Many of us have come to take our freedoms and independence for granted.  We shouldn't.   When we take things for granted, we end up loosing them.


Comments by ZingerBug.com

        

I have previously wrote about the Essene ritual bathing and how you can use your shower or bath to help remove negative thoughts and energies that drain your spirit and prevent spiritual growth.  There are other ways to use visualization to help rid yourself of negativity.  Here are a few:

• Visualize your mind as a dirty floor and sweep the negative dirt away
• See yourself as a cluttered closet and clean the negativity out and throw it away
• See your mind and spirit as a garden full of beautiful, positive flowers, but also negative weeds and see the weeds wither and die, or, better yet, see the weeds being transformed into positive flowers also.

You can probably think of other scenes, but that should get you started.    You can see the negativity being removed by angels, God, or your higher self.  When you visualize, it's important to be in a relaxed state of mind and to visualize the scene with as much detail as possible.  Don't just see it, hear the sound, smell the odors, make it real. 

        

Do you know people who always have to have noise around them?  There TV or radio is always on, or they have an iPod playing in there ear all the time.  They can't stand quiet?  You may even be like that yourself.  I know I am sometimes.  As soon as I get home I turn on the television even though I'm not going to sit down and watch it for a while.  Why do we do this?  In most cases, the answer is simply that we want to be distracted.  We don't want to think about ourselves, or life, what we are doing, what we are accomplishing and, perhaps most importantly, what we are not doing.  
    We all need to have some quite time.  Not just without a lot of noise, but without activity as well.  Real quite time where we just sit in a comfortable place, indoors or out, and just open our minds and let the thoughts flow.  Listen to those thoughts.  They may be keys to your future, reminders of dreams you pushed aside that you shouldn't have, and especially, reminders that there is something beyond your hectic, noisy, material life that is eternal and is calling out to each of us to acknowledge it and prepare for the changing times that are coming when spiritual development will become our primary goal in life and that noisy material life will be secondary.

        

Spiritual activities don't have to be limited to praying, reading scripture and other spiritual books, or other techniques recommended by your spiritual teacher.  These things are important, but there are other things you can do as well that will help in the awakening of your spiritual side:

• Lay outside on your back and study the movement of the clouds
• Watch kids play, especially very young one
• Observe the behavior of animals like squirrels and birds (this is how bird watching actually got it's start)
• Observe the plants and flowers, how they move with the sun, how the avoid the shade of other plants
• Watch the movement of the water in a babbling brook
• Observe the behavior of someone who is highly developed spirituality.

Some of these may seem silly, but they can all help you understand the relationship between the spiritual and the physical.  If nothing else, they will help you relax and that alone can help in spiritual development.

        

    People developing their spiritual side develop at different rates.  For some, it's fairly quick, for others it takes more time.  There are a number of reasons for this.  The more obvious ones are that some people spend more time working on developing their spiritual side than others do, and some are more dedicated to developing than others.  Some less obvious reasons are the effect of the world we live in and the people around us.  If you live in a very materialistic society, or just your family and friends are very materialistic, you will find it harder to develop spiritually that those who are fortunate enough to live around others who consider spiritual development important.  Perhaps the most important one is your chakras or energy centers.  Few spiritual schools seem to mention this, but your energy centers can be charged with either negative or positive energy.  If six, seven, or all eight of your primary energy centers are positively charged, you will develop your spiritual side faster, and with less difficulty, than someone who only has four or five positive centers.
    There is some things we can do like changing the people we hang around with, and moving to a quieter, more spiritual place, but we can't do much about the polarity of our energy centers.  We just have to understand that, even if we don't know what they are, there are good reasons why others, including friends and relatives, develop spiritually at a different rate that we do and we should not feel disappointed in ourselves or them because of it.

        

    It's a fairly well established fact that many ancient civilizations were obsessed with astronomy.  Obsessed in the sense that they seem to have spent a great deal of time studying the movement of the sun, moon, the planets and the stars and building fantastic monuments to help.  We all know that Stonehenge is designed to record a number of astrological events, but it is not the only one.  There are other henges, mounds and circles in the British Isles that record similar events such as the Newgrange mound with it's white wall of quartz crystals.  And we know that the ancient Egyptians studied astronomy and that the pyramids and other monuments are often aligned with stars or the sun.  Lesser known astrological monuments can be found in other parts of Europe, Asia and South America.  
    So why were these people so concerned about astronomy, even in places where there was nothing but primitive hunter gatherer villages?  One theory is that the earth shattering event that nearly wiped out the planet about 11,000 years ago altered the tilt of the planet (among other things) making it necessary to do these studies to figure out the seasons for planting, etc.  Another is that the ancients placed a great deal of importance on astrology.  Not in the sense of the simple fortune telling that is common today, but in helping them calculate all aspects of their lives.  This would include when to plant crops of course, but also such things as when to conceive a child, when to get married, when to start a war, when to relocate, etc.  We tend to think of Astrology as a European thing, but the Mayans with their well known calendar and associated prophecies were also very much into astrology.  So were the ancient Egyptians.  One interesting fact about the well know pyramids of Giza, the Great pyramid and two smaller ones is that the three pyramids form a line that, in direction and size of each pyramid, perfectly mirrors the three stars in Orion's belt, but not as they appear from Earth now, but as they appeared 10,000 years ago!
    One reason why the ancients were so into astrology is spiritual development.  The priests, priestesses and shaman used it to determine the potential of a person to develop spiritually and where to concentrate their efforts on helping them develop.

        

    When I was six or seven, I burned my leg playing where I shouldn't have been playing.  It was only a second degree burn, yet it left a scar that is still visible today.  Physical injuries can leave invisible scars as well, for example, a near drowning when your young may result in a fear of water later.  
    Physical injuries are not the only way we get scars.  We also get mental and emotional scars.  These are the scars that happen when we are hurt emotionally or are criticized or rejected mentally.  It may be getting rejected by someone you find attractive.  It may be an art teacher who criticizes your art work to the point where you lose interest in art.  It may even be ourselves because we may expect our first efforts at something to be successful and, when the are not, we give up on that idea.  The world is full of people who had dreams of greatness and gave up on them, often because of emotional or mental scars.
    Scars can also hamper our spiritual development.  We may have learned that the preacher in our childhood church was a fraud or a hypocrite and get mental scars regarding religion.  We may start to doubt God when we lose a loved one.  Or we may just let materialists and Atheists convince us that we shouldn't worry about such things until we are dead.  These, and many similar types of scars can hamper our spiritual development so we need to try to get rid of them.  To do this, we have to honestly examine ourselves on a regular basis to determine what emotional and mental scars are holding us back, then try to get rid of them by talking to ourselves in a simple, logical why, about why we should change out scar-created beliefs and attitudes.

        

ONE, the Online Nevada Encyclopedia now has an entry for the International Community of Christ.  Click here to read it.

A sad week with the loss of two icons, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.



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More Wierd and Crazy Crime

A woman was being held captive in her own home by an ex-boyfriend.  She was saved when a locar car dealer stopped by to find out why her payment was late.

A twenty-nine year old guy in Tennessee is complaining that he can't make child support payments with his minimum-wage job.  He has 21 kids by eleven women.

A woman in Colorado got into a fight with her ex-boyfriend when visiting at his house.  Soon, the guys mother joined the frakus, than his brother and father.  The woman excaped and called police who arrested the entire family.

In North Dakota, a twenty-six year old guy attending a concert with his mother allegedly vomited on other concert goers then refused to leave.  When police arrived to escort them out, the mother began pushing the officers and yelling obscenities at them, getting them both arrested.

        

They do not accept for themselves the nobility of the truth,  hating the one for whom they exist, and loving the one for whom they do not exist. For they did not know the Gnosis  of the Greatness, that it is from above and (from) the fountain of truth, and it is not from slavery and jealousy and love of worldly matter. For that which is not theirs and that which is theirs they use fearlessly and freely. They do not desire, because they have authority, and a law from themselves over whatever they will wish.

Many do not except the truth of a spiritual world and the existence of the soul and a spiritual God.  They believe only in material things and believe there is no God or that God is a material being also.  Worshiping the god of the material world is worshiping a false god, the one for whom you don't exist spiritually.  This is primarily caused by ignorance, a lack of gnosis (knowledge) of the greatness of the true God and the everlasting spiritual world.  Those who open themselves and develop their spiritual side so they do gain this knowledge do not have that problem.  They don't have to believe or have faith that God is real, they know.

        

    Many people believe that seeing into the future is impossible or, at best, something that happens occasionally to some exceptional individuals.  In actual fact, we all see into the future even though we are usually not aware of it.  I'm not talking about predicting obvious things like the sun will rise tomorrow morning and July will be hot, but much less predictable things.
    Modern brain science has come a long way in understanding how the brain works and how messages get sent through the nerves, to the spine, then to the brain where the brain send out signals to you body on how to react, such as pulling your hand away from something hot.  But what they found that amazed them is that the brain and body sometimes reacts to things up to three seconds before they actually happen.  This study, and others were done repeatedly by different universities to verify this and they all got the same result.  Out brain and body actually can react to things that haven't happened yet. This forces us to consider the possibility of seeing things minutes, hours or even years before they happen.  Why not?
    Actually, because of the way the brain works, it is unlikely that it can be trained to know things more than a few seconds before they happen.  The spirit and soul on the other hand, are dealing with entirely different dimensions of existence.  Since events that occur in the material world are always preceded by events in the spiritual world, the spirit and soul can know things hours or days before they manifest in the physical world.  So the only way to see more than a few seconds into the future is through development of your spirit and soul.