A breaking point

I’ve touched upon the experience that I’m about to describe many times before. But then it has scared me. It felt as if I was going to dissolve. Or that something else was going to happen. But this time, I decided to let go of the fear, trust and embrace.

What I felt was the unity that I share with God and all of his creation. All is one and all is love. And yet, this is not a oneness that threatens our individuality. It is impossible to adequately put this into words, but I am going to try. It was as if everything fell into place in this one single moment. As if the whole world had led me to this somehow. That every little detail of the event was planned beforehand. The love and unity that I experienced was beyond thoughts and identity. Beyond the body. Without beginning or end. And yet, I was very much still in my body. I was very much me. Just so much more. It was an experience of so much love, that I just couldn’t take it. I wanted so badly to stay in that love. But I couldn't. It was over in a matter of seconds and then I was back to normal.

In other words, I’ve reached a breaking point on my journey. I’ve written a couple of blog posts that have a bit of fear in them. I won’t delete them, because my blogging has in many ways been a way for me to document my journey. And it’s not as if these posts are untrue. They are just written from a limited perspective.

But truly, I know now that there is nothing to fear. All will be well. God is love and God loves us infinitely and forever. God will never truly force anything upon us, even though from our finite perspectives, we cannot see how this can be so. But when we spend eternity with God and those that we love, not limited by what is currently holding us back in this finite existence, we will know that it is so. All will be well. Now that I’m starting to come out of my darkness for real, I know this. All will be well. This is what I am here to do. To tell as many as possible that all will be well. 

All will be well

Lately I’ve been experiencing strange and wonderful things. I have touched upon the oneness and unity that I share with God and all of his creation. Afterwards, the same words that were revealed to the mystic Julian of Norwich kept echoing in my mind: “All will be well.” I shiver in delight just thinking of these words. All will be well.

Here is what I know when I don’t let my own, personal fears distort my experience: There is nothing to fear. We are all beloved children of God. Even those that do terrible things. Our only purpose is to love, be loved and express love. All will be well.

Inner peace is always possible here and now. We can always walk with God in peace, by bringing presence and awareness to our experience in this moment and allow God to permeate it, and by letting go of everything within ourselves that is based on fear. It is really as simple as a choice between love and fear. The difficulty lies not in the choice itself, but in seeing through all of the insanity that the world has taught us is normal.

If we observe our speech and behaviors carefully, we can see that they all stem from either love or fear. We already walk with God in every precious moment. Most of us without knowing it. It’s possible to feel God’s presence and turn life into an intimate communication with him. It is just a matter of what we pay attention to. The scary things that go on on the outside, or his loving embrace on the inside. If we choose to walk with God, we can create heaven on earth right here and now. We choose how dark it gets before the dawn. But the metaphorical dawn is coming, just as certainly as the one that comes every morning. All will be well. 

Humility again

I keep coming back to this word. It’s something that I constantly notice that people lack. Everyone except me…

Just kidding. The truth is that I find it so difficult not wanting to be someone in the eyes of others. Not wanting to be considered intelligent, educated and insightful. I often catch myself making statements that are meant to show off my positive qualities, while trying to not come off as boastful.

Even when admitting my lack of humility, there is a touch of pride in it: “Look at me how humble I am because I’m willing to admit my lack of humility.”

The Calling. Part 12

The world is slowly opening up again. So soon we will be back to normal, right? 

Now, I’m no economist. But if you have an already unstable world economy and you introduce a situation, where you shut down the whole of society so that one in five businesses have to declare bankruptcy as a direct consequence of it, take measures that deteriorate people’s mental health, thereby making them less productive and more prone to behavior that costs money for society, pay enormous sums of money to corporations that are going to “save” us and take all kinds of costly measures to handle the situation, make the biggest wealth transfer in history, from everyone else to the richest people on the planet, wouldn’t that have rather serious consequences? And shouldn't those that govern us know this, considering that they have access to all the best experts in all relevant fields? In light of this, do you really think that the actions of our leaders are simply due to fear and incompetence?

And an equally important question: When the consequences come, are you going to trust the people that made the decisions that created the mess, together with the only people that benefitted from the mess, to come up with the solution? 

As I’ve said in another post, I don’t know what I can say about this without being censored. But go to YouTube and search for “world” and “reset” if you want to know more about what I’m talking about. Russell Brand has made great videos about this.

This is not meant to spread fear. Everything is in God's hands and you are infinitely and eternally loved by God. But it's time to start thinking about who to put our faith and trust in. 

Connecting with other people

One of my core wounds, maybe THE core wound, is that I have problems getting really close to other people. It easily becomes just two intellects talking. 

The funny thing is that somewhere in the background, I’ve seen that I have a great capacity to connect with others. If I manage to not get swept up in negativity or take things personally, I’m fairly good at finding good qualities in people and treat them equally. I’ve also noticed that on good days, people like to be in my presence. Which was not the case when I was younger.

What I’ve realized, is that if I want to talk to people so that they actually listen to what I say, I need to connect with them first. The same words will be received completely differently depending on whether or not there is a connection.

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.

My spiritual awakening part 8

During our conversation by the mailboxes, Jessica asked me if I wanted to come over for coffee some day. So the next day, I wrote a message on Facebook, asking her if I could take her up on the offer. And a few days later, we were having coffee at her house. 

We ended up talking for several hours. It turned out that we did not just share many spiritual views. We also had many copies of the same books in our bookshelves, we were both vegan, not particularly fond of political correctness, we both came from Värmland originally, had jews among our close ancestors, had lived in Gothenburg at the same time, had backgrounds in the metal subcultures and we shared many other similar life experiences. 

It feels good looking back at this now. We’ve been together for almost four years now and gone through much together. We’ve struggled and had conflicts, like most couples do, but we’ve never lost the respect for each other and we’ve never resorted to petty stuff, such as name-calling. But even so, it’s easy to forget these beautiful moments, when things get tough, the miracles stop (yeah, real miracles! - I’ll get to that later) stop happening and the struggles of everyday life kick in. It’s easy to focus on the bad rather than the good, thereby holding on to the painful memories, while allowing the joyful ones to fade. This is what I, sadly, to a large degree did for a long time. And I did so while Jessica shut her eyes to everything that was not working, while only seeing the good.

And it’s true that you keep memories alive by thinking about them. So if the past is considered to be part of reality, I guess that in a very provable way, you actually do create your reality by what you think about. I guess this would be true about the future as well. If you think about all the good things that might happen, you live in more positive expectations, thereby creating a positive future in the now, independent on what will actually transpire in the future.