"Love in its essence is spiritual fire"

Had an interesting fortune cookie today: "Love in its essence is spiritual fire"

Gosh, this just makes me think of the experimentation which led to my writings on Inner Homeopathy. This is a practice of Love, to love ones self, to love every single part of you, to love the self destructive parts of ones self, to love, and to love more. This is a very self transforming practice, so very simple yet so comprehensive.

Love is acceptance, as it accepts the loved one without regard for anything the loved one is doing. This is God's love this is, it is a sort of love which humans often have a time accomplishing.

Humans so often have conditions on their love. I'll love you only if you treat me a certain way and so on. Is that God's love?

The Inner Homeopathy practice I've written about can be very challenging. Inside us are so many conflicting ideas about ourselves, not all of which are consciously known. In the subconscious is held all the beliefs we've made about ourselves and the world, many of which paradoxically contradict each other. We may have a belief of our competence and love-ability, but find another part that's self doubting and certain nobody loves us. These subconscious beliefs swirl around based on the events around us, the memories inside us, etc, each belief being triggered at various times depending and affecting how we act from moment to moment.

Not all of our inner beliefs appreciate being held in love, just as we don't always recognize love when it is offered to us, and we don't always trust those who claim to love us. So is it also true when we practice loving ourself.

Yet I know from the experience of my experimentation, loving ones self can transform such inner beliefs. It is as if unconditional acceptance and unconditional love, Gods love in other words, is the ultimate in remedies, the cure for all ills.

Love to you all.

First day on the job

A new priest at his first mass was so nervous he could hardly speak. After mass he asked the monsignor how he had done. The monsignor replied, "When I am worried about getting nervous on the pulpit, I put a glass of vodka next to the water glass. If I start to get nervous, I take a sip."

So next Sunday he took the monsignor's advice. At the beginning of the sermon, he got nervous and took a drink. He proceeded to talk up a storm.

Upon his return to his office after mass, he found the following note on the door:

1. Sip the vodka, don't gulp.
2. There are ten commandments, not twelve.
3. There were twelve disciples, not ten.
4. The communion wafer is consecrated, not constipated.
5. Jacob wagered his donkey, he did not bet his ass.
6. We do not refer to Jesus Christ as the late J.C.
7. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not generally referred to as Daddy, Junior and the Spook.
8. David slew Goliath, he did not kick the shit out-o-him.
9. When David was hit by a rock and knocked off his donkey, don't say he was stoned off his ass.
10. We do not refer to the cross as the "Big T."
11. When Jesus broke the bread at the Last Supper He said, "Take this and eat it for it is my body." He did not say "Eat me."
12. The Virgin Mary is not called "Mary with the Cherry."
13. The recommended grace before a meal is not: Rub-A-Dub-Dub thanks for the grub, yeah God.
14. Next Sunday there will be a taffy pulling contest at St. Peter's, not a peter pulling contest at St. Taffy's.

A tip for keeping track of your life

I've recently been studying the material in the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and it's a very enlightening book shining a light on habits which create mental clutter, and showing ways to rid yourself of that clutter. The idea is the more "stuff" you carry in your head, the more appointments or to-do list items you carry in your head, the more your mental and emotional energy is tied up with the act of carrying those factoids in your head.

It's a mental juggle trying to remember all that stuff... and if you think about it, the reminders don't always come out at the most convenient time. Say you need to buy a pound of hamburger for dinner, but you think about it during a meeting in the afternoon, but it's completely gone from your mind until you get home. Emotional costs arise because of fears of what might happen due to forgetting these factoids.

The more of these little factoids you try to carry in your mind, the heavier is the burden. Looking at it from another angle, the less you carry in your mind the greater will be your peace.

One idea I'm using pretty successfully is to use a computerized calendar to track appointments. However it is not perfect, yet. In the past I've used a paper calendar and that is pretty successful, but for two issues. One is I found it easy to forget to look at the paper calendar, leaving it as a continued mental weight to remember to look there. Second is the paper calendar isn't always on my person, and again you have to rely on memory during those times you aren't carrying the paper calendar.

With the goal being to reduce the mental burden to zero, any solution which involves remembering factoids is something to resolve.

My current method is to use the iCal application on my Mac, and to use the iSync application to exchange appointments between iCal and my cell phone. The advantage is that I'm always carrying my cell phone (well, almost always). Because iSync does a good job of synchronizing appointments, they can be entered either into the cell phone or the iCal application and kept synchronized.

What happens is my cell phone kicks off an alarm shortly before every appointment. I find it very comforting to have this widget remembering my calendar for me.

I said it isn't perfect, so here are the issues I know of.

First, entering appointments through my phone is clumsy. It means entering text through a numeric keypad. While "the kids" seem very comfortable doing SMS messaging through their cell phones, I find it tedious.

Second, I don't remember to enter all appointments and end up keeping some of them in my head. Oops. That may be partly to do with the clumsiness of using the phone to enter appointments.

Third, synchronizing my phone with the iCal calendar does not help my colleagues know what my schedule is. My iCal calendar is in my home computer and there isn't a way to synchronize appointments from my home computer to the calendaring service my employer uses. This means my colleagues have no idea what my schedule is. While that could be a problem, many of my colleagues also do not synchronize their appointments to the corporate calendar service.

Life is a Verb?

Yesterday my fortune cookie said "Life is a verb", which has me pondering. It also said my lucky numbers are: 5, 38, 11, 50, 29 and 34, but I'm more interested in the words than the numbers.

The first thought was, life is about action and movement. One of the distinctions between a living and a non-living object is that the living object moves on its own accord, or rather it does things on its own accord. Bacteria and the like may not move on their own accord, but their life process is to take in stuff (nutrients) process the stuff and expell other stuff. Clearly the distinction I'm thinking of is the living object does things on its own accord, while non-living objects don't do anything on their own accord.

Life is about action. Actions are verbs, right? That's because verbs are the action portion of sentences. Hmm....

The second thought is to remember this be-do-have paradigm. The idea is that the ideal pattern to follow is to "be", then from your beingness to "do", then you will "have" the desired result. If you want to be rich, first "be" happy, then "do" things based on being happy, and eventually you will "have" happiness. The key concept is your way of being, how you are. Meditation is a way of practicing "being" because meditation is largely about experiencing how you are.

The typical person, however, is all about "doing" and not at all about "being". There's so many things to do, rush rush rush and do do do seems to be how most people are living their lives. Wasn't modern technology supposed to give us more leisure time? And in any case if most people are unhappy perhaps they aren't taking enough time to stop and smell the roses or otherwise to simply "be".

In sentences the "be" portion is everything but the verbs, so being is not action. Does that mean being is not an aspect of living? Oh, in a sentence if there is no noun, there is no object for the verb to act upon. Even in a single word sentence like "Go!" there is an implied object of that sentence. If life is a verb, life is about action, then there must be an object on which to perform the action. Hence to "be" gives an object for your action, or life, to act upon.

It's not the job you perform, but creating and manifesting your vision of the world

What career or work or job or activity do you want to do? How will you occupy your time? How will you earn your living and keep food on the table and a roof over your head?

It occurred to me this morning that many times someone sees a job being done or a skill they can learn in school. They learn the skill and then pursue as their life "I'm going to be a X" where 'X' could be Nurse, Barmaid, Soldier, Lawyer, Barber, etc. What occurred to me is how this misses an interesting option.

What is your goal? What world do you want to live in? What is your vision of the perfect world? In answering the question try to remove from your thinking any concern over how you're going to achieve that vision of the perfect world to live in. We're dreaming here for a moment, so let the dream sink in and become vivid.

With any vision there are many ways to bring that vision into reality. Let me ask, do you know the best way to accomplish your goal of world peace, one where people live in harmony with each other and their environment, where the plants and animals are given sufficient consideration in the planning of the affairs of human kind? Do you know the best way to accomplish this? Most likely not. However there is wisdom held in the jointness of us all, you might call this Divine wisdom, and that wisdom has a path for each and every one of us if we choose to follow that path.

We can choose to follow a path where we see some skill, enjoy using that skill, and then decide we want to earn our living using that skill. Or we can choose to follow a path where we see a vision or goal of a desired outcome, and then learn the skills necessary to achieve that desired outcome, and make connections and communities of people who will together create that desired outcome.

The interesting option we miss by saying "I'm going to be an X" is to ignore the desire which led us to learn X and to be drawn to X. The desires which drive us to specific X's are threads that, if we pay attention to them, represent the tapestry of our personal wants and desires.

Making peace with mass media tragedies in our society

Today in the news we have: Officials: Gunman dead after bloody campus rampage ... the story? A lone shooter goes on a rampage on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg VA, he managed to kill 31 people and wound many more. The police sent in SWAT teams, found the killer, and shot him dead.

This is clearly a tragedy, one which will be a focus of the mass media attention for a couple weeks. Or at least until the next mass media tragedy comes along. We don't yet know why this happened, what motivated the person who perpetrated the shooting. We know from past shooting incidents like this that the people have been disaffected people in pain about their lives, etc.

Such violence can only be perpetrated by a person who believes violence is a way to ease their pain. Perhaps they are unwilling to acknowledge their pain, and need to lash their pain out to others instead. But it's easy to get lost in second-guessing why someone else might commit such an act. Many spiritual traditions such as Buddhism teach that the universe is one consciousness, and that our ego's create an illusion of being individuals with identities separated from the identities of everybody else. Hence, the spiritual teaching is that our true identity is unitive consciousness and that everything which happens, every persons individual thoughts and hopes and fears and pains, all happen within that unitive consciousness.

Clearly in our world as it stands a lot of people are in pain. We have seemingly unnecessary death happening all over the world in all forms. If the teachings of the spiritual traditions are true, then in our true identity as a being of pure universal consciousness, all those unnecessary deaths and pain is happening within us. In particular Buddhist practices ask us to seek inside ourselves the pain we see in the world. And to hold that part of ourselves in compassionate awareness.

Essential Phowa Practice contains a very good and clearly described method from a Buddhist perspective.

While looking at the CNN.COM web site for news I saw the following title: Having baby at 12, 18K dead a day; $34 to stop it

It's a link to a video about world hunger, and discusses how at least 18,000 people per day die of hunger. There's an intriguing contrast between this figure, 18,000 people per day, and a single incident involving 32 deaths. This clicked something in my mind .. often the mass media goes into a frenzy over certain stories while ignoring other stories that have similar attributes. Last week the frenzy was over "shock jock" Don Imus and an inflammatory and racist statement he said on his radio program. The frenzy over that event led to his firing as a radio personality, but isn't it interesting how there's a whole industry of "shock jocks" who are famous for pushing the bounds of indecency, who regularly get fined by the FCC for public indecency, etc, and why does this one incident by this one guy get so much frenzy when the same thing happens every day by dozens of other shock jock's?

Similarly why will this shooting incident get so much coverage compared to the tragedy of 18,000 deaths per day due to hunger?

Tragedy is happening every day in every corner of human society on this planet. While we may be led to incredulously ask Why?, it's clear this has been the path of human society for millennia and it shows every indication of continuing for the forseeable future. I believe that a practice of praying for and manifesting peace around the world is a necessary part of changing the course of this pattern in human society.

How to fall in love?

I came across a blog posting by Mario Torre How to fall in love... where he linked to an image of a beautiful young lady. Yup, as a red-blooded male she sure catches my attention.

But it occurred to me ... is that Love? Okay, lust, love, but what I really mean is this question: With whom is your primary relationship?

You may say, oh my Wife/Husband/Lover is my primary relationship you silly person, what are you talking about? I'm talking about ones relationship with ones own self.

Any relationship with another person will eventually go away. That person might die or might become disinterested or might grow to hate you etc, and what happens to that being your primary relationship? Hopefully when that person leaves your life and stops being in relationship to you, you'll find a way to move on gracefully. Many people aren't able to make this transition gracefully, leading to long morose periods of longing for this person that is no longer in their life.

If a relationship can end can it be considered to be your primary relationship?

The one relationship that cannot end is your own relationship with yourself. It seems to me, then, that this, your inner self relationship, is the primary relationship. And that the longing for another, the type of longing that caused Mario to post about that beautiful young lady, that is a fleeting relationship, one that is destined to end in time.

As I've explored the ideas I'm calling Inner Homeopathy I'm learning that one key is ones inner relationship to themselves. That the Inner Homeopathy practice is a way to learn to have a wholesome relationship with yourself.