Quote:

It is time for people to move past their beliefs. To say, “I believe,” is the same as saying, “I do not know from personal experience, but I have chosen some arbitrary story or explanation.” Unfortunately most people stop there and solidify their beliefs in their mind. They stick with their beliefs, defend them and close their mind to other possibilities. But Masters insist that we can “know”.

- Michael Skowronski

Easter Reflections.

Easter is one of the most significant events in the Christian calendar, and it is a spiritual and reflective time for many people throughout the world.

This rings particularly true for me. Easter is a profoundly significant time both personally and spiritually to me.

My Mother was killed on Easter Saturday, 12 years ago. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was visiting a good friend of hers to give easter eggs to her children. This friend had ended a relationship with a man some two weeks prior, and it just happened to be the day that this man turned up at her house with a gun.

My entire world collapsed that day. I will never forget when the police arrived to tell us what had happened to our mother. My brother and I were still teenagers at the time. Words simply cannot describe how horrendously painful that time of our lives was.

One of the saddest times for me was about a week or so after the funeral, when all the flowers died. All week, the house had been filled with the perfume of beautiful bright bouquets and cards of well wishes and it was comforting.

But then all the flowers wilted and died.

And I threw them out, and the house was empty and bare.

And the phone stopped ringing.

And the world moved on.

But my world was left in pieces.

When a significant tragedy occurs in your life, you really stop and question many things. I had always been spiritually inclined, even as a child I would ponder things like why I was here? What was the point of life? What happens when you die? What is beyond this life? But when something like this happens, you ponder these things profoundly.

Why did this happen? Why Mum? Why me? Where did she go? Does she even exist anymore? What’s the point of even living? Do you just die and then it’s all over, that’s it? Why even bother? Why, why, why?

I had no answers to these questions, and in the months (even years) following her death I spiraled into a dark depression. I developed post traumatic stress disorder, and at night I would be gripped with irrational fear that someone was going to come into my bedroom and shoot me. Sometimes this was accompanied by auditory hallucinations of footsteps coming up the hallway, it was terrifying. In the few hours when I would finally fall to sleep, I was plagued with horrific nightmares.

The worst part was waking up in the mornings. When you wake up there is a few seconds of peace as you transition from the dream world to the physical world… but then it hits you – you remember she is dead, and it’s like experiencing the loss all over again, every single time you wake up.

I turned to drugs and alcohol to try to escape the pain and sadness inside me. I didn’t want to live anymore, and wished that I could just go to sleep and never wake up. I thought about suicide a lot, and the only reason I didn’t do it was my belief in reincarnation; I figured I must be here for a reason, and if I was to kill myself before I actualized that reason, then I would be brought back again to re-live these experiences (or their equivalent) until I ‘got it’. Well I couldn’t bare the thought of having to endure this pain from the beginning all over again, so that wasn’t an option for me.

This was the beginning of a turning point in my life. I had became so disillusioned with this physical world that it forced me to take a serious look at what was beyond it – to yearn for understanding, to be able to make sense of this nonsensical existence. It was the beginning of my true spiritual yearning.

They say everything happens for a reason, and I am a firm believer in that. But I don’t just want to believe, I want to, need to, fully understand and comprehend – I need to know the reason. I need to know why.

Things eventually got better, slowly. I got better. I got stronger. I moved on, just like the rest of the world had.

And then some years later, I found Gnosis. This changed everything. Finally, I was given the tools to be able to get the answers I had been yearning for. I learned about astral travel and started to have out-of-body experiences, directly verifying that I am more than just this physical body. It’s one thing to believe something, but it is a whole other thing to experience it and know for certain, it completely changes your perspective.

I started to learn about death, and have directly verified part of what happens when we die by investigating my mother’s death in the astral realm (you can read about that experience here). After that experience I understood the attachment I had to my mother’s personality, which is only a temporary thing, and I was able to let go of that attachment to her completely and truly move on. (Attachment in itself is still something I have yet to conquer, but I gave me an understanding that will help me to get there).

I know the Divine exists – I have had direct experiences with my Divine Parents and have received spiritual teachings in the astral – direct personal spiritual teachings, not something preached to me in a church that I must ‘believe’ in.

I have been given the tools to eliminate negativity within myself – those dark days of depression and sadness that crippled me need never do so again. I am no longer a victim of life’s circumstances; now I now know how to use life’s events to my advantage to change what is within myself. I am a long way from eliminating these aspects of my psyche completely, but now I know how to fight them, and it is SO liberating to not be a helpless victim to them.

I have learned a lot about myself, what is within me, about my psyche; my consciousness and my subconscious. I realize that for most of my waking life I am asleep (psychologically speaking), and I have learned what I need to do to ‘wake up’.

And I know why I am here. I know my purpose. Life is completely transformed when you know the point of it all.

All this, and I have barely begun to scratch the surface. There is SO much more to life than just this physical world which we temporarily find ourselves in. Just think; in 200 years from now, everything you hold close to you will be gone. Every person that is in your life now, your family, your friends, the people you love, your children and grandchildren, even your enemies, will have died. Everything you own and value will be gone, and everything you think is important in your life right now will be irrelevant. This physical world is transient, it doesn’t last. There is much more to life than just this.

So, it is Easter once again. Time keeps moving on, and each year seems to be passing faster. I have a lot to reflect on, both in terms of where I have come from, and where I am going. While I now know my life’s purpose, I have a lot of work to do get there. And time won’t wait for me. I have come a long way, but I still have a long way to go.

This is what I am reflecting on this Easter.

 

The first time I woke up in a dream.

I learned how to wake up in dreams in the ‘Dreams and Out-of-Body Experiences’ course run by Gnosticweb.

I don’t mean to become lucid in a dream where you become aware that you are dreaming and gain some control over the dream, I mean to take it one step further and actually ‘wake up’, becoming fully conscious so that you are not dreaming at all anymore, and to have a conscious astral travel experience.

The first time I experienced this was about 1 ½ years ago. I was having a dream where I was holding a strange-looking fishing rod, when some kind of giant creature/thing started chasing me. It wasn’t overly frightening like true nightmares can be, but my instincts told me to run and so I did.

It wasn’t long before I thought “hang on, this is a very bizarre situation” and I realized this wasn’t ‘reality’, I must be dreaming! Once I realized this, I knew that whatever was chasing me was just a figment of my imagination, so I stopped running. The creature as well as the scene I was in disappeared, and I found myself standing in my apartment.

Funnily enough I was still holding onto the fishing rod.  Knowing it wasn’t real, I dropped it and it vanished before it hit the ground.

In the course I learned there were things you could do to test whether you were in the physical or the astral, such as pulling your finger – if you are in the astral it will stretch (there are different laws that govern the astral, and as such matter behaves differently over there. For instance the law of gravity doesn’t work the same so you can fly and you can also go though solid objects just as walls). Even though I knew I was in the astral I decided to test anyway. So I pulled my finger and it indeed did stretch like rubber!

I looked around and the thing that struck me the most was how familiar the mystical feeling of being in the astral was, and I thought to myself “wow, I do this all the time, I just don’t remember”.

The next time I woke in a dream happened not long after, when I was overseas. I had gone to the Philippines for work, and it happened the night I arrived. During my travel I was pushing really hard for awareness, and this no doubt helped increase my lucidity that night.

We got to our hotel late at night. I was tired so went strait to bed. Before doing so I closed the curtains in my room, but unfortunately I didn’t do a very good job and left a gap between them. It was just enough for the sun to come streaming through in the early hours of the morning and get me right in the face! Being comfortable and sleepy, I turned over and buried my head under the blankets. But the light was still bothering me, so eventually I got up and went over and shut the curtains.

I turned to go back to bed and noticed that the hotel room was a complete mess! There were things thrown about everywhere, and I was really puzzled… I had only just arrived and gone strait to bed, how on earth did the room get to be in this state? Then I saw on the floor a possession from my childhood, and I was like ‘wait a minute, this can’t be right, maybe this is a dream?’ But it felt SO real that I was totally confused. So I pulled my finger, and it stretched. But I still wasn’t convinced, so I had to pull it another 2 times to satisfy myself that it was in fact the astral and not the physical. And there I was, fully awake in my hotel room, having a conscious OBE. Only this time it didn’t feel mystical at all, it really felt just like the physical.

Then I decided to visit by brother back home in Australia, and attempted to fly out the window. But I couldn’t seem to get though the glass. I sensed this was a psychological barrier, so I turned over and sailed though backwards without a problem.

I flew out over Makati city, and it looked beautiful! I got distracted by this and just flew above the city for a while, taking it in. By the time I decided to visit my brother I had lost some lucidity and began to fall into a dream.

I dreamed that I was with my brother in Australia, and we were on the rooftops of houses and I was telling him how cool it was that we were in the astral! Then he said he had to go now and left. Not long after I woke up – I was back in the hotel bed, with the sun still streaming through the curtains.

I called my brother to tell him about the experience, and amazingly he said “that makes sense now!” At around the same time he had also projected consciously, (unlike me he has a natural ability to do so), when he heard a familiar female voice talking to him. Thinking it was his girlfriend who was in the bed next to him, he purposely went back into his body to she what she wanted. Only when he did so she was fast asleep! He woke her and asked if she said something to him, but she said no. When I told him about my experience he remembered the voice as mine, not his girlfriends!

Unlike most people I know who have taken the Dreams and OBE course, I tend to project more often than wake up in dreams. I imagine this is a direct reflection of how unaware I am during the day, and it indicates that I need to push much harder to wake up my consciousness moment to moment…

The Lake of Consciousness.

A teacher of mine likened the psyche to a great lake, with the consciousness being the water, and the subconscious (’egos’) being the mud and silt at the bottom of the lake. Normally it’s as though the settlement at the bottom is all stirred up, causing the water to become dark and murky. This is how our consciousness is when we begin the inner work, we are clouded by the egos.

But then, we learn some practices. We learn how to concentrate, how to meditate, we do some mantras, and we learn how to astral project. As we do these practices, we begin to balance our energy centers, and the mud and silt begins to settle at the bottom of the lake. Slowly the water becomes clearer, and as it does we are able to see reality – we begin to get esoteric experiences; some astral experiences, perhaps some spiritual teachings, and some moments of inner peace. But the mud is still there, it’s just resting at the bottom, ready to be stirred up again by some curve-ball of life. At any moment life will throw us some mishap which draws up frsutration, negativity or fear, perhaps anger and so on.

In order to permanently clear the water, we need to extract the mud out of it. And we do this by using the events of life that allow us to see the mud that is within us. We don’t want actively do things to stir up the mud, like drinking or taking drugs or actively pursuing situations that will feed our egos – if we do that, the water just gets all muddy and we get lost in the darkness. Instead, we do our practices and clear the water as best we can, then just be alert and vigilant and life will bring us exactly what we need to extract the mud. A situation will present itself, and if we are clear we will see the particle of mud – the ego – that it brings up from the bottom of our psyche. When we see it, observe it and comprehend it, we can apply the elimination technique, and that particle of mud is extracted out of the water. Then life presents another situation, and we do the same. And like this, little by little, particle by particle, ego by ego, we extract the mud and permanently clear the water of the consciousness.

This is why it’s not enough to go and live like a hermit or a monk, off somewhere far away from society in a temple or deep in a forest. Sure, we may do lots of practices and get lots of wonderful experiences, but we still have all that murky darkness within, it’s just settled at the bottom of the lake of our psyche. If we isolate ourselves from society, we deprive ourselves of the wonderful opportunities life presents to see and extract the particles of mud. Then as soon as something really bad happens, even if we have been meditating for 20 years, all that mud gets stirred up and the water gets murky again.

If we want to permanently change, meditation, mantras and astral practices alone will not get us there…they will only help us to see. It is in seeing the egos, and then eliminating them with the help of the Divine (otherwise known as the ‘death’ of the egos), that we will clear the waters of the consciousness, permanently.

Getting Through Suffering To Reach Peace.

What does it take to get to peace?

Peace and tranquility within is one of the most precious things a person can have, and yet it can be so elusive. So how do we find peace within ourselves, permanent lasting peace?

I used to think peace was achieved by spending a quite afternoon curled up with a good book, or lazily walking through a park or lying on a beach in the sunshine. But that wasn’t real peace – a young family could come along with a screaming baby and any remnants of peace would be shattered, leaving irritation and annoyance in its wake.

If inner peace is freedom of the mind from annoyance, distraction, negativity, anxiety, obsession, etc., then that is something internal, it needs to come from within. If our external surroundings dictate our internal state, then lasting peace will always remain elusive.

Have you heard the saying “It takes a war to get to peace”? It was only when I began the inner work on myself that I gained an appreciation for what that statement actually meant.

In life there are so many difficulties we face. Life isn’t easy, it throws so many things at us; problems, stresses, tragedies…. young families with screaming babies…. And these events stir up different emotions and inner states within. We can either be carried along in the current of life’s turbulent waters, with our inner state at the mercy of what is thrown our way… or we can embrace life’s events as a means to learn about ourselves so we can change what is within – to move towards lasting inner peace.

This inner work has been such a blessing for me. Now that I am armed with the knowledge about how to go about it, I look at life completely differently – the struggles of life are now wonderful opportunities to face the darkness within myself, and by facing it I can change. I am now armed to fight that war, to get to peace.

Belzebuub recently released a video on Youtube that explains what I am talking about in more depth, how we face difficulties along the way in our spiritual journey and how we can use them to find inner peace.

He explains how the inner death of the egos, which is the removal of the different animal drives, such as anger, negativity, greed, fear, etc can lead to the awakening of the spiritual within….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN0-Mg_juU4

What does “Christ” mean to you?

Despite my family being non-religious and us never going to church, as a young child I had much love for God and Jesus. I didn’t intellectually analyze what or who God or Jesus were, they just were, I just felt felt love for them. I felt this love went both ways too. It was simple, and it was pure. I can’t remember who explained them to me, maybe it was Mum, or maybe it was religious instruction at primary school. But I remembet the feeling.

One Easter when it was way past my bedtime, Dad fell asleep on the couch and in glee I stayed up to watch T.V. Being Easter there was a movie on about Jesus (it was probably Jesus of Nazareth, I’m not sure). Anyway what started off as glee turned to horror as I watched what we did to him and how he suffered on the cross – up until then I knew ‘he died for our sins’ but I had no clue we tortured and murdered him. I was absolutely mortified and traumatized by it, I felt so much shame for the human race and what we had done. I cried about it for days, and I remember Mum’s frustration at Dad for being “irresponsible” and letting me see that movie when I should have been in bed.

As I grew up though, I slowly lost that loving feeling, and the word ‘Christ’ began to represent something to almost be ashamed of. It certainly wasn’t ‘cool’ to be Christian put it that way. All the Christians I came across were a very peculiar type of people – they would preach about sin and heaven and hell, yet they themselves were some of the most judgmental, unforgiving people I had ever met. Often they were extremely fanatical about their faith, even aggressive about it, and the term “Christian” became tainted for me.

I began to question the Orthodox view of God and Christ, things just didn’t add up. How is it fair that these individuals who called themselves ‘Christian’, who were such horrible people underneath their preaching, go to heaven because they went to church on Sundays to be forgiven for their sins, when others of different faith would go to hell, no matter what they were like inside? They could be saints and the door would be shut to them. Where is the love in that? That just didn’t make sense! That wasn’t the God or Jesus I loved as a child, and eventually I turned my back on them, just as one dismisses Santa Clause when you discover he was never real in the first place.

But in recent years I have began to learn a different view of what ‘Christ’ actually is, different to what is portrayed in mainstream Orthodox Christianity. And the teachings of Jesus now make a whole lot more sense in this new context.

To truly live without sin is to eliminate it within, to fundamentally change. It is not enough to outwardly act a certain way if within you there is negativity, hatred, judgment, anger, frustration and so on. These negative aspects need to be removed so that the truly spiritual can manifest in their place.

Many people consider themselves ’spiritual people’ and ‘good people’ or even ‘Christian’, however if they were to observe what is actually within themselves, they would be horrified by the harsh reality of who they really are. You can profess to love Christ all you like, but in those moments of negativity towards another human being (and we all have those moments) what is manifesting is far from spiritual.

By observing ourselves, we can see this harsh reality, and we can begin to change. With the help of the Divine, we can eliminate these negative aspects and increase our capacity for love, peace and to truly experience the Divine. But we cannot change what we cannot see.

The Christ is a Divine force that can live within. Jesus had this force within him and was teaching us how we could incarnate this force within ourselves, how we can change and become truly spiritual people. And what I am talking about goes far beyond simply going to church or ‘believing’ in God or Jesus.

“Now, since it has been said that you are my twin and true companion, examine yourself, and learn who you are, in what way you exist, and how you will come to be. Since you are called my brother, it is not fitting that you be ignorant of yourself … For he who has not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same time already achieved knowledge about the depth of the all.”

Jesus,

The Nag Hammadi Library

Finding Spiritual Truth.

My parents weren’t overly religious, although Mum started going to church shortly before she died. Dad always considered himself an atheist, but as his mortality becomes more apparent with age, the discomfort of this belief has rendered him more open-minded than he used to be.

Me, well I have always been searching for spiritual truth. Since I can remember I have questioned the ‘hows’, ‘whats’ and ‘whys’ of the universe… How did I come to be here? Why me, why was I created? What’s the point of life? What is beyond this life? I have pondered these and countless similar questions right through childhood to adulthood.

I’ve looked for the answers in a myriad of places. I never quite found it in mainstream Christianity (in fact some of the least ‘Christian’ people I know are avid church-goers). And while I’ve always leaned more toward God and Jesus than anything else (being a white girl raised in a western society), the concept of ‘faith’ in the traditional Christian sense never really sat well with me. It never made sense that you could be the most sinful person on earth, but so long as you ‘believed’ in Jesus and asked for forgiveness before you died you’d go to heaven, where as everyone else who didn’t would go to hell. And you just have to have ‘faith’ that this was the truth and that was enough. Well it was not enough for me – I had to know.

I explored a few other religions as well; Hinduism took my fancy for a while and I read with great enjoyment the Mahābhārata and the Bhagavad Gītā. I looked into Buddhism and Islam which had some concepts I liked. I read a wide range of authors, from Richard Bach to Neale Donald Walsch to Erchart Tolle. I took a bit of this and a bit of that, and started to form my own beliefs from a myriad of concepts. But, something was missing. I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I had filled my head with a lot of ideas, but in reality I was no better off than when I started.

This video talks about the difficulties we face when searching for spiritual truth today. How do we find the truth amongst everything that is out there? When mainstream religion and out-dated traditions don’t give us what we are yearning for, how do we find true spirituality, and not charlatanism? Spirituality that leads to the awakening of the consciousness and to enlightenment?

The answer is we find it within ourselves, if we practice it properly. I feel so blessed to be learning how…

 

 

http://www.belzebuub.com/awakening

Quote:

“If a person does not work upon themselves today, they will never change. When we affirm that we wish to work upon ourselves and do not work today, leaving it for tomorrow, such an affirmation is a simple project and nothing else, because today is the replica of our whole life.”

Samael Aun Weor

IMPORTANT DISCUSSION: The state of the world today, what can we do?

The current state of the world is deeply saddening. We are dropping bombs on each other, people are starving, we are suffocating the planet; destroying our forests, poisoning our oceans and killing our wildlife. It’s just terrible. At any given moment just take a look at the headlines on cnn.com, it’s like a crazy horror movie. But this is no movie, this is our world, the world we live in.

If you are as concerned about the current state of the world as I am, then this coming weekend tune in to this discussion about what steps have to be taken as a humanity and as individuals, to facilitate positive change:

You can listen to a recording of this remarkable interview here:

http://belzebuub.com/state_of_the_world_radio_interview

Interview on national radio in Australia
Belzebuub talks with presenter Dave Callan on the state of the world today and what steps have to be taken as a humanity and as individuals, to facilitate positive change.

Location: Triple J Radio, Australia

Time: Sunday 25 January 2008, 1:30am – 2:15am (Melbourne time)

As individuals, we may think we can’t change the state of the world. But we can bring about a positive change in our own life, and in our relationships with the people in our lives. We can lead a more spiritual life, and together we can change the state of the world.

Change begins with the individual. What starts as a life change can lead to a global change. But if we do nothing, then nothing will ever change.

Noticing Beauty.

This article is making the rounds… it struck me as very profound and very sad. It’s amazing how we prioritize our lives in such a way that we miss the whole purpose of living – completely oblivious and unaware….

“A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousand of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, tickets for Joshua Bell’s performance at a theater in Boston were sold out and the seats averaged $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of an social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing …??? “