Spiritual Art Blog - *Ed P

Gateway

Here’s the latest development of Gateway…

Observe ourselves, get to know ourselves (part 2)

Thought for the Week
If we can take time to observe ourselves and get to know ourselves, that is, how we react to things, what makes us do the things we do, we will begin to understand how we work in this life and how we can make our lives a little better. 

In last weeks post, Observe ourselves, get to know ourselves (part 1), we discussed taking a detached view of our emotions so we can get a better understanding of them and how they affect us. We also looked at our memories and how we can change negative ones for something new and more beneficial to us. This week lets look at our mind, intuition and Soul, to see if we can get to know our true selves.

Our mind is a great tool
The next area we want to look at is our mind. That is the area within ourselves which helps run our lives in a logical and systemised manner. Our mind is a great tool and used correctly it can make our lives a lot easier. It helps us by creating:
Systems, which help us get things done.
Opinions, which give us a quick and easy method of reaching a conclusion.
Habits, so we do things almost automatically without thinking.

We also use its logical functions to:
Work out solutions to problems.
Read, write and do mathematical tasks.
Devise methods of doing things.

The mind is excellent for all of these tasks but we have to careful that we don’t let it take over running our lives. This can easily happen if we believe that life is logical and works in a logical or systematic fashion. Life is logical to a certain extent but if we run our lives according to our mind’s logic, habits and opinions we loose our connection to the life force or the Holy Spirit, which really runs our world and our lives. 

Listening to our intuition
We have our own freedom to lead our lives in any way we wish but if we can connect with the Life Force we will have an easier and happier existence. How do we do this? By listening to our intuition.

Our intuition is that feeling or urge we get to do something that often doesn’t make logical sense. It can reveal itself as:
A feeling to go in a particular direction or to avoid a certain place.
A hunch about a place, person or event.
An awareness of seemingly random events giving us some wisdom or insight.
Guidance to do or say something ‘illogical’ but which brings some major benefits.

You can sometimes see this working between team mates on a playing field. In a match recently a player got the ball and intuitively passed it behind himself, where he couldn’t see what was going on, but his team mate was there, took the ball and scored. 

Our intuition is characterised by a feeling that what it suggests is right for us but often doesn’t make sense in the logical world that we live our physical lives in. We can have difficulty acting on our intuition if our mind is a dominant force in our lives where we require logic and agreement with our opinions before we act on ideas, thoughts and feelings coming from our intuition. If we are a mental person it can take time and practice to begin to trust our intuition.

How do we become more intuitive?
How do we become more intuitive? We need to build up a trust in the ideas and thoughts suggested by our intuition. We have to listen for the ‘still small voice’ deep within ourselves. This is Soul, speaking to us using our intuition as its way of getting through to us. Soul has a much higher viewpoint of our lives than our mind. It can see the whole of our lives now. It’s not confined by time and space, it knows all it needs to now, in this moment. It is in tune with the Life-force or Holy Spirit. This is how it knows what is best for us and the situation around us.

If we look at this from a mental level, it doesn’t make sense, but if we can reach this higher viewpoint we begin to see how beautiful this truth is. Soul is the happy, loving part of ourselves, our true self, and it only has love for us and our world. It communicates with us through our intuition. How do we recognise its messages?

It takes time to re-establish our connection with Soul. We have probably allowed a lot of mental baggage to distract us. If we try and grasp a few small messages first, test them and then begin to build out trust in the messages bit by bit we can get to the point where we get regular clear messages on all sorts of topics as we go about our lives. We might go into a bit more detail on this topic in next weeks post.

In the meantime, watch your mind and enjoy your life.

*Ed Parkinson

Inspirational Intuition Quotes

“Listen to your intuition. It will tell you everything you need to know.”
 Anthony J. D'Angelo

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”
 Albert Einstein

“Often you have to rely on intuition.”
 Bill Gates

“You must train your intuition - you must trust the small voice inside you which tells you exactly what to say, what to decide”
 Ingrid Bergman

“I feel there are two people inside me - me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely.”
 Kim Basinger

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.”
 Alan Alda

“Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.” 
Robert Graves

“Faith is a passionate intuition.”
 William Wordsworth 

“All great men are gifted with intuition. They know without reasoning or analysis, what they need to know.”
 Alexis Carrel 

“Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way.”
 Florence Scovel Shinn 

“Cease trying to work everything out with your minds. It will get you nowhere. Live by intuition and inspiration and let your whole life be Revelation.”
 Eileen Caddy 

“Trusting our intuition often saves us from disaster.”
 Anne Wilson Schaef 


“Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.”
 Jonas Salk

“Learn to let your intuition—gut instinct—tell you when the food, the relationship, the job isn’t good for you (and conversely, when what you’re doing is just right).”
 Oprah Winfrey


“Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious”
 Carl Gustav Jung 

“From what I’ve seen, those who are mostly head or mind, people have a harder time trying to deal with the hard questions of life.”
 Harold Klemp

Gateway

This picture Gateway is beginning to take shape. The elements are coming together into a happy mix, well at least a mixI hope gets something of the story across.

Observe ourselves, get to know ourselves (part 1)

Thought for the Week

The Ancient Greek saying "Know thyself” was inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and has been attributed to ancient Greek sages including, Plato, Pythagoras and Socrates. It is still relevant today. If we know how we work, that is, how we react to things, what makes us do the things we do, we will have a better understanding of how our life works. 

There are different elements within us which we should try to get to know better. They are:
Our emotions
Our memories
Our mind
Our intuition
Our true self, Soul.
This week we’ll look at our emotions and memories, next week we’ll discuss our mind, intuition and Soul.

Our personal emotions
Our personal emotions are easy enough to see. Here’s a list of the basic ones we can experience on a regular basis.
Confidence
Fear
Happiness
Sadness
Love 
Loneliness
Beauty
Horror
There are several levels within each of these emotions, which vary with the strength of the emotion.  

Know our emotions
So how can we know ourselves through our emotions? Depending on the intensity of the emotion we may be able to observe ourselves as we go through them. For example, if we are angry which is often part of fear or sadness, we may be able to just observe ourselves as we go through the turmoil it brings. We could to do this at the time or later when we’ve calmed down. If we can look at ourselves as we go through the anger we can observe:
What triggers it, 
How we react, 
At what point do we loose control or 
Can we keep control of it, 
What happens next,
How we get back to some kind of calmness. 
If there are others involved in the emotional exchange, how are they affected, are they part of the cause or the cure? How can we handle the same situation better in the future?

By taking this kind of a detached view, of this part of our life, we can get a better understanding of it. The next time we come across it we will have an idea of what is going on. We’ll know how it will proceed and how we can manage it better. We won’t get it right the first few times we meet the situation again but we will be better prepared. Each time we go through it, observe it and think about it, we’ll learn a little more about how to handle ourselves.

Know our memories
If we have lived for any number of years, we are going to have thousands of memories. Our memories can be a key influence on our attitude in our lives therefore we should get to know our memories. Most of these are filed away in the Forgotten file. They are not required to be remembered for any critical reason. They will only present themselves if we find ourselves in a similar situation at some time. 

There a few key memories we hold on to which colour our lives for better and for worse. The only way we can judge if it is good or bad for us, is to ask the question, Do they bring any love into our lives? If the answer is Yes, they are beneficial memories. If the answer is No, we should look at changing those memories. 

For example, if we have an unfriendly relationship with someone, we are going to have memories of them which remind us of the hurt, harm or injustice done to us by them. Every time we meet this person these memories pop into our head and the bad feelings that go with them flare up within us. This flare up only damages us, we are the ones who get burnt. The other person is probably unaware of our emotions.

We don’t have to relive the pain 
How do we change this so we don’t get these flare ups? If we can realise that a person or situation causes these negative memories to flare up, we are part of the way to dealing with it. We have now accepted that these memories hurt us. Can we change them for something new and more beneficial to us? We don’t want to deny or devalue what we’ve learned from the situation. We can recognise that a person is not to be trusted, or will react in a certain way, or a situation will go in a particular direction if the circumstances are in place. We keep the knowledge we have learned but we don’t have to relive the pain every time come across it again.

If we see that we’ve learned something useful, we’ve begun to change our attitude and our memory of the person or situation. If we can add in a sympathy or compassion for the pain suffered by others involved in the same or similar situations, we are moving on to a healthier attitude. This new understanding gives us a different attitude and over time will quieten the emotions that used to flare up within us.

If we can take time to observe ourselves and get to know ourselves, we will begin to understand how we work in this life and how we can make our lives a little better.

Next week we’ll continue exploring our selves by looking at our mind, our intuition and our true self, Soul.

In the meantime, let’s get to know ourselves.

*Ed Parkinson

Inspirational Know Yourself Quotes

“If something is getting you down, here’s a technique that never fails to work… 
All you have to do is this: Stop thinking about the difficulty, whatever it is, and think about the Eck, Divine Spirit, instead. This is the complete rule.
It is really just shifting the attention from one point to another.”


 Harold Klemp

“ "Know thyself," said the old philosopher, "improve thyself," saith the new. Our great object in time is not to waste our passions and gifts on the things external that we must leave behind, but that we cultivate within us all that we can carry into the eternal progress beyond.”
Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“If you want peace, stop fighting. If you want peace of mind, stop fighting with your thoughts.”
- Peter McWilliams

“We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples' models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.”
 Shakti Gawain

“One of the secrets of life is to be honestly who you are. Who others want you to be, who you used to be, and who you may some day become ... these are fantasies. To be honestly who you are is to give up your illusions and face today with courage.”
 Bill Purdin

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
 Henry David Thoreau

“To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.”
 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning to work on becoming yourself.”
 Anna Quindlen

“The real power behind whatever success I have now was something I found within myself -- something that's in all of us, I think -- a little piece of God just waiting to be discovered.”
 Tina Turner

“We should every night call ourselves to an account; What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired? Our vices will abort of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.”
 Seneca

“Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.”
 Benjamin Franklin

“I define comfort as self-acceptance. When we finally learn that self-care begins and ends with ourselves, we no longer demand sustenance and happiness from others.”
 Jennifer Louden

“You are in control of your life. Don't ever forget that. You are what you are because of the conscious and subconscious choices you have made.”
 Barbara Hall

“It is the habitual thought that frames itself into our life. It affects us even more than our intimate social relations do. Our confidential friends have not so much to do in shaping our lives as the thoughts which we harbour.”
 J.W. Teal