Inner alchemy: You are what you love

According to the Eastern definition of our spiritual nature, love and attention are synonymous.

by Vaishali — 

You are what you love, and you love whatever you give your attention to. Eastern spiritual psychologies profess that whatever you give your attention to is what you are making your god.

If, for example, you spend all your time thinking about that next cigarette, then you have just made that next nicotine fix your god. If you worry about your bills, your daughter’s boyfriend with the spiked hair and nose ring, the price of gas, the likelihood of another terrorist attack or CNN’s reported “fear du jour,” then you love worrying and stressing out about your life.

Surprising, isn’t it?

According to the Eastern definition of our spiritual nature, love and attention are synonymous. Spirit is inseparable from awareness, consciousness or any other buzzword you might use for it. Spirit is awareness itself. We bring consciousness with us when we come to the earthly plane. We also take it with us when the body expires and we shed the mortal coil. Awareness is our divinity, our “god juice,” so to speak. Therefore, whatever we give our attention to, we empower with life-giving energy.

When we run an inner dialogue that qualifies everyone on the planet as having the IQ of an amoeba — except ourselves, of course — how does that makes us feel? Frustrated? Annoyed? Superior, in a mean-spirited way?

Where we place our attention is the highest form of inner spiritual alchemy available to us. The physical, outer-world-based alchemy — reality — is simply a metaphor for turning the heaviest of our thoughts, the lead, into the purest gold of our focused attention. And unlike the arduous, exterior, atomic version of alchemy, the inner can be accomplished in the blink of an eye, without expensive equipment, nasty, bad-smelling acids or cluttered laboratories.

Inner alchemy happens as quickly as it takes to release the dark and turn toward the Light. Another perk of inner alchemy is that all the inner gold you make, you actually get to keep.

Vaishali was diagnosed with a terminal illness in her mid-20s, but slowly pieced her health together using the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine. She is the author of You Are What You Love. 239-514-7193 or www.purplev.com.

Reprinted from AzNetNews, Volume 26, Number 1, February/March 2007.