Affirmative Living

Friend

Greetings to you and your Higher Mind.

I hope you’ve enjoyed several insight breakthroughs and that you’re ready for many more.

This month we’ll explore another aspect of mind: the power of affirmative thought. The quality of your ideas can open many mysteries to you.

Shall we proceed?

What do you think about most of the time? Is your mind inspiring you to fulfillment — or bothering you into sorrow or oblivion? Do your thoughts do you justice and give you a chance at happiness?

On the other hand, do your daily thoughts increase the size and weight of a huge chip you carry on your shoulder? Oh, you may have very good reasons for such a large chip and you may be somebody’s hero for bearing it so many years, but you might stop to consider just how much your dear chip is costing you. That chip is your most expensive extravagance.

When you live with resentful attitudes, feelings and thoughts, your spiritual life must wait. All the rewards and joys you could call your own await unclaimed, unknown, because of your gloomy preoccupations.

The chip on your shoulder can grow so immense over the years that every area of your life hurts under the weight of it. Chips rob you of your potential. They can make you cruel and petty. Chips can make you stop believing in — or trying for — a better life. They can grow into serious mental/emotional disorders. Chips can make you so deluded and wacky you can’t function.

Chips on your shoulders can cost you everything. They can estrange you from everyone you love, from all your goals for a happy life, from career opportunities, from the pleasures of congenial society.

Chips can become so large and heavy they descend into your heart and poison your whole system. Chips ruin you. Chips can kill.

Mystics know from their own experiences — often involving the removal of their own aged and petrified chips — that life’s fulfillments are unavailable and in suspension until chip removal is done.

Lay Your Burdens Down
Mystics take the chips off their shoulders and lay their burdens down.

To a great extent, the Mystical Path is one of:

1. Laying down your chips, burdens, and blockages.
2. Humbly and lovingly inviting the Infinite Spirit to come into you more fully.
3. Receiving and being uplifted by Spirit.
4. Being enfilled by Spirit.
5. Becoming an instrument of Spirit, letting Spirit move through you to others and the whole world.

Negative living — that is, chip-on-the-shoulder living — blocks Spirit’s gracious expression in your life.

As neophyte (new) mystics gradually become able to recognize Spirit, they discover something amazing: The Infinite Spirit wishes to fully enter them and express Its loving, beneficent nature through them — if they will drop the chips from their shoulders and stop living so angrily and fearfully.

While the Infinite Spirit is already moving through them as the life force which sustains their bodies, senses and normal consciousness, Spirit is ready and waiting to reveal so very much more of Itself to them — when they lay their burdens down.

So, how can you successfully remove the chips from your scarred shoulders? Here follows the method, which needs to be repeated until the entire weight of your burden is gone.

Method for Laying Your Burdens Down
On a free morning or evening when you have the opportunity to be alone and feel no time pressures, sit comfortably and practice these steps slowly and thoroughly:

1 — Consciously Notice Your Burden
Consciously recognize the burden you are carrying. Notice your grudges and fears, your haunting memories. Feel the full weight of your disappointments and resentments.

2 — Primary Releases
In the manner of dropping stones into a vast ocean, consciously release the largest parts of your burden into the Infinite Ocean of Spirit, one by one. Take time to imagine each major stone making a splash and disappearing into Spirit.

Now release your minor burdens, your smaller stones, into the Infinite. Release each and every part of your burden.

Say prayers of forgiveness. Trust the Infinite to work out all necessary matters in the future. You no longer bear the burden of life’s inequities. You have given your burdens to stronger shoulders — to the Infinite Being.

3 — Release Ownership
Having released your full burden to the Infinite, who owns it now?

Not you. You gave it away. That burden is now the property of the Infinite.

Consciously release any sense of ownership. It is no longer yours. Think about this. If you put those items which you gave away back onto your shoulders, you are a possessor of stolen goods, aren’t you? What do you call a person who takes what does not belong to him (her)? A thief.

This release of ownership leads us to an all-important new mode of life: living affirmatively.

4 — Live Affirmatively!
Now that you have released the chip from your shoulder, how will you live free of grudges and frustrations? How will you conduct your life? How will you think of others? How will you express yourself? What will your feelings be?

Mystics live affirmatively. When you live affirmatively, Spirit reveals Itself to you.

In the next element of this Mystery, you’ll practice a technique which helps you live affirmatively and exuberantly!

In contrast to chip-on-the-shoulder living, mystics live positively. They continually appreciate what is good, true and beautiful. They seek to see everyone and every thing in aDefinition spiritual context. They affirm Spirit’s presence and activity in their daily world.

The word affirm is Latin in origin: “ad-” means to and “firmare” means to make firm. To affirm is “to say positively; declare firm; assert to be true …; to declare valid; confirm; uphold … opposed to DENY.”

When you affirm the soul, the spiritual essence of others, you can see and experience it more easily. When you assert that Spirit is moving and acting in your life, you give Spirit more opportunities to reveal Itself and uplift you.

Living in denial — with a chip on your shoulder — leaves you ignorant and disconnected from the presence and fullness of Spirit.

The main levels at which you can admit, or refuse, Spirit into greater manifestation in your world are:

• your attitudes
• your feelings
• your conduct

Mystics strive to affirmatively admit Spirit freer expression in their everyday lives through these three levels of their being.

Here’s a technique which will significantly help you to live affirmatively:

Affirmative Living Technique

Our attitudes, feelings and conduct are like three switches which either admit Spirit’s free expression or they bar it. So mystics do a symbolic “checking” of their three switches morning, noon and evening.

1 — The Attitude Switch
Is your attitude switch ON or OFF? If you feel superior to others or think you came to earth to judge people or dominate them — your switch is OFF. Most superiority and inferiority attitudes usually mean your attitude switch is OFF.

Your attitude is a direct extension of your ego, your sense of who you are. A person filled with a consciousness of separateness from others is not an eager seeker of Spirit — unless he desperately craves a change.

For purposes of symbolically turning their attitude switch ON, mystics touch their central forehead, just above the juncture of their eyebrows, and say an affirmation which has personal meaning to them, such as:

My attitude switch is ON. I am a spiritual being in a world filled with and acted upon by Spirit. ON. ON. ON.

2 — The Feelings Switch
Emotions are powerful and old momentums. They are hard to change. Old feelings of estrangement, anger, fear, shame, or grief, for example, can flow into your awareness almost unnoticed and suddenly reverse your new attitude (throwing your attitude switch OFF) while triggering an avalanche of thousands of hurtful, life-denying feelings and related thoughts. An old feeling of betrayal can pop into your awareness and remake you into a cynic once again.

Mystics check their “feelings switch” by touching the center of their chests and consciously affirming, in their own words:

My feelings switch is ON. I feel the underlying unity and harmony of life. I live in Spirit and Spirit lives in me. ON. ON. ON.

3 — The Conduct Switch
Our words and actions are either affirmative or negative, constructive or destructive. We help others — and ourselves — with our words and actions, or we don’t.

Our conduct in word and deed generally flows from our attitudes and feelings. However, mystics also focus directly on their conduct — they want their words and actions to be in tune with Spirit as well.

Mystics symbolically touch the bottom of the throat, below the larynx, to check their “conduct switch.” At this switch they are easily aware of their voice and their arms, from which so many words and actions spring.

As they touch the lower throat, they affirm, in their own words:

My conduct switch is ON. My words and actions express truth, beauty and goodness. ON. ON. ON.

This is the life-affirming technique. In a little while you can attune your whole being to affirmative attitude, feeling, and conduct by thoughtfully touching forehead, chest, and lower throat in sequence.

Sometimes, for various reasons, one of your switches will be thrown OFF, so check your switches faithfully in the morning, at noon, and in the evening.

Watch what happens in just one month of conscious affirmation. You will find great joy and fulfillment in living affirmatively!

Friend

How are you?

Are you saying “yes” to life and the Infinite? “Yes” and “No” may be the most powerful words we mortals can speak.

“Yes” admits Spirit. “No” closes the door.

Did you know you were so mighty? What a great mystery that we can say “yes” or “no.”

Shall we look at the Key Points of the Fourteenth Mystery? Yes or No?

Would you like to add to the Affirmative Practices you are currently doing with the Attitude, Feeling and Conduct switches?

Some of you may prefer more words of affirmation along with an added focus on the mind and its thoughts — a “mind switch.”

I hope you find these helpful.

1 — The Attitude Switch — Touch your forehead above the juncture of your eyebrows. Affirm:

Beloved Infinite Spirit, with your help, I live every minute of the day with an attitude of love and good will for all people. You are moving through me now to heal all misunderstandings and solve all problems.

2 — The Feelings Switch — Touch the center of your chest. Affirm:

Beloved Infinite Spirit, throughout this day my emotions receive and assert all that is loving, compassionate, good, merciful, positive, and truly helpful to one and all.

3 — The Mind Switch — While sitting upright, hold your head with both hands. Affirm:

Beloved Infinite Spirit, today my thoughts assist and affirm what is good, true, compassionate and uplifting.

4 — The Conduct Switch — Touch the bottom of your throat. Affirm:

Beloved Infinite Spirit, the words I say and the things I do today serve, support and uplift one and all. May these words and deeds further Your work of creation, preservation and positive change.

As you complete each part of the above practices, consciously say “ON,” or “YES,” or “AMEN,” which means “So may it be.”

Affirmative Living
In a nutshell, mystical training is affirmative living. It is an openness to Spirit at each level of your being along with an effort to release old habits of attitude, emotion, thought, and conduct which deny or block Spirit.