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Daily Ramblings – Spiritual Saturday – The Higher You Are, The More You Can See

09 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by Dave Gardner in Spiritual Saturday

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Emotional, habits, Intellect, Intuition, memory, Physical, Ruts, spirituality

“As Soul, you are like a balloon that rises above the ground. The higher you go, the farther you can see. And the farther you can see, the better you can plan your life.”—Harold Klemp The Language of Soul

Have you ever observed other people’s lives? Have you ever wondered about the friends you have, the job you ended up with, or the situation you find yourself in? All of us are here to learn. We learn about ourselves. We learn from others. We learn how to do new things.

I notice patterns. I have always possessed an innate ability to recognize patterns and processes within various systems. I notice patterns in other people’s lives. Patterns that help them and patterns that hurt them. The patterns that hurt are self-destructive. Patterns like excuse making. Patterns such as blaming other people or outside circumstances. Patterns of apathy that contribute to a person giving up, accepting their lot in life and doing nothing to improve their circumstances.

If you pay attention, you can uncover destructive habits in yourself too. When I think about or observe myself, I take the view from the real me—soul. Soul is the real you. It is not the ego or your mind. It is that part of you that can view the things you think about. When you can stand back and look at your life or the lives of others, you can see what’s wrong and make changes. You can break down “you” by understanding that each part composes multiple levels of consciousness.

We have the physical or lowest level. This is the part of you that gets hungry, tired, and horny. Next you have the emotional part of you. The part of you that gets scared, bored, angry, fearful, and lustful. Beyond the emotions is the memory part. The memory contains your past and highlights key events in your life you have learned from. Beyond the memory is the intellect. This part of you represents your ability to think, analyze, and learn. Soul decides on a course of action by using memories and other environmental inputs. Finally, you have the intuition. This is the part of you that gives you little hints or ideas when you are trying to solve a problem or decide after you have analyzed all the things your mental part of you is thinking about or learning.

At the top of all of this is Soul. Soul is the real you. Soul uses these lower parts of you to interact in each sphere of existence. Soul is infinite. Soul can rise above these lower parts to glimpse the whole. When you act at the soul level, you can make better decisions because soul sees the entire picture of you. Soul can also explore beyond you. It can go places your lower parts cannot. When you get an impression or idea, this comes from Soul. Soul can warn you before you make a mistake. Soul can show an idea that might help you solve a problem. This is the analogy of the quote at the top of this posting. The higher soul goes the more it can see.

You can also limit yourself. Have you ever gotten so mad you cannot think? This is when soul has activated your emotions and focuses its attention on this part of you. Soul blinds itself to any higher faculty. When Soul focuses on the past, the same thing occurs. Soul is so entertained by the past it can’t think or analyze new ideas. Instead of rising above these lower parts of you to see the whole, it entertains itself by these lower parts, and restricts itself from the higher view it is capable of.

This leads me back to the statement I made in the initial few paragraphs. People become occupied with one part of themselves and get stuck. Soul gets stuck in the physical, emotional, memory, or mental realms. This prevents soul from seeing all there is to see and prevents soul from providing the ideas or advice these people need. They get caught in an automatic loop that the lowest part of them used for survival. Bad habits rule over them.

Your brain builds habits. It builds neural pathways to perpetuate actions that repeat. The brain does this to conserve energy. This system is automatic. We can exploit this process for good when you recognize a harmful neural pathway or habit. The only way to determine the advantage or disadvantage of any habit is to measure the results a habit produces. How do we do this? We take the time to analyze ourselves. If something we do is destructive, we can identify the specific actions we take and change them.

Changing or altering your habits is difficult. The neural pathways that compose our habits are as strong as steel cables. The longer you have acted out a habit the stronger it will be. Undoing a harmful habit can take as many years to undo as it took to build. Be persistent. Remember the harm this habit causes.

Need outside help? No problem. Research. Look for books, websites, blogs, and research articles that address this problem. You’ll find that there are many people that have run across the same problem and broke their harmful habits. Record as many ideas as you can. Try each one until you find the solution that works. Engage with other people on social media that have had the same problem. Ask them questions. Most will be happy to help you out. In fact, it is highly likely they got help from others the same way.

Remember who and what you are. You are soul. You are not your brain, your emotions, your memories, your intellect, or your intuition. You are above these individual facets.

Until next time.

Dave

42.997861 -82.517470

Daily Ramblings – Spiritual Saturday

17 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by Dave Gardner in Spiritual Saturday, Uncategorized

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Dimensions of Life, Emotional, Julius Erving, Mental, Physical, Spiritual

“The key to success is to keep growing in all areas of life – mental, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical.” – Julius Erving

Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/spiritual

How do you know what to pursue when you are setting goals? Should you only pursue those goals that provide you with the ability to make more money or should you invest in your time to your church, synagogue, or mosque? Should you spend time learning more or work more on your physique in the gym?

I recommend that you pursue a balanced life by pursuing the four areas “Dr. J” provides us in today’s quote. Dr. Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People agrees. We should learn new things (mental), cultivate and sustain relationships (emotional/social), pursue a life of service and goodness (spiritual), and build strong and healthy bodies.

We are all different. We possess certain skills and abilities. This characteristic is not limiting; it is liberating. We all have the opportunity to do great things in our lifetimes. We have the ability to improve our knowledge and skills, we have the ability to create, we have the ability to improve our physical bodies (regardless of age). We can also improve our relationship with our loved ones, future friends, and God.

When you begin adding to your list of goals, take a quick look at your list. Is it balanced? Is it pursuing multiple areas to improve, all of which are synergistic in nature? Some that can learn new things will always find employment or be enabled to provide for himself. Being rich is vacant, if your body is broken, you have no one to share your wealth with, and you ignore the finiteness of your life. At some point, you will leave everything behind. The only thing you will leave this Earth with is you, the toys, loved ones, things you know, and all the rest will be left behind. Pretty dark thought, right?

If you take any one of these areas and improve that while ignoring the others your life will be pretty vacant. I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t specialize in areas where our strengths already exist. I’m suggesting that each area should have some of our efforts. This provides us with a balance in our lives and allows us the ability to truly live a rich life.

If you are healthy, your brain will work better and allow you the ability to pursue all of the things you want without limit. If you are intelligent, you can learn new things. You can also apply that knowledge to the other areas. If you have a strong social network, you will be more resilient when life’s “surprises” show up at your door.

Religious beliefs, in my opinion, bring everything together. Regardless of your path, believing in something greater than yourself, pursuing a life of love, charity, and service are valuable goals. This is also one area where improvement is not something you can measure. It is more about consistency and practice. If you are a Christian, your daily acts will be guided by your denomination. If you are a Buddhist, Muslim, Zoroastrian, Taoist, or Eckist, each faith has requirements. These requirements could be meditation, reading of holy books, celebrating certain holidays, and following certain creeds or rules required by your religious pursuit.

Each week look at each one of these areas and determine what actions you can take to move each of these areas forward. What could you learn? What exercise could you participate in? Who would you like to spend time with? What spiritual events are required of you this week by your path?

I use Sundays to take inventory. Then I set out and begin putting my week together, looking for opportunities to grow in each of these areas for the week. Nothing huge, just little things that move me forward.

I hope you are having a terrific Saturday! Enjoy your weekend!!

Until next time…

Dave

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Weekly Ramblings – Remaining Centered Despite Life’s Little Surprises

27 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by Dave Gardner in change, Life Happens, Spiritual

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Calmness, Centeredness, Emotional, Meditation, Spiritual Exercises, Unconscious

I just got back from my Sister’s home after being there for a few days. It’s always a nice change of pace from the day-to-day. I visit my sister each month for a long weekend to hang out, get some good food and binge-watching TV shows or whatever she wants to do. This last trip we went to a comedy show, featuring Rocky LaPorte and Ron White. It was hilarious.

During this short stay, we also experienced a vehicle break down, which resulted in the replacement of a tire on my car. I was wondering how to react to these little-unexpected experiences. How do we stay in balance when something out of the ordinary happens we had no warning of?

I think the best way to handle the unexpected is to be proactive about those things we know may happen but may not. How do we prepare? We have insurance to protect against an accident, insurance for our health, even insurance for our life. We make sure we have an emergency kit in our car and home in case someone gets hurt. We make sure we have a good spare, jack, and other equipment needed to change the tire. We save some of our money to prepare for any potential emergency.

I contemplated about this over the weekend, after it happened, and realized that the key to dealing with the unexpected is to remain calm and balanced as well. It is so easy to be thrown off balance when the boss hands us a job we aren’t ready for, we get sick unexpectedly, or a car breaks down. Any number of things can happen to us or the things we own with little or no notice. Remain calm. Remain balanced. There is no reason to get out of whack when one of these things come to pass. Use your creative imagination to solve the problem once you’re hit with it. Remain calm. Remain balanced.

I practice meditation daily. My religious path calls this practice a spiritual exercise. Spiritual exercises come in all shapes and sizes as most meditation practices. The key is consistency and to have a purpose or goal when doing them. In Eckankar, we strive to practice these spiritual exercises with an open, loving heart. Sometimes, this is hard, particularly when one of these out-of-the-blue emergencies happen. We are freaked out, scared, nervous, the whole emotional gambit. The practice of meditating or spiritual exercises counter these feelings by slowly building a foundation of calmness and centeredness, both of which allow us to remain in control, despite what is happening around us.

Have you ever heard the statement: “He was so angry, he couldn’t think.” Thinking or mentalizing on something is really difficult if your emotions are out of control. The calmness allows us to think, to critically analyze our situation and get to work on solving the current dilemma. What happens when we have internalized solving the kind of problem we are hit with? This solving goes to a higher level. It is literally unconscious, which is what happens when we know how to solve a particular problem without thinking about it. Do you see?

Emotions, come before intellect, which comes before unconscious execution. If one of these is out of balance and control, they make the others that follow impossible to use. If we are too emotional we won’t be able to think about a solution—the emotions won’t allow that. If we are too caught up in mentalizing or thinking about a problem, our ability to apply what we already know is impossible.

By meditating or doing a spiritual exercise every day, we build up an internal centeredness and calmness that becomes more and more difficult to upset our natural balance. Thus, we have access to the creative imagination that would normally be blocked off by a stressful situation. You can find a great wealth of material available about meditation online or read about spiritual exercises at www.eckankar.org.

Have a great week!!

See you next week…

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