Eternal Solitude I, ~CordieB

In the course of one’s lifetime

what will one learn?

will one learn of hatred?

what bridges will one burn?

~~~

In the course of one’s lifetime

in the blink of an eye

will one find the answers

to the who, what and why?

~~~

In the course of one’s lifetime

what will one sing?

will one sing a love song?

what gifts will one bring?

~~~

In the course of one’s lifetime

what crafts will one master?

what gods will one serve…

in the mists of disaster?

~~~

In the course of one’s lifetime

What will one fulfill

Will one’s cup flow over

what bridges will one build?

~~~

In the course of one’s lifetime

What heights will one climb?

How far  will one fall?

In the depths of sublime?

~~~

In the course of a lifetime

what will one foresee

when one takes his last breath…

what will one’s thoughts be?

~CordieB.

———————————————————————-

Opening lines from Gregory David Robert’s Shantaram:

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when its all you have got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving,can become the story of your life.”

Quote for the Day:  You can be so heavenly bound until you are no earthly good – Dr. Oscar Lane

“In the Course of One’s Life Time ” inspired by  Simply Snicker’s Poetry Prompt.  This weeks words were, climb, course, and craft.  Let us keep Linda and the Midwest, USA, in our prayers, as she and her community have endured natural disasters due to flooding this week.

Indecision by *moonmomma

Indecisiveness

Indecisiveness takes its toll
On the drollness and lightness of our soul
Made up minds lift the dread filled weight
lingering heavily on our fate

Indecision stunts our growth
though deciding we may loath
one must move through inconclusive’s brace
holding mind, body and spirit stuck in place…

till decisions can be made
life continues, low-keyed; afraid
knowing in the back of mind
choices must be made in time

Preventing  souls from moving free
intensifying fears of what may or may not be
lest we move from fear to flight
we may never see the light

Though decisions may be wrong
lack of choice only prolongs
mending of spirit and self torn apart
when in dire doubt, follow your heart

Written by CordieB.

I’v been reading "The Book of Secrets" by Deepak Chopra for the past week. I’ve noticed that many of my blog friends have been experiencing spiritual and mental breakdowns so to speak, and there has been an increased discussion of duality, nondualism, oneness, quantum physics, karma, and the like.  Therefore, I thought I’d share a bit of my readings with you.   

Today, II will be sharing Chopra’s writing on Evil.  Just a little food for thought. . . Your comments are most welcomed!

"The most grievous failure of spirituality occurs in the face of evil.   idealistic and loving people who never harm another person finds themselves drawn into the mailstrom of war.  Faiths that preach the existence of one God mount campaigns to kill infidels.  Religions of love devolve into partisan hatred of heretics and those who threaten the faith.  Even if you think you hold the ultimate truth in your hands, there is no guarantee that you will escape from evil.  More violence has occurred in the name of religion than for any other reason.  Hence the bitter aphorism:  God handed down the truth, and the Devil said, "Let me organize it." 

There is also the more subtle failure of passivity–standing by and letting evil have its way.  Perhaps this reflects a secret belief that evil is ultimately more powerful than good.  One of the most spiritual figures in the twentieth century was asked how England should handle the threat of Nazism.  He replied:

I want to fight Nazism without arms.  I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity.  you will invite Herr Hitler and Signore Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possesions.  Let them take of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings.  You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your minds. 

The author of this passage was Mathama Gandhi, and needless to say, his "open letter" to the British was greeted with shock and outrage.  Yet, Gandhi was being true to the principal of Ahimsa, or nonviolence.  He successfuly used passive nonviolence to persuade the British to grant freedom to India, so by refusing to go to war against Hitler–a stand he took throughout World War II–Gandhi was consistent in his spiritual beliefs.  Would Ahimasa really have worked to persuade Hitler, a man who declared that "war is the father of all things?"  The Catholic Church marks as one of its darkest eras the years when it permitted millions of Jews to be killed under Nazism, to the extent that Italian Jews were rounded up within sight of the Vatican windows.

So lets acknowledge that spirituality has already failed on countless occasions to deal with evil.  Turning away from teachings that have only allowed evil to propagate and spread, the one reality opens a new way, because if there is only one reality, evil has no special power and no separate existence.  There is no cosmic Satan to rival God, and even the war between good and evil is only an illusion born of duality.  Ultimately, both good an evil are forms that consciousness can choose to take.  In that sense, evil is no different from good.  There similarity goes back to to the source.  Two babies born on the same day may grow up to commit evil on one hand and good on the other, but as babies it cannot be true that one was created evil.  The potential for right and wrong exists in their consciousness, and as the babies grow up, their consciousness will be shaped by many forces.  These forces are so complex that labeling someone as purely evil makes no sense.  Let me list the forces that shape every newborn child:

• Parental guidance or the lack of it.
• The presense of love or its absense.
• The contex of the whole family.
• Peer pressrue at school and social pressure throughout life.
• Personal tendencies and reactions.
• Indoctrinated beliefs and religious teachings.
• Karma
• The tid of history.
• Role models.
• Collective consciousness.
• The appeal of myths, heroes, and ideals.

Every force listed above is influencing your choices and invisibly pushing you into action.  Because reality is tangled up in all these influences, so is evil.  It takes all these forces for evil and good to emerge.  If your childhood hero was Stalin, you won’t perceive the world as you would if your hero was Joan of Arc.  If you are a Protestant, your life would not have been the same under the persecution of the Huguenots as it is in an American suburb today.  Think of a person as a building with hundreds of electrical lines feeding countless messages into it, powering a host of different projects.  Looking at the building, you see it as one thing, a single object standing there.  But its inner life depends on hundreds of signals coming into it. 

So does yours. 

In and of itself, none of the forces feeding into us is evil.  But under this menu of influences, each person makes choices.  I believe that any evil inclination comes down to a choice made in consciousness.  And those seemed to be good when they were made.  This is the central paradox behind evil actions, because with rare exceptions, people who perform evil can trace their motives back to decisions that were the best they could make given the situation.  Children who suffer abuse, for example, frequently wind up as adults abusing their own children.  You would think that they’d be the last ones to resort to family violence, having been its victim.  But in their minds, other, nonviolent, options aren’t available.  The context of abuse, acting on their minds since childhod, is too powerful and overshadows freedom of choice. 

People in different states of awareness won’t share the same difinition of good and bad.  A prime example is the social enslavement of women around the world, which seems totally wrong in the modern world but is fed in may countries by tradition, releigious sanction, social value, and family practices going back for centuries.  Until very recently, even the victims of those forces would see the role of the helpless, obedient, clildlike woman as "good." 

Evil depends completely on one’s level of consciousness. 

You can bring this message home by considering seven different definitions of evil.  Which one do you instinctively agree with?

1. The worst evil is to hurt someone physically or endanger their survival.
2. The worst evil is to enslave people economically, depriving them of any chance to succeed and prosper.
3. The worst evil is to destroy peace and bring about disorder.
4. The worst evil is to entrap people’s minds.
5. The worst evil is to destroy beauty, creativity, and the freedom to explore.
6. The worst evil is often difficult to tell from good, since all of creations is relative.
7. There is no evil, only shifting patterns in consciosness in an eternal dance. "

Excerpted from The Book of Secrets, Deepak Chopra.

Photo entitled "Dream" by Erathic Eric   – Shared under a Creative Commons License, Some Rights Reserved.

In the darkest middle of the night
when you lie still in your bed
What thoughts come in your mind
What floats inside your head?

In the wee hours of the morning…
when your universe is still
What emotions cross your path
Tell me what is it you feel?

As the moon smiles upon your face
through the window of your heart
What stories do your soul retrace
Do you play the leading part?

Have you ever had a dream that lasts
through nights that never ends?
The dream that reinvents the past;
Rearranging fate as destiny ascends?

Have you ever dreamth of loveones gone
As if they were still with us alive?
The vivid dream of life forgone unknown
Where all remain; and all survive?

Do the departed speak to you in dreams?
Do they laugh with you in love and rejoyce?
Or do they caution you of life yet unseen;
A distant warning to change life’s course

Have you ever dreamth alternate versions
of what your life would be . . .
if you could rewrite; redraft the reversion
of your choices that have shaped all destiny?

As the stars look down upon your being
Through the window of your soul
What motion picture are the stars seeing;
Do you play the leading role?

Do you hold the key to your dreams?
Perhaps misplaced the key without the will to look?
Have you gave the key away it seems?
A supporting character in another’s dream book?

Whatever floats into your dreams or conscious
When your universe is still
Is the key to finding the missing key
Observe closely; it shall be revealed.

~By CordieB.

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One shot to your heart without breaking your skin
No one has the power to hurt you like your kin
Kept it inside, didn’t tell no one else
Didn’t even wanna admit it to yourself
And now your chest burns and your back aches
From 15 years of holding the pain
And now you only have yourself to blame
If you continue to live this way

[Chorus:]
Get it together
You wanna heal your body?
Get it together
You have to heal your heart
Whatsoever you sow you will reap
Get it together

You can fly fly

Dark future ahead of me
That’s what they said
I’d be starving if I ate all the lies they fed
Cause I’ve been redeemed from your anguish and pain
A miracle child I’m floating on a cloud
Cause the words that come from your mouth
You’re the first to hear
Speak words of beauty and you will be there
No matter what anybody says
What matters most is what you think of yourself

[Chorus]

The choice is yours
No matter what it is
To choose life is to choose to forgive
You don’t have to try
or hurt him and break his pride
Just shake that weight off
And you’ll be ready to fly

One shot to your heart without breaking your skin
No one has the power to hurt you like your friends
Thought it would never change but as time moved on
That ugly duckling grew up to be a swan
And now your chest burns and your back aches
Because now the years are showing up on your face
But you’ll never be happy
And you’ll never be whole
Until you see the beauty in growing old
[Chorus]
[chorus]
you can fly fly fly fly…
you can live or you can die
you know that life is a choice you make
you can give or you can take

you can fly fly fly fly
you can fly fly fly fly…

“I don’t know the ins and outs of this case any better than you do, frankly, but I can only imagine that Deborah Jeane Palfrey felt very much alone. That’s the part that gets to me. The government against her. The media shoving cameras in her face. All those men who once courted her services desperately scuttling away. She did, of course, have her mother. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle last year, “‘All I can say is I love her dearly and everything is going to work out OK,’ said Palfrey’s mother, Blanche Palfrey, who, reached at her home in Florida, complained about the stress the whole thing has placed on her already bad heart. ‘I’ll put my trust in God.’” – Sarah Hepola“

Remember, whatever is going on in life, it will BE alright.  We as woman need to stop judging each other and start being there for each other.  There is nothing so comforting sometimes than the unconditional love from one of your girl friends or even from a woman who is a stranger.  A peaceful and reassuring reminder to someone’s whose spirit seems lost that everything will be alright is so easy to give, yet we as humans often miss the opportunity.  Because, when all is said is done; it will be alright if we live through it. And, sometimes that gentle reminder is what keeps us going.  Unfortunately, Ms. Palfrey either chose to move on to another realm or someone made the choice for her.  I simply pray that she has found peace in heart heart ; light in her travels, and love in her spirit.  I also pray that God will send an extra dose of comfort to Palfrey’s dear mother.   I wish the same for all of you – from the bottom of my heart.

Peace, Light and Love, CordieB.

Little Girls – Patti Labelle . . . Little Girls sleep at night, safe inside our dreams, is it a scheme? we think we grow up into queens. . .
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Almaz – Randy Crawford – “Almaz, pure an simple born in a world where love survives . . . so young and tender, but will life bend her?  I look around she’s every where. ”
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Street Life – Randy Crawford – “Street life, there’s a million parts to play; Street life, until you play your life away;  . . . .Street life, but you better not get old; Street life, or you’re gonna feel the cold.”
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I have been sought for throughout the years; often the culprit of mass confusion.

I am always in your reach; always in your grasp- if only you awaken

I’m a free gift, hardly every opened fully; always yours for the taking.

Some find me in humbleness; I’m theirs to obtain

But if one is not careful, I will be lost in their minds once again;

The world makes it hard to clasp unto me;

To live without conditions; to simply be.

To keep me you must be able to master ones self

So few humans achieve me completely, in spite of themselves

They live each day dreaming of a life of love with me

In an imperfect world perfected by eternity

They strive to achieve me with their materials and money

They fight wars to sustain such, in the world of milk and honey

Young women leave fathers to gain me, only to their dismay

I’m lost to their passion of simply moving away

But so soon they will loose me to another, be it husband or lover

Or the career they grow to distain, it’s usually one thing or another

Men foolishly leave their wives in search of my light

Saddened only to find more of the same in hindsight

For I’m a true illusion if one can’t shed all the layers

Of needs, ambitions, false securities and prayers

Of things that are held and things that are seen

Things that surround you – if only in dreams

The things you desire most will cost you my price

Although they seem innocent, and …all comfy and nice

Those things that you work for a slave to encompass

For which the newness or beauty seems never to last

You dare to dream of a place far away from the hustle and bustle

To a place that’s so siren and quiet; no one to bother or trouble

But you find with your tranquility there’s another price to pay

Like the luxury of running water or even a neighbor to stop by some days

For every choice you make, you might imagine you’ve lost me again

But it’s the ability to choose that really makes me your friend.

Though you fight for me; strive for me; but ‘less you die for me . . .

I am the precious gift of free will based on your limits, unlimits, and reality

You may cry many nights, fight for your rights; stand and die for your kingdom

Sadly, that unremitting need to hold tight to earthly possessions will always cost you- (Click below for the riddle’s answer)

YOUR FREEDOM

By CordieB.

Anything or anyone you feel you must have and can’t live without , you are a slave to in some way. ~CordieB.

On Freedom I heard them say . . . .

 
Freedom is the right to live as you wish.

If you wish to free yourself from enslavement, you must choose freedom and the responsibility it entails.
There’s a price for every freedom; something to be given up for every liberty.
It’s up to you to weigh the price you must pay for each of your freedoms. And everything you want has a price.
Freedom is the opportunity to make decisions. It’s the capacity to take a hand in your own development.
Freedom is the right to choose.
It’s the right to create for yourself the alternatives of choice.

No one is free who is not master of himself.

You are free to do whatever you like; You need only face the consequences of your actions.

~The Daily Guru

clouds of emotions cross her heart

with droplets of promises, flakes of hope

an old desire opens its dreary eyes

from the underground, an unknown slope..

when did this seed, this neglected desire

with an innocent face, wearing bawdry attire

enter her soul, she can hardly remember

but her heart has always fallen in its mire..

an earth plowed by corpses of traditions

sowed with rotten seeds of ambitions,

her soul has eroded, her heart is barren

never in peace with its own definitions..

‘O father, why didn’t you let me be

with my own dreams, and my tiny sea

why did you always teach me to believe

in a restless world I could never see..

I could’ve been me, with a name of my own

clear and simple, my mind would’ve grown

but you broke my knees, and pushed me to run

Ah! had you just loved me, I sure would’ve won..’

and she, her heart and the old desire

now too tired to dream or aspire

walk alone with a crowd of compromise

so used to darkness, so scared of a sunrise..

heart is always in war with the reason

and she doesn’t know to whom she must listen

whether heart triumphs or her reasons win

always her soul feels guilty of a sin..

so her lips move, and whisper a prayer

an intense urge to be free from dispair

‘I want to be strong, I want to be brave

I want to be in peace, I want to be aware..’

Scribbled by Rahul

I heard this statement on the Steve Harvey Morning show this morning, “life’s disappointments always mean one of two things:  it isn’t our calling, or we are not faithful.” 

I took the time to ponder this statement.  What exactly does that mean?  Just another buzz statement.  After thinking about it and my own disappointments, I can see the factual and spiritual aspects of this statement. 

Often, when we do not receive what we want in life, for instance, a promotion, it’s because we were unfaithful to that position.  We did not do all that we could do to ensure that we were the best possible candidate.  We did not devote the time and energy to be the best possible person for that position.  This can also hold true with any other aspect in life, such as relationships, marriages, child rearing, saving money, to name only a few.  So often when we feel disappointed in how our life is going or how someone is treating us, it is largely due to our not putting faith, support, and endurance in what we claim to want so much.

Then there are those times, when we become disappointed because something does not happen the way we would prefer it to, and we’ve put all our faith, endurance, support, and hard work into it.   We ask God, “why did this happen to me?”   Why did I lose this job, this house, this marriage. We search for the answers, move from the circumstance and days go on.  Soon we often look back and realize that we are in a better place, have a more gratifying job, in a more fulfilling relationship, etc.  In these instances, we look back and thank God for bringing us through our distress and not leaving us where we thought we wanted to be.  In these cases, the situation was simply not our calling.

In life, we should practice to let His Will be Done.  If we learn to depend on God for guidance and lean not to our own understanding, it would make life so much simpler and less  stressful.   Usually, we know in our heart what God would want for us.  And, we know in our heart, what God would have us do.  In times of confusion, pray for God’s guidance  and strive not to lean on your own understanding. 

We need to practice to look at disappointments as perhaps not being our calling and take a hard look at whether we are really faithful in that which we want so very much.

There is a blessing in every lesson.  Peace, Light and Love to all of you.

CordieB.

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