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There is no denying that the different versions of God in world religions has led to historical violence and conflict, which humanitarians have tried to end by saying that there is only one God, implying that such conflicts are pointless. But is there only one God? The conflicting versions of God all attempt to grasp God in reality, so every version actually is God for that religion.
Atheists claim that all of these versions are fictional to begin with, but this misses the point. Human beings have experienced the spiritual dimension of life for as long as history can tell. The need for God grew out of the same need as modern science: to explain a fundamental aspect of Nature. The problem is that there is a gap between this need for explanations and the answers arrived at.
In this gap creativity went to work. The gods and God are human creations, constructs of the mind. Faced with unanswerable dilemmas the human mind went to work to fashion a supernatural dimension presided over by a ruler, or rulers, who stand in for rulers here on Earth, being human, emotional, unpredictable, beautiful, terrible, merciful, vengeful--pick any human trait and you can match it to some version of God worshipped now or in the past. The rational God of Thomas Jefferson's enlightened God is a projection of his ideal human portrayed on a superhuman scale, just as Jehovah, the complete opposite of Jefferson's God, was an idealized projection by ancient rabbis.
I hold the vision of our world waking up, and taking notice of all the possibilities that have been waiting for our attention. Many have recognized the stirring of the new energy and have been preparing for a monumental shift, or another Big Bang moment.
All the stars are aligned we are all allowing our awareness to expand.
Together we are finding ourselves exactly where we should be… the moment of Truth. As the Earth has been resting, part of humanity has been experiencing fear instead of awareness. Soon we will all feel an awakening as the Earth yawns and stretches. Our planet’s deep inhale will hold new elements. It brings in a burst of cosmic energy and the ability to expand. With the expansion we will see changes on the surface, and feel quickening deep in the core. It also brings a vast amount of creative energy that has been waiting. In the point between inhale and exhale there is a moment of stillness. This may hold the polar shift. On the deep exhale, all that is not needed in the new consciousness will be released. We will then experience great nurturing for all of humanity and beyond.
Relax. In relaxing, your entire being opens to receiving all the gifts of life: abundance, health, vitality, love, inner peace. You are so much more than you know. It is time to restore your inner luminosity. In this meditation, I will take you on a journey through your vibrational centers, filling your entire being with light. With each deep breath, the flow of energy will increase, and your true abundant nature will move to the fore. Receive the blessing and power of your own life force and see it reflected in the world around you. A life of boundless abundance is yours.
I have forever been looking “out there” for what was within me the entire time, or as one of my mentors told me, “What you are looking for, you are looking with.”
I have been writing since the age of four (I learned to read at age two) but whenever my mother would catch me writing, she would confiscate the papers and throw them away along with the admonishment that writers are losers and I would “never be a writer!”
It has been said, “Follow your passion and the money will follow,” and I believe that. However, how many of you feel, or have felt like me, that you cannot be self-supporting by doing what you love.That has been an on and off process for me using a myriad of tools to get in touch with why that is.
I am doing what I love since I retired from my real career but not making any money and I have had to take a serious look at why? It felt like I have always been simply chasing moonbeams, falling stars and rainbows looking for something but not knowing what. I just kept writing. One morning – before dawn – one of those moonbeams struck me upside the head with another memory. It is definitely not a new memory but one which has always been just hanging out with me. It is a sentence I frequently heard from my mother: “Writers are losers.”
If you think about being yourself, what does that mean? If asked, "Do you like being who you are?" not everyone would say yes--some people dislike themselves. This can be the product of low self-esteem or perhaps a deep sense of guilt. Liking yourself doesn't have to occur all the time, however. There are times when you behave in ways you aren't proud of and say things you wish you could take back. Yet being yourself is more mysterious than like or dislike.
To be yourself, you have to know who you are. "I" isn't simple and in many ways is very elusive. A two-year-old writing on the walls with crayon is being herself, and so is a middle-school bully tormenting a classmate on social media. Running wild, acting on your worst impulses, and flouting all the normal rules are behaviors worth suppressing. But if you are candid about yourself, such impulses exist inside you.
If you take a look at how your mind operates, you'll quickly realize that many agendas compete for your attention. In certain situations you call upon a wide range of emotions that want to be expressed. You act differently at work than at home. Habit, memory, and old conditioning compete over your attention. these agendas have their own claims, and there has to be a decision-maker and overseer who chooses which persona to adopt, which feelings to suppress, which behavior is appropriate at any given moment.
I’m so truly delighted that winter is finally over, and Spring is trying to emerge! To see the spring bulbs pushing their way up and the profusion of spring colors starting to change the landscape from the grey blanket of winter snow to the fresh vibrant colors of Spring.
Every year, I remind myself that when I witness the re-birth of nature, it’s important to stop and tell myself how important it is to reconnect with the divine source and spend some much-needed time with nature. Fortunately for me, I have a little dog who insists I do that every day … but there’s more to connecting with nature than just walking my dog.
It’s essential that you don’t forget that we’re all part of nature, yet regardless of whether you live in the country or the city, it’s easy to lose touch and for nature to become almost alien to your daily routine. Being indoors for all these winter months, it easy to forget nature, but next time it rains, stop and look at the rain drops! Experience the breeze of the warm winds on your face or go and walk bare foot in the new grass, so that you start to reconnect with nature again.
We recently participated in a public debate on the proposition "The more we evolve, the less we need God." The results were clearly in favor of the proposition against the stance we took. This was so amongst both the live audience and the online audience.
The cerebral cortex, the most recent part of the human brain to evolve, hasn't changed for more than ten thousand years. The writers of the world's ancient spiritual texts used the same brain as modern people, and since the world's religions revere these ancient texts, we accept that the Ten Commandments and the Four Noble truths of Buddhism came from minds whose processes we'd recognize today, however dissimilar the cultures of ancient Judea and India.
It must be cultural evolution that is relevant, and of course our modern secular culture has moved away from the age of faith. Rationalism seems to dominate our lives, and when we read of religious fanaticism, we feel that such issues belong to people living outside the reach of a modern secular society. Few people seeing news on TV of an attack in Paris or London feel an impulse to fight back by re-energizing their own religious beliefs. Being secular can easily feed the belief that one has evolved beyond God, religion, dogma, and the whole rigmarole.
Darshan means “to see” or “to reveal.” What is seen and revealed? Your divinity, your oneness, your essential Self. In Darshan, Panache Desai shares a state of oneness – the highest vibrational frequency and the most powerful force for transformation.
A gift of evolving consciousness is the capacity to recognize and honor the sacred awareness that lives through our own and all beings. This capacity is blocked by our identification with our “mask” or ego self, and not seeing past other people’s masks. In this talk we reflect together on some key filters of superior/inferior and good/bad that shape the trance of a narrowed identity, and then explore how mindfulness and kindness free us to inhabit the vastness of our natural awareness. We close with tasting the possibility of bringing the spirit of Namaste to ourselves, others and all beings.
Rumi writes: ““Are you searching for your true self? Then come out of your own prison. Leave the little creek and join the mighty river that flows into the ocean. Like an ox, don’t pull the wheel of this world on your back. Take off the burden. Whirl and circle, and rise above the wheel of the world. There is another view.”
Part of being human is that happiness is difficult. We are too complex for a cut-and-dried answer to work. There have been broad trends, however, over the course of time. Devotion to God, the pursuit of reason, getting rich, going to a therapist—all the possible avenues for achieving happiness have been explored, and in modern society each solution remains open. No one is locked into another person’s way to find happiness.
But that’s not the same as claiming that all of these various approaches have worked—there is a good possibility, in fact, that none has. That’s the position taken by a wide swath of teachers and guides, most of them classified as “spiritual,” who declare that living in the state of separation is the root cause of suffering. Separation is also known as duality, and so in recent years a new rubric, nondualism, has been used to embrace philosophers, therapists, spiritual teachers, and general writers who promote wholeness as the secret of true, lasting well-being.
In this post we’ll look at the nondual argument through an overview of how things stand in the wellness movement and particularly the evidence in biomedical literature that might offer scientific evidence for nondual claims.
God is everything. Yet within that everything, God has many aspects of being, from formlessness to form. At the center of the universe (actually before the universe became the universe) is just Source energy, pure potential. In some teachings, this is called the absolute, or “I.” It is the precursor to the Big Bang: out of nothing came something, out of absolute being arose relative being, or “I Am,” wherein God becomes relatable, experiential, as love, as consciousness. When we on the spiritual path feel divine love, when we expand into conscious awareness of something greater in our lives, we are experiencing the “I Am” at the soul level.
The next aspect is “I Am That,” in which we as humans identify completely with our physical forms, personality selves, or egos, and forget our divine connection. Forgetfulness is the common state for humanity at this time. In forgetfulness, we get caught up in all the polarities and dramas of human physical life on Earth. Our minds, emotions, and bodies are our primary experience, and the soul takes a backseat, often completely overlooked. This also is God, but it is God forgetting that it is God—something we all experience before we awaken again into the “I Am,” the love we came from.
In the collective awakening that is happening more and more on this planet, we reconnect with our souls, with the God within. This is the primary experiential focus for many of us who have incarnated at this time—to expand in awareness from “I Am That” to “I Am” and finally to “I.”
When you walk down the street you see other beings who are doing things, who are thinking things, who are wearing things, who are older or younger, who have personal lives. You see all the individual differences, but you also see them as packaging which holds that being.
This is a 1931 body and it’s decaying at a certain rate. It’s inevitable. I mean, I may prolong it or slow it down, but it’s inevitable. The personality of this being has a lot of residual little neuroses hanging around in it. It’s also charming, it’s delightful, it’s warm, it’s intelligent, it’s a personality, and those are my vehicles for being here on Earth.
It’s like a space suit, when you see those guys on the moon, and they’re encased in these suits. Those suits allow them to be in that particular element, and so we are in an element which requires that we be sheathed in a body and a personality.
Notice what I’m doing. I’m suggesting that we are not an identity with our personalities or our bodies, we are something more than that, and the predicament we face in recognizing this part of ourselves is that it isn’t ‘see-able’ with our eyes, isn’t ‘tasteable’ with our tongues… isn’t recognizable by any of our external senses.
So do we take this whole part of ourselves and assume it isn’t real?
The sign of spiritual freedom is a deep trust in our essential nature, and in the light of awareness that lives through all beings. This talk explores the conditioning that entraps us in a trance of separation and believing in a limited self. We then explore the evolutionary shift in identity that is possible as we deepen our attention and presence to the life that is here, and the loving awareness that is the source of existence.
When you get up every morning and look in the mirror, how do you feel? Do you like who you see, or do you cringe at your own image? The way you feel about yourself deep inside defines your outer experience each day throughout your life.
In this meditation, allow Panache to take you on an inner journey to self-love, that hidden aspect of yourself that you didn't even know you had. Feel the energy awaken within you, your own unique "rock star" specialness. Listen and remember who you really are. Then live it, full-out. "Self-love is contagious."
This short talk and guided meditation offers an overview of what many people find is a natural unfolding within a meditation sitting. It includes the process of arriving in an embodied presence, learning how to come back from thoughts, and then opening the attention mindfully to the changing flow of experience. The meditation provides generous space between prompts for practice.
This is a recording from the morning instructions and sit at the 2017 IMCW New Year retreat.
Many years ago, back in the early 70’s, I had a Buick limousine that I had made over into a camper.
I opened the trunk up, and I lived there, and I was driving across the country. I started out from Boston and I had been in India. I had developed certain practices that I just loved doing and at the time I loved doing mantra, or just saying the names of the Beloved over and over again, “Ala, Yahweh, Krishna, Ram.” I would just take the names and keep repeating it, and I sometimes sit with beads and I could go into these extraordinary states of deliciousness.
I was driving across the country, and I wasn’t listening to the radio, and the car is big. It was like a tank, and it just went slowly. I had one leg tucked under me, and I was just driving along in New York, doing my “Hari Krishna, Hari Krishna, Krishna, Krishna,” just keeping enough consciousness to keep steering the wheel. I was doing this when I became aware of a flashing blue light, which might have been the blue light of Krishna, but it looked like a state trooper, so I pulled over and I stopped, and this being got out. He came up to the window and he said, “May I see your license and registration?” Turned out I was going too slow.
In Unified Physics we are a part of a grand and Infinite Continuum from the very tiny to the extremely large with everything connected, indeed a Connected Universe proven now in the equations of Nassim Haramein. As human beings, we fall right in the middle of this Continuum as the center point of connection able to imprint and influence the entirety, yes entirety of the Universe. This above perhaps all other "superpowers" within us is the most mystical ,magical and auspicious with much responsibility.
How will we see, use and ultimately harness this beautiful grace and influence?
In this sonic infusion Kennedy gently traverses the footprints we and all of Creation make in the Space Memory Network.
We learn the same life lessons again and again, delving more deeply into the essence of these. We spiral and cycle through love that lightens, expands, and falls further into the endless each time we revolve through a familiar lesson with a loved one.
When I treat life with a willingness to cooperate, all life becomes my teacher and my lover. Recently I experienced some cramping during my menstrual flow. Believing that my ovaries have a life of their own and were expressing something to me, I decide to be my ovaries for a while. I took my consciousness into my ovaries. I placed my feeling awareness right in my ovaries. It became apparent that some sorrow was living there. I saw pictures of events that had happened many years ago which had lodged themselves in my ovaries. As I remained fully present, fully accepting of the ovaries' experience, the pain intensified. I was one with the pain so it no longer hurt. I was placing my consciousness in the ovaries instead of analyzing them. The pain was merely a sensation. As I remained present, the pain subsided. I took the pain to my heart (a practice suggested by Margaret Ruby, who is the founder of Possibilities DNA) and forgave it. My ovaries felt a tingling joy. I was in love with life.
During a visit, Feline Sno's person tells me that Sno has become calmer since the two of us recently spent time with one another. Sno has also repeated being stand-offish among some guests. My heart tells me again that Sno is a very loving and sensitive little being. I feel her to be playful, and she affirms this is so. These are her thoughts sent through my heart. We feel and think together. She sends me heart-telepathic pictures of herself as an acrobatic healer, bringing me great delight and joy. When I approach her she hisses. Her outer behavior doesn't match what I feel she is communicating to me from within so I remain curious.
I've been to New Zealand, and really respect and like it. There's a Maori term - turangawaewae (link is external), "a place to stand" - that I've come back to many times.
I'm sure I don't know the full meaning of the word in its cultural context. But at a basic level, it's clear that we all need a place to stand. A physical place to be sure - hearth and home, land and sea, a bed to curl up in - but also psychological or spiritual places, such as feeling loved, a calm clear center inside, knowledge of the facts, compassion and ethics, and realistic plans.
This is our ground, the place we rest in and move out from . . . even under the best of circumstances. And when you're shaken by events at any scale - from changes in your health to changes in your country or world (here's a recent post you may find relevant: Take Heart (link is external)) - then it's especially important to find and hold your ground.
How?
Start with the body, and the feeling of being here. The sensations of breathing . . . heart beating . . . going on living . . . feet on the floor, back against a chair. Whatever is true now can never be taken from you.
Happy Spring to all of us in the north, and happy Fall to my friends Down Under! (Although where I live on my farm outside of Toronto it looks like winter has come back- but heck I am hopeful!) The Spring equinox is when the Light and Dark are equal and then a new cycle begins as the Light begins to grow and become more powerful. This time of year always triggers a shift in everyone just as Nature shows us new beginnings and new life so will the natural flow of seasons in our lives, our projects and our dreams begin to naturally evolve.
When new life begins to appear its natural to feel the same compelling drive within you too. I find it most apparent at the spring and fall equinoxes. Something just begins to turn on the magic so to speak.
If you slow down enough to tune into your inner awareness you’ll sense that urge to spring clean, to make space for new life , or in the autumn you’ll feel the call to clean up to make space to incubate new dreams.
This time of year we really begin to feel the pulse of co-creation, abundance and our infinite potential for prosperity. There’s an anticipation, a palpable energy that we can tune into that turns on a switch, like all of a sudden going from dim and hazy to bright and shiny.
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