We all need a place of serenity, probably more than one. One place of serenity should be a location in our house or apartment we can go to get away from disturbances as much as possible. A room, or just a corner of our room where none of the things that disturb us or cause stress are allowed.

    Another should be an outdoor location. A quiet bench in a garden. A small clearing in a forest. A quiet corner in a park.

    And the final place of serenity is internal. We can learn, with practice and guidance, to create a place within ourselves where there is no thought of our jobs, no worries about paying bills, no concerns about our health, etc. If you have ever listened to a hypnotic tape, you probably have an idea of what is needed. In these hypnosis CDs or Apps, you will often be told to visualize yourself in a quiet place, a peaceful place, a place that makes you feel very relaxed. It could be an imaginary place, but is more likely to be a real place, or at least as real as you remember it, that you may have visited, gone to on vacation, or lived in as a child. In my case, when I am told in a hypnosis tape to go to my relaxing place, I visualize myself back on the island in the Bahamas that is now called “Blue Lagoon” after the movie made there. I see myself laying on one of the hammocks off to the side of the beach, surrounded by palm trees and listening to the waves hitting the shore and the birds chirping or a steel drum group playing in the background.

    Whatever your serenity places are, go to one of them when you are feeling stressed out, angry, negative, or overwhelmed with your problems. Take a few deep breaths, and let yourself relax. The benefits will be many. You will have better physical and mental health. You will thing more clearly. And you will allow your intuition to work and send you solutions to your problems.

    So the day came and the pot was set up in the center of the village and a fire built under it. The ladies, and even some men added their ingredients. Others in the village came out to see what was going on and, when they found out, many ran home to get additional ingredients to add. Soon, nearly all the people of the village waited as the pudding finished cooking, then cooled. Then the pudding was served, with a bit of apprehension as no one was sure exactly what was in it. There was some concern that too many cooks had spoiled it, but that was not the case at all. Everyone agreed that is was the finest pudding they had ever had.

This tale is an interesting fable, but it is really not far at all from the way villages did function at one time, and can again if the human race has any chance of survival. When people lived in small villages, they had to rely on one another to meet basic needs. The farmer did his best to produce good vegetables because he knew he was feeding friends and relatives, not customers he was trying to make a buck from. The tailor did his best to make good clothes for the same reason. The cobbler made good shoes because he wanted his children and his friends and their children to have comfortable footwear that would last. In short, the people of the village each contributed as best as he or she could to the well being of the village and, in doing so, contributed to their own well being better than if they greedily tried to provide inferior products or services for maximum profits, but at a cost to the village as a whole. And when someone in the village ran into problems, you didn't descend on them like a flock of vultures to buy their house and car and clothes at a big discount, you did what you could to help them out.

As some villages became cities, that concept changed. No longer were the customers your neighbors and friends, most were strangers, and greed soon took over. In time, it spread from the cities into the smaller towns and villages because people living in the small towns often bought things from the factories of the cities instead of from their neighbors.

The time has come for us to again live like those villages. We may not know everyone we deal with in person, but we have to start treating them as if they are our brothers, our sisters, our friends, because the age of materialism is ending, thank God.

    Many people are unwilling to trust their intuition, their dreams, their “gut feelings” when it comes to making a decision. “It is so unscientific.”, “It is unproven.”, are just some of the reasons they give. Even worse, when you refuse for a period of time to pay attention to dreams, visions, or other sources of information beyond the physical world, you will get those insights less and less until they don't happen at all.

    Sometimes, people reject these visions and gut feelings because they conflict with what they want to do, or with what the scientific evidence tells them to do. And, lets be honest, sometimes we reject those intuitive suggestions because they frighten us. When those visions or insights suggest that we should leave our well-paying job and go to another company or that we should give up the profession we have worked in and trained in for decades, and do something new, it is frightening, and we resist. But there is plenty of evidence that listening to dreams, visions, gut feelings, and other forms of psychic insight can in fact lead us on the correct path, even when we don't really know what that path is.

    Thomas Edison was well known for his use of naps to solve problems. When a particular problem seemed unsolvable, he would leave the lab, take a nap, and often wake up with a solution in his head. He didn't reject those spooky solutions that came to him while napping, he embraced them and they were of great help to him. George Washington was another great person who was sometimes guided by dreams or psychic visions. There are many others.

    In my own personal case, twelve or thirteen years ago the project I was working on was shrinking and I was one of many told to find a new project within the company to go work for. My intuition though told me that, after being there for seventeen years, it was time to leave the company and get a job somewhere else, which I did. I listened to my psychic insight. Less than a year later, the company I was working for got bought out and many people were laid off and were scrambling to find new jobs (a few that I knew called me and asked me to put in a good word for them with my current employer, that's why I know about it). A little over a year ago, something similar happened with my project at the new company and, once again I was told, along with many others, to find a new project to go to. But due to the economy, and particularly to cutbacks in government spending, the number of people looking for new positions in the company far exceeded the available openings. And being over 60 years old, and having skills that some considered outdated (although I had continued to attend classes and learn the new stuff), it became clear that I wasn't going to find a new job soon, so I retired. The good thing is, if I had stayed with that company I had worked for for seventeen years, and had been pushed into a similar early retirement, I would have been much worse off because that company had no pension plan, just a 401k, while the new company that I worked for for eleven years had both. That is just one example, probably the biggest one, of how I have used intuition or insight to help me make good decisions.

    Of course, the most important thing, as I emphasize frequently, is the development of our spirit and soul. When I looked at the advertisements in a magazine for spiritual schools and spiritual development programs, one grabbed my eye, I don't know why, but it did, and that is now the spiritual school I belong too, the one that is prepared to lead us into the new Age of Enlightenment.

    So don't reject your dreams, visions, and gut feelings.  They can lead you to something better.

A dragon year is a year of changes and this one is expected to be a year of major changes, life-altering changes. According to an article in The Nation, what you do the first half of the year will determine what the results will be later in the year. Thats all nice, but extremely vague. What kind of big changes are we talking about?

We can get some idea by looking at the symbolism of both dragons and water, particularly in Chinese mythology.

A dragon is said to be a combination of a serpent, an earth or matter symbol and a bird, a sky or spirit symbol, so the dragon joins spirit and matter together. The dragon is also associated with fire which makes it symbolic of solar power and transformation.

Water is a symbol of many things also. Water symbolizes birth, rebirth, and the Great Mother or the female aspect of God. Water is like liquid Light. Water brings new life into an area suffering from a drought. Water also symbolizes cleansing or purifying. Water comes from the Fountain of Youth that flows from the Tree of Life. Great sages are often depicted walking on water, sailing on water, or otherwise crossing a body of water, which is symbolic of a change to a new state of being, a more spiritual state.

So when we put this all together we get a water dragon year that will be a year of great changes, spiritual changes or changes that will tend to encourage us to become more spiritual and less material. And those changes will, on some level, be associated with water, fire, and the sun. When you combine this with the various prophecies and predictions from other sources for this year, you get a good idea of what to expect for the next several months.

    Managers will tell you that in the software business and some other office jobs, the quiet introvert is the one who does the best work and in the shortest time. So why is it that when interviewing for job openings, it's always the aggressive, self-confident extrovert who gets hired?

“Let a man return into his own self, and there in the center of his soul, let him wait upon God, as one who listens to another speaking from a high tower, as though he had God in his heart, as though in the whole of creation there was only God and his soul.” ~St. Peter of Alcantara

A woman robbed a Burger King and got away unidentified. But she called the place with her cell phone to ask if they had got her license plate number. They assured her that they didn't, but thanks to the call, they now had her cell phone number and traced her with it.

Better the second time: A guy in Florida, drunk and on Oxycontin, got arrested for casing a disturbance in his neighborhood. A few hours later, he was released from the jail but was quickly rearrested when he was found trying to break into cars in the jail parking lot.

A woman stole another woman's credit card at a gas station but was quickly arrested when she used it to buy lunch at the McDonald's just across the street.

And another cell phone OOPS! A guy burglarized a home, but wasn't hard to find since he accidentally left his cell phone in the house he burgled.

    Troubles and illnesses don't just happen. There are causes. We know today that many illnesses are caused by our poor eating habits. In the past, many plagues were caused by poor hygiene. But there are also non-physical reasons for our illnesses and problems. Some is often because of out subconscious belief that we have done something that deserves punishment, so we invite illness and difficulties to plague us. Often though it is what is best known as karma: what goes around, comes around; what you do unto others, others will do to you and what you send out into the universe will be reflected back to you.

    When you mention wealth, most people think they know what that means, but there are many kinds of wealth. In our very materialistic times, the person who has piles and piles of money is the one considered wealthy, but others are wealthy also.

    There are people who have a great deal of money who would pay millions to live a long, healthy life so those who are fortunate enough to live a long, healthy life must be considered wealthy also.

    The wealthy man who has gone through several difficult and costly divorces resulting in children who wont even speak to their father might say that he would give his entire fortune for a loving family. Doesn't that make the person who has a loving family just as wealthy as the one with the pile of money?

    When you hear of someone who owns a ranch of a thousand acres or a Hollywood star with five homes on three continents, you may feel jealous, but you can sit on a huge public beach, or go for a stroll in a park, or hike the Grand Canyon without fear of being mobbed by fans or paparazzi.

    And, as the quote says, the most important wealth of all is spiritual. No one, or almost no one, would immediately think “poor peasant” if you mention Jesus of Gandhi, yet, from a purely monetary point of view, they were. But they did not feel like peasants, or act like peasants, because they were wealthy in spiritual energy, power and knowledge. Something even the richest person would gladly pay for if it were for sale, but it isn't.

    And they great thing about spiritual wealth is that you don't have to be born to a wealthy family, or be a super-genius to get it. You just have to follow certain rules and work at it.

    So don't be jealous of the guy with the big pile of money. There are other kinds of wealth that are worth much more.

    I think there are very few Christians who would argue with the above quote, yet many of them act as if it is a lie. To put it in simple language, Jesus came to tell them that their interpretation of scripture was wrong. They were interpreting spiritual things as if they were physical resulting in false behavior. They were getting the prophecies about God and the servants of God confused with prophecies about Satan and the other fallen angels. And they were accepting the written opinions of priests and rabis as scripture equal to the revealed truths of the true prophets.

    Jesus' mission was to correct those errors, to provide a true interpretation of scripture, and to provide additional new prophecies to complement them and eliminate confusion.

    Instead, many Christians seem to have turned back to the old Pharisaic interpretation of scripture and seem to be giving the old testament greater weight than the new when the inevitable conflicts occur.

    But then, that is one reason why none of what Jesus taught was put into writing while he was alive and none of the true twelve apostles hand picked and trained by Jesus ever wrote any down any of those teachings, or any of the scripture that is in the Bible.

    Jesus came as a teacher and a prophet to teach truth and The Way, the path to enlightenment for each of us. He didn't come to be worshiped and it is clear that He was not worshiped by His apostles and His disciples. It was a later generation, led by the false priest Paul, who started the idea of worshiping Jesus rather than following his teachings.

    So if we all learn to accept that Jesus came primarily as a teacher, than we must take our appropriate role as students and, as students are supposed to do, listen to what the teacher said and act accordingly.

    When antique torture devices become available at auctions, they are easily sold and modern imitations of such devices are still made for those into S & M. Torture has been used historically by the military to get information from prisoners and, sadly, by churches to get confessions out of people. Even today, some continue to claim that torture is an effective way to get information. The historical evidence says otherwise. Torture often cause people to confess to things they didn't do just to get the torture to stop. It also causes them to agree to implement others who are totally innocent. In short, torture is often used to get false confessions from those the church or government authorities want to get rid of, to confess to things they didn't do, just so the torture will stop and they will be put to death. The Spanish Inquisition was well known for this. The Knights Templar were originally soldiers of the church who did much to aid the Catholic Church in defending itself, and protecting those traveling. But times changed and a new king and a new pope found they had become too powerful and independent, so they were accused of various crimes and sins including witchcraft and devil worship and then tortured until they confessed. They were innocent, but torture got confessions out of them. That is just one example of why torture doesn't do what proponents of it claim. So, again, why does it happen?

The answer, I think, is threefold, with the third item listed being the primary one:

1. Deep within the subconscious of all of us is the primitive beast that takes joy in seeing others suffer (but, of course, never wants to be the one suffering).

2. We all have a tendency to do things we would not normally do when we are part of a group, especially a fairly large group. Things like trampelling a person to death as we stampede into the malls on Black Friday (an appropriate name, but not for the official reason).

3. The main reason, and the one we hate to accept, is that, while we are children of God, we are children of the fallen angels also and so those fallen angels, devils, demons, whatever you wish to call them, still have a strong influence on out behavior. They get us to do things that they enjoy even when we think we would never stoop to cooperating with them. They are successful at it mainly because they do a good job of hiding their efforts to influence us.

    There are things we can do to keep from becoming a person who likes torture, whether as a participant or just as an observer. We can avoid as much as possible all forms of violence in entertainment: movies, video games, etc. The more violence we expose ourselves to, the more tolerant of it we become. And we can turn to God and the Beings of Light to help us avoid the influence of Satan and his minions.