experience. Spiritual awakening is not simply a one time event. it is a process and it is a process that has been mapped in order that it can be followed but not simply in a literal way. The great teachers of humanity have mapped this process of spiritual awakening. However, their lower consciousness followers have, for the most part, cemented the map of spiritual awakening in dogma and blocked off the threshold places and portals to transcendence.
A recent statistic tells me that 95% of Americans believe in God. If that question were asked elsewhere I suspect one might not get such a high percentage. The interesting thing for this writer on personal development and beyond is why the question isn’t how many American’s (or others) are knowers of God. Addressing this question purely from a Christian point of view it might be asked in this way
How many seekers will become finders.
In a recent presidential election in Ireland this question “Do you believe in God?” was asked off all seven presidential candidates. Everyone of them affirmed that in fact they did believe in God although it had never been a key aspect of their presidential campaign. Not anyone of the candidates claimed that they were a “Knower of God.” I don’t have an issue about someone who claims that they do not know God. I do take issue with someone who claims that they believe in God as if it where some kind of sound bite in order to win over voters.
In the journey that takes you through stages of spiritual development you can remain a believer for all your life but the beyond aspect of personal development is not something you can believe in. There comes a point when your belief must go in order to know and experience the mystery that is beyond belief. In order to experience the fullness of spiritual awakening one has to cross various thresholds. What was the gift of one stage becomes the resistance to the next stage. At a certain stage your belief actually becomes the resistance to the mystery that is beyond belief.
The history of religion, and especially the dark history of religion, is not the history invited by the masters who have given their names to such religious teachings. Their followers, who are lower consciousness followers, turn the living stream of inspiration into the dead letter of the law. They make the goal of a purpose driven life into the that of missionary work and service to a church. This then becomes the highest aspiration of the spiritual life which from a mystical point of view is also a kind of spiritual death.
The anonymous writer of the classic text The Cloud of Unknowing addressed this issue of belief. The writer choose to remain anonymous because to be a writer of such a transcendent invitation would at the time have meant the person likely be charged with heresy. The question of disbelief is also related. Believers and disbelievers are simply on opposite sides of the same camp. The opposite of belief is not disbelief but knowing. To travel the path of spiritual awakening means that you have to travel your own way. The history of the church is the history of repression and murder of those who entered the Cloud of Unknowing and moved beyond belief into the knowing of the Oneness of Love as direct personal experience.
The modern teacher Jeddu Krishnamurti, who happened to be my teacher, when asked by a journalist who came to interview him, “Do you believe in God?” gave the answer, “Sir, what need is there to believe in God when one knows.” The psychiatrist Carl Jung replied in a similar manner when he was asked if he believed in God. The pastor and founder of Saddleback Church Rick Warren wrote A Purpose Driven Life. The culmination of this book, which has sold in excess of 30 million copies, is that the purpose of life is to give your life in service to the Lord. The highest experience of this service is to become a missionary and promote the teachings of the church.
My reason for beginning to write Beyond the Purpose Driven Life is to invite those who come to this so called high point of religious experience and find it turns to nothing, as it must. My intention is that the full mystery of revelation be lived, not as a system of belief in words, but as direct experience of knowing what it is to live within the Word. The Word as experience has nothing to do with words. Words are only pointers to that experience that is beyond words and certainly beyond belief.
This intended book Beyond the Purpose Driven Life might not sell thirty million or more copies. There will the those, however, who come to a point in their lives that is called a crisis of faith, or to place the experience in more secular terms, to a point that is called an existential crisis. Within such an experience people often feel they have nowhere to turn. I hope to invite them into knowing that such a crisis of faith, or existential crisis, while challenging in all kinds of ways, is an opportunity for spiritual awakening into an experience beyond belief.
I am allowing my inner graphic artist to create a book cover for this proposed work. It has on the front cover a painting representing the call to spiritual awakening. It has within the picture on the front cover a number of angels. This is an artistic representation of the direct knowing of energies beyond material form. These are energies, subtle energies that are creative and loving. If you have a fixed belief system then you might see this experiencing of subtle energy as some form of threat to that belief system. Spiritual awakening is a process of expansion. It is a process of many deaths and rebirths into life. Each time something dies there is the re-birthing into the new. The death of belief allows for the arising of that which is beyond belief.
Let me say here that I am not in the business of taking away someone else’s belief system. That would be a form of arrogance and a subtle form of violence. I will say this, however, I am in the business of inviting revelation beyond belief. The purpose driven life does not end in the service of the missionary church. Metaphorically speaking, this isn’t even half way through the spiritual awakening process. The purpose driven life doesn’t end except when you become at one with the Alpha and Omega and know that God has no beginning or end. Love has always been and ever will be. The process of spiritual awakening beyond belief is a process of forever becoming that cannot be reduced to words and certainly cannot to be followed in a literal sense.
There are lines from The Purpose Driven Life that I love. I started reading it with enthusiasm. Further into the reading it simply became disappointing. The invitation to a purpose driven life needs to be available from the higher centres beyond the personal sense of self. This is not some experience codified in a religious text. It has to be lived directly. In living it directly it is then known but this knowing is beyond the intellect. I wanted The Purpose Driven Life to be the invitation from mainstream Christianity that my heart often longs for but is rarely nourished by. Even though it has been read by over 30 million people and rising it will disappoint anyone who feels the call within them of the mystic heart.
There is a fuller invitation to spiritual awakening within the book by Jim Marion called Putting on the Mind of Christ: The Inner Work of Christian Spirituality
I have many more ideas for books, eBooks, guided meditations and courses that I intend to share with you in various ways. I am presently focused on writing 7 Ways to a Wonderful Life eBook which I will turn into a Kindle format and eventfully publish on Amazon. This eBook 7 Ways to Wonderful Life is an extension of the writings featured on this website and in the weekly newsletter Personal Development and Beyond which is available for free. You can sign up to receive this free newsletter that takes you through various maps of spiritual awakening at the top of this post. Or simply use the form I have provided here.
OTHER GREAT CONTENT
Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
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STAGES OF PERSONAL GROWTH – This article describes four levels or stages of Personal Growth — social accomplishment, psychological growth, spiritual progress and transformation.
STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS – Video about the various states of consiousness.
SPIRITUALITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION – The study shows student life is enhanced if students engage in “inner work” through activities such as meditation or self-reflection
Personal Development and the Way of Sacred Activism
Personal development happens in many ways. One way that I may well be drawn into is the Way of Sacred Activism. I attended a meeting yesterday close to where I live. It was held in my home country of Northern Ireland in the town of Enniskillen in County Fermanagh. This was a forum focused on community activism against the threat of Fracking in Ireland. This is a industry that is a threat to much that I hold dear in our locality and beyond. This threat to the environment may well call me into an area that I have never before been engaged with. This is political activism.
The great mythologist Joseph Campbell writing in his book entitled The Hero with a Thousand Faces recommends that each one of us follow our bliss. Joseph Campbell writes
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you aught to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are – if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
On the other hand the modern mystic Andrew Harvey writing in his book entitled The Hope – A Guide to Sacred Activism writes
I don’t say follow your
bliss; look where that
has gotten us. I say
follow your heartbreak.
Each of these wisdom teachings can, in a very real sense, become foundational to our living what the poet Mary Oliver refers to as, Your one wild and precious life. I will say at the outset that the advice from Joseph Campbell is the advice that I would prefer to follow. However, it is the advice of the mystic Andrew Harvey that is in many ways the more physical, the more emotional, mental and spiritually demanding path of sacred activism and community activism.
Having said that, however, we do live in a world of duality. We live in a world of opposites. We live in a world where one tribe thinks it is doing right and the other tribe, which is in opposition, is also sure that what they are doing is also right. This is the very nature of the polar energetics within this realm of time and space. This is the very nature of life on this planet. This tension, and this opposition, when resisted is called suffering. It has many forms. The Buddha, however, demonstrated the way out of suffering and the way out of opposition. This is what he called The Middle Way.
Let me suggest therefore that you embrace both of these invitations. This is both the invitation to follow your bliss and the invitation to follow your heartache. Many of us instinctively choose to follow our bliss. We pursue pleasure and avoid pain. However, pleasure is not the same psychological and spiritual state that is called bliss. Bliss is a high state of consciousness. We might at times glimpse this state but it takes one to travel the Hero’s Journey to be able to turn such a glimpse into what the Sufi’s refer to as a station. A station is where you have the ability to abide within a given level of consciousness should you choose to do so.
The paradox for those who follow the path of bliss is that they will come to the experience of heartbreak. In fact the way of bliss can only really be sustained once the true heart’s desire is known. Knowing the true heart’s desire takes you through hell, or what the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung referred to, as the City of Jewels (3rd chakra experience). To follow your bliss means that you are willing to follow the way that the life force within you designed you to express that life force through you. This means that you must learn to listen to the truth that your heart is able to speak through you. This requires a certain level of integrity. This integrity is the ability to rise above the opposition within yourself.
When you are able to reconcile that opposition within you through an act of conscious will then the power of the unconscious becomes aligned with the will of the personality. This is the beginning of real personal integrity but it is only the first step in the beginning of the journey into bliss via the heartache of opening the heart centre (4th chakra experience). Remember that this journey of personal development and beyond is not simply a linear logical journey. Although I might write about lower and higher states of consciousness this is still speaking in language of opposites. This is the very thing we are required to transcend. You may well get glimpses of bliss that arise from the opening the higher energy centres (chakra’s). You may well be blessed with a breakthrough experience that then becomes your North Star.
When the personality has been integrated to a fairly high degree then there is the call to the next stage of the journey. This call can, however, come at any moment. This is the call of the heart and it is in very many ways the experience of that has been called an existential crisis. It is a crises of meaning and purpose and this crisis leads to serious heartache and mental distress. This crisis of meaning and purpose then becomes a threshold place that begins the journey into beyond and the journey into bliss.
To follow your bliss and the journey through the heartbreak of a life lived without meaning and purpose is the journey that Joseph Campbell refers to as The Hero’s Journey. It is also of course the journey of the Heroine and in a very real way is more the Journey of the Heroine. Do not equate the words Hero and Heroine here with the words man and woman. The Journey of the Hero (or Heroine) is the journey of a sacred marriage within. This journey has been mapped in many ways. It is the journey from the narcissistic sense of self interest in all its myriad forms into the realisation of the One Self in service to all forms living on this dimension of space-time and form.
It helps to know that this is part and parcel of the personal development and beyond process. There are many, and in my opinion, too many spiritual seekers seeking bliss from a sense of self interest. I have been one of those seekers. The difference now is that I am much older. I have taken the journey the City of Jewels on various occasions. I have faced enough opposition within me to know that the seeking of bliss for oneself tends to heighten the sense of separateness that we are trying to transcend. Following one’s bliss is a process of alignment with the creative life force. This creative life force has many names but the name is never the thing. It isn’t the name God. It isn’t the name Tao. All those names point to an experience that is the Oneness of Life. This process of the realisation of oneness begins within this dimension of time and space within the body.
The physical body is the temple of the inner body. The state of bliss is known from within and expressed within the form of the body. You are, in a very real sense, the unique embodiment of God in form. Choose your own word for God. Choose a word that connects to your heart. Choose a word that works for you. If the word Oneness works for you choose Oneness. If happiness works for you choose happiness. However, happiness is most elusive when it is sought for the purpose of the individual self. It is found in service when that service is given from the heartbreak of separateness from Love. Bliss is not pleasure. Neither is bliss happiness. Bliss is a state of consciousness that one seeks to abide in. There is a paradox here. The more you are not, and the more that you are not seeking, the more available you are to this bliss experience. Bliss is simply the state of being that you are.
Let me invite you to take the Hero’s journey and the journey into bliss. It is a journey that has been mapped in many ways and distorted in as many ways by those who would have power other than Love. If you would like to know how to follow your bliss and follow your heartache into living a life of meaning and purpose then I invite you to sign up to receive my weekly newsletter entitled Personal Development and Beyond. This is a FREE newsletter which will take you week by week into the journey of a lifetime and beyond. It is the journey of expansion into the endless journey of Love within form and beyond this form of the body. It invites you into an understanding of health and well being in body, emotions, mind and spirit. This journey of personal development and beyond is a challenging road but it is a road that I believe we will all journey in our unique and wondrous way. My intention is to show you the pointers along the way and especially the pitfalls that you will encounter along the way.
The modern mystic Eckhart Tolle writing in his book The Power of Now starts this book as follows:
You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold. That is how important you are!
That really is how important you are. Do not underestimate the power that you have seeded within you. You are a unique flowering. You will never happen again in this form, although paradoxically speaking, you never cease to be this flowering because the real you is the birth less deathless experience of Love beyond the limitation of time and space. My intention here is, metaphorically speaking, to give you some gardening advice that will flower this unique potential within you for the greatest good of all. This, I firmly believe, will take you into the knowing of your true heart’s desire and into the bliss of knowing who you truly are.
I invite you to subscribe now to this weekly newsletter Personal Development and Beyond and discover some real spiritual education. You are able to unsubscribe at anytime. Included in this newsletter will be access to all the resources that I have discovered on my personal Hero’s journey. Join me now and let us each follow our bliss through finding our true heart’s desire. Simply complete the boxes below with your name and email address to accept the invitation to living your one Wild and Precious Life.
Other Resources for Personal Development and Beyond
For more information on Sacred Activism and also The Hero’s Journey see the following links
Sacred Activism - Following your Heartbreak
http://www.andrewharvey.net/pdf/sacred_activism_article.pdf
The Hero’s Journey – Following your Bliss
http://lifecoachesblog.com/wp-content/files/theherosjourney.pdf
Fracking Free Ireland
http://www.frackingfreeireland.org
OTHER GREAT CONTENT
Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
levels of consciousness
SPIRITUAL ARTICLES FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS – Spiritual Development articles related to student life
SEVEN STAGES OF SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION – n his spiritual evolution, man passes through different stages, each of them having some specific characteristics. Recognizing these characteristics can open the path toward superior levels which leads us to perfecti
INFINITE BEING – Spiritual metaphysics articles to help spiritual seekers find inspiration, love and creativity through heart-powered consciousness.