Galactic Free Press Original

How the spiritual community becomes so fragmented

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On the surface it may not seem like the spiritual community is fractured at all, but if you look a little deeper there's very little real unity. I've worked with many of the spiritual teachers, gurus, messiahs, channelers, religious leaders, all the self-proclaimed spiritual authorities and I've noticed they don't get along with each other very well at all. Publicly it's usually all smiles, but when you put them together privately it's something resembling high school drama. These are people who are used to being surrounded by people who automatically believe what they say. When they're out of that element, their beliefs get challenged by other people with strong beliefs, and this almost always results in conflict.

Take channeling for instance and all the people who claim to have "behind the scenes" information. If these are reliable sources of information, their stories should confirm each other, shouldn't they? More often that not, they directly conflict with each other, and there's an excellent example of this with the recent Malaysian airliner disappearance. I counted at least 5 different stories of what happened, and I watched as people fought over which one was correct on Facebook.

Discovering Truth for Yourself

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We don't want anybody to be dependent upon the Galactic Free Press for truth in their life. If that has happened, we're doing you a great disservice. If you put your faith in something outside, if you rely upon someone or something else to tell you the truth, you're really disempowering yourself. We're not kidding when we say every Human Being Is God, and not the religious "gods" created by the mind, but a Living Expression of the Divine.

People are terrified of this though, it's a level of personal responsibility that few want to accept. It's much easier to let society or some spiritual guru tell you how you're supposed to live your life. Much more simple that way and if it doesn't work out, you get to blame something else for the way your own life is. It's very comfortable and convenient, and it's most likely the way you've been taught to behave by society.

What if you gave all that up right now? You could, in every moment exists the possibility of radical change, though most have an abundance of fears that still hold them back. Monetary worries, familial worries, as if fear is the main motivating factor in life and Love is just some luxury. People believe these changes are so difficult and while that's probably true, it's not the difficulty that really holds you back. It's the belief that you're not strong enough to face those difficulties.

The Most Beautiful Illusion

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Here at the Galactic Free Press we normally focus on breaking down illusions, but today I'm going to defend an illusion. Illusions are not evil or wrong, all that stuff is an illusion in itself, it's just that issues arise when you believe an illusion is real. In fact I would say this is responsible for all the mental suffering on the Planet.

Look at a horror movie, the actors and the people watching know it's a movie, they're well aware it's an illusion. To get more emotionally involved, they pretend it's not an illusion for a while, but part of them still knows it's all an illusion. Now imagine how traumatic it would be for everyone if they forgot it was all pretend! A little change in perception can transform fun & games into a very frightening experience, and vice versa.

So which is "the most beautiful illusion"? Well from my perspective it's forgiveness. You may not have thought about forgiveness as an illusion before, but look at it, what exactly are you forgiving? If you forgive another, do you change something in them? Something may change in them as a result of the forgiveness, but that's up to them, not you. When you forgive another, what you're really doing is transforming something within yourself.

What You Believe Creates Your Illusion

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This message may ruffle some feathers since I'm going to directly address a very popular new age belief, and I'm not planning on being very nice to it. The kind of people who don't want their beliefs to be challenged are the kind of people who cling to fragile and weak belief systems. These are the people who need to challenge their beliefs the most if they want to grow and evolve. Beware of getting too comfortable while walking the path, if that's the case you've probably stopped walking. Everything you believe needs to really be looked at, not just unconsciously accepted.

First, I'll talk about in what sense the belief that "your beliefs create your reality" is true. For most people, there's no clear difference between their personal illusion and the larger reality. As far as they can tell, their personal illusion is reality. That's all that they can see, so their beliefs, which do shape their personal illusion, appear to affect all of "reality". So long as you equate "your reality" with "your separate illusion", then yes, your beliefs create "your reality". Personally, it seems a bit insane to me to not make any distinction between reality and illusion, which is the denial of reality. I wouldn't pretend those terms are interchangeable, those two are as different as different can be.

When I'm talking about reality, I'm talking about God and Love, I'm talking about the much bigger Universe that goes far beyond the tiny human world. There is no reality separate from God, yet your beliefs can create the illusion that you're separate from God. This reveals the illusionary nature of the mind and its beliefs. Reality doesn't need any beliefs to be witnessed, it's easiest to see when the mind is silent and the Being Is Present.

The Dangers of Spiritual Elitism

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While this isn't true for everyone, there's a kind of elitism fairly common in spiritual groups. Some people have this illusion that they know so much more than everyone else, and this makes them "better". There's these loaded terms like "awakened" and "enlightened", and while these terms do mean something, the people who like to brag about being such are usually neither awakened nor enlightened. They've only taken the first few steps down that path. The ego likes to compare itself to others to gain a false sense of self-worth, and when they look at the sleeping masses they believe they're so much better.

I tell you a baker who does his work with love and joy, who has true respect for others and shares his happiness, this person is doing God's Work. This person can easily be doing far more to help humanity raise up out of fear than a person who's read a hundred spiritual books and pays thousands of dollars to attend the "best" spiritual retreats and conferences. Without the essential inner work, that stuff does nothing by itself, and can actually build up just as many illusions as it dissolves. Pay very close attention, you may be releasing one illusion only to replace it with another.

Cultivating God Within - Artistic Creativity

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It's Spring! What better moment to plant the seeds of God within yourself? While we're far more about Being than doing here at the Galactic Free Press, I want to discuss some of the things you can do to assist yourself in discovering the Divine Within. In this article I'll talk about an excellent way of doing that, art.

Art is a language beyond words, even if words are part of the medium. Art is a way of communicating feeling, and a painting can evoke a feeling far more quickly and efficiently that 100,000 words. Language is really quite limited in that respect. Even if it's purely unconscious, a person expresses their feelings and emotions through their artistic creations. It can be a very powerful tool for getting in touch with those aspects of yourself.

You are an artist, even if you haven't realized that yet. Everyone is, everybody has that Creative Spark within. Even if you believe "I suck at drawing", and then you go to draw, you will probably create exactly what you intended, a sucky drawing. That's still creativity! I do recommend expressing something other than self-judgment through your art, but either way you'll still be getting in touch with how you feel. You have to acknowledge that before you can really evolve.

How can you be happy when there's so much suffering in the world?

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This is a question we get asked every now and again, and it begs another question: Does sadness or pity do anything to relieve another's suffering? I see a whole lot of people who behave like it does, yet I also see a world that's filled with people suffering. Does being sad yourself really help at all, or does it just contribute more sadness to the world?

You've probably heard the expression "misery loves company", which means that suffering people are usually quite eager to spread their suffering to others. If this provides any relief, I suspect it's only because the mind gets what it wants. The mind gets validation for it's suffering by spreading it to another, which doesn't really relieve the suffering at all, it strengthens the patterns of suffering.

Unconditional Acceptance of What Is

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I mentioned before that "Love is unconditional acceptance of everything" and it seems I should explain more of what I meant. There's the idea that simply accepting things means you don't change them, that acceptance is passiveness, but this is not what I mean by acceptance at all.

Acceptance is not avoidance of change, it's not avoidance of anything. It's acknowledgement and taking responsibility for the way your life is. This is the first step to really creating positive change. If you want to release your fear, you must accept that it is there first. You can't get rid of something you refuse to even own up to. If you don't accept, you reject, which is trying to fix a negative thought with another negative thought!

When I say negative, all I really mean is fear, rejection, denial. People make this a million times more complicated that it needs to be, they make their fears into big scary things instead of the weak illusion that fear really is. A negative thought is only that which negates, it put a "no" into your mind. The mind is likely going to analyze this because it wants to deny it, yet the mind's rejection is what led humanity to disconnect from Source in the first place.

Real understanding and repeating rhetoric

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Let me begin by explaining what I mean by rhetoric, it has a few different definitions so I'd like to be clear here. In academics, it's often defined as skill or effective use of writing and speech, but that's not the type of rhetoric I'm talking about here. Another definition is "language that is intended to influence people and that may not be honest or reasonable", and this is the rhetoric I'm speaking of. Take a political party for instance, it's as if they've only got one brain to pass around between them and they all repeat the same lines, the same rhetoric, over and over.

So is rhetoric a "bad" thing? Not necessarily, but it generally shows a lack of real understanding. If you really understand what someone else has shared with you, you can apply your own unique perspective to it, you don't need to just repeat what the other person said. With a person who's really evolving, their understandings keep growing too. Their perspective gets bigger, so they don't just repeat the same things. They keep seeing life in new ways, and they keep expressing what they see in new ways. They may repeat the same general ideas, especially to people who don't understand them yet, but they don't just repeat the same rhetoric.

Why I am not neutral

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To get straight to the point, there's an illusion hidden within the concept of neutrality. When people say they are neutral they're almost always defining themselves based upon conflict. Neutrality requires the perception of different "sides", neutrality depends upon dividing people up. It's a dualistic concept pretending to not be dualistic.

Where I live we have two main political parties, and I'm supposed to choose one of them. I don't like either very much. I'm not neutral though, I am simply being myself. You could say I'm against both parties, though I'm not against the people that make them up, I view them as brothers and sisters. What I am against is the ideologies that divide people against each other. I'm against being against, if that makes any sense.

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