Awakening Our Spiritual Eyes

I was strolling with my wife, daughter and her two kids through acres and acres of tulip fields at a local farm here in La Conner.  Broad bold stripes of reds, pinks, whites, yellows, oranges, and purples set against the farms and towering Cascade Mountains.  The early evening sun gave a golden warm hue to everything.

The beauty was so commanding that it allowed my family and me to drop out of our busy minds and into the sacredness of the present moment.  Beneath the chattering of our minds is an ever-present backdrop of quiet and stillness.  This backdrop is where we all experience life unfiltered by the distractions and distortions of our conceptual thoughts.  We are so amazingly designed -- when our personal thinking falls away we are able to connect with this inner core of quiet.  And when this connection is made this quiet core so often awakens in us feelings of aliveness, vitality, gratitude and love.  This core awakened in me a deep sense of connection with everyone who was passing me in the fields.  When our minds are at rest in our souls, a deeper sense of clarity and tenderness arises.  I noticed that everyone was smiling and being nice to one another.  How wonder-full it is to learn that understanding the 3 Principles point us within to this quiet, enlivened place where our deepest humanity is awakened and brings greater spiritual sensitivity and caring into the world.  To know in our heart of hearts that this quiet place always exists within us, and that it has the power to awaken the sense of sacred in us, is a priceless gift.  I am amazed by this ever-present capacity in us to see the beauty in each other and in the world around us.  I call this deep core spiritual because it is a formless, creative energy that is ultimately indescribable, yet it is the essence of who we are as human beings.  And I got lots of hugs from little Jacob and Eva out in those fields.  I stop to take photos of them because I know they are also seeing everyone and everything through those same sacred eyes!

Feelings: A Curse or a Blessing?

Do you know there is a fundamental misunderstanding that each and every one of us has every day?  And do you know that this misunderstanding is responsible for a major part of our stress and preoccupation?  It is such a simple and common misunderstanding, but most of us fail to recognize it in ourselves and in others.  What is this misunderstanding?  We erroneously believe a good part of the time that our feelings are created from something other than thought.  For example, we may believe that a deadline is causing us stress, the traffic is making us upset, our spouse is bothering us, or that the sun makes us feel good.  

When we don’t recognize our feelings as coming from thought, we attribute our feelings to something in the outside world, e.g. the deadline, the traffic, our spouse, the weather.  Often we keep thinking about what we believe is causing our feelings.  This thinking may generate even more stress, upset, or preoccupation. We may see our feelings, especially our painful ones, as a curse imposed on us from the outside. Rather, when we understand the connection between thought and feelings, we will see our feelings as a blessing, tipping us off to their source within and reminding us that’s where they always and only come from.

As we learn about the 3 Principles of Thought, Consciousness, and Mind we are reminded of the fact that we live exclusively in a world of our own thinking.  We also learn that each and every thought we have creates a feeling.  As we realize this for ourselves, we have more and more moments of actually experiencing the truth of this fact.  This realization corrects the misunderstanding that our feelings are coming from anything other that thought.  It allows us to be fully accountable for our feelings rather than blaming them on someone or something else.

It is humbling to realize that all of us, with no exception, get lost in those moments when we misunderstand where our feelings are coming from and act as if the world is causing our feeling.  But it is up-lifting to learn that we all operate exactly the same way and that we can all become more aware that we live in a thought-created world.  Learning more about the thought-feeling connection is a short cut to well-being.  Do you think you can now see your feelings as the blessing that they are?