Reason for test and difficulties
As we go through life we are all faced with challenges, difficulties, pain and suffering. That is the nature of the realm we live in. It has been designed by God that way, not to punish us, but to help us grow spiritually, and develop Divine attributes.
We need those skills and attributes to deal with the situations we will face in the next world, and the new level of our life and spiritual maturity, after we shed our material bodies.
Some of those Divine virtues and attributes are; Kindness, Compassion, Love, Patience, Understanding, forgiveness, Bravery, politeness, Happiness, care, flexibility, awareness, Mindfulness, Service to others, Honesty, humility, empathy, and many more.
We need to stay mindful of our actions when responding to other people’s actions. Not to react when someone says something to us, but make sure we hear it on the level of our higher self and not just our ego.
We are here to learn all those Divine attributes, serve others and achieve our life purpose buy sharing our special gifts. This will continually raise our vibration, until we are ready for the next step.
I am reposting the Vibration chart again so you can see what emotions to avoid and what vibration is best for your personal growth.
Also for the times you are faced with difficult situations, I highly recommend these two favorite prayers that I go to.
O God! Refresh and gladden my spirit. Purify my heart. Illumine my powers. I lay all my affairs in Thy hand. Thou art my Guide and my Refuge. I will no longer be sorrowful and grieved; I will be a happy and joyful being. O God! I will no longer be full of anxiety, nor will I let trouble harass me. I will not dwell on the unpleasant things of life.
O God! Thou art more friend to me than I am to myself. I dedicate myself to Thee, O Lord.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá
Is there any Remover of difficulties save God? Say: Praised be God! He is God! All are His servants, and all abide by His bidding!
The Báb
This is link to a YouTube video of a Tablet Baha’ullah wrote about his suffering and difficult times.
Wayne Dyer – Love Your Life (Very helpful tips)
Why are we here?
We are here in this world to acquire God’s virtues and Divine attributes, that we will need in our next life (such as Love, compassion, Patience, Faith, Trust, Honesty, Humility, etc)…. just as a fetus develops in the mothers womb (Arms, Legs, Eyes, Ears, brain, etc) before it is born into the material world. Not developing these physical and spiritual qualities, causes us suffering in the word we are being born in to next.
To develop those attributes, sometimes we get what we might consider the most unlikely helpers. For example that relative or coworker that always gets on our nerves, and pushes our buttons, is really there to teach us patience and love. When we are faced with uncertainty in our lives, we are taught to let go, trust in the Divine process, and have faith that everything will turn out to our best interest at the end.
So when a lot of us were told as children, if we are not good, we will go to Hell, what they were really trying to say is that if we do not develop certain qualities and skills here in this world, lack of those skills will cause us suffering in the next life… like a pre-mature infant who suffers acclimation to the material world.
Firoozeh Bowden
The Grace of Beauty is a puzzling concept, mostly because of our preconceived notions of beauty. Hollywood and the fashion industry have defined beauty for most of the world for decades. However, before the advent of these industries, beauty wore many faces.
The ancestors saw beauty in nature. Sunrises and sunsets were observed in awe and ritual. The spirit of plants and flowers was seen and respected. The ancient ones, even found beauty in animals so rich and important that they recognized them as sacred.
Matthew Fox, priest and theologian said, “Animals are here in part to grant glimpses of the grace of beauty.” I had never pondered this type of grace before. When I thought of it, I immediately recognized how we could see the beauty of animals. But, grace? I was going to need more than a few minutes to reflect on this.
So, I began looking at the photos I had taken of animals over the years. Hundreds of birds, our cats and dogs, other people’s cats and dogs, chipmunks, butterflies, dragonflies and then, I found my frog pictures.
The frog (or toad) is not what some would call beautiful in colloquial terms, unless you happened to be another frog or toad. But, when I look at them, I see beauty. Their color, the way they can sit as if frozen, the quickness when they do move and, dare I say it, their grace!
Early on in our reflections on Grace, we defined Grace as the Divine’s blessing or favor upon a soul and the blessing of our gifts and talents. All creatures – not simply humans – have Grace. Animals most certainly have the Grace to teach humans, something Native and Indigenous people have known for thousands of years.
What lessons do frogs have to teach me about their Grace of beauty? I am learning to sit quietly and “be.” Frogs are very Zen! I am learning that when it is required, to move swiftly to resolve a situation, but to then return to being at peace. I am learning that beauty isn’t about how we look outside, but absolutely what is happening within our being.
With this new idea of Grace, I began looking for the Grace of beauty in other animals, including humans. I found so many grace-filled lessons just waiting to be taught and learned. Grace abounds in the wisdom of squirrel to gather what it needs to survive, of skunk to repel that which can be harmful, of snake to shed the old in order to stay healthy and strong. So many lessons, so much beauty and Grace!
Humans, however, don’t always see the Grace of Beauty in each other. Because of the constant bombardment of media, beauty has become a shallow covering worn to attract others. True Grace of Beauty is found in the eyes of a mother holding her child, in an elder gazing at the love of their life, in a young man working to support his aging parents, in a young woman learning to cope alone and in the children at play.
The Grace of Beauty can be seen in daily life as humans struggle to survive. This Grace helps us have the strength to move forward in a world of chaos. Grace of Beauty enables us to hope for a better tomorrow.
Grace resides within us all, yet, the ability to recognize it can slip away from us. Just as a heart can grow cold and spirit no longer enter it, so too, grace ignored and unseen can become something that is no longer recognizable. Grace of Beauty is a blessing that our world is in great need of at this time. We must refocus our eyes and hearts to inform our brains to see and hold as valuable the Grace of Beauty in all life. Our World depends upon it.
A new theory of consciousness
Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A bat? A cockroach? A bacterium? An electron?
These questions are all aspects of the ancient “mind-body problem,” which has resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years.
The mind-body problem enjoyed a major rebranding over the last two decades and is generally known now as the “hard problem” of consciousness (usually capitalized nowadays), after the New York University philosopher David Chalmers coined this term in a now classic 1995 paper and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.
Fast forward to the present era and we can ask ourselves now: Did the hippies actually solve this problem? My colleague Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I think they effectively did, with the radical intuition that it’s all about vibrations … man. Over the past decade, we have developed a “resonance theory of consciousness” that suggests that resonance—another word for synchronized vibrations—is at the heart of not only human consciousness but of physical reality more generally.
So how were the hippies right? Well, we agree that vibrations, resonance, are the key mechanism behind human consciousness, as well as animal consciousness more generally. And, as I’ll discuss below, that they are the basic mechanism for all physical interactions to occur.
All things in our universe are constantly in motion, vibrating. Even objects that appear to be stationary are in fact vibrating, oscillating, resonating, at various frequencies. Resonance is a type of motion, characterized by oscillation between two states. And ultimately all matter is just vibrations of various underlying fields.
An interesting phenomenon occurs when different vibrating things/processes come into proximity: they will often start, after a little time, to vibrate together at the same frequency. They “sync up,” sometimes in ways that can seem mysterious. This is described today as the phenomenon of spontaneous self-organization.
Examining this phenomenon leads to potentially deep insights about the nature of consciousness and about the universe more generally.
ALL THINGS RESONATE AT CERTAIN FREQUENCIES
Stephen Strogatz provides various examples from physics, biology, chemistry and neuroscience to illustrate what he calls “sync” (synchrony) in his 2003 book also called Sync, including:
Resonance is a truly universal phenomenon and at the heart of what can sometimes seem like mysterious tendencies toward self-organization.
Pascal Fries, a German neurophysiologist with the Ernst Strüngmann Institute, has explored in his highly cited work over the last two decades the ways in which various electrical patterns, specifically, gamma, theta and beta waves, work together in the brain to produce the various types of human consciousness.
These names refer to the speed of electrical oscillations in the various brain regions, as measured by electrodes placed on the outside of the skull. Gamma waves are typically defined as about 30 to 90 cycles per second (hertz), theta as a 4- to 7-hz rhythm, and beta as 12.5 to 30 hz. These aren’t hard cutoffs—they’re rules of thumb—and they vary somewhat in different species.
So, theta and beta are significantly slower than gamma waves. But the three work together to produce, or at least facilitate (the exact relationship between electrical brain patterns and consciousness is still very much up for debate), various types of human consciousness.
Fries calls his concept “communication through coherence” or CTC. For Fries it’s all about neuronal synchronization. Synchronization, in terms of shared electrical oscillation rates, allows for smooth communication between neurons and groups of neurons. Without coherence (synchronization), inputs arrive at random phases of the neuron excitability cycle and are ineffective, or at least much less effective, in communication.
Our resonance theory of consciousness builds upon the work of Fries and many others, in a broader approach that can help to explain not only human and mammalian consciousness, but also consciousness more broadly. We also speculate metaphysically about the nature of consciousness as a more general phenomenon of all matter.
ARE ALL THINGS AT LEAST A LITTLE BIT CONSCIOUS?
Based on the observed behavior of the entities that surround us, from electrons to atoms to molecules to bacteria to paramecia to mice, bats, rats, etc., all things may be viewed as at least a little conscious. This sounds strange at first blush, but “panpsychism”—the view that all matter has some associated consciousness—is an increasingly accepted position with respect to the nature of consciousness.
The panpsychist argues that consciousness (subjectivity) did not emerge; rather, it’s always associated with matter, and vice versa (they are two sides of the same coin), but mind as associated with most of the matter in our universe is generally very simple. An electron or an atom, for example, enjoy just a tiny amount of consciousness. But as matter “complexifies,” so mind complexifies, and vice versa.
Biological organisms have leveraged faster information exchange through various biophysical pathways, including electrical and electrochemical pathways. These faster information flows allow for more macro-scale levels of consciousness than would occur in similar-scale structures like boulders or a pile of sand, simply because there is significantly greater connectivity and thus more “going on” in biological structures than in a boulder or a pile of sand. Boulders and piles of sand only have thermal pathways with very limited bandwidth.
Boulders and piles of sand are “mere aggregates” or just collections of more rudimentary conscious entities (probably at the atomic or molecular level only), rather than combinations of micro-conscious entities that combine into a higher level macro-conscious entity, which is the hallmark of biological life.
Accordingly, the type of communication between resonating structures is key for consciousness to expand beyond the rudimentary type of consciousness that we expect to occur in more basic physical structures.
The central thesis of our approach is this: the particular linkages that allow for macro-consciousness to occur result from a shared resonance among many micro-conscious constituents. The speed of the resonant waves that are present is the limiting factor that determines the size of each conscious entity.
As a shared resonance expands to more and more constituents, the particular conscious entity grows larger and more complex. So, the shared resonance in a human brain that achieves gamma synchrony, for example, includes a far larger number of neurons and neuronal connections than is the case for beta or theta rhythms alone.
It’s resonating structures all the way down—and up.
Our resonance theory of consciousness attempts to provide a unified framework that includes neuroscience and the study of human consciousness, but also more fundamental questions of neurobiology and biophysics. It gets to the heart of the differences that matter when it comes to consciousness and the evolution of physical systems.
It is all about vibrations, but it’s also about the type of vibrations and, most importantly, about shared vibrations.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it … man.