GF Live 11-12-22 Rise Above Painful Spiritual Discouragement

Strive in all things, but especially in your spiritual work, to make your actions continuous. Even a small act of conscious self-work done each and every day is better than a large effort every second moon.

Transcript

Good morning. Good afternoon from England, Wherever you are. You know, I like to wait a few moments before I start presenting the material. Because when we do have time together, I like to present a complete picture. And picture is the operative word because what we're doing together, I hope, Is looking at insight, Looking at ideas, Truths that when you hear them, When I hear them, I don't need anybody to tell me it's true. That's the beauty of truth. And that doesn't mean that we can't be deceived because, For instance, So many of these phony baloney, So-called teachers and gurus today, They'll tell you anything so that you can feel good about yourself and then, Like some kind of conditioned creature, Associate that good feeling with that teacher because they keep you stimulated. We're not interested in stimulation. We're interested in inspiration and discovery. Sometimes discovery is truth. Sometimes discovery is tough. How many of you know that from your own work? You can raise your hand on this side here or just send along a little high sign that you know that spiritual work is not a cakewalk, Not by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I imagine that the reason that you're here and hopefully continuously so on Saturday, And God willing, On Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings when I talk online for free. And because it's tough, As we all know pretty well, There are times when it can just be downright discouraging, Where we don't just feel like we're in the dark. But, And much to the point of the talk of this material I present today, So much can feel useless. Like, Why am I doing this? Why do I persist? What is this kind of edge, This discomfort that I have? Yes, Jack, Find the cost of freedom. So I want to talk about that today. And I'm going to show you a couple things that if you stay present and listen as experientially as you can. What does that mean to listen experientially? It means to look at your experience up to this time that we're together and through the time we're together to see whether or not what I am pointing out as true is true for you. And it will be. I know it. But the more you can see it and then allow the impressions about to be given to you to sink in, The more you will take from our time together what is true and ultimately to help you. In these times when there's so much discouragement. Discouragement is a kind of a disease to tell you the truth. It isn't that we can somehow escape it. But when we find ourselves discouraged in one world, Have you not noticed how it seeps into all the other worlds? So that I'm discouraged in a relationship. I'm discouraged with my work. Discouraged with my work. I'm discouraged with how I look. You can see that discouragement has a kind of set of tendrils to it. Things that grow out of it and that infect everything that it touches. And that's why we must learn and understand the nature of discouragement so that we can begin to do what we are intended to do, Which is to outgrow our unconscious identification with it. And importantly, That when we are identified with discouragement, With feeling that things are useless, What's the point of our spiritual work if we're still like this, That or the other? We don't know when we are in that darkness, In the cold hands of something that has no interest in anything higher. So just a quick story. I have two stories to tell you today to set the stage. Here's a mom and dad and they have a son and a daughter. We'll make them teenagers, Which means they're usually fairly resistant to anything other than looking at their handheld device and daydreaming. And they go camping up in the High Sierras. And you know, The daughter in particular is just not interested in camping in the High Sierras. And to boot, Which is kind of a bummer, They get there late so they don't have the original impression of the beautiful views to offset some of the wish that they weren't there. So there they are. And mom and dad get busy. They build a campfire, A nice big one. Isn't it interesting that most human beings are attracted to fire, To the light? I have a wood fire stove here. There is an endless fascination in any way. We'll get to this. So there they are. And there's mom, Dad and the brother sitting around the campfire and the sister sitting over about 20, 30 yards away trying to get cell reception on her phone. And dad says, Come on, Honey. She says, This place stinks, She said. What do you mean it stinks? She says, It's just horrible. It's so cold, She said. He said, Well, Come over here for a second. Just come over here for a second. Sit down by dad. So reluctantly, The daughter gets up and walks over and sits down by dad. And she's there for two, Three minutes. No words are exchanged. And her attention leaves her cell phone and goes over to the fire. And about two minutes after that, Dad says, Well, How do you feel? She said, I feel better. He said, Why did you feel so bad before? He said, Well, I was cold. He said, Well, Do you understand that the reason you feel better is now because you're sitting next to the fire and it's warming you and you have something beautiful living to look at? And she said, I guess so. But she got the message. And the message is simple here. Is that we get discouraged. We feel like our work, Our life can be useless at times. Because we're out in the cold. Spiritually speaking, We're in the cold. We're outside of the light. And we're not outside of the light of God, Of the divine. Because God's light, The divine light, Is somehow decided to shine on everything else in the world but you or myself. We're outside of it because we have wandered outside of it. And once outside of it, Our attention is on everything that's wrong with where we are. How cold we feel, All the negative useless states that visit a person who has, By some means that I'm going to get to, Stepped outside of the influence of these higher impressions intended to feed the soul and keep it warm, Metaphorically speaking. So let's get into this. Take a nice deep breath. You could write this down if you want, But it's not critical. The important thing is to let the truth help you remember what you have forgotten. When there is some distance between, Let's say, You and I, But in this sense we're going to talk about some distance between ourselves, And if nothing else, The faith that we have had, That we are intended to be fulfilled and completed through a relationship with the divine. What is the distance between us and that the warmth of that remembrance, The warmth of being present to ourselves, The warmth of an insight of an epiphany, What's the difference between, What's the distance between us in those moments? How is it measured? How is the distance measured between us and the divine when we feel this discouragement and uselessness? And the answer is the distance between us is measured by the difference between us. The distance between us is measured by the distance between us. We know it's true with other human beings. Getting to fight with your brother, Your mother, Your lover, Your husband, Your wife, There's distinctly a distance between you, Isn't there? You know, Like an iceberg could move through and no one would even notice because everything's so cold in the heart. Well, The distance between you in that moment is the difference between you, And in this instance at the worldly level, The difference is that I think this way, You think that way. What do you think the distance is between all of the so-called things intended to unite human beings, Our religious life, Our spiritual life, Even our political life? What's the distance between us with all of this animosity or this cold-heartedness? And it's the difference. It's the difference between an ideology, The difference between a belief system, A difference between the way I think and you think when we can see it properly. The thing that's actually between us isn't anything other than our attachment to some system of belief, Our identification with some philosophy, Some ideal that when we, As we cling to that identification through that ideal or ideology, And we find someone that doesn't have the same one, There's a difference between us. And think of that, That the distance between us is that you look and think that love is something you have and I don't, Or that I don't know what love is, But you do. How incredibly insane is that? But let me not get lost. We know the divine. If we have anything in us, We know the divine never creates a difference between us. How crazy is that? The divine works to create a unity between ourselves and that living light by revealing the indwelling unity of all things, Even if it means revealing something in us that sits in the way of that revelation and that unity. And if it's true, Then how can we think in any shape or form that the divine would create a difference between us and itself, Something that has given us life? Clearly that can't be true, And I hope you're following me. So if there's a difference and a distance between us, Meaning if there's a difference and a distance between myself and the divine, And I'm going to come back at this a hundred different ways. Have you ever waked up in the morning and I hope that your wish is to begin your day on the right foot, Speaking metaphorically, Putting your wish to put a little bit of wood on the fire or light the fire so that you can feel the warmth of a certain unity that can't be experienced any other way? You know, Sometimes you wake up and that's like a thousand miles away, No interest in it at all. And that's when, Of course, We're in the hands of this giant of discouragement, As the pilgrims progress would call it out. So the task here, We have two great tasks before us, If I've set the stage properly. First task, And this is difficult to recognize if not in that moment, Which is more difficult because we're already identified with feeling like we're cold in the dark, To awaken to the fact that there is something in our consciousness that doesn't just incarnate this difference, Creating the distance between us, But it's actually intent on its continuation so that when I'm negative, Yes or no, The tendency is to stay negative. When I feel discouraged, The tendency is to feel discouraged and then to listen to all the thoughts and feelings deflecting any thought that comes along about, I should do my spiritual work, I need to remember myself, Because we're caught up in that process of identifying with what it is that has defined us in that moment. And I'm going to get to something important on that. So that's the first task and that's the most difficult one, To actually understand that at our present level of consciousness, There is something within us that has no interest at all in bringing an end to the very thing that we wish we weren't experiencing. That's the first task, Recognizing that there is something in us that doesn't want what we know in our hearts we want but can't remember in that moment. Second task with that in mind is to recognize the truth of our situation in that moment. Almost impossible for the longest time, Honestly, For a person to actually realize, I feel my heart is cold, My mind is dry, I have no interest in anything other than just kind of either sitting here and vegging out, Getting into my career, Thinking about my work, Worrying about something, My spiritual life is a million miles away. We must recognize in those moments, Hopefully, That that's true, And then do our very level best as part of that responsibility of remembering that there are parts of me that want nothing to do with the divine. I can say it's not so all day long, But if I examine my actions, There it is. So I must first remember there is something that creates this distance based on the difference between that nature, That nature that's unconscious in the dark of itself, The difference between that nature and a nature within me that knows and longs for the light. Now, If I will do that and begin to put that wish and that work first, Something miraculous will happen, But that I cannot know will happen until I do that work. We've all heard the expression, As above, So below. I want to give you an example. I'm a bit of a naturalist, I suppose. Did you know that there are actually all plants are what they call phototropic. Phototropic, Photo means light and tropic means following, So that a phototropic flower like the sunflower that I'm going to talk about here, A phototropic flower actually faces the sun and as the sun moves, The flower and its petals, The head of the flower, Follows the sun. Hence, Phototropic, Follower of the light. The sunflower is the most beautiful example of this. First of all, It follows the sun and then when the sun goes down, The sunflower actually turns and faces the east. So that when the sun comes up the next morning, It'll be there ready to take in the light that gives it its life, That creates the seeds that perfect the species and propagate it. If there was a more beautiful example than that, I don't know what it would be. There is actually a creature that exemplifies in this world with no awareness of its own, The instrumentation of another order of awareness that you and I are intended to be, Live. We are meant to be, I'm going to be careful here, Phototropic, Meaning light turning, Turning toward the light. Only in this instance, We're not going to call it phototropic, We're going to call it divine tropic. Phototropic is good too, If we put a capital P there. That as a human being, As above so below, Just as that sunflower and other creatures can't live without that light, Do you know there's no creature that can live without light? Even these creatures that live down in the deep vents, In the fathomless abyss of the ocean, Well no light gets down there, Yes it does. There is light that is trapped in the form of energy in the body of the earth, And as it wells up inside and brings this heat into the cold waters, That heat is a form of radiant energy. Everything is a form of the sun. Everything is a form of light. No exceptions. Just congealed, Just in different states. So it isn't really so much that light, That something follows light, As much as that light loves light. We are meant to be light lovers. And we're not. We have something in us that loves the light because the light has put that love in us. But don't you dare deceive yourself into thinking that you're a light lover, When all day long what your mind and heart is turned to is things that feed this nature, My ambition, My wealth, My possessions, My relationships. And because we're drawn to the outer world where there is no light, Save for the fact of being reminded by sunlight, That when we're drawn out there, No wonder we get discouraged and feel like it's useless so many times. Because when our attention is vested in what we've imagined and we derive an identity from that, And then the conditions change and suddenly the sun that was up there sinks and we find ourselves in the dark of despair, What else is supposed to happen? So I want to look at this deeply with you so that we can understand how we can become divine tropic, Phototropic. Now listen, Not a follower of the light, Not a follower of some teacher, Not a follower of some ideology, Not a follower of some belief, Not a follower of icons and images, Which by the way we were instructed even by Christ to have no God before us. That instead of the idea of being a follower of something, To follow means to be a part of and connected to, So that I directly receive the energy, The light, The love. I directly participate in that process of ceaseless reconciliation. This is what it means to be a lover of the light. So let's look at how do we do that? Because if you and I know anything at all, And I hope you're following me, How hard it seems sometimes. You may not share this with your friends and family, But there are times when the idea of God, Of love, Of light is so far away from us that we might as well be living on another planet. And in one respect, We are in that moment. We're in a level of consciousness that is totally removed from the consistency of that streaming of light impression, That we might as well be on another world. But here's the issue. I have a saying, Many of you know it. The saying is, As goes my attention, So comes my experience. If you think about it with me, It's inescapable. As goes my attention, So comes my experience. My attention is on what's wrong with the world, I feel pain. My attention is what's wrong with me, I judge myself. As goes my attention, So comes my experience. And as I have this experience, I can't separate the experience of the moment, The derivative of what my mind is attending to, Connected to. As that comes, So it is that my sense of self is given life. So that my sense of self is always being brought into this awareness, My consciousness, By what I am attending to and connected with. So attention cannot be separated from our sense of self. I can't tell you how important an idea this is. My attention and my sense of self, Moment to moment, Are inseparable. If that's true, Which it is, And going back to this idea of the phototropic sunflower, And that we are meant to be photodivine, What does it mean? It means I am meant, One day, God willing, 24-7, Apart from the practical things we have to do. But even that at a certain point, Just as a note of encouragement, It doesn't matter how many things you're given to do practically in this world. Once you become divine tropic, Once you are awakened sufficiently enough to understand the real necessity of this life, Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven all else has added to you, That once that becomes first and foremost, There is always and forever now the awareness of this perfect connection between yourself and the light that gives you your life. But for now, That seems to be quite distant when we are living out this, And this is important, This imagined difference between ourselves and the light that we say we love. And why do I say it's imagined? Because, Look at this with me, When you're feeling dark or lonely or discouraged, Whatever it may be, Can you separate that feeling of being discouraged or useless or inadequate? Can you separate that sense of yourself from what you are thinking about in that moment? And when we are deceived into giving our attention to things that dwell in the dark, These incomplete unconscious aspects of ourselves, Yet to be awakened, Yet to be brought into the light, The very relationship that our attention places us in with these dark thoughts and feelings, These negative states, Is that we have to resist them. The mind that actually attends to the thing it doesn't want, Then turns around and hates the thing it's attending to. It's mind-blowing when you see it. I'm sitting here, My attention's on how bad I feel, And I can't stand how bad I feel. And yet, I wouldn't feel that bad if my attention wasn't taken into some negative state, Some thought or feeling describing me and confining me. So here is this unique but unseen relationship that we have with our own consciousness, Where whenever we're negative, We wouldn't be negative if we didn't think that the condition was greater than our ability to get through it or to change it or control it. So that built into these negative states is this idea that we are facing something that has overcome us and that we are unable to deal with, Or at best we try to control and maybe get a handle on it, But only find ourselves back in the same thing again. So that means that in that moment, My attention is given to something that by my very resistance to it, Creates fear, Produces this sense of self, Has no freedom, Because until it can get rid of that condition or change it, It's going to be in this useless discouraged state. But nothing can be further from the truth. Why? Because I wouldn't be experiencing that state if instead of being phototropic, Divine tropic, I hadn't been darkness tropic, Negative tropic, My own consciousness, Looking out, Finding something seemingly in the world. By the way, Nothing that you find in the world is out in the world without it first being in this consciousness and without first having the image of it born of memory. Nothing out there that you find yourself overcome by is out there. Out there, All the physical properties, All the shapes and forms, They're just manifestations of a certain set of principles and images already present in the consciousness. And so we look at the world not knowing we're looking at the reflection of it in our own consciousness and then we give ourselves over to trying to fix the world instead of doing what? Using our attention for the purpose that it was given to us, Which is to be divine tropic, Which is to give our attention to what we love, Not to what we don't want. To give our attention to what we, And I'll use this word, Have faith in, Meaning that which I know I'm drawn to and have felt that drawing. And now I must do that again so that like that phototrophic creature who by nature gives its attention to the light, You and I by nature have something that doesn't want to do that even as there is a part of us that understands the necessity of doing that. This is the struggle. This is the struggle. This isn't the cakewalk of somebody telling you you're beautiful, You're a light of, Ray of light dancing on the lake, All that nonsense that they drain your pocket and steal your soul. This is the work that comes when a man or woman begins to understand how is it that here I am 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years old and I can get up in the morning or lay down at night and the last thing on my mind is God. The last thing on my mind is truth, Is love. And why is the last thing on my mind the Divine, The Christ, The Buddha, The truth? Why is the last thing on my mind that? Because it's the furthest from my mind in that moment. And by the grace of God, By the grace of that light, I can see that's the truth. So there I am in the darkness, Yea though I walk through the valley, We all know the passages, There I am in the midst of that darkness and I can remember in the midst of that darkness, In the midst of the discouragement, Something telling me no, You don't, Not the no, Not now, No you don't feel like it guy. You know, You don't, This isn't what you want to do right now because really there's nothing, There's no feeling for it at all. And so our attention goes on to a condition that by its nature denies being Divine Tropic because our attention is already given to something that is giving us a very familiar sense of self. And what is the familiar sense of self we're describing and being defined by in that experience? Discouragement. Feeling of uselessness, Laziness, Inertia. Try and see it with me if you can because I want to draw this important idea. Why is the sunflower phototropic? I hinted at it because it has a corresponding part. It is so deep and beautiful when you can see it, Literally the sun that it follows placed a little sunflower heart in that sunflower. So that the heart of the sunflower isn't separate from the sun that gave it that life and that attracts it to itself. God attracts his own, Light attracts its own. Every creature unless they're damaged beyond repair, I'm talking about human beings now, And some are, Don't mistake this, Some are damaged to the extent that they can no longer be Divine Tropic. Their attention is so thoroughly been seized and conditioned and crystallized that they are essentially cut off. Now that's another story and I probably shouldn't have gone there because I'm going to get you thinking about that and it's what I'm trying to get to is basically this. The key lesson that I wrote for this topic today which was the power to rise above painful spiritual discouragement. No it's not dementia Dean, It's a lot worse than that. The key lesson reads, Strive in all things but especially in your spiritual work to make your actions continuous. Even a small act of conscious self-work done each and every day is better than a large effort every second moon. Strive in all things especially in your spiritual work to make your actions continuous. Even a small act of conscious self-work done each day is more valuable than going on a retreat for three days and giving all your attention to something. Let me give you a last story to exemplify this idea. And this is, I think I have a book, Well I know I have a book called The Law Secrets of Prayer, Which isn't what it sounds like at the outset but something a little bit deeper than this self-hypnosis that most prayer represents which is always self-centered, What I want, What I need. Here's this little girl and her father notices she's moping around the living room. And he says, What's wrong sweetheart? And she says, You know, Nothing. Come on, What's going on? And she says, I can't find my favorite stuffed animal, You know, Which one I'm talking about? He said, Oh you mean that lion, That little lion, That golden lion that looks like Aslan, That's the one you love from that fairy tale? Yes, She said, I don't know where he is, I can't find him. So, Well do you want me to help you? Alright, Well let's go upstairs because he already had some thoughts in mind and they get upstairs to the little girl's room. And unfortunately because parents don't understand the necessity of conscious discipline, The little girl's room, It looks like a tornado went through it. Everything strewn all over the place, Including all the various stuffed animals. And he says to her, Sweetheart, I thought you and I agreed that every night that you were going to put all these things away so that when you went to bed your room was orderly. Now you know, Even though a little girl can't understand what that means spiritually, The father was basically giving her the beginning of an instruction that when things are orderly in your physical life, They will tend to be more orderly inwardly because you won't always be looking around at the mess that has been made by a mind that can't attend to anything other than the next thing it wants to attend to. So it's a kind of instruction, Proper instruction. He says, Well let's put everything away, Shall we? He says, Okay. And he says, Gather your animals and let's put them in that special chest that mom and dad gave you to store them. And she starts picking things up and he already suspected the truth. And he said, Hold on baby, Before you put those things in, Let's take everything out of the chest to make sure that everything that's in there you still want. Because maybe there's some children that would like some of these stuffed animals that you don't like and we can give them to the local charity to give to kids. Because that would be a good thing to do. If you don't need it, Don't want it, Let's give it away. Another important lesson. So a little girl, You know, Obliges, Goes over, Pulls everything out of the chest. And what do you think she finds at the bottom of the chest? Anybody guess? There's Aslan. There's her favorite lion. Oh, Here he is, Dad. Well that's great. That's great. How did he get down there? And truth is, She couldn't figure that out. But he knew. I don't know. He said, Could it be that you threw him in there one day and then threw a bunch of other things in there because you were done with him and you went on to something else? Well, I guess so, She said. He said, Well, If he's at the bottom, How are you ever going to find him? I don't know, She said. Well, I'll tell you what. He said, That's no good, Is it? That way? No, It's not. He said, Well, Do you want to change it? Yes, I do. I want to always know where Aslan is. I want to always know where my heart of hearts lies. He says, Well, I'll tell you how you do it. If you want, I can help you remember. I do want to remember. How do I do that, Dad? He said, Let's write this down and we're going to put it there right on top of the chest. I'll get a pencil and paper and you can write it out. It'll be a better impression. Okay. And he says, Okay, Sweetheart, Write this down. First out, Last in. First out, Last in. She looks at him, What does that mean? That means, Sweetheart, That every night when you put all your animals away, As I want you to do, The last thing in is going to be Aslan. And the first thing out in the morning is going to be Aslan. So that the first out will be what you love and the last in will be what you love. And that way you will never lose sight of him. Okay? Okay. First out, Last in. Last in, First out. That is the spiritual recipe not to be lived in through thought, But for spiritual action to be divine tropic. You see, And I set the stage, I hope it was clear, There are parts of us that have no interest at all in being in the light of any awareness of themselves, Let alone what these parts do within us as a form of unseen punishment when they take our attention and place them in places where they are not. In places where, In worlds, Levels where we are lashed by our own resistance, Our own thoughts and feelings. So when I wake up in the morning and before I go to bed at night and I'm telling you something about myself, This has been this way for me for really over 60 years. First out, I don't care how Guy feels. First out is I locate the sun, Meaning first out is I do my work. I bring into my life, However it may be, Through meditation, No matter how unmeditative I feel, Through a book, Through something I'm working on or writing, I put first things first out. I give myself, I become divine tropic. And when I do that, And if you work at this, And it's really important, You know, Most of us think, Yeah, It's great, I love God, I love the truth, Especially when I'm feeling this way and the other. It is far more important work for you to understand the task isn't to always do what you love, But to love what you need to do when you least want to do it, So that you can find out there's something waiting for you when you make the connection by giving your attention to it consciously. When you make the connection with it, Lo and behold, You find out you were never disconnected from it. That's the beginning of true faith. And by the way, That's the true action of faith. Everything else is lip service, Self serving. Then you begin to understand when you give your attention to the divine, However you do it, First out, By your attention, You make the connection that this consciousness that you're in when you're discouraged and feeling useless has no interest in making. And why does it have no interest in making it? Because if you become tropic, Following the light that way, Not mentally, By action, By deed, By sacrifice, Because something I don't know, Do this, First out, Last in. That's the task, The great task. You do that, You will find that something is waiting for you, Just like the sunflower and the sun. You'll find something waiting for you to attend to it. And when you find it, And you know it has been waiting for you to attend to it, Then you will want to draw closer to that fire, Like the little girl in our story did, Because she found by being nearer to it, It was much clearer how to enjoy where she was, Even who she was in that moment. Time's up. Do your work. Do your work. No free ride. Hope I see you tomorrow, Online, Or Wednesday night. Find out about it in my profile or search me out online. Be safe. Remember yourself. Bye.

Reviews

Encouraging to know this discouraging feeling is part of the “thing”. Thank you. 🙏🏻