People pay lip service to highly held values such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But they don’t really believe in these rights or they would leave people alone and not force them into anything. These moralistic beings think they know what is correct and they are going to strong-arm people into agreeing with them.

• They take life through murder while they say they are defending life. They even pray to their God to assist them in their killings.
• They imprison people ho do not go along with their program and take away their liberty to break their spirits.
• They believe that happiness is a limited commodity and that they must hoard it at the expense of others.
  
  

This shows great inner blindness and a complete lack of self-examination. Anyone can see that using coercion in the name of liberty is total hypocrisy and self-contradiction. Yet this is the willful blindness of the ego-mind. It demands that it always be right. It justifies the most horrible atrocities in the name of being right.
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The ego mind will say it believes in something, such as love, and behave in the exact opposite way: Controlling, stifling, smothering, demanding, and abusing. Do not be fooled by what people say they believe in. Watch their actions and you will know.

Twin flames are united for eternity. It is a soul connection and, as such, cannot be broken. It is what abides long after the bodies of different lifetimes come and go. It is not subject to the rule of time. Clock time does not apply to twin flames.

Eternity means forever. And not just forever going forward. But forever long before this particular lifetime. Twin flames have united and reunited for their spiritual good and gaining, to learn a lesson left unlearned, to resolve something left unresolved, and to continue their journeys together.

They may not show up in each lifetime together. That is why some people feel they have not met their twin flame in this lifetime. This may not be the lifetime for that. However, when you meet your twin flame, it is an unmistakable sensation and knowing.
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Your twin flame may not agree with you on everything but underneath it all, you feel that unity. That unity is forever.

Panpsychism presents the view that an organizing intelligence is basic and all around us in the natural world. Human and animal consciousness emerged as a result of this increasingly diverse and purposeful intelligence.

But plants and even inanimate objects, such as rocks and sand, inherently follow a certain pattern of intelligence. A plant will turn towards the sun for it’s beneficial rays. A tomato plant will emit signals comparable to pain when it is plucked or sliced.

“How Stuff Works” cites this example:

“According to researchers at the Institute for Applied Physics at the University of Bonn in Germany, plants release gases that are the equivalent of crying out in pain. Using a laser-powered microphone, researchers have picked up sound waves produced by plants releasing gases when cut or injured. Although not audible to the human ear, the secret voices of plants have revealed that cucumbers scream when they are sick, and flowers whine when their leaves are cut.”

This planet and others looked like a bunch of rocks when they first emerged. But people eventually grew from this big rock called Earth. The rocks were the platform for the development of life. But apart from that, rocks obey the laws of gravity and sand will move according to the tides.

The expression “dumber than a box of rocks” may not hold true if we examine the complex structure of a rock—even if it can’t talk to us.

It is very human-centric and egotistical to think that only people are capable of consciousness. It is about levels of complexity. The human consciousness has evolved, based on the fundamental intelligence of the entire universe. But we are the only ones who can talk about it. Dolphins, whales, dogs, horses, and other highly evolved animals demonstrate levels of perception that go beyond the human. They are just not equipped with the vocal apparatus combined with the capability of small mouth movements with the tongue to express what they perceive through nuanced words.

The amazing, essential intelligence of everything in the entire universe working together is difficult for us to grasp. We are fearful that we must control it all or somehow it will all go terribly wrong. In fact, we are not in control of the most fundamental movements of energy, driven by the principles that are at the heart of all that exists.
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We are not in control of our pancreas, our digestive process, our blood circulation and most of our other biological processes. Just because we can think in a certain way, and express these thoughts in small mouth movements and sounds, does not mean we are the only conscious entities in this vast universe. We are a part of something that permeates everything behind the scenes. Some people call this organizing force “God.” But whatever label we ​put on it, it shows itself in all of nature and is a source of infinite awe and wonder!

I agree with Emerson about this: When you give happiness, you get happiness. It feels good to make others joyful. Happiness is not something to be hoarded and kept sequestered because we are afraid there won’t be enough to go around. As with love, the more you give out, the more you get back.

Where I disagree slightly with Emerson is that when you give happiness you get more than just a few drops of it back. Often, when you do something that makes people you care about happy, it returns even more happiness back to you. So it increases the happiness all around.
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You can allow yourself more than a few drops and let in the flood of happiness as you keep the ever-increasing energy of joy in your life by spreading it around. The benefits of this are immeasurable and healing to the planet. Happy people do not go around maliciously destroying each other and selfishly plundering resources. They look for creative ways to keep the positive energy flowing.

The main difference is that Kant’s Categorical Imperative starts with the individual while Utilitarianism starts with the group.

Categorical imperative is Kant’s proposed way of evaluating our motivations for why we act. He talks about two kinds of imperatives (things that must be done). They are both based on the individual:

• Hypothetical imperatives, that have a specific end in mind, such as: To stop being hungry, I must eat something.
• Categorical imperatives, in which our actions are based on moral principals, and are an end in themselves because they come from our moral goodness. They are not to attain something but to emulate what you would want to consider as a universal law.

He says, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” The way he puts it is complicated, but it is really a secular way of dealing with moral duty and ethical decisions.

The Church created moral duty using the motivation of our punishment with eternal damnation. The State imposes ethical duty with imprisonment and other punishments. Kant says that it’s not because of our fear of hell or punishment that the good person chooses his actions, it’s because he has figured it out that it is his duty to be good and do good things.
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Possessing good will is one thing, but the reason we actually perform a good action is the result of our obligation to do the right thing. In other words, we ought to. So, it is a highly individual effort, focussing on the higher good of others as a result of our choosing the good action over the bad.

Utilitarianism starts with the group and then goes to the individual. It is about figuring out what is the greatest good for the greatest number and then basing our actions on that deduction.

Control is a human concept, brought about by our fears and insecurities in what we feel is a hostile world. As humans, we feel the need to control our surroundings and other people, to feel safe. We think if we can just control everything, no bad things will ever happen to us. Or we feel, if we can just control “them” it would be a better world.

Part of feeling safe is believing that there is Someone in Charge or in Control: The great boss in the sky, who has ordered all things to make complete sense relieves us from our sense that behind it all is cold, indifferent, chaos.
But if you look at nature, you will see that control doesn’t exist. Even in a pack of wolves, no one is controlling their behavior. The force of nature or fabric of reality operates through them in the most efficient way for their survival. They get, through behavioral cues, exactly where they stand in the order of their world.

The Alpha wolf is not about controlling the pack for his own glory or to gain some psychological advantage over his peers. He is not sweating about all the things that can go wrong in the future and creating strategies to mitigate them. It is the force of nature itself that propels him to the forefront of the pack for its ultimate genetic goal: To propagate itself and not be driven into extinction.
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All the rest of nature, from plants to fish to birds to insects, operate without the idea of control over anything. They just do what is appropriate to do next in the vast dance of life. They can defend their nests, swim away from predators, or sway with the wind, it is all built into their perfect systems. It is not about a big Master Controller in the Sky putting it all together according to our limited imagination.

To be in the physical body involves pain and its attendant, suffering. Pain is physical and suffering is mental.
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Pain is a necessary survival mechanism. People with congenital analgesia don’t feel pain and are at risk of bleeding to death from cuts and gashes This causes anxiety and pain to their loved ones, as the mother of a child with this condition states:

“Some people would say that’s a good thing. But no, it’s not. . . . Pain’s there for a reason. It lets your body know something’s wrong and it needs to be fixed. I’d give anything for her to feel pain.”

Suffering, however, is strictly a mental decision we make, driven by fear. The mother is suffering because of her fear of what will happen to her child. Fear is the major component of suffering. I realized this when I was going through childbirth. When I took the fear out of the situation, the “pain” was transmuted into a very strong sensation but not an agonizing one full of terror.

We can embrace pain as a protective feature in our biological survival. Then we can turn to the enlightened masters who have shown us the way out of suffering. For example, the Buddha’s life’s work was to show the path away from suffering. He lays it all out simply:

Give up suffering, give up desire (resisting what is and looking to the future for fulfillment).

The Buddha realized that during their journey through life, humans suffer through old age, sickness, separation from loved ones, poverty, unhappy situations, upsetting people, sorrow, and grief.

According to him, the basic cause of suffering is "the attachment to the desire to have (craving) and the desire not to have (aversion)".

He tells us to liberate our minds from attachment and free them from troubles and worries. We can still desire to create good things and plan for the future but just don’t be attached to the outcome. Rather, be joyful in the present moment, adhere to his Eightfold Path and don’t fret about the future, which is out of your control anyway.

The Buddha’s Eightfold Path consists of these practices:

• Right view
• Right resolve
• Right speech
• Right conduct
• Right livelihood
• Right effort
• Right mindfulness
• Right meditation and union with your Higher Self

He, and other greats have laid it all out for us. We do not have to go it alone. They have paved the road ahead of us.

Trying not to be self-conscious won’t work because it is not about effort. It is about understanding who you really are.

If you think you are this constant stream of commentary and judgment going on in your head, then of course you will be anxious and put your health at risk. This mechanism has evolved for our survival and it is not geared to our happiness or peace. It goes haywire in most people and ensure that their entire lives will be full of struggle to preserve the little miserable “me.”
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You need to get in touch with your Soul: The part of you that is eternal and above the non-stop fearful projections of this survival-mind. Find a spiritual teacher who appeals to you. He or she will point you in the direction of discovering your peaceful Higher Self. You don’t need to go it alone.

First comes Soul, which is the ground of our being. And then comes awareness of our Soul, which is consciousness.

Soul is our eternal essence. It is the undying spirit within that unites us with the energy fields of the Universe. It is always peaceful when we are at rest at the Soul level of awareness. Some of us are conscious of it, while others are not. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Consciousness is another name for awareness. Some of us cloud our awareness with our constant mind-stream of fearful thoughts. When this happens, it is difficult to live from our Soul.
Animals have more awareness of the universal ground of their being than humans because they do not cycle through worrisome thoughts about the past and the future. But, because they cannot communicate this verbally to us, it might be lost on us.

Humans are the only beings on this planet who can verbally communicate the qualities of the Soul. Yet in doing so, they try to define this amazing state of being with narrow definitions. Consciousness, too, has different levels to it, when we are talking strictly about awareness.
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Does a person in a coma not have a Soul, simply because they are not aware of their surroundings? No. The Soul precedes awareness and can never be destroyed. We may lose our physical senses but our Souls are forever.