Conscious love is self-sacrificing,
Unconscious love is self-serving.

Conscious love respects its beloved’s will,
Unconscious love imposes its own will on its beloved.

Conscious love results in freedom,
Unconscious love results in bondage.

Conscious love is constant,
Unconscious love is erratic.

Conscious love seeks only the highest good for its beloved,
Unconscious love seeks its own immediate gratification.

Thus, strive only to love consciously, or not at all.

I remember my first Christmas in Finland, in 1997, just 4 months after having moved there for a job position. Imagine that in those four months, I had moved my life across the ocean from Canada to Finland, began my new job, gotten illegally fired from that same job and, consequently, also dumped by my Finnish fiancé.

I remember sitting on the floor that Christmas alone in my nearly empty apartment in the dark in front of a lit candle, sobbing uncontrollably to God and reviewing all that had happened in my life to enable that moment and that situation. I traced my life path even as far back as 17 years, when I learned the geography of Europe in middle school and was smitten with an inexplicable attraction to Scandinavia, especially Sweden. From that point, I traced my life path forward through intricate details, meetings and events which had to have been timed to a tee to have occurred. Then, considering how the life paths and events of key persons I encountered also had to have been equally meticulously designed and timed in their own right, I saw clearly that some supernatural power had to have planned all this out and I basically concluded that God was actively trying to make me kill myself. In my defense, however, I only entertained this sort of thought in my worst moments, such as that Christmas of 1997. All I could be sure of was that the minute details, timing and coordination of the events necessary to bring about my situation at that time clearly indicated the deliberate direction of some power somewhere. I felt like a pawn in someone’s play. My general default feeling all through my 20’s was that I was being punished, but I just couldn’t figure out why.

This is an excerpt from a diary I kept back in 1997. While mildly amusing in parts, I can’t argue with one of the points I made: “All I could be sure of was that the minute details, timing and coordination of the events necessary to bring about my current situation at that time clearly indicated the deliberate direction of some power somewhere.” It was my conclusion that was amusingly child-like. I had always believed that if good things came to me, it was because I was a good person and deserving of good things, while if bad things came, which is pretty much all that came, I was bad and deserving of bad things, even though I knew I had never done anything to hurt anyone else.

Most recently, however, I have reflected on free will and destiny with yet more confusion, and the hypothesis that, whether I want them or not, I am destined for certain experiences. This thought process came about when I was reflecting on the latest male person I loved. How many times I had thought to myself in the years I had known him “If only I had not reacted like that, if only I had been or reacted this way instead of like I did!” During the years of struggle with him, I thought many times that by changing my actions and reactions, he and I would be happily together and incurably in love right now. As I pondered these things again, I realized this time that this thinking was wrong. I realized that crossing of geographical borders does not change the inside of a person. Whether here or there, this male person was going to lie and cheat, no matter what had happened outwardly, this male person was going to have sex with female people who were not me while he was married or engaged to me. I realize now that, despite all his beautiful words, in his heart, he never really wanted to be with me, and that would not have changed. I realized that nothing I could have done could have spared me the suffering I had in that last relationship. Nothing I could have done could have prevented me from meeting and loving that very unique and specific person in particular.

I also recalled, as an example of another destined move, how back in 1989 I had spent my junior year in college abroad in Sweden. I really wanted to be in Finland, because there was a boy there I was in love with. Therefore, during my year in Sweden, I had arranged specially with a Finnish teacher at the University of Stockholm for me to transfer there to study Finnish. The teacher accommodated me, which was not routine. On the day I had decided to mail the application, I fell apart because I could not find a single person at my school to give me a ride to the post office at lunch. I quit and gave up the whole idea of studying Finnish in Stockholm and of going to Finland.

Upon my return to the U.S., I transferred from a small American private college to a big Canadian university, where I finished out my university studies in 1992. Then I moved to Sweden to live with a Swede, after which we moved back to Canada in 1994 and broke up shortly thereafter. My “Finnish fever” had returned. I went to university yet another year and obtained a certificate for teaching English as a second language and, amazingly, procured a job in Finland during a recession in 1997 when unemployment in Finland was at 18%.

Thus, in 1997, 8 years after my first attempt to be in Finland, and long after I had lost all affection and respect for the Finn I had been in love with, I found myself living in Finland. I have often wondered what might have happened between the Finn I was in love with and myself if I had mailed that application 8 years earlier. Would he have “deflowered” me? Married me? Or would he have continued to brush me off with more excuses, as he had done when I lived in the U.S.? I sincerely believe the latter.

Upon recalling all this, I became sure I had been destined to go to Finland, one way or another. I failed the first time I had the opportunity, but it didn’t stop it from happening. Likewise, I was sure that my latest love interest was my destiny to suffer, no matter the nature or situation surrounding us, I was destined to suffer his evils against me. Could I have avoided the experience of him if I had been wiser, less needy, more emotionally together? Yes. But the whole point is, I wasn’t.

My Tentative Conclusion:
Summing all this up, I think I have arrived at the tentative conclusion that we are born into a “frame” which destines our complex human minds and our fragile and mostly selfish human hearts to develop as they will within that frame, while taking into account our individual make-up; the life we are born into and our own individual natures shape the frame. There are then free-will choices we can make within that frame, but, ultimately, we don’t have free will, since this frame is determined for us and it has deep-rooted, indelible effects on us. Or, as a friend of mine said: “Choices along the path of destiny give the illusion of free will.” I agree.

My Questions:
What do your observations of your own life lead you to believe concerning destiny and free will? Are events, directions you go in, meetings with specific others in our lives predetermined? Can we have any effect on them? To what extent can we affect them? Or do we control, choose or unconsciously choose events and experiences and meetings in our lives? If so, how do you explain all of the meticulous foreseen detail necessary to accommodate meetings and events even decades in advance of their occurrence?

Last summer I decided to forsake all other life pursuits and devote myself to healing myself, something I had realized was long overdue and imperative if I was ever going to stop my suffering. I sought out an EFT practitioner (Emotional Freedom Technique) for therapy. We had a fairly rocky relationship, as therapist-client relationships go. That was due to the fact that, as an EFT practitioner, she was not in any way educated as a therapist or otherwise suited to treat emotionally unstable individuals and wasn’t even intuitively tuned in to how she should behave while treating one (yes, I’m the emotionally unstable individual in this scenario, and in many others ). One of the ideas that she had espoused was the idea that “We are all one.” Now, I saw The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know, and I agree with the philosophy of “Oneness” (non-dualism). However, what irked me was that my EFT practitioner would repeat that statement at times, almost as if I had pushed a button on her, whenever I would be explaining to her that no one understands me, as if the fact that “We are all one” necessitates that everyone on the planet understand me (and each other), as if “Oneness” is synonymous with “sameness.” In fact, she would repeat the two phrases “We are all one” and “We are all the same” as if one could not be true without the other being true. I rebelled inside myself every time she said that, for I saw and knew intuitively it was not only wrong, but impossible.

Intuitively:
The problem with intuition, though, is that it only tells you what is, it doesn’t explain why or how, or give any information at all about the subject at hand, leaving you to try and deduce the riddle from its answer. Thus, I pondered the reasons for my inner rebellion to my EFT practitioner’s presumption that Oneness=sameness, in the hopes of identifying the truth about this issue. I recalled hearing from many different sources how each human being and soul is unique and fulfills a very specific function based on its unique make-up and gifts. I imagined a human being, a body. A human body is one. One entity. But in order for that body to be that one living entity, that oneness does not mean that all within the one body are the same, but, in fact, that oneness necessitates that all within the body be different from one another. To have a body, you need a head, torso, arms, hands, legs and feet. I acknowledge that you can have one of any body part, one hand, one heart, etc., on its own, but then these “ones” are lifeless, dead flesh. It is impossible for one heart, or many hearts, to have life. I have never yet seen a body made up only of one or multiple right hands, for example, yet they are the same. It is impossible for the parts that make up the whole to be “the same.” When we say “We are One,” we mean that we are all parts that make up a whole. How, then, has it come to be understood that it could even be possible that we are the same?

It is in being ONE that we all are inherently different from one another. Look at your own body, look at your hands and arms, think about your joints and all the organs inside. Watch a movie about human anatomy and consider all of the dramatically different elements working inside you, how vastly different from one another all the parts that make your body one single functioning entity are and how, if they were all the same, you would just have a big lump of detached, decaying, lifeless flesh.

Intellectually:
Upon further analysis of the semantics of these two words (”Oneness,” “sameness”) and of the deductions put forth above, I reached an understanding that logic and semantics dictate that it be absolutely impossible for a universal One to be in a state of sameness, either with itself or with something within itself. The reason for this is that sameness requires that there be two separate entities. If you have a state of sameness, you necessarily have duality, two separate things which you are comparing, which is the polar opposite to Oneness. Therefore, the claim or belief that “Oneness” can or does co-exist with “sameness” is an indication of mindless, misunderstood dogma, or else someone who is misrepresenting him or herself as someone who doesn’t believe in duality.

In conclusion, through this thought process, I realized that my rebellion to my EFT practitioner stemmed from my intuitive feeling that, under some noble and wise banner of truth, she was preaching to me things she had no clue about and which I, as her client, was supposed to mindlessly absorb, as if I were a student of her wisdom. She had memorized some New Age dogma and had no understanding of it. Like the followers of most organized religions or other type of group, she had heard something within her chosen religion and committed it to memory with no understanding of it and that kind of mindless, drone-like adherence to a group disturbs me sometimes, especially times when I’m seeking guidance and help from the drone in question.

So remember, anyone who equates Oneness with sameness has no understanding of either state.

Each of us, unique and different among ourselves, we are like snowflakes, no two souls alike, as we dwell together within One.

“Where is your consciousness located? Where (in your body) is your consciousness (and/or awareness) located?”
I read this question once on a personal development forum. I found it to be one of the strangest and misguided questions with one of the most obvious answers that I’ve ever read. However, I found the answers posted to it to be yet stranger. Perhaps I’m incapable of understanding the question? It seems clear that my understanding of consciousness and others’ understanding of it are not the same.

I have always understood consciousness and awareness, similar to “attention,” to be something that you direct with your mind wherever you want it to go. It doesn’t have a “location.” If it does, its location is where you have focused it at any given moment in time. If you are paying attention to a person you are observing (but not interacting with), your consciousness is with that person. If your eyes are closed and you are focusing on the sensations in your body, your consciousness and awareness are in your body. If you are doing a breathing meditation, your awareness is with your breath, although this is an example of a state in which your awareness of what exists may expand its borders, for example, to other realms, or to encompass understanding which you didn’t have before. Even so, your awareness is still where it is because you are deliberately focusing it there.

The consciousness is the awareness you have in the moment to be able to choose where to put your attention in any given moment. When you extract the element of consciousness, you are left with a person who behaves and acts by rote, like an animal, like a machine, like a computer program which is functioning on all its defaults, but whether or not the individual is aware and conscious of where he is putting his attention, his consciousness and attention still exist, he is simply unaware of where he is putting them. In a moment, he could “wake up” and realize that he is putting a cereal box in the refrigerator, or that he is about to smear toothpaste on his face instead of shaving cream. At the moment he “wakes up,” he realizes his consciousness/attention was somewhere else, away from his body (which kept functioning automatically nonetheless).

The concept of consciousness embodies and necessitates an element one can be conscious of, an object of the consciousness and the attention, plus the one being conscious of it. The focus of consciousness must exist somewhere, and wherever that is, that is where the consciousness is. As such, the question of where consciousness is located is irrelevant.

That is my current understanding until I acquire a better understanding.

My Questions:
So…where is your consciousness located? And is “your” consciousness any different from mine? Are they located in different places? Does the question “Where is consciousness located?” have a different answer from the question “Where is your consciousness located”? If there is some “universal consciousness” (a concept I don’t quite grasp either), how could and why would it be located in your body, as indicated in the original question and in many of the answers it received?

Do you know what hell is? People seem most often to believe that hell consists of some form of physical pain being inflicted on the earthly body. Perhaps physical pain is the worst kind, or even only kind of pain that many people can imagine. However, most people who might believe in hell or an afterlife will also believe that the body dies and that it is the non-physical elements of people that live on in the afterlife. What are our non-physical elements? Our non-physical elements comprise, at the least, what is in our hearts and minds – what you feel, what you think, what you desire – from these stem all of our actions and words, our behavior and the reasons for how we treat others, the acts we choose to engage in in our lives and so on.

What do you love? What emotions do you cling to? Why? What emotions do you hate and want to flee from? Do you spend more time in ill-will, hating, disliking, criticizing, judging, psychologically or emotionally breaking down or destroying yourself or others than you spend in good will, loving, liking, complimenting, accepting, psychologically and emotionally building up or nurturing yourself and others? Now consider this; just imagine that once you die, you will be stuck for eternity in that ill-will or good will and in those negative or positive emotions that you carry inside you towards yourself and others…would you try to change yourself before you die?

Throughout my 20’s, I told myself, hell is here on earth and I am living in it – my emotional experiences were my agony and I strove in desperation to escape my agony. The emotions we choose to foster inside ourselves can be of heaven or of hell, and they can bring the agony of purgatory or the joy of heaven.

I had the following dream during a week when I was in the midst of what was the single-most horrible and traumatizing ordeal of my life to that point in time. Believe as you wish, but for me, this dream showed me without the slightest doubt a true and accurate dimension of hell and the emotions that lead one there:

Evil woman spirit
6 August, 2002 7:31 Tues.

Some hours ago I had a horrifying “dream.” It was more than a dream though; its emotions bore a depth that was intense with reality, more intense and profound, more penetrating, in fact, than emotions I experience in people in reality. It’s the worst, scariest dream I’ve had since the one I had right before Bitsy [my pet] died. Elements of it were too real and felt far too deliberate to merely have been a fabrication of my mind.

I was in the large spacious room of a new house, light with windows, happily occupying my mind contemplating what sort of rug to put in it. Maybe it happened as I was thinking to myself…I’m not sure—but I felt an evil woman present, and I mean once trouble started, I could hear and even more FEEL her, not see her. One second I’m blissfully contemplating interior decorations in a silver-colored room, the next second I am being sucked under the floor and feeling this evil woman. She was evil to the core and I felt a blood-thirsty hatred that she had for me inside her. THIS and the aggressiveness with which she was trying to bring me down to her hell and destroy me were the things that made this feel more real—usually dreams and those in them are more passive. This woman was actively, deliberately and passionately trying to destroy me, and she had great power at her disposal to do so and she was exerting it all on me.

I found myself, like 2-3 meters under the floor, like in some other world, like hell, and this woman was pulling, TRYING to pull me deeper and deeper. The hell were the emotions—horrifying emotions, maybe they were hers—I couldn’t bear them and I felt her pulling me in deeper, so in desperation and horror I immediately began saying out loud “GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD” and I said GOD louder and louder, focusing on God in my mind, maybe I was shouting by the end GOD GOD GOD. And I felt I was pulled up out of that hell and stood in the room again in shock and, I think, very angry at that woman. I left the room to a different part of the house to try to get away from her. But I felt her beginning to try to suck me back into her dimension of hell again and again. This time, also in anger at her, I began shouting GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD. Somewhere in me I was worried neighbors or someone else might hear me. Again, also with my more aggressive shouting, she went away and I woke up, just barely. And, drifting off back to sleep, I could still feel her presence in my “dream-mind,” so I woke myself up as best I could and asked God to please don’t let me have anymore bad dreams tonight. And so I didn’t.

But I felt there was more to that dream than just being a dream, so before I began writing in here, I asked God to please protect me from that woman and all others like her. This dream scared the hell out of me. The horror and depth of the emotions in it defy description. I believe they were hers, and I felt that, in addition to being directed towards me, she lived in them. They are feelings I don’t wish to revisit, and I may not even be capable of revisiting them in order to even attempt to put them into descriptive words that you can feel. There are words though, they just don’t cause you to enter into the profound and extraordinary hell of what they really feel like: HATRED, FURY, ANGER, VENGENCE, BLOOD-LUST…this woman had some kind of power—she used it. She was power-hungry, blood-thirsty, murderous.

Most of the time, people discuss the subject of truth as if truth were a tool by which they manipulate another person or are manipulated by them. Human beings, as most of us can attest, do, indeed, predominantly use the truth to manipulate and control others’ actions, reactions or feelings, as we determine to tell the truth, to tell a lie, or to withhold some aspect of the truth, or certain information, with the sole intent of controlling the reaction of the other(s) in question. A classic justification for lying is “I don’t want to hurt her/him.” The obvious answer to not hurting the person in question is to not do what would hurt them in the first place. You already hurt the person in doing the act, which exists independently of the person’s knowledge of it. Having done it, however, and then aggravating the situation and the imminent pain by trying to control the person you hurt by lying is wronging them twice. In this situation, lying is all about protecting the liar. If you wrong somebody, take responsibility for your actions, come clean, sincerely apologize, admit your mistake, then let it go and sit back and accept the reactions of the one you hurt. In the process, you’ll get a clear conscience and a huge weight off of your chest.

For humans, truth has predominantly been made subservient to our various personal agendas. Truth is not supposed to be a tool for manipulation and control, or to be made subservient to our agendas. Truth is not a tool. Truth is a goal and a virtue in and of itself, to which all personal agendas should be made subservient and which we all should strive for. If you can’t achieve a personal agenda with truth, abandon it, or modify it. As humans of principles, truth is our North Star as we navigate our way through life.

Implement truth with wisdom and kindness

Some people pride themselves on always speaking what comes into their minds, uncensored and unfiltered, and they think that by doing so, they are doing everyone they interact with a great service with their “honesty.” For example, they think it is honest to tell someone they have a big nose, or that they are fat, or ugly, or that they look like an elephant in those pants. This is not truth. This is more akin to teasing and insulting. While it may be a true portrayal of that particular individual’s opinion and general ill-will, since there is clearly nothing the recipient can do with such degrading and subjective information, the intent behind saying such things is primarily hostile, or mocking, and self-serving and the true intent of the speaker is to make him or herself feel better, or to raise him or herself above the recipient by making the recipient feel bad or by humiliating the recipient. This is just another way of making truth subservient to a personal agenda and of manipulating the reactions of others.

________________________________________

We should aspire to make truth our guiding light in life, and we should consciously and deliberately avoid situations and actions which would lead to situations in which we would be tempted to lie, or where telling the truth would be too hard for us to do. At the same time, in general, we should impart truth with wisdom and compassion and use judgment when being truthful with others and not “tell the truth” from a place of spite or ill-will, or personal insecurity.

This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

– Shakespeare

When you are invisible, you write and people don’t see your words. When you are invisible, you speak and people speak over you, you cry and no one hears you, you take your stand and people walk on you. When you are invisible, you can enter into a room of people, unobserved, and listen and watch. You can read other people without them knowing, you can know them and see inside them, through their words, through their behavior, into their heart, without them even knowing that they are laying themselves bare before you – they can’t see you, they can’t feel you, to them, you are not there.

When you are invisible, unperceived, you can feel a man from across the room, looking into his face, you can feel his pain – you can be moved to tears by his sorrow and yearn to comfort him, but you cannot move, you cannot even speak to him, because you don’t speak his language, because he is a stranger, because he has no idea what you know about him, things you should not know – and he cannot see you.

When you are invisible, you can see a small boy being tormented by the misguided comfort of an adult. You can hear in the boy’s cries, you can feel his tears, he wants to be left alone, but the adult relentlessly “comforts.” Inside, you cannot understand why the adult persists and all you want to do is shout at the adult to leave the little boy alone, to relieve his escalating stress and the overpowering frustration that gives rise to his wailing and tears, but you cannot, because you are no one, not to be believed, you are invisible.

When you are invisible, you can sit in a classroom as the sound of students’ chatter, the squeaking of chairs, the rustling of papers lulls your mind to sleep, until you sink completely into the depths of the sea of your mind, inside of you, where your thoughts carry you very far from your body, in complete serenity, in stark contrast to the loud chaos of the world around you; all of the voices and the noises become as a soft and distant drone. You sit and look around you – you can see the other students, the teacher – you can see from your depth what they are doing “on the surface.” Although they are sitting so close to you, you are looking upon them from so far inside, contemplating the phenomenon and silently asking yourself in your mind “Where am I?” They carry on chatting with one another as if you don’t exist and you are as a spirit hovering in the room.

When you are invisible, you can see all of the things that the visible people can’t see in one another; hidden evils, veiling façades, false pretenses, unperceived misunderstandings, intimate shames, secrets, sorrows…but you must keep it all inside, because since you are invisible, no one believes in you.

*Tunisia/Finland-090704/030505