Bearer of the Light

Have you ever had this experience that you feel incredible pain inside but as soon as you try to look into it, the pain somehow dissolves. What exactly goes on here?

It is this curiosity, this intension to understand and observe, that separates the ego from the pain. When you feel pain, you believe that you are this pain; however, as soon as your attention switches to observe what is going on inside yourself, you become the observer and you connect with consciousness. You realize who you really are instead and that is the point when the pain starts dissolving.

What do you want to be?  Whatever you want to manifest is fine. Just be aware you actually have the power to choose and to awake from this dream that can be perceived as painful at times. You are the eternal awareness behind all these ups and down! As soon as you realize this, your light shines through the darkness. Be brave to face this human experience but please never forget your true identity; this fountain of joy, love and light is always at your disposal. Pain can in fact be quite useful this way. When the going is good, it can be hard at times to step out of this movie than if you struggle a bit. 

Whenever you are able to drink from this fountain of joy, love, and light, you are a torch bearer and bring the light to the people around you. You probably asks us how exactly does one drink from this spring? Life will get you there! Face honestly and openly everything that comes your way. Be aware of what is going on inside of you when the going is good just as much as when you get hurt by life's events. As soon as you observe, you connect with our Source. Your self starts separating from your Self and that is the point when you see the light shining through. You remember who you are. Joy, love, and light shower on you and everyone you are with.

Share this beautiful secret of humanity. Help the people around you to see through this veil, break out of their pain, and share the love, light and joy with others. Bearer of the light, what should you be afraid of? 

By Christian and Su Zhen 

One

How do you do respond to someone who is angry, sad, or full of negative energy? It turns out that your response largely depends on the way you deal with your own negative emotions.  If you tend to repress your negative emotions and deny their existence, you will most likely struggle with other people's negative emotions as well.

 If you learn to acknowledge your negative emotions, if you have learned to accept them, perhaps even tried to understand them, you will be at ease to deal with people who are in a negative emotional state. You will not get pulled down by them and you will not try to stop them either. Instead, you will let them release their emotions and just be there for them. You take the negative energy in just like the ocean accepts all the rivers, polluted or clean. Before you know it, things will resolve naturally and peacefully.

Coping with emotions, being open to emotions, and even digging up repressed emotions, is not an easy thing to do, but it is something that we can learn to master. The Tao - and the world - is here to help you. See your angry bother as a reflection of something that hurts inside. And see your sad sister as a symbol of one of your own suppressed emotion. We are one.  If we learn to treat people’s emotion as our own emotions, there is nothing really to do but to let the emotion express itself. Don't resist it and it will be gone before you know it.

Be Aware of Your Idol - Don't Fall under its Spell, and Don't Fight it Either

Seek not outside yourself. For it will fail, and you will weep each time an idol falls.
(A Course in Miracles)

When Moses returned with the 10 Commandments after a 40 day retreat on Mount Sinai, his people had lost faith and built an idol - a golden calf - and were busily engaging in some pagen festival in celebration of life and fertility. Moses was so distraught by what he saw that he shattered the stone tablets with the 10 Commandment on the floor; he also had 3000 Israelis executed as punishment.

What an irony that the First Commandment states "Thou shall have no idols before Me" and the first thing Moses' people did was to worship an idol of power and fertility. Your idol can be everywhere, money, looks, fame, degrees, professions, important friends or colleagues, sex, etc. I am sure you know who or what your personal idol is. The trick is to be aware of its charm and to be able to feel the dark energy it bestows on you. It is as if a cloud hangs over you whenever it touches you.  If you fight it, you are not getting rid of its influence, you are just re-distributing the dark cloud to your perceived holy part. Just recognize the idol for what it stands for, acknowledge its appeal and then choose to step out of its dark shadow into the sun.

Moses didn't help his divine cause by killing his brothers and sisters. He also didn't help our spiritual journey by making a taboo out of idol worship. What you fear and detest, you only attract. The only way to deal with an idol is to understand that you can do much better by keeping its sphere of influence at arms' length. Moses did what he was capable of 5000 years ago, but we have come a long way since. Today it is very much in our power to move past the idol's spell without condemning it and without being afraid of it either.

The Evolution of Consciousness

Learning of Christ is easy, for to perceive with Him involves no strain at all. His perceptions are your natural awareness, and it is only the distortions you introduce that tire you.
(A Course in Miracles)

What is the conscious "I"? Psychologically, it is a filter.  A filter that has been used to strengthen your identity.  The “I” expresses his opinion to show his preference about everything. Your desires, and with it the fears, in fact define the "I". Awareness is a different thing.  Awareness perceives the external environment and watches everything as it is without any judgment.  They say that we have the ability to consciously process about 40 000 external stimuli per second while our "system" in fact processes millions. So there is certainly a lot more happening under the hood than we are aware of, but the " I " gives us the impression that we are in charge of the most important decisions.

If you talk to a woman with dilated eye pupils, you - if you are a man - will find her automatically more attractive. The reason for that is that women who attracted to someone get dilated eye pupils, and the male subconscious brain picks that up. If you are a female reader and you feel smug about the robot nature of the male sexuality, I would like to remind you of the fact that around the time when you are ovulating you have a sudden preference for high-testosterone men. So who exactly is in charge here? Are we entirely driven by subliminal signals and is our conscious brain later just coming up with a reason for why we did what we did in the first place?

In the olden days we always lived in the divine Now. Whatever had to get done, got done. It was as if there was a voice inside of us that always told us what to do. Deep down inside we were peaceful and we were connected to our environment. From that perspective, which wasn't really a perspective at all given that we weren't aware of the alternative that our thoughts would come up with. At that time, we actually were all one, embedded in the Source.

Then we ate from the Tree of Knowledge and a world of duality opened up.  “ I “ and the mind is introduced.  " I " is separated from the whole.  It is as if a filter got introduced, a way of perceiving the world differently and reflecting on this perception. Your filter is telling you that you are different from the person who sits opposite to you at Starbucks. Your thoughts are telling you that this new colleague who had just joint the company seems nice, but he had a strange facial reaction the other day when you explained the project the team is working on right now. There is something about him that you need to be checking out.

So you see there is in fact a psychological filter in addition to that biological filter. It is a voice that feels it has a choice in every perception, every thought and every action. Who knows, perhaps in the olden days the divine voice would have said, "oh, my friend just had a strange thought while I was talking, but it absolutely has nothing to do with our project, so let me given him a couple of seconds to return to what I am saying." So in fact, you have a completely different experience of interconnectivity when the noisy voice in your head shuts up.

What the Tao is telling you is that you can get back to this divine state of connectedness. We are one. Let the Tao show you that this is not just a good sounding spiritual notion but in fact so. Sure, the subconscious still drives you. Who you are married to or who you are hanging out with, for example, had been decided eons ago and with the help of a little hormones, brain chemicals, scents and smiles and perhaps a sparkling sun on your first date, your "system" encouraged you to go along. You will never be able to change that fact that you are just taken for a ride. But what you can now do is to make your journey a connected one. You can set aside the psychological filter that disconnects you from the Now. As the Course in Miracle states in the quote above, all you really do is to return to the natural state of seeing things. Join our journey, where She treats, love abounds.

By Christian and Su Zhen

Mindfulness and the Tao

If you like to follow the Tao and get away from the control of your ego, your ability to be mindful of everything that is going on inside of you is key. So what exactly does it entail to be able to observe yourself?

Observation is the ability to detach yourself from everything that you are doing and, at the same time, be able to observe everything that is going on within you and in the environment that you are operating in. It is very much like you are watching a movie of yourself, but you are sitting in the audience at the same time. In the beginning you will probably get involved quite frequently, so you will be the actor on many occasions and the spectator in others, but that is ok too. Never try to force anything or your ability to observe will disappear.

You probably spend time analyzing how other people behave; you analyze their mistakes, or why they behave the way to do. But at the same time, have you ever thought that you can apply the same methodology to yourself? If you observe yourself carefully, you will realize many things about yourself, know the reason why you are getting stuck in some cases, find out why you experience these emotional swings and understand why it is so hard to quit some of your habits.

When you are observing yourself, you actually get in touch with your spiritual consciousness, and you will discover a universal healing power. Under your observation, you will learn how to step back and will have a shot at overcoming your robotic responses to your environment. Once you reach that stage, 'karma' will no longer stick to you and you will learn how to set yourself free. Awareness is a very powerful healing force.

When you observe, naturally, you will realize many things. For example, it is very common that we are triggered to react in a certain way when we are interacting with other peoples or when we are in special circumstances. We get mad when people say something that doesn't meet our expectation. Without this understanding, we are just carried away by our emotions without the ability to grasp what is behind all these dramas. We think that we have good reasons to be mad at others and blame them for our suffering. In doing so, we cut into our own power base - by losing control, we become the slaves of our emotions. The good news is that we can spot these points when we lose control and respond before the emotional train risks leaving the station for good. In fact, if you can transcend these moments, you will see for yourself that you can save a lot of money on antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills that way.

There are little tricks to get to this level of mastery. For example, you can look out for the moments when you have a strong emotional reaction to something and you can literally hear a voice kicking in and saying 'Hey, I am being emotional again - what's going on here?' In these cases, give yourself a time-out. Go to a quiet place and be with that emotion; feel how this emotion is influencing your body and what kind of thoughts you have. If you are really able to connect with your inner state, you will be surprised to realize how mechanical your emotional reactions always are in response to some pretty straight-forward triggers; you will be also be surprised to see how your emotions are transformed under your observation. Once the shock of the emotional swing has been digested, you will see for yourself that all you are left with are joy, love, peace, and understanding.

There are some ways to train yourself to raise your level of awareness:

1. Meditation: Regular meditation can really help you practicing your observation skills. Set a time every day aside for 10 minutes, sit still and watch whatever thought or emotion arises, the noises, the aches from the body, the thoughts rising to the surface. It is an observation without judgement. In the same way, learn to receive whatever comes your way in life without judgement.

2. Mindful living: Observe how you eat, what is the smell of the food, how does it taste and how fast or slowly you eat. Notice how your system digests the food and how your energy level is changing in response. Observe how you walk. Can you tell how your leg and feet coordinate when you walk? Observe everything that comes your way in that fashion.

3. Doing exercise might be a good practice as well. Just as you build muscle strength when you exercise, you can develop mind power when you do your awareness exercises. Can you be aware of all your body parts as you exercise them?

Once you are very skilled in observing yourself, it will be very easy for you to understand what is going on inside yourself. It is a process to get to this level of mastery, but every situation and interaction that comes your way is a new opportunity to practice. You have a chance to say good-by to the robot inside, and you will quit being a victim of your environment. At this point you will become a creator of your reality and stop being a follower. Soon you will learn that along the Tao there is nothing really that can give you an excuse for being grumpy about. Instead, you are grateful for whatever it is that is coming your way - your life is blessed after this realization.

By Sue Zhen

Soul versus Ego

A spiritual aspirant sits in his living room surfing the web and suddenly, inspired by one of the adds he sees, feels the temptation creeping up in him to get a penis enlargement done. Immediately a voice pops up in his head "I am not this body" it shouts. Another voice pops up "Well, I don't know about that, but I am pretty sure that I am the one who is aware of the voices in my head".

You have probably read as many books about the soul versus the ego theme as I have. I do not want to say that we don't have a soul. What I want to question though, is whether this distinction is really as helpful to you as you think it is. I am sure that you would agree with our spiritual aspirant that his body fantasies are part of his ego and hardly a soul demand, right? But what if I had changed the story by saying that a spiritual aspirant suddenly felt the desire to drop his current job and start an ashram instead, or to build hospitals in Africa? I am sure that he will now think that this is his true mission in life, one that has been dictated by his soul. But how does he know that? Perhaps our spiritual aspirant succumbs to the same desire to be special and to be admired independent of whether he has a perceived holy outlet or a not-so-holy one like the above mentioned body fantasy. Either way, the "I" wants to be admired, the latter only seems more meaningful to our society, but it's the same egoistic drive.

Fact of the matter seems to be that you don't know what drives you, but as long as you feel a drive to be somewhere where you think that you are currently not, you at least can be sure that you are the one who monitors this problem statement, as well as the one who has to make the choice about what to do next.