Inner Voice - Stop and think to succeed

Published on November 23 2009 ,Page 12

Neale Donald Walsch

innervoice@hindustantimes.com

WHEN people don't have time to think, they become identical.They are driven to react rather than respond -- as when people panic. Mass panic is virtually impossible to produce when people remain calm, stop and think.

Recall the US Airways plane leaving New York city having birds fly into its engines, quickly and totally disabling it. That jetliner, piloted by a genuine hero, Captain Chesley B."Sulley" Sullenberger, was forced to ditch into the Hudson river. After a picture-perfect emergency water landing, all the 155 passengers on board left the plane and stood on its wings, waiting to be picked up by nearby boats. All survived.

It was called a miracle. But the survivors had a different version. It was just simple, they reported. Nobody panicked.Everybody kept a cool head.People were responding, rather than reacting.

In an article in Newsweek magazine a few weeks after the incident, Captain Sullenberger offered his observation: "We never gave up. Having a plan enabled us to keep our hope alive. Perhaps in a similar fashion, people who are in their own personal crises, can be reminded that no matter how dire the circumstances, or how little time you have to deal with it, further action is always possible. There is always a way out of even the tightest spot. You can survive."

Wow, so the answer is here.In any unwelcome and difficult situation where things are changing rapidly, one must stop and think. That whole process does not take long. Seconds, at the most. Your mind is an amazing instrument. It can weigh all the options that are before you in nanoseconds and come up with a response. Yet it does take time. Response takes time, reaction is instantaneous.

If the passengers on that plane imagined that this was the end, then they were going to die. Even if the plane landed safely on the water, panic would have ensured their end.

So, the trick is to raise your consciousness from the lowest to the highest level of awareness, no matter what is going on around you.

(Edited extracts from the author's book, When Everything changes, Change Everything)
When people don't have time to think, they become identical.They are driven to react rather than respond -- as when people panic. Mass panic is virtually impossible to produce when people remain calm, stop and think.

Recall the US Airways plane leaving New York city having birds fly into its engines, quickly and totally disabling it. That jetliner, piloted by a genuine hero, Captain Chesley B."Sulley" Sullenberger, was forced to ditch into the Hudson river. After a picture-perfect emergency water landing, all the 155 passengers on board left the plane and stood on its wings, waiting to be picked up by nearby boats. All survived.

It was called a miracle. But the survivors had a different version. It was just simple, they reported. Nobody panicked.Everybody kept a cool head.People were responding, rather than reacting.

In an article in Newsweek magazine a few weeks after the incident, Captain Sullenberger offered his observation: "We never gave up. Having a plan enabled us to keep our hope alive. Perhaps in a similar fashion, people who are in their own personal crises, can be reminded that no matter how dire the circumstances, or how little time you have to deal with it, further action is always possible. There is always a way out of even the tightest spot. You can survive."

Wow, so the answer is here.In any unwelcome and difficult situation where things are changing rapidly, one must stop and think. That whole process does not take long. Seconds, at the most. Your mind is an amazing instrument. It can weigh all the options that are before you in nanoseconds and come up with a response. Yet it does take time. Response takes time, reaction is instantaneous.

If the passengers on that plane imagined that this was the end, then they were going to die. Even if the plane landed safely on the water, panic would have ensured their end.

So, the trick is to raise your consciousness from the lowest to the highest level of awareness, no matter what is going on around you.

(Edited extracts from the author's book, When Everything changes, Change Everything)

......

Feeling is Knowing

Sunday Times of India, New Delhi, May 14, 2006

If you want to know who you are, listen to your soul, says Neale Donald Walsch.

In life, the biggest choice you will ever make is the choice between your truth and the truth of another. And, how can you know which truth is truly yours? By listening to what you are feeling. Feelings reside in the soul, and the soul is God in- you. In this place is your truth, and it is in no other.

Feeling is the language of the soul. Most of our adult lives are spent learning to trust our feelings. This is not surprising, since most of our growing up years were spent learning to ignore them. Many people were told as children that feelings were not good. It was not good to be angry and to show it. It was not good to feel jealous and to show it. It was not good to feel scared and to show it. It was not good to feel too excited and to show it.

If we ran into a room filled from head to toe with youthful exuberance, we were told to hold it down, to not interrupt, to keep still. If we laughed too loud or cried too long, spoke too soon or asked too much, we were made to know that we had somehow done something wrong. We had not been good.

In all of this, we could not have missed the point; we could not have escaped the message. Life was not about learning how to be, it was about learning how not to be, what we were.

For many adults, the biggest challenge is to remember who they really are. Such a big portion of them has been dropped by the wayside, left behind, abandoned, stifled, ignored. Do you want to know who you are? Do you want to get back in touch with your truth about things — whatever those things may be? Then check out your feelings. Listen to your soul.

However, try not to confuse feelings with emotions. Your feelings are what you know about a thing. Your emotions are what you do with what you know. A feeling is energy. An emotion is energy in motion.

Your feeling is your truth. It is exactly how you feel about a thing, based on what you factually and intuitively know. Because feelings are what you know about a thing, they will always be your truth, but they may not be the truth. They may not be what you would have formerly called objective truth, especially if you look only at what you factually know, and set aside or ignore what you intuitively know.

There is no such thing as objective or factual truth in this reality. All truth in our world is created by the context within which it is experienced or observed.

Within the context of your life, for instance, the sun is up, the earth is down, the air and the sky are between. To Neil Armstrong, on his way to the moon, there were, no doubt, many moments when the sun wasn’t up at all, but down.

He may have found himself looking up at the earth instead. Up and down are relative terms. We can all understand this. What we don’t understand is that all of reality is relative — which is to say that nothing is truly true at all!

Still, to make some sense out of our lives, to put some order into them, we decide upon what we choose to call objective truth. If, therefore, what you know about a thing is false or incomplete you will have a false or misleading feeling.

This will make it no less your truth. You will still truly feel that way. Your feelings will simply not be what is objectively true within the larger context of your life.

Emotion is the power which creates, but it has nothing to do with what is really so. Emotion is neither true nor false. It is simply energy in motion. An emotion is an experience. A feeling is knowing. How you feel is what you know about a thing. How you express those feelings is how you emote — or experience emotion. That is, how you place energy into motion.

You do not have to place energy into motion around any feeling. To do or not to do is your choice. You can know (feel) that you love a person, but you don’t have to do anything about it. You can know (feel) that you dislike a person, but you don’t have to do anything about it.

It is when you translate what you know into action (e+motion=energy in motion) that you have an emotional response. This is not to say that an emotional response is bad. For there is nothing that is good or bad. There is only that which serves your purpose — or does not.

Your purpose is the key to everything. In order to know whether anything serves your purpose, you have to know what your purpose is. If you are not clear as to your purpose in any given moment or situation, to say nothing of all of life, it will be very difficult for you to decide or to choose how you want to act or react; which is to say, how you want to be. Beingness is everything. And so this decision, this choice, is no small matter.(The above article is an excerpt from Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch).

(websource: Indiatimes spirituality)

Please hear what I am not saying…

TOI dated March 16, 2003

Only true love can break through the façade with which we mask our lives, says Jill Zevallos-Solak

Don’t be fooled by me. Don’t be fooled by the face I wear. For, I wear a mask – I wear a thousand masks, masks that I am afraid to take off, and none of them is me. Pretending is an art that is second nature to me, but don’t be fooled, for God’s sake don’t be fooled. I give you the impression that I’m secure, that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within me as well as without, that confidence is my name and coolness my game, that the water’s calm and I’m in command, and that I need no one. But don’t believe me, please.

My surface may seem smooth, but my surface is my mask, my ever-concealing mask. Beneath lies no smugness, no complacence. Beneath dwells the real me – in confusion, in fear, in aloneness. But I hide this. I don’t want anybody to know it. I panic at the thought of my weakness and fear being exposed. This is why I frantically crate a mask to hide behind, a nonchalant, sophisticated façade, to help me pretend, to shield me from the glance that knows.

But such a glance is precisely my salvation. My only salvation, and I know it. That is, if it is followed by acceptance, if it is followed by love. It’s the only thing that liberates me, from myself, from my own self-built prison walls, from barriers that I so painstakingly erect.

It’s the only thing that will assure me of what I can’t assure myself – that I’m really worth something. But I don’t tell you this. I don’t dare. I’m afraid to. I’m afraid you’ll think less of me, that you’ll laugh, and your laugh would kill me. I’m afraid that deep down, I’m nothing, that I’m just no good, and that you will see this and reject me. So I play the game, my desparate pretending game, with a façade of assurance without, and a trembling child within.

And so begins the parade of masks, and my liufe becomes a front. I idly chatter to you in the suave tones of surface talk. I tell you everything that is really nothing. And nothing of what is everything, of what is crying within me. So, when I’m going through my routine, do not be fooled by what I’m saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I’m not saying – what I’d like to be able to say, what for survival I need to say, but what I can’t say. I dislike hiding. Honestly, I dislike the superficial game I’m playing, the superficial, phoy game. I’d really like to be genuine and spontaneous, and me, but you’ve got to help me.

You’ve got to hold out your hand even when that is the last thing I seem to want, or need. Only you can wipe away from my eyes the blank stare of the breathing dead. Only you can call me into aliveness. Each time you are kind, and gendle, and encouraging, each time you try to understand because you really care, myh heart begins to grow wings, every feeble wings, but wings. With your sensitivity and empathy, and your power to be understanding, you can breathe life into me. I want you to know that.

I want you to know how important you are to me, how you can be a co-creator of the person that is me if alone can break down the wall behind which I tremble.

You alone can release me from my shadow-world of panic and uncertainty, from my lonely prison. So, do not pass me by. It will not be easy for you. A long conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls. The nearer you approach me, the blinder I strike back. I fight against the very things that I cry out for. But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls, and in this lies my hope…my only hope.

Please try to beat down those walls with firm hands, but with gentle hands; for, a child is very sensitive. Who am I you may wonder? I am someone you know very well. For, I am every man you meet.

So what's wrong with miracles!

Hindustan Times August 31, 2006 | INNER VOICE | Lalit Mangal

I am a science student and have graduated from IIT Roorkee in 2006, but yet I can't defy the fact that miracles do occur. The biggest miracle which every one of us witnesses each living moment is life itself.

I cannot understand why there is such reluctance in admitting the existence of miracles.

The recent event of seawater turning sweet could very logically (and obviously) be traced back to a scientific phenomenon.

But what the scientific community is ignoring is that every effect has a cause and that cause has yet another cause behind it. The miracle's immediate cause can be easily deduced as excessive rainfall or dilution of salts, but what about the cause of this unexpected heavy rainfall, or ultimately the cause of anything at all? Do they have the answers to EVERYTHING behind this event that they can presume to dismiss those who experienced it with wonder?

What I’d like to bring to your notice is that the scientific community should not just dismiss these moments as obvious deductions while disdaining the faith of numerous fellow beings. Rather they should regenerate the lost awe of nature, of which the great geniuses lived in healthy respect.

They understood the holistic link between Man, a thinking creature, and the rest of Creation, of which he was merely a part and could never, despite all his cleverness, fully control or manipulate ever.

This respect was inuited and given voice by the earliest scriptures conceived by humankind, in fact such scriptures are considered revealed by a higher power in the early history of Man, to serve as a guide.

A guide we lost in our unbalanced worship of outer explanations.

I would also like to bring to your notice the fact that, all the great men like Farraday, Newton, Copernicus and so on who developed modern science (or rather the human understanding of nature) were themselves referred to, and are still remembered as philosophers and not scientists.

The very foundation of modern understanding is the illogical occurrence of intuitions in the human mind.