“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

This past week I went on a little trip to Geoje Island, which was about a two hour ride from my home in Busan. During the trip I made my way over to a few temples, here’s a few of the shots that I liked.

On this trip I was limited in the shots I wanted to take because I only brought along one of my lenses, which was a Nikon 55-200mm Zoom lens. Hope you like them.

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The Ultimate Adventure

“God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.” – William Shakespeare

Recently I was going trough some of my old notebooks filled with my thoughts, notes, and ideas. Here is a short entry that never made it to my blog. Hope it inspires you to uncover many of the hidden mysteries that lie in your inner world……

Man was not created equal, he has created to be unique. You are unique and unlike anyone else on this planet. You have something valuable to contribute to the larger whole, but unless you realize your true nature, you will remain unfulfilled.  You will not explore your innate magnificent potential.

Life is dynamic, constantly changing and renewing itself in each passing moment, yet most people resist change because they are more acquainted with the known and comfortable. No matter how uncomfortable it may actually be, the fact that they know it helps them take a certain comfort in it.

The way you will become valuable is through your experiences in the new and unknown. Your own unique experiences will give you the perspective to shed light and give a new understanding that may benefit those around you.

Why is it so hard  for people to actually change?

• We believe and are identified to our thoughts that create our self image. Our self image belongs to society, we have to wait for society to change or accept what we want to become.
• We only blindly believe and don’t know yet how to trust ourselves. We have yet to realize our essence.
• Trusting yourself is expressing your individuality, beliefs are shortcuts. They take the responsibility away from you. You don’t need to think for yourself because someone has already done it for you.
• People are focused on going outward into the world instead of going inward. Life is essentially meaningless, but this is why it’s beautiful, because your the one who will ultimately give it meaning. So you must go inward (meditation) to find any real meaning in your life.

How Can You Change To Find What’s Really Valuable?

• You need to dis-identify form your mind.
• Through a spiritual practice like meditation you will create immense inner space so that you can question and see the reality of your thoughts.  You will see how insubstantial they really are. This will help you remain fluid and unburden you from many of the false ideas that you carry.
• Having a calm mind helps you gently sense and feel your presence in the moment. Being present in the moment you can respond much more intelligently to life’s challenges.

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Hello and welcome to another installment of this week in pictures. Spring is finally here and  I couldn’t be happier. The last few day’s the weather in Busan has been really delightful.

It’s been warm enough to wear shorts and that really brings a big smile to my face. On wendsday it was election day here in Korea, so me and Ina took advantage by going on a nice little walk near Songdo Beach.

Here are a few of my favorite shots. Hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed taking them.

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“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” ? Oscar Wilde

I Can See Clearly Now The Rain Has Gone

Today I would like to share a little story from the life of one of the most enigmatic men of the last hundred years. This man is the often misunderstood mystic hailing from Russia, George Ivonvitch Gurdjieff. This short story has a significant insight into our daily affairs and our psyche.

When Gurdjieff was a little boy, his father, while lying on his deathbed called Gurjieff to his side to impart some last words of wisdom. Gurdjieff’s father was a poor man, but he said that what he was about to share with him helped to live like the wealthiest man on earth. He asked him to pay very close attention and to please repeat everything back to him, because only then could he die a happy man. He wanted to be sure that the young Gurdjieff would remember the advice that his own father had passed down to him from time immemorial.

Gurdjieff’s father advised him that whenever anyone insulted, annoyed, or irritated him, to just remain cool, to not react, to simply tell the person that he has received his message and please give him 24 hours to think it over. Then he would come back to try and resolve the situation.

What is the significance of this advice? Well, one of the things you will discover is just how insignificant most disputes are, when you just give your self the space to see things more clearly. In twenty four hours time, you should be able to see the situation more like an impartial observer.

In a heated argument, people become totally identified to their emotions, to their egos, thereby they act in a totally unconscious manner. By taking twenty four hours you create a distance from the situation, you become unidentified from it. Being unidentified you have the clarity to look into the situation. You may see that there wasn’t any problem at all, but it would have easily become a problem if you had identified yourself to it at that moment. And if there really is a problem and you are to blame for it, you now have the opportunity to thank the person for making you aware of it. You where able to see the situation much more objectively. With this objective view in mind, you may now act in a responsible manner. Responsible, meaning you respond with conscious actions. When you react, you are only half conscious. Only after the fact do you realize what you have done. Often times with disastrous consequences, that we may have to pay for, for the rest of our lives.

Identification is man’s only sin, as Gurdjieff would say. Once you experience this insight on the practical level of your human affairs, you need to observe it within the subtlety of your inner psychological world. You need to be able to see what it means to be in an identified state of being, and also see how it feels to be unidentified to something, yet remaining aware and alert. You will sense the difference in the quality and state of your consciousness. In one state you act intelligently in the other you simply react like a robot.

You learn to see the importance in dis-identifying your self from your body, thoughts (much of which is just your imagination), and emotions. In learning to distance yourself (meditation, self observation, yoga) you create the necessary space for proper self observation. Through proper self observation you gain a deep understanding of yourself. You start to understand what it means to be “self” conscious, which in other words means being conscious of your self. Simply being aware of your presence from moment to moment.

People wrongly believe that they already possess this state of being. We wrongly believe that we are conscious of our selves.

Seeing The Madness of The Mind

Try this little experiment: For 15 minutes, try and remain present to yourself, just be here now, feel all the sensations in your body, but as soon as a thought arises in your mind, just jot it down on paper, don’t censor it. Don’t worry you don’t need to show anyone, you can trash the paper when your done.

Okay,…now are you afraid? Does this resemble more the mind of a crazy person? This is just to show that the mind is madness, also to show you how each thought is completely independent of the previous thought, but because we are always looking for associations we give it the illusion of continuity. We give meaning to random thoughts that have no connection.

All these thoughts arise from the various personalities we have, that are shaped by our likes and dislikes, many of them only imagined. If you study your thoughts you can see how they belong to several distinct voices. Yet we believe it is always one personality, this is how you are able to rationalize anything.

This will show you how fragmented we are, and I feel our current fast paced lives are making us increasingly fragmented. The more fragmented we become, the more contradictions we live with, the more contradictions, the more unconscious we become. You will then actually see how much of our day is spend inattentively, how easily we forget our “selves”. If we really possessed consciousness we would have the will power to place our total attention on anything without loosing our sense of self. Your simple feeling of “I am”, your acknowledgment of your existence in the moment.

Going Beyond Emotional Suffering

By constantly observing your self you realize how poorly we really do understand ourselves. Just in the way you are able to see others and judge their actions objectively, you slowly start to see yourself in the same manner. In seeing yourself like you see others, you will expose many of the things which you unconsciously choose to hide. For many of us it is a terribly painful experience to bring our “faults” to the light and no longer run away from them. This is when you learn what it means to voluntary suffer. You see that this is the only way to heal the emotional scars that we carry within us.

We are a slaves to all the various thoughts, moods, and emotions that are constantly changing within us. Our attention is so easily taken wherever the wind blows, all because we become identified with whatever comes within our field of observation. In the act of observation you forget about the observer.

When you learn to be more mindful, more meditative, you will learn to remain aware of the observer and the observed simultaneously, this means you remain unidentified with the objects of your observation. If someone comes and insults you, you remain present to yourself and just passively observe what buttons this person has pushed and the reactions that want you to act on them. Clearly seeing the thoughts of anger rise up within me I choose not to become identified and thus they lose their grip on me and I remain cool.

Developing the right attitude is key, because at first you will see that our emotions are much faster then our thoughts. If someone hits an emotional nerve, the speed is so fast that you will still react in-spite of your new understandings and observations. At this point, it’s important to still observe how you act out your reactions. You will become more intimate with the causes. Later on, through your constant watching, you will be able to stay ahead of your emotional outbursts.

Next time someone comes and insults you, try to remember to stay cool. Take a deep breath. Bring your awareness to your breath. Let the person say what they need to say, give them your full attention, but don’t forget your “self”. Thank them for expressing their opinions, and then tell them you need some time to let everything sink in and you will get back to them tomorrow.

Now, in the meantime just observe anything that arises within you. Don’t judge, just see, like your watching clouds in the sky float by, but don’t give them any importance. Just learn to stay aware of the witness who is aware of the thoughts. Realize that who you really are is just the pure awareness that is aware of your thoughts and not the thoughts themselves. The problem is people have become so strongly identified to their thoughts that they now solely derive their entire sense of self from their endless streams of thoughts.

The mind is just an endless random stream of thoughts. Most people have never experienced the gap between their thoughts. The gap is you. This keeps you trapped in time. The moment is always in the eternal now. Thoughts simply being a response from memory are from the past. Seeing the world solely through the filter of your thoughts forms a slight haze on your vision. You don’t see reality as it is. If you sincerely inquire into this you will realize how insubstantial and empty thoughts really are. Yet your whole life and identity is built on a foundation that is largely only in your imagination. Thoughts only live in the past and project themselves into the future, but your simple awareness always resides in the present moment. Your true identity is beyond words and any mental label.

The more you dis-identify yourself from your thoughts, the more aware and responsible you will become. You will see that how you interact with the world will completely change. You will be able to handle life’s situations much more intelligently.

Next time you find yourself in a difficult situation, just take a deep breath, and remember to give yourself 24 hours. I am confident you will save your self much unnecessary suffering and will gain a deeper insight into yourself. Thank you for reading my post. Please share any personal insights that you may have in the comments below or send me a message.

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“Travelling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.” - Lisa St. Aubin De Teran

Been Around The World

This existence is such an incredible mystery, one of the things that baffles me the most, is that some how many of us fail to acknowledge what a miracle this cosmic play really is. You would think that every moment were alive, would be enough to keep us in a state of constant amazement.

One of the reasons that we end up taking life for granted, is that we become insensitive to life. Because we live through memory, through our conditioning’s, we take life, which is dynamic in nature and turn it into something static. We try to make life certain, when uncertainty is it’s basis. We end up taking the color out of life.

The moment you become open to life, you begin to see what a wonderful planet we live on. Our home is a place of such amazing diversity. One of my favorite ways to experience and marvel at our planets creations, is through travel. Traveling can really awaken your child like wonder.

My Top Reasons To Travel

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson

Below, are just a few of the reasons why I love to travel:

1. Self Discovery/Personal Growth: Without a doubt the number one reason why I love to travel and live abroad is because of the opportunity it gives me to grow as a human being. Through travel I first become aware of the spiritual dimension. Through travel I tested my assumptions, challenged my beliefs, overcame my fears, and broke free from many of my social conditioning’s.

Here are a few posts I wrote on how traveling can help you grow:

• How Traveling Can Help You Understand Me, Myself, and I
• Discovering Yourself Through Travel

2.Language: I find language and all the ways we as humans communicate fascinating. Being able to communicate with people from other cultures in their native tongue is such a rewarding experience. Obviously if you want to learn a language, the best way is to move there. Speaking only one language is terribly limiting, I would encourage everyone to at least pick up one other language. It really can open up a whole new world. Yes, it can be very difficult learning a new language, but with the right attitude and plan it can be done. My friend Benny has a great guide on Language Hacking (aff. link).

3. Street Food: Food is a huge part of any culture and if you want to try a country’s local food, street food is where it’s at. The best taco’s (besides my mother’s) I have eaten have not been in a nice sit down restaurant, but out of a tiny taco truck on the side of a bustling street. When eating street food be ready with the fact that eventually you will need to make an emergency trip to the bathroom. It’s always a good idea to carry some antacid tablets.

4. Sexy Foreign Woman: I love woman, no I am not a womanizer, I just think woman are one the universes greatest creations. I love the female energy, woman are generally more sensitive, more receptive, they are more in touch with their hearts. I think it’s safe to say that if woman ruled the world, we would live in a world where war did not exist, it would be a more loving society. I appreciate  and respect all the different woman of the world. Going to other countries I enjoy observing how the woman carry themselves. It’s great seeing the different hair styles, smiles, skin colors, eye colors, complexions, attitudes, body types, and fashion.

5. Beautiful Views: A beautiful view has the power to stop the movement of your mind, in that moment you are timeless, you sense how magnificent this planet is. One of my favorite views was from zip lining through the Costa Rican “Cloud” rain forest, it reminded me of what an incredibly rich, alive, and green planet we inhabit. Another scene that will forever be burned into my mind, is from when I was having a nice romantic dinner and had the Prague Castle and Charles Bridge as the backdrop. That evening felt magical, nothing beat’s a beautiful view and having someone special to enjoy it with.

6. Supermarkets: One of my favorite things Is to see what a country’s people eats and buys. You can learn a lot about a country by just roaming it’s supermarkets. I also love trying a country’s local candies and snack’s, but I will take a rain check on the Korean squid jerky. Man, they really love squid here.

7. Local Music: Music is the universal language, a good tune can make anyone move. I enjoy going into local bars around town to check out the live bands playing. It’s also a great way to meet new people.

8. Culture: I love observing the differences with how people live their day to day lives. I am fascinated by the the traditions, whether they are interesting, absurd, or annoying. There is much to be learned by observing a country’s traditions. Each country has it’s own set of positives and negatives and I love to experience them all.

9. People: I love connecting with interesting people. In traveling, many times you will have an adventurous attitude and usually will be more outgoing. In my travels I have met some amazing people, who in some way shape or form, helped me grow as a person. When traveling don’t be afraid of connecting with people who appear to be different than you. Just remember, you can relate to anyone, because after all, you are a human being.

Travel is a way of life, a way of being, and a way of experiencing. Freedom from the known is the mantra of my blog and traveling is one of the easiest way’s to step into the land of the unknown. These were just a few of my reasons for traveling, what are yours?

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(video from my recent trip to Thailand)

“When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep, and you’re never really awake.”~Fight Club

How To Get Deep Sleep

Aww sleeeeeep, for me nothing beats a good 8 hours of deep restful sleep, except for maybe a nice meditation session (conscious sleep). Deep sleep is blissful and its effects on the body and mind are tremendous. But in this day and age, deep sleep is truly a luxury.

Never in the history of humanity have we had so many people who suffer from insomnia and sleeping disorders.

Why Do We Suffer From a Lack of Sleep?

Think of your brain as a computer, one which you feed with inputs in the form of outside impressions (what your physical senses register), and inner impressions (thoughts, feelings). Since your mind works linearly just like a computer, it try’s to process all the days inputs, and when it becomes overloaded passes a lot of that work to your subconscious mind.

The more attention (awareness) you give each impression without becoming identified to it, the better you’re able to processes it without leaving a trace in your system.

The problem is our attention is very poor, so many of the impressions we receive on a daily basis are processed only partially. Our minds continue to work on lingering thoughts well after we have first thought them. Someone comes and insults us and we keep replaying thoughts and images of anger hours after the incident even occurred.

Many of our thoughts are put in queue; this creates a kind of a mental bottle neck. The mental item’s that where suppressed throughout the day then become the content of our dreams.

Dreams are therefore the continuation of the mental activity that we had throughout the day. The content of our dreams is largely from all the thoughts we repressed or did not process fully; it is the minds unfinished business. Dreams are a way for the mind to finish its work.

The mind will not be calm and relaxed (silent) unless it processes all the data that it was fed. So it is essential that we learn to be mindful in our lives, to live totally, by giving each task at hand the purity of our attention. When we live mindfully we deal with things totally, so no need to think about it later.

When you tell someone, “ hey…let me think about it”, immediately this thought is thrown in your minds ever-growing to do list. It becomes part of the silent undercurrent to our mental activity, very subtlety sapping our minds energy.

This is why many of us have a hard time  keeping a clear train of thought and become distracted so easily. We don’t have the sufficient energy to remain alert and attentive.

This end of day exercise that I am about to share is intended to help you clear and process all of your day’s activity, clearing any lingering thoughts from your system.

This will help you fall into deep rejuvenating sleep, because your mind will be free from the compulsion to continue processing all of its unfinished work.

The second aspect is to help you become aware of your witnessing presence. Living from your witnessing presence means you act and see the world from the deepest part of your being.

A place where you can observe your thoughts without judging, just remaining aloof to your thought process. If you can remain alert yet passive, you will see that your thoughts won’t be carried into your sleep and manifest themselves as dreams.

As many of us very well know, having too much mental activity during sleep causes us to wake up tired even if we technically slept 7-8 hours. Your body was never really totally resting, it still continued to work.

Technique To Help You Sleep Better

At night, before going to bed in the theater of your mind,  rewind your day just like a film strip. Start from where you are now then go back 10 minutes, then half an hour, then 1 hour, all the way until you make it to the morning when you woke up. Replay as much as you can, you will get better with practice.

Do this like you are watching a movie, but don’t judge the movie. As your replaying it make it as vivid as possible , try and intuit everything that surrounds each moment, but all from the perspective of an outsider. You’re on the outside looking in, you see and feel everything but you don’t get involved.

This will be hard if you had an intense situation, you will want to judge the scene. You may have had a fight with your girl friend and will want to analyze and rationalize what happened, try your best to not do it.

Just by seeing the scene clearly you will gain insight into your experience. You may see how silly it was for you to react in a certain way. Seeing it is enough, move on. Just by observing something without labeling it as good or bad will change your relationship to it.

This exercise can lead you into deep restful sleep; because it helps you process and evaporate all the unprocessed thoughts, which become your nightly dreams. Your dreams are simply a continuation of your minds daily activity.

Increase Your Awareness To Go Back In Time

Going from morning to evening most do it without any awareness, going in reverse will begin to sharpen your awareness. You will see how much of our day is spent inattentively.

The more you practice this the better you will be able to recall your whole day down to the smallest details. You will be able to see how your brain recorded every single moment of your day, even if at the time your minds attention was lost in its imagination.

Everyday your actions represent your whole past. If you start rewinding your day everyday (do it for one month) and can see clearly that you where comfortable and deeply at ease with the day, you will see you can go back further in your life. You can then go back year by year and see it passively and detached, in the process you will see that any of your past memories that are causing you conflict will begin to be healed.

Essentially what this exercise does is that it assists you in awakening to your witnessing presence. If you learn to become a witness to your life, many things will be revealed to you. Witnessing is the key of keys and the essence of all the great religious teachings. The more awareness you infuse into your life, the more you will actually live your life. Awareness is life.

If you have any personal insights you would like to add, please join the conversation below and leave your comments.

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 “One kind word can warm three winter months.” -Japanese Proverb

Seeing a new part of the world, and experiencing all it has to offer is one of the greatest sources of excitement for me.

In my latest adventure, me and my lovely girlfriend Ina visited my best friend from high school, Charley, in the land of ramen, sushi, and the rising sun. Sapporo, Japan would be the start of our Japanese journey.

Ina and I arrived at the New Chitose Airport around 3:00 p.m. and quickly made our way over to the JR train ticket counter. We purchased two train tickets to Sapporo Station for around 2200 Yen. The trip into Sapporo took 45 minutes. When we arrived we quickly scanned all the signs pointing us to “Stellar Place,” as my friend Charley, his girlfriend Maki, and brother Andrew eagerly awaited our arrival in-front of Starbucks.

As soon as I saw Charley, it felt like old times. He’s one of my few friends who it doesn’t matter how long it was since I last saw him, we quickly pick up where we left off. After doing a quick round of girlfriend introductions, we made our way to a taxi. I was really impressed with Charley’s level of Japanese. He said a few incomprehensible sounds to the driver, used several hand gestures, and a few minutes later we were in front of our hotel. Good job Charley! I actually didn’t know how good his Japanese was, but it got the job done, and later on I would find that my boy has indeed been practicing.

Our hotel room was really nice. It had two levels and a nice view of the city. We dropped off our bags and quickly made it over to our first Japanese pub for dinner and drinks. The place was unique. It was four stories tall with the hallways lined up with cozy little private cubicles. We placed our shoes in little lockers which had big wooden keys that reminded me of my old elementary school bathroom passes. Then it was chow time.

The food was delicious, my favorite was the yakitori made from several bite-sized pieces of chicken meat, skewered on a bamboo skewer and grilled, usually over charcoal. We also had all-you-can-drink for the time slot we reserved, so the big group we were with did their best to get their moneys worth. Many of you beer drinkers out there are familiar with one of Japans most popular exports, Sapporo Beer. I had a few, they tasted like..umm…beer. It was good times all around.

After dinner we made our way over to a Karaoke bar. If you have ever been to South Korea or Japan, you quickly realized how much they love to Karaoke. It’s one of their favorite social past times. I’m a terrible singer, but when In Rome you do as the Romans. I had two songs in me. First, I apologize to Montel Jordan for breaking his promise never to come wack on the old school track. Next was my awful attempt at Blink 182′s, “All The Small Things.” After that, I was done with the mic. Charley and Andrew kept us going with some classics that all of us could sing along to with them.

We were fortunate to have made it on the last weekend of the yearly Snow Festival. After Karaoke we went to check out the hundreds of amazing snow sculptures that spring up in Odori Park, the grounds at Tsudome, and the main street in Susukino. Ina had never seen so much snow in her life and also had never been as cold, so it was bitter sweet for her. Me being raised in Colorado felt right at home. It was a good first day in Sapporo.

The following morning, we did a little shopping and walking around the city. It was my first opportunity to try Sapporo ramen. The ramen in Sapporo, which is almost as famous as the beer, was soooo delicious. If you ever go to Sapporo, you need to make your way to the Ramen Alley in Susukino. In Ramen Alley you will find 17 traditional ramen shops crammed into a small walk way four tourists wide. It can be tough trying to decide which one to enter. The bowl I got had a soy-sauce based broth with savory ramen noodles, a big piece of pork and some good veggies added for good measure. It was a meal which satisfied my belly, unlike the Cup Noodles I pop in the microwave back home.

We then packed up our bags into Charley’s car, a cute little Nissan Cube, and started our journey to the Ski Resort of Furano. Mother nature, however, had other plans. We quickly found ourselves in a serious blizzard and had to cancel our plans to Furano. We spent the night in a little town, who’s name I don’t remember as my Japanese is non existent.

At our hotel, we decided it was best if we just skipped out on Furano and went to Charley’s home in Rubeshibe. Rubeshibe is a small town of about 8,000 people and much colder than Saporro. As Ina said, “how do people even live here?” I began to ponder her question. I had about 5 layers of clothes on and was still freezing. Once in Charley’s home it took about an hour before his trusty heater got us to a comfortable temperature.

The next nine days we went snowboarding, ate ton’s of delicious food, went to a Japanese style spa, played basketball with Charleys high-school students, and ate more ice cream (Ina loves ice cream) than we could shake a stick at.

All in all Japan was awesome. What made it awesome? In short, the people are what made Japan amazing. This was the first time I took an extended trip with a girlfriend to meet a friend in another country.

Being able to visit an old dear friend halfway across the world was a great traveling experience. While meeting new people on a trip is usually on my agenda, it was nice to see some familiar faces in unfamiliar places. Having my best friend as tour guide was definitely a plus, as it allowed us to see a side of Japan that most tourists never get to experience.

So for any of you fellow travelers out there, if you are fortunate to have any close friends scattered around the world, don’t forget to keep in touch. You never know when you may be able to pay them a visit.

If your’e planning on visiting and staying with a friend in a foreign country, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1. Be easy: It’s not easy hosting friends. It takes a lot of time, energy, and money. Do whatever you can to make it easy on them and not become a burden.

2. Don’t have unrealistic expectations: Your’e a guest, so go with the flow and take it all in. Communicate beforehand about what your plans are and get on the same page as your friends. Having as many details sorted out before you leave will only make things easier.

3.  Show your appreciation: Bring a small gift. We brought Korean couples-style cow pajamas for Charley and Maki. I think Maki was more excited about the gift than Charley, although he did comment on how comfy they were. I thought they looked adorable together.

4. Be flexible: Things happen, so be ready to adjust your plans accordingly. As long as you have a good attitude things will work themselves out.

5. Be clean: As a guest in someone else’s home, don’t be a slob. Clean up after yourself and do your part to keep things clean.

6. Don’t be cheap: Your’e on vacation and seeing an old friend, so do as many things as you can. Budget accordingly.

Here is a video and a few pictures from our trip, hope you enjoy.

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“Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.” – Bruce Lee

Expanding Your Consciousness

For me, the most uncomfortable feeling in the world, is the feeling of stagnation, of feeling restricted. Just as the greatest feeling, is the feeling of expansion, of growth. Within all of us there is something that longs to be boundless.

Expansion is all we want. If your focus in life is money, love, traveling, whatever it may be, you want to expand it. We hate being restricted in any way shape or form.

There’s something inside us that wants to go beyond boundaries, this is because it is “non-physical”, it can’t be contained by boundaries. But when we only identify to the physical world, the world of matter, we fail to acknowledge our non-physical presence. We then live a life of struggle, of mental anguish, because the essential part of our being is not being touched. Life is not perceived in it’s proper light.

You will only start to become at “ease” with life, when you start getting a taste for the non-physical. When I realized that life was not as it appeared to be, that I was experiencing this reality in a very limited way, my search began into why this was so.

I then devoted my life to learning about myself. I moved abroad to focus on myself without having the day to day influence of my family, friends, and society to interfere. I spent my time: practicing meditation, learning about tantra, kriya yoga, the human psyche, I read and practiced anything that would deepen my understanding. As my awareness to perceive reality expanded, moments of inexplicable beauty would penetrate my being to the core. My inner space felt so expansive, felt free, boundless. When you abide in this space of boundlessness, life just feels good. You walk on air, you are graceful.

Your perception must go beyond the five senses, only then the non-physical will enter your life, you will understand what it means to have a spiritual life. Your senses are designed for the material world and how we perceive reality with the five senses is just an approximation to reality. Used together they are the best tools we have. The problem is we have become identified to them, we don’t question the reality that they present to us, they keep us from experiencing a higher reality.

“All that is seen is You, Lord, the expansion of the expanse. Says Nanak, the Guru has removed my doubts; I recognize God in all.”- Sri Guru Granth Sahib

But if you are able to go beyond the senses, even just a glimpse, you will then be able to sense the immaterial energy that animates the whole world. Every object in your physical world is just a manifestation of the same energy. You begin to understand that every form that appears in reality can only exist because of the formless, it’s the basis of reality. Sure the table in your kitchen feels solid, and we experience it as such, but in reality it is just energy that is vibrating at such a slow frequency that it feels solid. Nothing is permanent, even a stone is changing each moment, it’s just so slow we can’t perceive it, in a few million years it will have completely changed form.

Unless you do the right thing, right things will not happen to you. If you want to penetrate into the formless world, you need to do the right things, meditation is one way in. But before meditation is allowed to happen, we need to get our house in order. A huge part of this is existentially understanding how our minds become attached to sensual pleasures, how these attachments cause us to have endless desires.

This is why Buddha said that one must be desire-less, because a mind buzzing with desires, cant be silent, to make contact with the formless dimension the mind must become utterly quiet. Buddha’s teaching of being desire-less doesn’t really mesh well with people, they don’t see the practicality of it, they don’t understand how it can make their lives any better.

There is nothing wrong with having and doing things, the problem is our psychological attachment to inner and outer objects. You just need to have enough clarity to see the whole process of how your mind becomes attached to these objects. If you can remain aware and unidentified, you can use and appreciate the objects without becoming a slave to them. If you are not able to remain aware to yourself, to your presence, you need to deeply inquire why this is so. You need to find out what you can about it.

One Love

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” – Albert Einstein

When the mind becomes silent what’s left is an awareness that is free to perceive the subtle dimensions of existence. You realize that there really isn’t an inner and an outer, that in reality it is all just one huge ocean of consciousness. This is why in the scared texts like the Upanishads they declare “that you are that”. Meaning, that you are the very existence itself, the ultimate reality, but this will not have any real significance to people if it remains a purely intellectual understanding. Your identification to the body and mind gives you the feeling that you exist separately and independently from other people, from the world.

When your mental activity becomes less, and your awareness grows, this awareness allows you to rise above and not be identified to your thinking processes. Sooner or later through diligent work on oneself, you will begin to have many mystical experiences, such as feeling the boundaries between you and the world melt. In this deep feeling of oneness you realize what Jesus meant, when he declared that “god is love”. In this oneness you don’t see the other as separate from you, you recognize yourself in the other. How then could you hurt the other?

The more mindfulness, more awareness, that you cultivate in your life, the more you will understand what your “true” needs are in life. Which for me where surprisingly few. Not being pulled in hundreds of contradicting directions, allows your inner space to merge with the outer space, thus you feel this sublime feeling of expansiveness. Expansion is life, is creation, is you.

If you know yourself, you know everything worth knowing. God speed my friend.

I enjoyed writing this for you, it surely was not a waste of my time, so I sincerely hope it is not a waste of yours…what are your thoughts on this post?…join the conversation below……thank you and be well….

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