Tag Archives: Affirmation

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The Stillness I Seek

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The Key of Solomon is without moving parts. It is from the Key that the illusion of movement becomes still. The stillness of the Key has no value, the value rests with me. When I am at rest, when I am still, I am the key.

In working to find this stillness I have been puzzling with the absolute known as compassion. It is absolute due to its quality of having only one measure. It is inexhaustible, always enough. A being can not withhold compassion and still have any measure of it. It is absolute, indifferent to fickleness. It remains enough. We can take no ownership of it and are only able to accept it without terms. It is the stillness I seek.

During this time, while I have considered compassion and its application, I have not been able to write and my blog has been silent. I am still here. Often my work is to write but not during this time.

Prior to my lesson on compassion I had been working with the spirit of compassion, Love, in order to spark the stillness that is compassion, I thought to use its spirit. I suppose that worked. It worked due to its failure. It made things worse. In working to repair a recurring theme of self-hate, hating not so much myself but my life, I was using the affirmation, “I love my life”. The truth is there were things that happened that I did not love. Painful, difficult and costly. A cost I have yet to pay, a cost I can not pay. I can not love these things. In my effort to tell myself, “I love my life”, the wound only festered and the echo of hate grew louder. I have no love for life’s difficulty and pain, mine or yours, but when I have compassion I allow life’s pain its place. In the boundless absolute of compassion pain gets lost. We can not hold on to our pain and have compassion. This is the lesson I needed to learn, not to love but to give permission. Admit and accept the pain that life has to offer by the only known remedy, compassion.

While writing this I learned that I had lost a loved one to cancer. A brutally fast departure. On February 1st she arrived at the hospital with what she thought was the flu and today, seventy-eight days later, cancer has taken her life. She was a middle-aged woman with all the familiar details, a daughter, a wife, a mother, and as we all do, as we all will, she left life’s details behind.

It is compassion that reminds us of who we are, even if we can not quite grasp it. When compassion rests with me I am that woman. I am her husband, her son, her mother and all of her loved ones. I am all that ever has been and ever will be. Every damnable act, no matter how heinous, I did that. Every act of kindness, all goodness, the miracles of lore, I did that. It is who I am. Who then are you? You are me, we are the same and there is no mystery.

We are not charged to love life’s pain.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

 

 

The Complexity of Now

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Now is not complex, it is everything we engage in, instead of now, that is complex. Now is the simple magic of existence. The only time anything can or will happen. All that can be, all that ever will be, all that has been, is contained in its entirety, now. It is magic. It is creation. It is now. Without it there is nothing. It lasts only for a moment and yet without that moment nothing exists.

Of late affirmations have taken center stage in my life. Truth is, I am very good with affirmations. They are as powerful a tool for change and personal growth as I have ever known. There are rules for the effective use of affirmations, at least for me and I have a great deal of experience using them to successfully become the person I prefer to be. The primary rule of affirmation is present tense. An affirmation, by definition, must reflect a condition that is in the present, not the future or the past but now. If it is something that you can, might or would do, it is not an affirmation. It is best to be concise. I have found that when I create an affirmation it often needs work. I usually work with an affirmation for several days and as the time passes I prune and tune it until its nuance is entirely now and as brief as possible. It is surprising how very small adjustment to nuance makes the difference between success and a waste of time.

In my last post, Divine Affirmation, I wrote of frustration. I felt that I had experienced a period of incompetence with my use of affirmations. Jumped the gun there. I might have found a more direct path to success but none the less the work I did, including my use of affirmation, produced success. I have seen as much personal growth and achievement since I started this blog as I have at any other time in my life. Much of that has been recent, my assessment of my life and what shaped it is different today than it was even a few days ago.  The recent pace of change is extreme. My life has changed and I can no longer consider it the way I always have. I am not the way I thought I was. I traveled to my past and shone a light in the darkest places. I found the person I might have been, I made the better choice I did not make then. I have a brand new past. One I like much better. I did not set out to do this. I only found it along my way.

I concern myself with my spiritual health and pretty much nothing else. Sure I have distractions, I like politics and social issues but the driving force to everything in my life is spirituality. I have no other concern. I believe in God but not perhaps as you might think. God, or the absolute, the way things actually are, truth, is inseparable from any spiritual quest and I can think of nothing else worth doing. Because my spiritual template is based on the absolute everything I am given to do is fulfilled by my spiritual success. The surest proof of this is compassion. I am devoted to what is absolute and compassion is absolute. How do I make this observation? It knows only a single measure, enough. Another of my rules is confidence. I have no faith. I believe instead in providence and I expect that my life content is produced by it. I am as devoted to the people I find in my life as I am to anything. I have loved ones and their importance is made clear by providence. Of course my devotion extends to them.

I do expect a lot from my spiritual path. Success in every aspect of life. It is an all in approach and the proof is in the end result. Along the way the successes are obvious, one after another. That is a powerful incentive giving hope that in the long haul the effort proves its worth. All this intellect poured into spirituality, is it a waste of time? Personally, it is gratifying. I learn so much but why not a more traditional path? Maybe read a book or otherwise take counsel in what has worked for others. I do expect to answer that with a success that can be realized by no other means. To realize the magic that is the simplicity of now. To have success in all that I do by simple acceptance of it, by allowance. Set aside all that is in conflict with success, success in its full measure, by accepting it as present now. I am sure that this is how things work and I am much less angry about presenting an example, of now, than ever I have been.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

Divine Affirmation

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Choosing my activity, anticipating being known as an authority people can be comfortable with requires being comfortable with myself. I now see that I can use affirmations to achieve this condition of being comfortable. With affirmations I have known both success and incompetence. In the last few years incompetence has been the norm. Both outcomes are delivered with the same ease. In the last week I have produced the exact result I had in mind, twice, by simply using an affirmation.

I enjoy writing as the Mystic Tourist, but none the less, after posting my work I get uncomfortable. This routine created a habit of thought that was unhealthy. I corrected it using the simple affirmation “All is good, all is well.” Armed with this affirmation I returned to writing and after two posts the same injurious habit of thought returned. Although very weak, it was back and surely would grow strong without intervention. I decided to try building another affirmation using my divining rod to guide me. Worked like a charm. The use of my divining rod in crafting my affirmation is what determined the effectiveness of the affirmation. Using affirmations successfully is not new to me. What is new is my appreciation for the surgical accuracy required for success today.

Simply having a poor habit and throwing an affirmation on it proved ineffective, counterproductive. My ineffective affirmation had been tailored to cure the symptom and short of curing the problem, it only made things worse. What I have learned is I need to craft affirmations exactingly. Of course this seems obvious now. I am well-practiced at divination and had I thought to divine this I would have seen this path years ago. It is habit itself that prevents us from seeing the obvious, or conversely, enables sight of it.

Let’s see what can happen if I knock my inner bully down and stop beating myself up.

Are you wondering what authority I might presume myself to be? I am the same authority anyone is and that authority is the authority of the experience concerning who and how I am.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

All is Good All is Well

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Am I troubled by agreement? In my recent post, Chalkboards and Other Dark Places, I wrote of self-hate. It had been a problem that built into a climax until I was reduced to dealing only with that. I wrote of spending seventeen days working to sort it out and rid my life of it. That worked and now as I return to blogging… it is coming back. It seems I may have an issue with agreement. I am troubled to be seen as someone who has occult knowledge. That tension makes it difficult for me to share my experience because I tend to start beating myself up and that is distracting. I did learn a couple of tricks to quiet the self-hate mantra that had become so irritating. A subtle affirmative correction that proved to be very powerful and that may help guide me to a place of comfort and ease.

I really like my spiritual experience. It has been and is fulfilling but for some reason sharing it triggers a hostility within myself, toward myself. Writing calms that hostility but after posting a blog entry the pull to beat myself up over it is very powerful. This has been a tough nut. Short of cracking it open, and solving the mystery, it festers and pollutes my life all over again. If I can not understand the trigger I am confident that it will find places, in my past, to take hold and self-hate will repopulate my life. Everyone’s life is fertile ground capable of growing damn near anything. What is this determination to do this to myself?

I imagine it has to do with expectation, my expectation of what others expect from me. Having made that observation it seems obvious that any issue I might have about expectation would have to be about what I expect from myself. What can I possibly do about someone else’s expectation except to do something about my own?  That is probably very easy to fix. A simple affirmation ought to do the trick. What I learned when addressing this issue of self-hate, my recent correction of it, is that the affirmation needs to be spot-on. You see I had been working with an affirmation to deal with the hate for some time. When the notion of hating my life would pester my mind, I would tell myself, ‘I love my life’. Completely ineffective and that was surprising. After rooting out all the places that hate had taken hold in my life I found that the affirmation that dissolved this tendency was ‘All is good, all is well’.

Affirmations are powerful metaphysical tools and I have had great success with them. At this juncture the application of this tool is somewhat different. For years I used affirmations everyday. I would divine some affirmation and then over a few days fine tune it. When I started doing this I would create ten affirmations and throughout the day repeat them. Over time I would move on to a new list. Eventually I think I reduced the active number of affirmations I practiced to three. The difference now is that the affirmation I need is a little more precise. In the past these tools were more like a diet that promoted health, now it seems like I need affirmations that extract a condition rather than create a condition. The true nature of the injury in need of extraction needs to be identified if there is to be any hope of success.

I will try this affirmation; All is good. All is well. Doing what I like best, sharing the secrets of spirituality, of life’s mysteries, brings success. All is good. All is well.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2013

Behind The Veil

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Ego projection. Under pressure forged of choice, ego squeals out an expression. As choice collects unnecessary weight the pressure generates an expression that belongs to our ego. These expressions become the person our ego expects of itself. The ego takes comfort in the familiar expression it produced, even if that expression brings no comfort. These expressions are ghost-like apparitions  that we respond to, usually involuntarily as we unaware of their existence. Life is very distracting and most do not have the time to consider such things. My life is very busy considering such things and while looking to improve my spiritual health, I noticed one of these apparitions.  I did not know how to consider it and the process of asking what this might be has led me to see it as the egoic projection I have described. I am sixty now and so most of these constructs, of my ego, have been with me for a considerable time. This one has been with me at least since I was four. I discovered this property of ego while applying an affirmation to assist me along my way. I came to understand it as I wrote this just now. It is my usual way. Now, what to do about it. This expression is an injury, caused by choice, and it does not seem to want to go anywhere.

The image itself is broadcast from the point of Being and Now at the center of what I consider to be, Solomons Key, a metaphysical tool for dissolving mystery. For more information about the Key you can consider my most recent posts. I expect that I will be devoting more text to it in the near future, but who knows? With this blog, I only know what I am doing after it is done. Now I am off to see just what this apparition has come to teach me.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2012

Joy Remembered

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Disposition is a stubborn collector, often feeling justified and very much holding on to the past. Its true service is to let go and when it does not it instead becomes reservoir for our pain. Pain of course always prefers a mask and we pretend to disguise it in many colorful ways. It is always something unpleasant, hate, rage, depression, it is a long list but these examples give us a sense of the burden we often assign to disposition. Generally it carries goodness along with the rest but it is really intended to let go. Today I am still looking to evict a passenger my disposition collected while I was in preschool. In my last post, Metaphysics And The Distillation of How, I wrote of fixing the pain and frustration, of rejection, to my disposition. As a preschooler the adults in my life had tired of what they considered my imaginary friends. I believe they were actual people. Spiritual beings. I was persuaded not to talk of them again and I fixed this choice with unpleasant components in my disposition. In considering this difficulty, from the past, I had imagined that I could visualize the movement of Solomon’s Key and in so doing rid myself of this passenger. Not quite. Today I will consider what more there is to do.

The alternative. What else might my four-year old self have done to address the concerns of my elders and yet honor my spiritual experience? This is what I am to do today to mend my child and the man he grew into.

In my most recent posts I have been revealing some of the secrets the Key of Solomon, its basic structure. The lines of Fate and Abundance generate a plane,  it is Reputation. Reputation is a horizontal plane and it divides the sphere that surrounds foundation into two halves, top and bottom. This passenger, from my childhood is stuck in the top half of the sphere. Perhaps some other time it would be stuck elsewhere but this is where I see it now. In considering how to unravel this old choice I sink into a bit of an emotional storm. Grief, rage, animosity, the clench and the grit that hold on to, that own, my choice. This morning is day three of working on this. I have just begun my day and my reluctance to do this is visceral. If I put it off it will only fester and I will be back to deal with it later. Finally an epiphany. It is stuck in my flesh, clinging to past injuries and broadcasting itself into the sphere I have been discussing. The injury it favors is the physical tension that stems from compacting my seventh thoracic vertebra in 1974.  This injury, along with its chronic discomforts, have collected in the pool of reputation. The injury of my poor preschool choice is somehow the same as the choice that lead to compacting my vertebra. The young man I was when that vertebra got squished was not one for letting go of anything. All clenched fist and rage. I will drain all this from Reputation, the plane that is Reputation, with an affirmation.

It is morning of day four as I work to finish this and I feel much as I did yesterday. Reluctant. My passenger is still with me and generating the emotional disposition that makes me feel like doing anything else. Anything but dealing with this. If I do not do it I will continue to carry that stuff with me ignoring it into the background. Having worked its way up from there the time to do something about it is now. I had hoped that through the day yesterday I would recognize a direction for the affirmation I need but I still am without a sense where to go to deal with this ugliness in my Disposition. While I am at it the ugliness is busy working to persuade me to leave it alone. Let us see If I can come up with this affirmation this morning.

I remember my childhood companions and the joy we shared. Being joyful is how I will remember and share my experience of them.

I have long ached to restore the joy of my childhood. I was one happy little kid but I chose to walk away from it. Perhaps this affirmation will help. As I repeat it the grip of my passenger slips and he changes. I suspect over the next few days the affirmation will mature, change a little, although this one does seem quite clear, they often need to be tweaked. It probably needs company and I expect to generate two more in the next few days. That always seems to be the way.

Michael, The Mystic Tourist ©2012