God's Firewall

It is not your job to annihilate your mind. Your mind with all its abhorrent thoughts is not your enemy. Your mind is a tool for creation in the physical realm. The purpose of your mind is to produce options for you to accept or reject.

Having an idea you must reject is not a failure, it is how the process works.

The mind presents you an option which arises from the course you are on. If it is not what you want, appreciate it has arisen because you are now alerted to the fact that you have given it sufficient attention to be on the cusp of creation.

This is important information, because now you may choose to accept it, or you may release it and clear it before it manifests. If it does not serve you, if it is not what you want, let it go, and act as if it never was.  Do not try to 'resist' it. Just accept it has arisen and dismiss it. To resist it, fight it, dispair over it, hate it, struggle with it, is to resonate with it, and therefor attract/create/manifest it.

Awareness of what you do not want is not a failure. It is the process working perfectly. Release it back to the devine, into the realm of the unmanifested. Do not give it your attention again, unless it arises in your consciousness again, which is an indication that another aspect of it also needs releasing, least you create it unconsciously.

Be aware of your mind and what it is thinking. Think actively and consciously.

If it arises 1000 times, release it 1000 times. A thought arising is not a problem. Accepting that it is there is not a problem. Accepting that it has arisen is the opposite of resisting that it has risen. Accepting what is, keeps you in a state of non-resistance, which is the 'unattached' creative state of NOW.

Let it come and go, do not make judgments about it (which takes you out of the NOW and attaches you to the dead past) and do not fear it (which takes you into an imagined unwanted future, which is also is outside the NOW.)

NOW is the only place creation happens.

Giving 'what you do not want' your full attention and holding it in your thoughts and rehearsing it in your mind, and acting on it will bring it into form. Learn to discern the difference.

Just thank your mind for pointing it out. Deal with it and move on.

You are a creator. Your purpose here is to learn how to be a conscious creator instead of an unconscious one. This is the task of life.

The illusion of separation from God arises from identifying with your own created persona rather than with your true nature, which is God the Creator.

Your persona is your avatar, it is how you interface with the material/manifested world, and it is also a kind of firewall.

It is a buffer between your unconscious intentions and your conscious creations.

If not for your physical body (your avatar), you would blow up the world with your unconscious creations!

Our avatar is our 'governor', it receives most of our attention, and so suffers most of our unconscious creation. But our avatar is also our greatest teacher: through it we learn the discipline to create with consciousness. As we develop enough consciousness to create without being distracted by our avatar, then we become mature enough to do so.

I believe this is enlightenment and also the beginning of miracles.

The Metaphysics of Aging

Aging is the separation of the material from the sense of self which enables transcendence.

Okay, there has to be a simpler way to say that. So; if the jewel is in the lotus, at some point, the lotus has to drop it's petals to reveal the jewel, no?

Aging, and ultimately dying, reveals the material for what it is: temporary.

Aging is increasing evidence that YOU are not your body. That you are something else entirely. Your body becomes increasingly irrelevant. Nothing more than traveling clothes on your journey in this life. This realization is what is essential to balanced detachment.

In order to be an effective healer, you must be detached from the outcome. It is only when we recognize that our own illness and infirmities and disabilities are not ourselves, and the body's increasing and ultimate failure to align with our spiritual nature in a necessary peeling away of material things, that gives us that detachment. It is then we may heal ourselves. Or not. It really doesn't matter then, does it?

I just see myself as quite old and round and merry and laughing my ass off in a zen fit of glee over this.

The greater the degree of our recognition that the physical self IS NOT ME, the less the sense of suffering. This can seem a paradox, because often we must suffer the awareness of this disconnection prior to transcending it. When you understand that the body is not you, it becomes a much simpler matter to tame it. It is a matter of conducting oneself within the lotus as the petals peel away.

The challenges of aging, then is not the decline, but a turning-up-the-volume of existence.

If it is true that the harmonic scale of our years is a musical 7 X 7 octave to the cadence of our lives. 49 ends the first scale of your life, and 98 concludes the second.

I'm taken with that notion, although I don't yet fully get it. Still, it's quite interesting to see 50 as a new beginning, corresponding to a second journey. I'm wrestling with the notion of whether one goes up, and then back down the scale, or if it just begins over again. (can you hear the piano in my head?)

It may be an important distinction, as each octave has it's own level of vibration. I can easily equate the 90s with one's first decade, and a re-descent into physical babyhood again. However, entering one's 50's as I am now, begins that confrontation with aging which seems to increase in pitch until a final vibration is reached which rattles you loose from mortal existence altogether.

The former seems a feminine outlook. The flower blooms and then fades. Gives rise and then yields.

The later is a masculine climb up the mountain into thinner and thinner air with increasing exertion.

Perhaps both are correct.

I am awake at 2 in the morning capturing these ideas because they feel like they will be essential to how the rest of my life plays out.

This is the answer to question I wished I had asked my grandparents before they passed. “How do you grow old without despair?” Now, instead of despair, I see an entirely different scenario. One which reminds me of a poem which impressed itself on me when I was barely 20:

i want to live to be

an outrageous old woman

who is never accused of being

and old lady

i want to live to have ten thousand lovers

in one love

one 70 year long loving love

there are at least two of me

i want to get leaner, and meaner

sharp edged

color of the ground

till i discorporate

from sheer joy

This was from the book Country Women, a handbook for the new farmer. It was written by both Sherry Thomas and Jeanne Tetrault but the poem itself is not attributed. My husband gave me this book when we were first starting out, and it is one of my great treasures. The book now has yellow and brittle pages. The front cover is lost, Instead, the first thing you see is the cover-sheet where my husband once scrawled in pencil: To my wife with great love. He was 22 when he wrote that. It seems from where I sit now an age where love and its greatness could have only barely been an inkling, yet as I write this, I can hear that same man stirring in our bed down the hall.