“The soul has been given ears to hear things the mind does not understand.” ~Quote from Elsa Joy Bailey’s Facebook Page
~Rumi

We are mind-based creatures and find the soul difficult to actually heed. We do this because we fear the judgement of other mind-based people.

And we are all alike in fearing to take even the first step on the real journey back to God, or Truth.

I know I do not belong in society, but guilt extracts a payment from me if I actually withdraw from a mind-based society. So what happens is that I go along. But going along extracts a price on the soul.

The basic part of returning to God is returning to your own soul, letting it be the center of this earthly life with all of its hells therein. Yes, there are as many hells as there are human souls. Don’t be naieve; that just delays the journey back home.

Doing our inner work matters because every once in a while, we actually remember to put our soul before a lie-based society.

I have been on line listening to people who had Near Death Experiences. I believe them when they say they saw the other side.

From what I can tell, we are sent here to learn our lessons and everyone’s experience will be different.

Since I posted the photo of my daughter, many people have responded to it. I look at it again and see her joy radiating out from her.

I have been left here to finish my work and I have no idea what that is. I know I write, but there are other things that I need to do. Hopefully, I will have time to do them.

I am a piece of God and also I am the peace of God, as we all are. It’s just that human beings always have some amount of darkness in them and that has to be worked out while in a human body.

I look at my life today and see that I am slowing down the pace of my life, which is a part of the aging process.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

This life, for me, has been about coming to terms with loss and the lessons continue.

My life goes slowly so that I can feel the peace of God.

Breathing in and out, I remain in a human body/mind that is seeking the light, which I already am. I am learning that paradox is part of the human experience.

Chaos happens on a daily basis inside and outside and the best thing we can do is be humble.

We do not have to change anything; we have to see how poor in spirit we are when we remain in this earthly trance.

All is well, or so we have been told. This is an energy statement; do not try to believe it your human mind. Just accept the love of God, which permeates everything.

Vicki Woodyard

Nothing matters much except self-honesty! The world is made up of artificial things manufactured to make us want them. But only self-honesty matters. This mean you must curate your life ruthlessly.

Awakening is about learning about your true nature and yet the false nature thrives on lies, deception and pretense, so we must investigate those as well.

There is no such thing as an enlightened human being, only the wish to be one. No human being can ever know the nature of God; he or she can only guess at it.

When earthquakes crush thousands of people, where is God? Is He safely hidden in the sky?

Life goes on despite millennia of cruelty to both humans and animals.

Where is God when it hurts, as someone’s book title asks? He is said to be in all things, but no microscope has ever been able to find him in materiality.

Let’s change the subject back to self-honesty. We all know we hurt constantly and that no literal god has ever come to save us. Can we be honest about that?

Evolution seems to be true, but it is a scientific claim having nothing to do with God.

So we return to self-honesty. Are we capable of it? Only at times.

We can aspire to it, but that does not mean we have mastered it.

Human law cannot protect us and religious laws easily turn into work-arounds.

We are all in a cosmic jam and only self-honesty can save us from ourselves, for we are all one.

Try it; you might like it. It is a form of awakening from the dream.

Vicki Woodyard

The Earth is running out of room for evil (unconsciousness). It would seem that we might be in what some have called “The End Times.” The Work speaks about this, saying that another deluge will come and the truth will be stored in the Ark to be preserved until which time when it is safe to send it out again.

We have let the letter of the law ruin Spirit. When this happens, evil men and women prevail. Evil runs on the letter of the law, forcing truth to go underground.

I have been studying truth for a long time and it is clear to me that what lies ahead for Planet Earth is more poison.

Jesus spoke about evil versus good; it is how the unredeemed world works. But once we see the terror of the situation, as Gurdjieff called it, we want to work on ourselves. We simply put all of our energy into awakening because awakening requires a great deal of conscious attention.

There is no time for socializing and trying to one up each other. There is no time for lying about how we’re not so bad.

There is no time!

All we have is our state of being.

We are asked to confess our state of mind in order that we might aspire to higher things.

We are never asked to rule anything in this world.

Everywhere we turn we see catastrophe that we have brought on ourselves. We can blame no one but ourselves, for how we react is how we will experience life.

We need to turn off the TV and go deeply inside our shuttered consciousness, for it is filled with fear and dread. We need not fear because once we look at darkness consciously, it disappears.

“Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the earth.”

“Peace, be still.”

“Let there be light.”

The Master is ever with us.

Vicki Woodyard

I was never the same after my little girl died. But neither were her brother or her father. We were all crippled in different ways. My husband was solemn in his reactions; perhaps that is what caused his cancer at the age of 58. I had full freedom to cry, whereas my husband and son suffered from “male pattern stoicism.”

No matter how you cut it, the death of a child has lifelong repercussions. My writing is fueled by grief and the relief found therein. But men are not disposed to break down and weep. And I often found myself alone with a full box of tissues.

One thing I could not do then was talk about my child’s death to friends. They might have listened, but I could not open up to them. My best friend, the parent of 3 healthy boys, invited me over for visits, but grief was not on the table. Only cheerfulness and talks about nothing.

Sadly, the relationship did not survive and I made no new friends. I turned within and to my Higher Power; there I found solace not available in the outer world.

I found solace in solitude; actually I am a solitary by nature. Now I am in the winter of my life and little Laurie died in the first bloom of summer. I still feel the bruises on my soul. But it is from these bruises that my writing flows.

Some of you also have bruises on your soul; if so, it may help to read about my attempts to learn all I could about awakening. It is fair to say that I put all of my time and attention on the world outside of this world. This world lies within and truth is found in no other place; this I know.

The Planet Earth is crashing and burning now, fueled by hatred and poisonous politics. All of the great teachers counseled us to turn within to know the truth; but we also have to turn within to see the falsehoods that we ourselves continue to embrace.

We can no longer afford to pollute our oceans or our bodies. There is a hole in the ozone layer and a deeper one in our sense of personal responsibility.

I can only write so much about personal loss; this is a time when the world is grieving the loss of its innocence. We have only ourselves to blame. Mea culpa, mea culpa—truer words were never spoken.

Vicki Woodyard

Not knowing is a great opportunity to stop and simply break into your current state of thought. Thoughts are artificial signposts that lead away from the straight way and the narrow gate to which Jesus pointed his followers.

Thoughts are random firings of the mind. “This new flavor of Cheerios is too ‘almondy’. I spent way too much money on these flavorless tomatoes.”

I sit each morning waiting for these kinds of thoughts to die out. They are temporary grumblings that the mind loves to generate to muddy the waters of silence.

Silence is a knowing substance which our being cries out for. It is society’s downfall and therefore called “awkward gaps” in conversations.

We are called to silence by the words of Jesus.

We enter into the straight gate of silence and there is a chance for renewal to happen. Renewal never happens in idle chatter or pompous orations. Jesus might have said, “Keep it simple, stupid.”

So this Thursday morning finds me stringing out a few words and then throwing them into the silence.

Silence, the great sea of the soul, changes the words into nothingness.

Out of the deeps a peace arises, enough to feed the five thousand.

Peace, be still.

Love is found deep within the suffering soul as it waits on God and God erases clumsy words and replaces them with silence, the substance of transmutation. We are fed, truly fed, from within.

Vicki Woodyard

Words fail me; words fail us all. On this bright Monday morning, words will fail me at regular intervals. It is then I sit in silence.

The mug is empty of tea and I am empty of me.

Sunlight shines on us all and into each life some rain must fall. Mine came in two great deluges that went on for years.

Now I am back in both sunlight and shadow, trying to live at the still point between the opposites. This is a form of active meditation where you consciously let go as often as you can during the day.

I have been reading about the teachings of Gurdjieff and they demand one’s full attention. One quote I remember is that we human beings are “food for the moon.” In other words, rather useless.

I know that I am not doing much but trying to follow the rules as far as paying bills and honoring any appointments I might have. Everything else will simply happen.

When storms come, we become them. Our job is to know this so that we will have a place to take cover until the sun comes out again.

Impartiality is a great help if we can but remember it.

Taking a step back from our thoughts helps us regain a sense of peace. We let it be. We let it go. We let it do what it wants to do. We are just watching and that is enough and plenty.

Vicki Woodyard

Life is a mixed bag; one day you’re up and the next day you’re down. We live in these incredibly complex body/minds that are exposed to negativity in every possible form.

When we start traveling the inner path back home to our essence, we read lots of books and look online for teachings that may jump out at us. We may join discussion groups about awakening or keep notes about our progress, or lack thereof.

We instinctively know not to tell friends or family about how deep we are going, lest they turn and rend us. The tribe wants everyone to conform and the tribe can be anything from a church membership or a book club. We know better than to share what we have fallen in love with.

To speak personally, I don’t have a tribe anymore. That is a relief that comes in many forms. My time is my own and I can study at leisure.

Leaving the world happens gradually, so nothing changes that much.

When you leave the world, what fills the vacuum? More me-time, and that is always a good thing. In this time apart from the world, we ponder the words of saints and sages.

We now see that although we may have left the world, the world has not left us. Now begins our inner battle against negative elements of our very own selves. Guilt kicks in and so does self-doubt.

This is where we live and move and eat our dinner now. In a private search for God rather than a public one.

The books have been read and the true teachings remain just a bit out of reach for us. But we keep on keeping on.

Every day some sort of inner disturbance arises as we peek into the world in which we used to live. Strangely, that world does not miss us. Our dropping out was actually a private thing.

We are now halfway to heaven and halfway away from hell. It is a delicate balance. The path is more of a tightrope than any found in a circus.

And this is what my writing is about. Teetering in the air not knowing if our balance will hold or not. It won’t; everyone falls down repeatedly.

Falling down leads us to humility. We used to be cocksure of how enlightened we were. Now we know that humility is being learned one fall at a time.

The hand of God is always being held out to us, but our attention is turned in the wrong direction. Once we see that, we turn toward Him at long last. Stripped of everything, we lack nothing. End of sermon. Amen.

Vicki Woodyard

The planet is awash in darkness, both literally and figuratively. If you can’t sense this, you are sound asleep. But if you watch the news, you will see human brutality in its worst aspects. You will see beatings, arson, murders, etc. and so forth.

It is for this reason that we come to a spiritual teaching. It is because of lack that we come to it, not because of abundance.

I lived a normal life until I was twelve and had my first panic attack. They didn’t stop until I was in my fifties, when they faded away.

My anxiety was put in place to prevent me from growing and it worked well.. I had to isolate myself from social events because they freaked me out. I had full-blown agoraphobia but I never told anyone about it.

I still have social anxiety to the degree that I much prefer solitude and my own company. Socializing is a drag on my energy field.

Luckily I was led to Vernon Howard, who never shied away from discussing evil. Some find this bad form, but it was plain to me that evil, or mechanical behavior, was enveloping the earth. No one spoke of it because it was just not talked about in polite society.

But Vernon did not call polite people to him; he called those on the verge of seeing clearing that this earth is filled with evil and it is growing worse all the time. The Work says that esoteric teachings are an ark which will survive the next flood. At this point, floods are becoming worse with every passing year. And poisonous politicians want goodness to be erased altogether.

The Planet Earth is a house of cards and if you can’t see this yet, you haven’t suffered enough yet.

Jesus gathered just a few around him and if you are on the verge of awakening, you can read the Book of John in The New Testament, where it is explained clearly what human beings are capable of. Being good is not enough; one must admit that evil resides inside of themselves and not just in the outer world.

The next phase after you find a teacher is to keep immersing oneself in the truth, whether it speaks of good or evil. Both must be risen above, for human goodness is a travesty. Beware of those who casually use phrases like “born again.” That is lip service only.

My life now consists of daily witnessing of how soundly I sleep, waking just long enough to sit silently for a while or to write an essay. These essays write themselves, but they don’t proof-read or arrange them to sound more authentic. Some of you receive them while others don’t. I will never be a household name.

My sorrow is now burnished gold and continues to infuse me with lovingkindness towards myself. I have been called to leave society with its lures and continuous confrontations. I find this easy to do. So I keep on keeping on.

Vicki Woodyard

I am happiest when I remember that I am only the witness to an ongoing play of consciousness. It is amazing that the play goes on regardless of knowing that we are the one Self.

In the morning after breakfast I sit in my chair and enter the silence. I know how to get there; what I don’t remember is that at some point I will get lost in the dream again. And in the dream, just as in a sleeping dream, I will play my part mechanically. I will have no memory of myself sitting in the chair watching the play of awareness without getting involved in it.

I will have a cup of coffee with a cookie and browse YouTube, where awareness swiftly disappears. I will buy into different ideas while I am there watching mechanically. It is so easy for me to be taken in.

Freedom happens only when we choose awareness over thought, for thought is the enemy of awareness. Others, like myself, are always seeking immunity from our actions, yet the universe knows nothing about our desire to have our cake and eat it, too.

We feel bound to our desires and so we do and say painful things to ourselves and to others. We hope to avoid judgement, but we ourselves are busy being judgmental. Is there no escape from the nightmare of humanhood?

Only awareness can break through the dream state. Happily, awareness is our true nature.

We come and go from the daily drama of thinking that we are separated from our true nature. It is then that we hurt ourselves and others. It is then that we forget we ever studied truth.

As soon as I leave the house, I leave awareness. I go to the grocery without a single moment of awareness. I move through the aisles zombie-like, scoring treats for myself while pretending to want to eat healthily.

At home I remember myself once again, but not entirely. The dreamer is sound asleep and cannot wake up without hard inner work. To throw off the dream is to be the Self in all beings. We are not “others.” We are all the Self in disguise.

Vicki Woodyard