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Spiritual Living for Healing Joy Prosperity
- Jeff Cox
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In today’s episode of “Healing From Within” your host Sheryl Glick author of Life Is No Coincidence: The Life and Afterlife Connection and The Living Spirit which share stories of spiritual communication healing energies miracles and ways to reconnect to your intuition and soul guidance system for living a healthier happier life welcomes e Jeff Cox editor of Paul’ Brunton’s work in a new book Instructions for Spiritual Living.
As listeners of “Healing From Within” have come to expect Sheryl and her guests share amazing intimate stories and insights into the metaphysical world of energy and eternal life forces which help us know more about our human and energetic influences so we may experience the best of both worlds. As spiritual beings having a physical life there are infinite possibilities for self-discovery and investigation and the mastering of our human emotions for an improved human condition.
In today’s episode of Healing From Within we will discover how Jeff Cox was guided while in College to the teachings of Paul Brunton and in the early 70’s moved to an area around Ithaca New York where he and other students studied with Anthony Damiani a close student of Brunton’s We will discuss Brunton’s widely esteemed integrated spiritual teachings and meditation systems into a practical approach for contemporary life.
Jeff shares how when he thinks back to his childhood and and his Catholic upbringing he remembers when he was around eight years old he had painful stomach aches and remembers asking God to heal him and it ultimately worked. Sheryl shares with Jeff as a sensitive empathic intuitive child aware of a higher force of being or God she also had many stomach aches but didn’t know to ask for a healing. Quite funny how she eventually became a Reiki hands on spiritual healer and now knows to ask for God’s help all the time.
Jeff goes on to tell us about Paul Brunton and why he was so highly regarded. Paul Brunton or “PB” as he preferred to be called, was a gentle man from whom an aura of peace and kindness emanated. His deep understanding of the spiritual life was forged in the crucible of experience and his spiritual depth shines through his writing. PB provides instruction to guide one’s development in three fundamental areas: in a full course of the stages of meditation to deepen one’s inner life: in the process of self-examination that roots obstacles out of one’s character: and in the unfolding of full awakening that includes wisdom in action. As he makes clear, the living expression of realization is a life of service to the inner well spring of wisdom as well as to others.
What distinguishes this book from others on the spiritual path may be in describing perhaps the adventure of meditation. PB writes, “ It has been customary for learned professors of the metaphysics of psychology to teach that consciousness always implies a relation to an object because it is always directed toward something. While this is true, it is true only at the level of ordinary experience. It is no longer true on the level of the highest type of mystical experience. Here consciousness can exist without any relation at all for it can be directed toward its own self. The world of ordinary experience is not the last possible one. There is a deeper and diviner world, or as in Wordsworth’s good phrase, an unknown mode of being, open to our adventuring. We have not yet attained true self-consciousness: we live too completely on the lower level of our existence for that. It is indeed time we take full possession of ourselves. For the experience of thousands of people throughout history situated in every station of life has confirmed the reality and attainability of the transcendental state. However, it is relatively on a few sensitive persons who have heard these mystical overtones of human existence. Yet we should not regard the mystic as a highly specialized type of human being. He or she is like ourselves but has had the vision and patience to follow up an act of faith with a long drawn series of active experiences to test the truth of that faith. Therefore we are all connected to this field of higher life but some are unable to invest the time and attention consistently necessary to know and utilize its wisdom.
Sheryl says that the reality and awareness of PB is entirely correct for she has spent the last 25 years mingling within that higher state of energy or Universal Source while in meditation and sometimes even with her eyes open can drift into that higher zone of peace love and Universal Source. Sheryl has tried to share the magic with as many people as possible for we are all the sons and daughters of that creative force known as Universal Energy …the Divine or God and have within us the wisdom to create with our thoughts which are part of that energy, whatever we focus our attention and actions on… In regard to that in her book The Living Spirit she wrote, “ As I began to step outside my comfort zone, I realized that there were thousands of people just like me, who had been thrust into a new state of awareness of life beyond the physical plane. Once that happened, it was impossible to go back to that three-dimensional way of thinking. Suddenly the concerns of everyday living like worrying about paying the rent and managing our family and careers was no longer enough. We were seeking something greater: we were seeking the truth of why we are all here and our connection to what is beyond us. Throughout the amazing journey that followed I learned several truths. The first is that there is indeed an afterlife: the second is that the separation between this world and the next is not a thick impenetrable wall, but a thin veil that allows our loved ones in spirit to communicate with us, and we with them. They assist us in making the choices in this life that prepare us for the next dimension in that world. The assistance received from spiritual influences will be in our proportion to our wish for help and to the effort we expend in our self-growth process in this lifetime.”
Jeff goes on to discuss Paul Brunton’s view on the need for teachers or gurus vs. going it alone. Whether we have a teacher or not spiritual development is fraught with complexities and challenges Paul Brunton offers transformative wisdom that aids our understanding of what the spiritual journey entails and helps point the way when the way is uncertain. This is why meditation which is the art of introverting attention is so needful. By means of our own mind we can discover the Soul. The introverted consciousness, turned away from the five sense activities to contemplate itself, first feels the presence and later becomes aware of the Divine Mind behind it.
There is a chapter on probations and tests of the aspirant. PB wrote, “To master desires and to overcome passions and to ennoble emotions self-reform and self-purification are the first fruits of philosophy. Thus an interval of long probation must inevitably pass before the results of this effort can become apparent in thought and action. The task before us is really a tremendous one, requiring our whole nature and our best mind. Candidates for initiation into the great mystery schools of antiquity were subjected to arranged tests and ordeals that determined the fitness of a candidate for entry. They even brought the candidates into surrounding and among individual whose powerful temptations to their sensual desires had to be overcome. The farther we advance the more formidable and less recognizable will be the obstacles trials and temptations we will have to overcome. One of the strange methods used by the powers to test us will be to arrange coincidences in our external life cycle. Within a short time of our solemn renunciation of a certain thing it will be offered to us. Some coincidence may be evil or good. If we are able to renounce the desirable object person or thing, where the ego has but to stretch and practice self-abnegation we may remember the warning of Awhadi a medieval Persian mystic: When Fortune’s cup into your hands doth pass, think of the headache as you raise the glass!”
If spiritual help is to be given in the way it ought to be given—as an altruistic service—no payment should be taken not even in the least obvious and disguised form. When we are sufficiently advance even the notion of accepting voluntary offered contributions will be repellent. Spiritual teachers, above all others are expected by God and others to be the first to follow their own teachings and to practice the virtue that they inculcate.
The importance of grace for Paul Brunton is absolute for in finding the Oversoul which is the goal of all spiritual pursuits grace is always available. If in the first stage of our adventure with meditation to discover the Oversoul involves an eager willed endeavor of the mind, the final one involves a quiet passive surrender of it. If the one depends wholly on the aspirant’s own exertions, the other depends wholly on the Overself’s bestowal of grace. In both the first and second stages that is, in concentration and meditation, the will is eager and active. We have absolutely nothing to do except be content and receive what the Higher Self graciously bestows upon us.
The state of attentive absorption is not a passive one. How could it be when the mind must be made strong enough to endure the strain and steady enough to hold the stillness perfectly when the thoughts are dropped. We must not be vague hazy or purposeless when we sit down to receive should not seek a mere blankness. On the contrary we must be fully alert and attentive positive in attitude and definite in understanding what we are trying to do. There must be a definite subject for our thoughts to start with and only afterward an object in repressing those thoughts. Only then may we become receptive and expectant:
We might feel that PB felt enlightenment would include discovering the foundations of a meditative practice and the need for solitude and time to cultivate the inner life in both metaphysical and mystical phases is the first imperative on the road to enlightenment. Solitude is needed because the presence of others definitely disturbs the emptying process. Time is needed because the mind is habitually filled with thoughts of the outer world: it is essential to totally empty the mind of thoughts for a while—regularly habitually and deliberately. Without a determined use of willpower, it is, however, hard for most persons to get solitude or find time. …The mystic who has learned the art of creative solitude can hear a mental voice in its inner silence. Thus for him or her, the loneliness that is maddening for some is enlightening. Also for reaching a state of enlightenment for a certain period each day there must be a separation from all usual physical labors and intellectual activities, a period where we can become and remain bodily still and mentally quiet. This is indispensible to achieving spiritual progress on the path to enlightenment.
All ordinary concentration concerns the form side of life, not its essence. Mystics may not indeed possess a greater concentration than others are able to show at their best, by giving it inward direction they use it to detach themselves from external, to weaken their belief in Matter’s reality, and to become spiritually self-aware.
In your innermost being you are already as divine as you are ever likely to be. Hence no interior training can give you what you already possess, but a suitable training can help to give you the consciousness of what you possess. No practical system can develop a Soul for you, for it is already there but an adequate system or practice of meditation can lead you into awareness of it.
Through insistent practice and patient cultivation we can make this turning point to the inner world, this silencing of body and mind, just as easy to do eventually as it may be hard work to do at the beginning. We have reached the most critical and most important part of our adventure in meditation. It is the borderline where our own effort must gradually cease and the Soul’s effort must commence. Thus we will introduce nothing to impede the holy presence’s movement stealing over the body and taking hold of the mind.
Real meditation is an intuitive process or a connection to the Soul Higher Self or Overself. Tensions and thoughts and cares that preoccupy your busy hours slow us from reaching this intuitive essence of connection. We must lift ourselves out of the stream of personal life. It must, in short start and end with one theme: the Overself. Hence we must begin to meditate by withdrawing our thoughts from our own affairs and those of the world, fixing them instead on the object of our quest, the Overself.
When we go into silence, when we sit to meditate so we should first clear all the day’s business or occupations of our mind. We should let the door shut on the outside world but also on the inside world where trivialities routine business affairs angers resentments irritations and passions are native inhabitants. Equally we should let the past go and disdain the future. We are there to engage in a holier business than that in which the world usually engages, to follow a diviner occupation than the personality’s fated round and to lift our thoughts to higher levels.
Jeff hopes readers take away with them after reading Instructions for Spiritual Reading what Paul Brunton wrote about the Integral Path where he states, “Meditation alone is not enough.” Meditation may advance us in our vocation as a mystic, but will now be sufficient by itself. What is still required beyond meditation exercises is that we should become philosophical mystics should unfold the possibilities of our whole psyche and not only our intuitive ones. The effort to attain spiritual awareness is not only a matter of the acquisition of concentration: it is also a matter affecting every side of our life. If the quest were only a technical process and any problems with meditational technique it would be easy enough. But it is much more than that. It also involves the emotions, the desires, the will, and even an unknown factor—the Overself’s grace. Hence a purification, an analytical purification of the heart, an emotional pruning of it, is indispensible side by side with efforts to achieve the one pointed still mind.
We can make a success of meditation and deeper connection to higher Universal divine source if we have veneration and sensitivity and if we give it the character of an act of tender devotion and make it bear the quality of heartfelt reverence.
Sheryl says that in her years of intuitive healing sessions and volunteering for hospice her meditation practice, teaching Reiki energy healing to others, hosting an internet radio show “Healing From Within” for ten years has enabled her to talk to the most advanced metaphysicians on the planet and she had opened her heart mind and spirit to share the philosophical artistic creative and natural expression of the love and compassion of a higher force of creation or Universal Source which has led her to know “unconditional love” beyond the physical stresses of human life and an array of human emotions from fear and negativity to the higher vibrations of love compassion and joy as well as all other positive inspirational energies. As she surrendered to her destiny and life plan, called on help from Spirit, and said, “Yes” to all events even those outside her comfort zone she feels she has attained life’s highest goal being permanently stabilized or part of the Divine merging her physical life with her energetic Soul Overself to find peace unity oneness and a song in her heart”
We thank you Jeff Cox for sharing the wisdom of Paul Brunton’s search for awareness and higher consciousness through the many wonderful insights of Spirit and other souls on his own path to the clarity of knowing who we are as spiritual beings having a physical life always learning to balance our physical personalities with our inner heart soul essence for the best way to travel knowingly through the world of experiences.
In summarizing today’ episode of “Healing from Within” we have explored the lifetime expression of inner soul wisdom as expressed by Paul Brunton widely esteemed for creatively integrating the world’s spiritual teachings and meditation systems into a clear and practical approach to find your soul wisdom in modern day times. Paul Brunton provides instructions to guide one’s development in three fundamental areas of the spiritual path: meditation, self-examination and the unfolding of awakening. We have also found that only by exploring the process of self-examination and mastering our emotional landscape can we make real progress in understanding who we are and why we have chosen to experience a three-dimensional physical life so we may learn that in surrendering parts of the ego or personality we may go beyond the illusions of the physical world to follow intuition, align to Universal Energy or higher ideals, and tap into the soul wisdom and flow of all knowledge time and places from within. As we grow in the development of transcendental insight compassion and love blossom and spread into the world affecting each of us and inspiring others as Paul Brunton did can we find peace awareness and trust in a much larger view of individualistic and collective life stories.
As PB wrote, We are not really walking alone. The very love that has awakened within us for the Overself is a reflection of the love that is being shown towards us. Thus the very search upon which we have embarked, the studies we are making, and the meditations we are practicing are all inspired by the Overself from the beginning and sustained by it to the end….Even when we believe that we are doing these things for ourselves, it is really grace that is opening the heart and enlightening the mind from behind the scenes.”
Jeff Cox and I would have you know that the journey Paul Brunton lived in this lifetime and the truths that he shared in his writing are what he still pursues and shares with others in eternal life and for all time…for once someone has dedicated himself to living according to laws of Universal Source there is only that way to proceed.
