THE SEVEN CENTERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The following is from a classic of the higher consciousness frontier; The Handbook to Higher Consciousness by Ken Keyes, Jr. which explains the Living Love system to higher consciousness. 


1. The Security Center
This Center makes you preoccupied with food, shelter, or whatever you equate with your personal security. This programming forces your consciousness to be dominated by your continuous battle to get "enough"from the world in order to feel secure. 


2. The Sensation Center
This Center is concerned with finding happiness in life by providing yourself with more and better pleasurable sensations and activities. For many people, sex is the most appealing of all sensations. Other addictive sensations may include the sound of music, the taste of food, etc. 


3. The Power Center
When your consciousness is focused on this Center, you are concerned with dominating people and situations, and increasing your prestige, wealth, and pride-in addition to thousands of more subtle forms of hierarchy, manipulation, and control. 


4. The Love Center
At this Center you are transcending subject-object relationships and are learning to see the world with the feelings and harmonies of flowing acceptance. You see yourself in everyone-and everyone in yourself. You feel compassion for the suffering of those causht in the dramas of security, sensation, and power. You are beginning to love and accept everyone unconditionally-even yourself.


5. The Cornucopia Center
When your consciousness is illuminated by this Center, you experience the friendliness of the world you are creating. You begin to realize that you've always lived in a perfect world. To the degree that you still have addictions, the perfection lies in giving you the experience you need to get free of your emotion-backed demands. As you reprogram your addictions, the perfection will be experienced as a continuous enjoyment of the here and now in your life. As you become more loving and accepting, the world becomes a "horn of plenty" that gives you more than you need to be happy. 


6. The Conscious-Awareness Center
It is liberating to have a center from which your Conscious-awareness watches your body and mind perform on the lower five centers. This is a meta-center from which you non-judgmentally witness the drama of your body and mind. From this Center of Centers, you learn to impartially observe your social roles and life games from a place that is free from fear and vulnerability. 


7. The Cosmic Consciousness Center
When you live life fully in the Sixth Center of Consciousness, you are ready to transcend self-awareness and become pure awareness. At this ultimate level, you are one with everything-you are love, peace, energy, beauty, wisdom, clarity, effectiveness and oneness. 

Quotes About Life and Death

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

Abraham Lincoln

True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein 

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Alice Walker

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.

Amelia Burr 

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

People living deeply have no fear of death.

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.

Anais Nin

Life is a process. We are a process. The universe is a process.

Anne Wilson Schaef

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

Barry Lopez

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Bertrand Russel 

You can shed tears that she is gone, 

or you can smile because she has lived.

You can close your eyes and pray that she'll come back,

or you can open your eyes and see all she's left.

Your heart can be empty because you can't see her,

or you can be full of the love you shared.

You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday, 

or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.

You can remember her only that she is gone,

or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.

You can cry and close your mind, 

be empty and turn your back.

Or you can do what she'd want:

smile, open your eyes, love and go on.

David Harkins 

Every man dies - Not every man really lives.

William Ross Wallace

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

Winston Churchill

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend - provided, of course, that he really is dead.

Voltaire 

Every True Story Ends in Death

Today the Lenten Season begins. It's Ash Wednesday. This season has always been dear to me. It is a time when I really experience the magnitude of God's love for me. It's a time of purification, a time of cleansing. It's a time of setting the priorities of my life right. It's a time of focusing on the essentials rather than the accidentals.

At the beginning of the movie Brian's Song, a voice says: "Every true story ends in death. This is a true story." Yes, my life will end in death. I will cease to be. I will stop walking on this earth. I will no more play and laugh with my baby girl. I will never 'make love' with my wife. (I put it in inverted commas because I am not sure of the expression. Do we make love or do we share it?) My feeling towards death is very distant. I feel, most likely like everybody, that it is not going to happen to me. Or it is not going to happen to me in the foreseeable future. I kind of think that I have many more years to live. Is that true?

I would like to think that it is true. I would like to believe that I have many successful and fruitful years ahead of me. I would like to believe this with all my heart. It gives me the extra courage to carry on and hang on when I feel terribly down. It is amazing to note that this thought is so embedded in my head that it is natural. It is like a give (as we say when we do physics calculations.) Though I know death exists, it doesn't cross my mind. (Only sometimes when I think of putting an end to so much suffering.) I don't think it has ever descended from my head to my heart. For me, the existence of death is more theoretical than real.

As you can tell this is not a good way to go about it. I was watching one programme about death on Ethiopian TV. The journalist was interviewing two very old people. One was a woman, who is waiting for death to come at any moment. She even has her coffin ready. The other one was a man, who is always on the go trying to escape it. When told about the woman who has already bought a coffin, he said: I don't want you to talk to me about coffins. I don't like it. I have never been close to a coffin before. I am begging God for more days. He listens to me. He knows how I hate to die.

These two old people have death on their minds practically every moment of their days. In my opinion, what makes them wait for it or fight it is their age. What makes the idea of death so distant to my mind is my age and health. I am young and healthy, so I don't expect myself to die anytime soon. To be honest this scares me. It scares me because I am not living my dreams believing I will have time to do so in the future. It scares me because at odd times it dawns on me that I could die at any moment. To die without living is a thing to dread. I dread dying without living my dream more than I could possibly dread dying itself. It will be a tragedy.

"Every story ends in death. This is a true story." says that voice. My life is a true story. And it will end in death. (Logic 101.) I wish I have a voice that whispers in my heart "Your true story is going to end in death. Are you ALIVE?" Obviously, it is what lies between my birth and death that defines my life. What lies between the two, we call it LIFE. What is my life like? Am I living it or going through it, as I pass through some town on my way to another one? And that is what I am struggling with.

More Beautiful Pictures

Kosice Marathon

Baby Asian Elephant in Tall Grass

Baby Asian Elephant in Tall Grass

Is There a Way Through Suffering?

I found the following while reading the preface of a book entitled "Is There a Way Through Suffering?" by Pat Lynch.


As an evangelist it is my privilege to meet thousands of people from different backgrounds, nations and cultures. Something they all have in common is pain-the pain of being human. People do not live detached, unthinking lives; we are constantly asking questions. What is it all about? Is there a God? If there is a God, does he really care? How can he love me in the midst of my sin and pain? There are no easy answers to the question of suffering. Often all I can do is empathise with the people who share their problems and doubts with me. I must confess that I have a great love for people, especially when they are down or depressed. I feel honoured when they share with me their innermost selves. 



I have listened to many stories throughout my life, and I have learned something of the journey each person has to make. We sometimes sat in silence, entering into the pain, sharing the sadness without needing words. I learned about the longing of people's hearts, the loneliness of their lives, their need for love and affirmation. I heard of dreams that were shattered, visions unfulfilled, hopes disappearing. I was told of isolation and bitterness, joy and laughter that turned stale. I felt the budding of new life in the searching of each soul and could see people's dignity as they trod their own muddy and twisted path. It seems that often all we have to hold onto is the hope that life springs from death and light from darkness. One truth kept coming back to me as I wrote this book: God is always saying, 'Love each other and take the hand of my suffering people'.