There are moments, days and sometimes even months where we must face our darkest hour. Sometimes this is represented by things happening in the world around us that create deep sadness, despair, and anger within us. Yet other times this can come about through our own inner world when we are going through some challenging emotions around our own personal experience. Often both the inner and the outer can intertwine and we do not always know what is our own sadness, anger and rage, and what is that of others or that of the world around us.

The first step to take is to focus on our breath while breathing in and out of our heart center. We can do this for some time, and then begin to deepen the breath by bringing it into the stomach while gently and lovingly guiding the breath as deep as it may go into the pelvis region. Then pause, and begin the inhale moving up through the body. See where the inhale stops, and then begin the whole process again. We can do this for some time until we feel at ease.

By focusing on our breath, we can tune into our very being and essence. This can be a form of meditation as well as a very healthy step to include in with other daily rituals of self-love, self-care and meditation.

Now let us tune into our heart. What is our heart trying to say? This may take some time as we are only now beginning to truly understand how important it is to listen to our heart. What is our heart trying to tell us about any given situation or emotion? The more this becomes a daily practice, the more the true safety of our very existence begins to become clear, and the more we begin to realize and make manifest our true hearts desire. On the outside, the more we practice this, the more we can become a part of co-creating a heart-based world.

“As we learn to tap into our heart’s intelligence, it increases our vitality, our resilience, and especially our health and happiness.”

-Dr. Rollin McCraty

Often the first instinct is to run away from these emotions and situations.  Now, if there is an environment or person who is unable to value and treat us as the beautiful souls we are, walking away and giving them space to heal what is going on within them can be a true act of love towards that person and our self. When we recognize that the behavior is not ours and is unwanted and harmful, we can walk away and bless them. Wish them well, wish them healing, and know that they have probably had a painful past that they need to heal. Forgive them, and move forward.

Forgiving does not mean this person or situation needs to ever be a part of our life again, yet it does allow us to create healing space for them while freeing us of the need to carry their emotions any longer.

Sometimes it can seem more difficult to let go and let the Universe handle the harm and destruction that takes place in the world around us. When there is injustice and great harm on the Earth, it is then most especially time for us to up our level of kindness, love, compassion, respect, humility, integrity and demonstrate what true healing is by being the light in times of darkness.

There is a very magical and powerful transformation from dark to light that takes place when individuals refuse to give up and give away their power, and instead up their game of self-love, self-care and kindness and compassion towards others.

“We have within us, a power that is greater than anything we shall ever contact in the outer, a power that can overcome every obstacle in our life and set us safe, satisfied and at peace, healed and prosperous, in a new light, and in a new life.”

Ernest Holmes

When we trust in our heart, follow our guidance, and discern what is right for our beautiful soul, we help the world to do so as well. There are situations and lessons that may arise, yet the more we learn to go within, and navigate them through our focused breath and heart space, the more we learn to let go and let the Universe, the more we learn to stand in our lighted power and walk into any darkness knowing by our very presence we will transform it.

Always remember, each one of us has a very beautiful and unique song to sing to the world. The more we shine our light like the stars we truly are, and the louder we sing our beautiful songs with our very own fragrance, the more the world responds with love. Let’s celebrate each other, let’s honor each other, and let us always remember that there is only one you and there is only one me. What are we waiting for, and when will we begin to light the world with our love? The time for me, and the time for you is now.

Let’s take three deep breaths together, tune in and turn up the love. Let’s follow the inner guidance of our heart so we can all arrive. We are growing, we are expanding, we are raising our consciousness and creating a new reality and thus a new world unlike any other. Yesterday already was, and tomorrow has yet to be, will you join us in filling today with hope, goodness, truth, love and beauty? We always have a choice. What will you choose?

Cover Image Credit: no more lookism discovered on Conscious Lifestyle Magazine

Ulonda Faye has a B.A. in Political Science and International Studies, and studied Peace and Conflict Research during her Masters program in International Relations. She survived a Near Death Experience during an accident that led her into Mind-Body-Spirit studies. She is a certified Wellness Practitioner, Rejuv Miracles Practitioner, and holistic esthetician as well as an ordained spiritual minister. Her services are available in person or through Skype and are offered in English and German. For more information, please visit fayenaturales.com

A soap bubble may serve as a good symbol of our individual, separate existence, as it surrounds and protects us, but at the same time completely isolates us from the external reality and the other ”soap bubble” people. We may try to get closer to reality or to another person, but we are never able to reach them, as there is the wall of the soap-bubble. We are only able to see reality and the other people through the wall of the soap-bubble, which is tinted to various colors by our opinions and desires.

Three Basic Motivational Factors

According to humanistic psychology, we have three basic motivational factors that determine the birth of personal identity. One is the need to belong to somebody, the other is the need of safety, and the third is the need of appreciation.

These demands or needs appear in our life in the order listed above, and they are hierarchically connected to each other. It means that the need of safety only becomes important when our need to belong to somebody has already been satisfied, at least to a minimum extent. Similarly, the need of appreciation will be important when we already belong to somebody (it can be an individual or a group), and our need of safety, stability has been met to a certain degree.

Satisfying these needs is of primary importance for us, as they provide the foundations for our individual existence and personal identity.

All this also suggests that our personal identity is basically social, as belonging to somebody, safety and appreciation all depend on other people.

 The foundations of our personal identity are constructed in the first years of our life, when we are embedded in the society of our family. Our parents are the ones who help us satisfy our needs, and in this way lay down the foundation stones of our separate, individual existence.

A soap bubble may serve as a good symbol of our individual, separate existence

In the Safety of our Soap-Bubble Castle

Our parents and teachers ”blow up” the soap-bubble for us, when they satisfy our initial needs, and we soon regard our soap-bubble as our own personal identity. In the course of our life, we develop the soap-bubble into a soap-bubble castle that we regard as safe. Since we have no idea that we are soap-bubble people, we are immensely proud of our own soap-bubble, the construction diary of which is added to our own personal history.

A soap-bubble town

Our soap-bubble castle does not stand alone in some desert; it stands in one of the streets of a nice soap-bubble town, close to the other soap-bubble castles, as the need to belong to someone, our needs of safety and of appreciation will only be satisfied in interaction with other soap-bubble people.

But, as a consequence of our soap-bubble existence, all these needs will never be completely satisfied, as the walls of our soap-bubbles do not allow real connection and contact with others.

The walls of the soap-bubble are created by our sense of separation which destines us to eternal solitude, even if there are hundreds of other soap-bubble people around us in our soap-bubble town. In order to alleviate the unpleasantness of loneliness, we decorate our soap-bubble existence with nice images made of the individuality of our life, and we fill books with nice tales of our life. The images, the tales and the alleged safety of the soap-bubble town lull us into a false sense of security, into a beautiful dream.

False Sense of Safety

There are numerous signs in our life that all indicate how false our sense of safety is. One sich sign is the confusion in our relationships with other people. This confusion is brought about the fact that as soap-bubble people we will never be able to completely understand the others, and will never be able to come into real contact with them.

We are only able to contact other people through the walls of our soap-bubble, but the wall is tinted into different, distorting colours by our desires and opinions. The distorting coat of colours will be thicker and thicker in the course of our life, making the originally transparent walls more and more difficult to see through. We therefore never see reality itself, but only something that we believe is reality.

Every single individual created their own individual reality in this way, and the reality thus created is different from all the other individual realities.

As there are no two identicial individual realities, the realities, when get into contact, often collide with each other. Naturally, there are realities which are similar to each other, and the force of collision is smaller when such realities meet, and it is likely that they are able to come into a compromise and create a district in the soap-bubble town where they enjoy a higher sense of safety.

Another sign that points at the weaknesses of our sense of safety is the fear of death, which is present in every human being.

The big unknown arrives, and bursts our soap-bubble castle in an instant

Enveloped in the false sense of security of our soap-bubble castle, we are all afraid of death, which will put an end to our soap-bubble existence. The big unknown arrives, and bursts our soap-bubble castle in an instant.

We may pretend that death does not exist, that after death we will be in a bigger soap-bubble, or the master who blows the soap-bubbles will protect us from perishing.

These tales only alleviate our fear of death somewhat, but will not fully eliminate it.

The End of the Soap-Bubble Existence

What is able to put an end to the soap-bubble existence?

The first step is the recognition that our existence is built upon false foundations, that there is something wrong with it.

Without realizing that, we so strongly identify with our soap-bubble existence that we consider that as our basic and natural state.

But if we start to wake up from the dream of our soap-bubble existence, we realize very soon that there is something wrong with us in the world around us. Then the glue binding us to the world of forms and shapes begins to melt away, a space, smaller or larger, is created in us and-detached from the forms and shapes-we are able to contemplate the forces determining our personal life as eyewitnesses.

Now we realize that this soap-bubble life, this separate world does not exist at all, it has only been created by our identification with thoughts, forms and shapes.

The obligation and urge to build up a personal identity generates this separation, this soap-bubble around us almost automatically. Society then feeds and sustains the separation.

What are we without our personal identity?

We are the free space of the Consciousness

When we wake up from the sleep of personal identity we recognize that we are the free space of the Consciousness. We are not identical with the shapes and forms appearing in this space, but we are the space itself, the space that enables the forms and shapes to appear and that keeps the forms and shapes alive.

~From the book: Frank M. Wanderer: The Biggest Obstacle to Enlightenment: How to Escape from the Prison of Mind Games?

Read more articles from Frank M. Wanderer

“Meditation is a subtle, barely perceptible stream, in which you will experience a radical shift of the center of gravity. The manifestation, limited in time and space, thick and heavy, that you have formerly regarded as yourself, changes into a weightless but ubiquitous point without limits and dimensions. The massive creature, bound to the earth that used to be you, is now free from its bonds and begins to soar.” Frank M. Wanderer

An Effective Remedy for the Overburdened Mind

Our Mind is one of the most sophisticated, most complicated instruments in the world. In this modern, rushing world, however, the Mind is bombarded with information to the extent that it virtually overflows. On those occasions the amounts of unprocessed information whirl in the Mind so fast that we are sometimes afraid of going mad. All the unprocessed information demands our attention, naturally, every single idea may appear to be very important for us. Our body reacts to the rushing stream of our thoughts, and sometime we fall ill because of the stress caused by our overburdened Mind. Is there anything that we may do to alleviate the burden of our Mind, is there a medicine to treat the problem?

Naturally, the remedy exists, and its name is meditation. A good night’s sleep in itself has long been insufficient for our Mind to rest. At night our body sleeps, but the our Mind continues to rush. The enormous amounts of information absorbed during the day are processed by our Mind at night. It is done with the help of dreaming. Thus, by the time our Mind has finished processing the information, our body is awake again, and a new day, full of stimuli begins. Our Mind therefore does not have its due share of rest, and it is soon overburdened. All this leads to a stressful life, and our body may eventually become ill.

We have to consciously find the time for our Mind to have some relaxation and to have an opportunity to shake out all that useless information. We must therefore find the place for meditation in our daily timetable. During meditation, the Mind rearranges itself, it is refreshed and revitalized and rejuvenated.

Active Meditation vs. True Meditation

In your present, isolated state of Consciousness, based upon your identification with your illusionary self, spatial consciousness is not present in your life, so you are unable to experience Consciousness free of forms.

But you have read a lot about this subject, so you wish to bring things beyond forms and shapes under the control of your Ego, in order to stabilize the Ego and make it permanent. You have read or heard somewhere that meditation is the best method to that end, so you have began to meditate diligently.

The Active Meditation

But you are approaching meditation the way you do with other objects of the outside world. You believe that meditation is also an activity of the mind, a concentration on an objects (e. g. a burning candle), or your own respiration or a mantra.

Meditation is therefore something that you perform yourself. Through active meditation you wish to reach a higher state of the Mind, which is expected to give you happiness, satisfaction and enlightenment.

You start to practice meditation as an individual self, as an Ego. You make efforts to tranquilize your mind. This activity may be successful up to a certain level, when you suppress your thoughts and emotions with your willpower, reaching transitory peace in you. That state will be lost immediately, when you stop concentrating, meditating, and no longer sustain the effort, as your mind returns to its usual activities, the old pre-conditioned patterns.

Meditation therefore has not brought you the lasting peace you had been longing for and you had read so much about, the peace independent of your mind that reinforces your existence in the world.

Your personal identity is rooted in your actions and the results of those actions. Your personal history is the chronicle of your actions and achievements.

The idea of being active is therefore a product of your conditioned mind, your Ego. Ambitions to acquire, to achieve something all work as motivations for action in the Ego-dominated mind. The desire to control, to manage are also powerful urges to act.

As you have seen, these very same forces are the ones that spur you to meditate. It is, nevertheless, not a bad phenomenon, as active meditation is the first step towards real meditation. Active meditation consolidates the outermost dimension of Alertness, that, is attention, in you.

The True Meditation

Your attempts at meditation are futile because real meditation is, by nature, effortless. It does not create an artificial quiet, but allows the deeper dimensions of Alertness to surface. This is the deep internal Silence that constitutes the real core of man.

The spatial awareness thus acquired remains with you after meditation, for longer and longer periods of time. You will eventually no longer need meditation, as the deeper dimensions of Alertness are there with you, so every moment in your life will be meditative.

Real meditation is always without object and is never the result of an activity, but Presence in the space of Consciousness. This natural, effortless Presence is meditation itself.

The deeper dimensions of Alertness, the awakened Consciousness, the world of Silence, are beyond the mind. This Silence is not forced upon us by some concentration technique, but the indescribable but experienceable of living emptiness. Conscious existence in the space of Consciousness.

A Simple and Powerful Meditation Technique

Let us take a closer look at that, how are the deeper dimensions of Alertness increase their presence in you, and how are you able to get from the state of consciousness meaning ”I am this and that” to the state ”I am,” how can you replace active meditation with real meditation?

Let us start by observing that in every waking moment you experience that you exist, you are. This experience is, however, so common and familiar that you do not dwell on it too long. Instead, you are preoccupied by “who are you” and “what are you.”

That is how your entire life story is born: ”What was I, what will I be, what I want to become”. The Ego-dominated mind keeps revolving around these questions, creating the psychological categories of time, the past and the future.

The fact that you exist means that you are alert. The fact that you are conscious and alert is the result of the pure Consciousness in you! In the following we wish to experience that pure Consciousness, we want to enable that Consciousness to awaken to its own existence in and through us.

Once you are able to keep your attention on the object of your meditation, now try to divert your attention from it to the space in which the object of your attention appears.

Then a new dimension of Alertness opens up in you. The space thus opening and the Presence appearing in it are now there for you to observe, your attention is able to grab them. You experience that you are Consciousness, sensing the work of the mind.

Now shift our attention to that contemplating Consciusness, to the “I exist,” to the pure Presence. Try to find the core of the Consciousness, the idea of ”I am,” and who the person who has done the meditations before really is.

Submerged into the Quiet of ”I am”

Submerge completely in the feeling of ”I am,” allow it to remain in itself, prevent it from being connected to thoughts and ideas, to the works of mind. Try to find the silence, the quiet of ”I am,” and stay within that.

In the meanwhile, try to locate Consciousness itself. Do not only watch what you are looking at, but also from where and with what intensity you are looking at it? In what quality are you watching? Who are you in the process of observation?

Be in the state from which recognition emerges, be at the source of recognition, where you are able to see recognition itself. Be in Sight itself.

Do not worry about the operations of your mind, just stay in the sensation of ”I am.” Do not qualify, do not interpret! Stay in the sensation of ”I am.”

Whenever your attention wanders away, trying to get into contact with thoughts, trying to be manifested in some story, bring it back to the state of ”I am,” and keep it there.

~From the book:Frank M. Wanderer: The Flames of Alertness: Discover the Power of Consciousness! (This books presents the path from active meditation to true meditation)

Read more articles from Frank M. Wanderer

For a wound to heal… you don’t keep touching it, picking at it or scratching it. It’s common sense, right? So… why do we keep doing it to ourselves?

Yesterday night, I realized that I’ve been way too hard on myself when it comes to getting past old wounds and insecurities. I saw that most of my stress and struggle were not because going through so-and-so emotion or challenge was so difficult. It was because of my incredibly stress-inducing reaction to every new dis-ease coming my way.

Here’s an extreme example of such a reaction:

“What’s this emotion now? Where is it from? OH, not those daddy issues again? I thought I was over that! Is there something else I don’t know? Maybe I should buy this book about abandonment issues. Maybe I should go meditate and dig some more into past traumas… or maybe past lives! Or maybe i’ll just go eat a whole bag of chips and 2 chocolate bars. Actually… I’ll just go post a meme about it. With my bag of chips and chocolate.”

“What happens when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, queasy? Notice the panic where you instantly grab for something.” – Pema Chödrön

It seems that many philosophies in the spiritual/personal development realm are all about endless psychoanalysis of our emotions and digging into ten thousand “hows” and “whys” — all aiming at explaining why we feel a certain way. I’m not saying there isn’t value in understanding the roots of our wounds. Actually… it is a must! But once you’ve touched it, once you’ve fully seen it and felt it… you don’t need to keep touching it. You don’t need to keep poking at it further whenever there is a little flare up, or fuel it with a hundred more stories about why you are so wounded still. You can just LET. IT. BE.

This is something I am basically just learning now. Having a strong and stubborn intellect, I’ve always been into “trying to figure it all out”. Trying to fix things with my head. But there is a time and place for putting the mind at use, and there is a time and place for simply allowing ourselves to be as we are; present, open and gentle with ourselves.

You don’t intellectualize your way into loving and being there for a child, for example. You don’t read books about psychology to a kid that simply needs you to be there and hold their hand. In the same way, we sometimes just need to BE there for ourselves, without saying anything. Without trying to fix anything or talk ourselves out of whatever we may be feeling. Sometimes, to heal, we just need to be there, and that’s it. And I don’t mean curling into the foetus position and cry a river because “we should throw ourselves into a dramatic purging process every time an emotion says hi.” You can do that if it feels natural to you, but where I am getting at is that shifting from one state to another can also be accomplished with the lightest of touches, as my wise friend Kosta Stoyanoff would say. With a gentle acknowledgment of what you are feeling, a smile of compassion, and a willingness to continue moving forward even if you aren’t feeling “perfect” yet.

“As long as our orientation is toward perfection or success, we will never learn about unconditional friendship with ourselves, nor will we find compassion. ” ― Pema Chödrön

See, the only reason I’m writing this blog right now is because last night, I’ve decided to put the cellphone and distractions down for a few hours and just be there with what I’m feeling. I recognized my anxious feelings of not “being enough” and of this moment not “being enough” as products of an old train of thought that has never before led me to a happier and more fulfilled space anyways. So instead of treating it as this big ol’ monster requiring 10 more hours of psychoanalysis and anxious “figuring things out”, I simply let it be. I sort of said “Hey, I recognize you. You can stick around or whatever, but I’m just going to feel this out and not listen to your suggestions of finding yet another way to run away. I will just stay here and be okay in this moment with myself.”

Doing this shifted me out of this overwhelming fight-or-flight mode and provided me this single insight that I swear is going to be a game changer for me from now on. I already feel more relaxed. I already feel like I can move forward and be a better friend to myself. Growth doesn’t have to be a constant battle with yourself. It can be a wonderful, supportive relationship between your mind and soul. This is what I want to build my life on. No wonder I’ve been struggling with internet addiction, attention-seeking, sugar cravings and distraction binges lately. I’ve been beating myself up for it wondering what’s been wrong with me… but the truth is ANYONE would want to escape from the stressful and pressuring relationship I’ve been having with myself. It is even understandable that my poor mind would want to take a break from myself with food, social media newsfeeds or whatever else can take my mind off the bully inside of me. But that bully is me. It’s always been me against me. The beautiful thing though… is that it can also be me supporting me. Me loving me. Me being patient, kind and gentle to me. We all hear and say that we need to be more kind, gentle and loving people… no reason this shouldn’t apply to ourselves. 🙂

“The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.” ― Pema Chödrön

I believe that being more gentle and easy with our internal ebbs and flows is what provides us the perfect environment and space to actually heal and flourish. It’s kind of like providing a child with the love, patience, wisdom, care and space he or she needs to thrive and grow into the best version of themselves. You don’t punish a child for falling down when they are learning how to walk. You don’t ignore them or run away in fear either. You understand that they are just calibrating their balancing muscles and are learning as they go. Growing as a human being is also a process of learning as we go; a natural one. You don’t grow a flower by pulling on it. You simply give it sunlight and water and let it flourish at its own space. You can’t control your own or anyone else’s growth, you can only support it.

Would you rather have a controlling or a supporting friend? A controlling or a supporting parent? If you’re like me, you probably resonate with the latter. So let’s go ahead and be what we seek. 🙂

“There are more than enough voices in this world that will weigh you down by telling you that you are “not enough” of something or other… Don’t let yours be one of them.” – Kosta Stoyanoff

Many people are concerned about the increasing pollution, violence and suffering. We want to help, but many times we feel that we are powerless against these trends. However, there is an universal law that you should take into account before trying to help: You should clean up your mental garbage. The largest manufacturer of junk in our lives is our own Minds, so first of all we need to know clean it up and to recognize its functioning.

The Nature of the Mind

In order to control something, we first need to know the thing concerned¸ so we must know our Mind so as to be in charge of it. The most important thing we need to about our Mind is that it is not something that exists separately, individually, like some inanimate object.

The Mind is not an object–it is a process. The process of constantly streaming thoughts. This stream of the thoughts is what we perceive as the Mind. When these thoughts disappear, the Mind disappears with them, as the two are only able to exist together. The very basic nature of thoughts is that they are in a constant move, and this motion, almost automatically, creates the Mind.

A characteristic feature of our Mind is that it keeps roaming, wandering; it operates in something like an automatic mode. Thoughts come and go all the time. If we attempt to suppress them, it is only possible with considerable efforts, and even then to a short time only. In most of our waking time, our Mind wanders either in the past or in the future, in our thoughts we deal with our experience of the past, offences we suffered in the past, or with our future plans, goals and fears.

Another characteristic of our Mind is that it constantly evaluates things. It means that we do not simply live through our experiences, but we also categorize them as good or bad. We judge everything that happens to us and everybody we meet in our lives. This permanent categorization may easily lead to a distorted perception of the world, as we evaluate our new experiences in these categories. If we find an experience negative, we will tend to keep–and reinforce–that category for similar experiences in the future. Our perception will therefore be selective, and we will only accept the stimuli that reinforces our categorization, and we tend to ignore those that fall outside our usual categories.

The third important characteristic of the Mind is that it permanently produces stories. These stories often have a disastrous end. For instance, I suddenly try to remember whether I locked the door of my home or not. The Mind immediately fabricates a whole story around the idea: I did leave it open, a burglar came, my valuables have been stolen, and the police, instead of chasing the thief, will harass me with their questions. We often experience the ends and emotional consequences of these stories. Another type of stories deals with us, who are we, what are we like, what we should do or should have done. The entirety of these stories comprises our personal histories.

A Foolish Game

Most people tend to identify with their thoughts and personal histories, that is, with their Minds. A lot of us are not satisfied with what we are, and we would like to have a better and more beautiful personal history. That is why we create a mental image of our desired personal development, and the ways of making the work of our Minds more effective.

In order to achieve the mental image we ourselves have created, we embark on a foolish game, as we attempt to bring our Minds under our own control, and be the masters of our own development. Since we do not know the nature of the Mind, this venture is destined to failure right from the beginning.

This game is foolish, since in fact one half of the Mind attempts to bring the other half under control. Our Mind itself deems our own mental image of our personal development good. At the same time, this half of the Mind deems the other half, the one we wish to change, bad. Mental images fight against each other, trying to overcome each other, using the weapons of selective perception and story fabrication. The struggle goes on, with changing luck, all through our lives. Sometimes we believe that we are making some progress, we are improving, and a few weeks, months or years later we drop into the abyss of despair.

A lot of us play this foolish game all through our lives, because we are unable to recognize the simple fact that a Mind is unable to overcome itself. We may, perhaps, with the utmost effort, suppress what we believe is bad in us. That is, however, just a virtual victory, leading us to virtual calm and personal development, because when our power declines, the suppressed forces break out again, destroying all the temporary results that we achieved previously, washing away the results of our personal development.

The Freedom of Tolerance

Now we can see that the way leading to our control over our Minds does not lead through suppressing them. It is not possible to control the Mind in the ordinary sense of the word. Partly because it only exists in its functions and operation, and partly because there is nobody to control it. One half of the Mind, as we have seen, does not control, only suppresses the other half.

In order to be able to control our Minds, we must step outside of them. This statement may sound surprising to a lot of us, since we tend to fully identify with our Minds and their operations. As long as this identification is strong, we shall not be able to step outside the crazy dance of our Minds; we will have to merely suffer its consequences.

Nowadays, however, more and more of us begin to realize and experience that we are more than our Minds, more that our thoughts and emotions, and the personal history these thoughts and emotions build up. Our attention is no longer completely engaged by telling our personal history and identifying with that personal history, and we become more and more sensitive to the deeper dimensions of our life. We also begin to notice the breaks between thoughts, and we begin to turn towards these gates leading beyond the Mind.

In these breaks between thoughts, Mind does not work, it is not there–it simply vanishes. What is left there is the alertly watching Consciousness. If we are able to take roots in that alert Consciousness, we recognize that this watching alertness is tolerant with the Mind and its operations. We shall see that there is nothing wrong with thoughts, nothing wrong with the operations of the Mind. It is not necessary to struggle against the Mind, as it is not an enemy, only an instrument that, without control, tends to function chaotically.

We only have a chance to know the true nature of thoughts and the functions of the Mind if we detach ourselves from them, keep a distance, and do not consider them as enemies. They will reveal their secrets to the alert Consciousness, watching with affection, and we will see the subtle shades of the Mind, the games it plays and the dreams it evokes.

Controlling the Mind

This tolerant, alert, watching attitude to the functions of the Mind will give us the ability of stopping our thinking effortlessly. Once thinking has been suspended, the continuous stream of thoughts stops, the Mind itself disappears and stops working.

Now we shall not seek our own identity in an identification with the Mind, since we have found our real center, our real self, our alertly watching Consciousness. We will be aware that thoughts and the Mind have not really disappeared, they are still there, only in a dormant state. Our attitude to thoughts and the Mind will entirely change at that moment. We think when necessary, and we do not need the Mind, we put it aside. The Mind no longer dominates our life, it is not more than an obedient tool that we use or not use as we please.

That is when we realize how wonderful an instrument the Mind is, and now we are able to use it for its original purpose. And the purpose of the Mind is to serve as a means of connections, to connect us to the world to each other. Through the Mind, used with alert Consciousness, creative energies are released to the world, and create a wonderful harmony there.

From the book>> : Frank M. Wanderer: The Revolution of Consciousness: Deconditioning the Programmed Mind

Read more articles from Frank M. Wanderer

Many of us think that we are not only the main actors of the films of our lives but also the directors of it. But the more detailed analysis of the reality shows that this is only an illusion. In most cases our mind directs the film of our lives, not we. I’ve previously introduced in my articles how the mind works, now I only wish to point out those factors, which manipulate our film of life unconsciously. 3 type of social engineering attacks  are the following: the Consumer Social Pattern, the Power of Expectations and the Mirror of Opinions.

The Consumer Social Pattern

The most important system of social co-existence on Earth today is the consumer society. It means that the basis of social development is economic growth and economic growth depends on how much we consume.

The most important consumer is Ego, since all products obtained (house, car, expensive clothes), improve the imaginary greatness of the Ego. The more commodities or more power we possess, the more important members of consumer society we are.

If we are able to divert our attention from Ego, and concentrate on our internal development and our spiritual birth, our qualities as consumers will considerably drop, since we are no longer attracted to the things that so far fattened our Egos.

As in the recent decades more and more people have felt a need for spiritual birth, social strategy changed accordingly. Spiritual development has also been made a consumer product, which largely supported by the survival instinct of the Ego. The Ego, which has been interested in money and power, now turns towards spiritual development, and disguises itself in the dress of a spiritual Ego. We try to decorate those spiritual clothes by adding more and more spiritual knowledge and experience so as to make it more colorful and individual.  With all that, we hope that our spiritual progress will serve the further increase and eternal happiness of our spiritual Ego.

Consumer society is all too pleased to serve us in those needs. A glance at the vivid market of spiritual books, methods and masters will suffice to convince us about that. Nothing has really changed; the pattern of the consumer society is the same, only its contents have been partially replaced.

The Power of Expectations

The more complex a society is, the more space a specific member of it is supposed to occupy in the complicated system of human relationships. Every such occupied status involves a set of rules, the system of expectations that dictate how the individual occupying the status is supposed to behave in a specific situation, how to behave as a man, a father, a doctor etc.

These expectations tell us how we must and how we must not behave in a specific situation and in connection with a specific person.

In the majority of cases, these expectations work unconsciously, almost like automatic programs running in our life. These deep programs have become a part of our mind in the course of our upbringing, and they are activated by a specific situation in which we are or a person we get into contact with. Then we put on the appropriate mask, tailored to the specific situation or person.

We occupy several statuses at the same time, so it seems that we drown in the sea of expectations. It is also common that the various expectations attached to various statuses collide with each other, generating further anxiety and stress for us.

What keeps us on the forced track of expectations, why do not we simply leave it behind?

The dynamizing power of the social expectations is provided by our identification with the internal and external expectations, and base our identity on them. We identify with our social statuses, with the masks of our roles in our gender, family and occupation. These masks are attached to us so closely that we would not be able to exist without them. We indentify ourselves with our internal expectations, and our scruples and level of demands often constitute the cornerstone of our identity.

We are so deeply identified with these social expectations, we do not notice that these very expectations convert us into replicas, fake personalities. The pages of our personal history are written by these external forces imposed upon us by society, they determine how to see the world, how to think about the world, how to think about it, what to believe in, what is good for us and what we should avoid.

That is how we have lost our individuality over the years and became unconsciously the victims of a manipulation based upon public agreement. The social expectations have been shaped through a general agreement over the centuries, and became manipulative because we insisted on our identification with the separate state of consciousness.

That is how we jointly sustain this identity, rooted in isolation, this social ”creatureness,” because, due to our ignorance, we stick to the world of forms and shapes. We are only able to imagine our personal existence in the here and now.

The Mirror of Opinions

”Tell me, what do you think about me, what is your opinion about me?” we have asked other people this question a number of times. What we have gathered from the opinions received from others, we forged an image of ourselves, who we are and what our mission in life is. We have gradually identified with the image, we believed that the image is really us; we have pinned it up on the wall of our room, and proudly show it to any coming our way: look, that is me.

On the other hand, the image in the mirror has also caused us a lot of worry, since there is always a doubt in us: does that image really meet the expectations of others, do we appear good, decent, religious enough in the eyes of others?

As a consequence, we spend our whole life polishing and improving the image in order to make it look better and better for others. We tend to believe that the best strategy in this process is copying, imitating others. This is a strategy that we use from our babyhood onward, that is how we learn our native language, and that is how we acquire the elements of our culture. Later, when we are older, we continue copying others, since if we follow the ways of those who lead a decent and good life, we cannot be wrong.

Another characteristic feature of our image in the mirror is that it is contradictory by nature. We receive almost as many opinions as many friends and acquaintances we have. Some may consider as clever, whereas others do not find that the most important feature of ours. It generates a permanent state of uncertainty in connection with the image, that is, in connection with ourselves.

This uncertainty in connection with ourselves shall serve as a basis for our desire to convince other people that the image in the mirror is true, and we really are the way other people see us. If our identification wirth the image in the mirror, generated from the opinions of others, is strong, it keeps us in a virtually hypnotic state, and we life our whole life under the spell of that image.

Be the Director of the Film of your Life

If we realise how these unconscious processes affect our lives, we can become the directors of the films of our lives.

Our internal development therefore does not only depend on our life experience; it depends much more on our ability to divert our attention from the outside world to our internal world. The patterns of the consumer society are determined to prevent us from making the necessary adjustments in our orientation by gluing our attention to various consumer products or a spiritual development scheme that involves the Ego. A major element of this spiritual development pattern is that we are trying to understand the contents of our Minds, to analyze our thoughts and emotions. Our attention is thus engaged by the various methods that we are using to examine our thoughts and emotions. That is what we regard as our real internal world, and we create the illusion of toiling on our spiritual birth.

From the aspect of our spiritual growth the –often chaotic– world of our Mind and emotions is not our real internal world. Our attention should not be directed to the analysis and comprehension of these; instead, we need to concentrate on becoming conscious of our existence, to find the center of our Self behind our external life and personal history. That is our real internal world.

In the course of our spiritual world we become conscious of, and alert to that internal center, to that internal world. Once that has been accomplished, our life is placed on entirely new foundations. The Mind stops functioning the way it used to and, together with that, our sense of identifying with the Mind vanishes. The spiritual Ego, our separate little self disappears, and we are permeated by a permanent, light presence. The personality is gone, and what remains is silence and presence, as the real essence of our existence. From that time on, that will serve as the real foundation for our internal development.

We submerge into the present moment, we shall experience a miracle. At present, the program of our internal expectations have already been dissolved, and we no longer identify with our expectations of the other people.  The mirror of opinions blurs, and our wholesome Self, the pleasure of Existence shall be revealed.

From the new book>>Frank M. Wanderer Ph.D  3 Stages in the Evolution of the Human Spirit EGO – ALERTNESS – CONSCIOUSNESS

Read more articles from Frank M. Wanderer

Featured Image

“There is no death! Only change exists, and there are wonderful changes in the space of Consciousness, who you really are ”  –Frank M. Wanderer

During our spiritual Journey through the world of shapes and forms, we are often under the effect of our daily disappointments, as our “sandcastles come tumbling down,” and we ask ourselves the question: ”What am I doing here?”

In a narrow sense it may mean: ”What am I doing in this situation?” or ”What  am I doing in these relationships?In a broader sense the meaning can be: ”What am I doing in this life, what is the sense of life, what is my ultimate goal ? Why was I born onto this Earth?”

The socially conditioned mind is ready with the answer to all those questions, provides a detailed description and explanation, underpinned with scientific arguments. It tells us and analyses our own personal histories, starting with birth and ending with death. Between the tangible endpoints, the already and the yet, every single conscious moment of our life is embedded int he story as experience.

Every such personal history, however, has its own problems and conflicts, beauties, ups and downs, and questions awaiting answers. One of the central questions in almost every autobiography is the following:

• How could I achieve more in life in order to be happy?

One of the awakened teachers, who has experienced the real nature of truth, Nissargadatta Maharaj believes, however, that instead of asking that, we should concentrate on the following questions:

• What is my true nature?
• What is the capital that I had when I was born and that has stayed with me since the moment when I realized that I existed?
• How did I acquire this bodily structure, together with the vitality and Consciousness that gives me the sense of Presence?
• How long is it going to last?
• What had I been before this body was born, and what am I going to be when this body decomposes?
• Who was born, and who is going to die?
• Who am I?

The only answer to these questions is that the capital with which we were born and which stays with us is the concept of ”I am here, I am now,” the intuitive feeling and reality of ”I am.” It is only possible to experience that in the Present moment, in the Now.

Past is an intangible part of our personal history, and future is the expectations we project into it. Both are products of the mind, therefore illusory, false, not realistic things.

 From the Edge to the Centerpoint

In order to bring our life into a resting point, the Present moment, we need to “move” from the edge to the centerpoint.

What does it mean?

The edge is the present state of Consciousness, in which the overwhelming majority of people live. That is the state of identifying with the mind, that of the dormant Consciousness, which dreams and tells our personal history.

That is the state of perfect identification with thoughts, emotions and desires, where we seek the goals of our life only in the world of forms and shapes, whether they are crude material forms (the world experienced with our sensory organs) or fine material forms (thoughts, emotions). The motor of our existence on the edge is the ambition to become something or somebody and to be in control all the time.

The centerpoint, the Awakened Consciousness, and the world of internal silence are beyond the mind. It does not refer to the internal silence forced upon oneself by various techniques called meditation (in this case, in fact concentration), but theundescribable, but experiencable, alive and living internal emptiness. In there, there is no effort, no desire and ambition, and we give up the last bastion of wanting to be in control. This is the state of perfect abandoment and submission, submitting ourselves to the Present Moment, to the Now. That centerpoint is the Self.

At the very moment when you find a resting point in the center, you will be away from the edge, and you will be able to see your previous self (the image created by the mind). Here it becomes obvious that the external world may only touch or scratch the edge, but never your real Self.

Be Alert and Conscious!

How can we get from the edge to the center of our Self ? The solution of this question should be the inner purpose of every human being. A precondition of making a move is promoting the emergence of the extra sensitivity found inside us.

The first phase of the process is becoming sensitive to our external environment in a new manner. Be consciously attentive to your environment, see, hear and feel everything with an intensity and vividity that we should be the eye when we see, we should be the ear when we hear, and we should be the sensor when we touch. We must not, however, stick to any of the senses, we should be attentive to everything at the same time, when all the senses unite. The information broadcast by all the senses will merge  into one single stimulus.

After practising and making it regular, the second phase of the process comes. In the second phase we turn our alert attention inward.

The first phase of turning inward is becoming conscious of our body. In most cases, our body works unconsciously, automatically, we are not really aware of how we walk, sit, eat etc. Now our alert attention will be extended to these activities as we try to use our body more consciously. As we become gradually more and more conscious of our body, we perceive more and more of the vitality and energy in the physical body and beyond. We thus become more and more sensitive to our internal body. If we do not give up consciously watching our body, but diligently practise it, after a while the sense of the inner body becomes permanent and keeps us in the present time as a massive anchor.

Once we have become conscious in connection with our body and the awareness of inner body is a permanent part of our life, then we may advance even deeper as the third phase of the process. We may become alert to the functions of the mind, the ideas, concepts, projections and the emotions generated by all these in the body. As we become more conscious of our mind, we may observe that the initially permanent and forced operations of the mind slow down, our thoughts become more transparent and the mind, slowly and gradually, becomes quiet.

At the same time we should also watch our emotions and moods, since we need to make these conscious as well, seeing that out thoughts are followed by bodily reactions. These reactions do not differentiate between the effects of reality and those generated by the illusoric works of the mind; the reactions are the same as in the case of a real experience.

Having discovered all this, we are now capable of behaving as external spectators of the generation, functions and disappearance of emotions and moods.  As a result of this process we enter a formerly unknown and new domain, which is undoubtedly the center of our personality, and we become aware that we are the Witness, the Consciousness, which was not created and so is eternal.

 By practising the attention described previously, we are not yet able to reach the center from the edge. At that point our own power is not enough, but the helping Grace will be sufficient.

ARE YOU CONSCIOUSLY ALERT?

 WHY NOT COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING

CONSCIOUS ALERTNESS QUIZ?

From the book Frank M. Wanderer Ph.D    The Revolution of Consciousness: Deconditioning the Programmed Mind 

Read more articles from Frank M. Wanderer

During our spiritual Journey through the world of shapes and forms, we are often under the effect of our daily disappointments, as our “sandcastles come tumbling down,” and we ask ourselves the question:

What the f#ck is this? What am I doing here?

In a narrow sense it may mean: ”What am I doing in this situation?” or ”What  am I doing in these relationships? In a broader sense the meaning can be:

What am I doing in this life, what is the sense of life, what is my ultimate goal ? Why was I born onto this Earth?

The socially conditioned mind is ready with the answer to all those questions, provides a detailed description and explanation, underpinned with scientific arguments. It tells us and analyses our own personal histories, starting with birth and ending with death. Between the tangible endpoints, the already and the yet, every single conscious moment of our life is embedded int he story as experience.

Every such personal history, however, has its own problems and conflicts, beauties, ups and downs, and questions awaiting answers. One of the central questions in almost every autobiography is the following:

How could I achieve more in life in order to be happy?

One of the awakened teachers, who has experienced the real nature of truth, Nissargadatta Maharaj believes, however, that instead of asking that, we should concentrate on the following questions:

1.  What is my true nature?
2.  What is the capital that I had when I was born and that has stayed with me since the moment when I realized that I existed?
3.  How did I acquire this bodily structure, together with the vitality and Consciousness that gives me the sense of Presence?
4.  How long is it going to last?
5. What had I been before this body was born, and what am I going to be when this body decomposes?
6. Who was born, and who is going to die?
7. Who am I?

The only answer to these questions is that the capital with which we were born and which stays with us is the concept of ”I am here, I am now,” the intuitive feeling and reality of ”I am.” It is only possible to experience that in the Present moment, in the Now.

Past is an intangible part of our personal history, and future is the expectations we project into it. Both are products of the mind, therefore illusory, false, not realistic things.

From the Edge to the Centerpoint

In order to bring our life into a resting point, the Present moment, we need to “move” from the edge to the centerpoint.

What does it mean?

The edge is the present state of Consciousness, in which the overwhelming majority of people live. That is the state of identifying with the mind, that of the dormant Consciousness, which dreams and tells our personal history.

That is the state of perfect identification with thoughts, emotions and desires, where we seek the goals of our life only in the world of forms and shapes, whether they are crude material forms (the world experienced with our sensory organs) or fine material forms (thoughts, emotions). The motor of our existence on the edge is the ambition to become something or somebody and to be in control all the time.

The centerpoint, the Awakened Consciousness, and the world of internal silence are beyond the mind. It does not refer to the internal silence forced upon oneself by various techniques called meditation (in this case, in fact concentration), but the undescribable, but experiencable, alive and living internal emptiness. In there, there is no effort, no desire and ambition, and we give up the last bastion of wanting to be in control. This is the state of perfect abandoment and submission, submitting ourselves to the Present Moment, to the Now. That centerpoint is the Self.

At the very moment when you find a resting point in the center, you will be away from the edge, and you will be able to see your previous self (the image created by the mind). Here it becomes obvious that the external world may only touch or scratch the edge, but never your real Self.

Be Alert and Conscious!

How can we get from the edge to the center of our Self ? The solution of this question should be the inner purpose of every human being. A precondition of making a move is promoting the emergence of the extra sensitivity found inside us.

The first phase of the process is becoming sensitive to our external environment in a new manner. Be consciously attentive to your environment, see, hear and feel everything with an intensity and vividity that we should be the eye when we see, we should be the ear when we hear, and we should be the sensor when we touch. We must not, however, stick to any of the senses, we should be attentive to everything at the same time, when all the senses unite. The information broadcast by all the senses will merge  into one single stimulus.

After practising and making it regular, the second phase of the process comes. In the second phase we turn our alert attention inward.

The first phase of turning inward is becoming conscious of our body. In most cases, our body works unconsciously, automatically, we are not really aware of how we walk, sit, eat etc. Now our alert attention will be extended to these activities as we try to use our body more consciously. As we become gradually more and more conscious of our body, we perceive more and more of the vitality and energy in the physical body and beyond. We thus become more and more sensitive to our internal body. If we do not give up consciously watching our body, but diligently practise it, after a while the sense of the inner body becomes permanent and keeps us in the present time as a massive anchor.

Once we have become conscious in connection with our body and the awareness of inner body is a permanent part of our life, then we may advance even deeper as the third phase of the process. We may become alert to the functions of the mind, the ideas, concepts, projections and the emotions generated by all these in the body. As we become more conscious of our mind, we may observe that the initially permanent and forced operations of the mind slow down, our thoughts become more transparent and the mind, slowly and gradually, becomes quiet.

At the same time we should also watch our emotions and moods, since we need to make these conscious as well, seeing that out thoughts are followed by bodily reactions. These reactions do not differentiate between the effects of reality and those generated by the illusoric works of the mind; the reactions are the same as in the case of a real experience.

Having discovered all this, we are now capable of behaving as external spectators of the generation, functions and disappearance of emotions and moods. As a result of this process we enter a formerly unknown and new domain, which is undoubtedly the center of our personality, and we become aware that we are the Witness, the Consciousness, which was not created and so is eternal.

By practising the attention described previously, we are not yet able to reach the center from the edge. At that point our own power is not enough, but the helping Grace will be sufficient.

About the author:

Frank M. Wanderer Ph.D is a professor of psychology, a consciousness researcher and writer. Frank is the author of the book s  The Revolution of Consciousness: Deconditioning the Programmed Mind and  3 Stages in the Evolution of the Human Spirit

Read more articles from Frank M. Wanderer

Confucius said: “Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know more.”

We hear and speak words everyday for the reason that we heavily rely on them to communicate. Because of this, words play a very important role for shaping our beliefs and perception of reality. It is estimated that the average person speaks more than 7,000 words per day. Even though we hear and speak words everyday, most of us have no clue as to how powerful words are.

What most people do not know about words is that they have magic properties and are very effective for deceiving the mind. However, words can also be used to empower the mind. In this article, I will show you how words are used to trick you to give up your natural rights and spiritual powers to the state. Every time you give up your spiritual powers and natural rights to a government agency, you are committing sin against the Prime Creator.

The process of using words to trick you to commit sin is what I like to refer to as word magic. Be aware that word magic can be used for good or evil purposes. If you are new to word magic, I recommend reading my empowering article titled Magic and the Power of Words. My article shows you evidence of why words have magic power.

One of the first things the state does to trick you to give up your natural rights, so they can make you play their vampiric game called the debt-based commerce system is by convincing you to sign commercial contracts with their government. Your first commercial contract with the state is the birth certificate. I am not going to go into details about the birth certificate, because this article is about educating you to become aware of the magic power of words and why words rule the world. If you want to learn more about the birth certificate, watch the short and informative video below.

The Magic Power of Words

Before we explore the magic power of words, I need to explain to you what magic is so you can see the relation between magic and the power of words. The term magic is derived from Old French magique, Latin magicus, and Greek magikos. One of the earliest definitions of magic is the “art of influencing events and producing marvels using hidden natural forces”.

The Universe has many natural forces. Some of these forces are the “engines” that control the behavior of sound, light, vibration, and frequency. When you learn to use these forces to control energy, you can control how energy manifest itself into physical things to a significant degree. This is the art of magic or magick.

One way to tap into the magic power of words is to use the force of thought along with sound and sacred geometry. Sound plays a really important role for directing energy to create sacred geometries. These sacred geometric patterns are some of the building blocks of matter, which is why they can be found near the core of all material objects, even down to the level of atoms. The evidence proving that sound has the power to create sacred geometry can be seen in cymatics.

A written word without sound is not that powerful. However, when you add sound to it using your voice, the word vibrates with more energy and therefore becomes “alive”, allowing it to do magical things. Because a spoken word has sound and sound can create sacred geometry, the right combination of spoken words can cast magic spells and control the flow of energy. Combine spoken words with the power of thought and emotion and certain natural elements (e.g., fire and water) and you have a very powerful tool to use for creating magic.

Why Words Rule the World

The system that deals with law and justice and keeps society in order is the court system. When you go to court, you are not really going to court but are going to a game arena to battle other people with words. The person who knows how to use words wisely and effectively will usually win. When you arm yourself with the right words and effectively use your mind and heart to unleash the power of words, you can win nearly every court case. This is why words rule the world.

The court system like to use words to trick you to consent to be a legal person, also known as a corporation or legal fiction. Because of this, you need to know how word magic is used in court. The content in italics below shows you how courts use word magic to deceive you, so that they can claim jurisdiction over your body, mind, and soul. The following content is a section from my book titled Word Magic: The Powers & Occult Definitions of Words.

The legal system operates in a jurisdiction that deals with fictional things. This is why the “laws” of the legal system are called acts and statutes, just like the acts and statues in a play. Because of this, nearly everything it does is unlawful. After reading this book, you will know why the legal system is a big fat fraud!

Under admiralty law, if you are missing for 7 years, you can be declared legally dead. This is why people lost at sea are declared legally dead after 7 years. In the USA, our political and court system are operating under admiralty and maritime law. Both of these laws deal with commerce on the sea. To connect the dots, when the government announces you as being legally dead, what they are really saying is that you are dead at sea. They say this because you are mostly made of water and you were born from a sack of water (the amniotic sac).

Because you are legally dead and the government owns your legal name, the government can legally claim your estate. This process is similar to when people die and their estates are transferred to the people listed on their wills. This is why the government can legally seize your properties and children when you violate their acts and statutes. However, if you rebut their presumption and let them know that you are not dead, it makes it much harder for the government to confiscate your properties.

When you send a letter to the government to let them know that you are not dead at sea but is alive and well, you are correcting your status and removing yourself from their jurisdiction, which is an imaginary territory that operates in a dead fictional world. After you correct your status, the government now has to treat you as a living natural person instead of a dead person/legal person.

A dead person, also known as a legal person or legal fiction, has no natural rights, only privileges. An example of a legal person/legal fiction is a United States Citizen. Because United States Citizens are legal persons with only privileges, according to the legal system, they have no natural rights. This is why when you go to court and shout out to the judge about your natural rights or constitutional rights, the judge will look at you like you are a fool and may tell you to sit down and shut up!

Because the legal person (e.g., United States Citizen, legal name, and corporation) is a dead thing, the government has jurisdiction over it. On the other hand, the natural person is a living, breathing person, and therefore has natural rights, which are unalienable rights given to the natural person by the Prime Creator. The word unalienable means “incapable of being aliened, that is, sold and transferred”. In other words, your natural rights are superior to all “laws” made by the government and can not be sold, and therefore the government does not have jurisdiction over you, the natural person.

The people who control the legal system are master magicians, and therefore are well aware of the power of words. Unfortunately, they like to train their judges and attorneys to use the power of words to enslave your mind, body, and soul. The good news is that if you learn how to use words wisely, you can put their judges and attorneys in checkmate. The following video shows you how the right words can free you from the jurisdiction of the court.

Did You Know Judges are Low-Level Magicians?

When you walk into a courtroom, you are actually walking into a game arena to play legal and magic games. This is why the judge is sometimes called the magistrate and the letter that the court used to notify you to appear in court is called a summons. What do witches do when they want to call spirits to appear in front of them? They summon them using the power of words! They did not call it a summons letter by accident.

In legal terms, the word magistrate is defined as “any individual who has the power of a public civil officer or inferior judicial officer, such as a Justice of the Peace”. Magistrate can also be defined as “a civil officer charged with the administration of the law”. To find the occult definition of the word magistrate, you need to split it into two words (magi-strate). The word you need to pay attention to is magi. One of the origins of the word magi is the Latin word magi (plural of magus), meaning “magician, learned magician”. Hence, the words magistrate, magician, magic, and magistery.

Judges are trained by the legal system to cast magic spells on you when you are in a courtroom. However, many judges may not be aware that they are casting magic spells. The hidden agenda of their magic spells is to trick you to give up your spiritual powers and natural rights. The good news is that when you learn how to rebut their claims using the right words, you can nullify their claims and put them in checkmate. Do you comprehend now why words rule the world?

About the Author

Pao L Chang is the author and founder of OmniThought.org and EnergyFanatics.com, two informative blogs dedicated to exploring esoteric information about energy, magic, conscious living, spiritual science, conspiracy, and exotic “free” energy technology. If you like this article, visit his blogs and subscribe to his weekly newsletters for more enlightening knowledge.

Featured image: BrighterScribe

My life has gone through a series of ups and downs over the last year. I’ve had incredible high’s and have experienced some deep, dark lows. I attribute my ability to bounce back from situations in life to living intentionally.

But what does that mean?

Well…I guess it means, in simple terms…knowing what you’re doing…at all times.

To me it means, being with yourself…feeling your breath on your lips when you breathe. Feeling the rise and fall of your chest. Feeling the ground underneath you when you walk. Watching your thoughts as you think and enjoying the moment of being alive.

Doing things intentionally isn’t nearly as common as you think.

Studies show that about 45% of what we do every day feels like decisions, but they’re actually habits.

That means almost half of the actions we take every day are actually happening on auto pilot.

Well, when we live on auto-pilot, we’re certainly not in full control of our lives, meaning that we’re giving a percentage of our control and power away to habits that we’ve formed in the past.

There is also a great chance that the habits you have either

1. Aren’t serving you to the highest potential
2. Possibly Destructive

The reason I say that is that there is a fundamental truth about Humans: We aren’t perfect. Even people performing at a very high level could always improve at something. There’s always a way to be more efficient in our lives. And there is always room for improving our mental game.

I’m sure you’ve also heard about the concept that 70-90% of our thoughts are the same as yesterday.

Well…if you’re in it to win it. Having the same thoughts over and over again probably isn’t serving you either.

So…

Here are 10 ways To Live More Intentionally so that you have more control over your life and ultimately become happier.

 1. Write Things Down

Make lists. Write things down. It truly works wonders. People often overestimate some abilities while they underestimate others. Most people overestimate their ability to stay organized, remember things and follow through on tasks or goals they need to achieve. Writing things down is one of the key’s that has helped me accomplish many of the things I’m proud of in my life. Don’t underestimate the power of a pen and paper. If you don’t usually write things down and you start the habit, you’re making a conscious decision to do something that is outside of your normal routine and pattern. By writing things down like your inner thoughts, feelings, daily tasks and goals you not only gain a better understanding of yourself through self-reflection but you also now have some additional motivation to follow through on the things you’ve written down.

2. Notice The Finer Details In Your Environment

When life becomes routine, our surroundings start to blend in and we start overlooking some of the little things. Ever wondered why moving to a new place, seeing a new site, or traveling is so gratifying or exciting? As humans, we’re predominantly visual creatures and our eyes play a big part in everything we feel. Consciously choosing to notice different things in your environment that you wouldn’t usually look at brings you back to yourself. It brings you back into your body and allows you cut the pattern you might be in at the moment. Our eyes are one of the greatest gifts we have as human beings and it’s important that we use them consciously and in a way that serves us.

3. Drink More Water

Water plays an incredibly important role in your health and unfortunately in today’s society, most people are dehydrated. With the abundance of processed foods, sugary drinks and restaurant options available, many people aren’t getting proper nutrition and still neglecting their water intake. By carrying around a large water bottle with you at all times, you’re not only contributing to your health (more energy, a clearer mind, better skin, more functional cells and better detoxification) you’re actually creating a positive habit that’s going to serve you well beyond most other habits you could form.

Taking a drink of water from your water bottle a few times per hour not only hydrates you, but also allows you to live consciously by breaking the pattern you are in and consciously choosing to do something positive for your health. Each positive thing you do builds momentum and momentum is the secret key to creating sustainable positive change.

4.  Learn To Say No

Learning to say no to is like a muscle. And with any new muscle that you haven’t worked out and strengthened, it’s going to be weak at first. Learning to say no can be one of the best things you can do for your life in the long run. Because it’s easy to say yes to the things that aren’t that good for you. And it’s easy to say yes to things that would distract you from what you need to be doing. Learning to say no allows you to take control of your life so that you can live more intentionally and more consciously.

5. Take Deep Breaths Often

Let alone the fact that many people aren’t engaging In some type of moderate or vigorous exercise regularly to get their blood flowing to oxygenate their muscles and cells, many people just don’t breathe deeply. By consciously taking deep breaths every so often, you bring yourself back into your body and break your pattern. Taking a moment to take a deep breathe is also a perfect time to be grateful for your health, the oxygen of the earth that is always there keeping you alive, and the moment you’re in. Because the truth is, that moment won’t last forever…

6. Stand Up For What You Believe In

All of us have things we feel strongly or are passionate about. And we’ve all been in a situation where we didn’t quite speak up about something, whether it was to fit in, not cause an argument, or we simply let it pass as “it’s not THAT important.” The problem with that is, is that every time you don’t say something when you want to, you end up walking away feeling a little dis-empowered. And feeling disempowered is never good for our growth.

The problem most people encounter when trying to stand up for what they believe in is that it opens them up to possible attack and criticism. In other words, haters. And most people are scared of that.

The flip side is, when you stand up for what you believe in, your life has the possibility to improve beyond your wildest dreams. Everything people want is on the other side of fear.

7. Do Something You Feel is Out of Your Character

Living intentionally doesn’t just mean breathing deeply and drinking more water. It means congruency between your thoughts and your actions. It means being in control of your life and the direction it’s headed.

That means that if you have thoughts about taking an action, take the action.

The world needs more action…from everyone.

You might have heard of Charles Cooley’s Looking glass Self which describes “Other people’s views build, change and maintain our self-image, and thus, there is an interaction between how we see ourselves and how others see us.”

To reduce this drastically, we could say that our personalities are a reflection of our “thoughts” about our environment. We might act, behave and think in a certain way as a result of us imagining that that is how our friends, family and acquaintances perceive us to be.

And so in turn…people create a box for themselves and for their life. They believe they can only do certain things and that other things are out of their reach.

But all that is false.

Doing something out of your character is one of the best ways to live intentionally. Because none of us have accomplished 100% of what we want in life and many people have things that they want to do, but are afraid of what might happen.

Doing something you think might be out of character is only in your head.

People accept you for who you are at face value.

The truth is that people aren’t in your head.

They don’t know your inner dialogue and every detail of your past.

They understand what you present them. So if you want to start acting “out of character” just do it. And you’ll find that people are far more accepting about it than you might have thought.

Living Intentionally through some of these practices are just some of the ways you can start taking control of your life, your health and your destiny. This post was inspired from my recent experiences and remembering that we are here on earth only for a short period of time…and that every moment is a gift.

Did you know that there was a study conducted to see if someone from the future was here present in our time? Yes, it’s true! Astrophysicists – Robert Nemiroff and Teresa Wilson at Michigan Tech University did just that as reported in 2014. They figured that if someone from the future traveled back to our time, there may be trace evidence. Someone may have done internet searches of future events. The search dates would have been prior to the events and would stand out that way. Enough of them traced to one user would reveal a pattern of advanced knowledge.

After exhausting their funds, the results of that study remained inconclusive. However, in response to a question posted on one website asking: “Do you believe communication through time would be possible?” I replied that “I believe it has already happened.” Only because I believe that our near future thinkers will be quantum computers with artificial intelligence. I believe that not only would they be able to figure it out, but man has figured it out already.

What? Yes, what we once believed to be impossible is already proven science fact. So although this is complicated, I’ll simplify what’s involved for you. Hopefully the science behind it will become easy to understand. Now I want you to keep in mind that it concerns faster than light communication called “superluminal” which Einstein dismissed as impossible. Although being one of the discoverers of this phenomena he dismissed it because it violated his own speed limit of light. According to Einstein, nothing in the universe could travel faster. Communication through time however also violates another law called “causality.” The law of causality simply means that any event must have a cause and the cause must happen before the event.

As an example, I often use a glass of milk: I drop a glass of milk, it falls to the floor and breaks, spilling the milk. Then you see and hear it fall from the cause of me dropping it in the first place.

You could never see it break before I dropped it because time as we experience it occurs from past to future. This is called the arrow of time or “Eddington’s Arrow” named after Sir Arthur Eddington who coined the phrase in 1927. It drops, falls to the floor, it breaks and then you see it. All one straight line from the past to the future.But many paranormal phenomena like supernatural abilities which many throughout history have claimed to possess are based on violating these laws. ESP, telekinesis, precognition and many other psi abilities do just that. Many famous psychics like the late Edgar Cayce claimed to leave his body to retrieve information from the Akashic Record which goes by many other names. Some call it the Astral Planes, The Book of Life, universal consciousness, collective consciousness, etc… It is what some believe makes psychic abilities possible.

According to Akashic Records theory, information has no time or distance barrier. Non-local or universal information resides outside of the mind where it is always available and can be tuned into like a radio. With some people like psychics it’s a natural right brain activity and with the population being majority left brain it may be something that can be learned. Although mainstream scientists reject all of these claims as fake or pseudo-science. For people like Edgar Cayce, Nostradamus and others alternative explanations like trickery, fraud and coincidence are the usual suspects.

Now, a funny thing happened on the way to the witch and it’s been happening more frequently lately. It started with atoms and accidents and now it’s routinely done on purpose. Once again peering down into subatomic particles is bringing two worlds together. Believing the impossible but approaching it from different directions.

Scientists have long noticed strange things going on with atoms, electrons and even now with larger molecule experiments. What Einstein used to call “spooky action at a distance,” is now routine. If you follow me I won’t go into depth and it’s really very simple. Say you have a molecule that consists of two atoms and each has one electron. Well, these electrons are spinning. One is spinning upward so the other electron has to be spinning in the opposite direction or downward. That’s the way it works because they are from the same molecule. In quantum physics they call this “entangled” meaning they will always be connected. The “spooky action” comes in when you pull them apart.

We’ll pull them apart in our minds but there are many methods in the real world to do this. Now, by taking a measurement of one electron we will destroy it, but we will know which direction it spins. Knowing which way it spins instantly tells us the direction the other is spinning without measuring it because they are a pair or connected (entangled). What’s weird is that we can separate them and put one in another room or even across town and it will still work. This is called wave collapse because by measuring one the spin direction of the other collapses to the exact opposite.

So what if we separated them by a hundred miles? The truth is, we could separate them by a million miles or a light year and as soon as we measure one it collapses the wave and the other one becomes fixed. So, measure the one in front of you and the other one instantly spins in the opposite direction. See that’s the problem Einstein had with it. The electrons communicate faster than light. One light year away it should have taken at least a year to communicate with the other electron, right?

What does all this have to do with communication from the future? Well, it has to do with the beginnings of figuring it all out and they’ve done it! Through entanglement not only can you separate electrons by distance but by time. Then, you can perform the same experiment in a different way and the electron you measure in the future will communicate back in time. Measure the spin next year and the one you have separated in front of you will collapse today to the exact opposite spin before you’ve even taken the measurement.

Since this is supposed to be an easy article to understand, let me tell you of the implications rather than how it’s done. It’s easy to understand but the article would have to be twice as long. There are different techniques with some straight forward and others overly involved. Creating what they call qubits is one way which is short for quantum bits and is a little more involved but I only mention it for anyone who wants to investigate this further.

Up until recently it was believed that any of this was useless because it couldn’t be used to transfer information through time. However, it is now believed that by setting up a coding system, communicating through binary is theoretically possible. So in theory I could send you next year’s newspaper headline back through time as binary. This is all in the early stages, but the science is solid. Entangled particles like electrons communicate not only faster than light, they also break the time barrier. One current theory is that the electrons communicate bypassing our space time dimension completely.

This is HUGE – it opens up not only communication possibilities but quantum computing possibilities. Meaning computers from the future may already be communicating with one another back through the internet and back through time. So, the original study at Michigan Technology may have actually been ahead of its time or behind its time or something that we may figure out or already have and don’t know it yet or whatever.

This article was written using concepts from the non-fiction book “Sin Thesis” available at Amazon written by the author Robert Torres. https://about.me/Towers3

Not long ago on our land at the Valhalla Movement we spent three months building our Earthship-inspired greenhouse. It was messy, unnecessarily long, cold, and fraught with unpredictable challenges. We thought that the integrity of our mission plus the enthusiasm of our team and our supporters would be enough to get the local municipality on our side. We thought that our plans would be approved in no time. We were wrong. If we had done sufficient research beforehand, we wouldn’t have made such casual assumptions. The biggest mistake that we made was assuming, in doing so we did not plan the build thoroughly or timely.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get to it!

Also we did build a DVD guide and ebook to help with the specifics the actual building of it see end for details.

1. Research the construction codes and regulations in your area

Our mistake

Due to stringent agricultural land laws, we couldn’t build a makeshift bathroom on our land or let people camp out there. Our building team ended up having to hold it in for most of the day until they got back to our house for the night.

The lesson

It is absolutely CRUCIAL to understand what your team needs. Do they need a toilet on the land itself? A spot for camping and making fires? How many meals a day will you be providing? If you are also facing land limitations, then make sure you have a back-up plan. Being able to go to the bathroom during a long hard day of work is not to be taken lightly!

Residential and commercial building codes are very complex in the United States and Canada, so do plenty of research and make sure that your dream Earthship complies with both federal and state/provincial laws! Alternatively you can hire a lawyer, but you can definitely find out yourself if you put in the time and patience. Building codes are often taken care of by municipalities themselves – keep that in mind.

Make sure you know:

• What kind of zoning is my land considered? What building restrictions are there for that kind of zoning?
• Do I need a building permit from my local municipality or province/state?
• How do construction inspections take place?
• Am I allowed to use car tires as part of my foundation?
• Do we need to build a toilet and set up a temporary living space on the construction site? If so, are there any local or federal regulations about it?

Canada:

The National Building Code of Canada (http://www.nationalcodes.nrc.gc.ca/eng/index.html) is a model building code – that means it has no legality until it is adopted by provincial regulations. Most provinces have their own versions of the building code, so research the appropriate documents for your province.

• Alberta committed in 2007 to using the National Building Code as its standard, but it also made a few changes to suit Alberta’s needs. The regulations are administered by Alberta Municipal Affairs.
• Ontario’s building codes and regulations are administered by the Building and Development Branch of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. Note that much of the decision-making roles are given to local municipalities, so make sure you look into that!
• Vancouver is the ONLY city that has its own building code that is separate from the provincial and federal models.
• Quebec’s construction codes are overlooked by the Régie du bâtiment du Québec. Make sure that you look at both the Construction Code (intended for architects, engineers, and planners) and the Safety Code (intended for the owners of buildings, equipments, and facilities).
• Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland/Labrador have all adopted the National Building Code.

The United States:

The U.S. has several model building codes that are maintained by the International Code Council (ICC).

• International Building Code (IBC) – applies to almost all types of new buildings.
• International Residential Building Code (IRC) – applies to new one and two family dwellings and townhouses.
• International Existing Building Code (IEBC) – applies to the alteration, repair, addition, or change in occupancy of existing structures.

Although most states and local governments have adopted these codes, make sure you know exactly which regulations your state and town follow!

2. Get your plans stamped and looked over by a licensed architect and engineer

Some background

In 1990 a repository of 3.5 million car tires had burned in St. Amble, which released dark plumes of thick and noxious gas that are an environmental risk both to the air and water supply. Thus all car tires are considered a fire hazard in Quebec and can not be used in construction without an affidavit of safety guarantee. No exceptions.

Our mistake

We thought that the local municipality would okay the use of car tires in our Earthship greenhouse because of the research and solid convictions held by Earthship Biotecture about the viability of car tires. Since Earthship tires are pounded with dirt and covered with cement, there would be no air to consume even if the rubber caught on fire. Unfortunately, we had neither an engineering or architectural stamp on our plans when we submitted them in May. The result? Rejection.

Our solution

After we were rejected, we frantically searched for an architectural firm that would stamp our plans. However, none of the firms would stamp our pre-made plans! They either asked for $5000+ or demanded that we pay them to completely redesign the greenhouse structure. We were baffled. We did not have that kind of money nor did we want to compromise the integrity of our Earthship-greenhouse, so we kept looking. Finally a prominent eco-architecture firm, L’Oeuf, helped revise and stamp our plans to comply with regulation standards. The fee was extremely reasonable and they also kept the structural integrity of our original plan intact. BONUS: WE ARE GIVING AWAY ARCHITECT PLANS FOR FREE – Just need to sign up for newsletter at Valhalla Movement.

The lesson

Our Earthship greenhouse was originally designed by Francis Gendron, who had attended Earthship Academy and has experience building sustainable structures, but he is not a professional architect. Oftentimes you can design your own plans if you are constructing small structures. For larger ones, approved professional plans are necessary. Know exactly what your plans need in order to be approved by the local government!

Make sure you know:

• Will I be able to design the structure myself?
• If so, does it have to be under a certain size? What are the state rules regarding this?
• How much will it cost for a professional architect and engineer to design my structure?
• How much will it cost to get a stamp of approval on designs I’ve received from elsewhere (such as from Earthship Biotecture)?

3. Budget your funds properly

What we did well

We launched a Kickstarter campaign in April to raise $10,000 for our Earthship-inspired greenhouse. We ended up getting $28,000! It was an incredibly memorable day and we are extremely grateful to our donors.

Our mistake

Despite receiving more funding than we anticipated, our budget was not organized well enough. Resources were not accounted for, some were estimated at lower costs, and some weren’t even in the budget to begin with. This caused materials to be acquired in less then ideal ways,  for the sake of time and convenience. There were also numerous incidences where people paid for construction materials out of their own pocket because there just wasn’t enough money in the budget. When a budget is well-organized, that should NOT happen!

Our solution

In the end, we pulled through thanks to additional donations from our supporters and ingenious recycling of materials. We also got a lot of resources for free, such as glass bottles and metal cans. Some of our members still paid for some of the costs themselves, but we reimbursed as many people as our finances would allow.

The lesson

It is absolutely crucial to plan your budget well in advance of the build, preferably as soon as you know exactly how much you have to spend on the entire project. Leave ample padding for any discrepancies or miscellaneous expenses. It will be helpful to assign one or two people to this task so as to streamline the process. The person(s) who mock up the budget should get quotes from different materials manufacturers and construction companies. Having plenty of time to make these calls will ensure that you are able to secure the best deals. Make sure that you understand the needs and specifications of your structure when you make those calls!

Additionally…

The budget leader(s) must consult the rest of the team. The budget has to be agreed upon or else there will be avoidable disagreements and confusion along the way. If some people think that Category A should be allotted more (or less) money than the materials in Category B, the budgeter should take such input into serious consideration. The group should come to an overall agreement through consensus decision-making or whatever process is appropriate for the team.

Make sure you know:

• What are the best industry prices for what I need?
• Are there any adjustments that need to be made after I’ve talked to the team?
• Have I accounted for miscellaneous expenses?
• Is there anything in my budget that may require more money than I can currently allocate to it?

4. Know exactly what resources and tools you will need, when you’ll need them, and where to get them

Our mistake

The Valhalla land is not hooked up to the grid so we have no access to electrical lines or water pipes. We had to use a generator, which we had not accounted for in our budget and planning. Our one and only solar panel could not generate the amount of electricity we needed to power drills, tractors, cement mixers, and other high-powered tools. Additionally, with no running water, we had to haul water (for drinking and for washing) to the land manually by filling five to six 5-gallon bottles with tap water from our faucets. It was not an efficient process.

The lesson

Know what capacities you currently have and make a list of what you’ll need to acquire in time for the build!

Make sure you know:

• What tools do we need?
• What kinds of structures can we pre-assemble before the actual build?
• Do we have all the materials and resources ready?
• How many people do we need on the build each day?
• Is there ample electricity and running water on the land?
• Will we need a generator? A cement mixer? A tractor?

5. Delineate individual roles and teams with assigned leaders to manage each aspect of the build

What we did well

During our build, roles were filled based on people’s various expertise, skill sets, and interests. This came about organically as we started construction, but it helps to set up roles ahead of time.

The lesson

A successful building project requires efficient leadership on all levels. There should be one person who takes charge of such tasks. The stress and pressure during construction can be very hectic and difficult to manage if people are unsure of who to look towards for guidance and action steps. Keep in mind that a team leader is not someone who simply dishes out instructions but someone who can harmonize the skills and strengths of the individuals on the team. Each member decides what he/she is going to do for the build; the team leader then organizes all the tasks/responsibilities and keeps track of timing.

Our task forces:

• Construction
• Food and water
• Volunteer/worker organization and morale (essentially HR)
• Media (photography, videography, blog posts)
• Finances and budgeting
• Off-site errands

6. Know how much food you will need to provide

Ingredients are often quite expensive, especially for large teams, so try to get the things you need from supportive friends, family, and even neighbors. Maybe even pick the fruits, vegetables, and herbs yourself if you have a garden.

What we did well

We were able to prepare cheap meals en masse using ingredients such as beans, rice, tomato sauce, pasta, homemade flatbread, and sweet potatoes. We also used fresh tomatoes, peppers, squash, herbs, carrots, and some fruits from our own garden. Another good way to cut down costs is dumpster diving. We went dumpster diving at organic food supermarkets for some of our pre-packaged or bagged ingredients, which saved us a lot of money too. Supermarkets tend to throw out their produce JUST as they are fully ripe but not yet rotten. There is a wealth of great information and tips online about safe and lawful dumpster diving, so do some digging!

Our mistake

We underestimated how hungry people would be. On a few days, we didn’t make enough food for everybody to get seconds. Fortunately the construction crew were very forgiving and some had even brought their own snacks to munch on. Still, it didn’t feel good to not be able to provide. Construction is hard work, and we really believe that the builders deserve nothing less than a feast fit for a king! Our kitchen crew was also short-staffed so the people cooking were more stressed out than we had anticipated.

The lesson

If you are organizing a large build spanning many days, it is crucial to organize a good kitchen crew with enough ingredients and tools to prepare the amount of food needed for that many people. Making food for yourself and your family is very different than cooking for 30-50 people! Preparations and cooking take the whole day, and it DOES get tiring, so it is very helpful to rotate the crew throughout the various meal times. There will be room for improvisation and experimentation, but for the most part the head chef will plan the menu and make sure that all the ingredients are ready for the day.

Lastly, do not underestimate how much food your team will need. It is always better to make too much than too little. Meals are precious times for relaxation, connecting, and refueling – make them memorable and fulfilling!

Make sure you know:

• How many task forces do we need, and who will take responsibility for each one?
  What other experts and people do we need?
• How much food will the kitchen crew need to prepare each day?
• How are we going to get all the ingredients? Are we asking for donations or dumpster diving?

7. Celebrate and congratulate one another during the build and after major milestones!

The lesson

Construction is very hard work, but that’s not all it should be! It can be an enriching bonding experience when volunteers, members, workers alike share stories, personal notes, and jokes with each other. We found that time passed by much quicker and work was more enjoyable during conversations and moments of resounding laughter.

Every individual is incredibly interesting and has a story to tell or something you can learn from. It’s up to you to be curious and engaging in order to dig beneath the surface and find the treasure waiting beneath.

When you accomplish a major goal or reach a new point in your building construction, take some time out to celebrate! Make a little something special for dessert, go for a round of nice cold beer, throw each other into the pond/lake/river/pool… It’s these moments that remind you what you are all working towards and how well you are working together to make it happen.

Remember – work hard AND play hard.

8. Don’t hesitate to ask for and accept help!

Recognize where you and your team’s strengths and weaknesses lie so that you have a good idea of what you need help with.

What we did well

We were lucky enough to have an extremely talented core group of workers with a diverse range of talents. Each person was an experienced builder and many also had the practical skills needed to carry out specific and extremely important tasks. When necessary, though, we were not afraid to ask for help. We did a massive call-out and organized two successful volunteer weekends where 50 people came to learn and help out with the build! It was incredible to see that kind of support come out. All it took was a genuine humility and some reaching out.

We got a lot of stuff for free, such as bottles and cans, thanks to our friends, family, supporters, and community! When trying to get recycled materials such as car tires, glass bottles, and cans, ask around your community/neighborhood! You can also find car tires in your local junkyard or scrap yard. There are different sizes you’ll need so know which ones are right for your plan.

You WILL need help, sometimes from people you don’t know and for things you didn’t expect. Don’t doubt that people genuinely want to lend a hand, often without any compensation or service in return. Be grateful for their support and genuinely thank them for their kindness. You may not need to “repay” them, but a token of your gratitude is always be welcome and meaningful.

Ask yourself:

• What are your team’s strengths? Weaknesses?
• Do you need a carpenter, an irrigations system expert, an electrician, a videographer/media specialist?
• Are there certain resources that you and your team can’t get yourselves?
• What tasks and jobs require a specific skill set?
• What can you can offer or exchange for someone’s help?

In conclusion…

There are many factors that will play into whether or not your build is successful; effective and timely planning is only one (albeit crucial) part of it. There will be factors that are out of your control, such as how long the local municipality takes to approve your build, the weather, and individuals’ dispositions. It does not serve you to worry about such factors. The only things you can do is know when to let go of your frustration and to channel your energy towards figuring out how to work around unforeseen problems that may arise.

Your building process, organizational structure, and ways of tackling problems will inevitably be very different from ours. We are here to share our experience so that you can avoid the mistakes that we made. We are here to help and to listen to your stories so that we can also learn from YOU.

Please comment below with any comments, questions, concerns, corrections, inspiring anecdotes, or stories you have. We want to connect more with all of you who are taking concrete steps towards making your lifestyle more ecologically conscious and responsible.

Checklist:

• A detailed budget
• Research on building codes and land regulations
• Approved plans
• List of all the necessary material resources and information about where to get them
• Estimate on how many people will be needed on the build
• A schedule/calendar of the build (including details about the tools/resources/people needed on each day)
• Food menu
• Call-out for help from friends, family, members of your community, and your greater network
• List of task forces, members in each force, and assigned leaders
• Ideas for playing games, bonding exercises, and festivities
• A positive energy and proactive attitude, even amidst potential failure and obstacles

Good luck, and have fun building!

If you are looking for some extra help building your Earthship we made a how to DVD and Guide to help!

Consciousness – The Unified Field

What follows is a theoretical explanation of how energies interact in our universe to create what we know, and also what we don’t know. Some of the content is scientifically proven, while other parts of this essay are based on my intuition. This is not meant to be a purely scientific article, so bring your curiosity, and come along while I take a stab at explaining the unexplainable. Keep the parts that resonate with you, and leave the rest alone, but remember the take-home message at the end.

Energy of Consciousness – the Great Influencer

Energy is the fabric of the Universe, and all matter originates from energy. Energy is information, including thoughts, prayers, intentions, and beliefs. Regarding this, some of the highest energetic frequencies in consciousness are universal spiritual truths found in all of the sacred texts.

Consciousness is the omniscient information field that connects everyone and everything. The energy field of consciousness includes:

• Subconscious and conscious thought forms of all humans
• Consciousness of the soul – Higher Self
• Consciousness of all that is created by the Divine – Universe
• Consciousness of the Divine

Concepts in physics relating to energy are evolving based on new findings in the cosmos, which may require a complete rethinking of Einstein’s law of relativity. Not only is the concept of energy shifting on the physical plane of mathematical laws as new discoveries are made in our universe, but a major shift is occurring in global consciousness. Researchers at the Institute of HeartMath say “Humankind is in the middle of a great paradigm shift from a mentality of competition to one of cooperation.”

As the human race goes through the Great Change of transformation in consciousness to create new systems of cooperation and unity on earth, the energetic push comes from the frequencies encoded in your DNA. These frequencies include lower vibrational shadow frequencies associated with fear, and higher vibrational gift frequencies associated with love.As you transcend your fears and come into a state of unconditional love, you transform your consciousness to a higher frequency band that energizes your DNA creating profound healing in your body-mind. DNA is a biologic quantum field computer, and as such, connects you to the energies of the spiritual dimension and consciousness.

All energies influence each other, sometimes in subtle, but more often in highly significant and unusual ways. If energy waves come together in coherence forming a constructive interference pattern, they create an energy wave of higher amplitude, thus increasing the amount of energy carried by the wave. Increasing the energy of a wave has the potential to amplify its effect on matter, including your body-mind.

Quantum coherence, or coherence of energy at a subatomic level, adds the quality of entanglement. Entanglement is the ability of energy particles, such as photons, to communicate even if on opposite sides of the universe. Einstein described this phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” Entangled energy particles, even when separated by great distances, don’t exist in a specific state until measured, but once measured, are able to communicate their state to each other instantaneously.Einstein thought it was spooky because this happens faster than the speed of light, which violates his theory of relativity.

Energy in many forms is constantly influencing your physical body. Epigenetics is the study of how your environment affects gene expression, or how genes are turned on or off. Energetic waveforms predominating in the body are the ones that potentially have the strongest epigenetic influence. Meaning if you are constantly in a state of anger or dissatisfaction, then that prevailing emotion experienced as an energetic thought form may create an overriding epigenetic influence on how your genes are expressed. Gene expression triggered by stressful emotions can be harmful, whereas gene expression triggered by thoughts and practices inducing relaxation can be beneficial.

As a quantum intention, every thought has the potential power of prayer. This is because all energy contains information, and as an intention, it also contains consciousness. When an energetic waveform of a specific intention comes into coherence with another waveform, its impact on matter results in conscious creation.Learning how to transmute negative thought forms is a powerful way to positively influence your environment, especially your body-mind.

There are ways to create coherent waveforms in your body that positively influence core parts of you associated with intuition and non-verbal communication. The main regulator of these abilities is your heart energy field. Regular practice of creating coherent energy fields in the heart through techniques developed by HeartMath®, much like practicing to play the guitar or learning how to speak a new language, can be honed. And with regular practice, it becomes second nature.

Fractals – the Great Stabilizer

So what stabilizes all of these energy waves flying through our universe? The answer could be found in fractals, which create an efficient and structured energetic highway upon which to travel. Fractals originate as an alignment of repeating energy vectors that provide for a stable interconnectedness of all energy systems in the universe. Since these fractals are energetic in origin, and since energy influences matter, they leave their mark in matter by creating repeating patterns seen throughout nature. These repeating patterns are also found in the human body serving as a reminder that we all originated from the same source, and we are all connected.

Fractals display self-similarity with the ability for objects to exhibit the same type of structure in all scales, large or small. Fractals give sacred geometry and snowflakes their structure. You can also find fractal patterns in the branches of a tree, fronds of a plant, crystals, ocean waves, earthquakes, and even DNA. Not surprisingly, since fractals originate as energy vectors, they are also observed in coherence patterns of brain function and in heart rate variability analysis.11,12

Dark energy existing in dark matter, consists of energy vectors creating repeating fractals, and is what gives our universe energetic stability through similarity in structure. On the earth plane, the energetic influence of fractals is represented mathematically, allowing for the actual measurements of the physical components of these fractals.

Mathematical expressions of fractals are seen in the Golden ratio, Penrose tiling, and the Fibonacci sequence. The Golden ratio is a number found by dividing a line in two parts so that the longer part divided by the smaller part is equal to the whole length divided by the longer part. Roger Penrose, a professor of mathematics and physics, established that a surface could be tiled in an asymmetrical, non-repeating pattern using five-fold symmetry with two shapes based on the Golden ratio. This pattern named Penrose tiling, and was later discovered to exist in nature as the structure of quasicrystals. The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers, and is represented in nature by the petals of a flower and the bracts of a pine cone.

The Global Scaling Theory, based on the mathematical model of logarithmic-scale invariance, explains why structures and processes in nature are fractal. The Global Scaling Research Institute located in Munich, Germany is the leading researcher of this theory, and some of its publications point to why waveforms associated with fractals might one day help explain astrology.13,14

Astrology – the Language of the Cosmos

The entire cosmos has an energetic influence on you as an individual. While the moon’s gravitational force stabilizes the earth’s rotation and influences the watery tides, lunar cycles also influence our bodies.15 But gravitational forces alone cannot account for all of the moon’s effects on human physiology. While the exact mechanisms of how the moon influences human physiology is unknown, its scientifically documented impact does make us consider how other parts of the cosmos may also affect us.

Astrologists say that the unique planetary alignment at the time of our birth provides a template upon which to base the potential impact that future planetary alignments may have on us. While many theories regarding astrology have been scientifically disproven, one must keep in mind that the laws used to disprove them don’t apply to all aspects of the cosmos. The classic example of this is how generally accepted laws of physics don’t hold true inside a black hole. This is like using the laws of physics to prove that God doesn’t exist. The laws of physics can’t account for all of the possible energies in the spiritual dimension, much less that of all the energies in our known universe.

Energy fields, including those created by planetary alignments, are made of tiny subatomic particles. Since all of the subatomic particles in existence haven’t yet been discovered, scientists and engineers built a massive particle collider, called the Large Hadron Collider, to flesh them all out. Because some subatomic particles are still unknown, science can’t mathematically account for all of the possible information- packed energies contained in astrological alignments. The poetic language of astrology is written so as to make sense of the symbolism inherent in the components of these cosmological alignments, such as trines and squares.

Consciousness, as a highly intelligent and powerful force, is the common influencer of energy in the spiritual dimension and in astrological alignments. Consciousness contains energetic information existing as multiple potentials for outcomes as far as how they may impact matter and other energies. These multiple potentials come into existence through the creation of coherence driven by consciousness. This is why people born on the same date and time can have different outcomes associated with astrological predictions based on specific planetary alignments. The unique aspects of our consciousness at any given time influences the outcome of astrological predictions due to specific resonating energy waveforms coming into contact at any point in time.

It is the combination of the unique energy contained in your consciousness that locks in the memory of the energetic combinations of the fractal energy vectors at the time of your birth. The information contained in that memory serves as the energetic template upon which the energy of future planetary alignments may potentially influence your life.

Coherence in Consciousness – the Great Facilitator

It is the energy fields of fractal vectors that provide the information highway upon which consciousness travels, and when coherence patterns are formed in these fields, you will experience deja-vu, synchronicities, and even miracles. Keep in mind that the energy of consciousness is the major player in helping to create coherence.

Human thought forms, as a part of energy in consciousness, are some of the most influential of all energies in our cosmos, much greater than that of the combined energy of all the suns in our universe. This is because thought forms always contain consciousness, and consciousness is part of the original source energy for the existence of all that is.

Learning to harness the power of your thoughts through practices like meditation, contemplation, and prayer, along with increasing high vibrational thoughts associated with unconditional love and compassion will facilitate the Great Change in global consciousness. This Great Change is simply a remembering of this universal truth – we are all One Love.

We all originated from the same source of Love that permeates everything, and beckons us to reunite to create a new energy on earth. This new energy that will make war, famine, poverty, and strife something we only read about in history books, and will make us wonder – Why did we wait so long?

About the Author

Dr. Keith Holden is a physician who is board certified in Internal Medicine and trained in Functional Medicine. He has a special interest in parapsychology, mind-body medicine, and spirituality in medicine. His popular course on Udemy.com, “Power of the Mind in Health and Healing,” teaches how to use the power of your mind to heal your body and maximize your intuition.

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2. Mccraty R, Deyhle A, Childre D. The global coherence initiative: creating a coherent planetary standing wave. Glob Adv Health Med. 2012;1(1):64-77.

3.Rudd R. The Gene Keys, Unlocking the Higher Purpose Hidden in Your DNA. Watkins Pub Limited; 2013.

4. Mihelic, F. Matthew. Model of Biological Quantum Logic in DNA. Life. 2013;3(3):474.

5.Giustina M, Mech A, Ramelow S, et al. Bell violation using entangled photons without the fair-sampling assumption. Nature. 2013;497(7448):227-30.

6. Available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0614. Accessed January 28, 2014.

7. Dusek JA, Otu HH, Wohlhueter AL, et al. Genomic counter-stress changes induced by the relaxation response. PLoS ONE. 2008;3(7):e2576.

8. Mccraty R, Atkinson M, Bradley RT. Electrophysiological evidence of intuition: Part 2. A system-wide process?. J Altern Complement Med. 2004;10(2):325-36.

9. Mandelbrot BB. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Macmillan; 1983.

10. Mcnally JG, Mazza D. Fractal geometry in the nucleus. EMBO J. 2010;29(1):2-3.

11. Di ieva A, Grizzi F, Jelinek H, Pellionisz AJ, Losa GA. Fractals in the Neurosciences, Part I: General Principles and Basic Neurosciences. Neuroscientist. 2013; Dec 20

12. Yamamoto Y, Fortrat JO, Hughson RL. On the fractal nature of heart rate variability in humans: effects of respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Am J Physiol. 1995;269(2 Pt 2):H480-6.

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Featured image: “5 Centimeters per Second” By Ryzuuke From DeviantArt

“The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.” –David Foster Wallace, ‘Infinite Jest’

When we utilize critical thinking and question whether what society tells us is true or not, we are called “paranoid.” When a major tragedy strikes, we are conditioned to automatically accept what authority figures and the media tell us without question, lest we wish to be cast into the tainted demographic of society known as “conspiracy theorists” –basically, a manipulation of the term “free-thinkers,” insinuating a person’s open mind is instead a psychologically deranged prison. When we feel sad, we put on brave faces like we were taught to do; and we certainly do not let others see us “break” down, as to do so would be socially unacceptable. We fail to realize this, in reality, is the very definition of weakness. The truly brave thing to do would be to embrace and listen to our feelings, otherwise known as embracing our innate human nature. Rarely do we consider that by repeatedly denying ourselves the opportunity  to “break” down and feel our emotions in their entirety, we are simultaneously sealing our fate to break down on a chronic basis in the future, as the accumulated negative energies within us from our repressed emotions will eventually reach full capacity and burst.

When we fail to thoroughly work through and resolve our emotions, their energies remain stuck within us and accumulate until all we feel is their collective darkness, as there is not much room left inside us for anything else. This, of course, is quite frequently the working definition of “chronic depression.” Since we masked our sadness and anger so many times, we seemingly have no root cause for our chronic depression. Once repressed emotions from various experiences become piled up within, it is close to impossible to distinguish one from another and trace each one back to their origin. As a result, there is no identifiable root cause of our now unrelenting depression –and rightfully so, as there are many. Of course, the doctors we go to when such depression befalls us typically only lend to the notion that there is no root cause, and in no way promote healthy methods of taking responsibility for the management of our emotions in the future. However, they nonetheless claim they can help us –and they do, they help us to further gloss over uncomfortable feelings by placing us on psychiatric medications such as anti-depressants. Unfortunately, anti-depressants not only take away feelings of sadness, they to some degree take away all feelings in general.

When it really comes down to it, the choice to escape darkness is at the same time the choice to escape light. To knowingly opt out of painful emotions is to unknowingly opt out of pleasurable ones as well. Unfortunately, this numb state of existence promoted by modern day society is all too easy to fall victim to –especially when medical experts we quite literally trust with our lives tell us it is a correct and healthy way of being, generously giving us substances to feed our desire to not feel pain of any sort. So, who and what is really crazy here?

“Our education from the start has taught us a certain range of emotions, what to feel and what not to feel, and how to feel the feelings we allow ourselves to feel. All the rest is non-existent.” –D.H. Lawrence, ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’

Since we are taught from a young age which feeling are acceptable to feel, what emotions are safe to express, what heart driven behaviors are appropriate to act upon without deviating from the “norm,” doing otherwise seems incredibly dangerous and can easily invoke paralyzing fear. However, subduing parts of ourselves by cutting off certain feelings and prohibiting emotions from arising past a certain level is the truly dangerous thing to do. It prevents us from fulfilling one of our primary obligations in life –to give birth to all parts of ourselves, to emerge into the world as beings alive in every sense of the word, and to then share with the world our unique gifts stemming from the deep sense of luminous aliveness radiating within.

Allowing Ourselves To Fully Feel

How do we go about allowing ourselves to feel our emotions in their entirety though, and how do we do so without letting ourselves become consumed by the negative energy of the more painful ones? For starters, we stop telling ourselves that feeling any emotion too intensely is wrong, because perhaps there is actually no such thing as feeling TOO intensely, there is only feeling something intensely and not knowing how to then work through those feelings. Perhaps it is not the feelings themselves that are the problem, but our inability to deal with those feelings. Perhaps  there is no clearly defined right or wrong way to feel, there is only feeling what it means to be alive in its entirety. And whether or not those feelings are painful or pleasurable will not matter much in the end. What will matter is we can rest assured that we did not take life for granted, knowing we seized every opportunity to fully live.

Next, we must cease to resist strong emotions out of fear, often resulting from a subconscious awareness that surrendering to them will inevitably change us within on a deep level, as anything of depth in life always does –and we certainly must stop worrying that allowing profound changes within may cause others to no longer accept us. After all, any love with conditions is limiting, and thus does not embody the true definition of love. Those who do not love us unconditionally and who hold a firm picture of how we should live our lives do not serve our true nature, and should in no way be allowed to influence who we are or what we do or do not become. Ultimately, we must die to the false belief that a way of life that is safe even exists. As Michael Meade so eloquently put it, “a false sense of security is the only kind there is.”

Once we dissolve the fear of allowing ourselves to fully feel due to the desire to be socially accepted and the like, and begin the process of feeling our emotions in their entirety and journeying deeper into our hearts, we often run into the problem of subconsciously resisting from fully engaging in the process because it is uncomfortable at times. However, at this stage of journeying deeper into our hearts to reclaim our capacity to feel, it is crucial to acknowledge that the only reason we feel this discomfort is because we have been conditioned to believe we should avoid discomfort and pain –much less take responsibility for working through our pain, especially when emotional in nature- at any cost. Basically, we must become comfortable with being uncomfortable. A strange thing happens when we do this –feeling uncomfortable begins to dissipate entirely, as we have given ourselves permission to feel and surrendered to its existence, thus dissolving its power over us. No longer feeling uncomfortable over, well, the act of feeling in itself, sends a signal to our subconscious minds that there are really no “good” or “bad” emotions, there are just emotions. In this, we learn “good” and “bad” are merely a matter of subjective perception, and  many of our perceptions regarding what is good and bad are actually not our own that were born out of our own self-discovery and life lessons, but are ones that were instilled within us from a young age via conditioning from others.

It is our inherent birthright to explore life and use our personal experiences to formulate our own perceptions in life. In order to cultivate such experiences, the manner in which we live must stem from the deep sense of aliveness within that can only be accessed when we feel intensely and allow ourselves to be flooded with passion. Inevitably, this leads many to find there is really no such thing as “bad” feelings, in the sense that they are intended to harm us. Rather, the feelings we once revered as “bad” are intended to deliver specific messages to us, signaling certain areas in our lives are not in alignment with  the true nature of our souls.

Beginning to work with our feelings rather than against them, and exploring them to unveil the messages they are attempting to reveal, is the process of working  with our different ego states –not dissolving our egos entirely, but transforming them. Eric Berne, who developed the idea of Transactional Analysis and Structural analysis, was the first to really bring to light the idea of observable egoic states within individuals –the parent, adult, and child egoic states. Using this theory, we can begin to identify the different ego states within and learn what role each one plays, essentially allowing us to work with and nurture the expressions of all of them rather than suppress them. The ultimate goal is to bring to surface and heal the fragmented parts of ourselves we have repressed, and essentially reintegrate these parts of ourselves into the whole. You can learn more about this process and the different techniques for working with ego states and reintegrating fragmented parts of the self into the whole to cultivate a healthier internal state here.

To feel is to be human, to be alive. To not feel is to be less human, to be less alive. This is a grotesquely reckless way to live, as it involves taking life for granted. In fact, it may be one of the most damaging forms of abuse humans are capable of inflicting upon themselves. I in no way expect you to accept my words and the concepts they shape as absolute truths. In fact, I beg of you to do the exact opposite –to consider them, but not adopt them, and instead go out and find your own personal truths.

©2015 The Mind Unleashed, Inc, all rights reserved. For permission to re-print this article contact contactthemindunleashed@gmail.com , or the respective author.