By John Ashbrook
On Patience
The cultivation of patience is essential to one’s personal spiritual progress.
Impatience is obviously a negative trait. That is why the lower self is in the business of creating and instigating impatience. The lower self is primarily negative in its motivations. Negatives prevent change and growth, and of course, the lower self is threatened by these concepts. If you are trying to make spiritual progress in your life, the lower self digs in and looks for ways to stop your efforts. It loves the concept of impatience because it knows that impatience creates frustration and anger, and a desire to give up. Why bother to change? It takes too long! You see, impatience causes you to try to force change, and the lower self rebels against force. Just like a child who cannot be forced to do something, it is afraid to try, the lower self hunkers down, pulls back, and resists forcing, throws a tantrum. Impatience becomes a tool of the lower self – a change-preventing tool. By using your adult mind, you can intentionally and consciously choose to be patient. It is a discipline that one must cultivate if one ever expects to coax the lower self out of its fear of change. Impatience is not love; patience is love, and love is the purifying force that gently coaxes the lower self out of its dark hiding place of fear and into the light of spiritual growth, freedom, and joy.
On Meditation
There is a tremendous difference between people who unconsciously and, therefore, unwittingly create their lives and those who attempt to make the creation of their life a conscious act. Those people who create their lives haphazardly by ignoring their unwise, distorted thoughts and destructive feelings do so deliberately; they just don’t know it. They are not conscious of their own negative patterns. Those who choose to create their lives consciously are aware of their intentional creating and therefore have the power to direct their life in a positive, meaningful way. These people choose to challenge their shortcomings by seeking the truth about themselves. They work hard to discover and dissolve negative pain-causing thought patterns, and they understand that what exists inside them, no matter how frightening and painful, cannot simply be avoided but must be experienced and dealt with in the light of conscious reasoning.
This is the positive attitude toward living that ultimately results in the deliberate and conscious creation of a fulfilling, productive life. Meditation is one of the most powerful tools that you can utilize in this struggle to be aware of what you are creating in every minute of your life. Meditation is intentional, conscious creation. It is positive expression of the highest order because it uses the power of a conscious, focused mind in conjunction with the right and natural laws that govern the awesome creative dynamic that is a universe of infinite benevolence.
On Fear and Mistrust
Resistance to the natural and healthy flow of life energy is ultimately the source of all evil. Where fear and mistrust of the process of life rule the personality, peace, joy, and harmony are obstructed. Unresisted life flows too calmly, like the smoothest of rivers.
When this river of life energy meets resistance, it is slowed up, it begins to congest, and the flow is blocked. Fear and mistrust hold still that which would naturally flow; freedom is lost. Matter itself is energy in an extremely disunified state. Matter is an energy of low vibration; it is congested and condensed by its own resistance to the force of life.
This is symbolic of what happens in the human psyche when fear and erroneous beliefs dominate the soul, and disconnection results. This resistance within cuts one off from the natural flow of life and obstructs the realization of important, freeing universal truths. Where truth lives and thrives, there can be no resistance, no misery, no suffering, no pain, no evil, only spiritual growth, love, and divine fulfillment.
On Happiness
When people harbor an attitude of immature insistence that they can only achieve happiness if certain, specific situations manifest in their lives, it is often the case that true happiness and spiritual fulfillment evades them. This is so because their closed, rigid attitude toward life creates a tight, forcing state within their soul. This tight, forcing state takes them out of harmony with the free-flowing malleability of a benevolent universe. In their refusal to accept life on life’s terms, they close themselves off from the infinite possibilities that exist for all living souls. Their limited, immature, narrow vision of happiness robs them of their divine right to the unlimited bounty, adventure, and pure bliss that is the intelligent universe. When someone clings to this limiting attitude of life, it often indicates the unconscious desire to remain unhappy, an emotional attachment to unhappiness. For those souls who are willing to surrender to the flow, trusting and remaining open to life with a still and patient heart, total fulfillment will come, and it will be beautiful beyond imagination. Be willing to be surprised.
John Ashbrook
