Why Do People take a Sabbatical?

Genesis 2:  

"1. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 

2.  And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

3. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it; because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made." 

The people were instructed to remember the sabbath and keep it holy.  It was to be a day of delight and thanksgiving. So just as joy is more than the absence of sorrow, keeping the sabbath is more than the cessation of work. It is a time to develop a deeper, more meaningful relationship with God. It is a time to fully appreciate the blessings that surround and indwell us all.

Ministers, teachers and other professional people are encouraged to take sabbaticals periodically to rest and renew.

What better use of a minister's time and energy than to rest from the daily activities and to renew her connection with Source.

I am very grateful to be given a three month sabbatical beginning September 1, 2017.

Please know that I love my work and feel blessed everyday to be doing the work I am doing. I am blessed by the entire community -- the people who attend services here regularly, the ones who have been part of  our community in service, the hundreds of students who have studied with me. I am grateful to be part of a Center that values my contributions and service.

When I speak on a Sunday, I want to speak about the experience of Transcendence from a felt sense. I want to inspire other seekers.  When I truly experience the divine within nature and within myself, I experience transcendence. That is my hope for my sabbatical. I will be a better minister for unplugging and turning to the Source within.

Jason Silva spoke about the mystical experience recently. He inspires me.

 

Why Do We Fall In Love?

"What we regard as normality is our collective, protective madness,

in which we repress the grim truth about the human condition." - Ernest Becker

The Same Reason The Flowers Grow. 

World's Best Sunsets San Clemente

"Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement." - Darwin

Join Jason Silva every week as he freestyles his way into the complex systems of society, technology and human existence and discusses the truth and beauty of science in a form of existential jazz. New episodes of Shots of Awe every Tuesday!

The Power Of Sunsets

We Don't Cry Because We're Sad

"The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be." - Alain de Button

The Sky Does Not Rain From Sadness 

Compassion and Connection

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another." Thomas Merton

This video is the Charter for Compassion and is beautiful to see all the different  ages cultures and regions represented.

It is the golden thread of truth running through all religions to care for others. In our journal today, we are encouraged to connect when we are feeling ashamed or defeated. Brene Brown, the current researcher on shame states that we must stop trying to be perfect. She further encourages us to stop trying to hide our imperfections from our loved ones but rather to have the courage to tell the truth about our experience to someone whom we can trust. Please reach out if you are feeling discouraged or alone. I would love to be of service as would all our ministerial staff and practitioners.

If you would like to be more compassionate, watch the following video, in which Jason Silva shows how we are hard-wired for compassion. He shows six-month old babies responding with compassion. He also shows us how we can increase our compassionate responses.

I trust that you will enjoy.

Shots Of Awe In San Clemente

Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has proposed that our ability to awe was biologically selected for by evolution because it imbues our lives with sense of cosmic significance that has resulted in a species that works harder not just to survive but to flourish and thrive.

Are you looking for a "Shot of Awe" in San Clemente? Look no further than "The Center For Spiritual Living"

A Shot Of Awe From San Clemente

Layers of Truth in San Clemente

Christopher Uhl reminds us that "while gazing 'up' at a night sky, one in fact hangs off the planet and near the edge of a galaxy, vertiginous, suspended over the infinity of space...

Layers of Truth in San Clemente 

Contemplate: Become consciously aware of this open channel between the human and the Divine.  Can you tell where one starts and the other leaves off?

Saturday Photowalk With Arpad Petrass

Come explore Salt Creek on this months San Clemente Connected PhotoWalk with our featured photographer Arpad Petrass

Inspiration is Therapy 

Where Salt Creek Beach Park

33333 S. Pacific Coast Hwy. Dana Point, CA 92629
Date: Saturday- February 8th
Time 3:30-5:30PM
Click Here To Sign Up! 

• Lots of opportunity to take pictures here. 
• Large park for the kids 
• Practice portrait photography on the beach 
• Shoot the sunset 
• Take pictures from the golf course overlooking the beach 
• Take Pictures from the Ritz Carlton

Arpad says that “Photography should delight and excite the senses." There are so many magical moments in life that if you were to just stop, pause and look around, you could begin to experience life’s extraordinary beauty. "Just by giving ourselves the ‘gift’ of opening our eyes and be willing to see clearly, we will experience the wonder and magic on this planet like never before."

"Photography can be classical, whimsical, realistic, dramatic,breath taking or artistic. It can be created through the eye of just the photographer and his camera or enhanced and embellished in a lab. What really matters is not how the photograph was created, but what emotions that photograph invoked in you. Did you want to own it, experience it, taste it, be it or do it. After all, this is our life, what we experience and believe about the world , is our perception of it. “ 

If you don't already know Arpad come to "Not just another Wednesday Wisdom" here at our center tomorrow at 7pm

Beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment between poetry and grace.  And So It Is!  

Go To Oz, But Return To Tell The Tale

We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex­ternal, active, work project...

- Ernest Becker

Lately I have been dreaming that I can fly, not in a movie kind of way, but in a visceral 4D,  touch taste and feel, first person kind of way. I find myself hovering over the trees, then floating down to meet with people on the ground, and loving this round world. I find myself so involved that I don't want to wake up. But in the end, Kate kicks, or the light comes. These dreams all seem to be connected in some way, like watching a TV show from one season to the next.  I have been sharing these dreams and the insight I get from them with my friends and family. It is a story that is better told than read.

What have you been dreaming of lately? Do you find yourself flying in your dreams? What is your unconscious mind trying to bubble to the surface of your experience? Are dreams our connection to a quantum multidimensional universe or just an escape from our everyday reality? That you must decide for yourself.

Want to know more about your dreams? Then sign up for our "Dream Interpretation Workshop" Sunday, January 26th from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. We hope to see you there.

A Dreamy Little Waterfall

The Universal Law of Cause and Effect

Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed;
For the effect already blooms in the cause,
The end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Trust The Law

Believe In A More Brilliant World

We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe and fear before these very same possibilities. - Abraham Maslow

And So It Is!

Is Love a Religious Problem?

Ultimately when we fall in love, it is a prayer, it is a sacrifice, we give ourselves and hope that this being of light will save us from our animal condition,

We can dispense from being Gods with Anuses into being just Gods. - Jason Silva

And So It Is! 

Day of the Girl

"We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results." -Herman Melville

Something to contemplate on October 11 the "Day of the Girl"

And So It Is!

Following Your Intuition Into The World

Following Our Intuition Into The World

Last month a few of us gathered together to do a "visioning" for the month of October. We were instructed to sit quietly and listen to our intuition. What came through loud and clear, and one of the things that keeps coming back to me over and over again.

Get Outside 

Get outside of your comfort zone, get outside and meet your neighbors, get outside and interact with your friends, get outside and sing, get outside and love, get outside and learn, get outside and share, get outside and teach, get outside and practice, get outside and capture the moment, get outside and play, get outside and change your world.

Take the time to listen to your intuition today, where should you be going?

"I would argue that immersion is primarily a quality of consciousness that has to do with the capture and control of attention, a necessary condition for any interpersonal persuasion, education, or entertainment to occur." Diana Slattery.

"We are talking about directly engaging the technical material of subjectivity itself" Erik Davis. 

Is Life An Existential Bummer?

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

Let's Talk About What Life Is.

A single thread of self generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos together into one creation. Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made... the arc of complexity and open-ended creation in the last four billion years is nothing compared to what lies ahead. - Kevin Kelly

Wake Up Universe
And So It Is! 

The Mirroring Mind by Jason Silva

We are self-perceiving, self-creating, locked in mirages.

We are miracles of self-reference. ~ Douglas Hofstadter

Each one of us is an outlet to God 

& an inlet to God. ~ Ernest Holmes

You Are A RCVR By Jason Silva

RCVR

Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
-Khalil Gibran