Archive for the ‘Spirituality’ Category
Life on earth is like a dream. Birth is the moment when the dream begins, and physical death is the awakening. The time in-between – the dream of life – is totally under your control, whether you believe it to be so or not.
Let’s talk about dreams a little, because this is a metaphor which can be very useful.
When you are dreaming, anything can happen. You can be rich or poor, old or young, thin or fat. You can experience anything and everything. You can date celebrities, dine on the world’s most exotic foods, enjoy unlimited financial wealth and even fly through the air like a bird. On the other hand, you could be the victim of a bug-eyed monster, be chased by giant insects or wrestle with crocodiles in a sewer.
The dream is created by you, and no-one else. What you experience in the dream is determined by your frame of mind, your beliefs and your expectations. If, during a dream where you are flying, you suddenly realise that it is ‘impossible’ to fly, you would soon come down to earth with a crash! If, on the other hand, you believe that flight is natural, you would continue to soar until the dream came to an end.
So it is with the physical life, which is but an extended dream of around seventy years – sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. What you experience here in this dream is governed solely by your frame of mind, your beliefs and your expectations. If you think you need to work hard and long in order to make money, then that is what you will be forced to do. If, on the other hand, you believe that money comes to you automatically, then it will!
We realise that this sounds a little simplistic, but it is an essential truth. As a man thinketh, so he is. What your mind can conceive and believe, your mind can achieve. Ask, and you shall receive. These are all ways of saying the same thing:
Limitations in life are created by limitations in the way you think.
Do away with mental limitations and your life can be anything you want it to be!
Of course, breaking through the barrier of mental limitations is not easy. If it were then everyone would be doing it automatically, and there would be no need for a website such as this.
Breaking free from limitations may mean that you have to discard something that you were brought up to believe as being ultimate truth. For example, if you were brought up to believe that your way of thinking was the only correct way of thinking, you will need to get rid of this idea so that you can truly appreciate the customs, beliefs and essences of other people. This is by no means easy, but if you go with the flow and discard everything except that which you know intuitively, your life will become altogether simpler and more enjoyable. Life will lose any nightmarish quality and will instead become a wonderful, exhilarating dream.
So where does all of this talk about life and death and dreams bring us? Well, let us summarise the principles that have arisen from our discussion in this series:
- Our physical lives are finite. Death is inevitable, but not to be feared. Death is a gateway – a gateway home to the place where you truly belong.
- Because our physical lives are finite, we should make sure that we use every minute wisely. We should, when the time comes, be able to greet death with a smile and say, ‘I have accomplished and experienced all that I wanted to accomplish and experience. I am ready to go home now.’
- Our life experiences are determined by our beliefs and expectations. Just as a dream is created solely through our own consciousness, so are the experiences of our physical lives.
These principles form the cornerstone of all forms of advanced spiritual knowledge, and so it should come as no surprise that we here at Create Good Things view them as being vitally important.
Changing The Dream
You visited Create Good Things because you want to change some aspect – or perhaps a few aspects – of the dream we call physical life. You want to enjoy a greater level of material success and prosperity, or you want to experience a better level of health, or you want to improve your relationships, or you simply want to increase your spiritual knowledge and power.
All of this is perfectly possible. All you need to do is recognise that change comes from within, and that you hold the key to your own success. We can show you different ways of turning that key, as it were, but it is you who must actually turn it. Just as you must follow a recipe in order to make a cake, so you must apply what you read here at Create Good Things if you actually want to get tangible results.
With that new understanding in mind, why not visit our Archive page and explore the information that we have made freely available for your benefit? Diligently apply what you learn and you will be able to start changing the dream of life as you desire.
Last time we discovered how Life and Death are intimately linked, and we said that it is very important for us to live life to the full. If you don’t know what it means to squeeze every ounce of living out of your life, set some time aside to carry out the following exercise:
The Last Day
Imagine that you knew you were going to die in exactly 24 hours. Let that scenario sink in, then ask yourself the following questions…
- What would you do in the next 24 hours that you hadn’t previously planned to do?
- What plans have you already made for the next 24 hours that you would now cancel?
- Which people would you make every effort to spend time with?
- What specific things would you say to these people which you wouldn’t otherwise have said?
Once you have answered these questions, you will soon realise whether or not you are living life to the full.
If you are then you probably wouldn’t do anything different over the next 24 hours – you would continue with your present plans and see the people you have arranged to see.
If you are not living life to the full, however, the chances are that you would totally rearrange the next 24 hours so that you can ditch the trivial plans and spend time doing something more meaningful.
Now, imagine once again that you have just 24 hours left, and write down a list of ten things you wish you had done during your lifetime but never actually got around to. Here are a few examples to start the ball rolling:
I Wish I Had…
Visited the Grand Canyon
Prepared for the financial well-being of my loved ones
Climbed a mountain
Taken my partner on a second honeymoon
Been less judgmental
Helped people less fortunate than myself
You get the idea. Once you have a list of ten or more of these things which you would have liked to have done (and not before), you may continue…
Now that you have decided exactly what you would have like to have achieved during your lifetime, you have a perfect list of goals which you can now pursue with enthusiasm.
At this point, some of you will scoff. ‘Life is not that easy!’ many of you will exclaim. ‘You can’t just make a list of goals and then expect to achieve them. You need money to achieve some of these goals, and money takes work, and work takes time!’
We too used to think along similar lines. We used to think that life was difficult – that the only way to survive, let alone thrive, was to work hard and long. We used to think that you needed luck to be happy and do all the things you wanted to do.
But we were wrong, and in the final part of this series we will explain why.
Life and death are always intertwined. It is a paradox, but to truly understand and master life, we must first take a close look at death. This might sound morbid to some people, but really it is not, as I hope to explain in this short series on Life and Death.
Death is one of the few things that we know is going to happen with absolute certainty. The only thing we don’t know is when it will happen. Since the event is inevitable, it makes sense that the worst thing we can do is avoid thinking about it in the foolish hope that it will go away. It is far better to face the fact of death square in the face, for in doing so, the mystery of life itself becomes dramatically clearer.
The majority of people – including many ‘enlightened’ individuals – have a fear of death. They see it as the end of something beautiful – as something that should be postponed for as long as is humanly possible. Thus modern society is endlessly concerned with prolonging life on this world. One thousand and one diets are launched onto an unsuspecting public, new exercise fads appear every week and scores of scare-mongers advise us not to eat eggs, or cheese, or beef… the list goes on and on and on.
Of course, life is precious and should be sensibly preserved if at all possible. But no diet, no exercise routine, no abstinence from cigarettes or alcohol is ever going to alter the fact that one day, every individual on earth must face death.
So let us face the facts. You were born alone, and eventually you will die alone. Of course, you may be in the company of others when the time comes, but from a spiritual point of view both birth and death are solitary journeys from one plane of existence to another.
This should not frighten you, but it should make you see that your preparation for this event cannot be passed on to someone else. Whatever your religious beliefs, you cannot rely on others to make the journey for you. For example, if you have Christian beliefs then you cannot rely on the faith of your minister to help you through death.
Likewise, this series itself cannot help you except in the form of guidance. You must face the event alone – like a warrior passing from the safe haven of his home into a gloriously new, unexplored territory. The amount of preparation you make in this life, in terms of spiritual progress, is entirely up to you.
Many people talk about life after death. They believe in something called eternal life, and assume that their human birth was the beginning of this life. This is incorrect. Eternal life has no end, but it also has no beginning. You existed before you were born, and will continue to exist after your physical death.
So if you look at the situation from another perspective, you have already gone through a ‘death’ experience when you were born. Before birth you existed in another form on another plane of reality. Then you ‘died’ on that plane and passed onto the physical plane through birth. When your physical body dies on this plane, all you are doing is going back to the plane you came from.
So what is the point of all this talk about death?
Well, the main point is to help you realise in a conscious manner that your life on earth will not go on forever. You do, of course, already know this – but how many people actually let that fact sink in? Not many. If they did they would see the futility of becoming too engrossed in material pleasures, or in wasting the time they do have here in shallow or even pointless pursuits.
Now that you realise that your time on earth is but a blip on the scale of your whole eternal existence, the question arises as to what you are here for. We believe that before physical birth, the spirit that is you actually decided where and when it was to be born. We believe that you chose your parents, your social status and even your neighbourhood because those people and situations would give you the best possible chance of achieving your life goal.
If you have experienced what you might refer to as a ‘hard life’ then you will know that this life has already taught you plenty. You may know what it feels like to suffer poverty, sickness or physical disability. Yet through these things you have learned more about yourself and the universe. However, you have not yet learned all there is to learn. If you had, your physical body would have died so that your essence may return to the other plane and ‘report back’ as it were.
Consider the old American television series Mork and Mindy, which starred Robin Williams as Mork – the alien from the planet Orc. His mission was to visit earth, spend some time here and report back to Orson – his superior – on a regular basis. Each episode had Mork experiencing something different – be it love, anger, jealousy, kindness, honesty and so forth – and then reporting about what he had learned.
If you see yourself as a spiritual ‘alien visitor’ who is here to experience life in all of its fullness and then ‘report back’ to your origin when you physically die, death holds little to fear. It will be seen as nothing more than ‘going home’ to the place where you truly belong.
Since you have so little time here and are meant to be experiencing everything which life has to offer, you can’t afford to waste a moment of it. You should treasure each week, day and hour of life as a precious gift – as another segment of time which has been given to you to use wisely.
Silence and solitude are essential if you want to create good things in your life. Unfortunately, unless you make a specific effort to spend time in silence and solitude, it is unlikely to happen often enough to make any meaningful difference to your wellbeing. It is therefore a good idea to schedule silence and solitude into your life as you would physical exercise or any other important activity.
When you spend time in silence and solitude, don’t distract yourself with activities such as reading, writing or even gardening. These activities might be physically silent, but they create just as much mental noise as watching television or playing computer games. Your aim should simply be to spend some time being aware of yourself and the world around you.
Initially, silence and solitude can make you feel uncomfortable. If you feel any discomfort when you avoid mental distractions then console yourself with the fact that your discomfort represents a particular need for silence and solitude. The more silence and solitude you experience, the less discomfort you will feel, and before long it will be the most natural thing in the world.
But why spend time in silence and solitude in the first place? The answer to that question is because you need to. When you spend time in silence, away from the distractions of activities and other people, you will gradually discover that your stress levels drop, that you can detach from the problems of daily life more easily, and that you can operate more effectively as a spiritual being that just happens to be in charge of a physical body. This will, in turn, make it easier for you to create good things without stress or struggle.
Such benefits won’t come along instantly, so if you are planning to sit in silence and solitude for fifteen minutes and expect a miracle after your first session you may well be disappointed. That said, fifteen minutes of silence and solitude a day is a good start, and if you can spend time in silence and solitude in a natural environment (be it your garden or by the ocean) then you will ultimately get a great deal out of the exercise.
The benefits of regular silence and solitude sessions are many and varied, but include less stress, more genuine happiness, the development of greater patience, a more detached perspective and – yes – a greater degree of control over your personal universe. Enjoy!
