Dying to Live

from ANAM CARA: A Book of Celtic Wisdom — John O’Donohue © 1997

WHEN DEATH VISITS . . .
Death is a lonely visitor. After it visits your home, nothing is ever the same again. There is an empty place at the table; there is an absence in the house. Having someone close to you die is an incredibly strange and desolate experience. Something breaks within you then that will never come together again. Gone is the person whom you loved, whose face and hands and body you knew so well. This body, for the first time, is completely empty. This is very frightening and strange. After the death many questions come into your mind concerning where the person has gone, what they see and feel now. The death of a loved one is bitterly lonely. When you really love someone, you would be willing to die in their place. Yet no one can take another’s place when that time comes. Each one of us has to go alone. It is so strange that when someone dies, they literally disappear. Human experience includes all kinds of continuity and discontinuity, closeness and distance. In death, experience reaches the ultimate frontier. The deceased literally falls out of the visible world of form and presence. At birth you appear out of nowhere, at death you disappear to nowhere. . . . The terrible moment of loneliness in grief comes when you realize that you will never see the deceased again. The absence of their life, the absence of their voice, face, and presence become something that, as Sylvia Plat says, begins to grow beside you like a tree.

DEATH TRANSFIGURES OUR SEPARATION . . .
It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, “Being here is so much.” It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. The more lonely side of being here is our separation in the world. When you live in a body you are separate from every other object and person. Many of our attempts to pray, to love, and to create are secret attempts at transfiguring that separation in order to build bridges outward so that others can reach us and we can reach them. At death, this physical separation is broken. The soul is released from its particular and exclusive location in this body. The soul then comes in to a free and fluent universe of spiritual belonging.

DEATH AS AN INVITATION TO FREEDOM . . .
If you really live your life to the full, death will never have power over you. It will never seem like a destructive, negative event. It can become, for you, the moment of release into the deepest treasures of your own nature; it can be your full entry into the temple of your soul. If you are able let go of things, you learn to die spiritually in little ways during your life. When you learn to let go of things, a greater generosity, openness, and breath comes into your life. Imagine this letting go multiplied a thousand times at the moment of your death. That release can bring you a completely new divine belonging.

Spiritual Exercises

The spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius.

Have you heard of this before? I had not until recently, as a result of one of my deep searches for Truth. It appears to me that the Catholic Church has held these writings in high regard but thought the messages contained were of only of service to the priestly not the masses. I believe there in contains much for all. Certainly food for all. Food for thought.

Ignorance speaking

This video made me mad.
The makers of this video twist tales to breed fear and hatred.
I thought about ranting about it on the video site but instead chose to post it here.

Each one of us is first a spiritual being.
We are spiritual beings made in the image of God having a human "skin on" experience.
Sadly most of us are really unaware and out of touch with our true spiritual nature.
Dogma has managed to keep us all in line and out of touch with this touch stone.

When someone calls on spiritual help the spirits they attract are "like minded" to them.
If one is in a higher more realized spiritual state then they are assured to attract the energy of other spirits with higher vibrations whether the spiritual being has "skin on" or not. Hearing someone talk about Spirits may be spooky to another if they have not developed their innate spiritual abilities. There is so much more to life than we can see with our eyes. When one awakens to this realm, one's world expands in wondrous ways. Not scary at all. Actually it's very comforting. It's the unknown that's always the scariest in life.

Rest assured of this: Spirits are not the enemy. Not bad, evil or demonic.
That's just plain ignorance speaking.

Are you out of tune?

We each need to take time

to tune up and tune in each day

to our Highest Frequency's.

The Love Network

- 

 The Wisdom Channel

- 

& Abundance Broadcasting.

We have to unplug from the TV, Internet, cell phone, and I-pod to hear our calling.
What calling? The messages you have waiting. The calls you have either missed or ignored are still there. Where? Your personal call waiting system. From whom? That small still voice within.
Yep. You really should take time to listen. Try heeding the messages. Start small and learn to trust. The voice is one of wisdom. Wisdom beyond your immediate knowing. Wisdom from a much higher perspective that ours with feet planted on earth.

I know what I am taking about because I listen. I listen, heed and learn. The time I  spend in quiet, stilling the chatter of my mind strenghtens this higher frequency. Imagine how it is when you are attempting to tune into a radio channel in your car. You might hear a really good music station very softly but it is garbled and overpowered by mixed signals from another station. The more you can quiet the noisy physical world the better chance you have of hearing the softly spoken spiritual quidance.

Life works better for me when I am tuned in to the higher channels.

Love is the fulfilling of the law.

GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD

 By Henry Drummond

Every one has asked himself the great question of antiquity as of the modern world: What is the sutnmum lonum—the supreme good? You have life before you. Once only you can live it. What is the noblest object of desire, the supreme gift to covet ?

We have been accustomed to be told that the greatest thing in the religious world is Faith. That great word has been the key-note for centuries of the popular religion ; and we have easily learned to look upon it as the greatest thing in the world. Well, we are wrong. If we have been told that, we may miss the mark. I have taken you, in the chapter which I have just read, to Christianity at its source ; and there we have seen, " The greatest of these is love." It is not an oversight. Paul was speaking of faith just a moment before. He says, " If I have all faith, so that I can remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing." So far from forgetting he deliberately contrasts them, "Now abideth Faith, Hope, Love," and without a moment's hesitation the decision falls, "The greatest of these is Love."


And it is not prejudice. A man is apt to recommend to others his own strong point, Love was not Paul's strong point. The observing student can detect a beautiful tenderness growing and ripening all through his character as Paul gets old; but the hand that wrote, "The greatest of these is love," when we meet it first, is stained with blood. "Love is the fulfilling of the law." It is the rule for fulfilling all rules, the new commandment for keeping all the old commandments, Christ's one secret of the Christian life.


Nor is this letter to the Corinthians peculiar in singling out love as the summum bonum. The masterpieces of Christianity are agreed about it. Peter says, "Above all things have fervent love among yourselves." Above all things. And John goes farther, "God is love." And you remember the profound remark which Paul makes elsewhere, " Love is the fulfilling of the law." Did you ever think what he meant by that ? In those days men were working their passage to Heaven by keeping the Ten Commandments, and the hundred and ten other commandments which they had manufactured out of them. Christ said, I will show you a more simple way. If you do one thing, you will do these hundred and ten things, without ever thinking about them. If you love, you will unconsciously fulfil the whole law.

Awakening to possibilites

"AS I AWOKE" 60" x 48",  oil on canvas, 2010 by Debra Clemente

My recent painting "AS I AWOKE" was an exciting discovery for me on several levels. As I have changed the way my life is directed I am as well applying these lessons to my painting process.

When I began the painting, I knew not where the adventure would lead me. I thought it might be a large colorful abstract. As I have as yet to paint a full fledged abstract, I found myself seeing and developing possibilities in the patterns of colors I was laying down upon the canvas, much like how one discovers shapes in the clouds which appear to be more than random puffs of air. My level of energy and enthusiasm to discover the treasure that lay within remains evident in the painting as one can see where I scratched through the paint revealing wondrous hidden color suggesting the grasses and sunlight on the hills.

I have found that when I have something so specific in mind at the start I often struggle and agonize to "get it right" and yet at other times wonderful paintings seem to "fall from the sky" onto my canvas within a relatively short time. Not long ago I believed that blood, sweat and tears was the only valid avenue of art creation. I didn't give full credence to these works that flowed with ease from my imagination which is indeed a gift from God. I am consciously working on painting through a higher level unconsciousness, desiring Spirit to work through me and not fight the flow with my own preconceived ideas.

It's a delight to share with you.

It's a GIVEN

Those ideas that pop-up

out of the invisible, good ideas,

wonderful ideas, timely and fresh ideas

they are gifts.

Remember to say thank you.



I thought of you.



above my will

Above my will, I am necessitated

to create, to express to paint. 

Debra Clemente



Color Happens



Excerpt from essay "Art" by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

      
Above his will, and out of his sight, he is necessitated, by the air he breathes, and the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times, without knowing what that manner is. Now that which is inevitable in the work has a higher charm than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artist's pen or chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history of the human race.

All peoples seek

All peoples seek the temple where God dwells, where the spirit of the great Truth illuminates the shadows of human ignorance, but they know not which way to turn nor where this temple is. The mist of dogma surrounds them. Ages of thoughtlessness bind them in. Limitation weakens them and retards their footsteps. They wander in darkness seeking light, failing to realize that the Light is in the heart of the darkness. To the few who have found Him, God is revealed. These, in turn, reveal Him to man, striving to tell ignorance the message of wisdom. But seldom does man understand the mystery that has been unveiled. He tries weakly to follow in the steps of those who have attained, but all too often finds the path more difficult than he even dreamed. So he kneels in prayer before the mountain he cannot climb, from whose top gleams the light which he is neither strong enough to reach nor wise enough to comprehend. He lives the law as he knows it, always fearing in his heart that he has not read aright the flaming letters in the sky, and that in living the letter of the Law he has murdered the spirit. Man bows humbly to the Unknown, peopling the shadows of his own ignorance with saints and saviors, ghosts and spectres, gods and demons. Ignorance fears all things, falling, terror-stricken before the passing wind. Superstition stands as the monument to ignorance, and before it kneel all who realize their own weakness; who see in all things the strength they do not possess; who give to sticks and stones the power to bruise them; who change the beauties of Nature into the dwelling place of ghouls and ogres. Wisdom fears no thing, but still bows humbly to its own Source. While superstition hates all things, wisdom, with its deeper understanding, loves all things; for it has seen the beauty, the tenderness, and the sweetness which underlie Life's mystery. Life is the span of time appointed for accomplishment. Every fleeting moment is an opportunity, and those who are great are the ones who have recognized life as the opportunity for all things. Arts, sciences, and religions are monuments standing for what humanity has already accomplished. They stand as memorials to the unfolding mind of man, and through them man acquires more efficient and more intelligent methods of attaining prescribed results. Blessed are those who can profit by the experiences of others; who, adding to that which has already been built, can make their inspiration real, their dreams practical. Those who give man the things he needs, while seldom appreciated in their own age, are later recognized as the Saviors of the human race.

Excerpted from THE LOST KEYS OF FREEMASONRY or The Secret of Hiram Abiff  by Manly P. Hall