Friday, May 24, 2013

An Introduction to Spiritual Change

 

May 23, 2013 |By | ReplyMore
Flickr - Awakening - jeronimoooooooo (Away - On a Trip)Belsebuub, Guest
Waking Times
If you want spiritual change, you need to see and understand yourself.
While the conscious spiritual ‘you’ may wish to awaken, there are also subconscious parts of the psyche that are contrary to spirituality and work against your awakening.
Their roots are unknown to most, yet they exert an unseen grip and control over everyone who has not freed themselves from them. These subconscious states are opposed to spiritual transformation. If you want to awaken, you will have to see, understand and remove them.
If you don’t see them, they will have control over you beyond your comprehension.
If you don’t understand them, they will likewise ensnare you regardless of what you think about them.
Although you may be aware and relatively quiet in the present moment for a short time, the various psychological states, such as fear, pride, greed, lust, anger, depression, worries, stress, tension, and so on, which are referred to as egos, will arise to rob you of your awareness and quietude.
Some of these are disabling and unpleasant. If you want to make inner spiritual progress and change, you need to be able to observe and get rid of them, which is a slow and gradual process, but as you do, you are fundamentally changing within.
Everyone has different kinds of circumstances within their life, with many psychological challenges.
To see how you respond to the events and challenges of life, observe within, look inside, and see what’s going on. Get to a point where you are just aware, clear, and have no psychological problems. Unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and emotions are obstacles to love and inner peace.
Although many promote the virtues of positive thinking, that in itself is of very little value if inside, one is fundamentally full of evil.

Destructive Inner States Cause Destruction in the World

Looking at a landscape I passed through recently, it’s devastated. It isn’t beautiful and full of life; it’s sparsely populated with dead trees and is a barren wilderness. What is it within human beings that causes such destruction to take place? We can have food and produce from the land and keep it healthy and beautiful, but in most people the sense of beauty is lacking; with this sense life can be perceived clearly and beautiful things appreciated.
Those who don’t have that sense don’t value beauty, they value something else, so that something else replaces the beautiful things and from this comes a world full of ugliness and destruction. If you change inside you change what you do in your life and the way you view it.
Unfortunately, those who wish to change fundamentally are small in number, but imagine if people were changing inside, and that sense of beauty, which is dormant, was awakened, at least partially. Then, there would be a much better world.
Unfortunately there are negative elements inside each individual which bring about destruction upon themselves and upon those around them, throughout the whole of their life.
Many live in terrible conditions. In some places it’s difficult to find anything natural. But so many people are not concerned, they don’t mind, because their values are not in those things nor in things which have beauty and life in them. Their values are in other things—just getting a bigger house, a new car, playing sports, whatever it is, their values are in those things, and therefore their energy and their input goes into that.
If you’re practicing the correct spiritual exercises and are changing, you begin to perceive life in a superior way, because the psychic faculties such as those which give a sense of beauty increase.
The world really needs people who develop their consciousness. But for the world to get this, people need to be able to understand how to achieve it in themselves, and then to tell others about it. If you don’t tell people about it, how will they know? If you have knowledge and keep it to yourself, don’t you then have a part in all the destruction and negativity which happens in the world and in your life?
For those who value truly good things, there’s a responsibility to pass on this information to others, so that they too can appreciate what is valuable and can bring about positive changes.
Those who stay preoccupied with their own worries and concerns will never be able to properly help others.
Each day brings a great opportunity for self-discovery, to be able to look inside and see the various emotions and thoughts that arise. It is a pity to miss these opportunities – when they’re gone, they are over.
People not only miss the opportunities for learning, but exist in foul inharmonious states that they are not even aware of—from this comes destruction.
If someone is in nature in inharmonious states, even the animals can pick up on it and run from them in a way they wouldn’t do if they were peaceful.

The Alternatives – Inner Silence, Peace and Enlightenment

These negative states are completely out of place if you want to be silent in nature. If you have a moment of silence, then you see that negative ego states can have no part in it. If you are aware and in a moment of silence, and the ego states are absent, even if it is just for a moment, there is clarity, and you are here, aware of life in the present moment. In this you can find a sense of peace, a silence, even if it’s momentarily, but it is also possible to have that silence during the activities of daily life.
For those who reach enlightenment, that peace becomes permanent and multiplies unimaginably.
If you want enlightenment you need to make sacrifices, to do whatever it takes, sacrificing lower states for higher ones, and sacrificing some time to help another. Then you get the due rewards. Something lower is always sacrificed for something higher to take place.
The rewards of higher things sometimes may not be as you may expect, and may be hidden from the view of everybody else. No one can really see the truly spiritual, nor is it really valued by society. What’s valued are material things, good jobs, fame, prestige, celebrity, comfort, entertainment, pleasure, and the like.
People usually don’t appreciate the respect, goodness, and love that is given to them because they live in an animal state. They regard those qualities as weakness and even look down on them, when in fact those qualities are amongst the highest ones and they belong to higher, spiritual realms.
As a society, real spiritual things are not valued, but individuals can find out the true value of spirituality by taking the journey to enlightenment.
In the beginning, you can start with the practice of the different spiritual exercises. If you have a moment of silence, you may see something of value there—it is a better way to be than to be full of negative states.
Pleasure brings pain, but inner silence brings nothing negative; it is in itself of great value and is a far better way to be than to be in ego states.
The silence you find in the beginning is just a tiny thing, but it becomes a spark of light that guides you toward the all-encompassing light.
Living a spiritual life and awakening is difficult, which tends to make people back away and look for something else. When you go to advance spiritually a step has to be taken in the dark where you can’t see what’s ahead. It’s inevitable that sacrifices have to be made, but many stop and leave the work to awaken when they need to make sacrifices and things get difficult. It’s inevitable that spirituality has its cost just as everything does.
One of the first spiritual exercises to learn is self-observation. It is a faculty that can be developed by applying it in daily life. This enables you to see what’s happening within yourself, which in turn allows you to change what you see. Inner change is necessary to be able to live a truly spiritual life. A person may be able to astral project, but if they don’t change and become more spiritual, then they won’t meet the criteria for getting more advanced knowledge and wisdom. Change is absolutely vital – without it, the attempt to live a spiritual life is destined to fail.

Q: I can feel emotions like anger when I’m talking.

Belsebuub: Learn to use the word and observe yourself when you speak. If you are forceful that is a form of anger, although you don’t perceive it in that way. Anger is being fed in a subtle way through aggressive ways of talking. It’s better to speak clearly and give your opinion without pushing.

How do you budge an ego?

You need to strip the ego to the bare and raw awareness. It is simple awareness versus egos.

How can dreams help us to understand ourselves?

When you look into dreams, you are mostly looking into your subconscious, although some dreams are teachings and real experiences of different realms of existence.
When you wake up in the morning, look back over the night’s dreams. Lie still, go back over them, and see what you can remember.
Most of what is happening in dreams is, for most people, usually the effect of the subconscious. They show what each person really is inwardly. Someone may say that they are not an angry person, but in their dreams they can be reacting with anger. Or to give another instance, they may be stealing, even though they don’t steal here. It’s because those emotions, those states are within the subconscious, and when there is no physical body to bring someone back to “physical reality,” they stay with just what’s in the subconscious.
If you’re observant during the day, you’ll catch those states and thoughts. And, as you observe them, you’ll begin to understand them more and more, and by dying to them, they will disappear from your behavior and eventually from your thoughts. By doing so, they will start to disappear from your dreams as well. So you are clearing these states during the day, and clearing them from dreams as well; eventually you can gradually clean yourself of the negativity of all the egos of different kinds.
When you are immersed in beauty and love, when you feel life permeating every cell of your body, when you feel that you are resting in peace and you feel this peace wherever you are and in whatever you are doing, you know that this is worth fighting for.
~ A talk by Belsebuub given in Australia, 2007
About the Author
Belsebuub is the author of a number of books on out-of-body experiences, dreams, self-knowledge, and esoteric wisdom including A Course in Astral Travel and Dreams which became a bestseller in its genre. His book Gazing into the Eternal was finalist in the Best Book Awards 2009 in spirituality, and he has appeared on over 60 radio and television programs internationally.
Belsebuub is the name of his spirit/soul/consciousness, everyone has their own unique spiritual name, it’s a matter of knowing it. Please visit his excellent website, Belsebuub.com.
original article here

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