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Are you a spineless coward? A people pleaser? White lie teller?
Fear of speaking or hearing the truth is the biggest stumbling block we face in our desire to experience genuinely fulfilling, honest and loving relationships. When we hold something back, that something separates us from the other person. If we’re not open to hearing the words of others without reacting or taking them personally, we have distanced ourselves from those individuals.
It’s always easier to tell people what they want to hear. It’s often more comfortable to agree with someone, even if we disagree in our hearts. And since it can be equally frightening to confront painful truths about our own selves, our friends and family may feel compelled to tell us only what we want to hear.
Today when you need to tell the truth, have the courage to open your heart as well as your mouth. And when you need to hear the truth, have the strength to open your ears and close your mouth.
What’s the meaning (purpose) of life
The two sources that helped me define what life could mean to me are Wallace D. Wattles and The Zohar, the definitive book of Kabbalah.
According to Wallace D. Wattles (of The Science of Getting Rich fame) is that life wants more life, and your job (YOU! Human Being) is to align yourself with that. More life means being able to have all the tools that you are capable of using, being on the cutting edge of thinking, etc. This has been really very inspiring to me.
I have worded this MY WAY: our job is to be God’s self-expression. God doesn’t have a thumb, but we do. And we are causing full self-expression to God when we use what we were blessed with, our bodies, our minds, our emotions.
Kabbalah is similar, in a way, saying that human beings are a part of the vessel the Light created (eons ago) to receive all its blessings, but (unfortunately and unintentionally) the Light’s desire to give got transmitted with the light that was giving fulfillment to the vessel, and at some point the vessel said: I don’t want to eat bread of shame any more, I want to be able to earn the light I receive, and be a giver, not just a receiver.
That is what caused the physical universe to spring into place, so that the vessel, (that broke into chards into the billions of souls) can earn its light in an environment of seeming scarcity, by becoming like god: giving of themselves.
Of course, physicality and scarcity are powerful forces, so it is not easy for the souls to “tame” their physical hosts… and only very few people in every generation elevate themselves much on the scale of 0-1000 (100% scarcity/ego to close to godliness).
So, in my life, this moment to moment to moment transformation of the selfishness and the full expression of what’s god (without being religious) is the purpose of living, i.e. the meaning I give to life.
And by selfishness I don’t necessarily mean material selfishness: generosity of heart is the opposite: I want for everyone what I want for myself. But I won’t give it to them and I won’t do it FOR them. I inspire them… by MY ACTIONS.
Now, this is a full blog-post… where is my blog… darn… when I need it? lol
Sophie Benshitta Maven
The last “evil inclination” to go
Rabbi Akiva was a great sage of Rabbinical Studies and had lots of students, around 24 thousand. They all studied, and followed the rules, and practiced, etc.
Regardless, when the great plague came, all 24 thousand students died except five, among them Shimon Bar Yohai, the author of The Zohar, the main written book of Kabbalah.
Why would all those students die, and why the five. The legend says that Rabbi Akiva went through rigorous self-examination after this plague, and came to the conclusion that it was his fault: he did not squarely base all his teaching on the most fundamental (and hardest) principle: “love your neighbor as yourself”.
It is hard to define exactly what this “love your neighbor as yourself” is, because it is so missing from today’s culture.
What is it? respect? willingness to support another?
I am no sage, so I am going to give you a few recent examples I have experienced.
Why this is important? Because when you are violating this principle, you are disconnected from the 99%. When you are disconnected: your life goes darker. When you are disconnected: the things you desire move away from you. Is that good enough reason?
OK, here is something that happened last week:
Two revered friends of mine, business partners, teach stuff on the internet through webinars. So far so good, right?
They are both extraordinarily talented people. One has a more pleasant voice and a more pleasing way of stringing words together though.
You may expect, but in order to make a living with webinars, you need to sell them… 🙂
Half the people like the sharpness of one of these guys, the other half gets enchanted by the oratory capabilites of the other.
The other night I was at one of these “pitch” webinars and noticed the orator’s attitude of extreme beligerance. I picture him in my mind reclining in his chair, and lazily pumping out oh, yeah, hell yeah… constantly interrupting sharpie…
I sent a private message asking”are you drunk?”
“I wish” was the answer
“you do sound drunk…” I replied.
“so much for being encouraging” he retorted.
“well, you sound drunk, snap out of it” I commanded…
It took him a minute or two, but he eventually came around and became part of the presentation, instead of hindering it.
OK, I hope is visible and plain that the attitude of orator was: I do this better, i speak much better than you, I should be doing this, not you…
This, clearly, is disrespectful and diminishing for his partner… so it is violating the principle “love your neighbor as yourself”
Would you have noticed? Would you have known what is happening? Or would you have just gotten, below your conscious level of thought, that there is something off… and that you should not listen to sharpie… that he is no good? I think so.
What am I trying to say? That it is so ingrained in most of us that it is an “either you or me” world, that it would have not occurred as a disconnect from the divine…
The first level of any transformation is awareness.
I used to gossip. I still do, occasionally. I now catch myself fast, but only after the word is out of my mouth.
Gossip is designed to climb on another’s ruined reputation higher… but it is a mirage… everyone who listens feels that you are compensating for something lacking in you.
Since I have stopped to be constantly condescending, proud, gossipy, and comparing myself to others, my luck has increased, my fortune is coming, my health is better, because I disconnect less and less from where it all comes from, the 99%
Why people are coming to this blog for weight loss info… hm.
Like most blog, this one has a couple of software programs installed that tell me how many people visit this site, and how they got here. I can even see what they searched for to get to this site.
So, the past month or so, about 80% of the visitors came after they looked for weightloss… wow. Weird. but then again, there are no accidents in the Universe, really, no accidents.
When you can see behind the curtain, like in the Wizard of Oz, you can see the connections, plain and clear.
Let me reveal a little magic for you: at about the same time this rush of weightloss traffic started to come to this site, at the exact time, I had a revelation: that what’s been keeping me fat is what I didn’t know. Ha-ha… not very funny, is it?
About a month ago I heard that sugar, in quantities high enough (how about 6 grams… that’s one and a half teaspoon of granulated sugar… a bottle of coke has 42 grams of sugar in it) trigger a release of insulin, and insulin’s secondary job is to turn sugar into stored fat. Mainly around your waistline.
Now, that, I kind of knew… didn’t live like I knew, but as book knowledge goes, I knew it. But I found out something dramatic for me: a glass of milk contains 9 grams of sugar. My milk consumption was, at the time, a little over a liter a day. That is, my friend, 56 grams of sugar. Neatly concealed in whiteness…
Now, that was a wakeup call. It was loud and clear, that it wasn’t my genes, my age, it was the sugar that I unwittingly consumed that had kept me fat.
I went cold turkey, and cut out the milk. I have been putting a little bit of heavy cream into my tea, since then, and… drumroll please, I have dropped ten pounds, just by cutting out the milk.
I am not eating sweets or fruit either. I am not craving either. I have more energy, and I am getting visibly slimmer.
So, my firend, if you want to lose weight, maybe stop counting the calories, stop counting the fat, stop counting anything other than the sugar… rule: less than 5 grams of sugar in a meal, less than 15 grams of sugar total for the day.
Doesn’t sound very exciting? Hey, you can have an exciting diet and stay fat. I don’t care, I want to be slim more than have my excitement limited to sweetness… how about dating, how about dancing, how about hiking… no one really wanted a fattie for those exciting activities…
I have made my choice.
Now, back to the no coincidence… can you see? I have shifted and my blog has been attracting people like myself. Wow.