Aspiring to the goal of Spiritual Happiness and Wisdom

This picture inspired the words in this blog post!

Some of us aspire to this.  We understand this as the goal, the intention.  And that is the absence of the goal or intention.  Sounds like a Zen riddle.  Pretty much is I suppose. Seeking NO fulfillment!

Recognizing the vain irrelevancy involved in seeking fulfillment, yet finding it everywhere as we giving up endeavors to acquire it.

Un-petrified, un-paralyzed, un-phased and un-dazed–more than comfortable to stand alone and become eccentric in a spiritual and otherworldly way.  

Knowing fully that it is the path itself and not fulfillment of outer world desire that makes the magic.  

Understanding reality for its nature and finding spiritual happiness–some of us value this.

As this value is perceived, adversity faced in the outer world holds less meaning than in the past.

 Friends  disappear but those that remain are high quality spiritual brethren.  (non-religious) 

Both traveling and staying at home are one and the same–aspiring to live this particular wisdom leading to spiritual happiness!

Some of us yearn for this if we do yearn at all, but we do not seek it.

Karma, Ground Consciousness, Habituation and Meditation – mindfulness can create happiness

Karmic imprints.  They accumulate and are latent in ground consciousness or base mind.

This area of psyche gathers up or collects  (through the many layers of it’s nature)   all the karmic latencies that are gathered over eons of lifetimes.

And the responses to those tendencies create more imprints and here in this reality, on the earth,  they are able to be stimulated.

I used to think that we were completely in control of moods via our thoughts–and while that is partially true, the karmic imprints that settle into consciousness awaken in us as experiences of suffering or experiences of happiness which sometimes are seemingly out of our control.  I’ve been thinking about  karmic latency and habitual tendencies.  Do we say something like, ‘Oh that’s just how I am an I can’t help that‘ or what?  Just how does it all work anyway?   These thoughts that follow are influenced by Buddhist views by the way and they make perfect sense (to me).

Positive or negative karma ,it is said, does not always  immediately express itself. These karmic latencies resting within ground consciousness can arise later, even in future lifetimes.

Sometimes I can correlate karmic events to the Nodes of the Moon (North Node, South Node)  in an astrology chart–imprints remain in ground consciousness to ripen under the appropriate circumstances.  And we can correlate that to aspects to the birth Nodes and the transiting Lunar Nodes.  Anyway…

Negative and positive qualities increase due to habitual patterns–if a person tends to be angry again and again then becomes habituated to anger, it creates an increase of anger-latency in the mind.   The same is true with positive qualities such as love and compassion.  These qualities (either positive or negative) creates the foundation for the mind–ground consciousness.   Even in remembering some experience of the past, the remembering of it strengthens the latency.

For these reasons, we should be ever-aware and mindful–otherwise our disturbing emotions gradually increase from day-to-day and lifetime-to-lifetime.

We can create mindfulness latencies in the ground conspicuousness (habitual pattern of mindfulness).

Through meditation we can create positive latencies of love, wisdom and compassion which does overcome negative imprints when meditation is increased to focus on that love, wisdom and compassion.

We are born with a particular proclivities or latent tendencies developed in previous lifetimes.  We see this within seconds, minutes, hours of a baby’s birth.  Not all babies have the same newborn tendencies—some are restless, some are peaceful, etc.  Some children are naturally very kind due to positive latencies developed and imprinted in previous lifetimes into their ground consciousness.  Other children are very aggressive due to their own latent tendencies.

Some people are unable to deny themselves their desires and cannot say no to themselves–others can deny themselves but have difficulty saying no to others. Yet, we can change through cultivation of mindfulness or being aware of our tendencies and developing positive virtues where needed.

It seems like another lifetime ago when I asked higher mind/spirit guides [_____ fill in your own preferred word (s) here] a question. (Divination)

I really wanted to know why we were here and what we’re doing here and what the whole bottom-line point to our lives here were about.

And I was told that we are here to develop virtue.  And now, many years later, I see how true that answer was; although at the time I wasn’t satisfied with it.

With the correct understanding and with mindfulness in life and developing good qualities through  meditation we will be able to develop new latencies, new habitual  patterns, new tendencies.

Is that easy?  Is being mindful and conscious of our latent habitual tendencies at all times easy?  It’s as easy as that — or as difficult.  It depends on us.

We can develop positive or negative tendencies throughout life!  They come and they go depending upon our own awareness and contribution to the habitual patterns.

Our experience of happiness is based upon ground consciousness no matter which realm we are in.  Creating karmic imprints in the present reality results in experiencing their results in the future.

Just like a child who goes to school and studies hard creates an imprint in the mind that allows the child to later on do something with the imprint like become a teacher or a doctor.  If there was no type of imprint to start with (no schooling, no education) there would be no possibility of becoming the teacher in the future.

Well, this is all I have time to write on the topic for the moment.  I hope some of these words will find their way to the right person at the right time out there in cyber world and in doing so be helpful to that other.  

 

Emotion as ‘the’ spiritual path on April 22 2014 Grand Cross – a continuation of last post

My last blog post was incomplete.  I got to thinking about it afterwards–the evolution of our emotional life, that is.  We evolve in the way we deal with them–the emotions.  I have observed that progression in my life.  And it 1,000% correlates with Buddhist teachings–the parallels between my own observations and the teachings being very validating and actually very comforting.

Let me try to explain.  You see, in our younger years (there are always exceptions) due to lack of experience/immaturity, we tend to act out our emotions.  When we are feeling  overwhelmed by the intensity of the wave of feelings that occur when emotions arise, what we tend to do before we know any better is to act out in some way, we re-act.

No matter the chronological age of the individual who is experiencing the emotion, immaturity or ignorance causes us to have a particular view of emotion.  The reaction may be to run away from the situation or stimuli that triggered the surge of emotion in order to relinquished or release the energy.  Therefore, the individual does not examine their own inner response.  The don’t hang out with the emotion long enough to realize the truth that emotions arise and then then dissipate.  There is no ability, therefore, to create enough space around the feeling to allow that realization to occur.  Emotions are viewed, therefore, as something bad or something that must be gotten rid of as soon as possible.

Once I heard a Buddhist monk speak about how some advanced Buddhist practitioners will purposefully hold a difficult emotion that arises and try to expand it and to work with that energy for the intentional purpose of extracting wisdom information from the emotional energy.  They also do a practice called Tonglen with the energy in order to help all sentient beings. Wow; impressive!

Many of us, because of societal conditioning, have been told that strong emotional energy is like poison or is highly undesirable and further that one must repress, suppress, avoid, or run away from or get rid of anger, fear, etc. as soon as possible.  And further that we are a sinner!

But eventually, if we progress in our evolution as a human, we begin to see how we can counterbalance an emotion by transforming the energy into it’s opposite or into something else instead–like in my last blog post.  For example, we learn to turn anger into compassion instead.  Whatever or whoever our anger may be about, even if it is anger that we have toward our own self, it is possible to transform it into compassion for self or others.

So then we first try to get rid of the emotion, run away from it somehow, eventually we progress to learning how to transform the emotion and then finally (and this is where I personally am deep into it), we take emotion “as the spiritual path itself”.  Yeah.  Heavy.

I’m doing a lot of that lately (just as others are) with the grand cross today, 13 degrees Pluto/Jupiter opposition in Cap/Cancer respectively and then Uranus/Mars in Aries/Libra.  Two oppositions and 4 squares–and we’ve all got that activated now!  That’ll intensify emotions if anything will. ( I’ve also got a lot of energy aspect-ing communicative Mercury in my personal chart  today so I thought this to be a good time to write a little bit about all this.)  But getting back to the topic here…

The other day I posted a line on Facebook that sort of speaks to using emotions as the path itself:  Fit regular life into spiritual practice, not the other way around.

And speaking of the other way around, when we can use the emotion to create something positive by flipping it around, this leads to really working with the energy–using it in a positive way instead of running from it or stuffing it.  This begins the awareness of the emotional causes and triggers and opens the door to a deeper understanding of one’s self and others.

One begins to notice patterns or triggers and begins to understand how past or present conditioning (cause and effect, karma) play into the emotions.

We can almost see emotions as friends because they assist us to relate to ourselves and to the world differently.

We exit the world of duality and separation and begin to see all people have similar motivations.  Just as the Embodiment of Compassion, Dalai Lama, always says, we see that all beings are, similar to ourselves, in that they are seeking pleasure and happiness and trying to avoid pain and suffering.

Another benefit is that we don’t feel alone in our emotional thunder storms and we can seek the shelter of viewing them from a higher place–seeing the bigger picture.

We can realize that without emotions there is no spiritual path!  Emotions contain spiritual wisdom, knowledge and information.

And this aspect of incorporating emotion into the spiritual path involves looking at the true state of emotion and finding the wisdom there.   The spiritual path IS seeing the nature of emotion.

And the emotion gets stronger and stronger as our teachers (if we ignore them) in order to show us the wisdom and knowledge and information contained within the feelings.

The previous blog post (a divination about emotion) was about the stage in which we take that emotion and flip it or transform it.  The stage after that one is to really wish to see the emotion for what it has to teach–asking what is this emotion’s wisdom nature?

So we let ourselves feel the emotion knowing it will recede just as abruptly as it arose and we hold still with the feeling and allow a gap between the feeling and our old tendency to react or run (fight or flight).  And as the gap forms we can distance ourselves enough to see the psychology of it all, to understand and to do something constructive and positive with it.  To change.

That’s all for now!  I have psychic reading clients calling soon and this is all the time I have right now.   I hope this information helps someone today!