The Laws of Nature for a Better Self
Christopher Walker
The Art of Stillness in Everyday Life
Bridging the rift between work and play, spirit and matter, heart and soul in work and life.
Introduction
Have you ever experienced a moment where you felt absolute oneness with the world around you? A state when everything became crystal clear and still and all of a sudden you understood the reality that exists in nature in everyday life? It may have been after a yoga class, or walking along the beach or even amongst the beautiful architecture around European cities.
Stillness is real wellness, because your body, in this state is in perfect harmony within itself and with the world around it. For most people it is an accident, a random circumstance they hope for in their daily life. For us, it’s our mastery. We teach stillness, and therefore perfect harmony, within and without.
There are great masters such as Emerson, Plato and many Asian Masters (Lao Tzu) who are convinced that if mankind lived life according to the principles of nature, then we would be at peace with ourselves and with each other. It’s a philosophy not uncommon in the ways of the East but has yet to be fully grasped by the western world. We are hoping this modern way of presenting this ancient theme will resonate with you, irrespective of your cultural or religious background.
The real goal of self-mastery is the freedom to give without limit, to get ourselves to a state of total contentment so that there is no ‘self ’ to worry us or distract us from our gift to the world.
More than Self Help - Global change through personal change
By living in harmony with nature we achieve global change through personal change. It is a rebuke at so much of what is being done at present in the name of wellness, good business, religion and cultural development. It’s a simple spirituality, a nuts and bolts, real world, roll your sleeves up, in your bones, spirituality that could be applied everywhere both in personal life mastery, business and in global economics.
Simplicity is at the heart of nature’s spirituality, she gives us her guidance in very simple terms. Universal principles separated from any denominational control, immune from human transcriptional errors, no manipulations, just raw and natural, honest, simple and awesomely powerful.
When you learn nature’s law, then as well as praying in a temple, you could use the sky as your roof and the earth as your floor and life itself as your alter. To your amazement you will find nature’s laws and the laws of most religions parallel in so many ways. With nature however, everyone on earth can access it as a guide to living in harmony in their life, business and community.
Indigenous Respect
In Canada, during one of my sessions with the amazing Mi’kmaq Nation, a Pipe Carrier and Elder joined the Real Spirit Course. He hardly spoke throughout the program but at the end he stood with tears in his eyes and said, “This is what we believe in, a new language.”
A Master in the Art of Living
Draws no sharp distinction
Between their work and their play
Their labour and their leisure
Their minds and their bodies
Their education or their recreation.
They hardly know which is which.
They simply pursue their vision of excellence
Through whatever they are doing and
Leave others to determine
Whether they are working or playing.
To themselves, it always seems
As if they are doing both.
- Christopher Walker
Stillness
Stillness is a real life inner peace, it is about living in the world, feeling still, inside yourself, even when you’re out partying or going to work or doing your thing, having a sense of good stillness inside of you and so, that’s what stillness is about.
You need to feel good love inside of you towards people and towards animals and nature and pets and things, because nobody can take that away from you, nobody can fight you, nobody can really disturb you because if you keep love important in your life, you’re going to hold centre.
A big perspective. There’s a lot of turbulence and people can get you really bent out of shape really easy, so the idea is to see the world in a bigger way than just what the newspapers or the press or some trend is going on. I think we need to look at it more like if we were looking from the moon, looking back at the Earth. What does it look like? Big picture mentality means you don’t get bent out of shape so easy. And you get kind of like this space where you can be your self and care about the world but you’re not disturbed, your centre is health strong.
You will also need to know how to deal with people and situations you have with other people, how they come in and go out of your life and how you deal with emotional disturbances that go on. And I think this is really important because how can you have stillness if you’re always flipping out and people are flipping you out at work and at home or wherever that is. We’re going to talk a lot about flexibility.
A lot of disturbance comes to us because we don’t know where we’re going and we don’t know what the future holds. And there are two sorts of confidence. One is confidence in our self, and that’s survival. And the other confidence is confidence in the world that we live in. Certainty that we’re going get what we want in the future. So you have to ask yourself, when we’re talking about certainty, you have to ask, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?
Certainty is important for real life stillness because it gives us control, and that means having a sense that you are in control of your life. If you’re not in control of your life, that’s a pretty frightening experience and it’s going to make you pretty tense and stressed. Control comes from the choosing the place where you live and what you do. It also comes in the form of money. And the other control is your relationship. It’s natural to hold stillness, but our cities are really hyperactive places and this makes it hard to find that inner connection. So we need to practice bringing our intuition alive, getting it refined because this overcomes the challenge of the city turbulence. That way, you can remain authentic and natural even in the middle of a city.
Love
Love is the shortest path to stillness that you can find. There’s no better definition because when your heart is open and you feel good, you feel rock solid, so independent.
Love is about bringing your whole being, your mind and your body and your heart in line. It is to do something with total commitment, focus and concentration. It doesn’t matter what. It’s a natural experience for people who are totally absorbed by what they do.
That means to make sure that we walk around on a daily basis feeling love and that means you can say things like, I love my computer, and really mean it. You can say, I’ve got a Mac and I really love it, I’ve got a new book and I really love it, and I’ve got a cat and I really love my cat, or gee, I live near the waterfront and I really love looking out on the ocean.
And you need to say these words all the time to yourself and remind yourself that you are doing love in your life. That love is really important because it causes us to be relaxed. It’s an awareness of the goodness of life.
And of course, if you’re in a relationship, you need to remind yourself that you have love with your partner. Even if things aren’t perfect, love is there. Just because there are some troubles in your relationship or if it isn’t quite what you want, you can still remind yourself you still have love for that person, and the people in the past, love for your family.
Now, the most important thing to understand about love and the thing that a lot of people misunderstand is that it can’t be exclusive. You can’t have this feeling of, I hate those people over there but I love these people over there. That is separation and that means that you’re not really loving the people over there and you’re not really hating the people over there. It’s a myth and to have love you’ve got to be able to say it. Everything’s worthy of love, even if I can’t see it right now, it’s worthy of love. The whole world is nature – “maybe I can’t see love over there but I have faith in nature, she can’t make mistakes. The love is always there but I might be blind to it.”
Violence is the opposite to love. So, when we start judging people or being angry or having regrets or negative emotions towards somebody, even gossip, this kills the love in our heart. Now, when that love goes there is no stillness. We can’t divide up the world and say, this is love, I’m going over here and I’m going to leave this other stuff out of my mind. A lot of people do that. They say, I don’t want to watch the news and I don’t want to listen to this new information. And that’s crazy because you can’t be exclusive. The world is the world and there’s bad news inside of even ourselves. So, we have to love that as well.
So, the best definition of good love is to try and be happy. Be happy and celebrate life rather than to be trying to work out what we can do to fix things. A lot of people talk to me about global warming and killing the whales and the dolphins and I understand their point of view, I really do. But that’s not really going to make good love and a good stillness inside that person if they’re so disturbed about the world. They need to look at things a little more calmly and say, yep, we can still have love and respect for the people who do damage to the earth while we love the earth as well and while we make change.
Remind yourself self of what it feels like to be in good love is to go into nature because in nature I can love everything. It’s really strange but there’s nothing in nature, even a dead animal or a vicious tiger that eats an innocent deer, I see good love going on because I understand nature’s plan and I understand some trees dying and some trees born and some rivers drying up and some rivers flooding and I understand.
Viewpoint
A lot of people get bent out of shape from small things. If you go to Nepal, there’s a little child on the street. The cost to feed that child for one week is $1. You go into Sydney and you walk around the streets with people with their dogs, the cost to feed some fancy dog for a week is $100. We lose a little perspective. People in Sydney get stressed out because the driver in front is too slow, when the same amount of money they’re spending on their car could treat a hundred children in Nepal.
With a small picture mentality we can get so easily stressed over small things because we lose the perspective. With lost perspective, we get a very turbulent based perspective on life. We need to acknowledge that we can get a little self-obsessed and egocentric at times.
Even if we’re not earning as much as we thought we should or generating as well as we could, we need to be putting it in context of some poor child in the middle of Africa or Nepal or India that’s being abused. 15 million children are currently trapped in the sex slave trade, and I think that’s a narrow estimate of how many there really are. So many. 20 thousand children a day die from starvation in the world. So, I think there’s got to be some way in our lives of keeping a context of our experiences so that we get a bigger story to tell. And that way we don’t get so bent out of shape. We don’t get bent out of shape by somebody or something that happens to us as long as we maintain a sense of appreciation for how lucky we are, even in our bad luck.
For me, when I hear an ambulance go down the street, I always say to myself, thank God that’s not me. So, I think a big picture mentality helps a human being create stillness inside of them because it leads to a state of inner gratitude, inner humbleness. We’re just thankful and we’re not comparing ourselves to a self-help guru who’s told us we’re inadequate. We’re comparing ourselves to a street urchin who’s been born in Kathmandu with nothing.
Stay humble to the experience that you have, or the opportunity you have. Being humble to what you’ve got, and being humble to the luck you have in being born here. That means not getting too wound up spending money on junk food, and not buying a great big dog for some unreasonable purpose and feeding that dog more than some kid in Nepal. If you live globally you’ll keep those things in perspective.
So, a big picture mentality also includes the small things we do in life. I see a lot of people just throwing stuff out in the garbage because they bought too much food. Maybe it’s a wiser thing to say, well let’s not buy so much food and with the extra money we’ll send it off to an orphanage and feed some children. That way we have a big picture mentality. We are valuing the opportunity of the luck of our life and because we’ve got a big picture, we’re sharing; we’re sharing with other people globally.
We’re sharing with people who want food and need medicine and need looking after, and especially the children, especially the children because they’re the ones that are, dependant on us. If we don’t share, they grow up angry and starved and with poor nutrition, then those children are going to end up taking military action, and you can see a lot of that in the world right now. There are a lot of the kids who have grown up hungry and now with a gun in their hand.
So, investing in the future means that we think global but act local. We put the resources in context. It also means that we don’t waste money on self-identification, ego worship. We just relax and do what we are born to do, with love and focus and dedication.
Flexibility
When your head gets spun out of shape, there’s just no way in the world that you can feel the stillness and the power within you. You’ve lost it. And any reaction to another person means they’re either pushing you away or pulling you toward them. So, sometimes we get deluded that we have some sense of control when we judge people but anyone that we judge is running our lives.
If we judge people we mess with our head. Then we can’t be authentic and we certainly can’t have stillness. All that said, emotions are a natural part of life and so there’s going to be some reactions and therefore there’s going to be some need for self-adjustments around people, and that’s fair. We can be honest. The real question about our emotional reactions to people is whether we take responsibility for them.
There’s a lot of myth around the idea of being able to remain emotionless because it’s not possible. Every human being, male or female, young or old, has emotion. Without emotion we wouldn’t know how to feel. Without feelings we would have no compassion, without compassion, we’d be a manic crazy person and we’d probably go and do a lot of damage.
Emotions connect us to sensitivity and life, and therefore, they are a positive thing. However, emotions are based on the senses of the body: vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Therefore emotions are, in a sense, very personal judgments, because the eyes, ears, the nose, the mouth and the fingers are really our perspective on the world. We think they are telling the truth but it is really only a personal truth.
In actuality everything is lovable. Events are events until our mind turns them into emotions. So, what we see is not good or bad until our mind converts it into that. The interesting thing is that if you travel around the world you will see that what one culture calls good, another culture calls bad. What one culture calls loud is to another culture soft. Our judgments are our dumbness.
So, all of these judgements are relative and relativity is important because it gives us a sense of identity. The most important thing here is to acknowledge that it isn’t the truth. You can’t be flexible in life if you’re always going around saying; “my perception of this experience is the real one”. Now, this is the biggest problem with religion. Religions say, our perception of these experiences is the real one and therefore everybody else’s is not the real one. So, there are religious people saying, our perception is the truth. And then everybody gets caught up arguing. The real truth is that all is love, but we’re human and can’t always see it. That’s flexibility.
The idea is to have realistic expectations so you can take the foot off the brake. You take the foot off the brake and you go through life. And you go, well, if this happens, there’s going to be some good news and bad news and you can deal with both. And that’s how we get flexible. Most knowledge is not needed. It is only needed to fix things. So, anyone can run a business, even a huge business because it is intuitive really. But if something goes wrong, they need to have the confidence and realistic expectations of life that protects them from disaster. So, companies need wisdom in leadership to have back up plans otherwise there’s 100% risk, and that is like an all upside relationship, it just never happens, it is an unrealistic expectation. Naivety.
Look for the two sides of every coin. It’s an opportunity to remain flexible in life. There are two sides to every argument, there are two sides to every coin, there are two opinions for everything. There are two sides to every situation. And in reality, if you can acknowledge that then you’ll remain flexible. Inner stillness requires that you see two sides of the coin and don’t rely purely on logic to make decisions.
Certainty - The inner environment
Certainty comes from knowing what you’re going to do in the future and that if you don’t succeed, it’s OK. There are two aspects to certainty. Those two aspects are inner environment and outer environment.
Inner Environment. Inner certainty comes from a sense that no matter what goes on around you there is an intuition about the future. It’s not as easy as it sounds because there are a lot of things that come along and make us feel like we’re not so confident in our ability to trust our intuition. And I think this is where there’s a really good benefit in understanding the process of stillness. You see, the idea of creating a future for yourself needs to respect divine order as well as free will. There’s karma, luck, divine guidance as well as our own intentions.
Those components are called the “Manifestation.” The manifestation process has to include both higher power and real life efforts and actions, on our own.
You have to believe it before you see it, you have to smell it before you smell it, you have to taste it before you taste it, you have to see it before you see it, you have to hear it before you hear it. In other words, your mind has to draw a picture of whatever you’re going to do in the future really clearly before you do it. Then you better act on that.
Now that mental picture can’t be a fantasy. It needs to be intuitive. So, the dream is an inner knowing that gives you confidence. If you can’t see it, within, it won’t happen without.
There is a real life component, acting on your intuition. A rock band that’s on a tour still practices three or four hours a day. I know the Rolling Stones rehearse for six months before a world tour. So the six months is the investment they make and then when they’re on tour they’ve just got to maintain things and make improvements to them.
The second part of certainty is confidence that the world around you is going to be good enough for you to live your vision, live your dreams. And that’s where we really need to tune into nature. You have to come to the acknowledgment that the earth’s been here for three billion years, it’s going to be here for another three billion years, whether you like it or not. So, the world’s going to be around but you aren’t. That’s the key. The world’s going to be around for a heck of a long time and no matter what you do, you are not going to be around. So everything is possible except the impossible. Eventually you are going to fail, hard work does not make you immortal.
So, there’s a sense of contribution or participation in the world and a sense of relative calm. A sense of go, out there and participate and let the world bring you the magic and this is where it’s really important, we have to celebrate the journey. You might make billions but your inheritance could get wasted (as it usually does) after just one generation.
We’ve got to go out in the world and give, practice, practice, practice and become a legend. We need to go out there in the world and celebrate what we do, even if it’s not good enough yet. The world is ready for you. It will welcome you and you’ll grow as a result. So, the most important thing - if you want to be an international speaker, go and speak, and fail, and speak, and fail, and speak, and fail, until such time as you speak and don’t fail. And keep going along those ways. That’s how you develop certainty. You learn to be incompetent in the world that is where you get self-confidence from. You learn to love life, not beat it.
Self-awareness
A strange thing happens about stillness, when we feel stressed we can’t be still; we get a feeling that life is out of control. Now this is a really big problem for people and the definition of out of control really changes from person to person. Nobody can say, control this and you’re going to have stillness, control that and you’re going to have stillness because this idea of control depends on where our problems are and where our buttons are. Like, some people really want to control their relationship, some people really want to control their money, some people really want to control their home, and so these ideas of things we identify as most important to have control over, give us the security and that security can give us stillness. And that stillness inside of us can’t exist in turbulence, when we’ve got fear or insecurity happening.
So, I’m going to talk about three core issues for control. A lot of people would agree that these are the three basic areas of control issue. The first one is we need to control our money. A lot of people would want to separate stillness or spirituality or the inner experience of life, from money. But the fact of that matter is if you don’t know where the next dollar’s coming from or your rent’s only paid a week out and you don’t know where the next rent cheque is coming from, or if you’ve got bills coming in and your income is not matching your bills, it’s very, very hard to find stillness because your mind’s spinning around going, how am I going to pay the bills, how am I going to survive under these circumstances?
This is called desperation. Desperation is not an insult to people who are in this position. Desperation is kind of like saying, that’s an emotion that comes up. People will feel desperate and even though they’re good people, their desperation will possibly lead them to do things that are not healthy. Desperate employees, for example, cheat on the boss. A desperate housekeeper will steal things; a desperate partner will have affairs. So, desperation is a sense of urgency. It’s a revelation that the stillness is completely gone and there’s a sense of panic set in. “Fight and Flight” is the psychological term for it but I don’t know a lot about that. What I’m actually saying here is, inner stillness cannot exist in a turbulent world and one of the things that causes people turbulence in their inner world is the insecurity that comes from lack of money.
So, we need to have money in the bank and the average assumption is that if you’ve got three months worth of expenses in cash in the bank, you’re OK. So, if my expenses on a weekly basis were say, $300 or $400, I’d need that, multiplied by 12, which is three months, at four weeks every month, multiplied by 12, I’d need that amount of money in cash in my bank, to sit there and feel relaxed about money. Now that includes my rent, my food, my insurances, all the things that I need to live. If my income got stopped tomorrow and I didn’t have that amount of cash in the bank then I would be nervous. And that nervousness undermines us, undermines our inspiration, undermines our stillness, undermines our health, and undermines everything.
Control in personal relationships comes from being comfortable with vulnerability. To create a strong relationship is very important and if we are comfortable with being vulnerable, we have perfect control, because there’s no need for it.
There are only two choices. Get comfortable with being vulnerable or leave. Setting boundaries in relationship is really important but there’s no boundary to protect you from vulnerability. Your laws and rules about preventing your partner from doing things that you don’t like, just encourages them to lie. They love you, and don’t want to hurt you but rules won’t stop them doing things.
You’re far wiser in relationships to say, I cause stuff to happen. If you can accept yourself as the cause of all your relationship problems right back to being a child, you can empower yourself to change what happens. But the poor individual who is trying to control everyone, blames everyone, and must be so vulnerable – it is impossible to imagine the pain.
And that’s what the book I wrote, Sacred Love, is all about. It is just understanding the five principles that keep couples glued together. And when I say, glued, I really, sincerely mean glued. A couple that are living in sacred love cannot come apart. There’s no way either of them can walk away from it. They might try or they might pretend, but they can’t walk away from it. That relationship is sacred and it’s just completely magnetised those two people together. But I don’t see too many people really implementing the process, the five steps of sacred love. They take pieces of it, or bits of it and say, this is what I’m doing but it’s the whole package of five steps of sacred love. Finding stillness, which is what we’re talking about. Dealing with appreciation and romance, growing through the challenges, getting some common dreams together and the fifth one is making sure love is a lifestyle.
Interconnectedness
All by yourself, out in the middle of nowhere, it’s really hard to feel a sense of stillness because you can feel disconnected. Connection to something is the ultimate relationship. Whether it is a God or Nature, or the Universe. Connectedness puts life in context. Sometimes it is family, sometimes a lover, sometimes a ceremonial icon. People around you give you context for your life. They’re like mirrors, they’re reflections back and that’s so important for us, to be around people that we care about.
The more expanded your context of connectedness, the more connections you can feel in more turbulent conditions. When people get judgemental, they have to go inside a building, close the doors, kneel down and pray to feel some sort of connectedness. That means, as soon as they walk out the door they are disconnected, and this explains the reason people have such strong ego’s. They build a wall to protect themselves.
There’s something more universal than that, a connection to the earth. Connection to the earth means to the flowers, to the birds, to the volcanoes, to the water, to the fish, a sense of place that can’t be taken away. It can’t be diminished by some circumstance. A sense of connection to the earth is so important for us and it’s something that we, from time to time, forget the importance of. When you connect to the earth it’s really kind of like understanding what is life and what is death. Diversity becomes the mantra, not righteousness.
And so, you’re an important part of something far bigger than you can understand. And that’s stillness, that’s when you look up at the stars at night and you lie there on the grass and you look up and you go, WOW!! What have I achieved, just by being here? What a magnificent opportunity this is, to witness the beauty of life, celebrate the stars, celebrate the earth, celebrate the water droplets and connect yourself back into the earth.
Beyond emotion
Stillness comes when we are without disturbance to our heart and mind. This means action with complete certainty, open mindedness and compassion, in other words, without emotion. The emotional person has only glimpses of stillness. The remainder of the time they are in the turbulence of life, spinning around thinking, worrying, stressed and making effort where no effort is required.
A few moments of stillness in the average life can be transformational. Life exists in stillness, because here the ego, the illusions of life, does not exist. Ego is the mirage, the illusion that our thoughts, beliefs, reactions, associations, experiences are real. Stillness is the awareness of the opposite. That in fact in emptiness, nothingness, there is life, because in that emptiness there is love. Love and this is the real pursuit of existence. Stillness.
You may want to change cities, move somewhere else, live in another country, find a new job, get over some issue, change the world, transform a social norm, fight against global warming protect the children, defeat evil, stop the war, feed the hungry, raise awareness and be a good person. We can respect the human need to find a cause, to express a social good and fight against injustice, but if any of this is done without stillness, can become just another part of the melodrama. We need stillness in order to create purity in our intent. What is done from love will become love.
Emotional stability
If your body, mind and heart were a horse and carriage. The horses would be the body, the carriage the heart of it, and the driver the mind. For the vast majority of people, the horses drive the cart rather than pull it. In other words most people let their body rule their head and heart. Therefore, the first skill requirement for understanding the art of stillness is to train the body to obey the mind. That means, being dead still for 10 minutes, in one place, not even moving a finger. Try it. It is harder than you think.
Emotional wisdom
How many times have you found yourself angry and frustrated because someone doesn’t understand you? This reveals a common human issue. We think that we are what we think. Attachment to our knowledge, beliefs, stories, expectations spells trouble for everyone of us. It is from this fundamental place that all our struggles and challenges begin. Therefore, separating ourselves from what we think is a magic pill, an automatic release from a very troublesome habit. See if you can conceptualize this. You are not your morals and ethics. You are not your achievements. You are not what you think. Your opinions about things are your egoistic projection of who you think you’d like to be. Everything that you think, know, believe and worship is simply your ego trying to create some sense of permanency in an impermanent life (you are going to die one day for sure).
Once you have learned to be “dead still” the second discipline is to kill the power of the ego: “Dead thinking”. In a state of dead stillness, and preferably only after you master that skill for 10 minutes, you start to withdraw yourself from your thoughts. You achieve this by just watching them. Now, this is more challenging than it sounds because you must not try. Therefore, you must let any thought that chooses to be in your head, surface. These might not be “nice” according to your self-projection of who you are, but this is the art of emptiness. It is to just watch your thoughts without expectation or judgment. It sounds boring to some people, a waste of time to others, but please, tell those ego’s it’s OK, you will return to your ego after you finish.
Emotional awareness
If our expectations are real in life, then whatever happens in life will not disturb us. Most people are disappointed with the world because what they think should happen and what happens is different. This is the most challenging step because it is the re engineering of the structure of the ego. Disturbance comes to us because our expectations are not met in life. But sometimes those expectations are at fault, not the event. As a result, we commit a grave act of violence on others and ourselves: expectations that are false. So, this third and most difficult step is to change the way (not what) you think.
Non-disturbance means thinking with real expectations. There are five key principles that underpin these real expectations, a sort of filter through which, illusion cannot pass. At first these five principles are challenging, it can take some tough love to cause your ego to let go of false stories and attachments, but it will if you just persist.
The five universal laws of nature are simple, but your ego mind might just kick like a horse when you consider them.
1. Balance
2. Harmony
3. Abundance
4. Growth
5. Higher order
The skills required in the development of these five ego filters can be challenging. For example, most people think there can be a right without a wrong, a bad something (like global warming) without a good. That fails the first law. Another myth is that of gratitude. People are so grateful for what they can see benefit in, and want to change the things they call ‘bad’. That’s not gratitude. Gratitude means not wanting to change anything, appreciation for things as they are. These concepts challenge the constructs of our ego mind. And because we think we are what we think, they cause huge confrontation as we try to save our selves from extinction (ego loss).
Higher emotions
Gratitude
Health and gratitude are the same topic. Maybe this is the real middle path. If there are two sides to everything, (the first law of nature) then surely we will be thankful for both. Gratitude is referred to as “An Open Heart” and this is an amazing state from which to act, thankful for the negative and the positive.
Presence
Emotion and presence are enemies in battle. Emotions cannot exist in the NOW. They can only exist when we think about the past, or the future, fear and guilt. So the emotional person is both dwelling in the past, and hopeful into the future. This turbulence eventually sabotages all they desire. Learning the art of presence comes automatically to those who practice stillness.
Certainty
Certainty comes from patience, contentment, silence, balance and calm. When you stop wanting, and appreciate what you have, this is the energy that generates the certainty to manifest. Greed makes us reach without discernment, hunger leads us to fulfil our appetite with substitutes, distraction causes us to loose our focus (drop the bone) and dissatisfaction (fear) drives away the energy and support that people want to give us, naturally.
Love
Choose an object, which is something precious to you. Feel it, go deep into it and let it go deep into you. It is not for the purpose of achieving pleasure but for the purpose of achieving stillness. The moment will come when all other objects have left you, and there is simply one in front of you and then this one will disappear. When you have forgotten all, you and the object will merge.
See with your heart
You have to learn to become what you see. Seeing with your eyes is not good enough, you must learn to feel it. You see a rose, but this is with your eyes, and if your heart is not stilled, you are not feeling it. It is not true seeing is it? While there is a separation between you and the rose, you are seeing only with your eyes. That seeing is incomplete. When you see the rose with your eyes, there is no real experience; you are actually recalling a memory, from the past, and this seeing is just recollection. You see it and go “Ahh, that’s a rose”; you intellectualize it and keep moving. Did you really experience anything? Only that experience you just had is the one of the past. Your memory substitutes even the smell, you are just too busy to keep smelling things, you say, “I already smelt a rose” But what about the rose you are looking at now? Just a short glimpse of anything is enough to revive the memory of the past experiences, and simply we pass on thinking, I have seen a rose it is beautiful, but we really haven’t seen this rose.
You must remain with the rose. See it, with your eyes, and then feel it with your heart. How do you feel? Smell it, touch it, let it become a deep bodily experience. Close your eyes and let the rose touch your whole face. Feel it. Let the eyes and the ears touch it, smell it. Taste it with your mouth. Put it against your heart, be silent with it; give this rose a chance to be itself, give yourself the chance to experience the feeling. Forget everything else, forget the whole world, make the whole world just this rose. If your mind is thinking of other things then your experience of this rose is not real. It will not penetrate deeply. Forget all other roses; do not compare this rose to any other rose, or any other flower. There is no need to say that this is better than any other rose, or this is not as pretty as the rose I saw last week, or this is an Australian rose and that is a Russian rose, they are unnecessary thoughts. Be here with this rose now and experience all it has do offer.
There will come a moment when there is no separation and you will say in your heart “I have become a rose, I am a rose” This is what happens in love. If you are in love with someone, you forget the whole world. If you are still remembering the world, then know well that this is not love. When you have forgotten the whole world; only the beloved, the lover remains.
Inner sight
Every person in the world should train themselves to depend on the third eye as much as possible. It can make you a power in your day, if not in the world. It can work out your destiny. By having mastery of it, you can become an architect of your own life on earth; you will learn self-reliance. The third eye awareness will keep you wholly within the bounds of right dealings with all others, and then you will be able to show a generosity with the things that self-awareness has accumulated.
When your eyes come to the front of your head they are in attention, when your eyes soften toward the back of your head, they are in awareness. One is hard one is soft. One creates tension the other releases it. First try it in selected periods. For one hour just be attentive to your breathing. By and by you will be able to change your attention into awareness. Then do some simple things, for example, walking; walk attentively with full awareness of walking and also of breathing. Attention is to focus on just one thing, awareness is to be able to hold that focus and do many things. Do not create any opposition between the two actions of walking and breathing. Be a watcher of both. It is not difficult.
When you have mastered awareness over attention, these exercises help to open the third eye. Close your eyes then focused both of your eyes just in the middle of your eyebrows. Focus just in the middle, with closed eyes, as if you are looking with your two eyes. Give total attention to it.
Now this is an amazing awakening when finally you becoming aware of Prana in your centre of imagination. There will develop a blur between reality and your imagination, dreams and visions. By focus on the third eye, and awareness of life force, you become the beauty, you feel it; it is you. This is the key. You feel the heat, the warmth, that’s the clue. If you are cold within, always feeling chilled you have lost the inner glow, the warmth of self-love, the life force has escaped. Then you need to turn the world inside yourself and find the third eye and feel the life force, then inner beauty will come and you will again feel the warmth of inner strength return.
Act on your inspiration
Inspiration is a higher form of intuition. It is an inner response, a deep intuition, a stream of wonder and bewilderment that comes to the individual through mysterious means. When a truly inspired person has received an inspiration, be it a writer, a poet, a composer, or a creator; they are totally satisfied. Their satisfaction is not with themselves, but with what has come to them. Inspiration is called “the soul’s reward”. It does not come from us but through us and requires steadfast diligence in thought, vigilance in word, and a deep order to make it manifest.
It is not by being anxious of receiving something that we are able to receive it. It is not by straining the brain that one can be inspired. It is not by worrying for days on end that one is able to compose a piece of music. A person whose mind is cluttered, worried, stressed, or angry cannot receive inspiration. The individual who receives inspiration is a tranquil and unconcerned soul, calm and assured about what is coming. Certainly they desire to receive something. They are passionately waiting to conceive of it. It is by focusing the mind to the divine mind that consciously or unconsciously, we will receive inspiration.
With this guidance, they will create or paint, with little recollection of how they produced their final piece. Inspiration comes to a musician as though through the voice of another. The music will appear, a complete song, with perfect melody and rhythm. A poet’s inspiration comes to them as though someone was dictating and they were simply writing it down. There is no strain on the brain while writing; there is no anxiety in receiving this information.
The best way to tap genius is to make yourself an empty vessel, free from pride of learning or conceit of knowledge. Become as innocent as a child who is ready to learn anything that is to be taught to you.
Learn nature’s guidance
The revelation is that every leaf of the tree becomes a page of the sacred scripture. Once the individual has learned to read, every insert elects the mystery, the stars reveal the whole story. Great books become secret codes to the deeper mysteries and your life becomes a mirror of the divine laws that permeate the universe. Your separation from God and the universe can only exist when you consider yourself immune from the great laws, or you consider those great laws unevenly applied. Some individuals perceive a sense of great worthiness and this is separation because it implies that by doing good you become more worthy. Just like creating your own worthiness, people tend to condemn themselves with judgment. This is a dangerous practice, as our thoughts create our reality. It is truly your own thoughts, which can consequentially result in the end of your existence.
The great mystics knew this. If they wanted to understand something, they simply observed it, they didn’t criticize it, they didn’t condemn it, they didn’t reach out for it or avoid it. They just sat in silent observation of it. Great composers, artists and inventors have always had the capacity to be alone for extended periods of time. The greater their achievements, the more alone they were. Edison, lived, ate and slept in his workshop laboratory for weeks at a time. Interruptions would bring his mind back to the surface layers, so he would immerse himself in the inspiration of silence for days at a time. It was through this isolation that his subconscious mind could access that great ocean of knowledge in the central courts of heaven. It is from there it can tap discoveries.
A purpose greater than self
Why am I here?
Where am I going?
Who Am I?
Where did I come from?
The perennial teachings of life. Universal questions requiring universal answers.
The more certainty we have regarding the answers to these four questions, the deeper our stillness will be. Certainty comes through the answers to these four questions, the higher the answer, the deeper the individual.
Most people have not reached a clear state of realizing exactly what they love to do and what they are good at. By simply being aware that there is a greater plan for your life that waits to unfold in the course of life itself, you will begin to become in tune with something greater than yourself. Every incident that comes into your professional and personal life will be an opportunity to celebrate and to unravel the mystery of your life.
Examine your attitude. Sometimes people feel that whatever the work they are doing, it could not be sacred, not intended for them. They blame the work. The missing piece here is not what is wrong with the work they are doing, but rather understanding the work they are performing right now in the context of the bigger picture of their destiny.
It is in the doing of things that the wealth exists. A person who can say, “I love doing this” is far more rewarded on the cosmic level than the person who would say “I am doing this job because I’ve got to do it” Even an open heart will close if inspirations are not being expressed - the artist must paint, the sculptor must sculpt, the doctor must heal. All your inner stillness must result in action. When you do what you love and follow this inspiration, your opportunities expand ten fold. That’s not to say things won’t get tough, they do, but when you do what you love, the challenge is worth it.
Unlearning judgment
Once, many years ago, I sat on a mountaintop in Nepal. I had given much to be there, and put myself at some financial and physical risk to arrive at this summit. It was my belief that, in achieving this “peak” I would be somehow transported emotionally and spiritually.
In my over loaded backpack, along with my ice axe and rope, I carried my beliefs with all my emotional baggage and judgements. I carried it all the way to the summit. Nothing changed really. I was just somewhere else, with the same old consciousness. I realized then, unless something changes, nothing changes, and the thing to change, is my consciousness; my judgements of myself and others.
The gift of reconnecting with nature, is that we change connect to our core. It is not something we add, design, manipulate or collect. It is a state we revert to, one that exists already within us that we occasionally experience by accident, but now we reconnect, for life. All the knowledge in the world will not bring us happiness if we are falsely defining ourselves by our identity. No matter whether I become a born again Christian, a Fundamentalist Moslem, or an anti globalization protestor, all I change is what I judge, not how much. To really add more love to my life, and therefore grow spiritually, I must learn that whatever I judge has two sides, and both add up to the whole truth as opposed to the emotional half-truth.
Stillness, the real home of a relationship is a mindless state. It is a place of stillness, absolute stillness where we don’t want to go anywhere.
Fall in love again, and again
Go together into a place of beauty and solitude and stop. Stop wanting to stop. Stop wanting to go. Stop trying to connect to each other. Just find stillness. Don’t speak, don’t look into each other’s eyes, don’t try anything.
The person who finds harmony with nature does not give up material life, nor throw away technology or even stop the quest for self-improvement. This person simply underpins everything they do with an awareness of stillness and peace.
In stillness, we are full; we are fulfilled, nourished, nothing is needed. No achievement can add to it. No pleasure can supersede it. We are content in our harmony with nature, and therefore, in this emptiness, we are no longer imprisoned by our mind. It is the emptiness of our true nature that frees us to love.
When we reconnect to nature in stillness it calls us away from our ego mind. It calls us away from our emotions and judgements and requests that we sit still for a few moments, in truth. A truth not dependent on our beliefs or religious ideology or social construct, but a truth that is found sitting by the edge of a lake, in silence not thinking at all. When we feel this awe that comes from the awareness of beauty, it reminds us of just how we felt as a child, when we opened that gift we never dreamed we’d get.
Overcome obstacles
Jane was proud to inform me, “I go into nature, I sunbathe on the beach. I tan myself and feel totally connected to the sand and the sun.
Not wanting to spoil her sense of achievement I responded, “the connection to the sun and the sand is profound, and you can magnify this too. You can listen to the sound of the surf, you can feel the wind on your body, you can really expand this experience. However the most important element of connection to nature is, the not doing. When you sunbathe it is possible that you are still trying to achieve something. You are trying to get tanned, and this, combined with the drowsiness one can feel in direct sunlight, can make it a little harder to stay present with it.
Being in nature is a non-doing activity; you just take time to go there.
Follow Your Path
As one of my many and varied spiritual pursuits I decided to climb a mountain in Nepal. A friend had championed this exploit. I idolized her success and was setting out to emulate it. I took a couple of months off work and headed up to explore the mountains, get lost, become famous, find truth.
I spent six months preparing. Learning to climb up and down vertical cliffs with my finger nails, hanging from ropes about the thickness of my pyjama chord and at the drop of a handkerchief scramble down mountains backward. I arrived in Kathmandu to great celebration and ceremony. My friend had recruited the support of all her trusted Nepalese friends. I was, in an instant, one of the bunch.
I arranged for food drops, bought supplies and acclimatized in a mountain village for three days. I was ready for fame and glory. However, four hours into this month-long expedition, I stopped, took off my pack and threw in the towel.
Climbing the sacred mountain is a personal journey. No one can tell us what to do with our lives. However, we deserve to know the difference between our destiny and someone else’s.
Unlearn – every step up to the age of around 20, we create identity “who am I”. Every step after is the journey of unlearning all that imprisoning identification with judgment.
Prepare to unlearn
To truly climb this Sacred Mountain we need to have a sense of our own personal truth, a sense of openness to life. To become open to life we must undo what has been learned and begin to accept that there are two sides to everything. That is the mountain’s first teaching.
The greater the climber, the better the pupil they are. They learn from everyone, the great and the lowly, the wise and the foolish, the old and the young. They learn from their lives, and study human nature in all its aspects.
They say in the East that the first thing that is learned is to unlock what has been learned and then to unlearn it. We have to learn how to become a good student. It means loosing our individuality. And what is individuality but one’s ideas and opinions, a collection of erroneous facts that, through conditioning, or experience have been adopted as truth.
If you have once said, “I dislike that person” -- that is learning. And then you say; “I know, I can like them, or I can have empathy for them”. When you say that, you have seen with two eyes. First you learn by seeing with one eye but the load is too heavy; then you unlearn and you see with two eyes, this makes the learning complete, lessen the load.
Become one with your journey
In spirituality we aspire to be complete. Whatever this means, the ultimate experience is to be in total contentment, to want absolutely nothing, to desire nothing, to be totally content with yourself. Then there is nothing lacking. There is no desire, no movement, no mountain, no you. From this place all actions are taken with purity and whatever you touch, whatever you are doing or not doing -- even just existing -- is a peak experience. You are alive and that is enough, each step up the mountain is a victory, the summit becomes just another step like the last one. It is all a wonderful experience.
Prepare your mind
A good climber will become desireless. They say in some teachings that if you become desireless, you’ll know yourself. But the contrary is also true. If you know yourself, you will become desireless. If you feel incomplete, you think you don’t have enough, and this drives us to make climbing mistakes; the wrong foothold or a slip on ice. If we simply focus on the joy of the process, and allow the results to care for themselves we will perform at our best.
Finding your true spirituality does not necessarily mean that you are satisfied on the outside. It simply means that you are satisfied on the inside. True spirituality means that you have extinguished only the inner desire. But this does not mean that your external world is unproductive.
When we talk of this inspiration, we do not mean that you should become a monk, but we do say that you can become a total person, whole, complete. That means to create a balance, be centred and fulfilled as a person.
Be Centred
A person who is centred is the same, no matter who they are with, or where they are. They have the same inner quality. When alone they are no different then when they are with friends. They are completely natural. There is no need to pretend, there is no act to present. Falsehood has no place in their life because the centre is the axis around which they live their life.
The infatuated person will jump for the sky, and reach great heights. For a moment they are not on the earth they have defied gravity. But the next moment, they are on the earth again. To hold your centre no matter what is happening is a key to climbing high on the sacred mountain. You don’t want to slip and fall do you?
For the centred person everything becomes sacred, beautiful whole. Whatever they are doing, whatever it is they focus their mind and take full mindfulness. Nothing is trivial. They will not say this is small and this is large. This is important and this is unimportant, no, for them everything holds the same weight. A self-actualized person, a balanced, centred person, feels in harmony with everything. You can feel it in their touch. The great doctors and healers of our time have been known for the power of their touch, the softness of the disposition and the power of the concentration.
Hold Balance
Another thing about climbing sacred mountains is that you remain balanced. Not just your body, but also your mind, and your pack and your life are in balance. If you become one-sided or even make a stand or get righteous, which is polarized thinking, you’ll fall down because, as you understand, everything is built in duality and to stand on one side or the other breeds imbalance. We know imbalanced thinking makes imbalanced body. So, if you don’t keep your thoughts balanced, your body will be uneven and woooshhhh.
A person who is imbalanced will have significant swings of emotion from infatuation to resentment, elation to depression, attraction to repulsion, they find extremes attractive. Now you know that emotion on a trek or a climb is your enemy. If you have emotions you’ll react, and then surely miss your footing.