NAVIGATION 6 and I AM IN MY KNOWING 1

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Letting go of that past involves a number of undertakings: Forgiveness, including self-forgiveness; Awareness and Honesty in discovering those thoughts, ideas, behaviors and defenses that no longer fit—those that no longer serve us; Practice and Willingness to move through those awkward times getting familiar with new ways of approaching life.

The guides also tell us:

“Relinquishing the past involves many, many things, including a lack of response to those things that you believed that you would never have to let go of.”

I am not sure if this will be true for you, but I know for me that attempting to get rid of many of my self-created knee-jerk reactions to life experiences has proved to be extremely difficult.

What works for me the best is being aware when the knee-jerk occurs—this reaction to life from fear, or guilt or some other sort of victimhood, and then consciously decide to do something different. For instance if I see or hear an angry person, my first unconscious response might be to feel my gut clinch and a desire to run. As soon as I become aware that internal reflexive response I can then remind myself this has nothing to do with me, and I can send that person love, light, peace. AND I can also consciously choose to leave that place if I desire to do so.

Scary thought to change everything, but as is pointed out—this is not about externals so much as it is: 

“your consciousness that is transformed, and your consciousness is what is rendered through this work to out-picture itself in form, in physical manifestation.” 

How I perceive aspects lot life; how I hold them is different because my frequency, my vibration has changed, the lenses through which I observe life are different.

         ∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

          I AM IN MY KNOWING

As an introduction I would like to address two questions that came up Sunday, both of which are extremely important to this chapter. (Please be aware, these answers along with most of what is posted on this blog are a reflection of my own learning and consciousness at this time.)

Question #1 “Is the kind of knowing that is referred to here the same as faith?”

Yes and No. 

Somehow the idea of faith has gotten watered down over time. When we believe something or “take it on faith” we are usually agreeing to an idea that we would like to be true, want to be true, but have no real substantiation for.

I believe faith is another way of knowing, a kind of knowing that goes beyond or deeper than the intellect, the emotions, and the material world. 

Let me give an example. 

Let us suppose you are by yourself and you ask yourself the question, “Do I believe that I am loved?” I could go through whole check list, “Well, I got hug yesterday, he/she smiled at me, they told me that they loved me, etc.” and this all very nice, but it is not here right now.

How do you know you are loved? Most of the time the answer will be, “I just know it!” and you are correct. You know that it is true.  

It is not that you just have faith that it might be true, you know it is.

Ask again, “How do you know?” and you might reply, “Well I feel it in my gut, there is a part of me, in the depth of my being that responds with that knowing.”

You can apply this same idea to many other aspects of life and relationships.

Question #2 Many spiritual books refer to the word feeling as being a way of knowing the truth. How does that work?

Again, there is a bit of a language lapse here. There are feelings and then there are feelings. 

Imagine what it would be like to base all of our actions and behaviors on how we feel emotionally. For example, I wake up and I’m angry because the alarm didn’t go off, then I feel happy because I smell coffee being made, then I’m annoyed because there are towels all over the bathroom floor, then I’m delighted because there is some hot water, then I’m annoyed because someone ate the last english muffin—and on and on. I am certainly feeling everything, but letting these feelings run my my life does not guide me very well or contribute to my growth and peace of mind.

Suppose I decided I was not going to work because I didn’t feel like it? (I would not have a job very long)

There are also times when I don’t feel like loving myself or someone else, does that mean I don’t love them or shouldn’t love them or can’t love them? 

Of course not. I can love you even if I don’t feel it.

I think that when spiritual authors use the word feeling they are referring to something much deeper than superficial emotions. Again, we do not have a descriptive language for this, but let’s explore a few examples.

We can feel the Presence of God/of Love, can’t we? Now that is not a feeling in the emotional sense, but it is a knowing. I can have a sense of what is the best thing for me to do right now; I can be drawn to a certain prayer or book. I can know that I am loved even if I do not feel it.

There are many ways to describe these “inner feelings” which are different from our usual ideas about emotions.

So this is what I believe spiritual teachers are speaking of when they talk about feelings, and how they can guide us.

I would like to remind myself and all of us that when we come across a passage in the book in quotation marks (and usually indented towards the middl of that page) that these are affirmations of Truth. They are not simply statements of what we desire or what we would like, they are statements/prayers/affirmations of Reality and Truth—and with these books they manifest an energy and a power as well.