by Norman Paulsen, Sunburst Founder • We are all looking for love. Not just love that flares up and lasts a short time, but love that is enduring and ever new. It can only be found in knowing God. God’s love for us and our love for God is eternal and enduring. The most important thing we can do in our lives is to seek God. to feel that great love that God has for each one of us, to feel it take fire in our hearts and grow.
by Letha Kiddie •
by Valerie King •
When the Creator set out to make this creation, divine Mother and Father filled it with beautiful sustaining law, the law of love and virtue. This virtue, or Life itself, has twelve universal facets. One of those virtues, continence, has many meanings, but one of them can be described as self-control. Paramahansa Yogananda once said, “Self-control is the key to a happy life.”
Sometimes self-control can bring to mind holding tight, but that’s not really what it means. Meditating more deeply upon it, I found that it means growing a finer and finer awareness of the energies that we exist in.
We each come forth from the one Pure Self, pure consciousness, existence, and pure joy. In venturing into this creation, we have been given a soul with an ego, a mind, a body, and a personality. Norm Paulsen, founder of Sunburst, used to liken these aspects of ourselves to having a horse that we need to learn how to ride, and hopefully not have it riding us.
There’s a word in Sanskrit, pranayama, that means life force control; or caring for life force. Our life force constantly flows outward through the five senses. Continence is our ability to become aware of that outward flow of our precious natural energy and then begin to conserve it. We begin by offering it up to the Divine for the purpose of our soul illumination, and awakening into divine consciousness.
Pranayama, in yoga, is often referred to as working with our breath. There is a simple exercise of paying attention to your breath without trying to change it in any way, to just notice what it’s doing for a moment. The magic of paying attention to it, of putting our consciousness on it, is that it changes.
Scientists of quantum physics discovered several decades ago that subatomic particles change if someone is looking at them. The same thing occurs when we observe our breath. We notice that the quality of it also changes. So conscious awareness is the key to awakening, to transformation. Consciousness is the Divine within us.
We can apply consciousness to our actions, our speech, emotions, our thoughts. Simply by becoming aware, we begin taking care of our energy. This is continence, true self-control. The more we apply it, the greater the space we find in between stimulus and our response. If some energy comes at us that’s hard, we can take a moment and observe it. And by that very observation, we transform the energy.
Norm Paulsen, in his book “Life, Love, God,” said that eventually we come to realize that continence is the caretaker of all the other virtues in creation. Continence, the simple act of paying attention, is the gift of life force riding upon the breath. From this practice, we gain great treasures which we can then bring out into our daily life—great treasures of love and peace, unutterable joy, and happiness.
O Great Spirit, You who shines forth from the very center of every particle of creation,
You who shines forth from the endless sea of eternity,
Filled with thy light, pouring into creation,
Pouring into our bodies, minds and souls at this very moment,
We offer our life force, our love, our desire, back to you, back to the source of all life.
Touching you, we find the power of love; we find the power of virtue.
We find the power of joy unending, and we bring it back to spread it across the Earth,
To transform the Earth in the way that you created it to be in this very moment.
by Letha Kiddie •
by Dawn King •
Divine Mother, Heavenly Father,
I invite you to sit with me.
Oh Mighty Spirit, and all your saints and angels,
I pray that you are with me
when I dive deep in meditation.
Let me open my heart, my mind, and my spirit
to your Life so abundant within and around me.
Divine consciousness resides in us. It makes our heart beat. It brings healing where healing is needed in our body and mind. It causes us to breathe when we are unconscious of it. And it directs our lives if we allow it. Divine consciousness, our true Mother and Father, brought us here so that we could experience this world and grow in understanding, so that we could be instruments: hands, mouths, eyes and feet for God to act on this dimension in a divine way.
Most of us think of our face as being what we see in the mirror as we comb our hair in the morning. But in reality, our face is what we see out in front of us. We’re always looking at the mirror of life; it reflects back at us what we need—the love, the lessons, the understanding, the wisdom.
In each of us the divine Consciousness resides. We have the willpower to let it function fully through us, or let our egos blot it out. When divine Conscious is fully alive within us we feel complete; we feel divine joy. We feel love radiating from our hearts and we feel loved. We feel our connection with the infinite abundance that is God.
When my husband and I hike in the beautiful high Sierras, I find my mind is at peace, not caught up in thoughts of work and normal everyday life. We see other people like ourselves, who’ve been hiking the 12,000 foot passes, people who have been camping in nature for a week or more. Talking to these people is like seeing the angel man or woman speaking to you. Their eyes are so clear, and their smiles so bright.
That’s the same consciousness we can have every day when we meditate and connect with Divine Spirit within us. We can consciously feel that Life beating in our hearts, guiding our thoughts, leading us, giving us direction. It’s there for each one of us. All we have to do is open ourselves to it, to let go of what holds us back.
Divine Mother and Father love each of us so dearly. We are their spirit children. Our divine Parents want only the very best for us. They want to see us joyful and happy, doing meaningful work, loving each other, living a balanced life. They want to see us living in harmony with nature and with each other. These opportunities are there for us. It’s only for us to choose them.
