A Bun Dance #1

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Aidan

Been working away from home for a couple weeks, travelling a lot and not therefore posting on a regular basis. But I have been listening in the car to some of these ‘self transformation’ calls with inspirational teachers that you get via websites like manifesteverythingnow.com and youwealthrevolution.com. Sign up at your peril, your email inbox will be flooded. Why do I find myself there? Obviously because I’m led there, partly in truth because I’m a sucker for their promises of wealth and abundance… which just don’t seem to be working. Can’t understand why. I’m a pure, perfect, powerful being, right? I am Magnificent Me, right? I am everything and everything is me, so gold, silver, diamonds and all manner of abundance should be flowing right in, through and out of me again. Right, Mr Taxman?

Doh… somehow, not. Which in itself is a negative thought. Which right there is a crime against the law of positivity, the Law of Attraction even – cardinal sin of the 21st century, to flout the LoA – which only serves to ensure that whatever I don’t want (lack) will continue to be my fate. Which seems somehow unfair really, when I’m working so hard to get all my vibrations and energies and whatnots in alignment with the Universe.

I jest, of course. No disrespect to these many powerful and eloquent teachers, some of whom, let’s say, I find easier to follow than others. Rikka Zimmerman, bless her heart, left me more than a little bemused (‘I mean, when you judge, do you feel like you?’ Er… yes?). That is one high lady, for damn sure, but I couldn’t remotely hook on to her message. She seems to be saying, as above, that I am everything and everything is me. Which I guess you have to be very high indeed to feel as Truth, because it makes no sense to me at all. I can sort of get why people come to conclude that God is everywhere and in everything, because of the simple connection between Pran, Life Force, Ch’i – the physical force of the universe, call it Love if you like – and the spiritual energy that is the Soul. But to understand my Self as but an ingredient of the Cosmic Soup – if that’s the correct interpretation Rikka, sorry if I’ve missed the point – really doesn’t play with me. Or am I the whole cosmic soup, and is therefore the whole cosmic soup also everybody else and everything else on earth and in heaven, from neutrinos and microbes to rivers of mud to the newly fallen dew to large industrial meat processing installations (for example)? Or are we sort of like meatballs in said Cosmic Soup, with an individual identity yet nevertheless part of the whole recipe? Because surely we have to find a way of understanding our Selves as individual entities? Otherwise how would we have individual karma? If Abundance is me, why aren’t I feeling it? What am I doing wrong or not doing right? Where am I failing? Never mind abundance, this is more like A Bun Dance, or perhaps a Bagel Breakdown. A Pastry Pirouette, perhaps. Nonsense, in other words. And very counter productive.

But I did get a bit of a breakthrough listening to Derek Rydall – who also, of course, it has to be said, is offering his self transformation teaching package via youwealthevolution.com, usually worth $997, for a knockdown deal of only $97. But he makes more sense than I have heard in along while, and what’s more, he speaks with a real understanding of the dramatic power of language, which I respond to every time. His Law is the Law of Emergence. More on that – and much else around this whole abundance thing – to come.

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Shopping in the Spiritual Supermarket #3

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Aidan

We’re talking about the manifold and varied routes, methods and techniques to ‘manifesting’ –ie, turning your desires into reality – that go with spiritual teaching packages you can find all over the web. The promises are like Yee Shun-Jian’s, the ‘Chief Happiness Officer’ at richgrad.com, who we meet down below in  our first instalment of Shopping in the spiritual supermarket: <<Enable you to overcome fear, build your self-confidence and develop an abundance mind-set. Inspire you to achieve your ideal weight and body image, attract the right life partner & find inner peace, clarity and your life purpose. Help you to easily activate the law of attraction so as to bring everything you’ve always wanted into your life!>>. Solve all your problems in one hit, in other words.

There’s ‘manifesteverythingnow.com’ (‘discover the secrets of effortless manifestation’), on which I have discovered and listened to some really insightful people, or  ‘wealthforwomensummit.com‘, where I met Leela Francis and her idea of the four ‘modes’ of wealth – Spiritual, Emotional, Sensual, Physical, including money –  which seems a very balanced and sensible insight. But we’re still trying to make physical things happen through some sort of spiritual practice, and I’m uneasy about this. If ‘manifesting’ doesn’t work as you’ve been led to believe it should, what are you left with? The danger of being worse off than if you’d never started, is what.

I like the Law of Attraction, I really do. Just look at simple ideas that come up through any religious tradition – do as you would be done by, as you sow so shall you reap etc etc – which express it, in some form or other. But it ain’t a simple matter of thinking about stuff and it will appear, folks. Sorry, but no. Robert Anthony is pretty much on the button when he talks about ‘alignment’. It’s a matter of responding to the universal vibration (sorry for the hippy mumbo jumbo, but it does actually mean something) and experiencing how you as a spiritual/physical organism fit into the macro picture. You are Nature with self awareness, in the midst of beautiful/ugly, kind/cruel, entirely un-self-aware, totally dispassionate, Nature. Develop that sense of your Self – crucially, your True Self as a specific, unique, pinpoint of light that is consciousness, that is silent, profound, Power and Peace – refer to it daily, in or out of your Magic Minute – and everything else slots into place. Don’t court disappointment, screwing yourself up trying to make that magical cheque appear. If you’re Soul Conscious, at least you’ll have the power to conquer worry and anxiety. Then you can get on with doing what you have to do to fix your wealth.

Here’s a knobbly one: how do you think the Law of Attraction and ‘manifesting’ fit together with the Law of Karma? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right? It means that sooner or later, over many lives perhaps, you get what you give. Stuff doesn’t just appear in your life without some sort of trail, some meaning, resonance, or implication – usually unfathomable. What the Law of Karma doesn’t mean is that you give up and sit in a cave because there’s no point in acting, since everything is pre-ordained. It means you work for what you want – with every ounce of positive mental attitude you can muster – until what you want begins to come to you. And a whole lot of other things besides, probably. Fix the mind and spirit issues first. That will give you a handle on the wealth ones.

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Shopping in the spiritual supermarket #2

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Aidan

As I said yesterday, there’s a host of miraculous Mind-Body-Spirit techniques and solutions on offer out there, routes to increased power, peace of mind, freedom from disorder and anxiety, and even – and especially – to quantum increases in wealth. Money, coming through your door, apparently just because you called it.

It’s good that people are looking for inward ways to make sense of their outward lives. Can’t be a bad thing that more and more people are turning their attention towards a life with at least an element of spirituality. Two things worry me about this spiritual supermarket, though.

1)   The suggestion that these breakthroughs in self transformation, in your spiritual and physical life, happen with ease and without effort.

2)   The inclusion of physical wealth – or for the moment, given that some make a distinction between wealth and money, let’s just say money – in the list of benefits accruing to those who sign up for these teaching packages and practices.

1 I finished yesterday with: ‘Why should we expect reward without effort here, when we don’t anywhere else?’ – purposely because I wanted to examine this idea more closely. With the greatest of love and respect to my American friends and soulmates, it’s a common theme in modern American culture to aim for the reward without the labour. Ads are always telling you that what you’re buying will deliver whatever it is you want without you having to work for it. Weight loss programmes (programs?) are specially good at this. My unease about this is simple; you don’t get a damn thing without somehow working for it. I address this in the Magic Minute idea of Eco-Mentalism, which is designed to get you started on a meditative, spiritual practice because it is so easy and takes so little time. But the truth is, the more time and effort you spend on growing your own Self awareness, the more it grows. Your Magic Minute, likewise, will grow into two, ten, or even 15. Which is a good chunk of meditation time to put into your every day.

2 The money thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a £10,000 cheque come through my door for no apparent reason. Or even £100,000. Yes please. I also do genuinely think that one’s attitude to money helps or hinders one’s ability to get it, and for the idea of creating a new relationship with money I am grateful to Morgana Rae. But the really tricky thing about associating the appearance of physical abundance, in the form of money, with spiritual practices such as tapping, opening the chakras or other more straightforward meditations is: what happens to your state of mind when that cheque doesn’t flop on to your doormat? Keep working away at it but your circumstances don’t change? Anxieties still there? H’mm. You must be a failure then. Add disappointment and a reduction in your sense of self worth to your struggle to elevate your consciousness.  No help. You must be doing something wrong. See what I mean? Stop now. More tomorrow.

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Shopping in the spiritual supermarket #1

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Aidan

Yee Shun-Jian, Founder & Chief Happiness Officer at RichGrad.com and 101PowerfulAffirmations.com, makes an appearance today. <<Enable you to overcome fear, build your self-confidence and develop an abundance mind-set. Inspire you to achieve your ideal weight and body image, attract the right life partner & find inner peace, clarity and your life purpose. Help you to easily activate the law of attraction so as to bring everything you’ve always wanted into your life!>> Sounds like a good deal, right? He was introduced (in an e-distance sort of way, I think he’s based in Singapore) to me by Dr Robert Anthony, who I mentioned yesterday, and whose individual take on the Law of Attraction has a healthy tinge of realism about it, or even just ordinary common sense. I don’t know Shun–Jian personally of course, nor Dr Anthony, but for whatever reason just at the moment I’m doing a lot of browsing in the spiritual supermarket and these guys popped up on my spiritual travels yesterday.

Is that what they are? Sounds like a high minded search for truth. Mostly it’s just nosing round the web and being drawn towards the multiple and manifold offerings there are out there to change your life – and particularly, create untold wealth – without any effort whatsoever. I’m as much a sucker for this kind of thing as the next man or woman I guess – certainly the idea of being able to create money just by thinking about it is worth a try, right? I’m downloading free e-books here and there, I’m listening to these e-calls from a range of enlightened beings that you connect to through Darius M. Barazandeh’s youwealthrevolution.com, or manifesteverythingnow.com, or loads of other similar sites. (Manifest everything? Is that supposed to mean you can really make all your desires appear before you, as if by magic? What about when it’s my best friend’s wife I happen to desire?) The Ortners, Kim Serafini, Debra Poneman, Rikka Zimmerman, Leela Francis, to name only a handful – all wise people with a lot of good stuff to say. It always seems to boil down to right thinking, the right mental attitude, but I haven’t yet found much about how to drag yourself up by your own mental and spritual bootstraps if  you’re stuck in the wrong mental attitude. Haven’t listened to all the ones in my collection yet – not sure which one to go for next. Which is part of the issue (let’s not call it problem, that’s a negative thought). Is this too much?

There’s a huge industry out there based on the initial freebie – the e-call, the e-book – that then leads you to sign up for a package of DVDs and workbooks, usually offered at the one-time only knockdown price of $197, a massive discount from the (entirely notional) total value of $1275 or whatever it happens to be. And I’m exercised about all this. As I say above, I’m kind of a sucker for it, though I stop short of shelling out $197. Plus it must be the case for a lot of people, and it certainly is for me by now (and that’s only after a few weeks), that I’m getting into what these people call ‘overwhelm’ because there’s too much choice, too many directions. We are so many seekers in need, wandering the aisles of the spiritual supermarket, not really knowing what we’re looking for, trying different things; there’s even software for it (left). Seeking ways to change our minds, change our lives, so many products are on offer, we try this, we try that, the risk of missing the one which is right for me or you is high. And you’ve just dropped another $200.

For me this is a personal quest, but it’s also by way of being research, because I know the schtick I’m selling and I’m happy with it. What I won’t be selling is a guarantee that balancing the Ecology of the Soul will bring you untold wealth (or your money back). What it will bring you is true Self awareness, with which come (as part of the package) true Peace and true Power. And you have to work for it, even if it’s just for a minute a day. Why should we expect reward without effort here, when we don’t anywhere else?

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Magic Minute #7; Body conscious OK, body consciousness not OK

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Aidan

I’m spending time in the learner pool it seems, gathering ideas, wisdom, energy, reading and listening to Morgana Rae on wealth health, Robert Anthony on the Law of Attraction, Carol Tuttle on the Chakras and the estimable Ortners on Tapping. A veritable shopping basket full of teachings for the spiritual seeker, ready to try almost anything. My critical faculty (I’m trained and educated to be critical in the sense of enquiry, not negative) is much exercised because most people I’m close to – and indeed vestigial parts of my cynical self – would like to dismiss all this as nothing but mumbo jumbo. But I know it ain’t. I know it means a great deal to a very great number of people, all of whom are prepared to pay for yet another arrow in their personal growth quiver. Whether it works or not doesn’t seem to matter that much. The money is paid, the DVD or book is on your shelves, see what you make of it.

A theme I’m seeing in these and other teachings, some more responsible and reliable, others less so, is the part the body plays in consciousness.  ‘Your body is more powerful than you can imagine… filled with life, energy, and a compelling ability for self-healing,’ says Nick Ortner. Which is all good; we know about the chakras, about Pran or Ch’i or whatever we are calling the Universal Life Force this week. But right here, as in other places on this blog, you will find the cautionary distinction between the strictly spiritual energy of the non-physical Soul, and the subtle physical energy of Pran, Ch’i, the Meridians. The task is to refine our understanding of how the body works, not only on the mind but on the Soul. Not ‘Your Soul’ or ‘My Soul’; Soul is True You, True Me.

Body conscious, in the sense of conscious of the subtle energy and power running through the physical body, is thus OK. We have to deal with – and benefit from –  the way mind, body and spirit interact on each other. Body consciousness, in the sense of my consciousness of my Self as a physical body, is not OK and not true. Big mistake. For today’s Magic Minute, meditate your sense of Self into the metaphysical, that infinitesimal point of light in the forehead, where, guess what, ancient wisdom puts the Third Eye. That’s where it all begins to fall into place.

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Magic Minute #6: Empty, full, fulfilled, fill-fulled

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Aidan

The Magic Minute; the time to refresh, restore, revive; the tiny amount of time you give yourself to float off on the very biggest things in Life, the Universe and Everything – until you go about your daily business, get on the wheel again. A precious moment, during which you can be filled with glow. Power seed thoughts leading to insight, leading to experience, leading to changed action.

But it’s been occurring to me lately – and this is directly from my own recent experience – that we can’t be filled with glow, with bliss, with abundance, with contentment, peace and power unless we make room for them first. This may not be true in all cases. Sometimes, and again I know this from experience, you’re lucky enough to be able to take on board an infinite supply of glow – the warmth, light and bliss that is your natural state of being – without having to flush out the crap. The crap just sort of flows out because the beauty is flowing in and pushing it out. The two can’t coexist; not when you’re 100% full, anyway.

But we’re almost never 100% of anything, us imperfect humans. if you’re beset by unruly thought patterns, a set of anxieties or attitudes that you’re finding it difficult to shake – over,  for example, money or work or family or health – it pays to focus on emptying that out first, starting the process of ‘voiding’ so you can draw in the glow. Release, let go, give up, offer up; many ways to express and experience it. The only thing you mustn’t do is force it, because that just makes it stronger and deeper rooted. Let it go. Let it out. Freedom can be found in fullness, fulfilment, fill-fullment; it can also be found in emptiness. Is that where you need to go first?

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Magic Minute #5: Nature is cruel love

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Aidan

So we’re looking at the two sorts of energy, both of which, when all the bits and bobs, surface accoutrements, distractions and detours, are stripped away, are best understood as Love, because they are life, and if life isn’t love then there is no life (bit clumsy, but you see what I mean). The force which is Nature, flowing through everything, embodied or embedded or expressed or expelled, is just that; force. The wind, the sea, the force that makes plants and trees grow from seeds, that turns caterpillars into butterflies, that makes an engine run when you explode fuel inside it. Nature is as it is, no messing, no thinking, no pondering, no meditating. No sense of right or wrong, good or bad, morals or ethics. Unutterably beautiful, magnificent, red in tooth and claw, cruel and insensitive. Tidal waves, predators, beauty, ugliness, cruelty, kindness; it’s all part of it.

The force which is Soul (remembering each individual Soul is unique) is something else entirely. Conscious and ‘conscient’ energy, consciousness aware of itself, and able to enquire into and explore the nature of itself. It has tools to do this, superstructures which are there to mediate its relationship with the daily physical world; the mind, the intellect, the emotions, the senses. The trick, as anyone who meditates knows, is that to turn on our true sense of Self, get to the place of peace, power and love that engulfs us in the Bliss of Being, you have to turn those superstructures off. Teach yourself to let go. You can’t force your thoughts to stop; that is in itself a thought. Let it come, let it go, glimpse the clear water beneath, relax and gently bring yourself back to gazing into the still pool. You are the pool. Pure essence. Pure you. Pure Love. But this time, love with conscience. Con-science, self knowing. Nothing cruel about this love.

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Magic Minute #4: Energy is Love

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Aidan

Well, not all energy of course. The electricity companies would be fascinated to hear they are generating and trading love. In a way they are, because there is a way in which we can see all and every damn thing in the whole entire universe, from minuscule to gigantic, as Love – including electricity. Don’t ask me about weapons and disease, I’m not (yet!) enough of an enlightened being to give the smart answer.

I’m pointing at the essence, the energy that flows in and through everything, call it life force, call it Pran, call it Ch’i. It’s natural force, the force of nature, the power that pushes the root and stem out of the seed so they reach downwards to collect energy and upwards to express it. Express in two senses; the sense of communicate it, and the sense of channel it out, let it flow.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the lines of demarcation between physical and spiritual energy. Both are love, because in their purest form they are ‘being-ness’, the essence of life with all the surface stuff stripped away. If love wasn’t the essence, then we wouldn’t seek love. May sound twisted, but everything we do is in search of love. Money? Power? Physical expressions of the energy that is love. Love describes what we are, and what that flower is, even that tin can or tractor tyre. Matter is physical energy (ask Einstein), soul is spiritual energy, and when we are clicked in to the flow of either or both, we experience bliss, peace and power, which we know (in an ‘unknowing’ way) are our true nature. Which is Love. Where Nature itself fits in to all this comes next.

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Magic Minute #3: Power Seeds

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Aidan

Power Seeds are mental devices, thought triggers to create, enhance or encourage Soul Consciousness, and hence change your actions. They can be aimed at specific behaviours or specific problems, or they can be random insights, even word games, which lead the Mind to blow a fuse and cease its unruly chatter, allowing you to look through an open door in your consciousness and rub up against consciousness itself. There’s a whole list of them in the Ecology of the Soul’s vault, more coming daily. Some are practical and sensible, some off the wall. For example; ‘Walk like a Cat’. Even if you don’t like animals, you can see a cat’s silent, acute awareness in every step. It is quivering with sensuous sensitivity. Every movement is precise, accurate, but fluid and subtle at the same time. It has the appearance of pre-meditated, carefully thought out action, but as we know it is actually entirely instinctive and natural. Plant the idea in your mind; ponder it, consider it, give it 60 seconds. Then – and this is the point – let it ‘repeat’, like sardines or garlic. Let it rise to the surface of your mind through the day. Remind yourself, as you walk to the photocopier: ‘Walk like a cat to the photocopier.’ Your colleagues might think you look a little weird, but you know you are practising walking lightly on the earth, all your antennae (or whiskers, if you prefer) aquiver. Tomorrow, you can walk like a giraffe. What? Think about it.

 

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Magic Minute #2: Insight

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Aidan

Almost every word in the English language – or any language for that matter – can be a trigger for a meditation. Thinking about the process by which we can get people to start exploring what’s going on inside their minds, we immediately find ourselves in the realm of words like ‘vision’, ‘perception’, ‘experience’, etcetera etcetera. Almost all of which mean or have relationship with the idea of sight, of being able to see. As does ‘insight’, although those two unassuming letters at the beginning, like a small door that opens into a very big space, gives the word ‘sight’ a whole nother dimension. Insight is seeing inside, ie seeing the truth under the surface. Not to suggest that the surface is not the Truth; just to suggest that the surface is obviously not the whole Truth, so you better look inside – if you want the Truth, that is, which can be powerful and therefore unsettling.  And guess what, there’s only one thing you can reliably and safely look inside to gain insight; your Self. Next step: this is not about the workings of your Mind, apart from insights into what happens when you park it. More to come. Enjoy.

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Magic Minute #1

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Aidan

OK, everything in this category will take you a minute or so to read, maybe 67 seconds or even 73, but not much longer than that. The point being that the Ecology of the Soul proposes a minute’s meditation, simply because getting into the habit, even the idea, of meditation,  usually fails on the time issue. I don’t have time, we don’t have time, no one has time to do what they need to do (which begs an entirely nother question). The ‘Magic Minute’ is the space in time you allot yourself, often without having to make a special slot for it. You can give yourself a minute while you’re waiting for a bus, even while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil (did you only put in one cup’s worth of water?). You can even get up a minute earlier, which can’t be that hard. Just make this 60 seconds as precious and valuable as you can, and maintain complete concentration on one thought, one experience, one idea, which leads you towards Self knowledge and Self realization. (Are they the same thing? Maybe not.) Plant Power Seeds, the seeds of powerful, peaceful thoughts that will grow in your Mind, take root, flourish, and change your behaviour. If that’s what you want. And who doesn’t? If not your behaviour, then your state of mind. Oops. Minute’s up.

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The Wisdom of Home

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Aidan

This is a theme that pops up in the book right at the beginning. Always useful to look at the origins of words and how their meanings truly resonate. Eco, or in the Greek (where are the Greek characters?)οἶκος, means ‘house’ or ‘home’. Logos means ‘word’, ‘wisdom’, ‘study’ or ‘understanding’. ‘House’ or ‘home’ also means ‘body’. I’m a Soul and I live in my Body, right? Which brings us to the current theme; a balanced ecology of the Soul is actually a balanced ecology of the whole being – body, Soul, mind. Emotions and senses? H’mm. Come back to you on that one. They’re definitely in the Mind department. What is crystal clear, though, is that our connection to Home – to Earth – works alongside and in harmony with our connection to Om – the spiritual resonance of pure essence, life itself. Spiritual balance and understanding, hand in hand with physical balance and understanding. Now that looks like Ecology to me, baby.

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The Whole Soul

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Aidan

Been doing a lot of reading and working on my Own Stuff recently, hence no posts for a while. Input rather than output. Feeding the soul. Plus dealing with matters of ordinary everyday physical life, specifically money. Amazing how much teaching there is out there in what we may call the ‘Mind-Body-Spirit’ market that is actually about money. Some inspiring people writing and speaking on or around this, notably Morgana Rae on Alchemy and Carol Tuttle on the Chakras. Even been tapping with Nick and Jessica Ortner. God knows We all need the cash, But I still get the worries about this idea that you can just make money happen without effort. Love of money is the root of all evil, right? Er… maybe not. Not if you go with Morgana anyway, who talks about making  money love you, an idea I find entirely attractive.

The inclusion of this physical dimension in the spiritual project brings me to thinking about wholeness, the Whole Soul. We see wholeness innately desirable; it comes with the idea of integrity, completeness, the way things should be. Balancing the Ecology of the Soul comes not with ignoring the physical, but engaging with it for all it’s worth. The Chakras are a perfect route through this since they give such a clear experience of the relationship between spiritual and physical energy. Balancing the Whole Soul means balancing out your powers: reading from the top (unlike traditional Chakra wisdom which flows up from the bottom, or the ‘root’); Connection, Focus, Communication, Love, Endurance, Creativity, Nature. The job is to unveil them, nurture and enhance them, balance them. And a lovely job it is too, as long as you can find a quiet minute at the very least to pay some attention to your Self.

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The Blackboard Blog #6: Is desire undesirable?

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Aidan

Desire is undesirable, it says here…

More than one image this morning, the Blackboard being a space where there is more than one idea to follow. Hope you don’t mind the sort of random household feel, deep spiritual Power Seeds (yeah, right) mixed in with notes about scourers and frozen sweetcorn. We can go back to some of the other blackboard images in the blog and look at different routes to follow to get to Power Seeds for your Magic Minute. In case you haven’t come across those ideas before, they’re elsewhere on the blog, and a key part of the practice that the book talks about (The Ecology of the Soul: Unlock Your Seven Powers of  Spiritual Success) – get your downloads here. Plant a powerful thought – a Power Seed – for you to meditate on for a mere 60 seconds – your Magic Minute – which you can then apply to action, to change your behaviour. Sounds easier than it actually is, but there is anyway no question that if you want to change your behaviour (you do, don’t you?), it has to start with the consciousness that drives your thinking. Thoughts create action, but what creates thoughts?

Careful not to get sidetracked here. The ‘today I have been thinking about’ part (well, actually not today, but yesterday. Today it’s too early in the morning to have been thinking about anything) on today’s blackboard – which as you can see also contains peace, fear, habit and habitat, silence and solitude – is Desire. Whether it’s undesirable or not. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Buddha taught that desire is at the root of all our problems, didn’t he? All suffering? Isn’t that one of the Four Noble Truths? Let’s have a quote from Wikipedia: <<The first noble truth is the truth of dukkha. The Pali term dukkha (Sanskrit: duhkha) is typically translated as “suffering”, but the term dukkha has a much broader meaning than the typical use of the word “suffering”. Dukkha suggests a basic unsatisfactoriness pervading all forms of life, due to the fact that all forms of life are impermanent and constantly changing. Dukkha indicates a lack of satisfaction, a sense that things never measure up to our expectations or standards.>> And, for the Second Noble truth: <<The second noble truth is the truth of the origin of dukkha. Within the context of the four noble truths, the origin (Pali: samudaya) of dukkha is commonly explained as craving (Pali: tanha) conditioned by ignorance (Pali: avijja). This craving runs on three channels:

  • Craving for sense-pleasures (kama-tanha): this is craving for sense objects which provide pleasant feeling, or craving for sensory pleasures.
  • Craving to be (bhava-tanha): this is craving to be something, to unite with an experience. This includes craving to be solid and ongoing, to be a being that has a past and a future, and craving to prevail and dominate over others.
  • Craving not to be (vibhava-tanha): this is craving to not experience the world, and to be nothing; a wish to be separated from painful feelings.>>

Which leads us to this image, a photograph I took of a page of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, a little book that has helped millions – or billions, if we are to believe Rhonda – but which I’m not so damn sure about.

‘Feeling is desire and desire love’. Really?

She’s quoting Charles Haanel, the early 20th century New Thought author and originator of the ‘Master Key System’. Her (and his, and many others’)  thing is the Law of Attraction, which as far as I understand it – and I must say, I believe there are more responsible authors writing about it – says that you get whatever you think about. The power of your thoughts brings your desires to you. Of course, every spiritual and ethical tradition has the idea of ‘as you sow so shall you reap’, ‘do as you would be done by’, the sense that you are responsible for your own actions and you will experience the results of those actions. It’s positive thinking. It’s even a version of the Law of Karma, that I happen to hold as an absolute truth, that simply says: ‘For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’ (sound familiar to physicists?). Given that thought creates action, it is kind of a logical step to make the claim that whatever you think will come to you. And that also has to be true, in a way. But a far more subtle and complex way, I would argue, than just ‘think about a parking space and it will magically appear’.

Haven’t really cracked this desire thing, have we? The philosphers’ problem with it is that to embark on a path of spiritual seeking, to wish and work for enlightenment – which to us lowly beings just means exploring our inner space and looking for a sense of our True Self, to drive our actions towards a desirable outcome, ie, our own and the world’s salvation – is also desire. Oops. Yep, it is. But you know what? I don’t think it really matters. If you desire your brother’s wife or the million quid cash inside that security truck, you’ll have trouble. If you desire to re-connect yourself to Your Self, the pure pinpoint of conscient, metaphysical energy that is the True You, I’d say you were on to a Good Thing. Don’t confuse it with Buddha’s idea of craving to be nothing: <<Craving not to be (vibhava-tanha): this is craving to not experience the world, and to be nothing; a wish to be separated from painful feelings.>> – That in itself is a kind of body consciousness. This is Soul Consciousness, you being the True You. Because once you get there, into that totally blissful state of pure, conscious but non-thinking Being, all desire –  and indeed all of everything else – just drops away. All you’ve got is the perfect, pure light that is You. And that, in my humble opinion, good and lovely people, is very much worth desiring.

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A Conscious, Conscient Being with a Conscience

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Aidan

Word games, here. But I love it, and in truth there is a lot of benefit in mining the meaning of words, ‘churning’ it, as they say in Raja Yoga. Look at the roots of the word, how it has come to mean what it means, and you often get a clue that helps you latch on to the experience of the real You. And it’s only by experiencing the real You, getting to grips with Soul Consciousness, that you can change your actions, your behaviour. Which is why we’re here in the first place, remember?

Back to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary for this one. We’re looking at the difference between ‘conscient’, which to me means an active knowledge or awareness of consciousness, and ‘conscious’, which just means… aware. Turns out the Shorter Oxford isn’t much help after all. ‘Conscient’ is now rare, apparently, and anyway it only means ‘conscious’. And of the seven listed definitions for ‘conscious’, the best one is from 1620: ‘Inwardly sensible or aware’. No reason why we shouldn’t revive ‘conscient’ though, bring it back into use a little, because although they all come from the same Latin root, these words – ‘con’ meaning ‘with’ and ‘scire’ meaning ‘to know’ – they still seem to bear a subtle difference. I’m trying to get at the idea that the Soul is ‘conscient’ energy, that is to say, energy with awareness of itself. Mind, intellect, thoughts, emotions, impressions are all part of consciousness, when it is externalised for the purposes of dealing with the physical world. Underneath all that activity, You the Soul are a conscient being, an individual item of pure ethereal, non-physical spirit, aware of itself, aware of its own nature. Self Conscious, in the sense of Soul Conscious. For your 60 seconds today, your Magic Minute, just turn your attention to that spot high in the centre of the forehead where You live, and go deep into that awareness, feel Your Self burning like a bright light. It’s a strange sensation, because you’re more than ever acutely conscious of your own being, but because the normal tools of perception –your mind, intellect, rational faculties – are in abeyance, the process of knowing Your Self has to come from somewhere else in your consciousness. Deeper, is where. Mind is no use in this particular here and now. And in fact as you get more and more of a hold on this experience, you realize that it isn’t a sensation at all, because sensation comes from the realm of Mind and Body. It’s a physical word used to describe a physical thing. Stick with ‘conscient’, it carries with it that powerful sense of Self at the same time as all the different levels of mental activity. A consciously conscient being, with a conscience.

Conscience, Oh Lord. The idea that there is some inbuilt marker of right and wrong in your conscient-ness, a mechanism that will raise a flag and ring a bell when your actions cross a line. The earlier (1745) Shorter Oxford definition is more or less the same as the entries for ‘conscious’ and ‘conscient’; ‘Inward knowledge or consciousness’. Not till we get to definition 3 do we enter the moral, ethical dimension; ‘the faculty or principle which pronounces upon the moral quality of one’s actions or motives, approving the right and condemning the wrong.’  Easier to understand how this works if you’re a committed Christian, Muslim, Sikh or Buddhist – or belong to any religion or espouse any set of moral principles, usually written, that defines right and wrong. Where does it come from, this automatic warning system? Does our conscience kick in if we just think bad thoughts, or is it only in action when we’re in action? Well, only you know the answer to that, and it’s also true that some people have more active consciences than others, and indeed that you can train your conscience either way – make it duller, allow yourself to accept actions you wouldn’t previously have countenanced, or make it sharper, pull up your moral socks and condemn actions you would previously have allowed yourself. Whether it’s lying to your boss about why you’re late, or cold blooded murder, somewhere down there is a mechanism telling you what is true to Your Self and what is not. Are your actions – and motives, indeed – driven from the mistaken sense of yourself as a body, or the true sense of Your Self as a conscient being made of metaphysical energy? ‘Churn’ that for your 60 seconds (or another day’s 60 seconds, this is quite a lot to pack in) and discover the difference.

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60 Seconds of Solitude

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Aidan

Bit different from One Hundred Years. But in a way that 60 seconds, the Magic Minute we’re talking about here, is considerably longer than 100 years, so much longer in fact that it qualifies as infinity, the endless journey into inner space.

In his book Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar mentions the solitude that he regards as necessary for his life and work. He gives himself his daily allowance of solitude, which also means silence, because unless you talk to yourself very loudly, you’re silent when you’re alone, right? This is fairly standard stuff for writers, at least writers who write about the journey, the work on the Self, the path of self improvement and self transformation. We have to have silence and solitude to do the thinking about the writing. Thinking at this level is a kind of meditation, and the whole point is that we are always but one small step away from meditation, which is exactly what this blog is here for – to suggest points to ponder, to meditate on, in 60 seconds of silence. The Magic Minute. Never mind that this will take you longer than 60 seconds to read; that’s not your Magic Minute. Your Magic Minute is when you take the time to take these ideas with you into silence, into solitude, for a specific reason – to meet Your Self.

I’m often aware, and quite shocked, at how so many people live so far away from solitude. It’s also silence that we seem to avoid; it makes us uncomfortable if nothing is going on, nothing is making a sound. This kind of solitude is actually your own and only natural state, because originally You the Soul were a bodiless being, and without a body you’d find it hard to a) make any kind of noise and b) have any awareness of others who might ‘keep you company’. You’re just a node of pure, conscient, living energy. The solitude and the silence we’re exploring today are essential qualities of our consciousness of our Selves as Souls – of Soul Consciousness. That kind of solitude is not loneliness, the pit of despair, the sense of disconnection, of abandonment to a place where there is no help. It is a powerful and creative place, to which you can take yourself – and Your Self – as a gift for that short minute. The effect will feed back into your daily life like a shot of power and peace in your spiritual arm. A relief, a relaxation. Turn yourself off, turn Your Self on – by which I mean, your solo, silent, single Self.

We seek company and companionship, and if we haven’t got people to rub up against, we tend to use sound. Have a think about this: when are you ever ‘off’? Are you ‘on’ all the time? Do you turn on the radio or TV the minute you get out of bed, kicking off a day full of sound and vision, a million stimuli, constant input? The other half of which is output; you’re thinking, you’re talking, you’re doing. You’re probably surrounded by at least some noise, even if you work alone deep in the woods; there’s always noise, and there’s always the opportunity to protect yourself with it, to accompany the inner chatter of  your thoughts with the external soundscape so that you never have to cross a patch of silence. But crossing a patch of silence, for at least 60 seconds every day, is a Very Good Idea. And it goes without saying that that silence is a silence in solitude. You can’t do this Magic Minute thing, which after all is meditation, with your mates, friends, colleagues or family. Yes, they could also be there, doing their own Magic Minute and planting their own Power Seeds; but when you all come back from your 60-second journeys, you open your eyes and see the world around you, and look at each other and go: ‘How was it for you?’ You’ve been in solitude, you’ve been in silence, and you feel good. Rested. Refreshed. Replenished. Refuelled. Worth turning the radio off for, right?

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Hold your peace. Say your piece

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Aidan

You know where that comes from, right? The ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ thing? The tense moment in a movie wedding where the bride is standing at the altar with the wrong guy and the hero comes in just at the very moment the priest is saying this? What he is actually saying is ‘keep schtum’, or, more politely, ‘remain silent’. I just like the idea of ‘holding your peace’. It makes it look and feel like something you can have and hold, something separate from you that can get away from you if you’re not careful.

The latter is true, but not the former. This peace we’re talking about is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill peace, nothing to do with the quiet of an English country evening or a still, sparkling morning on some remote Pacific island – although both those things, and many others, give you a taste of what you’re looking for. This is the peace that passeth all understanding (see ‘Peace of mind. A piece of my mind’), because you can’t use your understanding to get to it, in the sense that mental or intellectual activity – ‘cerebration’ – will not lead you there. You can’t think it, you have to unthink it. In that sense yes, it is a result of an intellectual process – the process that says, OK, now I have to stop thinking. You can’t force yourself to do this, of course; you can only let it happen. Only when we become silent, listen to our breathing as a way of opening the door into inner space, and focus on our Self as Soul, the pinpoint of conscient energy that is so small it has location (the centre of the forehead) but no tangible form, do we get to experience the peace that is the energy that is the essential ‘I’.

Which is a really interesting one, and again one that you can’t cerebrate into experience. You can cerebrate after the experience, which is what we’re doing now; trying to express, trying to understand. But it passeth all understanding, remember? If peace is energy, and energy flows, how is that then stillness? This is the nub and the crux, the place to point your mind so that it gets kicked out of gear, like the Zen kõan that asks you to consider the sound of one hand clapping. It’s your Power Seed for today’s Magic Minute. You are Peace; you are Energy; You the Soul power all your mental, cerebral and intellectual activity (much of which is un-conscient, unknowing), but the true, essential You is stillness living in stillness. This is why this Peace is so Powerful (again see ‘Peace of mind. A piece of my mind’), because it is pure energy. You are pure, metaphysical energy, sending out a vibration but perfectly still.

Soul consciousness; conscient energy

I can bang on about this for ever, keep trying to find new ways to express it (which I love doing, because it is such a beautiful idea and a beautiful experience), but the only way you’ll really get it is by doing it. Call it auto-suggestion if you like – that’s another way of describing meditation – but if it works, why not. Harness your mind, which by now you are getting used to thinking of as a useful but on the whole wayward and wilful component of your consciousness, to this end. Make it think: ‘I am a Soul. I am not this body. I live in the body, up here in the forehead, but my true nature is something else. I can disconnect, withdraw the outgoing control mechanisms that govern my mind and body – all of which are energy that consumes my essential energy – and consolidate. As I do that, the deeper I go inside my own awareness of my awareness, the more my mind shuts down and I am left with my Self as the light that burns eternally, silently, an infinite stillness in infinite stillness.’ Just focus on that for your 60 seconds. Or 60 minutes, if you prefer. And now tell me that doesn’t have an effect on your everyday actions. Hold your peace? This is more like your peace holding you, isn’t it?

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Peace of mind – a piece of my mind

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Aidan

This is a ‘today I have been thinking about…’ post. Much of the thinking around the Ecology of the Soul comes from deconstructing words, really digging into language, figuring out why we say the things we do and how they reflect the things we are thinking, feeling and experiencing, without really knowing it. I started on how peace and power can be two sides of the same coin, because surely at one level they are inimical. Then I moved to ‘peace of mind’ and began to ask myself what that really means. Then I got sort of sidetracked into the way people sometimes say as a threat: ‘I’ll give him a piece of my mind’. Sounds kind of uncomfortable, and is always used to indicate a desire to chide, castigate, criticise, condemn. Negative negative. Then it moved to my father the Church of England priest, saying at the end of his church services: ‘Peace of Mind, which passeth all understanding…’ no, hang on a minute, that’s not right. It’s the Peace of God, which passeth all understanding. Or so Christians would have it.

Either way, we’re looking at a transcendental peace, the peace we seek. Somehow that is also part and parcel of power. Looking at Mahatma Ghandi helps with this bit; non-violent, unshakeably compassionate, unbeatably powerful – but he never accepted political power, the ‘real world’ kind. Pretty safe to say his power to change the world came from his peace, not the other way round. So power comes from peace, so peace is underneath power, a sine qua non. So go inside to make acquaintance with your peaceful Self and you’ll meet your powerful Self on the way back.

Just to clear one other small thing up: spiritual practice, thinking, teaching and activity assumes that peace is a state we all seek. But self evidently, this is far from true, given that most political and commercial institutions either directly seek conflict or cast themselves in a role where conflict is the normal modus operandi. It’s another word for competition, after all, which brings with it words like ‘battle’ and ‘domination’, and it feeds down to people at large. Our daily lives are encumbered with, defined by, struggle. It’s the norm. But there’s no short way to alter that circumstance for others. If they don’t seek peace, they don’t. They are responsible for their own state of mind, and you are responsible for yours. Either you’re here because you recognise that the way we live isn’t working, that there is a better way, and that peace is very much a basic building block of that better way (to mix my construction industry metaphors), or you’re not. If you are here (or anywhere else – book, blog, meditation class –  that deals with spiritual awareness, self change, self improvement) then you can be certain that the more you practice tapping into your untold reservoir of peace, the more it will affect your own behaviour and the lives of those around you – and, ultimately, the state of the world. Which is the whole point of studying, balancing and nurturing the Ecology of the Soul. It’s not just the meditating, folks. It’s the meditation in action which makes the difference. Let’s do another post about that one.

For now, use your Magic Minute to plant the peaceful Power Seed that suits you. We deal with Soul Consciousness elsewhere on the site, and we’ll always come back to it. Here is where you focus your consciousness of your Self as a Soul, whose nature is peace. A very different peace from when you’ve finally got the kids to bed, or even from the moment when you’re alone at the top of a mountain. This is the peace which passeth all understanding, in other words, you can’t get at it by thinking about it. It’s your very being. That infinitesimal pinpoint node of light that is You burns eternally, silently, steadily, in stillness. Ultimate stillness. It is not ‘your peace’. It is ‘You, Peace.’

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Soul conscious, body conscious

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Aidan

The Ecology of the Soul is about consciousness, which, as we all know – or would, if we stopped to think about it for one moment – operates at different levels. Mostly when we say we are aware of our own consciousness we are talking about the mind, because that’s where we do our thinking, and, crucially, that’s where the idea of ‘I’ keeps popping up. What I will be doing today, what I did yesterday, how I liked that movie, hated that meal, was angry at work, relieved to get home… ‘I’, all the time ‘I’.

Implicit in all this thinking is the picture I have of myself, what I see in the mirror, what others see when they look at me. Ah, you say, you mean my face. Or my body. Yep, that’s what passes for ‘I’ or ‘you’ in the everyday world. But hang on a minute; if it’s ‘my’ face or ‘my’ body, who is the ‘I’ that owns these things? Who, separate from ‘my face’, ‘my body’ – and indeed ‘my mind’, because that’s how we speak of the mind – is doing the talking?

Next step: move the awareness of your consciousness down a level (or up, if you prefer), away from everyday rational thought or emotional activity. Notice I say ‘awareness of your consciousness’ rather than ‘your consciousness’, because yes, mind is part of consciousness; but when you focus on your own perception of your consciousness, your own awareness of it, you immediately go through a door into a realm of self-awareness where the mind is not a hell of a lot of use. Once through that door, thinking is a hindrance, not a help. You become conscious of yourself as Your Self; Self = Soul, but not ‘my soul’, because who owns your Soul? Your Soul is You, permanent, infinitesimal, un-creatable (excuse the language mangle), indestructible, a pinpoint of non-physical energy carrying all the recorded results of its actions which will contribute to all its future actions – through the body. You’ve left the realm of Doing, now you’re in the realm of Being.

This is a key teaching of Raja Yoga, to which the Ecology of the Soul owes a very great deal – in fact, all – of its insight into the nature of consciousness and how that translates into action. Accept that the real You is beyond Mind, that You the Soul do your thinking in the mind (and ’emoting’, and a few other things besides), but that your pure, unencumbered existence is something else entirely – the pinpoint of light energy –  and you already have the makings of Soul Consciousness. If you merely meditate on this idea it will bring a result. I’m intending to interest people in these concepts without making them run a mile when the word ‘meditation’ comes up, so all I’m suggesting here is you sit in silence for a minute or two and ponder this idea: I am a Soul, a pinpoint of incredibly powerful energy, a mini- mini- micro-dot of consciousness, which in its pure, natural state, sits silent, glowing but not consuming itself, at peace. Perfect peace.

Soul consciousness (from http://www.bkwsu.org/uk)

I am not my body. When I say ‘I’, I do not mean this physical form. I am inhabiting this physical form (I am located in my forehead) so I can create action in the physical world, which it is in my nature as a human soul to do. But I am in truth non-physical, and when I create action out of the mistaken sense of myself as a physical body – when I am body conscious – it all goes horribly wrong. I am black, you are white. I am a woman, you are a man. I am Serb, you are Croatian. I am poor, you are rich. I am fat, you are thin. Fear, anger, greed, enmity, anxiety, jealousy – all the negatives – come from and are fed by this massive, mega mistake. The biggest and only case of Mistaken Identity in human consciousness: body consciousness.

Chew on Soul Consciousness for a while – make it your Power Seed for today, a meditative 60 seconds followed by a full, conscious day in which you return to the idea and see how it affects your actions. You’ll feel light, you’ll feel high. You’ll feel what humans should be feeling as the norm; you can’t maintain it, of course, in the midst of a daily life of organising, planning, working, playing, getting, spending; you have to engage with the world that sees you as black, white, thin, fat, Serb, Croatian, man, woman, rich, poor. But you can return to Soul Consciousness; you can do all those daily life things but still keep it as your silent secret, watch Your Self as an inexpressibly tiny node of inexpressibly powerful and peaceful conscient energy, steering this mountainous body through its actions from your vantage point way up in the high forehead, controlling it through the ‘control panel’ of the brain. It’s a blast. It really is a new way of seeing, of doing. Of Being.

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The 7 Spiritual Powers & The 7 Chakras

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Aidan

I spent about two years thinking about the spiritual powers which are the constituents of the Ecology of the Soul, how many there should be and what they should be. Among my research notes is a file called ‘total powers list.doc’ which had 58 of them at the last count. Clearly I couldn’t use all those, and many of them overlap anyway. So it came down to seven. You know, days of the week – maybe I should structure the book (The Ecology of the Soul; Unlock Your Seven Powers of Spiritual Success) so it is useable as a ‘mental/spiritual breakfast’, a food-for-thought manual that you dip into every day. Seven is also a beautiful number, lucky for many, and with many resonances. Of course I was familiar with the Chakras from long ago, but I swear, honest to God, I didn’t research them again until long after I had settled on the Seven Powers. When I did look at them, I was astonished and uplifted to find that those seven powers are more or less directly equivalent to each of the seven Chakras.

The Chakras: Body, Mind and Spirit (Soul) working on each other

You probably know the Chakras, or at least know about them. It doesn’t take much background reading to understand that there are many different versions of this particular brand of wisdom, and that those many different versions appear in most of the Eastern spiritual philosophies that involve meditation and the ‘mystical’ experience. Essentially they are understood as energy nodes in the body that have an affect on, and are affected by, specific areas of your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual being. Having at least a passing acquaintance with them really helps you make the leap from physical to non-physical experience, because you start right there at a specific part of your physical body, focus on it and very soon become aware of its mental, emotional and spiritual energy. The image of the meditator with all seven of his or her chakras lit up and glowing is a powerful and profoundly compelling one. Kundalini yoga is a kind of meditation which focuses on the power of the Chakras, awakening the ‘energy snake’ inside you. But we don’t have to go there – not yet, anyway.

Briefly (and probably arguably), this is how the Chakras and the Seven Powers of Eco-Mentalism work together:

1.    The Power of Connection

Sahasrara, the Crown Chakra, ‘honors spiritual connectedness’. It deals with the release of karma, meditation, universal consciousness and unity, ‘beingness’.

2.   The Power of Focus

Ajna, the Brow Chakra, or ‘third eye’, ‘honors the psychic’. It governs the balance of the higher and lower selves, trusting inner guidance, intuition, visual consciousness and clarity.

3. The Power of Communication

Vishuddha, the Throat Chakra, governs communication, independence, fluent thought, and a spiritual sense of security.

4. The Power of Love

Anahata, the Heart Chakra, governs circulation, unconditional love for the self and others, passion and devotion.

5. The Power of Endurance, Sustenance

Manipura, the solar plexus Chakra, ‘honors the life force’, the Ch’i. It governs digestion, personal power, expansiveness, and spiritual growth.

6 The Power of Creativity

Swadhisthana is either the sacral or the spleen Chakra, depending on where you look. It governs reproduction, creativity, joy, and spiritual enthusiasm.

7 The Power of Nature

Muladhara, the base  or root Chakra, governs sexuality, stability, sensuality, and spiritual security.

An understanding of the Chakras, like the practice of Yoga, isn’t necessary. But it helps. How you can re-awaken your own personal powers is the subject of this book, and, I hope, the inspiration for a new way of life based on mental and spiritual harmony, inner peace and profound fulfilment. The payoff is very practical. It’s about Doing. But we can’t fix the Doing until we fix the Being (no do-be-do-be-do jokes, please). So that’s where we start. Enjoy.

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The Blackboard Blog #5: Build a fire inside, solve your own energy crisis

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Aidan

Moving  away from those nasty vices, we continue on the theme of Energy. We make the connection between energy efficiency in the accepted eco sense (buildings that don’t waste energy, cars that use less energy to achieve the same performance, etc etc) and the energy efficiency of the mind and Soul.

Build a fire inside: solve your own energy crisis

Again, back to the Ecology of the Soul. It’s a simple idea, but not so simple to achieve; eliminate waste mental energy, in other words useless thoughts, in other words, for instance, resentment, worry or anxiety. Then your real power house, the still and silent, peaceful and powerful Soul, works far more efficiently and you are more directly in touch with it as a source of ‘Clean Energy’, which is the True You.

Easy to say, you say, ha ha. A few words, and we’re deep in the heart of the universal challenge that faces all spiritual endeavour at whatever level, from a weekly yoga student to a sadhu in a loincloth in Rishikesh who does nothing else. Mind control. Highly likely that you will say: ‘Eliminate worry and anxiety? Are you kidding?’ A) because you have no concept or experience of just being able to free your mind like that, and B) because somewhere at the back of that very same mind, you kind of half-believe that worry and anxiety are necessary to get things done.

That’s why the Ecology of the Soul’s  ‘Power Seeds’ exist. You find yourself 60 seconds in your day. Come on, can’t be hard. A minute? Can you manage to get up a minute earlier? (It will take more than that of course, but we have to start somewhere.) You need to be silent and undisturbed, ready and willing to shut down from external stimuli and turn your attention inside your own awareness. You can do it on the toilet, on a train or bus, or waiting for something. You can’t do it while you’re driving, but you can do it while you’re in a traffic block, as long as you can see you won’t have to move for a whole minute, or preferably two. Then take a thought and ‘churn’ it, that is, give it your full attention, ponder it. Yes: meditate on it. Here’s your starter for ten:

<< ‘I can’t help thinking’… but you can. Your thoughts are in control of you? That’s madness. You are thinking those thoughts, right? So what is this, a runaway train? The thoughts control the thinker? The most difficult thing about controlling your own thoughts – deciding which ones to have and which ones to reject, to ‘unthink’ – is realizing and deciding you can do it. The trick is not to beat yourself up about your unruly mind, which keeps running off in another direction and jumping over fences. Don’t try and hold your thoughts down, just let them go. Gently, patiently and with love bring your attention back to your silent consciousness, the level below the thinking mind. Thinking is Doing. You are focusing on Being.  Once you are over that hurdle, the task is clear, and this in itself is a Power Seed you have just planted.>> Just focus on that for 60 seconds and see where it gets you.

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The Blackboard Blog #4: The Devil’s Children, A beautiful mind, Co-loquy, Dogs & Cats…

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Aidan

And on this one below, see, under a beautiful mind, co-loquy and being like a dog or a cat, the Devil’s  Children appear. Six of them at the last count. What we were talking about before. Hate (hatred), Greed, Fear, Ignorance, Prejudice (or prjdce because I didn’t have room) and something we call ‘Close-mindedness’, which has a close relationship to ignorance, in that it’s like wilful ignorance. You can choose to know, or you can choose not to know.

It’s true, embarking on this or any path of self transformation, or even just self-improvement, is scary. You may well choose to turn away. All sorts of changes are going to come up, many of them just as much a surprise to you as to those close to you. The scariest thing is that you may find yourself having to change more than you bargained for. Your consciousness changes at the soul level, your thinking changes at the mind level,  your behaviour changes (which is what, after all, it’s all about), and all of a sudden you discover you’re out of sync with your nearest and dearest. Will they come along with you? Perhaps not. Things that used to matter seem not to matter so much any more. You may have issues which have been a source of worry and anxiety, but now you’re beginning not only to see that worry and anxiety serve no useful purpose whatsoever, but also that they are entirely under your control and can be de-activated. It doesn’t mean you care about those issues any less, and you could argue that it makes you more effective in dealing with them, since you can keep a balanced attitude, make decisions with clarity, and put your energy into finding and effecting a solution rather than just worrying. But those nearest and dearest may find it spooky that you don’t seem to be worrying any more and conclude that you don’t care. A cause for concern.

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The Blackboard Blog #2

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Aidan

The point about The Enemy is how to combat it / him / her, which is chiefly a matter of remembering who and what you are, and who and what you are not. The Enemy chapter on the contents page of The Book currently lists six emotions or states of mind: Fear; Greed; Jealousy; Guilt; Regret; Despair. Some say that there are actually only two: Fear and Greed. Break them all right down and you can fold pretty much every nasty thing into those two. Or Five. But I seem to be adding to them all the time; I just put in Hate, Pride, Prejudice and Ignorance. One way of looking at it is to drop them all and just concentrate on Ignorance – by which I mean, of course, Ignorance of your true nature. And that one, perversely, is the easiest to combat.

A Little Travel Story. One of my first experiences of  Raja Yoga, at the World Renewal Spiritual Museum in Mount Abu, Rajasthan, was peering into a museum-style glass display case at the Five Vices portrayed as half-size human model figures, rendered in that popular Indian naïf style familiar from tea-towels illustrated with morality tales like Aesop’s ‘The Fox and the Stork’. I can’t find the image with the Vices on (probably been suppressed, it’s kind of cheesy) but just as an example, here’s the original 1950s version of ‘You are a Soul’:

But the Five Vices were done up like ‘dacoits’, the traditional Indian bandits, complete with staring eyes, wild hairdos, big beards and heavy armoury (or a couple of big knives at least). And what are (were) those Five criminals of the soul? Sex Lust; Anger; Greed; Attachment; Ego. As you may imagine, as a red-blooded youth I had a big problem with the first one. More on that to come. But looking at the others you can see where jealousy, for instance, comes from; Attachment is the idea that something – or more likely, someone – is your property, belongs to you. Which, given the immaterial and non-physical nature of You Your Self the Soul, is obviously a non-starter. Body is car, soul is driver, right? See above.

H’mm. Wasn’t really intending to get stuck into the good ol’ vices, because once we’re there it is but a short step to the ‘Mega-Concepts’ of Sin and Karma, which will keep us chuntering for the rest of human existence. Point is that The Enemy, however you draw or describe it / him / her, derives its/his/her power from the One Big Mistake; simply confusing your Self with your body. You say ‘my body’, right? So who is talking? Remember, recognise and experience your truth – your non-material, infinitesimal form of ‘bindu’, an atom of light (the Sanskrit for ‘soul’ is ‘atma’) carrying out actions in your physical body – and all the rubbish drops away. Come back from Soul Consciousness to, let’s say, a sort of enlightened body consciousness (ie, light as in weight, light as in shining), and you find your behaviour being influenced by that awareness. Not many steps from here to a balanced and harmonious ecology of the soul, which feeds into balanced and harmonious action that serves the world around us just as Soul Consciousness serves our inner world.

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The Blackboard Blog #3

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Aidan

Oops. Got distracted from the Blackboard. Here’s one of the really early ones. You’ll have to ignore the shopping list and daily family reminder stuff. In amongst all that is some ancient wisdom, as I’m sure you can see:

Create a beautiful mind – not a beautiful chalk writing style

Create a Beautiful Mind: Create Co-Loquy, ie Colloquy, but I liked the idea of meaningful exchange of concepts in conversation to be a ‘co-‘word; Be like a Cat, be like a Dog, which in updated form reads Walk like a Cat, Walk like a Dog;  To Create a New World, We Unlock our Creativity; and beat The Enemy with The Energy. This is where The Enemy first came up, balanced against the idea of The Energy (seen here, for no particular good reason, as ‘TE NRGI’), which is another one of those eternals; spiritual, ie non-physical, as distinct from physical, energy. Soul and Body. Soul Consciousness and Body Consciousness. As you may have guessed, Body Consciousness is the Devil, the arch villain, sending out his five (or however many) sub-villains with their wild eyes, big hair and big knives to do their dirty work. Through you. Watch out.

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The Blackboard Blog #1

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Aidan

The Blackboard in the Kitchen has a special ‘testbed’ relationship to The Ecology of the Soul. It’s where I chalk up ideas as they occur, usually late at night, so I can look at them again in the morning and see if they’re any good. Some are, some aren’t. Some go into The Book  – The Ecology of the Soul: Unlock Your Seven  Powers of Spiritual Success – some won’t. This one starts you pondering about the verbal, as well as the meaningful, relationship between the ideas ‘inspire’ and ‘breathe’; and it suggests that you plant a ‘Power Seed’ – a meditative kick-starter, a simple, single thought to occupy the 60-second ‘Magic Minute’ you are giving yourself, to focus specifically on the state of mind you want to achieve. Is it peace, power, stillness, accuracy, energy?

We deal with Power Seeds, more and more of them. They don’t have to connect directly to a specific state of mind, in fact much of their appeal comes from their random nature. They are the link between Mind and Action – a way of making behaviour change real. But there will be times when you need to get a grip on the underlying consciousness that is generating the uneasy, downward-moving mindset. The Substrate.

This one also captures the moment when The Enemy made it into The Book with his very own chapter. We met him a while ago, on the earlier boards that follow (in true logical sequence we go last first), but here is where I decided he had to have a proper presence in The Book. No point in filling a big book with wonderful, blissful, powerful, spiritual things to work on but ignore the negatives that keep people from even getting started, right?

Inspire / Breathe, and ‘Meet the Enemy’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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