"Beliefs are needs one is wanting to have take place because they seem like a good idea."

Ishvara

"If one is not experiencing the spontaneity of Life, one is experiencing one's beliefs."

Ishvara

"Life manifests your knowing. It doesn't manifest your beliefs."

Ishvara

"Nothingness is boundless everything -- 100% de-labeled space"

Ishvara

You Have The Final Word


Ishvara:

There is also self-intimacy, that is, intimacy with yourself. Intimacy with self means accepting yourself and being aware of and open to who you are, without reservations, without explanation. In other words: what you see is what you get. Self-intimacy is not a narcissistic self-love, but a connected presence, an ongoing appreciation of who you are as a unique expression of Life, appreciating the embodiment of intelligence that you are, and looking openly at that without judgment. Self-intimacy is much like becoming your own best friend; you understand "you," you talk to "you", you are gentle to "you."

Usually, fear is the main barrier to the openness of intimacy: fear of knowing too much, fear of seeing too much, fear of not "being enough." Fear distorts or annihilates intimacy. For instance, someone may say something about you and the intellect worries, "Oh, what if that is true?", and that creates a wedge, an obstacle to intimacy.

Now, it is difficult to see yourself in the inter-relationship with other people, because you see yourself through your own intellectual arena, and there may be things to which you are blind. When you interact with someone else, those things may bounce back to you. They may bounce back in a distorted way, a seemingly threatening way, but you can still look at them, be with them, and see whether there is something there for you to know.

In openness and intimacy you are always willing to know everything you can know. There is no resistance to what you can know: good, bad, ugly -- it doesn't matter. You are totally open to what you can know, and that is where it becomes hard, because most people have a lot of secretiveness about them: they are ashamed of how they see things, fearful of revealing what is there.

In intimacy, there is no need for defense, no need to be right. Your internal "critic" creates the need for defense. The best thing to do with the critic is to be aware of it: "OK, you (the critic) are running again; what are you going to do with me?" Make fun of it, laugh about it, joke about it-- "Aren't I being silly?"-- something to shift the focus, to shift the energy away from it, because if you resist it, it gains power. If you sort of embrace it and say, "Oh, the critic is running again, having its way. So what?", that can take its power away.

This is not easy. The lower intellect, where the critic resides, has controlled your life for so long that it is not willing to give up control. You have to appeal to the superior intellect that sees more, sees a bigger picture. There is no set way to deal with the critic, other than just to do it. You can laugh at yourself when the critic comes up. Another technique is to throw yourself into something and forget about the critic, because if you are really engaged with the present, the critic cannot appear. The critic, and the way it appears, are unique to each individual, so you have to come up with your own way of dealing with it.

You have a story, a description of yourself that you have collected over your lifetime. Unfortunately, most of the things you have collected are negative, demeaning. Your body-being takes that story seriously. It is an energy-price you pay constantly; it diminishes the quality of your life. The body doesn't know anything other than what the intellect is saying. Changing your story involves deliberately beginning to change what you say to yourself. Suppose your story is that you are stupid. Changing your story involves realizing, "Yes, I've acted stupidly sometimes, but it doesn't need to be that way all the time." The more you see it, the less it happens.

When some criticism is leveled at you from the outside, it doesn't have to become part of your story. When you hear the criticism, you don't reject it, but you don't own it either. You can be with it, and ask "What does this mean to me? Is this saying something to me?" If you experience an internal resistance to what has been said about you, then probably there is a kernel of truth to it. The goal is to have the awareness, because the moment you have the awareness, things can shift. It is not a matter of being guilty about it. It is simply the awareness, "Yes, this may exist, and I'll look at it and see if it does." You have the final word on any information: You can add it to your story, and make yourself more wrong, or you can see it just as a piece of information about which you determine whether and where it fits.

You try to look at yourself through the eyes of the person who is criticizing you, and you will see whether that person has an agenda, an opinion, or a projection, and then you are liberated. It doesn't matter what the truth is; all that matters is that you become aware of something. Life is about gaining awareness, not about gaining anything else. The awareness is liberating.

When you reach true intimacy, you can be "slapped" with criticism and not feel it. You can look at it to see if there is any truth to it, but feel no hurt from it. You don't have any judgment on yourself, or on the person who said it.

I have a blanket assumption: everyone wants my highest good, so everything is helpful. I have reframed my life in that context, and as a consequence I am liberated. You can do that too.

Everything coming from the outside is hearsay, but if you have any kind of reaction to something it is a signal for you to look at it a little closer to see if there is a message in it. Sometimes there is. Sometimes the person criticizing you is just having a hard day, and you needn't take it personally.

I don't take criticism personally, and I see that my frequency makes all the difference in that. I see where things are coming from, I see a bigger picture, and often I have to be careful not to laugh at what is happening with other people because I see the dynamic that is occurring, the hilarity of it. Mostly, I find it hilarious because I did the same thing in the past. Yet people who are in a very emotional state may not like it if you laugh at what is happening.

Written and transcribed by Terry Grant

This is the conclusion of a message in which Ishvara speaks of intimacy. I have transcribed and edited his words from a talk he gave on April 5, 2005. - TG.

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This message comes to you from Alaya, a nonprofit organization. Alaya depends upon financial contributions for its continued existence. Click here to make a tax-deductible contribution to Alaya.
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Intimacy


Ishvara:

Intimacy is an energy that can be very transformative, if you are courageous. It can open you to the whole of Life. It is a high frequency energy that operates in unconditional and allowing awareness. Feeling a connection with something or someone else is always a component of intimacy. Another component is your intent of being all that you can be, and looking at the other person with the awareness that the other person can be all they can be too.

In intimacy, there is not the constraint of "You have to be this way so that I can be happy." That kind of attitude breaks intimacy right away, because it involves projecting your needs onto the other person, which destroys the synergy of intimacy.

To develop the energy of intimacy, you need to be open and receptive to it, allowing for its possibility. The fewer constraints and expectations you have, the greater the field, the space, for intimacy. But if you come to that space with conditions or expectations, you diminish or even destroy the possibility for intimacy.

Human interaction works best when there is total trust and openness, always allowing that the highest good can take place regardless of what the circumstances are around that. The problem is you may start to have that kind of opening, but then "I need" or "I want" comes into play, and either of those is conditional. The moment conditions start, intimacy is lessened, and if the conditions continue, intimacy can simply disappear. Intimacy happens when there is a genuine openness to Life.

So in a way intimacy is fragile, but in another way it is very powerful, because when you come to the space of total openness you have transcended fear and expectation. To be totally open and receptive to the flow of Life is a high frequency, a high intimacy with Life. That requires a tremendous amount of trust and fearlessness, with no opinion, no projection, no attitude. It is a purity, an allowing for the best to occur. It is not something you can make happen; it is something that has to be allowed. If the ingredients for it are present, it will happen.

Intimacy involves a deep knowledge of the other person, having an awareness of where the other person is coming from, their likes and dislikes, what they are experiencing. You don't "use" that knowledge on the other person; you are just aware of it. In intimacy, there is a constant exchange of energy. It can be non-verbal; it can be just presence.

In intimacy, there is a flowing awareness. When you become open, you begin to see everything, and you have a willingness to see everything. This involves seeing things about yourself and about other people, but not moving into judgment about what you see. It entails a willingness to simply be with what you see, recognizing, "Yes, this is here, this is how it looks in the moment," without assessment or guilt.

Intimacy is more than just connection. You can have a connection with a person, and afterwards wonder, "What was that about." Intimacy, on the other hand, involves really knowing a person, really knowing a situation, but without judgment, expectation or projection.

In a sense, intimacy requires a super-human capacity: you have to be beyond any kind of vindictiveness or judgment or guilt, because many times what you see in another person is something that exists in you too. This "super-human" capability is the next step for humanity. Humans are going to have to master intimacy in order to move to the next level, because the next level functions in a connection, an intimacy, that involves knowing others, seeing a very clear picture of other people and what is happening. That clarity does not happen if you have a lot of judgments and expectations.

With intimacy, there is a great relief, because you have let go of your story, the persona you have held up to portray "who I am." In intimacy, that persona disappears, and you simply "are," so you don't have to hold onto your story.

Written and transcribed by Terry Grant

In a two-part message, Ishvara speaks of intimacy. I have transcribed and edited his words from a talk he gave on April 5, 2005. - TG.

Copyright © 2005 - 2006 by Alaya®.
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This message comes to you from Alaya, a nonprofit organization. Alaya depends upon financial contributions for its continued existence. Click here to make a tax-deductible contribution to Alaya.
Thank you for your support.

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It Is A Matter Of Knowing

Ishvara:

Once you've had a direct experience, it remains yours, and you are ready for the next experience, but don't expect it to be as glamorous as the very first experience. You have had many "firsts" in your life, and you know that. The first time you ate chocolate pudding, it may have been exciting. The firsts are exciting, but the seconds aren't exciting. Direct experience is no different. You keep making progress in the mastership of Life, taking steps, doing what is in front of you, being open to new experiences, allowing for greater possibilities, and loving the things around you. The more you can love, be with, appreciate and respect the things around you, the greater is the flow of energy, which increases your frequency, and allows you to have an even greater appreciation of what Life really is. You stop looking at things negatively; you no longer have the vocabulary "it's awful"; you change it to, "What's next?" Life's direction is always what's next. "What are we going to behold now? What are we going to experience now? How much freer, how much lighter, how much more connected, how much more aware can we be?"

Setbacks are illusions of the intellect. The intellect says, "This is a setback; we're moving in reverse; the world is entering the dark ages." Not really. It's just that the fear mongers, those who are afraid, are telling us what needs to happen. It is not happening. It just looks like it is happening because the media say so, the reports say so. If you can find the heart of humanity, you will see how untrue that is. There is nothing to it; it is not real; it is the delusion of those who are trying to stay in control, those who are using fear to try to manipulate what they think are "the masses." Appearances are deceptive, and these supposed setbacks are simply there to wake people up. I just hope people wake up soon.

When you look at the big picture, you realize how ignorance, conditions, superstitious beliefs and concepts have ruled the past, and that when you are fearful you fall back into that superstitious nonsense, but you can't stay there any more. It is short-lived. The cat is out of the bag forever. People have got a taste of liberation and freedom, and after they get over the fear they will be right back to liberation and freedom. That is the progression of Life, the direction in which Life is moving. It is not going backwards. It is going forward, though it can look like reversal. It is not a time to be complacent, because your knowing, your awareness is going to propel this onward. That is why it is so important that you gain clarity and awareness, that you become very much aware of what your knowing is doing for Life. What you can know in yourself, what you experience as the progression of Life through connections and awareness, is going to shape the morphic field for others to tune into, so they begin to know too. That is how it works, and how it has always worked.

Those who propagate fear and separation are like dinosaurs; they are passing away. They are yelling and screaming in their passing, trying to hold a structure in place, but the foundation has already crumbled. A new edifice is being created, and those who support it, those who look at it, are contributing to it, not by doing, but by knowing. Knowing is the most powerful thing in the universe. Knowing is absolute. If you acquire the courage to know, something happens.

Believing, on the other hand, is empty hope. "I believe this is true" does not make it true. You must KNOW it is true, and then it happens. It is the same in every aspect of your life. If you are suffering from a disease, and believe you can get better, you may or may not get better, but if you know you can get better, you will, and the more intensely you know, the faster you will get better. There are degrees of knowing.

Mastership of Life is about developing a body of knowing that becomes present and integrated into every cell of your body. When you hold negative thoughts, the body suffers; it begins to break down. If you have been having negative thoughts, the best thing you can do is forgive yourself, apologize to yourself for doing that, and have some happy thoughts to counter it. That may be difficult for you, but you can allow what-is, embrace what-is, know that the highest good is taking place in spite of what it looks like on the outside, and hold determinedly to that knowing. That is what changes the world; that is what causes evolution to accelerate.

Humanity can stay in the loop of belief and keep hoping, or it can step out of the loop and accelerate through direct knowing, direct experience, through allowing greater possibilities to take place. You claim the miracle for yourself through knowing, and the miracle then becomes ordinary to you. Others will look at it as miraculous, but you will know, "Well, of course, it couldn't be any other way."

Knowing is direct. You are learning about knowing through your experiences moment by moment, and if you didn't know, now you know. Just keep knowing, keep working at it; know that each experience is leading you to the next experience, and that you are always all right; no matter where you are, you are always Life happening. You cannot be wrong; you can only be right. You can become misguided, deceived, distorted, diminished, but that is only on the surface. Your core cannot be diminished. The truth of your being cannot be lost. The essence, the Life Force, the energy that you are, cannot be lessened. It can be added to. It can be put on hold, but you can't put it on hold forever. At some point you will break out again. The mastership of Life is living moment by moment, being the direct experience, connecting with the things around you. Try it.

Instead of being angry or upset with things, try to love things. As you walk by a plant, appreciate it. As you walk by a person, appreciate the person. Yes, some people are hard to appreciate, but if you hate them, you empower them; if you love them, you leave them alone. It is amazing. Love is unconditional acceptance of what-is. If you practice acceptance, you add to the authentic hope of the world, you shine light on greater possibilities. That is important.

Trying to change the world is difficult, because for every action you take, it seems someone else is doing something to counter it. You can jump ahead of the game by Knowing. What you know, will take place, and will override what people are doing or not doing. The knowing is direct, into the heart of Life. Connection brings about transformation and change.

Allow for the possibility, in each moment. Practice it; do the best you can with it; that is all Life asks: do the best you can with it. It is not a matter of success or failure. It is a matter of knowing, and the more you know, the more you master Life; the more direct the experience, the more connections take place; the more awareness, the greater the increase in frequency, which in turn allows for even greater awareness, moment by moment.

Written and transcribed by Terry Grant

This is the conclusion of a message I have transcribed and edited from a talk Ishvara gave on March 13, 2005. - TG.

Copyright © 2005 - 2006 by Alaya®.
All rights reserved.
Alaya® is a registered trademark and service mark.

If you forward this message, please include the copyright notice.

This message comes to you from Alaya, a nonprofit organization. Alaya depends upon financial contributions for its continued existence. Click here to make a tax-deductible contribution to Alaya.
Thank you for your support.

To learn more about Ishvara and the Alaya Community, visit our website at www.alayanet.org

To subscribe to this message list, send an email to tgrant@alayanet.org with the word "Subscribe" in the subject of your message.

No Stopping Place


Ishvara:

Humans place value on well-worn paths, old books, and ancient history. All of these are important to human belief. But actually they are not valuable; they are "has beens." They are what-was, or what was believed to be what-was, because the actuality might not have been that way at all. People fabricate and interpret things; they make up stuff. If you are writing a book, and you try to remember how it was, your memory can become confused with a dream you had, and so the dream winds up in the book and becomes "how it was."

You can't rely on "what-was", which is a good thing, because if you rely on what-was you can never be with what-is. Life is about being with what-is. That is the mastership: you are able to be with what-is. "OK, this is what's happening, now let's see what this is; let's connect to it, let's experience it, understand it a little bit." Too much understanding becomes confusing. There is a saying, "Know thyself, but not too much." People leave out the last part. Most people try to understand too much. When you "understand" too much, you become distracted, and lose sight of what-is. When you try to explain the beauty of a flower in detail, you have already lost sight of it. It is just a beautiful flower. It is simple.

People have criticized me for simplifying things. People want more explanation, which is really saying, "I want you to tell me how, why, when, where, how much, and whether I can do it." I settle for: You can do it, so do it. You don't need the how, when or why. It just happens, it unfolds, it comes about as it does.

The intellect wants authority: "Who says? What is the authority for that?" Mastership presents its own authority. When you are mastering energy, you are the authority of what that is. Suppose you fall in love, and you go to some supposed expert and say, "I think I'm in love; I feel warm and fuzzy, and I think of this person all the time. Do you think that could be love?" You don't need to be told you are in love. You already know it. Humans don't have confidence in direct experience; they go to someone else and ask, "Did I have a direct experience?" The mastership of Life is very simple; it needs no outside authority.

As you master Life, you find various ways of being that resonate with you. It is important to you that you resonate with what you are understanding. You find moments where you resonate with that kind of awareness, that kind of connection, that kind of experience, and that is part of the mastership. It would not be fair if there were not a way for you to know when you are "on", when you are in-line with what-is. The body has a response to that; there is a resonance, a feeling, a sense of connection, and that lets you know you are on course. You can't ask other people, because if you are not on the course which they want you to be on, they will say, "No, you are off course. You are not on the right path." What you resonate with is your "path." It is not a second-hand path.

Getting to the point where you trust your knowing involves transcending beliefs and concepts about things, and getting down to what you feel directly. It involves realizing that if you have had an experience, it is yours. You have had it, and it can't be taken away. However, in the mastership of Life each experience leads to something else. There is no stopping place, no ceiling, no limit.

After you have had an experience, the intellect thinks, "I lost something; it's not there any more." Sure it is there. You cannot un-have an experience. In the years following the awakening event which I had eighteen years ago, I sometimes thought, "Well, it would be nice to have that experience again." I felt I had lost something, that the experience was not there any more, but I came to realize that I had already gone so far beyond that experience that I would have to go backwards to have it again. Yet the intellect does that: it glamorizes an experience, makes that experience "it", and then you keep referring back to it, thinking, "That was it. This isn't it, but that was, and so I've lost it." You diminish yourself when you believe that. Every experience you have had is real, but you are already moving beyond it and getting ready for the next experience. That is the mastership of Life.

The mastership of Life involves one experience after another after another, without clinging to any of them, but embracing the Now. It is so simple when you think about it. If you have always lived in a darkened room, and one day you accidentally turn the light on, suddenly you have an experience and you think, "Wow, look at that!" After that, you cannot have that same experience again. You can turn the switch off again, and then on again, but it doesn't seem as exciting. That is the nature of experience.

After you have seen the light, you are never in darkness again, but the light will never be the same. The initial moment, the beginning of awakening, is a "first." There will be many other moments after that, but you become used to the glamour, the excitement, and you think that nothing is happening if you don't continue to have that excitement. It requires that you trust your experience, relying upon the connected awareness that you are progressing moment by moment, experience by experience, that you are just experiencing greater degrees of light, and that it will never be the same as coming out of the darkness. It will be another degree, a greater awareness, and not a big deal.

It is human to want excitement, the thrill, but after awhile the experience becomes ordinary, and not such a big deal. That is where the trap is, because you begin to think, "I'm not getting it any more; I've lost it." Not true. You can't lose it. Once you've had the experience, it remains yours, and you are ready for the next experience, but don't expect it to be as glamorous or as exciting as the very first experience.

Written and transcribed by Terry Grant

This is the continuation of a message I have transcribed and edited from a talk Ishvara gave on March 13, 2005. - TG.

Copyright © 2005 - 2006 by Alaya®.
All rights reserved.
Alaya® is a registered trademark and service mark.

If you forward this message, please include the copyright notice.

This message comes to you from Alaya, a nonprofit organization. Alaya depends upon financial contributions for its continued existence. Click here to make a tax-deductible contribution to Alaya.
Thank you for your support.


To learn more about Ishvara and the Alaya Community, visit our website at www.alayanet.org

To subscribe to this message list, send an email to tgrant@alayanet.org with the word "Subscribe" in the subject of your message.

You Are The Embodiment Of Intelligence


Ishvara:

You believe in your story, and often you forget that you can change it. There is a wisdom you learn from direct experience: that you don't continue to do the same things over and over again, expecting the result to be different. You realize, "OK, we've done that, and we don't need to do it again." It is like a person who walks the same path every day, every time stumbling and falling over a particular rock. It is not a large rock, but each day the person falls over it. Why not move the rock? Why keep stumbling?

Why continue to go down the same path, when you know where it goes, and what the consequences are? All the time, you have the ability to create a new path, to go a different way, to look at something differently.

If you are going to be bothered with thinking, it is a good practice to purposefully have different thoughts. How many ways can you look at something? How many ways can you hear something? I have become quite good at that. Ever since the awakening began eighteen years ago, I have been saying the same thing over and over again; I just find different ways of saying it, looking at it, and you think I am saying something new! That is what occurs when you reduce Life to its utter simplicity: there is not much to say about it. Instead, it is a matter of "Just do it; be it; experience it, master it." That's it.

Hopefully you can be inspired and encouraged to see the bigger picture, to come to the awareness that your thoughts are important, and what you know about something is even more important than your thoughts. Thoughts come from the thinking mechanism in the intellect, and they can be very conditional, tied to the past and linked to consensus reality, but what you know through direct experience is what you actually are aware of, what you have felt directly.

People have told me, "This is the way it is," and I have said, "Well, that sounds interesting, but have you experienced it? Is 'the way it is' your experience, or is it what you believe?" They reply, "Well, it is written, it is taught; people say it is so." That is a bunch of crap.

You go for direct experience. That doesn't mean you deny things. Instead, you allow for possibilities all the time, but you realize that direct experience is necessary in order to develop a body of knowing. It can't be "They say," it can't be "Somebody else said this is what happened," it can't be "The group believes." People make up stuff all the time. Students claim their master levitates; that is what they want to believe, and so after awhile they believe it. There are documented accounts of teachers who have done all kinds of horrendous and abusive things, and their disciples hardly noticed. That is what occurs when people do not go for direct experience, when they do not use their own sense of awareness and connection as to what is appropriate, and what can happen.

There is something very powerful that takes place in the mastership of Life when you go for direct knowing. You no longer accept what "They say"; instead, you try the currents of Life, you test them, you see if it works. But you have to be careful, because if you have a lot of beliefs and concepts you may miss how it can work. That is the case with a large segment of the population; they are so caught up into beliefs and concepts "about," superstition "about," that they can't see. They have eyes, but they can't see; they have ears, but they can't hear. Their eyes are blind, their ears are full of hearsay. They see only what they believe they should see, what they expect to see.

Direct experience with the core, the heart of Life, begins to reveal to you the true energy pattern, the working of existence itself, the very embodiment of intelligence and information. Every individual has this connection. You don't need to go through somebody else to have it; it is in you. Yes, it may need to be pointed out, to be brought to the fore, because consensus reality, the hypnotized world, is not going to point it out. Unless it is pointed out, you may be oblivious to what-you-are as the essence of Life, the embodiment of intelligence that is connected to the whole of the information field, the whole of existence.

As you master Life, you are mastering the flow of energy, you are mastering connections and awarenesses, you are seeing how things work. You gain an understanding of existence itself, you transcend cause and effect. You see that "It works this way, because it can." People hate hearing "because it can." They ask: "Why is it that way?" The answer is: "Because it can be." People hate that answer, because it doesn't satisfy the intellect. The intellect says, "That's not an answer; I want to know why it's that way." If you know it's that way, what difference will a "why" make? Is it going to change it? It is still going to be what it is.

This awareness involves looking at Life and knowing that you are the embodiment of intelligence, of Life, on purpose, that you are designed to learn, to experience, and to connect in all the sundry possibilities of Life. There are so many possibilities, so many ways of seeing, and being and experiencing, so many shades and colors. You begin to realize that you don't ever need to do anything over again; you don't ever need to take the same path; there is no way that Life has to be. You can always do something new.

Written and transcribed by Terry Grant

This is the continuation of a message I have transcribed and edited from a talk Ishvara gave on March 13, 2005. - TG.

Copyright © 2005 - 2006 by Alaya®.
All rights reserved.
Alaya® is a registered trademark and service mark.

If you forward this message, please include the copyright notice.

This message comes to you from Alaya, a nonprofit organization. Alaya depends upon financial contributions for its continued existence. Click here to make a tax-deductible contribution to Alaya. Thank you for your support.

To learn more about Ishvara and the Alaya Community, visit our website at www.alayanet.org

To subscribe to this message list, send an email to tgrant@alayanet.org with the word "Subscribe" in the subject of your message.

Mastership Of Life


Ishvara:

Life is about mastership, not control. Mastership comes from realizing that everything is connected, that there are unlimited possibilities, and realizing that you can prepare yourself for the experience by being open, receptive, and present.

So much of your life can be spent in resistance or attachment, wanting or not wanting, to the extent that the living experience, the presence, is often missed. That seems peculiar: how can Now ever be missed? Yet humans have the capacity to be in the Now and live elsewhere. Projecting, analyzing, contemplating, comparing, escaping -- all of these are attributes of elsewhere. To master presence is to intentionally keep your focus on what is actually happening, not the interpretation or projection, but what really is going on. One way to do that is to give unconditional acceptance to everything. This doesn't mean that you like it; it is simply the realization that any kind of resistance to what-is creates a problem. When you are giving unconditional acceptance to the things around you, to people, to places, you create a flow of energy that is circular, it comes back to you, and in that process it tends to lift, to increase your frequency, to help you be aware of more possibilities, even greater connections.

If you are thinking negative thoughts, fear thoughts, separating thoughts, it diminishes you; it takes the Life force from you; that too is circular, but what you get back is more "taking," more diminishing. Any reasonable person would recognize that the only way to live is to embrace what-is, to live fearlessly with presence. It is quite magical when you get into it: you can walk on the earth, loving the things around you, which increases the energy. The things you love, the things you accept and embrace, are enhanced.

In the world as it is now, it is difficult to see any kind of progress being made; most often it seems humanity is going backward instead of forward, but you can be aware that adding to that energy just makes it worse. If you focus on "Ain't it awful," you find more of the awful, and in that process you are diminishing your own being-ness, limiting your possibilities. So for your own benefit, you change the way you look at things, and master the process of living. When you become a master of Life, you are not controlling Life. You are looking at Life in a way that contributes, adds to, lifts, supports, and inspires. You benefit from that, and everyone around you benefits. Things benefit from it; the earth benefits from it. It is amazing what a little bit of direct communion with Life --things, people, places -- brings.

People are afraid. The media has no good news for anyone, so people are frightened. When people are afraid, they react. They go into survival mode, which is very selfish and separative, not realizing that that very act is compounding the problem. When you withhold, when you hold back, you block the flow of Life, the flow of experiences; you block possibilities. It seems illogical to be giving in a time of lack. It seems foolish to be loving when there is so much hate being projected. It seems unwise to be allowing when there is apparently so much that should be disallowed.

In the mastership of Life, the direct experience of the information and possibilities that you are as Life, there is a way of being that will lift, support, encourage, and expand, and that is what mastership is about. Anyone can just live, be tossed about on the sea of change, and become frightened with all of the other sheep, struggling for survival, living separately. That is easy to do, because there are so many examples of it around you, but that will not lead to mastership of Life; instead, it will lead to the eventual demise of life.

Life-enhancing processes are connecting processes, connecting with the world around you, fearlessly. Yes, there are many things that you would prefer not be happening, but they are happening. That is the Is-ness. There is a way of looking at things where you can help in those instances. Physically, there may not be much you can do about it. You can march and protest and draw attention to it, but when you do that there is somebody else trying to do the opposite. The anti-war demonstrators protest alongside the pro-war demonstrators, and they actually cancel each other out. The whole process creates more enemies, more judgments, and more separation.

Living processes are established within your own arena: how YOU see things, the things you know and experience. The things you really know are the things that carry weight, that make a difference to the world; not what you believe, not what you hope, not what you think, but what you know. In the mastership of Life, you are learning how things work; you gain an understanding, and you also realize that resistance doesn't work. Resisting things merely gives them more energy. Attachment also is a strange phenomenon: what you are attached to, flees from you; what you hold onto, dissipates. What you reach for, skates out of your way. And the things you don't want, well, you just can't get rid of them; they stick to you. That realization is part of understanding how energy works.

Developing a relationship with Life means developing a relationship with nature, with the earth, with its people, realizing that all are connected, that all participate in this great adventure of Life. I know it is hard to be happy, to be present, when there is so much lack, so much suffering around you. Yet it is important to realize that you don't need to contribute to that. What you hold, what you know, is contributing to what is known. When you realize this, you turn away from negative things. This does not mean that you deny or hide from them. You can't turn away from something unless you know it is there, so you are not escaping it, but you realize that by turning from it you cease to energize it. It is quite magical. If you ignore it (without resistance) it will go away.

This is not a process of denial, but of accepting Is-ness and of not giving it more energy when you see that it limits possibilities. You don't push, you don't shove, you simply say, "Yes, I see you there; you can hang out if you must, but I won't have anything to do with you." There is a simplicity that tends to create an environment of acceptance and allowing. It begins with your thoughts: what you hold, what you think about, what you believe, what you contemplate. It is so simple: your story -- the story you believe about yourself, how you look at things, your interpretation of things -- carries weight; because you believe in your story, you act out its various elements. Often you forget that you can change your story.

Written and transcribed by Terry Grant

This has been a message I have transcribed and edited from a talk Ishvara gave on March 13, 2005. - TG.

Copyright © 2005 - 2006 by Alaya®.
All rights reserved.
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Trust In The Core Of Yourself


Ishvara:

One other ingredient to deepening awareness is intimacy--not just lovers' intimacy. Each human relationship will thrive when there is intimacy. Intimacy is letting someone see into you. I see into you all the time, so I am intimate with you all the time. In a relationship, a partnership, in any kind of coming together, there is the necessity of intimacy, allowing others to see into you, not creating a wall of separation. That has been the problem of human existence: walls of separation, keeping people out, often with good reason, because you have been hurt, you have been wounded. But no matter how often you were hurt, you didn't die. You have to go deeper into the solidarity of that True Nature of your total existence, where there is nothing that can damage or diminish you. You may run into individuals who are mean, but I think mostly they are just jealous because you've got it and they don't, so they do everything they can to take it away from you. Also, in the same breath they are testing you to see if it is real.

Don't be afraid to look into the individuals around you, to look into the core, the heart of their existence. Intimacy is a vital ingredient in preparation for the evolution of humanity. Just imagine what happens when you develop the brain's capacity to immediately connect and see into any situation. If humans haven't learned to accept intimacy, it can create quite a problem, because when that capacity of the brain is developed, there will be no walls, and nothing will be hidden.

There have been movies and television programs about how machines may take over the world someday, and rule over human beings. My experience with machines is quite different, however. I have found that I must make agreements with machines, so that they will work when I am around them. I am not afraid that an intelligent computer will boss me around, because I already know that if I don't have an agreement with it, it won't work; it will just quit. It is up to the human species to keep up with the machines, not to be afraid of them. It is possible that machines could become sentient; machines could evolve to house not only information, but also self awareness. Then you would have to be really conscious to keep up with the machine. The human brain is actually the master computer. Already there is tremendous potential in the brain that is not even in use, just waiting for the intelligence to make use of it.

We are on the verge of a great humanity. I know that humans have a large potential to mess things up, but I also have hope that humans won't mess it up, that there will be enough who realize it is a partnership, that we can form partnerships even with machines. We can cooperate, we don't need to lose the human transformative ability to house more and more and more intelligence. I see that is the only way for humanity to survive: to keep expanding, to keep housing more and more of the universal intelligence that is available from all experiences, that is, being in total connection, fearlessly. If you are afraid of machines, you probably will create the reason that you should be afraid of them.

It is a matter of realizing that everything is connected, everything can become a part of the explosion of possibilities. Fear has no place in this scenario. A lack of confidence has no place. Separation has no place. You are designed for this step; you inherently have the possibility; it is natural, part of True Nature. It is inevitable. Humans periodically go through dark nights, fear mongering, but I know that the human being is more capable than what belief says. I know there are greater possibilities in waiting if humans can just get over themselves, if they can just move to a place of letting go, surrendering, because the world cannot survive if everybody tries to get even. At some point people have to transcend the part of the brain that has the capacity to seek revenge, that clings to a narrow view, that incites chaos, drama and even murder. There are other things happening in the brain which will eventually override all of that.

This is something you can start doing now: you start having amnesia, on purpose. You forget the bad, and you remember the good. You forget the problem, and you remember the things that are working, and if there is only one thing in your life that is working, you don't remember anything else. If you remember only the one thing that is working, soon you will find that other things are working, and first thing you know there will be nothing in your life that doesn't work, because you forgot it! That is the secret of success.

There is nothing that intelligence doesn't know, and there is nothing that cannot be overcome through intelligence. You now have this bit of information, and it is up to you to make use of it. You can set it aside and say, "Oh, maybe one day I'll get to it, after I muddle through my stuff." Or you can make use of it now. You make use of it by being present, realizing connection, being aware, and trusting in that core of yourself that resonates with the truth of each moment. That trust is so important. I have seen countless people who have resonated with this Space, but then they go off and listen to someone else who says, "Oh, that could not have been it," and they believe that, and they reject their own direct experience. People just don't trust themselves; they would rather trust an outside perception of authority than their own direct experience. It is a sad, dangerous state of affairs when people do not trust their own direct experience.

How are you ever going to know, until you start trusting what you know? This means trusting your direct experience of things--not what you believe, not what you are conditioned to, not what you have been told, but what you truly resonate with. Yes, through hypnosis or belief, you can think that you are having an experience, when in fact you are only experiencing your beliefs or conditioning, but when you really begin to trust you start to find what is genuine; it starts to reveal itself. You start resonating with something very deep, and it becomes lasting and present. Within you is that capability, the place that resonates with information and intelligence that is happening through each experience, moment by moment.

This is the conclusion of a message I have transcribed and edited from a talk Ishvara gave on January 16, 2005. - TG.

Written and transcribed by Terry Grant

Copyright © 2005 by Alaya®.
All rights reserved.
Alaya® is a registered trademark and service mark.

If you forward this message, please include the copyright notice.

This message comes to you from Alaya, a nonprofit organization. Alaya depends upon financial contributions for its continued existence. Click here to make a tax-deductible contribution to Alaya.
Thank you for your support.

To learn more about Ishvara and the Alaya Community, visit our website at www.alayanet.org

To subscribe to this message list, send an email to tgrant@alayanet.org with the word "Subscribe" in the subject of your message.