The Deep Hearts Core – Spiritual Direction for Difficult Times

An Anam cara who guides your spiritual direction can be your undoing.  They invite you out of constant need to be doing your life situation that leads you into the prison of never enough. Spiritual direction is not about telling you more about something.  Most of us already know more than enough.  Except that the Anam cara will tell you that knowing about something is not real knowledge.  

Nor is spiritual direction about telling you what to do.  It is an invitation from someone inspired (meaning in spirit) who already knows the beauty within themselves and thus can invite it to blossom within you.  The Anam cara trusts and lives this beauty within themselves.  They invite you to trust it and more to the point to live it.

In your day-to-day life situation you can learn to enhance your skill base in many ways.  This assists you in practical ways to achieve your goals.  However, in following any spiritual direction you are invited to learn that less is more.  Your spiritual director or Anam cara knows you are already magnificent beyond anything you can think about yourself.  They know that you are inspiration in form.  They know you are more than enough.  The work of one who offers you spiritual direction is to remind you of this. 

They do not remind you because they believe this is simply a nice idea.  They remind you by their presence.  The work of the spiritual guide is to invite you to allow this beauty within you to flower rather than continue along the same old known way of doing that only gets you deeper in the do-do.

 Spiritual direction points you toward allowing.  This is often experienced as frustrating for anyone intent on getting somewhere.  The A+ personality type, which most of us subscribe to, wants to have the answer right now.  Only spiritual guidance is not something you achieve by doing.  It is realised by seeing in ways that you did not see before.   Spiritual direction comes from one who does not lead you up a blind ally but gets you to connect to vision.

 The spiritual guide watches you without judgement.  They watch as you metaphorically pull up the young seedling of your unique creative potential by the roots.  They watch as you criticise it for not growing or getting somewhere fast enough.  They watch as you criticise it for not being beautiful enough, for not being the right shape.  They watch as you plant it in places where the sun never shines.  They watch as you neglect it in all sorts of ways while you compare it with how others are doing.  Then you wonder where the wonderful flowering of your creative potential has gone.

 An Anam cara who is a spiritual guide invites you to leave the seeding alone.

 They give you directions on how to tend it and how to care for it.  Then they invite you to get out of the way and allow the unique expression within the seedling to flower within you.  They suggest that you don’t compare your flowering with any other bloom.  They suggest you ground yourself and stay in the light.  How each person does this is unique.

 The Anam cara who is a friend of your soul invites you to learn another language.  This language is not the language of go getting.  It is not the language that will make you more successful.  It is not the language of sound bites masking as communication.  The Anam cara teaches you the language of the soul.  This is the language of the

Source

Of

Unlimited

Love.

Unlimited here also means unconditional.  This soul language is not the language of self-improvement but the language of opposites and the language of parable, paradox and of fairytales.  It is also the language that invites real communion.

 An Anam cara invites you into the Anam cara Experience.  This is were you become able to source your own spiritual direction.  This is where you are able to access intelligence that is beyond the intellect and the rational.  This is where you learn to tend to the seed potential only you can grow to its full majesty.  You learn to be come the King/Queen of your own magical Kingdom.  Then you begin to flower in ways unimagined and you too become an invitation to beauty.

 At the Anamcara Experience we invite you to tend the flowering that is always being expressed within you.  This flowering never stops because it is essentially who you are.  It is that you have forgotten how to source this beauty within.  At the Anam cara Experience we invite you to tune into this unending Source Of Unlimited Love.  We invite you into soul friendship.

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In Eternal Echoes the poet and scholar John O’Donohue writes:-

“To pray is to develop and refine the light of your life.  It smoothes the courseness of your vision.  It brings you closer to the homeland of your heart.”  There are many wonderful ancient and classical prayers from tradition.  Yet there is something irrevocably unique and intimate about your own individual prayer.  It would be wonderful to create your own prayer.”

I sometimes have an ambivalent toward the practice of prayer.  There are times when I love it for the sense of connectedness it gives me. There are times when I think it is simply more of me, myself, I when there is the engagement with an idea of someone separate asking for something from that which does not know the idea of separation.  Even from a purely logical point of view there is no meeting of minds.  From a mystic point of view there is only ever the one mind so you can`t pray to something or someone.

Yet I value prayer as an act of co-creation.  This is not simply the action of getting what I want because I am told I should want it or to avoid something I do not want.  John O’Donohue says that to pray is to develop and refine the light of your life. 

In this presentation I am simply going to share with you thoughts and ideas that come immediately to mind as I play with the idea of writing my own prayer.  I am not going to censor these thoughts in anyway but simply run with them as they arise.  I do not claim any expertise in relation to the practice of prayer but I do claim an interest in prayer at my deep hearts core.  The authority for communion with the Divine I claim as my own and it is in no way dictated by allegiance to any outside body or any outside authority.

So let me simply run with this invitation to writing ones own prayer that, personally speaking, I think is a great invitation.  Immediately the image I get around this idea of writing my own prayer is that of a block of marble.  Out of this block of marble I intend, metaphorically speaking, to carve my personal statement of Love.  I am going to engage with the wisdom within me that can create the beauty in the form that best expresses  Divine nature as it moves through this form in time and space.  

This, as John O’Donohue says, begins to refine your vision except that is isn’t really your vision but the blessing of being able to see beyond the limitation of the suffering of the separate sense of Self.  This is the vision of at one ment.  Out of this vision you are able to be a seer of what action needs to be taken.  You become a vehicle for Love in action.

I am more or less thinking aloud here as I write this article but I think that prayer would best become something that you love and something that you enjoy being engaged with.  Sometimes it might become dry and this can be acknowledged as a time of incubation.  Surely, however, prayer isn’t something that you think you should do because some outside authority tells you that this is required of you.  I think that prayer might be thought of as a communion between a lover and their Beloved.  Sometimes this can be challenging but this takes us into new thresholds of creative possibility.

 Prayer, I think, can become a way of tuning into the vision that is unique to you and the way that the light of Love plays through you.  For, me personally, the prayer that I most identify with is that of St. Francis of Assisi.  This begins 

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy Peace.”

Even to live this first line is a statement of a visionary of Love.  In this request there is no praying to get anything but it is a prayer of a co-creator willing to be used for the purpose of peace on earth.  It would be, personally speaking, difficult to come out of the rock of the separate sense of self with a more visionary statement than the invitation asked for in this line.  It could, if you were so inclined, become a kind of living mantra.

Thinking aloud again, I ask myself what would be the qualities required to write your own prayer.  This list of qualities and practices that I immediately think of are these.  They are listed simply as they arise and this does not indicate any level of importance to any of the qualities or practices listed.  I would include humility, silent witnessing, patience, intention, commitment, attention, faith, courage, surrender, enthusiasm, self worth, compassion and thankfulness.  This is not a list that is definitive but as for myself anyone of these is a great foundation on which to begin the practice of writing your own prayer.

In more practical terms you would need to commit time.  You would also need to have a place of quiet and you would need a journal to write in.  I wouldn’t use a computer because there is a direct connection between the use of pen and paper and the hand and heart that I think the computer does not give.  A computer is not a natural extension of your bioenergic form.

Looking at the above list that has simply arisen I find myself thinking that there is every reason to begin to write the prayer of your heart.  This would be the prayer, or unique spiritual statement, that you can feel directly in your heart and which you have no issues about using in the service of Love.  This invitation from John O’Donohue has given me inspiration to at least begin to step out on this journey of writing my personal prayer as a kind of love letter to Creation.

This, I think, is very different to praying a prayer of chanting a mantra given to you by an authority outside yourself.  This is an authority that you have projected your spiritual power unto.  I often think that mantras are given to the individual from direct divine awareness and that they are unique to that individual.  They represent the direct connection of that individual to their divine nature and are not for anyone else.  Creation never creates twice.  Even when there is a cloning the clone is never a full representation of the original.   

When the Lords prayer is recited it is intended to be an invocation from a state of consciousness which is Christ Consciousness.  To invoke the power of the Lords Prayer you need to at least be aware of the existence of non-dual consciousness from which this prayer is intended to be spoken.  If this awareness is not present then you are simply mouthing sounds that have no resonance to the direct experience out of which this prayer arises and out of which the power inherent in this prayer and other universal prayers arise.

When I go to church or chapel on occasion I am always astonished at how quickly the Lords prayer is recited.  It feels to me as if it is a race to see who can get to the end of the prayer first.  It is as if it were some unpleasant taste in the mouth that one wanted to get rid off.  Personally speaking I think it would be better not to recite it at all if you cannot give it the presence it deserves.

Go one step further, however, and imagine claiming your own spiritual authority and writing your own prayer that you can say and feel and love.  So if you where to begin to write your own prayer how would you begin.  Here again I am thinking aloud because in this article I am in my own way beginning to examine this process.

I think I would do what I am immediately drawn to do. I start with simply trusting the process.  I trust the first through that comes into my head even if it makes no logical sense, which is often the best beginning.  So the first thought that comes to my mind is “Start from the end.”

I don’t know about you but this “Start from the end” really excites me.  This is because it is a paradox, a kind of riddle and I love paradox and I love riddles.  They take you beyond the prison of the intellect and into the unknowing knowing of the heart.  It isn’t sensible.  For many of you it will be kind of confusing.  It is a kind of Zen koan, the kind of phrase that might pop out of the mouth of a child.  It is what I call thinking outside the box.  There are consultants who are paid vast sums of money to come up with this kind of out of the box thinking and get no where near as crazy as this opening thought invites.

You are probably like myself, You don’t know the end. However, as far as I am concerned this writing your own prayer is an engagement with creation and I in this process of writing my own prayer am a co-creator.  I am sure of one thing and this is that creation knows how to create.  I am sure of one other thing and this is that creation knows how to create far better than I do.  I create through a limitation that I think I am called me, myself, I.  Creation is the I AM that creates all things out of no thing.  The best way of being a co-creator is to get out of the way and trust the creative process to be the creative process.  This getting out of your own way is the difficult part

So let me end here with the intention that I come back to this writing your own prayer process as a way of refining my own inner light and the way the vision within me and the vision within you can begin to shine and envision others.  Let me also invite you to join me in this journey by committing to writing your own prayer.  With that intention I am examining the possibility of adding a private forum to the Anam cara Experience website where you would be able to share this journey with myself and others.

If you are interested in becoming part of this “Writing your Own Prayer” group I would be pleased to have you join me in this adventure into what I have come to call the deep hearts core.  This phrase the deep hearts core is taken from the last line of the wonderful spiritual poem by W. B. Yeats entitled “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”  So either email me at one of the following email addresses.

radiate@anamcaraexperience.org

or

irishmysticstoryteller@gmail.com

Or if you know of anyone who would be interested in joining me on such an adventure then please mention this invitation to them.

©   Tony Cuckson 2009

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Nine bean rows will I have there
A hive for the honey bee and
Live in a bee loud glade.

From Lake Isle of Innisfree
By W. B Yeats

Are you living a life filled with the gladness of being. I suspect that for many of us we are more living a life not of a bee loud glade but as the experience of noise and haste that is our busy bee lives.

In my weekly podcast entitled The Deep Hearts Core, taken from the last line of the poem by W. B Yeats entitled “Lake Isle of Innisfree” I invite you not to be a busy bee that is forever doing your life but to create some real sense of lifes sweetness from the buzz of simply being.

A hive is a kind of community. The word community derives from the word communion and this expreince of communion is a state of being out of which real gladness arises. Gladness is more than happiness which has a tendancy to be something we manipulate for our own ends.

Are you willing to learn to invite some real direction into your busy bee life that will give you what W. B Yeats called the peace that comings droppings slow. In your head you have a buzz that is anything but the sound of gladness. It is that buzz that is your doing your less than glad life.

As a storyteller and spiritual director it is my intention to invite you into what W. B Yeats called the bee loud glade. He used the word glade for a specfic reason in order to remind you and I of our real sense of gladness that is available to each of us when we follow our true direction and find real sweetness in being the dance of Love that we have come here to share. This is the real buzz of being here as a human being on this planet.

Come and learn to live the sweetness at the deep hearts core and become a real hive of creative activity.

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W. B Yeats – My Spiritual Director

As an Irish mystic storyteller I adore the poetry of W. B. Yeats.  Let me say at the outset this interest in W. B Yeats. is in no way academic.

I never set out to find a connection to W. B. Yeats and his poetry.  I never set out to find a connection to the poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi but I did.  These wonder poets came into my life at a time of threshold.  Each appeared in my life at the time of my return to my homeland of Ireland..  

In April of 2000 my sister Mary who was four years older than myself died of cancer.  This lead me to question what I was doing with what the mystic poet Mary Oliver calls “this one glorious life that you have been given.”  The answer to that question was that I wasn’t doing what I wanted.  I wasn’t living gloriously.  I was playing safe as an accountant working for myself.  

I made the decision (along with my partner Bee) to return to Ireland to develop what we would call A Still Point Centre.  Little did I know then that all hell would break loose.  Since my return I have been supported and amazed at the beauty and invitation from the poetry of W. B. Yeats.  He keeps asking me deep hearts core questions that I attempt to share and sometimes avoid.  

One key aspect of this mystic search at the deep hearts core is the search for peace.  It is the peace that Jesus Christ refers to when he says, “My peace I give to you but not as the world gives you.”  This peace in no way requires that you believe in Jesus Christ.  Belief in Jesus Christ must be the direct inner experience of Christ Consciousness.  

W. B. Yeats in his poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree invites

“And I shall have some peace there for peace comes dropping slow.”

I, as a storyteller, am in some little way a peace pilgrim.  I walk this world in search of what it is I aspire to know and be and give.  This peace pilgrimage is inner.  It is a journey into stillness and silence that is at the deep hearts core.  Out of this stillness arises what is called right action.  This is Love in action.

Gangaji says this beautifully when she writes in “The Diamond in your Pocket – discovering your true radiance.”  She writes

“It is possible to trust that right action can come from the unknown stillness of your being.  You have learned not to trust this stillness, because you are afraid you will just lie on the couch all day.  And you might just do that.  Your body is probably exhausted anyway.”

We don’t have to know what the plan is, but we do have to be true to peace: to take responsibility for choosing to over look what is already at peace.  We have learned how to armor, to lie and to protect ourselves.

Yet deeper, closer than any strategy we have learned, the peace remains.  It is here right now.”  

All mystics invite you to know the now of this peace.  Except that Gangajii says you do not trust that out of the stillness, the apparent emptiness of no thing comes everything.  That, at the centre of such a peace is a power that knows what needs or needs not to be done.

As W. B. Yeats rightly says in the poem Lake Isle of Innisfree, 

“for peace comes dropping slow.”

You have to value it.  You have to have direct experience of it.  You have to have the commitment to make it real in your life and to have it radiate within your life situation.

Pay attention to what your culture invites.  Our Western culture teaches us to be afraid of silence.  Thus it holds tight the keys to the dwelling of peace but not the indwelling of peace that allows you to know safety, sanctuary and Love.  You have to become an island of calm.  You have to be able to attune yourself to listen to the peace of the infinite peace.  This peace is at the still point centre of your deep hearts core.

On this journey of the peace pilgrim you learn that peace comes dropping slow.  Do not be discourgeaged.  Still it comes because it is always there.  The more silent you become inside the more the Universal song sings through you.  It is always a unique song and always a song of peace.

How do you find this peace that comes dropping slow?  Simply by witnessing the non-peace of your mind without judgement until you enter no mind and the One Mind.  It is the most difficult and the most simple of practices.  It follows the biblical instruction “

“Be still and know that I am God.”

Out of this knowing all that needs to be known is know and out of that knowing Love in action arises.  Action that is effective in the world of form arises out of the still point centre of the deep hearts core.

NOTE 

You can download and listen to Tony making this invitation to Finding the Still Point Centre at our Deep Hearts Core podcast.  Simply click the button below.

 

 Spiritual Direction for Awakening Beauty [33:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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In this weeks Deep Hearts Core podcast you are invited to discover a lost art. This is the lost art of loving. Most people hunger for Love. Most people think that love is simply an emotion that you feel for some people and not others.

On this spiritual journey to the Deep Hearts Core you discover that Love is not just an emotion. You are invited into the vast realization that Love is not only a state of being it is who you are at your Deep Hearts Core.

This is the only real spiritual direction worth going in. It is a living and lovely paradox. The more you learn this art of Loving which is more an unlearning. The more you discover that you are not the more Love is. This is the task of becoming a real artist – on who is a servant to Love. Then you live the art of love as your life’s expression.

An Anam cara offers you true spiritual guidance and true spiritual direction. It is the guidance in trusting the hearts little intelligence at your deep hearts core. They hold the knowing of this inner telling sense until you love yourself enough to allow yourself to receive the beauty you are. They simply assist in authorizing the real story of you as an individual glory of Love you already are.

To listen to the full podcast The Art of Loving simply click on the button below.

 

 Spiritual Direction - The Art of Loving: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Meeting at the Deep Hearts Core

Have started a podcast called the Deep Hearts Core. This will be a weekly podcast including heart stories, heart song and mystical poetry

The first podcast is called Stairway to Heaven and looks at the word you need to ensure that you get what you came here in this world to be.

In the second podcast you are told the wondertale about the Tuatha de Danaan – the beautiful people who were driven under ground.  This is a metaphor for many of us who live our lives judging our success or failure.

Have a listen.  You will need broadband to download these files.  Simply click on the podcast button below to immediately here this invitation to buying a stairway that takes you to that place of unimagined beauty and creativity – your deep hearts core.

 

 Buying a Stairway to Heaven: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Storytelling as a sense of wonder

Question: How to be in the world?

Many of us, when we were growing up, were asked the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Maybe we didn’t really know what we wanted to do. We might have said we wanted to be a fireman or a ballerina.

Note that the question is asking, “What are you going to do?” The reply is returned as “I am going to be.” The reply is not “I am going to do.” This is not simply an issue about the correct use of grammar. It is a fundamental way of understanding why you are here in the world of time, space and form.

Most of us are focused and are encouraged to focus on the do-do of our life. We are focused on the dance of the do-do, which is taking us as a collective called humanity, toward the experience of the Dodo – a flightless bird that became extinct. When we focus purely on the do-do of our lives then we are not only flightless, we never get to soar.

The do-do of our lives creates the culture of more and more doing. We follow the focus of affluence, which turns into affluenza and meltdown. At the heart of such focus is the dynamic of fear. We fear that if we don’t get on the treadmill of the do-do bird we will lose out.

What is the primary source of value that exists in this world today? It is the holy measure called GDP – Gross Domestic Product. It has one primary direction. It has to go up. When it falls there is what is called recession. The result is panic.

This GDP is driven by ROCE – Return on Capital Employed. It is really ROCE that is our focus of worship. It is what drives the world stock exchanges. It is what drives multinational corporations. It is what drives our need for early retirement. Profit is not the primary measure of the success of a business. ROCE is. It, in turn, determines whether the share prices go up or down.

The success of a CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of a multinational company, or any company, is determined by the value of the shares based on ROCE. The bigger percentage ROCE, the better. If this means you pull down a rain forest in order to earn a higher percentage rate of return on capital employed, you do it. If you, as CEO don’t do it, then your share value will fall and you are likely out of job. What drives this dynamic is that fear of losing out.

In order to get a return on capital employed you have to have capital. The primary capital in this world of time and space and form is a piece of capital called the Earth. Accountants will tell you (and I have worked as an accountant most of my adult life) that no business can develop when it erodes its capital base.

This erosion of the capital base is fundamentally undermining the very value system worshipped by the capitalist system. It is no longer working. It goes against the law of nature. Communism did not work because it also goes against the law of nature.

What is aligned with the law of nature is being. When you move action from a state of being the capital base is not depleted but expanded. It expands forever because it is created to expand forever. Individual life forms evolve but they are not designed to expand forever. Form arises out of being and the greatest action arises out of non-action, which does not mean doing nothing but means doing arising out from nothing.

Creation created you to be an experience of joy in being creative. This is its intention. It is more than capable of ensuring this happens in your life. You have to allow it.

At this point of time only a few people have ever learned to live in this way. The present global crisis offers more of us the opportunity to ask fundamental questions. Is it going to be more of the same only with a little more controls in place that those with the power will manipulate for their own interest. No one can do this for you. You have, as Mahatma Gandhi said, to become the change you want to see.

The capital of your life is your connection to being. You have forgotten this connection. It requires that you connect to your heart song, your heart story and your heart blessing. This is not the story of your nation, your tribe, or your family. It is the living experience of your connection to the source of creative life. You do not earn this by the sweat of your brow. You melt into it by trusting in its power to celebrate its life through you.

For the most part we are a faithless lot. I include myself in this. We think that if we don’t do it, it won’t get done. Many of us spend our whole lives working to an end that ends. We work and we work. We follow the sound of the drummer playing the collective and psychotic rhythm of ever increased GDP and ever-increased ROCE. The higher the ROCE, the bigger the bonuses. If the system were subjected to an analysis it would be certified as a mental illness. As the mystic Eckhart Tolle says in The Power of Now, “This is exactly what it is.”

You can’t learn how to be. You have to undo the learning of distance from being. To that extent this storyteller has written the eCourse Ready to Radiate.

Are you ready to radiate the being you are? Are you ready to be one who says enough of this collective insanity that is taking this dance of the sound of God (humans and other species) to the experience of the Dodo via the do-do?

If you say you do not have time, you will not have time. The time only ever comes now. It is the now from which awareness of being arises. Without this awareness much of what you will achieve called success is simply more do-do.

Right now gift yourself some sanity not only for your own sake but for the sake of others and in service to the one creative life that serves all life and which you are not apart from, the one infinite being.

© Tony Cuckson 2009

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” Never confuse intellectual understanding for insight.”

 - Michael Langford, The Most Direct and Rapid Means to Eternal Bliss, Vol. 1

This Irish storyteller refers to insight as knowing.  Knowing is not the same as intellectual knowing. Intellectual knowledge is always ‘about’ something. It is dualistic. There is the knower and that which is known.

Insight is transformational.  It changes your worldview.  You see from a higher plane.  You get a larger, wider and more expansive understanding.  There is, however, a paradox with insight.  It will make you humble.  If it does not humble you, you have claimed it as your own and not as the gift of and from Love.

There is a difficulty here.  You must have a contrast in order to avoid confusion.  You have to have had the experience of insight to be able to distinguish it from intellectual understanding.  Most of us have had the experience of intellectual understanding.  Too few of us know and become the experience of the ‘insider.’

“Love is an inside job,” says Paul Ferrini.  Insight, as the word implies, is also an inside job. It is not seeing with the physical eye but is the experience of becoming a Seer.  A seer sees in a way that we ordinarily do not.   A seer experiences life without being an ‘I’ to experience.  This they know is the way to be in the world, the dying before you die, and the dying to a sense of separateness that keeps you anchored to death.

‘Your experience’ as you experience it is filtered.  This filter you call ‘me’ and ‘mine.’  You call it ‘your experience.’  You have it within the boundary called time and space.  When you have a particular experience you say now ‘you know.’

The now your know may be intellectual understanding.  It may change your life’s situation but it will not change the way you see the world.  Insight changes the way you see the world.  You become a seer beyond time.

What if you never experienced insight?  What if you have not seen for yourself with the eye of the Seer?

First, you need an intense desire to become the knowing of who you are or have the intense desire to put an end to suffering.  In the beginning, this desire can be for yourself alone.

The root of suffering is in your sense of separateness.  Insight allows you to recognise that this sense of separateness is created by your sense of attachment to the ‘I’ you call ‘little me.’  To have insight inoto this separateness of self means you feel  the connection to Oneness.  This gives you the ability to distinguish between knowledge and knowing.  More intellectual knowledge may assist you in creating a more comfortable lifestyle.  Insight will lead you to a feeling relationship beyond belief and beyond limitation called ‘my life.’  Instead of satisfaction one experiences joy.

Insight turns rags to riches and lead into gold.  Fairy tales invite insight.  They invite you to kiss the Sleeping Beauty within you locked away in the ivory tower of intellectual knowledge.

In the Hans Christian Anderson’s story The Ugly Duckling the farmyard can still be improved through intellectual and scientific progress. There is nothing wrong with this unless you get stuck in the upgraded farmyard.  You will still be the Ugly Duckling who has not had the insight that he is given when he goes to the lake and sees his true reflection and insight into the true Self.

The work of getting insight is something you do but do not ‘do.’  Insight is a grace.  When you receive it you will know that this is so.  You will know that you could never in a million lifetimes earn this.  You cannot buy it with effort but you need to make the effort. Consider yourself a gardener of insight.  All you do is plant the seed and tend it.  It is, as the word implies, already within you.  It requires practice and patience.

What is given to you through insight you will want to give away.  Only you will be disturbed.  Now you are the knowing of that no thing that is everything and this is the beginning of an endless becoming! You are now an outsider although you have also been  an insider. Now you have to choose which master you are going to serve. Insight?  Or separateness?

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Whatever’s written in your heart

That’s all that matters

You’ll find a way to say

It all some day

Gerry Rafferty

Here are lines from a song written by a soul friend.  They are point you toward a place you will find what matters.

Every song can be an invitation to the Great Song, the song that you alone have come here to sing.  This is a metaphor.  You are not required to be a singer, although you might be that.  You are, however, required to be a singer although in the sense that you are required to carry the tune of the Infinite as it plays through your heart. 

The heart is not just a physical pump; wonderful as this instrument is that pumps our life’s blood around the body.  The heart is a dimension that spans the time and the timeless.  Without a direct experience of this connection you can have all the things you want but it does not matter that much.  The heart is the bridge between the human and the Divine.

Heart work focuses on what matters.  What really matters to the heart is beyond person, the mask.  What really matters to the heart is the Universal, the timeless qualities of beauty and grace.

These are qualities that you cannot buy but that you realise.  You don’t make them. They come through what Eckhart Tolle refers to as ‘portals.’  These are place of threshold where the heart engages with its Lover and Creator.

You and I are writers.  We write our life’s expression in each thought we think.  What we think about we become but what we think about is not necessarily what we are intended to become.  This writer was intended to become a teacher of yoga long before this word was the household word it is today.  Instead, this writer trained and became engaged in the work of an accountant.

All through this writer’s life people would say, ” Tony, you’re not, you cannot be an accountant!”  But I was and that I remained despite their vocal scepticism.  However, I found a way to do the work of an accountant with the values that wanted to create a yoga teacher.  This did not make me wealthy but it kept me sane.

The heart loves one thing more than any other.  It loves to expand.  Expansion means breaking boundaries.  It means being willing to let go and move into the new.  The ego tends to dislike this.  It dislikes this because with the heart the ego gets dissolved and becomes at one with the boundless.

We each write a script for the heart. We do this everyday.  The script we write has two broad directions.  One leads us down a narrow road and the other onto the highway.  Each signpost that takes us there looks the same.  They have the same words written large on them.

The signpost reads, “This way to heart matters.”  Most people follow the road to the highway.  When asked why they choose that route they often deny that it was because that was the way most people seemed to be headed.  This Irish storyteller headed for the highway of accountancy because, to be honest, he had not the heart strength to go another way.

Actually, what happens is that you will find a way to say it all some day.  This ezine, this website, is the way this storyteller’s heart learns to say it all, not someday, but everyday.

The heart does not just say what it wants to say on one day.  It is saying what it wants to say in every moment.  Fear and doubt get in the way.  What really gets in the way is you – your sense of separateness from Love.  What gets in the way is that sense of unworthiness.

What matters to the heart is not what matters to you but what matters to Love.  You think you are separate from Love but Love is not separate from you.  Your heart knows this.  Your heart longs to remember this.  This is the meaning of yoga – to join together, to re-member.

Whatever is written in your heart will make you sing.  You might sing a song of sorrow but still – it is your song of sorrow.  It is not to be grudged.  It is to be expanded. Your sorrow can be the invitation to deep compassion or bitterness.  Usually bitterness is the calcification, the hardening over past hurts that are being said but not being owned.

The writer and creation spirituality teacher Matthew Fox says in Radical Prayer (available from www.soundstrue.com) that ultimately there is no protection for the heart. There are boundaries but no protection.  The greatest protection is a paradox.  It is to trust the process and allow love to write and play the universal song through you.

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Some people say

They’ve had enough of

Silly love songs.

-         Paul McCartney, Just Another Silly Love Song

Let this Irish storyteller suggest a time when people could really say they’ve had enough of ‘silly love songs.’  It’s when they are dead.  Before such time ‘silly’ loves songs may very well be silly but still they are attempts at the invitation to Love.

Some songs you will always remember.  Such a song for me is “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by Lennon and McCartney. Actually, it’s a Paul McCartney song and a song that is one of this Irish storyteller’s ‘silly love songs.’

This Irish storyteller was around fourteen years of age when this silly love song became anything but silly.  It became an invitation to what felt like unconditional love, an invitation to feel wanted in a way that I never felt before.

She was fourteen years old as well.  She was blonde and very pretty.  She was not exactly the girl next door but she did life at No. 27 whereas I lived at No. 1.  That was thirteen doors apart. Thirteen might be considered an unlucky number for some but not for this Irish storyteller.  Not on the night of the Boy’s Club Bop when The Beatles’ song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was played.

I was dressed in a bright orange shirt and wore striped hipsters.  Today I wouldn’t be seen dead in that sort of thing but at the time I was wearing them I felt dead.  All the colour was on the outside.  I was living an existence of grey like a “lonely painter living in a box of paints” to quote a Joni Mitchell song of similar vintage. But all the colours had been mixed up and turned to mud.

It came out of the blue as wonder often does.  At fourteen you know nothing about what it is to cross a threshold place where in the eyes of another you look drop dead gorgeous even in orange.  I knew nothing of kisses or kissing but this kiss opened me up and prepared the way for something even in my wildest dreams I could not even imagine if I tried.

The great Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh talks about such an experience in another song/poem called Raglan Road. It is when “first you knew.” It is when, metaphorically speaking, all the lights go on and the house can never be quite dark again.

You know that you are ensnared.  It is not quite like being caught in a trap or if it is you want to go back and give yourself up.  You are being called along the enchanted way and what an enchantment!

Is any of this just ‘silly?’  It is when you defend against it and the blue of wonder becomes the blue of not so silly love songs but sad songs of regret that begin to harden the heart.  Then the enchanted way becomes a far off place covered in thorn and briar.  The more that such silly love songs are considered silly the thicker become the briars.  Silly then turns to sorrow and you go to sleep awaiting a kiss that will reawaken the enchantment within you.

I held her hand.  She kept inviting this holding and I fell deeper and deeper into enchantment.  Her ” hair wove a spell” and her kiss did the rest.   The young man of fourteen who was dead was raised in more ways than one.  This you might say is just a sentimental remembrance. Not for this Irish storyteller and I suspect not for those of you who have been along the enchanted way.

There is plenty out there in this world of time and space and form to be cynical about.  Cynicism is a practice of burying the suppressed ghost of Love.  Only Love cannot be buried because it never was born and has never died.  You are the one who chooses to live in a box of paints without the colour of silly love songs.  This is your choice.  It is not an easy choice.  When you die to Love you find there is no such thing as death.  This is a living paradox.

Patrick Kavanagh warns in Raglan Road that there is a danger.  There is the possibility it will all come to grief and that what will happen is that you end up with ghosts of memory of what might have been – the ghost of regret.

For those of us who have risked the danger of the enchanted way we will live with ghosts.  Only these are not hungry ghosts of memory but moments of remembrance.  They remind you what it is to be a being created by a force that created you for the wonder of Love.

I held her hand.  She held mine.  For all sorts of ghostly reasons the enchantment did not become the full expression of what the mystic Alan Watts calls in Man and Woman ‘flowery combat. It did, however, add colour to this lonely painter.  I had ventured along the enchanted way and in some ways came to grief.  Only I never grieve the experience.  If that was danger then take me to the edge and I will gladly jump!

This writer is still in love with silly love songs.  Now the kisses come in different ways.  Still there is the danger and still there is the enchantment.  One is not available without the other.  Enchantment comes out of the blue but is anything but blue.  My Silly Love Song Love now is long dead.  He danced 20,000 plus silly love songs that are still dancing.  This is Jelalludin Rumi, the dance of the Beloved.

” I Wanna Hold Your Hand” is one of this Irish storyteller’s  silly love songs. He is better by far for such a silly love song.  Be aware of silly.  Play a heart song.  Come along the enchanted way.  It is dangerous but then so is dying without ever really having lived and loved.

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Exercise caution in your business affairs:

for the world is full of trickery.

But let this not blind you to what virtue there is.

Many persons strive for high ideals

and everywhere life is full of heroism.

- Max Ehrmann

The above quotation is taken from one of this storyteller’s favourite poems. Desiderata translates as ” a list of desires.” It was at one time a favourite piece of poetry during the 1960s, a sort of anthem of those who were known as the ‘hippie’ generation.

 One of this poem’s invitations is to build a firm foundation upon the rock of the timeless intelligence of Love rather than the shifting sands of ego enhancement.

We see the shifting sands of time at work in this present economic climate.  What many people have invested their lives and their energy in has fallen to pieces, shrunken or come to nothing.  All the promises of how it might have been are scattered on the ground.

The only constant has been the universal law of change.  Only such a change appears to come nowadays more and more swiftly.  The sands of time are shifting more and more quickly.  This induces fear, which turns to panic.  We are witnessing this in the financial markets of the world with its shift having impact on jobs and living conditions for millions of people.

This storyteller invites you to build a life foundation on a foundation that does not shift.  This does not mean that you won’t lose your job, your home, your career prospects or credit rating that you have spent years investing time and money in.  It will mean that you can stay calm and focused in turning such crisis into opportunity.

The rock upon which to build a life of purpose, passion and prosperity is the rock of the Timeless.  It is not one you will find in your goal setting manuals.  You will not have been taught this at school.  Your religious teacher (if you have one) might invite you to do this but they will cloak this invitation in so many preconditions that it seems impossible to get through the door.

When you build your house upon the rock of the Timeless that is in the Land of the Forever Young you have to build the foundations so that they do not shift.  This means they do not shift in times of adversity when it feels as if the earth is quaking underneath us all.

Imagine you are laying four corners on this rock that will not move.  It will not move provided these foundation stones are made by the Tuatha de Danaan.  Each of the foundation stone is laid by a question.  Depending on how your answer will mean the difference between building a life on the changing sands of time or on the rock of the presence of the Timeless.

There is a foundational question that will form the cornerstone of your life’s journey.  Spend time with this question.  It is in itself an aspect of the quest.  You are the only one who really knows the answer.  It is a question that all wisdom teachers invite you to answer. 

It has to become a question that you live.  It has to become what Les Kaye of The Zen of Work, calls the real quest -I -on. In times of crisis this is the question that is being asked of you.

This foundation is not built overnight.  Your heart knows the answer but you have been taught not to have faith in this guidance system that is your connection to universal intelligence.  If you are sincere in wishing to build a foundation beyond the shifting sands of time then do three things in order to show a sign of commitment to your heart quest.

• 1. Invest in a journal in which to invite the awareness of your heart
• 2. Email this writer for the foundational questions (and answer)
• 3. Reflect on this question with sincerity until you live it.

If you are prepared to do this then you will be invited to build a house of purpose, passion and prosperity on solid ground beyond the shifting sands of time.  This house is called The Anamcara Experience.

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Here are some resolutions that will upgrade your sense of its being “a wonderful life.” Practice these each day and you life situation will feel full of both presents and presence.

 1. Download the latest virus checker

You have a virus. We all have this virus. It is called separation from Love.  This virus is not easily recognised because it is termed normal.  It is recognised by the absence of joy and wonder.  Symptoms of infection include negative self-talk, time poverty, low self-esteem and constant ‘doing’ in your life.  This virus checker is available free from Open Mind Software.

 2. Defragment the disk regularly

Defrag on a regular basis. Trying to be in two places at once indicates an un-defragged mental life and not archiving past hurts through forgiveness. Up load a useful piece of software called whole heartedness and register your heart for regular updates.

 3. Move Beyond the Binary System

There is an operating system that most people use that is very limited. It is a binary system called Good and Bad.  An international company called Self-Doubt Unlimited produces it. This company suppresses your awareness of the upgrade from a company named Inner Wisdom.  This upgrade takes you to a whole new dimension and is available from a company called In Tune With the Infinite.

 4. Maintain a Proper Firewall

In the binary operating experience you will get burnt out unless you maintain a proper firewall.  A company called Universal Values publishes the best firewalls.  They have a choice of appropriate products including Integrity, Compassion and Service to Others.  This ensures that you have clear boundaries and do not get all fired up about people who hack you off. Go to http://www.anamacaraexperience.org and register for updates for inspiration and clarity and 7 Ways to a Wonderful Life.

 5. Get a Decent Monitor

A monitor is a way of seeing. It is also a way of paying attention.  Monitor your thoughts for indications of any viruses that have your feeling separate from Love.  Monitor the way that you express or do not express kindness to yourself and others.  Monitor the state of well-being and your ability to see through the darkness to the light within that illuminates all.  Learn to see through hearts.  Good monitors are available from a company called Intuition.

 6. Before You Switch On

First thing each morning make sure you are plugged into the Universal Intelligence that created you for the purpose of Love in Form.  Make sure that the energy supply is monitored for surges of self-aggrandisement, self-pity and other powerful negative attitudes.  Plug into the supply of right intention. A Universal Supplier of energy called “The Highest Good for All monitors right intention.” Sign up and get moment-to-moment updates. Bonus features include a sense of wonder and joyful intent.

 7. Upload the shareware program Love

This program has no known virus threats except that it changes the binary program from the ‘good vs. bad’ to beyond limited ideas of opposites. The price for this program is that you trade the lead of self-doubt for the gold of self-awareness. Support is free provided you allow it and it lasts for eternity.

With these upgrades and downloads there will be an upsurge in energy and few situations will load down your life.  With regular monitoring your system will become immune to hackers, viruses of self-doubt and those feelings of never being quite good enough.

This will give you new windows on the world. In this way you can activate the start up button and know that both you and your computer are really switched on.

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Give bread. Give wine

Feast on your life…

Derek Walcott, Love After Love

You are invited to live.  You will say that you are already alive. Wisdom teachers will tell you that you are the dead following the dead.  They get into trouble for this. The ego is not flattered but offended. This storyteller is not flattered.

How do you feast on your life?   You give it away with passion.  You cannot give it away without passion.  You cannot turn up at the banquet with a lukewarm attitude.  To feast on your life requires that you engage with consummation rather than consumption.

When you spend your time in consumption you tend to get burnt out rather than burned up.  There is a difference.  The fire that will allow you to feast on your life is the fire of passion allied to service.  This is service in and for the sake of Love.

It is more than the law of attraction it is attraction itself.  It is not the law of attraction in service of ‘little me’ who come to it with a shopping list filled with things to get.  It is the experience, to quote St. John of the Cross, of “the living flame of Love.”  It is the experience of being burned alive by Love.

This sounds horrid!  It is to the ego. The ego wants to serve itself.  It does not want to be consumed by Love and so it creates for you a banquet where all the hungry ghosts of a life not aflame with passion appear.  What then happens is not consummation but consumption.  Ghosts of passions unlived literarily eat you up from the inside.

The story of the talents in the Bible is the story of passion. The Master who is creation gets angry when the talent is buried.  This anger is the fire of passion.   It is not destructive. It is telling us something is out of kilter.  It is compassion inviting you to wake up and expand into fulfilment.

Creation is not lukewarm.  It created you because it is passionate about creation and you are its child.  This passion does not cease.  This passion is not born and thus never dies.  It only changed form.  It knows what it intended you to be, do and have.  It is intelligent beyond your limited sense of intellectual knowing.  It can in one moment change your whole outlook on the world.  It can raise you from the dead and a life of lukewarm existence.

Creation gives. It is always giving.  We resist this giving because it does not quite fit.  We are created to be a yoga teacher and we become an accountant. This was this storyteller’s experience earlier in his lifetime.  We are created for the purpose of giving away who we are created to be.  This is expensive and it goes on forever.  You think you don’t last but you simply change form.  Passion breaks boundaries to take you into the boundless.

There is an unattributed story that circulates.

” A man visits heaven and hell.  In each place there is a table filled with the most beautiful food.  Hell looks like heaven and heaven looks exactly like hell.  Only in hell everyone is starving while in heaven everyone looks happy and contented with a full belly.  When the man asks God why everything in heaven and hell appear the same yet different God ‘answers.’ In heaven everyone is feeding while in hell they are all feeding themselves.”

Here you have a wisdom story. The difference between the two is consumption and consummation. Consummation involves passion for life.  It involves anger used in the service of creation rather than destruction.

In The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide the wonderful Rick Jarrow asks people what they are passionate bout.  If they don’t know what that is he then asks them what makes them angry.  What are you angry about?

Or do you avoid such questions?

Life will ask such questions of you.  This is not a punishment.  It is an invitation to the feast.  If you resist it you will feel uneasy.  If you put away this unease then it will come again.  Only now there is deeper resistance.  This resistance is mirrored in the body.  The body never lies.  You, in your resistance put on psychosomatic armour. Nothing gets in or out.

In 7 Ways to a Wonderful Life this is why we emphasise passion.  The lukewarm life is not for passion but for comfort.  It is a life of self-interest rather than the expansive invitation of interest (turning to Love) in Self (yes, with a capital S.)

Ask yourself this question:

What am I passionate about?

When you ask this be aware of how you feel.  Do you feel alive with passion that wants to give itself away through you? Do not feel guilty if you don’t.  You came into this world of form as an expression of the passion of the Divine for its ability to create.  Very soon you learned that being passionate was not terribly popular.  It still is not.  It goes against the norm.  The norm is lukewarm at best.

Still and all it is a great question and a great invitation.  Ask it everyday with the intention that you use it to feed the hungry in whatever way that speaks to you and you have the ticket to the banquet where you give wine and give bread and you feast on your life.

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As the Anamcara Experience invitation to divine purpose unfolds in form as a website, this storyteller has been increasingly attracting energies unleashed by attachment to language.

What this storyteller writes about is not always popular.  It never has been popular but thankfully that seems to be changing.  When you begin to live the invitation to Divine Purpose you can expect to be visited by those energies of what I call the Moneychangers in the Temple of the Divine.

These are those writing to me telling that the language of invitation to divine purpose is their language.  They write threatening to pull this site down because I use the language of divine invitation that belongs to them.  These are individuals who use the language of sacred unity to change the currency of your life situation rather than unfold the radiance of the Divine with you.  They know the language. They know the law but they are not the spiritual knowing of the Divine invitation.

They use exactly the same words as I am using here.  Only to use a Biblical metaphor, they are pouring old wine into new wine skins.  What does this metaphor actually mean?  Let this storyteller invite an understanding of this beautiful metaphor in this way.

Jesus of Nazareth was probably the greatest of all storytellers.  These stories eventually got him murdered under the law. The language of Divine Purpose is still being murdered under the law of old wine, the ‘mine, mine, mine’ law that is so prevalent in many modern divine purpose invitations.

In this metaphor you as a living form of the formless are the new wine skin.  The Divine is, as the beautiful tradition of the Sufis tells us, the Wine Pourer.  The Divine gets us drunk on Love.  Not the sentimental love of popular song, but the direct experience of Oneness when you as the dewdrop merge with the ocean, when you are no longer loving but Love itself.

The Divine created you for the purpose of Love.  This is forever new.  You don’t get it if you get it.  You don’t get it by going after it, except that you won’t get it without going after it.  You are like someone trying to bite his or her own teeth, the fish in the ocean looking for water.  The unveiling of your Divine purpose is a revelation.  It is an absence. You are required to be absent while present.

This is unpopular language and an unpopular invitation. The ego does not like not being invited along to the party. What would happen to our precious sense of self if we all gave up the illusion of separateness from Love?  It looks and feels like we would become nobody.  In our go-getting, self-improving, goal setting culture this invitation is anything but popular.

So, as this invitation to divine purpose that is the Anamcara Experience unfolds, I receive emails from moneychangers in the Temple of the Divine.  In this sacred space they are shouting a mantra of narcissism.  ‘Mine, mine, mine!’ Let’s be fair here. A writer, a speaker and a teacher who invests time, money and energy in creating a product, a book or course for example, is entitled to be heard for that invitation they have manifested in form from the formless.

This storyteller has no problem with this.  I ask that what I write to honoured as the invitation it is. I am not asking you to agree with it.  Most people, including very dear and old friends, don’t want to hear such an invitation.  Still and all, I have one long ally.  It is to the revelation that I was graced when I was around twenty-seven years old.  This revelation is not mine. It does not belong to ‘me.’ It was lost because I claimed the power and the beauty of it for myself.

The perfume of that revelation remains in this writing.  It is not always popular.  It gets up the noses of those who embrace the smell of the separateness from Love and bottle that as the perfume.  Yet another kind of old wine in a new skin. These are the moneychangers who claim to change your life with the emphasis on ‘your’ life.  This is not an invitation to the radical revelation that blows your sense of self out of the water.

Divine purpose begins with the opening of the heart chakra.  This is the conduit through which the power of the Divine works its purpose.  This heart is not yours.  You give it to Love so that the work of Love can be done through you.  Anything below this chakra can be considered ground preparation for the seed of Love to begin to flower in form.

The language of the Divine tends this seed.  It does not belong to you or me or to anyone else. Honour it and give it away.  That is why you are here.  You are here to serve the revelation of Love in form.  Until that revelation lives in your heart you are a moneychanger in the Temple of the Divine.  The Divine never loses but you do.  Your wealth is in the language you use to serve that which is creating you in every moment from the force of Love.  This lasts forever.  This is the real invitation to Divine purpose.  Any lesser invitation is stealing your birthright to, as Gangaji so beautifully puts it,  the diamond in your very own pocket.

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Come out of the circle of time

into the circle of Love.

-         Rumi

What if you were not who you think you are and you went through life living an illusion?  What if you were not the only one?  What if the illusion continued only because everyone lived the same illusion and believed it was real?  What if we were all naked behaving like we wore Emperor’s clothing?

What if someone came along who knew that everyone was living this illusion and simply said so?  What do you think would happen then?  You would probably do what many people do.  You would continue with the illusion and go one your not so merry way and live not so happily ever after.

What would be the one thing that might make you want to live beyond this illusion?  It might be the experience of suffering.  If you suffer enough you might ask the question, “Is this all there is? Is my life worth anything?”  It is this sort of question that gets you turned on.

This is not our usual understanding of what it means to be turned on.  The experience of being turned on is what is known in the story of the Hero’s Journey as The Call.  This is The Call to fully express your unique way of being in form.  It is a unique question.

When you begin to become a questor it is not the answer that turns you on but the initial question.  Wisdom teachings say that the quality of one’s character is known by the questions being asked.

Certain kinds of question lead you on the adventure of what it is to feel Divine within form.  Other questions lead you deep into the prison of time.  You might be comfortable.  You might be called successful.  Yet if you think that who you are is this body living in time, space and form, you are living the illusion of one world.  The world of separateness.

Ralph Waldo Trine writes beautifully about this in his book In Tune with the Infinite. This is what an Anam Cara invites you to tune into.  Only before that can happen you have to get switch on.  Getting switch on means you get passionate with the intention that this passion aligned to the Infinite blossom into compassion.

Most, if not all of us, will suffer in some way in this world.  Suffering can lead to breaking the chains of the illusion of the separate self.  If this happens, and it does happen, then suffering is seen for what it is.  It is not a punishment.  It becomes an invitation to transcendence.  What is worse is suffering that has no meaning.  Who give it meaning?  You do.

To turn on you need to ask a real question and commit to living it.  This is the question. What am I passionate about? Now you can live this question and you will miss.  This is because there is a second, companion question.  This question is the second question. How am I going to serve? Put together they begin to look like this: How am I going to use my passion to serve humanity?

I will guarantee you that if you commit to learning to live and Love this invitation that you will get switched on and tuned in.  The illusion that you are separate from Love will begin to dissolve.

Do you know what you are passionate about? Do you care enough to find out?

What makes you feel angry?  That is a pointer but not an excuse to act irresponsibly. Anger is no excuse.

Most people want an easy life rather than a passionate one.  Passion does not mean being fiery all the time.  It is the full flow of emotional response in tune with the Infinite.  It becomes compassion in Buddhist terms and Love in Christian terms.  When it is available you know what to serve and how to give yourself away.

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As a writer on divine purpose I am interested to see and read what others are writing on this beautiful invitation.  I have to say that what I read is, metaphorically speaking, old wine in new wine skins.  As one who was once one who was an earnest wine drinker, seriously in love with ‘the women with the dimple in her bottom’, I can say that in my opinion it is not even very good old wine.

So I am writing this article to give you some guidance on who to recognise a true invitation to the revelation of the beauty you create and what can be called Divine Purpose.

1. The Issue of Time

Does the teacher ground you in the issue of your relationship to time and your relationship to the timeless? Or is it simply more goal setting techniques that offer you the ability to live in the prison of time a little more or a lot more comfortably.  Get comfortable in the Timeless.  It is the only comfort that lasts.  Get comfortable in time and you will be ‘doing time’ rather than having the time of your life.

2. Are they inviting you to serve?

Does the teacher continually live the invitation of service to the Divine or are they living their ‘divine purpose’ as invitations of self-interest.  Service is understood by all true teachers of Divine Purpose to be at the heart of what it is to live in form as a revelation of the formless.  This is fundamental to the process of divine purpose unfolding.

3.Are they creating clear boundaries?

Does the teacher offer you a license to say what you think or feel just because this happens to be what’s on your mind? This might sound silly to you but there are those teachers of divine purpose promoting a ‘tell it like it is’ approach. They proudly wear the badge of unbridled self-expression.  While this might be understandable in small children, divine purpose requires that you actually create clear boundaries with precepts. The boundless that is your Divine Purpose is not revealed to those engaged in narcisstic self-absorption or self -expression.

4. How do they deal with conflict?

This may be difficult to know until a conflict arises!  Anyone intent on the unfolding of divine purpose within and through them will meet resistance from within and without.  You are not going to transform lead into gold – the spiritual alchemical process of Divine Purpose – by living a life of pure self-interest and comfort.  Conflict is inevitable. It is not its absence that makes you grow, but how you alchemise it. This is not done through unbridled self-expression. If takes humility to be the authentic expression of the Self.

5. What language are they using?

Does the teacher hold himself or herself up as an example? Do they give you a sense that they are broadcasting an “I did it My Way” wavelength? Do they use paradox, metaphor, or poetry to invite you into the river of presence?  Divine Purpose is a presence that embraces those willing to surrender.  The more you are invited to do your purpose the more you are likely to get in the do-do.  You might end up doing all you ever wanted to do but never know who ‘you’ are.  If your divine purpose teacher is not asking, “Who are you?” then go and seek again. Be open to other invitations. Knock on a few different doors. Anyone that is intent only on making the prison house of being separate from Love a more comfortable prison truly has your divine purpose at heart. As all the mystics will tell you that way can only end in tears.

So whom can you trust? You can trust any of the following teachers of divine purpose. This does not mean you can trust those who profess to be their followers.

You can trust Rumi. You can trust Hafiz. You can trust Christ. You can trust invitations from the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Chang Tao.

Modern teachers you can trust with the invitation to Divine Purpose include Eckhart Tolle, Guy Finley, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Joseph Campbell, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, David Whyte, Mary Oliver, John O’Donohue and Gangaji.

So be very discerning.  The invitation to Divine Purpose was not popular two thousand years ago.  It still is not popular.  When it is then Heaven will be on earth because the consciousness of duality will be transcended and sacred unity know to be the true purpose of living in form.  Anything less on offer is what this storyteller calls the invitation from the Dreamstealers.

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Lonely looking sky!

Lonely looking sky!

And being lonely

Makes you wonder why.

Neil Diamond from the soundtrack of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull

One of the great invitations from storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book Women Who Run With the Wolves is “Do not fear not knowing. In various phases and period of our lives, this is how it should be.”Most of us fear this ‘not knowing.’ We are like trees pushing for the buds to open. We wait in a lonely looking sky and push with our logic chopping brain to make sense of it all.  We might wonder why but there is more of the why than the wonder.

This place of ‘not knowing’ is uncomfortable.  We are taught that life is about get up and go.  We are taught that life is about producing.  We are not taught that life is about birth and death and life.  In this cycle there is a time of incubation.  There is a time when the old is dying for the new to be born.

This is the phase of not knowing. What we tend to do is extend this period through resistance in order to avoid this frustrating ‘not knowing’ and we rehash the old and dress old wine in new wine skins.  This rehash is willed from the discomfort of ego rather than creative birthing from the soul.

We see this approach in our collective relationship to nature.  We view nature as something we use as a productive resource.  In a natural organic cycle of food production we allow the land to rest.  With our agribusiness focus we pour more chemicals on the soil to speed up the product cycle and do not allow the soil to recuperate.

What is the answer to this issue?  First, become aware of your fear of not knowing what the future holds.  This is usually a projection.  Come back to the present moment through focusing on the breath.  Do this as a regular practice and you will find this can become an anchor when your mind starts to fly off into a lonely looking sky and rather than feel any sense of wonder being filled with worry.

The next exercise is not popular but I am going to write it.  You are here to ser creation and you are not here to serve yourself.  This is why many of us get lonely and even get depressed.  We don’t know what to do with ourselves and we don’t know who or why we are here.  In one sense depression is a healthy response to a sick situation.

Krishnmurti, this writer’s first teacher, was interviewed by a press correspondent who began by asking, “Well, Mr. Krishnamurti, it is said you believe…”  Krishnamurti quickly corrected this correspondent’s view by replying, “You are wrong. I do not believe at all. I know.”

Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist, issued a similar reply to such a question. “Why believe when you know.”

This is the invitation from “Do not be afraid of not knowing.”  It can be the prelude to your becoming the knowing of who you are.  It can become the prelude to you being born anew into the full realization of your being here now.

Real education that focused on the cycle of creation would teach you this.  Then you would be less resistant to change that invariably comes.  You would grow into your soul invitation and you would become an Anamcara.  The experience of not knowing might never be a delight but at least you would not feel so afraid of going into the unknown.

All mystics will issue the greatest invitation: “Die before you die.”  To the logic chopping mind that wants to know everything and arrogantly thinks it can know everything this does not make sense.  To the soul it is wisdom that is sensational.  If you live this invitation you will not be afraid of not knowing for you will become the not knowing that paradoxically is the experience of infinite intelligence.

Out of what appears to be ‘not knowing’ can come ‘all knowing’.  The way to get there is a paradox.  You let go and you trust the process.  You practice a sense of humility and get out of the way.  The creative intelligence that creates you also creates all things and knows what it is doing.  If you had faith in it the size of a mustard seed you would know this.

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I am the Lord of the Dance!

Dance! Dance! Wherever you may be.

I am a recovering alcoholic.  I am also recovering from the impact that Christianity had on my heart. Both these processes are ongoing.

I was brought up in the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland. This is the city of Armagh, the city of saints and scholars, neither of which applies to myself.  I love this city but it haunts me in many ways.  I was in that town scripted someone who it seems had the word ‘sinner’ on his forehead like a scarlet letter.  Then there was the other idea.  This was that God had a plan and that I had better get in line.

This invitation is still being dressed up in new books and sermons.  Essentially it is old wine in new wine skins.  Both of these invitations to recognising that you were a sinner and that God had a plan for you seemed intent on creating feelings of guilt.  As someone with very low self-esteem at that time this was an emotional experience that until I left Northern Ireland when I was twenty-one years old.

Little has changed. This is, in part, the reason why this site exists and for The Work I do.  It is an invitation to the awareness of the beauty that is at the heart of creation and which you are created to express without any sense of guilt.

Guilt has a value when it arises from one’s internal wisdom.  It is an invitation to correction, to take action that follows Love.  It is corrosive to the spirit when imposed from an authority outside oneself.  There can be outside corrective instruction but there is no place within such instruction for the invitation to feel guilty.

This writer is for conscience and not guilt.  Conscience is there as a protection, not a punishment.  Close it down and you wound yourself and shut down your power.

For years I was a reactionary to the word ‘sinner.’ If you attend some of the Protestant churches I have attended you would suspect that this word was an obsession.  This writer thinks that in many places the institutional mind reigns rather than Love.

I am less of a reactionary than I was but my alter ego Mrs. Batty still appears when I hear or read about us ‘all being sinners’ who need to follow God’s plan.  Mrs. Batty can be a bit of a ranter.  It is my work to keep her contained.  She has a problem with what wisdom traditions refer to as ‘right speech.’  She likes to shout her mouth off and say exactly what she wants and consequences be damned. One thing about Mrs. Batty – she is sure she is right, which is always a dangerous card to play.

So let me share where I am now as a recovering mystic/seer wounded by the institutional mind called christianity. I deliberately am using the small ‘c’ to indicate the small mindedness of that mind set.

Am I a sinner? The answer to that is ‘Yes.’ Am I to feel guilty? The answer to that is ‘No.’

A sinner is someone who misses the mark, misses the centre.  The centre is Love.  So a central to the sinner’s experience is the absence of Love.  All I do is invite awareness to this absence.  This does not condemn any of us. Your are being invited into a love affair that was created to last forever and you are one side of it that, paradoxically speaking, you are never apart from.  You certainly leave Love but it never leaves you.

Does God have a plan for you?  At this stage in this storyteller’s life the answer is ‘Yes’ and it is ‘No.’ God is not a planner.  All those who tell you God has a plan are focused on time.  When you question them you will find that most, if not all of them, think that eternity is a time beyond measure.  This is one key to knowing that they do not know.  Any teacher who teaches the invitation to the timeless, who has not been graced the knowing of eternity here and now, ought to shut up.

God is not a planner because a plan has to have a beginning and an end.  God – Creation – is in love with creation.  This is why creation is.  It is a manifestation of Love in form. To say that God has a plan would involve you in saying that there will come a time (within the timelessness of Creation) when God ceases to Love.  This is childish nonsense. Not only that. It wound the mystic heart that is a heart seeking missile for the Beloved.  It screws up this inner guidance system.  Not only that but it sets up an idea of a chosen ‘elect.’

God is a dancer.  You are a part of this dance of eternity that is stepping into higher and higher forms of Love.  If there is a plan it is contained in the word Love.  How this Love is expressed needs a boundary.  You are that boundary designed to contain the boundless.  This is more a love affair than a plan, more a dance of the timeless than within the prison of time.

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I have a soul friend who when we first met did not like me.  He thought I was opinionated and arrogant. Not much change there then. He had one unusual trait to his character. He would go to cathedrals and churches and there he would cry but not know why.

I don’t know if he still cries when he enters beautiful church or cathedral spaces.  I suspect he still does but for very different reasons.  He has become a reverend and a reverence to what was calling his heart on that time when we each were searching for the understanding of that cathedral space within us.

It takes tremendous courage to enter the paradox that is living in the cathedral space of the heart.  It is not give the title “The Hero’s Journey” for no good reason.  In order to live in that twixt and between place you have to be prepared to give up what you think will make you happy and risk entering a place of unknowing.

You are asked to risk all for nothing.  You, as an ego, are a bargain hunter.  You, as an ego, think that you are something.  You, as a sense of separateness from Love, think that you are the one to do and have it all.  You are only reminded of this illusion when you enter the cathedral space for no reason at all.  Not a popular invitation for most people.  Except that it is the invitation from all those madmen and mad women we call mystics.  They say, like Rumi says

I used to be shy.

You made me sing.

I used to refuse things at table.

Now I shout for more wine.

 In sombre dignity, I used to sit

on my mat and pray.

 Now children run through

and make faces at me.

From Birdsong- 53 short poems translated by Coleman Barks

This is sometimes the best reason to cry.  It is beyond logic.  It is the heart calling you to wake up from a life devoid of purpose, passion and real prosperity.  Real prosperity is the ability to give yourself away freely.

I love poetry.  In a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye she asks, “What makes you cry?”  She is asking a key question here. This is the body’s response to either absence of fullness.  She isn’t asking you what make you sad.  She is asking what make you cry for joy.  What is it in your life that allows you to live the heart paradox that is an emptiness filled with joy?

This is the emptying of your life so that the One life can flow through you.  This is a feminine virtue.  It is the virtue of surrender and allowing.  It is the allowing of the space within you to open up to that spaceless, timeless dimension within you.

This Irish storyteller will guarantee you one thing.  It will make you cry and you won’t be crying for lack of understanding.  You will be crying because it is all too much to believe in because your feeling connection to that outpouring of creation through you is beyond belief.

Find time for those cathedral spaces within.  Allow them to be sanctified and to become your sanctuary from the trials and tribulations of the shifting sands of time.  If you find yourself crying for no reason it could be the call to become reverent rather than grasping.

Strange to say your soul friend is glad of heart to see you crying in the chapel.  The chapel here is not a reference to any formal religious affiliation.  It is a metaphor for one who has entered that paradox of unknowing, where emptiness is felt as an fullness.  What you felt was empty is what you were looking for.  You have come home to a house of reverence.  You are to be revered for the courage it takes to go and cry willingly for union with Love.

Go now and quest.  Ask a poetic question, “What makes me cry?”  Trust the process and you might arrive at a point where, like George Bailey in the film It’s a Wonderful Life you cry out “I want to live again!” Which is to say, “I want to Love again.”

Would that make YOU cry?

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Many of you will know that I am a storyteller and writer on “Seven Ways to a Wonderful Life.”  Each of these seven ways is individually important in their own way but I start with purpose.  This is foundational.

As a storyteller I promote the invitation to the Anamcara Experience. This is an invitation to unfold the divine purpose that you are here on this planet to allow to flow into and through and up.  To do this you need to be grounded.  You will not be able to unfold your divine purpose without some key precepts to build on.

As a storyteller it will come as no surprise that I love stories.  Most of all I love healing stories.  Having been brought up in Northern Ireland I carry old baggage around the teachings that I call christianity. The small c is intentional. I am conflicted around this issue because my heart is in love with the Divine.

When I was graced what Buddhism calls stream entry, I fully expected to experience an intense love affair with the Buddha and the four noble truths.  What I did not expect and did not really want (although of course my soul’s inner wisdom wanted this) was to fall in Love with the Christ.

Notice here that this storyteller is not saying he fell in love with Jesus.  Notice here that he did not say that he fell in Love with christianity. Notice that it has been stated that this storyteller did not fall in love with the Bible. In that grace experience I fell In Love and became Love.  This cannot be understood without such a grace experience.

However, here is the crux of the matter. I think that the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is one of (if not the greatest) of storytellers to have graced this planet as an invitation to awareness of divine consciousness in human form – the new man/new woman.

At the time he was telling his stories they were not always popular.  The stories I tell are not always popular so I have a role model! The Christ story has never been ‘popular.’ The christian story is in decline although the corpse is being risen from the dead by such best-selling books as The Purpose Drive Life, which is apparently the most popular hard backed book ever published (although I would have imagined the Bible had it beaten.)  Rick Warren, who gave the inaugural blessing to the new President of the USA Barack Obama, wrote this best seller.  This President is, for this writer, an invitation to the mystic.

Having said all the above I absolutely love Bible stories.  Especially those told by the Christ in the form of Jesus of Nazareth. I particularly love the story of the moneychangers in the temple.  I have heard it many times.  This storyteller thinks that were it told the way that Christ intended it to be understood the churches and chapels would be empty.  That is why you don’t hear this story in the modern money changing temples of divine purpose.

When this story is told people think it is an anti-profiteering, anti-business, anti-riches story.  If christianity fully embraced this teaching even on a literal level there would be more justice for the poor.  The rich would not be caught up in the prison of never quite enough and the churches would not be attached to real estate and simply ‘gather in my name.’   In ‘my name’ has nothing to do with church dogma but is a whole other energetic relationship to the Divine and Divine Purpose.

It is not a popular story if you read it as it is intended.  You will tell this storyteller that this story does not apply to you?  You think that it does not apply to you because you have never traded in a church? You might have engaged in fundraising for, say, repairing the church roof, but you are not a moneychanger in the temple.

Now if you take this story literally, as most people do, then you can say, “Okay, so the moneychangers were thrown out of the temple.” If you are graced the insight contained in this story it becomes a beautiful invitation to the mystic.  You get the invitation, the words of the great Van Morrison, “to sail into the mystic.”

From the point of view of the mystic, from the point of view of the Anamcara, you are the moneychanger.  Now you may well be offended at this idea. This storyteller has been offended by the idea.  This is to be expected.  If you are not engaged in the service of the Divine Purpose of Love you are a moneychanger working to profit from your life for your own purpose.

How popular do you think the church would be if each week your religious authority were to tell you that you are defiling the sacred temple of Love with your energy of self-interest? Would you not seriously think twice about going back! You would protest.  You would think, “I haven’t come here to be insulted!” 

Matthew Fox tells a story in “Radical Prayer” (CD available from www.soundstrue.com) about a Native American who decided to ‘travel in the light’ and educate school children about his spiritual tradition’s wisdom. The children always would get the point of his stories but immediately the word “Great Spirit” got mentioned the teachers got really antsy. He told Matthew Fox, ” I don’t get invited back.”  On the other hand, there are an awful lot of schools in the USA and he just keeps moving from one to the next and the next and the next. The stories and their wisdom get planted.

I can relate to this myself when I tell children about the Tuatha de Danaan and that they, too, are Beautiful People. The only teachers who seem to get these stories are those who work with the so-called ‘handicapped’ or ‘special needs’ children.

Popular is not necessarily the best measure when it comes to wisdom.

There are those on the World Wide Web who are inviting you to simply change the cloth on the temple’s money table.

Why is this story so very important?  Because it shows why the incarnation of Love in form got angry.  He’s not angry about making a return on investment. He’s angry because you and I have claimed the temple of Love as your own.  You have changed the currency of sacred unity for the currency of ego. 

He is angry because you are changing gold into lead.

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