Allan G. Hunter's Blog, page 67

Wise words

Reading inspiring quotations is good. Passing on wise words is good, too.

And better still is feeling those words in your heart.

Temptation….

Temptation.

When temptation comes, be grateful. If you really do covet your neighbor’s wife or husband don’t fight that feeling. Move towards it knowing that until you feel it, fully, as a temptation you could act on, it will have no reality. It will be merely theoretical.

The whole point about temptation is to feel it so you can see that, in fact, it is simply the frightened part of your personality that is seeking to be consoled. You may think you want your neighbor’s spouse, but actually, behind that, you are simply feeling unloved and not very attractive. You’re feeling weak. That’s not unusual for most of us. This is the frightened part of yourself that is, like a small child, clamoring for consolation.

Now you know what you feel you can take real action. If you’re feeling unloved go out and find the unloved people in the world – the poor, the homeless, the dispossessed. You won’t have to look far. Then give them the love you hanker after. I promise you, that will change the way you see yourself.

What we think we want is often the thing we most need to give to others.

Death and Value

Death and Value

We give “value” to all kinds of things, some times in terms of money, and sometimes in terms of usefulness. Yet I think there is another set of values that we overlook at our peril – we value things by what we had to give up to get them.

My mother, until she died, was constantly worrying about what would happen to all her valuable things in the house. After her dearth we discovered that even though these things may have cost a lot of money, no one wanted them at the auction. When she had selected and bought those objects, years before, it was with a view to demonstrating how far she’d come in life. She’d risen above her background to live a rather more glamorous life than her school friends. So, of course these things were valuable. She’d given up her home, her native language, and much of her cultural background when she married my father. No wonder the objects she bought were so “valuable” to her. They were compensating her for all she’d lost.

Fun with Spam

I get a lot of spam emails on this website.  My spam catcher is good, though, and they don’t get through (I’m pretty sure).

So I’m thinking I should preserve some of these gems of spamwriting. Perhaps I could spin them into an ebook with a humorous title.

The ones I like are those that say something like “Good webite this. I tell my friends. I realy like you stile of writing”. Yes, that’s an accurate transcription. Why would I even consider posting an illiterate comment even if it is full of so-called praise?

Another favorite would be the ones that come from Russian addresses which are simply rows of ??????, neatly divided into paragraphs, sometimes several pages long.

And yet… I know that many of these spam messages are of purely harmful intent. People out there either hate people like me or regard us as legitimate prey. Perhaps the dirty secret behind the internet is that it allows certain people to spread hate and distain, because we’re all so disconnected from the human actuality of others and they can only see us a potential victims.

We may claim to be “connected”, but we’re not.

What do you need in a friend?

 

 

Friends are wonderful – and they can also be too kind for our own good.  They are the ones who will try to make us feel better. They may try to convince us we’re right, even when we know we’re not. They love us and they want us to be happy, so they try to keep things calm.

That’s great but it may not be much good for your soul.

Perhaps you don’t need a friend. Perhaps you need a Soul Partnership. A Soul Partner will challenge you, will risk upsetting you, because the thing that may be at stake is the integrity of your soul. That’s too important to be trifled with, and making us feel better may, indeed, be trifling with us. So choose your friends well.  And choose your soul partners because they will tell you when you’re going down the wrong path, and they’ll keep telling you until you pay attention. You deserve to be treated right.

Intention Matters!

Intention is everything. We know this, but we so often forget it. If we give something to someone we don’t like we may do so with the secret hope that whatever we give will bring harm to the other person. “There,” we may say to ourselves, “much good may it do him!”

An unloving gift is no gift at all.

Now, think of giving money to a cause. You can do that in several ways, also. If you give it with a grudging attitude then that money, no matter how much it is, will go into the world with a less than pure intent. You can also give with the underlying thought that if you do so this person will, finally, leave you alone, or think well of you. A donation made in that spirit is not likely to feel very good to anyone. In contrast, a small sum, given with heart-felt joy and with innocence, not expecting any reward nor any thanks – that money will carry a pure intention and will do real good.

The way we give money is exactly the same as the way we give love. We manifest what we feel in our souls, not what we give from our wallets.

The Innocent Archetype

This is a picture of my Grand Daughter Zoe, who arrived on Valentine’s day , the day of love. In this picture she’s laughing in her sleep (not bad for 6 days old). Her proud parents were astonished and videoed it.

Yes: Laughing in her sleep.

The Innocent archetype can teach us about love and acceptance – also about the sheer delight of a new spirit arrived on this earth.

Getting to know this kid is going to be so much fun…..

Intent

I’m back on Intent.com, after a brief hiatus.

Intent does matter. After all, we cannot be sure what the results of anything may turn out to be; we can only try to be sure that our intent is loving in the deepest sense. If our intent is pure it certainly will come to pass. but we do not have to force anything. Ever.

A Proposal For World Peace

This my my grand daughter Zoe, now three days old. I think she and others just like her have a major role to play in world peace.

My proposal: gather the world’s leaders together and make them each hold a newborn for a couple of hours. Then watch the change in them.

The rules will be simple: No loud talking, no one to ‘deal with’ the baby for them…. Then just watch as their hardened hearts melt.

If that doesn’t do it nothing will.

Temptation

Yes – I know. I can resist anything but temptation. So said Oscar Wilde.

Meanwhile the church tends to say we should resist temptation as much as we possibly can.

Yet there is a more productive way to think.

When temptation arrives it brings to the surface the the parts of us that are hurt and need healing. For example, I may be tempted to go out and buy a fast car so I’ll feel better about myself, perhaps, which really only indicates that I don’t feel good about myself right now. If so, then that is the part of me that needs to be healed. Buying a car will not heal anything, although I may feel temporarily god about what I’ve done.

Until that temptation surfaces, until we really allow ourselves to feel its pull, we may not truly know that we’re feeling a bit under appreciated, that we don’t actually like the person we are right now. If we did like that person, fully, then there would be no need for the car, or the expensive luxury item we’ve fixed our minds on.

Greet temptation as an old friend. It’s there to tell us what we need to do. Listen, and then do your soul work.