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For the Love of Spiders

“How can we practice not yelling when we’re angry if there’s no one around to push our buttons?”
~~from Ruling Your World by Sakyong Mipham

I remember listening to an Abraham Hicks clip on YouTube a few years ago where they said that your Inner Being might sometimes steer you towards unwanted. This really bothered me and made me a bit angry, actually. I remember thinking, “What’s the point of doing all of this inner work and raising my vibration if I’m still going to have to deal with unwanted? I thought I was working towards creating my own reality!”

But I’ve come to see this from a different perspective. Your Inner Being and the Universe won’t randomly throw completely pointless negative events in your path just for giggles. Everything in our experience is there to help us learn and expand. Everything is here to help us reach new heights.

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Selflessness and Doglessness

Here is a passage about selflessness from the book Ruling Your World by Sakyong Mipham.

Even when we speak of selflessness, the mind goes to “me.”  We think, “I’m selfless,” but everything is selfless.  Saying “everything is selfless” is like calling that stone “dogless.”  It might give the impression that a dog was there at some point, but it never was.  It was our idea of a dog that was there.  Similarly, we say everything is selfless, but the Self was never there.  There was only our idea of a self.

~~Sakyong Mipham

I’ve had trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of selflessness, but the analogy of saying a stone is “dogless” got me to look at it from a different angle.  He is trying to get us to see that the word “selfless” itself is revealing our bias or assumption.  He is saying we are starting from a manufactured place of “self” and then creating the term “selfless” to point back to the state of being without self, but that “self” was something we made up to begin with and “selflessness” is what truly is.

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Believing Your Beliefs Aren’t Beliefs

I had a lot of doubts along the way to my new belief system.  I still have some, of course, but the interesting and incredibly frustrating thing I noticed was that some of my lingering doubts have to do with things that I am actively experience on a regular basis.  Some of my old beliefs were tenaciously standing their ground even as I had experiences over and over again that showed them to be false.

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So… everything is energy?

Over on my website for my Reiki practice I have a section called Reiki Questions where I answer questions that my clients, other people, and even I have had about Reiki.  There are only a few questions there so far, but it’s a start.

I added a new post this morning addressing the question So… everything is energy? that talks a bit about atoms and how everything is made of things that are 99.99999% empty space.  One of my earliest posts here on this blog, The Space Between, is related to this topic as well, if you would like to check it out.

Exploring Reality for Myself

I feel as though I’ve had a thick, wooly blanket thrown over my mind.

Why was I so consumed with reading about other people’s thoughts, beliefs, and theories about the nature of our reality instead of just experiencing it for myself?  Why did I accept other people’s views about what was possible or impossible even as I had experience after experience showing me the exact opposite?

Now, I am starting to feel a new sense of enthusiasm and freedom.  Even the familiar view out of my bedroom window seems fresh and exciting.  Maybe this is a wee taste of how the explorers of old felt as they sailed or hiked away from everything they knew, into the beautiful unknown.

I bought in to the idea that everything had already been dissected and categorized and now it was up to me to make sure that I learned the officially agreed upon version and stayed well away from anything too close to the fringes.

I feel as though we know next to nothing about the true nature of our vast reality.  And that is a wonderfully exciting thought.

Life is Spirituality

Yesterday I understood at a deeper level than before that life is Spirituality. There truly is no part of life that isn’t. Even though I had read and heard this from different teachers at different times, I still wasn’t getting it. I still separated my day into doing spiritual stuff, doing chores, watching sports, volunteering, etc.

But everything comes back to Spirituality. The ideas that come to me throughout the day, my reactions to different events, my interactions with people, shovelling the driveway are all my Inner World expressing itself in a myriad of ways so that I can experience my innermost self as though it was external events and relationships.

Nothing is actually “outside” of me. Everything in my experience is me — a projection of some facet of myself.

The Walled Self

I was very much like a walled city.  My thick, solid walls were essential with my old definitions because they made me feel safe and secure.  Minor external threats were easily kept at bay, and it was only large threats that caused me any worry.  I was safe.

But the problem I see now with my stone wall approach is that while my walls kept out threats they also hindered growth, just like with a city, because I had to make do with the area that the wall encompassed.  There was some room to grow by adding on floors to pre-existing buildings, but any new, ground-breaking ideas were outside of the wall and automatically seen as threats.  At best, I would have a scornful reaction to any concept too far outside of my comfort zone, if I didn’t reject it outright.

While I’m now busily dismantling my stone wall, I certainly don’t want to swing to the other extreme and have no boundaries.  Letting everything in can’t be any healthier than keeping everything out.

Happiness Seeking or Fear Avoiding?

“When you know what you don’t want, you know what you do want.”
~~Abraham Hicks

I realized yesterday that most of my life has been spent with one eye constantly fixed on the thing I didn’t want the most.  I would identify unwanted and then focus on it.  I told myself that this was helpful and practical, and I suppose that in some ways it can be.  Identifying what you don’t want can help you clarify what you do want.  But I never moved on to focusing on what I did want.  What I was doing was spending the vast majority of my time focusingon what I didn’t want, feeling horrible about it, and then trying to avoid it.

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Since There Was Nothing Before There Isn’t Anything After

It occurred to me this morning that my old belief that there is just nothing after we die (oblivion) was based almost entirely on the fact that I couldn’t remember anything from before this life.  Since I didn’t know anything from before I was born I must not have existed, and I would go right on back to not existing after I died.  This is the belief I settled on with very little, if any, actual thought on the matter.

I’m not sure why I came to believe this despite several obvious problems with this shaky logic.  For one thing, I didn’t remember being in the womb, or being 10 days old, or even being 1899 days old either, but I allowed for the fact that I must have existed because older people around me remembered me and were also able to produce some rather cute, if I don’t say so myself, photographs.

I believe now that we all existed before we found ourselves in these bodies.  We were in a completely different form of existence, but we were still us.  And I believe we’ll go right back to that non-physical existence after our deaths.  

I’ve come to see birth and death as simple transitions from one state to the next rather than beginnings and endings.

If you don’t have anything positive to think…

“You are all selective about the cars you drive and the clothes you wear, but you are not very selective about the thoughts you think.”

~~Abraham Hicks

When I finally became aware of the endless stream of thoughts going through my head, it was a bit of a shock.  And they weren’t particularly useful thoughts.  A lot of them are judgements, crtisicms, and endless commentary about trivial things going on around me.  “How stupid.  Why would you do that?”  “Wow.  That was inconsiderate of her.”  “I hate when people block both sides of the escalator.”

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