I AM GOLDEN PEACE

 

February 29, 2012

Hope others find this funny and/or enlightening.  There is a story about a man who does something he feels guilty about in India and comes to believe in a legend about an avenging tiger.  It was sometime in the nineteenth century.  He travels half way around the world to get away from tigers.  He thinks he must surely have found safety in a remote town in Texas, USA.  It so happens that a circus comes into the area and a tiger gets loose.  Hearing that the circus is coming to the town where he lives, in his attempts to get away; he unknowingly travels towards the loose tiger.  The tame circus tiger is caught without any trouble, but the man has run head long off a cliff and died in his attempts to escape this “ferocious avenging” tiger.  We cannot escape our beliefs. We can change our beliefs and therefore change our reactions.

 

February 28, 2012

Inner peace is being able to find a way out of or a way through a “no win” situation – creating the space to ask for guidance and see alternatives.

February 26, 2012

Positive self talk is a huge component of inner peace.

"What lies before us and what lies behind us is nothing compared to what lies within us."   Ralph Waldo Emerson

February 24, 2012

Silence is a big part of my life.  But I also use music.  Personally I choose Indian flute, or classical or Irish.  I try to stay away from heavy beats of the drum.  However, my brother calls most of my music lullabies.  It appears anything I call relaxing puts him to sleep.  And I listen to it so low that he can’t even hear it most of the time.  But it is soothing to me.  Personally my sensitive ears can not handle loud bass or high pitched sounds.  So whatever works for you.  I don’t know enough about music to relate what some people have told me about a syncopated beat lowering our vibration.  I do remember my own grade school science projects about the affects of different music styles on plant growth.  Classical and relaxing was what my plants liked best.  So I might suggest you try your music on a plant and see how it responds and then you’ll know how it might be affecting you.

February 23, 2012

Then there is the universal process – looking at beliefs, thoughts, words and actions.  Cultivating those that enhance peace, joy, harmony or whatever interests you.  Replacing those that detract.  This involves monitoring our awareness.  Sometimes it can help us to recognize that the intensity of the emotions may not be all our own.  We might be picking it up from the mass consciousness or picking up on something from another individual.  There is some element within us, or it wouldn’t be affecting us at all, but the whole ball of wax may not be ours to own.  As I tend to mimic my beloved trees in processing emotions almost as naturally as I breathe, I need to remind myself that the intensity does not necessarily have its source within me and so there is only so much I can do.  Anyway, whatever the details of what we each process (Some people have associated their bodily symptoms with processing things from the mass consciousness.); from what I have read and heard discussed, it appears the generics of processing are common to most.  Whatever you may be processing, I offer you encouragement, perseverance, courage, strength, a sense of victory and joy; as well as my love.  Oh, hey, I guess I’ll throw in peace.

February 22, 2012

There is being what comes natural to you and cultivating that which enhances your particular flavor of expression.

February 21, 2012

It is, of course, plants that provide the oxygen we breathe.  And trees are my favorites.  My brother asked why I went down one street versus another.  Because there are more trees.  He just laughed with knowledge of me.  Trees are another important enhancement to my peace.  I have yet to figure out my affinity for trees, but I’ve always had a sense of them transmuting emotions.  In a way it seems a burden we place upon them.  (And sometimes an overwhelming burden of lower energies that we transmit out to all types of elementals, resulting in earthquakes and other “natural disasters.”)  So I take special care to share what I hope are higher energies - energies easier to digest, such as love, appreciation, happiness and joy – with trees.  In return, I find more peace in a forest then any place else.  Some 20 years ago, a friend and I used to chime “Baby Mimosa!” when ever we saw a Mimosa tree.  I have no idea what started this game we played.  One day during that period a complete stranger walked up to me and said that the elementals love me because I keep them laughing.  I didn’t even know what an elemental was at the time, but I immediately associated the comment with the Baby Mimosa game.  Sharing awe and appreciation bring me peace, and I find that strongest in an old growth forest such as the Redwoods.  I run to a forest for detoxing, also, and perhaps this isn’t fair.  (However, deep grief will lead me to stone outcroppings.  Some odd sense that rocks digest the really dense energies easier?)  But I also stay long enough to return the whole gambit of love and joy in return.  My sister loves orchids.  Another friend loves African violets.  I suspect it is an interaction between us and plants – something associated with their automatic processing of emotional energy – that helps us find peace in nature.

February 20, 2012

Because my norm tends to be a state of peace, I tend to take more notice of what disturbs my peace.  However, I am going to try to focus on what enhances my peace.  Today it was being reminded to focus on breathing to deepen my meditations.  At work the standing joke during times of stress was for the group to start chanting ‘Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.”  This would inevitably lead to laughter.  One technique I was taught long ago for meditations was to visualize the breath coming in and out of the heart.  Yoga has all sorts of breathing exercises.  One is closing one nostril while breathing in and out of the other, and then alternating nostrils.  Another technique was to visualize purified energy flooding a person’s physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies with each in breath; and to visualize any negativity going out with the out breath into a violet flame.  A slight twist on this is to visualize some gift, like joy, coming in with the in breath and then being shared with the world with the out breath.  Will you take a moment to take three deep breaths with me, while visualizing peace coming into your being and breathing peace out to be shared with the world?

February 19, 2012

What is it about another person’s behavior that can embarrass us?  Association and/or responsibility.  Just recently I knew the people listening did not want to hear what this person was saying and it was just making the whole situation worse.  I could not keep the person from saying what they wanted.  And as I had brought the person into the situation, I felt responsible.  I finally gave up and let go and some measure of peace returned to me.  I finally accepted that only the person could be responsible for her words.  My association did not make me responsible.  The listeners were adults and I, also, was not responsible for their discomfort, reactions or emotions.

Perceived expectation had something to do with disturbing my peace, as well. It appeared to me that the people involved were looking to me to help with the person I had brought. Yet, that did not make it my responsibility to perceive that something needed to be fixed, nor to fix it. After all, I'm learning to flow and let be.

February 17, 2012

Evolution of spiritual identities.  I started this life not consciously thinking about a spiritual identity, but luckily for me, knowing I had one.  I was taught as a youngster in the church that I was a sinner, but this never seemed to strike a cord of truth.  Somewhere early on I accepted that I (along with every other human) was a child of God and for many, many years that was my spiritual identity.  At some point I thought of myself as a Being of Light.  A few years ago I was taught that we are all extensions of God and this concept has assisted me greatly in how I look at other people.  The teaching said something about us each having an Alpha and an Omega God Flame, an extension of some aspect of God.  Someone at a conference told me I was Infinite Peace thru Divine Direction and the Peace struck a chord of truth with me.  For now, I’ve adopted that focus as a tool for helping me become more aware of spiritual identities.  I feel like I’m discovering and creating it at the same time.  It helps me build a sense of unity to look at someone and wonder what God Flame they might be an extension of.  It is no more a summation of identity than a name is, but it helps.  And just like anyone can change their name or be known by a nick name, it makes sense to me that people can be focusing on different aspects of God flames at different times.  Some people say they cycle thru a cosmic clock that has 12 aspects of focus.  

Do I think everyone is interested in inner peace?  No.  Do I think it is useful for everyone?  No.  Some people would be more likely to put things in terms of harmony, joy, love, wisdom, healing.  I’m not sure where the idea of God flames came from or how long it has been around.  I was told some suggestions for determining your God Flame(s) are to look at what you struggle with, what you are tested on, what you speak in terms of, what you think about.  Other people, who also identify themselves as flames of peace, aren’t focused on inner peace.   Some people focus on an active peace affecting groups of people or social peace or world peace.  When I tried to expand too quickly to world peace, I fell on my face and got out of sync with who I am. It takes us all to bring it to fruition and we all need balance.  So there are the God flames of so many other aspects of being - power, vision, truth, transmutation, service, mercy, forgiveness, victory, gratitude, justice, liberty, etc., etc., etc.  I’ve never really researched what teachings are currently available on God Flames.  I put it out there as an indication of how our differences can also be our unifying factors.

To me inner peace is not everyone being the same or having the same agenda; it is every person being true to who they are in the moment.  In a social situation a few years back, I was told I was out of sync with what the leaders said was occurring.  I never did understand nor adopt their viewpoint, but I did recognize that they had one.  For what ever reason, it was important that I follow thru on what I saw.  It seemed to me that they were assigning a villain and sort of wanted everyone to essentially stone her.  They felt they were helping everyone grow.  We each respond (or don’t) to a given situation based on our viewpoint.  I was true to myself based on my viewpoint at the time.  That’s all I feel I can ask of anyone and it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are all always in sync.

I look at any piece of knowledge as a tool for understanding.  It doesn’t really matter how accurate it is.  Looking at the Earth as flat was too limiting and we eventually graduated to looking at it as round.  Eventually perhaps we’ll adopt more of an egg shape and that will mean something to us.  Right now we tend to assume that because we look at our own planet as round, all planets and moons are round.  I suspect we could find some octagons or many faceted spheres or perhaps even crystalline structures, if we looked.  So I suspect our understanding of our spiritual identities will evolve, as well.  Right now I accept that inner peace has something to do with my focus on learning and sharing.  Some people are also focusing on inner peace perhaps while they are focusing on other aspects, as I am also focusing on aspects other than inner peace at times. So here is a toast to each of our individual, unique blends of God Flames and to the unity of each personal whole and to the unity of us all on planet Earth and to the unity of us all everywhere and to the unity of the whole Whole. Hee, Hee, Hee, Ho, Ho, Ho, Ha, Ha, Ha.

[One time when I was sitting in a Buddhist Temple looking at a wall of varying Buddhas, I heard a voice say: “Look at what they have done to me, tried to separate me into so many different fragments.”  So even though I spoke of God Flames, extensions of God, aspects; I don’t want to say I think God has separated itself into a bunch of tiny fragments.  I tried to envision a diamond with numerous facets, but I quickly got off track trying to take the concept too far.]

February 10, 2012

I can give you a glimpse into my process in the hopes that you can find a tool, technique or encouragement that helps with your own processes.  [Note: Your processes might be associated with something other than inner peace.  Maybe I’ll talk about various God flames in the next posting.]  Re-processing the event described on the 8th might be productive for a number of reasons:
          Time has passed to allow the hurt to heal.
          I have more tools in my tool box.
          I have a different perspective.
          I have more knowledge and understanding.
          The fact that the topic surfaced again is an indicator.
[So even if you have processed something before, it can be useful to process it again.]

Questions to myself:
          How does this relate to other things I am learning right now?
          What does the fact that I was in a relationship with a person whose beliefs were along the line of a materialist persuasion indicate to me?
          Since the non-argument he used as a medium stood out, what does that say to me?

Two other big events have been having body parts surgically removed.  The processing of the grief on these has indicated that I need to be more at peace with the concept of being in a physical body on a physical planet.  I tend to be far more at ease with the spiritual; having a spiritual identity, believing the physical is temporary, seeing spiritual continuities, putting priority on spiritual goals.  What I heard this man saying was that he only believes in the physical.  He also brought up a debate with only two sides, each an extreme and each trying to say the other doesn’t exist.  These are sure indicators of duality.

Hence another question.  What about my current beliefs, reeks of duality?

What do I know, believe, think and feel I need to know?
My experiences say there is some form of evolution, although I don’t believe it is always a linear progression.  My experiences say there is definitely something beyond the material.  As well as believing in a lot of levels of creation; I firmly believe there is one very intelligent creator, who started the whole process, continues to be active, and had/has a definite purpose. My terminology is God the Creator of ALL.  I don’t care one whit whether the creation of this little planet (or even this solar system), this teeny tiny spec in all of creation, originally took 7 days, 7 billion years, there was no time frame, or it was some time frame I don’t know anything about.  In fact, I suspect the creation of whatever this planet will be isn’t even yet complete. What makes me consider this planet insignificant?  Why do I tend to project insignificance on the physical? Is this just a backlash from so much around me giving it too much importance?

I am a mediator.  I love to find the common ground.

One might say materialism met spiritualism and found they had nothing in common.  But I adamantly refuse to be at an extreme.  I now know that as long as I see opposites, I’m in dualistic thinking and I try not to be there either.  Since I’m at ease with the spiritual and he was presenting the material, what do I need to see about the material/physical?

One of my surgical grief processes revealed that I tend to associate pain with the physical world, and therefore I tend to separate the physical from the spiritual.  Yet, I KNOW there is no separation.  Some people speak of Alpha and Omega aspects – but these people also see a unity and oneness in Alpha and Omega.

[You can see that my process is an ebb and flow type of thing.   I can only stand to put the pressure on for a short period before I have to back away.  Actually I went off on tangents for a couple hours, but I don’t need to take you there.]

The material physical world had a beginning and a purpose.  Do I think it was a spiritual purpose?  Yes.  Is that just because I tend to think that way?  Could it have had both a physical and a spiritual purpose?  I suspect that in the true purpose there is no concept of separation between physical and spiritual.  I’m here, but am I truly living the way the Creator intended?  For me that would mean being in sync with the purpose.  What do I think the Ascended Masters say about why we are here?  To bring light.  To gain awareness of self in union with the whole.  To truly see again the oneness of it all.  To experience the results of our choices (as individuals, as groups and as a whole) and learn.  To co-create who we are and what the whole is.  I don’t know if any of what I summarized that I’ve absorbed from Ascended Master teachings is accurate and I’m not sure how it helps.  Can I be at peace with all that as a purpose?  Yes.  Can I see a unity of physical and spiritual in what I summarized?  Apparently I need to look at the teachings again.

Can I get on point?
There is no separation of spiritual and physical.  There is no such thing as avoiding either one.  Physical is not an absence of spiritual, nor vice versa.  It is not a black and white thing, where spiritual is light and physical is darkness.  Lower frequencies, more density, are not at one end of a good/bad scale.  I have a misunderstanding about the teachings regarding frequencies of light and physical things being at lower frequencies.  I also have a false impression of what ascension is.  I have a dualistic and linear viewpoint of the teaching and that viewpoint is what needs to change.  Just like evolution does not always have a linear progression.  It depends on how much of the picture you are looking at.  If you look at a small segment of the picture, evolution might appear to look like a line.  But if you take in more of the picture, you see cycles and spirals.  I suspect that if we took in an even wider view, we would see spheres.

The unifying element behind all creation might be some sort of energy or even light, but it is not a linear progression.  In the true scheme of things, there is no separation between physical and spiritual.  I can’t be one with out other, nor say I feel more comfortable with one and not the other; because there is no separation.  This delightful man was helping me see a false veil.

Beyond this veil, there is so much more to see. Dear God of all creation and all the hierarchies with a wider view, Please help myself and others who are grappling with these concepts to see more of the real truth.

February 8, 2012

It was such a shocker.
This person’s own definition of self is that he is a chameleon.  At first I thought this meant being what people wanted him to be - what ever blends in.  And there is an element of that.  But a chameleon hides in plain sight.  The shape of the animal does not change, just the coloring and pattern.  This person never came across as fake, like a con man.  I think he had a firm sense of self and just chose what to show different people with his goal always being to blend in.  So it was a shocker one day when he decided to stand out. 

At the time I didn’t even know there was a viewpoint that I’ve now heard people describe as a materialist philosophy - a world view that honestly believes there is nothing beyond what a human can sense with the traditional five human senses, nothing that a physical instrument can not measure, that the human mind is the creator, and that creation is completely random.  It is so foreign to me that I don’t know whether I have summarized the materialist philosophy accurately or not, but I have summarized what this person ended up saying to me.  I had glimpses, but I didn’t actually know there was anyone who seriously believed something along this line of reasoning.  I new there were atheists and agnostics; but apparently materialism doesn’t have any concept of any kind of God at all, to agree with, disagree with, or even consider.  Now I understand it is a very prevalent and popular world view, but at the time it was totally new to me.

Also, the medium used to present this thought was a debate I’ve long held as a non-argument, meaning I’ve dismissed both sides as invalid.  I firmly believe both sides have taken a different element of truth to an extreme and neither is looking at the picture.  Each is so focused on their individual tree that they don’t see the forest at all.

So this person wanted to argue.  This in itself was bizarre, coming from a person who is a master at blending in.  Then to want to argue about something completely non-sensical???  For two hours this man went on about hardcore fundamentalist Christians debating evolution.  Numerous times I said who cares, the whole debate is a complete non-argument.  As he became more and more passionate; I finally recognized that he was arguing in favor of evolution.  And a form of evolution that I had never heard discussed in such terms.

So just like the guy in yesterday’s story trying frantically to figure out what the teacher was asking, I was frantically trying to figure out why this guy was taking a stand at all and why he had chosen such a subject.

The poor dear was trying desperately to assign me the task of arguing the other point of view, which of course I refused to do.  So he was having this debate all by himself and I was just sitting there watching.  I was thinking he had gone off the deep end and I could only wait for him to surface into some sense of sanity again.

Then he changed his tactic to not only does God not exist, but he literally has no concept that any kind of God in any form exists at all.  It took me another hour to determine and accept that not only is this what he was saying, but he was adamantly stating that he fully believed this.  My response was: ‘Oh! Wow!  That’s weird, but OK.  I’ve learned something new.  You can believe anything you want to believe.  That’s fine.’  I thought he had sure gone around the world to state his belief.  I hoped that the exercise helped him.  I thought that maybe we could move on to some sort of conversation that I could participate in.  As far as I was concerned he and I could still have a relationship, but then the other shoe dropped.  He finally got to the point of the whole conversation.  Stating his belief was not his point nor his goal.  “Because he loved me I MUST state that I believed the same as him.”

Well that was an easy duh NO, I don’t believe that at all.  It also never occurred to me that someone would act on the thought ‘be dishonest with me, so I can love you.’  It was just too weird and shocking.

He proceeded to cross a line that cut all ties between us.  It took another six months for an event to end our relationship, but it was the following event that cut the connection.  He honestly and actually tried to FORCE me to say what he wanted me to say.  He didn’t use physical abuse, but he sure turned on the mental and emotional pressure.  Any kind of love I know any thing about doesn’t have any kind or amount of force in it.  To me this was the ultimate betrayal and from someone I thought completely incapable of it.

There were way too many shocks to the system to allow peace; although I struggled to try and although I didn’t know I was a spirit of peace at the time.  I suspect he is a spirit of harmony, so it is certainly a measure of how important this was to him that he even tried.  However, both the method and the topic eradicated any middle ground.  And my complete shocked fog made it impossible for me to even consider an avenue for meeting him half way.  The solution we chose was to remove ourselves from each other’s worlds.

February 7, 2012

It was the first day of a philosophy class.  The teacher asked this man where are you from?  The teacher became quite impatient as the seconds passed without the man answering.  The teacher finally said:  Don’t you know what state you were born in?  (In the United States this would be referring to a geographic location.) Later the man told me that he had been frantically trying to figure out if the teacher was asking where he thought his spirit came from, where he physically was from, what his genetic linage was, what his psychological or philosophical background was, or biologically where humans come from.  He even jokingly wondered if he wanted to know what planet?  The teacher acted like he was looking at a blank non-functioning mind, when it was actually in overdrive.

This story is in preparation for tomorrow's story, where my mind was in overdrive. The question is: Do I think that peace within oneself always leads to peace with other people? And my answer is no. I think similar tools can be used and practicing on self helps us use the tools to assist in having peaceful interactions with people. But there is always the free will element of each and all involved in the interactions. And as tomorrow's story (which I warn you will be long) illustrates, sometimes the participants are on two such different pages that one just keeps saying come over to my page and the other is so befuddled it takes time to recognize they are on different pages and never even reaches a point of trying to find a bridge or some middle ground.

February 6, 2012

An acquaintance some 20 years ago said he had a formula for determining the ONE way speed of light.  Right now the speed of light is determined by sending out a beam in a vacuum and measuring the time for it to reach its destination AND return.  However, even at the speed of light on a rotating planet the point of origination has moved slightly.  Therefore the distances to and from are not equal.  The assumption that they are equal is what the current value for the speed of light is based on.  So this man said he had this calculation that he wanted to publish.  To the best of my knowledge, he never went ahead and published it and a quick search of the internet only showed that people continue to discuss whether the measurement can possibly be made.  Because he is not a physicist, he didn’t feel that he could withstand the backlash of critics.  If he had published it, people could have been debating it all these years and perhaps some other break thru in consciousness would have already occurred.  How many times do we do this?  We are shy to put something out there, because we think we own the idea and that the criticism will be of us personally.  If we could manage not to have a predefined expectation, a picture of how our gift SHOULD be used; then we could just put it out there and let happen what happens.

February 5, 2012

There is a way of sharing self freely and there is a way of sharing self with attachment, perhaps ownership of a job well done?  And perhaps it is rather different selves being shared, one with an identity in a higher vibration and one with an identity with a more material vibration.  Something similar to the following was said to someone.  'This item was the result of something you conceived and brought to success with flair.  Even though the thought was to do something charitable for someone else, this item is a tangible token of a triumph that the self sees.  It was the self that took on and accomplished the task and retained some sense of ownership of the resultant item.  So when the item was destroyed, you became angry because it felt like the self had been attacked.'  So if the person had been able to step out of self and allow their higher power to accomplish the task, if the person had been able to not be attached to the result; would the anger have been avoided?  

February 3, 2012

People who give of themselves. There are so many. Inn of the Sixth Happiness stars Ingrid Bergman as Gladys Aylward, a british maid who was adamant that God wanted her in China and didn't stop until she arrived in 1932. One of the many events in her life that she is known for is walking 150 children from the front lines of the Chinese-Japanese war to safety. Christy is written by Catherine Marshall telling her mother's story as a teacher of 67 students in all grades in early 1900s in the Appalachia Mountains. There is also the female quaker missionary who is demonstrating a loving and joyful God to a people who have long believed in a harsh and vengeful God. Then there is the Appalachian highlander, who after training as a medical doctor, returns to his home to help his people find new ways and bridge the gap from old superstitions and killing feuds. Aside from these stories, right in my own family, my two nephews have long been married to women totally devoted to their families here in the 21st century. A neighbor is constantly working with the school to find innovative ways to teach students similar to her son. I'm sure you can come up with many examples, perhaps even within your own stories.

February 1, 2012

I pray that each person in the world who is willing has an experience that brings them some glimpse, a clearer vision of this life's purpose, something that helps them trust in their own instincts and a deeper realization of who they are in God.

What ever that moment of experience on January 30th was about, the result is a sense of cohesiveness of my life experiences, and a deeper peace about the workings of the world in general.

 

This energy is sent out thru the protective filter of Father/Mother God's will
 and can only be returned in that will and by God's grace.