Author: Gary

For the Love of Christ

The evangelists stopped by my door this morning.  They brought their bibles and were sharing the message of Christ.   They were two nice ladies so I spent a few minutes with them.  We got to talking about love and one woman said, “That’s what we should do.  We should love more.”

Saying that, “We should love more,” implies that we aren’t loving enough. It’s kind of an indirect way of putting your self, or someone else down for not doing what they were supposed to do.  I don’t think that was Christ’s message.

His was more like. I love you just the way you are.

Cleaning House and Cleaning Your Mind

It seems we spend more time cleaning our house than cleaning up our mind.  It’s nice to come home to a clean house.  But you don’t spend all your time there.  You spend a lot more time with your own mind than you do your house.  It makes sense then that you would spend some time making it a nice and enjoyable place to be.

For practical steps and exercises on cleaning up the fear based beliefs in your mind do the exercises in the Self Mastery course.

Cleaning Your House and Cleaning Your Mind

 

Addicted to Suffering

Are people in love with their suffering?

People are not in love with their suffering.  Rather I’d say that either it saddens them, or they hate it.  In either case their emotional reaction of hate and sadness to their suffering causes them to suffer more.

What is important to breaking this cycle is the awareness that our emotional reactions are not something that we control.  But this very idea that we are not in control,,,  this frightens people more.  So to avoid their fear they cling to the idea that it is reasonable or justified to hate or feel sad about their condition.  In effect they close themselves off to the truth out of fear of acknowledging something that is already happening.

 

Originally posted at Addicted to Suffering

Published at ToltecSpirit.com   Guidance based in the Four Agreements for  Spiritual Warriors seeking happiness and love.

 

Morals and Ethics

In the basic quest of morality and ethics “right” trumps “wrong”. In Advances levels of morality and ethics,,,, Love and Respect trump “being right”. The challenge for those who are attached to “being right” is that if they cling too tightly,,, love and respect appear to be wrong.

What Happens When We Lose Control

I was listening to a group of people talking the other day.  In this particular group the tendency was to drink alcohol in a self abusive way.    They were mostly talking about what they do when they lose control of their emotions.

After a while someone asked me what I thought. I said,

“When we lose control,,, what do we lose control to?  
When we lose control,,, what is it that then has control?
When this “other thing” then has control,,,, where are we?

Where did we go and what are we doing  when this “other thing” has control of us?”

Things I think about.

This post originally published at  What happens when we Lose Control

Toltecspirit.com  a website with guidance for spiritual warriors based in the Four Agreements.

Making Personal changes

How do make personal changes in your life?

Sometimes making changes in your beliefs, emotions, relationships, and elsewhere in your life is counter-intuitive.

When you are riding a bicycle,,, how do you turn the bike to the right?   You turn the handlebars to the left.    How do you change the negative thoughts in your head?   We’ll maybe you get the best results in a similar way.  Don’t try to push more positive ones on top of them.  Sometimes when you do you end up going in a negative direction.

Turning the handlebars to the right in order to turn the bike to the right makes logical sense if you aren’t aware of the other factors like the gyroscopic effect of precession.   Don’t know what you are doing when it comes to changing your beliefs or emotional reactions and you are likely to end up goring in the wrong direction.

The Self Mastery Course can help steer you in the right direction.  Some of the things might seem counter-intuitive, but they will make more sense when you have more awareness of how belief systems operate.

Originally posted at Making Personal Changes

ToltecSpirit.com, a resource for living by the Four Agreements.

 

Free Your Mind

The challenge is not to free your mind.

The challenge is to free your self from your mind.

 

This post by Gary van Warmerdam at https://www.toltecspirit.com/2010/02/free-your-mind/

Where you can find Wisdom of the Four Agreements for Spiritual Warriors

For practical steps and exercises to inventory and change your own beliefs/agreements there are exercises in the Self Mastery course.

A Word about Truth

Words aren’t the truth.  Words are symbolic meanings for something real or abstract.  Words are not truth so there is no sense in investing any faith in them.

But if you listen carefully to honest people you might find kernels of truth within the packaging of their words.