• by Sandy Anderson •Divine love is the mother of all virtue. That is where it all starts. Love is the root and the source of compassion. Love makes our hearts beat. It makes our blood flow. It makes the sun shine inside us, and it brings us to understanding and compassion for our fellow beings. Our hearts can include them all.
We are all beings of divine light, of love, from the same Being whom we call God. Our greatest fulfillment is to celebrate our Creator, to embrace him and her, to live a life acknowledging the Divine Being day to day. And to know this being lives in each of us.
As parents, we wish to nurture our children with true unconditional love, total forgiveness, complete embracing, moment by moment. How could you ever reject your own child? That is how Spirit feels towards us. Each of us is their child, and we are each other’s children. I am so grateful to be a part of the human family.
In the vibration of Leo, celebrating compassion, we come to the heart, to living love, to forgiving, to holding the hands of the people next to us, rising above judgment. We all know self-righteousness is not really righteous. Understanding and compassion are righteous.
Visitors to Sunburst sometimes ask, “How do you do it? How do you get along with each other, with so many different personalities?” Living compassion, understanding, living love is the essence, the answer.
Many times, if I have a conflict with someone, I’ll say my prayers and let it float, praying for resolution. As time goes by, I will find myself in meditation with that person, and somehow their feeling is made known to me. A door opens in my heart bringing understanding, and I feel for them. Forgiveness comes spontaneously. I love that. God unites us and brings healing love as a balm, as the comforter of all hearts, solver of all problems, as the joy that we live.
Paramahansa Yogananda: Don’t depend on death to liberate you from your imperfections. You are exactly the same after death as you were before. Nothing changes; you only give up the body. If you are a thief or a liar or a cheater before death, you don’t become an angel merely by dying. If such were possible, then let us all go and jump in the ocean now and become angels at once! Whatever you have made of yourself thus far, so will you be hereafter. And when you reincarnate, you will bring that same nature with you. To change, you have to make the effort. This world is the place to do it.
Norman Paulsen:Self-discipline arises from commitment to the vision you seek: knowing what you want and dedicating your life to bringing it forth into being. To walk the spiritual path, the utmost discipline is required. Threefold development must be pursued: physical, mental, and spiritual. Through the attainment of virtue, the ego-centered consciousness must abdicate the throne to the pure Self. This is the crowning achievement of the spiritual athlete. Helping you to achieve this goal of virtue is Spirit, I Am That I Am, existing within your soul. Yes, we all have this energy nearby, and centered deep within.
It has to be identified and brought forth. Meditation alone will not take you home. Without practicing virtue and walking the a balanced path, you may see the goal, but you will not be able to hold onto it. By attempting to live the virtue every day, whether you succeed or not, you plant positive seeds in the field of power. The law of cause and effect has no choice but to return these efforts toward virtue to you.
Swami Guru-Bhaktananda: All beings are manifestations of God alone. This is the vision of the great Indian scriptures, the Vedas. The worship mentioned is also unusual. God in the form of each being is worshipping God in the universal form! Life takes on a completely new meaning when lived in accordance to what this verse implies. This vision creates the right feeling in us in all our daily activities. Every act becomes an act of worship. The fact that we do not feel in this way is due only to one single factor: Our Ego steps in between and tries to snatch away all the glory for itself!
by Norman Paulsen, Sunburst Founder•Someone once asked me, “Why is God so hard on me? I never hear his voice or see his light.”
Responding, I said, “Do you hear that creek running? Do you hear those waters rushing down the mountain on their way to the sea? Listen to them! Meditate upon nature. You didn’t create it; God did. It is the visible body of Spirit, the voice crying in the wilderness.
The wind in the trees! What a sound—the elements of air pressing against the elements of the earth. Listen and hear God’s voice in nature, and in the creatures of the earth.” Once understanding this communion, God speaks to you in a voice from all space, calling you by name and giving you love and direction in your life.
Recreate with God’s creative life force. Read words or watch movies of inspiration. Write and play music expressing mankind’s glories. Play games that encourage one another to be strong and live virtue. Develop spiritual willpower through the discipline of physical exercise. This is recreation and regeneration for body, mind and spirit.
Allow your heart to commune with God in nature. Find a pristine environment that makes your heart swell with joy and love. Embrace the solitude. The pure Self within you will come forward through your senses to commune with you in nature.
The word recreation means to co-create with God; this is the purpose of the divine creation. Yes, knowing one’s own pure Self within is real re-creation. Living upon the earth as Spirit intended humankind to live, God fully conscious in human beings, brings heaven on earth again!
by Dawn King•In our busy lives, sometimes the day seems chaotic. Chores, cooking, meetings, phone calls, texts, child care, traffic jams, emails, sounds that irritate us, and even more bombards us. Our attention is demanded from all sides.
If we can remember to consciously take a deep breath, inhaling the life of Spirit and realizing the temporary nature of this ever-changing life, we win! This is when we embrace the advice of Paramahansa Yogananda to “…Stand unshaken amidst the crash of breaking worlds.” Our spirit remains strong and is untouched.
An article I read recently told of a young man’s six-week sojourn in a Buddhist temple. He described being invited one day to tea by the abbot. He ascended the stairs to an upper story, only to find the abbot absorbed in concentration over his task at hand, and observing a focused silence. He cleansed each article used in the tea ceremony with full attention, as though nothing else existed at that moment. Ultimately, tea having been served, the abbot turned the same full attention on the young man.
When we focus the mind completely on the moment, whether in meditation, or while carrying out an action, we bring peace to our minds, hearts, and nervous systems. The distraction of phones and other electronics is especially disruptive to this process of being here now. We make ourselves ill by attempting to deal with everything at once.
Studies have now proven that multitasking can reduce your cognitive functioning. Your brain isn’t really doing more than one thing at once, it is jumping back and forth between tasks, and needing to try to remember where it was each time it returns to the earlier one.You lose valuable productivity time in completing tasks, make mistakes, and memories are harder to recall.
Entrepreneur Andy Hill writes: “Multitasking is just a fancy word for being unfocused.…When we multitask we can’t give ourselves to the present. Instead, we sacrifice now for later with the hopes of future happiness.…Imagine what we could hear, learn and share if we were 100 percent present in a conversation. …We’d be more focused, apt, adaptive and therefore better decision makers. The better we can solve problems, the more productive. More successful. Happier. And isn’t that the point?”
To the words of psychologist Michelle Fung: “…By simply focusing on one thing at a time you will instantly improve the quality of your work,” I would add “and your life.”
The importance of meditating each morning and evening cannot be emphasized enough. At first, this discipline takes effort, but as your meditations deepen and you begin to feel the inner peace and joy, your desire to meditate will grow. Each day resolve that you will meditate more deeply than yesterday. Set aside time one day each week for a longer practice. Make a place in your home that is dedicated to meditation.
Developing devotion, called bhaktiyoga, is also an essential part of the practice. Norman [Sunburst’s founder] often said, “Talk to God as you would your best friend, your divine companion!”
Devotion to whatever concept of God is pleasing to you is a powerful magnetic force that Spirit cannot resist. Your heart may be drawn to visualize Divine Mother, Heavenly Father, a God-realized soul, or a radiant sphere of Light, I Am That I Am, brilliant like the sun. Offering your love and devotion to your favorite image of the Divine will help rein in the ego-centered self, freeing the pure Self to come forth.
The meditation technique can take you to the door, but only your devotion will take you through the door. – Paramahansa Yogananda
John Kiddie:
Using our meditation technique, we quiet the senses, find that center place within us, that spark of the Divine that has been with us always. We imagine our spine as a hollow tube connecting Mother Earth and Father Spirit. We make the connection with the breath going up and down that tube.
We continue to do this, mixing and melting the energies of the Mother and the Father, bringing forth a union within us. It’s like dipping the fabric of our soul, our being in the waters of the Divine and washing it clean with every breath. As we bring in the energies and circulate them through our spine, we are slowly but surely cleansing ourselves from the inside.
We quiet our mind and come to reside in that center place within where Spirit resides. Through time, all will be revealed in that sacred space. What is revealed in that place is virtue, taking many forms. When we get to that place and reside there, we put on the cloak of virtue and transform ourselves so that our thoughts, words, and actions are virtuous. We do not have to think of being virtuous because we have become virtue.
by Norman Paulsen, Sunburst Founder • Self-discipline arises from commitment to the vision you seek, knowing what you want and dedicating your life to bringing it forth into being. True discipline is never a restriction. It is a liberation! Through meditation and right conduct, the ego, the false self, draws nearer to the pure Self. Virtue begins to arrive in your outward expressions, conducting the power of infinite love through every thought, word, and deed. Energies, never before felt, approach your awareness. Great love is felt for life, for God!
God is more desirable than all that can be experienced by the five senses. However, one does not abandon the outer for the inner! The adept, once knowing the inner, brings it to the outer world for expression. To bring heaven on earth again is our purpose. Yes, God is alive in you, experiencing the five senses, picking and tasting the fruit of the trees that I Am That I Am created, feeling the miracle of the solid earth beneath your feet, bathing in the waters, experiencing the warmth of the sun on a summer’s day.
Having access to the inner life, one now expresses it in the outer life. I Am That I Am now walks the earth as was originally intended in the cosmic plan. Yes, God, Mother and Father, those two divine dreamers, living and walking fully conscious within you upon the earth. This is the reason you are here today, dear friend, that God might live and work and play through you, fully conscious. And as a son or daughter, you are joined in this union.
