Upheaval

Vehicle

They are foolish people, indeed, who believe that one can reach the Divine Presence without a vehicle without relying on a means. It is as though they are saying, ‘We may reach the moon without using anything. We may jump from here to there!’ What is the purpose of knowledge if one does not use it?

Such people tell those who listen to them that all the knowledge they need can be found in the Holy Qur’an. They say, ‘Read the Qur’an and you will understand.’ That is destroying Islam. It is God’s Ancient and Holy Words. How then, can they say that everyone can recite and understand such a sublime text? On the contrary, God said :

If they had only referred it to the Messenger, and to those in authority among them, those among them who can search out knowledge of it would have known it (4:83)

You must listen to those servants who have been granted authority. Only they can discern the real meanings from what is necessary to be known. Only they can comb the oceans of Divine Knowledge and bring back pearls. Not everyone may comb through the oceans and bring back pearls. That means, if you are unsure about something, you must find such a person – one who is bringing back pearls of meaning.

God has given that understanding only to those special people whom He has authorised to receive it. Not everyone understands. Those who believe otherwise are falling into unbelief (kufr). So, too, are those who – acting upon this misguided belief that the full knowledge of the Holy Qur’an is available to all – declare that the practice of making meditation to a Sufi guide is unbelief fall into unbelief themselves. The irony of their claim is that, through meditation with the Sufi guide, one may come to a real understanding of the Qur’an.

May God forgive me and bless you. Al-Fatiha.

Shaykh Muhammad Nazim Adil al-Haqqani – Lefke, Cyprus Ramadan 17 1425/ October 30, 2004 – from the book The Healing Power of Sufi Meditation ISBN 1-930409-26-5

The above quote exposes a spiritual principle that is at the heart of the 12 Step Programme as it promises to allow a person to construct an experiential vehicle that is fit for the purpose of conscious contact with God, which is stated as Step 11.

For to say to a suffering person, “Just read the book of Alcoholics Anonymous”, expecting that this is enough 88 years after the text arrived through a founder who said whilst writing it, it was as if the pencil had a life of its own, may actually be falling into Spiritual Bypassing and the dogma of a hierarchical intellectually based culture unwittingly hijacking a spiritually based healing that is designed to change the old hierarchy!

All emotions are sacred

The criterion for assessment and for the avoidance of Spiritual Bypassing is to ask the question, how has the message transmissibility of the 12 Step Programme improved over the last 88 years whilst leaving the Basic Text unaltered?

The work of Joe McQ took the 12 Step Programme into a clearer transmissibility in the last decades of the twentieth century, whilst preserving rigorously the original text of Alcoholics Anonymous. He did say though of the 12 Step Programme in the 1970s and 80s, that if you weren’t sick when you went into some of the meetings of AA – you sure as hell were sick when you came out!

This was the catalyst for Joe McQ to begin to work with Charlie P and to travel the world simply improving the transmissibility of the already existing 12 Step Programme by rigorously attending to the words and thus bringing pearls of meaning for a new generation.

Now the same question must be asked for the twenty first century. The context for the asking of the question has changed radically as Anne Wilson Schaef has defined for us in her book written in 1987 called When Society Becomes An Addict.

Anne Wilson Schaef has made the bold and revolutionary discovery that we live in a sick society. Often unknowingly, the vast majority of us collude in a system that encourages addiction and co-dependence – and sees these states as normal. Many of us are addicted to chemicals, not only alcohol or drugs but nicotine, caffeine, chocolate, overeating in general. Even more of us are involved in addictive processes: workaholism, gambling, compulsive shopping, sex, and so on. The realisation of the extent of our addictions, both individually and as a society, is shocking. However, there is no need to get depressed, because we can do something about it.

The first and most important step is to admit and name the disease, both in ourselves and in our society. Anne Wilson Schaef’s brilliant and compassionate dissection of addictive behavioural patterns leaves us no option but to see truth. However, the message of this book is essentially optimistic, because once the process of awareness is triggered, healing begins.

ANNE WILSON SCHAEF, PhD, is an internationally known author whose books are recognised as major contributions to the understanding of addiction. Her bestsellers include Co-dependence Misunderstood, Mistreated and Women’s Reality.
Published in 1987

Any therapist who is not actively recovering from the Addictive System is perpetuating it. Any therapist who is not actively trying to make a system shift is supporting the Addictive System.

p136 When Society Becomes An Addict by Anne Wilson Schaef

The modern spiritual teachings offer no personal template that can provide a sense of vehicle. Therefore the teachers become merely brand vehicles that in themselves cannot carry a person to a Divine Presence experience.

The 12 Step Programme offers the only living vehicle template on Earth presently that is fit for purpose, fit to carry people to their own conscious contact with God.

For a person to be helped to build this vehicle in the 21st century then, even though the template is only 88 years old, guidance from those with their own vehicle up and running is necessary.

This is why good sponsorship is vital in the 12 Step Fellowships. As the founder of the 12 Step Programme Bill W. said, you can’t transmit something you haven’t got.

How vital is it then for those offering treatment in a rehab, treatment that has to be regulated by orthodox non-spiritually based intellectually formulated structures of assessment, to be clear in their adherence to the principles of spiritual healing that are Ancient, principles that Bill W. accessed in a way that was by his own admission, mysterious?

Diction Resolution Therapy is a bridge from the paradox that is spiritual healing, across to the orthodox structures of governance for all forms of healing to be safely delivered. Does this work? I offer some feedback from the relatives of a client I received after one session of counselling with their relative:

Just a short message to thank you for the care and counselling you gave…. He has already started to turn the corner and is looking forward to your next session.

Client feedback to the DRT WhatsApp page. 2023.

The opening quote in this post is offered simply to see a correlation across the centuries as to how consciousness transmits. The Sufi is ever free from dogma, is ever the pragmatist, for the Sufi knows that there is only One Existent.

Bülent Rauf – Addresses II

In this post linked below, I explore the building of this vehicle as the completion and perfecting of a sense of an octahedral presence that establishes personal experience of Divine intervention that heals and establishes an ever deepening and improving contact with Consciousness Itself.

https://lifeisreturning.com/2020/08/28/the-sphere/
12 Step Programme as an Ancient Template fit for the 21st century

…. good news

“You cannot transmit something you haven’t got”, is how Bill W., a founder member of the Fellowship that gave the world the transmission of the 12 Step Programme in the 1930s, described the process of carrying a message to other people.

On the 21st September 2013, I wrote the first post on a blog “Hu’ll heal your heart” with a title “No news is ….”, so you may see the sense of completion that this post contains in its title!

I don’t know if this titular completion ends a blogging effort all together, but it seems that there is a sense of arrival from then to now that draws this line.

I like Tony Benn and this speech summing up the end of the then Thatcher era is clear, but he and the Labour Party and the Trade Unions in the UK miss a certain point.

Yes, Margaret Thatcher brought in the Passenger Charter, the Parent Charter and the Patient Charter to destroy Trade Unions who might have further threatened her Executive control. It was to be a little while after the demise of Thatcher before there was a change in the party government in the UK, but actually the trajectory of money dictated policy that Benn described has been proved to have been unstoppable, even to this present Brexit day.

Tony Blair was given a huge majority in 1997 to bring back to a middle-ground the Tory zeal in cutting the corruption in Trade Unions, but he didn’t do it, he hung up the blunt democratic pendulum and his advisors had to start spinning language to justify his more presidential approach to conditions as he saw them.

The UK Unions were hobbled, probably infiltrated and seduced into Westminster via the Labour Party at the beginning of the 20th century. As soon as the Unions were made left-wing, deep global capital sat back and waited for Thatcher.

For the word “Union”, spiritually, is the most powerful word on Earth.

Politically too, it is the only word that can hold Executive fiat to account.

The world is going through its fire today because of misplaced money and the lack of a unified response to the 25 people on Earth who have as much wealth as half of the world’s population.

So, because the UK #Brexit calamity is simply the necessary evolution of Thatcher’s 3 deregulation Charters, it is clear that the overall diseased comprehension of the word Union has rendered Parliament into precipitating the Executive collapse that we have witnessed for the last 3 years.

There is also the fact that the City of London could not accept the changes to European Law that threatened to regulate the offshore accounts in their three areas of global financial power, Bermuda, Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands – so Brexit had to happen, whatever the appearance given out to the news in the temporary smoke and mirrors of dynastic ploys.

This clip of orthodox Jews meeting in 2017 brought tears to my eyes as the universal message of tawhid rang out in the words, the sacrifice of manifesting presence undeniable.

The Higher Love that the spiritual word “Union” describes is not manifested in any of the world’s main-stream religious vehicles as they have all been hobbled also by monied forces of dissolution.

Only the usually hidden individuals who are always present in a living “Union” with God now stand as the bulwarks to be able to have any chance of averting the calamity facing Mankind today.

“Tawhid” is the Arabic word that the Sufi manifests. Teachers through the centuries, some famously known, most efficaciously unknown, have granted evidence of the existence of a science of being that can turn Mankind into Humankind.

It is “Union” that unites, nothing else can unite. The politicians know the power of the word Union, but as a class of people, they have sold out their Oaths of Office to the private money lobby.

The constant battle to deflect questions away from the truth of a situation by leaders who think that this is the required behaviour of a successful politician or corporate business person, this behaviour is sick and it spreads sickness.

The State of the Union address in the US is now wholly a report to money. The European Union is collapsing. The Soviet Union is history. Wherever Mankind looks on Earth for evidence of any success at all for its intellectual hijacking of this word “Union” to have become a successful “State”, there is only the evidence of corruption, destruction, war, genocide, broken treaties, weasel words, sexual scandals, professional liars on an industrial scale …. all in their particular God’s name or their particular form of Marxism.

Seems (as of the 19th October 2019) that Brexit has moved in the direction that America wanted it to move, we’ll all see how that works through.

As I look upon these days, it is Consciousness that is the key to progress for the Earth. We all plug into Consciousness with the Yin-Yang of our possibility. We plug in with our blue and brown wire, except that in many, many people their brown wire is a co-dependence upon a person, place or a thing.

Or, there is no brown wire there for a person at all, only a form of the disease of addiction, a form of suicide in slow motion of a person’s accidental choosing.

Then, the narrative of the blue wire expands and consumes people and their collectives.

This disconnect, this disrepair is where I started in 2013 with a message of physical repair and metaphysical reconnect. This work is now clear. The difference between universal simple feelings and personal complex emotions has been restored.

(Postscript 12/04/20 The above video recorded by me has been deleted by Facebook from my account along with five others with the titles of Trust, Certainty, Patience, Resolution and Veracity without my permission – strange days indeed. So, in a postscript at 10/10/20 I’ll replace the deleted video with this https://lifeisreturning.com/2020/05/26/satsang/)

I am open to the material and spiritual requirements of these days as surely as my blogs bear my witness. I remain cheerful and optimistic for myself and clear in my willingness to further serve people in my occupations. Yet the Sufi is ever the pragmatist, there is a reason that “poverty” drives me to work, it is in the dignity of the very word itself, a word describing the state of many of my beloved forebears.

There are, as always, people living on Earth today in a state of tawhid, those in the attainment of spiritual Union. The challenge, as always, is to see if the United can be brought into a viable contact with the disunited, without the historically murderous story lines of those previously recorded contacts simply repeating …. with no blame …. we’ll see 😉

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/astaghfirullah

12 Steps to sanity.

Half measures availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon. Here are the steps we took, which are suggested as a program of recovery:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol —that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than our-selves could restore us to sanity.
3 Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Many of us exclaimed, “What an order! I can’t go through with it.” Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.

(AA Basic Text 1937)
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These Spiritual principles of the Spiritual Kindergarten are timeless and remedy the devilry that is manifested by envy and resentment.

Many people these days are looking for a New Age asset stripped version of the blood and thunder religions of past centuries. In recovery dynamics this is called looking for the easier softer way.

Unless a person can lay down the foundation protection that these divinely simple Steps provide, any attempt at a 21st century exploration of inner space is as doomed to failure as would the prospect of going into outer space without a space-ship.

In fact the global religious trigger points that fill the news channels 24/7 offer ample evidence of an encroaching insanity of which #Brexit is but a local symptom, that stubbornly refuses to respond to the partisan systems purportedly of the same Holy Spirit.

If the religions did a 12 Step audit of their actual state and made amends, then their individual adherents might have some chance of enjoying a Step 11 that was actually connected to Consciousness.

The challenge to face the destructive force of envy and resentment is not just a personal matter, whole systems now face collapse unless the systemic leaders can see the illness that threatens our whole global system.

Whatever side of the #Brexit argument a person find themselves on, when alcohol is replaced by whatever is the person, place or thing that is clearly causal, then Step 1 chillingly describes the actual state of the UK political Executive function over the last three years. The recent change of UK leadership when placed into an illness paradigm is almost certain to be a deepening of the calamity.

The Dunning-Kruger syndrome may well be a problem affecting some personality types presently bulldozing their way through the global logjams that fill the news channels.

A well known search engine gives the etymology of the word expert as follows:

“Middle English (as an adjective): from French, from Latin expertus, past participle of experiri ‘try’. The noun use dates from the early 19th century Compare with experience and experiment.”

So the word expert is an adjective that can be used as a noun, but in its root it is all about experience.

Then the difficulty around the hostility toward the self-proclaimed expert becomes clearer in the difference between theory and practice.

This is no more clear than when a man becomes a politician who is rich and who has been rich all of his life saying that they are experts in knowing what poor people need.

(Postscript added 30/11/19 https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10218768279451646&id=1039915465)

In my professional work, the expertise that I bring to Diction Resolution Therapy is based primarily on the fact that I haven’t had a drink of alcohol since May 1995 and that my professional work roots from that personal experience.

In my spiritual work, I speak from my experience not from a theory.

This experience is clarified in the Sufi Way here.

Without prejudice, the reference to Jared Diamond’s book is a signpost that the illness paradigm is at least being talked about at the Davos level of global cultures as Bill Gates has recommended that all leaders read this book asap.

Priceless Prayers (retrieving the baby from the discarded bath waters)

___________

In The Name Of God, Most Compassionate Most Merciful ….

…. Say, [O Muhammad], “I do not tell you that I have the depositories [containing the provision] of Allah or that I know the unseen, nor do I tell you that I am an angel. I only follow what is revealed to me.” Say, “Is the blind equivalent to the seeing? Then will you not give thought?” [6:50] ….
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From al-Islam.org this Creation Story looks at “resentment” as first felt by that entity known as Satan or Iblis in the Abrahamic religions.

“One day Shamim asked her grandmother, “Tell me Grandma, who made us? How did we come on this earth?”

Grandmother smiled sweetly and said, “Yes, my child, I will tell you. Listen to me carefully and patiently.”

She began:

“Many, many years ago, in fact thousands of years ago. There were water, trees, mountains, birds and animals on this earth. But there was no man or woman.

At this time Allah created one human form. It was man’s body. Then Allah made the body alive. He was called Adam. Having created Adam, Allah commanded all his angels to bow down to it. All the angels obeyed and bowed down. But one Jinn (who used to pray with the angels) and who was called Azazil, did not do so. He stood erect against the order of his Master and Creator.

God asked him:

‘Why did you disobey my order and did not bow down as commanded?’

Azazil proudly replied: ‘Oh God, You made me from fire. Now you ask me to bow down to a body made from clay and earth. I cannot belittle myself. That is why I will not bow down to Adam.’

The reply displeased Allah. For, all who are created by him are to obey His orders.

Azazil was sent out of heaven onto the earth. And from then on he was called Iblis and Satan.

Iblis before coming onto the earth begged Allah to look at his many years of prayers and obedience.

Allah asked him to ask for reward.

Iblis thought deeply. He felt that it was because of Adam that he was sent out of Heaven. (In fact it was not Adam but the pride which had caused the downfall of Satan). So he thought that Adam was his enemy. He decided to ask for life upto the Day of Resurrection. Allah granted him life upto a certain day. It is the day of the Reappearance of our 12th Imam (a).

Having got such a long life, he vowed to misguide Adam and all his progeny on every possible way.

Hearing his determination, Allah told him that his scheme would be successful for only those men who would be of evil thoughts and deeds. But he would never succeed against good people.”

“Oh, how bad of Iblis”, cried Shamim, “to think in such an evil way”.

”Can Iblis hurt us?”, asked Shamim.

“Yes,” replied Grandmother. “He can harm us by making bad things appear tempting to us. We must always be careful”.”

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For the Dervish, when looking at the Ancient psychology of spirituality, it is said that all teaching stories can be internalised by Mankind into the inner universe.

All peoples know of resentment. This is not to criticise or favour any culture or religion over another. Stuck-addiction affects and infects the whole world’s people and has a whole world remedy.

So, all people have the Angels as connections in the psyche. It is said that all people have God and the Devil inside. In the story, Satan took a huge resentment, felt ill-will against God and Adam, when asked to worship (wor[th]ship, to see the worth or value of) Mankind and earthly creation.

When any person therefore wants to know if they have God and the Devil in their inner experience, look no further than emotions charged with ill-will stemming from a resentment toward a person, place or thing in their life as their Devil, toward emotions charged with good-will stemming from seeing the worth of a person, place or thing as their God.

This simple Creation Story taken from The Qur’an gives the foundation for the redemptive 12 Step Programme that is the gold-standard treatment for the primary disease of Addiction.

“We took stock honestly. First, we searched out the flaws in our make-up which caused our failure. Being convinced that self, manifested in various ways, was what had defeated us, we considered its common manifestations.

Resentment is the “number one” offender . It destroys more alcoholics than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically. In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper. We listed people, institutions or principle with who we were angry. We asked ourselves why we were angry. In most cases it was found that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships (including sex) were hurt or threatened. So we were sore. We were “burned up.”” (from chapter 5 AA Basic Text)

QED as a mathematician might say. Here is exposed a practical connection between ancient scripture and contemporary psychology of spirituality.

Ill-will that stems from ignorance of how this world and Mankind actually is put together is a descriptor of the cause of all spiritual illness and that addiction in all of its forms is actually a spiritual illness even though it seems to present as a mental and physical collapse.

So, simply put, there are two states of will on this planet experienced by Mankind, good-will or ill-will.

Ill-will is rooted in ignorance, good-will in knowing.

This then simply put is what my work in blogs since 2013 is about, this then is what Diction Resolution Therapy is about.

Are the governments on Earth fundamentally activated by good-will as they deal with their populations nationally and with each other internationally? Are the peoples of the countries encouraged to act with good-will toward each other and toward foreigners? Are the peoples of the countries encouraged to put each other first, or to put money first?

These and other simple questions can show that most people are often taken over by Satan as defined by ill-will toward people, places and things, but that this animosity is so painful that most people have in the past tried to find ways to return to acting with good-will as soon as they can in their close personal relations.

When sensitive people get stuck in resentment, then all the many failed forms of attempted remedy are the forms of illness that are collapsing the health services around the world today, broken hearts and cardiac disease, food issues and obesity plus secondary diabetes, sex instinct disorder plus physical and behavioural disease, alcohol and drug misuse, gambling dysfunction, monetary hoarding and/or profligacy causing mental and physical illnesses associated with bingeing, many forms of co-presenting mental illnesses including dementia. The fact that academics in medicinal departments can’t even see these connecting symptoms as being from one disease, is politically at least, a huge part of the disease.

When leaders of collective endeavour get stuck in situations of ill-will as competitive approaches to commerce become personal or when ethical rules are broken, then corporate as well as local, national and international political governance can get taken over by Satan as defined by ill-will toward people, places and things.

This situation is not resolved by the unaided intellect. It is a spiritual illness that is only relieved by a spiritual remedy.

The global situation on Earth is now a spiritual collapse. The religions as a partisan phenomenon of theories about God are part of the disease, no longer able to deliver the initial Human remedy.

The increasingly tribal and febrile partisan political situation nationally and internationally is clearly broken, ill and not responding to the usual sticks and carrots of a monetary based system that only pays lip-service to the Spiritual oaths that the individual politicians take as they enter into the governments’ machines.

How much further must the situation in the world deteriorate before my message is received?

There are signs that Leadership Teams are waking up to the actual conditions that they face. Jared Diamond’s book called Upheaval that has been endorsed by Bill Gates recently is the first sign of a genuine breakthrough that I have witnessed in my lifetime.

Say: I love God alone, whilst seeing the worth of Mankind, whilst worshipping Mankind. I am in the middle.

For this Universe and this Earth and this material Sentience is utterly perfect now. The design of light and dark, angel and demon is necessarily and beautifully cohered for adventure and individual becoming of The Human, being.

Stuckness, a lack of turning, a fixation with a false singularity such as a person, place or thing, this when collectively manifested to a point of breakdown has brought about Messengers from The Source.

All Messengers repair material opposites to get them turning again and authentically reconnect them to The Source as they understand It.

It is said that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ as a saying in the West.

In Recovery Dynamics evidence about recovery from a spiritual disease, it is said that the only bar from recovery is ‘contempt prior to investigation’, that is a closed mind, or only imagining or thinking that a thing is already known. The Sufi says ‘love’, and people think that they are familiar with that word.

When all said and done, change is up to people. Systems change only when enough people change themselves.