The Power of NOTHING and the elephants!
Eric Butterworth says - “You cannot get away from yourself, no matter where you go. You are always environed by yourself, horizoned by your mentality, encircled by your ideals, and constantly influenced by what you are saying to yourself. What you think within yourself and what you say to yourself, is what determines the life you experience, the health you express and the prosperity you demonstrate.”
I don't know of anyone who does not have some deep and primal connection to elephants.
They are the true KING of the jungle.
This Saturday at 9am EST I will continue the exploration of time and the power of NOTHING..
One of my favorited excerpts is from a book by Kurt Vonnegut; Dead Eye Dick. " I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and that was that. They said the year was 1932 and that was that. They said I was in Midland, Ohio and that was that. They never shut up. Year after year after year they piled detail upon detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say now? The say the year is 1982, and that I am fifty years old... blah, blah, blah, blah."
We can all write our equivalent of this story - right? "I have caught life. I was an invisible non-material state of being bliss and then decided to foray into the realm of the visible. Light and sound poured in and voices began to describe me and my surroundings. They said the year was 1951 and that my name was Denise, the oldest of 5 children born to poor and powerless teenagers. They said I was of the ilk that would never go to college and that life would be a struggle. They said there were rich people and poor people and that we were poor. There were people who had everything and people who had nothing - and we were the have nothings. They said I loved John F. Kennedy, was against the Vietnam war and should remember my place. It was best to be seen and not heard and to love and trust sparingly. You are born, you pay taxes and then you die and everything in between is just plain hard. My family, friends, teachers, and preachers, and the media have never stopped telling me how life is. Now they say that I am 70 years old, close to the the statistical expiration date of 81.1 years (for women in U), and to try to be happy being comfortable and grateful to having lived this long. Blah..blah..blah...
The point is that life gets dictated to us pretty early on and unless and until we open the eyes of our hearts and see through the eyes of our authentic Self (our SELF as a Spirit), the realm of possibility and the realm of 'nothing', will remain illusive. Living from past circumstances (or something) rather than from possibility (nothing), our lives will inevitably have a kind of limiting, restricting feeling to it. Sometimes that might be a nudge to think differently or a push to pivot into a new idea or activity -- but when chronic it can be the source of a great deal of existential angst, depression, addictive behaviors or lethargy. Each of us has to determine for ourselves our tolerance level for this kind of suffering.
I know mine is quite low. I have re-invented myself more times than I can count in my 70 years on the planet. I did start out to be the first born child of painfully poor and powerless teenagers. I Somehow made it through the melodrama of being a child raised in an alcoholic household to reinvent myself as the wife of an orthodontist, wall-papering my bathroom on a monthly basis and playing bridge with the ladies at the country club twice a week. That clearly wasn't it for me! I spent another twenty years playing a variety of roles in a plethora of plots -- some fun, some traumatic or dramatic, some lucrative, some quite interesting - all had in common an ongoing search for someone or something that remotely matched who I knew myself to be on the inside.
Then something broke open or broke through. The only way I know to talk about it is that I got cured. If I caught life then what happened is I found the cure for the life I had caught. That cure was a coming face-to-face with the SELF I really am and now know myself to be, separate and apart from the self I was told and believed myself to be. I don't mean for that to sound lofty. But it opened up something deep and fierce and authentic in me that has allowed me to live in a creative, authentic, unapologetic kind of way. Is the this way better than the normal way? Today, I say yes. In truth life still happens in all of its glory and its challenges. Covid still came, my cats still died, I still had a stroke. But I am happy, living in the present and unfettered by the past and mostly I feel real. I no longer blame others or myself. I am definitely not feeling sorry for myself. I simply ask at every turn, "What do I want to do, to have and to be from this moment forward?" And I ask God (the Infinite Ineffable) surrounding us all, "What would you have me do and/or have me be in this moment?". I listen carefully, and then I go about the business of creating something out of nothing in the full awareness that my mind, my thoughts, my beliefs, my intentions and my deepest and most soulful commitments are the tool of manifestation -- Life's gift to us to co-create our destiny.
Write your blah blah blah paragraph -- and then write your created future paragraph. It is quite fun!
Join me tomorrow morning 9am on Facebook and YouTube Live to explore the top of "Creating Something Out of Nothing".
Love, Denise
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/A-Life-of-Spiritual-Power-106836340982992
Zoom ID: https://zoom.us/j/4792839409
Comments are Disabled