Transform Suffering Into Joy - American Spiritual Teacher Stuart Perrin`s Teachings.


Transform your suffering into Joy!	Read more ... What’s the worst that can happen to me? I die? All right, then my problems will disappear and I'll have nothing to worry about anymore. What’s worse than death is an empty shell of a person pretending their petty dramas and soap operas are a reason to be alive! There's no guarantee we're going to succeed in life. We have to take each day at a time and measure our self-worth by the amount of openness in our hearts, by our master of tension, and by our ability to live quietly in the moment. To define freedom? Impossible. The words themselves are a prison. Success at life depends on how happy we are at the moment of death. Success at life also depends on a conscious dialectic: Are life and death one and the same to us? Can we embrace them? Are we no longer frightened of the unknown? Press here to subscribe.

Cover Image of Moving On: Finding Happiness in a Changed World Hampton Roads Pub Co; (June 2004) Paperback 224 pps The insights of this book will guide the reader past confusion of conflicting thoughts and dreamlike images he or she things are real, into a reality devoid of illusion, a reality that cuts through a painful and dense fog binding people to their true selves. The question will be asked "Who Am I?" and the answer will surprise the reader It will show a multifaceted person capable of transforming suffering into joy and happiness. It will allow the reader to move on and to find happiness no matter how much the world has changed. It will help the lotus flower to emerge from muddy waters.

Life is hard, but so what! We all need roughage. If we don\'t have roughage in our diet, our digestive systems get messed up. We\'d never go to the toilet. Life\'s difficulty is part of a healthy diet. It can be used to grow. It can be transformed into positive energy. You have to know how to do it. You have to get proper training. No one can hurt us unless we let them, not if we open our hearts, feel love, joy, forgiveness, and the rest of the higher emotions. It is a different kind of logic, one that trusts the world, that trusts ourselves. It takes a very strong person to live with trust. I can never remember it being any different, not in my childhood, teenage years, twenties or thirties. There was always the battle of polar opposites consuming every moment of my time. Always, goodness was followed by evil. So, when good things happen, I stay detached, when negative things happen, I still remained detached. I\'ve seen "The Good" put on demon masks and spit fire in my face, I\'ve used negative experiences as steps on a ladder leading to profound spiritual growth There are billions of people on Earth. Every one of them sees a different reality. Somewhere along the way, there needs to be compromise. None of us is perfect. We\'ll have problems until the day we die. Since perfection is the domain of God and His angels and madmen, inner growth is the best we mortals can do. We evolve closer to perfection. Our problems are reminders that we\'re not perfect. We have to work on ourselves. We can\'t take ourselves for granted. The only successful people on Earth are happy people. The rest of humanity has got to repeat the course. A job site is a place to learn about ourselves, to become more conscious of who or what we are, to refine our abilities and use them the best we can on Earth. \"Business creates pressure, and responsibility and pressure makes me go deeper within myself,\" Rudi once said. \"A diamond is the product of millions of years of pressure. Human beings who thrive under pressure have learned to detach their minds and emotions from events. They stay centered, focused and balanced. They\'re able to see clearly what needs to be done.\" Ambition releases torrents of tension that sweep us away in emotional and psychological tides often washing us out to sea. It can also guide us to spirit. It all depends on how we use it or how it uses us. We must learn that success and failure are one and the same energy. Both are prisons if they become ends in themselves. No one succeeds in life without experiencing failure. One attracts the other. People afraid to fail live in little worlds of self-inflicted perfection, frightened worlds bordering the unknown. They never take a chance. Ambition attracts success and failure. It forces us to sally forth in life\'s adventure, to slay dragons, griffins and motley monsters, to find the pot of gold or the damsel in distress. In truth, there is no such thing as failure. There are only mistakes. We need to learn from them and go on. There\'s no guarantee we\'re going to succeed in life. We have to take each day at a time and measure our self-worth by the amount of openness in our hearts, by our master of tension, and by our ability to live quietly in the moment. We can\'t compare ourselves with other people. There is no sense in it. No matter how successful we become, there\'s always someone more successful. There\'s always room to expand. Satisfaction limits life to old, boring repetitive activities. The only thing that grows is one\'s ass. We\'re born on the Earth to learn to serve. Wittingly or unwittingly, we serve some part of life, but unconditional service teaches unconditional love. It expects nothing in return for time spent helping other people, and it lifts the consciousness of a human being bogged down in self-interest. Many years ago I discovered the objective world mirrors my inner experience. It teaches me about myself: what I have to do to get closer to spiritual enlightenment. As I change, it changes. The clearer I am inside myself, the easier it is to make decisions the less hassled I am by the madness of the world. When my heart is open, I see love everywhere. Even in the eyes of people who are sworn enemies. I learn compassion and forgiveness and I learn to have patience with myself and with those around me. I have no doubt that the earth is a circus. But, no one goes to the circus to have a lousy time. If the objective world is an illusion and the only permanence is the soul of man connected to God, then what is it that passes? The soul of man, like the sun, is forever present in the vast nothingness of spiritual enlightenment. It watches the objective world pass by. When it desires things of the earth there is pain and pleasure. When it acts in the world there is also pain and pleasure. When it accepts the marriage of pain and pleasure, it functions happily on earth. It skips and jumps like a child witnessing creation a winged child a delirious child a drunken child embracing all things. What passes are the objects we cling to with emotional, mental and physical desperation the possessions we think belong to us until the day we discover the flitting and fleeting dreamlike nature of an external world without substance At a Barnes & Noble book signing and talk not too long ago, a person asked me to define "hell". "Turn on CNN," I said without skipping a beat. We trip and stumble over life’s obstacles till life’s obstacles remind us that only spirit is infinite. Everything else is finite and limited, a piece of a puzzle, mere steps on a ladder leading to God. When a human being uses will to dictate the ways of the world, he spends his time manipulating shadows. We trip and stumble over life’s obstacles till life’s obstacles remind us that only spirit is infinite. Everything else is finite and limited, a piece of a puzzle, mere steps on a ladder leading to God. Most human beings live in the shadow of their enlightened selves. They refuse to step out of the shadow and allow the heart to determine action. But the shadow world has its own unique qualities that sidetrack us and give us what to do every day, that make room for the mad and the blind to dance a funny little dance at the edge of a foggy cliff. It\'s the right of every human being to live a wonderful life. We\'re not born to be miserable and unhappy. An infant radiates joy and sweetness . . . everything precious the world has to offer. Where does it disappear? Why do we have to spend the rest of our lives regaining what we\'re born with.? I\'ve never had a positive experience that wasn\'t followed by its opposite. It’s the same with negative experiences. They are both a reflection of an active mind projecting its own reality. Neither leads to spiritual enlightenment. We must learn to unify positive and negative, we must learn to transform them into harmony and balance. Doubt, cynicism, and skepticism are three paths that lead directly to a dead end. They are created from threads of fear that keep people from ever stepping into the unknown. They stop the creative process by reducing insight, imagination, instinct, and improvisation to structured mind sets that have answers before questions are even asked. Doubt and skepticism siphon creative juice from people. They leave us empty, dead, and sterile, and they destroy the possibility of living life in the moment. What’s the worst that can happen to me? I die? All right, then my problems will disappear and I\'ll have nothing to worry about anymore. What’s worse than death is an empty shell of a person pretending their petty dramas and soap operas are a reason to be alive! Tension is just human garbage, Rudi once said to me, and garbage makes the best compost. If you bring your tension to the base of the spine and transform it into energy, the thing that’s killing you will give you life. It’s a process, a way of using all our crap, of making room within ourselves for God. Like the alchemist, we transform everything into gold. The Earth is a minor league insane asylum peopled with important and not so important people struggling to get through the day. When we awaken the spirit inside of us, when we live our lives in the moment, when we\'re no longer filled with fragmented images of self, we discover everything that was, is, and will be is in the moment. We don\'t have to look for answers in the annals of time and history. The Earth is a complex university with multifarious departments all eager to teach us how to get to God. The problem is that we don\'t listen. We know better than the Earth. We argue with a great master, an argument impossible to win, but an argument that engages most of our time and energy, an argument that finally exhausts us. The energy needed to develop a spiritual life is wasted on pettiness, vanity, greed, avarice, and empty desire. The secret of interacting with life is to stop seeing things as positive and negative. Each situation is another reason to go deeper within the self. It is not a reason to bitch and complain and fight with other human beings. They are not the enemy. They are mostly unconscious people struggling with their own lives. They should remind us to stay centered, to go deeper, to not let petty differences and tensions rip away the benefits of meditation. Sexual energy is the Tantric vehicle bridging the Earth and the cosmos, the prime mover in life as we know it and life seen in deep meditation trances. It gives birth to the world and it gives birth inside each and every one of us. When used consciously, it transforms the human into the divine. --Rudi. It’s easy to forget we have karma and responsibility and day-to-day lives. It’s easy to become an astral vaudevillian putting on a magic show. Power is very attractive and astral power is the most attractive of all, but chakra systems have checks and balances. Humility, love, gratitude each of these is a safeguard against power. Each transforms cosmic madness into Divine light. Acceptance of our limitations is the first step towards change. We stop beating ourselves up. We become the best janitor, waiter, CEO, salesman, clerk, president, seamstress, or taxi driver it’s possible to be. We should be grateful for whatever we do for no other reason than gratitude moves something in the heart. It takes us to a higher place inside ourselves. If we can\'t mop the floor with an open heart, we\'ll never be happy running the company. There’s a simple exercise for letting go of tension: Let your arms drop to your sides, close your eyes and ask for help to surrender all negative psychic tension. The tension will flow off the ends of your fingertips. This simple lesson can take what’s killing you and use it to give life. I once complained to Rudi about how difficult my life was. He pointed to a weed growing in a crack in the New York City sidewalk. There’s more life in that weed than in you, he said. I never complained to him again. No one can take away from us possessions we\'re not attached to, no one can hurt us if we\'re not fearful. We can only be hurt if we\'re protective of ourselves, if we hide in the womb of our own anxiety, if we set up psychological barriers between our self and life. Talk of reincarnation turns to nonsense the moment we realize there\'s only life lived throughout eternity. To accept the present is to free ourselves from karma. To fight it is to create more karma, more reasons to reincarnate, and more difficulty and tension. Success at life depends on how happy we are at the moment of death. Success at life also depends on a conscious dialectic: Are life and death one and the same to us? Can we embrace them? Are we no longer frightened of the unknown? If we have found the spiritual child in us, if our inner lives are vital, happy, full of joy and love, though the body will have its share of aches and pains, age will do little or nothing to stop the evolution of higher consciousness. When a human being uses will to dictate the ways of the word, he spends his time manipulating shadows. We trip and stumble over life\'s obstacles until life\'s obstacles remind us that only spirit is infinite. Everything else is finite and limited, a piece of a puzzle, mere steps on a ladder leading to God. We refuse to live in the moment, but drift with mind and emotion from the past to the future, unaware of a simple reality: This moment contains what is, was, and will be. If we continue to drift unconsciously from moment to moment, life\'s splendor slips right past us. To love without consciousness is to wander blindly in another person\'s heart. We regard suffering with disdain, but without it, we lose one of life\'s best teachers. It is beter to be wrong and grow by making up the difference, than to be right and crystallized in our own point of view. To try to understand the logic of the world is like placing a gallon water in a six-ounce glass. How many people can remember the color fo the socks they wore yesterday? HOw many people can remember what they had for breakfast or the reason why they argued with a loved one? Living in the past is like drawing a wagon with a dead ox. Meditation brings together life’s discordant elements. It creates harmony and balance within a human being, it dredges up inner garbage, flushes it out, and gives us a taste of transcendental energy. Hunger for spiritual food is the first step on a path to enlightenment. We\'re up against ourselves. We are the problem and we\'re also the solution. The Earth is often compared to a circus, but the truht is, no one goes to the circus to have a lousy time. To find one happy person on Earth is more difficult than finding the Holy Grail. A wise man knows nothing, but a fool is convinced his knowledge will change the world. A wise man admits his limitations. He let\'s life be and he loves peoplefor who and what they are. When we learn to transform tension into spirit; when we no longer sit in judgement of other people; when we learn to quite neurotic minds; when we learn to live each day with harmony and balance; when we\'re grateful for the things that bother us; when we learn the above; and, more importantly, when we live it, we are well on our warrior\'s path to enlightenment. Like the wind, I drift in many directions before I find my path out of the world. Innocence without foundation is like veneered furniture in a rainstorm. There is change in that which appears stagnant; water evaporates, the body grows old. A stagnant pool of water attracts insects and disease. Anyone can drink form a stream that flows down a mountain. To define freedom? Impossible. The words themselves are a prison. Freedom is not what we possess, but how detached we are from our possessions. Until the world learns to forgive terror, war, vengeance, and hate, all the vehicles of death and destruction will plague mankind. But forgiveness starts with each of us. First we must forgive ourselves. We have nothing to be guilty of, nothing to be fearful of, nothing but our inability to center ourselves and keep our hearts open. We all want to live wonderful lives, but wonderment of life cannot exist if we tear ourselves apart, if we look in to a mirror and do not see what\'s there. Life is the mirror. It reflects every human being\'s view of reality. It shows us how important it is to forgive.