December 14, 2021

~ A text by Irma ten Brink inspired by the work of Yoginâm ~

Let’s find our common ground

The Covid crisis a a very unique world events we all went through serves in a beautiful way to cover many different crises people can go through. Therefore let’s look at crisis this time with the covid situation in our minds

Whether you are or have been seriously sick, acute or chronically from covid. You lost someone you loved to covid or you got in a serious financial crisis. Whether you are for or against vaccine, you suffer nasty side effects from the vaccine or lost loved ones who died from it. 

Whether you lost friends and good family relations because of different opinions about what is going on. Whether you are scared of covid or scared of measures you cannot live up to like a mandatory vaccin, scared of losing your job or you are under huge stress because you are working in the healthcare with too few staff trying to manage. Whether you got into serieus mental problems because of isolation, your kids suffer from isolation, you miss the touch of a hug because you are afraid of infection or don’t want others to be at risk. Whether you believe in everything or you believe in nothing, you don’t know what to believe, you don’t want to believe and everything in between. Whether you are upset and angry for what ‘they’ are doing to you… 

Whatever the reason, we all have a crisis to deal with.

There is one thing that everyone has in common. We all have to deal with a crisis here. Only the perspective from where it comes differs in personal lives. Nonetheless whatever the reason, we all have a crisis to deal with and we’d better make the best of this together.

It can be very helpful to look at it from this helicopter view. To see it is not easy for anybody, some might take it lighter than others okay, but everyone is faced with covid, just the perspectives change a bit. But we are all in the same boat!

So if you deal with it lightly, try to find compassion for those who can’t. If you are angry, try not to project this on those you love but search for meaning. If you have strong opinions, try to practice non-judgment. If you are convinced you are right, find out if you can be a bit more open minded, for billions of people are saying different things, how can one person be right? Even if he thinks he is part of a majority? Or part of a special minority? If you suffer from a financial crisis, try and find help. If you are scared, search for help in a transcendental way to find trust. If you are lonely, look deep inside to find what you need and then go for it! If you are very sick or lost someone who died, try to make peace with it for sickness and death are part of life, try to connect with your true nature, an inner voice will guide you either to find the right care and medicine, to die in a peaceful and meaningful way or say goodby to loved ones this way. If you got separated from your loved ones because of different opinions, try to find out what made it possible in the relationship to split, there could already have been some fundamental trouble. Find this and see if you can find a common ground again, like the love that was there which is maybe covered now by a layer of something else that blinds you both. And if you are able, try to find ways to help others!

Try to manage the crisis from a transcendental perspective. 

Try to overcome the differences by recognising we are all human beings, living on the same planet, in the same galaxy. All longing for well-being and happiness. How can we find this for not just one person but for all living beings?

Try not to be caught up by only one, your, small life. Try to find the Greatness in all living. The Greatness of which you are just as much part as I am.

All we can do is our best and this we should do at the best of our possibilities. More is not needed so be forgiving to yourself and others when it seems you are not doing enough. And it also doesn’t have to be easy, I don’t think life was meant to be easy nor difficult. I just think there is a task for us here, a communal task to transform which refines itself in the personal situation into smaller tasks. 

Whether you transform sickness and death into acceptance and love. Whether you transform quarrels, fights and hatred into compassion, forgiveness and understanding. Whether you transform a financial crisis into practical solutions. Whether you transform dual perspectives into a transcendental perspective. It is the transformation in your niche of living that matters. And with these small transformations you contribute to the whole of living in which all and everything shares. 

It is like the story of the famous butterfly who flapped its wings in New Mexico and causes a tornado in China (the chaos theory). With your effort of transforming something in your life, you can make it lighter for somebody else somewhere else in the world, without you knowing this. 

Within this perspective it is not so much the real actions you need to focus on but rather your intentions, your ideas, thoughts and feelings. For the actions are following up these aspects. Therefore make an effort to make your thoughts, dreams, feelings, beliefs and intentions as pure as possible through transforming them all into love, compassion, loving kindness and honesty.  

Let us bring light into this world together and for each other!

November 1, 2021

~ A text by Irma ten Brink inspired by the work of Yoginâm ~

As is mentioned often in literature, and Yoginâm has said it in many of his books and texts we are creative beings and we are creating our own world. Start dreaming about another world and the resonance will create another world.

In this blog I would like to elaborate more on it because it might be simple but is not as easy as it is simple.

We are the Cause of our own Consequence

This means it is not so much about who we are but what we are that matters. We create with what we are and that is mostly unconscious.

If we do not explore what we are we will, with our mostly unconscious dreams, start creating mostly just our projections. These projections are based on habitual programmes built up in our lives which are not all only beneficial. Also these projections are following individual needs and wishes mostly together with ideologies based on culture and tradition (and realise for a moment that our western culture is expressing at the moment mostly consumerism and a dualistic way of thinking built on an old guilt programme.)

Can you imagine a beautiful world?

Just ask yourself, can you imagine a beautiful world that also fills the needs of a Tibetan farmer, a western doctor, a Russian astronaut, a Persian musician, all children in Africa and a Dutch mother? And not to forget a cow, a bee, an oak, a sardine, a bacteria…?

While unaware with perhaps the best intentions we want to create something we think is good. But the world, as being an ecosystem, part of a galaxy and so on is so big and beyond our grasping, how can we possible begin to think we can know what it needs? How can we make a picture that includes all? And to make it small again, do we these days know still what we really need ourselves?

For example:
If I just look at my own life so far and how it was created this tells me a lot. I am right now living a way of living I could never have dreamed before. If I would have dreamed a life for myself consciously earlier and that would have come out it would not be as it is now, it would be much more limited because it was created with the mind of that moment which was more limited as my mind now and I would regret that (if I would be aware). This because my life right now is absolutely beyond my conscious imagination.

Also in the past I would (being unaware) have dreamed a life without suffering and difficult times. While it is exactly these times that formed and brought me so much and looking back there is not one moment I would want to have missed. Would I have put these difficulties in a conscious future dream? Probably not. Unconsciously yes I did.

Also to take into consideration

‘Whoever wishes for peace might with that wish automatically create war’, Or who wishes there will be plenty of food and riches for you, could that create perhaps for other life a lack? This is similar to the saying ‘Where there is light there is darkness’ a biblical saying.

So I decided already long ago to be careful about formulating my wishes. Because I also know that a wish that is really sincerely desired can come true, and that again refers to another wise saying ‘careful what you wish for’ or as Alan Watts (inspired by William Blake) says:“The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions”.

I am not saying it is wrong to dream a beautiful world. Just be aware of the pitfalls and be conscious of the dual way of thinking from where it often starts. Just like the idea of a war that is intended to create peace. Peace will never come as long as you think in this way. You have to start thinking differently, start looking at life differently and start seeing with different eyes, actually become another being in order to start creating something else.

So what did create my life as it is now?

There is one dream I had as a child which still stands today and this is because it is very open and full of potential. If you would ask me as a child what I would want to become when I was older it was not a doctor or nurse or something, the answer was “I want to become a wise old woman’.

Also there was a longing to serve, I wanted to do something good in the world without knowing or filling in what that was. Later on I asked for Guidance to do that, realising I could not do it on my own.

This is actually a combination of Intent (become a wise woman), a longing to serve and an openness to Guidance which became the driving force which is gradually helping me get past my own projections, likes and dislikes and transforming my Habitual Programmes of Perception. I think it is this combination that has been given and still is giving direction to my ongoing creation. Here I like to dive deeper into these elements with you.

There is a different way of creating we can become aware of

It is really from the inside out that we have to change something and it needs a complete different mindset and orientation which is very new for most people.

Because it is natural for all living to thrive, living beautiful lives with our loved ones and be happy in life, this longing and wishing can be enough to create something beautiful and yes we should continue to long for this and thrive because it is natural like it is natural for a flower to grow towards the light.

However if on this way in life we do not explore our habitual programmes we can seriously get lost in our intentions and do harm with them unconsciously.

For example and to make this more concrete look at this typically western programme of wanting more than we actually need. Realise that this is a causal habitual programme of perception from which consumerism is a natural consequence.

Investigating these programmes is never direct, nor a therapeutic action.
It is within a way of living, in which Intent and Attunement are the basic instruments, that these programmes will come up and can be transformed.

The Transcendental Way

Living Nâm provides me with different and very powerful tools for creation that tranforms the above pitfalls and unconscious projections.

It is a way in which I gradually transform my unconscious disturbing Habitual Programmes of Perceptions into beneficial ones.

A way of living that is a very beautiful and powerful way to create true beneficial resonance. Resonance that will create a wonderful world I cannot with my conscious mind imagine anymore, that is beyond my grasp but I do can see that with enough people living such a way, a beautiful world that serves all can be created.

This is the way of ‘Attention in Remembering’.

Attention in Remembering

I can best envisage this by sharing an intimate contemplation with you while realising the experience crumbles down to meaningless words as soon as I write it down. Yet it may help and inspire you in your own search.
Recently in a meditation I had a realisation.

“I am the Essence of Essence.
And everything, every phenomena, every experience, every human being, animal, plant, bacteria, the earth, the galaxies are an expression of this Essence of Essence. So also sickness, disaster, war and suffering are expressions of this very Essence of Essence.

This Essence of Essence is not a something, and certainly not a something outside me, a something I can address by prayer and thought.
It is me as it is you,
I exist out of this Essence of Essence!
With my life I am giving it a human expression”

This realisation is not something that just comes up in me out of the blue. It is the basic principle of LivingNâm and I read it, in different words, time and time again in the different texts and books of Yoginâm. So realising it during meditation in a much wider sense than just rationally is a consequence of reading about it regularly and exploring and remembering it with the specific tools I use, and as such the realisation is very valuable to gradualy change myself into a different Cause.

Now going back to creating the world, the answer on how to do so lies in this realisation and by giving form to your life in such a way that you keep reminding yourself of this realisation as much, as deep and as often as you can.

With this realisation you start orienting yourself not to the phenomena of living but to where it comes from, to the Essence of Essence.

The stronger your realisation becomes, the stronger your orientation stabilises in something unchangeable, something that was always there, also before your birth. Something that is there right now and also in difficult and confusing times. And something that will be there still when you die. This realisation then becomes an Affirmation, a Certainty that has nothing to do with believing or knowledge. An Affirmation that will eventually become you.

In Oneness all ages unite

Time loses itself in timelessness

Past and presence and future

Unite in a single instant

The everlasting now in all infinity

Eternity within eternity

Such is Oneness in you

Beings are reduced to dust

When your manifestation

Withdraws within itself

Eternity is now
And now is eternity

Evaporated are the distinctions

Between yesterday and tomorrow

All united in your Love

From ‘Oh Abbah – Songs for Lovers’ by Yoginâm

This orientation becomes a constancy and a Certainty you start to rely on without a need to understand and grasp it. It will grow a trust in you and it becomes something you can hold on to while everything else can fall apart. Because realise that an accident could happen any moment and your health is gone, or your house and wealth, your loved ones and so on, nothing is permanent except that which is always there, that which in spirituality is often referred to as the Transcendence of living.

It is in this Transcendence where we can find answers, Trust, Love and Certainty. It is also in this Transcendence where we can truly contribute to a beautiful world!

We call this shift in orientation the shift from Soul to Heart.

The Breath

“Millennia of spiritual investigation has proven that Attention in Remembering is the best approach. Wisdom does not emerge from the effort of learning, it spreads by itself like light in a dark room when the shutters are opened”.

From ‘The Book of Nâm’ by Yoginâm

The Breath is a powerful tool given by Yoginâm himself which opens these shutters. This tool is so powerful because it is beyond our knowing and grasping.
The Breath is the ultimate tool of Remembering ourselves of the Essence of Essence of which we cannot know what it is, nevertheless we can Remember!

“The Breath is the instrument that facilitates Remembering and prevents it from deteriorating in beliefs and opinions distorted by the ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ of our habitual programmes of perception”.

From ‘The Book of Nâm’ by Yoginâm

The invitation of this blog is finding beauty in everything

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder they say.
Aspire to become a Beautiful Human Being by searching for the Essence of Essence in everything.

Learn to witness the phenomena as expressions of this Essence of Essence with practicing the Breath.

Once you start seeing in everything, everyone, and in all situations the expression of the Essence of Essence, you will naturally start seeing beauty. A kind of beauty in which ugliness is naturally transcended.
Beyond judgement, projections, likes and dislikes you will enter a state of Awe and Wonder.

With this resonance of Awe and Wonder you become a Beautiful Human Being and you contribute in your modest way to a naturally beautiful world full of potential and beyond your comprehension.

Because Yoginâm has said it so many times: “You are the Consequence of your own Cause.” Take up this invitation and become a beautiful Cause with which you will create naturally a beautiful Consequence both individually as well as collectively.

This is my way of dreaming a beautiful world and LivingNâm gives me all the tools and inspiration to explore and live this way of living.

Explore with me and discover it yourself!

Thank You

September 14, 2021