Keeping your heart and mind open

Keeping your heart and mind open seems to be key to spirituality.  This is paradoxical for me, since many think of spirituality as being about those moments we experience when our heart and mind are fully open and we experience that wonderful flow of life.  All the rest; the difficult people, situations, ugliness in the world feels to them like the things that are getting in the way of them being spiritual - the things they want to get away from.  My experience has been the reverse, that keeping my heart and mind open is hard work, that the real spiritual work is how to respond to the people and situations we find difficult.  These people and situations are our teachers, or "worthy opponents" as Don Juan would refer to them in the Carlos Castaneda books.  They are the very things that are going to frustrate and hurt us but they are also the key (Chiron for astrologers) to how we grow and learn.  If they did not exist, we would have to invent them in order to develop.  Mostly they are teaching us where we are attached to a fixed picture of how the world should be which has closed our heart down.  Since our brains are more receivers than generators, it is our role to keep them clean so they can be good receivers.  A closed mind or heart interferes with the universal flow - love.  I have to concede my indebtedness to Chrissy Philp (One Way of Looking at Man) for teaching me much of this and for those interested in enlightenment there can be few books as insightful.

Cosmic Mind

This is a post to share thoughts and insights on life.  I am new to blogging so don't know how this will work but I am currently doing distracting activities as a creative way to give my mind time to contemplate a piece of work on change that I should be getting on with!  I am assuming that my subconscious is not ready yet or at least needs time.  Since I am an advocate of wu wei (not doing) this is part of my not doing for today and I am going to do it with no expectations and see what transpires.

A short interlude as I received a text, one of which was from my bank and what has transpired is that we have spent a huge amount of money in just 2 weeks.  I can't help noticing that Life seems to have it's own agenda when it comes to money.  It always ensures it flows out and if you try too hard to accumulate or hoard it, it finds ways to ensure it is spent.  You never seem to have it as such, it is a flow.  This doesn't mean you shouldn't take responsibility for your actions but like most other areas of life, it is not worth kidding yourself that you are in control of it.  It clearly belongs to the universe which is deciding how much you should have.