In spiritual work, understanding in itself has the capacity to bring about change. It acts as a catalyst and opens new ways of looking at things. It brings about growth and spiritual advancement. As spiritual growth continues, old styles of thinking and contextualizing are surrendered and accompanied by the joy of new discoveries. Anger at the absurdities of life is now replaced by laughter, and what a lot of the world bemoans and makes much of as melodrama is now seen as comical. Spiritual teachings need to be accepted to become integrated. Resistance comes from the ego, which lacks humility, and that, out of pride, resents being ‘wrong’. It is better to realize that one is not giving up wrong views but instead is adopting better ones. That peace is better than war and that love is better than hate makes sense to the intellect, but the ego may rebel at giving up its favorite hate and justified resentments.
Category: Thoughts & quotes from Sir David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. & Susan Hawkins
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Aware Mind
The mind’s reality is a fiction. With that realization, it loses its reign as the arbiter of reality. Through the eye of the ego, life is a kaleidoscope of constantly changing attractions and repulsions, fears and transient pleasures. It bases its security on overvalued positionalities, but, with maturity, it progressively looks within for enduring qualities that can be relied upon. Without spiritual direction or information, it does not know which way to look and may merely settle back into basic survival techniques that have had pragmatic value.
… There is ‘thinking mind’ and ‘aware mind’. Awareness is automatic and inclusive of the totality of life’s situations. It relies on knowingness rather than on thinking or figuring things out. Its function is spontaneous and silent rather than calculating.
… Aware mind is not prone to banal positionalities or judgments nor does it get entrapped in frenetic endeavors. It tends to be easygoing and mellow and prefers to observe rather than to become involved in the world’s dramas.
… To the ego, peace sounds inactive and passive because the ego thinks in terms of ‘doing’ something, such as seeking control, gain, or avoidance.
… It does not rely on actions but on total vision. The ego relies on force; the spirit influences by power.
The Unconscious Mind is Not Fooled
In normal persons, deviation from truth and honesty results in the accumulation of guilt that is then repressed because of its unpleasant, painful nature. Thus, over time, a sizable reservoir of guilt accumulates, which escapes attention or awareness unless discovered by periodic, fearless inventories. This is a very common condition that contributes to social discord and contention. Moral/ethical lapses are often excused by rationalization, but the unconscious mind is not fooled by deception and innately knows when it is being lied to by self or others.
… The capacity for forgiveness arises from accepting with honest humility the limitations inherent in the human condition itself, which is, after all, merely on a learning curve of the evolution of consciousness.
Humor
Q: How does humor fit in with devotion? Are they not diverse?
A: Devotion is the dedication to Truth and Love by which humor becomes a handmaiden to assist in realizing the goal. It diminishes the value of fallacy by contrasting truth with falsehood by putting them into juxtaposition. The underlying intention of humor is actually quite serious and dedicated to liberation from illusion, fear, hatred, and guilt. It unmasks the ego, thereby decreasing its dominance. It leads away from the self to the Self.
From Transcending the Levels of Consciousness, ch. 22, pg. 366
Moralistic Polarity
Moralistic polarity is traditionally the greatest conflicted area of civilization. It is responsible for the killing of more people than any of nature’s catastrophes for it segments mankind into hate, guilt, revenge, murder, suicide, and more. It also sets up the ideological basis for all the pseudo-religious wars that parade under the banner of some religion, yet it completely disregards and violates all the premises of the religion under which the persecutions and terrorist attacks are conducted, ostensibly in the name of God.
Even ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ are not opposites but merely quite different spiritual regions. The same phenomena occur in political ideologies, such as communism versus democracy, totalitarianism versus freedom, and communism versus socialism. If we examine much of what the world traditionally calls evil, what we discover is not evil, which is an abstraction, epithet, and label; instead, we see behaviors that could be described as primitive, infantile, egotistical, narcissistic, selfish, and ignorant, complicated by the psychological mechanisms of denial, projection, and paranoia in order to justify hatred.