Wings to Fly

Wings to Fly

"Energy is real. It is real now and it has always been real as a part and parcel of our human condition that allows us to grow and change within our own personal energy field. One of the primary levels of learning for our Dual Soul is the lesson of learning what energy we are, what energy we are comfortable with, the energy that we are not comfortable with, and the choice of energy that we want around us in our daily lives. If we did not have a personal energy field that is held close to our heart and Soul, we would not be capable of growth and change on a dynamic level on a daily basis. The more comfortable we become with our own energy field, the more productive we will become as human beings in creating what we want to create in our physical lives." (Kathy Oddenino,April handout, 27)

My cousin invited me to take one of the ubiquitous quizzes shared on Facebook, this one about “What Shakespearean quote are you?” When you click the link a short questionnaire pops up and after you answer the questions, your quote is selected. My result was "What is in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet." A familiar portrait of the man we call Shakespeare, and one image of Juliet (the quote is one of hers) was included with the quiz result. (I had to make a joke about the portrait - my driver's license ID looks so different! :)Here's the rest of the result:
You are innocent, pensive and fascinated with names. You may be slightly rebellious, or fighting for a cause which is dear to you. Your quote is one of Juliet's lines!

Another cousin responded, Slightly rebellious? Too many stories we could tell. I had to laugh at this, and I thought of it again this morning as I was reading our handout from the last SP event. Kathy wrote about how we begin to live levels of change within ourselves as we learn to live the spiritual energy of our loving emotions. If that sounds complicated, it’s because we just haven’t thought about ourselves as “real as energy beings.” I know that we act out the energy of our loving emotions in many ways, such as the love we feel for our family, our spouses, people in need – and often the loving emotions that we set in place as children follow us throughout our life. This is interesting to think about. Kathy refers to her father’s love of baseball, and her parents’ love of dancing. I think of words, books, learning, and the way my parents are with people, how they love(d), their compassion. I often resisted living the energy of compassion, thus the rebellion! “It takes integrity, strength, and courage to support our positive beliefs system and to live it in our daily lifestyle.” (30)

Last night several of us got together and we talked about the value of knowledge, what learning means to us. Each personality, each person has his or her own way of expressing themselves, and the many levels of our thinking and emotions we reveal as we interact. Examples others gave prompted me to think about lessons my parents taught me, us, and how I appreciate these examples of love now. My mind, my level of thinking has expanded, because I no longer feel the compulsion to “rebel” against, to test love as a theory. I have grown into knowing that love is real as an energy. I did not realize before how elusive my definitions of thoughts, emotions, things were, because I did not yet know how to think of the reality of all of life and creation as energy and therefore not as “spiritual energy” and the infinite dynamic beauty of change. I understand better now why we have to grow as a mind before we feel “true love” as real, and as a conscious reality that we use as a daily, non-stop energy. Learning and the focus on “loving and feeding myself the food of spiritual wisdom” has shown me the wisdom of the Ethical Values as the foundation of our design as energy beings. As I gradually accept that “I am real only as energy ,” compassion and the sense of cooperation inside me overrides resistance, and cradles my fears as the love of a mother will a child, still firmly urging growth and sustenance. It’s fantastic.

The gentle guidance of a mother-love (which is the symbol of our Spirit, not the overriding “Father God” in the physical symbols and icons we have created) is what coaxes me into remembering how we are all created, as energy. What does it mean to use self-discipline to create equality, love, and truth in my thinking and in my physical life? It means to honor my father and mother, to honor life and the energy of creation as love. It means to “put away childish things.” It means to be born anew in the energy of love as thought form, without restriction, without the “hedonism” of self-centeredness that competition and fear support. Clarity replaces confusion in recognizable “forms,” as I listen and appreciate our humanity. What a gift it is to be alive and learning.

Integrity

"Even something as effortless as speaking simple sentences depends upon integrity of grammatical circuits within the brain." (BrainScapes,111)

Truth

Greetings,

I value my counseling sessions with Kathy as I explore my energy with her and how she opens my mind to new circles of energy within me. I would love to share with you how the circle of truth is expanding within my energy. Fear is alien to our intelligent design but if I do not understand my intelligent design I will think fear is normal. I came into this life living fear beliefs such as the fear of death, only one life, if I spoke my truth, I would be persecuted for my thinking, feeling of being bad just to name a few beliefs causing the energy of fear within my behavior which affected my work, my relationships, and my life.

Since studying Spiritual Philosophy, Kathy has worked diligently with me to change my energy of speaking untruth to living my truth. Thank you for being part of this journey as Kathy would share my experience of throwing her table over the railing and breaking the table and then my lying about the fact that I broke the table. This energy was very real within me but I have not always understood my behavior and why. Now I know that this energy was from a previous life or lives where I was persecuted for my religious beliefs and the memory was real to me today as it was in the previous lives where it was occurring. I have been working diligently to change my energy by speaking my truth and I asked Kathy if I still had threads of fear in speaking my truth. Her response was that I had changed my behavior at work in speaking my truth, which I feel in my behavior at work. Truth is what truly does set one free. My threads of fear are attached to speaking my truth as the teachings of spiritual philosophy for fear of persecution. It is in the doing that I change the energy of fear in to living my truth.

Today I have a dialogue going on with a respiratory therapist at work who I only see briefly throughout the week-end. This dialogue has been going on for maybe a month or two and it started with her asking about the bottle of Apollinaris that I was drinking at the time. She did go buy a case of the water and she and her husband love the water. The dialogue has progressed to my sharing my knowledge and Kathy's website with her which she read and found very interesting but stated that the seminars were to expensive. My reply was that the knowledge was priceless.

This past week-end Denish said that she had several questions that she wanted to ask me and that she would come back down to CT later in the night. This did not happen but I also was very conscious within my energy that when she said she had some questions for me, I felt a moment of panic (fear) which lasted very briefly but was real. I am excited that Denish has questions and I am looking forward to spending some time with her because she is giving me a gift of love for me to speak my truth of the knowledge that I have been studying. Plus she has a beautiful energy that I want to know at a deeper level.

I love how my energy knows itself and I am the only one who can change my energy to the energy that I want to be. It is as simple as saying to myself that from this moment forward, I am going to live my love, truth and equality. The key is that I have to put the change into action because it is only in the doing that the energy becomes real. Talking about my goals and not incorporating the energy into my behavior is revving my engine and going nowhere except stasis. I have had to become comfortable speaking my truth at work in order to expand to the next circle of speaking my truth.

We truly are a majestic design as I marvel at my energy and the changes that I am incorporating into my energy. Let us all be the best that we can be by living our ethical values as the fabric of our design. I loved reading the hand out from the seminar and one sentence I found as my truth is "When we are capable of changing our internal energy fields, we will have set change in motion." Kathy O, thank you for your determination to move me through my lesson of truth. My resistance was intense but your love and at times "tough love" kept nudging me to the next level. This is an eternal gift that affects my life now and will affect my energy in my next life. Friends, thank you for your patience and hearing the story of the table. Moving through this energy has not been easy for me at times and I know it was not easy for Kathy to have to use tough love but I am eternally grateful because of how I feel now. I am learning what it means to be a friend to self.Sending you bundles of loving energy.


"We must make a choice and continue to live our choice as we choose to live the loving neuronal energy patterns within our thinking mind in harmony with our loving emotions and infinite Spirit senses as our Intelligent Design."(Spirit Consciousness, pg 72)

A Pearl of Wisdom

A sentence I've heard came back to me as I was reading the recent handout from Kathy's seminar (The Soul: Infinity and Beyond), and thinking about kindness.

Someone who is spiritual doesn't let life get them down. They use experience as a tool of growth.

The illustration is of the art of stringing pearls, and the knots between them.

Sex and Ethical Values, Oh My!

Lately I have been wondering about the “sex is love” belief and its sister, the "sex is a sin" belief. They seem to be pervasive beliefs all over the globe and all over time, and they have probably done more to advance our negative perception our ourselves as humans than just about anything. So I was wondering how these beliefs have affected me and my life and how they relate to ethical values. These are the thoughts that ensued.

When we think about sex we are really thinking about our own spirit energy. Sexuality is a part of our spirituality. It seems that most people do not think of it this way, but our spirit is in the human body, and the human body must advance itself and recreate itself. So with sexuality the human race is able to perpetuate itself. Perpetuation is the very act of creativity. And creativity is the behavior of the spirit, although when creativity is truly spiritual it is imbued with all the ethical values of the Creative Spirit.

But as we have lived in fear throughout history, that creativity has not always been a spiritual act. It has not always been ethical. So the challenge is for man has always been to create with the ethical values.

Sexuality defines a manner of being creative. To take a creative seed, which is the human seed of the egg, and bring it together with the sperm and together to form new life in the physical body (not in a test tube) this is a creative act. It is the ultimate in creativity. It is a fractal pattern of what our Creator did to create the human species. The Creator took his own creative seed, which was his thought of Spirit, and created new spirit consciousness from it. And all of the Universe is a result of this vast thinking and of the commitment that the Creator had and always will have to the act of Creation. It is divine action, action of the Spirit, action of the ethical values of love, truth, perfection, equality.

But in our beginnings of fear, we created an institution of fear - religion - our way of pulling together the mental forces of those in fear and bringing it to a mass consciousness level. And one of the major tenets of religion is that sex is a sin. We might wonder how religion could take an act of ultimate creativity and spirituality and say that it is a sin. And yet this is what was done because religion reflects our fear thinking. And so we perceived that we were in sin to have sex because indeed we were in our fear thinking and so sex was not a loving thing and was not an act of creativity as much as it was an act of physical gratification, selfishness, harm, punishment, of abuse, domination, gender control, violence, and fear overall.

This is the story of us and sex if we look only at our past and at the acts of abomination that have pervaded our history. But just because this picture is in our past, it does not mean that this picture is the truest story of us, because when we begin to live our ethical values, we surely begin to understand sexuality and the act of having sex with another person as the creative, ethical act that it is. We can respect, value, appreciate and honor our sexuality because we can understand that it, like every other aspect of ourselves, is a part of our Creative Spirit seed of spirit consciousness.

So how do we get to this point of accepting our spirit energy and integrating ethical values into our behaviors, including sexual behaviors? Maybe the first step is to acknowledge that we live eternally and that we are still on our path of learning, and that we are greater, truly greater, than we have in our past perceived ourselves to be. This seems a simple enough thing to do -- it only means changing our thinking. It does not mean we must acquire a million dollars or climb Mount Everest or swing from the Empire State Building or win the lottery. All we have to do is change the way we think. Is there anything more fundamentally at our disposal than our thinking?

But our fears are in control of our thinking, and our fears do not want us to change. Our fears like being in control. They are the Napoleons, the fierce little dictators of our being. But truly they are impotent even as they have convinced us that we should surrender our power, our innate Creative Power of Thinking to the dictators of fear. The sex-is-love belief, the sex-is-a-sin belief, which are both intertwined, are such dictatorial fears. They have exercised power over us for millennia.

But we can make the conscious choice to regain our freedom of thought and shed the sex-is-a-sin belief and begin to perceive our sexuality through the perspective of ethics. We can challenge ourselves to ask how we are being kind to ourselves when we are having sexual behavior. How am I being kind and respectful of the other person? Am I using this act simply to gratify myself, or am I embarking on a journey of kindness or love and caring and appreciation of this other person? If we truly examine our intentions and our motivations, scrutinize them, we will see where we may be living vestiges of the beliefs and where we are living our loving behavior. We don't have to believe the voice of the ego, since truth is not the behavior of the ego. We can work with the creative energy of our spirit consciousness, which is inherent in each of us, to banish the fears that have held our intellect captive. And by doing so we can become more loving, more respectful of ourselves and our partners or partner.

Sex is not a sin. Surely our Creator does not judge his children as sinners. Sex and sexuality are the behavior of creativity and adventure. So we should love ourselves and love the expressions of love that we share. Sex is a physical act; love is an emotion. As we imbue our physical acts with the emotion of Divine Love, we become a master creator. We are learning. We can be proud of our lessons, and excited about our lessons, and committed to our lessons. We can share the joy of learning our lessons.

If we see success in these avenues, we will be the activation of the Creative Seed of spirit consciousness that brings good things to fruition. Sex is about bringing good things to fruition when it is coupled with the ethical values of the spirit. These values are within us at all times. If we seek them, feel them, know that they are ours, and share them, all good will result.

the download

Here is a thought...we have been talking about the ethical values and its relationship to us in our life in that it is meant to be lived. After all when you read all 33 ethical values, what is there not to like? So how about rather than the perspective of striving to live up to it or look up to it, how about letting the ethical values download into our mind and out through our behavior as we would a software application download into our computer.

I have spent some time giving some of the mainstream values a try. I have tried the Zen approach and the Catholic guidance to empty the mind and let it be. If you haven't noticed, they are one and the same by the way. I have tried the Christian guidance suggesting that we should just accept things as they are and that we are not good enough to ascend without intervention from an external savior...and then there is the new age approach that we can ascend into heavenly bliss if we let love in.

I think I have given a lot of techniques and modalities to life a good try...yet nothing about these modalities would have us believe that we can create true happiness for ourself through our mind alone. We can't be mind-full if we are encouraged to be mind-less. I look around and I see and hear a lot of angry and sad people. We know pretension does not work, and yet we go on with pretension.

Our humanity deserves better, we deserve to treat ourself better than to think that we are just a physical body whose only focus in life is survival before death.

I have been thinking about what it means to have an intellect and our responsibility to learn, understand, and live our love for ourself and others in our life, so that we may live the life we want to live. It seems easier to me to acknowledge that we do have a very physical focus with a physical intellectual mind as our reality. So that we don't have to live to false hopes of trying hard to live up to something we are not. Instead, how about thinking about how we could do the things we want to do in our life with our intellectually focused mind and use the ethical values as a checklist to help us guide our thinking process and our decision process?

Rather than try to ask ourself how we could be all of these things...how about defining what we want to do from the activities and focuses in our life and simply use the ethical values to see how many of them we can relate to our activities and what our goals in life are?

Now I have tried this and it has shifted my point of view, my perception and interpretation of my goals for the new year and what I want to do in my life into a different way of thinking, a different way of perceiving and interpreting what is possible that I can do right here, right now. Our mind then changes the way it sees these ethical values, not as something outside of itself to strive for or look up high above in the sky from which we are beneath to, but as a true ally in all things that we want to do, right now.

It becomes our unconditional friend to us rather than an outside finish line that we have to cross.

The ethical values is the portal to our mind that operates in our physical world to provide us all the abundance we want to create in our life. It gives our mind the maximum energy to power our thought from its birth of creation to fruition as a reality in our life. It energizes our thought to make it real. It is the portal to give our physical mind the sense of love. We can let it work through the portal of our physical mind in how we choose to see its value and relationship in our own personal responsibilities and goals in our daily living, and how we want to live our life, what do we want our accomplishments to be, how we want our life to be, and who we want to be in our life.

Maybe this is what it means to en-lighten the mind.

Pesay

Independence, Freedom, Personal Responsibility

As Kathy, Lucy, and I were talking on the way to the seminar on Sunday, the phrase “Give me liberty or give me death” came to my mind. When I said this, Kathy said something about even this showing the physical and the spiritual focus: liberty is a focus on energy and death is a focus on matter. “The soul is dual in every aspect,” I remembered. I first heard Kathy say this many years ago when I first began studying with her. Always, this phrase I heard echo within my mind ringing notes that told me “there is more for you to know in these words.” I heard different things each time, which added to my understanding, but always the echo came – there is more.

Independence, freedom, and personal responsibility are my next choice of ethical values to write about. When I think about “liberty” phrases throughout history run through my mind – the French Revolutionary cry, Patrick Henry’s famous phrase (as it is remembered anyway), “Lady Liberty” and Ellis Island. I think about why independence only comes with courage, and why personal responsibility is a quality of someone who lives the courage of their convictions – the convictions of life, of being alive. These are not grand ideas, except in the fact that figures throughout history have shown us what courage it takes to live nobly, with full conviction of the truth and doing no harm. They are noble ideas because they stand out so in the train of our collective behavior throughout time. When I look at my own life, and I am calm enough to seek counsel, entertain the tribes and parties of people I have been and known throughout my own eternal time, those energies that have gained nobility through knowledge of themselves as they changed stand out because so many more shuffle along in the shadows or the labors of their own making. When I think about the many people in my life who have influenced me (consciously, in my memory today), I smile especially with those whose presence has been a calm, steady light of life. I realize they are the ones with the nobility to know themselves as loving people, with a constant appreciation of the efforts and joys of being alive. There are people for whom their hands are beautiful tools with which they can create or fix anything, conjure anything from a material of their own choosing. Others never think of creating in this way. I admire these forms.

I know now that the joy in creating, anything, beginning with the birth of thoughts, ideas, is a sign of accepting personal responsibility as a creator with the energy of the universe intact and acknowledged. Independence is the joy of knowing the unity in one for all and all for one. Freedom is the sense of infinity, which is the description of us as chemical energy beings. Without borders, boundaries, rules, or restraints, no “right” or “wrong,” we are simply creators learning to recognize and use the guidance of our own creative energy, with its properties and qualities that are consistent with clearly defined Ethical Values.

My goodness, I have struggled with this knowing of myself in my life. This is not because I have not had very courageous role models and examples – in fact, it is because of them, and my learning of why they are good role models and examples, that I can appreciate the evolution of consciousness and the great teacher that experience is, by our own design.

I have struggled in my own little world as I held my struggles tight to my chest, though they are of course never invisible or without influences which ripple. Learning how to define the many ripples of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and experiences as energy fields and levels of evolution through infinite lifetimes, makes me feel the thrust of “give me liberty or give me death” in the energy of life that motivated its utterance. I sense embryos of energies I have lived – the cloths I have been wrapped in and have wrapped myself in, warming to the thought of being human, or of learning to know the hunger borne of emptiness; the films that come from rods and cones and filaments forming from liquid magic, making colors vividly and forever known; the translucence of light seen through skin as it forms, that gentle beat of hearts with the pulse of some universal music. And I see images such as I saw this morning as I lay in bed before awaking fully for the day: three little children, figures running down a hallway or tunnel of bright white, giggling, one with dark hair and a red ribbon through it, running fast and at the end turning then disappearing into the white without a wink. Such laughter, such reminders of what it means to me to be alive, visible and invisible.

I recognize how I have sought warmth, love in the physical boundaries of life – sometimes skin, sometimes food and drink, sometimes the thrill of consuming something else – buying something on impulse with the hunger that came with it whose satisfaction was disguised as freedom and power. I am slowly learning why this is essentially different from the energizing that naturally permeates my being when I smell the scent of something like the lilies I bought a week ago, and the smell of woodsmoke from fires crackling in fireplaces, warming rooms. Let it be, I hear inside and the hum continues. This is evolution at work! Living our freedom is living our freedom of expression at all times, I heard during the recent seminar. Next, the true freedom of expression is to know who we are as “originals,” not counterfeits, or “aliens,” or “copycats.” This is knowing the essential difference between creation and reproduction. There is a sign somewhere on the highway in Virginia which says “Antiques made daily.” Well, now I think of this in the context of we have to keep “being who we are” every moment of every day, with the wisdom of our ancient beginnings and our accumulated knowledge expanding that wisdom. Parents know this, some more distinctly than others. Not knowing the motivation of creation is saying, I can’t learn, I have to copy. The night before the seminar,I looked into the blue eyes of a beautiful little boy whose face was calm, innocent, and expectant. In them I could see the same tunnel of white, the rippling air, the giggling and disappearing. I could also see the questions that lingered like low-hanging fruit through every season.

As a child of parents, now grown, I feel the shaping force in creation which is as hot as molten iron and as gentle as a mother’s kiss. Feeling this force of Fall, the season this year, I know I am changing like the seasons. I have never felt this this deeply before. More than skin deep? The skin is its own universe. My eyes are opening and I am not disappearing but growing.

Check this out - "magic-eye" pictures, this time referring to Lady Liberty