I want to be dependent upon God PART 4

This series turned into something that I had not at all expected. But now I think it’s time to wrap it up. And I think that from the darkness and philosophical speculation that I’ve talked about, I will turn back to the light and to something rather simple.

When I went to the university, I talked to a rather smart girl that later went on to become a doctor. Once she told me, pretty straight forward, in those words, that she had a rather childish belief in God, where she more or less looked at God as an old man sitting on a cloud. It was obvious that she had given her faith quite a lot of thought and ended up in this place. 

For me, I think I want both. I want the ecstatic, mystical experiences. I want the philosophy and the difficult questions (even if I don’t want the pride that pops into my head from time to time as I engage in such thinking). But in the end, I want to put my life in God’s hands in the simplest manner possible. I want to just trust and feel like a little child, embraced and held by my heavenly father. Held by this being, whose love and wisdom I cannot even begin to fathom. 

I want a balance between the crazy and the simple. Between the extraordinary and the mundane. And in the end, I never want to stray too far. I’m an adult now and I want to interact with other people as an adult. But in my relationship with God, I still want to be a child. Does this make any sense? I don’t know how to explain it in any other way. There is an innocence here that somehow permeates life and existence itself, behind all of the darkness and complexity. An innocence that was never lost. Something that can be felt in such simple experiences as petting a cat. Or listening to the right song at the right time. Such as the song that got me thinking of this series. That’s fun to think about, ending this on sort of a philosophical note: A simple song and my emotional reaction to it was what started this whole stream of thoughts. It’s something to think about when we decide what to fill our lives with.

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I want to be dependent upon God PART 3

This little series is turning into some rather free speculations. Which has been interesting. But I think that I’ll go ahead and pick up the thread of undeserved grace. For me, this grace that has been bestowed upon me, would be more understandable if I had committed some truly atrocious acts. It would somehow seem more fitting to make an example of underserved grace if I was a person that for example was spending life in prison for murder. 

I do have a past that I’m not proud of. But I haven’t committed any really serious offenses. Maybe it’s my thoughts? I don’t know. I don’t have access to other people’s thoughts. But for most of my life, I’ve allowed my thoughts to wander freely into places that are not pretty. On the other hand, from what I can tell, many people do. From what I’ve read, many just have very little knowledge about what is really going on inside their heads. 

Maybe there is some kind of clue here. You see, even though I’ve embraced much of my darkness throughout the years, I can still sometimes be shocked by what I find out about myself. So I can only imagine what would happen to someone that regarded themselves as basically good, but that had allowed their thoughts to roam free without paying much attention to them. And this is something that both intrigues me and scares me. Namely that even though I’ve done some quite serious introspection and observed my actions and behaviors, I’m still to a large degree a stranger to myself. A stranger that is to a large degree oblivious to my behavior. 

A few years back, I made the mistake (or apparent mistake) of reading and watching some rather vile books and movies. And since for example the writings of Marquis de Sade must be representative of what was going on inside his head, I don’t think that my thoughts are the worst in the world either. And nowadays I’m doing my best to clean them up and not allow them to drift too far into things that could be deemed “ungodly”, whether it’s my own fantasies or something that I’ve read or watched. 

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I want to be dependent upon God PART 2

It’s true what many say, that God does not force himself on us. God might give us a tap on the shoulder sometimes. As God did with me almost twenty years ago, when I was a stubborn atheist that looked upon religion and spirituality as self-deception. I was full of pride and arrogance at the time. Stains, by the way, that have been hard to wash away and that sometimes still make their presence known. So I don’t understand why God chose to give me definite proof of God’s existence. I know that I’m not the only one that has had this type of experience. But I can think of so many that haven’t, that would deserve it better, if you see it from the perspective of their actions and their overall effects on people’s lives.

I’m of course familiar with the concept of undeserved grace. And that in some sense we all fall short of what God intended us to be. Whatever that means. Was our fall into something lesser an accident? If so, did God make a mistake? I guess that in the concept of almightiness, there must be room for creating creatures that can make choices that are out of the almighty being’s control. If God was forced to be in control of everything, and/or know everything, God wouldn’t really be almighty. 

This is also another reason why free will truly deserves attention. Because it is by necessity so central to religious life. And I know nothing that comes with so many difficult questions. Such as the one just mentioned. Or the fact that when we start looking at what seems to be free choices, these are really reactions to stimuli, driven by unconscious emotions, desires and a number of other factors that we are not consciously aware of. And yet, free will seems to be what characterizes being human. Animals don’t seem to make free choices, as far as we know. And without free will, we cannot be accountable for anything and the idea of consequences for our actions just seems cruel, since no one could do anything but what they in fact do. On the other hand, the consequences happen by necessity as well, no matter what they are, since they, by necessity, must have emerged through the actions of individuals that are only acting under the illusion of free choice. And so on. 

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I want to be dependent upon God PART 1

I’ve know for quite some time that we are not nearly as in control of our lives as we often like to think. So thinking of our lives as dependent on God is not as disempowering as some would think. In fact, it’s the opposite, I would argue.

The other day I listened to some music by Rebecca st. James (a rather huge leap from the industrial and black metal music that I usually listened to before and it feels great to, nowadays, have zero identity tied to the music that I listen to) at my job. I think that it was the song You are Loved that got me thinking of the fact that I like being dependent on God. To know that my life is in God’s hands. That God loves and cares for me.

Does this mean that I stop making my own efforts? No. Honestly I don’t know exactly what it means. Just not that. I’m not really sure what the proper relationship is here. At what point do I let go and allow God to take over? 

I think it has something to do with recognizing that my life is in the hands of a being that is so infinitely more powerful and wise than I am. A being that loves me more than I could ever imagine, as the song says. To really put this understanding in its proper perspective and allow myself to be humbled by it. And to allow God’s loving presence to be felt throughout my days, in good times and in bad times. Sometimes, when I can really feel this presence, feel what it truly means to me, I can get this overwhelming feeling of joy and my eyes tear up. The feeling can be triggered by such a simple thing as hearing the right song at the right time. 

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Guided by God or guided by the ego?

Everything should come natural to us. But we need to be deprogrammed from the world’s programming. We can live with an absolute, intuitive knowing of what to do and how to act.

What I’ve realized through putting myself through a rather harsh self-analysis, is that it is extremely difficult to know what I actually want in many situation. And to do just that. Or what I really think about this or that thing. 

I’ve gotten so used to consider all kinds of irrelevant factors when making decisions rather than my true will, such as what is socially acceptable or in general what other people think. I have also become rather good at hiding this fact, even from myself.

I have gotten so used to believing that the real me won’t be accepted, that I’ve gotten lost in my persona, the social mask that we all put on. But I believe that this is true for most people. Most just don’t realize it. And in my past it might have been more severe in my case than for most people. Because at some point I unconsciously decided to adopt an image. Put on a show. Become a character. Something like that. I wanted to separate myself from other people and show the world that I wasn’t like the rest. And what instead ended up happening, was that instead of becoming more of a unique individual, I became less like myself.

I think that something similar might be happening to many people that try to “express their uniqueness” by attaching all kinds of labels to their identities nowadays. You know what I’m talking about without me having to be too specific. I’m talking about the kind of self-expression that is encouraged by society and our cultural norms. The kind that is often shared on social media.

If you have the kind of attitude that I used to have it’s going to shape you. And in my case not in a good way. At least not directly. But indirectly I believe that it allowed me to see these things more clearly. Come to think of it, it has been like this with many “errors” that I’ve made in my life. They have allowed me to see aspects of the human experience and our being in the world more clearly than I would have without them. 

What I want to get at, is that since I started to become more present and get more into contact with myself and my true feelings, I have also started to more and more clearly discern the still voice inside, that others talk about. It comes in the form of an inner knowing about what to do and what is right or wrong. It’s still very much drowned out by the world. But it is getting stronger as I am being more honest with myself and don’t lie to myself about what it is saying.

What is resistance?

A while back I talked about the inner resistance. How we tense up inside and try to block whatever is going on in the present moment. This is part of a bigger pattern of living in a state of resistance towards what is. 

Let me give you an example from just this morning. I wanted to get up one hour earlier than my wife. But I didn’t want to disturb her sleep more than necessary. We have a very small bedroom with no given place to put our clothes. And in the darkness I couldn’t find the clothes. I knew that the more time I spent looking for my clothes, the more I would disturb her sleep. So I quickly started to feel stressed. And with the stress, frustration started building. 

I of course found my clothes, after having made sure that there was no way my wife would be able to go back to sleep. And I got dressed with negative emotions lingering in my body.

The point is that that my irritation and frustration over something very trivial did nothing to help the situation. On the contrary, it made me stop thinking about what I was doing, which most certainly prolonged the situation. 

And yet, we have trained ourselves to respond to situations that we perceive as negative in this way. This is resistance. According to Eckhart Tolle, behind all of this is the ego’s unconscious and erroneous belief that we can change our circumstances by making them “wrong”.

We cannot help that we have negative emotions. But we can help how we respond to them. Every time that we get frustrated, blame, criticize etcetera, we are resisting. These are a few examples to help explaining what this is about. But really, every time we make a situation “wrong” in our thoughts and attitudes towards it, we are resisting. And the paradoxical is that there is no point resisting the resistance. As with so many things, the only thing we can do about it is bringing awareness to it, while reminding ourselves that the resistance does nothing to help the situation.

We sometimes think that resistance is valid. The thought may be something like this: I want this, so I’m going to make someone or something bend to my will. But how often has this led to the desired result? On the other hand, when we stay calm and instead put focus on what we can do, while not expecting anything in particular from the world, we start taking our power back. 

What is INNER RESISTANCE and what can you do about it?

Most of us, including myself, carry around an inner resistance. You can feel this as a tightening of the muscles in your body and in your head. As a tightening of the facial muscles. This is because we unconsciously want to block the energy of the present moment. Above all, we resist our emotions and therefore we hold on to them instead. Often they turn into the aforementioned tensions in the body.

I know that this sounds like some vague nonsense. But it’s not. It’s a real phenomenon that I am trying to put into words as best I can. My wording may be lacking however. In fact, my wording is most certainly lacking. But believe me, this is real. You can feel this resistance in every given moment. And when you feel the resistance and bring your attention back to the present moment without holding on to it, you can feel a relief in your head and your entire body. 

You can feel this inner resistance as if something is blocked in the middle of your head and in different areas of your body. If you train yourself in being present in the body, you will feel it more and more. The less you are in contact with your body, the more likely you are to feel this resistance. Believe me. I’ve been terribly out of touch with my body for most of my life and I have literally thousands of tense nerves due to suppressed emotions. But I’ve also managed to release thousands. 

Once you start noticing this, it might seem like a daunting task at first. But every time you release a tense nerve, you will feel a little better. Your body will feel a little better. Just try and be present in the moment as often as you can. Start feeling your body and what goes on inside of it. Try and meet every emotion that comes up with acceptance. Try to feel how it feels in the body, while staying present in the moment. Observe your thoughts, as they bring you out of the present moment and out of your body. Bring your attention back to the present moment and the body when they do. You can also focus on your breath to come back to the present moment.

You can do this anywhere and any time, but you will forget it. And you will feel an unfounded resistance, even though this literally requires no effort. But with time you will train your memory and remember it more often. And you will experience a sense of relief. As if a burden that you didn’t know that you’ve been carrying around is becoming lighter and lighter. Attention and present moment awareness are key here.

Askng the right questions

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We often get so stuck thinking of what we want, that we speak and act mindlessly. And so we fail to adjust ourselves properly to the circumstances and the people involved. And seemingly small factors can change the outcome of a situation completely. 

I was in a situation at work recently, where everyone thought that everyone had the relevant information, until one simple question was asked that changed everything. It resulted in me getting more money than I initially would have, with a lot less conflict. 

This made me think. Had not this one question been asked, the situation would have looked completely different. This does not go just for what questions we ask others. This also goes for the questions we ask ourselves. In a sense, this makes language magical, but seemingly without involving any type of metaphysics. Our words change our realities in a very literal sense. They cause new thought patterns to emerge, both within ourselves and in others. They give us access to information that was previously hidden to us.

I’m going to end this post on sort of a sidenote. What is the most important question I can ask myself right now? Go ahead and ask yourself this question too. See what comes up.

I think that the most important question I can ask myself right now is: What do I need to prioritize right now? 

The inner guidance

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Love or fear? Maybe it is this simple when push comes to shove.

I am noticing a more and more clear distinction between when I try to use my little rational mind to do and understand things and when I allow something higher within me to take over. When I act from my little ego, what my understanding and what comes out becomes pretty mediocre and boring. From this position, it becomes painfully obvious that there is nothing special about me and that the world is full of people that are smarter and more capable than I am. 

But when I manage to set my ego aside, sometimes something magical comes out. I’m still pretty new to this, so it’s not always easy for me to discern whether this higher - dare I say God - works through me, and when it is little me that has a go at it again. 

As soon as there is an element of pride involved, or that I want others to see me a certain way, I lose this connection. I also lose it as soon as I’m not honest with myself, when I’m not present, or when I don’t accept the present moment. There is no escape from this. I can either act from “little me” and try to gratify little me’s petty wishes and desires, that have nothing to do with God’s will for me. And get nowhere. Or I can set little me aside and open up to God’s will. There is no getting away from this. This goes for everyone. Not just me. I can either do my best to be who God wants me to be and do what God wants me to do. And maybe, just maybe, there is something great waiting for me in the future. Or I can keep complaining that my life isn’t what I want it to be and try to make the world give me what I want and be sure to get nothing other than more of what I don’t want. 

Bringing conscious awareness into everything

As with many other things, the first step to changing this, is to set the intention of becoming aware every time my focus starts to drift and consciously bringing it back to what's in front of me every time that it does. I believe that if I persist, I will become aware more and more often. This has worked when it comes to my job. And it works with many other things. 

What I've realized, is that at my job I’m pretty focused on what’s in front of me and do things very efficiently. But when I sit down with projects at home, I tend to lose focus easily and become distracted. And I’ve realized that this is actually a habit. I’ve allowed my work that I do in my spare time to become sloppy and unfocused.

This also goes beyond mere lack of efficiency. When I do things in this manner, I also much more seldom get into a flow state. This means that I more often do things from a place of ego and of trying to force things, which means that I get access to much fewer novel ideas than I could. 

What do you bring out in other people? Part 2

Functioning from the higher place does not always bring out the same in other people. But if it doesn’t, you will instead be able to see their mechanicalness if you stay present. And if you’re fully conscious, this should also not bring out judgment in you. Judgment is obviously never good. But judging someone else’s unconsciousness and mechanicalness is a little extra hypocritical, since judgment, as will be made clear here, by necessity only comes out when we ourselves have become unconscious and mechanical.

To remain conscious in the face of someone else’s mechanicalness is difficult though (Sidenote: I believe that there are degrees to which we can be free, conscious, in contact our higher selves etc.). At least it is for me. If you are like me, you will be tempted to see the mechanicalness as the whole truth of the person and thus dismiss him or her as nothing but mechanicalness. Because our brains have this nasty tendency of not being able to see beyond the present situation, while at the same time for the most part being lost in thoughts about the past or the future.

First: As stated earlier, most people drift in and out of various degrees of consciousness, even though there also are many that more or less are sleepwalkers. Second: you don’t know what is inside the person in front of you, that is waiting to come out. And my guess is that if you have really started to awaken into awareness, it wasn’t your own effort that made you wake up. It sure wasn’t for me. My guess is that your awakening was either triggered by something you stumbled upon by accident, some other external event, or you don’t really know how it happened. Your thoughts sort of just started to drift towards certain subjects, leading you into revelations about who you are and the nature of reality. My awakening was a combination of all of the above. 

So why would you judge someone that is in a place that they have no control over? Knowing that you could just as easily be the unconscious one? And maybe, just maybe, if you were fully in your authentic self, you would bring out nothing but authenticity in other people. I don’t know. I’ve never been there. And I suspect that when I’m fully there, I will never want to go back to my sleeping state again and I will not let any judgmental thoughts enter my mind.

Sorry if this post came out a little messy. I noticed that I had to fix a few things in it and I don’t really feel very conscious today…

What do you bring out in other people? Part 1

In spiritual circles there is this idea that we bring out in other people reflects something within ourselves. Is this true? 

What I have seen, is that I basically have two selves that can come out. One of these selves has several sub-personalities, while the other is an integrated whole. The one with sub-personalities acts more or less like a robot. It has certain scripts which it functions from. If you know this self, you will be able to predict what I will do, say and how I will react to the circumstances that I’m facing. The other self will, as long as I remain in it, be able to make authentic, free choices, say genuine, heart-felt things and respond freely, to the best of its ability, to every given situation.

Now, I’m beginning to notice that others have these two modes as well. They might not be conscious of it, but they do. And I’m not sure about this, but I believe that some may be much more in tune with this higher self than I am and yet not know that they have these two sides.

What I’m also beginning to notice, is that people tend to respond to each other from the same level as you interact with them. This means that if I am acting in a mindless way, other people tend to do the same. This in turn leads to social interactions that look like they are taking place between free people, but that are little more than mechanical actions and reactions from pre-determined scripts.

What's going on on the inside Part 3

When I’ve focused on the energies inside my body, I’ve noticed that they correspond with my physical sensations, my body’s, movements and even what is going on on the outside. I’ve  started to feel the mood of other people much more strongly. 

Furthermore, I’ve realized that I’ve numbed and pushed down many emotions in different ways. And that these emotions haven’t simply vanished, but have instead been stored in my body as tensions. I’ve also noticed these emotions get activated in situations that trigger them. This means that when something happens that upset me emotionally, if I manage to be present enough to notice it, I can feel that the areas where I have tensions tense up more than usual, and that this is the areas where I can feel the emotions most strongly. Finally, I’ve noticed that when I don’t react to these emotions and don’t try to push them away either, but simply let them be there, I can let go of them. I’ve released many tensions this way and my body feels much less tense today, than it did just a couple of years ago.

What's going on on the inside Part 2

The truth is that there is a lot of the things that I’ve discovered that I don’t understand fully. Just that I’ve discovered something significant that has been hidden in plain sight for most of my life. 

Looking inside has made me wonder about the connection between thoughts and emotions. What effect thoughts and emotions have on our day to day lives. I have discovered that when I shift focus between different body parts and the sensations in them I can create very different experiences. I can for example create a totally different experience for myself, depending on if I for example focus on the sensations in my fingertips or the taste in my mouth. Depending on if I’m lost in thoughts or engaging in what is actually going on or what I’m actually doing.

What's going on on the inside Part 1

I know that a key component in what is happening right now, is to become aware of what is going on on the inside. When we start feeling our bodies, we start to experience energies flowing through them. When we observe our thoughts, we see that many of them are just repeating themselves over and over again. It’s often negative content that makes us feel bad. But we can also see that some of them contain what seems to be messages. We notice that the stream of thoughts never stops. That we can’t stop it and that when we try, we soon seem to forget what we are doing. Maybe we start to ask important questions, such as: What are thoughts really anyway? How do they function? Maybe we start wondering why we’ve never asked this before, about something that goes on throughout all of our waking lives. Maybe we start seeing that we have much more choice when it comes to our thoughts. That how we treat our thoughts right now, is not our nature, but rather habits. 

Learning to walk

I am more and more becoming aware of different layers of reality. Of how I have a whole network of energy inside myself that I can come into contact with just by focusing on it. But since I’ve had my attention firmly placed in the five-sense reality, I have the experience of a toddler just learning to walk, when it comes to these other aspects of reality. 

These aspects are just as real as the physical, five-sense reality. They actually seem to be the same as the five-sense reality. The best theory that I’ve encountered, say that at the core, everything is energy, but we can decode this energy in different ways. And one of these ways is the one that creates the five-sense reality. 

So, it’s time to learn to walk by putting more and more focus on these other aspects. The interesting thing is, that when I focus on these other aspects of reality, the effect is not that I withdraw from the five senses and become neglectful of the physical. On the contrary, focusing on, for example, the energies inside, puts me in a flow state, where everything just seems to run more effortlessly. And if I’m focused on the energies around me, I become able to detect more of the subtle nuances of other people’s behaviour, or the things that God wants to tell me through the events in my life.

But thoughts that "slip by" can teach us something

When we stop believing our thoughts and instead start thinking of what they are saying about us, something happens. We can start looking for clues to what is broken inside of us, or what negative beliefs that hide inside us. This is very liberating. I, for example, have noticed quite a few judgmental thoughts inside my head. But when I chose to just observe them, while knowing that they are not me, they lose their power. As with so many other things, we take control simply by bringing awareness to them.

Don't let thoughts slip by

This is sort of a continuation of  yesterday’s post. This realization came because of something I experienced during meditation yesterday. I’ve been aware for quite a while, that thoughts disappear when I observe them and that when they do, I become present in the moment. And other things seem to happen, such as that my third eye seems to open up and I lose my sense of the physical, of my body and the rest of the world. 

But sometimes thoughts come through that don’t seem to disturb my peace. I’m fully present with them. And they are distinctly different from my usual thoughts, in that they seem to speak to me and they seem true in a sense that my other thoughts aren’t. Yet, at the same time as they seem to speak to me, I’m in more control of them than my usual thoughts, in that as long as I’m fully present, only thoughts that I accept into my mind comes into it.

But as soon as I lose focus, other thoughts can creep in. In fact, I’ve realized that when it comes to any thought that is derived from any other state than present moment awareness, are not fully my own. They slip by, often undetected. And if I’m not careful, I might very well end up believing them.

Think only about now

Something struck me while meditating a while back. When my thoughts were focused on what was going on in the present, such as how my body was feeling, the slight movement that my body did by itself to adjust my spine etcetera, the thought didn’t seem detrimental to my meditation. But as soon as they drifted off into the past or future, my focus was disturbed and I got lost in them. 

Thinking of this afterwards gave me an interesting insight. Almost all thoughts about the past and the future are useless. Not only useless. They profoundly disturb my peace for no good reason. The only time that I can find that it’s useful to think about the past, is when I consciously wish to learn something from it, or when I consciously conjure up a positive memory to elevate my emotions and/or strengthen it. And the only time when it is a good thing to think about the future, is when setting conscious, clear intentions about it or when I think about what I’m doing in the now, in relation to my intentions for the future.

It is interesting and a little scary to notice, that I, and more or less all people that I’ve ever known or come into contact with, have given very little thought to how our thoughts operate. And that we habitually let our thoughts just go where they please. We do this even though it doesn’t take that much to just become aware of what is going on inside our heads from time to time and give the thoughts a nudge in a preferred direction.

The devil is in the details

Pay attention! We miss so much because our attention is elsewhere. Attention is the key to everything. But because we have our attention with us all of the time we take it for granted. We never consider what we can do with it. The world is full of wonders that we miss because we don’t expect them to happen. We don’t believe that they are possible and therefore our focus becomes so narrow that it’s almost non-existent, in comparison to what is possible.