by Kathy Biehl

If you’ve heard the term “Mercury retrograde,” odds are you don’t have good feelings about it. Take heart! Even if some people react to it as if the sky is falling, Mercury retrograde is not the end of the world. It’s a regular phenomenon that happens three or four times every year.

What does Mercury Retrograde mean?

First, the technicalities: Mercury is retrograde when it’s traveling backwards. That’s an optical illusion, of course, and comes from a change in that planet’s orbital speed in comparison to the Earth’s. (Think of it as the planetary equivalent of speeding up, passing a car and seeing it fall far behind after you in the rear view mirror.)

How this works: When Mercury is moving in reverse, the areas of life it governs do not play by the usual rules. Pay extra attention to anything related to communication and travel-including phones, computers and electronic devices, the mail (remember that?), cars, public transportation, and commutes.

Bernardo Kastrup, Reality Sandwich
Waking Times

The following is excerpted from Meaning in Absurdity: what bizarre phenomena can tell us about the nature of reality, published by Iff Books.

We are incessantly, relentlessly, tirelessly telling ourselves stories; constantly attempting to categorize and match everything we experience against some (coherent) storyline playing out in our minds. Well, at least I am like that, and I seem to observe others doing the same. That is why certain forms of meditation prove so challenging: there, the idea is to stop the story-telling. It turns out many of us require instruction, the learning of techniques developed over centuries or millennia, and years of training to have a chance to momentarily pause the story-telling; so inborn it seems to be. Some people even feel they need to isolate themselves completely, in mountains or monasteries, for years at a time, to stop telling themselves what is or might be going on.

If you started to live with a focus on your wholeness rather than your woundedness, you would find yourself thriving like never before. ~Archangel Gabriel

Written by Wes Annac, The Culture of Awareness

Sometimes, we reach a point where we want to feel more connected with the Christ within; more connected with our essence, and when this happens, we might have to ask ourselves a few essential questions.

One of them is if we’re making choices throughout our day that are in alignment with our wish to be more connected. Are we helping ourselves live a lifestyle that’s truly inspired by spirit, or does the idea of staying connected only sound good at the surface?

Oftentimes, we’ll find when we take a serious, discerning look at ourselves that even though we think we want to be more connected, we still aren’t making choices that help us stay aligned. We’ll find that continuing to falter in some areas of life is what causes us to feel distant from love or spirit.

It is easy to “feel” the truth when we trust ourselves. It is easy to “know” the truth when we are aware.

Truth automatically confirms itself within us. It is a recognition, a remembering, of what we knew, forgot, and now remember again.

The mind is like a dog chasing its tail in the hopes of catching it. Awareness cuts to the core of our nature where no outside influence is needed to prove what we know.

The last stop on our journey home is the recognition of our truth within. It is the beginning of our true life and a natural expression of our being.

Namaste.
Robert and CJ

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email Robert: robertcosmar@gmail.com
email CJ: cjheck60porsche@gmail.com

By Lissa Rankin MD

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

As we embark upon the journey of 2015, I am dreaming of a world in which we remember, as the indigenous people do, that our Story of Separation is only an illusion, that we are all connected, not just to other people, but to the plants, the animals, the mountains and rivers and oceans, that we cannot harm one another, we cannot violate nature, without directly harming ourselves. What would a world governed by our certainty of Oneness be like?

I just had the unspeakable privilege of living in such an experiment while spending most of December in Australia, preparing to speak at the Uplift Festival amidst a group of modern day spiritual teachers, indigenous elders, and sacred activists. The experience was so profound, moving, and hopeful that I was launched into a phase of grief after leaving our bubble of Oneness in Byron Bay. Even though I know this shift towards Oneness is already underway, and more and more of us are acting from a space of kindness, generosity, compassion, appreciation, and love, I still found it hard to walk through the airport on the way home and feel the pain of the remains of the separation story among us.