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What is your opinion on Osho's quote, "Don't take it seriously. Life is just a game! Enjoy!"?

6/18/2024

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Osho’s statement that life is just a game makes it seem OK to do whatever we want regardless of how much suffering it causes. As long as we’re having fun, that’s the point of the game. To have fun.

But if we take out the word “just” and make it into “Life is a game!” then we can see that life has certain rules that if you don’t follow or understand, you won’t even be able to play the game and definitely not win it. The word “just” trivializes Life and gives the impression that we can do whatever we want and there are no consequences. It’s just a playful pass-time.
However, what actually happened in the case of Osho, was that the literal interpretation of this philosophy turned into orgiastic irresponsible sex, addiction (including his own addiction to nitrous oxide), murderous power struggles, and hateful and greedy behavior resulting in much harm done to innocent people.

I loved Osho for years and read his books as well as listened to his talks. Articulate and loving, wise and profound, full of light and peace I was entranced with him as I became more and more spiritually aware and awakened. But something got twisted along the way.

I arrived in India just as he was being expelled. Mostly “Westerners” followed him and loved the lack of discipline and “anything goes” behavior. But India didn’t like it. It was not in keeping with a serious approach to spirituality. It was a bunch of hippies dancing around in a frenzy and it just looked like a giant rave at a nightclub—but outdoors under the blazing sun. It looked like he was pandering to spiritual tourists who wanted to have a great time.

Then we all know what happened when the Rajneeshis arrived in the US. At that point, if life was a game, that game included poisoning the townsfolk, murderous plots towards targeted people within the ranks, and greed, as exhibited in Osho’s collection of Rolls Royces. His aim was to have 365 Rolls for every day of the year. This game was not something that looked enjoyable. It was not lighthearted and fun. It was a malignant game.

Who was going to win a game based on invading and killing? His organization wanted to take over the town governance. It became like some violent video game such as Mortal Combat or Manhunt. They were serious about grabbing power. There was no playfulness about it and I can’t imagine any enjoyment either.
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So to say that “Life is just a game, enjoy,” sounds good. It sounds like nothing matters. It’s just a game anyway and you are just a player. In the abstract, this is actually so. But in the physical manifestation of this life, there are consequences. People can suffer because of our actions. We can suffer because of the karmic consequences that can the the result of such an attitude. This is a holy game and Osho was making up the rules as he went along and, iin his case, the game became more and more destructive
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Why has the Chinese government rejected even the idea of past and future lives and meddled in the system of reincarnation, as the Dalai Lama said in 2011?

3/9/2024

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If you think this is your only lifetime and the whole purpose of this life is to serve the state, you better behave accordingly. And that is what so many governments, including the Chinese government, aim for. If you know that you are an eternal Soul, with many lifetimes to express your individual imprint of this Soul, how can anyone control you through fear? When you know in your heart that you go on forever, no one can control you through threats of death, for you know that you don’t really die.

Fear is what prevails in so many government systems, including China’s. China’s brutal slaughter of Tibetan monks and nuns was a statement that the contemplative, spiritually minded people better stop thinking about reincarnation and get down to the dirty realities of physical life in this world. This is a world where the ego-mind wants to dominate and control based on its greed and fear. Fear that this is our only life so we better get as many goodies for ourselves—including invading people’s homes and snatching their property.

Human rights in China, in spite of Confucius’ wisdom, have been ignored. People are not seen as sacred, eternal souls that need to be loved, cherished, and cared for. For example, Mao's policies were responsible for vast numbers of deaths, with estimates ranging from 40 to 80 million victims due to starvation, persecution, prison labor, and mass executions. Meanwhile, he was eating luxuriously and living the life of earthly abundance.

If you think this is the only life, then it is short, brutish, nasty and not worth all the suffering. If you know that nothing can kill your Soul and it goes on eternally, how can anyone twist your arm to obey their unreasonable and cruel policies? You know that with reincarnation comes Karma and what goes around comes around. So it’s best to be kind and foster the rights of others. China and other governments (such as North Korea, the Soviet Union, and other totalitarian states) have never been interested in that and have been examples of monumental failures to provide for their people..
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Does a person's past lives become irrelevant during a spiritual awakening?

2/16/2024

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The significance of knowing about our past lives lies in our understanding of ourselves as Eternal Souls. Whether we were beggars or royalty is not as significant as how much of the loving energy we expressed. More important. in terms of karma, is if we inflicted intentional cruelty on anyone or anything. For the Universe is perfectly balanced and no one gets away with anything.

It can be useful to know the patterns of our past lives because they often shape our choices, likes, loves, and which people we attract into our lives this time around. These are our individual colorations, quirks, and talents—illustrated by Mozart composing perfectly complex symphonies at age 5. But in terms of our Eternal Soul, all these talents and abilities are like the individual grains of sand on the beach. Fascinating and unique, yet part of the whole mass of sand.

Spiritual awakening includes the deep feeling in our guts and hearts that we have passed this way before and encountered some of the same people. And therefore knowing about our past lives is a key to figuring out why certain patterns keep occurring or what impels the choices that we make. Yet, after all of these many lives our Souls have cycled through, we remain the One Eternal Soul.
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So it is not irrelevant to acknowledge that we lived before in a different body when we live the awakened life. It is just part of the process of awareness that this body is not who we are and we have had many of them before this. In the case of Twin Souls, the same Soul resides in two different bodies in the same lifetime. Our Souls are eternal and do not perish when the body goes away.
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Can a woman attain enlightenment in Buddhism?

1/10/2023

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As a woman, whose entire life has been devoted to the Spirit and the unseen powers of the Universe, I have been dismayed by some of the antiquated views on the ability of women to be enlightened.

In some world religions, such as Svetambar Jains, women don’t have a chance of getting off the wheel of birth and death until they are reborn as a man. They were reborn as women as a result of being deceitful in a former life and have to work like crazy to prove themselves worthy of even being born a male next time around. One of the Jain sacred texts states:
“As the result of manifesting deception, a man in this world becomes a woman. As a woman, if her heart is pure, she becomes a man in this world.”

In the Aganna-Sutta from the Pali Canon, a record of the teachings of Gautama Buddha, imply that women are responsible for the downfall of the human race.

These attitudes toward women were imposed many, many centuries ago, when women were not seen as men’s equals. Historically they were seen as men’s possessions or as brood mares for ensuring the birth of a son. A girl birth was seen as a liability, especially when it came to the dowry for marriage.

In other religions such as Islam, women may not pray in public. They are also not permitted to pray during menstruation as they are not considered clean. Judaism also has constraints around women’s spiritual attainments with the concept of not being clean for the menstruating woman. If a woman is seen as not clean during the natural process that enables her to have a child, it brings a great stigma in terms of self-worth even if it not acknowledged.

Buddhism can then also be seen as a sexist religion in this way. Buddha himself was reluctant to take women as nuns. He was afraid of the various consequences that would arise if women were enrolled. The consequences he thought would have a negative impact on the society at that time, when women were held at little value. It was only upon the request of his stepbrother Ananda that Buddha agreed to take female followers into the worship practice.

And even when allowed to enter the practice, only women were required to follow the eight garudhammas. These are the “eight heavy restrictions” the male practitioners were not ordered to follow. These eight restrictions clearly kept monks at a much higher level than the nuns. One of these restrictions is:

"A nun who has been ordained even for a hundred years must greet even a newly-ordained monk by rising up from her seat and saluting with joined palms."

Therefore, women were not considered as complete entities in the old Buddhism of thousands of years ago. This attitude has still carried over to modern times in some Buddhist societies. Women's bodies are not considered fit to attain enlightenment and to become Buddha. There is a still a concept that women are not complete until they attain enlightenment when reborn as a man. The man’s form is required for completeness. The Bahudhatuka-sutta states that there could never be a female Buddha.

The psychological impact of this view is to keep women in a weaker and inferior position. Their morale is kept low because they think, “What’s the use? What if I get born as a woman again? How holy do I have to be before I get a chance at freedom from this bondage? There’s something wrong with being a woman.”

According to Ajahn Sujato, the early texts state that the first garudhamma, which states that every nun must bow to every monk, was instituted by the Buddha because of the customs of the time. But modern scholars doubt that the rule even originated with the Buddha.
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The rules were written only after the people started to become literate. And in ancient times, men were the first ones to learn to read and write. It was only much later that women got the chance to be educated because they were seen to be more at the level of the animals. These rules were written by a male-dominant society to favor that male Buddhists. It was one more power play over women.
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But now, the world has changed. Yet fundamentalist world religions have not changed. Their opinions and beliefs are based on what seemed practical many centuries ago. These beliefs do not apply today if they ever applied at all. As a deeply spiritual person, I know that we are not just these bodies, miraculous as they are. At the Soul level, we are beyond being men and women. The body and its endocrine and hormonal systems do not apply to the world of the Spirit. Any view about men being spiritually superior to women is not relevant when we know that women are capable of every task a man can do—and also produce children!
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Is constant unbearable physical pain the result of one’s karma?

10/1/2021

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Pain comes with the body and may not have anything to do with your karma. The body breaks down or has inflammation or it itches, it aches, it has stabbing pains. We can point to obvious physical causes: We stubbed our toe on the table, we cut ourselves, we got into an accident. On one level, pain is our friend because it is telling us that something needs to be attended to.

Maybe we didn’t eat as nutritionally as we could. Maybe we are careless or overindulge. We don’t want to blame all this on Karma. Karma isn’t like that anyway, giving out pain as punishment. It is more about how you face your life when you are ready to cross over. How much love did you show?

Humans often want all the pleasure of the body but we often don’t understand the yin/yang of pleasure and pain. Are we going to have all the pleasure and fun and none of the pain? That is not how the Universe manifests itself. Actually, people who cannot feel pain at all, die at an early age because they can bite their tongues or seriously injure themselves and just bleed to death because they have not sought help.
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Don’t blame yourself for your pain. You don’t need that added psychlogical burden to your discomfort. Separate the pain from the suffering and see the difference. You can’t choose the pain, but you can choose the suffering (or not to suffer).
Yet pain has nothing to do with who you really are, as a Soul. The Soul feels nothing of pain or distress. It is not physical.
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Is the pursuit of enlightenment less of a thing for women?

1/25/2021

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Enlightenment has been the center of my life since I was a small child. And I am a woman. At a young age, I also became aware that some religions don’t believe that women can achieve enlightenment or even be allowed into sections of an all-male heaven. I was perplexed.

Are you going to tell me that I won’t be allowed into the boys club of enlightened beings because I have been blessed with certain physical attributes or a certain distribution of hormones in my system?

Whether we have testosterone running through our veins or estrogen has nothing whatsoever to do with our Soul’s path. Those things belong to the body and determine whether we are male or female strictly for reproductive purposes.

From an enlightened point of view, we are not our bodies. They are the vehicles through which our Souls experience physical existence as part of their karmic journeys. It’s absurd to think that a male, regardless of how he behaved in this life, has a better chance of going to heaven than a female who has led a life of caring and spiritual pursuits.

One example is Digambar Jains. I am generally a big fan of Jains except on this one point. They believe that women are not capable of being enlightened. Svetambar Jains have opposite beliefs, believing that women are capable of enlightened and can become religious role models. But women, especially among Svetambar Jains, are believed to be deceitful. They believe that deceit is the foundation of their character. The reason they were reborn as a woman is because they were deceitful in a former life.

One of their sacred texts states:

“As the result of manifesting deception, a man in this world becomes a woman. As a woman, if her heart is pure, she becomes a man in this world.”

And men aren’t deceitful? That is my question. What does gender have to do with it? According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 93.% of the population in prisons are males and 6.7% are females. Is it not deceit to steal peoples lives through murder, theft, racketeering, con artistry, and other crimes? So please don’t tell me how holy the male population is, based on their criminal behavior.

According to a study entitled: Women in the Afterlife: The Islamic View as Seen from Quran and Tradition by Jane I. Smith and Yvonne Y. Haddad:

“The most basic relationship in Islamic society is not between a man and a woman but between a man and God: It is definitely not between woman and God.

. . .men, have, upon occasion, apparently used the assurance of their own place in eternity as a tool of control and of dominance.”
Yet other religious systems based on the Goddess, instead of a patriarchal punitive God, have deemed women as the leaders in enlightenment.
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Heaven, (which I have experienced as enlightenment here on earth) is not a physical place of luxury where women take a subservient role as they wait upon men. This is fun fantasy for the male ego. This fairytale is not based on spirituality or any of my own deeply-held experiences of enlightenment. It looks like a pride-based and greedy imaginary man-made creation, based on physical dominance, very similar to life on earth.
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What is the time period for a soul to reincarnate?

12/18/2019

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Every soul has its unique path of expansion and growth. Human concepts, such as time, do not apply to the Soul. The Soul is eternal and always exists in the eternal Now. So for anyone to determine how long it takes for a Soul to reincarnate is an exercise in absurdity. Time does not apply in this situation.

Each reincarnation depends on so many things. And if a Soul has finally reached the end of their karmic path it may not choose to reincarnate at all. It may choose to remain in pure cosmic consciousness or pure positive energy. Or it may be completely karmically clean and decide to reincarnate anyway to help others on their journeys. These are known as bodhisattvas.

Dr. Helen Wambach, Ph.D., was one of the earliest scientific researchers into past lives and reincarnation. She was the author of Reliving Past Lives and Life Before Life.

In Life Before Life Dr. Wambach described the results of hypnotizing 750 people and taking them to the time between their past and current lives. One of her findings was that the disembodied consciousness, or soul does, not enter the body until near birth. "The soul usually enters the body near birth, and has a choice of which fetus to enter. If one fetus is aborted, it is possible to choose another. In some cases, the soul who will occupy the fetus, is in contact with the soul of the mother, and can influence her decision regarding abortion."
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Dr. Wambach found that 89% of those hypnotized said they did not become part of the fetus until after six months of gestation. A large group said they did not join the fetus, or experience inside it, until just before or during the birth process. They existed fully conscious as an entity apart from the fetus and even after six months many reported being 'in' and 'out' of the fetal body.

"Many subjects reported that the onrush of physical sensations on emerging from the birth canal was disturbing and unpleasant. The soul exists in a quite different environment in the between-life state. The physical senses bring so much vivid input that the soul feels almost 'drowned' in light, cold air, sounds.She reported that the new-born baby feels cut off, diminished, alone compared to the between-life state. To be alive in a body is to be alone and unconnected. Perhaps we are alive to learn to break through the screen of the senses, to experience while in a body the transcendent self we truly are."
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Does every child have a pure soul?

11/24/2019

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Every child has a pure soul. Moreover, every adult has a pure soul as well. The soul is that part of us that is eternal. It has nothing to do with value judgements of good or evil and it cannot perform any actions. It just is. Insofar as we can contact this part of us, we find peace. If we are distracted by our thoughts and other outer attention-grabbing devices, we are not at true peace. But this has nothing to do with the soul.

The soul is purity and perfection itself, for it is in union with the harmony of the Universe. Again, it has nothing to do with cultural ideas of right or wrong, good or bad, but its milieu is eternal peace. What the mind compels us to do once we have entered a body cannot affect the soul, which always remains perfect and spotless.

But once we enter this body and become conditioned by all kinds of forces, including the mind’s hard-wired ego drives, we may think we are killing our souls. No. We are obscuring our souls. Our souls can never be killed. It is always there and we are covering it over with a lot of tape. Some people use masking tape, some duct tape, some super 88 electrical tape. But it is all a substance that obscures the soul.
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Sometimes we see people with black auras. That still does not relate to the purity of their souls. It relates to the karma they have accrued through harmful and deadly actions based on deliberate cruelty. Their souls remain pure and when they find their way to their souls one day, their harmful actions will cease.
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What is the relation between memory and karma?

10/11/2019

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Karma is about our actions in this and in other lifetimes. Most people don’t remember past lives because it is enough that we focus on this life. Many times we can’t even remember our actions in this lifetime. So memory and karma do not necessarily connect.

But there are times when we remember our actions in this life that make us feel uncomfortable about ourselves. We know those actions accrued karma that needs to be cleaned up. For example, I remember when I was about four years old. I was cruel to another child on the playground. That has stayed with me my entire life. It was unnecessarily mean and even to this day I regret it. So now I go out of my way to not make that mistake again.
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I can also remember times when I was charitable and forgiving as a little child. Those were actions that generated good karma. I was kind to a child who felt she was an outcast. I comforted a crying child. So even though those actions were more than a half a century ago, I still feel good about them.
The only connection between karma and memory would be that memories help us to refrain from repeating actions that bring bad karma. And memories can also remind us of how good it feels to do kind things for others and ourselves.
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Is blessed and lucky the same thing?

9/13/2019

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Being blessed is a state of grace that lasts a lifetime. Being lucky is just of the moment.

If you win the lottery, you are lucky. But so many people who win the lottery end up worse off than they began. Uncanny numbers of people who won the lottery have committed suicide, ended up broke, or were the targets of murder plots. A few of them are noted here:

Curse of the lottery: Tragic stories of big jackpot winners

It makes us wonder if luck is really “lucky” after all. The money isn’t earned and often the winner doesn’t understand finances. That is one of the reasons they bought the ticket to begin with. They thought that luck would bring them what they didn’t have the confidence in themselves to earn.
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Being blessed feels like peace and satisfaction that comes from within. It has more to do with talents and abilities, gifts that are special or brilliant. These are not necessarily earned but they can be cultivated. Lots of people are blessed with talents and just let them go to waste. But those who embrace and develop their blessings find the highest fulfillment, for they are the ones who have given so much to others.
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    As a spiritual guide, healer, and lecturer, I have had the privilege to touch the lives of people who long to understand their higher selves. Please leave questions and comments for me. Hope to see you often here!

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