“When a man begins to perceive the love of God in all its richness, he begins also to love his neighbor with spiritual perception. This is the love of which all the scriptures speak. Friendship after the flesh is very easily destroyed on some slight pretext, since it is not held firm by spiritual perception. But when a person is spiritually awakened, even if something irritates him, the bond of love is not dissolved; rekindling himself with the warmth of the love of God, he quickly recovers himself and with great joy seeks his neighbor’s love, even though he has been gravely wronged or insulted by him. For the sweetness of God completely consumes the bitterness of the quarrel.” ~The Philokalia

“People who are not spiritual will undoubtedly disagree with this quote very strongly. They will claim that they are fully capable of love for others even without any awakening of the soul or even belief in God. But the love that is addressed in the above quote is a higher love that cannot exist in those who are not at least partially awakened. This love happens when you look at another person and recognize the spirit and soul withing. You recognize that while the physical being is not of God, the unawakened spirit and soul is. And that is what the spiritual person loves.”

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“I participated in the Peru Sacred Places of Power Tour with Sean Savoy as our group leader. On August 3^rd, we visited parts of Lima, the capitol city. We went first to the main square in downtown Lima where many government buildings and the main cathedral are located. As a writer, I of course made special note of the House of Literature there (see photo). We went to the catacombs at Saint Francis Church, which was interesting, but a little creepy. There are piles of human bones and skulls from thousands who were buried there.

“Later, we visited Casa Luna, the home of the Luna family with a large private collection of nativity scenes. After touring the collection, we had an excellent lunch of Peruvian dishes. After lunch, we visited the archeology museum, but we didn’t get to see everything because we were behind schedule.

“Few people seemed to pay much note to this badly faded old tapestry, but I found it very interesting because the pattern has a striking resemblance to the diagram for a modern computer chip! We then went to an old tavern and were shown how to make a Pisco Sour, the national drink of Peru (which I enjoyed regularly during the next ten days).”

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“We are beginning to learn the overwhelming importance of infantile impressions: how a forgotten babyish fear or grief may develop underground, and produce at least an unrecognizable growth poisoning the body and the mind of the adult. But here good is at least as potent as ill. What terror, a hideous sight, an unloving nurture may do for evil; a happy impression, a beautiful sight, a loving nurture will do for good. … Babyish prayers, simple hymns, trace while the mind is ductile the paths in which feelings shall afterward tend to flow; and it is only in maturity that we realize our psychological debt to these early and perhaps afterward abandoned beliefs and deeds. So the veritable education of the Spirit begins at once, in the cradle …” ~Evelyn Underhill

I seem to remember reading somewhere that about half of what we learn during our entire life happens during the first five years. While that is partially due to the fact that after a while we are no longer exposed to much that is new, it is also largely due to the fact that as we develop beliefs and create filters in our subconscious mind, we start rejecting anything that contradicts those beliefs.

Recently, there have been posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites that show something like a white infant playing with a black one and saying that racism is something that has to be learned and no one is born a racist. That is true for just about all forms of bigotry. No one is born hating gays, Jews, Muslims, blacks, short people, etc. They learn these prejudices from others, most often their parents, siblings, and caretakers. But it isn’t limited to what we directly tell out babies, they learn as much—if not more—from observation.

But the good news, as Ms Underhill mentions, is that they can learn good habits and beliefs as easily as they can learn bad ones. The key thing is we have to make an effort to teach them the positive, knowing that the very nature of the world means they will regularly be exposed to a lot of negative things. We need to tech them to be open-minded rather than trapped in any belief which may later prove to be wrong, no matter how fervently we believe in it ourselves. We also need to be careful about teaching them something negative in an indirect way by promoting a group that practices negative or bigoted beliefs, such as promoting a church that promotes hatred of gays (I know, I know, they claim they don’t hate gays, but their behavior says otherwise), or a club that allows members of only one sex. Even the idea that certain toys are for boys and others are for girls helps to build false beliefs that may be difficult to overcome at a later age.

Most important, though, is the last part of the quote. It is never too early to start teaching kids about spirituality. They need to learn to value the spirit and soul as soon as they are old enough to understand what the words mean.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“Let us begin, then, to withdraw from the thing of this world. Let us despise possessions and money and all that swamps and drowns our intelligence. …Those who travel by sea, when overtaken by a storm, do not worry about their merchandise but throw it into the waters with their own hands, considering their property less important than their life. Why, then, do we not follow their example, and for the sake of the higher life despise whatever drags our soul down to the depths? Why is fear of God less powerful than fear of the sea? …
“Do athletes compete with their clothes on? No, the rules require them to enter the stadium naked. … Yet, instead of stripping ourselves, we try to engage in the contest while carrying countless burdens on our shoulders, thus giving our opponents many chances of getting a grip on us.” ~The Philokalia

We do need to withdraw from the things of the world, but despising possessions and the material world in general is probably going a little too far. We don’t need to hate the material world, indeed we should not, because the source of it is the spiritual world, the realm of God and the angels. We don’t hate a person for having a physical deformity, so we shouldn’t hate the spirit that has been deformed into matter. Spirit is still at it’s root. We can have possessions, we can wear clothes and live in a house, but we should avoid becoming attached to these things.

The quoted section gives the example of a ship caught in a storm and how even the owners of the property will throw possessions overboard in order to save themselves. That is the proper attitude to have for material goods, but the real “storm” we should be concerned with is the battle of the Children of Light and the Forces of Darkness for possession of our souls. Many people seem to have the idea that by default, when they die physically, their soul and spirit will go to heaven and be claimed by the Children of Light as one of their own and the only way they will be claimed by the dark ones is if they do something really evil or, as in many classic novels, sell their soul to Satan. The truth is, if you ask Satan to buy your soul he will laugh in your face. As an old saying goes (on a totally different subject); why buy the cow if you can get free milk?

Satan doesn’t need to buy your soul because as long as you are in the grips of materialism, it is already his! You need to wrestle it away from him, in a manner of speaking, by turning away from materialism, by rejecting attachments to physical objects, and become attached instead to God and obeying His will and fulfilling His Plan.

I had to include the part about athletes competing naked for a little humor, but it does make a point. When we become attached to material things, and then try to develop spiritually, the demons can use those attachments to pull us away from our spiritual intentions. Then can cause a car to crash into our beloved auto, they can cause a forest fire to burn our house, etc. By not getting attached to things, we take that away from them.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

Lancaster, Pennsylvania Boys & Girls Club lawn in April 2014

“Overall the last couple of years I’ve felt a growing connection to the sunflower.　I began planting a few of them last year but wanted to do something bigger and brighter.　 This spring I saw an underutilized section of grass at the Boys & Girls Club in Lancaster, PA and the vision came to me.　This vision was to start a sunflower garden and have the kids at the club contribute by helping to plant the sunflowers.　 Planting day was a huge success with kids enthusiastically and curiously getting their hands dirty and planting the garden.　The rain and sun did the rest as we now have well over 100 sunflower plants in our garden.　 I thank the sun not only for helping the flowers grow but also for inspiring me to start the project.”

Paul Schmitendorf

Lancaster, Pennsylvania Boys & Girls Club lawn in early August 2014

“To recognize and began the shift into new, Intuition Age perception, you need to feel how limited you are by old perception and consciously decide to expand beyond beyond what’s been so familiar. …
“The heart is really a kind of brain, and it generate an electromagnetic field of radiance that’s spherical in nature. … Your hears resonates with all other hearts, all other souls, and all other centerpoints. By being in your heart, you can know the core experience of any other being or reality—and you can know yourself as the whole unified field. … And as you experience spherical-holographic perception, you have insight into the workings of collective consciousness and an understanding of why the Golden Rule exists in all cultures.” ~Penney Peirce

“Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful” -Buddhism

“All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” -Christianity

“This is the sum of duty: do not unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.” -Hinduism

“No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself.” -Islam

“What is hateful to you, do not do to you fellow man. This is the law; all the rest is commentary.” -Judaism

“Respect for all life is the foundation” – Native American

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“We as adults may actualize and help on the spiritual life in ourselves. But our best hope of giving Spirit its rightful, full expression within the time-world lies in the future. It is toward that, that those who really care must work. Anything which we can do toward persuading into better shape our own deformed characters, compelling our recalcitrant energy into fresh channels, is little in comparison with what might be achieved in the plastic growing psychic life of children did we appreciate our full opportunity and the importance of using it.” ~Evelyn Underhill

In many popular spiritual feel-good books of today, as well as in many of the posts on Facebook and Twitter, we are told something like: the past is gone, the future doesn’t exist, the only thing we can deal with is the present. While the basic idea that we need to act now, and do good today, rather than putting everything off until sometime in the future is a good one, there is also a negative side to this attitude which may actually be greater than the positive.

Look around you. Look at the world, the people, the climate, and so on. Listen to the news on TV or radio, or look at the web pages of a news service. Are you seeing a description of an ideal world? I certainly hope that what you see and hear is not what you consider ideal. Everyday there are murders, rapes, robberies and other crimes. People are dying of all sorts of nasty diseases and new ones pop up all the time. As I write this, the news is full of stories about a disease known as MERS, which is short for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, a respiratory illness with no known cure and a high mortality rate that has recently entered the United States for the first time.

If we have any sense at all, we realize this is a world that has problems and can improve. We may differ on exactly what to do and how, but nearly all agree that change is needed. And this is where the main problem with the “we only have the present” attitude is found. For starters, how are you defining “present”. Is it today? This hour? This minute? We have clocks so accurate that can break a second into billionths! So by the criteria that the present is one tick on the clock, the present would be less than a billionth of a second. That isn’t enough time to even become aware of anything, let alone doing anything. It should be obvious that if we are to change anything, it must be done in the future, whether that future be one minute, one hour, or one year from now. Yes, we have to start now, but if we do so with the attitude that the future should be ignored we can never plan the type of improvement that take time, sometimes years, decades, even centuries. So yes, we need to act now, but we also need to plan for a better future by remembering and trying to correct the mistakes of the past. And this certainly includes the spiritual aspirant who cannot achieve any significant enlightenment in the present, but must work to get it in the future.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

This is your forum to share higher-level experiences in Cosolargy through the images of your dreams and visions. All postings are anonymous. Send in verbal descriptions and, if you have them, drawings or paintings.

The primary value in these postings is simply to allow others to see that people do have relevant or meaningful dreams and visions. Another value is to see if others find that the dreams and visions we post are similar or identical to their own. This is why we ask for your comments.

Dreams are communications from the unconscious mind and sometimes the higher self. Some are simply compensation for attention directed elsewhere during the day; some are indications of bodily processes, and some help us work through conflicts. Occasionally, they communicate information from higher realms and thus have more than individual value.

As Cosolargists, we are learning to navigate higher realms. Dreams are part of these higher realms. The Worlds of Light, the realm of spirit, sometimes breaks through to the psyche and gives us information. What breaks through deserves our attention and analysis. In this section of the Community Communique, we offer Community members a forum for sharing their dreams and visions for the edification of the Community and themselves.

PHOTO: www.arkive.org

Dream No. 9 : Green Lizard Dream

Sometime in the winter of 2013-2014 I had the following dream.

I was in a normal looking room in a large office or hotel type building.  Looking up at the ventilator grate I saw that there was a brightly colored green lizard stuck halfway in it.  Its head and forepaws were outside the grate.  Immediately after this I found myself in a different room in the same building, down the hall and around a corner.  (This other room resembled a room in the Atlantis casino in Reno where the AEF had held a dinner some years before.)  Looking up at the ventilator grate in this room, I saw another lizard stuck in it.  This lizard was also the same bright green color, only its hind parts were showing.  In the direct way in which ideas come to one in a dream I realized, with a kind of certainty, that this was the same lizard I saw stuck in the other grate!  This violation of common sense caused me to wake up immediately.

The unusual nature of this dream and the vivid color of the lizard caused me to contemplate this for a while.  I thought of a couple of other famous unusual dreams: the one where a snake was eating its own tail, and gave chemist Friedrich Kekule his idea for the structure of benzene, or the one that gave Erwin Schrodinger the idea of his wave equation.  I immediately thought of the quantum mechanical phenomenon of entanglement.  Maybe entanglement is not two particles that are entangled.  Maybe it is really the same particle that exists in a higher dimensional space, and which intersects physical space in two places.  If mass can deform physical space, perhaps it can be deformed in other ways which can allow one ultra-dimensional particle to appear to be two individual particles in physical space.

Not having the physics background or mathematical tools to investigate this possibility, I just kept this idea in the back of my head as a kind of curiosity.  My jaw almost dropped however when reading an article in Science News recently (“The Mysterious Boundary,” May 31, 2014).  This article outlines some of the ideas that theoreticians are exploring in an attempt to understand black holes, specifically their event horizons.  One of the ideas (proposed by Susskind and Maldacena) echoes the message of the green lizard dream almost exactly.  From the article: “[This proposal turns] entanglement into a shortcut through spacetime rather than a mysterious long-distance link. In essence, the particles inside and outside the event horizon become one and the same.”  Again, my jaw almost dropped!

July 2014

“We are obliged in the end to trust the universe and live by faith. Therefore the awakened soul must often suffer perplexity, share to the utmost the stress and anguish of the physical order, and, chained as it is to a consciousness accustomed to respond to that order, must still be content with flashes of understanding and willing to bear long periods of destitution when the light is veiled. …
“It is not from real men and woman of the Spirit that we hear soft things about the comfort of faith. For the true life of faith gives everything worth having and takes everything worth offering: … It entails a willed tension and choice, a noble power of refusal, which are not entirely being ‘in tune with the infinite.’ …The distinctive mark therefore is not happiness but vocation: work demanded and power given, but given only on condition that we spend it and ourselves on others without stint.” ~Evelyn Underhill

Many people have the idea that a spiritual life is a life free of stress and worries, free of difficulties, free of sadness, hunger, disease, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is true that, generally speaking, highly developed spiritual people will seem very joyful most of the time, but that is only because they have learned to accept the difficulties material life throws at them as a learning experience and as something they simply have to bear if they are to stay on this plain and aid others in their quest for spiritual growth. So don’t assume when you see the smiling face of a spiritual teacher or guru that she never has troubles, never gets ill, never grieves over the loss of a loved one.

So why try so hard to awaken and grow spiritually if it doesn’t get rid of the problems of the material world for you? For one, it makes you better able to understand those difficulties, to realize that they are not God punishing you, but just the karma you bring upon yourself, and sometimes just the randomness of the material plain, and that these difficulties come from Satan, not God. He also realizes that these problems are temporary and will not follow him into the spiritual realms when his physical body dies. And that brings us to the primary reason for studying and practicing spiritual growth techniques while we are living on the material level: to prepare us for functioning on the next level, the level of spirit.

The quoted text ends by telling us that spiritual growth gives us a kind of power, but power that must be used only to help others. This is very true. While I haven’t been seeing those ads for a few years now, there was a time when we were seeing ads on TV, in magazines and online, offering to tell us techniques that would allow us to take over the control of others and get them to do our bidding. Those tricks may work for awhile, but using this power in this satanic manner will give you a great karmic burden to pay, and eventually they will stop working for you. In other words; evil dies, good lives on.

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contributed by Harold Boulette

“The inward aim of the self is towards unification with a larger life; a mergence with Reality which it may describe under certain contradictory symbols, or may not be able to describe at all, but which it feels to be the fulfillment of existence. It has learned—though this knowledge may not have passed beyond the stage of feeling—that the universe is one simple texture, in which all things have their explanation and their place. … The goal of the process, which has been called entrance into the freedom of the Will of God, is the state described by the writer of the ‘German Theology’ when he said, ‘I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man.’ For such a declaration not only means a wiled and skillful working for God, a practical siding with Perfection, becoming its living tool, but also close union with, and sharing of, the vital energy of the spiritual order: …” ~Evelyn Underhill

The first part of this quote basically tells us that when we let go and stop trying to be in control of everything, we will naturally flow toward the Light, move toward unification with God and the worlds of spirit. I’m not sure that is always true, but it is true that we must let go of our egotistical desires in order to open ourselves to the truth of God. As Zen teachers sometimes say, you can’t fill a cup that is already full.

She then goes on to tell us that as we become more enlightened, we reach a point where we become aware that the universe is one simple texture. That terminology sounds misleading to me. Obviously a porcupine has a different “texture” than a bowl of whipped cream. But that isn’t what Ms Underhill is talking about. She is talking about something that is behind the material being, something at the root of everything that is the same in all things. We call that something spirit. St. Francis recognized this when he referred to all other life forms as his brothers and sisters. In essence, we may be wearing very different masks, but the reality behind the mask is very much the same in all of us.

The third—and probably most important—part of the quote gets into the idea of serving God. This is always a difficult subject because most of us have been taught since a very young age that we should not allow others to control us, so when we tell people who seek spiritual enlightenment that they must give themselves over to the will of God, they are often not happy with that idea. For that reason, I love the term ‘the freedom of the Will of God’ that Ms Underhill uses. Because the truth that the advance spiritual students learn is that the people in the material world who consider themselves free are anything but. They are enslaved by a social order, enslaved by an economic system that requires them to work at jobs they often don’t want and doing things they often don’t want to do because they have to make a living and because they have been taught that it is there divine duty to consume, consume, consume, and then consume. So the paradox of serving God is that those people who truly serve Him are the freest people in the world because God is not about force, but about teaching you what is for your own benefit and letting you decide if you want to do it.

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contributed by Harold Boulette