If Your Life Is A Story, How Do You Make Sure It Has A Happy Ending?

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WORTH READING – FROM OFF THE WEB!

There’s a reason stories resonate so strongly. They reflect real life in profound and mysterious ways. They teach us about ourselves. They teach us how to live. It’s in fantasy that we find ourselves, that we discover the meaning of our existence. Is it any surprise then that your life should actually be the greatest story of all?

In the grand sweeping epic that is your life, you’re the main character. Your story is an account of your progress as you gradually develop into the man or woman you were created to be. It’s about your struggles, your victories, your failures, your desires, your hopes and your dreams.

Like all tales, yours has a beginning and an end. And perhaps it’s the ending that concerns you most of all. Who will you have become when the last page is turned? Will you be a hero or a villain? Will you have lived a life worth living? Will your story have a happy ending, or will it be a tragedy?

It’s up to you.

You have the power to be whatever you want to be. Life isn’t just something that happens to you. You might be a character, subject to the mandates of your story. But you’re also one of your story’s authors. The choices you make shape and mold you as a person.

Of course, circumstances beyond your control will always, to some degree, dictate the course your life will take. But your story isn’t about that. It’s about who you are. Who you are is determined not by the things that happen to you, but by how you respond to them. You choose whether to react to conflict with anger or patience. You choose whether to react to fear with courage or cowardice.

You might be one of the lucky few whom fortune and fate have favored in abundance. Or, your life might be a roiling cloud of doom and gloom. But it’s how you react to the cards you’re dealt that will determine the outcome of your story.

If you’ve been blessed with good fortune, will you share it with others who are less fortunate, or will you squander it on yourself? If you’ve been downtrodden and forced to suffer for most of your life, will you allow that experience to serve as the crucible in which the impurities of untested human nature are burned away, making you wise, empathetic and caring beyond your years, or will you allow yourself to be consumed by jealousy, bitterness and hate?

Your choices will determine whether you were the hero or the villain. Your choices will determine whether or not you lived a worthy life. Your choices will determine whether your story ends in happiness or tragedy.

In the end, there’s only one person responsible for the kind of ending your life’s story will assume: you. So make it a good one.

What Is “Awakening”?

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Worth Reading Off the Web – The author, Scott Kiloby is an international speaker on the subject of freedom through non-dual realization, a Certified Addiction Treatment Counselor/Registered Addiction Specialist.

EveningofLight

EveningofLight

Awakening is a living, breathing, constantly unfolding moment-by-moment adventure.

The Head-Awakening

What gets passed off as awakening is a certain shifting that happens, where one sees that they are not the concepts in their heads. In awareness-styled awakenings (there are different awakenings that look and feel differently in different traditions – awareness-styled is just one), the shift usually involves some sort of non-conceptual realization of awareness, being, presence or no self that seems to be an end point at first. It can be a sudden or gradual shifting, but people generally report this kind of change in perception. Things are seen to come and go within awareness inseparably or things seem to come and go but there is no self to be found.

Because this opening reveals a profound seeing that separate things, including a separate self, are not really there, it is easy to see why the proclamation of “I’m done”. In many ways, one is done – done with seeking as a self in time and in thought. But this is only a head-awakening. Even in a head-awakening, it can feel as if the body is open and transparent at first. But given time, areas of the body that are dense with the feeling of separation start to become conscious.

There are at least two other big areas to be navigated after a head-awakening.

1. The baggage of mental concepts around awakening itself.

2. The body.

Let’s start with the mental concepts. In my experience, there is a desire in many people to grasp mentally what has been realized. There are elaborate conceptual frameworks devised to “make sense” of awakening, just as this writing is a conceptual framework. There’s nothing wrong with having a conceptual framework, until it becomes the new mental prison. Just as there is a rush to a head-awakening, there is often a rush to neatly place the realization into certain conceptual boxes. There are many boxes. All the buzzwords you hear in awakening circles can be imprisoning boxes, including:

• “we create our own reality”
• “everything is just a concept”
• “nothing is true”
• “life is a divine mystery”
• “oneness is the ultimate truth”
• “no self”
• “awareness”
• “I AM”
• “all there is, is THIS”
• “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao”
• “The Middle Way”

People can spend years after a head awakening endlessly identifying with all sorts of mental stuff around the awakening. This is the time when people desire to be teachers. I went through it. It’s really very innocent and comes from good intentions. But what gets passed off is only what a teacher has realized, nothing more. And many times what gets passed off are ideas about static, fixed things that are taken to be objectively true and real. Spiritual experiences and realizations get concretized into doctrine or dogma or “this is the only way” type thinking.

Eventually, what becomes important is the living of the realization itself, rather than the conceptualizing and understanding of it.

Conceptualizing goes on, but things are held a lot more lightly and non-seriously. The Living Inquiries were born out of my experience of being first immersed in certain boxes and then turning attention towards the moment-by-moment living and seeing.

The Body

The body has its own say in the matter. There are other chakras – not just the crown and mind’s eye. The heart can feel heavy, dense and closed for years after a head awakening. So can the root chakra, the sacral, the stomach and the throat. The result is often an arising of addictions, anxieties, self-limiting thoughts, grasping after understanding, issues with money, depression, big ego trips, issues with control and jealousy. I found this out by proclaiming that I was done too early. My issue was the continuation of certain addictions long after the head awakening. In my conversations with other teachers, they reported similar things. It takes a while, sometimes years, after a head awakening to fully see the darker, denser aspects of the body that remain closed. This is why becoming a teacher right after a head awakening is not a great idea. It’s like the blind leading the blind.

Adyashanti speaks eloquently about the post-awakening dilemma. Somewhere between 3 to 7 years after an awakening, the other shoe drops. Everything that was held in the mind and body and that was not seen through in that awakening will come up and bite you. It’s like it all wants to be seen and released. And it can be painful. You can even wonder why you started the awakening process to begin with. The body awakening doesn’t happen through seeking. It happens just from remaining open and working with those energies in skillful ways.

Try working with a therapist on this “Shadow” self. It is the doorway to greater and greater levels of evolution and freedom.

Article Source: http://kiloby.com/premature-claims-to-awakening/