Father Knows Best, Should Know Better

Good morning.

I haven't written here in a while, because I haven't really felt very awakened lately. Things are getting better in my outer world, but my inner world is currently in turmoil.

I got a job, after nearly six months of unemployment, and it is better than I hoped for. It's very challenging for me, but I haven't been challenged in a job for a while, so it's welcome. My feelings about money have relaxed, and I'm getting more of it now; I haven't decided yet which came first (actually, I know my feeling changed before I even got the job).

On the day of the holiday of Father's Day this year, like most years, I did nothing but sit in solitary discomfort at the whole idea of Father's Day. I don't really understand it the way most people do. I have no image of "Father" on which to base the object of my paternal affection. Even my mother's dad, the greatest man I ever knew, could never be "Father;" he was already Papa. I have a father, though it has never quite felt like it.

Today, the Monday after Father's Day, a coworker asked me if my father was still alive; I said yes. He asked if I talked to him yesterday, I said no. He then said my name to me in a tone that spoke the unspoken meaning behind his use of it: "shame on you."

I knew, from past interactions with this person, (we've worked together before) that he had good reason to feel the way he did, and even to admonish me for not staying in touch with my dad; he's had some problems in the past getting his own kids to stay in touch with him. I get it. But I found myself getting increasingly distraught as the day went on. Not angry, only, though there was some of that. Nor was it mostly guilt, or even pain, but a combination of all kinds of negative emotions, all tied to various thoughts which all shared a common theme: my history (or lack thereof) with my father.

I won't get into very much detail in this medium; this is a weblog, not a diary. Suffice it to say, I've seen the man maybe a dozen times since I was 5 years old, and not a single one of those times was at his initiative; I have always had to invite him (in the cases of my graduations) or seek him out myself. I had other "father figures," but I never had much use for them as "dads".... I guess I couldn't bear to replace him, in spite of all that. But I did allow myself to love my stepfather as a dad when he came along. Then, I lost him, too. That story is too gruesome to tell.... Let's just say, I grew up real quick in high school (and I would have no trouble seeing Thestrals).

I reconnected with my dad a few years ago, but even that has not continued. I found out from him what his reason was for staying away: He knew my mother had it under control, and he felt that he would only get in the way by being around. If he only knew what good just being in my way would have done me. I do love my dad, just to be clear. And I forgive him his mistake. At the same time, he hasn't stopped making it.

So I let another Father's Day go by unobserved. I could have tried to contact my dad, but he hasn't got a phone, and it leaves me bitter to call the only other place I know he's likely to be or to get a message, the saloon. I wanted to tell my coworker all this, and so I did tell him this last fact. As soon as I did, I felt worse. I thought it would shut him up, and it did, but it did not help. The vicious spiral had begun.

I spent all day at my new job with my mind basically disengaged. Instead of focusing on work, I was unfocused, with the many various dad-related thoughts and the accompanying negative emotions that only served to keep them coming. Like, "I'm glad I never had kids, I don't know how I could ever be a good dad myself..." and, "I do know my dad's not going to be around forever, and I really SHOULD try to get hold of him...."

And my whole day got worse. I made a couple of mistakes I shouldn't have made. I got a huge, ugly mark on my pants, which I just washed yesterday. At lunch, every traffic light was red, even though all last week they were all green. Pretty much everything I saw today reflected my repugnant mood.

Then I came home and started writing this. My hope is that, with this venting, (and the EFT tapping I might do later) I can let this pain go, too. But you know, a big part of me is not ready to let it go. It's like it informs my identity. It's MY pain, I earned it. I know that's insane, but I know that it's part of my ego, and I will be ready to let it go soon. And either way, tomorrow will be better. At this moment, though? ...I don't know. I don't feel like it.

I really should know better.

The Sun is Rising....

Good Morning!

If you have been following along with me on my journey of awakening so far, you may have noticed that the blog's background is no longer black, but a dark blue. It was a purposeful choice; that's what happens just before dawn.

After nearly 6 months of unemployment, I finally have a j-o-b. It's in a field that I enjoy, the hours are fine, and the benefits will be great. I'm happy.

But there is still a long way to go. My Shadow Self still likes to poke at me, feeding me doubts ...{{you can't handle this job}}...{{it's too much stress}}...{{you're gonna screw something up, just watch}}.... But that doesn't bother me. I recognize the voice now.

The Shadow Self, the Ego, the Opponent, the Pain Body, Satan, whatever you like to call it, always sounds the same. It tries to keep you from making change. Its greatest mission is to keep itself alive, and it does that by keeping you in darkness. It feeds on fear and doubt and pain. It withers and dies under the Light of Consciousness and Wakeful Presence, so it has developed terrific stealth skills; it will even make you believe it is YOU, so that you don't look too closely at it. It will make you think it's your best friend, whilst simultaneously sabotaging your life. It loves chaos, hatred, and dominance, and can manipulate its victims into doing almost anything, for the price of "pleasure," accompanied by pain and panic that it will never cop to. It is powerful, but not as powerful as Presence.

Wakeful, Mindful, Dutiful Presence, Non-judgmental, Loving Presence, is the only weapon we have against this Adversary, but thankfully, it is the only one we'll ever need. Presence immediately weakens it, creates space around it. It wants to isolate you; so, you must isolate it instead, secure in the knowledge that you are One with the Light, and that isolation is an illusion. The Shadow disappears when you shine the Light upon it.

We always have these two voices, and we always have the choice of which one to listen to. When you learn to recognize the difference between the voices, and to recognize which one is really YOU (it's Presence, if you hadn't figured that out by now) then you are one step closer to Waking Up!

The road is long. Let's keep moving.

Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT - Why I Know It Works

Good morning!

So, it was just a few days ago I was feeling really horrible. I'd been unemployed for five months, living with my mother, who had just finished venting her frustration with me for the last two hours. I felt worthless. I felt unworthy. I felt insignificant and undeserving of the relief I craved.

I was sitting alone on my bed, trying to feel, trying to cry, but I felt so rotten I couldn't even do that. It was the kind of self-loathing that cripples; it was as though my very soul had been severed.

I had read about EFT, and even messed around with it a little, but I didn't apply it on a regular basis, by any stretch. I decided I had nothing to lose by trying it in that moment. So I started tapping my hand, saying, "Even though I feel worthless, I accept myself." I went through the rest of the tapping procedure, really allowing myself to feel that unworthiness. When I was done, and I took one deep breath, my body - not me, I couldn't control it if I had tried - immediately began to WEEP. I cried for maybe a minute, maybe less, and then, I was done. I felt better, and I felt a little bit relieved.

The real miracle of EFT did not become obvious to me until a few days later. For I realized in a rush of understanding, that I not only did NOT feel worthless, I felt worthwhile. It felt like a new feeling, as though I had never felt that way before, and I really have to wonder if that's not absolutely true.

I know that the instant I stopped weeping, I had released all of the negative energy that I had held onto for so many years, that was causing me to feel unworthy and worthless. All that's left is a feeling of freedom and power, which has only grown since. I feel, in a word, HUMAN, for the first time in my life.

Now, I'm a tapping fool. Like they say, "Try it on everything." One of the best resources to learn more about EFT is thetappingsolution.com. You have nothing to lose except your pain.

My Own Worst Enemy

Good morning.

A sequoia lived for 400 years. It lived through 400 winters, 400 springs, 400 summers, and 400 autumns. Each season bombarded the great sequoia with rain, wind, lightning, heat, deathly cold, storms of every flavor. For 400 summers, it grew, and for each one of 400 winters, it slowed to almost death. Every spring, though, 400 times, it reawakened, to be clobbered again by the elements of nature. What finally killed the mighty tree? Beetles ate it from the inside.

Like the 400-year-old sequoia, Man can handle ANYTHING the external world hurls at him, but his vital weakness lies within himself.

My good friend Dana Lisenbee told me this parable today, because I needed desperately to hear it. The last few weeks have been, for me, a downward spiral into my own self-loathing. I thought I had licked it; I was mistaken.

Now, I am consciously using my mind to be aware of what it is doing to itself, and to me, as a whole person. I'm using EFT whenever I feel negativity creeping into my emotional matrix. The only way to get positive is to feel your way there. EFT helps transmute the negative feeling into something positive. Negative emotion becomes trapped in the body; by tapping on certain acupressure meridian points, and feeling the emotion fully, the body can literally let go of the trapped emotion and you can move on from there. It's a technique I've known about, and used a little, but I'm beginning at last to understand just how powerful it can be. (learn more about it: thetappingsolution.com)

Another cool thing happened today: I saw the movie Revolver (2005), with Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Andre Benjamin, and Vincent Pastore, written and directed by Guy Ritchie, produced by Luc Besson. It was exactly the film I needed to see today. It's ostensibly about chess and con games, but it's really all about the ego. But it goes roundabout the subject for 104 minutes of total mind-warping, violent confusion. I highly recommend it. You'll definitely have to see it at least twice.

The ego feeds--thrives, even--on negative emotion; in fact, it may even be fairly accurate to say that the trapped negativity is an ingredient or component of the ego itself. The ego is chaos incarnate, a constant adversary of the True Self. Its greatest trick is convincing you that it IS you. The ego is a shadow that thinks it is the light, wants to be the light so badly it hurts, but it can never be. It then uses the pain, makes you feel worthless, hopeless, helpless, until the light is almost invisible, and all seems to be the shadow. But there can be no shadow without light. You are the light; the shadow that is ego is not who you are. The pain is not who you are; you are Unselfish Love, which is the Source of All Light.

Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him. I'm feeling better today; the Force will guide me. All I can do is feel Better Now. Small moves. I can do it. I am worthy, and I do deserve it.

Supper's Ready? Or, A Day Passed Over

Can't you feel our souls ignite?
Shedding ever changing colours
In the darkness of the fading night
Like the river joins the ocean
As the germ in a seed grows
We have finally been freed to get back home

There's an angel standing in the sun
And he's crying with a loud voice:
This is the supper of the mighty one
Lord of Lords
King of Kings
Has returned to lead his children home
To take them to the new Jerusalem
-Genesis, "Supper's Ready"

I have had this 23-minute epic song stuck in my head for the last two weeks, like a massive prog-rock earworm. So when the news came about the Last Supper being dated wrong, I found it more than apropos.

First of all, WHO CARES? A date 2000 years ago may have been wrong. Well, darn it, one day in 2000 years ain't a bad handicap, really. Especially considering the number of times that calendar has changed. Yet people do care, and those people won't like what I'm about to say.

The reason people care about this is, at some point after the stories were written, there were some who thought that the allegorical stories were literally true, even though they were obvious rewrites of other allegories, particularly those of Joshua from Exodus and the Persian Godman Mithras. Later, the government adopted the literal view, and volumes were written to support it, including out and out forgeries set amidst the rest of the stories, in order to fill in the gaps. After that, there was no hope left for the allegory. Wars based on the belief in the literal, historical "truth" of these allegories have ravaged the world for the last 15 centuries.

This isn't about debunking the myth. In fact, the very word "myth" has been perverted, in the interest of literalist dogma. Myth used to be powerful; it was poetry, with layers of truth laid one upon another. Now the word is synonymous with "falsehood." This is unfortunate, because there is nothing false about the myths in the Bible, except for historicity.

The Myths of the Ancient World were guideposts to the Ultimate Truth--that God is within each and every one of us--and through them, we can Awaken to that Truth Within. Taken literally, the mystical nature of this Truth is all but lost.

Awakening involves broadening the mind. Whether the stories of a man dying and returning to life are literally true or not (regardless of when they were written--in the case of Mithras, 200 years before Christ, and including many of the same events and motifs as the Jesus stories) there is no denying the stories' emotional and spiritual benefits. Millions of people have been inspired, with or without the significant allegorical symbolism.

...I guess my point is, instead of arguing over whether it's literally true, we ought to focus on how each of us connects to the stories in our own lives and hearts. The rest is just details.

It's All About Soul

Soul is a feeling, feeling deep within
Soul is not the colour of your skin
Soul is the essence, essence from within
Soul is where everything begins
-Van Morrison

I've been doing some serious soul-searching of late. I do it regularly, about every seven years. I don't plan it that way, I've just noticed that it seems to be at that interval; interestingly, I have heard that the human body regenerates all of its cells in a seven-year cycle. So really, I guess it's like reprogramming the software for all new hardware.

I find "Soul" to be a curious word. Today, when we hear it, we mostly think of "Spirit," like the undying, infinite, eternal core part of us, our essence, which moves on when we die. But that's not what the ancients meant.

In ancient Greek manuscripts, including and especially those of the New Testament, the word that is variously translated as "Spirit" or "Breath" is defined as above, and the word is "Pneuma." (Breath, air, makes sense.) The word that English Bibles usually translate as "soul" is actually the Greek word "Psyche," and meant pretty much just what you'd think.

The ancients who took part in the Mysteries understood these words as two stages of conscious development: Psychic Initiates were those who identified with their minds, their thoughts and emotions, while Pneumatic Initiates held a broader perspective, identifying with their still, essential nature as Spirit. In myth, they are the lower and higher aspects of the goddess, Sophia (which means "wisdom"). In Christian texts, "Sacred Breath" is perhaps a better translation for what we now know as "holy spirit."

They each had an elemental baptism to them; Psychics were baptized in water, Pneumatics in air, or something related, like breath, or a kiss. Of course the other elements had baptisms, too: earth was for the Somatic (body) and the Gnostic (meaning "one who knows") initiation was a literal baptism by fire. In light of this, the many passages in the bible which talk about baptism make a bit more sense, e.g., Matthew 3:11. (Speaking of that verse, and of mistranslating Greek, the word usually translated as "repentance" is the Greek word "Metanoia," which means basically, "a change of mind;" and the Greek word "hamartia," usually translated as "sin," actually comes from archery, and means simply, "to miss the mark.")

So, at 35 years old, I have rejiggered my soul ("psyche") for the fifth time (once every seven years). In other words, I have been once again (as I have done four times before) reprogramming my Self to be the man I want to be. I have been immersed in water (the water, that is, of nous, or "mind") but the time will come when I am filled with Sacred Breath and fire.

And the good news ("gospel"): with the state of the collective human consciousness today, we don't need hard Initiations to rise to the next level; we can do it slowly, gradually, because those who came before paved the way, or forged the path, or burned the neural engram, or however you wish to look at it.

With time and training, we all can become Buddha ("Awakened")! It takes mindfulness, Right thinking and Right action, patience and humility. Simple enough, even if not necessarily easy.

Obstacles in the Road

Good morning!

The last couple of days, for me, have not been the greatest. At present status, I am still unemployed, my tax refund is almost gone, and the lower pitch emotions are stalking me, like vultures circling, diving in for the occasional test bite. Times like this, in the past, I've turned to drink. This time was no exception.

The problem with alcohol is that it only seems to help, and even then, its apparently positive effects are only temporary. A nice buzz can make me feel pretty good, for a minute. The next day, however, I invariably feel just as bad as before, and usually worse. And not just because of the hangover; I tend to hate myself for drinking at all, for spending money I don't have on a poison, and for being like certain of my family members and relying on the crutch of booze. All of this is, obviously, counterproductive thinking.

The truth is, beer is just a shock absorber. It helps a person get over the bumps in the road, to a point, but it does nothing to remove them. The problems that caused me to drink are still there, no matter how blind I choose to get.

An alternative tactic is required. The bumps in the road are still there; I need to remove them, or go around and past them, so I don't have to deal with them any more.

We call it "mindfulness."

In the present moment, there is no fear, no obstacle, no problem so great that it cannot be overcome. Those things belong to the future, or the past, both of which exist only in the mind. In the present moment, all the power of the Force That Creates Worlds is in your hands.

One of my heroes of mindfulness, Karen Bell (ktotheb.com) posted a link today on Facebook that reminded me of what I was missing. At the core of mindfulness is peace. Mindfulness is being. Not being anything in particular, just, BEing. Thoughts do not affect Being. Emotions are comparative; Being IS. (The Jedi Code says, "There is no emotion; there is peace.")

In the end, it's about letting go. I have always had a hard time with that idea, but with mindful practice, I can do it. I will do it. I AM doing it. The present moment is about overcoming obstacles, by becoming what we are: free of obstacles. It's a hard road, but it's mine.

Here is the article KB posted. You may find it quite as useful as I did.