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If you are on your own, it is very hard to get yourself motivated and continue forward. But if you have someone to work with, you have much more power. Two people together can do the work of four people each on their own.
Your true nature, a state of full consciousness, it is within your grasp, you just do not know it. You see, your true nature is not an organ or a particular thing that you can call your soul. True consciousness, enlightenment, is a state of being. You could almost call it feeling an emotion or a mood. To be enlightened is just to be in a different mood but that mood is permanent and so very different than any other mood you can imagine. I am just trying to put it in words for you to understand. When you understand your true nature and what enlightenment is, you are there.
As long as there is more than one thing involved in any situation, and there always is, they have a point at which they meet. This meeting point is often overlooked or simply not recognized that it exists, and so problems are difficult to solve and conflicts grow because the true cause is not known. By finding the meeting point, you will find the precise moment of the beginning of every situation or creation of any thing, and so you will also find the instant that any problem was created.
There is a nice story of two old friends, one who never married. His friend asked one day, why he never found a wife. John said that he did look, but there was always something. One woman just could not cook well, another was too selfish, another was not a good homemaker. On and on he went about all the different problems that he found with each one. “Then one day”, John said, “I found the perfect woman.
To me, nothing is certain so I always think in terms of trying. I will try to work in a new profession, I will try living in a new country, I will try being in a relationship, I will try to live another day a little better than the last. The idea is that I know nothing is certain and it is impossible to know what anything will be like, no matter what it is. A job, a place to live, a person to be with, even to get up out of bed each day, how will the day go or will it be my last, is uncertain.
If the soul, your essence, is the smallest little dot of your being and is covered by layers of ego personality and there are layers for each experience of your life, how can you ever find it? Each layer is another illusion. Illusions are how we have interpreted situations and developed certain characteristics and because of that, we create an infinite number of layers to our personality, as each illusion creates another layer by causing another misinterpreted experience. Then there is the body and the body has more psychological layers due to its physical injuries.
There is no character trait or condition that affects one human that does not affect every human. It is just a matter of degree. The preceding statement must be part of every sincere persons wish to improve oneself. One of the greatest confusions about humans is their love for pain. Either self inflicted or inflicted upon others. Even if you may consider this statement completely foreign to your character, have you ever laughed or enjoyed a movie in which people are getting killed or hurt? Perhaps sports in which there is some form of violence or aggressive component?
The first key principle in business success is knowing who you are dealing with, and who you are, a smart person or a foolish person. The difference between a smart person and a foolish person is that when a foolish person is foolish, he thinks he is smart, when a smart person is foolish, he knows he is foolish. The next difference is that a foolish person thinking he is smart, has no chance of becoming smart, whereas a smart person knowing he is foolish, can become smarter.
Many people get the feeling that everything in life is just an empty waste of time, totally futile. So much of our time spent on empty interactions, work to make money just to pay taxes and survive, etc. is just a waste of time an effort, given the inevitable end. This is a very depressing way to live, and ironically, it often overtakes people who consider themselves spiritual or feel there is a higher purpose to life.
The goal of personal development is personal freedom. Freedom from your emotions, moods, reactions to success or failure and most importantly, freedom from being dependant on other people or your environment. Emotional independence is not about suppressing or stifling your emotions, rather it means that you can choose your moods, and obviously you will choose to be happy rather than sad.
The Sufis say that the way to find God is either through a living teacher or, failing that, is through acceptance. Acceptance of all things that come to you without judging them. The way of accepting all things without complaining or feeling bad is to know that the reason these difficulties exist is so that you can be offered the opportunity to accept what is coming to you without your ego determining good or bad. It is training you in endurance, which is self will, inner strength, or, will power.
Have you ever tried wrapping a copper wire around an iron nail and connecting the ends of the wire to a battery? Instantly, with the electrical charge going through the wire and around the nail, it becomes a magnet. Even with the addition of electricity, the wire alone is not magnetic, nor the nail on its own, but together the three create a fourth, magical force. The more electricity, the more powerful the magnetic force. I call magnetism a magical force simply because if you observe it in action objectively, you would have to call that magic.
Insecurity, fear, inhibitions, lack of self-confidence and freezing up are some common plagues. Feeling great then all of a sudden feeling down, a spontaneous emotional drop in mood and energy, or any emotional swings without significant cause is another painful condition for many people. This article which follows in the series starting with Which Is Better To Pursue; Enlightenment Or Emotional Independence examines these conditions and will hopefully shed enough light on the cause and thus a means of removing or reducing their effects on ones life.
We often confuse our emotions with what we think they are as opposed to what they really are. This misinterpretation of our feelings to the opposite will keep us limited as this process most often interprets a wise emotion or intuition as a weak emotion or fear as we try to identify and explain our feelings. Seeing yourself as weak instead of strong will obviously prevent you from getting stronger and dealing with situations appropriately.
Is the difference between being open and closed emotionally simply being focused or preoccupied? Maybe we are just too preoccupied with the stresses and problems of life to be able to relax our mind enough and that is partially what prevents our ability to feel and connect. Feeling your heart is closed, empty or longing to have some connection with another person is real, but what is the real cause of that isolated feeling?
This article is about the ability you have to communicate with your past lives, and how to develop that ability. Please bear in mind that these words and concepts, the way I am explaining them to you are only quasi accurate. I say this because in order to describe the spiritual realm in human terms is not possible, it is apples and oranges as they say. We do our best.
There is a great power in the concept of the law of attraction, which has also been expressed in terms such as ‘magnetic centre’, ‘attractive force’, ‘the power of the mind’, and many others. The danger of the modern concept of the law of attraction (loa) is that it professes that you have incredible power, even that of God. You can bring anything to you, make anything happen, the world, and even the universe, will bend and bow to your desires.
The most attractive is of course enlightenment, spiritual realization, self-knowledge or anything in that direction. Promise of this draws many people, and although it would be wonderful to have a large following, I will not claim to have achieved or promise something I cannot deliver. What I can promise, and something I do have, is emotional freedom. The Sufi and the Kaballists say; "Freedom is not being conce ed with what anyone thinks or says about you."
Right and wrong are a matter of personal opinion, this is the definition of morals. Your morals define what is right or wrong for you. If you do things you feel are wrong, but then convince yourself it is acceptable or divert your attention from feeling what you did is wrong, that takes energy and builds guilt.
Many people are hindered by procrastination, and have no idea why they do it. There doesn’t seem to be any logic or reason as to the cause of putting things off, but it is almost impossible to get the simplest task done. My theory is that the problem lies in the aspiration of perceived perfection. How many people are actually fully content with being themselves compared to those who aspire to be like someone else?
We all suffer from a heart that is closed, either a little or a lot, and we spend our life trying to avoid being aware of this, but it is always there in the back of our mind. This article will take the article; “How To Find What You Really Are” a little further. Our activities and desires are in one way or another related to this, trying to open our heart in some way, as that is the core of our experience of life.
If you observe yourself, you will discover that all you are is an emotional feeling. It could be positive or negative, love, anger or hatred, it changes frequently, but ultimately we are nothing more than emotional feelings. Are not all your thoughts and actions an expression of your emotions and feelings? This is validated in the reverse by one who says they feel dead because they feel nothing emotionally. Therefore, our life is our emotions.
“...From very young, we are taught to ask questions, so we keep asking until we find answers…” This is a quote from Nobel prize winner, Dan Shechtman, in response to being asked why there are such a high percentage of Jewish nobel prize winners compared to any other race. This is not an article about Jews, but rather about the characteristic of people who excel in any way. If you would always ask questions and never accept blank answers such as; ’that is just how it is’, you too would be much smarter than you are, and maybe, win some prizes of your own such as;
I post articles on a few sites, one of which is http://ezinearticles.com. They give me a report of how many views each of my articles gets and the keywords that were used to find it. This has been a very interesting report. The article that was viewed more than double any other article was The Different Types of Weaknesses Which Effect Us Top Keywords Used to Find This Article were: types of weaknesses in a person kinds of weaknesses different types of weaknesses types of personal weaknesses different kinds of weaknesses
I have experienced too many times and have heard from so many other people about conversations that went inexplicably wrong. You may meet someone, have a conversation, even by text or email, and all of a sudden with tremendous ease and agility that you had no idea you possessed, your foot ended up in your mouth.
Everything in the universe works in some pattern. Everything has a logic and pattern of its own. The trick is to find the pattern of what you are studying. This could be so different than anything you can logically perceive, which makes it very difficult to find. If you can remove your opinion of what a pattern should be or what is logical or what constitutes a pattern, you may be able to find the pattern in all things. This can be applied to finding our true nature or anything in science and nature.
Adab is the foundation stone of developing the essence of ones being such that one can grow in an opening manner to receive ever increasing wisdom using the inverted pyramid as the analogy. As the pyramid continues to grow, it gets wider and wider until it is so wide it can encompass all things and all things rest within it.
Deadlines are a natural part of the universe. There is no need to get stressed and resist them. In the Kybalion, one of the Hermetic laws is; As above, so below. This is to say that within the larger, there is a smaller version of the larger. The microcosm is in the macrocosm, etc. If there are deadlines in a company, that means there will be deadlines in each department, and then deadlines put on each employee. The law of cause and effect is seen in action, the original cause, a deadline to the client, trickles down to every link in the chain of creating what the client wants.
Feeling inferior prevents you from finding happiness and can make anyone overdo proving that they are adequate or superior rather than accept the reality that they simply are not perfect or perhaps even capable of doing the particular task. We are all less than someone else, and more than others, but people do not like to accept that they are inferior to anyone.
This is an excellent exercise to attain an objective detachment to events and retain a freedom from being negatively emotionally effected. The exercise is; Do not say anything that will not serve a useful purpose. Most often, when someone says something that is wrong, we jump at the chance to correct them. If it is not important information that needs to be corrected, this serves no other purpose than to make you look and feel smarter than the other person by putting them down in front of others.
I can tell you your block of finding happiness, but you will not understand. This is normal, and why it is the greatest stumbling block for a seeker of truth. Truth of the Universe and truth of oneself.r
We have all been lied to, cheated, tricked and hurt. Sometimes it is just the common result of business, other times it is incompetence or a lack of accepting responsibility, but most of the time it is someone who is either a stranger or at least not very close to you, and this can upset you but you get over it. Inner peace and happiness will never be attained as long as your mind is upset.
As your eyes focus on one point, but your peripheral vision takes in and registers so much more in your subconscious, so do all your senses, of smell, sounds, touch, and taste. Self-improvement as well as inner peace and happiness can only be found when the fear of love is eliminated. The fear stems from what we imagine what we think is going to happen in a relationship through what can be called our peripheral vision of imagination.
The search for knowledge and self-improvement drives many people in the path of personal growth. Knowledge and information are not the same although our educated minds have confused the two and made them one from the intellectual point of view. Information is like any other item, it can be collected and accumulated. To do this, it takes time, effort and money and then a place to store all that is collected. Then it is useless and the effort in its accumulation wasted if it is not shown off. So not only is time spent in its accumulation but also in its presentation and sharing.
From a spiritual point of view, in order to achieve personal growth, you must have a passionate desire for enlightenment that is completely selfless. If your passion has anything to do with you, then certainly you can succeed in your goals, but there will be negative effects from having desires. For the goal to be spiritual, you must remove yourself first.
How do you know when to let go, in business or personal situations in life. This is a very difficult question, but one that is vital to living a life that continuously moves forward. Afterall this planet is moving through space at 1,350,000 miles an hour, so we may as well keep moving also, it is just logical. Besides that, everything is always moving either forward or back. If something stands still it will have its appropriate equivalent to a stagnant pond, smelling and slimy, with no vibrant life at all.
In order to fix something, you must first know that it is broken. Now you can target the part that is broken, and then fix it. The problem is that although most people are aware there is something wrong, they do not know what the real problem is, and so cannot fix it. This is commonly expressed with the question of; “Why do I do what I know is bad for me, but do not do what is good for me.”
I was reading an article about Kobe, Japan and came across a very telling report which gives an incite in to the dangerous territory we are going as a species. I do not think this attitude is limited to Kobe or Japan, but rather is global. The point of this article is to ask; are you helping the world, or part of the problem? The following sections of the article on Kobe** basically say it is wrong that women should stay at home and raise their own children. “...much remains to be done in Kobe and in Japan overall.” i.e., things are wrong and must change.
There is a big difference between being bored or depressed, however they appear the same in an adult, and so boredom becomes confused with depression. The longer you are bored, the more you will think and appear to others to be depressed, If it lasts too long, you may eventually become depressed, but in fact you are bored. Children are easily entertained, and so boredom does not last long, because it is short lived, it does not turn to depression. Adults start to get bored at some point in their life,
This subject is very tricky to understand, it is simple, yet difficult to grasp because it is so simple. For this reason, there will be many discussions about it in different ways for you to have the variety of concepts that one may reach your understanding. Although there will be many lessons on the same topic, they may be seen as parts of one long lesson, but in truth, you could grasp the concept from not only any single lesson, but even from one line of one lesson.
The principle of the Mastermind group is well known by many people and there are many groups that have been formed under the premise of mastermind support groups, but they rarely if ever deliver a successful outcome. I have seen many of these groups and they have one thing in common, they are very short lived due to a quickly dying interest from lack of success. This article is about the reasons that those groups have failed and naturally, the solution to creating an effective group.
Buddha said that life is suffering and that the cause of suffering is desire. That is a very clear and obvious truth. If I desire something, that means I do not have it, and if I want or need something that I do not have, that craving for it does imply suffering to some degree. Maybe it is a thought about a new iPhone that it would be nice to have but you do not need. Regardless, that desire will occupy your mind and anything that occupies your mind means you are not present in the moment, you are thinking of the object of desire.
Many people think they have a bad memory or simply cannot think straight. There are too many events which turn out that we forget something or neglect to prepare for the obvious, and this is allotted to a bad memory. What if it has nothing to do with memory at all but rather is the way thought is processed? How often have you heard or said; “What were you thinking!” and the reply is the usual; “I don’t know.” How can you not know? That is unacceptable, and of course that reply is usually followed by more frustration for all conce ed.
Many people think that humanity is reaching a higher spiritual level than ever before. I think those people have not been to the historical sites and probably lived through TV and the internet. Certainly there are many things on the internet which simply based on volume and dissemination of information would justify that claim, but I disagree. The reaso I say that they have lived their life on TV is because a personal visit to the ancient sites will clearly show we are going backward. Watching a show or reading a book is simply not the same as being there.
Many people want to find their true essential nature, their soul, but of course, that is a very rare discovery, at least it is if you are honest about it. I have another way of searching for that answer which is a bit simpler and perhaps answers more questions about why we are the way we are, as individuals.
You cannot make yourself love yourself just as you cannot make you love another person. Loving yourself is a result rather than a cause of a changed personality. When you have rid yourself of qualities that you dislike or are no longer limited by fears and inhibitions, or you just happen to have a a really good life and all goes well, you will naturally feel happy about yourself and you can call that loving yourself. The next question is what self is it that you love?
For a bike wheel to roll smoothly, all the spokes must be strong and well connected. They connect to the hub. The hub is the central point of the wheel and connects to the axel. As I discovered by my own experience, when one spoke out of the 20 on my bike wheel broke, the whole wheel was wobbly and I could not ride safely.
It is an interesting thing I have noticed, that everyone dreams and wishes to be a certain way, free of negative emotions, free in spirt, open of heart, without pain or fear, and meet someone like that. Yet if they met someone who possesses those qualities, they say it cannot be real, they are faking it and just hiding or trying to trick them for their own benefit.
There is a saying, look to yourself for the cause and solution to all your problems. This is a very interesting saying because it has many meanings. The first is the obvious, to see what you have done wrong to cause the problem. This is easy to apply, see what you did and accept responsibility then correct your mistake.
Many times people, in the heat of the moment, will say something, and then quickly upon realizing that it was inappropriate, try to stuff the words back in their mouth pleading that they did not mean that or they were just joking. The problem is that retraction is not possible.