Reclaim the Greatness From Which You are Born
Key Lesson: If you want to measure the degree to which some thought or feeling is harmful to the development of your soul, just see the extent to which its presence separates you from the possibility of remembering the Divine.
Strengthen Your Connection to the Timeless Life
You'll never know how forgetful of your self you are until you make the smallest effort to be self-remembering. But in the same measure you make the effort to see that self-forgetfulness is overtaking your life -- and that it is the real cause of your pain -- comes a kind of new and special spiritual memory, a certain Presence that little by little grows in you as a powerful new awareness. As you work to place the Divine before all else in your life, it begins to go before you, not only keeping you from forgetting yourself, but helping you to realize, increasingly, your connection to the celestial, timeless Life.
Start this wonderful, positive, upward spiral by using ceaseless prayer to go within yourself. You'll quickly discover that this wish to go in is the same as asking to go up! Following are three key ideas to help strengthen your understanding of the need to remember this new kind of inner work:
An unattended mind is the breeding ground of self-defeat.
If you're not present in your own life, working moment to moment to remember something Timeless, you will find and then lose yourself in every thought or event that floats by. Self-defeat is the unconscious act of being identified with and investing your self in what must disappear... and then a sense of loss, sorrow, or suffering rushes in to fill the temporary gap. Every moment that you can, come wide awake! Do it right now!
Conscious efforts are always rewarded with increased consciousness.
We live within a totally responsive universe, always responding with more than we have asked for. And when you begin to ask for real things in life, you get more than you can possibly know you're asking for. To increase your consciousness is the same as learning to ask for something more, and to learn to ask for more is to receive more than you could ever imagine.
Wasted energies are the same as lost opportunities.
When you stop working to grow, you begin dying. Beginning today, choose to use your life for those true purposes that withstand the test of time instead of allowing your life to be used up serving only one temporary purpose after another.
Whenever you can remember yourself in whatever you may be doing, bring yourself back into the awareness of the present moment and into that secret Permanence that dwells therein. Use every waking moment -- when you're eating, while you're walking, or just waiting. If you're at work, you have to do your assigned tasks, but when you take a break, return to that higher awareness that cannot disappear into the river any more than the ocean can be engulfed by one of its own waves. In this state of awareness, the river of time and all upon it runs by you, through you, instead of carrying you away. In its waves and ripples you can see your own thoughts float by with no sense of loss. This is the essence of spiritual detachment. You choose to stay with what is Timeless by refusing to lose yourself in the world of thought and time.
