Working on
Procrastination

Living Consciously August 20, 2010

Dear friends,

Marcus Aurelius asked “What am I doing with my soul?” He suggests we interrogate ourselves to find out what inhabits our “so-called” mind and what kind of soul we have right now; that of a child, an adolescent, a predator or its prey? Spiritual inventory has always been on the list of wisdom teachers as the first order of business for anyone seeking depth change in their lives. It all begins within, behind the thoughts and beliefs, at the level of our deepest self awareness.

How to know? That is the easy part. We can observe how we react to the situations in the moment. Be honest. Do we behave like a petulant kid who wants his dessert before dinner? Are we overly dramatizing how others seem to treat us, in the manner of an emotionally charged teen? In the privacy of our own mind do we talk about how “they” won’t let us, “they” betrayed us, “he or she” took advantage? Are we plotting and planning how to get our good rather than engaging and trusting the creative aspect of our mind?

What is our goal here if not to be present and comfortable in our own skin; and as Aurelius wrote “not showing off our obedience to logos (God) but resting in it.” There is no need to take a stance as a warrior, a damsel in distress, a needy child, a superior intellect or the star in the great drama of life. We simply need to look within, call up the natural self, acknowledge our safety in the atmosphere of this spiritual universe and be ourselves. Life knows how to take us forward from that place. There is a way of being in the world that opens the whole field of possibility to us. We cannot fail at anything when we are a success at being real.

Peace is ours now,

Rev Carol Carnes www.positiveliving.org

Living Consciously August 17, 2010

Dear friends,

Spirituality is a way of seeing and being, not a memorization of doctrine and rules. The depth of our awareness can be measured in everyday activities. Are we able to see and feel a commonality among all people? Do we trust in the goodness of the human heart to assert itself in the face of another’s suffering? Do we share our prosperity with ease and joy? Is our health something we cherish and look after in gratitude? Can we see through the appearance of ugliness to the beauty within? Do we expect the best and praise what is good now?

An important aspect of modern spirituality is the assertion of mind power over materiality. It is the daily practice of introducing wholeness affirmations into our thought processes. It is a kind of declarative stance that all is well, that life is good, that we are greater than we may seem to be, that there is One Power underlying all diversity, that we are capable of creating a world of love and beauty, peace and prosperity.

More important than any doctrine or dogma is how we behave in the world. We may not always be perceived rightly by others, but if our intention is to authentically express ourselves without artifice or agenda, then we will ultimately be seen correctly. If we seriously attempt to be more compassionate today than yesterday, if we circulate our good with greater ease and trust in the process of replenishment, if we give our time, talent, and treasure to support what is helping the world become a better place, if we are happy now without anything changing first, we can be assured that our spiritual beliefs are having their desired affect.

Peace is ours now,

Rev Carol Carnes www.positiveliving.org

Living Consciously August 16, 2010

Dear friends,

Emerson said “the radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction of more and less.” How much unhappiness and personal angst is the result of wishing something were more of itself or less? A person ought to be more loving and less aloof. Our job needs more variety and less tedium. A friend should be more available and less involved with her work. The weather is more humid than last year and less pleasant. There are more problems than opportunities. We go on and on in the more and less chatter.

It is the constant noticing of what we think is missing that is the culprit. Rather than enjoying what is, right now, we tinker with the alternatives in our mind. This or that could be more or less of what it appears to be. It sounds like complaining, but in some instances it is merely the mind mulling over possibilities. We simply have to be careful that this tendency does not rob us of immediate enjoyment and possible discovery. Underneath what we judge as less, there might be more of something real and valuable which we would miss if we are overly focused on the judgment. A shy person may seem to be difficult to hold a conversation with, but if we accept them as is, they might open up and prove to be an expert in some area of interest to us.

Making something immediately wrong, if it is a person, the weather or a circumstance is to negate the many opportunities inherent in every moment for self discovery. Who am I in unpleasant weather? How do I feel when the other seems to have nothing to say? What is the level of my comfort when my friend cannot attend my party? Why am I so bored at work and blaming the job? These are the real questions to be answered. If something is missing, it is because we are not bringing it with us. The irony is, there is always more of us to give.

Peace is ours now,

Rev Carol Carnes www.positiveliving.org

Living Consciously August 12, 2010

Dear friends,

My son is visiting from Toronto so of course we took a ride through the Rocky mountains, which are very near to Calgary and are majestic in summer covered with the thick forest of evergreens and bare headed without their snow covered hats. We opted for a one hour canoe trip around the pristine aqua-blue Lake Louise, and enjoyed a simple but perfect lunch while looking out on the hotel gardens.

There were many foreign visitors at the Chateau, which is a destination point for people from around the world. We share the same awe and wonder at the natural beauty and diversity of our planet. No matter that we do not speak the same language, we understand what the other is feeling. Everyone knows what “ahh” means. It should be spelled “awe.”

I have lived in several places that are considered tourist spots, usually because of their proximity to beaches or mountains or desert. . But wherever we live, there is natural beauty and there are awe-inspiring sights. The people of New York flock like birds to Central Park and marvel at the hawks nesting under the eaves of tall buildings. In Chicago, sail boats on Lake Michigan balance the sounds of the traffic close by. A few steps in one direction transports us into another world.

This is so true of our inner life as well. Behind the chatter and worry and busy-ness of our ordinary thoughts, there is quiet and a neutral stillness. A shift in the right direction takes us from solving problems to drifting down the river of inner peace and into a natural resting place that is the true destination of our mind. This is where the “awe” in us originates. It is not the outer beauty that does it. That is merely a reminder of the perfect world of being that we all share.

Peace is ours now,

Rev Carol Carnes www.positiveliving.org

Living Consciously August 10, 2010

Dear friends,

Perhaps Emerson’s best advice in his essay on Self Reliance is “insist on yourself, never imitate.” Of course he did not mean to insist that you are right about everything, but that you are right about being you; your way of living is your own cumulative expression of a lifetime of self discovery. Over time you have learned how to be the most authentic, caring, compassionate, healthy, happy and prosperous person you can be. You have made every decision in support of those aims and your decisions have always been right for you. Could you have done things differently? Of course! Could your Good be increased? Yes! Is there always more to learn? To be sure! But you are the expert in your life.

This is not so difficult to accept. The challenge is allowing it to be so for others. When we see someone we love and care about going down a destructive path, we want to jump in and set them straight. Helpful suggestions for how they could better live are not usually heard in the same way they are intended. There is a way, however, to be of real service to those we love. It is to be certain that at some level they know exactly what they are doing. It is to affirm that the wholeness of their being, the intact spiritual soul, is the driving force within them and must assert itself and set them on a new path. It is not for us to know or judge what that path may look like, but to trust that whatever it may be is the right one for them and leads to a greater measure of the good they seek.

What to do while our loved ones “flounder around” trying to find their way? Mind our own personal growth business and stay in the awareness that we all have the same Source, the identical potential for releasing our higher wisdom, a common ground of being upon which we all stand and from which we all arise anew every moment. Is that not what you want others to know about you?

Peace is ours now,

Rev Carol Carnes www.positivliving.org

Living Consciously August 9,2010

Dear friends,

The early New Thought teacher, Thomas Troward, said that Spirit must surely be that aspect of our own nature that knows joy. He said it is the result of two things; pleasure in self-expression and knowing that the Creative Potential is limitless. He added the realization that no matter where we are on the evolutionary scale, it is always only the beginning. That is the basis of our joy.

Knowing that we are ever ascending to new heights of self expression and are always becoming more of our potential surely lifts our perception and charges our emotions with hope and cheerful expectation. In times of real challenge, that awareness keeps us open to creative solution for we deeply know that an answer is always at hand; furthermore, whatever the problem, we are nonetheless, moving forward.

This is spirituality, not mind control. It is an easy, constant observance of how nature builds upon her destruction; how life insists on growth even in the most challenging circumstances. It is looking at one’s own life and seeing how one everything has contributed to where we are today. It is in knowing that our experience is more about our reaction than the events themselves. Joy is not a special occasion emotion. It is a state of mind which accepts the inevitable changes that come with living but never forgets the impression every life makes. It is the noticing of the smallest details while meeting the large moments with equal fascination.

It begins with authentic self-expressions and continues as awe and wonder at how personally the Creative Intelligence is involved in every life.

Peace is ours now,

Rev Carol Carnes www.positiveliving.org

Living Consciously August 6, 2010

Dear friends,

Those of us who live in the western world with our luxuries and tech toys and extra cash to spend may be, if not unhappy, then discontent. It is not that we are spoiled or greedy, but that we are sensitive to the unrest in the world; the poverty and violence; the exploitation of children; the oppression of women. It is impossible to sit at a beautifully laid table for a delicious meal and not think of the children who have not eaten in days. What about the inner city kids right here who have never experienced the ocean or the mountains or the beauty of a wild river, who have no supplies to make art or exposure to music?

I just read that four of the world’s most famous billionaires have pledged to give away half of their fortunes to eradicate disease, to educate children, to bring clean water and food to blighted villages around the globe. Some of us who are far from rich, sponsor a child in another country. For pennies a day we help with school fees, dental and medical care, food and clothing. The most important gift is the connection made between us and that child. They become aware that the world “out there” knows they exist and cares about their welfare.

Our discontent is of the spiritual kind. We know the world can be a place of equality, beauty, celebration, joy and healthy living. There has always been enough of everything for everybody. We sense the need in us to help, to make a difference, to do something! There are opportunities in every town and city, village and hamlet. There is no “they” preventing our humanity from asserting itself. There is no evil force creating the lack and ugliness in the world; it is ignorance alone that perpetuates it. Think today of how fortunate you are. Find a way to extend the gifts you have received. Be the change you wish to see.

Peace is ours now,

Rev Carol Carnes www.positiveliving.org

Living Consciously with Carol Carnes
July 17, 2010 - Emerson said in his essay on Compensation: The changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth.

All of nature lives in an evolutionary mode. We out-live our childhoods. We gain wisdom beyond our teen years. We become so adept at our professions that promotions and raises follow. We are constantly making progress, but in the short intervals there are sometimes reversals or downtimes. It may seem as if all is lost or that all our efforts are in vain.

However, all systems, whether they be of thought or politics or family, must by necessity serve the soul or we will find new ways to broaden our scope of experience. Emerson used the analogy of a crab shedding its beautiful shell when it becomes too small for his body and then slowly growing another.

Change is a requirement of life and of health, love, prosperity and creative self expression. If we are constantly looking over our shoulders, bemoaning the loss of a past that is gone forever, we miss the beauty of our own soul which is forever moving forward. More

Living Consciously with Carol Carnes

July 15, 2010 - Who are we without our desires? Funny question, but think about it. If you didn’t want anything how would you define yourself? If we didn’t interact with the world by achieving goals and materializing our personal vision, how would we know ourselves? 

Yes, there is that Real Self that all spiritual traditions speak about; the One that is our core being which lies undisturbed within our own field of awareness; yet, if it isn’t expressed in some particular way it is incomplete, or let’s say it remains in the potential or wave state.

However, in our culture we have misunderstood desire. The impulse to express comes from our Spirit Self but we often interpret it as not having which quickly becomes wanting, which turns into longing, which depletes us of energy and joy. We will then focus almost entirely on something outside of ourselves and our Self is left in the unexpressed state. It is like denying God its experience of being you.

The desire for love is an indication that Love in us wants out. If we do not have a relationship with our Core Self, we will feel it as a need and the cycle of chasing after what we already have begins again. More

Living Consciously with Carol Carnes

June 22, 2010 - The answers to the deepest questions in our hearts are often diametrically opposed to the conclusions we draw from our observations of experience. We mistakenly think that birth and death are demarcations for life, when really, life is forever and the so-called beginnings and endings are merely the rising and fading of a particular expression. Just as the toddler we once were is living inside us, so the human being is living in the Spiritual Body of universal consciousness at all times; in the seen and unseen realm of being. To think otherwise is to live with pain and sorrow as we watch our loved ones move into that otherworld.

Our linear view of things tends to fix us in time and space and make us into objects that are acted upon rather than beings who are acting upon the field of experience via the avenue of awareness. So, when we feel sick we feel attacked or that we have been invaded. We expect the sickness to run its course guided by its own intelligence and not receptive to ours. A relationship falls apart and we blame the other person for not loving us properly. We believe we have been robbed of our ability to love. We think we have been rejected. We expect to hurt and feel alone. It never occurs to us that we are the source of love whether it appears in an outer form or as a feeling in us.

Our money life is thought to be the result of the machinations of strangers on a street in New York City. We “buy into” the stock belief that wealth is the result of corruption, good luck or fanatical dedication to work that destroys other aspects of our lives. None of this is true. It is all perception and it is a warped view distorted by superstitious religious notions about the universe.

It is time to stop looking to the world for help, answers, love, substance or health. Those are the basic attributes of being and we already hold them in the inner kingdom of wholeness. 2010, if not now, when?

Peace and Blessings,

Rev Carol Carnes www.positiveliving.org click on XLeratdYour Spirit for an online message

Living Consciously with Carol Carnes

June 20, 2010 - Human Beings are not things inhabiting space, separated from the universe itself. That is an old, out of date, mechanistic view of reality. Today we see that life is a web of relationships, that this universe is a dynamic, organic, living experience in awareness. Well, that last word may be the next realization, but to some of us it seems apparent that life itself is conscious. Each one of us is a point of individualized awareness in the Whole. This is not unlike ancient scripture which said that we are part of the body of God.

It may be that science will at last reveal to us the true nature of Being, yet our own senses are attuned to this higher awareness. We know that we exist; we think; we feel; we imagine; we invent and discover what was already there in the invisible realm, like electricity and gravity. We make art and music out of nothing more than our intention.

Our religions were met to prepare us to awaken to the living presence of the Infinite in everyday life. The problem was that religions became trapped in the mechanistic view of reality and therefore humans were seen as nothing but particles occupying space attempting to find their way back to some place in the universe where the Source lives. The Source itself was described as stern and judgmental, allowing only some into its presence.

As science helps us evolve our awareness of the immediacy of the Originating Power, we will cease to fight over territory or worldviews and begin to realize the how intimately connected we are to everything we could possibly desire in this life. But why wait? The spiritual practices of meditation, service, compassion, affirmation, study, conscious giving and celebration give us a first hand experience of our place in the universe.

Peace and Blessings,

Rev Carol Carnes www.positiveliving.org

Living Consciously with Carol Carnes

June 10, 2010 - As the great Thomas Troward wrote a century ago, the creative process is everywhere and is the same in the universal as it is in the personal. We are drawing from and expressing with the Intelligence that is behind all sentient life and the universe itself. Another way of understanding what this means to us is to ask: Is God enjoying itself as my life? What am I giving It to do? If I were the power that makes all things new, would I be getting rusty from lack of use?

It is understandable that we have trouble believing this basic truth. We are feeling beings, emotional memory systems and our bodies seem to be the real self. The physical realm is seductive and convinces us of our fallibility. Well, yes, these bodies are only temporary. This brain is a vehicle for consciousness. But the Consciousness of Being is the leader and the eternality of us and it is the only way that we make changes, progress and create newness. The body doesn’t do it by itself. The brain does not think new thoughts. It is the Self Awareness that directs the creative process by means of us.

Assume this is true, even if your experience seems to indicate otherwise. Now think of what you truly would like to think and feel and experience this year. Begin today to frame that vision in words and thoughts and mental pictures. Begin today to say “I am this vision in action”.See it, feel it, act as though it were so. What belongs to the nucleus of that image will form around it and become something in your human experience. It will begin, as everything does, on the inside. The outer reflection of it will unfold in the time/space manner that is perfect for you. The only way to know God is to be available to It.

Peace and Blessings,

Rev Carol Carnes www.positiveliving.org

Living Consciously - by Carol Carnes
May 26, 2010 - Ernest Holmes wrote: Stop arguing. Learn to believe. Stop debating.  Learn to accept.

Use your intellect, imagination and feeling for the purpose of seeing and sensing freedom instead of bondage, joy instead of unhappiness, plenty instead of want, health in place of disease. The very denial of your Good keeps it from you.

What is the purpose of a thinking mind if not to create?  Why do we have the capacity to imagine if not to bring our images into form?  Our minds are designed for more than survival.  They are meant to be the means to thrival.  In the evolution of awareness, we spiral up and out of superstition and into co creation. We discover the principles that are involved in the personal experience of being human.

Moving out of survival thinking we come into our own as conscious centers in the creative process.  We find that we are meant to participate in the unfolding of experience.  Humbly we realize that in some very real way, we are necessary to the particularization of the Whole. More

Living Consciously    
The use of electricity is commonplace to us.  We know that we can use it in specific ways to produce desirable results. We also know that if used improperly the power can harm us or will have no effect whatsoever. For example, I can cool down a small space with an electric fan but I would never expect it to light the room.  My electric oven bakes a cake but cannot run the television.  Each use is necessarily specific to the desired result.  Some of the early spiritual teachers of New Thought presented this as analogous to how our thought processes access the universal Creative Intelligence.

There is a way to think that allows the Creative Intelligence to bring about exactly what we want to manifest.  How would the power that gave form to the universe think if it wanted to create prosperity?  It seems obvious that it would have no thought of lack!  It would begin its announcement with “I Am.”   It would see prosperity flowing from its own center!  The same would be true of vitality and Love and Joy and Peace. More