It’s a Positive Feeling
It's a Positive Feeling
I’m starting this week’s blog with an excerpt from Second Chance, by Sydney Banks (pages 84-85 and 104-105).
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“Death is nothing to fear,” she replied. “Beyond life lies beauty. Beyond life lies peace and tranquility. At death, this world you now know stops, and the full illumination of Mind is born. This shows you your innocence of life and allows you to see the true beauty of yourself.”
It was an incredible statement and for some unknown reason helped to alleviate the anxiety I was undergoing. We sat looking at the view which by this time was breathtaking.
Mamma Lila remarked how lucky we were to witness such beauty, then turning to Jonathan she said, “The evening is full of Mana.”
Mana was an unfamiliar word to me, so I asked her what she meant by it.
“Mana, my young friend, is a power that holds the secret to your very existence. Mana on its own has neither definite shape nor form, yet it is in everything that exists.
“Mana is the power that holds this world of ours together. Mana is pure energy. It is virtually impossible for anyone to explain what Mana really is because it is of spirit essence.
“Mana cannot be seen by the naked eye. It must be absorbed by a positive feeling. It is Mana that helps wash away the illusionary values you place on life. It is the sustenance of the wise.”
Mama Lila broke the silence by saying, “The knowledge that my kupuna kane taught me was a gradual process. It took many years to find out what he was trying to get me to See. It wasn’t until I was seventeen that I finally broke through to the world beyond our senses and found the secret of Mana.
“I remember as though it were yesterday. My kupuna kane cried with joy when the pearl of wisdom was handed to me from the spirits.
“It was only two weeks later that my kupuna kane decided to leave this material reality and join my kupuna wahine – my grandmother – who had died two years earlier.”
As she spoke about her grandfather her face revealed her great love for him. It was obvious that there had been a very close bond between them.
We sat quietly for a moment, then I said, “Mamma Lilia, please tell me more about Mana.”
At this point she rose and walked toward the ocean. She stood gazing out at the sea for a couple of minutes and then beckoned me to her. “You asked me to tell you about Mana. Mana, in essence, is a spirit power that, when grasped, can open the doors to all cosmic consciousness. Mana is love.
“True love is pure spirit power being manifested. The manifestation can take many forms. There is a mother loving her child, a doctor caring for his patient, a father playing with his children, a child with a new puppy, people caring for the less fortunate.
“Love is a positive feeling, and if people cultivate this feeling in their lives, they will free themselves from any unbalanced conditions that surround them.
“Love is not just an idea. Love is a living, breathing essence that the wise can pluck from the air at will and then like a master artist mold it into something beautiful.
“Love, my dear Richard, makes the impossible, possible.”
When she stopped talking, an incredible tranquility came over me, and before I could say anything Mamma Lila said, “Look within yourself for the answer you seek.”
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A lot, if not most, approaches to finding internal quiet, relief from anxiety, and coping with stress look at fixing or diminishing mental processes. The problem with all of these is that the nature of our mental processes is that whatever we try to "do" with them only strengthens them. In aiming to quiet the mind, the mind gets louder. In trying to see the space between thoughts, all we ever look at is our thoughts. We never look at the much larger space of who we are. It's been there all along.
Who we are is a feeling. By focusing on feeling good, we shift into a different space. The mental processes, left alone, begin to starve and die away. Like a fire where you just stop putting on new logs. I love these excerpts from Sydney Banks because he's pointing (through the character of Mama Lila) to the fact that peace and wisdom come from or through a positive feeling.
It's not "positive thinking" in the way most people have come to think of it. It's just feeling good for no reason. Sitting listening to the tree frogs in the evening comes to mind, for me, as that's what I've been doing lately, as I sit outside at dusk. I let the peace and quiet bubble up within me, and the teeming night full of insects, frogs, and birds reflects that peace and quiet. In Second Chance, Richard is often struck by the beauty of the Hawaiian countryside, and his own peace rises up. Quiet comes in, and we are in a different world.
Much Love,
Sara Joy
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