My Soul, Remembering.

Hello all,

Today is the summer solstice, and whenever the Pagan holidays hit, I find myself looking back at how I had marked them in the past. Once I would have marked the sunrise and sundown with rituals. Today, I slept until 10 am and caught fireflies with my kids at dusk. The older I get and the more my soul remembers, the more I realize that ritual and ceremony are really just foci, chances for us to feel like we belong to something greater, a group of like minds. Once we start to catch on that all this separation and differences of opinion are just window dressing, that We Are All One, all the need to belong disappears. Because we already belong to the greatest group of all.

God.

CS

The Tightrope Walk of Spirituality

It is a razor-fine line we all walk, to hold steady to our own truths, yet to also be open to new truths that other souls may bring into our lives. One one side is arrogance and surety, which are both just disguised fear of being wrong. The other side is compliance and loss of self, which are sacrifices made in order to feel sure, which brings us back to fear again. The deeper we delve into spirituality, the more we hang our sense of self and our self-esteem upon it, and ironically, the more susceptible we are to our fears and insecurities. 

Thus for anyone on the Vertical Path, the most important question we can ask ourselves is "what if this belief I hold dear is wrong?" The more we recoil in fear from this question, the more we must honestly examine that belief. If, instead of fear, we sense a simple feeling of un-right-ness, of lack of resonance with our soul, we know that, at least for now, this truth is our own. 

Problem is, not only is such a question unpleasant to ask ourselves, but the paths of arrogance or compliance are far easier than the path of self-honesty.   It is easy to lock our beliefs into place, it is easy to allow others to dictate our truths.  It is damned hard to always question ourselves.  But if we can get ourselves to a place where we can do this, the rewards are huge. Only when we achieve self-honesty can we truly have compassion for others, because these personal insights allow us to understand the actions of others.  We can see that when someone does something that upsets us, they do it because of their own imbalances.  This compassion brings us great inner serenity, because it allows us to "accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Karma

I was posting on SpiritualForums.com today regarding Karma, and I really liked what I wrote so I decided to repost it here, just for chucks.  Enjoy.

I don't think Karma in the traditional sense exists, as in we get punished with unpleasant lives because of things we did in other lives. That would only make sense if Time existed in the realm of Spirit. But Time is a function of physical reality, a tool that allows us to organize our experiences here. Outside of this Realm of the Relative, there is only the infinite Moment of Now. Thus there can be no "karmic rebalancing" because which direction does it rebalance? Forward in time? Backwards? Randomly?Traditional Karma only works if lives are progressed through linearly, but future lives are just as much a reality as past lives, they're just harder to perceive because of how probability splinters the timelines.

That having been said, there are still consequences and the law of cause and effect. The vibrations of our thoughts and actions draw like energy to us. This is not justice, but simple spiritual physics: that which is sent out eventually returns. The reason for this is incredibly simple: We Are All One, thus what happens to another happens to you. Again, like Time, this action/reaction is a function of physical reality, and thus does not affect the realms of Spirit. Thus nothing carries over from one lifetime to another.

So then, why are some lives harder than others? This is really the question that the idea of Karma was created to answer, the seeming injustice of one person being born to privilege and another to squalor, one with perfect health and another with chronic illness, one living to be a centarian, another dead as a teenager. "How is this fair?" we ask the universe. This only seems unfair if we maintain our illusion of separateness. If we remember that We Are All One, then we do not envy that person for their health or wealth or longevity, we bless the fact that these others are really facets of ourselves, and we, with our illness or poverty or short life, are giving these others a chance to appreciate what they have.

Now this is a very deep and difficult and esoteric way of looking at things. It's bloody hard to be grateful for our hunger when others have food. So let's look at this another way. At the level of our souls, we choose our lives and our experiences. We draw situations to ourselves in order to define Who We Are in relationship to what happens to us. At all times, no matter how hard things are, it is possible to look into our souls and sense the why of things, to understand the choice we made to draw these circumstances to us. In reality, this is type of reverse Karma. By changing our perspective and understanding, we can draw to our lives the circumstances we choose rather than unconsciously behaving in a way that draws consequences to us.

Thus, traditional Karma only really exists for those who do not go through life making conscious choices. As long as we bumble our way through life thinking that thing happen to us, thing will indeed happen to us. The moment we take the reigns and live consciously, life becomes something that happens because of us, for then we are truly being the cause.

CS

Peace and Joy to all, no exceptions, for we are all One. Thus, my Peace and Joy are also yours, and yours, mine.