The truth about "Psychic Vampires"

Back in the day, I really got into the whole Celestine Prophesy/energy vampire thing. Since then, my views have changed significantly, and I think the truth is a lot simpler than this idea of people sucking the life out of you.

Put simply, you do it to yourself.

Let me explain what I mean. People in this world have created this thing I call the Scarcity Myth, the general idea of not-enough-ness in the world. We have this subconscious belief that everything worth getting or having is scarce: money, love, time, good ideas, energy, happiness, and so on. I personally believe that our thoughts create our experience, so therefore if we believe these things are scarce, we experience that.

But where does this myth come from? What is the root cause of this assumption? IMHO, I think it comes from the Western monotheistic (WM) idea of a God whose love is conditional. Put simply, the greatest feeling of all is Love, and the greatest Love of all is God's Love. But, according to WM, God requires things from us in order to receive this perfect Love, namely proper worship and behavior. What worship and which behaviors are proper? Depends on who you ask: surrender, the Five Pillars, the Ten Commandments, what have you. If God does not receive what He wants, or worse, receives the wrong thing, His Love is withheld, and even punishment is meted out.

Each monotheist sect believes it has discovered the right way to placate and please this demanding God, and that all others have it completely wrong. Between these two, the capricious nature of the WM God and the confusion created by so many conflicting ideas about what the WM God really wants, we subconsciously believe that the Love of God is scarce and only given to those who are "worthy". The extrapolation from here is simple; if God's Love is scarce, all other good things must also be. If all good things are scarce, then we must compete, horde, and fight over all good things in order to make sure we have "enough".

So what does this have to do with psychic vampires? All of these ideas of scarcity and competition have created in us the belief that everyone else is out to "get" everything that brings us joy. When a person first discovers the wonders of spirituality and personal energy, they have yet to unlearn this scarcity mindset. They get this incredible jolt of inner energy which, while it comes from within and from the truth of our connection to All That IS, they still think comes from some "outside" source. If the energy comes from an outside source, it must be both scarce and losable. Which means others can "take" it from us, and thus is born these ideas of psychic vampires, demons, evil spirits, and all these other dramas. In truth, all there is are people who have yet to unlearn their reflexive belief in the scarcity of God's Love.

JCS

Oneness as honeycomb

Hey all, been a while.

A great analogy popped into my head when I was debating on SpiritualForums.com, and I needed to share it. For context, we were discussing the nature of Unity and whether or not individuations actually exist....

It really depends on what we mean by "exist", doesn't it? When I say "doesn't exist", what I mean is that the individuation is perception, a point of view. Let me use an analogy....

Picture a piece of honeycomb, all those little perfect hexagons. If you choose to see the honeycomb as the individual cells, then yes, it is a whole made up of parts. But in fact, the cells are just empty spaces, and the comb is in fact an interconnected lattice, all one continuous piece that merely seems to be made of separate parts. The walls that make up one cell also belong to all the surrounding ones, whose walls belong to the ones that surround them, and so on and so forth. The empty space created by this lattice is then used by the bees for the creation of honey.

Just the same, we are the "empty space" used by Oneness, the lattice of energy that permeates, that IS, all of physical reality, to make the sweet honey which is experience.

Desire vs. Attachment

IMHO, experiences are the whole point of physicality. As such, desire for experience is not something which "should" be transcended, nor should the perception of separation. What "should" be transcended is attachment to particular results and the belief in the reality of separation.

Many people don't see the difference between desire and attachment, so let me give you an example. You are on your way to work, and you usually catch the 8:17 train. You wish (desire) to catch this train because it gets you to work a little early, allowing you time to get situated before starting, maybe get a cup of coffee. Today, there was an accident on your way to the train station, and you ran late and just missed the 8:17.

Now the average person, someone attached to results, would get upset now. There is another train at 8:26 which can still get you to work on time if you hustle, but this means you don't get your morning cup of coffee, and you will start the day hurried and frazzled, and this would upset the average person. You would not be upset because of losing your desired outcome, but because you are still attached to that outcome and the experiences that would have resulted from it. Attachment is an emotional state that draws you out of the Present Moment and into the imagining of outcomes which are no longer possible. It is a clinging to the past.

Now, a more "evolved" person can still have desires, but can let go of unmanifested experiences. Take our example. Instead of becoming upset at having to catch the 8:26, you can look and see that no actions of yours could have kept this experience of missing the 8:17. This can now be seen as an opportunity, because no circumstance happens "by chance". Any situation which comes to you not of your active choosing is a situation drawn to you by your soul or higher self, for the purpose of setting in motion a new set of circumstances. Thus the missing of the train can be released, and you can now look around at your new experience and try to find why it has come into your life. Sometimes, such events are the triggers for serendipitous coincidences (what Karl Jung called "synchronicities"), initiating new possibilities.

Thus it is possible to desire an outcome but not be attached to it if it does not manifest.

Totally non-spiritual thing here... Winter Is Coming!

Winter Is Coming

JCS

James Cameron's Avatar: A Spiritual Critique

Hello all,

I don't get out to the movies much. Weird work hours, two preschoolers, long commute, makes it hard. So I usually don't get to see movies until they're out on DVD, if at all. I finally got around to renting Avatar to see what the fuss was all about. Fun movie. Lots of action, visually stunning even on my crappy TV, not the grand and amazing thing it was made out to be, but fun. Reminded me of a mix of Dances With Wolves and Braveheart, with some obvious Cameron touches.

For anyone who missed it, the basic story is as follows. In the not-horribly-distant future humans discover a habitable planet and name it Pandora. It has Earth level temperatures, but the atmosphere is toxic to us. The entire surface of the planet is a vast jungle, teeming with life and inhabited by the Naavi, a humanoid race that looks like 10 ft tall blue cat people. Humans discover a valuable mineral on this planet (called, in a horribly cheesy touch, Unobtainium), and start mining it. The Naavi don't like that so much, and so begins a conflict that closely parallels how the US treated Native Americans, us land-grabbing and driving them back and them fighting a guerrilla war with primitive weapons and stolen guns.

A paralyzed former soldier named Jack gets recruited to be part of the Avatar Project. Avatars are genetically-created human-Naavi hybrid bodies that a person can project their consciousness into via a machine that looks like a coffin filled with unflavored gelatin. The point of the Avatars is to give humans a way to interact directly with the Naavi. No big surprise, Jack falls in love with having a 10 ft tall body that can walk. He meets a female Naavi on his first time out who 1) doesn't kill him on sight because of a floating flower, 2) happens to be basically a princess, and 3) takes him home to Mom and Dad.

You can figure out where it goes from there. Humans do bad stuff, Naavi get pissed, Jack and Princess fall in love, Jack goes native, two secondary characters (who you don't like at first but you like more later) die, big climactic fight where things look bleak and then turn around, humans leave, and they find a way for Jack to be a Naavi permanently. Roll credits.

It was a very fun, if predictable, movie, but something about it got under my skin just a tiny bit, something I couldn't put my finger on right away. It took until a couple of weeks afterwards for me to figure it out. The Naavi are depicted as being very spiritual, very All Life Is One, Earth Mother, give thanks to the spirits kinda people. And yet they never seem to even attempt to extend this spirituality to humans. Humans are depicted as, and assumed to be, irredeemable, motivated by nothing but greed. Even one of the better humans, when confronted with one of the biological wonders of Pandora, replies "I need to get a sample", seemingly motivated by nothing but intellectual greed. Even Jack, in the beginning, really only loves being Naavi for the opportunity to walk again.

This is not to say the depiction of humans was wrong, that's not my point. My point is that, if the Naavi were so spiritually advanced, where was the attempt on their part to extend the olive branch? Why did the Naavi automatically assume that humans were not part of their Circle of Life, not connected to their Earth Mother? Why did the Naavi assume the irredeemability of humans?

Any race that truly embraces Oneness would automatically extend it to all living things, not just those contained on their little planet. I find the spirituality of the Naavi to be incomplete and inconsistent. Just my two cents.

JCS

Now Available on Amazon!

Hello everyone,

It's official, "The Curious Snowflake" is available on Amazon as a Kindle and iPad download! If you have one of these nifty devices, please support my dream and buy a copy for just $5. If you don't, then please help me out by spreading the word. Mention it to people, send out an e-mail, post it on Facebook, anything you can do to help me out, no matter how small, means the world to me. Here's a link to Amazon for anyone who would like to take a look.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Curious-Snowflake-ebook/dp/B003T0GIP4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1276992039&sr=1-1

Peace and joy to all, and wish me luck!

JCS

Autobiography of a Yogi

On my continued trek through my accumulated literature, I've come across another gem. Somewhere, at one book sale or another, I picked up a copy of Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi", and it is a wonderfully fantastic tale.

For those who've never heard of him, Paramhansa Yogananda was on of India's premiere practitioners of what's called kriya yoga, and the first major Indian spiritualist to spend significant time in the U.S., specifically the last 30 years of his life (he died in 1952). "Autobiography" was published in 1946.

Kriya yoga is not the typical, twist-my-legs-up-into-a-pretzel kind of yoga (that kind is called hatha yoga). Kriya is more focused upon specific mediation practices with the goal of conscious acceleration of spiritual evolution. PY called it the "jet airplane" path, since each meditative session, properly undertaken, is supposed to be the equivalent of years, decades, or even centuries of typical spiritual progress.

AoaY is half a biography, half a spiritual treatise. PY is very scientific in his explanations of his spirituality, but some of the circumstances in the book are incredible enough to make most people doubt it's veracity: co-location, precognition, faith healings, materialization and dematerialization of physical objects, levitation, people going years without sleep, all happen frequently throughout the book. For those with an open mind, the claims in it are fantastic, especially in the realm of spiritual progress.

The book is quite well written and thoroughly footnoted. I'd recommend it to anyone capable of keeping an open mind about miracles.

JCS