'TOUCHING
BASES'
Newsletter
September 8, 2003
I
want to thank all of my dear friends out there for your continuous
faith and support
Hello everyone. I hope this little newsletter finds you well and happy. Things here on the homefront are going very well. We are approaching my favorite time of the year. I love that first cool blast that comes from out of nowhere, (well, actually from the North!) piercing the sweltering heat wave we had suffered here in Texas. Actually, I never suffered from it much, as I remained inside at my desk with the a/c keeping me comfortable. I always feel for the men and women who work outside in the hot and humid Texas summers.
Let us give an anonymous gift to someone. The gift can be flowers, a card, a keepsake, or money. The important thing is that the person who receives the gift must not associate it with us. It is a good idea to perhaps have a friend mail it from a different city or location. When the gift is given, the law of giving and receiving is activated. Our premise is that it must be fulfilled. We have given...therefore we shall receive. In this instance however, the person who receives the gift cannot respond, because the individual does not know who gave it. For this person, the universe has become a friendly place. The person will look around and wonder, "Is he/she the one? Was it he/she? Did this person give the gift?" Suddenly there will be many potenital people who may have given the gift. Here is another premise of this experiment. Because the gift was anonymous, it is possible that someone will suddenly bless us with a gift as well, but a greater gift is potentially flowing into our lives. When we give anonymously, it is Spirit that must fulfill the law. We can let our minds expand and consider the many ways we could be blessed, but essentially there is only one gift that Spirit can give. The Presence gives the gift of Itself. What could be better? The result is that we experience the presence of a joy that comes over us. A peace that surpasses understanding rises up within us. An idea comes to us. A feeling of warmth fills our heart. This is the kind of gift we will never forget. In fact, such an experience changes us forever. This is the way it is in our Universe. A gift is given, and the law of giving and receiving is activated. The gift becomes a seed that bears fruit in our souls. We are now convinced of the reaity and closeness of the Presence. We are blessed beyond words and beyond any worldly gift we could receive. My dear friends, let's put these principles to the test. Discover for yourself the power of giving and the great truth... that you are made to live on this earth in togetherness. You have only to begin....you have only to give. I would love to hear how this little experiment goes for you. Please email me and I will add a webpage to my sites and we can share all your experiences with others. (Annonymously, of course.) It's time to do something different today, something constructive, let's break the monotony, and give someone something! Then stand back and watch. :)
Developing
Your Spiritual Intelligence - Part II In
review... As we grow older, spiritual emergence dictates its own special urgency. People for whom the first part of life has been unsatisfying now make a determined effort to change the second half. Their moves are fueled by their reverence for life and by the growing sense that they have limited time to honor their talents and gifts. Despite fear, they surrender themselves to the call and law of their own being. These internal shifts frequently follow a predictable route...As the material, everyday world fades into the background of our awareness, spiritual concerns take center stage. To accommodate this redirection of attention, we revise both inconsequential and signifgicant habits. We may alter daily routines, structure our time differently, and perhaps change the way we work. Each altered course or shift in worldview also requires us to relinquish what has been. Before gaining something new, we release former things. This development, when it occurs in the collective consciousness, upsets the status quo of community, institutions and family habits. In the life of the individual, a similar clash and an experiential anarchy seems the norm...This means we don't know which end is up. Disorder or confusion arrives whenever we revise our inner and outer life. How we deal with these alterations depends on our way of handling problems and our own psychological history. But few of us are prepared for the momentous disruption that interior shifts can bring. Reading about other people's experience is never like living through our own. Conversions of habits, values and relationships amount to a series of small deaths which we ourselves set up. Like moths, we are drawn to these dissolutions. As we give ourselves over to new loyalties and affections, those to whom we might turn for consolation may misinterpret and misunderstand us. We forget that friends, colleagues and therapists are simply ordinary people with fixed belief-systems of their own. Counselors, as one example, are by no means "enlightened" as a group...few (save the best of the best) are even gifted enough to have developed what has been called a "private science". Most obediently follow their textbooks, teachers and mentors. The psyhoanalytic tradition has historically discounted the mystical dimension of life and the reality behind it. If we have had peak experiences (such as out-of-time or spaceless moments of rapture and ecstatic insight) or if our spirituality includes mystical or inexplicable elements, there is no reason to expect that our self-disclosures will meet with much empathy. As a matter of fact, with the exception of Jung (who seemed himself a mystic) the major schools of traditional psychoanalysis have defined mystics as hysterics or worse. Even organized religion (and thus spiritual directors or ministerial counselors) may be unfriendly to the mystical perspective since it is always an individual phenomenon, hard to describe, and generally subversive to institutional processes and objectives. Superior, unconventional thinkers, psychiatrists like, say, Dr. Thomas Szasz, or Dr. R.D. Laing, have written of the power struggle that ensues when religious or spiritual people walk throught the doors of insensitive, controlling counselors expecting to be understood. We should enter at our own risk, realizing that the average psychoanalyst is fluent in the language and cognitive constructs of pathology, neurosis and "the known", while the spiritually emerging (especially the mystics in the bunch) speak of things super-natural and the unknown. This is not your marriage made in heaven. For instance, the buzz-phrase "middle age crisis" is an easy one to affix to those who leave posh jobs for simple, low paying ones. Other behaviors can also be called foolhardy, indulgent or even irresponsible. A woman friend just sold her business to work at little pay for Habitat. One friend leaves his prospering business every other month to visit an ashram (cloistered spiritual setting or retreat) in India. He studies with, and receives spritiual direction from his Master, a noted guru. A couple I know spend up to three hours a day meditation while holding down full-time jobs. Another friend rises before dawn everyday to pray, read the Bible and have her "quiet time" before beginning her day's work. While her family sleeps, she studies and prays in the dark, depriving herself much-needed rest in order to satisfy a deeper requirement. All these transmutations of self-identity, energy, values and commitments are quite normal, potentially wholesome and life-affirming...both for the self and for the greater good. A reader wrote to say: " I have no checkbook, one credit card, and minimal clothes. Reading makes up the bulk of my "social life". I have very littlle furniture, no radio in my car and few friends. I've consciously chosen to live like this as it makes me happy. My simple life brings contentment. I have, and do, experience both social and self-transcendence. Not everyone wants or needs to live so austerely. But for those who do, getting to such a life is no mean trick. Thankfully, love paves our way. "With
a high spiritual IQ we gain insight, wisdom, and the knack of right
action".
If you haven't noticed, on my websites I have decided to offer you a free reading with your order of a reading. It's my way of helping out during these stressful times. These are ALL full readings! For example: Order
a
Unique Personal
Tarot Reading Order
a
Spiritual Guidance Reading Order
a
Special
12 Month Reading Of
course, there are also
Astrological Profile Readings, Numerology Readings, If
you would like to poke around and find out more about the readings,
here's my Tarot Gallery url: http://www.tarotbyjeanne.com/tarot.html Worth repeating..... Many
of us need to re-adjust our attitudes and thoughts. This is a time of great transformation on our planet. We all have a part to play.
It
is well known that emotions of the soul affect the body and produce
great, significant and wide-ranging changes in the state of health.
Emotions of the sould should be watched, regularly examined, and kept
well balanced. Numerous emotions sweep through our minds each day...anxiety and anger, jealousy and joy, love and compassion, and many, many more. But one emotion has long been praised as supreme by the great religions...love. Though love is much sought, it is little understood...though universally desired, it is rarely wholly fulfulled. Most people feel like helpless victims of love, which seems to overwhelm us like epilepsy and then vanish, leaving us dazed and abandoned. Where and how do we find love? Most people assume it is something they get from outside themselves, from a few special individuals. They hurl themselves into a desperate lifelong search for the perfect person, relation, or community who will give them the love they crave. Yet this desperate search is based on the same tragic error that underlikes all craving...it is driven by an unexamined sense of inadequacy, deficiency, and fear. This error leads to the futile search for something or someone outside ourselves to compensate for what seems to be missing within. This is a recipe for disaster. Another lover, a new spouse, or the wild cheers of an adoring crowd may offer temporary satisfaction. Yet as long as the inner fears and insecurities remain unrecognized and unhealed, outside rewards bring temporary relief at best. This deficiency-based craving for love brings a plague of further problems. When our sense of well-being seems dependent on the approval and love of other people, we naturally become dependent on, or even addicted to, them. We cling, demand their exclusive attention, and love then conditionally, offering love when they behave as we want and withholding it when they do not. If you turn on a radio almost anywhere in the Western world, you stand a good chance of being bombarded by an endless series of popular "love songs", fascinating examples of pleasure and pain, pathos and pathology. They wail such mournful lines as, "I can't live without you", "I can't stop thinking about you", or "I get chills thinking about you". To a doctor such cries feel painfully familiar: These are the symptoms of heroin addiction! One of the great tragedies of our times is that our culture has confused love with addiction. Of course, there are also more mature forms of love, and healthy relationships and families depend on them. Mature love is based more on sufficiency and wholeness than on deficiency and fear. But fear-based infatuation and craving for affection are so common and fill so much of the media that we sometimes assume this is all that love can be. But love is something far more profound and powerful, boundless and beneficial than the songs incur. Far more than the fleeting infatuations we praise in our experiences. Wheras addictive love is based on a painful sense of lack and need, this greater love is based on overflowing fullness and joy. Spiritual love has no desire to get but only to give, no goal except to awaken itself within others, no need except to share itself. Being unconditional, it never fails or falters...being boundless, it embraces everyone. But love does even more that this because love has the power to awaken us. "When
love fills our minds, we see a world that yearns to love and be loved." The
new-Confucian sage Wang Yang-ming said:
I
have completed a major rennovation of my website,
Tarot By Jeanne.
I
love working with every one of you, and helping you on your path. Please
keep in touch, because as I have told you many times before, I truly
do care.
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