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Enough….
Thank-you, thank you.
You feel ready.
In the last lecture of this series,
I talked about the importance of distinguishing between
physical realities based on indisputable evidence,
and inner personal realities that are based on beliefs.
And somebody said that
he would not believe anything that could not be demonstrated.
Now a different viewpoint on that is that
if something can be demonstrated, it must be part of the physical reality,
and there would be no need to believe in it.
So, the big difference between inner personal reality
and outer physical reality is their degree of malleability.
It means the degree that something can be shaped or influenced;
malleable.
And you can shape personal reality by changing your mind,
but to shape physical reality requires planning and effort.
The good news is that the vast majority of those things that
determine your life experience: beliefs, motivations, and goals
are elements of inner personal reality.
So what I am saying is that you are an intelligent creature
who can re-acquire the state of creator
in regard to your personal reality.
Now if some transparent belief
generates experiences that you don't prefer,
you have the power within you to change it.
You can change your "I can’ts" into "I coulds if I wants to."
That’s the way Popeye would say it.
If you’ve done Avatar® you know that there is a step-by-step process for
tracing back from undesirable experiences
to the underlying beliefs that are generating the experience,
and that there is an effective and swift methodology
for changing the beliefs, if you choose to.
One of the things that is repeatedly stressed in Avatar
is that the choice of what you believe,
or what you change, is yours.
And that's why we began these talks with
the path to personal responsibility.
And part of this responsibility journey
is learning to control your own mind.
And to acquire wisdom about what beliefs lead people to happiness
and what beliefs lead people to suffering.
That’s the basic lesson of your life.
Experience with the physical universe leads to knowledge;
experience with beliefs leads to wisdom.
And as I promised in an earlier talk,
here are some broad guidelines for choosing beliefs:
For at least 10,000 years, and probably a lot longer,
wise men and women have taught that beliefs
motivated by forgiveness and kindness lead to happiness,
and that beliefs motivated by revenge and selfishness lead to suffering.
History has repeatedly tested this thesis and pretty much confirmed it.
So this is the first thing that you should consider
in deliberately choosing what beliefs to put your faith in,
and what beliefs to discreate.
Just ask, “Why do I choose to believe this?”
Inspect your own motivations.
This is best done with a resolve to be completely honest.
Look for what your motivation was
in the moment before you chose the belief,
or accepted the belief from someone else.
Generally speaking, beneficial beliefs
are motivated by the prediction of future consequences,
and harmful beliefs are motivated by justification of past events.
I say generally speaking because both beneficial and harmful beliefs
can be contagious, can become indoctrinations
accepted by the majority of a generation without event.
Another thing for you to consider in managing your beliefs
is the golden rule:
"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
If everyone chose to believe what you believe,
would the amount of suffering in the world increase or decrease?
The third thing,
and this one can spare you from destructive emotions,
is to deliberately believe
that any misfortune that you experience
is the result of actions you have done in the past.
Wow.
At first this may seem like it’s just too great a burden,
or that it’s letting a victimizer off the hook,
but really, it frees you completely from the blame game.
And at best, it turns your suffering into a lesson.
At worse, it is an honorable settling of a karmic debt.
And either is better than flailing helplessly
in the trap of victim consciousness.
Full responsibility is a source belief,
and it increases the possibility
of self-healing and of living deliberately.
Remember, no one is arguing for the truth of the statement
that you are totally responsible for everything that happens to you.
It’s a hypothesis.
The truth is, "I don't know,
and neither do you."
I mean, life can get weird.
What I am saying is this:
believing that this statement is true will lead to less suffering
than surrendering to the idea that you’re a victim.
Stay forgiving, responsive to others,
and the truth will take care of itself.
Among self-sabotaging beliefs,
beliefs that place the cause of your life experience
beyond your control are at the top of the list.
Some other self-sabotaging beliefs are
beliefs that seek happiness at the expense of another,
or beliefs that deny your obligations,
and beliefs that minimize the importance of ethical conduct
or spiritual practice.
And as a last bit of advice on taking personal responsibility
for your beliefs is this:
compare the consequences of holding one belief
with the consequences of holding its opposite.
When I first started computer programming,
one of the most difficult things I had to come to grips with
was that there were many ways to code the same thing.
There wasn't one right answer.
I was looking for some kind of instruction that said
this is how you do it, one right answer.
But what I found was that there were many different ways
of getting to the same result.
Now there are rare cases in the physical universe
where there is only one way, or one procedure,
or one formula that will produce a specific result.
But the same is not true for consciousness, and
“only-one-answer-solutions” should always be suspected.
Believing that there is only one right belief leads to
dogma, indoctrination, and intolerance;
it doesn’t lead to wisdom.
In the universe of mind, there are as many right answers
as there are viewpoints,
and creating only one answer is just lazy.
It’s also dangerous because it locks you into one inflexible viewpoint.
One belief, one viewpoint; that’s all you get.
One of the duties of Avatar Wizards is to perform
an on-going assessment of society's belief choices.
Does life run better if people believe this,
or does life run better if people believe that?
Truth is not the issue;
the issue is what people believe.
Which in a round about way
brings us to the subject of this talk,
which is entitled “The Path to Compassion”.
The goal of this path is to open a connection
between the feelings of heart consciousness
and the reasoning power of the intellect.
The feelings of heart consciousness:
love, empathy, kindness, patience, tolerance, and so on,
as a group can be labeled compassion.
And developing compassion is
breaking through the selfishness that dominates reason.
Compassion means sharing someone's suffering.
And it’s a transition from, "What do I want?" to
"How can I help?"
I once attended a meditation retreat in upstate New York.
The organizer was Swami Chod,
who was a psychotherapist who had left his practice
to study Hindu yoga.
And the program required that each student meditate
from 6 in the morning to 9 o'clock at night.
Breaks were only allowed for bathroom
and a light noon meal.
And the goal was to put in 40 hours of seated meditation in three days.
During this period everyone agreed not to speak
to anyone other than to the Swami
and only when he addressed you with a tap on your knee.
So on the first day Swami Chod instructed us to sit quietly
on our pillows and meditate on the location of our consciousness.
Now to me this was a little bit like trying to
lift myself by my own shoelaces.
After I struggled with it for eight hours, you know,
punctuated with naps and daydreams,
the Swami squatted in front of me and he patted my knee,
and asked me with a gentle smile, "How are you doing?"
And I took the opportunity to quote something I’d once read,
"The eye that sees cannot see itself."
I felt very smug,
like I’d figured it out.
College grad-u-ate.
He smiled, shook his head yes,
and said, "OK," which meant, "No, keep trying."
He patted me on the knee again
and he expanded the instruction.
"Locate your consciousness without thinking or looking."
Oh, without thinking looking, I thought.
He should have told me that to begin with….duh?
He was wasting my time with incomplete instructions.
And I felt this flood of blame arise in my mind,
which wasn't the first time I had experienced it,
but it was so clear and completely separate from me this time.
Wow.
That's what a blaming mind looks like.
So I sat for another three hours, thinking about my resentment,
until I realized that I was probably wearing grooves in my brain.
Then I started thinking about not thinking,
and then looking at not looking,
and dreaming about a redhead in my history class.
I thought about leaving, but then I imagined
what a blow that would be to my reputation.
And that led to a fantasy about God appearing to everyone and
announcing that I was the chosen one,
which directly led back to thoughts about the redhead.
I see we’ve got some meditators here.
So, Day One….interesting. But no real progress
on locating the source of my consciousness.
On Day Two, I discovered leg cramps.
And I was wondering if I might be inadvertently
crippling myself for life.
That was pretty much my concern for Day Two.
On the third day of the retreat,
just as I was about to give up,
I suddenly stopped thinking and started feeling.
Here. Here.
I mean, consciousness is here.
Right here, right now.
Wow - everything is here, right now!
Everything, the past, the future, right now.
Right now.
I think a halo must have appeared around my head.
This time when the Swami patted my knee,
he didn't even ask how I was doing.
He just smiled and left me to enjoy the here and now.
And I understood why at the moment of enlightenment
Buddha touched the ground.
He’s going “here…here.”
For the rest of the day the "here" got wider and wider,
and the "now" got slower and slower.
And I experienced unconditional love as a state of being
rather than as an idea.
Loving precious humanity as an experience, as a state of being.
Oh - and I cried like a baby, as this
overwhelming compassion just raised from my heart.
I think there’s some magic in slowing down
that causes consciousness to move from the head to the heart.
And vice versa, I imagine.
I was aware of this movement as a literal fact,
rather than as a poetic metaphor.
My perceptions were being translated in the chest area
rather than in the brain.
My heart opened.
I was at the heart of the matter.
I experienced heartfelt compassion.
I fell into the sacred heart.
I had a song in my heart.
I left my heart in San Francisco.
Sorry, I lost my heart to metaphor madness.
OK, I'm through….
cross my heart.
In Hinduism, heart consciousness is called Anahata,
which is the name of the chakra in the heart region, anahata.
According to their belief, the heart is the center of compassion,
altruism, forgiveness, and non-judgmental acceptance.
And it’s this heart consciousness where unconditional love manifests,
and where personal responsibility arises from,
and where people engage in selfless kindness toward each other.
Let me read you something written by the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung.
When consciousness orients itself with the heart
instead of the brain, people change.
Doing feel-its is an orientation to heart consciousness.
We touch our head to signal an intellectual process,
but when we touch the heart region, it signals a spiritual process.
The head is intellect:
it communicates with words and emotional reactions,
and its basic motivation is to solve problems and deal with fear.
But the heart is spirit:
it communicates with empathy, feel-its
and its basic motivation
is to connect, to contribute, and to express love.
The intellect focuses on matters of survival and social status;
the heart focuses on ethical matters and compassion.
The self of the intellect is the ego;
the self of the heart is the spirit, or higher self.
The connection between head consciousness and heart consciousness,
or between ego and spirit, is called the path of compassion.
Head is "me" consciousness; heart is "higher self" consciousness.
Head is reason; heart is feeling.
Head is mortal; heart is eternal.
Wholeness is experiencing the connection between these two extremes.
A person operates most successfully
when he or she has deliberate access
to both of these modes of consciousness.
Head without heart is brutish and selfish;
heart without head is naïve and reckless.
But together, they inspire people to ethical sane behaviors.
The integration of head and heart give rise to a moral conscience.
Heart directed by head, and head restrained by heart,
are optimum conditions for creating an enlightened planetary civilization®.
The obstructions on this head/heart path
are addressed on the Integrity Course,
and on the Professional Course,
and in the Wizard's materials.
And the obstructions consist of
misunderstandings, misidentifications
indoctrinations, and transgressions.
Let's do the compassion exercise together.
See if you experience any movement on this path
from head consciousness to heart consciousness.
First, select a person in this room. It can be a friend or a stranger.
Preferably someone you can see.
It's fine if you what to run it
on the person next to you or in front of you.
This is a non-vocal exercise
and the results I’d like you to focus on are
what you get from running the exercise
rather than the results of having it run on you. OK?
Are you set?
Source beings?
With attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
"Just like me, this person is seeking some happiness for (his or her) life.
"With attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
"Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in (his or her) life."
With attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
"Just like me, this person has known sadness, loneliness and despair."
With attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
"Just like me, this person is seeking to fill (his or her) needs."
And finally, with attention on the person, repeat to yourself:
"Just like me, this person is learning about life."
Can I see a show of hands of how many
of you have experienced some movement from head to heart?
Yeah, good.
That’s most of you.
Here are some techniques that
various religions and spiritual practices have used
to move people on this path from head to heart:
First is meditation.
For example,
meditating upon the kindness of your mother.
She took care of you,
she fed you,
and she kept you safe when you were helpless.
How do you repay her for giving you human birth?
And think of the many kindnesses and
sacrifices that your mother made for you.
Does that open your heart?
Another practice is breathing exercises.
Most of the breathing exercises have the goal of
making your breathing deeper and slower.
And when that happens,
the body cleanses itself,
blood pressure drops,
and consequently the heart relaxes and opens up.
Another practice is chanting mantras.
These are sounds that cause energy movement in and around the body.
One of my favorites is om mani padme hum.
The tonal vibrations of this mantra balance energies in the mind and body.
And as the mind and body relax,
again the heart opens.
There are some mantras that are just devotional:
Hail Mary, full of grace.
Hail Mary, full of grace, is a Christian devotional mantra.
Aum Namah Shivaya, Aum Namah Shivaya,
Aum Namah Shivaya is a Hindu devotional mantra.
They both awaken heart consciousness.
There are many compassion practices that are based on devotion.
In this sense devotion means to give up
or surrender the ego to a divine influence.
And the divine influence comes through the heart.
Devotion includes all kinds of rituals,
prayers, dancing, singing,
or any selfless activity, that moves consciousness
from the head to the heart.
Once the heart path is open,
confession and forgiveness will keep it open,
and head and heart consciousness will begin to integrate.
Now I know I covered a lot of ground in this talk,
but I hope that something I have said has touched your spirit.
Be well and continue to contribute
to the creation of an enlightened planetary civilization.
And I'll see you at Wizards.