The Secret of Life

Manitonquat's Prayer

This Native American prayer was read at a recent Deeksha gathering I attended, and it expresses very eloquently a lot of what I am trying to say in this blog. I thought that this Christmas season would be a good time to share it with you. It describes the way I hope we shall one day become:

Hear, oh Humankind, the prayer of my heart..

For are we not one, have we not one desire,
to heal our Mother Earth and bind her wounds
and still to be free as the spotted Eagle climbing
the laughing breath of our Father Sky,
to hear again from dark forests and flashing rivers
the varied ever-changing Song of Creation?

Oh Humankind, are we not all brothers and sisters,
are we not the grandchildren of the Great Mystery?
Do we not all want to love and be loved,
to work and to play, to sing and dance together?

But we live with fear.
Fear that is hate, fear that is mistrust, envy, greed, vanity,
fear that is ambition, competition, aggression,
fear that is loneliness, anger, bitterness, cruelty….
and yet, fear is only twisted love, love turned back on itself,
love that was denied, love that was rejected…  

And love…. 
Love is life ~ creation, seed and leaf
and blossom and fruit and seed;
love is growth and search and reach and touch and dance.
Love is nurture and succor and feed and pleasure.
Love is pleasuring ourselves, pleasuring each other.
Love is life believing in itself.
 
And life…. 
Life is the Sacred Mystery singing to itself,
dancing to its drum, telling stories, improvising, playing.

And we are all that Spirit,
our stories tell but one cosmic story that we are love indeed,
that perfect love in me seeks the love in you
and if our eyes could ever meet without fear
we would recognize each other and rejoice,
for love is life believing in itself.
 
Oh Humankind, we must stop fearing life, fearing each other,
we must absolutely stop hating ourselves, resenting Creation…Life. 

Oh Humankind, life is the only treasure.
We are the custodians of it, it is our sacred trust.
Life is wondrous, awesome and holy, a burning glory
and its price is simply this: Courage….We must be brave enough to love.
 
Hear my heart’s prayer, Oh Humankind,
trust in love, don’t be afraid,
I love you as I love life.
I love myself, please love me too,
love yourself, for perfect love,
as a wise one said, casts out all fear.

If we are to live there is no other choice,
for love is life believing in itself.
 
Above all,
let us set the children free,
break the traps of fear that history has fashioned for them.
Free to grow, to seek and question, to dance and sing,
to be dreamers of tomorrow’s rainbows

and if we but give them our trust,
they will guide us to a New Creation,
for love is life believing in itself.
 
Hear, Oh Humankind, the prayer of my heart.

(Poem by Manitonquat of the Wampanoag Nation - 1971)

Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you all have a peaceful time this Christmas - and that a Loving, Fearless New Year is in store for us all!

Unresolved Issues

Christmas can be a magical time of year but it can also be a difficult one for all sorts of reasons. Thoughts of the past can be a particular problem during this period, especially if we're obliged to meet those with whom we have unresolved issues. We may have managed to avoid these people all year long, but at Christmastime we finally run out of excuses. We are forced into their company over the plum pudding and crackers. There is no longer any escape.

Or perhaps we have thoughts of people with whom we have fallen out and whose departure from our lives we regret, people whose absence at Christmas we find particularly difficult. This can be even harder to deal with.

The approach of mainstream therapy is to investigate such difficult issues, with a view to bringing about some form of resolution, so that we can spend future Christmases and - most importantly - the rest of our lives, free from such ghosts from the past. This can be effective but it is time consuming, and especially if the therapist isn't up to the job, it can even be damaging. Digging around in the past can raise more problems than it solves.

Is there anything else which can be done about these unwelcome memories?

One of the most annoying thing about having negative thoughts about people who have wronged us in some way is that those people are entirely untouched by them. They carry on their lives in blissful ignorance of the fact that we wish them to be run over by a large truck, or to say they're sorry, or simply to understand the pain they have caused us. Even if we've made them aware that we have a problem with them, they're unlikely to feel the constant nagging ache of these thoughts which we carry around about them. It is only we who feel it constantly. It is we who suffer these thoughts, this burden of pain.

In other words, the only effect of our anger or hurt about these people - entirely justified though it may be - is to cause ourselves to suffer. If only we could just get rid of these feelings, we'd be doing ourselves a favor...

But how can we do it?

In some cases, especially if the root of the problem is recent, then it is possible to resolve things simply by talking things through with the person concerned. But if that person isn't willing to talk, or can't be made to understand, or simply doesn't care that they have hurt us, then we have to turn to something else. And it comes down to something I've talked about a lot in The Secret Of Life: acceptance.

What does 'acceptance' mean exactly? It doesn't mean that we have to pretend that the people concerned were right to do whatever they might have done to us. It doesn't mean that we have to try to rewrite history in our head. It simply means that we come to accept whatever happened happened, so that we can stop giving it valuable mind space and get on with the rest of our lives.

One powerful way to come to this is through the teachings of Byron Katie, as described in her book Loving What Is. Katie has developed a process of self-inquiry called 'The Work', which involves asking yourself four simple questions about the issue which is troubling you. A close friend of mine with intractable family problems has recently used this process very effectively to turn around the thoughts in her head in a matter of days.

Byron Katie's web site contains a lot of information about her teachings. The important information - including the four questions - is all there, though you may find it useful to also get hold of the book to enhance your understanding of her ideas.

Foreign Bodies

After all those serious posts about The Secret, it's high time for an anecdote. So here's one about guess what?: the law of attraction. But I warn you, it's not for the squeamish. I mean, it's really not for the squeamish. This is an official warning.

But it's quite funny, I think...

Chris recently drew my attention to the fact that I'd put on a bit of weight. So I checked on the scales and found that, yes, I'd put on half a stone (about eight pounds). This was a bit of a problem. How was I going to lose it? You see, I don't really do diets. I try but they don't seem to take. The truth is: I like the eating too much.

And yet, thinking back, I realized that I do sometimes lose weight. It usually happens by accident, due to some fortuitous circumstance or other. Like, er, gastroenteritis - that's been a popular one over the years. But I thought it best not dwell on that one too much: what we focus on grows. I'd learned that much from all those posts I did about the law of attraction.

So guiding my thoughts swiftly on, I tried to think what else had turned up to make me lose weight over the years. Well, there was falling in love with Chris. That seemed to do the trick at the time - the pounds fairly rolled off me. But I'd already been and done that one. There was always the chance of an affair on the side, I supposed, but Chris might not like it and I didn't want to upset her.

So what could I do? How was I going to lose those extra pounds?

I decided that something would probably turn up...

Carbohydrates are my downfall. I can eat muesli till it's coming out of my ears. Gluten free muesli, that is, because I find I'm best without too much gluten in my diet. Another favorite is gluten free porridge, made out of rice and millet flakes. Yum.

I was helping myself to some of this the other morning, pouring it into the bowl to warm it up in the microwave, when I suddenly noticed something strange in it, which I took to be some sort of husk. A millet husk, I supposed, not knowing very much about millet or how it grew or anything. The truth is: I tend not to know a great deal about anything much. I'm remarkably incurious really (except when it comes to the meaning of life and stuff like that).

But I'm quite good at eating things...

Anyway, I thought I'd better take a look at this thing in the porridge, so I went and got my glasses and found to my surprise that it wasn't a husk at all. It was an insect. Quite a big insect as it happened. It had its wings outstretched as though it was about to fly away - but it wasn't going to go anywhere. It was far too dead for that. And far too toasted.

My first thought was to pick the insect out and carry on making the porridge. After all, that's what you'd do if you were washing vegetables, wasn't it? And I was really looking forward to that porridge...

But I decided that I really ought to take a closer look at the packet. And that's when I noticed that there were other things in there as well. Things that also looked like cereal husks - but on closer inspection, weren't.

On closer inspection, the packet contained rather a lot of dead insects.

Suddenly, I didn't feel very much like the porridge any more.

And that wasn't the end of it. There were other things in the packet as well: things that were harder to identify. I delved inside and picked one of them up to take a closer look and found that it was attached to a string of grains of millet as though they were all on a necklace. My mouth was gaping wide open in awestruck wonder by this time. I seemed to have found a kind of Aladdin's Cave of Yuck. I saw that what I was holding, with the grains of millet attached, was a string of white cotton.

Well, that settled it then! I was going to have to complain about this...

My mind started making connections now. I had previously only identified the insects as 'insects'. That had seemed to be all I needed to know. Delving any further into the zoological details would have seemed over-fastidious. But now I realized that these creatures were actually moths. And moths eat cotton, don't they?

Which kind of made sense - and yet didn't. I mean, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was the cotton in the porridge to start with and then the moths found their way in, attracted by the cotton? Or was it that the moths were in there first and then some concerned operative at the porridge works came along and fed them some cotton in case the poor things should starve? Or else - my mind was going into overdrive now - had one of the operatives fallen into the vat of flakes and these threads of cotton were all that remained of his T Shirt? In which case, where was the rest of the operative? Was he all mashed up in another part of the porridge?

I threw a sidelong glance at the packet. It was sitting there looking all innocent, apparently filled to the brim with its humdrum load of rice flakes, millet flakes and dead moths - yet did it also hold a sinister secret?

I thought it best not to delve any deeper...

So I took the porridge back to the store and complained. The young lady at the desk looked suitably horrified. She took a look at the packet.

"I didn't realize that's what 'organic' meant," she said.

"Neither did I," I told her.

So they gave me my money back there and then - how's that for customer service? - and told me that the packet would be sent to their laboratory for inspection. I would hear from them in due course...

I d*mn well better do...

But I kept quiet about the terrible truth - I was too scared that I would throw up all over the customer services counter if I told them about it.

The truth was that I'd actually bought two packets of porridge. And I'd already eaten the other one.

I'm definitely going to put on my glasses when I fix my breakfast in future...

"What do you fancy for tea?" asked Chris, when I got back from the store.

I told her that I didn't feel very hungry.

And indeed, I haven't felt very hungry ever since.

So what did I tell you? I knew that something would come along. There's the law of attraction for you...

Because it seems to me that I'm not going to be putting on very much weight over Christmas, not this year.

I'll be sliding into those skinny jeans in no time...

IONS - Free Download Offer

I'd love to write more often here at The Secret Of Life about the intriguing interface between science and spirituality but the honest truth is that most of my time I can't get my head round it! Fortunately Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell foresaw my shortcomings and created IONS (the Institute of Noetic Sciences) to carry out research and provide information in this fascinating area, which it describes as "the frontiers of consciousness".

The IONS web site has a wealth of material, some of it always freely available, some of it normally accessible by subscription only. As a special offer, however, the entire library is now available on free download until 24th December 2007. There are audios and videos from a wealth of contributors including Neale Donald Walsch, Rupert Sheldrake, Deepak Chopra, Bernie Siegel, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Marianne Williamson, Ervin Laszlo, Lynne McTaggart,  Dean Radin, Candace Pert, and Edgar Mitchell himself. The only thing they don't seem to be able to provide is the time to listen to it all...

(If you'd like to take a look at my own explorations of science and spirituality, please check out these previous posts: The Nature Of The Universe and What The Bleep Do We Know?)

Cartoon Time (and more...)

A few things this time. First of all, here are a couple of interesting animations on a similar theme:

This first one, based on a vintage recording by Alan Watts, makes an interesting comparison between life and music. It's an old recording and the quality is poor at first, but it swiftly improves as it goes along:

I found the above on richgrad's blog. Many thanks to him for finding it!

Thanks too to Linda (aka Cosmic Sunshine) for sending me the link to an animation called The Book Of Now, which you can find here. They request your email address unfortunately but I don't seem to have been spammed as a result - and it's a great animation, kind of a cartoon version of Eckhart Tolle's teaching.

Did anyone else try the recent Jyothi transmission? I've written about my own impressions here. Please feel free to add yours too...

Special thanks to those of you who left supportive comments on May's blog, in response to my recent post! May left some response here.

Finally, here are a couple of local notices. If, like me, you live in Yorkshire in the north of England (or thereabouts) my friend Ed Harpin (who contributed two fascinating comments on enlightenment a few months back) is starting up Deeksha sessions in Huddersfield again. He is now combining Deeksha (also known as the Oneness Blessing) with Kundalini Yoga. The details of his classes are here.

And if you live a bit further north, Heidi Fawkes is continuing her regular Deeksha sessions in Otley and Hunton. You can contact Heidi here.

There are links to information on Deeksha sessions worldwide in my original post on Deeksha.