limitless happiness

Limitless Happiness and Spiritual Wealth

Posted on by Harold Boulette

“Love infers limitless happiness in which the universe is immersed. You are living in the world, but you have closed your mind and your heart, but you have to know that God’s goods are received through the mind and the heart. How will happiness come for you if your mind and your heart are closed? Every day in your mind must shine one bright thought; every day in your heart must shine one warm feeling.

“Children have excellent and uncorrupted minds and hearts, consequently, all those people who possess uncorrupted minds and hearts are children of God. To them belongs the Kingdom of God.

“The new sits in the following: your mind and your heart must become like those of children. Then you have to start to serve God with Love.

“There is nothing impossible for God. When somebody says that he is a sinner, that means he does not love. As soon as he begins to love, he will right away become righteous. ‘But I am not a happy man.’ You are unhappy because you do not love. When you begin to love, you will be happy.’I am poor.’ You are poor because you do not love. When you begin to love, you will become a rich person. … When love comes in man, he will resurrect.” ~Beinsa Douno

Limitless Happiness

The universe may be immersed in limitless happiness and love, yet the physical universe is, by its very nature, neither a happy or loving place. Love and happiness are found in the underlying spiritual universe from which the Demiurge generated the flawed physical universe. So if we really want to find true happiness and love while trapped in the fallen realm of matter, we must seek beyond the limits of matter and into the spiritual realms.

Closed Mind and Heart

While I can understand his meaning, I do wish spiritual writers would stop using “heart” and “soul” interchangeably. The heart is a physical organ. It pumps blood. It doesn’t have emotions, although it doe react t them because of the mind. Happiness of a worldly sort comes to the mind, not the heart. The happiness of the spiritual sort happens in the soul, not the heart. While many may think of the soul as residing in or near the heart, that is only partially true. Since the soul is pure spirit, it is beyond the limits of time and space, so is not found in any particular spot in the body.

It is true that a closed mind and a closed soul cannot know happiness. A mind needs to be open to new things to experience happiness, even of a limited sort. And the soul must be awakened from its coma-like slumber before it can experience limitless happiness. So the first step in achieving limitless happiness and love is to awaken the soul. The best way to do that is to use the light of the Spiritual Sun following a process called Spiritual Sun Gazing. Continue reading “Limitless Happiness and Spiritual Wealth” →

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trust the spirit

Trust the Spirit and Intuition

Posted on by Harold Boulette

“When we learn to trust the Spirit, it responds by sending us more frequent flashes of illumination and enlightenment. As one unfolds in Spiritual Consciousness he relies more upon his Inner Voice, and is able more readily to distinguish it from impulses from the lower planes of the mind. He learns to follow Spirit’s leading and to allow it to lend him a guiding hand. Many of us have learned to know the reality of being ‘led by the Spirit.’ To those who have experienced this leading we need not say more, for they will recognize just what we mean. Those who have not yet experienced it must wait until the time comes for them, for we cannot describe it, as there are no words to speak of those things which are beyond words.” ~William Walker Atkinson (also known as Yogi Ramacharaka)

Trust the Spirit

It is important to trust our spiritual faculties and to trust the spiritual beings that communicate with us through them. If we ignore those messages, the spirit world will stop communicating with us. That even includes prophetic dreams. If we ignore them too often, we stop having such dreams. We may still dream, but they won’t be prophetic.

Flashes of Illumination and Enlightenment

While we do get flashes of hidden knowledge and truth from the spiritual realms, I don’t think that alone can be considered illumination and enlightenment. It is an indication that we are becoming enlightened, but it is not enlightenment in itself. When we are truly enlightened, we don’t need the spirits (Angels or other Light Beings) sending us hints and warnings because as a truly enlightened person, we know the truth just as well as those Light Beings do. Some of the information granted to us may be illuminating in a limited way, but it isn’t total illumination. We need to awaken and fully develop our own spiritual faculties before w can claim in full honesty that we are completely illuminated and enlightened.

Spiritual Consciousness

When we trust the spirit and the spiritual beings, it does help us “unfold in Spiritual Consciousness” as Atkinson puts it (For more on what he says about Spiritual Consciousness, click here to read a previous post.) It is also true that as we “unfold” higher levels of consciousness, we learn to trust and rely on them more and more. But it is to some degree a “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” kind of thing. Developing higher levels of consciousness causes us to turn to spiritual sources of knowledge and truth more than physical ones, but it is also true that turning to spiritual sources of knowledge will help us develop higher levels of consciousness. Of course, nothing helps as must as taking in the Light of the Spiritual Sun or Sun of Righteousness.

Led by Spirit

Many people, including quite a few who want to develop their spiritual self, frown at the idea of being led by God or by the spiritual beings. They can trust the spirit, but they don’t want to be led by it. They don’t want to be led by anyone or anything. They want to do it their own way, on their own path. Yet they do, in nearly all cases, let themselves be led at times without thinking about it.

When you go on a tour of a place you have never been to before, you will likely be led by either a professional tour guide or by the leader of the group taking the tour. If not, you are likely to waste a good bit of time and energy trying to find things on your own. Even if you trust the spirit, it doesn’t help you at all for something like this.

If you are going hiking through some deep woods where there are no marked trails and you do not know the area, you are probably going to have a personal guide with you, or some sophisticated GPS electronics to help guide you, which is still being led, just not by a person.

There is nothing wrong with letting the more experienced beings lead you, so if you trust the spirit, you will trust the spiritual beings to lead you on the path of spiritual growth.

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oracle-sanctuary

Oracle-sanctuary of Special Importance

Posted on by Harold Boulette

“There was one oracle-sanctuary of special importance, which in the universal decline had preserved the ancient cult in its purest form. It was one of the Christ oracles; and on that account it was able to preserve not only the Christ Mystery itself but those of the other oracles as well. For in the manifestation of the loftiest of the Sun-spirits, were also revealed the regents of Saturn, Jupiter, and the other planets. In the Sun oracle the secrets of producing in some particular human being such human etheric bodies as had been possessed by the best of the Jupiter, Mercury, and other Initiates were known. By means of the methods used for this purpose, which cannot be further dealt with here, impressions of the best etheric bodies of the ancient Initiates were preserved in order that they might subsequently be stamped upon suitable individuals. The same process could be employed with the astral bodies of the Venus, Mercury, and Vulcan Initiates.

“At a certain time, the Leader of the Christ Initiates found himself isolated with a few associates, to whom he was able to impart, to a very limited extent only, the mysteries of the cosmos. For those individuals were endowed with the natural ability to permit the least possible degree of separation between the physical and etheric bodies. They were altogether, at that time, the best possible individuals for promoting the further progress of humanity.” ~Rudolf Steiner

Oracle-sanctuary

An oracle-sanctuary may be an ancient mystery school, a spiritual school, or a place where oracles gave predictions, such as the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece. It would be a sanctuary if it was a safe place for mystics and oracle to practice their spiritual arts and sciences in peace, and give predictions without interference. They might also take in gifted children who were orphans or were sent by their parents because they were weird. In some cases, the parents wanted them to truly learn the divine arts, in other, they just wanted to be rid of their strange offspring.

Various religions and philosophies had an oracle-sanctuary, sometimes several. Today, probably the closest thing we have to them is some remote monasteries for monks. Most modern spiritual schools are not really sanctuaries and students are often forced to hide their membership in them for fear of losing their jobs in a materialistic world.

The term “Sanctuary” is often thought of as a refuge from the materialistic world, but it has another meaning. It is also the holiest part of a temple or church. So an oracle-sanctuary could be either of those and is usually both.

Christ Oracles

“Christ Oracles” and “Christian Oracles” doesn’t mean the same thing, so it is not clear which Steiner means here. A Christ oracle is an oracle who follows the Way of Christ and is developing his own inner Christ, while a conventional Christian oracle is any oracle that belongs to the Christian faith. But as Steiner is a spiritual teacher, I will assume he means a true Christ oracle who is trying to be one with the Christ spirit and follow the teachings of Christ as given by Jesus is secret to his apostles and closest disciples, but never shared in public or put into writing.

True Christ Oracles could, in fact, belong to any faith. The ancient Greek oracles were, in some cases, Christ oracles. They were not Christians, but they followed the Way of Christ nonetheless. And they sought to help people develop their own spiritual faculties, not to control them as so many Christian churches do.

Christ Mystery

The real teachings of Christ were a mystery, and for the most part, still are. Some were passed on to spiritual schools, primarily the Christian Gnostic schools, many of which had an oracle-sanctuary or two. The more conventional Christian churches, who can only honestly trace their beginning back to St. Paul, not St. Peter or Jesus, know little of those mysteries,

gold sun

Monstrance By LaRedCultural – Own work

although hints of it remain such as in the use of a monstrance to hold the host in some of them. This is quite clearly a solar symbol.

The Sun Oracle

The Sun Oracle was always the highest oracle-sanctuary. When you consider the structure of the solar system, the sun is greater than Venus, Jupiter, or even earth, so the sun oracle is greater than any planetary oracles. Most of the well-known oracles were sun oracles, even if they were thought to be worshippers of some pagan god. Secretly, they all knew the source of spiritual power and energy, the spark that awakens the sleeping soul, came from the Spiritual Sun. And the only oracle-sanctuary we need to turn to for help in our spiritual quest is the Spiritual Sun.

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indifferent zen

Indifferent Zen, Emotionally and Mentally

Posted on by Harold Boulette

“How prosaic and emotionally indifferent Zen is! When it sees a mountain id declares it a mountain; when it comes to a river, it just tells us it is a river. When Chokei (Chang-ching) after twenty hard years of study happened to lift the curtain and saw the outside world, he lost all his previous understanding of Zen and simply made the announcement: ‘How mistaken I was! Raise the curtain and see the world! If anybody asks me what philosophy I understand, I’ll straightaway give him a blow across his mouth with my hossu.’

“Chokei does not say what he saw when the screen was lifted up. He simply resents any question being asked about it. He even goes to the length of keeping the questioner’s mouth tightly closed. He knows that if one one even tried to utter a word and say ‘this’ or ‘that,’ the very designation misses the mark. It is like another master bringing out before the entire congregation a monk who asked him who Buddha was. The master then made this remark, ‘Where does this monk want to find Buddha? Is this not a silly question?’ Indeed, we are all apt to forget that every one of us is Buddha himself. In the Christian way of saying, this means that we are all made in the likeness of God or, in Eckhart’s words, that ‘God is-ness is my is-ness and neither more nor less.’” ~Daisetz T. Suzuki

Emotionally Indifferent Zen

Is Zen Buddhism truly emotionally indifferent? I am not convinced of it. I can remember during the Vietnam war scenes of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire (self-immolation ) to protest the war and the rule of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. That is not at all indifference. Of course, some of these monks may have been practicing a form of Buddhism other than Zen. Yet I still believe that Zen is not truly indifferent.

For starters, why bother to be a monk at all if you are indifferent to the condition of the world, the people in it, or your own fate? Unless forced to by circumstances beyond their control, I think one becomes a monk (or spiritual adept) because he wants to better himself, the world, and all of humanity. So if they later achieve this emotionally indifferent Zen, why don’t they quit being monks?

I think the idea is actually to not worry about the conditions of the world, especially those things you cannot change, to the point that it makes you behave contrary to common sense. Continue reading “Indifferent Zen, Emotionally and Mentally” →

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