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Word Gems exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
How To Sit Quietly
Spending time in a small quiet room is important; in fact, it's so important that it speaks to the primary reason why we came to planet Earth. It has to do with waking up and coming alive. The section below is reprinted from the “True Self” page. It’s an excerpt from a classic afterlife-testimony book, “Spirit Teachings.” Therein, Spirit Guides offer advice on what they consider to be the most important elements of successfully living life. The excerpt will speak for itself. However, I’d like to point out and emphasize one particular precept from the Guides: They said that, while some of the sensational phenomena surrounding psychic abilities -- bursts of light, floating tables, materialization of objects -- is necessary in terms of attracting the public’s attention to the evidence for the afterlife, the Guides want us to know that, as soon as possible, these externals should be put away in favor of learning to “go within” and accessing the soul’s ability to discern the will of God. This latter would be what we might call “spending time in a small quiet room.”
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William Stainton Moses, "Spirit Teachings," (1883); Moses channeled extensive teachings from advanced Spirit Guides covering many subjects. The wisdom received is impressive and most valuable. But, for our purposes here, it should be noted that the Guides strictly cautioned against becoming too enamored with physical phenomena - i.e., rappings, table liftings, levitations, receipt of apports, and the like -- but, instead, one should focus on the inner journey of the soul, "the spark struck off from God." See the following excerpt from "Spirit Teachings": "Beware of encouraging the promiscuous evolution of violent physical power [when you seek for a psychic-medium]. Such comes generally from the lower and more undeveloped; and its development is frequently attended by spirits for whose absence you should pray. In the encouragement, especially in newly-formed [psychic-medium] circles, of undue care for physical marvels is a great risk. "Such are necessary to the work, and we do not in any degree undervalue their importance to certain minds. We desire to bring home evidence to all; but we do not desire that any should rest in that material form of belief, in an external something which is of little service to any soul. We labour for something higher… Nor do we rest content even with showing man that beings external to himself can interfere in the order of his world. If that were all, he might be so much the worse for knowing it. These Guides are so adamant for us to experience the inner life, the true riches of the soul, that they fear we might be made “worse,” even by knowing of their existence; bedazzled and distracted by a messenger from heaven, diverting our attention from the real action within! "We have before us one sole aim … to demonstrate to man that he is immortal, by virtue of the possession of that soul which is a spark struck off from Deity itself. We wish … to show him the life that leads to progress, to point him to the future of development and growth… How can we know that we are beings with a divine heritage? Feel the flow of the Guides' argument. They say they have one “aim.” It is to inform us that we are “immortal,” that is, made in the image of God. By what demonstration? “by virtue” of the fact that we possess a divine “soul,” which is like a “spark," a particle of the divine essence, "struck off” from God. And how shall we assure ourselves of this divine possession? We will know that our essential life is divine and from God because it will reveal itself as a “life that leads to progress,” to a “future of development and growth.” In other words, we can know that we are immortal, fit to “live with the gods,” by our awesome potential to enlarge and by a commensurate innate desire to improve, to become, to achieve, to soar. Granted, the “false self” has dampened this success-mindedness with its fear, guilt, despair, and anger – but these merely cloak and overlay and do not represent our natural state. We are to “go within” and discover who we really are, the "made in the image" heritage from which we derive. Special note: compare this desire to achieve and improve with Jesus' teaching, "Embrace this god-life, really embrace it!" "If we use such [phenomenal] power at all it is because we find it necessary, not because we think it desirable, save always as a means to an end… Regard [the phenomenal] only as means of conviction, as so many proofs to your minds of actual intervention from the world of spirit with the world of matter. Look upon them as such only, and use them as the material foundation on which the spiritual temple may be built. Rest assured that they of themselves can teach you no more than that ... you must go on to further steps. "You must seek to know of the nature of the agency, of its source and intent. Surely you would desire to be assured that it is of God, beneficent and pure in origin and intent. Surely you would seek to know how much the visitors from beyond the grave can tell you of that universal dwelling-place of your race; how they can satisfy you of your own soul’s destiny, and of the means by which you may best fit yourself for the change which you call death. For if we be not as you, how is our experience fruitful to you? If we cannot tell you of your own immortality, what profits it that we prove to you never so conclusively that we ourselves exist? Such may be a curious fact; it can never be more… "When you can reach out beyond the phenomenal to the actual investigation of Truth for its own sake—when, in short, you can believe our pretensions—then we can open out to you a realm of which you are yet ignorant, and which has been far more fully revealed to earnest seekers in other lands than yours. To few only in your land have higher revealings of spiritual truth been vouchsafed. Even this means of communing by writing, which seems to you such an advance on the clumsy rapping out messages and such material means of communication is as nothing compared with the inner communing of spirit with spirit without the intervention of material signs… [we] encourage you to rise above the material to the spiritual plane. "Receptivity must precede higher development: but we yearn and pray for the time when you shall have shaken yourselves free from earthly trammels, and seek only after the higher revealings of Truth. To that end you must have singleness of purpose: you must have shaken yourselves free from human opinion, and have dissociated yourselves from the material plane, so far as an occupant of earth may do so." Editor's note: This is wonderful advice from the Spirit Guides. Even the "scientific evidence for the afterlife" might become a snare if sought with materialistic view. It is mere stepping-stone and "nothing compared" to the far more valuable intuitive realm, an "inner communing of spirit with spirit." Regard the "scientific evidence" only as means to initial conviction, and then move on to the primary substantive issues of the soul's destiny and one's life in God.
Rainer Maria Rilke: “A billion stars go spinning through the night, glittering above your head, but in you is the presence that will be when all the stars are dead… Think... of the world you carry within you… your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”
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