Frank M. Wanderer, Ph.D, Contributor
Waking Times

We are all on a spiritual journey. For everybody, this journey starts with birth and ends with death. Our life is a link between our date of birth and date of death. A link that contains all the secrets, dramas, tragedies and comedies of our lives, and we are all abandoned in this performance that we tend to forget who we are in reality.

The book of our life stretches between the two end points, and this book is the chronicle of our wanderings. The track of our wanderings is defined and determined by our thoughts, ideas, desires and our willingness and readiness to meet the expectations.

The story of these wanderings, this personal history may be infinitely varied at an individual level. Breaking through the different heights and abysmal depths along the route in the world of shapes and forms may provide the individual spiritual Seeker with endless joy and immeasurable sorrow. By identifying with our personal history written in the world of shapes and forms we experience ourselves as individuals different from everybody else.

Water is an absolutely essential element for shifting, releasing and moving with new energies. The simplest way to think of it is extra water supports your flow. If you become diligent about your water intake, you will be surprised at what a difference it will make to your comfort level, especially during enhanced times of transmutation and integration. ~Archangel Gabriel

Some will make the mistake of thinking that there are ‘outside forces’ dictating your where, when, how and why. Remember, everything exists within and without you. ~ Creator

Have you heard the expression:
 
“To the victor belong the spoils.”
 
In the old days, the soldiers who won a war had license to pillage the villages. The winners could take anything they wanted. They stole. It was considered that they had the right. It was considered that taking from another made the winner notable and worthy.
 
Spoils, in this case, mean the winnings. The winner gets the winnings. That makes sense only in the world because the thinking is that a winner triumphs, so he must win something. In Truth, whatever a victor’s winnings may be, he hasn’t won anything. The world says he won. What he has won may be nothing except a few pats on the back and a swelling of his ego. This is a poor profit from winning. The victor may have the wool pulled over his eyes. He has been fooled. Of course, people fool themselves. The idea of winning can become insatiable.
 
This idea of being the foremost reminds Me of Sleeping Beauty’s wicked stepmother who had to be the Fairest in all the land. She had to stand out. If she had to be the winner, others had to lose. She plied a certain kind of war. Her life certainly was made up of selfishness. In such a case, what can be won but controversy?
 
Nothing wrong with a good-hearted good-spirited playing of a game. Play well. One team won, the other lost, so the world says, yet both teams have played well. Congratulations!
 

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

As we’ve addressed before, the wisdom of the Native Americans was vast. Theirs was a culture whose values spoke to an understanding of human nature and the interconnectedness of all things with a clarity only rivalled by the Buddhist traditions of the east. Dismissing the idea of the noble savage, it nonetheless becomes clear to anyone who studies their culture that they somehow reached a very ‘high’ level– a level found in very few societies today. This list of 29 quotes from varying tribes, as compiled by Liz Olsen at infoplease.com, is but a snippet of the wisdom they attained, yet, as with many Buddhist koans, worth reading time and again. {WP} 

S. Grant, Listverse
Waking Times

Consumerism and the practice of flaunting one’s status through clothes, jewelry, and other things has existed since the dawn of civilization. Yet, the endless cycle of working to buy has never been more rampant than it is now. How did the United States, a nation founded on Puritan, non-materialistic tenants become filled with the biggest shoppers on the planet and end up occupying 29% of the World’s consumer market? As it turns out, Americans were carefully and systematically manipulated into becoming insatiable shoppers.