Tag: aversion

How do I find my spiritual home?

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The following is what I believe my Higher Power or Inner Guru is saying:

Open your hearts in moments of quietness and find me waiting there for you.  During the protests of the ego, during feelings of clinging and aversion, focus on the heart of peace within yourself.   Do not expect your thinking mind to be at ease with everything that is perceived.  It is best to not give it the attention it desires.  When you feel yourself being drawn to something or when you feel yourself being offended, look for the peace in your heart and take refuge there.

It is enough to share love and compassion with others and to rest in the heart.  I will take care of the rest.  Do not feel alone in this journey, for you have brothers and sisters who seek the respite of a peaceful heart.   Don’t allow the inner cynic, critic, or bigot to take away a single moment of peaceful reflection and acceptance of the world as it is in this moment.

When we fall short and we allow the ego to lead us astray, remember that forgiveness of oneself is the path back.  Using loving kindness and forgiveness of others and ourselves we will find our true home.  Once the skill is mastered, you can always depend on it to bring yourself back to a place of safety, security, and peaceful reflection. 

Love in degree: How we fool ourselves into believing that love can be directed, collected, and withheld

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The following I believe to be a teaching from my inner guru:

Now that we have an explanation of ego identities,  let’s discuss how it affects response in this world.   
Let’s start with a simple diagram:

The ego identity measures love, compassion, joy, and peace in degree.   A person or an object can be loved more or less.  For a given object,  the force that is used to determine the degree of love that is felt is determined by the force of fear based thinking.   Fear force is a pressure felt as an emotional response.  Fear determines the placement of an object with regards to how much love is related to something.    In actuality, the fear is not real, nor is the object that we perceive to be loved or unloved.  Love in degree is non-existent.

Let’s not think about this love or fear in terms of good or bad.  Let’s examine this with an example.   Our friend prides themselves as an expert apple picker and this serves as our identity for this purpose.  When presented with an opportunity to grade an apple they must decide if it is a good apple or a bad one.   The attachment and sense of self worth is centered around picking the best apples,  the object of measured love.   Aversion in this case would be towards the bad or rotten apple.  The person, or subjects, fear response is what is used to choose where the apple resides or the measure of love for the apple.   A fear response of measuring a bad apple as good comes from a sense of pride in our friend’s identity as an apple picker, fear response also dictates the force of choosing a good apple as bad,  in this case, the fear of loss.  

Make no mistake,  this same drama plays out in each identity role embraced.   There is a better way.  Through letting go of desire for both what we covet and what we shun,  we can free ourselves from the sensory response of identity and recognize who we truly are.   A manifestation of higher Self that loves without degree or measure.