Entries Tagged 'Spirituality' ↓

I’ve read a lot of personal development books over the years and along the way you sometimes read about a person who leaves a mark on you. Long after you’ve or read about them you still find yourself daydreaming about what they are like. We all love meeting people who stretch our limits of what is possible for a human to achieve because on some level we want to know that we can achieve far more than where we are right now.

Reading about role models can make you uncomfortable sometimes because they might be doing so much better than you in an area of your life that it makes you feel like you’ve failed. Try your best not to dwell on these thoughts though and let them be your inspiration rather than feeling shame or inadequacy.

I like picking role models in my life and surround myself with them. Why do you think people put up posters of Muhammad Ali or Martin Luther King? Their subconscious sees it and it becomes part of their personality. If you read enough about them and have their thoughts circulating around your head that you will become like them. As Buddha said, we are an accumulation of all we have thought. It’s impossible to have thoughts in your head over the long term and not be affected by them.

A few of my role models are :

• Eckhart Tolle - My main spiritual mentor. This is the man that truly sparked my understanding of “the self/ego” and realizing that on a level beyond physical things. I am already perfect. Before this all personal development felt selfish but now I have a clearer understanding of what my true nature is I don’t feel this anywhere near as often. His first book is easily the most influential of my life, bar none. It allowed me to feel a deep unshakable peace unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced and a knowing that all was good in the world. He inspires me to stay present and watch the craziness of the human mind.
• Lao Tzu - Although he’s dead, I feel his book the Tao Te Ching contains eternal wisdom and is one of the deepest spiritual book around today. Eckhart Tolle has been carrying around a copy of it with him for decades. He also speaks to my creativity. He uses a minimalist kind of poetry to connect with you.
• Dean Karnazes (Runner) – This man is all about persistence. He ran 100 miles in under 24 hours non stop, ran a 200 mile race on his own and his book “Ultra Marathon Man” is incredible.
• Steve Pavlina – Before reading of Steve Pavlina, I was a typically convinced Atheist (don’t worry there isn’t a Christian rant coming up!). I read some of his posts and found that he was really logical with his thinking in some areas which connected with me deeply but he also wrote on spirituality! This was a shock to my system because to me you couldn’t combine the too. I found my spiritual side through him and he is the biggest influence in my life in terms of cutting edge personal development. He’s where all my passion for personal development comes from. I thought his blog was good but his book is just on another level and helped me achieve so much in 2010 already.

You’ll often find that your role models combined will reflect a mixture of your current personality and where you’re heading.Your role models will change over time. People can only teach you so much and there is such a variety out there that you should never stop looking to learn more.

Who would you say are your top role models in your life at the moment? What does this say about where you are and where you are heading? Do you feel a deep connection with them or are you just answering the questions?!?!

Role Models Are Within Us

I once heard that reading a book is like sitting down with the greatest minds in history. I wanted to take it a little further and actually sit with them but I’m not into digging up graves. Let me explain.

I know that all other people are a projection of my mind and take that as a given. If you don’t agree with me here, show me where “other people” exists. Lao Tzu doesn’t exist anywhere in external reality. He’s dead but I still think about him so where is he alive? I have a mental concept of him from all I’ve read and thought about. All I have ever had of Eckhart Tolle is a mental concept as I’ve never met the guy. Unless you’re directly interacting with something right now you can never be 100% sure if it exists, can you?

Asking For Guidance

The next step here is in your mind to ask for guidance from them. Sit down with them in a room in your mind and ask them questions and listen for the answers. Be prepared with a blank document as this can be seriously realistic and I sometimes find myself typing 600 miles an hour from the answers that I’m receiving.

Really interact with them though. Try and experience them with as much depth as you can. Use your vision, smell, feeling etc and deepen the feeling that you’re actually there. I find it useful to make their characters seem realistic and life like. The have bodies, regular clothing, habitual tendencies and I say goodbye at the end etc.

You will create the experience of sitting with someone you truly admire and to your mind this was real. It’s like if someone tells you that you are going to die your mind will react with an immediate state of fear. If it’s one of your friends calling you playing about then there was no actual danger but you still experienced the fear. Your mind believes what it’s told.

What I love most about this technique is that I know that the answers are within me. They’re not in some external place that I have to travel to or strive for. I have all the answers and it’s just a process of finding them and using the right techniques.

Problem Solving

This is really useful when facing a problem in your life where the answer is not clear and you could do with multiple perspectives from outside of your own repetitive thoughts. You can go to all of your role models and ask each of them for their view and then go through your notes. I was amazed the first time I did this and honestly thought it was a stupid idea but the experience is eye opening. When I got up, I felt like I’d been chatting along with people who I admired and it made me feel fantastic!

Strengthen Your Connection

Maybe the person you have as your role model has a biography or autobiography and you could read that. This really helps you get into the same state of being as them. Listening to Tony Robbins motivational tapes every day will get you into a state very similar to his and the same with Eckhart Tolle for spiritual depth. You are the combination of the top 5 people you associate with. If you can’t physically meet them then this technique works wonders.

If you have no role models at the moment then that’s fine. Pick something that you’d like to become amazing at and then go and read about someone who is already where you want to be and by developing your mental concept of them you can ask them questions.

It’s really just a technique for accessing a higher self you but works really well. To be honest, it works just as well to create a totally fictitious character who has all the characteristics that you want and talk to this person. Now you can connect and recieve guidance from all these amazing people without ever moving a muscle.

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment ” - Buddha

“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

“Life is Now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be” - Eckhart Tolle

“Before Abraham was, I Am.” - Jesus (John 8:58)

You cannot really argue with that line-up can you! It is like a who is who of spiritual awakening history.

The phrase ‘I Am’ has been one of the most controversial in history. Jesus repeats it several times in the Bible including the mind bending statement “Before Abraham was, I AM”. It is also mentioned directly and indirectly through the work of Eckhart Tolle which I have gained huge wisdom from.

All spiritual seekers and religion founders speak of the same one truth and its spiritual awakening. It is the same truth just expressed by different voices. It is similar to hearing about a football match from fans of opposing teams. Each have their own interpretation but ultimately they all saw the same game. The phrase “I am” means a breaking apart from the dimension of time. When you are in time you are subject to suffering, illness, dis-ease and on the positive side you can plan for the future and learn from the past. When you are in presence in the state of “I am” or “being” you cannot experience illness. Illness requires time. Jesus experienced timelessness and knew, as Zen Masters do today, that the mind cannot comprehend it so bypassed the mind. A great teacher will always tailor his teachings to the student.

“I am” is the state of a mind before it judges something which is the ultimate spiritual state – empty of preconceived notions. You are a human BEING remember, BEING right now. “I am X” means that something is not x which must be so it can be compared too. This is the first phrase which splits the world into two and takes away oneness. When something is described, there must be an opposite to compare it to or it could not be. This is why Lao Tzu says “Difficult and easy complement each other. Long and short define each other. High and low oppose each other.” I am is totally barren of judging. I am X brings multiplicity into the world.

When Jesus uttered the mysterious and profound phrase “Before Abraham was, I AM”, he knew that people would try and understand mentally in the dimension of time what this means but there would be no answer. How could you be in this moment, before something that has already happened? In this way it is similar to a Zen poem which has the aim to awaken you because there is no logical explanation. For example, when your foot touches the ground it is the foot feeling the foot. That one was a huge awakening for me.

It does not mean that he is God as common interpretations will have you believe. Jesus was a man like us all. He had emotional times like in the garden of Gethsemane, got angry at the people selling things in the church etc. These common interpretations come from trying to logically interpret what Jesus meant when the truth is actually ridiculously simple and you will only find it when you stop looking. Jesus is consciousness, perfectly awoken. And since he “Is” that means that he is now. Jesus understood that the spirit can never die but the form, or what he calls “being of this world” can die and shift form whenever it wants to. His form died but his spirit is here.

You are essentially presence. Whenever you are not presence, you are mind. When you are in your mind you are in the past and future so the present gets put on autopilot. The only place of possible change in your life is put on autopilot.

I remember starting to search for deep truth around 14-16 years old. I read books of people like Marcus Aurelius and time management and whilst they were good they felt somewhat skin deep and superficial and I had yet to find anything truly deep.

One day during my university life I was in a book store and saw the book “The Power of Now” on a bookshelf and bought it impulsively without ever having heard of the author or book previously (scarily similar to what happened to someone that I know). After reading it for a while I realised the deep truth in it and experienced alignment with the now for the first time.

It was incredible, everything was fresh and I was aligned with it all, a huge spiritual awakening. I knew that everything was good in the universe and that nothing external could beat this knowing that all was good mixed with deep joy. I remember taking a job after that shuffling files and at dinner times I would walk around the local streets finding trees and plants and having experiences like Moses with the burning bush. You can sense their aliveness by sensing them for the first time not through labels. When you look at something without a label and are totally focused on it, you sense your inner connection and can harm nothing as you know it as yourself.

Since that day I have read the book, I pretty much every week at least once. That was years ago too as I am now 20. It has bought a dimension of depth into my life through its spiritual awakening that I never had before and I see around me many are still blind too.

It taught me that this moment TRULY is the only moment there ever has been or ever will be. Consider this. Have you ever experienced something that did not happen in this moment? Of course not. Jesus WAS before Abraham, he WAS in a physical body and he is now. Or you could say Jesus is before Abraham, Jesus is the leader of Christianity and Jesus is now. Feel free to replace Jesus with any name/label.

I cannot tell you how fulfilling it is to know the deepest truth for yourself. You have to experience it (in this moment I may add). It is so fulfilling to know that every spiritual path leads to the same truth and there is ways for humans to find this as I did.

“I am” is the deepest spiritual awakening truth there is. An idea is to sit in meditation and say as a mental mantra “I am”. Try it a few hundred times 2 times a day for a week and it will give you a spiritual awakening.It might not happen during the mantras it usually happens as you go about your daily business and the statement is allowed to seep into your deeper consciousness.