The Secret of Life

An End To All Abuse

Today is Blog Catalog's Blogging For Hope Day, when thousands of bloggers all over the world will unite to turn the spotlight on all forms of abuse. The hope is that in raising awareness, we can make a difference.

Yet when you think of all the abuse which takes place all over the world, you could perhaps be forgiven for losing heart. We might achieve something here and there - and of course we are right to try - but will this enormous weight of human suffering ever really be lifted? People have abused each other in various ways throughout history. When you look at the big picture, is that ever going to change?

It seems to me that when you get right down to it, all abuse derives from a single mistaken idea: the belief that each of us is separate, that other people are somewhere 'out there' and are different from us, that they threaten us in some way, by hurting us or taking stuff from us, or just by being 'bad people'. From this idea, the impulse arises to get our own back by making these people suffer in return, in the mistaken belief that when we hurt them, we do not suffer ourselves.

Even self-abuse is rooted in this same belief in our separateness: that we ourselves are alone and unworthy, that we do not deserve any better.

It seems to me that what is needed to stop abuse is nothing less than a wholesale change in consciousness: for us all to come to understand that far from being alone, we are all together in this. We are all part of the human race, all part of this great universe in which we live and breathe, that all of us are linked: that we cannot hurt other without hurting ourselves.

Einstein expressed it brilliantly. I've used the following quote before on The Secret Of Life, but I make no apologies for repeating it here:

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)

In The Secret Of Life, I try to present some of the ideas and techniques which might help to bring such a 'new manner of thinking' into being. And what I'd like to do here is to take you through an exercise to help you imagine what this change in perspective might be like. Please give yourself a few moments to try it.

The words that follow are not a poem, but you may find them more effective if you read them slowly, which is why I've left gaps between the sentences. As you read, you might find it helpful to pause between each section to see what appears in your mind. I hope you enjoy the experience...

First, think of the people to whom you are close: your family, your friends, the people you see every day.

Imagine that you are connected to all these people by a series of thin, gossamer threads.

White, shiny, almost invisible threads, connecting you all together into one.

Imagine subtle energy flowing along those threads: subtle light, subtle electricity.

Feel this energy flowing through your body.

Imagine that this web extends more widely now, connecting you to everybody you know.

Those same thin gossamer threads, that same subtle energy, flowing through you all, connecting you all together into one.

Now imagine the web extending wider still.

Imagine that all these people you know are also connected to everybody they know.

Those same, thin gossamer threads extending round the world, extending to embrace the whole of the human race.

Now imagine that all your many feelings: your hopes, your fears, your pain, your love, are shared by everyone else.

Your feelings travel along the threads so that everybody experiences the same feelings as you

All of you feel whatever you feel as a single living creature.

All your feelings are shared by everyone else.

Imagine too that everyone else's feelings are shared by you.

And that everyone shares the feelings of each other.

Now imagine the web extends to embrace all living things: all the creatures and all the plants and trees all over the world.

All linked by the gossamer threads, all feeling subtle vibrations traveling along the threads, all linked by the same vibrant energy.

Now the web extends to the whole of the earth: the seas, the land, the mountains, and the towns and cities in which we live.

All linked by the same threads, by the same vibrant energy, in a single living, breathing pulsating whole.

All of us bound together in an intricate matrix of life,

All that vibrant energy shared, and all our feelings too, so that what is good for one is good for everyone.

Just reflect for a while upon these thoughts.

If you enjoyed that, you may like to hear the audio version where the same words are presented as a ten-minute guided meditation.

My good wishes to all those who are taking part in Blogging For Hope. I hope that it makes a difference and I hope that we can all eventually reach a place where abuse no longer figures in our consciousness.

The All-New Secret Of Life

OK, so the blog isn't 'all-new' exactly. But bits of it are new, honestly. I've changed the design of the site, for instance. What do you think? I haven't quit decided if I like it yet, so I might still change back, but it seems kind of restful, I reckon.

The other thing that's prompted some changes is that while I was having my house-moving semi-sabbatical earlier this year, Typepad (my hosts) introduced the facility to have extra pages on the blog, just like it's a real web site, and I've been scratching my head trying to decide what's the best way to make use of this.

What I've decided, as a starter at least, is to upgrade my various links. So instead of a short list of 'popular posts' in the sidebar, there's now a whole page of links to all my previous posts that are even remotely worth reading (apart from a few that are out of date) with a brief description of each one to help you decide if you want to take a look at it or go back to Google instead. Regular readers will know that I've covered all manner of spirituality, self-development, and just plain bizarre subjects including enlightenment, the law of attraction, living in the moment, Deeksha, the Quantum Light Breath, Eckhart Tolle, Conversations With God, What The Bleep Do We Know?, Richard Dawkins, science & spirituality, how to deal with difficult emotions, web 2.0, moving house, repairing a bed, Halloween, winning a million, and even how to slow down time! So get browsing now and find out what you've been missing...

The other main thing I've done is to upgrade my list of other blogs which you might want to look at. My 'eclectic collection' of links had got a bit long and a bit out of date, and the longer a list like that gets, to be honest, the less user-friendly it becomes. So I've done the same thing with this as I've done with the popular posts. I've taken it out of the sidebar and given it a page (actually two pages) of its own, with a brief description/mini-review of each of the blogs to help you decide if you might want to give them a try.

As spirituality lies at the heart of this blog, I've given spirituality (and self-development) blogs a links page all of their own - with a separate page for the other blogs that I visit. Time has taken its toll, though, and some of the blogs in the original list are no longer being updated. Forgetful God, the Modern Humanist, the Accidental Blogger and even the mighty Battle Rocker no longer seem to be writing, sad to say. Hopefully at least some of them will return to the fold (having taken a well-deserved break) and I can put them back on the list. But with a couple of honorable exceptions which have been quiet for a month or two, all the linked blogs on the new pages are current.

It was often difficult to decide how to categorize the blogs on the list, especially - in some cases - when choosing between spirituality blogs and personal blogs, as some are plainly both. So if your blog is on the list and you'd rather be categorized elsewhere (or indeed described rather better!) then just get in touch and I'm sure we can work something out. Similarly, if your blog has disappeared from the list and you'd really, really like it back on, then just let me know. Like I say, blogs have mainly been left off because they're no longer being updated, but in a few cases they've disappeared because they've changed their nature since I first included them.

I'd like to further develop the list of spirituality (and personal self-development) blogs, so if there's a blog you'd like to see included there (either your own or someone else's) do get in touch and I'll see what I can do.

You can access all these lists from the sidebar - along with an entirely separate project, the Personal Development List, a mega list of personal development blogs which is the brainchild of Priscilla Palmer of Personal Development Demands Success.

I'll also be updating the links to useful web sites and making a few other changes shortly, so watch this space for further developments...

Have I talked enough about my blog for now? I think so.

Ripples On A Sea Of Peace

Last time, I was talking about the concept of 'acceptance'. If we can accept whatever is happening in our lives in any one moment, instead of 'arguing with reality', we can save ourselves an awful lot of unnecessary stress. After all, what is happening is always what's happening, whether we like it or not. We can still take action to change what happens in the future, but just for the moment we have to accept what is.

If you think about it, this is the only sane attitude to have. 'Arguing with reality' isn't going to get you anywhere. But this sort of acceptance isn't always easy.

I got into an interesting discussion about acceptance over at Jon's Post-Christian Journey. A reader made the (perfectly reasonable) point that if his child was being tortured, he would find it very difficult to accept this. Indeed, he didn't even think that he should accept such a thing.

This appears to be a very powerful argument against 'acceptance'.

Two points occur to me however:

• This example is very extreme. In practice, fortunately, most of us don't have to deal with such extreme events very often, though terrible things do occur in most people's lifetimes from time to time. What's important to acknowledge is that many other much lesser 'bad' things happen in our lives on a frequent basis, and many of these we also class as 'terrible' simply out of habit. If we can 'accept' these - and save ourselves a lot of stress in the process - we are making a start.
• Acceptance does not entail inaction. It's not a prescription for apathy. If we can 'accept' that our child is being tortured one moment, we can still take action to prevent it the next. Perhaps the formula should be 'acceptance plus action'. The opposite of this would be 'lack of acceptance plus doing nothing', as in moaning about the state of the world while doing absolutely nothing to change it. This is a much more common state of being.

I suggested last time that 'acceptance' might be the cornerstone of enlightenment, of awakening to our true nature. Rather than traveling to cliff-top monasteries in distant lands to become enlightened, we simply need to accept ourselves and our lives the way they are.

We need to accept this from one moment to the next however. It is said that enlightenment, once reached, must be chosen in every instant. And perhaps there are times, when confronted with a tortured child for instance, when an 'enlightened' person might choose in that moment not to accept, might choose instead to enter into the drama of 'normal' human existence, and feel anger rather than acceptance before taking action. Jesus, after all, was reported as being angry when he threw the money-changers out of the temple. Perhaps, for a moment, he did indeed 'argue with reality'. Perhaps he did not fully 'accept' what was going on. But does that mean to say that he also got upset the following day when someone stood on his toe in the marketplace?  Or the day after that when he found a dead fly in his wine? I doubt it.

In his book Awakening Into Oneness, Arjuna Ardagh interviews people who have become enlightened (or, to use the term he prefers, 'awakened') through Deeksha. One of them comments on how things have changed now that they are 'awakened':

"When (emotions) happen, I feel them so much deeper. There's no holding back. I think that might be the biggest difference of all. If I'm angry, I'm angry with every cell of my body. I'm not suppressing anything. And then it's over. And then this stillness and peace and joy come back rapidly."

This is how it may be then. Perhaps there are times when such people experience 'difficult' emotions instead of 'acceptance', but these are fully experienced instead of being suppressed. This allows the emotions to pass through, so that calm and acceptance can return. Most of the time such people accept what is. The occasional squalls are passing things only, like ripples on a sea of peace.

(There have been some interesting discussions on previous posts: See here for 'Making Plans' and here for 'How Does It Feel To Win A Million?' (the latter including what I humbly suggest is the world's best-ever spiritual budgerigar analogy). Also, largely thanks to Liara Covert of Dream Builders, there have been further discussions on earlier posts, such as How To Have It All , How To Deal With Difficult Emotions and How To Slow Down Time. Feel free to take a look, and join in if you wish!)

How Does It Feel To Win A Million?

Looking through the biography notes on Arjuna Ardagh (author of Awakening Into Oneness, the book I mentioned in the previous post) I came across this interesting quote about the culmination of Ardagh's search for enlightenment:

(Ardagh) had the profound realization that he had been seeking for what he already was, and always had been. He realized that it was in the abandonment of seeking and wanting that his heart found its fulfillment.

What might he mean by this?

It seems to me that if people think about enlightenment at all - and it helps to remind myself from time to time that not everyone does - then it's usually in terms of lots of foreign travel. People are expected to journey along perilous mountain passes to isolated monasteries, where they rise in the middle of the night to pray, drink yak's milk, and smite themselves with sticks at frequent intervals. If they are lucky and survive twenty years or so of this, they become enlightened, which means that they sit around with their knees crossed and make cryptic remarks to their students.

Whatever this enlightenment thing is, the idea goes, it is out there. You have to go out and find it. It is all about long haul flights and frequent flyer points. You have to search under every stone, and having searched, search again. There is no such thing as a long weekend to enlightenment.

And yet increasingly, people like Ardagh seem to be suggesting that this popular concept of a lonely soul scouring the world for some hidden truth is mistaken: that enlightenment is really closer to home than we think. That if we only understood, we could have it here, right now, in this moment.

But if so, then what is it? What is this truth which is supposed to be staring us all in the face?

Eckhart Tolle tells a story about winning a million dollars. This is something which makes people happy. But why should that be, he asks?

We know from reading the newspapers that many people who win such a large amount of money don't stay happy for very long. They may be bouncing off the ceiling a while, but when the elation has worn off, they find that they just have a new set of problems. They may be besieged by people begging for money; they may have trouble with jealous relatives; they may have arguments with their partner about how to spend all the money; or they may simply become morbidly obsessed with the fear of losing this vast fortune, in spite of the fact that they have managed perfectly well without it until now.

So with all this in store, why are people still so happy to win the lottery?

It clearly isn't the money itself, not really, for even if they manage to hang on to it, the chances are that some of these problems will come along to make them miserable anyway. Even at best, it seems inevitable that the elation will start to dwindle away over the weeks and months, even if all the money remains.

So if it's not the money itself, what causes that initial burst of elation?

Eckhart Tolle points out that we tend to spend a lot of our time 'disagreeing with reality'. We refuse to accept that things are the way they are. He describes this as a kind of madness, and if we think about it a while, we can see that he's right. Things are the way they are. Period. There's no getting away from it and no amount of raging against it is going to change it. We might wish we'd done this or wish we'd done that, and want to have this or want to have that. We might want politicians to tell the truth, or our relationship not to have ended, or to have got that job we wanted, or to have eaten a bit less chocolate for breakfast. We might want it to be warmer in winter and cooler in summer. We might want the trains to run on time. But things are the way they are are the way they are - and banging our heads against the wall and wailing isn't going to make them any better.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying we shouldn't take action to change things. If we notice some injustice that's being done to us or to someone else, or if we see how something might be done more efficiently, it's perfectly reasonable to set out to change that. But it's important to distinguish between that will to change and our absolute point blank refusal to accept the less than perfect nature of how things presently are.

The truth is that when we see something we think is wrong, we don't put all our energy into changing it. We don't do that at all. We channel a lot of that energy, perhaps most of it, or - let's face it - in most cases all of it into moaning about how things are right now, in refusing to accept reality, in resisting what we can see in front of our eyes. "The buses should run on time," we will say. "You shouldn't have walked out on me." "Chocolate ought to have less calories and then I wouldn't get fat!"

This resistance does nothing to change things and neither does it make us happy. It makes us tense. It makes us angry. It makes us frustrated. In the end, it is not the situation to which we object which causes us so much pain, but our blind, obstinate, utterly mad refusal to accept that it is so.

And this, Eckhart Tolle suggests, points to the reason why winning all that money can make us happy: because for once in our lives we are willing to accept that things are the way they are. We have won a million dollars - yes, we can accept that. So just for once in our lives, we can drop our resistance to how things actually are. We can drop our disagreement with reality. We can drop our obsession with how things were or how they might become, put our plans and dreams to one side, finally stop resisting and let in life. It is not the money itself, it is the great relief of doing this, of letting go of that struggle, which feels so wonderful.

Which brings us back to Arjuna Ardagh "seeking for what he already was, and always had been". Ardagh reports that he found fulfillment when he stopped this seeking, when he abandoned his wanting. In other words: when he no longer disagreed with reality, when he simply accepted the way things were - and accepted the way he was.

So perhaps it is this acceptance, this surrender, not just from time to time but continuously, from one moment to the next, which forms the cornerstone of enlightenment. Which means that we don't, after all, have to search the world for the ultimate truth. It really is waiting for us right here. We just have to give up the struggle and accept the way things are.

So if you want to know what it feels like to win a million, just try accepting the way things are in this moment, really accepting. Then feel the tension ease...

Feel the lightening.

Receiving Deeksha Through Music

I've written in a previous post about Deeksha (otherwise known as the Oneness Blessing), a transfer of energy which is said to nurture a feeling of Oneness - connection with "all that is" - in those who receive it. People who wish to give Deeksha to others must travel to the Oneness University in India to attend a 21 day process, the idea of which is to allow them to act as a vessel through which the Deeksha energy may flow. This transfer of energy is normally achieved by a laying on of hands, the same as in Reiki or spiritual healing, but not everyone who graduates from the 21 day process will choose to give Deeksha in this way.  Some may prefer instead to use their own individual skills, such as music, artwork, or writing.

Now, a group of musicians have joined together to produce a CD with the specific intention of passing this Deeksha energy to all those who hear it. Everyone who has worked on the CD: the musicians, the writers, the producer, and even the sound engineer (not sure about the guy who fetches the sandwiches) have undergone the 21 day process. The CD is Om Deeksha by Maneesh de Moor, Maneesh being the musician who has coordinated the project.

Regular readers of The Secret Of Life may regard me as a sucker for all this spiritual stuff, but I honestly didn't approach this CD with any great sense of anticipation. For whatever reason, the idea of receiving Deeksha through someone's hands (which I had already done myself on many occasions) seemed a rather more credible prospect than simply putting on a CD and flicking a switch. There may not be much logic to this, but that's how I felt. So as I sat back to listen, I didn't expect to experience a great deal more than some relaxing music.

It came a very pleasant surprise, therefore - an unexpected and very welcome gift - to feel the familiar sense of peace which Deeksha can bring spreading through the room as the music played. There was something very powerful happening here, and Chris, who was sitting beside me, also sensed it. I have played the CD many time since then, and have always felt that same sense of peace, sometimes even of joy.

I cannot guarantee, of course, that you will experience a similar effect from this music. But if you are intrigued about Deeksha and either find the laying on of hands a bit too wacky or are too far away from a Deeksha event to attend, then do consider trying this CD. After all, this is world music. It's cool. You don't have to own up to the spiritual stuff if you don't want to!

The CD is widely available. Here is the link for Amazon.com and here for CD Universe, where you can listen to samples. The CD is also on iTunes, but I don't have iTunes on my computer, so I don't know if it is possible to download individual tracks. If it is, then try the first track, Moola Prayer, which is almost ten minutes long and should provide you with all you need for a Deeksha experience in itself.

Now comes the tricky bit to explain. If you listen to this music, please forget all I've said above. These things are best approached with an open mind and without expectations. I don't know what - if anything - you will experience from this. So simply listen to the CD as you would any other music. Then see what happens...

(Naturally, I shall be interested to hear any feedback you may have!)

Something else that's worth mentioning here is a new book, an excellent introduction to Deeksha called Awakening Into Oneness by Arjuna Ardagh (with a foreword by Ervin Laszlo). This is the preeminent book about the Deeksha phenomenon. I opened it almost at random just now to quote you a bit and this is the encouraging extract I came across:

There were several things that really impressed me on that first visit to The Oneness University... I have spent a great deal of my life around organized spirituality. The situation has always been more or less the same. A great teacher, great teachings, wonderful practices, meditations or prayers, and then among the followers, there was always a certain degree of politics. Who could get higher in the organization? Who had the power? During my three-week stay at the university, I looked under every rock and behind every bush. Where was the politics? I could not find it, even after an exhaustive search. What I found instead was an extraordinary quality of oneness: people living together, working together, being together as many bodies but one heart, one consciousness.

Does that sound like a good way to run the world?