Love is the conscious sense of being in partnership with my own essence. I am a being. Also, I am Being Itself.
Yes, you should love yourself no matter what, even the ego you. Love the divine consciousness within you and the divine consciousness which created you. Love Being, which is your existence.
The essence of all people is the joy of being. The essence of all people is life celebrating being alive. What if you tried to feel this inner essence? Just try to feel It, without the condition that It do anything.
Do you know what you think about love now? Has someone told you that Jesus/God loves you, and those words caused a feeling of hate or anger? Has someone told you that they love you, but you didn’t believe them? This is your current love litany. Love is useless to you. And that is fine. Leave aside the Bible and the seemingly fake people and television images.
What if love was the air you breathe or your heart beating? These are things you have right now. Begin your love mantra with these. Wait for another clue, another something that you are willing to believe is love. As you gather little scraps of love beliefs, you can repeat them to yourself, especially in your most desperate times. It is real to you because it is yours. Let it come. This is your new reality.
The word celibacy probably never graces your mind or your tongue. As a modern person, you are probably used to casual sexual references and behaviors all around you. Sex is constantly delivered by the media today. Our society fixes energy in sex. Most people seek and participate in sex, and couldn’t imagine a life without sex.
As a non-participant in the physical action, the celibate person lives in a different world. The dance of obtaining consent and the frenzy of coupling doesn’t exist. Celibacy is a kind of silence, a kind of fasting, a kind of life outside the pale of human biology. A celibate person has the potential to be the most authentic and deep lover on the face of the planet because they embody a unique form of silence: a radical way of loving which dissolves modern sexual violence.
Celibacy is abstinence with a spiritual or intellectual purpose. Yes, celibacy is a kind of moral purity, but more importantly, it is a silence to be contemplated. Celibacy is a purity of thought and conduct which provides extreme human dignity, the deepest form of love.
Celibacy exists in the heart and mind which has sold all material sexuality to obtain that love that connects souls not body parts. Grace your mind and tongue with this word. It is a holy word whose concept will rocket your love into cosmic dimensions.
Celibate silence is hidden beyond obsession. Stop and imagine it.
We live in time and space. Both of these are vacuums, dimensions of emptiness and nothingness, silences.
It is me that creates the dream of my life. Find an area of your life which you can allow to disintegrate, be a vacuum. It is in these empty places where new life can form.
Obsession can be dissolved into a vacuum. Take your life and all its thoughts to zero, a vacuum a silence. My life, null and void. How free it is.
In our society, for your cultural editors, a vacuum is terrible. But you have just learned that becoming zero for a little bit frees you to feel better for a little bit.
Play with the idea. We can’t escape our humanity and our lives. But we can recreate our worlds. A vacuum provides a new beginning. Be awake. Make decisions.
Well, first I must ask, were you looking? Maybe drugs caused you to think you knew God. This is a temporary illusion. The hallucinogen induced illusion of God may have led to deeper introspection while sober. Or it may have led to an inability to escape from deep addiction.
I know that my soul is my truth. My soul is what gets out of bed in the morning and finds some meaning in a world which I perceive as negative. The path of my soul can lead me forward into amazing love for life and miracles of connecting with all that is. Walking this path is a conscious activity. Choose a methodology.
Or simply pause a moment right now and ask for your soul to speak.
Aside from obsession, addiction and worldly stress, there is a pervasive quiet consciousness. Pervasive consciousness is everywhere. Quiet is found in inner emptiness. Making an interior empty space, you have a place to commune in silence with the pervasive quiet consciousness.
Do this habitually. Do this when your head is yelling at you. This interior emptiness is yours. No one can take it from you.
There is a thing to appreciate about spirituality which is different from every day unconscious living. Receiving inspiration is usually a quiet interchange of thought. Quiet interchanges, non-physical to physical, take place beyond the loud veil of mental obsession. The reception of thought from non-physical is a mode of living different from the busy active one, or of the busy one. The thought from beyond, received in the quiet interchange, is the better replacement for the drug euphoria. It fills the dopamine receptors and obsession dissipates.
Ponder “quiet interchanges.” Sit and allow them. Make that neuro connection now.
Here, now, we are calling on elemental existence. Way deeper than an average understanding of God is a wordless silent nothingness of being. Lay it bare. It is underneath opioids, food, sex, money, dopamine in all its causations.
Feel some inner truth or strength. Give it a brief amount of thought, time and space.
Every addict wants to escape their life, to get out. Freedom from the world’s prison is in finding an inner expansive feeling. The expansive feeling is mostly thoughtless but it results in inspiration.
I have a life. At the moment, I might be saddled with an active addiction or an active despair. Maybe I just got out of treatment and am hopeful for my future. Maybe I have been “clean” for a long time, but despair for life itself still lurks under the surface of consciousness.
Sure, the outer life of the sober person is tons better than the active addict. The outer form is great. But many of us don’t speak of the depression because we feel ungrateful for the blessings if we admit unhappiness.
Everyone has an inner life under the surface of the worldly clamors. Noise is covering the inner life, which is quiet. Quiet is my real life. Quiet is content not form. It is here where I must be most honest about my ego. Feel quiet.
I ask myself, what is my inner life like? The interior life is not the committee meeting in my head but the silence underneath the meeting. Regarding this inner content, what is the meaning for me? The meaning is the real content of my life. Contemplating the quiet, I recognize that it is a bit undefinable, but that I can connect with it and appreciate it and immerse myself within it.
Choose to feel that silent content over and over. Then go do the dishes.
“…nothing short of pure devotion to [this divine quality] ‘for its own sake’ is the proper goal” ( Paul Brunton, The Quest for the Over Self).
Have you heard of your higher self, your soul? There is an extraordinary consciousness beyond your ego consciousness. Maybe some think it is spirit, or soul. But it is a divine quality that all possess and can access somehow. It is this extraordinary divine part of us that will heal inner pain and give new life. More than anything in this world, I need my higher self. Devotion to this gift of Life is my life. The other side of the coin: devotion “for its own sake.” When have I ever unselfishly devoted myself for nothing?
“Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a ‘secondary rationalization’ of instinctual drives” (Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, page 99).
Is life a search for meaning in the meaningless flow of events? For most of us, I guess life is a daily grind. We try to do what we need to do to keep our life going. And that is not going to change. But we need something, something more than the occasional big weekend or Christmas or Super Bowl. And that is why we have addictions. Humans love the euphoria.
A butterfly flitted in front of me. Could that mean anything? What did it say? The traffic cleared for me. I remembered to do something just in time. How do these things happen? Does it mean anything? Yes, if you stop and think about it.
Meaning comes from an appreciation of non-obvious occurrences. Appreciation is needed, in the quiet of your prayer place, to see the meaning. Real love is subtle. Joy can be eternally found within, not of this world. Allow joy inside and it will resonate to meaning for the outside.
“It is when man, in the poverty of his worshiping spirit, treads before the face of God’s freedom, into the mystery of that impenetrable ‘Thou’—it is then that he finds access to the depths of his own Being and worth” (Thomas Metz, Poverty of Spirit, page 52).
To feel better, which is what I really want, it is best to go inside, not out. Outward, there is fleeting fun, like getting a fix for my addictions. Inward, there is stability and inspiration.
Inward is “the face of God’s freedom” and “the mystery of that impenetrable Thou” and my own Being and worth. Don’t ignore these things or throw them away. I bring my ego self to bear on them consciously: in the poverty of my worshiping spirit, I tread before the face of God.
It is a joy when I write a sentence which is my own and which I love. Here are some: The truth of every human being is a focal point greater than drug induced euphoria. Wanting your truth is a new way of being. Consideration of your truth is a step to being plugged in to who you really are. I always wanted to be more than a pile of crap. It turns out that I am, just never heard that from my parents. But now, I can come to believe it of myself. Yes, it takes some practice and some focus and some intent, but it is really my reality. If I think it, it will be. My truth is my spiritual awakening.
“Spiritual awakening is no more and no less than a human being claiming his or her full humanity” (Hungry Ghosts, Gabor Mate, page 421). The core, the root, of a spiritual awakening is your truth as the human that you are. The truth of who you really are is integral to developing and sustaining a new life .
Are you an addict? You are an addict if you are human. Dopamine is your drug of choice. This neurotransmitter will drive your every decision and activity, at least until you become aware and become driven by spiritual forces instead. Your truth, who you really are, is the spiritual life force. Your brain/mind has an unconscious life of which you are not aware. Thoughts are had and decisions made without your awareness. Who is the someone who gets up and goes to work even if they don’t want to? Or does chores? Or doesn’t steal, even returns lost valuables? This person was not learned in Boy Scouts or church. This person is who was born. This person is an abstract truth, the beginning of a human, a divine perfection. This truth lives on and exists now. Be it. Remember it. Truth is who you are. Think it. Feel it. Be it.
As a self seeking human, or someone who wants more out of life than a good paying job, “…see with the Soul’s sight, move in the realm of Truth…” (Plotinus’ Enneads, McKenna translation, page 69). Contemplate for yourself: your soul; your soul’s sight; the realm of truth; moving in the realm of Truth. Feel your consciousness expand beyond any drug induced trip. This bigger consciousness can be sustained by you, for life. This bigger consciousness will sustain you, for life.
Just these words, “deep investigation,” lead me out of superficiality and inwards towards the mother lode of spiritual value which exists as my soul.
Superficiality is obsessed with drugs or behaviors of choice. Deep is stable, integral, beneficial. I can become conscious of my depths. I can know my deeper self. I think these words: Stable. Integral. Beneficial.
Ultra Monk's Essays 