A selection of articles: Forget Me and Let Love Be, Addiction , Letting Go, The Spiritual Vision, The Fear to Love, Spirituality
Forget Me and Let Love Be
My face defined by changing mood
A body of parts
On an emotional ride
Carried on breakers of this earthly tide.
Forget me
And let love be.
Embodied in flesh
An unanswered thought
Travels in time on ancient space,
A wisp of eternity
Gathering mass
Until life comes forth in formal guise
By infinite grace
Of the Divine.
God the imponderable,
Still and immense
Beyond common sense.
Immortal moment
Strikes an awestruck mind
Forever behind now
But riveted to the point
Where reality breaks the spell
Of the dreamer and the dream.
Shimmering One
Light of a thousand suns
Golden glow of silence,
Love’s mystery
Venerated as She
Exalted in He
Sacred union in the flesh
A beginning with no end.
Forget me
And let love be.
Addiction
We human beings are extremely vulnerable to addiction. The robotic nature of our self-conscious existence lends itself to the repetition of experience as a need to substantiate the feeling of being alive. Increasingly, addiction in all its myriad forms is becoming more widespread as a global symptom of the universal unhappiness of life on earth.
The basis of all addictions is the search for something to alleviate the pain and trauma of being born in a divisive world where love struggles to survive. It’s possible to be addicted to sex but not to love. Sex as the isolation of the virtue of love is the basis of all addictions, regardless of the way it manifests externally. Most people have become so identified with their fluctuating feelings that any direct experience of love as the restorative quality of life is unable to be registered. When love is present as the palpable sensation of being alive, the addictive impulse to find solace in an external agency is negated.
When a pattern of behaviour becomes excessive beyond the normal bodily requirements, there’s the possibility of addiction. The trigger for addiction is manifold and often occurs when a person becomes vulnerable to the forces of the unconscious. Entities of past living experience are primed to enter existence through any emotional aberration, which creates an opening within the personal space of the subconscious. This is common when, for example, someone is traumatised or a way of life is shattered through the collapse of a relationship or losing one’s job. Alternatively, there are those whose lives appear to be loaded with such obstacles and disadvantages that addiction to drugs or alcohol seem the only solution to coping with life.
Habit precedes the full blown addictive symptoms. Habitual patterns form shallow grooves within the subconscious mind and lack the intensity of addiction. Addiction is of both mind and body. For example, anyone who’s smoked cigarettes will know how unsatisfying it is to begin with. It takes a while to get habitually into the routine of inhaling the smoke. The addiction only kicks in when the body becomes dependent on the nicotine as a stimulant, which is able to alter the sensitive internal apparatus of the body. Every puff on the cigarette pacifies the cellular vibratory motion that has now become dependent on the nicotine to maintain the integrity of the body as a whole. When deprived of their feed, the cells vibrate at an intensified rate which can only be quelled by smoking another cigarette. And this is the same for every type of addiction, the only difference being the psychic intensity of the addictive pay-off.
To break an addiction is difficult and harder for some than for others. While an addiction is rife, the best that can be done as a temporary measure is to manage the condition without trying to stop it completely. Ultimately, the addiction has to be willingly surrendered by giving back to life something of value beyond the person’s self-pity and pain. At a certain threshold of suffering, usually at a point of complete despair, the addict is compelled to enter their body as an action of consciousness. This direct experience of being present in the senses can instigate an extraordinary change and set in motion a completely new way of life. This is common in people who then go on to help and inspire others through the virtue of having passed through the addictive condition within themselves.
The world functions in revolt to the harmony of nature. There’s no allowance for addiction in the natural world. The integrity of the creative principle ensures everything exists to serve the betterment of something else and maintains the balance with consummate precision. Any addiction is something out of context of the whole, making the addict exclusive in their identification with a substitute love in the world. Each day, as the earth is divested of its natural resources, more and more people are becoming addicted to some external agency to appease the sadness and desperation caused by the appearance of the dying planet.
The integrity of life is its infinite compassion for all things in existence. Although there’s no way out for the masses, the solution is built into the living process itself and realised by the individual alone. To come to life, it’s essential to begin to perceive beyond the sense projection to the vaster life within. The impediment to this is the craving for the repetition of sensual experience in the flesh. However, when someone has suffered enough through the realisation that they want no more experience as a need, then they are free.
Letting Go
People are often advised to ‘just let go’ of any emotional pain or anxiety as though it’s something that can be done without first confronting the source of negativity. If it were a case of simply letting go, then everyone would be free and able to detach at will from the demands of self. It’s the emotional pain of the past that refuses to let go.
The past is an effect of intelligence operating below the speed of light. Unless the substance of the past is continually let go in the moment through being present in the senses, the flow of life becomes impeded and creates emotional blockages in the psyche. The past obviously has no place in the present. This substantive energy needs to be continually eliminated through being conscious in the body; otherwise the emotional content hardens as attached matter to the flesh.
The flesh is not the sensory appearance of the body but the inner sensation which resonates to the frequency of love. Love is the swiftest intelligence which is beyond the speed of light and enters existence as the speed of now. What happens in most people is that love degenerates to emotion, which is the slowest frequency of intelligence that’s possible for life to exist. Love is not an emotion since all emotion is an effect of the past.
The past is kept emotionally alive through ruminating on the events and circumstances of yesterday or the last moment. This creates a dull vibration of self, often registered as a dark and depressive shadow. The impulse is then to find something to elevate the negative feelings through some form of stimulation. Sexual excitement, thinking about good times in the past or projecting numerous possible scenarios in the future all speed up the dull vibration to a faster rate. Although this temporally lifts the cloud of depression, once the excitement peaks, the person plunges back to a low and the cycle repeats itself.
There’s no chance of letting go when the emotional force of self is rampant. Once activated in the mind and compounded by the thinking process, the energy must complete its cycle. The best that can be done in these times is to contain the inner pressure and the impulse to react. The challenges of life must come, but increasing stillness and sensitivity to the inner state creates a spiritual centre of purified space.
The key to it all is that whatever I the individual acknowledge then returns as the circumstances and quality of the life. To effectively let go of the past as any emotional suffering is to practise letting go in the good times, not the bad. Acknowledge pain and it returns, only magnified with the psychic force of other unresolved emotions in the body. Acknowledge with gratitude any good in the life, such as being able to perceive the wonder of the sensory world, and something is retained as consciousness which is accessible at any time. This is the spiritual essence of the being, which transforms the past into the presence of love.
The Killing Game
In the endeavour to create a civilised world order, the human race has made a virtue of war. The armed forces are deployed as a demonstration of the fighting spirit of the country – at least that’s what the propaganda machine wants us to believe. The personnel in the armed forces are primed for war and destruction by the very nature of their profession. Those in charge know that any doubt in the troops will have a negative effect on morale and distract them from the task at hand.
Rule one in the art of warfare: know thy enemy. The enemy is self which, as the thinker, creates speculative scenarios in the head unaware it has a body. This makes the self restless and crave power over other bodies or nations to compensate for what it thinks it lacks. The outbreak of war begins in the head, where the enemy has breached the walls that safeguard the perimeter of the mind. Prior to any external hostilities the politicians and generals are already engaged in a raging conflict within the psychic space of their own subconscious. What could possibly be worse than being at war, either within as in emotional conflict or without in the violence and mayhem of combat? Yet this is the way of life we‘ve devised on planet earth.
Human nature is a warring nature which began as territorial disputes among the primitive tribes. These skirmishes replicated the behaviour of the animal species when protecting their space from potential predators. The difference was that then there was no emotional attachment to the outcome. It was a case of taking the necessary action and afterwards, if they survived, attending to wounds before returning to a state of inner contentment. All the cruelty, atrocities and depravity associated with war and human conflict came later as a consequence of the appalling lack of love surrendered to the subconscious demon of sex.
Sexual frustration is the cause of all violence on earth. When someone is no longer sexually frustrated there’s no desire to wage war or to inflict pain upon another, either physically or emotionally. Wars rage on the planet with alarming frequency, but for the majority of people the struggle is an inner battle that erupts whenever an emotional button is pressed. Peace is often shattered when single thoughts are allowed to run together as a pattern of past memory impressions. Before you know it, one thought leads to another and bang – an emotional eruption of force is released as anger or some other negative exchange.
To be responsible is to be willing to preserve the integrity of whatever the situation requires. The ultimate task is to be responsible for a life lived free of emotional negativity and psychological pain. As no-one in politics or the armed forces is responsible for the integrity of the whole, no war can be justified. This deeply subconscious dilemma makes many people question the validity of sending our boys (and now also our girls) to be killed or maimed. But to no avail. The brave soldiers do their duty and the loved ones left at home weep. And the casualties of war are rushed to the hospitals, their shattered bodies symbolic of the wretched condition of the world.
Regardless of the moral stance of the politicians or peace-keeping rhetoric of the generals, warfare is as popular today as it’s ever been. Up until now, the ultimate release of force has been kept relatively in check by safeguards in the democratic system such as the United Nations (supposedly the moral guardians of the people). Nevertheless, how to wage war ever more effectively on the enemy, or to maintain the balance of power over potential threats, is the overriding concern for any nation, state or leader. The more determined and fanatical an individual, the more he deflects the possibility of any scrutiny of his personal fears and vulnerability in confronting his inner self, the source of his unhappiness. One day, perhaps sooner than later, a particular individual will instigate the ultimate salvo of force as a demonstration of humanity’s unworthiness to carry on as before.
Peace, somebody once said, is only the opportunity for an army to regroup, replenish supplies and forge new alliances so as to be better prepared for the next war. Human evolution can be measured, not so much for the achievements of the great civilisations, but through its desire to wage war and destruction ever more effectively on each other. Peace is bad for business when you’re in the killing game.
The Fear to Love
The fear to love arises as a reaction to the experience of life in a loveless world. This is now a global neurosis which undermines the power of love. Love is a natural restorative and healer when free of the impediment of fear, and provides a sense of wellbeing that is constant and all-sustaining. Fear is synonymous with self. Self arises through sex, which becomes an unconscious negative force when unabated and able to control the mind and emotions of anyone it can possess.
The fundamental cause of the fear to love begins very early in the drama of life. At birth the infant body enters existence, having absorbed the emotional stress of the mother from the placenta in the womb. This negative energy is actualised the moment the umbilical cord is severed. It’s the young girl who’s most vulnerable to the forces of the world since the female consciousness is more naturally attuned to the original state of love than that of the male. The fear to love is registered at a deeply subconscious level in the presence of the father and any other males in the household or environment. They may be kind and loving, but their psychic emanation of sexual tension will imperceptibly infect the minds and emotional bodies of the young. All men are sexually frustrated, even the most promiscuous, until the self-obsessive drive for control over another has been transformed through love.
By the time the teenage girl reaches puberty she’s absorbed the anxieties, not only of her immediate environment but through the competitive regime of school and exposure to the sexual content generated through the internet. This energetic residue hardens as an emotional clot near the entrance of the vagina. When love is made for the first time, the virgin female is physically prepared but inwardly fearful and reliant on the loving reassurance from her lover. What happens is that she’s traumatised to some degree by the experience; the lovemaking was not what she expected it to be. And this is every woman’s story, more or less. She was looking for love while he was looking for sex. Her natural protection, which is her innocence and divinity of love, could not offset the forces of the sexual self. And if the lovemaking was beautiful, the man leaves soon afterwards – and in so doing breaks her young heart. Woman never gets over this first betrayal of love.
Woman fears sex without the presence of love. Her self-doubt often arises through her conflict between her yearning to be with man and the fear to enter a new relationship and suffer another broken heart. The solution is to be in command of love, but with the knowledge of what causes her pain. A woman must know what she doesn’t want, having experienced the highs and lows in her relationships. In this way the traumas of the past serve as the wisdom distilled through the living process of life. But she must be prepared to die for this, whatever the price in personal loss and material security. For example, she must be willing to put honesty to love first by refusing to compromise with anything that makes her emotional in her relationship with man.
For a woman who puts love first, it would be intolerable to her to be with a man who frequently cuts off from communicating or undermines her in any way. The hurts and disappointments from the endeavour to love in the past are able to serve in the present as warning signs, not unlike a burglar alarm that’s set off when triggered by an intruder. Although it’s less common for a man to realise at a sufficient depth of the psyche that he was born to love, and to undertake to reach woman with his great passion and divine inspiration, he is out there. And a man who is worthy will always appear at the behest of love to any woman who refuses to give in to man’s sexual self.
It’s essential in love for a woman to be as wise as a serpent and as a gentle as a dove. A woman can sometimes be overly assertive and critical of a man in situations where it’s not appropriate. This is often to disguise her fear as a safeguard to being hurt again, as she was when vulnerable to love in the past. Alternatively, a less assertive woman often submits to the demands of man to avoid any confrontation with the source of her inner pain. In both instances, it’s the fear to love which undermines the honesty of the interaction and right discrimination necessary to deal with the situation effectively.
When a woman knows what she’s doing, and is true to her innate wisdom and virtue, she’s invincible – and never again need fear to love.
Spirituality
What is it to be spiritual? Is it to wear a robe and shave the head, or perhaps to go to church and be reverent in the eyes of the world? Many people associate being spiritual with a traditional religion, or a psychic teaching that involves visualisation and positive affirmations to attract good fortune and prosperity. Then there are those who are devotional in their endeavour to ease the burden of others, such as charity workers, healers and those in the caring professions. Could it be, however, that the most spiritual man or woman is the most ordinary, distinguished only by their extraordinary self-knowledge of life and reality?
The beauty of the sensory earth is the impersonal reflection of the spiritual vision of life. Spirituality begins with the senses, created for us by divine intelligence so that we may appreciate the magnificence of this sensual world. The elemental aspects of the earth are as much a part of us as the hereditary traits of the species. It’s through the love of nature that the mythic realm can be intuited as the spiritual calling of God.
A man or woman sensitive to the essence of the spirit has learned not to interfere with anything that doesn’t concern them. Such an individual is attentive but not looking to make an impression on the environment beyond the needs of the situation. To be present and alert in the senses is a conscious state which enables things to be seen as they are and not interpreted through the wall of emotionality. For someone inwardly focused but also externally aware, there’s a pause between each action to acknowledge life in all of its manifestations. This inner poise emanates as an absence of force which is pleasing for people to be around.
A spiritual man endeavours to purify his sexual self. He avoids pornography and joking with mates about his sexual exploits, or sly innuendos in the company of women. This is not done through suppression or with a sense of missing out, but by knowing what he’s doing. Such a man is resolved to transform his negative emotions by being more gracious and loving, so as to transcend the unconscious demands of his self. When this becomes a continual focus for a man, the life starts to be lived with a profound sense of purpose. His actions and communication to others are supported by a bracing new energy, reflecting an authority not reliant on the personality as before.
In woman, the spirituality of the female principle is an emanation of the ineffable mystery of love. This, however, may be so subtle that it escapes recognition by the world at large. But she will reflect a quality to someone sensitive to the beauty of love that is recognised as something divine. She’s soft in her absence of force, yet able to be firm when necessary in response to the demands of the world. A spiritual woman adores the nobility of man, her opposite principle, but she puts love first as honesty to her own spiritual nature. Such a woman knows that some men will try to undermine her integrity, particularly in the workplace. Man knows that if he can make a woman emotional, he’ll be able to manipulate her for his own selfish desires. When a woman doubts herself she becomes vulnerable to being exploited in this way.
To be spiritual is to have nothing to defend as an attitude or position when someone’s critical of what you say or do. It’s to resist the need to having the last word, either in an altercation or to justify a past action. The idea is to surrender in the moment anything which would reinforce the self’s emotional clinging to the world. Humility is to be open to the truth of life wherever it appears. Someone who’s opinionated and has an answer for everything (except what’s important) is a long way from home. Spiritual pride is an iniquitous thread of ignorance which often impedes the direct experience of reality. This is why it’s often impossible to communicate the truth to someone indoctrinated by a religion, or attached to a particular teaching or philosophy.
Bruce Lee, the renowned exponent of the martial arts, when asked to describe his particular style of Kung Fu said that it was ‘the art of fighting without fighting.’ To me, living the divine life is the art of being spiritual without being spiritual. This is because I cannot know when I’m being spiritual – only when I’m not, such as when I catch the mind wandering or when emotionally provoked. People are in the enlightened state for longer periods than they realise; it’s just the identification with the emotional turbulence of everyday living that suggests they’re further out than in.
It’s not necessary to be spiritual in the eyes of the world to find God or to realise any higher state of consciousness. All that’s required is the good common sense to know what causes emotional pain and to desist from making the same mistake again. In my work I’ve had the great privilege of speaking about love and truth to many thousands of people from all walks of life. I’ve often been deeply touched by the humility and innocence of those who speak so openly about their lives. This demonstrates to me that the people are God; and it’s these ordinary people I love and endeavour to serve. Only by being ordinary can that which is extraordinary be realised amidst the drama of life.