From Ravens Nest Mar 31

Energy Frequencies, Your Frequencies~Same Word

Everything is energy, and the truth of the matter is that energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed. If you believe in this theory, you begin to see that hurtful emotions can often transform into illness and disease. Physics tells us that if you match the frequency of the reality you want that you cannot help but get that reality.

If this statement is true, then if you choose to focus on healing, then healing will come.

Well-being encompasses all of your parts, not just your physical body. When your emotions are in turmoil and you are continually anxious and stressed, you aren't really doing yourself any favors when it comes to healing.

A wonderful way to heal the body and spirit is through physical practices such as yoga, tai chi and chi-gong.

* Yoga

The ancient practice of yoga has been around for more than 5,000 years. Most Westernized yoga classes focus on physical poses, which are also called asanas.  Many cultures practiced some kind of yoga, dating back as  far as the mid-third millennium BC.

Yoga is not only beneficial for strengthening the physical body, but it also helps one heal the mind and spirit through its meditative focus.

Yoga has many benefits, including helping to decrease depression and lower anxiety, and it can even help with sleep disorders and help you better manage pain.

Yoga is described as a general term that represents the physical, mental and spiritual disciplines that originated in ancient India. Yoga is actually one of six schools of the Hindu philosophy.

Most forms of yoga include some form of breathing technique and even some kind of meditative technique. While some forms of yoga focus purely on relaxation, others focus on core strength, muscle toning, balance and  flexibility.

A simple yoga practice can help you both physically and mentally, similar to the practices of tai chi andchi-gong, which we will look at next.

* Tai Chi

Tai chi, which is an ancient Chinese tradition, is practiced as a very graceful form of exercise. It involves a slow, focused series of movements that are also accompanied by deep breathing.

Tai chi has also been called tai chi chuan, and it is a noncompetitive very traditional form of exercise and movement. Poses are performed at one's own pace, with each pose flowing gracefully into the next.

There are many different styles of tai chi, each with its own subtle variety.

Research has shown that tai chi may have some health benefits in addition to its mental benefits, as some studies indicate favorable effects on balance control, flexibility and even cardiovascular fitness.

Studies also show that tai chi can help reduce the risk of falls in elderly patients and those who are recovering from heart failure, stroke, high blood pressure, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's.

Tai chi may also be quite beneficial for stress relief, in addition to mental health, with one study suggesting that one hour to one year of regular practice can increase psychological well-being while reducing stress, depression and anxiety.

Tai chi can also help also in enhancing the mood, so it is beneficial to both the body and the spirit.

* Chi-Gong

The ancient practice of chi-gong or qi-gong, however you want to say it, is based on the idea that chi or qi is energy that flows through the body.

The energy pathways can get blocked at any point in the body, creating illness and disease.

When you engage in a practice such as chi-gong, the theory  is that you free up these energetic pathways, increasing the flow of chi, which can help you improve your health and your spirit. Chi-gong involves different movements that can be done in different orders. You may choose to use chi-gong to improve posture, coordination, endurance or even flexibility.

The practice also helps one maintain good health and improve the quality of life. According to the theory of yin and yang, a Chinese based principle, these types of gentle movements can help balance the body's yin and yang forces.

Any way you put it, these kinds of gentle exercises can help you in many ways because they are not only beneficial for restoring physical health, they are also beneficial in restoring and maintaining good mental health.

From Raven's Nest Mar 29, 2015

The Making of Humans

"The ultimate self-absorption of our age is the self-hatred of our age. The belief that nothing we can say or do can help but screw things up even worse.”
HERE IS A SECRET. Many of my peers dislike themselves. They suffer from various forms of despair and depression, often leading to prescription or self medication. This is what the dominant culture tells them: there is something wrong with you.
Or, my peers like themselves too much. They swim in glossy representations of themselves, convinced they are the destined for untold greatness. The dominant culture calls this “narcissism” and tells them: there is something wrong with you.
The urge to be nobody, to have no consequence whether you lived are died, and the lust to be somebody, to leave your footsteps on earth as testament to your existence. Both perspectives are inextricably bound, revolving around the unseeable truth: the Self remains in the center.
This false dichotomy is found within the narratives of the dominant culture: Are humans a cancer on the planet, a flawed accident that deserves to be extinguished? Or are we the pinnacle of evolution, buoyed by our technology and bound for the stars?
This is not an accident. In fact, this is the perspective of childhood.
As a child, you are necessarily the most important story there is. Everything and everyone is a reflection of you and therefore, potentially “mine.” Whether through trauma or neglect, this perspective can reverse, turning the judgment inward. Herein lies guilt, shame, depression, self-hatred. Herein lies psychology, where the problem is your maladjustment. The fashionable response in personal development and spiritual circles is often self-love. “You must love the self before you can love the world.”
The antidote to self-hatred is not self-love. It’s to love the world instead. It’s to love the world despite your brokenness.
“The relentless pursuit of self reliance and self improvement is rooted in our lost connection to common stories, homeland and ancestors that bind and unite us. The times now demand that we recognize the world’s suffering in our own.”
This is the debt I owe humanity. It reawakened my ability to see the world, and the long caravan of forgetting that my peers and I are heir to. Those of us who grew up in the dominant culture are the children of Nowhere. Bless the parents that are doing the best they can (just as mine did) – but we have precious little guidance to make our way in a world that becomes more uncertain everyday, and are told in a thousand tiny ways that we are the problem.
What is the role of a human being? What is asked of us during this time of the anthropocene?
words are often difficult to decipher – not because they speak with ancient eloquence, rather, it takes a learned skill to hear the multi-layered spiral of wisdom. Therefore, in addition I’ve included further outtakes. If inspired, please share this work far and wide.
“How we see the culture down can be remarkably beautiful – just not the kind of beauty you wish for.”
On self-hatred:
“You have to understand that every culture worthy of the word culture has always practiced human-making, I think without exception. And there’s a lot of ceremonies and things that contribute to that making of humans, but why do they do that? Present tense I’m using, too. Why does it continue to happen?
Not because there’s anything wrong with anybody. That’s the macabre wisdom. The indigenous take on things is they don’t seem ever to resort to the Unified Field Theory of why things are as fucked as they are by saying, ‘Well humans, what are you gonna do?’ It’s a particularly modernist kind of self-hatred that is unrecognizable indigenously speaking.
It’s not like indigenous people are ‘good’ people and the rest of us are lost. They have the same dilemmas we have. They have found a way, an understanding of being human that includes the temporary amnesia around being one.
The indigenous take on it resorts to this: it’s in the nature of being human to forget how to be one on occasion, and to go earlier in your life, it’s in the nature of being human that nobody’s born that way, and so it has to be taught.
It means you need teachers and practitioners. And so, ceremonies are fundamentally designed to point this out to us, reminding us that this thing has been forgotten or set aside. And then you need a culture that proceeds as if the greatest gift you can give to kids at a certain age is give them the chance to be human, instead of assuming that by default they can’t be anything else.”
On initiation:
“Human beings are made. Who makes human beings? You could say well perhaps God makes human beings. Or you could say, the great God of our time is human beings make themselves. That’s where we worship, typically. But a culture that practices real initiation, you know what they say? Human beings have to make human beings.
Nobody else has really got the job description. I mean, deer make deer. But real deer, not deer who can’t figure out how to be a deer; they actually make real deer. Almost from the get go. But it doesn’t mean they don’t have to learn stuff. So initiation first and foremost is a human making thing. And how do you make humans? And the answer is: you’ve got to kill off their childhood.
Because why? Because the childhood doesn’t give way, that’s why. It’s a living thing. It’s not going to shuffle off this mortal coil because you’ve, quote, outgrown it. Nobody outgrows their childhood. It’s elastic beyond describing. Such that I have to regularly deal with 55 year old adolescents.
You have to kill it instead so that a human being can show up there instead.
Not when the kid’s seven. The kid’s supposed to be a child at seven, which means their self-absorption is total and complete, and that’s one of the ways they learn. Up until a certain point, it can’t be otherwise, and it shouldn’t be. After which time it becomes the most hazardous thing to this world, that self-absorption.
Many people say to me, yeah, yeah, I’ve been initiated man. I had a car accident. Do you think crazy shit happening, is that it? Come on. We agreed that it’s human beings that initiate you, it’s not, it’s not cars rolling off the highway. You know, that’s just called trauma. There’s a big difference. You being traumatized means you’re just fodder for the therapy system. It doesn’t mean you’ve outgrown anything. You know? If anything, that shit’s pretty seductive to drag you back into me, and me, and me.
Human beings are here to make sure that life lives, that the world somehow continues. Whether your personal life continues or not is not the bottom line of it. That’s an initiated understanding.
So humans are made in a place like this, and the making of human means we understand that we’re gonna lose track. The good news is we don’t all lost track at the same time, so there’ll be people there to, to welcome you in, and people there to remind you, and people there to show you what it’s like to be human.”
On elders:
Elderhood is not a consequence of what a birth certificate says, otherwise we’d be awash in them, with more on the way. It is not a consequence of not having died yet, nor of enduring a life. It is not what will happen if you or I stick around long enough. That condition I would call ‘senior citizen’.
Seniors are a consequence of death not happening. Elders are a consequence of a lifetime lived in the presence of elders, with all the subtle training laying out a template for service instead of retirement. Elders are a consequence of a whole sequence – a fragile sequence- of things happening. This sequence has a soul, and this it seems is it: elders do not achieve their elderhood.
For all their labors of learning they must still await elderhood being conferred upon them by those who seek them out.
Elders are finally made by the willingness and the ability of everyone else to have elders in their midst, to have recourse to them. Consider then how unlikely elderhood is in a time which medicates, resists and barely tolerates age instead of venerating it, in a time when being self made is king and queen of all aspirations, in a time when senior citizens are competing for jobs and life partners and the attention of the marketplace with people half their age.
Elders aren’t self made. They can’t be. They don’t confer elderhood upon each other, for it isn’t theirs to confer. They serve the culture which has given them their lives, their elders, and their achievement as elders only flowers when they have some place to serve. That place is younger people.
On self-love:
“[Many people] have a secret suspicion that they’re nobody, therefore they don’t really have the capacity to reassure anybody else on that matter. Because where’s your ability to love come from? It comes from getting loved first. Where’s your ability to know someone come from? From getting known first. Where does your ability to grieve– which is fundamental to being a human being– where does that come from? From being on the receiving end of someone’s grief.
And what does that do? Does it instantly translate into those skills of love, and grieving? No. Does it mean you’re going to automatically feel like somebody? It doesn’t mean that. There’s a kind of intermediate step without which the whole thing is stillborn, and what’s that?
If you’re on the receiving end of that stuff long enough, what happens is, there’s this little bud that grows up from you being bombarded with somebody being certain that you’re loveable, no matter what you think.
And that little bud is a bud of worthiness.
That you didn’t do anything to conjure, or manufacture this. It’s not a meritocracy getting loved, getting grieved, getting understood and seen. It isn’t. It’s a consequence that you’ve got sane people around you. That’s what it is. But if you have this bud of worthiness that somehow, involuntarily starts to take up room and your take on yourself? The inevitable consequence is your ability to love somebody is born there.
It’s not literally born and getting loved, it’s born in the un-sought after affirmation that you’re worth the trouble. There’s something there that can be, and will be, loved. That will be seen. It’s not up for grabs, and if that buds out one time in your life, it’s pretty hard to put that down again. You have to violate yourself to proceed as if you’re insignificant after that.”
On ancestry:
“Years ago I showed a film to a group of men who were newly bereaved about how Tibetans once – maybe still – cared for their dying and their dead. When the film ended, the long silence was finally broken when one of the men said, “I feel like I come from nowhere.”
And that seems to be what happens inside most of us when we see or hear of a people wholly at home where and how and who they are: we feel the shadowed hollow of our immigrant, refugee history, and our lack of ceremonial instinct and experience, or we try to fill it up by stealing something from those people who are miraculously still deeply, ancestrally, ceremonially alive.
Communities with endurance, purpose and commitment to future generations aren’t built on a footing of longing for such a community, or missing one. They are built on a willingness to learn and try and fail and learn some more about how real villages are a kind of cooking pot, the clay for which was taken from ancestral soil, and how that cooking pot hangs from a tripod of relation: how the villagers are with each other, how they are with the created world around them, how they are with the Unseen World.
The balm for feeling like you come from nowhere is to learn in a massive way about where you are from, and to do that with others.”
On the death of the dominant culture:
“When it comes to being sorrowful over how things are going, when it comes to being politically attenuated to how things are going, the word love doesn’t often show up.
But I’m pretty certain now that the willingness to see the death of what you love, and to be willing to continue to love it when it’s not going to last, that itself is an act of love. And if what I’m talking about is the culture that gave you your existence, your identity and so forth, then that’s what you do. That’s your last great act of love is to see it down.
See it properly interred, you know? Dig a good hole, you know. Not to get rid of anything, but that’s your job. I mean, where’d your life come from? This is not rats on a sinking ship I’m describing; real human beings will not abandon that which however faulty and misshapen, and perhaps an accident of nature – whatever this crazy life we’ve made for ourselves in this century is – real human beings will not leave it to its own devices.
Real human beings will sit there, even though they themselves might be beginning to grow hungry, and weary, and they will sit there knowing that’s the last gift you have. That’s the way I think to see it. It’s an act of love.”

http://www.ravenstarenchantments.com/raven-dolick-doctor-of-metaphysics.php

Initiating Contact with Your Holy Guardian Angel (HGA)

Initiating Contact with Your Holy Guardian Angel (HGA)

To begin this operation, you need to bring to bear all your gimmicks. You need all your magical weapons, all you symbol systems, an act of power, and, ideally a symbolically significant time (dawn is good, dawn on your birthday is better, dawn on your birthday on a numerologically significant year is quite excellent. You can also select the day through astrology, numerology, or some combination thereof). You want to make your entire area as perfect a representation of the semiotic web, i.e. the cosmos, as you can. You may have to redecorate an entire room for this operation. Take your time. Make it perfect. You should also have some paper and a consecrated pen handy. You’ll want to record what comes through, if anything.
First, banish the area. Stand at your place of working—altar or otherwise—and attain a state of deep relaxation and self-confidence. You may use an anchor for this, but take your time. You want as deep a state as you can possibly muster. Nothing should be halfway. You’re reaching out for something very large here. If you have a tool dedicated to invocation, pick it up. You’re going to try to invoke the HGA.
The problem is, of course, that you have no idea what the qualities of the HGA are! You don’t even know its name! This is the hardest invocation you’ll ever perform, because you’ll need to rely on the invoked entity to come halfway. Fortunately, the HGA wants to communicate with you, once it knows you’re willing. So you have to start to convince it that you’re willing.
The best way to do this, while at the same time increasing your magical authority, is to begin reciting your accomplishments, no matter how large or small, including every act of power you’ve ever performed, every spell, every mundane success. You may feel silly recounting how you heroically recovered from the flu, but just keep pushing on. Don’t think about what you’re saying. Don’t analyze, just recite.
At some point in this litany, which may take some time, you’ll begin to feel something strange. You might start twitching or speaking in tongues. Maybe you’ll just feel oddly diffuse in some intangible sense. Whatever happens, let your imagination take in every symbol of power with which you’ve surrounded yourself; let them congeal into an image, and let that image speak a word. That word is the HGA’s name. Repeat the name aloud and write it down. You may also receive a sigil. If so, write that down, too. If you feel up to it, ask a question. “Where can I look for greater power?” might be a good initial question, as is “How can I be a better person?” Record the answer, even if it makes no immediate sense.
Thank the image, giving it the license to depart as you would in an evocation. Then banish the area and—if you find the experience as draining as I do—collapse for a while. When you’ve recovered, try to see if the name, image, and answer to your question (if you have one) fit together symbolically. You may find the name means something in another language, or you may find some other connection. Remember, everything is a symbol like in a dream, and in a dream you won’t have any symbol you can’t interpret. I can’t give any more precise instructions than that. Here I have to leave the work up to you and your HGA.

http://www.ravenstarenchantments.com/raven-dolick-doctor-of-metaphysics.php

The Matrix Is Falling Apart

HE MATRIX IS FALLING APART!

Are you one of the people who feel like time is speeding up? If so, you may be one of the people who are about to move into the next density.
Many people across the world are experiencing a feeling as if time is speeding up. While a day is still constituted in 24 hour increments, time seems to be moving faster than ever for many people.
There are several explanations for this phenomenon. The most popular explanation is that time isn’t speeding up, but our consciousness is, which makes it seem like time is speeding up.
Ian Lungold believed that time was speeding up because creation was speeding up. In other words, more was happening in less time. "When more is possible to happen in every moment," stated Lungold, "there are more possible outcomes which open the door to things called miracles."
What many people aren’t taking into account is vibration. Everything in existence revolves around vibration as atoms vibrate to create our 3rd dimensional reality. As the atoms vibrate faster, the illusion of time speeding up is created because, physiologically, our bodies are sensing the speeding up of “something” but we cannot attribute it to anything familiar other than time.
The reason we cannot physically see higher dimensions is because they are vibrating at a higher rate. As our bodies start to vibrate at a higher rate, we begin to feel as though time is also speeding up.
Look no further than the drastic changes within our solar system. For many years in the past, our sun was a bright yellow in color but has since turned into a bright whitish yellow as it reflects the changes in vibration within our solar system.
In alchemy, the statement of “as above, so below” applies. As our solar system is going through dramatic climate changes, so is our planet. As our planet goes through dramatic climate changes, the inhabitants of this plant will experience drastic changes. One of these changes is in the vibratory level of the spin in the atoms of our bodies.
Days, weeks and years seem to fly by quicker than ever. This isn’t just a physiological symptom of those who are progressing in age as every age genre from teens through the elderly is experiencing this phenomenon.
The easiest way to raise your body’s vibratory rate is through meditation. Other ways include showing kindness to all forms of life, radiating unconditional love and doing kind deeds for others.
A simple way to raise your vibration while helping to raise the vibrations of others is to mentally express love and appreciation to random people through positive thoughts and intentions. For example, if you were to take a walk on the beach or even a stroll through the mall, try envisioning that everyone is part of your family. As people walk by you, mentally tell them, “I love you. You’re beautiful and perfect just the way you are.”
The bottom line is that your 3rd dimensional body may be preparing you for the 5th dimension as your atoms continue to vibrate at a higher level.

FROM RAVEN'S NEST Mar 25, 2015

The Path to the Light
Two ways and two spirits

Is 'the path to the Light' a philosophy? A religion? A way of life? Or is it gaining enlightenment, illumination, or finding and knowing God? It is all these and much more as we hope to show. We may put it another way by saying that there are two ways open to every one of us; one leading to the Light of Knowledge and Truth and the other to the darkness of Ignorance and illusion. You may say there is a third way, leading neither entirely to Light nor darkness, but a sort of dreary twilight. But we would hesitate to call this a path, for it implies that it has a destination and the only one we can think of is nowhere! What we can say is that many millions do drift along in just this manner as you will know only too well.
These two paths, one leading to the Light of Truth and the other to the darkness of ignorance, were well-known to the anonymous writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for in them we may read:
"God has appointed for man two spirits: the spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood. The spirit of truth springs from a fountain of light, but that born of falsehood springs from a source of darkness."
Here we have a clear reference to the Higher and lower selves of man, as we define them in the column on your right, one born of Light and Wisdom and the other born of darkness and ignorance. Many inspired Poets have intuitively sensed these two selves. In Sonnet 144, Shakespeare refers to them in a concealed manner when he writes:
"Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
Suspect I may, but not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out."
This enigmatic Sonnet is well worth studying very deeply. Note especially the reference to the foul pride of the lower self. And how this 'woos' the purity of the Higher Self from the path to the Light. This 'wooing' can take many forms and is often so subtle we do not realize we have been led astray by the promptings of our lower self until it is too late. Pride has been called the 'Peer and President of Hell'. This is true. Do we not all know men and women who are filled with pride on account of their appearance, social status, cleverness, wealth, or the 'power' they think they wield over others? Such do not realize that the things they are so proud of will all be taken away from them by death. This must be clear to all seekers who acknowledge that Man is a spiritual being incarnated in a body for the purpose of evolution to a higher state. Note too what the Poet says further about 'one angel in another's hell' which he may not 'directly tell'.
Depending upon which of these two selves has the upper hand, so shall we gravitate to the Light, or to the darkness; the choice is always ours. The virtues of our 'better angel' or Higher Self are described very clearly in the 'community rule' of the Dead Sea Scrolls we quoted from earlier:
"a spirit of humility, patience, abundant charity, unending goodness, understanding, and intelligence; which trusts in God and . . . (possesses) an understanding of all things."
The lower self is its opposite in every way, for as we may read in the next verse of the same book, its ways are:
"greed, and slackness in the search for righteousness, wickedness and lies, haughtiness and pride, falseness and deceit, cruelty and abundant evil, ill-temper and much folly and brazen insolence . . . blindness of eye and dullness of ear."
Note once more the reference to pride! The truly good man or woman is ever humble, for they know that whatever virtues they possess are the gift of God. But there are other vices mentioned in the above quotation which are just as bad, or worse than pride. Such are 'blindness of eye' and 'dullness of ear', for these prevent us from catching even the slightest glimmer of Truth. There are very many such afflicted seekers as we discuss in our article on losing your way.
We hope that we have now answered the question we posed at the beginning of this investigation; namely, what is the path to the Light? It is the path we walk when we turn our face to Heaven and beseech God to enlighten us with His Love and Wisdom. To tread that path requires compassion, patience and love; and a willingness to share even our last crust with those who are in a still worse condition, or seem to be. Sophistry, distrust, suspicion, intellectual cleverness and other worldly 'wisdom' are useless to the seeker who invokes the tolerance of the higher powers, who are only too well aware of his own many failings, but regard them with indulgence; knowing how weak the human Mind is, and how easily it is led astray. As long as we remain selfish, unfriendly, doubting, and are unwilling to give and lose freely without afterthought, we cannot make any spiritual progress; for we judge others whilst we ourselves are full of blemishes.
H. P. Blavatsky describes the path to the Light most truly and eloquently when she says:
"There is a road, steep and thorny, beset with perils of every kind, but yet a road, and it leads to the very heart of the Universe. I can tell you how to find those who will show you the secret gateway that opens inward only, and closes fast behind the neophyte for evermore. There is no danger that dauntless courage cannot conquer; there is no trial that spotless purity cannot pass through; there is no difficulty that strong intellect cannot surmount. For those who win onwards there is reward past all telling—the power to bless and save humanity; for those who fail, there are other lives in which success may come."
Awakening your Higher Self
In H. P. Blavatsky's The Voice of the Silence we may read: "the mind is the great slayer of the REAL." Like so many occult sayings, this has more than one meaning. As we have discovered earlier, "God has appointed for man two spirits"—the lower and Higher Self in our terminology (see right). Consequently, we can interpret this verse as referring to either the lower or the Higher Self. The lower self 'slays' the REAL by convincing us that all that we experience by means of our physical senses and intellect is the only 'reality' we can ever know. It is only by such means as constant study, meditation, intuition and spiritual exaltation that the Higher Self may learn to 'slay' this illusory 'reality' and begin to perceive the grand Spiritual Truths of Life. Each 'mind' or 'self' is the 'slayer' of the other. The lower self (or mind) slays Truth; the Higher self (or mind), slays illusion. Blavatsky confirms this when she says: "Let the Disciple slay the Slayer." In other words we must awaken our Higher Self in order to see truly.
For:—
When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams;
When he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE—the inner sound which kills the outer.
Then only, not till then, shall he forsake the region of the false, to come unto the realm of the true.
Before the soul (Higher Self in our terminology) can see, the Harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion.
The nature of Illusion
What does Blavatsky mean by 'illusion'? Does she mean that the material world as we experience and realize it is not there? Or that it is not 'real'—as almost every 'occult' teacher and teachings state with the greatest gusto, without explaining what they may mean by the words 'real', 'reality', etc. No, she and we mean neither of these things. The material world is very 'real' indeed as anyone who has ever stubbed their 'illusory' toe against an equally 'illusory' stone will know to their cost. When occultists state that the material world and everything in it, is an 'illusion' it simply means that we do not see material things as they really are. We see the appearances they cast in our minds by means of the perception of our physical senses, rather like a reflection seen in a mirror. It seems real enough to us but we know it is an illusion because we have learned what a mirror is and understand the physical laws behind such phenomena. In the same way, only those who know (or have been taught) the Spiritual laws can explain what things—material and spiritual—truly are.
Even science admits that it does not really know of what material things consist in their ultimate essence. It can merely describe the material constituents of a thing, be it a man, a plant, or a speck of dust. But it cannot tell you what these things are, notwithstanding its very great progress over the last few centuries. Centuries during which it has probed and prodded matter with a variety of tools and instruments culminating in the present huge cyclotrons, or particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, in Geneva. In machines such as this atoms, once thought to be the ultimate building-blocks of matter, are smashed to bits by other 'bits' with ever more exotic names, and the smaller 'bits' which result from all these experiments keep on multiplying with no end in sight...
Moreover, even the atom, which not so long ago was confidently thought by science to consist of a solid 'bit' of 'something' (the nucleus) around which revolved one or more other 'bits' (electrons) is now shown to be mainly...empty space! Of course, this 'space' cannot really be 'empty', but what fills it, whether we choose to call this mysterious something 'energy', 'force', 'motion' or even, as one famous scientist of the 19th century suggested, "an empty shadow of my imagination", 'IT' remains as elusive and imponderable as ever. Max Planck, the Nobel Prize winner in physics, ably articulated the impasse these researches have led science into, when he said: "There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together." Had that enlightened scientist named this mysterious force 'Spirit', his statement would have been in perfect accord with the Ancient Wisdom.
But when we hear such 'eminent' scientists as the late Carl Sagan, stating that: "Matter is composed chiefly of nothing", we part company with these modern 'sages' and say with Plato, Socrates and the great Minds of the past that ex nihilo, nihil fit—"out of nothing, nothing comes". This brings us back to where we began when we asked "what do we mean by illusion?" We hope that it will now be clearer to you that we cannot hope to discover what material things are by smashing their constituent atoms to bits. We might just as well tear a flower to pieces and hope in this way to discover what it really is. All we shall end up with is...lots of the little material 'bits' we mentioned earlier; the spirit of the flower escapes us.
The path of Wisdom
In J. R. R. Tolkien's famous trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, we may read that "he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom." To see material things as they ARE and not as they appear to our material intellect and physical senses, we must rise above the material world and enter the domain of Spirit. And to rise above is to take the path of Wisdom, which is not of earth, but of the Heavens, where dwell the hosts of Shining Ones who have done with illusion and now dwell in the glorious Light of Truth, as you may read in The true Destiny of Man which forms part of our Investigation into Evolution.
To see beyond or through the illusion of the material, we must learn to see with the eyes of our Higher Self. The Hermetic Teachings confirm this when they tell us that: "first thou must tear to pieces, and break through the garment thou wearest, the web of Ignorance..." Hermes here refers to the lower self, or physical body, senses and intellect which truly envelop the Higher Self with a 'web of ignorance'. And this is the only mind that is active in most human beings. Hermes goes on to say: "Therefore doth it (the lower self) labor to make good those things that seem, and are by the senses, judged and determined; and the things that are truly, it hides, and envelopeth in much matter...that thou canst neither hear what thou shouldst hear, nor see what thou shouldst see." Thus he confirms the same teaching given by H. P. Blavatsky in The Voice of the Silence, quoted earlier.
We have now seen how all these teachings link up and confirm one another. But even the best teachings and the best teachers can only point the way to these truths. We must walk the path to the Light on our own two legs. And that is what frightens many seekers off after a few short weeks, months or even years of study! They hope to find a "short-cut", or a "fast-track" to occult knowledge. There isn't one. At best such an attitude will lead you into deeper confusion and disillusionment, as you can read in our next investigation into the dangers and pitfalls of the Occult Jungle. But, for the very few who are prepared to work hard for their OWN liberation and enlightenment, the veils of the great illusion will be rent asunder, and they will SEE themselves, and the material and spiritual, as they truly ARE in all their Divine Simplicity, Truth and Beauty

The Egg~Pagan or Not?

The Egg~Pagan or Not?

A Symbol of New Life:In many cultures, the egg is viewed as the symbol of new life. It is, after all, the perfect example of fertility and the cycle of rebirth. In early Christian cultures, consumption of the Easter egg may have marked the end of Lent. In Greek Orthodox Christianity, there is a legend that after Christ's death on the cross, Mary Magdalene went to the emperor of Rome, and told him of Jesus' resurrection. The emperor's response was along the lines of "Oh, yeah, right, and those eggs over there are red, too." Suddenly, the bowl of eggs turned red, and Mary Magdalene joyfully began preaching Christianity to the emperor.

Pre-Christian Eggs:

Mary Magdalene and the red eggs aren't the earliest examples of eggs as a spring symbol. In Persia, eggs have been painted for thousands of years as part of the spring celebration of No Ruz, which is the Zoroastrian new year. In Iran, the colored eggs are placed on the dinner table at No Ruz, and a mother eats one cooked egg for each child she has. The festival of No Ruz predates the reign of Cyrus the Great, whose rule (580-529 b.c.e.) marks the beginning of Persian history.Bunnies, Hares, and Ostara:There are some claims that the original Easter eggs are Pagan symbols from Europe, but there's little evidence to support this. Instead, it seems to be a more middle eastern tradition. However, in Europe there may have been a goddess called Eostre, whose name gives us both Ostara and Easter. The Venerable Bede describes Eostre as a goddess with fertility associations, which loosely connects her to both rabbits and eggs.

Author Jacob Grimm (of Grimm's fairy tales) suggested that eggs were a symbol of early European Paganism.In some early cultures, the nocturnal hare was actually considered a symbol of the moon. In addition to feeding at night, the hare's gestation period is approximately 28 days -- the same as a full lunar cycle. In European folklore, the rabbit connection to eggs is one based on confusion. In the wild, hares birth their young in what is known as a form -- basically, a nest for bunnies. When the hares abandoned a form, it was sometimes taken over by plovers, who would then lay their eggs in it. The locals would then find eggs in the hare's form.

The character of the "Easter bunny" first appeared in 16th-century German writings, which said that if well-behaved children built a nest out of their caps or bonnets, they would be rewarded with colored eggs. This legend became part of American folklore in the 18th century, when German immigrants settled in the eastern U.S.Today, the Easter business is a huge commercial venture - Americans spend nearly $1.2 billion a year on Easter candy, and another $500 million on Easter decorations each year.

FROM RAVEN'S NEST Mar 24, 2015

You Are Changing The World

Could it be that trend setters are operating at a higher frequency of consciousness than the trend followers, and that the higher frequency carries with it a greater influence?

That’s exactly what David Hawkins discovered when he researched the scale of human consciousness. His book, ‘Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants in Human Behavior,’ reveals some fascinating properties of human consciousness. In it, he created and calibrated an enormously useful map of human consciousness, one which should rightfully be called, “The Hawkins Scale of Consciousness.”
Hawkins began practicing psychiatry in 1952, and then discovered the power of kinesiology, the science which obtains answers direct from the subconscious mind of a subject through muscle-testing.

The subconscious (or unconscious) mind is one segment of your total range of consciousness. The subconscious mind stores memories and emotional issues. It controls the involuntary nervous system, which manages such systems as breathing, digestion and metabolism. It is also in communication with the universe as a whole. In particular, it is connected to the global, or collective unconscious, mind of humanity.
The subconscious mind is, basically, the ultimate information source, one which is ready to provide information about anything upon demand.

With kinesiology, the subjects’ conscious minds are bypassed in order to receive clear answers directly from their subconscious minds. The tests are mechanically very simple. Subjects hold out an arm horizontally to the side while people designated as testers tell the subjects to resist their efforts to push one arm down with each question. If the arm remains strong and stays horizontal, then the answer from the subconscious mind of the subject is affirmative. If the arm yields downwards due to weakness then the answer is negative.
If, for example, you tell a test subject to resist while you tell them, “You have a human body” their arm will stay strong. If you change the statement to, “You are a human body” their arm will go weak as this is an incorrect statement. The reason for this is that we, as spirits, merely inhabit our physical bodies. We are not our bodies, even though the ego tends to see us as who we are in the mirror. The subconscious mind knows that the true answer is, “You have a human body.”

John Diamond, M.D., another early researcher in kinesiology, observed cases where the right and left hemispheres of a person’s brain were working together. The left hemisphere of the brain is normally used for analytical thinking and verbal activity, while the right hemisphere is used for intuitive and artistic activities as well as spatial orientation.
This explains why it is so hard to drive a car at the same time as carrying on a telephone conversation. In order to pay attention to the road and the activities of other traffic, the driver has to switch from one hemisphere of the brain over to the other side, and then switch back again to continue the conversation.
In the rare cases where both hemispheres were working equally together, Diamond discovered that the person now displayed creativity, which he referred to as humankind’s highest functioning.

David Hawkins found kinesiology to be a fascinating avenue into the unknown, and he began accessing what he calls attractor fields in the subconscious. Attractor fields are what Carl Jung called archetypes. They are created by the group efforts of millions of minds in the collective unconscious and hold a fascination for people because of their cumulative size.
Just when his practice became huge, with fifty therapists and other employees working for him, Hawkins abandoned it all for a life of research. Instead of treating one patient at a time, Hawkins wanted to discover how everyone could be helped by the promise and potential of kinesiology.
His research over the years proved conclusively the same thing that the new theoretical physics is beginning to say, that everything in the universe is connected. With kinesiology, he confirmed that whatever question is asked, if there is an answer to that question somewhere in the universe, then that answer will become yours.

He also set up a system of calibrating levels of human consciousness. Assigning the numbers one to infinity as the possible range of consciousness, he soon found that he had to use the logarithm of numbers, rather than just plain numbers. This is because the power of consciousness at higher levels is vast compared to its power at lower levels.
When you use a base-ten logarithmic system, the number 4 is not twice the number 2. Log 4 is 10,000 (one plus four zeros) versus log 2’s value of just 100 (one plus two zeros). A consciousness level of 300 is not twice 150, it is 10 to the 300th power; a one with 300 zeros after it.

Furthermore, Hawkins found that the consciousness level of 200 was critical. A global average of 200 or more is necessary to sustain life on this planet without it sinking into eventual self-destruction. Since the mid-1980s, he reports, the global average reading for humanity climbed above the critical 200 level. This, of course, is yet another discovery confirming the existence of today’s ongoing shift in consciousness.
Then, he began to wonder how much people of higher consciousness were compensating for people who live below the 200 level. Consider, for example, that 800 million people in the world are hungry, with many of them living near starvation. The consciousness of despair tests at a level of just 50. Even anger and hatred rate higher in frequency than the deep depression experienced by those who live with no appearance of hope.

So here we are, on Planet Earth, a collective humanity swimming hard through life to keep our collective chins above the 200 level, working towards the day when hunger and hopelessness will be eradicated from our world once and for all.

What can you do to help? As you raise your consciousness, you contribute more and more to the spiritual quality of the global mind. Therefore, your greatest service to humanity is, paradoxically, the development of your own consciousness.

How exactly can that help the world? Getting back to modern science and its numbering systems, along with today’s liking for summaries that spell out ‘the bottom line,’ here are the test results.

One individual at a higher level of consciousness counterbalances many, many individuals who are below the critical level of 200. Below the 200 level are the attractor fields of shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger and pride. Right at the critical 200 level comes courage and its ability to empower the self out of the victim-orientation of the lower frequencies.
At 300, a person has risen above many emotions of conflict to achieve some non-judgment and to feel optimism. At 300, one person, within the global mind, counterbalances an incredible total of 90,000 people below the 200 level. Such is the power of higher states of consciousness.
At 400, the individual achieves a harmonious attitude which brings acceptance and forgiveness. Furthermore, they gain an enhanced sense of reason, which brings understanding and meaning to life. This is not a difficult level to achieve. Those who, for example, pursue higher education and the professions function at the 400 level, where one person counterbalances an incredible 400,000 people below the 200 level.
To reach 500, a person needs to be spiritually conscious. At this level, unconditional love and unconditional forgiveness become alive and well in their reality. Here, one person counterbalances 750,000 people who are below the 200 level.
When a person has practiced meditation long and diligently enough to attain bliss consciousness at the 600 level, they are, at that moment, counterbalancing 10 million people below the 200 level.

Do you need a more compelling reason to develop your inner faculties? Just look at the wonderful level of service that each advance in consciousness brings into our world.

David Hawkins’ work reveals that the power of human consciousness to influence the world doesn’t just increase as you go up the scale. It increases exponentially! That means that your spiritual practices bring more peace and enlightenment to hundreds of thousands of other people around the world!
This wonderful level of service is the direct effect of your consciousness upon a world which has been starved, for so long, of spiritual thought and spiritual energy.

Tell a friend…
Better yet get proactive with us!
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