I had been drawn to a discussion stream on the Linkedin Website under the Spirituality and Consciousness group heading. The discussion had to do with suicide. A member had experienced having a brother who committed suicide and wished to talk about it with others because she still carried pain and depression from what had happened. She wanted to know if souls come into the world intending to commit suicide, and if they don’t, do they have to return quickly to work out what they failed to do. A deeper reason may well have been that she carried sadness, depression and many questions about the suicide. Many supported the questioner with empathy and sympathy, and some provided their spiritual understandings regarding our souls’ journeys. One comment addressed the Buddhist philosophy of the Middle Way, in which life is lived with non-attachment, non-judgment. Even knowing this Way, it is possible to slip, as the next respondent stated and feel “terrible, in a crisis or drama of some sort.” I noticed that many respondents commented about mind as a single entity. But my experience is that we do not just have one mind. Continue reading
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Laura Died at 96
My mother died one week ago, today. She slipped away in her sleep a few minutes after 3:30 in the afternoon Pacific Time on October 12, 2012. One of her last statements was, “My bags are packed and I am ready to go, but the plane has not come for me, yet.” Not long thereafter, her life of struggle and suffering as well as her life of love and caring ended on this side of the veil. Like all of us, throughout her lifetime, she lived from a mixture of light and dark, of great wisdom and a seeming disconnection from wisdom, of tender sensitivity and apparent insensitivity. At times, she was capable of expressing unconditional love that lifted me up, and at other times it felt as if she could withdraw love with coldness that crushed my heart. Continue reading
Genetic Darkness
By Dr. Sandy Sela-Smith
If it is true that our essence is something that exists beyond physical limitations, eternal, or connected to the eternal…spiritual beings having a physical experience…where has the darkness come from that seems to permeate nearly every front of our individual and collective experience? Whether we want to admit it or not, we all possess what I have come to call the Unique God Essence that is the core of who we are, but in far too many cases our true being has gotten overshadowed by a darkness that is also a part of us that may well go back for generations, millennia, or eons, perhaps since the beginning of human consciousness. This darkness is so deeply embedded in us as individuals, in family and social systems, in our cultures, and in our species, a darkness that has been passed on from parent to child for myriad generations and replicated in unconscious patterns that most of us have no idea we possess.
Articles Focus on Self Discovery
Whether the articles below are true stories from my life, like Samuel’s Gift or Darling Darla the Dragnofly, are Blog style articles such as Impending Doom, Mirror of Evil, or Letting Go of Financial fear…or more academically oriented articles such as Heuristic Self-Search Inquiry, what all the articles have in common is they provide pathways for your personal self-discovery.
Recall the most famous words of Socrates, who said, “An unexamined life is not worth living” and the ancient Greek aphorism, “Know thyself,” often attributed to Plato. Let yourself look into the mirrors embedded in these articles that reflect back something of yourself through your responses to what you read…and allow a greater depth of your awareness of yourself to unfold in the process.
Until we know our true selves and discover what hidden patterns form thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that unconsciously control our lives, we will not be able to create lives and experiences that contain the greatest meaning to our souls. Each of us came here to explore, to discover, to experience, to know, and to express our unique being in the world through what we create in our lives, as what we do in the world flows from who we are. But our disconnection from our essential self,–the being that we really are–causes us to live our lives feeling empty, fearful, threatened, angry, unsure, confused, and so much more. We live without direction and lack purpose or experience a sense of dissatisfaction in our lives, even if we have tried to force a purpose and direction or have attempted to fill our time–or kill time–with distractions, no matter how creative or destructive those patterns might be.
Open to the possibility of discovering who you really are, as Joseph Campbell so poignantly stated, “…not the you that you cherish; not the you that you distinguish from other.” Once you know yourself, both you, and your world will transform into what you wished for yourself from the very beginning. You will be able to create the life your heart once dreamed.
INTENTION FOR CONNECTION
On Leap Day, February 29th, 2012, I logged onto Linkedin and found a question for discussion posed by one of the members of the Spiritual Authors, Publishers, and Agents website which asked, What would be a reason for why you think a person would read your book?
And…I responded.
In the summer of 2007, I went to a psychic–a medium–of sorts who told me I was going to write three books. When I heard her words, I knew she was being used to tell me what a part of me already knew was to happen, though up until that moment, I had not consciously known it. Almost immediately, I saw the title of the trilogy: The Meaning of Three, and I saw the subtitles of each of the three books: The Mask, Behind the Mask, and Under the Mask. Each book has its own personality…the first is about the all we do to be acceptable to others and to ourselves, the roles we play and how painful those roles often become. The second is about what is hidden behind the mask of acceptability. There is so much we don’t want to know about ourselves and certainly much we don’t want others to know about who we think we are, usually because we believe we are what happened to us, or our responses to what happened. So we hide it all behind the mask and avoid knowing what is there in any way we possibly can. What is under the mask is the being we truly are, the unique god essence that has never been disconnected from the universal spirit, Universal God Essence, of which we are all a part.
The journey I took in writing this trilogy is something that called itself into being and became the creator of my life for 4 years. The books literally wrote my life. I believe there are people who will benefit from the learning that was a part of this magnificent journey I was called to take and those whose unique god essence direct them, will discover my writing in synchronous ways that I could never predict…just as I found the psychic and felt the truth of what she said.
Not a single book that has been written by anyone on this site is a mistake. I believe we all write, first and foremost for ourselves, and then, there are others who will benefit from what was written whether it is one other person, one hundred, one thousand, one million, or more…and those who are called to find the perfect book for their journeys, will find it. Sandy
A member of the Spiritual Authors, Publishers, and Agents site responded to my entry, saying, “I’m very intrigued by your words, Sandy” referring to my statement that my trilogy “called itself into being” ; and my comment about, “the unique god essence that has never been disconnected from the universal spirit, Universal God Essence, of which we are all a part.” She concluded with, “May many souls be drawn to the trilogy and come to know what lies beyond the mask!” Continue reading
The Single Garment of Destiny
I received a message from the Peace Alliance that contained the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.”
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
There is no question we are in this together. whether “we” refers to two people in relationship, to a family, groups of people, a nation, or our species. In this time of self-reflection, I choose not to look to others to become who they ought to be before I focus on being who I ought to be, despite the fact that I will not fully succeed until we all succeed. This is my gift to myself and to others, even to those who do not yet know the beauty of focusing on being who they ought to be.
Impending Doom. . . Or Approaching Transformation
The weekend of September 24th, I had the privilege of attending a powerful workshop in the mountains above Denver, Colorado presented by Howard Bad Hand, a Lakota Indian Chief. One of the topics for discussion had to do with what is happening in our world now and in the next 14 months related to the Mayan calendar that has been interpreted by some as marking the ending of human civilization on December 21, 2012. I have read extensively on this subject and have discovered differing perspectives of the meanings attached to our present time and the Mayan calendar.
Some believe the world will literally end following an increasing number of natural disasters that become more intense as that date approaches, destroying more and more of what we know of the world, until some final event obliterates whatever is left. Others believe that the numbers of humankind will be greatly reduced over the course of the time between now and that date, and that some people will remain to rebuild a human civilization based on a balancing of nurturing, cooperation, and caring, which are healthy feminine principles, with an honoring of the unique qualities of the individual and the protective strength of the healthy masculine energy.
Others believe that we are approaching the End Times as predicted by interpreters of the Bible who believe this Earth will be destroyed and those who believe in the Gospel will be transported to a New Earth, while the rest will be condemned to eternal hell. Still others believe that we are facing extinction, not unlike the dinosaurs of long ago, and a new species will eventually evolve to take our place bringing on the next cycle of life without humans. Still others believe that both nature and human folly will create unfathomable catastrophes and beings from other planets or galaxies will intercede, whether for good or for bad, to keep the toxic energies of our world from spilling over into the universe. But likely for the vast majority of people, this date of December 21, 2012 means just another day on the calendar, and maybe 4 shopping days until Christmas. And the seasons…they still go round and round on the Carousel of time.
