Our Soul's Christmas Desire

 Hi everyone. Happy Saturday after Christmas. 

We'll get back to A Search For God in a couple of days. I listened to a video today that I didn't want to wait to tell you about. It's a video from Edgar Cayce's visions called "Your Soul's True Christmas." on YouTube, on the Soul In Reflection channel, posted 3 weeks ago as of the time I'm writing this. 

I don't want to assume everyone knows the story of why we celebrate Christmas. Some people celebrate only because it's a holiday to exchange gifts, get together with friends and/or family, and just have a chance to rest and have time off from work. Not everyone is a Christian who acknowledges the birth of Jesus. It is widely accepted now that Jesus wasn't born on December 25th or even in December for that matter. Whoever decided just decided to combine it with the winter solstice celebration, and that decision has lasted. People either celebrate Christmas with Santa only, or going to church and acknowledge Jesus, or both like I used to do with my kids.

Today we'll talk about Jesus' birth. Not how it relates to Christmas, and shepherds and wisemen, but what it means to us and our spirituality. From this point on a lot of what I'll write will be from the video, in case I don't happen to mention it. 

Cayce says the true meaning of Christmas isn't just a beautiful story from history, it's a blueprint for your soul's awakening. It's an eternal spiritual process that must happen inside of us now in this lifetime. The "Christ" child wasn't just in Bethlehem. {The Christ came to earth in a child to teach us how to connect with out Christ Consciousness when He grew up.} My paraphrase of the transcript of the video. He's waiting for us to receive the birth of that child and the Christ Consciousness that the child was born with. Cayce says the Nativity Scene, although a literal historic event, is actually a cosmic diagram of what must occur within every human soul. Mary, a human girl, also represents your higher consciousness, pure, receptive, and willing to say yes to the divine when it makes no logical sense. Joseph represents your earthly mind, protective, practical, sometimes doubting, but ultimately faithful. The manger itself is our heart. The question is, is it empty, and if so are we willing to let the Christ that was in that baby be born there? I LOVE THAT!! 

Cayce taught that the birth of Jesus was a demonstration of the universe's intention for EVERY soul. The Christ Consciousness is the perfect union of human and divine. The complete surrender of love as or main reason for existing isn't just exclusive to Jesus. It is our destiny. It is what we were created to achieve. The question is, will we accept that destiny? Until Christmas becomes personal and it's about transformation, it's just a warm and fuzzy historical event that we're destined to repeat in future lifetimes. 

As you can tell by previous posts, I have an issue with things some Christians say to make other people feel inferior. "Being Born Again" is one of them. It seems it is usually said in an arrogant manner. I know Jesus said it. He told that to the Pharisee Nicodemus, but like a lot of things over the years Christians like to use that phrase to try to show that they're somehow superior to others. 

When I heard this video this morning, one of my first thoughts were, we don't need to be born again, we just need to be born with Jesus the baby. Born with the Christ Consciousness. See the baby laying in that manger and decide whether we are going to let the Christ Consciousness be born in our hearts.

I've covered about the 5 minutes of the 23 minute video. Check out the rest if you're interested. It talks about God appearing to the shepherds and others throughout history that were humble, but these first 5 minutes is what was so meaningful to me. 

We'll get into more of Cayce's book in a few days. But be on the lookout for more spur of the moment posts in case I hear something else exciting.

Here's a picture of Jesus as Christ Consciousness watching over himself as a baby and his family

Keep Searching,

Paul     

A Search For God

 Hi everyone,

If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you had a had a great day and if you have kids, I hope their's was everything they hoped for. If you don't celebrate Christmas I hope you had a wonderful day as well. Maybe you had the day off from work to take advantage of the holiday. Maybe you celebrate Hanukkah. I love that tradition also, I never took part in the Hanukkah tradition, but it always seemed more meaningful than a jolly old man somehow sneaking into your house. When my kids were little Santa brought presents, but we never were super serios about making sure they sat on his lap and all that other stuff. They wrote a letter and left cookies and milk out for him so he could get fatter, but we never really made too much fuss about it. We did make them go to bed early so we could have a reason to have some quiet time 😊😊 

Since last week I bought the Nag Hammadi. It's a compilation of books discovered in an area in a town by the same name in Upper Egypt. A local farmer discovered scrolls in pottery as he was digging on his land. The Gospel of Thomas and a bunch of other books that we'll get into. I also bought a couple of Edgar Cayce's books. A Search for God Books 1 and 2, and The Story Of Jesus. I started reading all of them but A Search For God is the one that has sparked my interest first. In some recent posts I mentioned meditation and that maybe not everyone can sit crossed legged, for an long period of time. If you're focusing on the pain in your legs or back then you wouldn't be getting the benefit of your meditation.

The first chapter in the book is called meditation. You may have heard the saying "Praying in talking to God. Meditating is listening to God." Cayce mentions that in this book as well. In the very first line he says, "In the material world we are conscious of the phenomenon of growth. We should be equally aware of spiritual progression that includes both a broadening of understanding of the relation between the Creator and ourselves." He also says, and I'll paraphrase, some people are just content to go through our day to day lives hoping that things will work out for the best, but other people seek a better way, searching for a light that renews hope. "Prayer is the concerted effort of our physical consciousness to become attuned to the Consciousness of the Creator." 

"Meditation is the emptying of ourselves of all that hinders the Creative Force from rising along the natural channels of our physical bodies." These natural channels are sensitive spiritual centers in our bodies. Some practices call them Chakras. Meditation is not daydreaming but connecting our mental and physical bodies to their spiritual sources. True meditation is arousing our mental and spiritual attributes with our creator. Will we always receive an immediate answer every time we pray and meditate? Probably not, but like Jesus says in Matthew 6:8, The Father knows what you need before you ask. Praying and meditating shows The Father we are anxious  for His guidance. I know sometimes we feel like we wait, and wait and feel like we never get an answer. 

Sometimes when we try to make things happen, it seems like we try over and over. Then finally when nothing seems to work, we say OK GOD, what am I suppose to do? The answer comes immediately. That is what Cayce means by attuning ourselves with God. If we can sit, in our most comfortable position. Maybe listen to some soothing music. I like to burn incense. There's no right or wrong way. Just put yourself in a position where you aren't distracted. There's a spot in our backyard that I call my spot. I can go back there under the trees and just have a peaceful feeling. Also in the pool. Whatever works for you is the way you should use to connect with God/Spirit/Creator/Universe or whichever term you like best. 

I've also been listening to videos about the Ethiopian Bible. They talk about getting back to the Old Testament names of God. YHWH, and all the names of Jehovah. Through the years we have gotten to where we just say God and that has lost it's personal touch, like when YHWH told Moses to tell Pharaoh I Am sent you to free the people. 

There's a lot I want to share, the Lord's Prayer video was way cool, but for I want to focus on Edgar Cayce's teaching on meditation so we can all start connecting to and feeling the presence of Christ Consciousness in our lives. 

The next section of Chapter 1 in A Search For God is preparing the body for meditation. We'll get into that next time.

Have a great week and Keep Searching,

Paul  

Immaculate Conception

Hi everyone, this week I was going to talk about prayer and connecting with God, but then I had thought about the birth of Jesus and what that means. What's a little weird about that is, it wouldn't bother me if we skipped from Halloween to New Years. I do like Thanksgiving though. I like Christmas Eve services, but it isn't something I make a point to go to. Except for the potential for family drama, Thanksgiving is nice because all that's expected is to get together and eat and spend time with family. At Christmas, if you have kids, gifts are a big part of the fun and possible disappointment. I heard one time that, what causes anger is that your expectations weren't met, or your goals were blocked. If your kid's goal was to get the latest digital device and you couldn't afford one at all, or could only afford a lesser version then Christmas day was spent in disappointment and "ruined" in their eyes. These days Andrea and I exchange gifts but a lot of times the gifts are something we need for the house or take a trip.

With that being said, after the thought came to me about Jesus' birth I also thought, It's the week before Christmas so why not talk about Immaculate Conception. What a lot of people don't know is there are other stories of women conceiving a child without being assisted by a male. 

A woman in China, named Jiang Yuan, as the story is told, miraculously conceived a child when she stepped in a giant footprint left by the supreme deity Shangdi, thus giving birth to a child she named QI, which means the abandoned one, because he survived every time she tried to get rid of him. 

There are other stories throughout history. The greek god Horus, an Aztec god Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, and another more famous name we recognize is Guatama Buddha. 

Lying on the royal couch she fell asleep and dreamed the 4 guardian angels lifted her and the couch to the Himalayan Mountains. They clothed her with divine garments and flowers and anointed her with perfumes. They placed the couch with it's head towards the east and laid her down. She saw the Future Buddha as a superb white elephant wandering on a Gold Hill. Descending Gold hill he ascended Silver Hill and approaching from the north he plucked a white lotus. Trumpeting loudly he went into the Golden Mansion. Walking three times around his mother's couch with his right side towards it, and striking her on her right side he seemed to enter her womb. 

She woke up and told the dream to the king. The king summoned 64 Brahmins and asked the dream to be interpreted. They said "Be not anxious, great king, a child has planted itself into the womb of your queen." (I've paraphrased this story from the book "The Second Coming Of Christ, The Resurrection of Christ Within You" by Paramahansa Yogananda). 

If you've spent your life around the stories of the Christian churches you, like me, may not be aware there are other similar stories, and there are people who believe these stories just as strongly as people in the Christian tradition believe the story of Mary, the Angel and Jesus. 

I was also thinking this week that at times I may seem to come across as bitter towards the Christian church, and in a sense I am, but to the teachings of the church and that in the 3rd and 4th centuries, in their quest to control the people, the church leaders rejected the true depth of Jesus' teachings and adopted the teaching that we need a savior to keep us from eternal damnation. 

I don't want to give the impression that I'm only here to condemn, I'm here to help others see there is more to Jesus' teachings than what the typical Christian churches are teaching, and it's not even the fault of the ministers of the churches. They're only being taught in their colleges these teachings and passing it along.

Next time we'll get into the birth of Jesus, and it's spiritual significance other than just a baby being born to save the world.

As always have a great week and

Keep searching,

Paul

I also decided to play with more AI images on my artspace ai program

Salvation 2.0- more thoughts

Hi Everyone, more thoughts occurred to me last night about Salvation. I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, or if it happens to you, but some of the best ideas come to me when I'm in the shower. Sometimes, like last night, old thoughts resurface. First let's start with a true story about the inconsistencies of denominations, churches and salvation. 

"Unity" is a worldwide religious organization. I don't know if they would be considered a denomination, so let's just say they are more of a New Thinking religious organization. Andrea and I went to a Unity church here in Florida til the covid shutdowns, then everything seemed to be different afterwards and we just finally quit going. While I like the model of the church format and their teachings, something happend to the one in our town and it just didn't feel right to us anymore. With that being said, here's the story:

Michael Gott is the pastor of Unity Houston. I listen to his Sunday teaching sometimes. One day he said he grew up going to a Pentecostal church. He recalled his church teaching that if you aren't Saved AND speak in Tongues you aren't going to heaven. He remembered thinking, how can this be? This really narrows down who's going to be getting in. It was then that he decided he'd be leaving. He didn't say how old he was at the time, but if he was still young he knew this wasn't going to be his lifelong church. Along with that story and searching Buddhism, Hinduism and others, and hearing about so many people having encounters with God, I started thinking, how can Evangelical Christians say they have a monopoly on God? How can they say "If you don't ask Jesus to be your savior you aren't going to heaven?" I looked up some statistics, and these were just from last night.

Now, according to this, if Evangelical Christians are correct, three quarters of the world is going to hell. Like Michael Gott, since God is a God of love, I'm not buying it. I don't have statistics to back it up, but I think there have been more encounters with God in other religions then the 700 million christians have had. We are watching The Saints series on Fox Nation right now, and every one that we've seen so far has been a person who has had an "Experience" with God. Not just one that goes to church on Sunday, but one that truly gets transformed like it says in Romans 12:2. A favorite line salvation based Christians like to say is "God is a God of love. He isn't choosing to sent them to hell, they have a choice to accept Jesus or not, so they are sending themselves to hell." I'm not buying that one either. Those Christians want to say the sinners prayer and use that as a license to sin. My thoughts on that are, if you can feel like you can "just keep on sinning now" then I question your Love for God. 

I'm reading another book now called "The Soul's Desire-A Guide On How To Pray"  by Glenn Clark. He talks about Jesus method of teaching was in parables and using your imagination from those parables to learn, therefore teaching us that we need to think past what we see as our reality and connect with God and "Not My Will But Thy Will." Jesus's teachings was meant for everyone. How did we get to the point where any given denomination can say the other is wrong? Now everyone is looking at each other and seeing their differences and not the Jesus they have in common. Even within the churches themselves there are cliques. A group of friends gossiping about a person or another group. People join together for a Sunday class and/of church service and sometimes can't even get out of the front door before gossiping. I have to admit, that writing about it now kind of feels like that's what I'm doing here. I'm not trying to imply that I'm any better, but as I was reading how this author was talking about it I found myself nodding in agreement with him. 

The idea of the book is to pray using your imagination like Jesus did in the parables. Instead of starting to feel like you're catching a cold, taking medicine and praying to get better, connect to the Christ Consciousness in meditation that you are a child of God and have a healthy body. Instead of praying acknowledging you don't have enough money in your bank account to pay your bills that are due, meditate and listen for the thoughts to come to your for a solution. We want to pray, give our needs and desires to God and move on with our next task. What we need to do is sit in quiet and connect our heart with the heart of our soul's consciousness that was created in love and the solution will come. 

To try to summarize all these thoughts on salvation, they're what I feel have been shown me in my frustrations about the christian community, and my quiet time solutions when searching for answers, just because you say a "sinner's prayer" but then don't try to transform to a life of love developing your christ consciousness, doesn't mean you're saved and get a free ticket to heaven. Salvation has nothing to do with church, a denomination, rituals or believing what I say or anyone else says. Salvation is your own connection with God. Jesus said "Be still and Know That I Am God." If we just take time to sit quietly, focus our concentration on the spot on our forehead between the eyes, look into the darkness and notice the thoughts and possibly the images that appear, your will eventually experience the peace and love of The Christ that Jesus the man taught that we can experience. 

Salvation is connecting with That Love Consciousness. That Consciousness is God, not some man with white hair. God is Love. We were created in God's image, therefore we are love, we just have to bring ourselves back to the place where we remember our loving soul that love made. 

What also used to frustrate me about the church was when we would have a weekend event and people would be pumped up about God, then the next week back to the same routine. I don't want that to happen here. If you have questions, ideas for topics to help you on your path, please leave a comment and let's address them. Let's study the things you're unsure about, or questioning, or just want to go deeper into.

Have a great rest of your week and,

Keep Searching,

Paul