Carl Bozeman Archives – Page 3 of 3

December 11, 2011

A Holiday Message – Before Giving….Release

During this holiday season I would like to share some thoughts about the greatest “gift” you can give to yourself. I hope you won’t mind my making reference to Jesus as this time of the year is especially focused on the birth and subsequent life of Jesus but the message is universal and certainly non-denominational.

Christians the world over look to Jesus as a gift, given to the world by a kind and benevolent Father and that we should pledge strong belief and allegiance to him. Christians miss much about this great man. The life of Jesus and all his subsequent teachings were about “release.” Our “giving” should be about giving away the things in this life that we attach ourselves to. It is believed that Jesus gave his life for the sins of those who would but believe in him, however, where we err is that the “giving” is about Him and not us. We consider his great kindness to us and we are forever obliged and in his subjection for having sacrificed as he supposedly did.

The idea of giving away our sins is not so much about giving away our sins to him as much as it is about releasing ourselves from carrying them. We should not feel burdened with life. Giving is a difficult thing to do when the giving is from the abundance of our egoic identity. Egoic abundance is all that ego holds as reality, truth and belief when most of it falls into a realm of illusion and untruth. We are all full of such abundance and all of it comes with the attachments of fear and guilt and second guessing our own unique and divine nature.

True giving is releasing ourselves of our burdens. This is a greater gift then that of giving from our physical wealth because “release” frees us of our emotional ties to things past that no longer exist other then as memories coupled with the original emotions they carried. Giving always carries emotion which is not really giving. Release instead, your identity with the things that cause you fear and doubt. These are the only things that make you question your own divine nature. Release your grief, your sorrow, your sadness, your unhappiness and your pain. These are the greatest gift you can give to life and everyone who experiences you in their life.

It is my hope that you make this holiday season, not about the traditional “giving” we have come to think it is, but about “releasing” ourselves of our limited ideas about how incredible we are. Let everything go and enjoy to the fullest your divine nature and the divine nature of everyone you come in contact with. Nothing you have done, do, or will do will ever impact your place in eternity. When you get to this place you no longer “give” of your abundance. You give of yourself and those to whom you give will sense the release you have experienced. This will release them.

All my best during this holiday season. Let yourself be merry, happy and free of anything you believe holds you to a view of yourself that is anything less than the god you are.

All my love,

Carl

April 3, 2011

Honesty – Do You Tell the Truth or Does the Truth Tell You?

From the moment of our birth onward over the span of our human sojourn, we are conditioned to be other than what we truly are. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in our general understanding and subsequent expression of honesty.

We are all liars. In fact, we are so good at lying, many of us will take offense at such an accusation, but perhaps more importantly, we have become so good at it we don’t even know it. Our conditioned nature has us convinced that our little withholdings and untruths are necessary to negotiate the collective human condition. We even come up with metaphors to express this conditioning even though we will not acknowledge the pervasive nature of our lies. We say things like half truths or little white lies to soften the blow, so to speak, so that our fragile egos do not have to face the fact that we are indeed liars. Collectively, we have come up with terms such as spin and techniques have been developed to divert the collective attention away from the truth.

We even accept that certain groups such as lawyers or politicians are dishonest and that is just the way it is. We will support individuals representing a political view, but overlook that they fall into a faction we know (and accept) as dishonest. We will even defend them to the point of anger or rage if they are attacked by another individual who is supported by a faction representing an opposing political view. Individually and collectively we have become defenders of our dishonesty.

Egoically, we have even gone so far as to determine that no individual ego, whether child or adult, should ever be told where they have missed the mark or fallen away from a particular guideline, without following up with where they have done well. Well, we don’t want to hurt any feelings now, do we? We are so concerned about preservation of feelings (ego), that we cannot speak the truth, or as we might say, the whole truth. It is interesting that we have books titled Radical Honesty, proposing that what was once simple honesty has become so elusive that telling any truth has now become radical. In other words, we have conditioned ourselves into the proverbial corner, that honesty is no longer the best policy, rather it has become the exception to the rule, both individually and collectively.

Perhaps in no other aspect of the human experience will it be more apparent how difficult it will be to alter this current conditioning. We have completely given way to the idea that feelings should not be hurt. We must conduct our lives in such a way that only the softest of blows are ever exacted against our own and other egos. The loss or damage of self-esteem is untenable in any circumstance. In other words, tell the truth if you can, lie if you must, but always spare the ego – always!

Gateway to Inner Knowing

If we can learn to listen to our inner talk, we can begin to notice the deceptions playing out in our minds. If we listen carefully, we can catch ourselves every time we tell a lie and hopefully, in time, catch it before we express it outwardly. In so doing, our dishonesty can become a window into the nature of our conditioning. It can become the way back to a life of integrity and truth. It is through that same window that we can begin to see once again our divine self. The who of our existence rather than the what the ego creates. Once found, we see life as it was before our conditioning took over our awareness.

Who you are always comprehends honestly. Finding who you are is the way out of the darkness of a life that is cloaked in a false illusion and untruth. In fact, it is the only way to have a life that is fully aware of something beyond our limited and egoic view of it.

It is seeing without eyes, hearing without ears. It is a life only a god could know.

March 20, 2011

Choices: You Choose, or Do You?

Life is not really about the choices we make. It is, rather, about repeating what actions to take which we have been conditioned to take. The so-called knowledge we gather is nothing more than an adding to the base of criteria we are taught to use to create our so-called choices.

When we are born into this world, we are born without conditions of any kind. Some of us even remember, as small children, that our lives were lived, not as decisions to make, but more as taking in as much as we possibly could, without having to decide if something was good or bad. We lived our passion, and moved from one thing to another, driven only by curiosity, wonder and awe! Life was not about choosing. Instead, it was a series of experiences, unjudged by any set of rules or guidelines. We simply experienced our experience. What happened? Why did this non-judgmental experience go away?

From the moment of our birth, the human process of conditioning us begins. With that conditioning, we are taught preferences and the reasoning behind those preferences. We become so adept at that reasoning that, in time, we no longer really choose. Of course we say we do, but the reasoning we are taught to judge between things always steers us to make “not” real decisions, but more a series of the same actions with only circumstances and scenery being different. In reality, what we think are choices are really nothing more than a repetitive sort of a variation on a theme. A theme we enact every day as a way to confirm over and over again that the choices we make are well thought out and correct. When we look out at the world at large, what we see confirms this to us, when, in fact, we haven’t really chose anything at all. All we have done is what we have always done before. All of it is based on conditioning that took over our minds so long ago that most of us have no memory of it.

Day by day, we simply act out what we think we know without deciding anything. choices Most of us, regardless of how we define success or failure, or the levels of human experience we achieve, always move in the direction we have always moved in. We may raise the bar and achieve so-called greater heights, but it is, more or less, variations on the same reasoning theme we have always used.

Who among us turns down a job or promotion so that the job can go to the individual we know could perform it so much better? Our reasoning, the so-called intelligence and knowledge, we claim to possess practically forbids us from ever making that kind of decision, and yet among the truly real decisions, that one really is a choice!

Most of us have forgotten how to live spontaneously, guided only by our intuition and sheer appreciation for every exhilarating moment life has to offer. Instead of living and enjoying each breathless moment in time, we try to control it with our reason. We have reduced an expansive, endless experience to a small, little place we uphold with our minds. We play it safe by our reason and our so-called choices become nothing more than barriers holding us back from the larger reality we knew as children but have completely forgotten as adults.

We think we choose but we do not. We repeat over and over again what our conditioning tells us is acceptable, and in so doing we stay confined within that tiny, little world we have created for ourselves.

Life was never meant to be about choosing. Life is about living – living without fear of our decisions.

Each of us needs to challenge every choice we “think” we make in light of the awareness that what we typically do is what we always do anyway and then do the opposite. That is a real choice and a real challenge, not unlike, the way we went about our lives as little children. It has been said that “awareness” creates (real) choices but in truth awareness really opens us to the wonders of existence, which are always before us if we let go of our reasoning and judgments. Ultimately, when the awareness of “who we are” becomes apparent to us an existence of so-called choices disappears and is replaced by a life of spontaneity, wonder and awe. We find ourselves always moving in the direction of who we are and life seemingly unfolds around that. Pretty cool!