Living Responsibly
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By now you’ve probably noticed there are some words on the board, unless you happen to be sitting in a place you cannot see it. But we’ve talked about this idea beginning to bring forth the life activity within ourselves. Because, as we all are aware, we have gone through a lot of negative conditioning, we are exposed to many ideas that indicate a lack of life rather than the presence of it.
And in order for us to be able to get rid of some of the old concepts and some of the old beliefs, we do need to take the time and make the effort to begin to identify with some very positive words indicating the presence of life. And of course, by now with the classes you’ve had, you’re very familiar with a good way to do this. And that is through your identification with your particular words.
These are only a few that you may use sort of as starters for your list of words to be identified with the idea of life, but also to be identified with you as a personality. Remember that when you relate I am, what are you speaking of? The spirit of God within you. And you’re also seeking to identify these qualities with this inner spirit with your own individual unique self. So remember that if you will take the time and make that effort to begin to use at affirmations that are filled with some of these words of life or life-filled words, you will begin to see some results take place.
For those of you who cannot read from where you are, I am strong, energetic, [unclear], lively, enthusiastic, active, dynamic, creative, flexible, and youthful. Is that a good start for you? Because once we begin to identify and to express all of those qualities, we find they are involved with a life idea. They are involved also with youth.
You can add to those many other words. And the key is to keep identifying with I am with each word individually, rather than just the whole group of them. But it’s important for us to make this positive identification in a deliberate, definite way. Because most people spend the greater part of their day using this term I am in exactly the wrong ways. Because we tend to identify with conditions of fatigue and tiredness and many of the other negatives that we actually could do without.
As we consider a little bit further along the lines of the cycle of life, as we begin to realize the continuity of life, that it is unending, we must also understand that this means responsible living. That in this cycle of life, we do not choose to be careless or thoughtless, but have the possibility of helping our own spiritual growth and unfoldment along. Remember you are looking for responsible living, living in which you identify with the life ideas, youthful living, active living, and creative living.
As we began to think deeply upon the ideas of reincarnation, getting into a little bit of the thought as we did last night of karma, it’s easy to allow ourselves to sort of put off things. This is one of the reasons that we have left or the reincarnation idea has been left out of many things. And that is man’s tendency to procrastinate and say, oh well, I’ve got eternity to do it in.
But we prolong our suffering in this way. We prolong our problems, our lacks, and our limitations when we do not deal with life as we go along. There is no need to get lost in the idea of reincarnation, but simply be willing to accept this as a part of the cycle of life and see how it fits in giving us other to grow closer to this image and likeness of God that we are. It is a part of the progressive movement of spirit. The object of which is to learn to live life freely and completely, expressing the divine nature that is within.
And it’s easy to get excited about things that seem somewhat mysterious about us, somewhat unusual. And yet if we begin to look at life itself and what we go through on a day-by-day basis, there are a lot of unusual things happening all around us. There are a lot of things that we don’t really comprehend and understand because done them so often and we’ve experienced them so often they have become usual.
But if we begin to just accept new ideas easily and to look at the cycle of life as a part of the natural process of growth and unfoldment, it becomes easier for us to relate freely and easily to other people, as well as to our experiences in life. As you know, many of our problems and difficulties arise because we function from the standpoint of defensiveness. We’re afraid others are out to cause us harm. We’re afraid people are going to abuse us and misuse us.
Therefore we’re always waiting for something to happen. And then what usually happens? Something does. Because we are building this into our consciousness. But we live in a friendly universe with a lot of friendly people. And if we can see one another as growing, evolving souls on this pathway of life, it helps us to be able to relate in a more healthy manner.
We need to think a little further along the idea of ourself as a physical being. Because right now you are functioning through your physical body. This is the method through which you are able to express the ideas that come to you, you are able to do those things that you feel guided to do. And not only those things that add to your blessings in life, but so those things that can be of benefit to mankind.
How would you like to have a house that constantly cleaned, repaired, and restored itself? A big other exciting concept within. To have a house that was responsible for its own upkeep. And yet in many ways we can liken this to the body because the body is such a self-renewing mechanism. And if we keep our thoughts, our feelings, our consciousness, in order, we find that so many things within the body take care of themselves.
We go through healings often that we know nothing about. Because during the process of evolvement, there are changes in the body. And there are adjustments to be made. And often these take place without our awareness at all. I remember hearing Dr. Simonton, who is involved in the cancer research, say that everybody has cancer at some time or another. And usually it is minor enough that the body itself goes right ahead and heals the condition.
And perhaps we might say, it’s very fortunate that we don’t get test at the wrong time and realize that we have a condition to cope with. Because what usually happens? We build fear thoughts, do we not? And we start attacking something that probably, in the natural orderly process of the life, would’ve healed itself. And a lot of times, if we would begin to expect the body to heal itself, we would see some good results.
What happens when you cut your finger? It starts healing very quickly, doesn’t it? And how does the healing process work? From the inside out. Because it doesn’t work right and you would not experience a complete healing if it started on the outside. And it heals from the inside out. And if we begin to see that this is really a pattern of work within the body, that it is self-healing to a large extent, maybe it is to all extent, we just don’t know that at this point.
But if we begin to understand that there is intelligent life within the cells of the body, that all of the intelligence that’s within you is not centralized in your brain, because your brain is not carried over from one lifetime to the other. Your body is changing. You’re taking new body as your consciousness, is carried with you. It expresses through your brain. It expresses through the intelligent cells within your body.
But these cells, we consider to be a part of a functioning intelligence. And although they are constantly renewing themselves and casting cells off and new ones being regenerated, we may even say dying and being reborn. This is happening within the cells of our bodies. They may renew themselves just like they were to start with. Or if our consciousness is changing, then we find that the worn out the disease, the healthy cells are replaced with those that more closely resemble the natural perfection we should be expecting.
If we interfere with the activity of the cell renewal within our body, through our wrong beliefs, our old concepts, beliefs, and disease, and suffering, and lack, and limitation, what so often happens is that we do generate the very condition we think we don’t want. We generate the causes that bring imperfection into being. So you can see the frame importance of learning to keep your mind in order. Because it is having its effect upon the body and upon the processes that are daily and even moment by moment taking place.
As we understand that the cells are renew themselves, we then have more validity for challenging the concept of aging and the loss of the youthful vitality of a body. Time is man’s own invention. It was not something that God said, let there be time, and there was. We have established a system of time. We have adapted our thinking to this system of time in such a way that our bodies respond to this particular system.
But it is an arbitrary concept that has no validity in truth. It is very useful because it enables us to order our lives, but the cells are much more affected by the character and quality of our thoughts than they are by the movement of the hands around the clock. And if we can begin to understand that this character and quality of our thoughts is, day by day, affecting us, and is affecting the physical being.
I remember hearing someone tell the story of the little boy who was sent to the bathroom by his mother and told to get cleaned up for dinner. So a few minutes later, he comes rushing out and yells, mom, mom, look at me. Well, she looked at him and saw was this cute, little, redhead, freckle face boy. And he says, can’t you tell? And she looked back and she couldn’t see a thing unusual about him. And then he said, look at me, I’m only four years old and I’m rusting already.
So we’ve built concept of age so that people pick up on it very early. And I’m sure a freckle might look like rust to a four-year-old. But if you begin to identify yourself with these concepts of youthful maturity. I’m not sure who it was that said youth is wasted on the young. And that they had some good points there. Because as we mature in our thinking and feeling, as we become aware of life in a more expanded way, it is natural that we experience a continuation of the youthful vitality that we experienced at an early age.
If we become motivated to live in this youthful maturity, we find that we keep bright, alert, and active minds, and we simply learn to enjoy life. Do you feel that you really enjoy life and living? Many people believe that life is a burden for them. And they somehow remove themselves from this joy in living, But we need not only to think about enjoying life, we need to think about enjoying people.
How do you feel about other people in your experience? Can you really enjoy them as they are? Or do you work pretty hard at making them into what you think they ought to be? Because the minute we start doing that, we cease enjoying. A great growing experience takes place when we can begin to share experiences with people and enjoy them without going through this judging and trying to determine what it is they should be doing or shouldn’t be doing.
But if we can learn to enjoy them where they are, as they are, and allow them the same privilege of growth that we expect, we find that life becomes much simpler for us. Because you are aware that a high percentage of the problems that we face to a day in our world are problems that have originated between people. They are people problems. And if we were able to solve suddenly all the people problems in the world, first of all, we would have a peaceful world. Would we not? We would have a very effective productive world because there would not be this element of relationships that causes a great deal of difficulty.
So not only should we enjoy life and enjoy our people in our life, but we should enjoy the experiences in living. Sometimes we get a little bit too concerned, I feel, with some of the challenges we face. And we see them as strong challenges or problems rather than simply opportunities for growth and unfoldment. If we began to enjoy the whole process of living, we will find that our growth and unfoldment takes place more speedily.
Also, if you observe the action of children, you will find that they have a tendency to enjoy life more than adults. Have you asked yourself why this is true? We are aware that one of the things is they do not have as many outer problems, perhaps to cope with, but they’re still going through tremendous processes of learning. Are they not?
Have you noticed that children have a natural optimism. Until you teach them otherwise, they simply go out into life expecting to enjoy it and expecting to have good things happen to them. They don’t go through what many adults do, this anticipation that every time there is a change or deviation from a normal happening, that it’s got to be bad. Children get more excited about change than adults, because they are continuing to learn and to grow.
When adults start stagnating, they become resistant to change and to growth And hate to have to even think of things in a different from what they have always thought. So we need to ask ourselves if we have become sufficiently motivated to begin to work toward a sense of youthful maturity. This means that we’re going to have to avoid inertia, to begin to break out of patterns of laziness, of lethargy, and to take a new approach to our experiences in life. We’re going to need to involve our selves in very alive, alert, and bright thinking, and get excited about new ideas.
We often seem to have and to go through much of life in a very sleepy sort of state. Have you ever felt that you went through a day sort of in a dreamlike state? Why? What caused it to be that way? These are the things we must look at individually if we are to break out of the old patterns to see what’s happening that keeps us in that type of thinking. Because we do have many sort of sleepy beliefs involving a race consciousness, many beliefs that we have accepted because everybody just believes that way.
And after all, you can read it in your newspapers and hear it on your news reports. And we suddenly get pulled into certain states of mind. And one of those states of mine that many people are having a problem with today, maybe all of us, is that we feel that there are so many things that we can do nothing about in our world. And so we’ve sort of placidly accept them. Because we’ve removed from the possibility of doing something to correct a situation.
Have you ever use the statement, well life’s just like that? Or you have to expect this sort of thing in life? Often involving things, yes, that people expect, but should not have to if they’re willing to break out of the old waves. When we are involved in our states of inertia and inaction, we find that our minds do not function well and that we really are not alert and aware of life as we should be.
I heard two little kids the other day. One of them was trying to explain thing to the other one. And the one that was a little bit older was very exasperated. And he said, you are deliberately being dense. And I think we sometimes are sort of that way. We are just dense. Whether it’s deliberate or not, I’m not sure. But he was recognizing that the other one wasn’t really trying to figure out what he was saying anyway. And sometimes we need that examination, the having to figure things out rather than just accepting them. And therefore the acceptance leading to inaction.
Perhaps we need to cultivate and to use the right mental of qualities that wake ourselves up that, help us to become more alive and alert to light. Remember that you can deliberately cultivate the qualities that you desire to express in light. But it takes effort on your part and work to cultivate These desired qualities. It goes back to, once again, our conscious choice. We must make a deliberate conscious choice to cultivate a quality that is different from what we are presently expressing. Because remember those that we are presently expressing are caught within us as strong habit patterns. And we become caught in the ruts of habit patterns. But if we deliberately take some conscious control, we can break out of those habit patterns.
Last evening we got into this idea of what you do with the knowledge that you are divine? How does this affect your being? We need to give deep consideration to this idea and to begin to relate it to all of the areas of our life. If you understand your divinity, if you understand that the same spirit that lived and worked and expressed through Jesus Christ is that spirit within you, how is this going to affect your work? How will it affect your family relationships?
As we ask these things, it will help us to deal more intelligently with all the different areas of life. And it’s important to keep going back to that idea, because basically, it’s essential as we consider life as this cycle. Because the basic purpose of it is to express our divinity and to go through this process of regeneration wherein we are able to apply our understanding of our divinity in and through every phase of our being, including the body itself. But we must think upon the ideas. Consider them and begin to see their significance for each of us.
In our cycle of life, we find that we go through many, what we call ordinary processes of living. Involved in our processes of living are not only work and rest and exercise and study and prayer and medical, but we also come up with this little thing called sleep. What do you do when you sleep? What’s happening to you? All of us know that we are still in that phase, or I assume you are too, in that phase where we still need sleep.
And we understand that, at this point in our development, that sleep is necessary for the wellbeing of our mind and our bodies. But what does it enable you to do? Are there specific things that you can see happening as a result of sleep? Because If you want to look in terms of time, you spend a great deal of your time in sleep, don’t you?
One of the things that happens as a result of sleep, it allows us to escape from a lot of disorder and confusion. Because if you begin to look at your day, you will find that as you are going through the process of living and working and being just in one day’s time, that there are a lot of things coming to you, consciously and unconsciously. You are picking up a lot of things from just the perception of your senses, are you not? Some of them very important. Others, little or no significance.
And don’t you find that you have even conflicting reports of your sense perception? Your eyes tell you one thing. You hear things that seem to be contradictory. So need to realize that sleep does do good things for us if we learn how to relax. It refreshes both the mind and the body. And if we can begin to see this is a part also of our process, it also relates to this concept of death and what happens after death. Because death is a sleep-like state.
But one of the things we usually come up with when we think about sleep is this little thing that happens called dreaming. Do you ever have dreams? How do you feel about your dreams? We have a lot of different concepts about dreams. Some people feel they are very significant and some of us hope they’re not, depending on the quality of the dreams we happen to have. Certainly we can look at some of our dreams and seem to have little or no sense to them at all. And then others that seem to have some, something good happen.
But it’s important for us to begin to realize that dreams also can serve as an outlet, an outlet for some of the confusion that has been taken in through the sense impressions during the day. Haven’t you ever really looked at a dream and seen that it was a combination of many things that you went through that day? And when they got all combined, they came out and it ended up being rather foolish. But it was a release of a lot of clutter that had come into the mind.
I understand and know that there are those to give a great deal of validity to their dreams. And certainly we cannot deny the fact that sometimes an idea comes to us in a dream. But remember that if God wants to reveal something to you in a dream, it does not have to be so hidden that you have to interpret 20 different things to find out what it says. Because the meaning should become obvious for you.
Maybe I am a lazy state of mind, but I cannot feel comfortable with spending a lot of time interpreting. I feel that if God has a message for me, he is perfectly able to speak in ordinary language that I can understand. And if there is something that you need to know from a dream, that does seem possibly to have some meaningful and you can’t figure out what it is, then just simply pray that whatever it is telling you comes to you without all the intellectualizing of having to try to figure out what it means to you.
I believe that some of our concern was trying to cause or to interpret and to get involved in all the details of dreams comes from the idea that we believe things that are complex are much more valued than the simple. We have gotten lost frequently in a world of complexities and tend to discount the very simple messages and look for hidden meanings in complexity.
All you have to do is do some reading and you come up with people who are able to take the most simplest idea and make it complicated. For what purpose? Because the simple things we can identify with relate to and apply. And that’s what’s important for us.
As we look at the various different parts of this process of life, we find that we go through a number of stages just in our outer experiences that perhaps we need to take into consideration. One of those that is causing some controversy in the thinking of people, and certainly that we need to consider in terms of the life idea is that of the concept of retirement. Because as you know, many people, a high percentage of people die within four years after they retire from their work More than half. And this seems to me to be a very unnecessary waste of life.
What is it that we have tied in with this concept of retirement? Does our purpose in life end because we retire from a particular job? It shouldn’t at all. And yet we are going to, if we break out of this pattern as a society, we’re going to have to rethink this process. Because there are entirely too many deaths that have no purpose behind them other than that person believes that life is over because he retires.
This is another one of those instances that we need to look a little more closely at the idea of change. This may be a beautiful opportunity for you to change from giving emphasis to one thing in life to something else. It may move you out of one work experience into something else even more exciting than what you’ve been doing before. But unfortunately many people have, subconsciously, if not consciously, conditioned themselves to believe that, well, what else is there left after I retire? And consequently, without the purpose to continue living the soul moves along.
This is another indication that we should start early in life to begin to have purposes and goals, to listen to many of the deep desires and feeling of our own heart so that we move from one thing into another as opportunities arise. And opportunities always will come to us if we are willing to respond to them. If we’re not willing to respond to them, we don’t recognize them as opportunities, even though they’re there.
But if there is a willingness to respond, we have opportunities for many beautiful things in all ages of life. Something that happens to many people when they go through this time of retirement is all of a sudden they figure, well, I don’t have to get up, and I don’t have to get dressed, and I don’t have to do certain things. So they begin the process of slipping away from life by spending more time in sleep, more time in rest, and more time withdrawing from the processes of living.
All you have to do is observe the behavior patterns of people and see how this take place. All of us need many interests in life, not just one. And the person who tends to have just one interest and that interest centering basically around his or her work experience goes through this business feeling law lost when that particular work experience ends. You have the same thing happening in the home with women who do not work, who are involved simply with the raising of a family. All of a sudden, it seems, the family has grown up. They no longer need the mother.
Now what purpose is there for her existence? Because the things that have taken all her time and energies and effort for years, all of a sudden no longer exists. And unless there are renewed interest and activities and hopefully constructive interest in activities, unless there are those, the person starts the process, once again, of withdrawing from life. Because we can begin, if you are willing, to observe people as they begin this process of withdrawal from life. And it often starts at a very early age for many people, unless they are having new purposes and new goals, are willing to make changes and are willing to move ahead with this whole process of life.
Life is always ready to be expressed more fully, but we as human beings must determine in our own readiness to move forward. What do you expect to be doing 10 years from now? Do you have any expectations? And this is not to say you’re not going to live today, but we need to look ahead sometimes and see what are the things that I have not done in my life that I really want to do.
Sometimes we have been so accustomed to pushing these things back to the back of our mind that it takes a while of self examination to start bringing them out into the open once again. Because we often cover them up with our beliefs and limitations that we don’t have enough time, we don’t have enough education, that we go through our many excuses. Or we are getting too old, which is a typical one.
But if we can begin to revive a lot of the interests that we had to set aside for the purpose of allowing ourselves to cope with work situations, to cope with bringing up a family and so on, now we’re able to move back into those and to get involved with those aspects of living. And it should be living, not just an existence.
Many problems arise, also, out of two other basic areas of life in which many people are involved. And that is that of marriage and that of children. Because we often, in the concepts that we entertain regarding marriage, we use marriage to make up for the emptiness within ourself. And often by our using it in this way, we really harm ourselves and harm the other person and we can’t figure out why there is not a meaningful relationship. But nobody really likes to be used.
What is it you should be doing in a marriage relationship? You are adding to the wellbeing of one another. This presupposes that there is already a wellbeing, doesn’t it? You’re not trying to make up for a void. And you see, these are the things we must think through in order to be able to live life more effectively. And certainly these things are evolved as a process or part of the process in the cycle of life.
This part of the process can be very rewarding and very fulfilling, if we learn how to look at it rightly. And a lot of the traces back to, basically two things, one, our concept of ourself and the other one is the concept that we have of other people. And our relationship to them. If we have a good concept of ourself, if we see ourselves as this divine, spiritual being, then we know that we can function very well alone. But we may choose not to. But you have the choice, don’t you?
If you rush into a relationship because you can’t get along without the other person, you don’t have a great deal to give to them, do you? In dealing with counseling of young people before they’re getting married, this is one of the first things that we share. If you are of the mind that you think you cannot live without each other, this is my first indication you’ll probably have a great deal of difficulty living together. You think about it.
And you realize this goes contrary to all these songs you hear sung about love. But so what? We’ve been known for being wrong about most things down through the ages. But begin to think of it. First, there must be the self-fulfilled individual. And then you can make a choice. Because until you’re at that point that you feel that you can function as a good human being with/or without someone else you don’t really have too much choice, do you? You get drawn into something simply because you think you have to have it in order to get by.
I’m not sure this is really a worthy motive. And yet this is the type of motivation that has conditioned people down through the ages. We need to look at what have been term typical roles in life of male and female. This has been another problem that we have had that has often caused people to not really get fully involved in life and living. Because they were so busy to fulfill the expectations of society, they never learned how to be themselves and how to express their own unique interest.
This is important for us to begin to think through. Because we cannot really have good, healthy relationships with people until we think some of these things through. We have created, through our concept of male and female, certain roles that if you’re a male, you’re supposed to play, and if you’re a female you’re supposed to play.
And the minute people began to deviate from those roles, what do you think? They’re neglecting their duties. Or they’re not doing what they ought to be doing. Because we predetermine how everybody else should live. And this cuts out this ability of people to have the spontaneity to live according to how they feel and to the guidance of their own inner spirit.
Realize that these are issues of life that we need to give consideration to, because it’s easy to just go blindly through and never give much attention to the important things in life. I think it has been very difficult, I know it has been difficult for most people in their growth experience. You go through a great deal of life and suddenly you get to that age or that point in time where you get married and all of a sudden... You’ve never thought about marriage much, except that being a desirable state, you’ve never given a lot of attention to it, except as a result of a love experience. And all of a sudden, you’ve got a relationship between people and you having the finished idea what to do with it.
Because you haven’t been taught a thing about it, how to relate and get along with other human beings. You’re just supposed to magically know how to be a good husband or a good wife. And you even a good mother and a good father. Because of our neglect in dealing with the important things in life, we have difficulty and are unprepared in dealing with them.
We certainly find that this is happening in relationships between parents and children. Because how much attention have we really given to the idea of being a parent? We may even see this as a desirable state. And often we haven’t taken the time, however, to see what’s involved. And it’s a little bit late, after you have several children, to decide you just don’t like the role of a parent Because you’re in a position where you almost have to work to fulfill the responsibilities of parenthood.
Because of our lack of consideration of both of these things, both marriage and parenthood, We have sort of slipped into something, conditions and situations without giving any intelligent thought to them. And often, we have not helped others, show forth, and get involved in this experience of life because we’ve been looking at them wrongly.
Marriage should be a choice, not a necessity. And if we handle it that way, we are able to deal intelligently with our relationships. If we see children From a broader perspective that simply they are souls that have been attracted into our experience, as we have helped to attract them, to learn, to grow, and to unfold, and to bring forth their potential, we can deal with them much more intelligently than if we look at them and think they’re just sort of a part or an extension of me. Because you can’t be very objective in dealing with a child if you are them as an extension of yourself, can you? Either in a positive way or negative way. Because you’re not seeing them as individuals.
One of the things I have resisted all my life, and I think I came into the world resisting, was the idea of adults treating kids as if they are non-entities. Somebody goes around pats them on the head. That’s insulting. You treat them like people because they are people. And they speak of their 15-year-old as being my baby. That’s worse. And don’t think this doesn’t have its effect on children and their ability to learn, to cope with life, your very attitudes in dealing with them.
Basically, we are doing one thing in dealing with children, and even our own children. We are educating them for independence. Aren’t we? That’s what they come into the world for, to be able function freely away from you. Because with the knowledge that you have, your understanding, you are able to help them do that. And yet many parents, because they have not found their own happiness and strength within themselves, they tried to live through their children, even after they’re grown up. And they have not only the outer involvement, but a lot of invisible, emotional attachment and strings tied to the children that inhibit their free expression.
But remember they are individual souls. They are not your personal possessions. And if you don’t treat them as a personal possession, they will grow up respecting themselves and respecting you. If you treat them as your possession, they’re likely to have a problem accepting their own uniqueness. And by the same token, because you have caused them to be weak instead of strong, there will be a lack of respect for you as a parent.
Enjoy children. They’re great if you learn to enjoy them without getting so involved in trying to make them over in your own image and likeness. Because, first of all, they are themselves. And if we can begin to relate to them in that way, we help them to get to that point that they are independent and able to stand on their own, and they are able to relate also to other people. If the emotional bondage and emotional dependency is there, they will never learn to relate freely to others in their world or accept themselves fully and completely.
There are many choices that we can make in life. We can choose to get ourself involved in this whole process of life and living to the very fullest of our capacity. And if we do this, we make a great deal of progress in a life experience. As we take conscious control over our lives and our involvement in this cycle of life, we find that our lives become extended, not only from the standpoint of time, but from experience.
And we may go through, once we are giving some conscious direction to our lives. We may make the progress of lifetimes in one by taking that conscious control, beginning to give direction to our thoughts and feelings. And learning how to grow closer to this image and likeness that we are Life is in involved in all of the different elements of our living process. And if we see life as eternal, inexhaustible, and know that is a part of us as we are a part of it, we can go forth to do those things that add to our wellbeing and that move us along on this pathway of life.
The cycle of life involves life and living. It involves another step in the process of life and living. And that is of death. It involves the process of rebirth, a reincarnation as another movement in the process of life and living. And then the regeneration, the regeneration in which we are able to bring our entire being, our thoughts, our feelings, our entire soul consciousness into this awareness Of the presence and power and activity of God. We are able to refine ourselves to that point that we are expressing the divinity that is within.
All the things that come forth through this process of life, Help us to be more expressive of this dynamic, beautiful, and loving spirit of God within. As we grow spiritually, we grow closer on this pathway toward God and toward expressing this individual uniqueness that we each have
Last night I had mentioned that if there were those of you who had questions, if you would hand them in. We didn’t really get many questions in. One of them did relate to a concept that do, is there any evidence in this process of reincarnation or of the return of certain family members into a family member?
I think the one case that probably started off things in the logical more scientific research into reincarnation was in about 1923, of a child born in India and born very quickly after the soul having passed from one life experience. But born into another family yet with thin a reasonable distance from those that she had moved away from.
There are a couple of incidences instances where, I believe, Ernest Wilson records an experience that he is aware of a child, a soul that was reborn into a same family later on, a child that went out at a very early age. And this at least was the belief of the family. Of course, you know many of these things, we do not have a factual evidence because we’re dealing in more than one dimension. But certainly there are possibilities.
Just as every one of you are totally unique and different. So’s every soul. And we can’t lay down exact patterns that are followed this life, let alone through the process of reincarnation, because everybody’s different and things happen in different ways. But there is certainly a great deal of evidence that the soul does continue to move toward this fulfillment of expressing the innate perfection within.
Another person wrote a question in regarding abortion. I do not feel qualified to even attempt to comment on it. I have some ideas, but they may not necessarily be true at all. And until I feel comfortable with something, I’d rather just not talk about it. So maybe all of you can do some thinking about that as well.
I think our time is up for this evening. Bless you.
