Right Effort, Right Action and Success

     Right effort means knowing what your capable of. It means applying will to the degree that maximizes results. Not too much, not too little. The Goldilocks zone. It means you have a idea of what you want to accomplish, how you want to accomplish it, and you accomplish it as you planned to. Your able to balance your various desires, impulses, and energies during the day as you execute your ambition. You are composed and the work you do is fulfilling.
     It is an ideal. Yet I believe it is also an exact science. I think you can perform perfect action. You can act in perfect balance with the universe and yourself. Actions can be right in different ways and wrong in different ways. Ultimately right action means being totally yourself, completely unbounded in action and in thought. Yet it also can means simply to do what needs doing during the day, however you go about doing it. Righteousness is subjective, relative, and also absolute and objective. Right action is spirit or the essence of life. Chi or pure energy. It is the totality, the Whole, the One, Unbounded boundless consciousness. Its also basic matter, it is the Earth and humanity. It is life as it is now: raw, messy and untouched.
     It is acting in accordance with principles, ideals, traditions, and conventions. Fulfilling agreements and plans; and maintaining relationships. It means being inspired, having desires, feeling, thinking, and being alive. Right action is ultimately us as we are now. It is life itself, working as it does, free and full, wild and alive. It is seeing, being, moving, loving. It is the here and now. It is beauty and ugliness. It is perfection and terror. It is the incredible system of consciousness that we inhabit, that we are. It is smells, sensations, sounds, tastes and sights. It means being whole as we are, yet also awakening to a deeper sense of who we are. Being right as we are, yet searching and striving for something more. Being right, yet also being wrong, and working to be better. To be more compassionate, able bodied and able minded. It is growing and expanding in form and being.
     In the pursuit of good and greatness, we cannot push too hard or too soft. We must find balance in ourselves: in the expression of who we are; and in the force that wells up in us and out into the world.  We perform right action when we are blind and we perform right action when we can see. The right action of the blind that we call good leads to the Good, the Light. And when we have found the Light, the right action we perform leads to God and the Whole, the One. Or the none. The Light leads to Emptiness, and the emptiness leads to the One: the Sea or the Multitude. Here we find ourselves and forget who we are in who we are. We remember that we are as we are. We stand wherever we may be as we are in the shade of the Sun. Asleep and awake as we walk in the twilight of ourselves. Empty and free, full and nothing. Everything and something. We melt into the stars: into thin air.
     Until we dissolve into ourselves. We have action to perform. We have a sentence, or a duty. An obligation, or a responsibility. I think for most of us, we seek the ideal of balance. Whether or not we can achieve it, we can get closer to it in our lifetimes. Nearly all of us have desire, ambition, drive, things to do, and somewhere to go. In this case, this very human case, right action definitely means the action that we can take to strike a healthy balance in our life. Its not perfect, but it works. The more it works, the more it becomes right action: until we believe it is right action.
     To perform an action is to manipulate the world. Manipulate or create or change. When we assess the meaning of right action in the scope of any single isolated action, it means manipulating the world(in the broadest sense) as we intended to: as we envisioned. The elements are mind(vision/plan/intention), subject, perhaps a tool(s), and that which is changed(world or subject). There must be an intention for their to be action and that intention must be made manifest by the act for it to be right. To perform right action, you must manifest what you intend to.
     To perform right action within the scope of attaining a healthy balance in life, you have to perform many actions well in an integrated and thoughtful manner. You have to manage various interconnected elements of your life successfully to achieve adequate health. These elements are the basic components of a human being and a human life. You have to give proper attention to each of these elements. You have to know how these elements effect each other. You can't give too much attention to one specific element and neglect others. When one or several elements are neglected the integrity of the system is compromised. To achieve optimum performance, optimum growth, and to keep the system from collapsing, you must organize your life, your attention, in such a way that you keep each of these elements flowing in a healthy way. There must be balance and harmony in the system, in your thought, and in you action. Each element has unique and specific properties and requires unique and specific attention. You can't eat food to satisfy your need for personal attention. You need to feel included, appreciated, and loved to be well. Food doesn't solve that problem. An inclusive and caring social circle does.
     We are not born aware of the complexities of life. We must learn what makes us thrive through trial and error. We are often working towards better balance and health. We feel and sense that part of us is compromised. We feel pain and we suffer. If we pay attention to these symptoms, we can discover why. We act from a compromised position. We act from partial ignorance and partial understanding. We must take risks. This is where right effort comes in. Right effort is learned through successes and failures. Through honing our abilities, understanding, sense, and intuition. It is a balance of vision (what we wish to manifest in our lives) and capability (what we actually can manifest in our lives). We may not  pursue what is good for us, but we still wish to make happen what we want most; and refine our understanding and abilities to make it so. We refine our effort to manifest what we desire most, regardless of how it affects us or others, unconsciously or consciously.
     Our ability to act in ways that bring about our heart's desire, our vision, is right action. Our ability to apply force or will in necessary degree, to our action, to bring about our vision, is right effort. Our system or being generates force that molds, changes, or creates the world(including ourselves). The force is generated by the content of our being. Our state of mind reflects the content and sum of our being. Our state of mind is also constantly envisioning and acting. Creating our life through ceaseless interdependent vision and effort. The force welling up within us is intelligent. It is not simple Newtonian force with one direction and one strength. The force is one with who we are. It is generated by the content of our being and it is the content of our being. You could say every aspect of our being is intelligent and creative. Every aspect of our being is endowed with a creative force. This force is directed by our state of mind. Our consciousness radiates our creative will upon the world, upon the universe.
     We learn through trial and error, consciously and unconsciously, how to modify our will, or effort, to achieve our vision. We achieve our vision by balancing the various aspects of ourselves through correct application of will. We must apply force appropriately in complex ways to keep the system in balance and harmony. This is the same as right effort. It is largely intuitive, imaginative, and speculative. You have a general sense of the order and composition of your self. You imagine what you want to achieve and you have an intuition(partially speculative) of the correct application of force or effort to apply in a specific way to realize your vision. You learn and sense based upon the result of your actions how to modify your efforts when you attempt the same actions again. You develop a sense of how to optimally expend your will throughout the day and through your life to achieve your goals. If your frustrated in life, your efforts are not succeeding in realizing your ambitions. You may be lacking in effort, overexerting yourself, or not taking necessary action. Its important to cultivate a realistic sense of  what it will take for you to get from where you are to where you want to go. To do this you have to understand your strengths and your weaknesses as well as the worldly system you are working in.
     You can know the action you need to take and not succeed in realizing your vision because you misapply will or effort. You can also know how to properly apply your will to manifest you vision, but you are ignorant of what you need to do to be well. Both are necessary to be successful. Both are necessary to achieve adequate health of the human being.
     Your consciousness and life are sustained by a pool of qi. This qi is the force that you use to take action in the world. It is depleted through effort. We pursue right effort and right action to bolster this qi within ourselves and to use it as efficiently as possible, both furthering our ability to shape the world to our liking. The first gives us more power and the second makes our power go further. When we take wrong action, uniformed or unwise action, it may compromise the integrity of our system, compromising the elements which sustain our level of qi, power, health, or consciousness. The same is true for misapplying force, will, or effort. You can break down components of your system or ineffectively power them, both which undermine the integrity of the system. Without right effort we cannot perform right action. We cannot perform well unless we properly apply our will, qi or force, to the inter-working components that perform the action. This proper effort is itself a multitude of small actions taken to perform the task in mind. We perceive the effort as singular because the smaller actions are more or less automatic. It feels more like we are simply controlling the amount of power we apply rather than making each piece of the system work in sync to move the entire body in a specific way.
     Right action and right effort are truly one and the same. We perceive them to be different because of the preconceived notions we have about them. We assume that force, effort, is itself unintelligent: unacting. The subject is the actor that applies varying degrees of effort, the power that moves through us in not intelligent, it is simply energy. In truth, any effort we take, any movement of power, is actually the action of intelligent systems: whether they are energetic or biological. Energy is intelligent. Effort perceived as using power is a subjective experience. The power that we apply is really a river or sea of action taking place. Action that doesn't necessarily belong to us or isn't necessarily caused by us. What we call action depends on a subject. What if their isn't really a subject? Or their is just one subject whose body composes everything? There would be no action taking place because A. there is no one to act, or B. there is nothing to act on. If everything is one or none, then their are no boundaries for action to take place, there is just undivided power and being. This is why right action and right effort are seen as no action or no effort.
     Their is no effort or no action needed when you are one with the universe. You are the universe moving effortlessly acting ceaselessly. There's no change in position to require change in action. There's one movement of one body springing forth effortlessly. For nearly everyone we don't consciously exist in oneness permanently, we live in the dual projection of our minds where we are separate from the world. We strive. We take effort and action to better our position. We gather qi and move closer to one-pointedness. Right effort and right action are ideals and intuitions we work towards, not our reality. Thus, it makes sense to understand them in a dualistic sense as well as an absolute sense: so we know how to navigate the terrain we pass through and know what to gravitate towards.
     The innate desire to better ourselves through wiser action and more efficient use of force is the undeterring awakening of being towards God-consciousness and beyond. It is an unstoppable force transcendent of our individuality. The awakening of God-consciousness is the highest achievement an individual can garner because it is the full awakening and expression of individuality, of the self. As we progress towards full awakening or liberation, our goals change; and what constitutes right action and effort changes.
     As we awaken our system or self becomes greater in scope and depth. What constitutes right action and right effort becomes more complicated and more involved. The key to achieving success is to understand the extent of your ambition and desire: the extent of your heart and mind. Once you know what you want, you must understand the variables or components of the system that you are working in. The components you don't understand and don't have power over may or may not get in your way. Even if they don't get in your way, the more you don't understand, the more risk you take. A main component of the system you are working in, is yourself. Your own weaknesses often defeat you. They are in fact always defeating you in small ways. Until you understand that the components in your system are interconnected, you will always be blindsided. Until you fix your attitude you will always run into the dirt. Until you get educated, you won't understand the world your working in and the people you have to deal with. This is why it's necessary to adopt a holistic outlook if you want to succeed.
     You have to have a holistic outlook and a growth outlook if you want to succeed in the long term. You have to be willing to change, and you have to see the world and yourself as a system of many interconnected parts. If you don't understand how each part effects and works with each other part, you won't know how to manipulate the system effectively or maintain your well being. There are countless dimensions/aspects/components of the world we live in. The more you are aware of them and understand them, the easier it is for you to navigate. If you are actively seeking to better yourself and your understanding of the world your chances of success are much greater.
     Life is hard and what we learn from our communities and traditional/state education may often not be enough to set us or keep us in a healthy direction. This is more true for people who don't fit in and people who possess more depth than that of the environment they grow up in and inhabit. If we really want to rise above much of the potential suffering in life and make our dreams come true we have to have an integral understanding of ourselves and the world. We have to be able to take wider perspectives stepping outside of our traditional worldviews. We have to learn to see life objectively and accurately understand how our perspectives are limited. We are blinded by our egos, our biases, and our beliefs. To have an effective integral understanding of the world, we have to cultivate our critical thinking and introspection. We have to have a working understanding of the dimensions we inhabit. The physiological, psychological, interpersonal, cultural, political, environmental, subtle, and spiritual dimensions of life. You have to understand how you exist in each of these dimensions and how they interact to determine your health and wellbeing. The more you awaken, the more intuitive right effort and right action become. They evolve out of our traditional values into highly individualized and direct sensing intuitions. We go from believing in a way, to reasoning our way, to feeling our way, to feeling the way, to being the way, and beyond.
     To optimize our ability to act and take right action, we must take care of our bodies, our minds, our hearts, our spirit, our communities, and the world we live in. We cannot continue in personal success if the world around us falters. We cannot continue to succeed if we let our communities collapse into fear, egotism, narcissism, madness, sickness, and hate. We cannot afford to pursue selfish interests without  framing these interests in a wider perspective. We cannot continue to cower in the face of tyranny and oppression. We cannot continue to sacrifice our freedoms for continued pleasure and ignorance. We are maintaining pseudo-security and losing our willpower and sanity to slavery and madness. Our ways are being uprooted and violated. Our people poisoned and assaulted. We cannot continue to be disturbed and do nothing about it.
     We have to sacrifice for the greater good. For those who can see, we have to be the leaders in a sea of disturbance. We have to lead the people into direct awareness of the senses and the sensed. We have to lead the people through chaos, delusion, and great change. We have to establish community in the Light of awareness and in the truth of Oneness and beyond. We have to integrate our sciences and technologies and arts developing integrated understanding and practices. The pursuit of truth and direct perception uniting us in discovery, evolution and expression. We have to go much further than what we thought possible, much much further than most of those that have come before us. I believe many of us were born ready for this task and are awakening to this spirit now in greater detail and engagement than before. For us, it is right that we come out to the world with what we know with great wisdom and care, and sow the seed of Unity throughout the world. We do this with ease of mind and harmony of self and spirit. We let it flow through us into the world. It is divine effort and divine will. Our success is being Whole and sharing our wisdom with the world in the Light of the Divine.
     To achieve your goals, you have to know what action to take and how to apply your energies. To truly take right action and have right effort, you need to sense the Whole act act from awareness of it.  Right action and right effort begin with our instincts to survive and procreate. They evolve into traditional beliefs, personal ambitions, feelings, divine intuitions, and self expression. They dissolve in singular perception of the universe and become supportive of the Whole and All. If we can truly succeed as an individual, it is by harmonizing our will with the infinite and awakening to our deepest natures: pursuing right action and right effort as they evolve in our lives.

Letting Go into a Psychic Universe

     Letting go of life in a deep sense means letting go of the fearful compulsion to control life. It means letting go of compulsiveness resulting from our conditioned ways of being. It means opening up to something greater and deeper. Something less divided from the world. It means letting life flow through you and flowing with it. It means allowing feelings to guide you through life. Feelings that don't have to make sense. Feelings that you can trust. Feelings that you learn do make sense. It's about awakening to your being and opening up to the heart of life.
    So much of what we do is limited by our conditioning. We are taught from birth how to be and how to not be. So much of this isn't grounded in good sense and ends up constricting our energy flows; hearts and lives; and closing off our minds and senses to the truth. We act compulsively based off of our conditioning. Not because our action is good or right, but because we were taught to be this way. We cannot see truth directly from our conditioned mind. The conditioned mind turns our senses into distorted reflections: hallucinations. In order to awaken our senses and awaken our self, we must let go of this conditioned way of being.
     Most human beings do not go far down this path. We all do in small or bigger ways in parts of our lives, but to truly live from a place of deep letting go and surrender is rare. Not only is it rare, it is difficult.
     To let go deeply is to move opposite of the direction of most of society world wide. Most of society seeks more control and more power. Letting go is to seek less power and to let go of personal control of life. Its counter-intuitive for most people. For others, it is the most intelligent and noble action to take. It is difficult because it may mean temporarily ignoring much of the sense and tradition that you have followed your whole life. It may mean relinquishing this sense to acquire something deeper and truer. To become your true self. It may mean not listing to the best advice of those around you and stepping into the unknown.
     I believe the Gods, spirits, and enlightened beings of our world are asking us, asking humanity, to let go in a deep sense. I believe they are asking us more strongly now because of the great adversity and change we face. I know that many of us, more than at any other point in recorded history, are ready to wake up to our deeper natures. I know many of us are born in this life with the purpose of waking up spiritually and healing the world. We are called to listen to the heavens, our intuitions, and answer the call of our souls and our divine union with life. We are called to go against the grain, to see through the beliefs of our traditions, and to come together as one people in a way transcendent of dogma. We are called to be pioneers in the field of consciousness; subtle energy; intuition; and holistic integration of various sciences and arts. This deep letting go and deep waking up is an energy current or energetic field not new to our planet. It has been springing out of human minds for perhaps tens of thousands of years:perhaps longer. It has been growing on our planet for at least the last three thousand years and has intensified in the last two to three hundred years.
     This deep letting go is one of the ways to reach truth: to wake up. The end of letting go is the same end reached by meditation. In both meditation and letting go, the conditioned mind is relinquished to obtain insight and direct awareness of the senses. Other names for letting go may be renunciation or surrender. Letting go is the process of transitioning from conditioned being to unconditioned being. But it's not a regression into unconscious activity and narcissism: the selfish rejection and shedding of social conventions; its a transcendence of conditioning into the emergence of a deeper consciousness. Your letting go of your life to receive and be your deeper self or true nature. Your awakening or cleansing your senses; and awakening your mind and heart to your true nature and your true self. Unconditioned being is the beginning and end of life as you know it.
     Crucial to this process is awakening your feelings and intuitions. You find God through your feelings: your heart and your soul. People let go deeply because of how they feel and what they intuit. They feel like they cannot go on living they way they are because they intuit something much deeper. They know this intuition is truer and more fulfilling than the life they are living. People's dharma, their life-path or soul trajectory, is learned through their feelings and intuition. Your dharma is your way of life; your way of being; and your way to move to or reach God or truth. You find your path to God or you way in life through your feelings and intuition. It is this unique path that leads you out of conditioning into heaven towards God or truth.
     Your feelings reach a critical point when they break out of what we consider the normal, the realm of the 5-senses, to the psychic transpersonal dimensions. This is when you begin to sense that your feelings aren't just how you feel, they may in fact be how others feel, and how the world is. How the world may be beyond what you can experience with your bodily senses. You also begin to sense that these feelings, this sight, can guide you in life. It can guide you in ways that your thoughts or beliefs cannot. As you begin to trust these feelings, this sight and psychic-intuition, you let them lead you more. When they get strong enough and clear enough, you begin to discover your unique way of being, your dharma or your soul. You learn the unique truth of your life, know it is the path that you will follow, and watch it unfold in your life.
     Part of the development of these feelings, this psychic-intuition, is letting go of what you may see as superficial ways of being. These conditioned ways of being that are not who you are anymore. Letting go gives these deeper feelings/intuitions room to blossom in your life.
     We wish to let go of our conditioning and develop and inhabit our psychic-intuition because we know it is the way we connect to ourselves and perceive truth. We intuit that these deeper feelings provide real security for without them we walk blind. We sense that the universe is much deeper and intricate than we perceive through our conditioned mind. We need a better set of tools to properly work with it. The development of the feelings leads to these tools, the senses of the psychic intuition. You use these tools, this psychic intuition, to judge the truth of what I write. I can't show you what they look like so you know that they are real. But, you can intuit and feel the truth in my words. Its indescribable, but its real. And its apart of every human's life to varying degree.
     We all have these deeper detectors built into to us. I don't know how or why we do, we just do.
It's apart of the mystery of being human. The psychic intuition is an energy center that lies on the forehead, slightly above the eyebrows. It's called the third-eye. This energy center can sense beyond the limits of the five flesh senses as well as into transpersonal dimensions. Transpersonal dimensions are heavenly dimensions that ascend in greater and greater degrees of Unity. They are called transpersonal because they transcend the identity boundaries of separate-feeling individual. The third-eye awakens the sense of oneness or singleness of reality, in contrast to the separateness-feeling experienced by the ego. We are blind or half-blind without the third-eye because the universe is truly one. We cannot operate in Oneness without our senses being attuned to Oneness: without our third-eye being highly developed. Not only is the world One, it is composed of infinite interconnected dimensions. The third-eye is the portal to the heavenly, metaphysical, astral, or transpersonal dimensions.
     These dimensions influence us even if we do not perceive them. We exist on them even if we are ignorant of them. We are psychic-spiritual-intuitive beings or souls. We cycle through Earth and Heaven. We are incarnated and reincarnated many, many, many times. Our soul-bodies are pure psychic substance born from the third-eye center living in the astral universe. Our souls perceive much deeper than our conditioned minds. They are the gateway to Truth, and to living a life in Joy.
We wish to let go to our deeper feelings and intuitions because we wish to awaken our souls and finder deeper meaning in life.
     Just because the psychic-intuition, the third-eye, is the means to finding deeper meaning, success, sense, and healing the world, it doesn't mean that it's necessarily safe to trust. The third-eye is a gateway to a very large universe. Very large, very complicated, and very powerful. Feelings are things to be honed. The intuition is something to be developed and carefully studied. Most of us are full of so much crap its quite easy for us to confuse our feelings or be deluded. The application of great power through a deluded mind can lead to disaster. Deeper energies can amplify delusion and confusion; as well as overwhelm the senses inhibiting bodily functioning. I talk about this more towards the end of my post, "Returning to Love and Joy". Be careful and be prepared as much as possible. This being said, you get what you got and you do the best with what you have. Life can be messy.
    When you let go to heaven and open up to your soul's guidance system, you more deeply join a chorus of heavenly beings and powers. You awaken to a deeper part of yourself. You can feel the deeper rhythm of your life and you can see into the sky and the stars. You let go of fear, of compulsion into what maybe without a limitation: you let yourself fly. You leave the ground and awaken to a glorious universe where what is possible is open to all possibilities. It can be terrifying and it can be wonderful. You wish to stand in line with your heart that lives for life. You wish to be awake and stand in your own light. To move into a space where you are not bound by fear and broken ideas. We are called upon to let go of the lives we know to go do deeper into the truth of ourselves and the world. We are asked to change because the world needs us to change.
     The world needs us to not just be psychically awake, but heart awake. Awake to our human condition, including our heavenly natures, and able to manifest great strength and intelligence to meet the troubles of our times. We are asked to let go into deep love, wisdom, and commitment to humankind. Heaven asks us as we ask it. We too wish to be more and heaven answers us as we answer it. Many of us are ready to go deeper than our parents and ancestors. It is a privilege to do so. It is the consequence of their hard work: of their dreams. They may not understand what we must do, who we are, and who we  become; but by letting go into our deeper natures, we are carrying the Light of humanity forward. We are carrying our people forward. We are stepping into the unknown because we feel that we can discover better ways to be. We can bring more goodness into a world that desperately needs it. We can make more sense out of life and create more intelligently. We can put the world together better than it is now. We can love more, be more. This is not a step in a new direction, its a step down the path human beings have walked through the ages. Into hopes, dreams, and wishes in our memories, instincts, and hearts. However new it may be, it is apart of the world of man and it belongs to the world of man. This is why it is our responsibility to share our knowledge and ability with the world: to bring our psychic-spiritual awakening to others in our lives. We let go not only to free ourselves, but to free each other.
   
   

Meditation in Martial Arts

     Meditation is an act that brings one closer to truth. It is an act that awakens the senses of perception and insight into the nature of reality. Meditation in martial arts, is developing martial ability in a way that awakens the senses to truth. From my own experience and awareness, I know that many traditional Asian martial arts contain deep truths in their practices. These truths are learned by properly performing techniques and forms in these arts. It is easier to learn these truths from instructors who are aware of them. In the United States and probably world wide, the deep truths are taught less and known less. In many organizations in the United States these truths are almost glossed over completely. The depth of awareness of our societies has shallowed and is shallowing today. This shallowness makes it harder to maintain and learn the deep truths of these arts. The shallowness of our societies is the reason that the depth of these martial arts has dwindled.
     The purpose of Gung Fu, Karate, Taekwondo, Aikido, and probably many other martial arts is to awaken to truth and lead a balanced life. This truth is the Oneness of life, the singleness of subject and object. The truth of these martial arts even extends to living in harmony with the Earth and maintaining balance in society. They teach how to lead, how to grow, and how to take command of yourself. For those with martial spirits, they are joyful gems to carry and study throughout life.
      Meditation in martial arts can be incredibly joyful because of the intensity and vigor they create in practice. Not only do you push your mind further than you ever expected, but you push your body as well. The spirit of martial arts is that their is no limitation on what your body can do and what you can do. You can always push the boundary. Through the exercise of perfecting and pushing the body to extraordinary fitness, you learn the subtle nature of life. You gain control of it and use it in new and exciting ways. Meditation in martial arts is a practice of discovery, liberation, dance, and unleashing and mastering power.
     Meditation in martial arts is about unifying the self through the art of combat. Its taking everything that you are and putting it into your training and your fighting. Its about taking everything that you feel, everything that you think, and all of your body and concentrating them all on one point of striking or movement. This one-pointedness is the intention of any kind of meditation. The difference in martial arts is that instead of sitting on the ground with legs crossed you are leaping, spinning and striking in the air.
     What I like about martial arts and meditation in martial arts is the way in which martial arts confronts some of the realities of life that are often ignored. In martial arts you face the violence in you and channel it directly. I think it's important to become conscious of the violence and aggression within us and to learn to use it in positive ways, to incorporate it into our being. I don't think we need to be afraid of violence or get rid of it completely. Life is violent. We're animals. By consciously engaging with it, studying it, and incorporating it into your life, you learn how violence and aggression fit in our society, how they are apart of our social structure and competition. How they don't have to be bad things. Violence and aggression can be controlled and tamed. Proper practice in martial arts does this in a positive way.
      I think violence and aggression lie at the root of our passions and our vitality. I think that by embracing them with conscious intent to do good and be more whole, we can discover strength and authenticity that we haven't known before. We can discover awareness of who and what we actually are. By understanding violence and aggression and integrating them into our life in a wholesome way, they won't lurk in the back ground suppressed and hindering our health and psychology.
     In sports, you learn about your motivations, and how your emotions influence your performance. You learn the same from traditional Asian martial arts. The same and perhaps even to a deeper degree. I think because of the spiritual element of these traditional martial arts, the inner awareness cultivated by the practices is stronger. This inner awareness includes being and becoming conscious of the emotions and how they effect action and the flow of vitality. The forms in Taekwondo, Karate and Gung Fu direct the attention inward, developing self-consciousness and consciousness. True practice of traditional Asian martial arts is a practice of personal and spiritual growth, the development of consciousness of self and world and the way to balance them.
     This is why many of us practice martial arts. They are a deep discipline of awakening consciousness and creating balance in life. Many of are called to train and participate by destiny and our souls, to further and maintain the arts in our lifetimes. I personally wish to bring the spiritual depth of the traditional Asian martial arts to the mma community, to heighten the level of competition and to bring the sport closer to introspection and serving humanity.
     Traditional Asian martial arts (tamas) awaken the self by awakening the energy centers of the body. The traditional forms cannot be practiced correctly without awakening the energy and sense centers. As you progress through the forms and techniques, you awaken and master deeper and deeper senses and energy centers. It is essential that you have an instructor who can adequately perceive this awakening and can give proper instruction according to your degree of insight and ability or, you posses the intuition and skill to teach yourself. If the organization loses sight of the spiritual depth of the tradition, then practitioner's will be allowed to teach before they are ready to properly teach the art. If the living heart of the tradition is lost, the art will degenerate and it will lose it's ability to awaken human beings. If their is not Light or sight or truth, the leadership cannot navigate through the terrain of life and when they misstep, they won't be able to return to sense, but will continue to fade into darkness and decay. The same is true for all arts, traditions, individuals, and societies.
     Meditation in martial arts opens up doors to great physical ability and different and perhaps new modes of consciousness. When you awaken the energy centers and the senses, you can do extraordinary things and your consciousness changes. The reason tamas are good at getting to the extraordinary is because their practices involve more direct and scientific understanding and manipulation of the vital energies and the body than other athletic disciplines. The knowledge and understanding of tamas are apart of multi-millennium old holistic sciences of the East. Understanding and technique that far surpasses Western science and understanding in many ways. Especially when it comes to the understanding of the subtle energies of the body and the world; and the way these energies effect the human anatomy generating health or disease.
     The knowledge of these arts and ancient sciences comes from millennia of holistic scientific inquiry. This accumulated knowledge is the key within the tamas that generates super physical ability; and consciousness/sensory awakening and expansion. The knowledge is transmitted into the forms and techniques by the highly advanced practitioner upon their creation. It is also passed down, generation to generation via  instructor-student relationships.
     One of the modes of consciousness cultivated in tamas is intuition. Intuitive receiving of information and intuitive spontaneous action. It is through this mode of consciousness that much of the learning is transmitted, especially at higher levels of practice. This faculty of consciousness  also governs holistic scientific inquiry. Through intuitive perception we sense the holistic nature of reality and the bodies in reality. We sense the interconnectedness of nature and develop understanding of its bodies based off of this sense. This intuitive objective science has been kept alive over thousands of years in the East and lives in tamas today.
     Embracing and cultivating this intuitive holistic approach is key to success in tamas. It is the key that drives the meditation of tamas. It is the key that drives meditation in general. Intuitive holistic vision unifies the individual under the force of expanding perspective. The intuition that all of the parts are interconnected is itself apart of the process of a being awakening to direct objective perception of reality. The individual is transitioning from believing that the mind, body, spirit, world and other are separate to seeing all of these phenomena as a single seamless body. Intuitive holistic awareness develops as the individual begins to consciously sense the interconnectedness of the components of their life. The power that arises with this awareness gives the individual what many see as extraordinary physical/mental ability. An individual who can sense the interconnectedness of being can draw and develop power from the interconnectedness of their being. An egoic person is always at war with themselves and the world. What if instead of fighting against parts of life and yourself, you were able to unite those parts and combine their powers for your own use. One who senses the interconnectedness of life seeks to unify themselves in higher orders of integration. The more you can integrate yourself, the more power you can draw and concentrate. If you sense the interconnectedness between yourself and the world, your power is unlimited.
     Intuitive holistic awareness is inherently an awareness that draws power from the singleness or wholeness of life. The inkling that you are interconnected with the world is sense and power drawn from the indescribable wholeness of life. The greater the sense you have of the interconnectedness and wholeness of life, the more you can draw power from the infinite. This tends to heighten your natural abilities and talents so long as the opening to greater power and being is manageable. Too much power can overwhelm the body and the senses, crippling abilities. If you can manage it wisely, you can gain powers that seem super human to general society: going further than what many believe is possible.
     The intuitive, holistic, and objective vision and study of life leads one to more direct perception of the workings of the body. You develop awareness of the interconnected subtle energy system of the body and how to manipulate it. You can more precisely perceive what your strengths and weaknesses are; and more efficiently work to generate health and functioning of the system. Tamas contain knowledge of how to turn on energy centers in the body that are normally dormant: driving ability and health even further.
    The realm of possibility in human endeavor is limited to our understanding of ourselves and of our world. It is limited to what we think is possible and what we know how to do. The Western mind thinks itself to be at the pinnacle of human awareness and ability; and often doesn't consider that many ancient cultures have deeper and greater understanding of the systems we inhabit; and can consequently generate much greater health and ability. Traditional Asian martial arts are apart of the wisdom and understanding of the ancient intuitive, holistic, and scientific thought of the East: a way of thinking and acting potentially older than 10,000 years. A way of thought developed from the interplay of Yogic wisdom; Buddism; Daoism; ideas and systems of Yin, Yang and Qi; and other rich traditions.
     As we become more and more globalized we must be mindful of how our traditions and societies change. We must maintain the integrity of traditions that uphold the integrity of our societies. We must not abandon the wisdom and understanding we have accumulated over the ages in the fires of consumerism, materialism, and thoughtlessness that ravage our ways of life: our connections to our senses. We must adapt in ways that preserve tradition, expand our ability to include others, and protect the sanctity of life. We must use our traditions as stepping stones into the future of high technology, unified science, a unified humanity, and direct perception of truth: the massive awakening of individuals and their occult energy centers to God consciousness.
     Tamas come from a lineage of wisdom traditions. Although they are flawed like any other traditions, their merit deserves close attention: especially as they spread throughout the world; and are threatened by forces that are rapidly destroying tradition and culture. We must preserve the elements of life that bind us together; we must preserve the elements of life that lead us towards deeper and better understanding of the world around us; we must preserve what is meditative and close to our hearts. I think it is important that we study tamas and other martial arts, assessing their validity and worth, because it is important to maintain and further a spirit of uniting human kind in goodness and precise understanding. The spirit of tamas is holistic and intuitive. It is meditative. It is this quality in martial arts that makes them wonderful, enchanting and worth pursuing if your seeking a discipline that will help you bring balance and awareness to your life.
   

Listening

     We live in a world where we attempt to reach out destination through effort. We believe we need to work harder and be more to succeed in ways we cannot succeed now. We need to focus more, to be more engaged, more committed, more disciplined, more intense. These attitudes can and often help us succeed and often are what we need to do, but I feel that often we have these attitudes because we are insecure.
     We are afraid of not succeeding. Of letting people down. We are panicking and we are stressed. We are on the run. We are running away from failure and from falling apart. We are holding on tight to keep control. The problem is, the tighter we hold, the more we actually lose control and the further we get from being happy and leading fulfilling lives. We end up running away from ourselves and our life. We lose touch with ourselves and with reality. We slip into deeper fear, deeper stress, deeper instability and unfortunately deeper insanity. We think by holding on we will remain safe and secure, when actually we are avoiding the senses that would save us. We hold on because we believe we need to. We have these beliefs because from birth we are programmed to be a certain way. We are told what to do, how to be, what is good, and where you will go and what your life will look like when grow up and keep on growing up. A lot of this is groundless. A lot of this is perverted sense by the corporate-consumer world. A lot of this is madness given to you by the insane and unknown. The unknown being people who don't know themselves.
     We consciously or subconsciously compromise our integrity and well being to fit into the world. We do it because we are afraid of being refused by the main current of society. We think we have better chances of survival if we don't listen to ourselves, but adopt other people's belief systems. This is true in a large sense. By compromising our values and integrating into the system, we gain the support of the powers that support it. We do gain safety and security. The problem is the long term trade off. The long term trade off is insanity, depression, dehumanization, and destruction of the planet. It means losing real friendships, losing real happiness, losing vitality of body and spirit. The problem is you've been duped, swindled and enslaved. Enslaved by the system however conscious the intent to enslave is, and enslaved by yourself, by your mind.
     The problem is that a lot of mainstream society is extremely negative and dangerous. A lot of it is not run by good people who care about you, who want to give you products that are good for you. They want to give you things in exchange for something worth more than what they give. They want to cheat you. And they do. Over and over and over again. This is the illusion. Look at all this cool good stuff. Of course its good for you. Of course you need it. It only costs the integrity of the entire planet and the sanity of the species. The reason it works is because it is one of the dominant forces on the planet. And they use their power to get as good as they can at manipulating and hypnotizing us. It works because we are sick enough and detached from our senses enough that we don't hear the alarms going off. Or we do, but we're too weak and too overwhelmed to do much about it.
     We cannot afford to be too weak and too overwhelmed to do much about it. Its now or near-total collapse of the good on Earth. We have to stop taking the red pill and take the blue pill. It's time to listen to our senses. To listen to ourselves. To turn off the tv and get to work. We may not even know where to begin to start. I have know idea what I really want to do with my life. I have no idea what my passions really are. The truth is that their is an incredible amount of good work to do right now. We may not know how to connect to life and society in original ways. That's ok. Figure out what you can do now and do that. Be open to the possibly of getting to know yourself more, of listening to yourself more and understanding your world and life more. If you open up enough, a torrent of wisdom, creativity, and sense will flood into your life. Life is ready for you to step up your game. Life is waiting for you to step up and hit the ball. We need heroes and we need leaders. We need people with big cajones who want to have fun. Our communities are thirsty for positive leadership and inspiration. Their are huge holes to be filled. Holes filled that will make life so much more fulfilling and easy.
     The key is being kind to yourself. Being patient and understanding and loving. This process is meaningless without love and consideration. It is not a ball to be beat, but a child to be nurtured. We need nurturing. Massive out-breaking of love. We need people to open their hearts to life and to each other. We need people to be brave with sharing their feelings and listening to the hard truths of the world. We need to understand that we can't get along by forcing each other around. We have to listen to each other until we find common ground to work from. If we listen to each other enough we will come to love and appreciation of one another. We won't be afraid, frustrated or hateful. We will understand and see beauty where we saw hate and division. We will feel like rejoicing and we will know what we need to do to solve our problems. When we don't listen to how we feel and we don't have people to truly listen to how we feel and what's going on in our lives with an open heart, we become afraid. When we don't listen to our fears, we begin to close off to the world. We don't stay awake. We start to get mad, to go mad. To get confused because we aren't seeing or thinking clearly. We get resentful and start to blame people for how we feel. When we blame them enough for our problems, we begin to hate them. If we think we're to blame we hate ourselves. We become sick and our perception becomes distorted. We get so sick that we want to hurt ourselves and others. We take drugs we don't need to take. We get into abusive relationships. We manipulate each other and do things we know are wrong. We become destructive. Self-destructive and world destructive.
     To heal these wounds, we need wide open tender-loving listening hearts. We need non-judgment and appreciation. We need people who are ok being as they are now. People who are ok with how you are now. People who love you as you are now. Wars don't solve these kinds of problems. Violence doesn't solve these problems. Hate doesn't solve these kinds of problems. Fear doesn't solve these kinds of problems. If we want to unite the world, or even to unite ourselves,our family, or our community,we can't do it without love and kindness. We can't do it without listening to the pains in our hearts and having the strength to do so. Without loving ourselves, our family, and our community more than we hate them and more than we are afraid of them.
     It takes strength to open your heart to the truth. It takes strength to turn to love. It takes fearlessness and self sacrifice to walk the path of Christ. To turn away from darkness and to be vulnerable in the Light. Its not easy being true. But is is harder living in a world without order, without decency and without good will. If you want to pursue the Good and the True, you have to face your feelings. You have to face the pain inside of your heart. You have to resist the temptation of evil in your life. You have to stand up for yourself and for those around you. You have to learn the word of God. The Word of Truth, the Way of Christ. Christ lives in your feelings. Christ lives in your heart. Christ belongs to the world, so you too must belong to the world. You must be prepared to follow the Light into darkness to liberate your Soul and the Soul of the World. You must be prepared to redeem the world. In order to redeem the world, you must first redeem yourself.
     You must grow beyond means of might and compulsion. You must grow beyond the conventions of your people. You must step outside of the box and you must put aside the security that you know. You must continually face the unknown as consciously as you possibly can. You must let the past die and be willing to let your life fall apart. You must give up everything you have and know for the presence of this moment. You will not find your life in your thoughts and ideas. You will find your life in yourself as you are now. You will find your self in yourself as you are now. In your pain, in your confusion, in your misery, delusion, fear, suffering and ignorance. In your goodness, in your love, in your laughter, in your happiness and in everything.
     It all begins with the heart. It all begins with a choice to listen to how you feel rather than to ignore how you feel and who you are. It begins each and every moment. You can rise and you can fall in each and every moment. When you do not or cannot listen to your heart, you fall. When we do not or cannot listen to the hearts of each other our society falls. Its not enough to have policies to govern us. We need wise and willing hearts to sow our lives together with listening and love. We can't know how to solve our problems if we don't listen to our hearts. By listening to our hearts and to the hearts of each other, we can learn why their is hate and why their is suffering. When we turn towards hate with hate we don't listen. When we turn towards people we don't agree with, with judgment and with certainty that we are right and they are wrong, we don't listen. When we don't listen, we don't solve our problems. When we don't listen, we stay angry, we stay afraid, we stay divided. We don't learn. We have to have the heart and the strength of character to face what we don't like for the sake of the integrity of the human species and the integrity of life on Earth. We don't need to win. We need to work together. We need to hear what is being said. We need to listen.
     Love will change this world. Love will change our hearts. Love will bring us together and make the bitter sweet. Love will turn rubble into roses, rust into shine, carelessness into carefulness. Love will end hatred. It will end fear. It will end suffering. It will end division. It will end sorrow. It will bring the Kingdom and the Seat of the Lord to the mountains and the seas of Earth. It will bring the Kingdom of Christ into our hearts and into our lives. It will bring Heaven to Earth. We must not be afraid of what we cannot control. Not be afraid of what we cannot see. We must not be afraid of monsters and demons. Of sickness, death and darkness. We must not be afraid of each other or ourselves. We must not be afraid of what has happened to us, what is happening to us, and what may happen to us. We must know that we are Children of God and that we are not of this world. We must listen to are hearts and answer the call to live the life we must. We must stand together in freedom and Justice. We must stand up to tyrants and dictators. We must cast down unfairness and cast Light onto the world. We must sow evenness into the foundations of our buildings, into the foundations of our hearts and our sight. We must sow evenness in the words we speak and the steps we take. We must listen to the Word of God and see it live in our lives.
      Listening is the way to the truth. It is recognizing the deeper harmony of life and being able to act from it. It may stand out in a world where people are asleep. In a world of violence, force, and abuse. It is dancing with life instead of dominating it or being dominated by it. It is seeing things as they are, seeing through what you are taught to believe. It is being still in crashing waves. It is seeing yourself in the other and it is letting go of hate and bitterness. It is the melting of winter ice and the coming of spring. The flowing of a stream through green fields. It is openness and evenness without form or ground. It is being without thought among thought and form. It is recognizing what you know and what you don't. It is being the seen and the seeing. It is as you are now, walking and waving speaking without saying. Listening is the return to the field. It is seeing your legs and feet in waving green grass. It is seeing where you stand without stepping away from where you are. Where the end of your sight is the beginning of your sight, and the beginning of your sight is the end of your sight. Where the apple falls onto the grass and makes a sound. And the sound on the grass is the grass waving in the wind.

Building in Light

     It is necessary to build life out of Light to be truly happy, to be wise, and to have wholesome communities. The reason why so many of us and so many of our human communities are suffering is because the lack of Light, within us. We try so hard hard, individually, socially and politically to make change through new ideas and new techniques or even by old ones, and so often come up short without making significant change or accomplishing what we set out to do. I feel like their is a huge lack of satisfaction in the planet and I believe it exists because we lack the Light and consciousness which provides the integrity for fulfilling our lives and living wisely. We are ignorant of the essential truth of reality, the ground of being, and because of it, struggle to achieve our goals and lead lives of integrity. We are ignorant of the Light, Oneness of life and full of ungrounded ideas which drive us apart. Without sight of the Light and the One, and without examining our beliefs, we will continue to struggle to survive, thrive, and organize ourselves intelligently.
     The truth is that all life is one and although we vary in talent and ability, no one of us is any better than another. We are all apart of the same Oneness and Light that are the ground of being and of life. We are all Light and Oneness. Our dogmatic ideas of superior sex, superior nationality, superior race, superior religion or belief, or superior self are ungrounded in any real sense. Certain  sexes, countries, races,religions, or individuals may generally have higher capabilities or intelligence in certain dimensions of life, but this does not make them better in an absolute sense. It doesn't make them separate and superior from other human categories and human beings. It makes them different with some potentially higher developments of certain intelligence and abilities. These beliefs hold the same assumption that the group or individual is separate from the other than they rise above. Their identity  that I am this and I am not that is false. We are not separate. We are in fact one with our enemies, the other, our hate and our suffering.
     The Light. The Light carries the Truth of the world. The Light carries the Truth of the Self, the Vision of the Infinite. It carries the Awakened Being and the Universal Self, The Christ Consciousness within all form. This is the Truth of the World. Until we live in Christ, the Universal Soul and Being, we will be blind and lost. Awakening to Christ Consciousness is the full awakening of the individual self into the Self. The Self is the faint background of all that the individual self perceives. The Self, the Universal Self, is the truth that humans struggle to perceive and to live by. It is the balance we attempt to attain and maintain through our aspirations, thoughts, and beliefs. The truth of the Self is that all beings are one, all religions are one and founded on the same truth, and all beliefs and all thoughts are one. No one or no thing is superior in fundamental worth for no one and no thing is separate from the whole. We come to this truth through the unfurling and radiating of the Light within our consciousness.
     As the Light awakens in the mind, it carves out delusion as it transmutes darkness into direct perception of the senses and the sensed. As darkness transmutes into Light by Light, the individual realizes the non-division of the object of sense, the faculty of sense and the subject who senses. The Light carves away the primary delusion of the duality of the individual and the world, revealing the undivided reality of the Eternal Self, the ever-present Universal Self radiating behind the clouds of delusion and ignorance.  The Self that has always been throughout space and time and will always be. It is the foundation and body of Life.
     When we are ignorant of the Whole and live in darkness, we will be unaware when we are unbalanced. We may know of some ways in which we are unbalanced and have intuitions of our position, but we are unaware of the exact state of our ignorance. The resulting overestimation and underestimation from misperceiving our environments leads to unbalanced action and unstable foundations of being. Without understanding the Whole, we cannot fully understand the part and how it fits together best in the Whole. We put the parts together with altogether unclear direction and are forced to live with precariousness and innate weakness in the structures we inhabit.
     When we become aware of the Whole and the Light, we begin to see for the first time how we are ignorant of truth. We sense directly the full extent of our ignorance, at least momentarily. While our minds and Life are awakened by the Light, we can see how we are weak and how we are strong. From these observations we can take action that produces Levity in our lives. Action that reduces our ignorance, increases our awareness, lightens the load and opens up our lives more to receive the Light and the Truth. We can build in ways that truly better the world and ourselves.
     Seeing the Light doesn't necessarily mean your instantly perfected or fully liberated. I think it may be possible to be completely enlightened, but for nearly all of us we live partially in truth and partially in confusion and darkness. Even most those awakened to the truth of Oneness and beyond life half lives in Truth and in Samsara. The Light and the Truth shine clearly in parts of our minds, but not in all of them. The Truth waxes and wanes as we pass from darkness into Light(presence), into darkness and into Light. We may initially recognize this as our failure or ineptness, but as we mature we realize that as much responsibility and control we may have over life, we are equally powerless to change our circumstances. And equally important, we realize that one does need to awake or fully awake to truth. We are the Universe evolving and awakening from nothingness into being and beyond. Our individual identities are drops of water in the ocean. We recognize that even in darkness, ignorance, pain and suffering we are One with the All. We cannot change the essence of who we are, not even when we awaken more to Truth and Light.
      I think that their may be eternal forms such as Light and Oneness, but I am not wholly convinced that they are eternal, or that anything is eternal. I feel what seems to be a perfect truth in the reality of Darkness passing into Light and Unity Consciousness as the eternal body of the universe, but I also wonder and feel truth in the notion that they are passing forms and temporary perspectives. I feel that their may be no eternal state. Maybe their's room for both views to be true.  I do know that however temporary these forms are, the process of awakening to the truth of the Oneness of life through Light and awareness is a real process that many of us pass through. And as temporary or as incomplete of a truth it is, I feel my understanding of it is worth communicating to others. I know that it helps people find ease in their lives and be more compassionate and careful human beings. I feel compelled to write because I feel that it is my personal responsibility to share what wisdom I have. I believe that it is worthy  to pursue truth and vitally important that  more of our species adopt a similar approach towards truth as I have in my own life. A serious, and thorough objective analysis of ourselves and our nature. A unfailing commitment to uphold and pursue truth for the betterment of ourselves and humankind. A moral responsibility to change our own lives as we grow in understanding and insight. Last a duty to share our insights with each other to keep ignorance at bay, to create the best possible society, and to challenge the status quo, protecting what vitality and integrity our species may have. To communicate our thoughts as clearly as we can to ourselves and each other creates room for our insights to deepen, giving us better ability to do what we must do in life.
     I know that Light, Oneness and the Truth resonate with people in extremely positive ways. Ways that regardless of the doubt of eternal nature and absolute veracity of these ideas/realities, will bring goodness and ease to the world. I feel compelled to use these ideas with careful articulation and continual assessment to spread truth and goodness throughout human society. I want us to unite in truth and goodness and build society and culture from these two pillars. I see how so much of what we are doing is unwholesome and dangerous. Mental illness grows when we fail to nurture our community members. Without Light, we cannot see what we need to be well, we cannot raise our our children properly and meet the needs of our community so society degenerates. I feel that their are several reasons why our social structures are falling apart. 1. Materialism and consumerism 2. Rejection of dogma and tradition, outgrowing of dogma and tradition,weakening of dogma and tradition 3. Active suppression and intentional disruption of society 4. Technological growth 5. Globalization 6. Information Age 7.Rise in negative attitude, defeatism, nihilism and general disheartedness 8. Expansion of consciousness  All of these factors contribute integrally to societal degeneration and change. There's a lot of societal degeneration that is negatively impacting us, but their is also a lot of breakdown of old social norms that's positive impacting us. There's actually a huge amount of positive change in societal structure. I focused initially of how our society is degenerating because of the strong feeling of the lessening of social unity and social strength that has been going on for at least the last 70 years and is becoming more and more apparent with each year. I observe the lessening of Light and strength in our communities, generally speaking of course, world wide.
      The Light and strength of our communities was and is still to a lessening degree generated by tradition, usually tradition inseparable from religion. Traditions operate on a social code. Certain behavior is approved of and certain behavior is taboo. Traditions are the same as the social expectations of your society. People commonly assume that upholding the traditions, social expectations, is the best way to act for the benefit of the individual and society. This assumption is not always true. The degree to which a tradition or social expectation is good is the degree to which it provides for the needs and desires of the people. The degree to which a tradition or social expectation is bad is the degree to which it fails to fulfill the needs and desires of the people. Tradition is doing something because that's the way your supposed to do it. Our traditions are weakening because less people are adhering to them, the general fervor surrounding them is diminishing, and the content of the traditions has lost depth and significance. This is happening for many different interconnected reasons.
     The first reason is that people are outgrowing traditional ways of doing things. People don't fit inside the box as much as they used to. People are more individualistic and complicated. They want to do things the way they want to do them. The way they want to be and live doesn't fit in the generic package. They see the holes and the problems with traditions and see a better way of doing things. A way of being truer to themselves and to each other.
     The second is that a lot of traditions and social dogma fails to fulfill the needs and desires of the people. Materialism, consumerism, egoism, superficiality, and thoughtlessness are some of the dominant religions and traditions of today. These creeds are killing the soul of the planet, dooming our future, and consuming what positive culture and tradition we have for the sake of profit, self-interest, and mindless pleasure. They drive us insane as we struggle to find some truth to hold onto and struggle to put/keep our lives together. Part of the reason why some outgrow traditions is because the corruption of tradition and society has forced them to become more conscious to remedy the malnourished condition of themselves and the world. If the traditions and mainstream society worked, they wouldn't need to grow outside of them. We are sold the empty promise of security and fulfillment. We sell our freedom, our individuality, our minds, our health, and our well being. We sell this to each other and to our children. These heartless traditions of today come at the cost of sense we have accumulated through the ages. They weaken the good traditions  as they erode the path we took to get here, marring our memory and vision into oblivion.
     A third factor diminishing our traditions and our society is our relationship with the rapid growth and evolution of technologies. The health of tradition and society depends on the sensibility of the population. When we become removed from our senses, we inaccurately perceive the world, and cannot care for ourselves appropriately. In a large way, the evolution and proliferation of technologies. has dampened elements our sensory awareness. It has been apart of the transformation of consciousness from the visceral to the mental and we have gotten rather disconnected from the visceral and obvious. We have become disconnected from the land, our bodily senses. This has weakened us vitally and made us susceptible to delusion. The more disconnected from the land, the more deluded we have become and the more deluded we become, the more we become disconnected form the land and our senses. We can build all of the advanced technology we want, but if we can't use it wisely, it is more of a burden and a threat than a tool. As we have become disconnected from the land, our bodies and our feelings, we have lost connection to truth and the source. We have lost Light and consciousness and our society and traditions have become underground from reality. The rise of technology comes with the rise of the thinking mind, the ego, a disconnect from the ground that undermines the vitality of the individual, compromises the senses, and weakens society.
     Many of the dominant religious-traditions/societies of the past and present, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism held/hold people together with social doctrine. We reached the Light, the Truth and the heavens through these religious traditions. They worked for most people. They are not perfect and contain a great amount of delusion. In some ways their was greater social unity. At least among members of the same community. As we become more globalized and unified as a species  the older traditions are threatened and weakened. With exposure to other traditions and beliefs, we have additional reference points to judge truth and fiction. It's easier to see where our traditions are weak and underground and where other traditions are stronger and truer. Once mono-tradition communities are now multi-tradition communities. Their's more competition and more mixing. Right now the world is in the middle of this mixing/blending. As we mix and open up to new ideas we are vulnerable. The stable ideas/traditions/ways of the past that have rooted us in relative security and health are in question and new ideas/traditions/ways are open to adoption/integration into our present ways. These traditions/ways are the safeguards of our health and well-being. When we question them, we make the life flow of their power more uncertain. Our judgment is based off of these traditions. So when we question these traditions, we question our judgment. When our judgment is in question, we are uncertain about how to act to ensure health and well-being. Some of our sense and judgment is adequate and some is not, but while we are uncertain and questioning, we haven't figured this out yet. We doubt some sense and judgment that insures our health and well-being, and in doubting let in dangerous practices and ideas into our lives. We ignore some good sense and practice, and are partially blind in our quest for something truer. We don't perceive that we are engaging in dangerous or untrue practices/ideas because we willfully ignore some sense/way that we had or we're naive/ignorant without sense in the first place. Perhaps we lack the sense to follow the senses that we have.
     These traditions that are still followed by the masses, but are weakening in general throughout the world, created Unity through doctrine and belief. The dogma and belief and tradition were and are mixed together with sublime truth in a palatable pill for the masses. This is how we found and how most of us still find God and truth and meaning in our lives. Another key element arose and is arising from the same force that is globalizing and unifying our various world cultures/traditions. The realization that truth and God don't belong to any of the religions or traditions alone. The realization that belief isn't necessary to reach God. That God can be perceived directly without creed or dogma. That truth isn't dependent on the traditional narrative, but is objective and scientific. The transcending of dogma and tradition to a truer more direct perception of reality.
     One of the troubles of the great blending is that the untruths of traditions/society are pointed out, but the truths of them aren't distilled and reformed in deeper understanding and insight. We see the relativity of tradition and religion, the superficiality of social interaction through the medium of dogma, the complete fallacy of much mythology and literal interpretation of religious texts, and throw out the whole notion of God, meaning, and a spiritual universe. We fall into soul-darkness and assume the world is meaningless and pointless. We live in such angst that we can't see the Light within ourselves, the being and the truth that are here now. We become pessimistic, nihilistic and terrible. We ignore many of the strong and true ways of our society because of this attitude when they can still help us.  We have lost our faith in life and in human society. This stepping away from dogma, this expanding of consciousness, is another huge force destabilizing society. Dogma is one of the main forces that binds our society together. As we negotiate the terrain between dogmatic order and and trans-dogmatic being, life is unclear, unstable and the integrity of society is compromised to varying degrees because order and sense and power aren't set as fixedly as they have been in the past.
     The information age and globalization have been essential to the distillation of truth from dogma, culture, and tradition as well as the proliferation of culture/ideas and the increasing opaqueness of truth, meaning and morality. The information age, globalization, expansion of consciousness and culture, and the exponential growth in technology are all co-arising and interdependent phenomena. They are inseparable and key elements of the transformation of our world order.  Technology has sped up our globalization, our sharing of ideas, mixing of cultures, and distillation of truth from dogma and tradition. The rise of telecommunications and information storage on the internet have sped this process up even more. Access to ideas and cultures is a click away with a computer and access to the internet. As culture and ideas spread faster, truth is distilled faster. It's incredible what we are learning about every dimension of human experience through scientific inquiry. This isn't limited to material sciences. But in any way that scientific thought can be applied. We're learning exactly how the systems we inhabit function and interrelate as we shed millennia of malpractice and ignorance. The most exciting part is learning how all of the different fields of study, all of the different systems and dimensions of life, are deeply and irrevocably interconnected. How each dimension of human experience, of life, is directly connected to every other dimension and how to create wellness and health and function for individuals and society, we must understand, view and treat these dimensions holistically, not separately.  This is the most positive consequence of globalization and the information age.
     Telecommunications and the internet have also intensified the spread of misinformation, unwholesome culture, and pseudo-science. The internet is a pool of information. That doesn't mean its true and useful information. Its easier to lie and be deceitful, when you don't have the person right in front of you. When you don't have a strong system to enforce good behavior and you don't have direct social response to your actions. You can engage it in secret in your personal space where it doesn't effect your social circles directly. This makes it easier to spread misinformation and to create unwholesome culture and behavior. This misinformation and negative behavior undermines the positive social structures we have. It also makes it more difficult to know what is true and meaningful. The same is true of texting and social media. They make it easier to be deceitful, spread misinformation, and create and make normal negative destructive behaviors. Children and people communicate less with others directly. They leave their homes less and are less involved with the community. They can sit at home, be "safe" and communicate through their phones and the internet. We are losing interpersonal skills and people's identities and perception are becoming further and further removed from what's actually going on. It makes it easier to inhabit false personas and harder to know what we actually feel and think. We live in this imaginary hallucination of who we think we are and what we think is going on, when we really hardly have a hint of how we think or feel and what we actually see because we have never developed, or have forgotten, the skills needed to interpret and understand the world as it is. Also the programming of many search engines on the internet also shows users more extreme versions of the content that they are viewing, which isolates individuals and forms isolated disconnected communities, beliefs, and cultures. The more we become disconnected from our senses and the world, the easier it is to adopt negative behaviors and untrue ideas. The easier it is to intensify this feedback loop, the easier it is to be manipulated, and the weaker and more dangerous our world and society become.
     The last factor contributing to the weakening of tradition and the destabilization of society at large is maniacal lust for wealth and power and the intentional effort to subvert and control human populations. Their is a massive attempt now to undermine the integrity of society internationally to consolidate wealth and power. Their is well thought out plans to systematically dismantle the trust and sense that holds us together, to rape our humanity and steal our wealth. To isolate us, to make life extremely competitive, and to obscure the truth as much as possible. Even to make us sick mentally, physically and spiritually. To pit us against each other individually, socially, nationally, racially, religiously, and politically. They want us divided. This is happening top down from fully conscious intention to semi-conscious corporate culture to compliance with the corporate/consumer/sell out system that is coming to dominate our world. This goes further than acting simply to maintain corporate profits. Its intentional, thought out, systematic action to rule the world and partially to destroy it. Our food is poisoned, our culture is destroyed, our traditions lost, our air and water contaminated, our land destroyed and polluted, our minds sickened, our souls lost. Much of this is due to intentional direction to undermine the integrity of society, but not all of it. Its happening because of a spectrum of motivation from pure malevolence to egotism to survival. From conscious understanding of action to basic ignorance of the consequences of action. And its inseparable from the forces of globalization, technology, expansion of consciousness, and the information age.
     Humans are subject to err. We are ignorant in many ways of ourselves and the world, and we probably have always been this way. As we globalize, unifying as a species, and undergo incredible change in belief, behavior, environment, and consciousness, fundamental change to the very structure of our lives, we are vulnerable and must be vigilant to meet the demands of these great changes in competent and wise ways. We face climate change and massive resource shortages. Nuclear destruction and systematic subversion of truth, liberty, and justice. Incredible corruption and terrible widespread mental illness. Fear and unwillingness to change and the rise of nationalism, racism and hate. Collapse of ecosystems and severe disconnect from reality. Many of us cannot or will not be able to deal with this change consciously and wisely. We should not expect everyone to. But the demands of the present require drastic change from many if we are to avoid incredible suffering and establish a world united in a deeper harmony and truth than we have known in the last several thousand years. I believe that we must unite to maintain our way of life. If we don't we will collapse into chaos and barbarism. We must carry the Light from our ethnocentric dogmatic traditions to a multicultural an increasingly trans-dogmatic future. I believe this was the intention of Jesus Christ. To seed the truth in the awakening of monotheism and prepare humanity for massive awakenings to trans-dogmatic direct perception of reality.
     We must change. We must live to serve humanity and truth. We must put this before self-interest and the status quo. We must put truth, justice, righteousness and soul before conventional thinking and behaving. We must unite in truth and Light across race, religion, nationality, gender, and socioeconomic background. We must tackle the problems and needs of society head on and fairly. We must be willing to share what we have for the common good and work very closely with each other in the establishment of wisdom and goodness on Earth. We must not worry about the future, but worry about the present. We must care for what we can now with the full commitment to expand our powers as much as possible to the fulfillment of Good on Earth. We must transcend hate in Universal Love and forgiveness, yet hold accountable each other for our actions and treat each other appropriately for what we have done. We must seek wisdom in all matters and know that nature is infinitely complex. We must treat our bodies with respect and learn to understand our feelings. We must answer the call to act in ways we have never acted before and do things we never thought possible. We must rise in truth from the chaos of the world and see clearly what is to be done.
     To build in Light we must come together. We must rise.

Returning to Love and Joy

   Every moment we have the opportunity to be perfectly connected to the object of our attention. This is the experience of pure love and joy. This is the deepest wish of everyone. We wish it in every moment, yet for most of us this pure love and joy doesn't come nearly as often as we wish, if it comes at all. Why don't we get what we want all of the time? If this is the center of who we are, then why aren't we living it in our day to day lives. Why do we not feel like trying to pursue what we really love? Why do we turn off to life and feel resentful, angry, frustrated and hostile to others and to opportunities. Why do we feel like closing off and hiding away in fear and self-silencing? What happened to our childhood? Why are we always compromising when we don't want to? Do you remember the feeling that you don't need to compromise who you are? Do you remember the feeling of joyful freedom and zest for life? Spontaneous success and fast friendships. Do you remember what it feels like to feel like you can do anything? Do you remember you soul standing aloft in its own light rolling in a sea, opening one with life? This is a part you may have forgotten, but it is not lost. It still dwells within you. It still is you, however lost you may be. However angry, confused, dark, and miserable you may be, this is still your soul. This is still your life. You just need to remember that their are other rules to the game. Rules you have forgotten in this silly world.
     Your soul is perfectly connected to life. Perfectly connected to everyone and everything. The word perfect comes from heaven and it describes the radiance of the light of a soul. The soul is directly connected to the source of life. This source is God, the supreme intelligence of the universe. Your soul is connected to this supreme intelligence. The ignorance of this soul connection is why you are in a compromised position and why you are suffering in life. Remembering this soul connection and your soul faculties is the way to realign yourself with the source and live in love and joy. How do you remember this soul connection? How do you use your soul faculties? You are still connected to the source, you are just ignoring/ignorant to a certain degree your soul faculties, your feelings.
      In this day and age we are so disconnected from our feelings and our bodies that we go insane and murder people in mass numbers. This is one of the loudest cries for help I can imagine. Think of how much pain those people feel who commit such atrocities? How much sadness they feel? How upset they are? How insane and confused they are about the nature of life? We create these people when our society loses touch with itself, with life, with our hearts. Our hearts and feelings tell us when something is ok and when it is not ok. The problem is, the more we don't listen to our feelings, the more they get distorted and we misinterpret and don't understand them. We see race and religion and feel justified in murder and hate. We don't see the overwhelming love within all of that hate that goes out from us to all human beings. We don't see how much we actually love that person who we hate. How much we love all human beings and all of life. How deep within us is an infinite sea of love and joy extending throughout the universe pervading all beings and all forms. It is magnificent... Yet, most of us are so far away from this. This is the center of our heart. This is the center of our feelings. This is what is distorted by our Earth drama. These feelings are the threads of truth that we can follow to the core of our beings, the core of our soul and reclaim our life, our love and our joy.
     These feelings lead us to God, to peace, to truth and to wisdom. Amazing! What wonderful knowledge! How do we navigate them? How do we begin decompressing the distortion we've accumulated since birth? You start by facing your feelings and assessing the truth of your experience. By bringing awareness to your feelings and to your life, you automatically cleanse your perception and develop understanding of how you feel and how things work in life. You'll gain a little more insight, move a little closer to God and understand a little more about how you feel and how life works. This is a positive feedback loop. This is the energy cycle behind all of the different ways of introspection that you may utilize. Whether it's meditation, journaling, contemplation, heart conversation, reading, or yoga, the positive energy behind these activities builds and deepens awareness and understanding. The key to returning to the light, is having the heart to do so.
      You must persevere through whatever you uncover in your self-healing. You must be able to follow the half-truths and distorted vision through the darkness. You must stand up when you are knocked down. You must find the goodness when you are shocked, reviled, and deeply disturbed by the world and yourself. You must pass through many layers of delusion, imagination, and many ways of being. While your feelings and perception are distorted, you will be led astray. But the longer you persist, the wiser you will become and the more control you will have over your life.
     See the deeper current of your soul. As you develop your feelings, you will come across deeper life currents in your vision. Your feelings will tap into the extrasensory path your soul is on in this life. I have had feelings that I know are what people call destiny. I don't know if life is entirely predetermined, but I know what it feels like when all of your being collapses in a wave function to one point and you know with total certainty where your soul is headed. This is accompanied by a feeling of perfect righteousness, a knowing that this is where you are supposed to go and what you are supposed to do. Maybe your path could have gone in several directions and you felt divided about which one to take. When you feel "destiny" and see the perfect path, its only perfect because your will has unified towards that end and you feel the confidence and reassurance of a unified self. Whether or not its set in stone or is created organically in the moment, this deeper current  or destiny of the soul carries with it a greater and more useful intelligence than reason alone and is a vital process in the return to God, love and joy.
      Knowing what your deeper currents are is basically knowing what your life purpose is. This is a pretty advanced level of intuition generally speaking. It's being so in-tune with your feelings and yourself that you've cut through most of the uncertainty surrounding why you are here on this planet. For some it's easy, for others it never comes. It's essentially a depth of intuitive vision and a pretty profound truth. Most of us walk around committed to relationships partially and with reservations. Imagine knowing that their is no other possible way for you to be, that you couldn't be anywhere else even if you wanted. That you were set where you were by a great and perfect intelligence far far beyond your comprehension. But you knew and felt that this is it, this is where I am supposed to be. You see the writing on the wall. Subtle cues and coincidences, gut feelings and deja vu or familiarity and ease with people you have never met. Literally being pulled by inexplicable inner forces to people, to events and to perform actions spontaneous and seemingly impractical or impulsive. A dive away from the norm, unless it is already the norm to you. Knowing your purpose is useful because it clears the field of unnecessary obstacles. You got a hand full of cards, you like some and don't like others. Knowing your purpose is taking another look at your hand and realizing you were mistaken all along. Instead of 5 cards, you only have 1. Of course you only have 1. Knowing your purpose, or your destiny allows you to focus yourself completely, which is the only way to truly be happy.
     Another way of describing knowing your purpose or destiny is knowing exactly what you are capable of right now. You know you want to be a writer, but you know perfectly that you don't have the focus to complete a book now. You know that instead of seizing on the idea to write a book and force it down your own throat with a whip at your back, your gonna relax, go with the flow and let life take care of itself. If it's really something you want to do, eventually, by listening to yourself and doing your best in the moment, you'll get to a point where your healthy enough and put together enough to complete something worth reading. Besides you know that you don't want to live in compulsion, fear of not accomplishing, self inflicted terror and tyranny. You would be happier doing anything else where you were open to life and open to the opportunity to be gentle and kind to yourself. You know that where you are now, your purpose is to relax the grip of compulsion and fear, and to cultivate your desires in openness, ease and lovejoy while tolerating and embracing as best as possible the chaos, pain and suffering lashing out inside of you. You know you can do no better than this. And when you look deeper, you see that this is exactly where you are supposed to be and it is beautiful, wonderful, perfect and you are overwhelmed by the love and graciousness surrounding it. You see yourself where you are on Earth, joy or pain, and see astral space around and within you, light opening up within you connecting you to a multitude of heavenly beings, embracing you with a riot of celebrating lovejoy and splendor. You slowly relax your fearful grip on life as your heart opens up to the infinite and you learn your place on this Earth.
     Your destiny may not be fixed in the way you imagine it. You may or may not have one single task to complete. I think often people have one or several main purposes in life, but destiny isn't necessarily set that way. It's more like an astral or heavenly field that you walk in. It emanates from your soul and you can be consciously aware of it by listening to your feelings and cultivating your intuition. You literally see it if you open your third eye. Its a astral or heavenly shimmer that overlays the world you perceive inside and outside you. Objects take on an astral aura and become transparent to a certain degree. The ground seems less firm. It's a sensation that although you are walking on Earth, you are also in space. Heaven or astral space. And the objects come in and out of your life not only because of Earthly explanations, but also because of deeper or higher spiritual reasons. Understanding your purpose is as much knowing what your are meant to do and doing it as it is walking in this field and awareness. This awareness possesses the unity, seamlessness, and perfect beauty of heaven. This perfect unity is the same as the sense of destiny. Often you may feel disconnected from life or from yourself, living in stress, fear, urgency, and darkness. You may go for a time or times without paying much attention to what's going on. Your mind is separate and fallen to a point of unconsciousness, a lack of presence. When your sense of self is split and fallen like this, heaven is split, divided and not possible in your awareness. The more your mind is split, the more uncertain you are about your purpose and the less you perceive the divine. The more you unify your self, the more certainty you feel in your action(to the point of knowing your soul-purpose) and the more you perceive the divine and literally walk in the heavenly aura on Earth fulfilling Jesus's words. Your purpose may be to perform one occupation or duty, but its not necessarily. What it is necessarily is life lived in the unity of heavenly awareness and inspiration.
     Destiny is life purpose at the soul level. This is why destiny is inspired by heaven. The soul resides in heaven, in astral space. Knowing your destiny is significant because the soul-destiny is the highest calling a person can have on Earth. It is the most fulfilling because it is the action you can take in which your being is the most unified. The more unified your being, the more you connect with heaven, with God, with love and joy. The more you harmonize with your soul, the more you harmonize with the universe and the more good comes to you. We are always perfectly connected to heaven and one with our souls, but often not conscious of it. We always have love and goodness coming to us, but we often are closed to receiving them. We turn off to goodness in fear, ignorance, hate and in negative belief and behavior. We are always walking the path, but often don't see and feel that we are. We grow through suffering, negativity, and ignorance to awareness, goodness, and love. Its in fact necessary to pass through darkness to come to the light. We constantly hope and expect that the understanding we gain from our current dilemma will completely free us from negativity and suffering. We won't have to return to the darkness, suffering and negativity. But, as long as there is fear in our hearts and ignorance in our minds, we will fall again. While we are ignorant and in our own positive power, we don't see our shortcomings. We feel on top of the world. Then we are blindsided by something we actually co-created and are shocked to fall back into turmoil and suffering. We didn't see that we were ignoring that person's feelings because we were so full of our own aggressive energy that is masked by our own pleasure and enjoyment. We were bulling over them and it pissed them off, then they let us have it and we were surprised and hurt and angry because we didn't see how we hurt them and don't see how we asked for what they sent back. Fulfilling your life's purpose or destiny is the culmination of understanding and utilizing your feelings. Understanding how your feelings operate, how this return to love and joy unfolds, helps immensely in the process.
     The heart calls into creation the content within it. The feelings are the content of the heart. This in an extraordinary process, linking humans to the supernatural and supreme creative intelligence of the universe. Humans are divine beings. We have the God power to create and shape the universe as we imagine it. Literally as we imagine it. The whole intelligent-energetic system of the body-being functions in unity in this creative process. I'm just going to focus on how the mind and the heart work in this process, specifically how thoughts (mind) and feelings (heart) manifest the universe through the portal of the third eye (psychic-intuition). Feelings are the meeting point of object (world/creation), subject (heart) and mind (awareness, thoughts). What we feel is us desiring a specific relationship to some object and us having a specific relationship with some object. The key to creation/manifestation is to hold the feeling in the mind either in direct awareness of the feeling or in thought, in a positive way (psychic-intuition). The positive focus is the opening of the third eye to the creative super-intelligence of the universe. The boundless unified universal being. God. The positive focus sends the desire-relationship (creation) to the infinite intelligence which can create it instantly within or outside of the parameters that this creation is conventionally/traditionally brought into being. Convention is the known way of creation. Manifestation and God are not limited to conventions/traditions. This is why they say, "God will find a way", and "God works in strange and mysterious ways". The degree to which the subject (heart) is unified in its positive awareness, is the degree to which the desire-relationship or creation is created in the here and now. Manifestation is the way everything is created. This is the subtle way it works. The heart, mind, and psychic-intuition do not belong and are not confined to humans or organic intelligence. Humans do not create everything. Its more like all life is endowed with creative will. All live is universal consciousness. All life is alive. All life has mind heart and connection to the source.
    The key to manifestation (creation) is to unify, harmonize, and clarify your desires/feelings. Contrary desires resist and negate each other, blocking the vital will from reaching the third eye. Vague and unclear desire creates vague and unclear life circumstances. Precise and singular thought and intentions produces clear direction and quick results.
      Unifying and clarifying your feelings/desires speeds up manifestation and unifies your self, but it doesn't necessarily manifest good things. The things you may strongly desire, may not be good for you or others. They may not be good for life in general. They may be destructive and foolish. This is why getting what you want isn't always good for you. And why I said earlier that on the return journey to God, love and joy, one must have the heart to continue when they are knocked down and when they uncover something, disturbing and/or terrible. Wisdom is what you gain from the meandering journey to the Light. Wisdom is what helps you manifest not only what you desire, but what is Good for life. Its key for being Good, and for saving your own bacon from yourself when you see something that you want, but know isn't worth it now. Wisdom is judgment of proper action and restraint. It is gained as the individual develops knowledge, awareness, and understanding of the world and themselves. When you find the Good, the Light, and wisdom, you'll know it. To get there, study the nature of reality, the integral structures of life which includes the structures of your heart and mind, your psyche. You must face the shadows within you,  strengthen the weak points of your character and body, and perceive and understand the subtleties of the metaphysical universe.  We are very complicated beings that exist on a delicate balance. It takes a lot of consciousness to ride the wave in the seat of the divine Lord. But, everyday it's getting easier for humans to do it.
     When you listen to your feelings  they lead you to fulfilling your hearts desire and  centeredness in life. Consciousness of your feelings reorients your energetic-feelings to a position more inclined to manifest and encounter the fulfillment of those feelings. Consciousness pulls the threads of the feelings out of the heart and weaves them into your being and your being weaves them into the world. The more acute your consciousness of them, the more readily the feelings manifest in the world. If you don't listen to them, they will undermine the feelings  you do listen to. They will rise in shadowy forms as ghosts and demons tormenting and sabotaging your plans. A healthy habit of listening and articulating your feelings keeps the life force flowing which keeps you centered. What you ignore now or are ignorant of strengthens in time, building in restrictive pools in your energetic system, in your body, and in your life situations.  Being conscious of your feelings also leads to wisdom.
     Upon the fulfillment of of feeling-desire, you are aware of the extent of which the obtaining of the fruit satisfied your expectations. You see how your expectations match reality and where they don't. You see the truth and falsehood  of your beliefs, perceptions, judgments. You automatically reassess what you perceive/believe/think you want and what is good to purse as new feelings arise in your heart.  We are always fulfilling our hearts desire in some way, reassessing our judgment and perception and feeling new feelings/desires. Its a living, constant process in the here and now. The degree to which we are or aren't mindful of this process is the degree to which we do or don't become wiser. The more precise our understanding of our heart, how it works and how what we want plays out in real life, the more we can orient ourselves to optimize the fulfillment of our desires, the good for ourselves, and maybe even the Good for life. We know what to avoid, what to be patient with, what to give attention to, what will free up restrictive energy and give us more power to manifest and receive our desires. Consciousness of your heart is a positive feed back loop to intensifying , fulfilling, and deepening your desires and your life, which is the deepening of life itself.
    Opposing desires keep us divided in the heart and in the mind. We have opposing desires because we are ignorant of truth. We are ignorant of life as it is and believe it to be otherwise. When a belief with a corresponding heart feeling-desire doesn't match up with reality, life tries to force itself in ways that it cannot go. Inaccurate beliefs are partially true. The truth in them flows naturally out and is manifested. The falseness of them leaves some feelings unheard and unheard they cause problems. For the flow of feelings is the flow of life energy which must flow for life to thrive. We believe our beliefs are true. We think they satisfy real need and wants. We think they make life work. Partially true beliefs don't necessarily satisfy  real needs and wants. We translate our vital needs and heart desires into beliefs. When our beliefs our wrong, we have mistranslated our vital needs and our heart desires. We believe in our beliefs, so real needs and desires go unheard, unexpressed, unfulfilled and the being suffers in real ways. Beliefs also set our energies against themselves. When we believe that apart of our being is wrong, we seek to suppress it. We use prescribed social conduct to limit and suppress sexuality, sexual energy. These prescriptions lay encoded in our beings in thought and belief. We use our mental focus to bottle up our sexuality, our sexual energy. Meanwhile our desire to procreate, our will to procreate pushes back against the mind. This urge surfaces consciously, where it is forbidden, hidden in deceiving and manipulating behavior which undermines our own well being and the well being of others. The self is thus at war because of opposing desires. To get along, and to procreate. This happens in countless ways.
     We often put aside impulses, desires, feelings, for the sake of other ones. Or our judgment is conflicted and we are angry or uncertain. Our lives are this complex bargaining system where we manipulate our energies to get the best deal, postponing or abusing parts of our self for the sake of what we feel to be more important. Denying this system and denying the divided thinking believing mind doesn't solve your problems and unite your self and your heart. You've got to play the game, learn, and play it better and better. Getting better means you understand yourself and life better through trial and error, through listening to your feelings and paying attention to what happens as you obtain what your looking for. It means you learn what you want and need to survive, thrive and become competent in providing for yourself. You're strong enough to face the hard feelings you have, some of your fears, and begin to unravel the parts of your personality and character that are self-deceiving to ascertain what that deception is driving at. You integrate what you discover into your consciousness and it no longer lies on the fringe and in opposition to your will. Ambition, needs, and desires naturally fit together better and mutually support the continual fulfillment of each other. You get smarter and your beliefs change. You learn how life really works and your ideas become more grounded in what's going on rather than what you believe is going on. You learn to see for yourself.
    Your developing your awareness of life. Your judgment moves from more imaginary(beliefs) to direct awareness of the forms and nature of life. As you develop your perception, you begin to see an underlying interconnectedness in the different parts of your heart and of your life. You see a single force animating and driving all of these parts, towards some common mysterious destination. The same force holds all of the different parts of your self together, a fact that drives you even more to uncover and integrate these parts into one working system. This force, this somehow transcends the physical and thinking realities in order of intelligence. You see this force in all things. In your body, your physical energies, your thoughts, your feelings, in ideas and in the world. You feel like somehow all of these things aren't as separate as you thought, they're somehow interconnected moving together. Your feelings open up to this interconnected dimension. This interconnectedness potentially explains the mysterious spiritual dimension of life. Maybe there's some truth to psychic forces, to a supreme intelligence if you can now sense a real interconnection between forms. This is the beginning of the consciousness of the metaphysical, heavenly dimension of life.
    When you become aware of this interconnectedness, your being opens to the interconnectedness. The force that drives these interconnected parts is a greater intelligence than what you posses in the moment and you instinctually begin to assimilate it into your operating system to improve your performance and your life. Consciousness of this interconnectedness is openness to and influence by it. Your seeing yourself as apart of an interconnected system with the same force(intelligence) driving the whole system, including driving you. If you like it, you consciously seek/desire to use it/become more integrated into it and have it more integrated into yourself. You allow yourself to be moved by forces beyond yourself that your beginning to trust/test. Your also probably second guessing your atheistic/agnostic beliefs if you have them and becoming curious/more interested in transpersonal potentials. Even if your not religious or spiritually knowledgeable, their's a very high probability that your psyche is full of spiritual ideas, ideas which posses some true information about the spiritual universe and its dimensions. When your open to this transpersonal interconnectedness (intelligence that transcends and includes the individual) and open to the possibilities of a spiritual universe with unknown scope and depth, you consciously, unconsciously, and semi-consciously open up to this data in your brain. You begin processing it and sifting though it(discovering what is and isn't true). You posses semi-divine awareness of the interconnected intelligence of the universe and this is the power that awakens these divine forms in your life.
     This force that drives interconnectedness is transrational. It is a dimension that transcends the limitations of the thinking mind. As you awaken to this interconnectedness, the force and its intelligence begin to supersede your rational-emotional judgment. You perceive this force driving you as you listen to it and feel that you can do better listening to it than following your reason and your thinking alone. You may see your reasoning and thinking as being dogmatic and conditioned as this force you sense and feel to be the way to move past dogma and conditioned being to direct perception of reality. This force is felt and sensed. It is tuning into and perceiving to the subtle energetic currents of life of directly. This is why it is transrational and transthinking. Because life is subtle energetic fields that can be perceived and felt directly. They don't need to be expressed in thought to be experienced or known. Often, the thinking mind gets in the way.  At least at first. This new mode of operation is called psychic-intuition. It is an aggregation of the five-senses plus metaphysical dimensions in one point of feeling/sensing. When someone says trust your feelings, this is what they are talking about. This isn't just emotional feelings, its emotional feelings, plus Earthly senses, plus awareness of metaphysical realities. You can still run into trouble with this level of operation. You can still misunderstand what they mean, or be guided by them to problems or danger. The change is that your beginning to perceive reality directly and that you are operating consciously on a metaphysical level. You are closer to your soul.
     Your soul is your body that exists on the heavenly or astral plane. It is a ball of radiant light, or a astral copy of your human form. It is your personal identity in the heavenly or astral planes. Your soul reincarnates on Earth and is much older than your current age. It has accumulated memories, skills, and understanding from previous lives. When you awaken to the metaphysical, you begin drawing on it more deeply. It is who you are now and have always been. You just may not perceive its effects on your life. For example, your natural talents. When you become conscious of it intuitively, you begin to see yourself on a much deeper and broader level. Your soul is your heart and it is perceived intuitively through the third eye. When you awaken/unify your heart enough, you begin to receive soulful feelings. Desires and affinities that are much deeper and older than ones you have had before. If your conscious enough you can tell which feelings are at this depth and which ones aren't. They feel older, familiar, and heavenly. It takes bringing your life into harmony with these feelings to reach perfect Love and Joy and to be totally yourself.
     Listening to these feelings is like reading the divine writing on the wall. They are much truer and powerful than what you are conditioned to believe in and pursue. When you develop your truth sense enough, you can know exactly what is true and exactly what you should do in the moment or in life in general. Knowing these truths and living them is acting in perfect accordance with you soul and with God. The feelings that come from this action are true centeredness, Love and Joy. A sense of knowing that their is nothing else for you to do now. The risk is that following these feelings/intuitions may seem or actually be impractical and risky compared to the safe known ways. They may even be dangerous. We don't need to forever abandon tradition or reason, but it may be wise to temporarily put tradition/reason aside to learn to communicate with your soul. It may be unwise to, it may be dangerous to. It all depends on the balance of energy you have when you open up to these higher energies, just like when you encounter anything else. One thing can cause bliss and at the same time it can cause severe trauma depending on how you receive it. It's up to you to know when to trust these feelings.
     They can be very powerful and overwhelming. They can temporarily overwhelm senses that may or may not keep you safe, or keep important things running in your life. They can also make life much easier and joyful, cutting out the need to plan and worry, bringing you effortlessly to fortune. It's best to introduce these feelings into your life in a way that doesn't overwhelm your senses or your reasoning. In ways that don't cause confusion, delusion, or harm to yourself or others. It's pretty complicated stuff, and definitely could use an instructor to guide you. Their are a lot of pitfalls on the spiritual path, and they get more complicated, and beguiling as you open to deeper energies. You can seriously go down into so weird, nasty, dangerous stuff even if you are careful. So be careful, be thoughtful, be considerate, and be mindful of pride, foolishness, recklessness, weaknesses and hidden negative feelings that may be released and thwart you when your vulnerable and open to higher energies. Also, be wary of the energies of others, especially those who you spend most of your time with and feel most influenced by. Learn to know truth from fiction and goodness from deception and manipulation. It's best to be grounded in great health, a good community support system with individuals who understand and have gone through/or are going through what you are going through, a sound moral compass, sound judgment, a unified heart,  a thorough understanding of what you may be getting into and tools to help you on the way. I think most people are somewhat unprepared for these energies and they cause more grief, confusion and delusion than they need to. The problem is that our society is generally unprepared to deal with such awakenings. I hope that with the growing number of individuals interested in awakening to this energy in trans-dogmatic ways, we will form support systems for each other and for future generations. We really need to to keep it safe, good, and fun.
     Like anything new and unknown, developing the intuition may come with problems. This shouldn't take away from it's real qualities. It is direct awareness of the life's subtle nature. It is awareness of heavenly dimensions. Why is this important? Because without direct perception of life and groundedness in it, we remain ignorant and unwise in deluded beliefs. We see the universe as we believe it to be, not as it is. The more we are grounded in direct awareness of life, the wiser we are, the more joy we can have, and the more suffering we can avoid. The universe has heavenly or metaphysical dimensions. We need psychic intuition to perceive these. They are fundamental to who we are, how we survive and how we thrive. To thrive as human beings, we need to utilize our psychic perception to navigate the metaphysical terrain we inhabit. Otherwise we walk blindly and dangerously. It' the tool we use to navigate to Love and Joy once we awaken to this terrain.
     When we have opened up our hearts enough that we have reached heaven, and listen to our soul enough that we live in harmony with it and with God, we find true love and joy. By listening to our feelings and continually manifesting our desires we make this discovery and are able to live in faith with life, not against it. Not against, but in single movement with our entire heart. Each of us have different callings. The heavenly soul always calls for unity of humankind and service to Life. It calls for compassion, understanding, wisdom, kindness and harmony on Earth. We have an incredible opportunity to unite in universal love right now on this planet. Their is an incredible amount of Love and Joy being sent here for us to use to liberate each other. When we awaken our hearts we learn this truth. We recognize it as the core of who we are and the reason why we are here.