Key To Success

What do you do when you come across a key to success in a book you're reading? You ponder over it. Since I read many books and come across many keys, I thought it would be fun to share the ideas that arise as I contemplate a key to success. Reading is not just about absorbing information, it's also about contemplating, allowing the ideas to blossom within, and nurturing a seed tossed in the rich soil of the inner garden.

Name:
Location: Denver, Colorado, United States

I got my Master's degree in psychotherapy more than a decade ago. Since then I've studied the human condition with fascination. Over the years, I've learned a singular lesson: your life does not work when you oppose your soul nature. If you want a magical life, you have to drop your inauthentic transactions with the world. You discover your own power when you spend time alone to figure out what you really love to do.

Friday, September 29, 2006

Here Is The Secret Of My Success

Your subconscious mind is always saying "yes!"

This "yes" is a very powerful thing. While your conscious mind can only process about 7 bits of information per second, your subconscious mind can process 7 billion bits of information per second. While your conscious mind can barely remember what happened an hour ago, your subconscious mind can remember everything with total recall.

What is your subconscious mind saying "yes" to?

Do you say things like this to yourself: "I don't earn enough. I can't afford it. Why do they charge so much? I'd really like to get it but I can't afford it right now. That's all the company pays." If you're thinking these thoughts, your subconscious mind is saying "yes" to it and you're getting more of what you don't want.

Do you say things like this to yourself: "I feel really tired right now. My back and shoulders are killing me. What wouldn't I do for just a little more energy. I could accomplish so much more if I didn't feel this bad all the time." Again, your subconscious mind is saying "yes" to it.

Do you say things like this to yourself: "I feel so lonely. Nobody really loves me. They're all just pretending to be my friends because they want something from me.
He/she just doesn't love me the way they used to. People are really mean to me. It always amazes me how rude/crude/ungrateful/selfish/stupid other people can be. I could accomplish so much more if they just gave me a chance." Again, your subconscious mind is saying "yes" to it.

You can turn this around by thinking completely different thoughts. "I can afford this right now because what I will learn from it will bring my money back quickly. I am really at the right place here to earn more. I'm going to make this investment right now."

Similarly, you can be thinking, "The more I exercise and eat right the better I feel. When I feel tired, it's fine for me to rest and get my energy back."

And you can be thinking, "It's great to be me. It's funny how people go out of their way to make me happy."

Since your subconscious mind is saying "yes" to these things, too, you will soon find yourself attracting more money, more health, and more positive relationships.

Your subconscious mind is a vast reservoir of pure intelligence. It powerfully supports you in whatever you think or dream.

Your subconscious mind hooks up to the super-conscious mind to bring you serendipidity and synchronicity. You start getting into the right moods, start working more productively, start sharing more of yourself with others. You start feeling better and acting more intelligently. You start to get intuitions and wonderful coincidences fall into your lap.

I'd like to give you an example of how amazing all this stuff is from my own experience. The other day I came across a website where I wanted to get the product. I thought, "I'd like to get this." It was an expensive product but I was fine with it because I knew I could afford it. Then I got a telephone call and got busy and actually forgot about this website.

However, my subconscious mind had said "yes" to it.

Then yesterday I got an email from someone I did not know. They said that they had been to my website and really liked my products and what I was doing online. They sent me a link to their product, asking me what I thought about it. Imagine my surprise when I downloaded the product to find that it was the exact product I was intending to buy the other day!

Stuff like this happens to me all the time. Why? It's because I know that my subconscious mind is saying "yes" to whatever I ask and I have trained myself to ask for what I want and to completely ignore what I don't want. I could tell you many other stories where things just show up for me with no effort on my part, but I think you get the point.

That's my secret, and now you know it too and can apply it.
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Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Thursday, September 28, 2006

What Does It Take To Feel Truly Alive?

What is stopping you from enthusiastically living your life?

Here you are in the middle of this massive adventure called life, with the possibility of having tremendous success and enjoying wealth, health, wonderful relationships, and the fulfillment of your talents, yet somehow you seem to have run out of joy.

Looking back, it seems as if you can't really think of ever having lived as if it were an adventure. There may have been pockets of spontaneous outbursts and creative expression, but they seem few and far between. If you're like most people, much of your life has been spent in stress, strain, and struggle.

The bad news is that with each passing day, you're running out of time.

The only way you're going to ever feel enthusiastic about your life and start feeling the fullness of life itself is by taking back your power.

You have to stop your world and take a look at it.

Since your thoughts create your life, a good place to start would be by examining your thoughts. Have you been busy describing your life rather than deliberately creating it? Most people spend much of their time describing all their experiences as if they were trying to solve a problem. This is a huge psychic drain. Only when you are creating, rather than rehashing, can you excite your mind to produce better outcomes.

How many times have you said, "Yes, I can do it!" How many times have you said, "Yes, this is what I will be, do, and have." How many times have you said, "Yes, I will learn what I need to learn to master this particular challenge."

If you have said this frequently, then your life has an enviable momentum to it and others watch you in amazement. But if you have not followed an affirmative way of living in the world, you have been steadily losing your power to be, do, and have what you want.

Your thoughts create your life and if you are not thinking affirmative thoughts, chances are that you are busy giving away your power to other people, circumstances, or your own past mishaps. With this self-generating psychic energy drain, is it really a mystery that you are low on life-force and feel that life is sometimes to much to deal with?

Do you realize that there is a massive conspiracy to undermine your personal power? Since infancy you have been told that you are not good enough. Every cultural institution wants you to conform to their ideas of what you should be, do, and have. You can see that economic, religious, political, and even police and military forces have worked hard to make you feel less than capable.

Yet, this is a lie. And by buying into this lie, you have given away your power.

The truth is that you are the creator of your own reality, and by affirming what you want to be, do, and have, these things start showing up for you.

People do not affirm their reality because they are reacting to what is before them, which is usually some form of coercion to perform according to somebody else's idea of what is good for them.

Fortunately for human evolution, there are those who chose to affirm their own reality over the collective viewpoint. Thus, artists and scientists, thinkers and philosophers push the envelope, disagree with the collective will, and create new realities.

Albert Einstein did not agree with Newtonian physics and envisioned a whole new view of the universe. Mahatma Gandhi did not agree with the imperial vision of colonialism and inspired a free nation. Martin Luther King did not believe in the historical policy of racism and created more dignity in the world.

When the voice and the vision on the inside is greater than the opinions and influences on the outside, you will understand what it means to take back your power, and when you do, instead of feeling oppressed, you will feel the exhilaration of truly expressing yourself and creating your dreams.

Life really is far too short to keep denying your own greatness. It is vision and daring that makes it worth living. Ironically, those who decide to take back their power find doors where they expected to encounter walls.
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Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Tune Into A Stream Of Well-Being

There is only a stream of well-being and it is our work to align with it.

When our thoughts, feelings, and sensations are positive, hopeful, and joyful we align with it.

Another word for this entire process is love.

Love is seeing the grace in another; love is appreciating the beauty in the world; and love is you expressing yourself as you, without fear, doubt, or inhibition.

Since human beings are free, they can choose not to be aligned with this stream of well-being. They then impose upon others suffering; and this suffering returns to them, which makes them even more bitter and more inclined to make others suffer.

This reaction against the stream of well-being creates a shadow self in a shadow world. Just as there is only sun and not darkness, with darkness not being something in it's own right but only an absence of sunshine; so too, there is only a stream of well-being, and all dissonance, disharmony, and discord arise from a rejection of it.

This may seem like a preposterous idea: but life is actually meant to be enjoyed all the time because all of life is creative, expansive, and enlightening.

This idea appears preposterous because individually and collectively we appear bent on spreading a spirit of disharmony, disassociation, and discord through the world, and it has always been this way. But although the world has shrouded itself in darkness, the sun still shines upon it. This darkness then emanates from a disturbance in the collective unconscious of the human race.

While obviously the idea of light and darkness here is used metaphorically, is this stream of well-being also a metaphor for Spirit or God-presence or is it something actual?

This idea of a stream of well-being has been mentioned in all the major traditions.

Here are the names and the traditions:

Naad", "Akash Bani", and "Sruti" in the Vedas
"Nada" and "Udgit" in the Upanishads
"Logos" and "Word" in the New Testament
"Tao" by Lao Tsi
"Music of the Spheres" by Pythagoras
"Sraosha" by Zoraster
"Kalma" and "Kalam-i-Qadim" in the Qur'an


This stream of well-being has been referred to as "sound" and I believe that we can also interpret it as vibrations at an atomic level, a concept that may not have been familiar to the ancients.

Thus, there is an invisible vibrational stream, of well-being, that can uplift us when we choose to tune into it and tune out the world. It can carry us beyond our internal discord into a place of inner peace and harmonious action, into a place of creative action and fulfillment.

Naturally, this entire notion is only a philosophical hypothesis, too subtle to be verified scientifically, just as the presence of the soul cannot be gauged by any instrument, an informal experiment of tuning in to the idea of this stream of well-being will produce pleasing results.

The wisdom traditions hold it as an actuality, but whether it is something real or imagined, I believe that using it in your work with the Law of Attraction will prove beneficial, if for no other reason than that it will give you a unique tool for visualization.


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Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Sunday, September 24, 2006

You Are Always Beautiful

We think that we lack beauty and live in an imperfect world but that is only because we are not seeing correctly.

Beauty is an act of consciousness. It is an appreciation of color and form in the phenomena of experience.

Your form is always beautiful because it has been created with exquisite craftsmanship. Each cell is a celebration of evolutionary genius.

And, if you look beyond your form, to your mind, then you can only feel a sense of awe and wonder.

Your mind can process trillions of bits of information every second. At this very moment, your mind is orchestrating the exchange of oxygen from your bloodstream to your internal organs while your eyes are busy reading these words and your intellect is busy comprehending them.

All human beings are beautiful because each and every one has arisen from the creative genius of pure consciousness.

And the world itself is a living, moving poem, full of wondrous sights, sounds, and myriad impressions.

The saddest thing of all is how little we appreciate any of it.

Sunrises and sunsets are lost on us, the dew in the morning, and the touch of a lover's hands are all wasted on us. We do not see what is before us or feel what is within us because we are preoccupied with things of the utmost foolishness.

Does it really matter what people think of you? Does it really matter if you did not labor diligently enough to collect more papers with pictures of dead presidents on them? Isn't your true prosperity in being yourself and walking on this earth?

All day long, we spend trivializing things of inestimable value and esteeming things of trivial value.

We pride ourselves on being moral but everywhere we are busy committing the deadly sin of disparaging life and beauty, joy and carefree fulfillment.

You are always beautiful, whether you acknowledge it or not, and this beauty has nothing to do with the artificial standards about the best human forms of color, shape, and height. Your beauty is the very act of creation expressing itself as you.

The only thing more wonderful than being alive is being alive as you. What else is needed? Isn't everything else just a footnote to this beauty, the beauty of consciousness experiencing itself?

The most beautiful thing in creation is you. How long must it take before you lift up your head from your passing troubles and notice it?

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Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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For Your Eyes Only

Imagine what would happen if you made a decision not to be unhappy anymore.

Yes, that's right. Give it up. Quit being unhappy. Sure there are plenty of reasons to be unhappy--the unpaid bills, the ache in your shoulders, and your difficult parents, spouse, children, friends, and so on.

In fact, if you really focus on it, the earth has always been a miserable place and if you read the newspapers it appears to be falling apart at the seams even faster than ever before.

There are plenty of reasons to be unhappy. The sensory evidence just keeps piling up.

On the other hand, there is only one reason to be happy. You're alive!

Do you understand what a miracle and wonder that happens to be? No one on this entire planet, ever, has been you. Only you are you. You have a total exclusive on this total immersion movie called life.

Expand this idea a little. The entire universe exists for you only. It only exists through your eyes. If you were to completely blink out of existence, it really would not matter much whether the universe still existed or not because there would be no you to appreciate it.

This means that the only reason the sun shines is so that it can settle on your skin, that rain falls only to make the earth green and beautiful for you, and that mountains and rivers and oceans exist in case you might see them.

True, for everyone else, it exists only for them, too. But what of it? It does not detract from your own exclusive experience.

Only you breathe for you, see for you, hear for you, talk for you. Just think for a moment of the sensory pleasure of being alive. All of this grandeur--just for YOU! Focus on your breath for a moment, and notice how delicious is that experience. You did nothing to deserve that breath or the air around you, yet here it is, offering itself freely to you.

Unhappiness is such a waste of life. It seems to me now that unhappiness is just a bad habit, an expression of ingratitude.

Every day life is blessing you with awareness and all everyone appears to do is grumble, grumble, grumble. Things will never be perfect. Life is short. If you don't enjoy it now, chances are it won't get any better tomorrow. Besides, it's not going to last long anyway.

Life is about love, laughter, and happiness. That's all. Not a complicated concept.

If people lack things, it is because their bad attitude brings them scarcity.

Imagine, for a moment, if instead of crumbling under every adversity, and drowning in uncertainty, you were to remain mindful. Imagine if you had a taste for the adventure that is your life. Imagine if you stopped taking everything so very seriously.

In the cosmic scheme of things, decades pass in the blink of an eye. Before you know it, the show will be over. All your suffering will cease. But before that happens, you still have a chance to grab some happiness.

Who knows, your happiness might even be contagious, and instead of spreading your irritation at the imperfection of all created things, you can just as easily start blessing others with the sunshine of your presence.

If you focus on unhappy events, either in your past or in the world at large, you will only dig yourself deeper into misery. Yet, with just a little effort, you can notice the bird that hops on a branch and think that this little scene was enacted just for you.

Nobody is going to start taking pleasure in life for you. It really is up to you to start connecting with the joy of your own existence and to the magical promise of your own gifts of love, laughter, and song.

It means much to be happy. Even for a day. And it is only today, every day.


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Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Saturday, September 23, 2006

Resolving The Paradox Between Psychology And Spirituality

It seems that there is a contradiction between the psychology of transcendence and the spiritual idea of transcendence.

Psychologists believe that through the proper application of intelligence and self-cognition one can have a full and enjoyable life, with wealth, health, and a great relationship, as well as a sense of communal belonging and contribution.

Those in spiritual groups, in particular of an eastern orientation, believe that one has to get rid of the lustful ego that craves only fleeting things and to unify with divine consciousness.

The most popular compromise to resolve this seeming paradox is that you have to build up the self and let it go. In Vedic philosophy this is expressed as becoming a householder in the first stages of life then retiring to pursue transcendence.

Yet most believe, because of cognitive dissonance, that they should choose one view or the other.

Thus, there are those who believe that they should be worldly and experience the world as it appears to be.

Then there are those who believe that they should reject the world and dedicate themselves to getting out of the misery of the cycle of birth and death.

Here is another way of understanding this paradox.

The self is a transcendent consciousness. It is not limited to a particular body or a particular lifetime. Because it is not anything in particular, the "I" is not an "it." This is why Buddhists say there is "no-self."

Similarly, the world itself is entirely illusory. I don't mean this metaphorically or even psychologically. At the subatomic level, again there is no substance. There are just probability patterns that literally flit in and out of existence! For example, an electron can appear under an observing instrument then disappear, then reappear again. There literally is no stuff! This is why the Vedantists say that the world is Maya, or illusory.

Yet to all purposes, on the macroscopic level, both an intelligent being and an intelligible world appear to exist.

On this level, personal growth and advancement is necessary, not because it means anything on a cosmic scale, but because there is literally nothing else to do with this adventure of life. You can either resist evolution and suffer all kinds of lack or you can embrace evolution and the refining of mind and enjoy fulfillment of resources and experiences.

Thus, when you look at things from the view of levels of perception, all contradictions disappear, just as the contradiction of day and night disappears when you understand that the sun and earth are in a cosmic dance.

It is possible to be engaged in the world and to actually enjoy it and at the same time to enjoy meditation and contemplation to experience the inner sky of blissful freedom. It is by no means an easy path, but after a while, they will support each other. Material success and harmonious relationships will give you the opportunity to retreat to your inner work. Similarly your inner work will contribute to your increase of abundance and maintaining a loving relationship with others.

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Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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How To Get Into A Resourceful State To Resolve Problems

All suffering is resistance.

We are resisting what is. Because it is not the way we want it to be, we then suffer.

The opposite of resistance is acceptance. Letting it be as it is.

Yet this is difficult. We reject what is because it is not perfect, beautiful, and true.

We think that by resisting it, we can then change it. If this worked, then suffering would not arise.

But our resistance does not lead to positive change, it leads to aversion, and we either avoid the thing or feel depressed about it.

Acceptance, on the other hand, does not mean withdrawal or resignation, it means engagement.

When we can accept what is, then we are also open to what can be.

All this is hard to understand in the abstract. So let us imagine a situation where resistance arises.

Imagine that you have no job and are low on money.

This is an unpleasant situation and you feel instant resistance to it. You do not like it at all. It frightens and upsets you.

It is not the situation that has created your suffering, but your strong reaction to it.

Because you are resisting, you are suffering. You reject the situation because it threatens the integrity of your well-being. This resistance, this rejection, and this suffering leads you to feel stuck, confused, and desperate.

From this place, your thoughts, feelings, and behavior are seldom productive. Your power of adaptation are greatly diminished. You have a bad situation on your hand and you feel bad about it.

Now switch that to accepting what is: that you have no job and are low on money. But because of that acceptance, you are able to feel good enough to start using the Law of Attraction to start working for you.

Because you are still in a resourceful state, you are open to new possibilities of how to create money in your life.

Do you see the difference?

Resistance creates a reaction of suffering that immediately plunges you into a non-resourceful state, and either the situation gets worse or it is resolved in a less than satisfactory way, e.g. you get a low paying job that you hate.

Acceptance on the other hand means that you remain optimistic. You see what is and you choose not to enter a non-resourceful state. You then resolve the situation by thinking, feeling, and acting in a positive way.

It is easy to love and accept what is good and pleasant. Yet problems do not have those characteristics. Our immediate and default reaction is to resist and to begin suffering and to make things worse. Yet with awareness, we can choose what is and adapt to positively changing it.

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Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Friday, September 22, 2006

Be Who You Are

Be who you are. That is all that you need to do. It is enough.

It is our inauthenticity to what is real that causes us grief.

Our conditioning is not our friend. It is our enemy. It keeps us locked in unhappy postures, playing roles that diminish our grandeur.

Who you are, naturally, without artifice and pretence is enough. It is beauty and power.

The human race is programmed for misery. Our problem-solving minds find problems. Solutions lie in creativity, but creativity comes from another place, where a fresh perspective is possible, where hope is rampant, where you, in your essence, really reside.

This world is but a dream, but because we are unhappy, we have turned it into a production of nightmares.

At any moment, at any time, it is possible to transform, to renew, to gain energy and move forward in a richer, higher, more fulfilling direction. But we seldom appreciate the originality of either ourselves or our unique situation in the world because we are conditioned to observe limited patterns and orbit around limited experiences.

We hurry through our days, savoring nothing, our heads bent with troubles; and when one heartache ceases, another rushes in to take it's place.

No one is happy, and the world is a troubled place.

We designed it to be this way. Since birth, we have been taught to betray ourselves and to conform to meaningless rituals and patterns of limitations.

People moan the fact that they will die and even the world itself may die, because the collective forces of chaos seem never to cease, but how few have ever lived in the first place and did we not band together to damage the world with our collective angst?

Today the sun may have shone on you and the rain may have touched your skin, birds may have flown in the air above, and the flowers may have opened up as you walked by them, but did you notice any of it?

Why do you not see the extraordinary in the ordinary?

It is because you are not where you are, you are somewhere else, regretting the past or fearing the future.

You are never anywhere but here and there never is a time other than now and you are never anybody else except who you are inside.

When you glimpse for just a moment the magnitude of your own presence, then life will have begun for you.
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Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Thursday, September 21, 2006

Love Is The Answer To Happiness

The thesis of this discourse is this: love is the answer to happiness.

Love, the most powerful force in creation, is also the most misunderstood.

It is misunderstood because of the context with which it arises: that of relationship. All relationships imply love, either an offering of it or a withdrawal of it. Thus, our understanding of love is conditioned by varying degrees of attachment and aversion. And because of this, there is an element of self-protection that is projected outwardly and becomes control.

Thus, our understanding of love is completely contaminated by all the associations that arise from it.

So what we have then is conditional love; love that is allowed if certain conditions are met.

In truth, none of this is really love, just as a delicious meal, sprinkled with some mud cannot be said to be appetizing any longer.

Love, real love, is acceptance. That is all it is. Simply accepting what is. From that acceptance flows giving and caring, nurturing and compassion.

When you see a beautiful flower wet with dew, you feel an out-flowing force from your heart. This emotion is love. It is a complete acceptance of the flower. You may call it beauty or appreciation, but it is really love.

A mother, seeing her child sleeping peacefully, feels love. This is a pure acceptance of the being of the other. Of course, when the child is awake, shouting, crying, and arguing, expressing it's being in a radical way, breaking some social convention of one sort or another, the mother's love is still there, but now it is mixed up with other emotions, anger, confusion, embarrassment. Thus, control is now exerted. A tension visits the relationship and the love that is implied in it is clouded over, at the heart of which are various degrees of non-acceptance.

When the love is uninterrupted, as in the still flower or the sleeping child, it is pure. It is spontaneous. When conditions are imposed, the love becomes something else, not quite definable, but definitely not as spontaneous, pure, and free.

What made Mother Teresa a lover of life? She accepted what was before her. Poverty, disease, and distressing situations. Her love then moved her to give, and the giving was to provide relief to the other.

Love that has conditions, that exerts control to bring the other into alignment with one's belief systems is not real love. There may be elements of love in it, but it is tarnished with some desire for egoic gain. The other must love back. The other must be appreciative. The other must return something to us.

Philosophers, poets, and spiritual people have long believed that love is the central force that holds the universe together. The physical union of love creates children. The emotional union of love creates families and nations. The intellectual union of love creates ideas, discoveries, and inventions. Philosophically, one can even say that the union of subatomic elements in relationship to each other or of planetary bodies in relationship to each other is part of that harmonious, blending, accepting energy that we call love.

Love does not necessarily mean approval. One cannot truly love something despicable. But love does mean acceptance. And once there is acceptance, there is understanding and insight, and if change is necessary for well-being, it is done with wisdom, not reactive emotion.

If human beings were committed to studying love and applying it, the entire planet would change rapidly, and instead of our continued creation of chaos, harmony and cooperation would occur. All sorts of wonderful prospering circumstances for the well-being of all life would emerge.

But as a species, we associate contention with intelligence and survival, and as long as we prefer exclusion to inclusion, we will continue to wreck our own lives and the world in general with our confused thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

When we begin an inquiry into love, then the journey to right living can be said to begin. What is right living? That which provides well-being for self and other. When well-being is high, there is a feeling of safety and acceptance, which creates happiness, a sense that all is well, good, and true and that we need not guard against sorrow.

The summum bonum of all life is happiness. It is the ultimate motive, the end of all striving. Yet this happiness does not come uninvited. It feels invited when love is present.
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Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

What is Enlightenment?

You are where you are right now in life because of how far your conditioned mind has taken you. Since most of conditioning, social programming, is inhibitive, you will probably find that you have not come very far at all.

If you are like most people, your life is besieged with problems. You are facing one type of crisis or another. There is an imminent threat on the horizon and you have no idea how to deal with it.

Where did all these problems come from in the first place?

They came from your conditioned mind.

And how are you trying to solve these problems? Again, with your conditioned mind. In other words, you are asking the same trouble-maker who created all your problems to solve them. The result, of course, is only more entanglement.

Who you are is pure spirit. But your conditioned mind is what keeps you earthbound. It convinces you that not only is the physical world real, but so, too, are all the conventions taught by your society and your religion.

What makes this problem far worse is that your conditioned mind is conditioned not only by your current experience in this body, but by all the experiences in all your various bodies. This in Sanskrit is known as your samskaras.

It is for this reason that liberation appears so very difficult. Liberation is the acknowledgement of your own true nature, your essence quality of pure awareness. But time after time, you find yourself pulled into the gravitational field of problems. These problems exist as a deliberate attempt by the egoic mind to keep you lost in samsara, or worldly experience.

Thus, for the spiritual aspirant there are two forces. The ascending quality of pure consciousness and the descending quality of contaminated consciousness.

Pure consciousness is identical in all forms of matter, whether it is necessary to create the orbit of a planet or the growth of a flower or the life-force in a person. Contaminated consciousness, however, is diverse, and regulates itself according to the body and culture. It believes in the immortality of the personality and the physical form although all evidence shows that these are ephemeral. It does everything to cement this conviction. Thus, all it's energies are based on survival of the body-mind complex. This is an impossible agenda.

Those who seek liberation pursue sadhana, or a spiritual path. The entire purpose of sadhana is to remove the conditioning from the mind so that it perceives it's own truth.

Who is being liberated? It is not the atman, the pure self, the awareness without attributes, it is manas, the conditioned mind alone that needs to drop its agendas that keep you earth-bound and on the kharmic wheel of death and rebirth.

Mind is split. One part of it longs for liberation. The other is earth-bound and resists it.

The mind that longs for liberation is the ascending mind. This is the witnessing mind. This is what is awake in you.

The mind that fights against truth is the descending mind. This is the conditioned mind. This is what keeps you asleep.

Once you learn to distinguish the ascending mind from the descending mind, your sadhana will speed up considerably.

It is mind that is liberated, not the atman, the soul, the pure essence. The liberation is when the ascending mind becomes clear and powerful, until the experience is that of no-mind and witnessing mind.

But as long as you have a conditioned mind, you will always have troubles of one kind or another because this is the mission of this mind, to entangle the being in sentience and deny it the freedom of its true unified nature.



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Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Monday, September 18, 2006

Give Yourself The Gift

Give yourself the gift of laughter, song, and love. Touch your life with your own magnificence. You are the ocean. Life itself. You are everything that you were meant to be. Touch your own soul; become whole once more.

Everything is the way it is. Let yourself see it as it is. Free yourself from the delusions of despair.

You cannot save the world from it's nightmares, but you can save yourself; and in doing this, you will salvage the world; for it will see your clear light and hear your clear call.

What if you don't have everything you need right now? Who you are is pure gold. You are the incarnation of abundance. It is right here where you are. Each part of your body is sacred, a miracle of life. And your mind is the greatest thing ever known among all living forms in the history of creation.

When you walk, you grace the earth itself with your presence. Who are you is the gift of life itself. How many more sunrises will it take before you allow yourself to celebrate the miracle of you?

You have lots to give and lots to share.

All lack, limitation, negativity, scarcity are the delusions you entertain to hide your own glory from yourself. And as you suffer through these things, you bring them into physical actuality. Free your energy, your mind, your life from these parasites of thought.

Instead, use your power and get everything you want when you want it. How? By learning how to love, by learning how to sing, by learning how to be yourself fully and completely, without inhibition.

Release yourself from the burden of what might have been. Allow the future to be as it will. Everything you want is here right now. What can be a greater blessing than life itself. To be, just to be, is glory itself. Take this moment to contemplate your own unique expression. Take the next one to celebrate it forever.

Yes, just be. Just be whoever you are. Just be yourself. And celebrate! For the rest of your days.

Not a moment can be grasped and held; not a step can be retraced. As you dance through your dramas of life, remember only this singular truth: you are the magnificence of all life.

Everything that exists filters itself through your senses. Can you celebrate the delicious moment? Or will it pass away as you evoke the hell of your sorrows and damn the cheerful lightness of the air all around you?

Give yourself the gift, before another moment has slipped away.

What is the gift?

The gift is you, my friend; just YOU. For never ever again in all of time and space will there ever be another even remotely like you.

May you be well and happy.

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Resource Box



Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

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Thursday, September 14, 2006

Explode Your World With Possibilities

You have enough brains to run a galaxy! What are you doing with it?

Neuroscientists have estimated that the average human brain has 100 billion cells, and that each of these cells is connected to 20,000 other ganglia and dendrites. This means that you have more brain connections than molecules in the known universe.

If this does not make you gasp, then you may have to question your ability to fog a mirror.

Naturally, with all this brain-power, you may wonder, as I did, when I learned these startling facts, is why does even my computer and calculator seem smarter than I am?

The answer is historical and social conditioning.

Yes, ever since you were little you have been educated to use less than your capacity. In studies of child prodigies, it has been found that they were raised in an extraordinary way that went against the prevailing social norms. They were exposed to sufficient intellectual stimulus at an early age and subsequently performed in a way that was truly remarkable.

I'll give you an example:

Instead of the disciplinary punishment so common to education, Boris and Sarah Sidis, believed in nurturing a precocious and fearless love of knowledge, into their son William.

This was an unusual idea in the early 20th century. They received much criticism for it. Nevertheless, they persisted.

The result of exposing young Sidis to educational information when most parents breathe a sigh of relief that their child can walk and talk was that young Sidis could read the New York Times at 18 months, taught himself Latin at 2, Greek at 3, wrote four books at 4, and knew Ten languages (English, Latin, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, French, German, Turkish, Armenian and Vendergood, his own invention) by age eight. And this was just the beginning. By the age of 11, William Sidis mastered higher mathematics and planetary revolutions, became youngest student to ever enroll at Harvard, and lectured Harvard Mathematical club on "Four-Dimensional Bodies.' He graduated from Harvard, cum laude, on June 24, 1914, at age 16. And two years later, entered Harvard Law School in 1916.

Now with this impressive start in life, you would expect that he lived a happy and productive life.

Actually, he went into obscurity, took on low paying employment, lived in horrible poverty, and even went to great efforts to hide his intelligence.

The reason: tremendous public disapproval. He was considered a freak, and constantly tormented by his peers.

Contrary to what you may have believed, intelligence is not popular, and this is why most people have learned how to dumb down their own.

Thus, it is not nature that has deprived us of expressing our own natural brilliance, but history and society.

We have been brought up to believe that we are not that bright. And this belief is a historical legacy, because high intelligence has never been very popular. A highly intelligent population is not the ideal of religious and political forces, and since the beginning of recorded history, human intelligence has been suppressed.

Today, with our tremendous explosion of knowledge, we are finding it increasingly necessary to open our minds to our mental potential. Although, of course, the same compressive social forces are still hard at work. For example, our modern day schools still use the model of industrial age training, despite the tremendous breakthroughs in accelerated learning psychology clearly demonstrated by people like Georgi Lozanov, Tony Buzan, and Win Wenger.

Or, here's another example. Take radio and television. These two mediums are capable of giving every listener or viewer a first class university education. But what are they used to do? Negative news footage, social banter, and silly shows and movies. Anything deep is considered controversial.

You may, of course, argue, that William Sidis, had wonderful genes, because both his parents were brilliant as well; but, the fact remains, that even if one cannot be as brilliant as a known genius, your neurology is capable of tremendous feats, much more than you have ever known.

However, when you study the history of known geniuses, you find for the most part that they became geniuses because of how they were raised. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, they found allies, usually intelligent parents or mentors, that sheltered them from social conditioning about what they were capable of doing. Thus, they overcame the social forces that compel most people to develop mediocre minds.

In other words, the biological equipment is there for anyone to be highly intelligent. It just has never been used much. In many cases, it has been actively suppressed by negative environmental conditioning.

You are much brighter than you think.

Imagine what would happen if you were to start a program of mental cultivation? For example, each day, you can decide to be more creative with one aspect of your life.

Simply by having an intensely desired goal and asking focusing questions, you can resolve most of the problems that are bothering you today. Once you start to stimulate your mind, it will respond.

The reason why all our problems appear overwhelming and unsolvable is because of a massive conspiracy, since the beginning of recorded history, to suppress intelligence.

In the 20th century, we have invented more things than the entire history of the human race. How? It is because as a species, we have allowed more intelligent people to have a say in what is going on in the world. The industrial revolution created a demand for more brain power and a small minority of people responded.

Imagine what would happen in a world where everyone was allowed to be much more intelligent? We would be building cities under the ocean and colonizing space and resolving those bewildering problems that are threatening to destroy our species altogether.

Now, sadly, nobody is going to give you permission to be as bright, capable, and effective as you want to be. You must cease it for yourself.

You can start today by just deciding to clearly outline your goals and purpose in life and begin a deliberate campaign to find out how you can resolve your most pressing problems.

Once you start to tap your tremendous neurological capabilities through a conscientious effort, who knows what you are capable of being, doing, and having from life.

When there is enough desire, you can do anything.
If you're looking for abundance, it's right inside your head. Nature has given you more raw intellectual capacity than you could ever use in a single lifetime. Imagine what would happen if you were to tap into even a sliver more than you have been using to this date. Your world would literally explode with exciting possibilities.

And as Mahatma Gandhi once said, "You must be the change you want to see in the world."



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Resource Box



Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist in Denver, Colorado. If you're up to the challenge and want to create the kind of freedom and lifestyle you truly deserve - starting now - then get his free book from
http://theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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