User:Denise Infinity

FOOD FOR THOUGHT SERIES: No Whine, All Spirit

A Collection of Daily Inspiration for the Higher Self Compiled by Denise Infinity

SERIES SUMMARY

A. Self-Knowledge

B. The Nature of Oneness (Cosmic Harmony; Interconnectedness)

C. Cosmic Laws (Cause and Effect; Free Will and Creative Energy; Higher Self)

1. The Essence of Being Human 2. Reality and Illusion 3. The Nature of Truth 4. Power of Love

D. Journeys on the Path -- Why the Way?

E. Paradigm Shift

1. Nine Insights in conjunction with The Celestine Prophecy 2. Prophecies 3. Current Realities

F. Probable Futures G. Recipes for the Way

A. SELF-KNOWLEDGE

INTRODUCTION (1) ''Come, come, whoever you are — wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving — it does not matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come, come yet again, come.'' (Inscription on Rumi’s tomb)

INTRODUCTION (2) Quaff, quaff deeply from the cup of Wisdom and join the stream of Spirits who have blazed the Path before you. (Author Unknown)

INTRODUCTION (3) We shall not cease from exploration; and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time. (T. S. Eliot)

	Food for Thought (A1)

If you seek to understand the whole Universe, you will understand nothing at all; but seek to understand your Self, and you will come to understand the entire Universe. (Cherokee Indian Saying)

	Food for Thought (A2)

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. (Marcel Proust)

	Food for Thought (A3) ''The key to our inner resources is self-knowledge...(which) is gained by personal development...this comes as close to being the meaning of Life...What a precious gift to humanity and our Planet it would be if the remarkable knowledge we have achieved should be united with wisdom. Then our Planet would be the paradise it is meant to be.'' (Rolf Osterber)

	Food for Thought (A4)

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering. (St. Augustine)

	Food for Thought (A5)

''Since it has been said that you are my twin and true companion, examine your Self so that you may understand who you are...I am the knowledge of the Truth. So while you accompany me, although you do not understand, you already have come to know, and you will be called “the one who knows himself.” For whoever has not known himself has known nothing, but whoever has known himself has simultaneously achieved knowledge about the depth of all things''. (From the Book of Thomas the Contender)

	Food for Thought (A6)

''Are you comfortable with the thought that the Universe is alien and dead and no more than your five senses can detect? How does your Heart respond to the thought that the Universe is alive and compassionate, and that with it and other Souls of great power and Light, you learn through the process of co-creating the reality that you experience?'' (Gary Zukav)

	Food for Thought (A7)

''Once we push the gate of the Mind slightly ajar and let the Light stream in, the meaning of Life becomes silently revealed to us. The gate may be open for one minute or for one hour, but in that period, we discover the secret, and neither weary Time nor bitter woe can tear that priceless Knowledge away from us.'' (Paul Bruton)

	Food for Thought (A8)

''Each man has only one genuine vocation: to find the way to himself...his task is to discover his own destiny--not an arbitrary one--and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else is only a would-be existence, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity, and a fear of one's own inwardness.'' (Hermann Hesse)

	Food for Thought (A9)

''The decisive question for man is: "Is he related to something infinite or not?" This is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing that truly matters is the Infinite, can we avoid fixing our attention upon futilities and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance...In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody; and if we do not embody that, Life is wasted.'' (Carl Jung)

	Food for Thought (A10)

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

	Food for Thought (A11) ''Transformation comes from looking deeply within, to a state that exists before fear and isolation arise, the state in which we are inviolably whole just as we are. We connect to our Selves, to our own true experience, and discover there that to be alive means to be whole.'' (Sharon Salzberg)

	Food for Thought (A12) All paths lead to the same goal: To convey to others what we are...and we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance, and sing our sorrowful song--but in this dance or in this song, there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our Conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common Destiny. (Pablo Neruda)

	Food for Thought (A13) ''There is something in all of us that seeks the spiritual... The spiritual is inclusive. It is the deepest sense of belonging and participation...there's no place to go to be separated from the spiritual, so perhaps one might say that the spiritual is the realm of human experience which religion attempts to connect us to through dogma and practice. Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it fails. Religion is a bridge to the spiritual--but the spiritual lies beyond religion. Unfortunately, in seeking the spiritual, we may become attached to the bridge, rather than crossing over it.'' (Rachel Naomi Remen)

	Food for Thought (A14)

''My eyes already touch the sunny hill, going far ahead of the road I have begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has its inner light, even from a distance—and changes us, even if we do not reach it, into something else which, hardly sensing it, we already are.'' (Rainer Maria Rilke)

	Food for Thought (A15)

It is only with the Heart that one can see clearly, for what is essential is invisible to the eye. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) 	Food for Thought (A16)

The curious paradox is that when I accept my Self just as I am, then I can change. (Carl Rogers)

	Food for Thought (A17)

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is—infinite. (Willam Blake)

	Food for Thought (A18)

''Fame or integrity: which is more important? Money or happiness: which is more valuable? Success or failure: which is most destructive? If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled. If your happiness depends on money, you will never be happy with your Self. Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.'' (Lao-tzu)

	Food for Thought (A19) ''When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness, lacking the knowledge I needed to live; when I think of how I sinned against my Heart and my Soul, then my Heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness...every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If youth only knew. Now my life will change, now I will be reborn.'' (F. M. Dostoyevsky)

	Food for Thought (A20) ''The spiritual life...isn't a metaphor or a remote possibility. It is a reality, a way of being in the world, and it is as full of adventure as anything I could wish for in my ordinary life.'' (Tracy Cochran)

	Food for Thought (A21)

A Mind once stretched by a great idea or new understanding will never fully return to its original dimensions. (William James)

	Food for Thought (A22)

The Four Reliances: FIRST, rely on the spirit and meaning of the teachings, not on the words; SECOND, rely on the teachings, not on the personality of the teacher; THIRD, rely on real wisdom, not superficial interpretation; and FOURTH, rely on the essence of your pure Wisdom Mind, not on judgmental perceptions. (Buddhist teaching)

	Food for Thought (A23) It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the Journey that matters in the end. (Ursula LeGuin)

	Food for Thought (A24)

''We know what we must do...And when we finally step forward to do it, when we have made our sacrificial offerings to the gods of understanding, then the ruptures will cease. Healing waters will cover the land, giving birth to new life, burying forever the ancient, rusting machines of our past understandings. And on these waters we set sail to places we can only imagine. There we will be blessed with new visions and new magic. But for now we wait--an act of faith...LAND HO!'' (Author Unknown)

B. THE NATURE OF ONENESS

INTRODUCTION

''...body, mind and soul are not mutually exclusive. The desires of the flesh, the ideas of the mind, and the luminosities of the soul--all are perfect expressions of the radiant Spirit that alone inhabits the Universe, sublime gestures of that Great Perfection that alone outshines the world. There is only One Taste in the entire Kosmos, and that taste is Divine, whether it appears in the flesh, in the mind, in the soul. Resting in that One Taste, transported beyond the mundane, the world arises in the purest Freedom and radiant Release...happy to infinity, lost in all eternity, and hopeless in the original face of the unrelenting mystery. From One Taste all things issue; to One Taste, all things return--and in between, which is the story of this Moment, there is only the dream, and sometimes the nightmare, from which we would do well to awaken.'' (Ken Wilber)

	Food for Thought (B-1)

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the Universe and all its powers; and when they realize at the center of the Universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this Center is really everywhere...it is within each of us.'' (Black Elk)

	Food for Thought (B-2)

From One, all; and from All, one. (Heraclitas)

	Food for Thought (B-3)

''In the ultimate depth of Being, we find our Selves no longer separate but, rather, part of the unity of the Universe. That unity includes the sufferer and the suffering, the healer and that which heals. Therefore, all acts of healing are ultimately ourselves healing our Self.'' (Ram Dass)

	Food for Thought (B-4)

Within its deep infinity I saw ingathered, and bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the Universe. (Dante)

	Food for Thought (B-5)

Each element of the cosmos is positively woven from all the others...The Universe holds together, and only one way of considering it is possible--that is, to take it as a whole, in one piece. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

	Food for Thought (B-6)

''The true state of affairs in the material world is wholeness. If we are fragmented, we must blame it on our Selves...What is needed is to learn afresh, to observe, and to discover for ourselves, the meaning of wholeness.'' (David Bohm)

	Food for Thought (B-7)

''As is the human body, so is the cosmic body. As is the human mind, so is the Cosmic Mind. As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm. As is the atom, so is the Universe.'' (The Upanishads)

	Food for Thought (B-8)

''The Cosmos is a coherent and meaningful whole...each aspect of creation is vitally connected to everything else. (Sacred) works...stress over and over that all the various dimensions of existence...are ultimately interwoven...A vast unseen web is said to link each of us. In its time-honored metaphor, we are all individual buds of Being on the great Tree of Life, whose roots lie in Heaven.'' (Edward Hoffman)

	Food for Thought (B-9)

''The living Spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men in whom it lives and who proclaim it. The living Spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms, which men have given it mean little enough--they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the Eternal Tree.'' (Carl Jung)

	Food for Thought (B10)

Consider that the ocean is the One Source. It has always been. Now reach in and grab a cup full of water. In that instant, the cup becomes an individual, but it has always been, has it not? This is the case with your soul... (Gary Zukav)

	Food for Thought (B-11)

Out of my experience...one final conclusion dogmatically emerges: There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness against which our individuality builds by accidental forces, and into which our several minds plunge as into a Mother Sea. (William James)

	Food for Thought (B-12) ''In a real sense, all life is inter-related. All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of Destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be; and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of Reality.'' (Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

	Food for Thought (B-13)

At the heart of each of us, whatever our imperfections, there exists a silent pulse of perfect rhythm, a complex of waveforms and resonances, which is absolutely individual and unique, and yet connects us to everything in the Universe. (George Leonard)

	Food for Thought (B-14)

To discover joy is to return to a state of oneness with the universe. (Peggy Jenkins)

	Food for Thought (B-15)

''In the spacious mirror of reflective consciousness, we begin to catch glimpses of the unity of the interwoven fabric of the Cosmos, and our intimate participation within the living web of Existence. No longer is Reality broken into relativistic islands of pieces. If only for a brief moment at a time, Existence is glimpsed and known as a seamless totality. To explore our gradual awakening to the aliveness and unity of the universe...awakens the intuition that a Living Presence permeates the universe.'' (Duane Elgin)

	Food for Thought (B-16)

...And I felt a Presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts--a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns, and the round ocean…the living air and the blue sky, and in the mind of man; a Motion and a Spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. (William Wordsworth)

	Food for Thought (B-17)

And when you have thus learned the Truth, you will know that all living things are but part of Me, and that they are in Me, and are Mine…for one who sees Me everywhere and sees everything in Me, I am never lost, nor is he ever lost to Me. (From the Bhagavad-gita)

	Food for Thought (B-18)

The Light is one, though the lamps are many. (Author Unknown)

	Food for Thought (B-19)

''The whole cosmos is being renewed moment by Moment...To those among us who have entered into this Mystery through faith, it need not be explained; to others, it cannot be explained. But to the extent to which we have given room in our Hearts for gratitude, we all have a share in this reality, by whatever name we may call it. It is a reality which we shall never fully take hold of. All that matters is that we let it take hold of us...which leads us to integrity within ourselves, to concord with one another, and to union with the very Source of Life.'' (Brother David Steindl-Rast)

	Food for Thought (B-20)

It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

	Food for Thought (B-21)

''Q = What did the Zen Buddhist monk say to the hot dog vendor? A = Make me one with everything.'' (Author Unknown)