Spiritual Art Blog - *Ed P

This blog is updated weekly with a Thought for the Week, Inspirational Quotes and News about Ed P and his Pictures. To make sure you don’t miss anything, type in your email address in the Subscribe panel on the right. 
Thanks for visiting and please leave a comment on anything that stirs your imagination.

Meeting Place

As I was working on this sketch of Meeting Place the colours and image seemed familiar for some reason. Then I remembered that it was similar to a picture on the cover of a book I was reading recently.

Can you see the similarity?
I then got to thinking, did the artist who created the book cover go to the same place where I now was? The more sceptical would say that I was influenced by wht I had see previously on the book cover. I would say I came across this on my explorations to create the picture I have in my mind's eye. The final picture will probably different from where it is now. Let's see how it turns out.
By the way if you are interested in the book Those Wonderful ECK Masters, you can get
it on ECK Books here:
http://www.eckbooks.org/items/Those_Wonderful_ECK_Masters-96-0.html
or on Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/Those-Wonderful-Masters-Harold-Klemp/dp/1570432171

Coincidences in our lives

Thought for the week

Have you ever noticed the coincidences in life or how life organises things so you end up in a particular place or meet a certain person? Think about the major people and events in your life? How did you meet your partner, spouse or significant friends? How did you end up in the place where you live now or in the position or job you now hold? What coincidences lead you to them?

There are some people who believe that there is no such thing as coincidences. For them, everything in life is organised by a Higher Power, the Holy Spirit or the Universe. They look at the things that come to them in life as a gift from the Life-force as the next thing they need to learn or to deal with. They look at problems as ways of learning and dealing with karma (issues relating to events which happened in their past). There is a humility in this approach where we recognise that we are the students, we are here to learn and we do not have much control over how the lessons are organised.

Divine Love
The basic reason we are here living our lives is to learn about Divine Love. That is the Love the Divine has for us and how we can use that Love in our lives with the Souls around us. We are learning how to love others like the Divine loves us. We are also learning how to use our freedom of choice in a positive and loving way. The choices we make lead us in particular directions and can have a positive or negative effect on us and others. Love and our freedom of choice are key elements of what we are learning as we go through our lives.
Life will sometimes place a challenge in the way of a goal we were pursuing. The road we were travelling has now been blocked. We may have a few choices of what to do next. We can wait for the block to go away, we can go to the left or right of it or we may need to go back a bit to find another route to our goal. We choose which route we take and we learn how to get past the challenge.

Freedom of choice and our destiny
There are two elements at play in our lives. Our own freedom of choice and our destiny, or the events and circumstances we are born into. We could say that destiny organises the coincidences in our lives. We have to deal with our situation but we have a choice of how we handle it and our attitude towards it. We can decide to be a victim of life and play the 'poor me' role or we can use it as an incentive to progress out of our circumstances and move to a better place.

There are many stories of people who have come from humble beginnings but ending up in with major achievements in their lives.

Oprah Winfrey who gave birth to a son at age 14 who later died. She then went on to become America's most famous talk show host.
J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, was a single mother and living on welfare when she started writing her first book.
Celine Dion, the Canadian singer, was the fourteenth (yes, 14th) child of her parents who's father earned $160 a week to support the family.
Designer Coco Chanel who gave the world the little black dress and Chanel No. 5 perfume was raised in an orphanage, where she learned to sew.

We don't have to be famous to be successful. There are lots of other people who have made a success of their lives and most of them are not famous. If we are happy within ourselves, regardless of our outer situation, then we are successful.

Is life trying to tell me something?
We sometimes stroll through life without noticing the circumstances or coincidences which lead us to the important events and people in our lives. We may not realise how we got to a position until we reflect on it. We may also be of the opinion that we got ourselves to where we are without the help of anyone or anything else.

When we come up with a series of challenges it might be time to reflect on our situation and ask the question “Is life trying to tell me something?” Are we going in the wrong direction or are we taking the wrong approach? The answer may be that we have other things to do before we get to our current goal.

When a series of coincidences points us in a certain direction and we notice them, then it is time to take stock of our situation and make adjustments. These coincidences may be minor or major events in our lives. They can happen doing something as simple as getting food. What we had in mind is not available or out of reach but another food is right in front of us. We go to a different place to find what we are after but it's not available there either but the other food is available there too. Is the Life-force suggesting you try this available food or what we are after isn't what we need now? Is it a coincidence that what we want is out of reach in several areas or is life trying to tell me something? What choice will we make?

Thought for the Week
If we can take time to contemplate on or wonder about these coincidences in our lives, we may get a deeper insight into how our life works. We may get a glimpse of how the Higher Power tries to bring Its Divine Love into our lives. We may see a lot of blessings.
Out thought for the week could be about the coincidences in our lives and how the major events and people who affect us got to that position. Is it a coincidence that you are reading this article now or is it just the way life works? I wonder...

Wishing you insights into your life and your coincidences.

*Ed Parkinson

Click here to see what coincidences will happen next as you browse through the Spiritual Writings.

Coincidence and Destiny Quotes

”When we work from the Soul consciousness, we can shape our own destiny.” 
Harold Klemp

“Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.”
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.”
Emma Bull

“Coincidences are spiritual puns.”
G. K. Chesterton

“Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.”
Jawaharlal Nehru

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
Auric Goldfinger

“Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.”
Albert Einstein

“Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said, so. What did you think?”
Steven Wright

“Sometimes, perhaps, we are allowed to get lost that we may find the right person to ask directions of.”
Robert Brault

“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.”
Jean de La Fontaine

“Stressed spelled backwards is desserts. Coincidence? I think not!”
Anon

“Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence.”
Alva Noto

“Every single moment is a coincidence.”
Doug Coupland

“Happiness is always a coincidence.”
Jose Bergamin

“Many applications of the coincidence method will therefore be found in the large field of nuclear physics, and we can say without exaggeration that the method is one of the essential tools of the modern nuclear physicist.”
Walther Bothe

“We do not create our destiny; we participate in its unfolding. Synchronicity works as a catalyst toward the working out of that destiny.”
David Richo

“Coincidences mean you're on the right path.”
Simon Van Booy

“The probability of a certain set of circumstances coming together in a meaningful (or tragic) way is so low that it simply cannot be considered mere coincidence.” 
V.C. King

“According to Vedanta, there are only two symptoms of enlightenment, just two indications that a transformation is taking place within you toward a higher consciousness. The first symptom is that you stop worrying. Things don’t bother you anymore. You become light hearted and full of joy. The second symptom is that you encounter more and more meaningful coincidences in your life, more and more synchronicities. And this accelerates to the point where you actually experience the miraculous.”
Deepak Chopra

“Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work.”
Anatole France

“As soon as we notice that certain types of events ‘like’ to cluster together at certain times, we begin to understand the Chinese, whose theories of medicine, philosophy, and even building are based on a ‘science’ of meaningful coincidences.”
Marie Louise von Franz

“There is no such thing as chance; and what seems to us mere accident springs form the deepest source of destiny.”
Friedrich Schiller

What coincidences are in your destiny? Click here to find more quotes on the Spiritual Inspirations page.

Meeting Place

Here's a further development of the Meeting Place picture. A friend who saw last week's sketch, asked me where this place was. “It's a place I go to during my contemplation exercises. If I'm looking for advice or insight into a subject, I ask to meet those with the relevant wisdom in a place such as this. It is like a cloud made of crystals.” I explained.