There was a Zen monk skilled in accessing the state of stillness, and a warlord who came to the monk and said, “Teach me of hell and heaven”, and the monk responded, “you stupid, ugly idiot, how could a fool like you understand hell and heaven?”
The warlord, enraged by his insult, he lifted his great sword, ready to strike the monk’s head off, and the monk said, “That’s hell”
The warlord paused. How could the monk be willing to sacrifice his life to teach him?
Ah, his heart melted open wide to the monk. Aah. And the monk said, “and that is heaven”.
We can see that these are states of consciousness, Heaven and Hell. Whether we’re life enhancing or life diminishing, we can change our state of consciousness. Our states of consciousness are made of our thinking, our emotions, our body and our spirit. And if we shift one of these, we shift all of them.
We can bring forward a particular thought, a thought of beauty or a memory, that evokes a sense of beauty in us, or happiness of love. We can actually shift it, and we can also change our body, that changes our consciousness. So we have this power as humans to choose our own state of consciousness from within.
Why is this helpful?
Well, it’s actually our consciousness, our state of consciousness, that is the primary influence on how we affect others and how we affect life around us. The most important thing, it’s more our consciousness with which we do things, than actually what we do.
So for example, we can bring appreciation even when we’re being challenged. We can appreciate something about the challenge. We’re going to learn something from this. We’re going to grow something, perhaps. Or we can bring forward a sense of compassion, like the great warrior did in that story. Open heartedness or generosity.
All these are ways of evoking an expansive state of consciousness, state of heaven, if you like, when we come into for example, when we come into peace consciousness, then we’re going to be bringing peace into our world.
So in Earth Wisdom Teachings, we spend a lot of time training to do this. On the training courses I’m going to be running in the autumn and next year spring, Evocative Leadership Mastery, Cave of the Ancients, Vehoma.
All of these we’re going to be learning how to command our state. We’re going to be training ourselves to command our state. I’d love to hear more of how you are able to do that. What you think of this in the comments? Please make a comment below if you feel so moved. Thank you very much for watching.