October 2015

28 October, 2015  by

What It Means To Control The Mind

The human mind is a wonderful masterpiece that has immense potential. Most of the potential, however, remains unused with most people, since it is not us who is in charge of things — it is our mind that is in control. Our Mind is rushing through life with us like a car running without a driver, causing us constant suffering and sorrow.

But if we were able to control our Mind, our life would change completely. This mad speeding would change into a beautiful, creative dance, giving us happiness, instead of pain.

The question is, therefore, how are we able to take control over our Mind?

The Nature of the Mind

In order to control something, we first need to know the nature of that thing, therefore we must know our Mind so as to be in charge of it. The most important thing we need to know about our Mind, is that it is not something that exists separately, individually, like some inanimate object. The Mind is not an object – it is a process – the process of constantly streaming thoughts. This stream of thoughts is what we perceive as the Mind. When these thoughts disappear, the Mind disappears with them, as the two are only able to exist together. The very basic nature of thoughts, is that they are in constant movement, and this motion, almost automatically, creates the Mind.

A characteristic feature of our Mind is that it keeps roaming, wandering; it operates in something like an automatic mode. Thoughts come and go- the time. If we attempt to suppress them, it is only possible with considerable efforts, and even then for only a short time. During most of our waking time, our Mind wanders either in the past or in the future – in our thoughts we deal with our experience of the past, offences we suffered in the past, or with our future plans, goals, and fears.

Another characteristic of our Mind is that it constantly evaluates things. This means that we do not simply live through our experiences, but we also categorize them as good or bad. We judge everything that happens to us and everybody we meet in our lives. This permanent categorization may easily lead to a distorted perception of the world, as we evaluate our new experiences in these categories. If we find an experience negative, we will tend to keep – and reinforce – that category for similar experiences in the future. Our perception will, therefore, be selective, and we will only accept the stimuli that reinforces our categorization, and we tend to ignore those that fall outside our usual categories.

The third important characteristic of the Mind is that it permanently produces stories. These stories often have a disastrous end. For instance, I suddenly try to remember whether I locked the door of my home or not. The Mind immediately fabricates a whole story around the idea: I did leave it open, a burglar came, my valuables have been stolen, and the police, instead of chasing the thief, will harass me with their questions. We often experience the ends and emotional consequences of these stories. Another type of story deals with us, who are we, what are we like, what we should do, or should have done. The entirety of these stories comprises our personal histories.

A Foolish Game

Most people tend to identify with their thoughts and personal histories, that is, with their Minds. A lot of us are not satisfied with what we are, and we would like to have a better and more beautiful personal history. That is why we create a mental image of our desired personal development and the ways of making the work of our Minds more effective.

In order to achieve the mental image we ourselves have created, we embark on a foolish game, as we attempt to bring our Minds under our own control and be the masters of our own development. Since we do not know the nature of the Mind, this venture is destined to fail right from the beginning.

This game is foolish, since in fact one half of the Mind attempts to bring the other half under control. Our Mind itself deems our own mental image of our personal development as good. At the same time, this half of the Mind deems the other half, the one we wish to change, bad. Mental images fight against each other, trying to overcome each other, using the weapons of selective perception and story fabrication. The struggle goes on, with changing luck, all through our lives. Sometimes we believe that we are making some progress, we are improving, and a few weeks, months or years later we drop into the abyss of despair.

A lot of us play this foolish game all through our lives, because we are unable to recognize the simple fact that a Mind is unable to overcome itself. We may, perhaps, with the utmost effort, suppress what we believe is bad in us. That is, however, just a virtual victory, leading us to virtual calm and personal development because when our power declines, the suppressed forces break out again, destroying all the temporary results that we achieved previously, washing away the results of our personal development.

The Freedom of Tolerance

Now we can see that the way leading to controlling our Minds does not succeed through suppressing them. It is not possible to control the Mind in the ordinary sense of the word. Partly because it only exists in its functions and operation, and partly because there is nobody to control it. One half of the Mind, as we have seen, does not control, only suppresses the other half.

In order to be able to control our Minds, we must step outside of them. This statement may sound surprising to a lot of us, since we tend to fully identify with our Minds and their operations. As long as this identification is strong, we shall not be able to step outside the crazy dance of our Minds; we will have to merely suffer its consequences.

Nowadays, however, more and more of us have begun to realize and experience that we are more than our Minds, more than our thoughts and emotions, and more than the personal history these thoughts and emotions build up. Our attention is no longer completely engaged by telling our personal history and identifying with that personal history, and we become more and more sensitive to the deeper dimensions of our life. We also begin to notice the breaks between thoughts, and we begin to turn towards these gates leading beyond the Mind.

In these breaks between thoughts, Mind does not work, it is not there – it simply vanishes. What is left there is the alert and watching Consciousness. If we are able to take roots in that alert Consciousness, we recognize that this watching alertness is tolerant with the Mind and its operations. We shall see that there is nothing wrong with thoughts, nothing wrong with the operations of the Mind. It is not necessary to struggle against the Mind, as it is not an enemy, only an instrument that without control, tends to function chaotically.

We only have a chance to know the true nature of thoughts and the functions of the Mind, if we detach ourselves from them, keep a distance and do not consider them as enemies. They will reveal their secrets to the alert Consciousness, watching with affection, and we will see the subtle shades of the Mind, the games it plays and the dreams it evokes.

The Disappearing Mind

This tolerant, alert, watching attitude to the functions of the Mind will give us the ability of stopping our thinking effortlessly. Once thinking has been suspended, the continuous stream of thoughts stops, the Mind itself disappears and stops working.

Now we shall not seek our own identity in an identification with the Mind, since we have found our real center, our real self, our alertly watching Consciousness. We will be aware that thoughts and the Mind have not really disappeared, they are still there, only in a dormant state. Our attitude to thoughts and the Mind will entirely change at that moment. We think when necessary and when we do not need the Mind, we put it aside. The Mind no longer dominates our life, it is no more than an obedient tool that we use or not use as we please.

That is when we realize how wonderful an instrument the Mind is, and now we are able to use it for its original purpose. And the purpose of the Mind is to serve as a means of connection, connecting us to the world, to each other. Through the Mind, used with alert Consciousness, creative energies are released to the world to create a wonderful harmony there.

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Author: Frank M. Wanderer; Ph.D   l  Wake Up World

 

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23 October, 2015  by

Grassroots Revolution Towards a Holistic and Creative Educational System

“Reform is not enough anymore. Because that’s simply improving a broken model. What we need, and the word’s been used many times in the course of the past few days, is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.” – Sir Ken Robinson

Mr. Robinson spoke these words in his popular 20-minute TedTalk entitled, “Bring On The Learning Revolution”, which is embedded below. This is one of the best lectures on a topic that so desperately needs addressed in our world and I recommend it to anyone.

The current educational system, which stresses compartmentalization and standardized testing, is limiting the inherent abilities we all possess. It’s as if the educational system is simply set up in a way that directs us only to memorize and regurgitate rather than question, express, connect, and create. We are taught to fall in line and adhere to “The Matrix” rather than being our unique, authentic selves.

Though we could go deep down the rabbit hole showing the financial corruption involved at all levels of the world’s educational system, we’ll instead focus on solutions.

The learner-centered education, or mastery model, which is the way Maria Montessori’s schools have been designed, has been at the center of this revolution in education for quite some time. The base of this model is the belief that the children must be in control of their own learning and that the happiness level of the student is reflective on how effective the education is for him or her.

The adult teacher shapes the environment in a way that encourages questioning, curiosity, mastery of skills, expression and creativity. Sounds about the opposite of what most traditional schooling systems create, doesn’t it?

In fact, looking back across hundreds and probably thousands of years, we see that the way we are hard-wired to learn is very different from a traditional school setting. Think about it. Prior to these systems of today, we learned through observation, hands on application, apprenticing, cooperative learning based in groups and pairs. The atmosphere of the learning environment was also completely different. In today’s model, fear is often at the base of learning. The fear of failing on a standardized test so one can receive a “good grade” is prevalent everywhere. One doesn’t have to be a social psychologist to understand that true learning and mastery is very difficult when a person is in a state of fear and stress.

However, when the environment is not competitive but rather cooperative, an environment where there isn’t the fear of failure, the person can thrive and gain the mastery of multiple skills.

Grassroots Revolution Towards a Holistic and Creative Educational System - insert

In fact, Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences , which is based on solid and unbiased psychological research, says that each person has at least eight different domains of potential intelligences, each of which can be mastered over time using multiple skill sets.

Howard Gardner said of this holistic learning model, “The idea of multiple intelligences comes out of psychology. It’s a theory that was developed to document the fact that human beings have very different kinds of intellectual strengths and that these strengths are very, very important in how kids learn and how people represent things in their minds, and then how people use them in order to show what it is they’ve understood.”

The Creative Grassroots Revolution, which like all truth-based revolutions, cannot be stopped. Keep questioning, keep proposing holistic solutions, keep in the state of curiosity and wonder.

As Albert Einstein said, ” The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”

 

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Author: Lance Schuttler – Wake Up World

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21 October, 2015  by

Active Dreaming: Exploring the Vivid Dreamscape

It is possible to enter a lucid dream directly from waking. Usually this entails lying down, relaxing, and allowing the body to fall asleep while the mind stays awake. Difficulties include falling asleep along with the body, or the body staying awake with the mind. Decoupling body and mind so that the latter can stay awake while the body falls asleep is difficult but possible.

The Process of Sleep

To enter normal sleep we begin by letting our thoughts wander until they turn into daydreams that either dissolve into oblivion along with our self-awareness and volition or else spontaneously evolve into hypnagogic imagery (short vivid hallucinations) that eventually cohere into a full-blown three dimensional dreamscape.

Whether drifting off takes us into oblivion or into a vivid dreamscape can depend on how far we are into our nightly sleep cycle. Early in the cycle, sleep tends to consist of delta brainwave activity and no REM (rapid eye movement), which indicates consciousness is off elsewhere. Most likely the soul is running its astral errands while the body does its repairs. Later in the cycle after these tasks are out of the way, or when taking a nap, the delta stage is replaced by immediate onset of hypnagogic andREM activity after mental relaxation. But these are passive dreams since lack of lucidity in them implies impaired volition.

Why are dreams so much more vivid than imagination? Because the images are being projected by the subconscious, not the conscious mind. Why do we lose self-awareness when we go to sleep? Because as we let our thoughts wander, the subconscious starts to influence our consciously projected internal images (imagination, visualization, daydreaming, mind chatter) while the conscious mind takes on a more passive and self-obliterating role. Not long after that, the subconscious takes over the role of projector and that is when mere mental images become virtual realities. The trade-off is that we have already abandoned ourselves by the time the dream projection kicks in.

We can understand the various states of internal imagery as being the result of either the conscious subconscious either directing or projecting these images:

Active dreaming: conscious directs while subconscious projects.

Passive dreaming: subconscious directs and projects.

Daydreaming: subconscious directs while conscious projects.

Visualizing: conscious directs and projects.

Inducing lucid dreams from a waking state therefore requires that the conscious mind retain its awareness and volition while the subconscious is given free reign to begin projecting the dreamscape. The prerequisite is total relaxation of the body, usually done in a step-wise fashion from head to toe, either by focusing on relaxing a particular body region, or tensing and releasing that region. A good exhausting workout that leaves you wiped out can also accomplish this.

Watching Phosphenes

One method of keeping your mind awake while falling asleep involves watching the phosphene images behind closed eyelids. These are the glowing blobs of static noise patterns that always fill our vision but are more easily noticed in the dark. Unlike passive dreaming, this keeps one’s visual faculties active and focused on real sense impressions instead of turning within and getting lost in consciously projected daydreams or visualizations.

Active Dreaming - Exploring the Vivid Dreamscape 2

Why is this important? Because notice that in dreams your “eyes” are focused on an environment existing “outside” you, seemingly as real as anything you might see with your physical eyes while awake. Also notice that in a dream, despite both your thoughts and the dreamscape being all “in your head”, you can still imagine things internally that are separate from the surrounding dreamscape. This means that the full blown 3D dreamscape is always perceived as an external phenomenon to your five senses, than mere imagination which is internal and runs in parallel to your surroundings. So staring out into the field of phosphenes involves a similarly externalized point of focus, even though eyes are closed. In this way, one aspect of the dream experience (the external visual focus) is already established. It therefore does not take long for hypnagogic images to start up this way, although these can startle one back into full consciousness. With repeated exposure they become less startling, especially if you cultivate a calm, detached, nonplussed attitude and ease into these images without becoming self-conscious and excited, which can snap you awake.

The next issue is becoming so quickly absorbed in the phosphenes and hypnagogic images that one loses self-awareness before the subconscious is ready to begin fully projecting a dreamscape. To counter this, a second technique may be employed: quickly opening and shutting your eyes every two or three breaths. This allows enough real sense data to come in, and is so intentionally controlled, that the mind has better chances of staying alert. And yet since this involves mere movement of the eyelids, the rest of the body is not prevented from doing its thing to fall asleep. One can keep this up until the hypnagogic state kicks in, then continue watching those and the phosphenes.

Sleep Paralysis

Very soon the body falls asleep by entering sleep paralysis, which feels like a sudden sinking, melting, tingling feeling. This is not your body going numb with boredom from having lain still for an hour. Sleep paralysis comes with a release of the soul from the physical body, and that induces the sinking or melting feeling. You may also notice your breathing suddenly becoming deeper, effortless, and automatic as the parasympathetic nervous system takes over. If your mind is still highly active, your breathing restricted, and your body simply numb from lack of stimulation then you’re not in sleep paralysis. You literally have to fall asleep, but with your awareness intact.

The subconscious is then at the verge of fully projecting the dreamscape, and one has only to retain enough self-awareness throughout the onset of sleep paralysis to allow the final consciously directed nudge to kick off a dream. (After catching your body falling asleep, before a dream begins you can visualize and intend to roll out of bed and that will induce an astral projection instead of a dream). Or you can visualize something and “get into it” and that will initiate a dream.

It is the intent combined with visualization that puts the subconscious fully online, and a dream begins. Then you can do reality checks (flipping a light switch, looking for inconsistencies) or astral checks (seeing your body still in bed with correct clothes on) and lucidly go from there.

Active Dreaming - Exploring the Vivid Dreamscape

Take note that because this technique requires immediate access to REM sleep, it must be done after already having slept five or six hours, or during the day when napping. If you’ve had a long day and are beat, and crawl into a cozy bed for lights out, you’ll have a tough time retaining awareness and your brain won’t initiate heavy REM activity right away. Rudolf Steiner talked about remaining aware regardless as being a qualification for occult initiation, and that in doing so you get to witness what happens during the delta non-dream sleep. He says one visits the spirit realm and experiences things there are harmonies and colors (which is probably all that the conscious mind can decode of that experience at first, whereas the subconscious or higher mind during this experience is probably having a very involved time “up there”). But for active dreaming purposes, later in the sleep cycle or during a nap is better.

Some induction techniques start off with visualization, whereby the conscious mind directs and projects mental imagery until the subconscious takes over the role of projector. The above technique of staring into the phosphene void and looking at hypnagogic imagery that arises does not use intentional visualization until the final nudge, thereby allowing the subconscious to start projecting more easily because it does not have to wrestle that role away from the conscious. To repeat, visualization is not necessary until the final stage when the body is asleep, otherwise it might interfere with the subconscious stepping into its role as projector. You can indeed use visualization, and Steiner’s method as well as Theun Mares’ method employ that, whereby an imagined visual suddenly blooms to life when the subconscious takes over and turns it into a dream experience (Steiner himself got that technique from Goethe, who wrote of experiencing exactly such a imagination -> dream phenomenon).

Applications

Why is active dreaming important? Because it allows access to the dreaming faculty at will and is therefore more repeatable at will compared to other methods of lucid dream induction involving autosuggestion, dream signs, periodic reality checks, and so on. However it is also more difficult to implement due to having to be conscious the moment the body falls asleep. But like any activity that requires finesse, whether hitting a golf ball or parallel parking, it can be trained with practice.

When you have achieved this state, which Robert Monroe termed “mind awake, body asleep” then you are effectively on a launch platform for dreaming, astral projecting, scrying, remote viewing, healing, entity evocations, past life exploration, spirit releasement therapy, subconscious reprogramming, communicating with the higher self, etc. This state of mind, which some claim consists of theta brain waves overlapped with high frequency gamma waves, is the state from which most occult maneuvers are performed.

Mnemonic Anchoring

When the body has entered its melted tingly state, it is possible to anchor this mnemonically using some tongue position, breathing pattern, eye movement, visualized sequence of symbols, hand mudra, or command phrase. When the anchor is repeatedly associated with this state, later the anchor can be invoked to cause the body to reflexively enter the state, dramatically shortening the induction procedure. But creating the association takes much repetition. Theun Mares’ technique and the Silva Method employ such mnemonic triggers.

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Author: Montalk – Wake up World

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18 October, 2015  by

18 Signs That You’re Here to Transform Human Consciousness

For many years now, a lot of people have been talking about “The Shift,” this mysterious transformation of human consciousness that is supposedly underway. Ever since the end of the Mayan calendar in December of 2012, New Age types tend to twitter away about the evolution of the species, the revolution of love, and other hopeful but fuzzy seeming changes in what it means to be human. I want to take a minute to help us all ground this floaty notion a bit.

See if any of this sounds familiar:

Do you have a vision of some aspect of a more beautiful world, and you know it’s your sacred purpose to help bring it into being?

Do you sense that something is out of alignment in the world, and you want to be a part of the solution?

Have you experienced a life-altering event that changed everything for you, and now you want to use that experience to help others?

Do you have an innovative idea that might make the world a better place?

Do you feel called to help others heal, transform, connect, love, create, succeed, and thrive?

Yeah, I thought so. I had a feeling you were one of us! Welcome to what my friend Martha Beck calls “The Team.” In her book Finding Your Way In A Wild New World,Martha Beck defines Team members by the following characteristics. You may not recognize every single attribute, but if you’re a Team member, you’re likely to be nodding your head a lot as you read through these characteristics of those whose souls incarnated here on this planet right now to facilitate this mystical shift in human consciousness. See if any of these Team traits resonate with who you are and how you feel.

  1. A sense of having a specific mission or purpose involving a major transformation in human experience, but being unable to articulate what this change might be.
  2. A strong sense that the mission, whatever it is, is getting closer in time.
  3. A compulsion to master certain fields, skills, or professions, not only for career advancement but in preparation for this half-understood personal mission.
  4. High levels of empathy; a sense of feeling what others feel.
  5. An urgent desire to lessen or prevent suffering for humans, animals, or even plants.
  6. Loneliness stemming from a sense of difference, despite generally high levels of social activity. One woman summed up this feeling perfectly when she said, “Everybody likes me, but nobody’s like me.
  7. High levels of creativity; passion for music, poetry, performance, or visual arts.
  8. An intense love of animals, sometimes a desire to communicate with them.
  9. Difficult early life, often with a history of abuse or childhood trauma.
  10. Intense connection to certain types of natural environment, such as the ocean, mountains, or forest.
  11. Resistance to orthodox religiosity, paradoxically accompanied by a strong sense of either spiritual purpose or spiritual yearning.
  12. Love of plants and gardening, to the point of feeling empty or depressed without the chance to be among green things and/or help them grow.
  13. Very high emotional sensitivity, often leading to predilections for anxiety, addictions, or eating disorders.
  14. Sense of intense connection with certain cultures, languages, or geographic regions.
  15. Disability, often brain-centered (dyslexia, retardation, autism) in oneself or a loved one. Fascination with people who have intellectual disabilities or mental illness.
  16. Apparently gregarious personality contrasting with a deep need for periods of solitude; a sense of being drained by social contact and withdrawing to “power up” again.
  17. Persistent or recurring physical illness, often severe, with symptoms that fluctuate inexplicably.
  18. Daydreams (or night dreams) about healing damaged people, creatures, or places.

You! 

If you read that list (like I did) thinking “Check, check, check,” you’re definitely one of us visionary healer mender way-finders on The Team. And the world needs you to fulfill your sacred purpose — pronto!

As Martha wrote, “If enough people start mending their true nature in the incredibly interconnected world we’re creating, the cumulative effect really could begin healing the true nature of, well, everything.”

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Author: Lissa Rankin

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9 October, 2015  by

Sacred Space – What Is It and Why Do We Need It?

In a recent conversation, a dear friend for many years asked me, “I wonder why it is that people need to hold this special view of what is sacred… why some things are sacred and others aren’t.” This is fascinating inquiry, one that invokes a number of subjects, such as the nature of healing, activism, our working definition of spirituality, and our emotional lives — all of which I hope to touch on here.

Sacred Space is time and space we set aside, or which spontaneously arises, to experience a depth, richness, and sense of meaning that usually escapes us in fast-paced everyday life when we are not as connected as we could be with our body, intuition, good thinking, compassion and empathy, and other emotions.

I imagine that many reading this article consider everything to be sacred. Some of you might even consider evil and suffering to be sacred, since the world is full of dark and light. For me, the word sacred has a definite earthiness to it, a sense of being here engaged in some ritual or activity connected with everyday life. Whereas, what is “divine” to me has more connotations with things ethereal, with a non-material influence or presence in our lives. We could say, in a sense, that what we consider sacred is a certain holiness of earthy things and what is divine is the holiness and immutability of invisible forces.

These are the loose definitions I’ll hold for this discussion, and if your meanings are different, no worries, just use your own words to substitute for what I have defined as “divine” and “sacred.” After all, I don’t mention these definitions to impose my perspectives, but for the opposite reason — so that you know what I mean, so that you can find your own meaning for what is discussed here. The point, after all, is not to get hung up on the words, but on what the words mean and the things and experience to which they point.

So, in a nutshell, we’ll consider sacred to be the presence of something “divine” in an embodied or earthy way. Yet, many of us still, unconsciously or not, hold some aspects of life to be sacred and others non-sacred. Some of us also maintain huge distinctions between what is sacred, what is spiritual, and what is not. No doubt, some of this separation has arisen from religious traditions that maintain God and Spirit to be separate from material existence, and certainly our everyday, mundane activities.

While I’m not here to tell you what is sacred and what is not, I am here to help you clarify what the word “sacred” points to in your own experience, or whatever word you might use to describe what I have called sacred, and then to consider how your perceptions, and divisions, of what is sacred might be holding you back from more richness, fulfillment, and joy in your experience.

Finding Meaning

So, let’s begin with positive sacred experiences. Popular sacred experiences might include spending time in nature, yoga and meditation practice, morning prayer, in church or a synagogue, tender love-making with your partner, a sharing circle, any kind of ritual or ceremony, or a healing session. Other sacred space moments might include feeding birds on a park bench, playing or reading with your child, watching a meaningful movie, making art, petting and cuddling with a pet, sharing deep feelings with a loved one, helping someone in need, giving someone your full attention, or saving a piece of nature.

All these experiences have something in common: we find meaning in them, and/or they make us feel good. If something isn’t meaningful to us or makes us feel not so good, we tend to push it away as non-sacred. So, either unconsciously or consciously, we tend to make a separation in our perception of reality. We separate “positive” experiences from “negative” ones, and we consider some things more meaningful than others.

Now, sometimes we consider ordinary reality less sacred not because it is inherently meaningless, but because we haven’t yet found the meaning in it. So, part of sanctifying what we consider less sacred aspects of life is finding meaning in them. This requires a change in perception and/or a change in heart. For me, this is a spiritual pursuit: finding meaning in what I have previously found meaningless by opening, or spontaneously being opened, to its wisdom. This does not mean making up stories about reality, not infusing meaning into things through denial, but finding real intellectual and emotionally honest meaning in my experience and the nature of reality. And this usually means letting both my heart and mind break open.

In particular, difficult emotions — such as anger, grief, remorse, guilt, and despair — is a domain I have found great meaning in over the years. I have found that when I stay with and welcome these difficult emotional states, they change, and change me for the better. In fact, my very welcoming them and feeling and expressing them allows them to change, allows them to truly transform me into more breadth and depth, so that I can keep my heart clear and open to the rest of life. So, all these emotions have become sacred to me, and they also allow me to experience more meaning and richness in the rest of what I consider sacred.

If we consider certain aspects of life not to be sacred, then we might hold them out of our hearts. When we hold parts of life out of our hearts we hold them away from our love and healing. Things I tend to want to hold outside of sacred are pollution, GMOs and toxic agriculture, dishonesty, and needless violence. And I confess, these are all still largely non-sacred to me because they desecrate the very fabric of life. But, if they spur more compassion, more revolution, more love, and more care for our environment, then they acquire some sacred value. And I do see that they inspire these qualities, however seemingly unnecessarily.

With this said, these industries don’t show enough transformational value, as with difficult emotional states, that I consider them worth keeping, at all. In other words, while they might elicit sacred internal moments, and sacred activism, they don’t create enough goodness in the world, and in fact, do great damage. And the good they do is only in the context of our trying to get rid of them! So, right or wrong, I do have a limit to what I consider good and “sacred.” What destroys the planet and our lives, with little redeeming value, is not sacred to me. With this said, destruction and death are natural, and sacred to me, but not when they are avoidable (largely by natural means) and go against the inherent wisdom of nature.

Love and the Sacred

So indeed, part of what is sacred relies on what we find meaningful and valuable. I find the Earth and its biosphere valuable. I find the proliferation of other species valuable. I consider clean water, soil, air, oceans, and forests valuable. So, I hold judgment over what injures these. And the sacred meaning I find in these negative influences is fighting against them and more deeply regarding as precious what they injure. I consider this gritty form of revolution part of the love revolution, as we protect what we have defined to be sacred. And since part of what fosters care for our planet involves feeling our anger and protection, our sadness and despair, these emotions increase our participation for what we love, for what is sacred. Love, then, is more than just a feel-good experience. And so is what I consider sacred.

When we can join what we consider non-sacred to what we do consider sacred, we join Yin and Yang, and we bolster the cycle of fertility and sustainability through ordinary activism, which is love in action.

For this reason, it’s important for me to keep my mind open to what I might be in denial of or blind to. For, if I misread part of reality and deem it evil when it is not — as certain religious and “spiritual” doctrines and edicts have done for too long, and I think many times in gross error — then I myself become a negative force. Discerning reality, therefore, is important to our sense of the sacred and our love. If I suddenly become aware of the great value of toxic agriculture, pollution, and mercenary greed, then I might be able to embrace these more and consider them sacred. So far, I have not found much grace, much sacredness, in these enterprises.

We can create an external space with similar qualities we want to cultivate inside us. And, we can bring qualities inside us that we want to see in the external world.

So, if you are torn up inside, find sacred space outwardly to help heal yourself inwardly. And if you are in chaos outwardly, summon your sustainable and enduring inner resources to the aid of the external moment.

Spiritualizing the Ordinary

A popular domain of the sacred is what many include in their definition of spirituality. Rituals, ceremonies, and gatherings of all sorts that we consider sacred are often held in a special space with special preparations. This has been the case for millennia in all cultures. Part of my struggle, however, has always been how to integrate the meaning and quality of attention common to these special functions and experiences into everyday experience. How to spiritualize “ordinary” life.

Indeed, many don’t even try to integrate “sacred space” in to “everyday space.” Their spiritual life is separate from everyday life. This creates a schism between what we consider sacred and what is not. I have never been satisfied with a spiritual life that does not directly and practically influence my everyday life, thereby spiritualizing the mundane.

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Author: Jack Adam Weber – Wake Up World

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