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The human experience comes with a secret toolbox preloaded with three exceptional tools for healing and accelerating growth. These tools are user friendly and quite ordinary but are often overlooked as being simplistic and not respectable, especially in the world of science and particularly in the field of Western Psychology.  Even those who know about the tools tend to misinterpret them or fail to understand their true significance. So here in this article we are going to focus on these three tools and explore the territory covered by each.  

Each human being comes equipped with these tools but just like wrenches or screwdrivers they need to be put to use in order to work. They do not work all by themselves, but simply sit in the toolbox patiently waiting to be picked up. In other words these tools only work if backed by intent and used with deliberate focus. If there are other agendas, if the mind is preoccupied with hostility, martyrdom, competitiveness and the like, the tools will be difficult to use effectively. Nevertheless the tools are so powerful that just by being willing to pick them up they will begin their repair work. What are these three simple yet profound tools that are available to you on a constant basis? Certainly they are not news. You have heard of them over and over but perhaps you have not known how to use them or have not known what an impact they can have on your life. Maybe you just haven’t known what a treasure they are especially when used together as a set. So let us clarify all this so you can set about using the tools with gusto.

TOOL #1: GRATITUDE

The first tool in your toolbox is Gratitude, an attitude and an orientation designed to open the heart. Gratitude is a word for a high level frequency that is designed to open portals, windows, and doorways into essence, the home of Spirit. In everyday reality, or we should really say un-reality, Spirit is not apparent to the naked eye. In fact this world of stone, flesh, and fiber is often quite depressing because it involves frustration, pain, and frightening circumstances and events. The pleasures are more than offset by the stress of everyday survival and the constant mind chatter that is enough to drive even the most stable person crazy after awhile. Yet just behind the movie set that makes up the material world, Spirit lies camouflaged  and bursting with light and freedom waiting to be recognized and tapped into. Spirit has cleverly arranged portals in strategic places that if opened lead directly past the everyday outer world into the power of the inner reality where all answers lie and where all problems are revealed to be the illusions that they are. These portals are literally everywhere but there are primary ones that are so close as to be practically impossible to miss. The one most accessible is the heart, symbolically lying smack in the middle of your chest just below your chin. So accessible is it that you can easily reach your heart with your hands and when you speak it vibrates and when you breathe it is massaged all around. How could you miss it and yet we do ignore it everyday unless it should happen to break with heart attack and disease.

The false personality is dedicated to keeping this powerful portal closed tightly lest Spirit happen to shine through relegating it to nothingness. The way that the false personality accomplishes this is to lower the frequency to the point where the portals remain closed. Let us say that the portals pop open only when a certain frequency is reached so keeping the frequency below this level prevents opening. What keeps frequency low are all the familiar maladies such as fear, hostility, self importance, depression, self doubt, the negative pole of cynicism, frustration, and so on. Therefore most people’s hearts are closed most of the time and not only does it feel bad in the chest but it cuts off the main avenue of escape from pain and suffering, an open heart. Gratitude is designed to counter these ploys by the false personality and raise the frequency high enough to begin the opening process.

When your personality is down in the dumps it is difficult to spring into complete gratitude for anything so you have to sneak up on it little by little. Turn your thoughts toward something that you for sure love, something that is innocent and deserving of gratitude like your cat or your dog or your parakeet. Allow yourself to feel a little bit of gratitude for this critter in your life. Then begin associating to similar creatures or things that your false personality has a hard time objecting to like sunlight on a cold morning or hot chocolate or shade in the hot sun. Now remember that the false personality has no effect whatsoever on essence. It can only lower the frequency of your personality temporarily so the advantage of gratitude is that it tends to engage essence by co-opting the personality and separating it from the clutches of false personality.

Here in brief are some of the things that gratitude will do for you:

1. Gratitude reframes experiences for the mind so that what seemed like a problem or at best something that hardly mattered becomes a good thing instead. For example when you are grateful for the tree in front of your house you stop ignoring it and focus instead on its gifts and benefits to you. The world instantly becomes a better place because you are grateful.

2. When you are grateful you extend to something outside of yourself and recognize that you depend on others or on Spirit for benefits that you did not put there yourself. In other words having gratitude instantly switches your orientation away from self-importance and self-referencing and reminds you of the proper perspective. It is not your ego that is in charge but Spirit.

3. Gratitude then reinforces what is benefiting you because Spirit is always inclined to give more when it is what you recognize and acknowledge. The greater your gratitude the more you will receive that which you are grateful for.



TOOL #2: FORGIVENESS

The second great tool in your toolbox is Forgiveness, the most powerful method of releasing blame, guilt, and shame that there is. Forgiveness ends the war within just as it resolves conflict with externals and paves the way for cooperation and extension. The false personality would have you believe that forgiving is a weakness, that you are setting yourself up to be taken advantage of again. It also tries to get you to believe that if you forgive yourself you are giving yourself an excuse to be bad all over again and thus it is not in your best interest to forgive. You must be tough minded and hold your feet to the fire. Only in this way will you learn the hard lessons of life. In a word you must be punished. The same applies to others. If you forgive them the false personality wants you to believe you are rewarding them for bad behavior and removing the consequences that will teach them to be good. The false personality however is wrong. Punishment does not work, never has, never will. Denying forgiveness doesn’t work either. It never made someone a better person and it never taught them not to make another mistake. In fact punishment almost always results in an increase of the objectionable behavior.

Forgiveness is relief from the terrible stress of guilt and this results in raising ones frequency, a prerequisite to opening the heart and other portals to the world of Spirit. Now when we speak of forgiveness here we are not talking about a grudging forgiveness that suggests that ourselves or the other person is really bad but we are cutting them some slack. This just isn’t it. Forgiveness actually means that we are seeing the truth and therefore there is no room for hostility or blame. How does this take place? When we really forgive ourselves we see that we are Spirit and that our personality got so confused and so lost there for a while that it committed an error while under the influence of the false personality. Since the false personality is not who we are and is only a delusional parasite, who we really are didn’t do any thing that it can be blamed for. If people knew who they really were they would never even think of doing something that would result in guilt. So in the same way we forgive others because they were truly insane when they did something that resulted in the harm of another human being. Should they be prevented from doing it again? Yes, but that is different from blame and punishment. Bear in mind that in Iceland criminals are not locked up in a jail. They are seen as unfortunate people who got confused so they are given rehabilitation instead.

Forgiveness is a great power and is absolutely required in order to become self-realized or enlightened. So the next time you hold on to blame or to guilt just realize that you are putting off enlightenment for yet a later date and ensuring instead that you will suffer more in the meantime. Blame and guilt and the resulting shame that goes with them are a kind of booby prize that gives you a short term self righteous gratification but not an accompanying happiness.

In order to forgive follow these simple steps. Think of something you did as a child that you were punished for or that you felt bad about at the time. Maybe you stole a bit of money from your parents or stole some candy. Maybe you tortured an insect or beat on your brother or sister. From your perspective now you can see that this was simply an error of a child and most likely you have long since let go of feeling guilty over this. Often the memory simply elicits compassion or little chuckle as time has healed it. If there is any sense of guilt left don’t use this event in the exercise. Find something that was very minor.

Now realize that there will come a time in the future when you have grown in compassion and wisdom, perhaps a time when you are a self realized being. >From that point of view you will look upon yourself today with the same kind of compassion that you now look at yourself when you were three years old. You will no longer blame yourself nor will you feel guilt over whatever you now hold over your head. Since your essence exists outside of time it is already capable of that kind of neutrality. See if you can tap into that perspective for a few moments.Try this as well with blame toward another. Realize that at some point in your evolution you will let this go because it only holds you back.

Forgiveness is the antidote to a terrible toxin that is even today poisoning the world. For blame always returns to its source and weighs heavily there. Consider this when you review all the people you hold accountable for all the seeming ills of your life. This includes politicians, younger souls creating mayhem, polluting corporate leaders and so on. Blaming them is like pointing a finger in the mirror. This does not mean that you agree with what they do or that you do not try to counter their actions with more beneficial ones. Nor does it always mean amnesty for those who have harmed. They still may need to pay reparations but punishment and lack of forgiveness will only perpetuate what they have done. Time spent blaming in anger is a further toxin that poisons no less than what they do. Forgiveness is the ultimate ticket and fast track to a better world.



TOOL# 3: BLESSINGS

Now we come to the third great power tool in that toolbox that everyone has from birth, the ability to Bless. People in general do not know their function as human beings so it never occurs to them that their job is to bless the world. Yes, it is true that many people have been taught to bless their food on occasion. A few words are mumbled over the meal, usually with some mumbo jumbo about thanking the great father with a beard who sits somewhere overhead watching everything like a big television show. That is hardly what we mean by Blessing here. Blessing is the act of recognizing that Spirit is coming through what we are witnessing or experiencing. It is recognizing and acknowledging the grand flow of Being-ness that is present as we eat or see the landscape, make love, clean, or create with tools. That Being-ness flows through the landscape, through our bodies, through each moment of now and gives it indescribable vitality and life force. Yet the physical plane is designed as a camouflage universe where Spirit does not appear to exist. This physical world is designed to put us under a deep hypnosis, a deep sleep where we no longer recognize that Spirit is present. Not only do we go to sleep but large parts of the world may temporarily go to sleep as well. So it is a human being’s job not only to wake up but to wake up all that is around. That waking up is calling Blessing the world.

Humans have been taught to believe that only special individuals have the right to Bless. They are people who have gone to seminary or special training programs to become ministers, rabbis, priests, imams, or shamans. We invite them to come before us and bless ceremonies, fields, businesses, projects, meetings, and banquets and we bow our heads while they talk to Spirit for us. This is not a bad practice but it is extraordinarily limiting. First of all many of those we invite to do the Blessing for us are the most asleep of all. Nor is any collar or robe or training needed to be a Blessor. No one can bless for us. Each human comes with that capacity, with that ability, and with that responsibility to Bless, Bless, Bless.

So what happens when we Bless and how do we go about Blessing in an effective way? To Bless means that you become conscious that you are alive and that Spirit is flowing through you. You then notice that Spirit is flowing through everything all around you and that what is coming though you is coming through everything and that it is all the same.  When you see or sense or feel that you merely say, “I am Spirit. Awake. Awake. I am. I am.” While saying this you can look around and bless with your hands and arms outstretched, waking everything up to the incredible power of Spirit flowing through everything with great passion and peace. Everything receives a boost, everything celebrates, everything is grateful, everything forgives its slumber. That is good. There is no better activity than this. Then if you want to add a little something you give everything that you are experiencing or witnessing a gift of well being from the bottom of your heart. You might say, “I give you great happiness and love. May all who come here or pass this way be blessed with joy, abundance, and wellness.” What you give is what you get so make sure you give the best you can imagine.
   
Blessing is incomprehensibly powerful and is perhaps the greatest tool of all because it is the pathway back to Spirit. Yet it is hard to Bless if you have no gratitude and you have not forgiven. So you can see that these three tools work together as a powerhouse trio. They are components of the three building blocks of the physical universe, Truth, Love and Energy. Each tool works with all three components. Gratitude recognizes what is true, transmits love, and enhances energy. Forgiveness tells the truth, generates love, and liberates energy. Blessing acknowledges the truth, radiates love, and releases phenomenal energy.
   
Remember, each person has the tools resting in their toolbox. They require deliberate use to become effective. These three tools, when used regularly are all that is needed to become liberated, self-realized, and or enlightened.

Why wait?

Article orginally posted: November 2, 2007