Chrysalis Angel

Chrysalis Angel
Becoming an Angel is the work of humans.

CHRYSALIS WELCOMES EVERYONE

Chrysalis' year begins the first Sunday after Labor Day in September. Services are held each Sunday at 10AM to 12 Noon. There will be no services held during August 2014. First meeting in the fall will be September 7, 2014.

Sunday Services from 10 am to 11:30 am each week
805 Mercer's Fernery Road
DeLand, FL (the white 2 story farm house)
Pastor - Skuli Thorhallsson

For more information or counseling phone (386) 478-9201

Email questions or requests to chrysalisgarden@gmail.com

Chrysalis Spiritual Center is a Swedenborg based congregation that studies non-deno
minational topics based on the value of certain writings and speech to society as a whole. Services are frequently presented by guest speakers. No denomination is excluded from meeting with us. We welcome all religions, ages, genders and beliefs.

Saturday, August 31, 2013



The Awakening
(Author unknown)

A time comes in your life when you finally get…when, in the midst of all your fears and insanity, you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out…ENOUGH! Enough fighting and crying and blaming and struggling to hold on. Then, like a child quieting down after a tantrum, you blink back your tears and begin to look at the world through new eyes.

This is your awakening.

You realize it’s time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change, or for happiness, safety and security to magically appear over the next horizon.

You realize that in the real world there aren’t always fairy tale endings, and that any guarantee of “happily ever after” must begin with you…and in the process a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.

You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are…and that’s OK. They are entitled to their own views and opinions.

You learn the importance of loving and championing yourself…and in the process a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval.

Your stop complaining and blaming other people for the things they did to you – or didn’t do for you – and you learn that the only thing you can really count on is the unexpected.

You learn that people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say and that not everyone will always be there for you and everything isn’t always about you.

So, you learn to stand on your own and to take care of yourself…and in the process a sense of safety and security is born of self-reliance.

You stop judging and pointing fingers and you begin to accept people as they are and to overlook their shortcomings and human frailties…and in the process a sense of peace and contentment is born of forgiveness.

You learn to open up to new worlds and different points of view. You begin reassessing and redefining who you are and what you really stand for.

You learn the difference between wanting and needing and you begin to discard the doctrines and values you’ve outgrown, or should never have bought into to begin with.

You learn that there is power and glory in creating and contributing and you stop maneuvering through life merely as a “consumer” looking for you next fix.

You learn that principles such as honesty and integrity are not the outdated ideals of a bygone era, but the mortar that holds together the foundation upon which you must build a life.

You learn that you don’t know everything, it’s not you job to save the world and that you can’t teach a pig to sing. You learn the only cross to bear is the one you choose to carry and that martyrs get burned at the stake.

Then you learn about love. You learn to look at relationships as they really are and not as you would have them be. You learn that alone does not mean lonely.

You stop trying to control people, situations and outcomes. You learn to distinguish between guilt and responsibility and the importance of setting boundaries and learning to say NO.

You also stop working so hard at putting your feelings aside, smoothing things over and ignoring your needs.

You learn that your body really is your temple. You begin to care for it and treat it with respect. You begin to eat a balanced diet, drinking more water, and take more time to exercise.

You learn that being tired fuels doubt, fear, and uncertainty and so you take more time to rest. And, just food fuels the body, laughter fuels our soul. So you take more time to laugh and to play.

You learn that, for the most part, you get in life what you deserve, and that much of life truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You learn that anything worth achieving is worth working for and that wishing for something to happen is different than working toward making it happen.

More importantly, you learn that in order to achieve success you need direction, discipline and perseverance. You learn that no one can do it all alone, and that it’s OK to risk asking for help.

You learn the only thing you must truly fear is fear itself. You learn to step right into and through your fears because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and to give in to fear is to give away the right to live life on your own terms.

You learn to fight for your life and not to squander it living under a cloud of impending doom.

You learn that life isn’t always fair, you don’t always get what you think you deserve and that sometimes bad things happen to unsuspecting, good people…and you lean not to always take it personally.

You learn that nobody’s punishing you and everything isn’t always somebody’s fault. It’s just life happening. You learn to admit when you are wrong and to build bridges instead of walls.

You lean that negative feelings such as anger, envy and resentment must be understood and redirected or they will suffocate the life out of you and poison the universe that surrounds you.

You learn to be thankful and to take comfort in many of the simple things we take for granted, things that millions of people upon the earth can only dream about: a full refrigerator, clean running water, a soft warm bed, a long hot shower.

Then, you begin to take responsibility for yourself by yourself and you make yourself a promise to never betray yourself and to never, ever settle for less than you heart’s desire.

You make it a point to keep smiling, to keep trusting, and to stay open to every wonderful possibility.

You hang a wind chime outside your window so you can listen to the wind.

Finally, with courage in your heart, you take a stand, you take a deep breath, and you begin to design the life you want to live as best as you can.


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Today is 8-31-13 and in two days it is time to celebrate Labor Day. 

Don't forget that the following Sunday after Labor Day services will resume at Chrysalis Spiritual Center. 

Saturday, August 24, 2013

POEM

The "definitive version", as published by The Times and The Sunday Times in Frye's obituary, 5 November 2004:[2]
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
 
Everyone liked this poem when Saundra read it at church, so here is a copy for you.
 
Dalai Lama's summer palace
 

Friday, August 23, 2013

Poem for August


The Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama.
















































The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character.
So watch the thought and its ways
with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.
As the shadow follows the body,
As we think, so we become.

—Guatama Buddha, Dhammapada

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

What If You Could Go Back In Time?

What advice would you give yourself?

What would you change and do differently?
Gateway


 

















You only have a limited amount of time in this life to reach
your goals, pursue your spirituality and experience everything
you can in this life. And it is all too easy to procrastinate and
put things off until tomorrow.

But what if you could get back some of that lost time?

Although life feels very linear, the reality is that time is not as
straightforward as we think. It is possible to glimpse the future
and even alter the past.

I don't mean that you will physically travel back in time.

But you already know how to influence time. If you have ever
manifested anything in the present, you understand that
everything has a different frequency. When you combine
this knowledge with the ability to 'feel' time, you will know
how access your past and present.

Energy knows no boundries. Physical or time. It is possible to
send packets of data, or information in the form of a "feels ike"
through the bands of time, to the past or the future. Have you
ever had a moment where a surge of emotion came out of
nowhere? Think about that moment, what caused that surge?
Maybe... just maybe there was some data or guidence in that
moment that you had overlooked.

For example, think about yesterday and how this feels in your
chest center. Now think about six months ago. Now five years ago.
Each of these times Feels different. The same is true when you
are going into the future.
 
Go back to power points in your past. Moments where you had
made life changing decisions or had an intense experience.
Is there any advice in the form of a feeling, an emotion that
you would send to your past self? Focus on what it felt like to
be you back then, create the emotion of knowlege and experience
that you have learned since then and project that feeling back to
your past self. Imagine your past self receiving that emotional
imformation.

This may seem extremely abstract, but give it a try.

Where you would be spiritually if you had faithfully
meditated twice a day for the last 10 years? Or if you had
mastered non-thought years ago...

Remember to make wise choices when doing this. Your past
experiences have helped to shape who you are, and it is not a
wise decision to try to remove everything that was difficult or
painful in your life.

Experiment with stepping back in time. And please share your
experiences and any questions you may have about this powerful
technique.


Good Journeys,

Eric Robison
Author of Bending God: A Memoir

Website:: http://www.higherbalance.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/higherbalance
Twitter: http://twitter.com/higher_balance
A copy of the newsletter from Eric Robison 

Monday, August 12, 2013

Stats Update

Arizona Valley of Fire

 Some available Stats for the Flitter Newsletter since inception.

Thought you might be interested. Wonder why 5 people from Ukraine are interested? Some of the US viewers were from Alaska.

All time viewers totals

Pageviews today
10
Pageviews yesterday
11
Pageviews last month
494
Pageviews all time history
10,015



Some newsletter stats for the recent week.
Countries viewers came from recently
United States
30
Sweden
8
United Kingdom
6
Ukraine
5
China
4
France
3
Colombia
2
Russia
2
Australia
1

1Isreal


EntryPageviews By Browser
Internet Explorer
29 (39%)
Firefox
18 (24%)
Chrome
13 (17%)
Opera
8 (10%)
Safari
4 (5%)
BingPreview
2 (2%)














Image displaying most popular browsers

Longing for the Beloved

Longing for the Beloved

Fran Angelico Fresco cycle in the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence scene: mockery of Christ detail: Maria mourners






















There is a longing that burns at the root of spiritual practice. This is the fire that fuels your journey. The romantic suffering you pretend to have grown out of, that remains coiled like a serpent beneath the veneer of maturity. You have studied the sacred texts. You know that separation from your divine source is an illusion. You subscribe to the philosophy that there is nowhere to go and nothing to attain, because you are already there and you already possess it.

But what about this yearning?
―Mirabai Starr: LONGING FOR THE BELOVED: Teresa of Avila—and grief—teach a mighty lesson from PARABOLA's fall issue, "Power."

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Death of the Internet

The Internet As We Know It
Is On Its' Deathbed

Snowden's leaks show how the Internet can be turned against us.
The original vision of the Internet, where information and media is freely shared, without one’s computer strokes and searches being metered, tracked, traced, archived, dissected, marketed and warehoused in government data banks, is dead. And that’s what’s being lost by mainstream media in the ongoing Edward Snowden coverage.

The Snowden story is not about whether Snowden is a spy, or U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will seek the death penalty, or whether Russian President Vladamir Putin will let him stay, or what dark novels his Russian lawyer has given him, or what clean clothes he has. It is, as the U.K. Guardian  notes, what Snowden has revealed about today’s Internet.

Snowden’s revelations are the end of a vision of unfettered Internet freedom. Over the past decade, we’ve heard all kinds of pronoucements that the Internet is in its death throes. Technically speaking, the net is bigger, more alive and more people are interconnected than ever. But what has died amid the Internet’s evolution?

In 2002, Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy,  wrote that big telecom companies were going to kill the net by charging for data use, like a utility charges for the water piped into one’s home. Gamers were particularly upset about that scenario. Today’s bigger and faster data pipes seem to have offset the fear of restricted access. But today’s Internet users pay just as Chester predicted.

Last year’s  SOPA fights raised another Internet deathbed scenario: the prospect that there might be government  censorship of content, because industries built on creating content could not stop its theft and demanded that Congress protect the intellectual property. The fight became so rancorous it killed congressional action. The Internet didn’t die, of course, but kept growing, with big technology firms increasingly capturing humanity’s keystrokes for their own marketing purposes.

A decade ago, few people forecast that the net’s growth would mean the disintegration of privacy for just about everyone who uses computers and digital devices. But that’s what’s at the heart of Snowden’s disclosures. And it’s not just a loss of personal privacy to the corporate sector—Google, Facebook, AT&T and the like—but its loss to the federal government’s spy agencies, police and secret courts.

“Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story,”  wrote the U.K. Guardian’s John Naughton last weekend. “The story is what he has revealed about our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world’s mainstream media.”

Snowden told Americans and the world that their governments—so-called democracies whose legacies in the 20th century include defeating fascism and expanding individual civil rights against state power—were spying on them. It’s not the same as the Soviets in the Cold War. It’s slicker and smarter: just collect and siphon and sort our data trails and digital fingerprints for later scrutiny. Every call, e-mail, search and move is fair game. 

A lot of people have responded to Snowden’s revelations with a shrug, saying, “I have nothing to hide.” But that misses the point. It’s bad enough that private companies track our movements, tastes, habits, health and networks, all to sell us more stuff. But when governments do the same thing, creating a domestic spying  industry with hundreds of thousands of contractors, the potential for abuse is frightening.

That digital dragnet is what Snowden has been trying to bring into the open and reform: the Internet, once one of our greatest tools, can be turned against us.

History has shown that he is correct. The 20th century’s targets of totalitarian states had almost nowhere to run. The enemies of Egypt’s military coup, like them or not, are not so secretly being rounded up and arrested. And Snowden, the messenger in a global Internet-based spying scandal, is now a man without a country.

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To add to the article above it is imperative that an individual's privacy be preserved. Problems with the loss of personal liberty and religious persecution are what drove the first settlers to America. Now, in America the two powerful religions, Christian and Catholic, are determined to dominate all the fringe worshipers and bring them into their fold. Just think of the pressure they could bear if the fringe or miscellaneous worshipers had no privacy to practice alternative forms of belief! Practices like meditation, natural healing, spirit awareness, Chakra clearing and stimulation, and other less accepted beliefs could be categorized as blasphemy or illegal and the same prejudice that causes race riots could suppress our freedom of religion.

Sometimes Flitter gets criticised for mentioning politics at church. Unfortunately church is so closely regulated by the tide of politic correctness that due diligence must always be observed. I predict that in the future Spirit is moving to a free and open method of worship that includes contributions by every member in a Spirit community. Eventually this type of beneficial worship will overcome the rich and powerful standing major religions -- if they don't incorporate truth and freedom and acceptance into their tenants. The only thing holding the major religions together now is the vast earthly resources they have accumulated.


By letting go of earthly riches and embracing the never-ending abundance of plenty that flows from Spirit through man a truthful and wise sacred bond will form.
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Spirituality
is not to be learned
by flight from the world.
by running away from things.
or by turning solitary and going apart from the world,
Rather,
we must learn an inner solitude
wherever or with whomever we may be.
We must learn to penetrate things
and find God there.

Meister Eckhart
Meditations
"The path is beautiful and pleasant and joyful and familiar
by Matthew Fox

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Summer News from Flitter

Quote

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
Jack Kerouac



Prayer with the Flame

become like the flame
clam unwavering bonding
become like the flame
never reacting only responding
become like the flame
giving but never expecting
become like the flame
dispelling darkness with light
become like the flame
never giving up without a fight
become like the flame
burning till the end with all its might
become like the flame
illuminating both the wrong and the right
become like the flame
taking every moment as something new
become like the flame
and let the flame become you


What Am I

All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.
Bill Hicks