Robbins Hopkins

Spiritual Health: Being at Peace in Everyday Life

oneness

Love Inspired Truth

Listen to Truth. It does not try to appease you or convince you. It simply is. It is created by Divine Oneness, never by mortal humans, because you are most likely still working on imbalances, confusion, and misperceptions.  Truth is beyond human understanding. It sings a song from the heavens, from the voice of All That Is, from the vibrations of Unconditional Love.  It is always attainable though you must have begun your inner journey to Wholeness. You need to begin this inner journey to Wholeness for Truth to be revealed to you.  You have to go within and understand with every part of your being that you are loved and cherished, constantly, thoroughly, and irrevocably by the Divine Love of the Universe.

Photo by Jared Rice

You are truly loved no matter what has befallen you. Even when attacked, hurt, sick, unable to find the right partner, or unable to find your professional path, you are profoundly loved. You may ask, how can that be? One explanation is that you may be paying a karmic debt during this life. Karmic debts are required of us when we have committed a seemingly unforgivable debt in a previous lifetime. We need to pay for that debt to be free to expand and fully grow in consciousness. Your life may be devoted to paying off that debt or debts so that you can soar. You may not feel loved because there are parts of your life that are very hard and seemingly unfair. However, you are still loved with a fierceness that created your current life precisely for you to be free from past transgressions. This is one type of Truth that  might be revealed to you if you go within, seeking.

Nothing that happens in this world is haphazard.  However, because you may not be fully versed in Divine Truth, you may resort to the belief in haphazard events, fear, or blame to make sense of that which is beyond your senses.  All poverty, hatred, violence, anger, resentment, and illness are humanly created. You create a myriad of imbalances from being separated from Truth. When you go within, you are taught about Love that is all encompassing and all forgiving and you slowly heal from all that separates you from Truth, Peace, and Balance.  

Being separate from Truth can also show up in how you feel about yourself. You may feel you have failed in reaching your potential or that you are being punished because of every bad thing that has happened to you. You may blame yourself for being in an unsuccessful relationship. All the while, you have simply forgotten to ask for help, for all things, in all ways, at all times. Consciously seeking in Silence and listening to Truth can heal these inaccurate perceptions of yourself and help receive needed support to see yourself as the person you actually are, loving and evolving.  

This world is created in Love, and Truth is intrinsically part of that Love. You stray from that Truth every time you give into fear, anger, blame, depression, gossip, pride, judgment, or shame. These feelings and thoughts separate you from Spirit. When separated from Spirit, your requests for help have no power. If for example you are carrying self-anger and blame, when you call for a shift in your work relationships, this cannot be received. Your self-anger and blame energy block your ability to receive the energy of the request you made. This is because your self-perceptions are not in Truth!!!  You have to come from loving, truthful energy for stuck energy to be transformed. The Truth is, you are a loving person carrying negative self- perceptions which are not the Truth, so this energy has to be transformed  before the healing energies can be received.

Photo by Simon Migaj

Clear all blocked energies that separate you from God’s energy of love, peace, and balance. Then, all subsequent prayers are answered, every single time. You are also then privy to Truth energy that helps form the way you live.

Only Love can fully speak the Truth. For the Universe and all who dwell therein were created in Divine Love and in the image of that magnificent energy.  Anything less than living in accurate Truth falls short of your full potential. You who want to reach your full potential; meditate, spend time in Silence, seek balance, seek kindness to self and forgiveness of others. You could do yourself a great kindness to pursue these ways to reach your full, loving, and powerful Truth.

Where to begin? Use the Spiritual Healing Protocol to free yourself from any type of imbalance which separates you from knowing Divine Source and living in Truth.

Experiencing God From Within

“God is in the heart and soul of every being. And when you open within yourself the secret temple in your heart, then with the all-knowing intuition of the soul you shall read the book of life.” Paramahansa Yogananda (1)

What does this mean? You have to go within to fully actualize who you are. You are vastly more than the localized body and life you live day to day. You are connected to the non-local energy of All That Is, all the time, whether you know it or not. If you want to fully reap those benefits, you have to go to Silence within and listen to the still small voice of God which is delivered through the intuition of your soul, your eternal self.

Photo by Robert Baker

Yogananda continues, “Then and only then will you contact the living God. Without this feeling in your heart, there will be no answer to your prayers. You may attract what your positive actions and good karma permit you to have; but to receive a conscious response from God, you must first attain Divine attunement with God.” (2)

Divine attunement with God refers to actively going into Silence with the express purpose of making conscious contact with the energy of God/Divine Source. As you discover imbalances within, you clear them and come into greater attunement with Divine Source. You have to want to have a personal  exchange with Divine Source to have that manifest. Attunement means coming into balance, into the same frequency as God. This only happens in the quiet conscious seeking of Divine Source.

You may be afraid of what you will feel or be told about your faults if you expand your personal relationship with the living God. The truth is that you are so loved, way beyond the ability of your imagination to comprehend this. You are first and foremost here to develop a two-way relationship with All That Is. You are here to heal that which is not who you truly are; your fears, your anger, your unforgiveness, and your self-criticism.

Photo by Keegan Houser

You are here to seek peace and joy within. You can’t do this anywhere else. You can’t do this when you leave your body or when you take a different form from your human body. You have to find this path to the living God while in a human body. That is the reason you are in body. When you find this path to God, you can create the life, relationships, peace, and loving wholeness you are seeking. You get as many chances as you need to do this.

Begin now and expand the time you currently allot to experiencing connection with God. Every moment you allot to connect with Divine Source comes back to you one hundredfold. (Mark 10:30, King James Version)

Conscious Seeking of God

1. Find a place where you will not be disturbed

2. Open Sacred Space (even if you are unsure about what that fully means just yet)

3. State your intention for being with Divine Source/God/All That Is/The Oneness

4. State your hesitations, your concerns, your troubles, your hopes

5. Be quiet, listen and be present

6. Give thanks silently or through writing to All That Is about what you are learning

7.  Return frequently to experience clearer direction and connection with the energy of God, that energy within you and surrounding you throughout the Universe

Remember you are already hard-wired to Divine Source! You are simply amplifying that connection. There is no one right way to do this. There is only the way you learn to make space in your life for a living connection with God.

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Who is Paramahansa Yogananda ( 1893-1952)? He is widely regarded as one of the preeminent spiritual figures of our time who draws on his own direct experience of God. He teaches us to seek and pray the way that saints, sages, and mystics have sought God over the centuries- the way that brings life transforming responses.  He has introduced millions of readers to the enduring wisdom of the East through his life story in Autobiography of a Yogi.

Notes 1 & 2, Yogananda, Paramahansa, In the Sanctuary of the Soul, Los Angeles, CA., Self-Realization Fellowship, 1998.

 

Authentic Prayer and Global Healing

Sermon – Comm-Unity On the Hill Congregation, Washington, D.C.*

Rev. Robbins S. Hopkins, Ed.D.

Thank you for asking me to speak.  It is delightful to be here this morning. The question I am exploring today is, “What is authentic prayer”?  Just plain and simple, authentic prayer is prayer that works.  It is prayer that brings results. It is prayer that produces energy shifts.  Authentic Prayer is powerful business.  Well then, how do we accomplish this?

The Bible has a few things to say to us about prayer.

“This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us – whatever we ask – we know that we have what we asked of him” (1 John 5:14-15).

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds ….” (Philippians 4:6-7).

“And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. (Ephesians 6:18).

“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26).

 

Atlantic Beach HDR Sunset – Explored by L1mey

The week before Hurricane Irene, exactly 7 days before it hit this area, we decided last minute to book a house in North Carolina for the week for my husband and myself.  We have been going to the beach in August for 41 years and we realized we were not going to go because none of our family were free to join us.  We discussed this at length and decided to make a reservation and take a weeks’ vacation just for us. That felt very wonderful, celebratory in fact! One day later, we realized that there was a Tropical Storm in the Atlantic. We thought, we had better arrange for trip insurance in case something more serious became of this storm. We called for the insurance and were told that we could not get insurance now because there was a named storm in the Atlantic, specifically now called IRENE.  So, my energy was very focused on this storm not only because of this reservation but also because I had been going to the North and South Carolina coasts literally all my life except for 4 years when were lived overseas.

So the prayers began in earnest.  Every time I went into prayer, I got the feeling I was simply nipping at the heels of Hurricane IRENE. I did all the things I usually do in working at the global level but I could not feel any shifts in energy which is how I know the prayers have been effective.  One day about the 4thday into the prayer effort, I finally asked in sacred space, “How do we do this?” I was feeling overwhelmed and completely under effective.  Someone had shared with me that the Hurricane itself covered an area as large as Arizona.  This left me totally amazed.  I could feel the power and strength of Irene when in prayer and something I called powerful fury but I did not know how to address it in prayer.

To continue reading this sermon, follow this link to the full  text.  http://robbinshopkins.com/sermons/authentic-prayer-and-global-healing/

 

*Comm-Unity on the Hill, meets at 10 Street and G Street, N.W. in jointly shared space with  First Congregational Church of Washington D.C..  Services begin at 1 PM on Sundays.  Comm-Unity can be reached at cothdc@verizon.net or  703-379-4450 . All are welcome.

** This sermon was preceded by a guided meditation for the congregation. This was offered October 2011

 

 

The Dark or The Absence of Light? Part 2

*Read The Dark or The Absence of Light: Part One

We can choose to be afraid or trusting.   We can choose to be selfish or generous.  We can choose to be welcoming or restrained.  Each and every choice we make for the goodness of the greater whole produces more balance.  Each and every choice we make which is not for the goodness of the greater whole produces more imbalance.

The greater the imbalance we feel within ourselves, the greater these imbalances manifest in our lives.  There is however no dark entity of dark power to be reckoned with sometimes known as the dark side.  We can know we are connected in one part of our lives to the Light and we can feel disconnected in other parts of our lives from the Light.  In my case, I was very surprised that I felt attacked by something I envisioned as dark energy.  I had not felt that fearful energy for years and years and yet there it was showing its ugly head right after our car accident. (spoken about in part 1)

Regardless of where we are in our journey, what we  feel,  see,  sense, and experience is a reflection of the choice to be connected to the Light or the choice to be separated from the Light.  This leads us back to the accident.

Why did that accident really happen to us?  I kept asking this in my mind and had a hard time not getting an immediate answer.  I wondered if I had attracted that accident to us through some means, if I needed to pay a karmic debt that I was not aware of, or if I was being attacked by the dark. I gave a lot of power to this last thought.

There are multiple true answers to this question.  Each of us involved, my husband, the truck driver, and me experienced this same accident for different reasons.  I now feel that I had this accident to give me a chance to directly face my deeply hidden fear about some force I thought of as the dark.  This was not something I might take a Sunday afternoon to contemplate! As with most of us, I would probably always choose to engage in something else, anything else, actually.  I needed a deeply shocking experience to go into my own darkness and wrestle my way through all of that old stuck energy.

Next Dimension by By h.koppdelaney- Hartwig HKD

Even though I slogged through the darkness after the accident, I sensed the minute we were hit, at some unconscious level, that we were not hurt.  Immediately after the impact, I was led to pray for the complete and total healing of  our fear from our energy fields.  I felt an insulating energy drop in around us as the accident occurred and as the  investigation was taking place.  I also had the dawning thought with increasing certainty that the impact of the truck’s energy on our van was buffered by Divine Presence.  We were surrounded immediately by that Divine Energy of Light. We were protected from harm’s way.

This experience of the Divine Presence with us at the accident continued to be present while I wrestled with my own created fear of the darkness. That powerful knowing just stayed within my energy field through all my stages of anger, frustration, uncertainly and questioning I felt I needed to feel. During one phase of my deeply questioning and anger tinged state about this accident,   I asked about all the times I had been killed from this dimension.  I was told the number.  Then immediately following this exchange I heard, “but you agreed to that”.  I started to laugh knowing deeply that this was true.  Further, if this is true for me, then it is true for every one of us.  Even the “innocent bystander” leaves when it is his or her time to leave.  At the same time, an innocent bystander does not leave before it is his or her time either.

Yet the question remains, why do some come here and physically suffer and others come and mentally or emotionally  suffer? Our entire journey is about coming into balance within our own energy.  When we begin to experience this inside, it begins to manifest all around us in all our affairs.  Many of the challenges, problems, conflicts, situations we get into are a result of imbalances we have chosen in our lives.  If we need to “atone” or re-balance, from some past transgression we have caused, we have infinite ways that we can do that in a lifetime.

Balanced Rocks by By squarewithin- Matthew Trentacost

Parts of our lives can appear like suffering until we get that we are One with the Light and that we are being given our specific life circumstances so that deep imbalances in our human selves can be re-balanced with the Love of the Universe.  We may also have a life in which we are given the option of being here in illness or disability as a way to re-balance some huge transgression of our past or as a way to develop compassion for ourselves and others, or as an example of living with joy and grace with our disability for others to learn from.

We are given whatever we need to come into a more loving and whole space with All That Is.  We cannot judge by appearances for ourselves or for others. There is a Divine and Holy Order within this Earth dimension even though we may not be able to discern it. The process of re-balancing for the Goodness of the Whole is taking place, all the time for all people everywhere.

If you think you have brought imbalances, fears and transgressions of the past with you,  you can work them out before you are required to do so, in some totally WAKE UP fashion.  I recommend all the preemptive work we can do to clear the darkness, fear and imbalance we feel inside ourselves.

  • You can pray and ask forgiveness for all the people you have hurt throughout all space and time.
  • You can ask for all the debts of imbalance you have brought about in your times of  separation from the Light to be made whole in all ways by Divine Grace.
  • You can literally call in the healing energy of the Light for all those you have specifically hurt.
  • You can call for the fear of anything you know you are facing to be consumed by the Light of God/All That Is.

Of course, one has to have the feeling that restoring balance is important.  We are loved beyond all measure but knowing that at the soul level requires our acting in this energy. We need to embrace the fact that we can clear our old stagnant energies and past misdeeds by calling for this to happen.

We have to embrace a new intention for being here, one that embraces that all living is for the purpose of healing and thereby for coming into the Energy of the One, the Whole, the Eternal Community of Life. Then all is possible.

The Dark or The Absence of Light? Part 1

What is “the dark”  anyway?  Is there a dark side as presented in all those sci-fi movies? What if the way we think about good and bad, light and dark, is all wrong.  I had occasion to seriously consider these issues recently.

DARTH VADER by foxspain

My husband and I were sitting at a red light and were hit from behind by a semi truck. Thankfully, through the grace of All That Is, which is something  way beyond us, we were spared great injury though our beloved car is a goner. Therefore, I have been deeply listening and asking very pointed questions about the presence or absence of darkness and about the real energetic causes behind such an accident in this cause and effect world.

The stages I have experienced after our our accident have been shock, rage, defiance, befuddlement, questioning, then listening and reintegrating.  The first stage was simply a numbness and exhaustion while all that had happened sank in. This went on for several days and was overlaid with rage and defiance.  The rage was directed at some unknown entity in my mind known “the dark”, envisioned as some power apart from the goodness of All That Is.  I was defiant and literally remember raising my fist into the air and hissing out loud, a number of times,  ” you are not going to get me.”  I suppose that was better than wallowing in fear and victim energy, perhaps only marginally though.  However, it did not feel very good to be facing the unknowable face of  “the dark” nor to imagine “the dark” coming after me again.  As there was incredulity and fear connected with all of this, I increasingly became mixed up, unsure of what I was possibly dealing with and I felt lost and befuddled.  I also increasingly wondered how could I possibly make sense out of this fear filled and seemingly senseless experience.

My next stage was full of questions.  I talked with God, my sons, my husband, my friends, my colleagues, basically anyone who would engage with me.  I talked and talked getting out all my questions and misgivings and when I was completely talked out, I listened in silence. I felt no peace in the self-fashioned image I had of  “the dark”.  As I listened and sensed the Divine Energy of All That Is,  I felt more and more deeply that All There Is is the Oneness. We are all connect to that energy, indeed we come from the same source, though some of us do not recognize this in our present state of consciousness.

A handful of sunshine by stuant63

The Oneness knows all the goodness and all the evil as we are given complete free will to live as we so choose.   Some of us choose to consciously live in that energy of the Light and others of us do not.  There are natural consequences for remaining outside Light space. One feels alone, fearful, angry, rage, resentment, uncertain, anxious, and far worse as well. That energy manifests as unkindness, cruelty, violence, disaster, war, and disintegration in varying levels to self and others.  This is the source of the darkness, these human choices, these human fears and their human consequences.

Through all this searching,  a deep knowing has emerged from within.  All darkness stems from the human choice to separate from the Light.   Darkness is the state of separation of individuals from the Light/ All That Is/ the Greater Whole/ the One Mind. I have suspected this for a while.  However, I was amazed that such deep soul searching was still needed to resolve my feelings.   With such a highly noticeable event in my life, it was challenging to come to balance with regard to,  “why me”?   One day, in silence,  I realized that I was not the only person involved in this accident.  DUH!  There were two others in this accident, my husband and the truck driver.  So, possibly it was not necessary to wrack my brain for a plausible explanation as it probably did not “belong” solely to me.  That was a total relief.

Still, there can be the appearance of darkness everywhere we look.  Someone in my meditation group asked about how my insights about there being no “dark” source energy fit with something as horrible as the holocaust.  How could anything less that deep darkness explain such horror, death and destruction?

We have had some simply horrific things occur throughout all time and across this entire globe.  With the holocaust, in our time, we can  include  Darfur, the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda,  the killing fields in Cambodia plus the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and 9/11 in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C., the Haiti earthquake, not to mention the four most recent oil spills and millions of other devastating events.  The question is how does one really believe that there is no “dark” in the face of the horrific situations clearly evident to us, all around.

Dark energy does exist, but it exists through our thoughts, fears and emotions. Millions are making choices individually and collectively which are not in Right Relationship with the Great I AM/Universal One God/Divine Creation.  Where there is the appearance of darkness, what we are truly seeing is the result of a human or group of humans making decisions which are not of the Light, disconnected from All That Is, not in alignment with the Highest Good.  Those who make decisions and take action, while being separated from the Light, are the creators of darkness.  There is no source other than the Energy of All That Is.

We experience human catastrophe, because we have made decisions which are separated from the Light, and are not of the highest good. The decisions are highly likely to originate from fear and anger.  We therefore see the absence of Light showing up as war, genocide, murder and abuse.  These are all consequences of choices we or those around us have made to act upon fear, greed, jealousy, shame, guilt, hatred, anger and pride.

Walter Hanson Winter Circus Holland by dirkjanranzijn

All the horrible and the all the wonderful things we see are a result of balance or imbalance coming from our thoughts and feelings.  We have control over those thoughts and feelings and therefore, the way to a more balanced life is through attention to what we are thinking and feeling.  (stay tuned for part 2)