A wet rainy Monday......

This morning I woke up to my mobile alarm going 'it's time to get up, the time is 4.30am'. I raised an ear from the pillow, heard the rain, my inner voice said 'get up and meditate' I said 'nah' and went back to sleep. Woke up 2 hours later more tired and totally fed up with myself. Dragged myself out of bed and couldn't shake off the shame of having let my laziness get the better of me. I wanted to go to the gym as well.

Got into work and really didn't want to be there. I was delighted that I had gone down to the centre where I am giving the workshop with a flyer for them to put up on their notice board yesterday when the weather was dry. The woman there looked at it and said 'that's nice' which reassured me. It's ridiculous how nervous I felt walking up the stairs and giving her the flyer. I don't even want to do this workshop so what is this inner urge to do it which is stronger than me. My mobile has been eerily quiet all day. This path is so frustrating. The gifts are not given unless there is a commitment to use them to benefit others. Then when they are given, it's impossible to give them to others. This is the biggest joke on the spiritual path. And yet this path is about service so I have to keep plodding on.

After Richard Dawkins programme last night I had this overwhelming urge to try to contact him. I knew that he was a professor at Oxford University so I put these details into the Oxford University website hoping to get an email address for him. It would have been a miracle if it was this easy but of course it wasn't. Not one to accept defeat once I have put my mind to something, I phoned up Oxford University and asked what the best way was of contacting him. A very nice man gave me a number but when I called that all I got was an answering machine. I left a message asking to be called back but it's a good job I wasn't holding my breath waiting for an answer because I would be dead by now....you've guessed it, nobody called me back.

I realised at lunchtime that this blog is going to be very boring if it's all about me and my life so what I am going to do from time to time is to take some writing and expand on it. At the moment I am reading for the second time a book called The Soul - The Quality of Life which is published by the Lucis Trust and is one of the books which Alice Bailey wrote through a process of channelling. Today the chapter was all about service. It makes the distinction between service which comes from the personality and service that comes from the soul.

When the desire to serve comes from the personality it is usually experienced as 'I will serve you, but only if you take on my views and be obedient to me'. Service of the soul has no personality associated with it. It is service for service sake not to satisfy any desire of the personality. One proof of gauging whether or not service comes from the personality or the soul is to see how much attachment is associated with it. To give a simple example. If somebody comes to me for advice and I give it and then the same person comes to me a few days later with the same problem. I know that the advice I gave the first time has not been acted on. If I then get angry and think something like 'I gave you all this advice last time, you're a total waste of space' then this is not service from the soul. It is service from the personality because there was something I wanted for myself i.e. my advice to be acted on. The soul does not recognise personality issues such as me and mine and want. It is universal and not personal. Many of the cults which purport to be of service are in reality only in service of the personality and not of the soul. This is why they will never be universally accepted because they concern themselves with service to the personality.

I have always been wary of cults and organisations which cut themselves off from society and demand that their followers do the same. Soul and Spirit are inclusive, not exclusive. When this happens it is the demands of the personality which are being played out. The soul will never demand this exclusivity because it goes against its very nature. I consider this distinction between the service of the personality and the service of the soul to be an important one. It explains for me why I have always been cautious of Guru's. I'm not saying that all Gurus are only in service to their personality because I do not know that this true. But I think it's an idea worth thinking about and discussing. Everything I write in this blog are just views that I write. They are not intended to offend just to stimulate much needed debate around the entire spiritual phenomena, to sort out what is real from what is illusion and glamour. If this blog begins this debate then I will have more than delivered on my life's purpose.

I am going to copy direct from page 138 of this book because I think it is important to be authentic 'by citing where information which triggers insights comes from. Bailey says 'This effect (service, my word) is somewhat in the nature of a reflection in the lower nature of a higher consciousness and therefore today we have much running after service and much philanthropic effort. All of it is, however deeply coloured by personality, and it often produces much harm, for people seek to impose their ideas of service and their personal techniques upon other aspirants' The reader will have to go deep within and establish for him/herself whether or not these words resonate.

I have noticed a strange phenomena happening when I am speaking to people or more accurately when they are speaking to me. While they are speaking I can't make sense of anything they are saying until they get to the end. Then a picture forms and I can understand and respond appropriately. This is such a strange thing, it's like being in a fog for most of the conversation with things only becoming clear at the end. It is making me a great listener though because the quality of the picture which forms at the end depends on the quality of my listening. This is definitely something that has only recently happened. It's like I can't process bits of information I have to wait to get the bigger picture and then work backwards and identify the pieces.

Psychologists may see this as right brain functioning where the brain sees the bigger picture and then works backwards. Left brain people identify the bits as they go along and then put them together to make the big picture. I have felt for many years that my uncorrected lazy right eye has contributed to an imbalance in the brain such that my right brain works harder to compensate for the lack of stimulation to the left brain. I have tried to speak with friends about this in the past but they just used to laugh or else would make a joke of it by asking me 'what side of the brain is coming out for a beer tonight!' I used to laugh but inwardly I was in despair. Would I ever get anyone to take me seriously....... Now when I observe how I am processing and responding to information I am even more convinced that I am right brain dominant. If you put spirituality and right brain into Google millions of references come up so this link has been made in the past.

I have time tonight to write this blog because my speech for toastmasters is not until next Tuesday evening so I was pleased about it. I am going to step out of my comfort zone and tell the story of The Little Soul and the Sun. When I have refreshed my memory of the story I will re-tell it in this blog.......