When I feel happiness arise, I also at the same time find these automatic responses arising like so many tentacles – you’re being too happy, don’t trust this person, don’t let your guard down, etc.

They don’t bother me so much any more as they show me how bankrupt the life of the mind is.

These are all the results of conclusions I’ve reached under traumatic circumstances and decisions that resulted from them: You can’t trust people. People always leave you. Nothing good lasts. Etc.

The mind is into right/wrong and good/bad and experience is into happiness, love, and the other divine states. And, in my fantasy, the mind is dominating and defining experience. [Think: Oilcan Harry.]

Because I see things that way, I’m pulling away from identification with my tribe, my group, my team and leaving it behind.

I find it hard, even though I know it needs to be done.  I no longer think I have to give up who I am to live up to an image, male in this case or otherwise. So I can drop that whole level of pretense, ready for whatever lies below it.

***

And now I’m flooded with bliss, having cut one more identification loose.

No, I don’t have anything to put in its place. I don’t want to replace one limiting belief with another. I don’t need to put anything there. I’m just me, until I refashion that identity as well.

What I’m finding is that by just dropping unproductive automatic responses I create room in which, now, bliss shows up or happiness.  Michael commented on this in regard to the heart opening:

Archangel Michael: Think of it in spatial [terms], time and space reality: you have created the space for this [energy of love] to, not only pass by you like a passing breeze or a rain, but to anchor within you because there is a sense of this spaciousness within thee. (1)

A space for this energy. Spaciousness. That space is created by our dropping something – but we really have to drop it. That includes that next smart rejoinder, judgment, grudge, and so on. It creates space in which the divine states can show up. Sunlight between the clouds created by the mind.

The divine states show up as a rising wisp of pleasantness. We have to acknowledge it or them (This is bliss. This is happiness) and allow it to fill us up. In my experience, the resulting divine states are the reward for all effort.

Footnotes

(1) Archangel Michael in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, March 13, 2015. Also “Activating the Wellspring – Part 1/2,” March 14, 2015, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2015/03/14/activating-the-wellspring-part-1-2/.