Seek you first?

The Daily Bell is a 'libertarian' investment news commentary site that attracts thoughtful or considered commentators - albeit with a tendency to blame the state for everything and identify in ideas about an ideal of freedom. This article questioned whether Trump is in fact a 'controlled opposition'. I may have written other comments in about Trump and power games - but in this I picked up on the last concluding summary of their 'advice' relative to such times as are painted so dramatically:

Quote:// Conclusion: Conserve your energy and husband your resources. Advance your personal goals and improve your professional
circumstances. Look to yourself first and the larger system second, if
at all.//

This at first seemed reasonable - even wise and kindly - but is it not the very predicate of the problem; the philosophy of elitism?

It can be read as "hold back on moving with or deny what moves you, and hold onto your private stash to use what profits you and gains power and privilege without regard for context or relationships - excepting they impinge on or support your private arena of power".

You may not intend such a meaning. I will now look at what I first took from it because of how and who I identify 'self'.

I know a lot of Americans (and others) use religious insight as weapon - but I invite looking at this phrase as a pointer that can be re-found in whatever terminology suits you.

"Seek you first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all things shall be added you".

This can be reduced to 'put first things first and all the rest follows'. Or simply 'get your priorities right'.

Obviously this phrase has not been used or appreciated in the meaning I accept or the world would be different than it is. The idea of a private authoritative and elitist self 'getting to heaven' or achieving enlightenment or Validation is deeply imprinted in human conditioning - regardless the symbols for fulfilment. It always ends in tears.

The idea of balance and alignment in Life is also one of healed communication and indeed communion; a FELT QUALITY of Being as the expanded CONTEXT of living a truly human existence. Without which is a flat or dimensionless struggle of obfuscation in which a sense of disconnect operates within a mind of judgement and control within its own narrative framing. A negative loop.

Because 'seeking' can be interpreted as if to find in some OTHER moment it may be worth using 'a willing desire to be found in' balance and alignment with what and who your truly are - rather than running as a 'self' presumption set by conditioning to think without feeling - in other words - to look only to its private thoughts and defend against or ignore anything that does not conform or fit.

I do believe we have to look to ourself first and release investment in 'systems' of thought that are not truly relational communication - though they may affect such a presentation. The capacity to Feel is the capacity to truly be with what is real- moment by moment - and we do not have such capacity within our own investments and identities as to what we define and determine real. And so we withhold or run from communication that threatens our sense of personal abiiity to control the narrative. AND the mind does this in ways it does not even notice.

It is telling to notice that your own definition of what is 'outside' or beyond self is called 'system'. For this is your world-reflecting as system of control rather than as relational communication. Yes there are systems of thought and behaviour that are part of our world experience - but beneath these are relationships. Perhaps messy, chaotic and out-of-control relationships! And is that not a large part of what power is sought to protect against? (within as without).

If we are out-of-true in ourself we meet that reflection everywhere - but having (all) learned to see what is wrong with everyone else - does such a world profit or indeed fulfil us? But if we first honour and align with what is true of us - we are then in a connected relational capacity to relate from strength and wholeness rather than distrust of mutually coded contract.
The fear of love - of real relationship - is the fear of sacrifice. Any love coming into this world meets the experience and demand for sacrifice - and forgets who it is for an adaptive mask.

The word "I" can be assigned anything within a range from a reactive subconscious reflex to the "I Am That I Am" of G-d. (If you regard the G-d term too degraded from misuse to use, just Feel the part within the double quotes).

Verbal mental concept and language itself is a set of derivative short-cuts that originally connected with direct experience that was substituted for by symbol, and basing our currency of thought on symbols of Life, is Life Itself made invisible - except to be enslaved and exploited by a worship of false thinking.

An Individual is integral to the Whole as an expression and extension OF Individuality and Indivisibility. Taking out of context is only possible in Concept - because you are as you are created to be and not as your thinking asserts you to be. However, you are free to prioritize your thinking over your relational communication - but you will then need to sell yourself for a power to deny Life and set you in in a narrative of justification - such that Life is seen as worthy of denial and denial as power to survive and prevail.

I'm not having a go at you Daily Bell. I am inviting a look at fundamental issues that can be seen to imprint themselves in every aspect of our lives. They are as hidden from our sight as any hidden power agenda - but in this arena we are free - are we not? - to open to communication.



footnote: The DB did not read this except to bracket it as 'pursuing 'spiritual' goals and fit it into their schemata of a private sense of personal determination. 'Freedom' can be defined to apply to its opposite - but that does not mean it has become what it is asserted to be.

The self is a construct of the collective!

An evolution article:
Why Richard Dawkins is no scientist, the survival of the least selfish, and what ants can tell us about humans


The 'self' idea is a construct of definitions,and beliefs that generate feelings, thoughts and perceptions, from which proceed actions and behaviours and conditionings.
Clearly, and observably, foundational self-definitions are imagined and accepted or created in consciousness - but this is not equivalent to the 'definition' of a personal or private 'consciousness' which in our current human template operates AS IF it is a thinker that thinks alone and apart from all else.
In antiquity there were mythic models of a world on the back of a tortoise. In modernity the world seems so much more 'realistic' yet the framework within which which it is perceived and manipulated is no more substantial than an imagined tortoise.
There is no self but Self (for want of a word for the All in All). There is no self as is presumed and asserted and supported with emotional force and intentional identification. But there IS a belief/definition 'self' that has all the currency of its mutual acceptance but only the value of what it fulfils as consciousness experience.
The mechanism of the delivery of experience within consciousness can be explored AS experience, but to do so is to differentiate from the indivisible in order to experience a point of view. But there is NEVER a separation in FACT from the experience observed. It is provided to the desire because it is part of the desire. The desire that has dominated and driven scientific exploration in the main is an expression of a 'disconnected urge to define, control and prevail over Life Itself. And as such is clearly insane to anything but its own self-conditioned blindness.
The cutting off of consciousness from its true nature is a device of dissociation and denial well known to those who would use psychology for the manipulation of other minds rather than heal their own and others. But it operates a splitting off of dissociated 'conscious' personae within a negatively or fearfully determined and segregated self-sense.
The nature of a deception operates defensively against its own exposure by invalidating all else in such wise as to seem associated with the power of it god - from which it derives authority. The god of the separating self sense is the idea of asserting coercive power upon life - but beneath this 'power' is a self that defines itself in victim-hood and thus in hurt, fear and anger. The halt lead the blind. Nothing will come of a fearful foundation but fuel for fear.
The idea of self can be reintegrated to its true nature and consciousness. This is not determined and controlled but yielded to and accepted INSTEAD of yielding to the god of fear. AND in a true willingness for Life, our Arts and Sciences will uncover a wealth of INTEGRATED inspiration in all that it explores to experience in shared reality instead of seeking to manipulate as dictated by private agenda.
WE ARE all already cooperating to maintain a culture of lovelessness, because we are not actually separate from Consciousness and must TEACH what we define and accept ourselves to be. WHAT we teach depends on what we choose to learn. Definitions operate invisibly until you want to check in with what is really going on right here and now where 'reality' is presumed to be. Now are you opening to a truth that you do not make - because that which observes definitions is not defined by them. Just because one can follow thinking, doesn't mean one has to. Aligning with true joy and passion is not a fear-based compulsion. Fear OF consciousness is scientism's shadow. True Science seeks to know the truth - not just the filtered truths that can fuel a fearfully derived agenda.

One commenter offerred this to the article:

Use of the word "selfless" here undermines the argument. Selfless suggests a conscious choice (and therefore ability) to go against ones needs or instinct. In the case of the ants, they have no such ability, so it is not selfless.

- - -
They don't demonstrate it on our timeframe - nor in ways that our human 'self' template can recognize. Species-ality focuses in its own explorations yet they reflect something to us that we take as 'collective' consciousness and that is something we tend to disregard in focussing in what we call individual consciousness. All facets operate consciousness - but we do not stand alone and apart to judge excepting we presume our independent ego to be god and believe our own spin.

Is not what we call 'conscious choice' but a virtual layer over what is actually happening anyway?Have you met any truly 'conscious' self that can choose to go against its needs or instinct - or is it a distorting layer of mind that redefines needs and the 'self' that it is, so as to then automatically 'choose' according to the defined template. In this sense our 'self' is a persona or mask upon what we actually ARE - that makes a model of the world in which to play out its illusory power. Putting such 'self' aside - that is - noticing it is not YOU, allows the undistorted integrity of a true existence to shine through. While the 'power' to be what you are not (against yourself) is your choice, all choice is but a mechanism of conditioned reaction.
But the first choice remains yours to change, regardless the layers of experience and definition that constitute the human conditioning.

What's in it for "me"?

"What's in it for me?" is the disruptor of honesty. Its coercive assertion re-frames all meaning within the terms of a private separate competitive interest - essentially at war with all other presumed to be 'private agendas'. Real communication is impossible in such a framework - but the form of communication is utilized as a mask both in dealings with others - and as a validating reflector of 'self-will'.

Those who seek to be honest WITHIN the phishing attack of a thought-based identity are those who are willing to break their mask in order to align with power as it seems to operate within the mask. Such are those whose behaviour reveals the corrupting influence of power - writ large. But they are manifesting the original thrust of such a script in raw terms - which as it is unmasked, becomes a reflection from which others (and themselves) may awaken.

There are two ways of looking at things and two ways of hearing. One is from the perspective of "me", apart from them, with an interest in the "me". The other is from the perspective of whole, a body of one which is a totality of Self. In this, there is no "me".

The script seems to thus have two faces. One serves guilt, fear and coercion. The other serves healing and reintegration.

It is all a matter of choice. The nature of a coercive deception is a trick in which a real choice is hidden by a counterfeit suggestion which frames issues in terms that suggest a special personal power or gain - or indeed in terms of threat and loss to such a special personal sense.

Coming back to choice. We invest our energy of attention and intent non-stop - but what are the choices we are habitually making as a sort of subconscious default? For these ARE determining the meanings and values by which we perceive.

Giving love (what else is your energy and attention but the love that you are?) to that which does not know you, see you or communicate with you, is to take on board a composite of self definitions that adulterate and undermine and deny your nature as love - replacing it with a masked mind of guilt and fear and a sense of aggrieved self-specialness - aka rage.

Material accounting is a dalek's eye view of even the manifest Universe. Discernment of 'spirits' is of PURPOSE. A true purpose is not manipulative or coercive on Life, others or self. But to the masked mentality EVERYTHING is perceived as coercive upon it - because it does not look within to see that it is merely getting back the echo of its own shouting into a cave. Instead it looks to the mask that justifies itself to itself - and if that fails, to the mask of such hatred upon self. life and other as to be intolerable. (Hence the call for the mask).

One way or another (as you will) the masks are being exposed - laid bare as devices and stratagems of defence and diversionary distraction.

How one looks upon anything is a choice - but self-judgement is a choice to deny choice because it is too fearful - hence a control mentality imposes or interjects itself into the flowing flowering being that you are - and makes shadows of the Light.

To suffer mental and emotional conflict without investment in the appearances is to let it rise up and fade. To rest the mentality of self-will in an honest willingness of communication allows Life's Presence to rise as your native awareness - free of coercion - and that is one of the signature vibrations of your truth. Within this LIVING context, self-will or the personal sense has become an instrument of a greater communication and participance - for it is not 'going it alone' on a covert operation as if to 'become' something special in its own right for others to worship, adulate or applaud.

Everyone operates the Script - but those who lack awareness of their innate and integral worth and power will seek it and thus prove they do not have it - no matter how powerful they seem to become in their zenith.

The ideas of a 'hidden hand' are symbols of the two ways of looking. I also call them the wheat and the tares.

When the harvest is called in, all that is without true foundation is in a sense 'nothing-ed'.

A book I have enjoyed summarized itself thus:

"Nothing real is threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the Peace of God".

Identifying with the imagined and the expected and the personified opinion, seeks and applies endless answers to endless convolving and mutating problems - but the actual problem is closer than the world and is a breakdown in communication that operates through a lens darkly.

While one is tuned to 'radio self-wilful struggle' one cannot receive 'Radio wholeness'. Therefore challenge everything that upsets or provokes conflict and discern directly as to whether it is a 'phishing attack' or truly is addressed to You.

Symbols are part of the way that Consciousness communicates within the dream of an unsinkable separateness. But as we all know, symbols can be associated with meanings as things in themselves. That their is a voice for deception in our mind need no longer be pretended away so as to operate unchecked beneath our mask of rationality.

Where we turn for our source will dictate where we invest - and the fruits thereof.


This writing stands alone but was offered to a comment on this page:

http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/35456/Is-the-Level-of-Economic-Illiteracy-Among-the-Wests-Top-Thinkers-Deliberate/

Negative cooperations of disconnecting minds

For the context to which I respond here's the article and comment page in the Daily Bell

On the cooperations that reinforce a negatively defined self:

Likewise ideas of "moral codes" can be subverted to social definitions of accepted behaviours, and guilt employed to coerce deviation to get into line or suffer penalty.

I feel this as a 'reverse engineering' of Life, that usurps or subverts the pure spontaneity of life with self-consciousness, self-doubt, as the development of the divided self that seems to be able to pause life or step outside it in order to experience all kinds of facets within what is actually instant forever - or timeless Infinitude that embraces both specific AND universal polarity within itself.

This self we humanly identify is not both, and... but tends to focus exclusively in the specific and be unconscious of the communion with the Infinite.

Insofar as that quality of connection/communication is held culturally and individually, it has tended to create rules to check and limit and correct the mentality that actively disconnects and yet keep it as it were hidden in the background, because it is associated with power.

This love/hate alloy is the nature of the human consciousness in its separation beliefs and definitions. The structures that we create in consciousness - that model our reality, express this 'house divided' against itself, so much so that the 'human condition' is accepted reality instead of recognizing it as the human conditioning!

The principle aspect of disconnection is a loss - and subsequent fear, of intimacy of being. For disconnection is the seeming power to have private thoughts and hidden mind, and from this seeming power a world arises that is no longer Recognizable in Consciousness - but chaotically conflicted through the filters and distortions of a split mind.

What arises from this is the joining in tacit mutual agreement NOT to join as an intimate connectedness, but to develop the FORMS of joining WITHOUT the actual meeting. The mind is thus structured to keep out that which threatens the order that it dictates and asserts via any available workable strategy that works to defend it. The cooperation of such minds can achieve all kinds of control over the forms and behaviours but none over the underlying reality. Eventually it runs out of ways to present and package itself - and so disintegrates. In the microcycles, this occurs all the time but in the larger periodic cycle of an epoch, it comes to an 'end' that reveals what Is beneath the beginning and Is after the end. This might be seen as a repeat class in the responsibility for self creation or a shift to a new perspective from which to share and appreciate life.

If we are not already invested in being the shift, we will not even see the bus... let alone catch it. However, what you want will determine your outcome, so there is no coercion involved - although it may seem so to the mentality that values coercion as hidden or private leverage over life and self and others.

The impermanence of all things can be used to justify asset stripping as much as you can before you die, as it can be used for an ever new opportunity to extend and share the core value that is our joy to be living. The 'selfishness' of fear rises from a false investment. If that is owned, one can use fear as the messenger that reveals it as something out of true - which can then be seen and undone, rather than blindly suffered.
Because we have such investments we fear to lose, yet no one really lives their joy in the shadow or undercurrent of fear. It is wise to honour our existing belief systems, for while they operate as our support  it is foolish to abandon them. But a process of curiosity and discovery uncovers alternate pathways and experiences, and of course this is already going on, naturally.


On condemning selfishness or doing for others:

To reveal selfishness as a deceptive reaction that acts against ones true interests is to join with the sanity hiding beneath the limited presentation. Sometimes a pause invites a greater perspective and we choose from a more connected place.

On the other hand, in the conspiracy of selfishness, anyone who stands in their natural authority will tend to be perceived as 'selfish' because the society redefines its own version of reality and enforces it.

Natural authority doesn't 'lord it' over anyone, nor does it give power to deceits and dead concepts, or stone gods.

I sort of agree with your last sentence - but I express value to hold and have that value by expressing it. So in that sense it is selfish of me and simply offered with no strings for others to resonate with... or not.

if everyone were to grow a culture of being who they enjoy being - and doing and allowing relationships to align and reflect that, then no organising and controlling externality is called upon or required.  In practice we cannot stray from our true desire without feeling the loss of joy - and forcing through doesn't force it back. Pretending there is no such thing only covers a hollow place. When we've tried everything that doesn't work... we have got ourselves in place for what does.

Disconnected thinking, loss of perspective, false self interest

(This is written in response to the following - which itself replied to *5 in the previous post, in which suicide is mentioned as an example that does not fit with the comment "No one hates his own flesh") :

Life the Journey: Philippines 2:4. Let each of you look not only to his own interest, but also to the interest of others.
Unfortunately, people today view "loving others" and "loving self" as a zero sum game. They win then I lose.
Human society is built on a balance of personnel interest. People are so used to seeing everyone serving his own ends that no other kind of conduct is expected. One thing is certain, we cannot turn back the clock to quieter times, neither can we hide from the persistent noise of this time. We must learn to live in such a world as this and be victorious over it. The truth is in nature, this being the wisdom of God incarnate.
May your daughter and your neighbor's son be in that happy home of saints and angels.

It is all a matter of perspective. The sense "my" life and "my" daughter is a shortcut term for a rich relationship - that then gets traded as if it was itself real - (disconnected from its living context) and then asserted/defended as a seemingly separate polarity within a greater wholeness. When we think to take (or assert) the "my" as an exclusive independence then we have stepped out of a wholeness perspective into a "defence (and attack) mechanism - that knows not love excepting what serves "my" interest. Appreciate the gifts of your life and uncover the deeper gift in the shock of such exposures of self knowledge, one step at a time as willingness allows. For of course they at first feel like violations.

Traditionally the 'selfishness' that cuts off from a living inheritance and which 'goes it alone' in a drunken and misguided sense of its own power, has been moralized against - such as to induce social controls in place of living communication. Fearful rules and hateful scapegoats set up a society in which personal control (power over) is worshipped (given allegiance) over trust and communication (love honouring).

Such personal control is the very thing that sets off and maintains the loss of clarity and relational wholeness - and so we have set up a self-replicating system of fear and hate, that works to deplete us of our living inheritance and our commonwealth - and which works under the name of love and freedom and fairness and so forth - but only up to a point  - and only when it serves such defensive self interest to do so. True order operates within life and not coercively upon it. Action and reaction is contagious to an ungrounded consciousness, but the tangible harmony of inspired alignment holds a unity freely shared, and truly attractive as a self interest that is at once the movement of a wholeness.

So in a sense, on the level of a divisive self interest, the devil rules the world - as a deception within our minds that we buy into and believe gives us power and freedom - or is the promise of regaining such. It plays all sides of every conflict and will make a 'side' of any rising communication or movement. That is it's 'fuel'; our investment in

Within such a mentality as - has you say - become normalised conditioning - the teaching of a common interest works to limit the 'freedom' to blindly disregard all that lives in a deluded selfishness, and so 'do as you would yourself be done by' is a Golden Rule that transcends any one cultural path or teaching. This reflects a greater perspective of which the disconnecting mentality is unaware of. For as you do, confirms you in the belief that gives rise to your action and this sets the value of your self in experience. It is literally like a control lever where you can let light in or shut it out. If you give (express yourself) in a clear honesty - then that is the value and measure of your receiving - and can grow in self-awareness.

Though the thinking of the world tacitly conspires to block, subvert or distract from any such 'interference' from reality, to its self-asserted version of reality, it is more desperately clinging to a disintegrating structure of control. So as the original fears and hates that programmed or conditioned our attempts at control by our own power, rise again in our awareness despite our ingenuity or determined unconsciousness, so does it the 'noise' (as you put it) increase.

The fearful deception that 'works' as subtler suggestion does not work as forceful assertion and obvious coercion excepting in a very short term - as terror. But within the original darkness - so to speak - is also a capacity to question ALL of it - and to choose NOT to invest in hate and evil as foundations of self.

Whilst there is a global shift going on - all of us are in one way or another - within a process of either segregating from life or reintegrating ourselves. It's a moment by moment context of which most are unaware as their primary self-loving responsibility to themselves - and which aligns them with Source and with 'brother' - with the living sharing reflections and communication that is our life in experience, no less than what we have tended to fence off as 'mine'. This is a totally different perspective that is entirely natural to an uncoercive consciousness.

What then works to exchange a participation in the Living for a lead role in a cage but our thoughts? - and beneath these the self definitions that we 'believe' by acting as if they are true. And so our thought creates personal density and polarised perception in which we can become so conflicted and worthless and failed in our deeply held wish that life be as 'my' will determines it, that we would rather 'die' than submit to humiliation and loss of 'freedom'. This is in a sense repeating the original choice to give all allegiance to the idea of self-will and actively deny a Universal Will in which our true will extends joy, tangible value, creative imagination, passionate embrace of life in its movement within us.

In the attempt to coerce others instead of owning and healing the coercive intent in one's own mind, the idea of guilt and pain as a god was woven into the story of our Source Nature and Condition. far from bringing the apparently immoral back into the 'fold' it instils terror at the very threshold of perfect Innocence. And so the fear of love is beneath all other fears. yet there IS no fear in love - and the world's idea of love is fearful - that is a fearfully distorted crumb that becomes a prison food - and thus a currency of exchange and leverage within the prison mentality.

There is nothing I can do to make another's choice, but in making my own, I can know that this choice is available to others and can at least not seek to confirm them in their choosing against their joy.
As far as I am concerned, Everyone comes Home - but as a waking up from knowing NOT what they do - to being restored to true sight. No one can maintain self-hatred in the light of love - and without the density of the body, the mental is revealed as a picturing that can be reinterpreted.
So thankyou for your blessing, I feel that when we are in a blessing mode, we are releasing others and ourselves, from a past made in judgement, confusion and fear.

Quietness is what can see the noise as noise. What we resist, persists! What we appreciate, appreciates! Peace is the most encompassing embrace of the dynamic vibrancy of life and not a mausoleum. Disinfo rises from the attempt to hide and be hidden from. The choices we make tune us into the realities we experience - all of which are passing. And yet an aligned choosing welcomes the recognition of our existence reflected in transparency, that Is, Knowing One in All and All in One - thus giving and receiving freely in an ever new act of extending Creation. I don't sketch this crude pointer as a future, but as our true presence. One can only re-integrate with what one has first disassociated.

The difficulty in communicating in the mind that does not know or has 'forgotten' its own act, is that it has you defending it's definitions and thoughts as if they were You. An open mind is able to pause of what it thinks it knows and listen or feel more deeply. Here, the 'still small voice' of a stirring recognition. And here also the 'temptations' that re-frame and subvert the natural being back into terms of guilts and disconnected derivatives!

The virtue of self interest?

A few article/comments into this article/page at the Daily Bell: The Virtue of self interest:

*1

If the ONLY motivation in all circumstances without exception is towards pleasure and away from pain - as we define the situation in relation to us, then we set up our own curriculum by what we accept and therefore share, teach or demonstrate.
When we seem to choose against our will or happiness it is because we have belief in greater loss by choosing other than as we do.
The sense of disconnection that comes with a negatively defined self leads to the urge to dominate and possess. The fear of the negative leads to the attempt to coerce and moralize.
Whatever Reality is - we only experience it through the filters and distortions of our beliefs and definitions, but the reality of our joy is of a recognition that transcends experience to the sense of knowing or being that cannot be in any way divided. This is the Singularity of the Indivisible and the true root of individuation.
Consciousness responsibility is inescapable because one can believe and experience accordingly - but never actually become something other than Consciousness. While any structure of self-construct holds meaning or value, it persists. What is without value or meaning is inherently disregarded.
Part of the implication of the above is that humans tend to use 100% of their Consciousness to experience themselves limited to perhaps to a few % or their capacity.
By far the most of Consciousness is unconscious to our 'waking mind' in a not dissimilar way to the front end of this computing medium being only an interactive experience on top of a complex multi-leveled structure of software code and hardware configuration.
The scientifically oriented mentality seeks to perceive and understand Life in material terms with material or external reality being primary and consciousness being somehow within this (presumed to be) singular Universe of energy stuff. It sees transactions in place of real relationships. This reduction of Consciousness to linear forms and processes in time is the result of disconnection from Source Consciousness - awareness of which has been effectively neutered or disregarded so as to maintain a specific focus in the personality structure.
Religious approaches have tended to believe separation from Source as being inherent or absolute - and sought to maintain the segregated self sense upon the sin, guilt and fear of the 'separation' of 'fall'.
As Physics expands, it will be seen that the God Idea is not external as a separate agency from All That Is - nor a special personage or power within it acting coercively upon 'stuff'. Everything is recognisable in Consciousness, but the freedom to experience it in terms of tangible light, energy, physicality extends the structure in which to experience itself through a personality complex - with all the facets of experience that that opens.
The fundamental Spiritual Recognition is of our oneness with Life, with others who share and are of the same Life, and with the world that reflects our unique multifaceted interplay in perception, action and experience.
The two commandments quoted by Jesus speak of an Already Truth that our consciousness covers over. As we do unto others, we DO unto our Self. What we give DOES set the measure of our receiving. Our experience does reflect this as faithful feedback but we are not receptive while engaging victimiser and victim-hood roles.
Without a guiltless - (read truly scientific desire for truth) - appreciation of consciousness, the game of guilt and fear and dissociation persists - no matter what kind of package or scheme it is presented in.
So yes to self-interest but YES to a true understanding and realisation of Self - for to take anything out of its living context is in a sense to kill it and engage in fantasy associations with the dead.
The Golden Rule presupposes loving yourself. If you actually believe you are worthless you will treat others in like manner - again regardless of the masks or presentations used. A self that hates or fears itself is not a true self and not a basis for the ideas of social, economic or political and personal harmony.
Be true to thyself and it follows as sure as night follows day, thou canst be false to no man. But if one invokes ingenuity, one can act in order to get or take by deceit, and use all one gets to bolster and develop one's 'power'. It's a choice.

PS: Sympathy can mean one of the most destructive devices in our capacity, or (the term) can be used for a true resonant recognition of the 'other' as one's self - for which 'compassion' is better suited. To confirm another in their weakness or error, undermines their own innate capacities and masquerades a 'loving kindness' when it is a mask for those qualities or facets in the other that we cannot tolerate in our self. To be powerless or helpless is considered invalidating, yet it is an apparent humiliation that through willingness, honesty and trust, becomes a truly humbling receptivity - and capacity for compassion.
No one feels another's pain or pleasure. These usage shortcuts came to usurp an intimacy each unto our Self. (Used to be called 'our God' and for some still is and might still carry that core meaning). The joining is a core aspect of what power is - but to join in hate or weakness is to strengthen that which undermines our true Spirit - and of course seduces us into giving away our true power for 'external' validations and protections'.
Trying to marry our experience with the truth of our being, intellectually, is impossible, but we can come to a clearer knowing of our being, which then fruits in a less coercively filtered and distorted experience of ourselves in our relations in our world. Its always a choice as to whether to fit Life into our mentality, or cooperate and fit in our relation with Life - with that which is aware through you, sustaining and giving existence. Life is what we make of it. But we do not make Life, because it is infinitely more Intimate than any self-construct in its particular focus - though not absent - or you would not be.

*2

Because we separate from Spirit - from intimate living presence - in order to think alone, we then separate all things from it and make it seem as if a goal at the top of the Pyramid. The filter of our thinking is not much appreciated because we generally are engaging it and suffering its reflections as our reflection. Every belief generates a corresponding reinforcement. The belief and the believer are of course two facets of one thing - neither being you, nor separate for each other. These tools for experience can get the better of us if we use them unwisely.
Our true social expressions arise from our connect-ness within ourselves - hence the divide and rule maxim, for once you can divide someone from their own consciousness, you can substitute or interject coercive will. This deceit is endemic because it is the foundation of a false sense of self that has as much real wealth as the financial shenanigans that are traded in today. It is a lure or illusion whose only power is in its acceptance as valid currency.
So as has been observed - though without much transformation as a result perhaps, is that social transaction is generally a substitute for real relationship; a receptivity of consciousness in some direct communication or interaction. The masculine without the receptive merely projects a show of force or farce, and yet has a protective sense of surviving as if it alone is holding the fort.
The observation of consciousness in action is itself an act or movement of focus and awareness within Consciousness itself - and the primary basis for truth in such observation is trust and self honesty.
It is well known that living with such integrity can cost one's job, and perhaps one's social relations - simply because one's current society is embodying a different sense of value. But sometimes existing relations open to the new level - and in time, new connections and relations occur that are in resonance with the uncovered 'you' in a true self-value.
When we can be ourselves - truly ourselves, with another, we feel loved and naturally loving. It doesn't oblige the other to 'supply' nor obligate us to them - excepting gratitude for sharing the gift of simply being alive - in whatever movements of interest, need and desire move us.
What does it profit to gain the world and lose our Soul? In this sense, economics reveals the truth - but who in their attempt to grasp the ephemeral pauses long enough to notice the hollow emptiness or restless dissonance that drives us to persistent distraction - for when is now to be the true expression that we are?
It only seems a spark to the mentality that redefined darkness as the conditions in which to see. The all pervading light of Consciousness is too close to see - except in reflection. But the veil of disconnected thinking runs a different economical model: divide and rule.
Coercive intent is the unmistakeable sign of a fearful non-acceptance of current reality. Reacting in like kind confirms its shadow perceptions to it. There is a 'social' dimension in refusing to pass the buck of one's discontent onto others, and instead being willing to work to the integration of the situation - as willingness allows.
If we try to force the good it no longer is good and we are operating the disconnected coercive will. But we can hold and demonstrate a true willingness for honesty in our relations - so as not to join in hate or false witness, nor to seek to use others for our own private agendas.
God is in a sense quite indifferent to what you choose to magnify. If you hate, abundant hate is given you. But of course we are both teacher and learner to ourselves - although the guidance that is implicit in our connectedness is absent and unbelievable to the disconnected sense, and so is often an idea in a special Other that saves us - simply because our self-definitions are ruling our experience.
If anything in what I write has any significance to anyone, it is because they recognize something of themselves. This is your Intimacy that I would serve simply because the nature of joy is to shine. There is not a special 'knower' in my person - quite the reverse!
But consider... if we have it upside down and back to front, the reintegration of our consciousness is going to have to accept some radical shifts. As willingness allows. But the persistence in what does not work and is no longer supported generates increasing intolerable conditions, and so the unthinkable has to become thinkable and bargaining for self has to make way for a deep and urgent need for self honesty and the sanity and peace that only comes with it.

*3

In the work of Adam Curtis's documentary "All watched over by machines of love and grace', are some ironic references to Ayn Rand's 'rational decision' to take one of her already married inner circle as a lover, and of that one's rational decision to dilute or adulterate his marriage, and that one's wife to rationally justify altruism.
So I don't use rational as a basis for living - but simply integral - integrity - which is a congruency of being that includes rational or logic. Words and concepts can become gods - and then one rationalizes or logically extends such assertions.
The attempt to rationalize human experience is trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again. What I mean is that there is always already a pre existing harmony or law at work that seems to work against us in our split off mentality. And so we attempt to make it work for us from a split off compartment that is not really split off at all - but we each have extremely compelling experience of being isolated, threatened and in need of protection and control - that we are then biased to seek alone due to the withdrawal and defensive separation from each other - and from the greater dimensions of our conscious existence.
The capacity of humans to assert concept over relationship, is that if growing and creating a model of the self and its world that substitutes for living participance. It seduces as if a frontier of discovery, possession and control for the explorer and it runs on top of Life like a mass hallucination.
The harmony reveals itself in that the very things that 'go wrong' or are dissonant to us - offer custom feedback to the resonance and relevance of our own conscious unfoldment of our being - which is integrally joyful when not invalidating itself. But we don't want to listen - for the most part, but would rather assert our power - perhaps through victim-hood, or in some reaction to something we are sure is 'wrong' so that we feel more alright.
I'm not suggesting humans are wrong in a blameworthy sense but that we have the map the wrong way round - as if to confirm and validate a manual control over life - when it can be used to open the conscious embrace and relationship in which alignment occurs without coercive force. There is every call to use force as an expression of truly caring. retraint and limitation are appropriate results for self harming or violence against others.
But note the personal element of revenge, hatred and self-righteousness are not called on when standing in and expressing from one's integrity. Forms of idea, form of action, can be ascribed meanings by othersto suit their own agenda, but each of us is the living context of our idea and act, and so the way we do it - is embodied energetically in what we do. Not because we 'say so' like the manipulator who tells you how to feel, but because we are essentially unselfconscious about what others - or ourself - thinks about us - because we are wholly embracing and extending our integrity such as unfolds. One can only work with the material in hand.
Of course we evolve complex cooperative strategies of 'getting what we want' and avoiding what we hate, but I feel that these tend to extend the idea of separateness rather than integral-ness.
As you can tell (and no doubt already knew) I can run on and on about this. I trust you can feel, (in what we call between the lines), that I am entering this in a willingness for communication and not to use the energy and sharing of your article to make cheap points - though that very dynamic - of using the creativity of others - or Life Itself - to raise a facade of a self and then assert it as if to then become real, valid, respected and loved as a specialness of some achievement or ascendency over others, is also a theme within the human consciousness that is played over and over in as many ways as can be imagined. But is it simply a simple but 'prodigal' error?

*4
Moral coercion is one aspect of 'self-interest' when self interest embodies or expresses self-concept. Who does not find themselves trying to 'guilt' another into either doing or not doing something that seems to be one's interest. The term 'self' can mean any of a range of identifications - so we can see that we 'make a self' by accepting and rejecting aspects of our thought and experience. But the consciousness in which (and as which) this occurs, pre-exists any rational or irrational act. So we are not identical to our self image or concept and yet tend to act from the distorted and biased perception, that such image filters - somewhat like a lens.

I am with you that self interest is the only game in town, but feel to add that we are entirely and demonstrably capable of doing what we don't want as if we do - or indeed doing what we want and then suffering our own assertion that it is forced upon us - because made me do it!

Turning a blind eye enables fantasies to be lived out as real, but brought into the light of an honesty of awareness, they dissolve to reveal a self-definition that was chosen - and can thus be re-chosen or choose differently.
Then if I own what is and always was my own part, I can redefine the situation from a clearer and more conscious appreciation of what really resonates with me - with the truth of what enlivens and moves me in life.
"Follow your bliss" said Joe Campbell - but this is a stirring within that may or may not conform to concepts of society or even one's own conceptual capacity to define.
I feel that self interest is the capacity to live from a sense of value, whereas conceptual approaches tend to put fulfilment in some future moment - which brings in the carrot and the stick - coercive mentality.

I did manage to keep this one shorter. I obviously an using concepts here - but always toward the recognition of the conceptual as a tool rather than as a box in which to be buried.
 
*5 (reply to the phrase "No one hates his own flesh"). 

It's all a matter of definition. My next door neighbour but one has just experienced her only son's suicide.
Self hatred in one form or another is a perversion of self love. That is to say a love given to that which usurps and denies the loving.

The 'flesh' has in many ways been defined negatively and hated - and a source of inadequacy, shame or ungovernable will.
So what exactly might your phrase mean? There are innumerable examples of infanticide or fratricide - not to mention irritation! I feel that all hatred begins with self and projects out - for what we hate in others we cannot abide in our self - so we are obliged to put it out there until we change our mind about our mind.

No man ever hated his own reflection - excepting he wake from the dream he makes by looking there for himself.
One might SAY they hate it and act out the hate - but yet keep looking there.
The narcissus myth serves well for the love we have of our own thoughts,
which are like a first born son to us - and which we generally are loath
to release - even if they wound us so.

We join in making illusions of hate or judgement - and so it is no surprise that the undoing of such negative self definition uncovers a cooperative will. But it is not the result of the ingenuity of the desire for exercising power over. It's more like when I abandon my attempt to be who I am not, I start to meet and discover others for who they really are - in a living way that does not seek to bind another to my will as if thereby it would make me safer amidst the uncontrollability of a world in flux.

War, Justice, democracy, deception and Life

The underlying principle in the idea of democracy that is worth standing for by living it - is that of engaging communication AS communication - and not as manipulation.
To be governed by twitter would hardly be to yield our allegiance to the wisdom and discernment that rises as a unified perspective from a willingness of truly listening and speaking into a trust of being heard.

Private interests, put before the true interests that include our own, disrupt communication and seek to manipulate. Not only others - but firstly ourselves. We come up with narratives or stories to justify our agenda - and keep it secret, even from ourselves.

"Oh everyone is in it for themselves - its Darwins's divinely revealed law in our genes!" SEE this as simply a narrative of a separate self interest.

Now the fear of loss - and the fear of being exposed as un-valid, heartless, selfish or hateful - is not a thing to be brushed aside in self righteous immunity, for its is much more deeply embedded into our consciousness than most everyone can admit, because it has become a basis of our thinking and our identity.

Regardless that there are those who seek to use psychological insight to more subtly manipulate the minds of others, they can only reinforce a pattern that we ourselves host and promote - and all of their intent is directed to maintain a state of fear and division in the mind - by whatever means and at all costs. For the survival of an apparent capacity to exert power over another depends on it - and this same power seems to be the only defence against a world of threat and ever shifting shadow enemies that rise up against it in the same measure as it has itself set in motion.

A true state of trust and communication cannot be grown from a mind at war with itself. But the war is hidden by projecting it on the world and making what seems to be a unified mind over and AGAINST the part of our mind that we hate, deny, fear and cannot tolerate.

True justice must bring home the thoughts we hold in secret to a true awareness. The presentation of relative innocence is the maintenance of a state of universal guilt.
True innocence of being is not arrived at or determined by our thinking, but is innate to our very being - regardless of that it is covered over with the experience of a wish to give our private thoughts priority over a truth that we do not make or rebrand or own.

There is an innocence of being where our thought cannot attain or penetrate - yet IS uncoverable to a willingness to put down our self-certainties and listen - as an extension of trust. Because we are alive - and not because of anything we or anyone thinks.

The war upon the surface is a distraction device. Everyone plays the game, but becomes blind in playing it. We cannot manipulate or mechanically leverage our Good - because Life is a relationship in which it unfolds through a willingness to share it.

Not to share it so that everything is measured according to one or another set of rules - but to share in purpose what living truly is- beneath the mind of guilt and fear that robs us of our presence extended.

One simply cannot use the mentality of conflict and expect to rule it. It corrupts - in terms of blinding and hollowing out. It replaces Life with a fantasy.
One CAN awaken to an integrity of being that is capable of communicating itself through us and through the situations of our life, appropriate to the need. This is an expression from a unified self in alignment with what is true in all. It has the feeling of peace of being and depth of connection in it - that no hyped up stimulus of righteousness can bring. It is the capacity to move through fear and release investment in guilt, one step at a time. We only live one step at a time.
To take this step from an honesty of being - grows that quality in ourselves and knows itself in its fruits. Whenever we notice we have lost our way and become reactive, THAT is the call to pause from reaction and listen for the movement of our being. For it is present to be felt when our noise of war and chatter of distraction is allowed to fade. Even if for an instant.

Without the felt connection with our being we are but indulging the fantasy of a mind that seems to have gone off on its own - or been abandoned. This may serve a scientific or religious function but it is not our unified human being where heart and mind are as one and not divorced or at war.

Nothing will get the mind to lay down its own thinking - excepting you awake and bring your attention present.

We cannot expect private self interest to be other than is its job description, but we can cease to employ it. Here's to a brighter future BECAUSE more of the Presence of Life is in its unfolding! (And not waiting on conditions to change in order to be the willingness to uncover and share it).

(I wrote this into comments on the Syria Crisis - relating to Assad's interview with The Times and Hague's reaction).

Reflections on the polarisation of (Greek) politics

 The sophisticated and articulate can enact violence  - the imposition of a coercive will upon others - with the pen, with the law and with the very political, economic and financial systems upon which everyone depends. When these are clever enough, they milk the cow without bleeding it to death, but a fearful and manipulative selfishness is the boom and bust mentality, where fear and lust overrule a more balanced strategy.

So those who have been encouraged to accept passive roles in unjust relationships get pissed off and start to express it without sophisticated articulation - and often in blind or fearful reaction - and there is a blame reaction to make them specially wrong rather that symptomatic of a body politic.

The thinking that makes self-specialness is the thinking of the will to power, whatever paths of expression it takes. Divide and rule begins within one's own mind and then proceeds to dance a bloody and tragic farce.

When special love is mutually engaged - whether in alliance or opposition, the true nature of love is denied, forgot and protected from ... by the persistence of a self-specialness.

The process of honestly acknowledging our fears is utterly essential to our becoming free of the mentality that usurps or sabotages our love, our shared living, our joy in life. Blame and its hidden progenitor; self righteousness, utterly deny any process of awareness that would enable a communication from a shared appreciation to replace a mutuality of shadow-fears.

Loving to hate is NOT love, but a morbid fascination. Those who deal in toxic assets will harvest a reward! But it is never too late to begin.
(Of a mind renewed).

Fatal mistakes are the ones that have no remedy of healing. Isn't this the love of hate? (an inverted form of special love).
I cherish the mistakes by which we realize we are utterly mistaken and find ourselves free to live out from Life anew - for that is the basis from which we do not re-enact the past over and over and yet over again...

Thanks for your attention

Lovelessness and pornography

Lovelessness - asserts it freedoms to abuse, exploit and worship fantasies upon life, upon others upon ones own body - as a substitute for real relationship - which it knows nothing of - and fears. It knows not an honouring, trust-growing, undefended, and loving relationship and lives out a distorted fantasy life in secret.


Sexual loving is a beautiful language of being. Our bodies are wonderful communicators of loving presence - as we allow ourselves to let go of strategic self interest - getting something or getting away from something - and discover ourselves caring, playing, and holding each other. Oneness is not a climax - it is the very ground of our being - shared. There is so much more to life than what we think we know - and that is experienced a wonder, beauty and a glorious quality of being - of a communioned life.


Lovelessness is a disconnected sense of self-lack in isolation that restlessly seeks stimulating distraction in order to feel alive - and thus deadens itself and calls it 'satisfaction'. It then ups the stakes in order to get a hit or becomes addicted to reenacting empty rituals. Fantasy life that fucks up the capacity to look beyond outer forms and discover the truly wondrous nature of love - because a society that has become fearful has turned its back on love and instead seeks selfishly to grasp at whatever offers makes its pain subside - and hates to open to a light of a shared awareness. It hates to love - and loves to hate.


By being available outside a cultural context of relationship, pornography becomes culturally acceptable currency. Women have their labia cut to look like the girls in the porn. College kids emulating the porn scenarios that are purveyed as if women are dirty slut bitches and fit only to fist, fuck and cum all over as if that were a gift!


When does playing in - and exploring boundaries become the deception and abduction or coercion of sex slaves? Is it when we care more about maintaining our own fantasies than letting the truth of another - or of our self - interfere?


I am writing here because there is a much larger conversation about our sexuality, than socially induced consumerism, that extends a 'culture' of exploitation, manipulation, and usury - and calls it freedom. It is not talked openly - but referred to in comic tones - that let a sort of slapstick, gloss over and sanitize it as a 'bit o'fun'.


Now if a demeaning and malicious lie about you is propagated as if it were truth - you would not subscribe to it - nor would you nurture it - nor would you defend its right to be equal to the truth. Instead you would subscribe to that which promotes appreciation of truth, and invest your care and value in it. You might struggle long to come to your senses though as the cultural pressures suggest that its ok to fuck yourself up - or indeed anyone else - because we are free of outdated and phoney moral sensibilities - and "We are all individuals".


Distractions that serve to cover the dissonance of human life do not really give freedom - they bring hollow emptiness and addiction. However, with those whose full intent is to wilfully assert themselves as they are not - and declare themselves self-content - it is vain to argue. Life is a teaching - learning adventure - and we are free to learn through pain as well as joy. Forgiveness is a real release from guilt when one is willing to accept and share it. No one is damned but by their own refusal.


What we demonstrate in our lives - is the culture that we share - particularly to those who we welcome into the world and pass on the ways we know. All are free to learn according to their own heart's guidance - no matter what experiences we have - we ultimately choose the meaning it has for us.


But the Meaning that is uncovered that truly serves us all is not one of dressing up in the dark so as to play out our own psychodrama - but of a genuine kindness, care and attention.


I see the raising of the curtains of a false privacy as the disclosure to ourselves of ourselves - and this IS a real opportunity. Because amidst our self spun script of a life we act out as if it were real - and discover perhaps a lot later - that we chose against our own heart's desire.


There may be a lot of money in selling porn - but there is only an undermining of commonwealth. Is there a place for it? Of course there is - but if it is not kept in its place it usurps ... the capacity of Soul to feel and know life directly.


Thanks for your attention

The value of nothing

If anyone desires sanity - and the peace that comes only from honesty - then they will have to reevaluate much more than financial and economic systems.
Everything that we presume real is brought into question - not in an irrational reaction or hysteria - but simply in a willingness to be honest.

Honesty allows the undoing of deception. Our so called human nature is like a program running that we pretend is in the other, in the banker, in the scoundrel. The qualities that we hate in ourselves are difficult to recognise and accept as within our mind. I don't say this to incite more of the blame mentality - but simply to look within and see - rather than to presume our own thoughts to be true and perceive only as these thoughts allow.

The curious thing that you would not expect - is that when you truly see the mechanism of a split mind 'working' as if against itself and yet dramatising a multiplicity of fantasy roles that provide a sense of oppositional existence and identity - you no longer identify it as your self.

You can say we all share in a deception that goes much deeper than hardly anyone will look - because we equate it with our life - our self - our protection and survival. But deception is destructive in that it uses all that is good, beautiful and true - to serve private ends.

The 'ego' or deceptive mind - is an immaculate defence system that thrives on being opposed - for that is its very nature: an oppositional will in a game of winners and losers.

We are living in a time of disintegration - where some of the subtler nature of our mind's activity is exposed and reflected in Our Face.

Thinking does not itself have a basis upon which to determine or ascertain either the nature of the problem - nor its solution. But true discernment and inspiration can use thought to communicate.

Nash was mistaken in assuming that a balance of our own and everybody else's interests leads to the best outcome - because his thoughts remained the property, and under the direction, of a self deception - a divorce of heart and mind - where mental derivatives substitute for true meaning.

Whatever we use as a derived meaning - becomes to its users a substitute for direct relationship with meaning itself - even though it may be full of the promise of what it represents and may initially be linked to real value.

What then is the meaning, the value, the purpose or function - of life?
As a lad I thought that if the answer were found it would make news.

Better to turn the world on its head that the truth be known.
There is no coin or currency of symbol or concept in this world that has not been degraded or adulterated by misuse. But let me say - if you are still here - that the meaning of life is already yours - but discarded. You are already all that life is - yet act out from a profound and desperate conviction that you are somehow life-orphaned - alien to love and must needs hide fear and shame with presentations of self-made identity. An identity born of confusion, struggle and loss.

We never were kicked out of eden - 'tis a will of our own thought asserted that kicks out love's direction.

Asking the blind to lead the blind results in falling in the ditch together. To regain an integrated wholeness or integrity of identity and experience, be willing to act out of the true heart - in which no self is asserted at the expense of another. How can you tell? The answer is proportionate to how honest you are willing to be with yourself.

This much I know - that we do not measure value with the world - but in the freedom and capacity to be unwithheld. For the withdrawal of value from relationship results in loss of the condition in which value is known and shared.

When the map blinds one from the actual terrain and binds one unto yet more devious mapping - put it down. Take a rest - let a true perspective rise in stillness.

Environmental Consciousness

Current mentalities on the environment are subtly at the source of the problem. Of course one can focus on one facet of a multidimensional issue and identify a fearful or adverse outcome or enemy and righteously align ourselves against it - but see how dumb so much of this becomes and how easily it is reduced to 'good' and 'evil' polarities not based on reality but on currently prevailing perceptions.
There is a fundamental waking up that is called for - and the nature of this waking is to the nature and politics of our own mind-set.

To be human has been defined and asserted as a private mentality in an independent organism that can then possess and exploit its own life and its own world.Writ small, this was largely held in check so as not to damage or undermine too widely - but now it is writ large in the corporate and consumer mentality that has no real relationship - no basis for love or joy - beyond the short term selfish 'getting' at long term expense - and at the expense of others - of our and other cultures - of our natural world in companionship and of our natural world as life support system.

The desire to see the deceiver/evildoer external to our own mind is a scapegoat mechanism that has to be relinquished if we are to be honest.

Only by recognizing the pattern within our own mind can we allow a change of heart to change our mind. Such change is freely and willingly embraced for though fear may initiate a sense of alarm - it need not blind us such that we merely react mechanically in selfish ignorance again - and yet again.
The resources that are available to a shared will - and a shared responsibility that grows from the ground up - are inconceivable to the mentality of separate and competing interests.
But without the awakening of a true responsibility for our use of our own minds - we cannot but continue to be deceived, manipulated and mechanically driven into the further density of a self destroying and loveless delusion.

Good Housekeeping in a Good Home, marries the practical expression of loving relationships.

Perhaps it starts with ceasing to deny or hide from the desecration of the home we share - both at mind level and world level - and sweeping out the crap that actively undermines trust and communication.

Fear is always used to distract and manipulate attention. But wisdom is resting in the heart and feeling an issue from a larger perspective than what fear would offer as your 'protector'.

Mitigating symptoms may be a part of a process - but intelligence needs to awaken to the real causes. They do not require science or intellectual prowess - but simple and profound honesty - in a context of what has been called humility.

For all the blight that humankind seem to bring to earth it is well to remember that we can also be the very beholding of the glory of the living universe. We can feel and know true inspiration and be moved to share and live on an awakened basis - despite the histories of habits that have yet to be replaced with a more heartfelt and conscious valuing of life.

The good news is that - though we can sell our soul and thus lose appreciation of the depth and interrelatedness of all things - it remains held for us on trust - until we change our mind and turnabout.

There is much talk about cooperating with nature rather than fighting it. Learning from it rather than enslaving it. This is a simple matter to anyone who isn't blinded by their own thinking.

Mind control isn't really the work of the media, governments or corporations - but is an estrangement from our own nature that sets images and meanings and definitions of self and reality - above the actual living relationship that is always present - where awareness rises to meet the world as it truly is, rather than as we would have it be.

If inspiration and insight and guidance were truly desired - they would be simply available - and effective.

What do we really want?

This question isn't addressed to an intellectual level but to our heart. This is the most fundamental act of which we are capable; to listen within and discover the desire that is truly moving in our heart. Until we are willing to truly reevaluate everything from the ground up - we run on and within old and false desires that are not sane, but are false promise based on false premise.
Be creative in your relationships with everything. Be present in your own life. Don't let fear blind you  - no matter how subtly it presents itself as you.
When Spring comes the seeds that lived invisible in the dark come forth. But the thawing of the heart is the season of your own willingness.