In Your Image
by Letha Kiddie
Opening of the Heart
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.
The Key to a Happy Life
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.
Gratitude Journal • Calm Joy
by Letha Kiddie •
Coax God to Come Sit with You
by Norman Paulsen, Sunburst Founder •
It is said that Jesus encouraged his disciples to follow him to an upper chamber. He was not speaking of an upper chamber in a house, but of the region of the great higher brain with its dual hemispheres that we are all wearing right now. This miraculous upper chamber was created for God to inhabit with us—for Christ consciousness to dwell in. When awakened it can comprehend the drift and design that projects and sustains this whole creation. How do we gain access to this great brain in the upper chamber?
Through meditation the descending baptism of illuminating fire enters in through the crown of our heads and bathes and nourishes our great higher brain. We can open up to God’s message and divine will through meditation by coaxing and asking that cosmic light to enter into us.
Through meditation you become aware of the dual forces that created us. The masculine force descends through the crown of the head to our beating hearts. The feminine force descends to the base of the spine, wrapping us in a cocoon of light. It then arises to meet the waiting groom in the bridal chamber of the heart. It is here that the dual forces of Spirit create a greater consciousness, a divine Being within us. It is the Christ child awakened and brought forth from our soul. This is the Immaculate Conception!
As this Christ child grows within us, we are able to live a virtuous life. We are able to see our virtuous desires, projected for the good of the world, materialize before our eyes.
Inward from the temples, behind the root of the nose and down from the opening on the crown of the head is the pituitary center. This is the throne of God within us. This is where we sit with the Light of Consciousness, the Christ, I Am That I Am, our Divine Mother and Father. We look out with these two eyes upon the world and are able to say, “Not my will, but Thy will be done.” Within us, the divine will directs our lives and directs that divine birth within our souls. This is salvation.
Keep the door on the crown of the head open twenty-four hours a day. Coax God to come in and sit with you in the upper chamber. It is the most blessed thing you can ever experience. All wisdom, knowledge, love and understanding will come to you. Rejoice and know that God is waiting to enter into you if you but seek it, if you but ask.
Discipline yourself to go twice a day, each morning and evening, programming your great brain with the things our world needs, works that you can accomplish in your own unique way. What a wonderful thing to be guided as you walk through life! I thank God every day for leading me to this knowledge, this truth, this love.
Sanctuary
Poem by Leela
