17. Thought & Focus

©1999 Athene Bitting

XVII

Thought and Focus:

Some Elementary Principles

Lecture based Questions:

1. Please check off any of the following issues that claimed time or energy from you today.

❒ Children ❒ Relatives ❒ Spouse/Partner ❒ Health ❒ Losing Things

❒ Work Relationships ❒ Friendships ❒ Finances ❒ Pets ❒ Schedule

❒ Clothes ❒ Transportation Needs ❒ Organizing ❒ Work Obligations

❒ Volunteer/Charitable Act ❒ Household Cleaning ❒ Household Repair

❒ Social Obligations ❒ Creative Expression ❒ Recreation ❒ Rest

❒ Personal Hygiene ❒ Feeding ❒ Worries ❒ Revenge ❒ Arguing ❒ Bills

❒ Depression ❒ Smoking ❒ Medications ❒ Other Drugs ❒ Meditation

❒ Shopping ❒ Pain ❒ Illness ❒ Alcohol ❒ Gambling ❒ Prayer

Which issues seemed to interfere with your sense of harmony?

❒ Children ❒ Relatives ❒ Spouse/Partner ❒ Health ❒ Losing Things

❒ Work Relationships ❒ Friendships ❒ Finances ❒ Pets ❒ Schedule

❒ Clothes ❒ Transportation Needs ❒ Organizing ❒ Work Obligations

❒ Volunteer/Charitable Act ❒ Household Cleaning ❒ Household Repair

❒ Social Obligations ❒ Creative Expression ❒ Recreation ❒ Rest

❒ Personal Hygiene ❒ Feeding ❒ Worries ❒ Revenge ❒ Arguing ❒ Bills

❒ Depression ❒ Smoking ❒ Medications ❒ Other Drugs ❒ Meditation

❒ Shopping ❒ Pain ❒ Illness ❒ Alcohol ❒ Gambling ❒ Prayer

Which were subjects of your prayer and meditation today?

❒ Children ❒ Relatives ❒ Spouse/Partner ❒ Health ❒ Losing Things

❒ Work Relationships ❒ Friendships ❒ Finances ❒ Pets ❒ Schedule

❒ Clothes ❒ Transportation Needs ❒ Organizing ❒ Work Obligations

❒ Volunteer/Charitable Act ❒ Household Cleaning ❒ Household Repair

❒ Social Obligations ❒ Creative Expression ❒ Recreation ❒ Rest

❒ Personal Hygiene ❒ Feeding ❒ Worries ❒ Revenge ❒ Arguing ❒ Bills

❒ Depression ❒ Smoking ❒ Medications ❒ Other Drugs ❒ Meditation

❒ Shopping ❒ Pain ❒ Illness ❒ Alcohol ❒ Gambling ❒ Prayer

You may perceive a connection between your meditations and the elements of your day. With any luck, meditation proves useful in reducing “worry time” on certain issues. Also, the items that seem to interfere with your happiness may need special attention as possible neurosis/obstacle factors.

2. The elements of daily life seem complicated. How can we maintain the correct focus for success on all levels?

This is much simpler than you might expect. In the Astral World, the energies that express themselves into the physical life are strong and anchored in core beliefs. The machine-like line of course that results from these beliefs can be altered with affirmations. When we spend the whole day saying affirmations of intentional blessing, wonderful things happen around us.

The most potent affirmations are the ones of deep change. These do not always address the surface appearance of everyday details, but they alter at a much more profound level how everything goes in your life. Some powerful affirmations of this kind are commands of permission:

I give myself permission to be perfect at everything I do.

I give myself permission to be wealthy.

I give myself permission to have fun.

I give myself permission to be healthy.

I give myself permission to have a happy relationship.

I give myself permission to win the lottery.

I give myself permission to learn this thing easily.

I give myself permission to succeed beautifully.

When are we least likely to have focused thinking, and be most vulnerable to attack or to shadow sabotage?

When we allow fear, external pressure, conditioned abusive thinking, or surprise to throw us off the center.

Maintaining a sense of inner balance, or keeping your inner center, is the point from which all success arises.

3. What does focused thought have to do with clairvoyance?

Everything. Clairvoyance is nothing more than pointing your focus outward. Then your sense of self disappears and you can tune into the infinite wisdom around you.

4. Exercise: Creating the Golden Mean

Pythagoras maintained that all things in nature were created with an inherent beauty of proportion, which was appropriate to itself and to its connectedness in the universe. In keeping with this philosophy, let us transform a single habit through visualization.

Choose one habit of emotion or behavior that obstructs success.

Search the Astral Body for the geographic seat of the habit.

Identify the elemental or demon that perpetrates the habit.

Inform the being that Light comes, and invite it to change with you.

Create a thought form of golden Light that will encase the being.

Create a larger one that will encase your Astral Body and your habit.

Invite the Divine Plan to now manifest within you, and to permeate your being.

5. Scrying Exercise: Intermediate Palm Reading

Inspecting both hands, compare possible futures and issues. What can the subject do to make life more successful?

6. Why and how does this work? What would be the most appropriate use of this technique?

The reader compares size and shape of the two hands and also listens for information from helpers. Health is a big issue (life line & bracelets) and should be addressed first. Then check out separation gaps between the fingers. Is the subject satisfied with family? The world? A sense of Purpose? Your helpers can give you all the advice to pass along.

7. Draw or describe one of your helpers.

Yes you do have hundreds of helpers! I'm serious! Ask one now to help you feel connected and write down your impressions.

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The Peace of Inner Strength

All that is visible must grow beyond itself,

extend into the realm of the invisible.

Thereby it receives its true consecration and clarity

and takes firm root in the cosmic order.

—I Ching, Hexagram 50

Academies of Thought and Light

In the Realm of Perception, our mental bodies attend schools of discipline for the purpose of honing the skills of clear thought production. This is extremely important if we are to do any work of building archetypes, looking into the truth of matter, or creating any sort of consistency in the quality of our thinking. We cannot move forward in the path of mastery without developing strong, quick, lively, and clear thought patterns.

We begin in the Halls of Learning. Large choirs of us learn from a masterful teacher to work together in manipulating a single thought form. Our cooperation strengthens it and our random thinking bursts it like a bubble. Here we learn in our weakness to join energies that will increase our ability to focus.

Next, smaller groups of us gather under the tutelage of a single instructor. We explore the value of colors, textures, sounds, and shapes of individual thought forms. We learn how they act upon the mental, astral, and physical bodies. We learn to create thoughts of beauty and to send them to certain destinations.

Later, with much practice, we continue learning at a more specialized level for the purpose of catching a seed thought of Divine Energy and translating it into a thought form that is easily disseminated and actuated on the lower levels. This is advanced training for work when we take an office of service.

Pathetic Loses

As partners of the Light, we must not allow illusion and distraction to divert our attention from the reality of our purpose: to act as channels of the Divine Will. It sounds simplistic, but it applies to all the subtle shadings of minutiae in our choices and attitudes throughout the course of a day. The most important illusion to discard is that of victim consciousness. Not only does it invite much woe and disaster, but it also pushes away the blessings at hand. Many are the opportunities to choose the way of the Lightworker. Each time one of us creates success by preventing negativity from taking a foothold in consciousness, our collective and individual strength increases with solid progress.

Personal power has limits and therefore is exhaustible. Divine Power is unlimited and has no end. We can tap into the Divine Power through faith, prayer, and the knowledge of from whence comes all things. Personal power is never to be used for expressed intention; its purpose is to act as a reservoir of strength for enduring karmic hardships or arduous learning periods. Only use the eternal Power of the Divine for all actions and needs. This not only sanctifies one’s purpose, but also creates much needed connectors to the Higher Worlds.

A Moderate Lifestyle Is Not a Life of Denied Expression

Our first responsibility in physical life is the loving maintenance of the physical form. Without health, the brain cannot function to full capacity. If the body is exhausted, sluggish from lack of stimulation, racked with pain, or depleted of nutrients, the brain attends to the physical necessities first. Therefore, let us adopt an attitude of wise treatment of the body—an attitude that includes forethought of anticipated needs, nourishment that does not weigh down the energies, and a rhythmic schedule that allows the body to relax in the routine of good care. When we can achieve this end, the brain can serve beyond survival mode into meditative transformation. In this way, we achieve mastery over the fabric of life.

Survival mode becomes a neurosis when someone becomes accustomed to experiencing it and then creates a lifestyle that necessitates it. In modern recovery programs, the following credo is often included:

H.A.L.T. — Never let yourself become too:

Hungry or thirsty

Angry

Lonely

Tired

Those of us accustomed to living in extremes (of denial/indulgence, tension, physical distress, emotional warfare, and restrictive duties) may view the dream of a well-tempered life as bland at worst and impossible to balance at best.

The source of extreme behavior may have come from a neglectful or unskilled mother. Do not blame her, however. Her karma is her own and she has done the best according to her development.

Our karma is to transcend the obstacle and share our success with others. The answer is a threefold program of developing perseverance

1. Daily meditation is required to implant the seeds for change into the Astral Body.

2. Daily endeavors to choose the new archetype in mundane existence, utilizing affirmations, planning, and gentle encouragements for change.

3. Patience with the Astral Body, who is always following a pattern imposed upon it. Repetition is necessary for permanent change. Even moments of enlightenment will wear off eventually if the truth is not accompanied by the physical affirmation of repeated action.

Master G. August 25, 1950 (all rights reserved, ©Athene Bitting)

There are two points imperative to your knowing and practicing this day and for the remainder of this week. The first is your need to exercise the faculty of spiritual knowing in the midst of unpleasantness and unhappiness, ill health or disaster. It is needful for you to align yourselves with your own solar consciousness especially faithfully during crises.

You must learn to think up to your level of contact with Light power. Having found it, you must gather in, through receptivity, through request, and through spiritual breaths or inhalations of energy, all that you can hold. Reason to yourselves at these times:

This is where my power resides.

This is my innermost Holy of Holies which none can assail—

Not any man, nor any draft of ill will.

I may invite, and will do so frequently,

All whom I love, and good things I appreciate,

Into the unfoldment of my remembrance.

That which cannot belong in oneness, beauty, power, or purpose

To the Solar Kingdom shall not receive my attention.

By centering your own recognition on the assurance and certainties the soul level has for you, you gather forces for spiritual endurance, for unbroken faith, as well as hope for the positive outcome; and by your alignment with the innermost Holy of Holies, a stream of attunement acts as a pathway between your inner world and your world of objective manifestation. Let the promise of destiny and the fortitude of your soul keep your body and outward circumstances related to the regulations of spiritual command.