Lessons

Unconditional love can be present during every facet of our changing world. It is the only constant presence through life’s ups and downs.

Giving unconditional love means we show caring through others' good times and tribulations. Receiving unconditional love means we let down our barriers; allowing another to listen to us, and give us care.

People are not so perfectly evolved as to be able to give or receive unconditional love all the time--or else they would not be living on this planet! We are here on earth in bodies made up of physical, mental, and emotional aspects, powered by the unseen universal energy. It is with the highest cooperation and integration of these aspects that we most fully give love and receive love unconditionally. Every caring effort, every reception of caring, integrates our aspects into the most beautiful self-realization of the souls we truly are.

Appropriately Expressing Instead of Repressing

Repressed emotions build up heat (concentrated energy), and when felt as stress- manifest in mental and emotional disharmony, and physical disease. The overflow of stress can be dissipated through doing aerobic activities followed by meditation.

Emotional feelings can be expressed in various ways. The urge to express love physically can be through mating, or non-sensual touching, such as hugging. Appropriately expressing emotion brings up our feelings of harmony while fulfilling our natural urge to express ourselves. Other ways to express emotional energy are through creative activities such as poetry, art, song, dance and sports.

Loving feelings can also be expressed esoterically by feeling appreciation for all the surrounding beauty, and for the Creator of the beauteous harmony. And we can direct some of our lovingness into service within the community, giving us the feeling of being interconnected within the larger whole.

Benefits of Kindness

By acting kindly, we remain energized and free of tension; avoiding self-induced stress in both our mind and body. A smile uses less energy and fewer muscles, than does a frown!

Benefits of being kind:
1. Our mind stays tension-free;
2. Our body stays relaxed, but energized;
3. With reduced stress, our mental and bodily health stays at its optimum as long as possible;
4. Our body stays energized longer because the mental attitude of kindness
opens our mind and bodily pathways to perceiving the flow of our internal joyful
energy;
5. By our being kind, we infect others with the energy of kindness;
6. Our self-esteem improves because kindness with others allows us to look
more kindly at ourselves, too.

Lesson 37.

By our free will we choose how to react to others and circumstances. Acting for the highest good brings the most positive results.

The intent to be positive and to act positively in negative circumstances transforms. Positive acts in response to negativity change the negative to positive self-growth in us.

Our body remains relaxed and our mind stays free of tension and anxiety when we choose to act for the highest good. These mind and bodily signs are our personal indications that we are choosing the best course of action.

Consideration

Our points of view are formed from personal experience; our past experiences uniquely our own. We all react differently, even in the same circumstances.

We can keep our personal point of view while accepting that others' point of view is valid for them--by remembering that current perceptions and reactions are based on past input.

Politeness and consideration of others' ideas and feelings lends to mutually relaxed interaction, and additionally, to expansion of our own base of experience.

Loyalty

Loyalty is a quality that develops our consciousness. Loyalty leads us deep into a situation, through it, and out the other side--emerging as a more developed person.

Loyalty is an essential in friendship. Acquaintances become friends through mutual loyalty.

It is our duty to be loyal to those who depend on us: family, friends, our employer or employee.

Lesson 38.

A relationship grows when fed with the flowing waters of sharing, and the essential nutrient of loving.

Relationships are precious entities, sustained with mutual energy. Both people need to share and be receptive to the other's loving actions--together forming a circle with permeable boundaries that can expand infinitely.

We grow in our ability to love the more we share lovingly, and relationships give us the opportunity to develop our capacity to love fully.

Blanketing Love Summer-Weight

A thermal blanket covers us, but has air pockets that allow our bodies to breathe. We feel its warmth without feeling suffocated.

Sharing our love is at best a blanket of warm caringness. But, if we smother those we love with a blanket of control and expectation they will eventually need to rip off the cover, as everyone needs time and opportunities to breathe on their own, in their own way.

Instead, love that is offered in proportion to the needs of the moment has the flexibility to adapt and grow--remaining a useful blanket of comfort during all seasons of life.

Compassion for Ourselves while Developing Caring Love

We need to be compassionate with ourselves at our current stage of development. Right now is our starting place from which to go forward.

Adopting a positive outlook and in-look means accepting the moment as it is and knowing that the next moment can be better because of our positive attitude.

Developing Caring Love

By acting for others' highest good we develop caring love. We are actually benefiting ourselves by acting caringly because our mind is peaceful and our body feels energized.

To develop caring love:
1. Adopt a positive attitude with the task at hand. A positive mental attitude energizes our body for action.
2. Follow the 'golden rule'. Act in the best interest of the situation in the same way you would ideally want to be treated in a similar circumstance.

The partners must feel that they will bear with one another in future situations--no matter what the other is going through. The decision to commit comes at the point in time when we become detached enough to observe how the other is on a regular basis.

From this observation point, we need to ask ourselves if we could maintain our own peacefulness and caringness under these circumstances in a daily living situation. It is important to face this analysis, so that the relationship can--if seen to be unconditionally acceptable--be allowed to expand to the level of life mates.

If both partners can not fully accept each other unconditionally, it is time to back off into a less involved relationship. This is not the time to plunge ahead into a live-in situation in hopes of working through obstacles. Pain and discomfort result when obstacles are compounded by living together. The relationship becomes a head-to-head situation, because the two minds are trying to work out issues that are inherently part of each person's point of view. Whereas, unconditional acceptance from both, for each other, is the harmony of hearts cooperating for the highest common good.

Lesson 39.

When energies are lovingly exchanged, we feel connection and wholeness all around--that circle of lovingness, spiraling 'round and 'round, rising by the power of caringness; including more and more as a swirling wind uplifts and grows upon itself.

We choose, by the strength of our lovingness, the kind of wind that picks us up-- encircling, embracing, uplifting us for awhile, sitting us down upon a yet higher plateau of our ever-present harmoniously loving nature.

Giving is Receiving

How is giving receiving? As we extend our thoughts and actions caringly, we fade the boundaries of our self-centeredness. We become like a jar full of delicious candy, which gives more enjoyment full, than if it only contained one piece.

The more people that we include in our candy jar of sharing and caring, the fuller our awareness of happiness becomes, and the less we feel an emptiness in our lives. We receive as we give our time and energy caringly. We receive a sense of satisfaction and increased energy. An example: As electricity flows through a magnet the magnet becomes stronger. When our attitudes and actions are caring, we are using the flowing universal energy, which grows in us--expanding our consciousness till our actions are spontaneously loving.

Giving Ourselves up to Life

In the merging of the moment we give up our self-centeredness in favor of becoming consciously entwined in more.

We feel joyful and fulfilled when our self-boundaries blend into the weavings of others' lives. As interwoven threads in a tapestry, we form a picture, rich in color and detail, that we do not enjoy while lying as separate spools of thread in a sewing box.

Fear of not being accepted keeps us from reaching out to include others in our caringness.

Life experiences show us that we are interdependent--not totally independent. All of our comings and goings, and interactions with one another and the world, are the flow of events in our lives. As a baby in learning to walk, at first shows courage, stumbles, and falls into waiting arms--we feel more joyful when we courageously reach out and fall into the waiting arms of life. It feels joyful to move and experience beyond the boundaries of yesterday.

Lightness--Direct Proportion to the Light

During our daily care-taking duties we have the choice to radiate our energy a lot or a little. We radiate at various wattages, depending on how well we are acting on the guidance of our conscience. Our conscience lets us know what is right for us in each moment--it is our personal guidance system.

All the uplifting and cleansing programs and practices we use with our mind and body to regain and maintain peacefulness and easefulness are for the purpose of clearing debris that is lying between our everyday waking consciousness and our conscience. The cleaning practices allow our wattage to be naturally increased--as when a globe of light shines brighter after being dusted.

As we increase in our capacity to shine, we experience love more profoundly and abundantly.

If we can experience more love by shining at 150 watts, why stay at 40 watts?!

The process of going from dim to shining brightly, is done by caring and sharing to the best of our ability each moment. Every one of our loving acts opens our consciousness a little more, till we eventually feel connected and comfortable in lovingness. This state of lovingness is like feeling ourselves as a limitless self-effulgent sun--our energized love warming our own body and radiating upon all the creation through our caring actions.

Lesson 40.

As we gaze with love upon or think about our beloved, the natural beauty and harmony manifests as an energized vibrant spring in our body, coming from our core. A profuse lovingness warms our physical body, bringing to our mind a sense of wholeness, wellbeing, and awareness of our transcendental self.

In the depths of intimacy between loving souls we transcend our awareness of ourselves as just observers of nature's beauty, intelligence, and harmony.

We come to realize that our consciousness of love and connectedness is alive in us, whether or not we are in the physical presence of our beloved, and beloved relatives and friends. And in this parallel we know that our source of life--Love--is ever alive as a flood of intelligent vibrant energy welling up from deep within.

Designing and Blueprinting a Relationship

The blueprint for a relationship can look perfect on paper, but the adjustments needed in daily living call for ongoing revisions.

Communicating our needs and expectations must be conveyed during the designing phase of the relationship, before the first set of working drawings can be made.

Even though we are blueprinting a relationship, our highest personal goal of living the most conscious good we are aware of, moment to moment, must be maintained. All other projects and goals need to be supportive of our choice to live as our most conscious selves.

Lesson 41.

Lesson 42.

It is limited thinking that keeps our lives repetitive and boring. Expansive creative thinking makes use of our vitality. Vitality is a limitless source of energy available to us when we have positive attitudes and thoughts. As vital energy flows through us our mental barriers seem to melt away, allowing us to experience the joyfulness of our limitless soul. We come to know ourselves, our soul, as expanded joyfulness.

Our mind can be trained to serve as our useful tool for experiencing the limitlessness of our soul.

Some useful techniques for training our mind to serve us:
1. Meditation. We become aware that we are the observer of events as well as the initiator and experiencer: sitting quietly, we can observe the variety of thoughts running across the inner field of mind, the internal movie screen. Note that any event can take place in our mind, while our body remains calm and relaxed. From this we learn that we have free will to determine our physical actions.
2. Holding positive attitudes and thoughts. When a negative thought arises--using our creativity to find a positive resolve.
3. Taking in clean, healthful substances that nourish the body.
4. Maintaining cleanliness and orderliness of body and surroundings.
5. Practicing both a meditative and aerobic physical activity--an example would be the combination of hatha yoga and brisk walking.

When we become master of our mind (and the body's subsequent actions), our mind becomes our useful tool, promoting our joyful state of living--then we are experiencing the joyful nature of our soul.

Emotional Loving

Because emotions are variable, when we tie love to an emotion, we are making our love feelings variable. There are going to be times when our emotional love will be expressing, times it will be gone, and times when the same emotional energy will mutate to other forms of emotion, such as negativity and anger.

At the beginning of a romantic attraction our positive state of mind stimulates vitality in our body. We interpret this physically charged state as having fallen in love. We are feeling attachment and energized at this time, but it is not from an outside source or cause.

To maintain this awakened awareness of lovingness within us, we need to take a giant step in consciousness by understanding that the other person is not giving us the awareness--rather they have awakened our own dormant state of lovingness. The process of stepping from temporary emotional loving to that of feeling the Source of love, and manifesting this vital energy takes time.

The temporality of emotional love serves a higher purpose, though--it sparks us to look for its permanent source. When we realize the Source is within us already, we gain the power and control, by our willpower and positive thinking, to use lovingness at any time, in any situation. We can then manifest that great vitalized love energy in our attitudes and actions with our partner, family, friends, and the whole world.

Life

L etting I ntuition F ind E xpression

Life is an adventure in discovering who we are and our role in the creation. Living and growing from trial and error, we gain insight, wisdom, and depth of understanding. Our life travels lead us beyond preconceived horizons.

LIFE--letting intuition find expression, is allowing our curiosity to manifest, discovering what is going on in our environment and in us. It is growth from the inside out.

Intuition is the suspicion we carry inside us, that as we are beings of love and intelligence, we must have manifested from a Creator of even greater lovingness and intelligence.

Lesson 43.

What we can expect in a relationship is to have a mutual sharing of caring love. We should expect of ourselves, that we need to share our love in a caring manner. What we can not expect in a relationship is to determine how, and in what manner, our partner will share their love with us.

We are in charge of determining the method of carrying out our own actions. And, our partner is in charge of determining the method of carrying out their own actions.

When we are only in a relationship with ourselves, we determine our actions, and as long as we are acting for the best of each situation that we are in, the method of acting remains wholly with us.

When we have a partner, we need to take into consideration how our actions will impact our relationship. If we are acting for the highest good of the situation, we are acting as we should in our relationship--whether or not our partner accepts or rejects our ways and means.

Acting for the Highest Good

Acting for the highest good of the situation in the relationship allows our body to stay relaxed and allows us to retain our peace of mind.

Each person is the compilation and product of their past history. Along the way, we each learn by trial and error how to get our needs and desires fulfilled--it has been an individual path to this point in time for each of us. We cannot expect another person's means of expression and action to be identical to our own methods--they have gone through a different "school of life."

We can request and make our relationship needs and desires known to our partner, but the exact method our partner uses to show us their caringness is completely their determination, which will be based on the compilation of their life experiences.

In relationship or not, we cannot expect another person to give us happiness or any form of fulfillment. Our personal happiness is our state of being when we are thinking and acting in harmony and lovingly with the highest good of each situation, moment to moment to moment.

The expectation of getting happiness from a partner is a selfish attitude that precludes our personal happiness. When we act selfishly we act without regard for the highest good of the situation. Selfishness is isolation in action. Truly, no person is so independent on this planet that they can survive without using something that another has had a hand in providing.

The expectation that our partner will provide our personal happiness is never possible. The attitude and actions of selfishness--getting or taking from another for self gratification is contradictory to living for the highest good of the whole situation. Harmonizing our attitudes, thoughts and actions with the highest good, ongoingly, is really what produces our feelings of happiness, ongoingly.
 

Lesson 44.

Friendship. As in the word, a friend is like a ship that carries us, abides with us unfailingly, through the calm and rough seas of life.

There is no purer relationship than friendship. It is unconditional loyalty and love. Friendship is a bond of steadfastness and acceptance that allows us to be who we are, fully, without fear that love will be withdrawn.

Over a lifetime, it is the bond of friendship that allows us to explore our depths with non judgmental feedback and supportiveness.

Sometimes, the friendship we give is not returned--but we benefit in another way: The process of extending friendship expands our consciousness. While giving and in the afterglow, we feel a sense of connectedness.

Once we experience the connectedness we feel while giving caringly, we know that it is not just what we receive in life that makes us happy. It is mainly the connectedness that we feel when our own boundaries of self-centeredness break down through our lovingness, that we feel our internal sense of peace and happiness.

Loving Moment to Moment

Life on earth is a progression of moments--a progression of remembering who we are and for remembering that our mission is to love fully in each moment. Acting for the best interest of our friends is a way to love fully in many moments of our lives.

Lasting happiness, moment to moment, becomes our experience as we feel and express ourselves lovingly.

There is an incredible depth of experience in being fully aware in a single moment. Example:

Traveling along by train, when we glance straight out the window we see blurred images--the train is moving too quickly for us to focus on one object. But as the train slows down and stops we can see a scene in depth--a field, farmhouse, trees off on the distant horizon. The stillness of the stopped train allows us to focus in the depth that was not possible while the train was rapidly moving along.

In our life we can enjoy depth of view by focusing well on each of our activities. When we focus on each of our activities during the day, we get a lot done, feeling satisfied. Personal organization--daily planning--allows us the freedom of mind to be focused in the moment. Planning allows us to accomplish the most in the least amount of time. We also are freeing up time and energy spent in thinking about what we need to do next.

As the day progresses and we perform our tasks and interactions with caringness and lovingness, we are fulfilling our mission--we are becoming the depth of love possible in each moment.

In the moment, at this moment, caring with our friends is a way to fully express life's excellence.

Lesson 45.

The long-term purpose of marriage is to transcend the depths of our partner's body, mind, heart, soul--in doing so, reaching beyond the limitations of our own barriers and self-centered bondage--beyond our self-preoccupation.

Full humanness in marriage--communion of body, mind, heart, soul--is perfectly suited for opening us to our own full nature of unconditional love. In unconditional love we accept that what another is going through is what they need to go through at the moment and we support their choices for self-growth.

Every act in a marriage impacts the partner. If acts are with kindness and caring then each partner is nurtured. For nurturing--holding each other close and intimately--is of utmost importance, because while we are humans and in these physical bodies, the act of mating bonds and re-bonds; catapults our self-centeredness into self-expansiveness.

Is there any state of being more precious or fulfilling than a human marriage enjoying full communion of body, mind, heart and soul--searing through the core of one another into universal love and care for everyone else and all creation?

How Attachments Help or Hinder

Hindering attachments include: compulsions, obsessions, overindulgence. These hindrances to happiness format in outer actions: possessiveness in relationships; overeating; alcoholism; drug addiction; and other harmful addictions and consumptions.

Greed's presumption is that what is pleasing in this moment, if increased, will give even greater happiness in the future.

Greed--producing compulsive behavior--disrupts our natural flow. A gently meandering stream retains its qualities of crystal clarity, while a rushing torrent excites us momentarily. But, we could easily be swept under by uncontrolled torrents--never to enjoy crystal clarity again.

To transform greed's vices into unbroken harmony requires the mental understanding that when we act from our highest consciousness--thoughtfully, lovingly--we retain the happiness we were born with.

In Consuming We Contract
In Loving We Expand

We might think it is the opposite; that by consuming we are gaining and that by loving we are giving ourselves away.

If we use our consumptions to fortify ourselves, solely, we are reinforcing the false idea that we are separate from that which is outside our own body. We are contracting in consciousness, rather than expanding in consciousness.

When we use our personal gains as tools of sharing, by including others in our circle of caringness, we are effectively using our consumptions to expand our capacity of lovingness.

Lesson 46.

The vine as a tender shoot is protected under the mature leaves and vines surrounding it, and we are protected by the mature people around us.

The new vine receives its nourishment from sun, rain, and minerals of the earth. We receive our nourishment almost the same way, plus we have adults to guide and give us emotional nurturing and teaching in how to live in our new world.

One day the strong young vine shoots up through the massed tangle of mature vines above, asserting itself--hanging out awhile, blowing gently in the breeze till making contact with another young assertive vine. They touch and cling, wrap their growing selves around each other for strength and support, becoming a strongly intertwined unit.

Heading off in their own direction the entwined vines eventually become entwined in even more vines. The intertwining mass becoming inseparable, providing a sheltering cover for the new life emerging beneath. Vines becoming mature, strong, lustrous, retaining their own stem of identity, but living as integrated parts, useful parts of the whole garden of vines.

We begin independently, are nurtured, grow strong, assert our independence, then join forces with friends and mates, fortifying our efforts in reaching our goals. All the while we are personally growing in lovingness by cooperatively caring and sharing ourselves with each other.

Loving is What Counts

Lesson 47.

Loyalty is a quality that develops our consciousness. Loyalty leads us deep into a situation, through it, and out the other side--emerging as a more developed person.

Loyalty is an essential in friendship. Acquaintances become friends through mutual loyalty.

It is our duty to be loyal to those who depend on us: family, friends, our employer or employee.

Making Time, Taking Time

We feel a burst of energy to get the job done when we adopt a positive attitude toward what we put off doing. We can say to ourselves: "the quicker I get it done, the sooner I'll be through."

Energy is flowing through us all the time from the permanent source--our Creator-Sustainer. By our attitudes and will, we are choosing how much current to draw from the inexhaustible supply. When we really want a certain result, we make the time a