13 Illusions to shake up your awareness

Illusions are self-created obstacles to a clearer view of things. Illusions are destined to dissolve as part of learning and unlearning.  This is part of a personal journey that is guided, diverges and finds its way home. Each stage is ultimately a choice. You decide when and where to pause. Your unique view of life is yours alone. You are invited to shatter your own myths.

When a person is ready to question or explore his own deeply entrenched ideas, he may awaken to acknowledge the rigidity of ideas and also shift positions or attitudes. Consider these 13 concepts to ponder and reframe;

1) Ego. Part of the psyche experiences and reacts to the outside world and imagines your self-image into being. To separate yourself from the selves of others and from objects of ego, thought causes you to forget or repress the truth. From the moment ambition is born, you are prompted to quantify it.

2) Money. This takes shape as a piece of paper with random value linkedto numbers. Virtually everyone buys into that idea and allows it to control how they think: what is affordable, enough, desirable, feasible, doable, relative and inconceivable. Currency is a human invention that arose with human motives.

3) Duality. To separate concepts into two parts is a gradual denial of unity or oneness with everything. To envision poverty distracts you from wealth and abundance. Polarities of positive and negative such as good and evil fragment underlying wholeness. As one concept exists, the opposite also exists, even if you do no choose to acknowledge it at this moment.

4) Consolation. From birth, part of you is consoled when you are fed, clothed, and loved. When was the last time you fully trusted all of your needs are met from outside yourself? Faith becomes consolation during trouble. Yet, you imagine issues where none exist and imagine what you require to dissolve it.

5) Comfort. This zone is a view of a degree of tolerance for mediocrity, anxiety, worry, and stress. It also denies what soul whispers. Some people view this as an excuse to stay put, to continue fooling self and everyone of what you need. To lose what you thought you needed shifts focus to what matters. You move away from tangible things that are bought, sold, stolen, burned or bequeathed to uncover other priorities.

6) Form. Your view of the physicality of things is grounded in beliefs. You envision or hear about objects, infer about density, texture and viscosity, without necessarily touching or experiencing them. You visualize shape without seeing and create interpretations of your sense of reality.

7) Beliefs. The focus of your devotion is hidden. It has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness or, level of conscious awareness and deliberate intent. To work in the realms of expectation and assumption creates layers of illusions you come to accept.

8) Fear. There is nothing to fear except your ability to create it. What you anticipate you will gain or lose goes deeper than ideas you access in the mind. This invokes fundamental views about what makes you who you are.  What can you live without? Few people recognize your own misunderstandings.

9) Pride. A high opinion of one's own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority is a view that grows from fears like inadequacy and insecurity. What you think you have or not does not change who you are.  Thinking without complete awareness explains many human issues.  People reflect each others issues, differing only in degree and level of awareness.

10) Effects. Reality is something other than perceived effects, for it is part of the Cause. Beside, over and above, under and behind, all forms of Being, Matter, Energy, Force and Power, is the ever-calm, contentedness. Reconnect to inner knowing grows into absolute trust. This translates into confidence in the goodness and justice of the only Reality that exists.

11) Crisis. When old ways of thinking and doing fall short or no longer satisfy perceived needs, a person may imagine the self is threatened. Behaving as you have done is not necessarily aligned with the natural flow of energy to start with. If you take too much without giving back, this creates imbalance. A sense of urgency draws attention to issues of survival.

12) Armageddon.  It is said a final battle involving good and evil will occur before the end of the world. Another way to view significant energy movement and upheavals is to concede former consciousness is dissolving on a wide scale. Such a view helps explain geographic, environmental and climatic shifts that might otherwise be viewed as a domino effect toward catastrophe.  Life-changing transition is imminent. How you understand it is grounded in perception.

13) Perception. If you agree your outer reality reflects your level of inner understanding, then indecision or turbulance speaks volumes.  How you come to recognize and grasp each experience is based not on superficial human senses, but on deeper awareness.  Answers do not always emerge in the form of words.  Letting go of ways you sense the world is an act of growth that dissolves dogma and resistance and brings you face to face with something indescribable.

"If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating fundamentally the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction." -Eckhart Tolle

10 Reasons to face your fear

Everyone experiences fear. What sets us apart are the reasons why we create it, the ways we choose to react and whether we choose to learn from it. You can develop practical exercises to build confidence and break down your own illusions. This has potential to shift your perception and more if you allow it.

Brace yourself: every instant, you choose to imagine reasons for fear. You decide whether or not it will control you. You opt to confront your fear or not. Your behaviour sends out energy. People read it. You are inviting them to tell you what you think of yourself. Your words, posture, and gestures mirror for something deeper. Consider these ten reasons to face your fear;

1) You never know where disppointment is taking you. To reflect on jobs, relationships or roles you feared losing, lost or left actually paints an encouraging picture. Note how versatile, resourceful and resilient you become. Conditions stretch you to explore talents you never even knew you had. You accumulate knowledge in life stages and can share lessons. Your intrinsic value never changes. How aware you become determines how you share it and where this takes you.

2) You have reason to admire yourself. Exploring discomfort evokes intense feelings. Things may not appear to run smoothly. You may feel drained as you exert energy struggling against odds or an enemy you would prefer not to name. It may be a major inconvenience. And yet, underneath it all, your tenacity, staying power, and will to grow are astounding. Note where you have been got youwhere you are.

3) You can choose to reinvent yourself. Any turning point in your life invites you to rediscover your own courage. You are constantly gaining new insight into your personality and core nature. This helps you grasp which parts of you shape and perceive problems and which parts imagine how to solve them. As you choose to identify and develop certain traits and mask or disregard others, you reinvent how you view your strengths and weaknesses and what you manifest to the world.

4) You eliminate confusion. Just because you encounter fear, this does not mean you know why. The choice to explore possible reasons why enables you to dissolve misconceptions and eliminate confusion. This is also a means to learn how to atune to feelings inside yourself you did not notice before.

5) You raise awareness to new levels. Learning to step back and view fear from different angles enables you to increase your objectivity about yourself. This new awareness can carry over to how you viewother things. You may come to expand your perspective exponentially.

6) You redefine personal satisfaction. Human beings are on a silent quest to prove themselves. You have the power to create fear and also to use it to serve your own ends. Among your choices, you can opt to feel disoriented and negatively affected or, you can also decide to use fear to empower you on the path to greater independence, confidence, self-sufficency and self-mastery. You can draw the line before arrogance.

7) You move to sharpen self-discipline. As you learn you exert more power over your mind and control over your thoughts, you can learn to decide which thoughts to create and perpetuate and which ones to dissolve. As you discern what is not destructive or dangerous, you replace that with love.

8) You realize time is not your enemy.   Many people are unaware that perceived time is an illusion. Human beings create it for their own ends.  You decide if this will serve you and if so, how.  How long you sense a fear may increase the intensity and draw your attention to it more effectively.  Facing fear helps you begin to realize you are growing differently. Time and fear complement each other. To realize time is not your enemy enable you to sense how much it serves you.

9) You realize you can behave wiser. If you believe that you have finite amounts of time and energy, then you also believe what you can accomplish is limited and the time you have can become saturated.  As you decide to narrow the focus of how you think and what you do, then you learning to pay more attention to the demands you place on yourself.  You become more aware of how deliberate intent can be used to undermine or serve your own unconscious priorities.

10) You unveil the truth. People will jumpt to fear what they cannot readily explain or understand. Rather than accept something mysterious for what it is, rather than listen to your gut, you may deny or ignore possibilities that ly outside your comfort zone. Choosing to face your fear is an exercise in accepting levels of uncertainty.  It is an exercise in building faith and trust in phenomena you did not initially desire to see.  As you dissolve fear, you begin to sense differently. You expand the parameters of joy, bliss and open senses you forgot you had. You are already relearning how to use them.

7 Things you can do during dream yoga

As you explore astral dreaming, you may decide to experiment with dream yoga. If you hesitate, then you may wonder whether this is for you or, whether you do it already. On your journey to the next level, you have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Tibetans describe dream yoga as the original or basic state of lucid dreaming. They are historic masters at awakening their consciousness during dreams. Astral projecting is when you become aware of an out-of-body experience (OBEs). As you gain more conscious control of OBEs, you can become lucid.

Many methods exist to discipline the mind, deliberately induce OBEs and lucidity. As you contemplate whether this experience would appeal, or select among ones to share as comments, consider five things you can learn to do during dream yoga;

1) Manifest physical things-Based on your perception, you create external, objective physical things, and the internal, subjective physical things. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations are the external or objective physical things. The five base senses are the subjective of internal physical things.

2) Discriminate among feelings& shift recognition. You choose to experience positive, negative or indifferent energy. Then, you shift to identify particular things. This mental recognition exercise moves from unconscious to conscious. You bring the process to the surface and become observer.

3) Explore different planes. You visualize a particular place in all its detail and go there, whether you have heard of it and visited there before or whether your imagination conjured an image from somewhere.  Your mind sharpens the texture.

4) Dialogue with enlightened beings- You interact with beings of higher awareness on dream planes and different levels of awareness.  You  only release what you learn into conscious awareness when these beings sense you are ready.

5) Meet with other sentient beings- When you mobilize your mind, you can actually intend to meet other sentient beings in designated places. That is, while your physcial body is at rest, your astral body can be directed elsewhere. Its also possible to explore other dimensions, realms, and bodies and log them all.

6) Unpack your paradoxes.  You evolve to realize all conditioned ideas in waking life are lying to and about the awareness that knows them.  You await your own soul-level process of conscious awakening, trigger a domino effect and watch.  Then move beyond the watcher.

7) Dissolve or transcend the dream states. As you detach consciously from the physical body (recognize you are lucid) and detach from the dreaming mind (become observer to your dream within dream), then you move to observe the purest form of conscious awareness.  This is that level where you become aware of an emptiness and become aware of the nature and dimensions of the reality behind everything. Opportunities exist to move through many levels of dream states.

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5 Ways to examine your current level of awareness

People hear so much about awareness, they begin to ask how to clarify their own current level.  You may sense certain things and so readily forget others.  This may confuse you. You may ask how many levels of awareness there are and what you can do to identify where you stand.  Consider these 5 ways to explore teh nature and level of your awareness; 

1) Disregard numbers.  This includes age, weight, height, psychological time and other numbers.  Physical measurements you imagine and impose.  They cloud pure awareness. Consciousness is beyond conditioning. Impatience is itself a pointer to what is here.

2) Focus on what you cherish.  Anything that strengthens your feelings of love or appreciation has a positive effect on opening to the awareness that is always present.   Express love at every opportunity. Listen to your heart. In essence, love expands awareness.

3) Rethink time and space.  Human beings are conditioned to fragment and limit their perception in an effort to pin things down.  Awareness is imperceptible in a traditional sense, yet you can evolve faculties to move beyond three-dimensional thinking.

4) Choose to be alive.  Consider what this means to you.  Decide to notice opportunities and find the courage to experience possibilities.  Permit tears to flow, and allow other feelings to unfold.  Decide you to consciously expand your points of reference. be open to discover what it feels like to know happiness, sadness and other emotions through the body.  Sense they are all interconnected and point to who you are.

5) Recognize perception is relative.  You will only ever grasp things you are prepared to sense and believe. Your level of self-doubt and negative energy determine what kind of reality you manifest and experience.  Work through scepticism, bitterness, and cynicism.

Tom the body piecer & 3 tips to be true to yourself

Traveling on a big city train, I recently struck up conversation with a man who offered some profound insight. I learned this man was a fashion designer turned professional body piecer. He spoke with me during an hour commute into a Toronto suburb.  Based on his life experience, here are three tips he believes would help you be more true to yourself;

1) View yourself as knowledgable in your field. People who perceive themselves as 'experts' are often the kind of people who evolve to become close-minded. To remain open to learning is to admit you never know it all.  Yet, to believe you know little or nothing is a lie to yourself. You have power to boost your esteem without being arrogant.

2) Share what you know. Every experience you have can help other people learn.  In group settings, people learn skills faster and adapt more effectively.  When people have the attitude 'knowledge is power,' and they choose to keep secrets, this does not help others.  In fact, it leads to fear, deception and less productive situations.  Many people undervalue their role as a teacher and the good they can do wherever they already are.

3) Rise above judgement.  People often decide whether they will talk to others based on appearances, assumptions about a job, socio-economic status, life choices or fear.   As you evolve to permit yourself to shatter your own illusions, you move beyond stereotypes and discover what being human is all about.  You have opportunities to learn from everyone about yourself.  Every situation or encounter is a gift.  You invite what you need.

"Wherever you go, go with all your heart." -Confucius