ECKANKAR Blog

Original Eckankar Blog

Aug
25

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Coffee Break

Category: ECK Parables Tags: , , , ,

By Harold Klemp

One Saturday morning a woman and her husband decided to go shopping at an expensive home-furnishings store.  The company was having a warehouse sale that began at 10:00 a.m.  Right next to the warehouse was the regular store, which opened at 9:00 a.m.

The couple arrived about fifteen minutes before the regular store opened.  Outside in the cold, unloading a furniture truck, was a young man.  The couple asked him if there was a coffee shop nearby where they could wait.  The young man gave them directions, and they set off.

They drove around for about ten minutes but couldn’t find the coffee shop, so they came back to the warehouse.  The young man was still unloading furniture.  He gave them the directions again, but they thanked him and said they’d just wait inside the store. Read More

Aug
18

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Life Partners

Category: Questions and Answers Tags: , , ,

ECKANKAR, Choices, Youth, SpiritualityBy Harold Klemp

Q: How important is it to date or marry someone in the same religion as me?

A: This life is for the gaining of spiritual experience.

Life partners often—nearly always—reach an agreement with others important to their mutual spiritual unfoldment long before either of them becomes aware of it on earth.  But destiny is not fixed.  Each has to find the other, often sorting through many possible choices.

An ECKist will, of course, consider both ECKists and non-ECKists as a life partner.  Most Souls agree to total amnesia before their return to earth in new bodies.  The reason for that is to avoid old biases and hatreds.  Amnesia gives one a fresh start.

Your spirituality depends upon yourself.  Someone in your religion may or may not be the right choice for you at a given time, so look around.  Ask the Mahanta, the Inner Master, to help you weigh the spiritual advantages of each potential life partner.

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Excerpted from Youth Ask a Modern Prophet about Life, Love, and God.

 

Aug
11

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How Dreams Can Help Us

Category: Dreams, Questions and Answers Tags: , ,

John V Autumn_7By Harold Klemp

Q: How can our dreams help us?

A: Dreams are like a daily report card. They show how you are doing in your spiritual mission, even if you don’t know you have one. Dreams tell how you are getting on in your relationship with God and life.

There is a spiritual side to every experience or event, no matter how large or small, and whether or not it occurs in every day life or in a dream.

But—and this is a big but—few people have the spiritual eyes to see.

Most people are in a daze but don’t know it. They have hardly any idea about their life in the higher spiritual worlds while their body lies asleep at day’s end.

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Excerpted from Youth Ask a Modern Prophet about Life, Love, and God.

 

Aug
4

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Spiritual Exercise: Self-Protection

Category: Spiritual Exercises Tags: , , ,

ECKANKAR, Protection, Healing

By Harold Klemp

To protect yourself you must remember two principles: (1) never believe that you will be harmed by anything or anybody, because you are ageless, eternal Soul; and (2) practice fearlessness by never being afraid of anything or letting the imagination run wild by imagining something happening to your body to harm it.

Three techniques for self-protection are: (1) place a reversed mirror in front of you, which the adversary’s psychic self can see but cannot withstand; (2) place a white light around yourself; and (3) start talking in a normal voice, telling your adversary that he isn’t acting according to the laws of human decency.

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Excerpted from The Spiritual Exercises of ECK, where more than 130 spiritual exercises like this can be found. Learn more about spiritual exercises.

 

Jul
28

By

The Australian Schoolteacher

Category: ECK Parables Tags: , , , , ,

ECKANKAR, ECK Parable, Waking Dream, Holy SpiritBy Harold Klemp

A teacher in Australia had finished a particularly rough day with her students.  She taught French to children ages seven or eight.  Because it was hot they were unruly that day, and she couldn’t do anything to maintain order in the classroom.

A citywide train strike was on that week.  Instead of taking a ten-minute train ride home, after school let out that evening the teacher had to get on the bus and ride for several hours.  The buses were very overcrowded because of the strike, and there was no air conditioning.

Sitting near the front of the bus, the woman mulled over what had happened during the day.  Inwardly she seethed.  How difficult the children had been!  Her thoughts went round and round as she got angrier.

Suddenly the bus driver’s radio crackled as a communication came through.  Another driver was calling the command center.  “The needle on my heat gauge is going up and up,” he said.  “What do I do?” Read More

Jul
21

By

The Secret of All Relationships

Category: Relationships Tags: , , ,

ECKANKAR, Soul, Love,By Harold Klemp

Everyone has some experience with love—even a child who has a pet kitten or a dog.  Soul is trying to give back or respond to God’s love that’s coming through. In some way the child learns lessons about caring for the pet.  If he neglects the pet and it runs away, the child learns one of the first hard lessons about love: If you love something, you have to nurture it.

Like anything else, you have to put your full attention on it.  Sometimes in the courting stage, a couple focuses all their attention on each other, but after they are married they begin to take each other for granted.  Instead of looking at each other when they talk, their eyes drift.  Maybe the man is thinking about work, and she is thinking about things happening in her life.  They talk past each other. Read More

Jul
14

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Spiritual Exercise: Law of Reversed Effort

Category: Spiritual Exercises Tags: , , ,

ECKANKAR, Goals, Positive ImaginationBy Harold Klemp

If you feel you are trying too hard to accomplish something, consider the Law of Reversed Effort.  This law is a practical law of nature concerned with the use of the imaginative powers.

It goes like this: The more you concentrate on putting your imaginative powers upon something, the less you are able to do it.  Or, the harder one struggles to avoid something the more it will be attracted to him. Read More

Jul
7

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Molly and the Great Unmovable

Category: Animals Are Soul Too Tags: , , , ,

DSC02149By Harold Klemp

For years my wife and I shared our home with a little dog named Molly.  Eventually she lost her sight and hearing, but she was still filled with love—and she was still every bit as stubborn as a puppy.

Molly’s goal was to understand the great unmovable, which happened to be our library bookcase.  We had set a protected area in the living room where she could walk around.  The walls were foam-padded but the front of the bookcase was not.  Yet Molly toddled along so slowly that she really couldn’t hurt herself.

As soon as she got up from her bed, she headed straight to the bookcase, and for some reason she proceeded to press against it with all her might.  We were not sure whether she wanted to shove it over or if she was trying to absorb all the wisdom she could from the books. Read More

Jun
30

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Practical Benefits of Dreams

Category: Dreams Tags: , , , , ,

ECKANKAR, Dreams, HealingBy Harold Klemp

Sometimes a lesson derived from the dream state brings a healing.

Healing in Dreams

An ECK initiate, “Helen,” went to see her doctor about a certain health problem.  He gave her two prescriptions which had proven helpful to other patients with the same condition.  She took the medications faithfully for a few days but finally concluded that they were not going to work for her.

One night Helen had a dream—a very simple inner experience.  First she saw a plain black screen.  Then the letters began to appear, one by one, each a different color, spelling out the word Ornade.  She didn’t know exactly what it was, but she had a feeling it was significant for her health.  She woke up in the middle of the night and, while the experience was fresh in her mind, she got out of bed and carefully wrote down the word. Read More

Jun
23

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How Does Prayer Work?

Category: Prayer, Meditation, and Contemplation Tags: , , , ,

ECKANKAR, Prayer, Unconditional Love, God, HUBy Harold Klemp

The Spindrift Organization has done a lot of experiments in the lab trying to prove that prayer works.  They set up experiments with plants, and they tried directed prayer.  They’d always have a control group.  Then they would see if there were any differences in plant growth.  And there were.

They did these experiments for a while, and then somebody had an idea.  They said, “We’ve proved now that prayer changes things.”  In other words, saying to the little plant, “Grow!”  “But now let’s see if there’s a difference between directed prayer and other types.”  They wanted to look at another kind of prayer, which is nondirected prayer. Read More

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