HOW TO “SAVE YOUR SOUL” NOW, WHILE STILL ALIVE​

AS HUMAN BEINGS, WE SHARE THE LONGING TO LIVE FREE OF SUFFERING … ENLIGHTENED … IN EMOTIONAL BLISS

Yet, we emotionally suffer because of our conditioned misguided or absent understanding of nature’s ageless principles that control all of this reality’s outcomes.

INDIVIDUALS PICK A PATH TO SATISFY THIS INBORN LONGING

Each of us decides where to look to understand and deal with the countless manifestations of this feeling-spun emotional paradox.

… RELIGIOUS THEOLOGY

This innate longing to understand the human experience will take some to religious theology for an answer.

Religious theology promises an afterlife of endless God-gifted suffering-free emotional bliss. Its afterlife promise is founded in the pins and needles of blind faith hope.

With a compromised curiosity, many religious believers will use their intellectually metered fundamental understanding of their God-bestowed wisdom as a cognitive crutch to calculate conceptional answers to navigate through everyday life. Listen sometime to the personality-unique justifications scripturally rationalized by Sunday morning TV preachers.

… REALITY

Some will work up the due diligence to develop and better understand their life awareness through looking closer at reality itself to better understand what constitutes its timeless unforgiving principles. A core-rattling steadfast faith develops hand-in-hand alongside their mounting wisdom-enriched understanding.

Truth seekers will not mortgage away their curiosity for an unverified promise. They will exercise their freewill’s first amendment human right to ask why and increase their experience-based awareness to further strengthen their steadfast faith in what they will with time come to intrinsically recognize to be self-evident truth.

Siddhartha Gautam,  the ”Buddha” (which we all have inside), looked deeply into reality and demonstrated how he, like any living human being, could self-train an enlightened understanding of the nature of this reality’s principles to eliminate their suffering and realize the same theology-promised emotional bliss before entering the afterlife.

… THE COUCH

Other individuals will be conditioned into choosing to live in the emotional pain of confused empathy for their entire lives.

… SEEKING SPIRITUAL ENLIGHTENMENT ABOUT THE IGNORANCE THAT SHADOWS EMOTIONAL BLISS

Having blind faith in the promise of a heavenly middleman standing between and claiming credit for what connects an individual’s suffering to their emotional bliss is not the subject of this article, yet it’s the distinction that has paused or sidelined the search for countless individual human beings since mankind’s conscious awareness percolated the collective ability to ask “why?” or to shout “prove it!.”

Read on, decide on what’s heartfelt and leaves you feeling whole.

I.  CONSCIOUSLY RECOGNIZE THAT YOU’RE SUFFERING EMOTIONALLY

This seems obvious, but don’t take this step too lightly.

… UNDERSTAND WHAT SUFFERING REALLY IS

Even though an individual can be living in a state poisoned by anger, apathy, hatred, shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, jealousy, envy, sadness, grief, depression or any other state of emotional distress, they might not realize it.

… THE HUMAN CONDITION CONSCIOUSLY HIGHLIGHTS ITS HUMAN EXPERIENCE IN SHADES OF EMOTION

Individual human beings can become conditioned to acknowledge any of these states of unhappiness as being their normal life.

It’s what they experience. It’s what they know.

“Eight years in it feels like you’re gonna die. But you get used to anything. Sooner or later it just becomes your life.”

—An insight from Bruce Springsteen’s “Straight Time”

It’s common for individuals, from early childhood on, to mistakenly believe what they’re told will make them happy and let that belief numb them and deafen their inner ear to the callout from their inside angst of emotional distress.

“We all regard physical pain and mental pain as something unwanted. It is much more difficult to recognize contaminated pleasure as a form of incipient suffering. Our search for pleasure preoccupies us and takes up most of our energy, yet it is doomed to failure from the start because none of these pleasures can give us the real and lasting happiness we crave.”

—Rinchen. Atisha’s Lamp For the Path to Enlightenment. (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, 1997), p. 43

II.   UNDERSTAND THAT THIS SUFFERING HAS A CAUSE

Suffering is generated from an individual’s poorly conditioned or total lack of understanding of the unchangeable logistics of nature’s uncontrollable principles that are responsible for all life outcomes.

An individual can control their behavior but not nature’s principles that control the outcome of their behavior.

In not understanding nature’s principles, it’s a most common misperception for an individual to knowingly or unknowingly recognize the character of the dimensional makeup of this impermanent reality as allowing for a hiccup of imagined continuity to exist in the flow of time.

They don’t think deep enough to realize how Father Time has to maintain providing an ongoing feed of unexplored naked change to maintain this reality’s animated yet elusive present moment.

… ATTACHMENT TO AN IMAGINARY WORLD

For many, the time-suspended essence of the remembered image of objects and ideas can register as being real and have a presence requiring an imagined reality with a supporting transforming dimensional backdrop that will “pause” ….. tolerating an imagined permanence of presence for their subject of thought. This is like when some older folks think of themselves and still ….. picture a human body that’s 20 years younger.

In this impermanent reality, the seeming solidity of your human configuration is actually no more than the ongoing transformation of a series of separate yet related events.

By becoming attached to the imagined permanence of things and ideas and fashioning an ego to posture and defend the idea of an imagined self and anything connected to it, an individual invites a kaleidoscope of feelings to inspire and feed into a reactionary minefield of emotional suffering.

… IT’S SAID THAT THIS FUNDAMENTAL IGNORANCE THAT INSPIRES CLINGING ATTACHMENT TO AN IMAGINARY WORLD IS THE ROOT OF HUMAN SUFFERING (BUDDHISM’S CORNERSTONE)

Lasting emotional relief is found in reprogramming the misguided perceptual understanding of the feelings that trigger life’s emotional agony.

In doing this, a truth seeker will change the nature of their mind.

… ACCESS THE MEDIUM WHERE THIS CAUSE CAN BE IDENTIFIED AND UNDERSTOOD

The sensual “ouch” from the triggering cause of these emotion-generating feelings is first metered via sensual media and then sensually transposed through conditioned perceptual interpretations into the emotions that get consciously tagged and intellectually managed.

Different parts of the brain here … different periods of evolutional refinement.

Successful soul-digging first must chop through the intellectual dirt to ever make it off Dr. Freud’s couch.

… WORK MUST BE PERFORMED IN THAT DIMENSION AFTER THE OUCH AND BEFORE THE CONSCIOUS TAGGING

If the conditioned interpretations of feelings that generate the emotions that tell an individual they are in a certain emotional state are wired sensually, their cause must originate from the same sensual dimension.

The ONLY way for a truth seeker to deal with a cause that exists in the transforming realm of reality is to learn how to eliminate the white noise to then take control of their conscious awareness and go to this dimension of awareness where life itself manifests with unbiased sensual eyes open.

The ONLY place a truth seeker has available to go for this sensually metered intrinsic education is to sensually check into the living flesh of their own human condition, sensually tune-in and catch life-noise there, red-handed, manifesting itself. There is no other part of the transforming material world but the blood-pulsing nerve-mapped infrastructure of the human body that’s connected to the human heart where the elusive boogieman of the unknown hides to do his dirty work.

The truth seeker takes their focused awareness there, humbled mind-into-body, to collect and assimilate the self-knowledge to use for deriving the strain of life wisdom that speaks the sensual body-speak language. It’s the life principle decoding key that brings conscious understanding to the ways of the pre-lingual relational data that connect all of nature’s countless ongoing transformational causes to their effects of change.

This life manifest process creates the dimensional fiber that supports the becoming nature of this reality’s transforming backdrop.

III. REALIZE THAT SUFFERING’S LIVING CAUSE MUST HAVE A LIVING SOLUTION

By seeking the appropriate strain or type of wisdom-deriving knowledge, the drowning pull from this eddy of suffering-inspiring ignorance can be eliminated to allow a state of heavenly emotional bliss to surface.

Some wisdom is intellectually borrowed or gifted from another source. It lacks having any intrinsic history (like when Adam and Eve borrowed the promised all-knowing Tree of Knowledge wisdom, snake-guaranteed to cover everything from good to evil). Like them, the wisdom borrower can be left suffering emotional shame from their emptiness of understanding like when Jehovah confronted them. Adam and Eve grabbed for fig leaves to mask their emotional shame.

Life principle-decoding life wisdom is experientially derived or assimilated from life-knowledge itself. (Like the Tree of Life wisdom Jehovah mandated to be Adam’s ONLY source of wisdom in his life-or-spiritual death ultimatum Garden of Eden chat.)

…SIDDHARTHA GOTAUMA CONNECTED THE DOTS LEADING TO SELF-TRAINING A WISDOM-ENRICHED ENLIGHTENED AWARENESS

“The unique contribution of the Buddha to the world was a way to realize truth personally and thus to develop experiential wisdom.”

The Art of Living VIPASSANA MEDITATION as taught by S. N. Goenka, William Hart, p. 90

Siddhartha recognized how to go beyond self-training morality (where Christianity stops) and concentration and was able to pass along an account of how he self-trained his ability to tap into the reality that his physical human presence was a material part of to better understand the principles of the uncontrollable dimensional forces that hold it all together.

In doing so, he was able to understand and overcome the fundamental ignorance that held his emotions hostage.

He taught of how and where a truth seeker needs to take their awareness and how to self-train the life wisdom that understands and decodes the logistics supporting nature’s unchangeable uncontrollable principles that govern the outcome of all the change that constitute and define the transforming nature of this impermanent reality.

… JESUS LATER TAUGHT FROM THE SAME WISDOM-ENRICHED INSIGHT

Just a computer keystroke away is much information dealing with where Jesus was from his teens until returning home which is where the New Testament starts. One account of this missing time zone has been well summarized in The Lost Years of Jesus: The Life of Saint Issa:

“Ancient scrolls reveal that Jesus spent seventeen years in India and Tibet. From age thirteen to age twenty-nine, he was both a student and teacher of Buddhist and Hindu holy men. Brahman historians recorded the story of his journey from Jerusalem to Benares. Today they still know him and love him as St. Issa. Their “Buddha.”

—The Lost Years of Jesus: The Life of Saint Issa (Introduction), translation by Notovitch (12-19-06 Internet writing from The Reluctant Messenger

… ROME TRIED TO EDIT THIS WISDOM-ENRICHED INSIGHT OUT OF THE ROMAN BIBLE FIRST EDITION

In 312 AD, in weighing what was the most popular religious trend in his Roman state, the Roman emperor Constantine decided to make Christianity Rome’s official religion. It would help corral citizen morale into a Rome-designed public ethos. It would benefit the government as many Christians could read and write … skills needed for managing the existing written accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings.

His Roman priests selected four of the many different gospel accounts of Jesus’s teachings for the new Roman Bible 1st edition. Rome didn’t want its citizens to realize that they each had inside, the power to determine their own life direction. He wanted Roman citizens to look to Rome for this. He ordered all evidence of the many competing religions and those of Christianity not suited to satisfy Rome’s deceptive intentions to be destroyed.

Still, even in the Roman Bible’s highly edited 1st edition, some of Jesus’s intended message seeped through. Here’s one example:

“Neither shall they say, lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

—Luke 17:23, King James Version…

… THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS SURVIVED

The Gnostic Gospels were discovered within the last century. They’re a collection of some of the original accounts of Jesus’s teachings that had been ordered destroyed by Constantine yet had been hidden. Who knows? Maybe there are more to be found?

Jesus’s intended message recorded in the Gnostic Gospels has not been exposed to the high degree of dilution lost in the multi-translating processes of the Roman Bible first edition.

Jesus taught the same life-truth as Siddhartha to those who could grasp its meaning. You teach theoretical physics to a college student while you teach addition and subtraction to a grade school student.

Some Gnostic accounts were written by more spiritually mature authors of teachings that Jesus had given to more spiritually mature audiences.

This scripture from the uncovered Gospel of Thomas is one example:

“The Kingdom of God is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.”

—Coptic Gospel of Thomas, Saying 3 of 114

As asserted by both scriptures, the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Thomas, this “God” notion is inside of you. It IS you. It composes your being. It’s the very life energy (Holy Spirit energy?) that flows through and comprises the essence of everything.

Indivisibly.

There is no room or reason for the essence of an imagination-nurtured heavenly hologram to sit between your heart’s innate desire for emotional bliss while taking credit for reality’s truth of where it lies. Is there?

There’s no splitting of consciousness that deems one overlooking entity the duty of making the other entity feel guilt or shame. It’s merely an imagined notion, an adopted hobby that’s unique to the boundaries of each individual’s imagination.

Helen Keller realized where to find the truth to her inborn longing:

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

—Helen Keller

IV.   USING THE RIGHT CONCENTRATION TO SELF-TRAIN A WISDOM-ENRICHED ENLIGHTENED AWARENESS

“In themselves, morality and concentration, sila and Samadhi, are valuable, but their real purpose is to lead to wisdom…By practicing morality, we avoid actions that cause the grossest forms of mental agitation. By concentrating the mind, we further calm it and at the same time shape it into an effective tool with which to undertake the work of self-examination. But it is only by developing wisdom that we can penetrate into the reality within and free ourselves of all ignorance and attachments.”

—The Art of Living VIPASSANA MEDITATION as taught by S. N. Goenka, William Hart p. 88

Even though it’s possible for any human being to uncover this pathway or part of it on their own, as it’s merely a natural process instilling conscious awareness of what’s already there, a truth seeker should follow the intellectual guidelines of an able-minded teacher that will lead them to developing a sensually understood intrinsically-enriched awareness of this reality’s ruling life principles they fail to consciously reckon with.

Siddhartha taught of the three stages of self-training he developed while reaching his own state of enlightened emotional bliss. These three stages contain eight steps. He referred to it as the Noble Eightfold Path (to enlightenment.)

This article’s four main sections follow the 4 Noble Truths presentation pattern used by Siddhartha in his teachings.

As a typical truth-seeking individual, Siddhartha self-trained his moral aptitude to fashion a mind clear enough to self-train the right concentration to then self-train a wisdom-enriched awareness to enlighten his understanding of his fundamental ignorance to allow emotional bliss to fill his conscious awareness.

That’s it. Just think about it.

… THE PROCESS EMITS WRITTEN-IN-STONE COMMON SENSE AND ITS FLOW ECHOES TYING-YOUR-OWN-SHOE SIMPLICITY

But you must keep in mind that the process of this discovery is much easier to intellectually conceptualize and parrot than it is to sensually recognize and establish its intrinsic history.

Therein lies the challenge.

1) SELF-TRAIN A MORAL/ETHICAL MENTAL PRESENCE

There are other very wise souls who’ve discovered pathways to enlightenment. For one, don Miguel Ruiz, a Toltec Indian shaman released a wonderful book in 1997, The Four Agreements, that focused on the same sort of emotional decoding purpose but only presented the mind control/emotion understanding pathway a little differently.

… READ IT. GET ANOTHER ENLIGHTENED PERSPECTIVE PLATFORM TO HELP TRIANGULATE-IN ON YOUR LIFE PATH

Siddhartha found it necessary to harbor a mental presence that wasn’t dominated by the white noise of unsettling thoughts. From his Noble Eightfold Path, Siddhartha says its necessary to use only the Right Speech and the Right Action and to be involved in the Right Livelihood to help fashion a morally calmed mental presence. He taught to abstain from unwholesome deeds and perform only wholesome ones … just to tinder the mind to allow training it to gain control of its conscious awareness.

… ALL RELIGIONS INSIST ON THE NECESSITY OF MORAL BEHAVIOR

This is the point on the same path to enlightenment Jesus taught where Constantine’s Roman priests cut off the intended meaning of his message of attaining spiritual enlightenment. Rome wanted its citizens to rely only on Rome for direction … not to know they had this power within themselves.

This cut off is why religious believers of today struggle when trying not to break the moral rules (Ten Commandments) that are said to have literally been carved into stone. They have no guidance on where to go and are not only afraid to ask, but they don’t really know what the question would be. They struggle to rationalize out mental peace while living handcuffed by unexplained fundamental restrictions.

… FOLLOWING THE RULES JUST BECAUSE THEIR GOD’S WISDOM SAYS SO RUNS A LITTLE THIN FOR MANY

They find it difficult not to have a conscious tie-in to any sensually identified intrinsic history to allow feeling the why or the why not. Again…this lack of conscious tie-in is just like the emptiness of understanding that drew the emotional shame for Adam and Eve when trying to use their snake-gifted Tree of Knowledge borrowed wisdom.

2) SELF-TRAIN THE ABILITY TO CONTROL ONE’S OWN MENTAL PROCESS

In discovering this self-trained process of mind-controlled concentration (meditation), Siddhartha called the contributing steps in his Noble Eightfold Path, the Right Effort (putting mental focus into the body parts), Right Awareness (sustained mental focus) and Right Concentration (sustained humbled mind-into-body harmonic focused awareness).

Develop the ability to focus your morally calm mind into the essence of your physical body while feeling the presence of your awareness concentrated in the coming and going sensations of your physical factory of life energy itself.

The faintly detected coming and going sensations reflect the unchartered patterned principles generated from the naked energy infused by the appearing/disappearing quark-scale subatomic bits of energy that pump life into this universe. They influence and help set the unalterable-by-man pattern for the life principles that determine the outcomes of events on the larger scale. They maintain the ever-changing elasticity that supports the impermanent dimensional makeup of this reality.

Go from head to toe and back again with a sustained focused awareness. The “sustained” part proves not that easy but is the important part. You’ll understand how your technique to shut out disturbing white noise thinking can improve over time.

… MAKE THE SENSATION IN THE TISSUE THE WRITING ON THE WALL

In Siddhartha’s self-training of mind control, he suggests that while making the Right Effort to be alert for four feeling characteristics. A truth seeker should make the Right Effort to (1)recognize and (2)eliminate unwholesome thought patterns while (3)remembering and (4)maintaining the wholesome ones that replace them.

Pretty basic.

Do it in laying in bed at night and don’t be surprised at falling to sleep mid-process.

This state of sustained focus improves with practice to take your state of self-deliberation further into the depths of your deeper conscious awareness that understands these principled relationships well enough to form a scab over a cut or make your heart beat.

… IT WANTS JUST AS WELL TO LET SURFACE INTO YOUR WAKING CONSCIOUSNESS ITS FACTORY-DEFAULT SELF-KNOWLEDGE TO HEAL YOUR ACHING SOUL

A happy heart supports a body that lives a longer life.

As sustained focus improves, the deeper consciousness excursions will inspire and let surface to waking conscious awareness deeper insightful understandings.

Siddhartha discovered that it’s through further calming the mind through self-training the ability to effectively concentrate that the mind becomes an effective tool for seeking the wisdom-deriving self-knowledge through self-examination that leads to letting the wisdom rise from the subtle level of the deeper consciousness.

3) FROM THIS RIGHT CONCENTRATION, SELF-TRAIN THE ABILITY TO GENERATE INSIGHTFUL “AHA” WISDOM

While making the Right Effort to find the mind control to sustain your Right Awareness valuing the mind-into-body harmony needed to establish the Right Concentration, allow the resulting fiber of thinking from this targeted state of self-deliberation to inspire the insightfully realized “aha” wisdom that decodes what’s set by the unalterable patterns of coming and going bits of quark-scale subatomic energy, the unalterable (Tree of) life principles that rule the outcomes of all relationships that make up, define and consign animation to the passage of time.

This wisdom arises out of a truth seeker’s own experience. It’s not received or borrowed from somewhere else. It comes from their personal realization of the truth.

Siddhartha’s Noble Eightfold Path recognizes the steps of this self-trained wisdom phase to be the Right Thought and the Right Understanding.

… ARE YOU READY FOR THE CHALLENGE?

… THE PROCESS WORKS

The process in this “how to” guideline has an adoptive sort of purpose that melds to, pulls together and helps straighten out the strands of life understanding you have floating untethered between the dead-end purposes your misguided conditioning has pointed you towards.

“Yeah, we go to the doctor,
We go to the mountains,
We look to the children,
We drink from the fountains,
Yeah, we go to the Bible,
We go to the workout,
We read up on revival and we stand up for the lookout,
There’s more than one answer to these questions,
Pointing me in a crooked line.
The less I seek my source for some definitive,
The closer I am to fine.
— An Amy Ray and Emilie Saliers life observation in the Indigo Girls song “Closer To Fine”

via Daily Prompt: Enlighten