It seems most writers or speakers who stake a claim of expertise in the process of Spiritual Development or Personal Development either choose to gloss over what you really need to know or do not really know themselves and of course can’t tell you, what you want to know.

If this were a site for profit I may be doing the same thing. It may be that is how for pay authors and web sites make their living. In some cases I think the person behind the scenes really may not know how to go about giving you what you need to move ahead in your journey. The write out some some easy picking fruit and leave the hard to explain fruit hanging on the branch.

Sooner or later in this type of endeavor everyone hits a point where the next step you want to accomplish is improving your spiritual self. It may not be understood as such,  Raising your spiritual self is written so many different ways, sometimes it is hard to tell what the writer means. Some writers write, “Increase your awareness”, and let it go at that. Other writers write about, “Increasing your vibrations”, raising your energy frequency or something else as vague. What the heck is vibrational frequency anyway? Still others write or talk about your Third Eye, Chakras, Kundalini Rising, etc; the terms go on and on.

I may be too narrow in my thinking about all the terms that are used to describe different ways of doing the same thing. Maybe they are speaking to a different audience who understand exactly what they need to do and how to do it. Words and thought that are understood by the smallest child in some places leave adults in other parts of the world feeling of helpless.

So what is all this jumbled talk about awareness, kundal-who, frequency changing and the rest? It is really quite simple to understand, and a lot harder to actually undertake because misunderstanding follows closely on the heels of a new idea.

These terms all mean the same thing. They only represent different ideas or thoughts of the same thing. What you want to do is change your spiritual or inner self. I bet you are saying, I know that, what a waste of my time to read all this only to be told what I already know.

The key is learning and growth is understanding what do you change yourself to, and how you do it. Everything else is so many letters and words flowing into the galaxy of written words. Most the Authors and Writers, and perhaps Speakers, are most likely all talking about the same thing, only they are using different words and ideas to attempt to explain the ‘same thing’.

Life is a process. Our physical life for much of our life is forged for the first twenty-five years or so of our life. Our spiritual life on the other hand marches to a different drummer, and ignores time. For most of us we manage our physical world fairly well. Then one day we suddenly have a need to improve our spiritual self.

We have a thin veneer formed around us by this time in our life. It is what has formed from what our parents, other family members, and friends think about us. What they perceive or think we are. This thin veneer is a good guess of who we really are, though at other times it does not wear so well.

When it does not wear so well, it is because there has been lots of time for serious introspection about ourselves, who we are, and our place in the world. It dawns on us slowly that those ideas and thoughts that others want us to be are not us. The thin veneer that has been placed upon us does not fit quite right. Or perhaps it does not fit at all.

Looking inside ourselves for what is really the first time, these differences may appear. The clothes we have been wearing all our life suddenly do not seem to be the right style for us. Our hair style, which we have had since we were children now belongs to a stranger. We wonder how it ended up on us, and how we went all this time without realizing that we are not the person we see in the mirror.

For some of us this is a sad and occasionally scary time in our life. As we are programmed to fight or flight, so we normally do one or the other. We change our looks, habits, and other things about us as we fight the idea of us we see in the mirror.

Others run away from what they discover. Why that has to be us. That is how we have been our whole lives, how can it be any different? We pretend we never noticed that we are not who we see in the mirror. We go about our day as if the discovery never happened.
For those who embrace change, and start on a quest to discover who we really are, it is a ride full of ups and downs. Imagine you are the person in the picture. You spend your days going up and down the stairs, trying on this clothing and that clothing. Cutting your hair and letting it grow out. Wearing clothes that do not quite go together, but they seem more like you than any other clothes you have been wearing.

I think we do a disservice to our young adults. We no longer have any formal ritual, or initiation process where one can make the change from being a child to being an adult. We do not have a process where someone is sen as their own person and have the freedom to be who they think they are.

Generally for some, it is a painful process for everyone around. Expectations parents had for their children are not met because as young adults the child may not know who they are, but they know they are not what the parents think they should be.

If you find yourself in this situation, there are a few things you can do. The first thing one should do is remember this is your life, and it does not belong to anyone else. It is your life to do whatever you want to do with it, within some boundaries of common sense.

If you are a parent, it is important to understand that children grow up, and need to be respected for who they are trying to become, not what you may think they are. You have done your job getting them to this point, now they need your support and understanding until they become who they think they should be.

The stairwell of life goes up and it goes down. This period is the spring time of adult life. It is a rare time when we have the freedom to start finding out who we really are and what we are about. It may feel like we are on level ground, but none of us are really. No matter who we are, we are either going up or down the stairwell of life.

Shin Yee, in her post, What am I missing, writes what she suddenly realizes is missing in her life, perhaps wonders where it all went. Shin Yee laments of all the things that were and are no more. It is almost as if all these things happened while she was off doing something else with her life.

Another young woman, Khushi writes in her blog/diary that she has discovered a part of herself that she never knew existed. She was willing to explore that side of herself, and for now has decided to leave it alone. Kushi say’s she has taken a, ‘been there, done that, got the t-shirt’ stance.

babarkazmi, writes in his post, The Lost Thoughts writes of living two lives. The first life where he tries to do everything expected by following the ‘codes and rules’. He writes this way of living is suffocating him, that there is another part of him wanting escape, wanting to create a life of its own. He calls it the, “Barbarian”.

Three different views of the same problem we all come to know as we live our lives and make that jump and grow into adults. The people around us are not there any longer. They have deserted us, they have changed, they are not who we always thought they were.

Living with our parents and having our life guided for us, life is so simple, we went through our planned day and life, rarely give thought to how well orchestrated everything is. How well the pieces are put together that made up our life during those years.

Now as we start a new chapter in our life of making our own way, we start to see life is not as it always was, and we are not who we always thought we were either. Entering adult life, introduces our life on an empty canvas. We are not prepared for what we see and experience. It is difficult to have our world change around us, when we are used to everything always being the same.

When we start looking at ourselves, we are shocked to notice that we are changing too. There is another side of us, that until now we have never noticed. In our first encounters with this other part of us, we see it as ugly, and not at all us, and we wonder where it came from and how it got in without our noticing.

Some of us are able to accept this other side of us, mesh it into our life, and we go on as if nothing changed. Others however, have a more difficult time with their other side. As children
and into adult life as babarkazmi so succinctly points out, we have been so busy following the rules and behaviors expected of us, that we never notice our complete self.
When the rest of us starts to make an appearance, we do not always like what we see. We may see someone who enjoys cruelty, vice, or other life choices we may have abhorred all our life – only to discover we are them. We discover in occasionally unpleasant ways that part of us is made up of those things we thought we despised all our lives.

We are enveloped in a conflict we all struggle with if we are to live a reasonable life. We have to accept that we are made up of thoughts and feelings that not only are we not proud of, but we may find revolting.

Some people turn these parts of themselves into enemies, locked away never to see the light of day unless they slip out in a moment we we let our guard down. Others, start leading separate distinct lives that have little in common with one another accept the body they share. The most successful of us, acknowledge these other parts of us, and accept that we are simply human.

From that acceptance of ourselves as being all those ugly things we find in us, we grow and evolve into more than if we never embraced the dark side of ourselves. Embracing our darker side makes us more human, compassionate, and in general better people. Embracing our dark side does not mean giving in to it, or hating it. Embracing our dark side means accepting what and who we are. For all the good that is in us, so is an equal amount of evil. Our individual life is in the balance and how we arrive in that space where we are okay with all of us.

It sure felt good when on the winning end to really punish the other person. Taking it one step further. Adding a few extra hurtful comments because I knew I could was extra frosting on the cake.

Over time, I learned, or maybe unlearned, that I was not doing myself any good going above and beyond when I won an argument. It made me feel good for a few minutes of course. Or maybe I should say it made my ego feel good.

What I found was the price I extracted in collecting my proverbial pound of flesh from the other person would eventually turn out to be very expensive for me. I found out my behavior I was really hurting myself in the long run.

Over time, I find it better not to let arguments become that heated if at all possible. The more battles I took on, even more battles would make their presence known. In the end there are only a few battles worth fighting.

What I learned to do was stop arguing when I won. When losing, I found it is less painful to concede immediately. Stopping at the first opportunity is something practiced in martial arts where the idea is to stop the violence as quickly as possible with the least amount of harm to the opponent.

Fighting battles can be fun. Winning them is fun. Punishing the loser is even more fun. It is a blast in fact, until I needed something that only the person I hurt could do for me. Then suddenly it became obvious that the price they paid was much smaller than the price I would end up paying.

At first it was hard to stop. Hard to make myself stop when I had a lifetime of taking arguments too far, too often. With practice it became easier, and when done long enough, stopping before an argument became heated and something painful was said, became second nature.

So what is the benefit in not taking an argument too far? The most obvious is the other person does not feel like they have an enemy. They know what they were saying was actually heard and understood. In the future they may be may be more likely to help you, or at least not do anything to hamper you because they are not your enemy.

Being perceived as more mature comes in third for me. Not letting a disagreement become personal, and therefore heated, allows me to stay focused on keeping the disagreement respectful.

I find I have more energy. I have more energy because I am not wasting energy and effort on something that is not that important.

Life becomes easier and simpler. Not wasting time and energy on something that when compared to the bigger things in life are not really that important, allows more time and effort for what really matters. Not spending my energy trying to win an argument at any cost, gives me more time to notice those little things that make a big difference in the quality of my life.

When enough time is put into not arguing for the sake of arguing, I now understand other peoples arguments may be valid when they disagree with me.

Because I learned other people are not always wrong, I started seeing the person. When I start seeing the person, I know they are trying to enjoy their life just like I am. They may be going about it differently, but they are not wrong.

Reaching this point, a happier more filling life starts to happen, and life becomes happier and more enjoyable because almost everyone is moving in the same direction I am.

As their life goes on they start to feel and look tired and a little worn out. As they grow older the effects of life pulling and tugging at them away each day becomes more obvious. If live to be very old they feel like a hollow shell where everything has been drained out of them.

They remember being young and having energy and fight, and strength, taking on the worst life can throw their way, but over the years it becomes to much. Life starts draining them, sapping their strength, and quelling their love of life. They are not sure where exactly it all happened, they remember the big issues, death, divorce, and financial struggles. They seldom remember the little things that really drained them. The day to day grind that their life turned out to be.

I share some part of me with people who feel like this. I have my days when I feel like life is trying to grind me into the ground and turn me into a dust cloud to be blown away by the wind. Everyone normal has these days or days like them. I think I am lucky though because for me these days are few and far between.

I love the change and challenge my life, and the sometime unique ways everything turns out for the best no matter what my efforts were. Problems and challenges are a part of life, we can not escape them normally. If we do escape problems that happen in every day life, it is time to acknowledge we may have a bigger problem starting with denial.

I had a though that prompted me to write about this. One that sort of puts life and the challenges we face in perspective. I saw myself in my minds eye as a rough and jagged rock. It did not look like much, just a big rock. As I watched, little chips were taken out of the rock, some so small they were hardly noticeable. Other times, larger pieces of the rock were broken all at once.

As I watched this movie play in my head, I made the connection that the rock was me. Over the years, little pieces have been chipped away from me. During those somber serious life events, larger pieces of me were broken off and cast aside. While parts of me are being chipped away over the years and decades something else was happening too.

I have been taking on a form or shape, becoming defined. My jagged outside was becoming polished, and taking on a little shine. Things that used to take little chips out of me, now polish me a little bit.

Maybe if I live long enough, one day I will look into my minds eye and see a shiny stone where the rough jagged rock once stood.

I never did find myself which at the time was frustrating for me. I thought once I was physically away from home finding out who I was would be an easy matter. After all anyone I was likely to meet or talk to would have no idea who my parents were, and should have a clear idea of who I was.

All these years later, I know now, that what I was doing was writing the story of my life. It was not out there for me to find, but rather there was a large empty blackboard waiting for me to fill. Who I ‘was’ is a lifetime of living and discovery.

Of all things that appeal to us, the first sought after are usually not the best for us. The best we can become take some searching and planning. I discovered a few things that may be of interest to you in the process of finding me.

Of the many things I have become, a few of them should not happen until their time. Getting married and having children are two that come to mind rather quickly. Many of us want to get married and we want to have children. That is the way we are, at least we want the try to have children part.

Getting married and having children though should be a farther along the road of becoming who we are rather than an early life goal. It is pretty difficult to become a parent and raise a family when we have not given ourselves a chance to discover who we are.

Other things should be done as soon as possible. For example, going to college or traveling across the country should be early life goals. College has obvious benefits and should be completed before life gets complicated. The same goes for wanting to strike out on our own or do some traveling. Traveling is much easier when there are no other responsibilities in our life.

Some things should be avoided all together. There are some roads where one should not venture when creating our future us. These are determined by what we think and feel, and vary from person to person. What is okay for one, is not okay for a second person.

Don’t be afraid to take reasonable risks. Because our life is basically empty until we start living it, taking risk is part of the process of defining who we are. Doing something you have never done before can lead to new friendships and interests. Be careful and make sure that what you are about to do is something you can tell your parents you are doing. It is a long lifetime, and it is easy to do something starting out in life that is regretted forever. The old saying, ‘look before you leap’, applies. Some new adventures can put you in a wheelchair or prison, or worse for life. Think long and hard before you act.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes when you are finding you. If you are not making mistakes, you may not be reaching far enough. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, just make sure the mistakes you could make, do not harm yourself or others.

As I was out there making my own mistakes, and trying out new things, and discarding things that no longer worked for me, somewhere along the line I found myself. I found out who I am, and clarified my likes and dislikes. I learned what I wanted from my life.

Who you become is who you become. It takes time to create your life, and if you find it is not working for you, it will take time to change your life again. It is not possible to change who you are overnight. It is not possible to write the complete book of your life and who you are until the final page is written. Until then we are on a sometimes rambling journey down the path of life.

Enjoy where you are at in your journey and make the most of it, the next chapter will start in it own time and rushing it does not speed the process up but only adds frustration. Enjoy today and tomorrow will take care of itself is a good though to end on.

Happy New Year, happy new life!

For most of us, it is not until our kids leave home, or we are cruising through our forties when we realize we really do not know a lot about us. We know what our beliefs are, and what our likes and dislikes are, but most of us we have no real idea why they are who we are. We only really know that we have been this way all our lives. It is during this period when we really start to find out about ourselves. Some of us like what we find and some do not, but it is generally a time of both inner and outer exploration.

A lucky or perhaps not so lucky minority of people go through this stage early in life. Perhaps in their teens or early twenties. It is much harder to explore yourself when you are younger because a number of life’s tools that come from living are not present. To compound the difficulty many common ideas in the adult world are still new to us, and we think we invented or discovered them for the first time. For anyone who finds themselves in this position, it is best to remember that what you are learning is new for you, but perhaps not new to others.

One area we exploration is finding how we think about the world and our place in it. When we are growing how the world effects us, and our immediate family. People who hold a world view that encompasses the world first, and not themselves are a rare prize. Generally, great struggles have gone on within their core being before they found this new plateau of seeing the world and their place in it.

This is only a minor example of how we change as our life unravels. There is a good learning here that applies to all areas of our lives. If you have ever heard or read the story of the blind men and the elephant you may already know how and why our views change. In the story, some blind men all examine different parts of an elephant and have different ideas of what an elephant looks like.

Whether you are one of the few who have more advanced ideas on the world and your place in it, or are just starting out on the journey and have no idea of how you fit into the world remember everything is perfect in this moment and time, all is as it should be. All roads lead to Rome as the ancient saying proclaims. What is important to remember is that unless you and the person you are discussing life with are touching the same spot on the elephant, your views will be different, and that is okay. Of course each of you will grow at different rates and your views will cease to be the similar, and that is how it should be too.

Conflict in these situations starts when one party forgets that neither party holds the correct view. The correct view is still somewhere ahead on the path of life. As soon as one party involved remembers either holding that view in the past, or that the other person is speaking from a experience level they have not arrived at conflict goes away. We can not pull or force another into our level of life. We can only hope that we are on the right path ourselves, and eventually others will join us.

Once out of school not much changed except my friends who had vision for thier lives moved on to accomplish whatever goals they had set for themselves. For my own part, my friends were changing as the more focused people were leaving, and more unfocused people took their place.

It was a hard balancing act for me, I had ambition and drive, but the people I hung around with most of the time did not. I would spend my work time trying to do a good job, but in my personal life nothing was changing. It was the same old grind every week. Looking back I can see I was sliding backwards in my life by the people I chose to have around me. They had no real goals for their life, and I was keeping myself from mine by being with them.

I slowly changed my friends, and made a more serious attempt to change my life. It was not an easy task though, as I was acclimated to a certain group of people and a certain life style that goes with it. The groups I wished to be a part of saw me as someone who did not belong in their circles. It took a lot lot of time and frustration to change. Change is never and easy thing to do, and it is much harder when you are changing your whole life in the process.
 
I feel that at some point along the way I completed the change. I look back at the young me and I think I would not recognize him if I could somehow go back in time and meet myself. That is not to say my personality has changed, but the way I envision life these days definitely has changed dramatically.

The point of all this is who you are, what you want, and who you choose to have around you determine you, like it or not. If you have goals and ambitions you have not yet realized, you may want to take a close look at those people you choose to be with. On a day to day basis, do they help you, hinder you, or neither? Many of my friends were in a neither category, which was a hidden hindrance. It is hard to have friends who are leading a life style you are not a part of directly, but you are involved in by default, and not become like them.

If you find yourself in a position like I was, it is time to start evaluating what your friends are doing for your life. If your friends are not a positive influence in your life, and you want to change and grow, plan to see less of your current friends, and start making new friends. While this idea may sound selfish and self centered, and it is, at some point and time if you do not change yourself, you become who your friends are.

It is important to remember you are not leaving your friends behind, rather you are choosing to grow away from them for a chance to improve your life. Most of them will see you as moving on, although a few may not and there is little you can do about how they feel. You will notice they will find a replacement friend to fill the spot you left faster than you will find new friends to spend time with. Do not expect new friendships to replace old friends. Be patient, as there is little you can do to speed up the process. The best you can do is remember you are trying to improve yourself. If your friends are paying attention they may even want to follow you and improve their life too.

If you accept as a basic concept that we are here on this earth to learn and become better human beings, these relationships are not terrible, and there is no exploitation. It takes is a rethinking of what we see from a physical to a spiritual process. For many people it is too big of a jump, and their minds can not accept that something horrible is being done as an act of unconditional love and growth for another.

I think this is true, and relationships like these are an obvious example. I think that growth and high level love are shown in many horrible things that take place in this world daily. Going back to the idea that we are here on this earth to learn and grow spiritually, who is it we are learning from? There is no supreme being that takes us by the hand and leads us through our life, and shows us what we need to know, and we understand the learning, and are grateful for the instruction.

We humans do not operate like that. We humans learn by making our own mistakes and committing our own crimes. For example, there is a savage murder yesterday. It is a terrible thing and the killer should be banished to prison for life, or executed as soon as possible.

This is the physical side of our thinking in action. What we do not think about is the spiritual side of what occurred. What about the victim, what did they learn from this experience? There is nothing obvious for the victim. Probably because of circumstances, or bad judgement they died a horrible needless death.

What about the possibility that they lived their life for this moment to happen, to willingly be the victim for the killer? While this thought is shocking and perhaps revolting, it can be seen as a possibility on a spiritual level.

The killer in this heinous crime needed to learn something from the killing. Why should someone who is here on this earth on their own journey, be randomly murdered, halting their path of learning and spiritual growth? There does not seem to be any balance or justice in this thought.

What about the possibility that these people agree to be in these positions for the sole purpose of being the victim out of love for the person(s) who need(s) to learn from this experience? While agreeing to be a victim, and be abused, tortured, or murdered is disgusting and repulsive on a physical plane, on a spiritual plane, it is an example of love on the highest level.

What more could a spiritual being do than volunteer to be a victim for another beings spiritual growth? Again the idea is repulsive, but history is full of people who have chosen to be a victim rather than allow another innocent person to be a victim. The most recent example to me is the holocaust. Many, many known and unknown people stepped up in place of another knowing full well what the consequences would be for them. Yet they did it anyway in an act of supreme love.

From that perspective, is the idea of one person living their life until some predetermined moment when they are to be a victim unreasonable? I do not think so at all. In a realm where everything is supposedly perfect, no matter how unjust it appears on the surface, it makes complete sense. Many of the worlds religions are of the belief that everything that happens is the will of God. The idea of a human being agreeing to be born to be a victim of another on the physical plane, is nothing different than Gods will being done on a spiritual level.

From time to time I have been at social functions, where I see young women who I know are being exploited. They are willingly sitting in a chair ignored for hours at a time. The man shows up or summons them to him for something. That is their life purpose by all appearances, to be totally dependent on one man in a one way relationship.

It is not obvious unless you understand the type of man they are with. I imagine they are everywhere, but to me they are only visible when it is a social gathering of some type. These are men who think the whole world serves only them, and that is how they live their life. Perhaps they are sociopaths to some degree, or maybe something different, but their views on how the world works, are far from normal.

The women are usually young and of course pretty, who are not in the rocket science league of brain power, but I am sure they are smart enough to do something different with their lives if they made the effort. I am not sure how the process works, but it must start at home when they are children. They are somehow turned into possessions instead of human beings by their fathers I think, or so it appears.

So they grow up and graduate high school, and maybe try out college, or living on their own. But it is not easy for them as they are used to being Daddy’s pet, and they miss that life. All they had to do was be cute for Daddy, and make him laugh, and everything else was okay. Daddy took care of their survival needs and that is all they needed

When these women are out on their own, perhaps before, male predators know them as soon as they see them. That is what some men specialize in, finding these women. They know some Daddy’s raise their little girls like this, probably because they were raised in the same type of environment. They spot these young women, and start working on them almost before they have lived on their own in the adult world.

So here is young woman, some toy a certain type of man picked up, and can afford right now. As long as she doesn’t act too stupid, or start thinking she is important, she will be what most people think of as a kept woman. She will have clothes and things, and she will get her own, cell phone, car, and probably spending money. This is not a Sugar Daddy relationship, because the woman is not out on her own and living in her own place. She is totally dependent on a man taking care of her.

The worst part of it in my opinion is that these women, and their men see this type of relationship as totally normal. If you try to tell them how abnormal the situation is, they will look at you like you are talking in a language they have never heard of before.

Of course the time comes, when he starts thinking she is not quite what he wants, perhaps he wanted her to do his bidding once or twice and she was not home, or she is spending money a little too fast, or maybe her mouth is getting a little smart for his liking. It could be as simple as she is starting to get boring to him. At any rate, sooner or later he will get tired of her and throw her out, or give to one of his friends as a pet.

I am not sure what happens to these women as grow into middle age, but I imagine that life does not improve for most of them. There is an alternate spiritual view I have been introduced to over the years, and it paints a whole new paradigm of what is happening in these relationships.

Part two tomorrow.