Conscious Living

In disputes, friendly or otherwise, have you grown to the point where you can say, I’m right from where I stand, but I must concede that the other person’s view point is also valid from their standpoint? If you haven’t, then you’re still locked behind the bars of a two dimensional thought pattern. This means every time you have an argument, you’ll huff and puff and stress yourself out, letting discord break your body down cell by cell until mental unease becomes physical disease. Count the number of acrimonious disagreements you’ve had in a single week, multiply that by ten thousand and you’ll begin to have a general idea of how many maladjusted body cells you’ve probably created over the period.

The fact is, TRUTH IS MULTIDIMENSIONAL. There’s no getting away from it. It depends on the angle you’re coming from. One person’s rebel is another person’s freedom fighter. The ‘saints’ who take care of the world’s sick and hungry, are deserters as far as their families are concerned. And the slight we feel from a loved one or workmate may be nothing more than an indication of their preoccupation with personal issues. Yet our ego, which is quite single-minded, continues to feel wronged, jumping into the fray at the drop of a hat to defend its honour.

Friends, we cannot depend on the ego to help us grow into the multidimensional beings we are destined to become. There is another aspect of ourselves, beyond the ego-driven conscious and subconscious, which many of us give little credit to:  our super-conscious selves – the inner voice of wisdom, intuition, higher nature, true self, or whatever you wish to call the part of yourself that is the compassionate observer with the capacity to see the big picture. It is the part of you and me that steps forward at the most extraordinary times with a magnanimous gesture that makes people want to put us on pedestals. That is the being we must all grow into if we are to save ourselves from ourselves.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to walk away from a dispute with the feeling of having lost nothing, gaining instead that sense of well-being we get when we solve a problem without creating another? Imagine: no more churning stomachs, exploding heads, angry thoughts to keep us awake at night, no hours wasted planning to get even, and most importantly, no body cells damaged by toxic exchanges! Pfeeew! What a  freeing thought! But there is even more at stake. If we elevate ourselves, then step by step, person by person, we will also elevate the world. So, who’s ready to grow? 

The greatest HOAX circulating is that we CAN’T MAKE this WORLD a BETTER place. YES WE CAN!! Don’t lose faith. Let’s keep the ball rolling by making 2013 the Year of Kindness. Every day, every week, every month, let’s take a step out of our comfort zone, and commit an act of kindness to the bums, beggars, thieves, mercenaries, pests, hangers-on, gossip mongers and other bringers of misery to our lives. The only barriers between us and a better world are commitment and trust.

People often equate loneliness with aloneness, but I was at my loneliest when I was a high-flying economist for a leading Hong Kong brokerage firm, although my days and nights were chock-a-block – producing dailies, weeklies, and quarterlies, hosting bigwig clients, lunching with movers and shakers, attending sophisticated charity dinners, running around the globe doing ‘roadshows’… And why was that? I had friends, good, wonderful folk. What could be more exciting than a life like that? Well, it was an adrenaline rush at first, but I was too busy to attend to my soul’s basic needs: simple, heart-warming connections with PEOPLE instead of their MONEY. In the end, I found I couldn’t live without that.

So, I gave it all up, and returned to a life of service. But I still had really lonely moments, because when I wasn’t out there serving others – kids in particular, or hanging out with friends, I was by myself.  You see, we’re programmed to believe that unless we have a husband or a wife, life can’t be fulfilling, and I no longer had one. But when I thought about it, I’d had some of the most frustrating relationships over the years, within which I’d felt even lonelier than when I was alone. So that wasn’t the answer.

Finally it came to me: until I learnt to enjoy MYSELF, I would never actually feel fulfilled.  So, I began by embracing silence until I learnt to be comfortable with my thoughts, my aloneness. Then I learnt to play alone: I played Scrabble with me, myself and I; I danced and sang with myself, I cooked elaborate meals just the way I liked them, I went out into nature, took long walks, and found great companions among the other creatures of the earth that we usually have so little time for, and I had a whale of a time, a whale of a time!

When I was at the height of my happiness, I met my current husband and remarried. Having learnt my lessons well, however, I refuse to give up the romance I have with myself. I still spend quality time with myself, with silence, with nature. My present contentment leads me to believe that I’ve solved the problem of loneliness, but only time will tell. I still have one more challenging adventure: old age.

There are those who speak of terrible things to come in 2012, and there are those who believe this year will be like any other. We will not argue with either prediction, because what one expects depends very much on how one chooses to view the world we live in, but we will say this:

• Beyond a shadow of a doubt, ours is a world of duality – good/bad, laughter/tears, wonders/disasters, fear/Love*;

• And as the primary energies of fear and Love have collided and interacted, humankind has swung up and down in a rhythmic spiral, yearning for the Light yet tempted by ‘density’s illusion’, i.e., that suffering is a must.

In truth, this world of duality is an unnecessarily dense one, made so by the heavy fog of desperate thoughts and actions, which have pervaded our lives for millennia. Throughout the ages, leaders of churches, countries, leaders of all manner of institutions, have chosen fear as humankind’s primary ‘mass transit vehicle’ through life. And we have yielded to their pressure, allowing ourselves to be swept along with the tide to the point where we’ve:

• killed for our faith,

• maimed for a claim on land, and

• clambered over each other mercilessly to get to the top of power structures we’ve created to immunize ourselves against the density we’ve fuelled.

From time to time, though, something within us, a whiff of remembrance perhaps, would provoke a wave of rebellion, and periodically, we would rush to reclaim dominion over our hearts – but not often enough. THIS YEAR, WE HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE!

Fear energies swirling around the globe are at an all time high, generated by record-breaking natural disasters, mass rebellions against archaic power structures, and doomsday predictions. We have a choice:

• Travel through density can be accomplished by riding the energies of fear, or Love.

• Fear pulls us further into the mire. We run from drought only to find floods on our doorstep; we flee tornados and end up in the eye of a hurricane; and carefully avoid fault lines only to be buried in the ashes of an awakening volcano.

• The only way to ‘run’ from trouble is to go higher, not to the top of the mountains of earth, but to the top of the mountains of density, on the waves of Love. The view is spectacular from there!

We’ve spent so much time on the fear end of the duality scale that it’s more than time to find out what life could be like on the Love end. Imagine a day free from fear… Feels great, doesn’t it? Now, imagine a year free from fear… Then a lifetime. That choice awaits you.

* For a complete definition of Love, visit http://www.swanlight.org/SpS_10.htm

Although written for one specific country, this goes for many parts of the world:

Protests, riots, looting, burning, economic inequity, political grandstanding, fears swirling of a descent into the chaos of yesteryear, when masses of people lost their homes and lives, and hatred festered within the hearts of neighbours and friends, who once lived AS ONE. While peacemakers on the ground strive hard to restore sanity and social justice, what positive action can the rest of us take to support them? Instead of adding to the river of anger, fear and despair, gathering force, seeking places and people to destroy, THINK PEACE! Use your thoughts and actions to transform the energies churning around you.
“EVERY DAY, hold a vision of peace, toss it out to the Universe on a string of Love, and let the vision find its seeker.” – S.O.
Then go out and live it, breathe it, share it! Out of this expansive energy will come solutions.