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23 October, 2015 by Choki team

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.

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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18 October, 2015 by Choki team

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.

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.
A strong sense that the mission, whatever it is, is getting closer in time.
A compulsion to master certain fields, skills, or professions, not only for career advancement but in preparation for this half-understood personal mission.
High levels of empathy; a sense of feeling what others feel.
An urgent desire to lessen or prevent suffering for humans, animals, or even plants.
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.
High levels of creativity; passion for music, poetry, performance, or visual arts.
An intense love of animals, sometimes a desire to communicate with them.
Difficult early life, often with a history of abuse or childhood trauma.
Intense connection to certain types of natural environment, such as the ocean, mountains, or forest.
Resistance to orthodox religiosity, paradoxically accompanied by a strong sense of either spiritual purpose or spiritual yearning.
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.
Very high emotional sensitivity, often leading to predilections for anxiety, addictions, or eating disorders.
Sense of intense connection with certain cultures, languages, or geographic regions.
Disability, often brain-centered (dyslexia, retardation, autism) in oneself or a loved one. Fascination with people who have intellectual disabilities or mental illness.
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.
Persistent or recurring physical illness, often severe, with symptoms that fluctuate inexplicably.
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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26 August, 2015 by Choki team

Does Positive Thinking Free Us From the Matrix?

On a bleak weekday of your spiritual journey you arrive home, full of stress and frustration, and open the mailbox. It is, as usual, full of advertising brochures. You are about to throw them all in the dustbin, but what you read on the cover of one of them raises your attention. You read the following:

Positive thinking makes you happy! Happy, because you can always look at yourself like you are looking at a miracle. Positive thinking is the magnet of happiness. If you think of something, you will start attracting it. If your thoughts are beautiful, you will attract beautiful things, whereas if you are looking at the world pessimistically, your whole life will be a tragedy. Change it, and you will be happy!

Yes, that is what is missing from your life: happiness!

You read the rest of the text on the page with interest, the five main points of positive thinking are:

I am existing in this world in order to fulfill my mission.
I achieve what I really want–I want things that are positive for me and advance me in life.
In the course of my development I need practice, experience and insight.
I am able to convert my negative emotions and thoughts into positive ones.
I am capable of loving myself, even with my weaknesses and faults.

If you wish to experience these five points, your life will be happier, more wholesome and harmonic.

You are invigorated by what you have read, you believe that you are feeling alive, first time for several days, and the world around you is beautiful. You decide that from now on you will think positively, and with the power of positive thinking you will be able to change your life.

But is that really true?

Lets have a closer look at those positive thoughts:

I Am Existing in This World in Order to Fulfill My Mission

In order to fulfill our mission, we need to know in the first place what our mission is!

During our Spiritual Journey, our mind has set up a number of goals and objectives for us. We have often believed “yes, that is it, that is the real thing”, but finally we realized with disappointment that it was not the case. What is the guarantee that the new goal set up in front of us by our mind and positive thinking, will really change our life? We do not even have a chance to see that, as long as we seek for the mission of our life in the world of shapes and forms.

Still, this endless chase for unfulfilled desires is not entirely useless as, after a while we get tired on our Journey, and realize the futility of the eternal tread-wheel.

I Achieve What I Really Want – I Want Things That are Positive for Me and Advance Me in Life

This idea further refines the notion of our mission, as we are allegedly attracted to things that advance us on our Journey towards fulfilling our mission. Have you ever thought about whose ideas these really are, who wants to achieve advantages?

Even a brief self-analysis will reveal that these ideas are dictated by the Ego-dominated mind. As long as the glue of identification binds us to the mind on our Journey, these are in fact our own ideas, and they forge our ambitions. Where these ambitions take us is something that we have seen at the mind games. Sometimes we get so hopelessly stuck in the net of the world of shapes and forms that only the death is able to get us out of there.

But if we recognize the trap, we may even experience our disappointments on our Spiritual Journey in a way that the disappointments effectively dissolve the glue of our identifications. Positive thinking is therefore not primarily useful for us and our Ego-dominated mind, but much more so for the awakening of the Consciousness.

In the Course of My Development I Need Practice, Experience and Insight

From early infancy, we have been brought up with the concept that we are not perfect, we need to develop, we need experience and insight in order to be better and more perfect. That social conditioning is the reason why we almost all fall into the trap and we believe we are able to achieve perfection in the world of shapes and forms. The eternal law of shapes and forms is, however, that a specific form is born, it flourishes and then dies, to give its place to the new ones.

There is no place for eternal perfection in the world of forms and shapes, and we look for it in vain on our spiritual Journey. Insight and practice are necessary to the final experience that will make us recognize that perfection is not to be found in the world of the mind, in the world of forms and shapes, and it cannot be grabbed by our thoughts.

I Am Able to Convert My Negative Emotions and Thoughts Into Positive Ones

The technique of positive thinking is not able to change you. All that happens is that it suppresses the negative dimensions of your personality. Positive thinking does not mean more than relegating negative ideas, thoughts and emotions into the unconscious level of our mind. Once ideas disturbing us or others have been suppressed, we condition our conscious mind with positive thoughts.

Osho asserts that the problem with this solution is that our unconscious mind is more powerful, nine times larger than the conscious one. As soon as we relegate an idea down there, it will be nine times more powerful than it used to be. It will not be there in the old way, but it will find new manifestations.

If you suppress some negative idea or emotion, just because you find irritating, even you yourself may be aware that it is only self-deception. Deep inside you the suppressed idea of emotion continues to work, and at the conscious level of your mind you are trying to make it look nicer. On the surface you may smile, but this smile is only skin deep.

If you are able to exceed that situation, reaching beyond the mind, you will always be able to look at the process as an external observer, and realize that positive thinking levies heavy the burdens of suppressed, internal tensions on your personality. These suppressed tensions may burst out like a volcanic eruption one day.

I Am Capable of Loving Myself, Even With My Weaknesses and Faults

This love is perhaps not the unselfish love of accepting ourselves; it largely depends upon the efficiency of the implementation of the first five points. If I am successful in positive thinking, if I am able to use this method successfully in my life, I have every reason to love myself. If I am unsuccessful, the love of myself may easily turn into disappointment and despair.

The latter has, we must realize, a much greater likelihood than reaching altitudes never experienced before as a result of positive thinking. We may conquer one peak or two, but as we have discussed previously, in the world of shapes and forms not success but change is the permanent tendency.

Consciousness without Choice

As a conclusion we may say that positive thinking may render a good service to us, though not in the way we originally expected. The impossibility of implementing positive thinking in the world of forms and shapes and the failures rooted in it may shatter or quiet the Ego-dominated mind, and open up the way to the re-emergence of a new mental ability.

On our Journey, we must acquire a new Consciousness which is neither positive, nor negative; that of Consciousness, the Witness, the Spectator without having to choose. It is the Pure Consciousness, which will completely re-shape your entire life.

You will astounded to see that if you stay as a Witness in the world of shapes and forms, in the Consciousness without having to choose, as a Spectator, how intensively will something appear in your soul. Something that points beyond both positive and negative, something higher than both.

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

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7 July, 2015 by Choki team

Taking Responsibility For Our Energy

For some, what I am about to share might seem radical, ridiculous, or even crazy, and for others will appear self-evident. I feel compelled to actively put it out there because I feel in many respects it is a crucial key to shifting our reality; the more people who take it to heart, the better our collective outlook will be.

At an early stage in my journey I became aware of the fact that each human is in fact a fractal of the whole. Deep within the vastness of our being we each contain every essence, every type of energy from the most sublimely divine to the most wickedly depraved. Initially when this realisation came to me it was quite abstract and there was a distance between me and the idea. However, as I explored the deeper regions of my being I found myself coming face to face with aspects that showed me that this was not just some faraway concept, it was a hardcore reality.

The more I explored my inner world the clearer it became that we implicitly contain every energetic expression. I realized that there was nothing that I could see in my outer world that was not in essence a part of me. Initially I was frightened by the understanding that I contained such dark and horrible pieces. Did this mean that I was evil? I didn’t want to be evil. Those guys out there are sociopaths, I am not a sociopath; I would never do those things, perpetrate those acts. On some level I feared that if I allowed myself to accept the dark aspects, I would become them. The only sane, good option it seemed was to leave them unclaimed; to reject them. However, as I explored these uncomfortable parts of myself it eventually occurred to me that it was actually possible to ‘own’ these parts without choosing to enact them. After all I am a sovereign being with the ability to decide what actions I deem worthy of expression. I could claim all my dark, ugly bits, bring them into conscious awareness, and still choose to operate from a space of love.

Casting Out The Dark

As young developing humans most of us learn to reject ‘undesirable’ aspects, to repress them in order to feel comfortable with our selves, and to ensure acceptance in our social group. We select what we are, and what we are not. In order to elucidate I will use the most basic example: I am light, I am not dark. However, if we are truly a reflection of the whole, then we should contain everything, even darkness. In rejecting and ‘disowning’ our dark parts we cast them out. But where do they go? I suspect this energy, cast out of our inner world, manifests in our external reality.

Rejected as part of the whole, thrown away from love, these elements seek to be re-integrated. They show up everywhere in our environment waiting for recognition. We perceive them as threats, and try to fight or ignore them. This doesn’t work; it only exacerbates the problem and reinforces the dualistic state caused by the self-imposed separation. If we recognize that external reality is a reflection of our inner state, it becomes clear that it is important that we take responsibility for our energy. In order stop adding to the problem we need to cease focusing so much on the outside and do some inner housekeeping. By healing our inner world, through acknowledgement of all that we truly are, we take responsibility for our energy and cease contributing to the darkness of our outer collective reality.

In order to illustrate my point I will use an analogy of a gardener. Imagine each of us is a gardener who has been gifted with the responsibility of managing every seed in existence. As this gardener we become aware that there are some seeds that develop into beautiful food and flowers. We value these seeds and carefully plant and nurture them. However, we also believe that some seeds grow into nasty weeds. Fearing the potential of these seeds we don’t want to be associated with them so, like most other gardeners in our world, we toss them away into the wind. ‘This is not me I want nothing to do with these seeds.’ These unclaimed, unmanaged seeds end up everywhere and thrive and threaten to dominate our environment. No one is willing to take responsibility for these plants. ‘No, I would never plant such a seed; this plant has nothing to do with me. It must just be the nature of reality.’

If instead we accepted responsibility for ‘owning’ the whole gamut of seeds, we could cease contributing to the communal problem. As a wise gardener we would not toss the potentially dangerous seeds away, we would do the opposite, aware of their power, we would keep them close by, where they could be kept in check and managed responsibly.

Continuing on with the gardening analogy, when we stop fearing the seeds that we allowed to get out of control through neglect and mismanagement, we might discover that judging them as weeds may have been rash decision triggered by fear and misunderstanding. If instead of pushing away the dark seeds, we chose to look at them more closely, we might discover that they have valuable qualities and attributes that we were previously unaware of. When tended and cultivated consciously, with understanding and awareness, we might find that their growth can actually have benefits for the whole.

“Like colors to an artist, there is no good or bad, the whole spectrum is available for expression. The darker colors are necessary to add depth, and when used appropriately, with awareness of the whole, are vital components of the emerging beauty.” ~ Jump Into the Blue.

Acknowledging The Wholeness

The more of us who assume responsibility of our own darkness, the less truant energy will be available to continue to animate the dark story that has been unfolding on this planet. Are we ready to stop being irresponsible gardeners dominated by unconsciously driven manifestations? Are we ready to stop placing the blame ‘out there’? Are we ready to own all that we truly are and stop denying our accountability? Are we ready to become custodians of our reality, acknowledging the wholeness of our being, so that we can consciously determine which elements we want to cultivate in our external reality? Rather than working to repress, fight, and deny some of what we are, let’s become mindful co-creators, nurturing and guiding a peaceful world based on love and beauty in full awareness of all that we are.

There are many approaches to begin exploring our inner world and integrating our shadow aspects. Carl Jung, a pioneer of shadow work, wrote much on the subject, and there are many great books and healers that teach strategies to facilitate the process. However, the most important attributes of initiating inner healing include being open, and willing to look at oneself as honestly as possible. A lot of my personal work takes place in meditation or in the bath. However, with certain challenging aspects I worked with a soul retrieval practitioner. She held space, and assisted me to connect with, and create an opening in my heart for some of my more stubborn, hidden, or sneaky parts.

The beauty of this work is that, not only does it contribute to healing our collective reality, it also creates powerful shifts on a personal level. When we face and integrate our fears and all our bits that we previously avoided, we find a new level of inner peace, solidity and wholeness.

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Author: Christina Lavers – Wake Up World

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7 January, 2015 by Choki team

Who Am I?

The question is an eternal one. If you don’t answer it, you may never be able to distinguish between what your essential self wants and what other people manipulate you to want. Each of us may do best to answer it for himself or herself. Yet the answers given by others do affect the way we approach (or avoid) this question. Several general types of answers have been offered.

The most traditional answer in Western culture is that you are a creature, a creation of God, a creation that is flawed in vital ways. Conceived and born in original sin, you are someone who must continually struggle to obey the rules laid down by that God, lest you be damned. It is an answer that appears depressing in some ways. One the one hand, it can lead to low self-worth and the expectation of failure. On the other, it can lead to the rigid arrogance of being one of the “elect.” Further, this view doesn’t much encourage you to think about who you really are, as the answer has already been given from a “higher” source.

The more modern answer to “Who am I?” is that you are a meaningless accident. Contemporary science is largely associated with a view of reality that sees the entire universe as totally material, governed only by fixed physical laws and blind chance. It just happened that, in a huge universe, the right chemicals came together under the right conditions so that the chemical reaction we call life formed and eventually evolved into you. But there’s no inherent meaning in that accident, no spiritual side to existence.

I believe that this view is not really good science, but rather what we believe to be scientific and factual. More important, it’s a view that has strong psychological consequences. After all, if you’re just a mixture of meaningless chemicals, your ultimate fate – death and nonexistence – is clear. Don’t worry too much about other people, as they are just meaningless mixtures of chemicals, too. In this view, it doesn’t really matter if you think about who you really are – whatever conclusions you arrive at are just subjective fantasies, of no particular relevance in the real physical world.

Psychologically speaking, this materialist view of our ultimate nature leaves as much to be desired as does the born-into-original-sin view. As a psychologist, I stress the psychological consequences of these two views of your ultimate identity, because your beliefs play an important role in shaping your reality. Modern research has shown that, in many ways, what we believe affects the way our brain constructs the world we experience. Some of these beliefs are conscious. You know you have them. Yet many are implicit – you act on them, but don’t even know you have them.

If you think life in general is a meaningless accident, your perceptions of the complex world around you will likely be biased toward seeing the meaningless and absurd. Seeing this will in turn reinforce your belief in the meaninglessness of things. If you believe in original sin and the great difficulties of finding salvation, your perceptions will likely be biased toward seeing your own and others’ failures, again reinforcing your belief in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our beliefs about who we are and what our world is like are not mere beliefs – they strongly control our perceptions. So we can gain more control by finding out what we believe and how those beliefs affect us.

Between the traditional religious and materialistic views of who you are, there are a variety of ideas that embrace elements of each which include rich possibilities for personal and social growth. The common element in these other views is that life and the universe do have some meaning and that each of us shares in some form of spiritual nature. Yet they also recognize that something has gone wrong somewhere. We have “temporarily” lost our way. We have forgotten the essential divine element within us and have become psychologically locked into a narrow, traditional, religious or materialist views.

There is an old Eastern teaching story that illustrates this – the story of the Mad King. Although he is actually the ruler of vast dominions, the Mad King has forgotten this. Years ago he descended into the pits of the dankest cellar of his great palace, where he lives in the dark amongst rags and rats, continually brooding on his many misfortunes. The king’s ministers try valiantly to persuade him to come upstairs into the light, where life is beautiful. But the Mad King is convinced these are madmen and will not listen. He will not be taken in by fairy tales of noble kings and beautiful palaces!

We have a lot of evidence in modern psychology to show how little of our natural potential we use and how much of our suffering is self-created, clasped tightly to our bosoms in crazed fear and ignorance. Yet the ministers do carry a light with them when they come down into the cellar, and they do bring the food which keeps the king alive. Even in his madness, he must sometimes notice this. In the real world, events keep occurring that don’t fit into our narrow views, no matter how tightly we may hold them, and sometimes these events catch our attention.

So-called psychic phenomena are like that. They certainly don’t fit a materialistic view, just as they challenge the traditional religious view held by many that this kind of phenomena only happened thousands of years ago, and are thus to be believed, but not pondered.

Psychic phenomena are disturbing to both the traditional religious and materialistic views of who we are. It is one thing to consider abstractly that our true identity may be more than we conceive, or that our universe may be populated with other non-material intelligences. It is quite another thing, with channeling for instance, when the ordinary looking person sitting across from you seems to go to sleep, but suddenly begins speaking to you in a different voice, announcing that he is a spiritual entity who has temporarily taken over the channel’s body to teach you something!

Now you have to really look at what’s going on. Who is that so-called “entity?” Who is that person who channels? If someone else can have his or her apparent identity change so drastically, do we really know who they are? Can I even be sure about who I am? If you have been conditioned to believe that who you are is meaningless or inherently bad or sinful, you might not welcome this stimulation that the phenomena of channeling gives to the question “Who am I?”

We have many ways of psychologically defending ourselves against dealing with things that don’t fit into our organized and defended world. You could just say, “This person is crazy, or maybe even deliberately faking this stuff.” It’s a good defense, for of course there are some people known as channels who are probably just crazy or deliberately faking it. The best lies usually contain a very high proportion of truth.

You could also just naively accept whatever the ostensible channeled entity says. “Yes, you are Master Shananangans from the 17th planet of the central divine galaxy Ottenwelt. Teach me Master, I hear and obey.” This overenthusiastic acceptance can be just as much of a defense against deeper thinking and questioning as overenthusiastic rejection.

Channeling and other psychic phenomena are having a great impact on our culture today. We can use this impact for personal and social growth if we are willing to think about the deeper implications, and examine the things we take for granted about our inherent nature.

If we just believe or disbelieve without really looking, this opportunity will be lost. Read, reflect, examine your own beliefs, argue, go meet some psychics or channels. Perhaps you will decide that they are “real.” Perhaps you will decide they are not “real” in the ordinary sense of the word, but are somehow psychologically or spiritually real or important. Perhaps you will decide that some (or most or all) of this stuff is really crazy. But in the process, you will learn a lot about who you are, and who we are.

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Author: Prof. Charles Tart

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6 January, 2015 by Choki team

20 Transformational Truths From Sages Throughout the Ages

Throughout the ages, there have been many who have had gotten a taste of incredibly mesmerizing higher states of consciousness. Rather than keep their experiential knowledge and wisdom about the higher and deeper elements of existence to themselves they spread the word to others, be it through spoken word, written works, or other methods.

Thanks to the sages, luminaries, spiritual teachers, thinkers and every-day people who had and shared their enlightening experience, we can ignite the light of expanded awareness of the higher and deeper aspects of the human experience and existence itself, within ourselves. When the future looks bleak and the motivation to excel and advance seems pointless, we can look to those who have lived and are still alive who possess that inner wisdom, realized through their own personal experiences of an enlightened state of awareness.

The transformational truths that such guiding lights to humanity express to us can raise our level of hope once more to the domain of energy that makes us more proactive. Reignited excitement and passion can drive us closer to the successes we imagined and dreamed would come true. We are all capable of incredible feats.

Ask yourself: is your state of mind stopping you from realizing that ‘realized life’ success story that you undoubtedly played within your head so many times before? Don’t let it stay a dream, let it become a reality. Living in the 21st century of our archaic timeline, we have the amazing opportunity to taste such consciousness-shifting words of wisdom.

Today we will take a look at 20 such enlightening truths from sages throughout the ages. Allow these timeless words nourish your mind, heart and soul.

Transformational Truth 1: Albert Einstein

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us a universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest … a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

– Albert Einstein

Transformational Truth 2: The Digha Nikaya

You should be an island to yourself, a refuge to yourself, not dependent on any other but taking refuge in the truth and none other than the truth. And how do you become an island and a refuge to yourself? In this way. You see and contemplate your body as composed of all the forces of the universe. Ardently and mindfully you steer your body-self by restraining your discontent with the world about you. In the same way, observe and contemplate your feelings and use that same ardent restraint and self-possession against enslavement by greed or desire. By seeing attachment to your body and feelings as blocking the truth, you dwell in self-possession and ardent liberation from those ties. This is how you live as an island to yourself and a refuge to yourself. Whoever dwells in this contemplation, islanded by the truth and taking refuge in the truth–that one will come out of the darkness and into the light.

– The Digha Nikaya

Transformational Truth 3: Unknown

“Life is what you make it,” this is very true.
Find beauty and magic in all things,
and the Love that sees you through.
When you look at the world where you live,
seek not your gain, but what you can give.
When a man is poor, and hungers, and thirsts,
serve not yourself til you serve this man first.
When a man is down and seeks shelter from cold, give him shelter.
You’ll receive blessings untold.
Live by the Golden Rule:
Do unto others as you’d have done unto you.
And always remember:
When you destroy, you destroy a part of you, too.
Life is what you make of it!

– Unknown

Transformational Truth 4: Carlos Castaneda

Loving this world, seeing the beauty in everything.
Appreciating every moment as a beautiful, wholly contained,
pearl of eternal nature, this is the world to me.

A never ending string of pearls…. every moment is in and of it’s self a life time,
and when we have affection and let ourselves experience life without expectation…
that is when the majesty of the world opens her petals to us…
And welcomes us home.

– Carlos Castaneda

Transformational Truth 5: Max Heindel

We may liken truth to a mountain, and the various interpretations of that truth to different paths leading up to the summit. Many people are traveling along all of these paths and every one, while he is at the bottom, thinks his path is the only one; he sees only a small part of the mountain, and may therefore be justified in crying to his brothers, “You are wrong! Come over to my path; this is the only one that leads to the top.” But as all these people progress upward, they will see that the paths converge at the top and that they are all one in the ultimate.

– Max Heindel

Transformational Truth 6: Nisargadatta Maharaj

Stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless, realize that every mode of perception is subjective, that what is seen or heard, touched or smelled, felt or thought,expected or imagined, is in the mind and not in reality, and you will experience peace and freedom from fear.

– Nisargadatta Maharaj

Transformational Truth 7: Gautama Buddha

Do not believe anything
because it is said by an authority,
or if it is said to come from angels,
or from gods,
or from an inspired source.

Believe it only if you have explored it
in your own heart
and mind and body
and found it to be true.

Work out your own path,
through diligence.

– Gautama Buddha

Transformational Truth 8: Osho

Every man has his woman within him and every woman has her man within her. Only the meditator comes to know his whole being. Suddenly his inner woman and the inner man melt and merge into each other. That creates an orgasmic state in him. Now it is no more a momentary experience that comes and goes; it is something that continues, day in and day out, like the heart beating or breathing.

– Osho

Transformational Truth 9: Lao Tzu

When you find the way
Others will find you
Passing by on the road
They will be drawn to your door
The way that cannot be heard
will be reflected in your voice
The way that cannot be seen
Will be reflected in your eyes

– Lao Tzu

Transformational Truth 10: John Gray

When we experience the pain of another person, we instinctively want to take away that pain. But by taking away the other person’s pain, we also take away his or her opportunity to grow. To be truly compassionate, we must be able to share another person’s suffering and pain — knowing there is nothing we can do to relieve it and that we are not responsible for it, and yet knowing and understanding what that pain feels like.

– John Gray

Transformational Truth 11: David J. Lieberman

How people see the world is often a reflection of how they see themselves. If they think that the world is just a cesspool of lies and deceit, then they themselves may be full of lies and deceit. Watch out for those people who are always telling you just how corrupt the rest of the world is. As the saying goes, “It takes one to know one.”

– David J. Lieberman

Transformational Truth 12: Lao Tzu

Throw away holiness and wisdom,
and people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won’t be any thieves.

If these three aren’t enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course

– Lao Tzu

Transformational Truth 13: Terence McKenna

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

– Terence McKenna

Transformational Truth 14: Ghandi

Keep your thoughts positive, because your thoughts become your words.
Keep your words positive, because your words become your behaviors.
Keep your behaviors positive, because your behaviors become your habits.
Keep your habits positive, because your habits become your values.
Keep your values positive, because your values become your destiny.

– Ghandi

Transformational Truth 15: Franz Hartmann

All the forms of Life in the Universe may be looked upon as being manifestations of the One and Universal Principle of Life in various forms; the whole of the Cosmos, being a product of the Universal Mind, may be regarded as universal, absolute consciousness becoming relative in separate forms. The universal consciousness of the Universal Mind forms spiritual centres of consciousness in living beings, whereby each being may feel and know its surroundings; and as the kind of living beings expands, their consciousness and power of sensation and perception expand with it; for all their powers belong to the mind. and not to the body: the latter without the mind is merely a form without life.

– Franz Hartmann

Transformational Truth 16: Bettie Eadie

If we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them more closely.
If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative.
In our thoughts and words we create our own weaknesses and our own strengths.
Our limitations and joys begin in our hearts.
We can always replace negative with positive.

– Bettie Eadie

Transformational Truth 17: Huang Po

Since time without beginning, the nature of Awakened Mind and Emptiness has consisted of the same, absolute non-duality of no birth or death, no existence or non-existence, no purity or impurity, no movement or stillness, no young or old, no inside or outside, no shape and form, no sound and color. Neither striving nor searching, one should not use intellect to understand nor words to express Awakened Mind. One should not think that it is a place or things, name or form. One should not think that it is a place or things, name or form. Only then is it realized that all Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and sentient beings possess the same natural state of great Nirvana.

– Huang Po

Transformational Truth 18: Dalai Lama

As human beings we all want to be happy and free from misery. We have learned that the key to happiness is inner peace. The greatest obstacles to inner peace are disturbing emotions such as anger and attachment, fear and suspicion, while love and compassion, a sense of universal responsibility are the sources of peace and happiness.

– Dalai Lama

Transformational Truth 19: John Lennon

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

– John Lennon

Transformational Truth 20: Sarah Ban Breathnach

Greet everyone you meet with a warm smile, no matter how busy you are.
Don’t rush encounters with coworkers, family and friends.
Speak softly. Listen attentively.
Act as if every conversation you have is the most important thing on your mind today.
Look your children and your partner in the eyes when they talk to you.
Stroke the cat, caress the dog.
Lavish love on every living being you meet.
See how different you feel at the end of the day.

– Sarah Ban Breathnach

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Author: Paul Lenda / Wake Up World

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14 October, 2014 by Choki team

Finding Our Peace: The Art of Loving Our Experience

The usual tendency in our modern secular thinking is to view the outer world as separate from ourselves, but really it is just a partial reflection of what we fundamentally are. Objective reality is one of two pieces. Both pieces make up one whole. The other part is our subjective world, which are our feelings, thoughts and beliefs.

In this ancient and rebirthed understanding, we are realizing we are both the inner and outer worlds.

Now I could go into why quantum physics specifies that these two portions are inseparable, or why ancient wisdom and modern mystics say the same thing, but if we’re on this path we intuitively and possibly even logically know this already.

Instead, here I’m going to focus on what actually makes up our experience, as well as ways to find our peace by loving our experience, because it’s not always easy to accept and embrace all of what we perceive in life.

Some of it is simply hard for our hearts to take and challenging for our minds to fathom. But our experience is much like an intimate relationship: it has its ups and downs, there are things that need to change, there are things that we wouldn’t change for the world and there are hard lessons involved which hopefully inspire us to develop ourselves. And just like we love our partner regardless of their positives and negatives, we should also love our experience, irrespective of its strengths and weaknesses.

Another way to begin to look at it is by considering how we love ourselves. Just as we don’t condone everything about our partner, yet we still love them, we still love ourselves, even if sometimes we’re not proud of all our feelings, thoughts and actions. After all, we make mistakes, learn and navigate our entire lives growing into our new, more developed selves.

But our experience is much bigger than our ego, or our perception and the ingredients of our ‘illusory separate’ selves. It’s also the objects of our experience, because if we change the objects, we also change the experience. Therefore, it is the two realities combined; it’s an intimate interconnection between the inner and outer worlds.

Let’s put it in a simple model:

Subjective world = feelings, thoughts, beliefs, actions

Objective world = body, people, earth, universe.

Experience = the interconnected total of our subjective and objective worlds.

This means that there is something which is the bridge between or the basis of these two seemingly separate realities.

Both pioneer scientists and contemporary spirituality view consciousness (or something like consciousness) as the ground of all being and therefore the bridge of these realms. Though to be clear: it’s not our individual consciousness but the whole of consciousness which is the unifying factor.

One way to illustrate this is through the analogy of a fire. The whole of consciousness is the fire, the objective world including our brain is a flame in the fire and our subjective world is our flame’s heat. All are the fire. All are consciousness.

One common assumption about our individual consciousness is that it is generated by the big brain (containing 100 billion neurons), the second brain (100 million neurons embedded in the walls of our gut) and the heart (which contains 40,000 neurons); much like a generator creates electricity. Even though this is voiced by some materialists as being a proven scientific fact, it’s not – it’s speculation based primarily on the evidence that if we tamper with the brains (particularly the big brain) in certain ways, it tampers with our awareness in particular ways too.

But just as all scientists and laymen alike should know – correlation does not imply causation. Just because our individual consciousness changes when we alter our brain does not mean that the brain created the consciousness in the first place.

The alternative to this explanation, one that is receiving support from emerging scientific evidence, is that the brain receives or tunes into consciousness, much like a radio or television tunes into signals. If we tamper with our radio or TV set, then it will no doubt have an associated impact on the way the signal is received, without actually changing the signal itself. Therefore, just because modifying our brain can alter our experience, does not inherently mean that we have changed consciousness itself. We have simply changed our experience of consciousness.

This makes sense when we acknowledge how our experience is influenced by what’s happening both inside and outside of us. We’re tuning into particular frequencies of consciousness to have an experience which is co-created by both our inner and outer worlds.

When we begin to meditate this point becomes even clearer. Think of our conscious awareness as the light from a torch and the darkness as our subconscious mind. When we meditate, we can navigate through our subconscious mind by making it conscious with our light. Meditation is the act of navigating our awareness through our subconscious mind. The more skilled we become at expanding our mind with meditation, the deeper we go into the darkness of our subconscious. Then suddenly – as many experienced meditators agree – we potentially reach beyond our subconscious mind.

In other words – advanced meditation can craft our individual awareness into a cosmic consciousness or even consciousness itself. This is also a common experience when taking a psychedelic substance. Over and over again, through countless individuals and a wide array of tribal, traditional and current cultures, it is believed that during a psychedelic trip (or other trance-induced activity) the mind becomes one with the whole of reality.

The line between the internal and external worlds has become reverently blurred. This is a big concept to entertain, but once we do, we arrive at an inevitable conclusion. If our experience is a melting between two interconnected worlds, and we love our experience, then we love both worlds. We therefore have a solid foundation to establish and maintain our inner peace.

That isn’t to say that we like everything within it – such as war, murder, emotional dysfunction, suffering etc. – just that we embrace it for what it is. We’re at peace because we understand it as a manifestation of what we fundamentally are: consciousness (or the more traditional term of God). The way we then operate through our lives is based on love, because we view our experience as a reflection of ourselves and we love it as we would love ourselves, and all humanity.

This is when it loving our experience becomes an art because we learn to consciously co-create our experience in a way that is beautiful, inspiring and above all loving. Ultimately, you should love your experience like you love yourself, because it is you. It’s a sure-fire way to be at peace.

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Author: Phil Watt / Wake up world

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