Your concept of spiritual power

cue

I'm looking for some help, or inspiration. I am in the process of searching for a spiritual power which I can access and learn to rely on in my everyday life. I know this is a personal journey but I would be really interested in what others have found which helped them, whether it is Jesus or just the unfolding of the seasons. Specifically, I am interested in the relationship people have with their own conception. How would you describe that power, if it can be described? What does it do for you? What do you do to access that power? What does that power want from you, if anything?

Gareth37

cue wrote: »

I'm looking for some help, or inspiration. I am in the process of searching for a spiritual power which I can access and learn to rely on in my everyday life. I know this is a personal journey but I would be really interested in what others have found which helped them, whether it is Jesus or just the unfolding of the seasons. Specifically, I am interested in the relationship people have with their own conception. How would you describe that power, if it can be described? What does it do for you? What do you do to access that power? What does that power want from you, if anything?

Pray to the Holy Spirit and ask God and Jesus to put the Holy Spirit into your mind, body and soul. Pray hard and go to church and eventually your prayers will be answered. I know mine were.

Nevyn

Gareth37 I will explain this to you only once.
It is ok to talk about what you believe and it how it effects you.
Do not instruct or tell others to follow your spiritual path.

If you had said

*I* Prayed to the Holy Spirit and ask God and Jesus to put the Holy Spirit into my mind, body and soul. *I* Prayed hard and went to church and eventually my prayers were answered.

That would be acceptable your post above is not.

the forum charter stated

No proselytising. Anyone trying to convert anyone to anything will be immediately banned.

Oryx

cue wrote: »

I'm looking for some help, or inspiration. I am in the process of searching for a spiritual power which I can access and learn to rely on in my everyday life.

The biggest lesson I learned was that the 'power' you seek is already there. It always has been. Learning to feel it is what made a change for me.

I know this is a personal journey

That is the nub of it. I can tell you every step of the path Im on, so could many others. No one path may make total sense to you. But you take small gems of information from each, and build your own understanding.

but I would be really interested in what others have found which helped them, whether it is Jesus or just the unfolding of the seasons.

Letting go of guilt was a big step, and by that I dont mean giving myself carte blanche to be horrible. It was about acceptance of who I am, warts and all. I can make mistakes, and still be a good person.

An essential part of finding peace and acceptance was learning to live for right now, not tomorrow, or yesterday. Its not so much about the change of seasons, but about looking out the window and appreciating whatever the weather is doing today, good or bad. Noticing things, instead of being inside your own head worrying about what youve got to do next. I think the old phrase is take time to smell the roses.

How would you describe that power, if it can be described?

The word power, as with the word love, carries so many misunderstood connotations. I tend to avoid it. And my understanding of who I am and the part I play here, does not involve power. It involves that word acceptance again. Acceptance of a larger plan than we see in this world. Acceptance that I am eternal, and what happens here are simply lessons for that eternal mind. It feels like serenity. Peace. Intense calm and being surrounded by love.

What does it do for you?

Believing that this life is part of a longer path, frees you from clinging to the things within it. Im less (though not totally non) materialistic. Im working on that, still. If you accept that all people come from the same eternal place and are essentially the same, it frees you from judgement and makes the biblical 'turning the other cheek' easier. Im far from saintly, but Im definitely calmer. I dont get het up about percieved 'wrongs' much any more. Im still physical with the auld feet of clay and all. And I have days when I am anything but spiritual. But I think thats allowed. Its about learning.

What do you do to access that power?

Its there, always, for me. In a single breath you go 'Im here' and you feel it. Its very calming.

What does that power want from you, if anything?

To pass on a greater understanding to me of why we are here. To show me that when all else is done and dusted, love (in the widest sense of the word) is all that remains. It is the one constant.

I realise I sound quite biblical. And Im not really like that in the flesh. But these are my deepest thoughts and understandings. Its hard explain them at all, or to put them out there without sounding a bit...well... intense.:D

hiorta

Cue, I'd agree with Oryx in that great explanation.

The fact that you seek for spiritual knowledge and understanding is enough to open the door.
Simply try to 'seek first the kingdom of heaven' in your life.
By this is not meant a religious searching, although it is not an obstacle, either. Simply try to become aware of your spiritual nature. Then try to live according to its understanding.
It will take time, as it generally does, but comes like the dawn - softly, slowly at first, but with increasing momentum.
Try to help any living creature that you can, where you can. Avoid cruelty of every kind - all life is precious.

Gradually, you will know you are on your path, although there will be times of doubt.
Finding your spiritual self is more of diminishing your ego side and again this has nothing to do with any religious practice.

Seeking spiritual knowledge is not at all like choosing a book or browsing supermarket shelves. It involves all of you - totally.

The following 'Dark Night of the Soul' experience is a likely one for you - eventually. It will happen when you've reached the right state for you and must be taken alone. I found it to be very accurate.


The Dark Night of the Soul

The ‘Dark night of the soul’ sounds threatening and appears a to-be-avoided-at-all-costs experience.
Yet many of the seekers now walking the road to higher consciousness will pass through the dark night. In fact, they may pass through several until they experience the profound joy of their true nature.

Seekers would actively encourage the dark night experience if only they fully understood it. To anyone presently immersed in the dark night however, suffering seems unending.

The dark night occurs after considerable advancement toward higher consciousness has been achieved. Indeed, the dark night usually occurs, almost like an initiation, before a seeker is admitted into higher consciousness. The dark night occurs to those who do not seek a relationship, but immersion or unity into the higher consciousness. While the term ‘dark night of the soul’ is used broadly, its general meaning — in the field of higher consciousness — is a lengthy and profound absence of light and hope. In the dark night you feel so absolutely, profoundly lost and alone.

You Can’t Fit In

The dark night usually develops this way:

You, as a genuine seeker, have gone through many significant phases as you progress toward higher consciousness. Your faith is strong. You have kept loyal companionship with fellow seekers and perhaps you have already found a special teacher. You’ve experienced indications of the reality of higher consciousness and yearn to be more deeply in communion with it. You see the principles of a higher power at work in your life. Yet, all in all, you find yourself somehow painfully on the outside. You feel caught somewhere between your old way of living, your old tendencies and associations and this nebulous, unreachable realm of higher consciousness.

You feel like an exile - in both places. You don’t belong in the old pastimes, the old empty or numbing way of life, yet you somehow can’t fit in or feel at home in the fellowship of those who talk naturally of the higher consciousness and its reality. They have experienced it - they are absorbed in it and by it. They are loving, giving people. But you are unable to live, with a full heart and mind, the way they do. They’re able to apply the principles of higher consciousness easily, yet it’s so hard for you. They have manifestations and proofs on a regular basis. You only reach out like a human mule after a receding carrot while pulling the weight of your old tendencies behind you.

You try to be ‘good’ and often you can’t, you try to be loving, but find at times that your heart is hard as stone. Sometimes your projects fall down around your ears. You keep struggling and still you don’t break through. You understand the path is one of joy and yet your life seems to have been barren for a month or two, perhaps longer. Where did that early joy and zest go?

Hanging On

Up to this particular time there was joy, there was delight. But now there is only a hanging on, a grim hanging on. You persist because you cannot conceive of going back to the former way of life. That is impossible now, like living in darkness.

You deeply want to have joy and fulfillment, easily manifest prosperity, but something’s not working. You don’t know what it is, but something’s awry, and your meditations have lost their lustre. At rare moments, you do experience brief moments of peace. Your agonizing mind and heart rest from their turbulence and even these fleeting times of calm are so deeply appreciated. Your light dance of life, which had gone on for some time, is now a heavy trudging in what seems a devastated and alien land.

Your fellow seekers look at you and show their concern. Their words of kindness are valued but you feel you’re somehow incapable of responding well. Your heart is numb. At these times your friends try to cheer you up. They invite you to dinner. You seem to perform fairly normally, despite the emptiness within. What else is there to do? You wonder if you have any right to be in their fellowship at all. You think of moving away, but where would you go? What good would diversion be?

A number of your friends in the fellowship of this great path know what you are going through for they have been through it themselves. They feel the main thing to do is encourage you to go on. They know if you keep it up and do not quit you will succeed. They know if you quit you will be a self-reject and will return to the old life, forever a stranger, never being at home with it or anywhere else. They recognize that your own higher self, out of love, is lifting you up into its embrace. They see you are being drawn into your dark night because your inner potential has great stature, your crusty, old ego requires you go through the dark night in order to be transformed.

You Feel Totally, Utterly Alone

Other seekers, for differing reasons, do not have to pass through the dark night. However, the dark night is your way.
Your night is a very difficult time. While others may one day envy you for the marvelous growth you experienced in such a short, intensified period, you will, because of the pain of your experience, always feel profound compassion for those whom you one day see going through a similar night.

Being caught between the old way of life and the new possibilities, your sense of alienation intensifies. Your sense of inadequacy and not knowing what next to do becomes as a gnawing constant. You feel you would do anything to get out of this state, yet it is only your ego which is keeping you in it. However, this insight is impossible to grasp whilst within it.

And you feel so completely alone, abandoned.

Sure, you have friends and you appreciate them, but you are keenly aware they are not capable of realizing the magnitude of what you are experiencing. Sometimes they seem clown-like, empty-headed, caught up in meaningless pursuits. They do not understand, you think, the extent of what you are suffering or how much you cry out and pray, deep into each midnight. You try their advice but it never touches the heart of the matter.

You begin to enter the dark night in earnest when you feel completely stranded. In the fullness of the dark night you don’t know where you are spiritually. You feel separated from God and man. You do not know where to turn. Your friends love you and wish you well but your condition does not improve.

The dark night is a very private matter, you prefer isolation. Surprisingly, you are generally able to function quite well despite inner suffering. Often your acquaintances never suspect that you are going through the dark night — they may not even know what it is. Only people close to you — especially friends along the path — can recognize your pain.

You feel like a hollow person doing the activities of life with no motivation except expediency. Your eyes seem deeper in your head. You are profoundly aware of the suffering of humanity and the cruelty of humankind. You feel that cruelty and negativity far outweigh love and constructive action.

You Enter Midnight

Alone, but not wishing to be, unable even to express yourself to others, you enter midnight and the greatest intensity of the dark night. Here you have finally come into the time of supreme solitude. In this precious time, which has no apparent prospects of love or happiness, you are clearly aware that nothing in the outer world has proven adequate to heal your condition. Nobody, not even your dearest friends and loved ones, can make you whole. Even if they have tried with all their love they can’t give you ease, or peace.

You view your books and consider all the benefit you have gained from these extremely wise vessels of truth. Yet not one, or one thought, can penetrate deep enough to where the affliction abides.

You examine your possessions, your material health and wealth. None of it has been able to help you. Nothing and no one, in the outer world has enabled you to come out of this dark night.

In your loneliness - in a seemingly random process - you next notice that none of your thoughts have proven adequate to your suffering. Not one - even repeated fifty thousand times - breaks the inner storm and lets in light. God and higher consciousness seem so far away that perhaps they were, in truth, unreal. Nothing, despite your protracted exposure of yourself, has done anything to even soften your agony. Nothing is efficacious. Nothing works. Nothing.

There is nowhere to turn. Nothing can be done. All the remedies considered have been tried. There is nothing to think, nothing to feel, nothing to do, nowhere to go. It seems you have to accept this defeat - or you can persist in struggling against it.
For awhile longer, you go about thinking, feeling, and trying other options that may occur to you. But you realize, deep in the midnight darkness of your soul that you have tried everything.

Peace Comes

Helpless, completely helpless, as well as so alone, you abide in this condition and accept your predicament. You accept that, except for a murmured prayer to a remote God, there is really nothing else left.

Suicide would be absurd and unthinkable, an act of arrogance and vanity. You have grown far beyond such primitive responses to your private agony. Nothing of help remains in this bleak helplessness. There is, unquestionably, nothing you can do.

You abide. You accept your state. How have you arrived in this place? Such insignificant musings and feelings aside, you wait. You realize that you may have to remain here forever, doing the regular day-to-day things, in this world of emptiness. There is Nothing -anywhere

Then, suddenly, it happens. A higher presence comes into you — sweetly, softly. You feel it filling you. Your mind is filled with mellow or bright light. Your heart, your still heart, is permeated with peace. This peace moves through your body like a cold spring of mountain water. It flows in your spine, your brain, and under your skin - everywhere.

Also, this presence, this comforter, moves like a breeze across your arid mind and numb heart. Then, or very soon, the fire of joy begins to burn. Here, abiding with nothing more to do, your ego drops away. Your ignorant, arrogant, fearful sense of self falls away from you. You stand in light — a new being, free, transformed.

The Ego Sense

Believe it or not, this is what the dark night is all about: transformation.
Your ego, your very limited sense of self, your inadequate complexities of ideas about who you are, has been dissolved.
Your ego was - you begin now to see - eclipsing higher consciousness and your true nature. Your old sense of self was inadequate to house your new hopes and proper state. Your suffering intensified because of a major misapprehension. You had become used to thinking of yourself as based on inputs from your previous experiences in life.

On the way through life, you gathered information and responses from the world which indicated to yourself what kind of person you were and are. These superficial units of related inputs became integrated in what is called the ego - your sense of self, the sense of who you are. As long as you allowed this inaccurate or distorted sense of who you are to dominate, you could not know or begin to find your true nature.

Your ego sense is so powerful - you invest it with so much of your thought and feeling - that your attitudes of life become based on the egocentric perspective. The ego gains a progressively greater foothold on your entire life because your basic attitudes about your existence and essential nature are strongly linked with ego.

Then, your ego sense, due to your suffering or your limitations in life, wants and tries, to have more and more power over circumstances and a more pleasant life. The ego sense often becomes motivated to seek higher consciousness and thus, greater ability to dominate.
Not always, but often, it is the ego sense which most eagerly pursues higher consciousness. It wants to be in charge; it wants to manipulate events and make life come out more to its satisfaction. But, as long as your ego dominates, it is on a collision course with your true nature and your higher consciousness. There’s going to be a showdown. There has to be confrontation sometime, if your higher consciousness is ever to emerge, if you are ever to know truly who you are and what your human capabilities are.

Furthermore — and this is extremely important, especially in understanding the dark night of the soul - your ego as it develops from childhood onward, has the conviction that it is the doer. Generally, your ego assumes that it chooses what your mind will think, and chooses what your heart will feel. It assumes that it selects the various actions and activities you are going to undertake. Your sense of self, being convinced it is the doer, feels it accomplishes anything and everything in your life. Do you see, then, how the dark night develops?
A false sense of self has been ignorantly and manipulatively standing in the way of enlightenment.


Additionally, until you are consolidated in higher consciousness, your ego can return and re-establish control if you allow it. Sometimes when you’re fatigued or when you have special, new openings in life, you become vulnerable to the re-enthronement of your ego, with its opinion that it is in charge.
It will again eclipse the higher consciousness until you recognize what has happened. Then you must courageously and consciously reaffirm your true nature and deal with the upstart.
Otherwise, another dark night phase will once more develop.

Attempts of the Ego

A person seeking higher consciousness is, in effect, and with intensity, seeking the transformation of his own ego. He is seeking to end the tyranny of the ego and abide in his true nature, instead of a false nature concocted through experiences and emotional inputs during the process of life. While it is true these inputs have a value in subjecting you to new experiences and so offer unique learning situations, they often give you a delusory sense of self. You are not your mistake. Even a murderer can change and become a new being.

Still, as you progress toward higher consciousness, your ego may not be humbling and daily transforming itself. You may, instead, have a highly developed ego which is sure that it is causing the events of higher consciousness to unfold bit by bit. Your ego, after all, can be very interested in the attributes of higher consciousness, in meditation and association with enlightened beings. Your ego feels gratification and satisfaction in moving on down the road toward higher consciousness.

Your ego may also have the opinion that, because of its grasp of matters, it will one day establish or - by its thought process and feelings - bring about enlightenment and awakening. It is convinced that it will achieve higher consciousness. Ironically, because by the time of the dark night, the ego is the main obstacle; it is the obstruction of the light of consciousness. It stands between you and your fulfillment. In fact, the length of your dark night is based on the truculence and cunning of your ego. It can fight a very lengthy battle if it fears it’s going to be destroyed or will have to give in to something so much greater than it knows itself to be.

Incredibly, your ego wants to be in on the act of enlightenment. Ego wants to bring about higher consciousness by its own dramatic means. Certainly, it doesn’t want to be granted fulfillment by a power outside of itself. Convinced that it is the doer, your ego holds on for dear life - until that event called the dark night of the soul, when your ego awakens to the profound fact it cannot cause or bring about higher consciousness.

Ego cannot, by its will or any other skills whatever, create the wholeness of heart which will end your deep suffering. In a sense your ego recognizes itself - in the dark night - to be the disease. It recognizes that its foothold on your mind and heart has, at an advanced stage on your path, proven a great numbing agent and a high obscuring wall against the light. Ego stands against the fulfillment of your faith and the realization of your profoundest yearnings. Finally your ego has found something it cannot do and in the dark night of the soul, it becomes totally convinced it is inadequate. It cannot deal with your suffering or the fulfillment of the heart’s yearning. Nothing it can do, or think, say, buy, or travel to, will in any way suffice.

Dawn of a New Life

Here in this dark night, the lifelong ego sense dies: impotent, having fulfilled its part and now weak and incompetent, it is dissolved - transmuted. From a higher sense now awakening within you, you slough off your false sense of self. You now know yourself to be a different person than you thought you were. Your ego was merely experiencing some of the attributes, some of the qualities, of your true nature, while at the same time obstructing others.

By passing successfully through the dark night, you enter the realms of higher consciousness. You’ve been cleansed of the most deep-rooted sickness: your ignorance of your true nature and your inadequate, often totally wrong opinion of who you are. You now cease your inner conflict and abide serenely in your true nature. The night is over. The dawn of a new life in higher consciousness transforms your bleak life of the past few months into one with a heavenly nature. You have been delivered of the intolerable bondage to ego.

From now on you will walk the earth seeing others afresh, living a new life, and abiding in your true nature. You have become a son or daughter of higher consciousness. Now your words and actions will be attuned with your true self. Now you express inspiration and comfort.

The dark night has passed. It is over.

Nevyn

The dark night has passed. It is over.

Until the next one

cue

Thank you very much for all the replies. They are very helpful for where I am at right now.:)