Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from Living the Principles of Abundance and Prosperity Vol. 1 by John-Roger, DSS with Paul Kaye, DSS. It was first published in 2010.
The sleeper goes for abundance by manifesting illusion out of greed and insecurity. The one who is awakened only has to take in the next breath. –From The Tao of Spirit by John-Roger, DSS
There are many ways I catch myself “asleep.” By far the most common is my busyness—always having something I need to do. By extending outside myself, I lose my center. Best to have my center and then extend from there. The center somehow has a wisdom about how far to extend, if at all.
Many years ago, this rhyme spontaneously came to me:
I found I got more done by moving slowly,
so I stopped to ask myself why
I found in moving slowly I caught the moment
whereas in rushing it passed me by
While being Poet Laureate is plainly not in my future, I still find a lot of truth in the last two lines. When I slow down and “take in the next breath,” I suddenly become aware of the abundance of beauty in and around me.
I found this passage from a book review quite illuminating:
One theme of the book is that ordinariness can yield much more pleasure than is normally assumed. All the striving for happiness in our culture may cause us to overlook the riches of the familiar and near at hand.
To the extent that the author has a secret to happiness, it resides in slowing down enough to pay attention to what you might call the grammar of experience. When you take the time to examine the world around you, parsing what you see, hear, and feel, you find that the plainest occurrence is surprisingly rich.
Works of art invite this kind of slow-motion reflection in its most concentrated form. Most museum-goers, the author notes, spend less than 10 seconds in front of any given painting. Instead, Mr Spiegelman pulls up a chair. At the Brera Gallery in Milan, he tells us, he once sat looking at Piero della Francesca’s Montefeltro altarpiece for 25 minutes before anyone else wandered into the room. A great deal of experience, he implies, benefits from a similar kind of attentiveness.
Wes Davis for the Wall Street Journal
on Seven Pleasures by Willard Spiegelman
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Paul Kaye, DSS, Author and President of MSIA, is facilitating a series of workshops on awakening abundance and how to create more of what you want in your life.
The events are at Peace Awareness Labyrinth & Gardens between January 22nd and June 18th, 2018.
I liked this edition and also the pictures. Thank you