Meditation is not for the Undisciplined

The purpose of meditation is to get your consciousness in a place where you can listen to something higher than what your frontal lobe can generate. It takes courage to stop the cackling thoughts from meandering around in the head trying to distract you. It might be interesting to watch a rapid file of scenes displayed in your cortex like so many commercials on television. You might experience time moving along as you are lulled to sleep by the drone of images that inundate you every second. Meditation is something entirely different. In meditation you stop all of that insane activity of the mind and you cease being attached to what is outside you. In fact, in the ideal state of meditation, you should not be feeling your body at all. You should not be aware of your flesh body or what it is going through. You can’t allow your body to itch you to try to disturb your peace or pull you away from the subject of your meditation. If you are meditation on peace, then only thoughts of peace or experiences of peace should be accepted in your experience. Other things that are not related to peace should be left outside and discarded. You need to focus and not be passive. You must be vigilant and not stressed out or worried.

Meditation requires stilling your mind to focus on something other than mundane worries and situations. You slow your breathing and you get very simple in your mind until you slow down enough to wake up from being outer- focused. You relax and observe what your inner being brings up to your awareness from a much wiser place inside of you. We say that is God within. God inside you is going to give you an experience or the knowledge or words about some subject that you hold in your mind. The reason this is possible is that God has been waiting to speak to you for so long and finally has your complete attention and can inspire and guide you in ways that are good for you. This can only happen when you turn you gaze to something higher than what your body, mind and emotions can generate. You are not your body. You are not your mind. You are not your emotions. You are something entirely different and you will find out when you get proficient at meditation. Many people meditate just to relax and so do not go to the deeper levels off humility and purity where they experience a divine Source within them that teaches, guides and directs things. They only go to the superficial levels of relaxing a little and never dive deeper into the sacred streams of blissful connection to the God that made them. All of the mystics had this experience of ecstatic embrace with God at the center of their being. God actually has been waiting to get your attention for years and finally in a successful mediation, you might actually be able to ear God speak to you in your meditations. This is for the advanced meditators however.

Meditation is for the spiritual adults and not for those too scared to let go of their own ideas and anxieties. Meditation will reconnect you with God and thus with real love at the source of all. God is within you and that’s why you meditate.

PURITY – WHY IT FEELS BETTER

As long as we are not jostled or disturbed in any way, we can maintain a reasonable balance and equanimity. Most of the times we function fairly well and can handle circumstances and relations with others without a tremendous amount of controversy and agitation. Most people are like a glass of water with some sediment in the bottom of the glass. As long as they are not stirred up, the sediment is not a problem and not noticeable. If you shake them a little or disturb their tranquility even a smudge, all that sediment rises into the solution and clouds the water of their experience. It is when life’s circumstances are difficult that we see the true colors come out in a person. If we haven’t done very much soul searching or introspective work on ourselves, there is years of unexamined feelings, resentments, fears and anger waiting to rise up when the storms come to disturb our waters. The storms are a blessing in disguise because they show up the things that need our attention and we get a chance to examine and sort through the things we were trying to avoid.

Purity is one of those words that immediately attracts or repels us. We have associations with words that bring up prejudices and fears inspired by memories in our past. Purity might have a negative connotation if you think of it as inexperienced or shut down. Purity might be positive if you think of it as saintly or holy. Purity means unadorned, uncontaminated – innocent. To be pure means to have no contaminating or competing elements in your solution. Purity means to have one goal, one ideal, one desire without conflicting complications. Pure is clear. Jesus said in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure, for they shall see God.” In God there is only light. In God there is no darkness at all. God is pure and those who are pure will become like God. In the heart are so many positive feelings and negative desires. As you sort through them and decide which to keep and which to let go of, you clear your solution, your psyche and soul of any elements that you really don’t want. That is a purification of your soul and your whole nature. This takes time. As you let go of things that are absolutely no good for you, you become more and more purely yourself and as a result you feel a whole lot better. Your real soul nature is like God, so that core of your being is pure. If you purify the outer nature and clear yourself of conflicting desires and ideas, you will start to become more and more like God and thus pure. In a much deeper way, if you really do the inner work of getting rid of the sediment and impurities in your being, you will actually be preparing yourself to come into real relationship with God at the center of your being. You will see God.

Spring Has Sprung

The powerful energies that come into the Earth at this Spring time quicken the planet with vitality and life. Everything is moving and life infuses leaves and flowers unfolding a magnificent pageantry of nature budding and blossoming. People are motivated to start cleaning and organizing, removing clutter and making room for the new. If you respond to this incredible force unleashed in the Earth at this time by the powers of the Sun, you will feel the lift and elevation of spiritual energies as well as physical. The spiritual energies are Resurrection energies. Renewal. rebirth, transformation and change accompany this natural cycle. The frozen waters of winter melt and moisten the ground, waking up the seed embryos and trigger an awakening impulse to reach up to the Sun. Animals get busy. Humans are fired up to to renovate or fix things. The quiet waiting in winter is over because it is time to get moving and do. Action is the hallmark of this season of Spring - renewal and exposure of the light after the darkness of winter. You can use this time to motivate yourself to make those changes you always wanted to make. You should get rid of those things that you have not used in over a year - circulate them or sell them. Paint a room or change a fixture; move things around and try something new. What are you waiting for?
Inside your soul, the urgency to come close to God is also calling you to be more inner connected and responsive to the urgencies of God speaking to you. God has been trying to reach you through dreams and whispers for so long. Are you going to listen now? God is always available and longing to help you become like you were created - in spiritual image and likeness of God. Don't be dense - that doesn't mean physical likeness. It means spiritual likeness and image. The more like God you become, the more you will be happy and fulfilled. There is no real happiness or fulfillment outside of God. Doing your own thing will not make you happy. That will make you more angry and sad. Learning to still that noisy mind will help you hear what God has to give you.
Blessings
Father Peter

Religion Today

Fifteen percent of the people in the U.S. don’t believe in anything. There has been an 11% drop in religious belief and fervor in the past ten years. Judaism, Protestantism, Catholicism all show drops in the numbers of the faithful. Only 47% of the people think they are going to Heaven. Much of this trend has to do with people changing their faith and moving on to shop at other churches. But the fact remains that people are less entrenched in the religion of their ancestors. As the population ages and the elders die off, there is a drop in traditional patterns among the young. Most people find discussions and topics of religion worthy of mockery and disdain just as politics is often disparaged as a topic for lunch conversations. Religion and politics are so subjective that people don’t want to get fired up about a discussion that can’t go anywhere because it is all a matter of opinion, or so they say. Times are changing and the old ways are not working. In fact, religion has become the shopping mall mentality with the mega churches and the parking lots with the shuttles moving large masses of people into a world of disneyland like mall-of-America type experience. It is exciting because of the sheer massiveness of the venue and the incredible number of offerings, support groups and classes available. The family neighborhood church is fading away. Wiccan is on the rise because they believe in nature and goddesses as a reaction to mainstream religious thought. What is clear is that people are disillusioned by traditional theology and religious training and are looking for anything that might free them from the wretchedness of fallen human beings that was taught for centuries in the churches. We are good at the core, but don’t frighten people with that revelation because then they might have to start living and acting like their true nature. That would be a spiritual revolution.

Voluntary Mind Numbing

I just read that the average person in the U.S. spends almost 150 hours a month watching television. This means that most of the available waking hours are spent in just plugging in and submitting oneself to a barrage of programming and useless information. Commercials make up almost fifteen to twenty minutes of each hour of programming and these are repetitive and relentless. Some television is informative in the best sense of the word and much of it is scenes of life in families, offices and households where people are made out to be humorous, undeveloped, mean or insulting. Some shows have decent messages of heroic strength, moral integrity, choosing the right path or courage against all odds. These are more rare but refreshing entries. Picking and choosing is really required if you are going to have a good experience of television. But what happens in your brain and consciousness with all of those wasted hours where you are doing absolutely nothing but vegging out on the menu of the evening. Who is minding your store and being selective about what you take into your system, into your consciousness and heart. It actually matters the kind of time you spend and the company you keep. If you are not engaged actively in the interaction, then you are passive and merely absorbing. This slows the activity of your imagination and shuts down your feelings to the point that what you think and what you feel does not matter. In a slow and effective way, this passive time warp of activity erodes your ability to have any say over things and makes you feel that important things don’t matter. It slowly develops apathy in your being that accepts that you can’t make any changes, that what you feel doesn’t count. This is the beginning of despair and hopelessness. If you subject yourself to forces that you have no say over and continue to have minimal involvement with, soon you will feel that you don’t count and don’t matter. So the next step will be that you feel like an automaton, free falling into a morass of helplessness. You might go through a phase of having lots of critical thoughts and feelings about what you are watching, but the worm is already in the apple because you are caring less and less about things since you matter less and less about what you are doing. You go from alive to merely existing and passing time in the vacuous meaninglessness of other fictitious lives that you essentially aren’t living. You have no life. When you are numb, you can be led around by the ad folks and they begin to control your world by the needs they sell you. Consciousness is involved in decisions and in your life. Apathy makes you not care anymore because your life has become the lives of others on the television. Please think again about how you are spending your time and be consciously involved in your life.

Free Will

Human beings are made spiritually just like God, in God's image and likeness. We have all the abilities and capabilities of God as co-creators of the little world we exist in. We are free in our choice and can will either constructive or destructive things. There is no power in a human being that was not been loaned to us by God, so all acts become directed by human beings using the power of God to do them. That does not mean that God condones the evil acts of people, but that there is no power or energy except God's power for any of the creation to do anything without God's energy. So we are free to choose and use the one will of God whatever way we want. Then there is the Law of Cause and Effect (Karma) which says we get what we put out. We are inherently good at the core. We have steered a sharp course away from the presence of God to live more like animals, fighting and struggling - by choice. We can come back to God by our own efforts working out changing ourselves over time and coming home. Or we can open to grace from Jesus and God and also by cleaning up our actions and thinking to more align with how God thinks, feels and acts. Our inner nature is exactly like God, but most people do not do the spiritual work of going that deeply within to find that core of goodness, love and light. God can help us if we request it, or we can slog it out alone and take a whole lot more time coming home to God.

Hope and Love

Hopelessness is exactly the first step to complete despair. Not having hope is the result of not feeling love, either from you to others or from others to you. When you lack hope, you have no faith in the future and it is a short stone's throw to despair. If you despair, you abdicate control over your life. You throw your steering wheel to the curb and drive without your hands on the wheel. You don't care because no one cares about you. You have decided that those around you don't love or cannot love or cannot see you or don't know you. In every instance of this kind of indictment about people not loving you, you have narrowed your gaze to those who you already know. This is a very limited view of who could love you. Why is it that everyone assumes it should be your family who loves you when you have some very good proof of their fickle love? Often the love of families is the most abusive and disrespectful of loves. They can be the most demanding the most conditional of loves because they demand the you be the way they want you to be in order to shower love upon you. But they are not able to love well and cannot love unconditionally most of the time. Most people who say they love unconditionally are actually not so good at evaluating real love. They love as long as you please them or suck up to them or do what they want you to do. Their love grows very chilly indeed when you don't do exactly what they want you to do. That is conditional love, conditioned on whether you obey them and please them. That is a deal or a business or an arrangement, but not love. So when you are starting to go down the road to despair, look outside the ones who should be loving you and I think you'll find people who genuinely care and are able to love much better than the people you have surrounded yourself with. That is scary to go outside your circle. But to me, it is scary to stay inside your circle where so little love exists. Branch out and hope will come back in to resuscitate you and bring color back to your cheeks.