Clarity from Chaos

By: Dave Campbell

Music to Read By

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Music to read by:

I ran across a quote today that I found most thought provoking and thought I would share it with you. “What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?” Quote by Thomas Merton. Oh how insightful those words are. We are so eager to go forth and discover new worlds and conquer others, yet we have not even figured ourselves out first! How have we allowed ourselves to become so distracted by the world that we have lost interest in understanding ourselves and striving to become the best that we can be? We are unable to settle our differences without war and yet we wish to conquer outer space. Our priorities are so warped; we seem to be guilty of destroying the world in which we live so we think moving on to a new one will solve our problems. We are not growing and evolving as we should be, we seem to be running in place on our hamster wheel or God forbid even worse, going backwards.

Albert Einstein was so right on when he said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same minds that created them”. He didn’t mean we had to find new people to do the changing, what he meant was we ourselves as a society had to change ourselves and evolve forward before we could solve our problems. If we did not grow, nothing was going to change! We are at that cusp right now of needing to change if we are to make right with the world. We cannot continue forward existing the same way we have been doing for eons. We have run our ship onto the sandbar and we are unable to get off unless we lighten our load and push off when high tide comes in. Just sitting there and hoping we will get loose will never work.

Society must come to grip with itself and what we have done and continue to do, not only to ourselves but also to each other. It is time to push the mindless, petty, distractions aside and look closely in the mirror at ourselves, ask the hard questions, pay close attention and start to make drastic changes if we are to survive. I see people on the internet write about prepping for the end times, worrying about a financial collapse, martial law etc. and while these are all worth our serious consideration, I have to wonder when anyone is going to put changing society as a whole on that list. What good is stored food and water if society does not make the necessary changes to move forward and out of this rut, we are stuck in?

Priorities are such an important part of life! It gives us direction and helps us to pay closer attention to what matters most in life. If we do not have priorities how will we ever know what needs our attention and work to better ourselves, both individually and as a society? Part of working on ourselves must involve having strong priorities and sticking to them. We seem to be aimlessly wandering about in the world with no compass. No morals, no priorities, no direction. This dilemma can only be solved when we stand up for ourselves, decide what matters in life, and fight for it, taking a stand and digging in. We need to grow a strong spine and stand tall again instead of slinking along with our tails between our legs. Whose world is this anyway? Who are we? Let us find out and be the change we so desperately need!
I may take a breather next week. For how long I am not certain but my own life needs some quiet time to reflect and evolve to where I want to be. The work on self never ends, at least it should not. I shall return soon. Have a happy and find out who you are, who we are!

Blessings to us all,

Visionkeeper

Not a quiet song this time, but rather one quite appropriate for this post!

How One Can Easily Slip Into Negativity

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It’s very easy to slip into negativity yet it’s hard to get out. For a pessimist it’s very hard to become positive; the optimist can much easier get on the road to negativity, all it takes is a little bit of ignorance.
Every day your positivity can be tested; if you allow even one time a day to be negative – to reply to someone in an angry manner, to complain about something – next day you will find it much easier to do. Within a week it would be quite normal for you to complain about what happened to you or to gossip.
It takes a long time to get into the habit of positivity. You have to uproot all the negative, inferior traits of your personality such as self pity, thinking that you are better than others, want to control others and so on. When you completely remove all the negative traits, your life starts slowly but surely changing. The money starts flowing in; you make genuine friendships; finally you are able to live the way you always wanted.
It’s easy to start taking this beautiful life manifested out of your hard work for granted. You start feeling that it will be so forever. You start getting influenced by mediocre people. You start taking on their habits of materialism, conflict, feeling that you are the right one. This change of your attitude starts destroying the foundation of your good life. Your good work is being quietly undone, but you yet not see it – the same as you didn’t see the positive outcomes when you were working on your positivity.
Next thing you know, you start experiencing difficulties in your life. Good friends leave you or change; your relationship with your loved one crumbles; Your business starts experiencing difficulties. Because you became again stuck too much into materialism, you can’t understand that these external changes are happening because of your change of character. The world doesn’t suddenly become hostile – it’s the change of your character that brings this change about.
Every negative trait you reawaken will cause some difficulty in your external circumstances. If these difficulties are met with conflict, more conflict will follow. The arrival of a difficulty is a sign to stop and reflect on your behaviour and the content of your mind. Yet most people do everything to end it by using aggression, wits or other selfish ways.
Ignorant about the real cause of these difficulties, people become more controlling in order to keep things as they were. However nothing goes how they want. This cycle can be vicious, as you may already see. It can only be stopped by setting aside some quiet time to contemplate your life and mind.
If you don’t know how to act when the difficulty presents itself, it means you shouldn’t. It means it’s time to not react, but observe. It’s time to connect to your Inner Self by being inactive and waiting for a sign. Acting out of confused, unsure mind will only produce more confusion and root you deeper into materialism.
If you still can’t get the inner guidance but you want to make positive changes now, you can do a few things. Get I-Ching; (the link to the edition I use) through this system your unconscious picks out the right spiritual advice for you. Each day you can throw three coins six times and see what the combination has to tell you. If you approach this system with open-mindedness, it can guide you very accurately through any difficulty of your life.
Start your blog and write about your feelings at this time and what happens in your life. This will help you to connect the outside experiences with your inner ones and will let you see the situation more clearly.
Remain quiet, attentive and observant. The indication of what step to take next may be very subtle.
Limit your exposure to the external world – it’s time to focus on the inner world which you might have ignored for some time. Being alone, lighting candles and using incense helps you to reconnect with your Higher Self.
Develop willpower – you will need it to get back to the positive path. Do trataka (gazing at one point as long as you can), stand in a tree posture (google “yoga tree pose”) with eyes closed for as long as you can; if your writing is illegible, write slowly and beautifully. Pray for inner strength.
When we are negative, we get on the collective negative vibe. There are more negative people (a lot more) than the positive ones, that’s why it’s so hard to stop being negative once you want this change to take place (the collective negative vibe is just too strong!).
However positivity is not out of your reach; you just need to take consistent small steps towards it: monitor yourself and weed out useless traits that root you into negativity, share with others what you have, do something good each day. Step by step you will return to your True Self – the one that is pure and good.

By Simona Rich
http://www.personal-development-coach.net/how-one-can-easily-slip-into-negativity.html