The Anne Report, Anne's Report from the Parliament of the World's Religions, tells some of Anne's experiences over the past week. The Main article, Awareness is on the Move, provides insight into how we can become more aware of what's happening in our lives. The Healthy Living article, Envision Your Healthy Life, encourages you to mentally create the healthy life you desire. The Anne Talk, EZosophy Silliness, includes several of Anne's silly songs to help you live your life EZier. The Featured Product This Month is Anne's book, Standing in the Dark. Click to read What is EZosophy? Click for Abundance Affirmations. Click for Shareables From Anne.

The EZ Mantra: "Everything can be EZ or at least EZier." -- Anne Sermons Gillis

Living EZosophy, November 6, 2018
Published Weekly on Tuesday Mornings

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  The Anne Report

Anne's Report from the Parliament of the World's Religions

Dear ,

It's been an exciting, exhausting week. I've cried, laughed, danced, and spent hours catching up with one of my best friends, Karen. We've been at the Parliament of the World's Religions.

There are more than 8,000 people attending. The theme for the conference is "The Power of Inclusivity; the Power of Love." There are 230 religions and spiritual traditions attending this major event. The first was held in 1893, and this is the seventh since the initial parliament.

The people in Toronto are friendly. The population of metro Toronto is almost six million. I love the subway, though it's taken a while to get oriented. We are staying in the "Times Square" of the city. It's a thrill to look out our thirtieth floor window and see skyscrapers and lights. Parliament guests were greeted the first day by the Lieutenant Governor, the Minister of Immigration, and other dignitaries. The next parliament president was announced. For the first time we will now have a woman president. It's past time.

There are at least ten workshops going on at any one time; there are also exhibits and entertainment. The choices are tough because there are so many to chose from. The convention center is about a mile long; therefore, there is a lot of walking. It is overwhelming to have so much information coming my way in a short time frame. I feel brain dead from all the input. We have had talks and workshops on inner peace, world peace, indigenous rights, restoring our earth, climate change, sexual violence, hate, and general violence. When all the survivors of sexual violence were asked to stand, one third of the audience stood. Each day the Sikhs serve a free meal to all the attendees. It's called Langar. When we enter the meal hall, a woman ties an orange scarf on our heads. The food is delicious and the Sikhs are very gracious.

The Theosophical Society has a booth here and I've spent plenty of time hanging out there. Our national president, Barbara Hebert, is here. She is humble and brilliant. Our membership chair, Beverly Porzelt, is here as well. It's fun to hang out with friends that I only get to see once a year, and that's it for the Anne Report.

Anne

  Main Article

Awareness is on the Move

While I use my computer for most of my writing, I still write longhand in my notebook. When I awaken with a thought, I must quickly put it on paper, before it vanishes. I must be careful, because there have been too many times that I wrote so furiously, I was unable to read my scribble. I have a good writing style, but when writing by hand, it only looks legible when I focus on the task of writing. The moment I connect my thought and my writing style, my writing improves. The letters become well-formed and sometimes even attractive. At that point, I not only enjoy what I am writing, I enjoy how I am writing. Awareness is the consciousness that can hold these two processes simultaneously.

Awareness is a blessing. It transforms the mediocre into mystery and brings clarity forth from confusion. There are seemingly two kinds of awareness. The kind of awareness we practice in mindfulness is "the awareness of." We become aware of our inhale and exhale, the pressure of the shoe on our foot, and the harshness in our voice. We experience the sensations life offers: pressure, color, fragrance, stench, touch, sounds, sweetness, and bitterness. We also experience our emotional reality. In the awareness of, we become an overseer of our senses, thoughts, and feelings. It is a state of non-judgment and a space where nothing needs to be fixed or corrected.

Moving from being unaware or unconscious of what's present, to being aware of the sensations that surround us and the awareness of our thoughts, emotions, and feelings, is a big deal. It heralds an awakening. Perceiving from this state makes our lives easier. There's a lot of our personal story left when we are here, but becoming aware of what happens, is an important step in detaching from the egoic mind. The more aware of life's unfolding we become, the freer we are.

Yet there is another kind of awareness. This kind of awareness is "artful." It erases our experience of time and allows us to spend hours in a timeless present. This awareness peeks through everything, but it is so subtle, we don't know it's there. It's like water to a swimming fish. The fish looks through it without even knowing it is there. This awareness is the consciousness that holds everything. When we deeply experience this awareness, all longing recedes. This awareness tends to determine our perception, and it doesn't require thoughts or gesticulations to soften the world we see.

How does consciousness and awareness develop in humans?

• The first stage is unconsciousness: we have no awareness of what we are doing. We act and react from states of habit and familiarity. It's like when we drive home from work the same way and barely think of which turn to take. Consciousness is our vehicle, but we don't know where it's going and what it's doing.
• Next, we become aware of what we are thinking, and we are surprised, wearied, and judgmental of what we see. We use awareness of as a weapon against ourselves.
• At some point, we drop judgment and allow awareness to help, rather than hinder, our lives. Awareness of life in its pure form, brings a newfound sense of aliveness.
• Finally, we begin to have moments when awareness of recedes, and tiny sparks of contentment and fulfillment surface. The drive to succeed loses its hold. We feel a strong urge to help the world be a better place, and we want to serve. We don't do this to get points or to try to make up for feeling like we are not enough. We do it because this activity, this divine activity, is what we were created to do. We arrive in an ordinary yet extraordinary place. This place can be somewhat confusing, because when we move our identity from what we do in the world to service, the ego resists. The ego wants to be special. It wants to be noticed. Yet this is not a space of ego aggrandizement; it is a place of deep humility. On onlooker might see contentment as boring, but when we are truly content, paradoxically there is more than enough action. It's a different kind of action. It's the action of love and Intelligence, not the action of chills, thrills, and drama. This is a place of rest and blessed unrest. Blessed (pronounced with two syllables - bless-ed) comes from no longer accepting what tears ourselves and the world apart and focuses on a collective, relentless genius that recreates our fundamental relationship with ourselves, our earth, and all living things.

People are more spiritually alive then ever before. Awareness is on the move. It moves in individuals and then moves into the collective arena. This process of moving from awareness of to awareness itself, may not save the human species, but it will give us the ability to either rise or fall, in song or in sadness. There is no predicting the future, but we can predict that when we are aware of our lives and what happens with us and to us, and we rest in something so deep that even its name alludes us, we can be certain that anything we encounter will be EZ or at least EZier.

Anne

  Quotes

Anne Quotes

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 Featured Product This Month

  Abundance Affirmations

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This group is a place to post uplifting affirmations and thoughts about prosperity and abundant living. Let's create a right relationship with money so that we feel comfortable about money. Let's use money as it's meant to be used, and not as a way to accumulate power or to fill a void. We don't need money to buy more stuff. We need it to create a world that works for everyone. We want to cast off old beliefs of lack and reclaim our natural state of abundance.

  Shareables From Anne

The World's Best Weight Loss Secret

Thought Freedom

40 Days to Abundance

  What is EZosophy?

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NOTE: If you are viewing this on a cell phone, be sure to scroll to the right to see the other column.

  Healthy Living

Envision Your Healthy Life

I was recently reading a book published in 1978 by Robert B. Stone. Stone's philosophy centers around the amazing powers of our mind. He talks about how many neurons and atoms are in the human brain. His point is that we have far more calculating power and mental abilities than we can fathom. I looked up his statistics and found them incorrect. I imagine that in the past 40 years, scientists' estimates of the brain have become more accurate. While his statistics are behind the times, his analogy is impressive. I have not calculated this accurately; a scientist would laugh at my clumsy attempts, but I have recalculated his analogy, to reflect a more accurate account. Just remember this is not exact, it is rough.

We have 100 billion neurons in our brain. The neurons consist of atoms. We have approximately 456 trillion trillion atoms in the brain. These numbers are difficult to conceptualize. Let's put them in perspective. If we were to fill up an average sized living room up with 456 trillion trillion lead BB pellets, those little round lead things kids use in BB guns, you could fill a living room every second for more than 450 million years.

What does this all mean? How is it germane to our lives? These neurons are constantly firing and they emit a frequency, just like a radio station. Our thought waves affect our surroundings.  Here's an exercise Robert Stone recommends in his book, The Magic of Psychotronic Power. This experiment helps us connect the influence of our thoughts on our world.

Soak mung beans overnight. Put them in two jars: one on the left, one on the right. Send good thoughts to the beans on the right-hand side. Imagine you are watering the beans. Use your hands, your real hands, to go through the motion of watering. Ignore the left-hand batch. Notice the difference in 2 or 3 days. The one on the right will thrive and the one on the left will not be doing as well.

While I have not done this experiment personally, I have seen the results of another's experiment. Things went poorly for the contents of the unattended glass, while the contents of the other glass thrived.

What conclusions can we draw from the experiment? Our thoughts directly influence our own health too. We are using our minds for either health or illness. We have extraordinary abilities to heal our bodies. Unfortunately, we have abdicated our power to heal and handed it over to others. It's very convenient to hand over the reins of our bodies to doctors, but is it wise? Doctors should be advisors, not tsars.

In ancient Chinese medicine, doctors instructed people on how to live a life that promoted health. They practiced Kokysyu, preventative medicine. If the patient got ill, the doctor was not paid, because he or she had failed. Kokysyu is the central tenet of Chinese medicine.

Maybe we should take a cue from the practice of Kokysyu. We need to do what it takes to keep our bodies healthy. The most important step in this practice is to begin to think of ourselves as healthy. Let's lavish appreciative thoughts on our bodies, regardless of the shape or state of wellness they are in today. The next best contribution is to picture ourselves as exercising. War prisoners, confined to a small cage, have been known to practice a daily golf game in their heads. While imagining a normal routine may have saved their sanity, it also kept their bodies in shape. Their neurons told their muscles that they were exercising, and their muscles responded. If you already exercise regularly, you may skip this step, but you may want to supplement your routine with some exercises you never get around to.

Two hundred years ago, people died of plagues and simple illnesses. Today we face stress-related diseases and environmental hazards. While these wreak havoc on our health, they are not as important as our self-talk about our bodies and our health. Let's start a mental trend by thinking of ourselves as healthier and healthier. Our overall thoughts about health and our bodies will contribute more to our aliveness and well-being that any practice, vitamin, or glass of carrot juice. (I also do the preceding, so I'm not knocking them.) Today is the best time to start a new health program. It starts in our minds, and we can start our new health program right away.

Here's an invitation to a healthier life.

The healing power of life, the power that resides in my infinite mind, visits every cell in my body, waiting only for an invitation, a sign, that I want what is offered. I respond with an unequivocal yes. My body receives my permission, approval, and appreciation, and the restoration begins. Each day brings in more renewal, revitalization, and health. And it is so.

If you have any healthy living tips for the newsletter, send them to me at anne@annegillis.com.

  Anne Talk

EZosophy Silliness

Take a few minutes to watch EZosophy Silliness. It includes several of Anne's silly songs to help you live your life EZier. Time: 3:45

  Anne Art

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