mandyjw

He can pretend to be blue then. You know, turquoise is just another shade of blue.

Ta DA!!! Captain Ahab is enlightened! He gets the white whale in the end!

Love is surrender. Surrender feels like a limit, when really it is ultimate freedom in disguise.

Why would a shepherd lay down his life for his sheep? Because he knows that the sheep are him. That's why Jesus said to eat his body and drink his blood. Non-duality. There's no job, there's no living, there's no earning, there's no sacrifice, there's no slaughter, there's no life, there's no death. @Preetom My white whale is enlightening other people. Yours is enlightening yourself. Same goddamn whale.

For sure. love is just giving yourself up to you, giving yourself up to others because they are you and accepting and being courageous enough to face what that means. Hopefully the world is conscious enough to not crucify Jesus this time.

@SerotoninluvBecause a true shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He doesn't have to give his literal life but he still has to give away his life at the same time.@Leo Gura You're already enlightened, you're accidentally already a Christ.

I live in a really rural area. I grew up here and our plans to move to a city coincided with the financial crash so we ended up staying. But to be honest I have always had this deep inexplicable connection to it, and never really wanted to leave until a few months ago. I thought that to be successful and have an engaging life that I needed to be by a city. As an adult we traveled more and I realized that I never fully understood how many people there are on the planet, and how very rural the place I grew up was. I found New York City fascinating but I could feel the energy of the place and immediately felt this strong drive to be someone, the be successful, you can feel the stress/energy in the air. Even in smaller cities, I would get disgusted by how materialistic they were, but at the same time I just FELT like I wanted that material success too. I would always breathe a huge sigh of relief when I got home. There's so many traps I never got caught up in, just because of where I live. There are such low standards for how people should dress, and for other areas of success. My husband and I were in the top 10% income without trying very hard. The house was so cheap to buy that we paid it off by age 30. The entire place is like a spiritual retreat all the time, you can go off into the woods or find a private spot on the water whenever you want and not see a soul. I was always able to appreciate the way that people live here, happy with their low standards and happy living in their ignorance. I was also able to appreciate the educated people from away who moved here for whatever reason. I was really lucky to be taken under the wing by several people from away when I was growing up. A few months ago I got really frustrated because I just started feeling like I was wasting my life here. I felt like I had finally done enough personal development that I didn't have to cling to my family and the place I grew up and that I could just leave. My son has autism and we weren't able to get him behavioral therapy. So I hatched a plan to leave and gave it everything I had and it got shot down. So that lead to me discovering the law of attraction and opening my mind to it for the first time. We got a behavioral therapist for my son, and there's no way I'd get one that trustworthy or great in any city. I go for a run with gorgeous views on the water in the winter and meet two cars the entire time. No traffic lights. No stress. I ended up reading a book by a clairvoyant guy who lived here and got really wealthy. Everyone thinks that he was a charlatan but I know from my own experiences and all the spiritual work I've done that he was enlightened and it was real. I hadn't even opened my mind up to such possibilities before. I found the old foundation of his house, would go there to meditate and I started having insights there. That lead to coming here and having an awakening a few weeks ago. Now I feel like I need to go other way. I shouldn't move to a city. More people should move here, or places like here. I know I'm probably closed minded to cities, and I still really want to travel and see the world. But there's something about this place and I credit my success with spirituality to it.

@Preetom No need to become a tree just yet, when you were born with opposable thumbs to climb them. @Leo Gura I think the highest love is sacrificing one's own peace for others. I guess I still believe in Jesus all along.

@Preetom The key to a good sandcastle. Build an awesome moat. Sand castle sticks around a lot longer that way. You have to be an architect, the architect of your life. Know your life purpose. Design your sand castle the be the best goddamn sand castle that's ever been built. That's self actualization.

@Preetom That's because the world according to the hardcore yogi in the cave is already perfect, already enlightened. Whereas if you are teaching, you see other people as not enlightened. Fuck. So either the yogi in a cave is a fiction of the mind, the same as God in Heaven, and enlightenment doesn't exist or it does and the teacher is not enlightened.

I like to think of it as a beach, God wants us to build sand castles because he knows the most fun we can ever have is watching the beautiful castle we built dissolve back into the ocean when the tide comes in.

One must awaken along with the world. Every enlightened master has to teach if he wants to fully awaken.

I've never lived in a town with more than 1000 people in it.

@zeroISinfinity Ok thanks, I'm working with that too right now. My loneliness IS a lack of self love and not feeling worthy. They are different ways of identifying the same disconnection. I'm preparing myself for eternal connection. I think maybe we should stop using the word prepare and stop worrying about the future and just be.

There's a really powerful collective energy that comes from having a crowd of people with one intention. That's the reason some people love going to concerts so much. It's easy to tap into energy from an awakened person and if you do it enough you get better at it. You can even do it through videos and recordings. It's a great tool. I'm guessing it's even more powerful in person.

Just wondering, do you also feel lonely because of that?

@jbram2002 The earth doesn't like to be scorched. It's fine with air.

wrong journal! sorry

Funny how two different people see the same movie and see themselves in the same character but in different ways. @jbram2002 just described spiral dynamics as "the color scale of self-righteousness"

@jbram2002 I was always concerned about the bus drivers at the school our kid attends. They are old, smell terrible, don't have many teeth and are extremely simple minded. They were the most striking change when I learned to truly see them. Since I didn't trust them with my kid, irony or karma meant that I had to sit in the lobby and talk with them everyday when I went to pick up my kid at the school. They truly and honestly love every one of those kids, and every one else they encounter. They will gossip and complain about people who are not around but when they interact with you, there's this absolute clear good intention and love in their eyes. I realized that was something I was not capable of, in the least. I was always interacting with people with judgement, with lots of reservations in the background. They were truly present in the moment. I still pick up my kid and the bus driver lets me go ahead of the bus and waves to me every single day with a big smile on his face and love in his eyes. And I wave to myself back in the same way.

@Nahm You mean we should try to sort out the mundane things from the spiritual/amazing ones?

@Nahm That's my ultimate dream, one I realized when I read that book, that I want to be just like him, traveling and helping people but never, EVER missing a single summer here.

The other thing about this place is not that nature is inescapable, it's that it is also a ghost town. The population peaked in the late 1800's. There are so many empty houses, abandoned things, and stuff falling apart. As an artist I really started to see the beauty in it and developed an attraction to abandoned houses. There was one a few years ago on the water down a dead end road that I'll never forget. It's a spectacularly beautiful and secluded spot. The whole thing was overtaken by wild roses, the field was left to grow up into wildflowers, lots of old apple trees around the place. We couldn't tell if the front door was black or if the house was just black inside with no door. We got closer and closer, and there was no door. Eventually we got the courage to go back and went inside the house, just barely because the floors were rotten. The have since burned the house, but something about feeling the energy of a place that was once something busy and beautiful and now in total decay and yet... still perfectly beautiful, made me think that "yeah, that's what life is really about."

@Andrewww Clairvoyant Reminiscences and Herbal Recipes @Preetom I'll send you the best real estate listings if you want. @Lister You are right about the downsides but the law of attraction works really quickly with people and relationships. It's really easy to avoid the gossip if you refuse to engage in it.

The are EXTREMELY closeminded and rednecky. But here's the unexpected part, I hated it all my life, and I was a hermit. As I started doing spirituality I realized that I couldn't stay withdrawn from people anymore. I really started to practice seeing myself in them. The more judgement I let go of, the more beautiful they got. I started really seeing the values from stage blue I was moving back into. The love for community, the love of place, the love for hard work that connects you with nature and other people. One of my biggest mentors when I was a kid was a Buddhist. She moved here from away and was the well educated and grew up very wealthy. Instead of having a job she was the most loving involved member of the community, she made an effort to know everyone and treat them with love, even if the community shunned them. She befriended and took care of the elderly and did hospice care and she was an artist and gave me lessons as a kid. I remember telling her that she was wrong about religion, I was a stage blue Christian kid in a stage blue Christian family. She didn't see us for being stage blue. She saw through us. And here she is still in my life 21 years later and we're talking about meditation and reiki together. There are other people popping up around the place too, mostly they are stage green but some beyond too. They come here for the same reason I can't leave. What if highly conscious people started becoming gravitated to a place like this? What would be the power in having a pocket of stage yellow, stage turquoise people in a rural enough place that their energy could not be watered down by the stress of a city? What if they created a community with the giving caring values of stage blue but without the prejudice and ignorance? What if they designed a place that incorporated nature instead of fighting it?