Identification Ends Love

Published on by Jim Category: Christian, Communication and Relationships, Liberality & Conservatism, Religion

CNN Exclusive: One conservative’s dramatic reversal on gay marriage – CNN.com.

This story is a perfect example of how a person’s identification with someone or something has limited their love.  Before Sen. Portman realized that someone HE KNEW and loved was gay he was very anti gay marriage.  But as soon as he realized that someone he knew was gay and that sooner or later he would want the same things that the senator wanted, the senator opened his heart and changed his mind to support gay marriage.

If the senator had opened his heart to ALL BEINGS then he would have felt the same desire that he has within them, which is the desire to marry the person of his or her choice.

Sen. Portman identified with HIS family but could really care less with people of other families.  He opposed gay marriage because he did not care about the desires of people he did not identify with. His son’s coming out to him caused him to re-examine his ways of thinking and change his perspective.

To me, this is an example of the biblical concept of removing the heart of stone (the heart of the conservative) and replacing it with a heart of flesh (the heart of the liberal).  [Ezekiel 36:26]

We can see this same thing happening with former Vice-President Cheney, who discovered that his daughter was gay and she wanted to marry her girlfriend.  Because of this Cheney opened his heart and is now pro gay marriage just as Portman.

The point is that our habit of identifying with this or that person, including our own ‘self’ is part of the process of closing ourselves off to or limiting love.

By identify as Spirit one sees themselves as one with ALL beings and the heart become open and we can feel the pain and desires of all beings.  Being one with them you want for them what you want for your Self, which now includes them.

This is what Unconditional Love is and does, it opens you up to the pain and desires of all beings, not just your ‘loved ones’.

Love is a Feeling

Published on by Jim Category: God, Love and Fear

The dictionary defines love as a an intense feeling of deep affection.

Scientists like Dr. M. Scott Peck define love as “”the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”. Yet, Dr. Peck admits that he does not know WHY a person has the will to extend one’s self.

That is because Dr. Peck and most people ignore the obvious, that love is something that we FEEL in our bodies.  Feelings, like the feeling of hunger, are what motivate us.

One thing that can be said about love is that it feels GOOD, even when it hurts.  In fact, sometimes the pain or hurt of love is what is so powerful about love.  We can long for union with someone who we are physically with, the longing feeling being the love, and that longing hurts SO good that it is so intense we feel we are going to die or be burned up in the feeling.

We do not have to be limited to this feeling just for a person, we can feel it for a concept like the idea of ‘God’ or country or freedom or just about anything else

The point is that love is a FEELING and the more we are willing to feel that feeling, including the intensity that feels uncomfortable at times, the more love we will have in our life.  From the perspective of the person in the drama of romantic love, this idea can really suck.

Yet, on the other side of this coin, fully going into the pain of love and staying there to long can be physically, emotionally and mentally damaging to the human instrument through which one is experiencing life.  Too much can be a bad thing.

This is where discipline and sensitivity comes in.  We first have to be sensitive in our bodies and mind to know when we are on the threshold of damaging ourselves so that we can then use our disciplined skill to stop the pain.

Without this sensitive and discipline we will continue in the pain until we damage our human instrument or condition it away from love.  You can tell a person who has done this for they are shut down to caring about most if not all people and life itself.  They become what I call ‘conservatives’ for they ‘conserve’ or hold back their love.

Both sensitivity and discipline come with practice.

Sensitive comes from practicing feeling what we are actually feeling in our body, not just the activity in our brain, our thoughts, but what is happening below the neck.  This is not just feeling the gross sensations we normally feel, but also the subtle ones, the beating of our heart, the movement of the blood through our blood vessels, movement of the subtle energies as the body communicates with itself.  Feeling this takes practice being still and watching/feeling what else is going on.

Discipline comes from keeping at it no matter what happens, even if at first you lose your focus and get distracted you go back to the practice.  That is discipline.

If you want love, unconditional love, then you have to develop sensitivity and discipline.

Be Happy 4 No Reason

Published on by Jim Category: Health Emotional, Love and Fear

BeHappy4NoReasonThe right to happiness comes with the consciousness that we always have the power to choose happiness. We have been lead to believe that ‘things’ outside of us are going to make us happy or give us joy and love. That is a lie. Things, including people, cannot make us happy or give us joy and love. It is our reaction to the thoughts of these things that creates our experience of happiness, joy and love. The conscious person recognizes this and PRACTICES happiness, joy and love no matter what life is offering.

 

 

The Happy Atheist

Published on by Jim Category: Atheism, Christian, God, Health Mental, Religion

It has long been attested by religious people that one needs a god to be happy or to find joy and love in life.  The reality is far from this.

The atheist can be as happy or even happier and have more joy and love than a theist if they recognize that happiness, joy and love is what they want in life.  Any person who recognizes that our emotions are a product of our ways of thinking AND our habitual physiological (emotional) reactions will then practice those positive emotions until they have perfected them.

The theists are taught that happiness, joy and love (God is love) are outside of them or come from outside of themselves so they are always lead to believe that these positive emotions or states are only available under certain conditions, conditions that can be used like carrots on a stick to manipulate and enslave the them.

Of course, not all atheists are happy people.  Many if not most atheists are very materialistic and think that happiness, joy and love comes from material things (pretty much like religious people).  Yet the atheist has the advantage of not being dictated to by some deity flying around in the sky, they can go after whatever makes them happy without worry of the opinion of that deity.

So again, the atheist has a better opportunity to find happiness, joy and love than the theists.

Honesty Leads to Heaven

Published on by Jim Category: Religion, Understanding Ourselves

Being honest with yourself leads to a heavenly life experience.  Lying to yourself and others leads to a hellish life experience.

It is so hard to be honest, even with ourselves.  Much of society teaches us to lie to ourselves and to others.  We call this process ‘believing’ and being polite, but it is just lying.

It took me years to break the habit of lying to myself, but when I did I experienced this world as heavenly, perfect.  Even today, I am not always honest with myself and hence I have periods where I experience life as hell.  But when I take the time to stop and get back to the truth,  I again go back to that heavenly life experience.

Recently there was an election and the conservative political party lost.  One of the things I find most startling about this is just how dishonest these conservatives were being with THEMSELVES leading up to the election.  They were all so certain that their candidate was going to win by a landslide even though the polls were showing he was going to lose.  But these conservatives wanted to believe their candidate was going to win so they lied to themselves saying that the polls were wrong or that the pollsters were all liberals and the liberal media was just trying to convince everyone their candidate was going to win so that the conservatives would be discouraged and not vote.

Anyway you look at it, the hell those conservatives experienced on election night and are now experiencing is entirely a product of their own self deception; nothing more.

The dictionary defines religion a a system of beliefs.  If we were to be honest without ourselves we would have to admit that a belief is a lie we tell ourselves.  For example, imagine I ‘believe’ that there is an apple tree around the corner with lots of apples on it, and I believe this because someone told me this, I am lying to myself because the truth is I do not know if there is a tree there  or if I understood the person correctly or whatever.  Such is the case with religion, for we really do not know what the writers of the scriptures meant by their words until we experience what they experienced, and that would only be in the present moment.  By experiencing something in the present moment we are not longer believing in some words about something, we are experiencing it.  Belief is gone.  If we just believe we are saying to ourselves that we do not care enough to find out the truth.

Religious people experience this world as HELL because of their self deception.  This is good for the business of the ruling classes, for they can hold out hope for a better future like a carrot on a stick and the gullible religious people will just keep chasing after that hope as they lie to themselves thinking that heaven is just around the corner.

Heaven is NOT just around the corner; it is here, AT HAND, as Jesus tried to tell people.  The only requirement is that you STOP lying to yourself.

That is a tough requirement; it takes a lot of discipline to stop lying to yourself when everywhere you go the world is encouraging you to lie to yourself.  Which is why some people encourage you to get away from society in order to find the inner peace and clarity that comes with it so that you can see what is real, what is true and you can be honest with yourself about it.

Yet who cares enough, even about themselves, to take the time to go off to a lonely place and find that clarity so that they can see the truth that will set them free to enjoy and love all that life has to offer?  Really?

Is it that people do not care of is it that people do not know HOW to be honest with themselves, they do not know how to find that clarity, they do not know how to stop the lying?

I do not know the answer to this question.  This has been the quest I have had for a long time, to find out the answer to this burning question.  I am hoping that there might be some people out there who will read this with some thoughts and ideas they will share on this here.

What is Love? How to Love?

Published on by Jim Category: Christ, Christian, Health Emotional, Health Mental, Jesus, Love and Fear, Religion

On a search of Google adwords I find that those two topics each get 185 MILLION searches a month. I realized yesterday that those two questions are what I started looking for answers to thirty years ago.  I realize now that I have found the answer to those question, found it to perfections, and so therefore I have something to offer those 185 million people who are still searching for answers.

Which is why I am re-dedicating my website, Yesness.com to answering these question.  Starting today I will just be focusing my blogging efforts on these questions.  I suspect that from time to time I will post on other topics but they will go to my personal blog, JimFreedom.com/blog.

I am sure there are many people out there who might read this and will be wondering why I would think I know something about love, for they might think I have no clue what love it.  After all, I have never had a romantic relationship that has lasted even a year and I have had very few relationships.  PLUS, I am one of the biggest assholes that many people who know me have ever known, so how could I say that I know anything about love?

I think that question is funny.

I imagine going into a Christian church and asking, “Was Jesus a loving person?”  I am sure that virtually everyone there would say that YES, Jesus was not just a loving person but the very incarnation of love.

Yet, if you asked the religious people of Jesus’ time if Jesus was a loving person they would say, “HELL NO”, for to them he was Satan incarnate, he was mad, crazy or possessed by demons.  To use modern language they would say that Jesus was an asshole extraordinaire.  Which is why the religious people wanted Jesus dead, because he kept pushing their button or “bearing witness to the truth” of how they were conditioned to ABUSE THEMSELVES and lie to themselves about it by blaming other people for their own emotional behavior.

Jesus then went on to talk about blessedness, which was the theme of his whole Sermon on the Mount.  One of the things he said there was, “Blessed be those who do not take offense at me,”  which put the onus of responsibility for being offended back onto the one who is offended.  Then Jesus went even further and said, “Take cheer, for I have overcome the world,”  which means that you could not push Jesus’ buttons and piss him off the way he could piss off the religious people’s buttons.

So Jesus was not just pointing out that people had been programmed to abuse themselves emotionally, but he cared enough to show them that there was a way out of that abuse.  He loved those people who were persecuting him, enough to take their hatred yet he still tried to inspire them to get free from the unhealthy/unholy habits.

That is what I do and that is why some people still see me as an asshole who knows nothing about love.  I may not yet be as big an asshole as Jesus was, but I aspire to and to even go beyond where Jesus went.

What I have learned is that when I was like everyone else I would abuse myself emotionally all the time, which lead me to experience this world as HELL, but when I learned to be honest with myself and to love myself I was then able to see, appreciate, enjoy and love ALL that life had to offer, which makes my experience of life heavenly.

I have learned how to love myself in the presence of whatever the world is offering and I feel that skill is valuable enough that people will come to my website/blog to hear what I have to say about it.

I would love to hear what you think about this.  Please post your comments wherever you read this.  Your criticism is VERY valuable to me, for it enables me to improve my method of communication and service to others.

Thank you.

I Love People

Published on by Jim Category: Health Emotional, Health Mental, Love and Fear

I have not always loved people.  In fact there was a time I wanted to be a forest ranger just so that I could go off and live in a forest in a cabin all by myself, never having to deal with people.  I outright hated people.

I am not saying that I hated this or that person, I hated ALL people.  I hated the very idea of people.  I hated humanity.  If there was a button that I could have pushed to wipe humanity off the planet I would have jumped on it with both feet.

And, I would say that the feeling was mutual; humanity seemed to hate me.

That has now all changed.  I have totally changed my attitude toward and behavior with people.  As I said, I love people.  I love to be around people.  I love crowds, small groups, meeting (even boring meetings sometimes).  I love any opportunity to interact with humanity, even people who do not speak my language.  I love both left wing and right wing conservatives, liberal of any sort, ever haters of the darkest kind.  In fact, I sometimes feel of most value to humanity when I am with people who are obsessed with hate, for I am constantly looking for a way to help them out of that darkness.  My heart opens to them for I can still remember what it was like to be in that hellish dark pit of existence.

How did I go from hating to loving people or humanity?  Honesty, being honest with MYSELF.

When I was a hater my anger and hate was based on the lies I was telling myself, lies that I had learned to tell myself from my family and society at large.  Eventually I recognized that everyone was doing that and that they had learned that from their parents, the lies had been handed down from generation to generation with only an occasional person daring to question them, daring to challenge the basic assumptions of society for fear of being further ostracized or rejected by humanity.

But I was now willing to question those assumptions because I felt totally ostracized and rejected by humanity and I had totally rejected humanity, therefore I had nothing to lose.

Getting honest with myself was not easy and in fact was not just very difficult it was actually dangerous.  I had to learn to be nice to myself first, nice enough to not beat myself up around all the terrible things I had been doing to myself all these years.

This learning to be nice to myself came in the form of mindfulness, which is one of the basic skills one learns in meditation.  Mindfulness is not meditation, it is something we do to prepare for meditation.  Mindfulness is watching ourselves, our thoughts and our behaviors as we go about our life to see where we are creating pain and trouble for ourselves.

I realized that my greatest pain came from my reactions to others. It really did not matter what they did, sometimes I would just take offense at them and I was off and running directly to my own personal hell.

It was a painful day that I finally accept that I was my own worst enemy.  But it was the beginning of the end of my personal hell, for until I was honest enough with MYSELF to accept the fact that I was my own worst enemy nothing was going to change.

I had a terrible habit of telling myself that it was other people’s fault that I was angry or upset or offended or whatever.  I had learned to lie to myself in this way from all the people around me; everybody was doing it so why wouldn’t I lie to myself also.

It took me many years to stop my habit of blaming others for my reactions to them, and it took many more years to stop reacting to the world around me.  In fact, I still react to the world around me in ways that does not always add to the quality of my life experience, but at least I now never blame the world for my reactions, for that would only trap me in that hellish experience.

As I look back on the process of how I stopped my self-injurious behavior that it was not necessarily the practice of meditation that stopped it, but the realizations that came from the clarity that I obtained in meditation that helped me see that practicing positive emotions instead of the negative ones I had been ‘practicing’ all my life was what was going to change my experience.

Meditation just helped me see this.  Meditation is just the practice of finding stillness within so that you can gain clarity that will enable you to see the truth of what is really going, that truth will set you free to enjoy and love what life is offering.

Unholy Beliefs

Published on by Jim Category: Communication and Relationships

I am sure that many people have discovered that their beliefs and other ways of thinking are causing most if not all their problems.  Yet do we know which beliefs we have that we do not even realize we are being limited by?

I started out this post wanting to write about other people’s belief that I see that are limiting them, but as I often do I looked back at myself first to see where I was blinded to something.  I am sure that the people who know me best will tell me that there are many beliefs that I have that are limiting me and they sometimes even tell me what they perceive them to be.

I am sure there are beliefs I have that limit me.  One question that comes to my mind is not IF I have limiting beliefs but does it matter to me if I have limiting beliefs.

The answer for me is both yes and no.  I do care about myself and the quality of my life, so I do want to know if I am limiting myself in some form or other.  Yet, I recognize that if I obsess about any beliefs that I have that might be limiting me, my obsession is itself limiting the quality of my life experience.

One thing I know is that I want to be open to hearing what anyone says that might be causing me some sort of trouble.  I wish more people cared enough about others, or at least me, to point out what they think is a limiting belief.  I can take what they say and use it any way that I want or I can disregard it completely, but if they do not at least offer it I do not have that option.

Which is why I do unto others as I would want them to do unto me: I offer my opinions and perspectives so that they can take it or leave it.

I do recognize that many if not most people will not want to hear what I have to offer, and that saddens me, for I offer it with love, kindness and caring.  Yet their hearts are not open to it.  I offer it none the less and that does not make me the most popular person in the world.  I accept this as the price I have to pay for being true to myself.

Is that an unholy/unhealthy belief in itself?  Would my life be better if I did not feel such a strong need to be true to myself or others?  If I was less honest with people would I not have more friends?  And would having more friends not add to the quality of my life?

Ok, so I can answer most of those questions because I have spent the time to really look at those questions and I no longer have doubts about them.

What is the point of this blog post?  We all have unholy/unhealthy or limiting beliefs, even we Buddhas and Christs.  Some of us are open to seeing that limiting beliefs and some of us see the advantage of having a team of people help us find them.  And then some of us are not open to seeing those limiting beliefs.  The latter will not appreciate me and I guess you can say that they are not of my ‘tribe’ or family.

I love feedback from people and I love to be around people who love to both give and receive feedback.

16 Desk Meditations That Will Change Your Life – OnlineDegrees.org

Published on by Jim Category: Health Emotional, Health Mental, Understanding Ourselves

16 Desk Meditations That Will Change Your Life – OnlineDegrees.org.

This is a good article with suggestions on how to deal with the stress of working at a desk all the time.  I find that just taking a timeout for a few minutes, closing my eyes and taking some deep breathes really helps.   AND, it makes your efforts more efficient, in case anyone were to complain about you taking a break.

Since I drink a lot of water, I often have to take bathroom breaks.  As I am standing there relieving myself I take several deep breathes as my body relaxes.  This is one way that I pace myself and kind of force myself to take these mental health breaks.

We work to survive, but if work is killing us then it is not worth doing.  By bring mindfulness into our work we cut down the stress that it causes and can improve the quality of the experience of working.  Being mindful of our attitude toward work, our co-workers and our work environment, reminding ourselves that a positive attitude improve the quality of our experience, we can greatly enhance our life experience that work is part of.

When you become aware that what you seek is quality of life, then taking a few minutes to enhance your work experience and create a healthier mind and body is worth it.

Beyond Nonduality II

Published on by Jim Category: Health Emotional, Health Mental, Nonduality, Understanding Ourselves

In my personal spiritual evolution I turned first to the eastern traditions because I had seen the corruption of the western traditions and the eastern traditions offered me a way to find inner peace and not just some nebulous concept like salvation.

After finding some degree of inner peace and the clarity that comes with it I turned to the western traditions and read about Saint Theresa’s “Dark Night of the Soul”, which I was now more prepared to deal with because of my skills developed via the eastern traditions.  Because of my study and seeking I was getting very depressed as I saw though the ideas and beliefs I had had from childhood and seeing that they were just my wishful thinking and not reality.  This depression was really a ‘dark night of the soul’ in which I truly felt abandoned by God, Consciousness and/or life itself.  There did not seem to be any real reason to continue living.

Around this time I read a book titled, “The Experience of No Self” by a former Catholic nun who was documenting her own spiritual evolution and process. In this book she talked about how she spent twenty years in the Dark Night of the Soul.  Since I was experiencing what she described I was even more depressed as I pondered that I might be stuck in this dark place for twenty years.

Yet, at the same time I was also studying Zen and it was showing me that all the negativity I was experiencing was just thoughts in the mind.  When it finally dawned on me that my depression was just a product of my thinking, just thoughts in my mind, I laughed at myself for making the thoughts so important.

With this laughing I realized I was immediately out of this dark night experience, my laughter being the light that was shined on my reality for me to see again.

Of course I would fall back into my negativity and fall back in to that pit of darkness, but eventually I would realize what I was doing to myself and again laugh at myself and my thoughts thus popping me out of that dark pit and depression and back into the light.

Every night I would set and watch what was coming up for me in my mind and in my body.  When I would go into this thinking that produced depression or negativity.  I would sometimes get caught up in for a while in the thinking and depression until I would catch myself seeing what I was doing to myself and would laugh at my silliness.  The laughter would feel so good I just dwelled in that feeling until I was tired and there everything would drift back into rest, equanimity and a deep inner peace.

This process made it easier to get to equanimity than if I was just trying to get to equanimity, for the very trying itself worked against my intention.  The more I tried to get out of negativity and into equanimity the more resistance and negativity I experienced.  I realized later that it was my effort or will that was creating the tension within my body/mind that I was experiencing as negativity, pain and suffering and keeping me from the equanimity and clarity I was seeking.

I realized that by going beyond equanimity from the negative into the positive emotional states and then resting in that positive state thus allowing the body/mind/human instrument to relax and drift back to a place of equanimity and inner peace allowing clarity which enable one to see the truth that permanently sets them free to enjoy and love ALL that life has to offer.