The Growing Field

The Secret – The Real Law Of Attraction

2009-04-20T17:07:00.001-04:00

By Denise Gibel-Molini

Sometime in the 70’s I came across Norman Vincent Peale W. Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill. Both of these men were amazing motivational teachers. They taught what today is called the “Secret”. Then it was the power of the subconscious mind. Later in the 90’s I had a Spiritual Book store and I began seeing different books on the various “proven” laws of success. These were more steps to achieve the same goals as were promised by Napoleon Hill and Norman Vincent Peale.

I believed, and still do to this day that there is an enormous power in positive thinking within the individual. I remember that my year spent in “network marketing” was spent in hours of motivation and the power of positive thinking. During that you I didn’t make money. However, I never even caught a cold, I was never tired, and nothing could break my spirit. It changed my life for the better – just not in the way that I was looking for.

I have a problem with all of these secret, hidden, special, scientific methods of attaining ones dreams. They could never pass the kinds of tests required in order to state that a product or a drug was proven effective. I know many many more exceptions to this rule than those for whom the rule has worked.

My cousin is the poster child for the anti-law of attraction, or the law of repulsion. The more that she wants something, the more she is convinced to the core that she will never have it. She focuses daily on visualizing her life – long and miserable in failure and loneliness. Yet, after an entire year of this dedication to the negative – in rode prince Charming on his white horse to whisk her away to love and bliss. In fact, most of the people that I know who focus all of their attention on the miserable trick that the universe has played on them, are the exact ones for whom success and opportunity seems to pop up out of no where.

Of course, there are those, such as Barack Obama, for whom living in the visualization of being President and sitting in the oval office did work. Then, there are John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and scores of others who also lived “the Secret”, who lost the race and the chair that they each saw themselves sitting in day after day. Yes, there is a law of attraction, but it is greater than we could every imagine, and it rules. You could call it the attraction of fate, or simply the power of the greater plan – the soul’s plan for each of us and for the world.

According the today’s science everything is nothing, or energy, consciousness – fields. Various fields of consciousness. So, some believe, and this is what I believe, that the soul is a kind magnetic field. Before it incarnates it programs itself to attract to it the people, places, and experiences that will facilitate its personal goals and the goals set by the accumulation of all souls incarnating in a certain time. We, our fields, are all woven together to form a divine personal and universal tapestry.

We attract, and are attracted to only what we chose as souls. And for the soul all experiences are parables. All experiences have within their essence a moral lesson teaching love, faith, compassion, forgiveness, and placing the spiritual above the material. We can find this in each story that we tell of an incident in our own lives. Sometimes it may take years to “get it”, but when we do – we understand the lesson.

Part of this process is the ego. The ego is made up of an accumulation of all of our lives on the earth past and present along with all of the emotional experiences that imprinted on it and lie buried within the database of our subconscious mind. “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” W. Clement Stone. This is true, however the kind of belief that is necessary is not belief held in our conscious minds, or our imaginations – it is belief held in our subconscious minds. You see, we live in a world that is neither solid nor three dimensional. It has no time. That is fact, but it is not the belief that is held by our subconscious minds, otherwise we could not share this earthy experience. So belief, is deeper that imagination – it is deeper than reality.

To journey into that realm of the subconscious through hypnosis or through deep meditation, is a journey to what is in essence another reality. It is a journey in which we leave our ego behind. What we find when we do, is that this plan, or this series of plans are purposeful and fulfilling in ways that are eternal and not limited to societal programs or past life understandings of what we should our should not want in this one life.

What we find, is that the path, however it appeared in our conscious state seems to be a path to joy. Even if we enter into this state to attempt to rewrite the script. We come back knowing, believing that there can be no better script for our lives than the one written.

Some of us come into life with a burning desire to be rich and famous. That burning desire comes from the fact that it is the journey written by the soul. And when these people enter that path to wealth and fame – they find that it was nothing that they had ever imagined, in no way free of pain or suffering, in no way self-validating, and that lesson is the moral of their parable.

I have a ability to visualize, not so much a persons path, but the purpose of the path – the types of experiences that will bring the story to its true gift. There is a good friend of mine who is a visionary photographer. His work will take people to great places one day. Consciously he is fully aware of the unique beauty in his pictures. And he is frustrated that he cannot sell enough pieces to pay he rent. Although people are taken aback by the beauty of his work, it is not selling.

We have done past life regressions. In each life he rose to a different position of social prominence. In each life he was very focused on his career, on his good name and his status in the community. And – in each life he died in deep spiritual and emotional pain because he had passed up his chances for true love and emotional fulfillment. His soul vowed that in this life he would balance both. He was told by his guides under hypnosis that he had to learn that God gave him two hands and he could have fulfillment in each.

The last time that we spoke, it came to me that although his material success and public recognition were immanent, his soul would not attract them to him until he was balanced within himself. Until he found his inner power, his inner love and was able to manifest that love in the world as a part of who he was – the material success would remain just outside of his grasp. The purpose of this being that if his material success were to come first, he would then become caught up, as in his many past lives in that alone. Once again he would miss the thing that eluded him life after life. He had to find himself now, to avoid the risk of never finding it, and living a life of emptiness.

There is a law of attraction that is at work in our lives from the day that we are born, but the attractor is not our conscious mind but the spirit that lives within us. When we want something and do not get it, it is because it is not something that we want from within our souls. It is perishable. The soul seeks that which is permanent and continuously giving. When we do not get what we want, however badly we believe that we want it, however hard, we believe that we have worked for it. The cause is not our personal failure – it is the success of the soul. We don’t generally know what we really want, we only know what we really want to feel.

Society tells us that what we want to fell is in box number one. But if we cannot open box number one, it is because what we want to feel is not in it. Society, those things that we are programmed from childhood to believe are the keys to happiness, are only part of the superficial, impermanent world around us. They are not part of the real and permanent world that is within us, the world that contains the true power. Jesus says, “Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all else will be added unto you.” This means seek for the joy that lies within you. Seek first the foundation that lies within you. Seek first the soul and its treasures that lie within you. Once you have found all the glory that lies within, all else will come. All else will be attracted to you. This is the Law of Attraction. This is the real secret.

Whatever we find before we find the kingdom that lies within, will be empty. And if we seek that first, it will consume us to such an extent that we will remain empty for the rest of our lives. No praise, no adulation, no recognition that we may receive from the world, will give us the fullness of self that we are really seeking unless first we seek and become grounded in the foundation that lies within.

The Atheist Question Of God's Existence

2009-03-13T17:40:00.001-04:00

: The atom

I think that we should all be free to follow what we believe. And so this is not to offend Atheists, just to discuss the arguments that I have heard in favor of it and against the existence of a God.

When I was a child there was no mention of God in my home, except when accompanied by damn. When my younger sister was born, I felt less loved by my mother than ever. Somehow I knew that with my sister in the picture I would never be loved.

So, around the age of four I began sitting in front of my house hoping that someone would pass by and adopt me. One of the many days I sat waiting for my new family I heard a voice in my head. It was a male sounding voice, the kind of voice that makes you feel safe and secure. This voice told me that I was not going to ever get a new family. It told me that I was very loved, that it loved me, and that when I grew up I would understand why I was in this family and know that it was the right place for me to be.

From then on, I had many conversations with the voice. It comforted me when I was afraid, and made me feel loved when I felt alone. The voice did not offer a name, I did not ask for one. Today, I believe that it was God speaking in a voice that would make a child feel safe.

When I was a teenager, I would come home from school, go up to my room, lock my door and either turn on music or the television. One night I was locked in my room with the television on and I fell asleep, as I did every night (because I was afraid of the dark). I was awaken by the one voice that could pull me out of a coma. I heard my mother scream at the top of her lungs, "Denise!!!!!! Get Down Here". I ran down the stairs to find her half asleep and half watching the television. I asked her why she called me, but in my mind I knew that there was no way that this half asleep woman could look like this after letting out the scream of the century. She looked at me as though I was crazy and said, "I didn't call you". As we were about to enter into this discussion over how I could have imagined her calling me loud enough to make me jump out of bed - while I was sleeping - an enormous cloud of black smoke filled the stairwell and came pouring downstairs. I screamed for my father who was in bed upstairs and he almost fell running down, By this time we could see nothing.

Luckily we found our way to the door and got out of the house. My father burned his hand opening the doorknob as it was already so hot. I ran next door and called the fire department. After the fire department came they told us that it had been an electrical fire. The origination point of that fire was my television. Certainly I would been dead, unlocking my door in the dark was not easy, and there is a chance I just might not have awoken before it was too late. My father and I could have both been dead before my mother even knew that anything was wrong - since she was downstairs. Something supernatural happened to me that night to save my life. That something, I call God.

Two weeks later, those same neighbors I ran to to call the fire department were all killed while they slept in an electrical fire.

Here are some arguments that I have found on the internet against the existence of any god.

"The progress of science
The progress of science bring each day a more complete explanation of phenomena that men attributed, until now, to the divinities. God is pushed back within the limits of the Universe."

Nowthese are quotes from Einstein which address that statement:

"Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there."

and another Einstein quote:

"Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world
of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

: What we are really looking at when we interpret the world - quantum

Here is another argument against God:

A different proof that there is no God is:

"Life is Material, not Supernatural: We are material, Natural Beings
All Evidence points to life being material and natural"

"A popular objection to atheists' arguments and critiques of theism is to insist that one's preferred god cannot be disproven - indeed, that science itself is unable to prove that God does not exist. This position depends upon a mistaken understanding of the nature of science and how science operates. In a very real and important sense, it is possible to say that, scientifically, God does not exist - just as science is able to discount the existence of a myriad of other alleged beings." Austin Cline

According to the ancient religions, God is unnameable, incomprehensible, a power that works within the universe as the universe exists within God. According to renown Physicist David Bohm:

"Bohm believes that life and consciousness are enfolded deep in the generative order and are therefore present in varying degrees of
unfoldment in all matter, including supposedly "inanimate" matter such as electrons or plasmas. He suggests that there is a "protointelligence" in matter, so that new evolutionary developments do not emerge in a random fashion but creatively as relatively integrated wholes from implicate levels of reality. The mystical connotations of Bohm's ideas are underlined by his remark that the implicate domain "could equally well be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness. The separation of the two -- matter and spirit -- is an abstraction. The ground is always one." (Quoted in Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, HarperCollins, New York, 1991, p. 271.)'

In Bohm's view, all the separate objects, entities, structures, and events in the visible or explicate world around us are relatively autonomous, stable, and temporary "subtotalities" derived from a deeper, implicate order of unbroken wholeness. Bohm gives the analogy
of a flowing stream:

On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no
independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.

(David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston, 1980, p. 48.)

We must learn to view everything as part of "Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement." (Ibid., p. 11.)"

This comes from the new physics that is responsible for 30% of our current economy. When today's science describes what the material, natural world is made of, it can be described as nothing less than supernatural or metaphysical. What we see as the world around us appears to be real, but what it is made out of is consciousness. A statue made out of clay, can be called a statue, but it is still really clay. Regardless of what we are made into in this material world, what we are made out of is not of this material world. So far, according to Science, what we and the entire Universe is made out of is an unending mystery. And as much as they learn to describe what we are made out of, they cannot ever come to the original cause, why we exist. If that force that underlies and guides the universe is what our ancestors and many of us today call God. Then Science proves God.

Next argument:

If God exists than God must interact with our universe and there must be some physical manifestations of his interaction.

For me, the voice when I was very young, and the voice that saved me from dying in the fire were manifestation enough, but the Universe itself is the greatest physical manifestation of God's existence, not as a "he" not "his" but the mysterious awesome force, the implicate order the unknowable, unnameable Source of the universe.

Often atheists use the Bible to argue against the existence of God. But the Bible, or the Koran can only be used to argue against the description of God, not God itself. In this respect, it is possible to argue because these books are ancient and must be taken on faith, not proof. But God as the Atom, God as the Implicate Order, as Consciousness Itself or Original Cause cannot be argued. Science is, in every day, coming to understand God in the way that our ancient ancestors once did.

To me, God is impersonal, unconditional Love, far beyond our capacity to understand but it is our drive to seek. I don't feel that anyone must believe in God. However, if atheism is logical and realistic as it is supposed to be, then its arguments against God, must be sound, grounded, and able to address even the most ancient spiritual concept of God, which I have not found that it has done. It may be capable of an eternal debate over the validity of religion, specifically or in general, but again, that is not an argument against God.

When This Crisis Is Over We Will Be Free

2009-03-05T19:12:00.004-05:00

I remember when I was growing up. Each year my Mother, sister and I would spend one month in Atlantic City. It was wonderful. During those summers I made many friends, one was Wanda Wingate. She lived in Philly. From the age of about ten, until I finished high school we would write letters to each other every week. Each week I would sit and tell her all of my highs and lows. I share all of the intimate details of my life with only her, and she with me. We exchanged advice, shared each others happiness and tried to support each other through our sadness. I loved getting her letters, reading them over and over and placing them in a box. Through her I met my first great love, Jeffrey Goldson. He was a few years older than I and when he went off to college we would write to each other a few times a week I loved to stare at how he formed the letters of each word, I loved the scent of the paper because it carried his scent. The internet is a wonderful place to share, and to learn - but it came at a great cost. It cost us those letters, those moments of going off to a quiet place to hold those pages and feel the energy of the person who is writing. I think that our letters intensified my love for him. And in his box, I could reach in a pull out the letters and feel again that love whenever I needed.

Then I remember so vividly the first book that moved me, it made me fall in love with reading. I remember the way that it smelled, I remember the way that each page felt against my fingers - I remember this, but I neither remember the title nor the name of the office, just the feel. There is no e-book that can compare with the feel of a good book in your hands.

Two of my favorite shows when I was young were "Little House On the Prairie" , and "The Waltons". The families in those shows had very little. Life was hard work, but somewhere in that hard work was a sense of quality of life. All that they had was the love of family and community, and somehow, life seemed to me so much better then. They were not plagued by depression - even in the depression. The wealth of each family was their bonds, bonds created out of necessity and lack of distraction. But their wealth could not be given a price. I remember when I was in my own business and making more money than I every imagined that I could make. I would drop ten thousand dollars in a boutique without blinking an eye, but I have never been so unhappy in my life. I wore the quality of my life on my back - Escada, Ralph Lauren my gold rolex, my Fendi purse, wallet and cigarette case. My life had no other value. I know now that the ability to feel joy and happiness are what we pay for those things. The more I bought, the more my soul was being drained out of me. I did not know it. A junkie first gets high to feel a little rush, to be taken out of himself for a short time. This is the same thing that happens when we find ourselves with money. We buy things that we could not have bought before just to be taken out of the self that we once were. What we don't realize is that whether the addiction is to a drug, alcohol, food, or money - we are not taken out of ourselves, instead, our self, is taken out of us. We don't realize this, until we kick the habit by choice or by force. Then we find that 'living' feels so much better than anything that we could buy or steal to make us feel like we are living. If one is born poor, he always looking through windows at the people who have everything. That experience makes them feel that they are not whole. So it is their journey to strive to have those things in order to see that nothing in the material world can increase us, to the contrary, it decreases us. Then there are those who are born with money and the status that it brings. They do what they have to do because they are raised to feel that who they are is about what they have and how they appear. Only by losing or giving up what they have, can they learn who they are.

There are two cycles of wealth and both are natural as the cycles of day and night and as much a part of our journey. These cycles occur to the individual soul as well as to the collective. There is the cycle of material wealth, where it is our path to gain materially at the cost of the spirit. This is followed by the cycle of spiritual growth, where it is our path to gain spiritually at the expense of the material. These are set by God, and we can no more change, extend or redirect them anymore than we can the rotation of the earth around the Sun or the moon around the earth. We can change these no more than we can change day to night and night to day. There are many minor cycles within each great cycle, but it is the great cycle that rules through it all. If you are on the spiritual cycle individually, you may win the lottery - then lose all of the money. If you are on the material cycle, individually, you may be down to your last dime and come up with an idea that brings you material wealth for the rest of your life. As a whole, we are so deeply engulfed by our addiction to the things that we don't need, that we can't see how life could be better or even tolerable without them. We have become enslaved by our material addiction collectively, that we fear losing our chains. In the Rider Waite Tarot deck the Devil Card has a man and a woman chained to the Devil.

The important thing about this image is that the two people chained to the Devil have their hands free and the chains around their necks are more than loose enough to be slipped right off. The Devil represents money, power, status, all of those things that are our addictions in the material world. It seems that the Devil has possessed these people, but in fact, they can leave at any time. They have taken on the horns of the devil because they have become that which they have coveted. This is the material part of the cycle. The Major Arcana, or first 22 cards of the Tarot deck depict the "hero's" journey from fool to wisdom. We have been the fulfillment of this card. But we are entering a Spiritual Cycle. So, since we will not voluntarily remove the chains, we must be shaken at the roots, we must lose what we have allowed to posess us in order to be free, and so, the card that follows the Devil is the Tower.

If the natural disasters of the past years have shown us anything, they should have shown us that we cannot control life. We do not know when we will be struck by a disaster. Personal safety is an illusion, just as homeland security is an illusion. We are each on our own clock’s and they will each stop ticking at the appointed time, whether we are in the Twin Towers or walking along the desert. All that we have built and held onto can be lost or taken away from us in a moment. How much better would we feel if we gave what we had to those who have nothing rather than just losing it? Once upon a time the world was immense, and one could comfortably live a lifestyle of opulent excess, ignorant of the starvation and suffering that our excesses could ease. Now, it is not the case.

And [Jesus] told them a parable, saying, "The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully; and he thought to himself, 'What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?' And he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.' But God will say to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God." Christianity. Luke 12.16-21

Imagine how the earth was created—how the body was created. The earth was given limited resources. The earth could have been created as a garden in which the food and shelter and everything that we could ask for simply grew as quickly as we could harvest it. Or, we could have been given the power to manifest everything we wish to have merely by desiring it to be. But that is not the case. And knowing that the force that guides the Universe is love, we must know that this is not to punish us. No, the earth has limited resources and some men are born with access to those resources while some are born without that access. This is the Divine Design, it places before us the opportunity to choose righteousness, the path must be chosen to have value, one cannot be forced out of fear of punishment or fear of rejection, the path of love must be chosen out of love—the need for love and the desire to give love. It is obvious that in the wild animals do not have this choice. Animals know only one path, and for the lower self in man, the animal way is the natural way. Yet as humans, we are able to reach into our souls and find the strength to rise above the natural choice to the spiritual one.

What causes wars, and what causes fighting among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. Christianity. James 4.1-3

We are containers with limited space within. We may fill that space with the things of the world or with the things of the spirit or, as it is for most of us – some proportion of both. Everything that the world of flesh has to offer contains an addictive quality. From the moment that we take our first breath – we are engulfed in an addict’s paradise. It is through this addictive garden that we evolve and it is our susceptibility to addiction – not the choice of drug, which marks the level to which a soul has evolved. Addiction is attachment plain and simple, but it is easier for us to raise ourselves above judgment (in our own eyes) if we limit our focus to what one is addicted to rather than that one is addicted. For one to be addicted to cocaine is bad; yet to be addicted to attention – is ok. It is bad to be addicted to alcohol – but power is ok. We become addicted to food, to comfort, to routine, to family, to nation, to form of worship, to race, to position, to war, to being divided or even to being united, to injustice or even to justice. Addiction is attachment.

All of these things that we attach ourselves to will one day be no more. And the extent of our suffering – the intensity of our hellfire, will equal the intensity of our attachment. We are all born within the garden of our own struggle. The lesson is to love your brother as yourself without condition. There is a story of a man who went up to the greatest Jewish religious leader and asked him to condense the entire teachings of all the sacred Wisdom into one sentence and the Rabbi, without hesitation said, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”. There are innumerable gardens in which to grow that flower and we are each born in one of them. Some learn through greed, some through religious hatred some through bigotry, some through the need for power and some as victims of the powerful. You can learn the lesson by the choice you are faced with while riding in a limo passing a poor child in a ghetto, or a homeless man on the street. You can learn the lesson being the poor child or the homeless man. Both roles are means to the same end and neither one is a punishment or a reward. The awareness of the other on both ends engenders an emotional response, which in turn forces a choice. The choice that we make in those moments will feed the soil that we sow and determine what we will ultimately reap.

On earth, our parents threaten the harshest punishments on actions that will cause us the greatest harm. They do this out of love for us. So it would stand to reason that the Source of all Love would place the greatest admonishment on those things that hurt us personally the most. And to Do unto others what we would have others do unto us is wise because what we do to others we really do to ourselves. When we harbor hatred, resentment, or anger towards another we create an energetic umbilical cord between the other and ourselves which flows from soul to soul feeding each with poisonous energy. When we are told to forgive, we are really being told to release ourselves from the flow of that poison; to forgive is only to release.

All that belongs to us or will ever belong to us is what we can take with us. All that we can take with us is what we can carry in our souls. Unconditional Love is spiritual tender. Those emotions that can only exist in the absence of Unconditional Love are spiritual debts. When we act selflessly from our hearts we are making deposits into our spiritual retirement accounts. When we act selfishly without regard for others, we are making withdrawals. The account must be full in order to retire from the suffering of this world. How many lifetimes it takes us to fill that account is up to us. There is no judgment. But to retire from suffering, it must be full.

We are here to learn to cherish that which is ours to pass through, with love and appreciation, that which is not ours and to know the difference. We are happy when we receive, when we acquire, when we are applauded, we are happy when we are loved. Happiness is contingent on an action that is happening and when it is no longer happening, we are no longer happy. But our being is transformed into the most elevated joy when we give and the more difficult the gift is to release the greater the feeling of sacrifice – the greater joy that fills us. Remember that to sacrifice is to make sacred. Feed your own body, you satisfy your body, but feed the body of another who is in need and you satisfy your soul.

3. I searched in my heart how to cheer my flesh with wine, my heart yet guiding me with wisdom, and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what it was good for the sons of men that they should do under heaven all the days of their life. 4. I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; 5. I made me gardens and parks, and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruit; 6. I made me pools of water, to water there from the forest where trees were reared; 7. I bought men-servants and maid-servants, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of herds and flocks, above all that were before me in Jerusalem; 8. I gathered me also silver and gold, and the treasure of kings and of the provinces; I got me men-singers and women-singers, and the delights of the sons of men, musical instruments, and that of all sorts. 9. So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me. 10. And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them; I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced because of all my labor; and this was my portion from all my labor. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was no profit under the sun. Ecclesiastes 2:3-10

God, Spirit, All-That-Is, placed a certain amount of resources on the earth for all life to share. It is limited, but it is always just enough. Regardless of what we tell ourselves about the greatness of our effort, we cannot earn more than our share, we do not deserve more than our share. And what is our share? It is that which leaves enough for every other person on the planet to have their share. Those of us who have more than we need to live comfortably are hoarding the food, the shelter, and the medication that could save the lives of those who are dying because of their lack. And the blood of those who die because of our greed is on our hands. The difference between life and death for a child in Africa is a few dollars; the difference between a life of poverty and suffering and a life of hope and possibilities is a few dollars. We are not only our brother’s keepers; we are our brothers. We are one body human containing one Spirit immortal, and to tell ourselves that what happens in the Sudan will not effect us, it the same as saying that cancer in the foot, untreated, will never effect the heart.

All children are our children, all lives are our lives, and any life that we are able to save becomes our responsibility to save. To whom much is given, much is expected. It makes no difference what lies we tell ourselves in order to buy our ten thousand dollar bags, and six million dollar homes, a child’s face is embedded in every one of those dollars and a child’s life or death is written into those choices that we make.

Jesus said to [the rich young man], "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions. And Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly, I say to you, it will by hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Christianity. Matthew 19.21-24

The depression that sweeps the industrialized nations is the price of our greed. The Bible says that money is the root of all evil, but it is not evil, it is the most addictive of all drugs and so it is the root of the greatest spiritual pain. Money is the key to the material kingdom. Money brings worship, adulation, slaves, all things that feed the ego. Yet, it is not money that is the problem it is the hoarding. The more money one hoards, the emptier one is Spiritually because the energy of material possessions in much denser and weighs down our energy fields leaving little or no room for spiritual joy to permanently root itself within us, not because we make money but because we hoard it for ourselves and do not send it back out to do good works.

“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” Matthew 16:25, 2.

Today the Spiritual force of the Universe has made the world one in which we know children are dying needlessly. The world is small enough for us to know where and when men, women and children are being senselessly slaughtered because of the color of their skin or nature of their beliefs. We know, because this has been deemed the time of revelation, when we are revealed for what we are—and what we are is reflected in what we most value, not what we tell others we most value, and not in what we tell ourselves we most value. In this moment, we can stand strong as healthy wheat, wheat that gives nourishment to all, or as weeds nourishing only ourselves at the expense of others. All that we each deserve is enough to live a healthy loving life. All that we have beyond that is what would give that same quality of life to another. I once worked eighteen hours a day and was paid more than generously for that effort; I had a house in the suburbs and three bathrooms in my New York apartment. At the same time a woman sharecropper in Mississippi worked the same eighteen hours a day and could not afford indoor plumbing. I was not being rewarded for being a better person in this life or any past life, what I was being – was tested. It is time for the harvest.

We must learn and not forget that it does not matter how healthy, wealthy or wise we are, the time and manner of our death is not within our control. How long we will keep whatever we have is also not within our control, all outcomes are beyond our control. Now is the time when we are to be seen clearly, we cannot hide or pretend. The true measure of the man is not how much he has, and it is not how much he gives, but how much he is willing to give of that which he cannot bear the thought of living without.

We are being tested, and more than this, we are being given an opportunity through the suffering in the world to show the power of the light that we have within us. The world has become small enough for us to see the needs of others, small enough that we must make a conscious choice with every penny that we waste on selfish pleasures. We are no longer only responsible for the consequences of our actions but we are responsible for the consequences of our lack of action as well.

The Universe is not something around us, it is the substance of our being. God is not a separate entity; God is the Great Self, the Great Soul of which each of us is a part. God is Love; to live in God’s image is to live in the image of love and to love in the image of God. No one is empty, we are all full, those who are empty of attachment to the world are full of Spirit, and those who are filled with worldly attachments are empty of Spirit. Some are half full of the world and half full of Spirit, each have our own proportion of both and that is our choice.

Do you not feel this time different than any other? This time is not a test it is a gift. It is a gift to us from Our Source, a chance to wipe out our karma with good works, to purify our souls with unconditional love. To strengthen our faith and show our love of All-That-Is by giving without fear of not having enough left for ourselves, for the enjoyment of the world is empty, but the joy of Love is a cup that constantly runneth over. What are the fires of hell? They are the tests and temptations that we must go through on this earth to burn away our attachment to the material – to mammon. The fires of hell are no more or less than the suffering that we endure living with the desire for what we do not need, the fear of losing or actual loss of what we do not own, and the blindness that keeps us from knowing that having and losing in this world are both illusions and what is of value to our souls is always a part of them.

He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may provide in abundance for every good work. As it is written, He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures forever. He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your resources and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way for great generosity.

Christianity. 2 Corinthians 9.6-11

We must join hands, join resources, and realize that it is not what we have that creates happiness it is what we share. That is what we will be left with when all is done. We will have all that we need to live. Above that we will have the spiritual wealth that is priceless. We will lose much to gain much more. We cannot recover we must recreate. And as hard as it is for many of us to believe, it is in the plan that we will. We are being shaken from the Devil by the Tower. But once we have lost all that stands between us and each other, between us and compassion, and between us and God, we become wealthier than we could ever dream because our wealth will flow from an unlimited Source. It will be spiritual and we will re-birth our humanity - the card in the deck which follows this, tells this story, it is The Star

After the tower of all that is false and illusion has crumbled to the ground, we are left with abundance of all that is real and eternal. The world as we know it is ending, its cycle is over. The Star represents abundance, a bright future - and most importantly it is a future that one of freedom. True freedom is owning nothing and being owned by nothing, but being a part of everything.

To Save The Nation We Might Try Common Sense

2009-03-03T11:48:00.001-05:00

I am going to approach this economic crisis that we are in, in twoways, the mundane and then, the spiritual. I first want to saypersonally, that I am deeply entangled in what is happening to so manypeople. This is my story:

I purchased a house with my husband that was well within our abilityto support. However, my son has a learning disability and I found thatin the special class in which he was placed, there were no text books,and basically no teaching going on. The only recourse that I could seewas to send him to a special school. The insurance paid forcounseling, but not for diagnosis, which was a $2000.00 expense. Themedication that he was taking was very expensive even with insuranceand so was his tuition. Being hounded regularly by mortgage brokerswho made offers that were so good, while we were unable to continue topay for our son's tuition, we said "yes". Of course, at that momentwhen we promised the tuition payments would be brought up to date, thecloser for the mortgage company comes in with the 'switch' as in 'baitand switch', and we really did not get the mortgage that we werepromised, but we were already too in need of the money to back out.

At this point, we can't pay for food, clothing ,utilities, themortgage and continuing tuition, so we accepted the many credit cardoffers that came in, only to use for living expenses. Without knowingthat the interest rates would only equal a loan shark. I explain mystory because when I hear politicians concerned over the fact that thegovernment helping the people who are losing their homes could penalizethose tax payers who were not abusive, I think that this is ludicrous. I believe that bailing out the institutions who prayed on those of usstruggling so that their executives could bring home embarrassingpaychecks is what is insane.

That was personal, now, here is what is logical to me. I have beenhearing lately, predictions that this recovery will happen by the endof 2009 or 2010. I still don't see how. The reason that I don't seehow is because there is a difference between a PH.D. in economics andcommon sense. Since the 1980's there has been little governmentregulation of industry and what regulation there was, was clearlyoverlooked. And what has happened? This is called the benefit ofsmall government. No matter what anyone says, we are here because theGovernment wasn't. Let me repeat, this is what happens when thegovernment does not regulate industry. This is no governmentintervention in business. As opposed, to total government interventioninto our private lives as we have had since 9/11. Ok, Business= nogovernment - the common citizen = Big Brother.

The average CEO went from making 50 times as much as the averageworker to 500 - 5000 times as much in that time period. So, while thetop of the food chain was experiencing a boom, the bottom wasexperiencing a bust. The cost of living steadily increased as theincomes on top increased, so the rich grew richer, the poor grewpoorer, and the middleclass just grew poor. But no one in Washingtonsaw this coming. No regulators, no analysts, no oversight committeesit was just POOF- it all happened in two months! Almost Supernatural!

In the past two years we have lost over 2,000,000 jobs - more thanhalf of those this year. Millions of families have lost their homes,everything that they have struggled to build. Now, the governmentthinks that putting more money into the banks will help the economyrecover. How? If - the banks lend, it will only be to those will goodcredit which leaves out everyone who has lost their jobs and or homes. Or, it will be fixed by tax breaks. Again, How? If I am an employerwho pays for store space in order to sell shoes that no one can affordto buy - why would I hire more employees to stand around doingnothing? Why would I keep the employees that I already have standingaround doing nothing? What kind of tax break will make this work forme? If the small businessman receives a large tax write-off forlosses, he will be really grateful that now he will be able to make hisown mortgage, he is certainly not going to increase production ofmerchandise that will sit on the shelves because no one can buy. If Iwere a manufacturer or a store owner I would appreciate my tax breakcome in the form of paying customers, after all, to go from 50% ofnothing to 35% of nothing really isn't a big incentive. And I thinkthat I can speak for many Americans when I say that an extra 25.00 inmy paycheck each week would only change how many times a week we eatpasta. Perhaps an extra 50.00 might help us add a steak night. As forshopping, my department store of choice is The Goodwill Superstore andI am afraid that unless the tax break can in effect double our income,or guarantee a future income, that will remain the only other store Ienter outside of the supermarket.

Today, we need 2,000,000 jobs. We don't even have to create anindustry to do it. Hire teachers, hire police, hire firemen, hirehealthcare professionals. Hire laborers to build more and betterschools so that our country can compete in the industrialized world,good clinics so that everyone can receive adequate healthcare. Insteadof guessing how much bad debt the banks have. Let the government takeover the mortgages that are at risk of foreclosure and renegotiateloans with terms that people can afford. Let the government take overthe homes that have been foreclosed on, locate the families and againrenegotiate terms that they can realistically pay. Do this, and it isa win, win situation. The government will see more of its money thanit ever will if it gives it to banks. The school system andhealthcare system will not be the worst one in the industrializedworld, people will be better protected, crime will decrease and most ofall - we will have some money to spend and maybe we will not be soafraid of spending it. Then create a supplemental healthcare systemfor those who cannot afford insurance, and for those medical crisisthat insurance companies don't pay for which destroy the livelihoodsand lives of millions of Americans. All of this, if done, can createemployment today - create spending today, because if we don't do ittoday, by the time the government has created 2,000,000 jobs we willneed 8,000,000.

The Republicans like to call this wasteful spending, pork. Ibelieve that tax breaks, at this juncture, is wasteful spending. Thisis my opinion. Arguably, I am a little miffed. But I would be even ifit was not happening to me because I see what has been going on asunconscionable. You know how I think it could have been avoided? Ithink that if the government renamed the minimum wage a "livable wage",and raised it to meet the increase each year of the cost of living,corporations would have had to raise all of the wages on up and thoseat the top would have had less to steal. In fact, if I knew a ballsylitigation firm, I'd beg for the largest class action suit ever seenagainst these CEO's of Wall street who created this mess, tookgovernment money and still spent in only on themselves while the restof the country lost everything. OK, now this is my non-spiritual takeon this situation. My next post, will be my Spiritual view of what ishappening in the world, why it must happen, and how it fits intoAstrology and the indigenous predictions.

Tags: foreclosure, bankruptcy, failure, obama, policy+change

One Day We Will Worship the Life Of Jesus and not the Death

2008-11-03T19:53:00.001-05:00

Why are there day and night? Why did God create the Sun and Moon? It is the same reason that He created male and female, up and down, in and out, left and right, fire and water, air and earth and all opposites. The first reason is that without interaction, the self cannot know itself. If the self does not know what it is, it has no understanding of what it can become.

A more accurate translation of Genesis does not limit creation to a one time action; it is more accurately an ongoing process. So, we need to know that we are a self or an actor. To understand more clearly what we are, we must first know what we are not. For example, the only way to know that one is tall, is to know what is not tall. The way to know what a man is, we must know what a man is not. In this world of ours, it is through opposition that we understand the world that we live in and who we are. Light would have no meaning without dark, good would have no meaning with bad, nor joy without sorrow. It may be that “I think therefore I am”, but what I am requires a process of elimination.

It has been said that this is the only one of God’s schools that has ‘free will’. Immediately we know that if we have free will, then we must have choices. For those choices to make any difference in our evolution as souls, we must have within our makeup a part of ourselves that is attracted to one category of choices and another part of ourselves that is attracted to another. So, we are each born with an ego, which is materially directed. It is like the soul of the body. It would worship the things of the earth, if it came to feeling good, then it would choose things that appealed to the five senses. It would seek love in the form of attention and admiration from another or many others. Its god would be whatever the most powerful force in the world was. And it sees itself as alone and so seeks what is best for the self.

On the other side sits the spirit. This is our connection to God. The spirit knows God and seeks the joy that comes from God. It knows that we are all one and it finds its joy in giving and sharing with others. It is selfless and seeks the food that nourishes the spirit and brings us closer to God. So here the soul sits between the two voices and impulses. We live with the desire for God on one side and the desire for the things of the world on the other. Being in the physical body on the earth the easier voice to listen to is the voice of the ego. It is the soul, through the journey from life to life that learns to listen less to one and more to the other. It is the soul that learns through the choices made in deference to the ego or to the spirit. That choice, to choose between the two opposite pulls - that represents the souls free will on earth.

When the sages speak of the “dead”, in reality they are referring to the soul entering the body which exists for such a short time it is considered dead, just like when a person is on death row and walking to the execution they say, “Dead man walking”. From the moment that we are born into this body we are walking towards the death of the body, in essence, we are dead men walking. When the spirit leaves the tomb of the body it is resurrected and returns to the spiritual plane that it emerged from, and the ego returns to the material world from which it came. It is difficult for the spirit to live on the material plane as it would be difficult for the ego to live on the spiritual plane. The ego would experience Heaven as hell, just as the spirit experiences the earth as hell.

These twins, the ego and the spirit are bound together because the soul cannot expel the ego. It is the engine that drives the vehicle that we use on earth. It cannot expel the spirit because the spirit is what supports the driver (soul) while it is the body (vehicle) on earth. The soul is the reason for the existence of both and our lives on earth are possible because of both.

There is no such thing as evil, because all that exists is God and all that is God is good. But let us digress for a moment. In my youth I was considered attractive. Men were initially drawn to my looks or my sexuality. The things that were on the surface, superficial, are still a part of me. I related to myself on the inside, my soul, my spirit, my heart. I felt that part of myself, my inner being as the greater part of who I was eternally. I did not feel loved, in fact I was not loved when men claimed love for me based upon what they saw on the outside, how I looked, or what I had. Those things were temporary, my looks would change – age, my financial status would fluctuate, they were of me, but they were not me. In the same sense, all of the things in the material world are of God, simply because there is no such thing as outside of God. But they are the temporary, transient things of God, not the true eternal parts of God.

The eternal parts of God have no form, and give to the heart and soul and not to the body or the ego. So the ego is tempted by what it can experience with its senses.

We depict Jesus the Christ as aesthetically beautiful, there is no way that he could have ever looked like the pictures that we see of him based upon his lineage and the fact that he and his family were able to hide in Egypt at the time that they did. He would have been very dark skinned with curly hair, there was no intermarriage at the time because there was no great migration from continent to continent. This image of Jesus aids the ability of many to worship him. Yet what I find the most disturbing is that most of the people who claim to love Jesus, love him because they believe that he died on the cross to erase their sins. To God, this is a sign of idol worship. To God, worshipping an act is no different than worshipping a statue. If we truly loved and believed in Jesus, we would live our lives as he lived his. The Buddhists love and believe in Buddha, and so they live their lives like the Buddha. If Christians truly loved, believed in and worshipped Jesus the Christ, the world would be a different place, there would be no inquisition, no crusades, no witch trials, no slavery, no judgment, to economic disparity, no withholding of healthcare, no prejudice and no poverty. The more wealth a Christian society had, the more it would have to give to the people. We do not worship Jesus as the Son of God, we do not worship Jesus, we worship the sacrifice that we interpret as having saved us from having to live the life of Jesus.

Satan saw this in Job. When God called together the Sons of God and Satan to show what an exemplary human being Job was, Satan immediately saw that Job loved and worshipped God because of the wonderful life that God had given him. Job followed the laws and did all of the things that were expected of him, but there was something in his love that was lacking. God gave Satan permission, in increments, to test Job until finally Job did turn on God. Eventually, after God spoke to Job, Job went from a superficial worship based upon what God did for him and fear of what God could do to him, to a deep love and awe of God with no hope or desire for God to give him what he had lost or do anything for him other than to be God in all of His Majesty. Once Job was filled with the love of God without need of anything else, God rewarded him with more than he had to begin with, however, now, nothing that God could give him would ever be of more importance to him than God.

I know many people who love Jesus, and do not believe that he died for their sins; they love Jesus for the same reason that the Buddhists love the Buddha; it is for the divine measure of their love and compassion for all of God’s creatures.

In the Old Testament Satan is not the enemy of God, but the adversary of man, the tester. Satan tests our love for God, believing that if nothing else that we do is perfect, our love for God should be without equal, uncompromising. Jesus proved His to be. Satan tempted Jesus just as he tempts all of us, with money, power, status – envy, hatred, prejudice, and judgment, all of the things that fuel the ego and deplete the spirit. Satan tests us because he is the last gate to pass through before God. He guards God against those whose love is not true. Religion is one of Satan’s biggest tricks, because it can be used to divide and distract. Some religions cause us to be so devoutly protective of our division, that we forget the One God we are supposed to be giving our devotion to.

There will be a new Christianity for the twenty-first century. It will be a religion that will carry us to the end of time. It will be made up of true Christians who have or will sell off all that they do not need to live in modest comfort and given the excess to the poor. They will follow the Christ just as the Buddhists follow the Buddha, and there will be no discrepancy between the words of Jesus and actions of those who follow in his name. It could be called, “The Followers of the Living Christ”. This will be a religion that unites instead of dividing and embraces instead of excluding. It will be one that is defined by the love, understanding, faith, forgiveness, humility and compassion that defined the Christ himself.

Faith

2008-10-28T18:19:00.002-04:00

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God is Outside The Box

2008-10-27T12:05:00.000-04:00

We speak about thinking outside of the box, but what we don’t think about is that there is no amount of “Outside of the box” that is outside of God. When we have an idea – it is God’s idea. When we think of a new form of worship – it is God’s thought. Regardless of what we do or what we think of – ultimately, it comes from God. Even war was not a product of man but of God. There are many paths to becoming one with God. Most of these paths have nothing to do with religion, they have to do with gaining understanding, and faith. One path is fear – through fear we learn that there is nothing to fear in God. Through the path of loss we learn that there is nothing that can be lost because all is One in God. Through hatred – we learn that there is nothing and no one to hate because we are all One in God. Through war and killing we learn the value of life and living. Through prejudice we learn acceptance. Through betrayal we learn forgiveness. All of these paths are paths and lessons created by God with the only intention that we find our way to the truth of what we are and what we have always been.

Once there were two villages that had established a very prosperous trade between themselves each growing the crops that the other needed. They were wealthy villages because they had the benefit of an abundant stream of water. Yet, with time both villages began to get greedy, charging higher and higher prices for their goods each trying to outdo the other. After time passed and this greed escalated, crime ensued. Each village began hating the other and refusing to sell to them. This hurt both villages because they needed what the other had, but their pride had grown too great.

They did not notice that while they were entrenched in the battle over their egos, the stream was drying up. Soon the crops that could be grown could barely feed the people, let alone the livestock and it seemed that all were destined to die out. After generations of only the water that could be caught from the little rain that fell was now taken by a total drought. One night as the leader of each village slept, there appeared to each, an angel. The angel told each of the leaders that there was a miraculous healing stream only seven miles from their villages. Each was told to journey to the stream early because the stream only filled with water at a certain time.

Each man protested to the angel saying that there had been no water in that stream for generations it was now mo more than a barren waterbed. The angel told the men that God had heard the prayers of the villagers and answered them by filling the waterbed with a healing stream that would not only heal the people, but would provide such nutrition to the fields that their crops and livestock would grow beyond anything ever seen before.

Early the next morning, unbeknownst to the other, each man began his journey to the stream. As the stream came into sight, each man watched in awe as the water quickly filled the once barren bed to the brim. Yet, the water was murky and did not look fit for crops, and in no way did it seem fit to drink. Even worse than that, when they finally reached the stream, they were astounded to see the water already draining back into the ground through the same opening that it had entered. Seeing the other, each man ran back to his village to gather the villagers so that they would arrive before the other and be ready to fetch all what they needed before the other village could take all of the water.

However, the peasants from both villages arrived at the same time and as the water began to fill the stream, a fight broke out over the water with the inhabitants of each village pushing, shoving and hitting the other. By the time they noticed the water again, the last drops were already draining from the streambed. Filled with anger and frustration, the villagers returned home with their buckets and their hopes empty.

That night, the angel returned to the dreams of the village leaders. This time the angel told them that instead of pushing and shoving each other they should throw stones. The angel told them that God had placed stones on their side of the stream. The next morning as the villagers once again reached the stream as it was filling up, they looked down, each saw the stones at their feet and began to hurl them at the other villagers. To their surprise, the stones never hit anyone but all seemed to land in the stream.

When there were no more stones to throw, the exhausted villagers noticed that the water had become so clear that they could see every stone lying on the bottom of the stream. Even more miraculous than this, was the fact that water no longer emptied. Just then a little boy from one of the villages cried out, “Mommy, mommy, the stones…they look like hearts”. And just at that moment all of the villagers felt their anger, and their hatred drain from their souls. They each drew from the stream all of the water that they needed and resumed their trading and sharing of resources with a new sense of gratitude.

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Different Is Special

2008-10-10T13:55:00.018-04:00

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I AM GREAT

2008-10-10T13:52:00.001-04:00

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The Growing Field - The Book

2008-10-08T10:54:00.003-04:00

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This Blog Has Moved

2008-07-05T10:21:00.002-04:00

This Blog Has Moved to: http://thepowerofbeing.net

Good Vs Evil

2008-06-17T19:55:00.001-04:00

Good and Evil
We have evolved in many ways since the days when the major religions were founded. We live in a world that is now explainable in ways that our ancestors could never have understood. We no longer fear the darkening of the sun, because we understand the science of eclipses. Religion used the mysteries of nature to prove their validity. Now, we understand the forces of nature and although we cannot control them, they are no longer a mystery. It is a different world. We have evolved by leaps and bounds intellectually, now in order for us to continue to live on and be sustained by the earth that we have come to understand scientifically, we must evolve, we must mature spiritually and “put away childish things”. We have access to great Spiritual knowledge; we must make the spiritual leap.
Before we can understand good and evil, we must be able to stand mentally and emotionally firmly in the understanding that we are not these bodies or these lives, we are souls experiencing these bodies and these lives for a great purpose. We are energy and energy seeks to expand, we are the stuff that God is made of, and as we expand so does God. Thinking logically, the earth is not the only game in town. Ours is not the only dimension in town, and we are far from the only intelligent species in town. I believe that the earth is a unique school, one in which a soul can study the most diversified subjects and master the most diversified abilities. We are all creators, this is part of expansion, and the earth provides so many different mediums to learn to create within. There is the earth itself, there is the body, the emotions, the intellect, so many areas to perfect, and so many opportunities to grow.
Then there are those difficult courses, such as overcoming temptation, overcoming greed, selfishness, fear, hatred, prejudice – what we call the seven deadly sins are actually the seven challenges that we must overcome in order to graduate from this cycle. This is a very difficult topic because it seems to easy to declare one person evil and one person good, one act evil and one act good, but spiritually there just is no evil.
To say that a lie is evil causes most of us to immediately put up a defensive wall, against hearing anything else. The ego becomes angry and prepared for this attack on its goodness. Yet, this is not meant as a judgment of goodness. It is mean to help us to question our concept of evil.
In a belief built world, good and evil are concepts that arise out of perception. When we life in Maya, illusion, we are already living in a world built in the sky so to speak. Like those castles so readily attributed to neurotics. But what grounds that illusion, what connects it with God is the heart. The heart is where we find the doorway to God. So we can say that what we believe in our hearts, whatever we believe to be the truth, is as good as it gets.
The illusion, the Maya into which we are born is ultimately created by God for the purpose of teaching the soul its own value, its own essence which is God. Man once understood this and so created initiations for the purpose of changing the boy into the man, the boy into the warrior, or the shaman. The boy at a certain age would be sent away from the tribe to some place where he was totally unfamiliar, a place that was wrought with peril so that he could confront the many challenges that would force him to reach deeper and deeper within his being until he was in contact with the source of his power, God, which would then guide him through the dangers. He would then be led back home changed, clear, the illusions of childhood replaced with the knowledge of the true self. Just like Jesus truly became the Christ not merely at the baptism but when he went away for those forty days to confront his last temptation.
This is symbolic of mans time on earth. We must confront the ego which controls our little minds, with its wiles, its rationalizations, it justifications, its cunning and its judgments, which are, in fact, all different types of lies.
Evil is merely an illusion created in the mind of man. It is only “bad” because it takes us further away from our Source, which is connected to the heart. Good is anything that is truth, which originates from the heart and leads us to our Source. Look at it this way, if take one letter, the “o” out of good, you have God, they are connected. If you take one letter the “v” out of evil, you have lie they too are connected. Anything that is a lie, is not good, not of the heart.
When we hear the word evil we immediately seem some red horned figure, or some darkly cloaked sinister shadow lurking somewhere in a corner. Evil is in merely that which points us away from the truth which is that path to God. It is a sign that has been turned in the wrong direction, intentionally, for whatever reason. It is ultimately not in the best interest of anyone if it is away from God.
Am I saying that understanding this will put an end to conflict…an end to war? No, I am not. In a world that is built on a foundation of illusion, which is inhabited by souls who are all on different levels of evolutionary progress, there are bound to be different truths. Those truths will be defended or not based upon the age of the soul, its understanding and its inherent nature. But while the ego seeks domination and adherence at all costs to its beliefs, the heart seeks understanding and acceptance. What I am saying is that coming from the heart, living in truth, even if it is a very personal truth, will put an end to weapons of mass destruction. The heart, every heart, contains the essence of God, and even within the illusion the heart can never justify the death of one innocent being as “acceptable collateral damage”.
The ends do not justify the means in the heart only in the mind. And so a man or woman might very well see that the only way to defend what he or she believes in their hearts is to defend it with their lives. But, at no time will the heart defend its truth with someone else’s life. A noble battle is fought with honor by the one whose belief is being defended. Jesus did not send anyone else to the cross for him. And so, although we will not end conflict by coming from our hearts, we will end dishonor, and find our way to God. We will all emerge from the wilderness with the heart of a true warrior.

The Journey's End is the Only Cause of Death

2008-05-28T07:40:00.001-04:00

And He said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts the sickle, because the harvest has come”. The Gospel of Mark, Parables 4:26-29

Everything grows; a dream grows towards becoming a reality. A journey grows towards its destination. A project grows towards completion and a search grows towards the finding. Everything alive seeks to reach higher, a plant and a tree grow towards the sun, their source of life. The body grows towards the sun, its source of life. The ego grows towards the soul its source of life. The soul grows towards God, or The Source, its life.

It is that growth which pushes us. It is an aching, the aching of the seed, the aching of the plant, and the aching of every life on earth. We seek growth in everything that we do. We challenge our bodies through sports, and through weights. We challenge our minds through puzzles and through overcoming obstacles, finding a new way. We challenge our souls through the obstacles and sorrows that we place before ourselves in life.

What is the reason for growth? It is to unite with our Source, become one with it. Our dreams grow to unite with reality. Our ideas grow to unite with form. Once the light is reached the journey is over. The process is complete. When that is achieved, the seeker becomes that which was sought. The journey becomes the destination. The being becomes its purpose for being. Everything grows to reach its light because it is that light which gives it life. We exist to seek the light, the light enlightens our way, and the light is the force within us that motivates our journey.

The light is the beginning, and the end, the alpha and the omega. To reach the light is the culmination, the highest point that we can achieve, and yet, at the same time the light is the death. It is the end. It is where we begin, our purpose for the journey and the end of it. To die is not to end it is to finally become. The seed dies to become the tree, the caterpillar dies to become the butterfly, the idea dies to become the creation, the dream dies to become the reality. It is a never ending process of birth, death and resurrection. There is no end. We leave one life when it is done. We are born at the moment that God destines our journey to begin in this life, and we die when God destines that it is over. My birth might be called a fluke, my mother could not go into labor, she had already lost one child for that reason. My father stayed out all night, one of many all nighters that he pulled. This night, she decided that he would not spend the next day resting up in bed as was his habit after an all nighter. This night, she decided that he would suffer. So, the next day when he came home she told him that she was in labor and he had to take her to the hospital. To her surprise, the umbilical cord was strangling me and she had to have an immediate emergency C-Section.

The body of the baby dies to become the toddler. The body of the toddler dies to become the child. The body of the child dies to become the teenager. Look at pictures, each resembles the other but each does not share the same body of the other. We die most deaths without know it anymore than we notice the birth of the toddler, or of the adolescent or adult. At the end of each life, there is simply no more script to read, no more lines for our character, it doesn’t matter how old or how young we leave this incarnation, some souls choose to accomplish a great deal in a short time. If a baby survives for only a minute, that baby has still changed the life of the mother who carried it into the world and the family that waited for its arrival. A life touches others for as long as it is written into the play. God allows the soul to choose the length of its stay. And the purpose that it is here to accomplish. We arrive on time and leave on time. The way that we leave is the way our plot ends. It completes the story, the story we chose, and the one chosen for us. They are one in the same. No one causes the death of another as no one causes the birth of another.

The Bhagavad-Gita is a spiritual epic about life, death and our relationship with God in between. As is so very appropriate today, it is the story of Arjuna, a warrior at a time when each person had a role to fill, teacher, ruler, warrior, etc. It is a story of a great battle lasting between warring families and the kingdoms that are their allies. Because of his birth, Arjuna is forced to fight in this battle. Before the battle begins, he asks his charioteer, Krishna, to drive him into the center of the battlefield so that he can see clearly who he will be fighting. He sees that he will be fighting those closest to him, his family members, teachers, mentors, brothers and father-in-law. He is overcome with grief at the prospect of fighting those he loves dearly.

"Arjuna said: My dear Krishna, seeing my friends and relatives present before me in such a fighting spirit, I feel the limbs of my body quivering and my mouth drying up." "I am now unable to stand here any longer. I am forgetting myself, and my mind is reeling. I see only causes of misfortune, O Krishna, killer of the Keshi demon." "I do not see how any good can come from killing my own kinsmen in this battle, nor can I, my dear Krishna, desire any subsequent victory, kingdom, or happiness." "O Govinda, of what avail to us are a kingdom, happiness or even life itself when all those for whom we may desire them are now arrayed on this battlefield? O Madhusudana, when teachers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, maternal uncles, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law and other relatives are ready to give up their lives and properties and are standing before me, why should I wish to kill them, even though they might otherwise kill me? O maintainer of all living entities, I am not prepared to fight with them even in exchange for the three worlds, let alone this earth. What pleasure will we derive from killing the sons of Dhritarashtra?"… "Better for me if the sons of Dhritarashtra, weapons in hand, were to kill me unarmed and unresisting on the battlefield." "It would be better to live in this world by begging than to live at the cost of the lives of great souls who are my teachers. Even though desiring worldly gain, they are superiors. If they are killed, everything we enjoy will be tainted with blood."

I didn’t know, when I read this years ago, why it felt so important to me. It was not only the message, but the context of war and the inner conflict that any good hearted man or woman must struggle with that stayed with me. Arjuna is a warrior, battle is not his conflict but with whom he must fight. In his argument laments the fact that although the perpetrators of the war are only fighting out of greed, why must he kill, knowing that it is wrong. He cannot understand how in killing those he loves, knowing it is wrong, he is not equally as sinful as those who do not care who they who kill.

The soldiers know that we support them, but not the war that they are fighting. We have learned from Vietnam not to fault the soldiers, but to love them, pray for them and support them. Yet, it does not matter to the soldiers that we support them, because we are supporting them without really knowing what they are doing that we are supporting. If you tell me that you believe in me, but I cannot tell you what I am really doing, or that I cannot believe in myself for doing it – I gain no comfort from your support. Most Americans do not really know, or really want to know what our soldiers must do and must see. There is no way to erase images that are emotionally or traumatically imprinted on the mind. But what can be done to in some way help those who are suffering loss, or are struggling with the guilt and or shame of feeling responsible for causing the death of another is to help them open up to the possibility of accepting that what we see as death, is a transition, and not one that man, regardless of his actions is capable of causing. The moment of our birth and the moment of our departure from the body are two moments more fated than any other in our lives. As Krishna told Arjuna:

"As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change."… "That which pervades the entire body you should know to be indestructible. No one is able to destroy that imperishable soul."…“ One man believes he is the slayer, another believes he is the slain. Both are ignorant; there is neither slayer nor slain. You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies. Realizing that which is indestructible, eternal, unborn, and unchanging, how can you slay or cause another to be slain?
As a man abandons his worn-out clothes and acquires new ones, so when the body is worn out a new one is acquired by the Self, who lives within. The Self cannot be pierced with weapons or burned with fire; water cannot wet it, nor can the wind dry it. The Self cannot be pierced or burned, made wet or dry. It is everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundation of eternity. The Self is unmanifested, beyond all thought, beyond all change. Knowing this, you should not grieve.”
( Bhagavad Gita 2.19-25)

When all of the pieces come together we become complete. To become is to die as we were. We die as that which seeks fullness, and are reborn as that which is full. We die as the question and are reborn as the answer. We change into the form that we seek.

Death is not the end of life; it is the end of a form, the end of an experience. It is the completion of a quest, our search for the Pearl. We each go out into the world for a reason, and when we have found what we were looking for or done what we went out to do, we all return home. We wear the garments appropriate for our journey. When we return home, we remove them. This is as it should be. It is when we return home that we are truly together.

Our lives that were once so connected with each other will die. We each go on to build new lives in new places and regardless of how much we loved each other while we were together; the time comes to move on. This is death. It is not the ending of a life; it is the ending of an experience. The act of dying is simply the ceremony, the ritual attached to that moving on, to that removal of our outerwear. Death comes much more peacefully than birth. There are many old souls who would rather die a thousand deaths than be born once more.

I was sitting with a friend of mine at the New Jersey shore, when she told me about a man who had been standing in the bay fishing when a helicopter fell out of the sky and landed on him. Needless to say, he died. She then remarked that there was no doubt that it was his time. We all have our time it is that moment when we have completed all that we came here to do. It does not matter where we are when our time comes because when it comes we will leave. The means of our departure is part of our journey but not the cause of its end.

We establish, before we incarnate all of the things that we are going to accomplish while here. In some lives there are many major events that we need in order to complete our mission, and our lessons. For others the lessons are very few, sometimes everything we experience in our lives is only to support one lesson. Sometimes we just come in to help another soul that we are close to, as in the case of many children who die very young. It is not for themselves that they come; it is to help their families with a lesson and sometimes to effect the whole society as in the case of Ryan White. The length of years that we spend here is not the issue. There are times when in order to connect with all of the souls that we have agreed to connect with we must spend many years on the earth. There are times when it is but a few hours.

Often the time of death is chosen in order to fit in with lessons of those close to us. Perhaps the experience of our dying is a group experience. Or perhaps it is a part of a lesson for those closest to us. So the time when this can best be accomplished will be our time, that time when we graduate to the next level or need to move to another life for our next set of lessons.
When it is our time there is no reason for our soul to stay incarnate. This has nothing to do with our ego attachment to being here, the ego does not rule the lesson, and it is only one of the tests. Often we will place other points in our lives where we may or may not die and although these points do not mark the end of our lesson here in this life, they still mark points where we may end our time here if our souls are ready. We are given the choice. These are times when things like prayer are very important. These are times when we are able to build our faith. We are brought to the edge and allowed a miracle to bring us back. We are able to make a permanent connection with our spirit and see it manifest in our lives. This is a gift to us.

Sometimes we need to come close to death in order to prepare for the next step in our lives. In other cases we need to be brought to the point of choice so that we can make a conscious decision to be here. Once in a while a soul just cannot appreciate being here because he or she may feel that it was not their choice. If that person has a near death experience and makes a choice to return, life then has a different value. When we die it is always our time, it is a time that has been predetermined and agreed upon by all of our soul family. It is a time appointed by God. It is the right time. It happens in the right way, and we are grateful for what it brings to our souls through the experience. It is a completion, a graduation. When someone we love departs from the physical body, we can always feel their presence if we open ourselves to it.

It is important to understand that when someone leaves his or her body, the connection that they had with the souls left behind does not end. The work that we came together to do must be completed. We have to accept that everything in the physical world has a beginning and an end. Yet the end is in effect a merging with a new beginning. Any guilt or regret should be redirected to positive changes for future situations. Nothing is left unfinished, we may not like the conclusion, but death is the period at the end of our sentence on earth, but by no means the end of our story.

When we leave this earth plane and look back on our time here, it is neither the pain nor the joy that we remember, it is the fullness, the richness of all of both pain and joy combined. It is the roller coaster ride that is life that we long to return to. Birth, death, and the time in-between are all points on the circle, which is life. There is really no beginning and no end, those are just illusions. There is just life, continuous, changing and yet always remaining the same, Life.

THE POWER OF CHOICE

2008-05-22T15:44:00.001-04:00

All that we need to be in control of our lives is to know that we have choices. We do not even have to exercise them so long as we own them.

Our lives are not determined by the situations that confront us, but by the choices that we make when confronted. If I am born into a poor family I can accept my lot and make the best of it, I can work hard to overcome it, or I can become a thief, or a drug dealer. We are not victims of the situations that life puts us in, we are victims of the choices that we make within those situations. It is vital to living a full life that we accept this fact.

I knew a woman who began with every advantage and ending up on welfare. I saw my daughter reacting to life in the same way and it worried me. I feared that if my daughter saw through the same lens she might end up same way. My daughter’s response to my fears was, “Don’t worry I won’t end up like her”. That statement had such an impact on me, because I knew that no one decides to destroy their lives. Our lives follow the paths determined by our choices and those choices are made one at a time. When we perceive that a choice we made was not right, we should then try to make a choice that is right for where we are now. Instead, most of us lose sight of where we wanted to be and instead focus our choices on making our initial choice right. Each choice is taking us in one direction or another. If we are not aware that we are making choices, we will not look around for options. The path that my friend was on was not the path that she thought that she had chosen it was the path that she took because she believed she had no other choice.

When we are in a place that is not where we had planned to be, we feel unhappy; either with ourselves or with the circumstances we hold responsible for putting us there. Usually we prefer to believe that it is anything other than our own choices that put us where we are. It is generally a partnership, life presented the choices and we made them. Acknowledging that we made the choices helps us to be more aware of the choices available to us in the future. It helps us to stand back when things seem bleak and see other options, and other ways. If we feel like victims, we react without assessing our possibilities, if there is a turn – we miss it because we are not looking. We continue on the path that has caused us suffering since our initial choice. What we can do is we can choose to dig ourselves out instead of choosing to dig ourselves in deeper.

My childhood was very difficult and I felt that I was a victim. I got involved in drugs, tried to kill myself, and I married for the wrong reasons. I married to escape the pain at home. As victims do, I sought escape from the suffering of my life, rather than a better life altogether. I exited through the only door that I could see simply because I was not aware that there could be others. I was not living in choice. I married the first man who asked. I felt very sorry for myself. Each choice that we make out of a feeling of helplessness places us in a situation that increases our helplessness. All of my limits, fears and pain simply changed form but remained consistent with my belief that I was a victim. I continued to make choices dictated by my perception of the situation rather than dictated by what I wanted, or who I was or where I wanted to be.

One day during therapy the therapist asked me why I chose to take drugs. I came from a town where taking drugs was the accepted means of dealing with our pain. However when I had to explain it as a choice, something changed. I never thought of anything that I had done as a choice; I just did what I believed I had to do. This covered anything, I had to react, I never thought that I could choose to act. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had made a choice and it was one of many choices that I could have made.

When we are children we do not have many obvious choices, we can fight, we can hide but we cannot change our situation. We actually have very little apparent power. Within that context I did not see myself as making choices I simply reacted.

I accept the choices that I made then; I accept my reaction to that environment because I did not see at the time that I had choices. I could never look back and blame myself for walking through a door that seemed to me to be the only one open. It was the door according to my belief system, but not the only one according to who I was and what I really wanted. Victims are always blind to where they are going because they live their lives running from instead of going to. They never plan a future – only an escape. Yet knowing even after the fact that I did have choices gave me the power that I needed to move on. I finally realized that each step along the way in my life I did make a choice for which I alone, not my parents, not my life, and not my situation, was responsible and one hundred percent accountable. I made the only choice that I could see, and that was fine, because a person who owns the power of choice owns his life. A person who makes choices, regardless of the outcome of those choices, is a person with a future to live, a life ahead of them rather than merely an expanding prison cell. I may have made choices that did not turn out as I planned, but those choices were mine. This freed me.

The fact that my life is made up of my choices has given me my wings. Nothing could stop me but I myself, and that was fine. I knew that in my life I may reach many dead ends, but if I built the road that reached them, I could build the road that would take me around them.

We suffer not because of what happens to us in our lives but because of the choices that we make in reaction to what happens. Each moment we live, we are making a choice, and that choice will determine the next experience. There is no choice is our last choice until we take our last breath.

We cannot assess our worth based upon one choice. Rather we must assess ourselves based upon our willingness to accept responsibility for each choice. If we do this, it will drive us to make each choice responsibly. Remember that so long as we have another breath we have another choice. Sometimes we are meant to make what we believe to be the wrong choice so that we can arrive at the right destination. When a situation is painful it is not working. If we cannot find a way to make it work there probably is no way. Here is where we have to make a choice. If we stay that is our choice and if we keep moving that too is our choice. The controlling factor is not the situation it is the choice that we make.

If I want my partner, but only if he or she fits into a certain image that I hold, I really want the image and not the person. I should look elsewhere or change the mold. If I need a job but I will only work under certain conditions, I cannot complain that I cannot get a job. I just have to choose what I want more and follow my choice. It does not matter what we do or do not do, we are making choices. What happens to us is and will always be a result of those choices not ever a result of the reason that we made those choices.

There is a person with one leg who chooses to play tennis and live a full life and joyful life. Then there is the person with one leg who chooses to sit in a room lonely and bitter feeling that life has given him nothing but pain. Both choices are understandable. The former is the choice of one whose choices are founded in a belief in challenges and not limits. The latter is the choice of one whose choices are founded in limits, a victim. Why should we sit and make ourselves miserable over those things that we cannot control? The time that we are wasting, and that pain that we are suffering is due to our choices, and not due to our situations. Difficult and painful things happen in our lives, but how we choose to deal with them will affect our entire lives. When we find ourselves facing an ocean of suffering we can choose to swim through it, facing only the far shore, or drown in it.

It used to anger me when every time I said that I could not do something because it was too hard, or even impossible to accomplish someone else did it. Someone would come along with less going for them than I thought that I had and do what I thought that I couldn’t. But I chose to let that help me grow. I could have said that that person was lucky, I chose to look at that as a sign that it could be done. When I took responsibility for my choices I had to examine their foundation. My choices were founded on my belief that my life held only a lose lose potential. Those who accomplished what I chose not to even attempt chose based on a belief that anything is possible.

I once would have decided that they must have been better or luckier than I. That way of thinking was once a choice that validated my self-pity. Instead I now choose to allow the accomplishments of others to empower me, and to make it more difficult for me to say, “I can’t”. We have to take responsibility for our choices, and embrace our ability to choose.

Some souls have chosen a more difficult road than others, yet however difficult or easy the road may be, we have all come here with everything that we need to reach our own destination. The pot of gold is behind one of the doors. All that we have to do is to find it. And we find it by choosing doors. Life is a treasure hunt, each experience gives us something, a direction, a tool, or a clue to the next door until we have it all.

The key is not to give up if it is not behind door number one. We have to keep in mind that the goal is just to find the treasure not to be right. First we find the treasure and then we know where it is, we do not have anyway of knowing where it is before we find it, so we should not expect that of ourselves. God knows where it is and He will lead us to it so long as we choose to seek it. Life does not force us ever to give up, that is a choice, sometimes it is the wise one, but in any event it still is a choice.

Choosing Our Own Way

2008-05-21T13:05:00.004-04:00

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Viktor Frankl

Often, we decide what the right direction is for us based on what it is for others. Then we find that we are stuck with a goal without the necessary desire to reach it. A person may decide to go into his own business because he does not like authority. He does not consider how much he hates paperwork, long hours, paying people from money that he has not yet earned, and that he can't do it all by himself. Instead of looking within to find what the real problems are and what the personal solutions might be —he looks outside to see what others had done.

This is the kind of confusion that we are faced with when we try to follow guidance from outside, and not of from within. When this choice becomes difficult, instead of seeking a different solution, most people just stick with the plan but find any number of obstacles to place in their paths to prevent its completion. They tell themselves and others that it is not that they won't do it; it is just that there are too many things going on which currently stand in their way. What is really in their way is that it is not their goal. They do not have the passion to walk the chosen path. If we have no passion for what we do with our lives, we cannot do those things well or for long without getting sick, or off balance in some way.

This causes us to consciously face a direction that we are unconsciously running away from. This results in deadlock. I have seen many people in this position one way or another. They complain that everyone else gets opportunities except them; something always gets in their way. Or it is their karma to fail. That is just not true. What they are doing is building their lives from the plans of others. They are making choices based upon the successes of others. It is easier to walk the beaten path than to pave ones own. There was a time when that it worked for most people. Now, we are in an age of individuality. Difficult as it may seem, we are being forced from an inner need for satisfaction from a constant lack of external reinforcement to forge our own path to our own goal.

We have traveled far from that sacred connection to our true selves. Instead of deciding at which place we want to arrive, we first need to decide what inner satisfaction awaits us there, how much we are willing to sacrifice, and most importantly, before we follow another’s path, we must be certain that where others have gone holds the same treasure for us. Once we know the price we are willing to pay, and what it is that we really expect for that price, we have something that we are capable of working with. There really are two different soul paths: those for whom the destination justifies the journey and those for whom the journey is the destination.

It is not a question of one being the right way, and one being the wrong way. It is a question of which way is right for each individual. Some of us become workaholics because we want more and more; we do it for the prize at the end. Others become workaholics because their joy comes from the work they do. Again, neither is right nor wrong. To try to develop the attitude that others say is right, or to attempt to see the truth as others see it, can only lead to miserable and unfulfilled lives, if it is not our own way. There is a difference between what feels right and what others say is right. In these times, we are being asked to find that difference for ourselves.

Those who live their lives based on what works for others cannot remain committed to what they do. Who we are is what dictates what we can do well. We can only do well and for a sustained period of time, that which is in alignment with who we are. Otherwise self-esteem suffers; either we feel like failures, or we feel unsatisfied which leads us to feeling that we are defective because we are missing what we have been told is the obvious.

This is a time when personal truth, rather than conformity is needed for our own inner well-being and for the wellbeing of the whole, every aspect of our living must reflect the inner self. The Native American names such as: Lone Eagle, Running Bear, Night Watcher, are given based on the persons own unique qualities. They are invited to live their lives in fulfillment of those names. There was a time when we all took names that mirrored who we were. We were once in touch with ourselves and with our environment. We are being asked by our souls to return to that ancient spiritual center. We are being called from within to live who we are, to love who we are, and to do what reflects who we are. This is the dawning of a new age, an age of truth. We neither find happiness, nor satisfaction in living anyone else's life. No one ever stands in the way of those who know where they are going. We have to go where we know from within.
When the world was disconnected, and there were such a things as distant shores, the structure of society was much stronger. The strength of a society or a religion to influence its members or followers rests strongly on the limitations of outside information that could otherwise be an influence or create choices that do not exist within the structure. The rules worked, not because they were right but because they were the only rules and pertained to everyone.

Since the end of WWII, slowly but consistently distant shores have become neighbors. Members of completely different societies have been unable to prevent the exchange of information. The world of yellow and the separate world of blue remain intact and self-fulfilling so long as yellow remains separate from blue. The rules of right and wrong, and even cause and effect work for all members of the yellow society or religion as they do for the blue although they may be in total contradiction with each other. However, when the members of the blue group and the members of the yellow group begin to mingle and share beliefs and information, a new green group emerges which inevitably destroys both the yellow and the blue. It does this because suddenly there exists and option, a choice, a way not previously known to either yellow or blue. In actuality it does not destroy the two separate groups but instead it is what they become, the product of their evolution.

The internet has completed the erasure of true borders, the world has now become a melting pot, and so, we can no longer look to any external governing principal for our lives, and how we live them or the direction that will work. We must now look within. There are too many truths ‘out there’ to find the one that will work; we must now journey deep into our own hearts and our own souls to find the truth that supersedes contradiction. This is the inner truth.

Mankind has mastered the lessons of leadership and brute force in the Age of Aries; it mastered the lessons of the herd mentality, the pain, suffering and fear of standing outside of the group, and the manipulations of power in the age of Pisces. It has now entered the school of equality through individuality. In this course, pain and suffering will come from inside when we feel our sense of self diminished. These are the ultimate challenges and lessons of the Age of Aquarius. It is not the energy of the individual merging and losing itself into the group but rather the group growing and becoming greater through the distinctly unique contribution of each individual. We are beginning to suffer depression and illness – not from being isolated from the group, but from being isolated from the self. Many of us think to ourselves, ‘I have what everyone says that I should have, I do what everyone says I should do, my life contains all of the pieces that everyone says should make me happy, yet, the pieces will not fit and I am slowly dying’.

Most people are too embarrassed to admit the panic and confusion that overtakes them when someone says, “Just be yourself”. The truth is, very few people know how to do that, or who that self is. So our first step in finding a fulfilling direction is finding the self that is seeking fulfillment and becoming an expression of that true and unique self living within each of us.

IS FREE WILL AN ILLUSION?

2008-05-19T18:19:00.000-04:00

One of the phrases that we hear and say a great deal in metaphysical circles in “This is all an illusion”. Although it sounds good, it is not something that we are able to really incorporate into our consciousness because it is so fundamentally opposed to our experience. And though we may be temporarily soothed by the idea of it, the feeling vanishes the moment we bump into a part of that illusion, like a wall, and get a concussion on another part of the illusion – our heads. For most of us the idea that our experience is “all an illusion” is filed away somewhere with God, another idea that, for most of us, is firmly implanted in our belief system but very much disconnected from the reality of our daily lives.

If this is an illusion, why does it hurt so much or feel so real? Why can’t we just affirm it away? In a movie, which is for all intents and purposes an illusion, when one of the characters – another illusion is shot by a bullet – another illusion, the character dies – another illusion. There are two layers here. There is the layer of the actors or the soul who is assuming the role of the character – the illusion who dies. Within the movie, nothing is an illusion. When the actor – the soul – steps out of the movie, or the life in our case, it was all an illusion. A good actor will feel the pain of the character; he will feel the joy of the character which is what makes his performance believable. A good actor is very sensitive, just as a soul is. When the actor leaves the role, he has to re-enter his own life - his own role in the greater movie that is life. This reorientation often takes time. When a soul leaves a life, that soul too has to re-enter its essence, after absorbing all of the experiences of the life that it has just left. A character in a movie or in a play follows a plot, acts or reacts in a way written by someone else. So, in order to react naturally the actor must inhabit the part. We souls inhabit our personalities and so we are able to act and react according to the character that we come to play.

An actor becomes the character, so convincingly. that we are able to anticipate what he will do or say next because we believe him. We may know that the actor is acting and that the words have been written by someone else, the cues given by someone else, yet we feel and experience what the characters are going through. Although the choices that each character is making have been predetermined by the writer, we know that those are the choices that this character would make. Even when the character surprises us, if the actor did his job and writer did his, we can review the movie and see how this unexpected action could have been predicted. This is free will. These characters are predictable because we understand how they are motivated. Yet, does our ability to predict their choices deny the freedom of their choices? No, they are free to choose. What is predetermined is the point from which they view the world at the time that God or the Universe places the choice on their path. How often do we say, “I did that based on what I knew then”, or “If I only knew then what I know now”, or, “The person I am today would never have done that”.

Imagine being in a room, facing a wall and from your position, you can see the wall in front of you and from your peripheral vision you can make out the walls on each side, right and left of your position. But from where you stand, there is no door. Now, the position that you are in places you on a wheel, like a clock gear, that will slowly turn you around. However, right now you only see walls. You are facing twelve o’clock. There is a door at the six o’clock position, but you won’t see it for six hours. Now a voice enters the room and says, “You are free to go”. Is it an illusion that you are free to go? No, there is a door. But from where you stand, there is none. In a story, the character has free will and, we can anticipate that characters actions. We have free will, and our choices are predetermined. They are predetermined because our visibility of available options is really limited to one, at the time that the Universe presents the choice. There may be ten puzzle pieces lined up before us to choose from, yet, the experiences, the beliefs, the impressions of the world that we have accumulated up to that moment sees only one perfect fit. Because there is only one, it is the one that our soul has chosen to best experience the lessons we need to learn.
We have to remember that we come here to learn and to grow. In order to do this, we have to set up a lesson plan.

Our lessons do not only come from where the choice leads us on our path, but also from which choice we make, and how we arrived at that choice. We are here to expand our view, and to learn to see from our hearts. Most actors take roles for a purpose. Many take roles which allow them to stretch, to grow. Free will is not an illusion, but in a way, the choices we make are. They are the lessons; they are the set-up for our growth. They create the plot within which the actor acts. As we learn from each choice, our view expands; our abilities grow until we are in tune with our hearts. When we are in tune with our hearts – we are in tune with our souls. When the soul has mastered the personality, its view is no longer limited. It then sees through the eyes of the creator of the path. The dreamer has mastered the dream, so it is no longer a dream; the actor now writes his part, so he is no longer limited by the existing plot. Illusion vanished and all that is left is one Will in tune with All-That-Is. To enlighten is to light the path so one may see the way. It really has never been a question of whether or not we have free will, the question is, how much we really see of what our free will is acting upon. This is where growth lies.

AVOIDING LOVE – AVOIDING LIFE

2008-05-14T15:29:00.000-04:00

Nothing that we avoid ever goes away, we will spend our lives avoiding it, and that will be how we live. If we don’t want to avoid something for the rest of our lives, we need to deal with it once.
Many people withdraw their feelings from each subsequent encounter being hurt. Each time that they are hurt, they withhold more and more of themselves from being vulnerable to feeling. As time goes on they give less and less of themselves to life and to their relationships. Those parts of themselves that they have pulled away are stored in a void, a place of emptiness. Feelings are the food that the soul exists upon, pain as well as joy. When we hide our souls from experience, deprive it of what it needs to grow, to expand. Sooner or later the pain that we are avoiding pales in contrast to the emptiness that we are feeling. It is the avoidance that causes us our suffering.
We feel an absence of joy in our lives, but we don’t understand why. When we avoid emotional experiences we not only lock away our souls, but we forget where they are, or how to release them. We deprive our souls the very food that sustains them, which is feeling. We allow them to atrophy. We lose our connection with them. Even when we enter a relationship, we do not permit our souls involvement. We handle it all on the ego level. The other person involved feels that nothing is being shared. There is no soul-to-soul connection, only ego to soul.
We make impossible demands of those with whom we are involved to guarantee our feeling of security, and in doing so we drain our partners until they pull away. We are left still hungry, still longing and still in pain. Although we are unable to give of ourselves we are still looking to receive. Yet since we are leading with our ego, we cannot receive. We believe that if we do not open ourselves we will not be exposed. We measure what we give, to convince ourselves that we are loving, but we are not giving, we are merely demonstrating because our heart is not involved, we are not letting anyone in, and we are not giving freely. Our partner sees that we appear to love but the feeling of openness is not there. Our partners sense that they are being tested and that acceptance is constantly conditional. A loving relationship requires a presumption of trust. Without the presumption of trust there can be no freedom and without freedom to be oneself, there can be no exchange of love. When we are protecting ourselves from being hurt, or being betrayed, we are never being there, never present in the moment or in the relationship because we are always watching for signs. Always ready to run or to attack first. So we can’t feel that the other person loves us, not because they don’t, but because we don’t trust being loved and so, we do not allow ourselves to experience it.
Love when true comes from a place that is open and vulnerable. It comes from the soul. This is the place that we do not let anyone or any feelings near. Love cannot flow in if we are not open. So our emptiness just keeps on growing and since we are giving nothing comes from us that is not measured and noted on our ledger, nothing given to us is allowed any closer to our hearts than the balancing column on our ledger. Our hearts remain empty and we tell ourselves and others that is because we are not loved. We remain empty. Only need flows from emptiness. Although need feels like love to those who are needy, it only feels like a drain to those in to whom it is flowing. Love gives to its object – need drains from its object. When we allow the pain of our past to be program that guides our lives, what we will continuously get is the same outcome. It means that our automatic pilot says love hurts. Regardless of the mantras or affirmations we repeat, the program is the program, don’t give until you are certain, don’t open up until you have a guarantee, don’t give more than you receive, and above all, don’t let down your guard. It does not matter what our conscious mind is saying, or what we think that we are giving, the moment that we feel vulnerable – the program runs and end result will be pain, caused not by the other person, but by our programmed belief that it is inevitable. So long as we believe in our subconscious that loving equals betrayal, or pain – our subconscious will ensure that we create this outcome. To feel joy and love we must be vulnerable and to be vulnerable means that we may also feel pain. The secret is that absence of feeling is as painful as any hurt that can be inflicted by others.
There is no way to avoid being hurt as long as we live. When we refuse to open ourselves for fear of more hurt, we are also locking the hurt that we have already experienced inside. This hurt is locked in the darkness and as anything positive flourishes in the light, anything negative flourishes in the dark. So we are not protecting ourselves only hurting ourselves. Pain can only be healed by love and forgiveness. As long as we live we will be trapped with our pain inside and the cure outside. There is no avoiding this. We can avoid loving but we cannot avoid living. Life does not allow us to hide; it finds us wherever we are.
It is imperative that we experience life with every fiber of our being. We must embrace every chance that we are given to feel. What we can do is avoid expectations of life, or of love. Each time something comes into our lives that has the ability to bring us an emotional experience we must embrace it. We have to understand that it will enrich us and increase our capacity for love. However, we cannot hold on to it. Allow the experience to be lived for the moment without strings attached to it or expectations of tomorrow. If it is still there and it is still good tomorrow, we should experience it all over again. If it is not there anymore we cannot think in terms of what we lost, only in terms of what we have had. The love that we give becomes a part of the giver; it becomes a part of the fiber of our being. It is ours forever.
I have been loved, I have been left, and I have lost and found again. Yet my life would not be as rich as it is has been had I not been open to the possibilities of being hurt as well as being loved.
We are here to experience. As long as we live we will experience all sides of all things. To everything there is a season under Heaven. While we are here we are to experience all of the seasons in our lives. These experiences are what living is all about. Each person, each situation that comes into our lives is a gift as well as a lesson. Who we are today is the sum total of these gifts and lessons. These experiences make up our colors.
Yet what we must understand at all times is that it is all experience, and all part of our journey. I am who I am, that I am, regardless of how someone else experiences me. If I make a mistake, I experience that mistake, I never become that mistake and I must never be afraid to start again because we are made as much from the times that we fall as from the times that we get up.
We all need love, and to avoid it because we are afraid of getting hurt is sentencing ourselves to a lifetime of pain. We must immerse ourselves in each experience, but detach ourselves from the outcome. It does not matter whether or not something will last, we must be grateful that it is here now. We don’t even know how long we will want to stay. What matters is that something is giving our lives extra color and extra meaning today.
There is no such thing as failure. We do not have the information to determine if traveling this path that we choose was meant to lead to our destination, or if the traveling of it is the destination. We will always be rewarded, sometimes the pot of gold is not on the other side of the rainbow – sometimes it is the rainbow. Somehow, we have to except that it is all right, every direction is the right direction. We always end up where we are supposed to, and with what we are supposed to have. The thing is that unless we are open and our hearts are available, we usually miss the best views and overlook the greatest gifts. It is like the joke about the man whose house was flooded, who believed that his faith was in God. A police boat came by to rescue him, and he refused because he was waiting for God. Neighbors on a raft came by to rescue him and he refused because he was waiting for God, finally a helicopter came by to rescue him and again he refused because he was waiting for God. When he ultimately died, and faced God with the burning question of why God did not save him, God replied, “I sent a boat, a raft, and a helicopter – what more could you ask for?
We must open to each day as it comes, not as a continuation of the last, but as a new beginning pregnant with new possibilities that we must be open to take advantage of. We are co-creators with the Universe by its’ design. If we do our part, the Universe will do its part. If we do nothing the Universe will not stop throwing us balls, but if we treat them all as bombs and duck – we will never know what we could have.
Remember that it does not matter what happens to us in our lives, or even what we experience, we are always passersby. For example, when someone succeeds they may be called a success by the world, but they do not become a success. We are always in the process of succeeding sometimes we are on the top and sometimes we are on the bottom, but as long as we keep moving we are succeeding. Therefore if one fails, they do not become a failure, for most every person who has succeeded has also failed. Yet we immediately identify ourselves with outcome of each experience. The sentence of our lives ends where we place the period. We can place it where we fell, or where we rose. Or, we can know that there will never be a period, only an occasional comma so long as we are open to life.
We see ourselves and many times each other not as who we really are but as the product of our last experience. So long as we do this we withdraw from life for fear of being a failure of losing our success or losing a love, but in truth, there never is a last experience.
I lose almost everything that I put my hands on, that does not make me a loser, it simply means that I am learning, maybe the hard way, that what can be lost is not worth holding on to. I could give up, but life has too many surprises for me to do that. And so, I try harder, and often lose harder, but I feel like a great success because my only responsibility, my only success lies in my doing, in my effort, in my willingness to be the product of this moment and not of the past. If God wanted me to catch the ball, I would catch it – so God must want me to reach for it, and as long as I do, I am fulfilling my purpose successfully. And I know that God did not put me on the earth to be loved, I came from God and so my cup is already full, I know that my challenge is to see how much of that eternal fountain of love placed within my heart I can spread in the world. Being hurt is one of the most important parts of living. Pain expands our capacity to feel, to be filled with love, not from man but from God. The more we are filled the more we can give and the more we give the more we are filled. We find, in the end, that we can never be hurt because we loved too much, only because we expected too much. Love with all of your heart and all of your soul, and expect nothing. Give live the best that you have, and better that best each time, and expect nothing. Live life in this way, and you will never suffer. But you will also never be empty but always full, always a success, and always satisfied. We can describe life spiritually in many ways, but in the end, we are here to learn one thing and that is to love, and we learn that by facing reasons and challenges to our willingness to love. If we can love through all of the hurt that life throws at us, then we rise above hurt protected, not by the love given to us by others, but by the love given to all by ourselves.
And so, when all else fails, love, love with abandon, love without condition, love so much that it fills your entire life. You will not only change our own life, but you will be a part of changing the world.

BECOMING COMFORTABLE WITH CHANGE

2008-05-13T15:20:00.003-04:00

Change has neither thought nor action, because it is in the state of absolute quiet and inactivity, and when acted on, it immediately penetrates all things. If it were not the most spirit-like thing in the world, how can it take part in this universal transformation? (Confucianism. I Ching, Great Commentary 1.10.4)

To be prepared for life is to be comfortable with change. It isn’t change itself that makes us uncomfortable. We are not afraid when we decide to change our homes, or change our minds. The change that we are afraid of is the change that comes from outside of us. It is not change that we fear it is the loss control over our lives.

This is what change means to us. We have come to believe that things should happen a certain way, that life should be lived a certain way. Children need consistency. Everyone needs consistency. Consistency stands for dependability. Yet the consistency that is needed is not material it is spiritual. it is truth.

Children need truth, as we all do. Sometimes the truth hurts our feelings, sometimes it makes us feel uncomfortable, but in the end it gives us something to trust. Regardless of how it feels, the truth is sturdy and strong, solid beneath our feet. It gives us a place where we can go back to, a place that we can count on in the midst of this changing world.

For so long we have lived our lives based on appearances. We have smiled though our hearts were breaking. Living our lives in houses that we could not afford to maintain appearances. Our Society has become so dependent upon these illusions that when they fail to keep their forms we become afraid. I was speaking to my stockbroker the other day and I mentioned the recent market crash. He corrected me and said that it was an adjustment. That is really true. Life is in a state of adjustment now. Things around us are not crazy they are real. The illusions that we have been so dependent upon cannot be maintained. In order to have consistency in our lives we must accept consistent change.

Life will never be as it was because it was not real. We lived our lives based not upon what was truth but upon what worked. If it worked, it was truth. If enough people believed it then it worked and if it worked it was truth. Now all of our beliefs have been questioned because nothing seems to work. Nothing working simply means that nothing is staying the same. As much as we realize that we never step into the same river twice, we still believe that there are things that can be guaranteed.

As children we all held a picture of what our lives would be like when we grew up. Reaching our teens and early twenties we either solidified this picture or developed a new one more in line with the world around us. This picture, whatever it was represented fulfillment for us. This was real. For most of us, this picture of happiness was refined as we grew older, not to a more perfect image of our own wants and needs but a more perfect image of the ideals according to our family or society. Television contributed to our picture of what reality was supposed to be.

All of those unwritten rulebooks that served the generations that lived before were burned in the sixties. The reality that existed before was torn to shreds during the sixties. The roles of men and women, the roles of government, and any form of authority were to be forever changed by the sixties generation. The rules were permanently and irrevocably destroyed. From that time on the mass consciousness could never trust those rules again. What we had accepted as real did not exist anymore. The problem for all of us living today is that the rules were never rewritten. We have since been lost, and brought into this world children who are also lost. All of us have nothing to draw from that we can trust. No consistent reality. We have lived in a world where we have nothing that we can trust. There are no rules that are proven to be trustworthy.
For us, the reality that was in place for generations is now only a fairy tale. We know what once was happiness, in terms of what we should want for our lives, but we don’t know how to get it, and if we do, we don’t know how to trust it anyway. Few of us really know what we want because the world has become hazy, foggy.

Now we must become comfortable with ourselves. The Universal agreements that were holding our facts in place are no longer working. We must find the truth within ourselves and see that it is only within that truth that we are safe. When we are flowing with life it is not moving past us. When we embrace change as growth it does not rock our worlds. Change is not sudden it is constant.

When something seems to happen suddenly it is because we have resisted its coming for so long that the pressure has built up and finally broken through. We are constantly in a state of change from moment to moment and that is evolution. Nothing stays the same that is real. However dealing with change on a personal level and on a societal level is a process. The first step in the process is to see the truth to see that things the way that they are do not work any longer. Once we see the truth we become shaken. After we are shaken, we begin to do everything in our power to recreate the lie, to hold on to the way that it was or the way that we want it to be.
The problem is that once we really know the truth we cannot maintain the lie. When the illusion falls apart for the last time we accept it. This acceptance brings peace. This peace brings power. It is the truth that does not change and the one that we must seek, that truth is our faith in God, and the workings of His Universe.

Anything that does not change does not continue. We must stop thinking of change as different than growth. There is no difference; change is only another word for growth. Embrace change, because it means that we are living. Life flows like water. What is not real will not survive. We can’t be hard on ourselves. We do not find the changes in our lives comfortable because we do not accept that change is a process, and that acceptance is also a process and the time that it takes is very individual. It never takes too long or happens too fast, it happens the way it should for each individual.

When we have a strong center, and a strong core we are not affected by change. When we have faith in God and in the Universe we have freedom and security in the material world. Change becomes flow, because we see and acknowledge and even honor its purpose. Although we live on this planet and within our own lives we are always also living above. Change becomes merely the train that we ride on in order for us to reach our ultimate destination.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PERCEPTION

2008-05-12T12:33:00.001-04:00

There is no such thing as a fact; all that exists is a perception. Even a fact would be irrelevant in one’s life it one did not perceive it as such.

How we perceive a situation determines a different reaction and each reaction creates a different outcome. A perception can ruin our lives, and allow opportunities to pass us by. Another can take us to incredible new possibilities. No one remembers how many times we fall only how many times we rise. If we perceive ourselves as being victims we will be victimized.

Lets us say that there is, in fact, an objective reality. It would make very little difference unless it was somehow able to pierce through all subjective realities because our actions are subjectively driven. Let’s say that two people are dating and one is very jealous. The other partner goes to luncheon interview with a man in a position to offer a great employment opportunity, the opportunity of a lifetime. The lunch meeting is in a restaurant that is within a hotel. The jealous lover happens to see the two of them enter the hotel lobby, of course they are heading to the restaurant, but that is not what the jealous partner sees. The jealous partner waits outside for them to exit, and attacks the potential employer. The relationship ends and the jealous lover believes that his partner cheated on him. A person goes to a job interview and the man doing the interview has had a very difficult day, he just caught his lover cheating on him (so he believes) the first applicant enters the office and immediately assumes that the expression on the interviewer’s face means that he took an immediate dislike to him and doesn’t even attempt to sell himself because he believes that he lost the position as soon as he walked in the door. The next applicant, seeing the expression of the interviewer’s face decides to take his obvious mood as a challenge and begins his interview asking concerned questions about the interviewer’s day. Because this applicant did not perceive the interviewer’s expression as a reflection of his qualifications, he handled to interview in a way that landed him the position.

Only the Universe knows all of the facts. All that we will ever know is what we perceive to be the facts and even that perception is subject to change along with all other perceptions. Our perceptions will determine our actions or reactions to any given situation. Things appear the way the majority believes them to be. The truth, as we know it, is not based on reality it is based on consensus. An observation is relative to the perception of the observer.

Every opportunity in life is open to you if you perceive it as your opportunity. If you perceive a wall to be a dead end, you will turn back and allow it to prevent your passage. If you perceive it merely as an obstacle you will get a ladder and climb over it. Regardless of what situation you are in, there are those who will perceive it as better than theirs and those who will perceive it as worse. There will be those who perceive a situation as a beginning and those who perceive it as an end. If we want to change our lives we have to change our perception of them.

There is a story about a man who had two sons. One son was always happy one was never happy. So the father decided one Christmas to give the son who was never happy every possible toy imaginable. The other son he gave nothing but horse manure. When he went into the room of the son who was never happy, he found the boy sitting on the floor looking very sad. When he asked why the boy said that with so many toys there would never be enough room to play. When he went into the room of the son with the horse manure, he found the boy smiling and singing with a shovel in his hand just shoveling away. When the father asked his son why he was so happy he said, “With all of this manure there must to be a pony.”

People, who are truly happy, seem to illuminate peace. We may find that they have nothing more to be happy about than we have. On the surface it may seem that they have even less. Sometimes it may seem to us that they live in a fool’s paradise, but how foolish can one be who lives in paradise? I have had many losses and disappointments in my life. I have a friend who was constantly telling me that I am lucky. I believed that she was saying that because somehow she chose not to acknowledge all of the obstacles that I had to overcome. But finally she explained to me that she saw me as lucky because I faced each obstacle as an opportunity and so I was able to flow with life without so much suffering. I always said that if this is where I am, it is where I am meant to be, and there is something here for me to receive.

Those of us who amass large sums of money, huge holdings in real estate, diamonds, furs, cars, all of the emblems of wealth and or fame, do so because they perceive a world in which ones value is based upon these things, without them one is nobody, worthless. Living in this perceived reality is an enormous amount of work, because one always needs more just be remain good enough because in the material world, that bar is constantly rising, today’s penthouse is tomorrows basement, and so today’s person of worth is tomorrows worthless person. This is why we do not own what we have, but what we have owns us, so long as we believe that it in any way defines us.

Regardless of what anyone says, a conscious person, in a world of suffering caused primarily because of poverty. The only reason for a person with even a modicum of compassion to cling to wealth is because it holds his identity. Today, having so much more than we need while so many have so much less than they need to survive is like walking around with a fur coat made of pelts that are still dripping blood. Only the loss of identity – which could seem like the loss of our own lives, could allow us this caveat to perceiving the suffering around us. We are able to justify even to ourselves, whatever we do or do not do, based upon the need of our egos to feel safe. And if the ego believes that wealth and power are all that keeps it safe, that perception will allow us to justify what we could never justify directly to our souls. This is the same as the man before could not just beat up a man and leave the woman who turned his world, unless, his perception justified his actions.

We move through the physical world, but we live in a world of perception. One person perceives himself or herself as poor because that person has only one bathroom. Someone else perceives that same person as rich because he or she actually has a bathroom in their home instead of an outhouse. Someone else perceives the person with the outhouse as rich because instead of an outhouse he only has a hole in the ground.

We cannot change our lives until we know exactly how we perceive them. Changing our physical world will do nothing for us because the physical world is only the backdrop against which we live our lives. Our story as well as our history is played out within our perceptions. Once we truly understand how we perceive our world we will automatically understand that there are also other ways. Each way of perceiving any situation or any experience has its own unique set of possibilities and choices.

Happy people see beauty in things that unhappy people don’t see. It is not because they would not see them as beautiful. It is because they do not see them at all. Happy people find what the Buddhist call, “the bless in the mess”. They do not notice what is lost they notice what is found. I remember a job I had that made my life so miserable that I quit. Having no job my grandmother made my home life so uncomfortable that I went out to look for a job on my birthday. Thanks to that first job ending and my grandmothers nagging, my next job lead to my eventually starting my own business making close to one million dollars a year.
I quit my job without thinking I did not take the time to feel sorry for myself. I did not allow myself the time to engage in a long period of self-pity or self-destructive behavior. I did not see the loss of my job as the end so I did not miss that opportunity. But I have to add that opportunity is a train that runs twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. It may take determination to find the station, but the only way we miss it is if we perceive it as non-existent if it is not where we expect it to be.

Christ said, Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all. [And after they have reigned they will rest.]" (Gospel of Thomas)

We can’t change what is, but since what is has probably never been seen by the human eye, all that we have to do is change what we perceive it to be and we will change the path that lay before us, obstacles become challenges, and we no longer seek until we quit, we seek until we find. Life is a series of experiences, and whether our lives we wonderful adventures, or tortuous hell is only a matter of perception, it is a matter, not of life itself but of our experience of it. What we see, determines how we respond, and how we respond determines our life’s experience.

How to Survive being Abandoned

2008-05-08T12:09:00.001-04:00

The first man I fell truly, madly, deeply for was the first man who broke my heart. When I met him, I believed that I had found my forever. I would not let anyone tell me otherwise, though many tried. He saw me and loved me for who I was and that was all that mattered to me.

It began to deteriorate after about nine months. I begun compromising myself for the sake of keeping the relationship going. After a year he was not the man that I fell in love with, but what was so much more painful was that I was not the woman he fell in love with. I was not even the woman who fell in love with him.

The Answer

To why I lost you

Lies in the place

I left me.

No one ever leaves a relationship before its expiration date. I don’t care if it the immediate cause is another woman, another man, or just a better life. The relationship had already reached a point of diminishing return. Most of us have a tendency to stay in a relationship long after it has become moldy and begun to stink up our lives. We stay for many reasons, but the greatest reason is the emotional investment. It is like investing in a stock. We invest in a great stock and as it rises in value we increase our investment. Then it starts going down, little by little. We hold – knowing that it will go up again; we hope that it will go up again at least enough to break even. We don’t sell because until we sell, we don’t realize the loss.

In a relationship, the initial investment is time is very low in comparison to the enormous return of happiness. We invest our love, our dreams, our beliefs, then our trust and commitment. If it begins to lose the value that it once had, we start increasing our investment by over-compensating, giving more of ourselves, giving all of ourselves, and in the end, giving up ourselves. When that does not work, and the signs of a failed relationship begin to show to the world – we up the ante by investing our pride, and as a last resort our integrity. Then one party finds a way out – finds a way to recoup some of his or her emotional investment through another woman or man. Someone who will re-establish the value, the self worth that we feel we have lost through having over invested in a relationship that has nothing left to return. But this does not happen out of the blue, if it’s an affair, it is kept secret while the other partner still believes both are equally vested, even if they are vested in a sinking stock. Yet, it’s not equal. One partner is secretly siphoning off his share of the emotional investment and putting it into another stock. This doesn’t have to be another person, it could be a plan to see the world, join an ashram, it doesn’t matter. One partner had found a way to begin rebuilding his emotional portfolio while the other still believes they are in it together. One partner has his entire being immersed in the relationship while the other has been quietly extricating herself. Then – when the departing partner feels secure enough that the new investment will assist in recouping what was lost. He or she abruptly – in the eyes of the partner being left behind – closes the account. All of the emotional losses fall on the partner who remained.

By the time a relationship comes to an end through the actions of one of the partners, the only thing left the investment is its definition. The one who was left behind believed that, as long as there was a shell and two participants, there was hope, and, even more importantly, believed that he had nothing left to leave with – everything was spent, was invested. A relationship ends when it has stopped growing, the only reason anything stops growing is that it is dead. The only thing that happens when one party ends the relationship is, the loss is realized by the partner left behind. By the time one party leaves a relationship the only thing left to do is bury the rotting corpse. There is no bond left, there is no shared vision, no shared desire, no shared hopes - nothing left to save or to hold onto.

It is devastating to be left. This is true even if most of the time we can no longer stand to see our partner’s face, because by this time the lack of return is equal to our diminished expectations. By this time our only hope is that our partner is willing to settle for as little as we are. It hurts to be left, and when it happens we just want that person back, it doesn’t matter if they are mean to us, or abusive to us, or ignores us, or humiliate us, we just want him back. But if we stop to think about what we are willing to endure to have that person return, we will realize that the things that we are now willing to endure are things that we would never have considered suffering for anyone. Of course, those were things that we would never do when we still had self-respect. And it feels very much like that leaves with our former other half. The reason that we are willing to humiliate ourselves is not because we want that person back. It is because we want ourselves back. We don’t want the person back who left us; we just want to be unleft. We don’t want to feel like someone worthless enough to be left behind, it’s not about the one who leaves us – it’s about what we feel that we are left with.

A funny thing happened to me on my way to, “Losers Anonymous”. I heard a song that had one line in it that said, “Every cloud don’t have a silver lining”. It is funny, but that changed my life. I realized that he was, or at least had become an a—hole, and there was no silver lining in this cloud. It wasn’t the loss of him, or even of us that I was mourning so deeply, it was the belief that I could have made it work because it was workable. It was workable because every cloud has a silver lining. It was workable because I believe that ‘all you need is love’. So, if I had love then I was just the biggest loser in the world because nothing else could explain my standing here alone. But that song made me realize that if something has a limited shelf life, like my relationship had, I did not lose it, break it, mess it up, or ruin it.

I had made a huge emotional investment in the relationship. But the only way that I would be forced to realize a loss, was if I still believed that there was something left for him to offer me. And I really didn’t – we left each other long before he left the relationship. So, what I lost was the part of me that I invested in the relationship and if I could now gain insight and growth, I would not only recoup my investment, but I could turn a profit, because the stock of Me, Inc. had risen remarkably. Whenever someone walks out, they are doing us a favor because for us, there just is no more water in that well. Those we love may die, and cause us to feel a temporary sense of separation, but anyone who we truly love will never leave us in spirit. They move on to what is next for their growth, and allow us to do the same, and all in the spirit of the love that we shared.

Regardless of what we tell ourselves in the moment while we are looking at our joint plans shattered on the floor around us, we knew that we had nothing more to share with the one who left long before the door closed behind him. And after the pity party, and the hangover – comes the enlightenment of a new and stronger sense of self-worth and an even greater sense of power than we ever had before the experience.

FOUND

In pain

I found strength

In lies

I found truth

In deceit

I found trust

In being lost

I found my way

And in rejection

I found myself.

Different Is Special

2008-05-03T16:15:00.002-04:00

A Nation Must Have A Conscience

2008-05-03T15:35:00.001-04:00

A nation must be governed by conscience. For what is a nation, is it real estate; is it a land of squatters? No, a nation is people. Everyone in the United States of America is a member of a family whose last name is America. There are no servants in a nation, no servants in a family – each member has equal value, equal rights, and can and should have equal expectation of consideration, education, health care, education, and protection. Those members of the family chosen to head the family are chosen by each individual with the valid expectation that their needs, and their rights will be given no less consideration than those of anyone else. They have a right to believe that the size of the population will not in any way diminish the value of every single member. If a whole neglects its parts it will eventually become defective.

Our future survival depends more on this than on any other single factor. Humanity has become marginalized. Human beings have been categorized as collateral damage, acceptable loss, consumers, the list goes on. A nation cannot be great if its people are suffering. A nation is not wealthy if its people are hungry. A nation becomes great when the health, education and well being of its people are its priority. A great nation is not a nation that excels in its ability to arm its forces or wage its wars. A nation is not great because it boasts the largest percentage of billionaires, but because it boasts the lowest percentage of poor.

The United States becomes less and less united every day, and this is because our leadership lacks a connection with the humanity of the citizens whose rights, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness it is pledged to represent. We send children off to fight a war. It does not matter anymore why we entered the war, it is of no importance whose fault it is anymore. What matters is that we understand the difference between supporting our children, our troops, our family members who are risking their lives at our behest, and supporting the war itself. Our sons and daughters sent over to Iraq face physical and emotional challenges that we do not even understand. They face medical and financial challenges that may last their entire lives. Their families, who also serve by sacrificing their husbands and fathers, also face endless emotional , and financial suffering. Why does this country respond so quickly and decisively when it needs young men to serve in its armed forces, and respond so slowly when those same young men need the country to help rebuild their lives? Why is their duty to serve their country unlimited, and our duty to repay their service so very very limited? What happened to a country for the people?

If we are to support our troops, we must hold the government accountable for how much of our tax dollars go to the continued support of the troops and their families, just as our tax dollars go to the continued support of those who serve in congress, the Supreme Court the white house. To serve the country as a lawmaker is no greater a sacrifice, or gift to the nation than that of serving in its defense. If we do not have enough money to honor and protect those who fight for the country in its armed forces, then we do not have enough money to wage a war. If we do not have enough money to afford them the unlimited access to those things that they need in order to enjoy the rights that they are risking their lives to defend – then we cannot afford to go to war. Our children cannot be cannon fodder. Our service men and woman cannot be considered less valuable, in anyway, because they do not have the ability to raise the capital to fund an election campaign.

What does it mean, United we stand – divided we fall? Siblings fight, differences arise, it is up to a wise leadership to find a way to unite the divided. In a nation composed of people that requires conscience, and when conscience has been lost so is the ability to lead a people forward. We are divided in so many ways, between rich and poor, between races, between religions, between educated and non-educated, but the most dangerous division of all is the division between the head and the body. We have no need to fear outside enemies when the head has become alien to the body. We can do nothing in that state but fall upon ourselves.

The Tree of Knowledge

2008-04-26T16:27:00.003-04:00

The fruit and the sap of a tree nourish our bodies, the leaves of the tree purify the atmosphere and the wood of the tree provides shelter for our bodies. Understanding these things is the beginning of the journey. This nourishment and shelter providing object is sufficient in itself to the common man, interested only in what is it and what does it do for him. Having found nourishment and shelter for his body, and cleansing for his atmosphere, his journey is complete.

The Scientist goes one step beyond the ‘what’ to the, ‘how’. The man of science must seek the answer to how this is accomplished, how the tree provides the fruit, the leaves, the bark, and the wood. Because in knowing this it can insure that earth will be sustained. So, the scientist digs down into the earth and finds roots then following the root system it discovers that the tree is nourished through the soil where it derives its nutrients and water supply. Now science is done, it has accomplished its task and explained how. The material world can be sustained.

Yet there is more to the tree and to the world than what is physical. To truly understand the tree we must venture to the next level. Here the seeker searches beyond what is physical to what is metaphysical, and beyond how it works, to, ‘what is its source?’ The seeker must search for the seed, the unseen, because the seed cannot be seen, only the roots, the tree, the leaves and the fruit can. The seed is no longer visible as a seed. It is now only visible as a tree; for it has transformed itself into a tree so it could grow to become that which could feed the fire that warms, and produce the fruit that nourishes, the leaves that cleanse, and the wood that shelters. Finally it will return to the soil as thousands of other seeds which will begin their journeys nourished by all of the experiences that it has completed. In this knowledge the Seeker is satisfied, knowing the Source.

The Mystic seeks the answer to why the seed, already containing the tree within itself, desires to journey at all. In his journey he finds that the Source is all that it creates, and multiplies itself through its creations. Like a candle whose light is not diminished regardless of how many other candles it lights, the seed that was one, has become thousands and always remained one. It experiences itself as it multiplies, it nourishes itself with its experiences and it returns to itself with increasing brilliance. In this knowledge, the circle of benefit is complete and the Mystic is satisfied.

God’s Bible, is as simple as a tree.

Relationships and Irreconcilable Differences

2008-04-15T19:26:00.001-04:00

Irreconcilable differences begin to accrue as soon as a person forgets that being entrusted with someone’s trust, love, self-esteem, growth, and happiness is a privilege and not a birthright. It is a precious gift to love and be loved.

Once we give something a name, we have given it a definition. Once we have defined it, it no longer has room to grow. What we call a relationship and what we call marriage must grow to meet who we have evolved into. When my first husband and I returned home from our marriage I did not recognize him. He had become a ‘husband’, which bore no resemblance to the man that I had been engaged to. I, on the other hand, did not know how to become a ‘wife’. And, I have to add that the husband he became was his father, a man that I would never have married. So even if I had known how to become a wife, I would have had to become his mother to make the institution function. We did not form a relationship, we entered an institution with strictly defined roles, at least, the ones that worked for my husband.

When two people enter into a committed relationship they create an extension of themselves, a midpoint where they unite. So, the relationship is not a thing, or an institution as marriage is called, but a place where lovers join, share, love and grow together. It is the third entity. It is the form of the bond through which their love flows, through which they share themselves and experience each others growth from that sharing and that bonding. This does not describe most relationships and it does not describe most marriages. The reason begins in childhood.

Children have their first and most important lessons in relationships in their family homes. They learn by watching their parents with each other, they learn by watching their parents with themselves and their siblings, and they learn through their interaction with their siblings. One of the first challenges that we are faced with when we enter into an adult relationship is that it is destructible. The relationship with our parents and siblings is indestructible, for better or for worse – they are always there. Even if we run away, they are still always there till death do we part. The relationship between parents and children is the only relationship that is relatively certain to be till death. Yet, somewhere in our subconscious minds we form, and act based upon a belief that a few words repeated before an official creates the same unbreakable bond. It does not and it has not for a very long time.

Divorce statistics show that eighty percent of marriages that end in divorce do so because of irreconcilable differences. Any relationship, including marriage will last as long as the needs of those involved are being met. This makes sense, but understanding those needs, grasping the importance of those needs and realizing how the survival of a marriage can hinge on the smallest thing is a little more difficult. This is because the smallest slight, or cruel word said in a fight never leaves the relationship. It never leaves the memory of the one who was slighted – never – ever, no matter what the person says. Put a person under hypnosis and you will find that throughout that person’s entire life there was not a leaf that blew by that is not remembered. We are, for better or for worse, memory keepers. No one knows for sure where all of the memories go, but what is a fact is that if the incident is repeated, the original one flies out to meet it and grow.

They say God is in the details, well, a relationship is strengthened or weakened by the details, the little tiny details and sometimes no one is aware of its condition until it snaps. One partner says, “What did I do”, the other partner says, “I don’t know, just a lot of things”. It is just a lot of little things. So many people think that the work ends when you say “I do”. This may be when we stop working, but it is also the time when the things that must be worked on begin to accumulate.

From the beginning of any relationship, we need to understand that if we have, ‘fallen in love’, then we are under the influence of a heavy intoxicant, maybe the heaviest. We are not in our right minds. The more that we struggle to see beyond our need for the next fix of the other person’s energy, the better chance we have at success. Clarity is the most important thing in having a successful relationship, make your needs clear – especially to yourself. My hand is a zillion times more mine than my husband will ever be. When it comes to another human being, we can’t take the word ‘mine’ too literally. No one abandons a relationship that makes them happy. No one cheats on a relationship that fulfils his or her needs. No one can be held down, held back, or controlled indefinitely. The only way to guarantee that the one you love is going to be there is to seek to make that person feel important, appreciated, loved, and most of all respected.

There are always two complete individuals and the relationship. The part of you that enters the relationship is the part of you who thinks first of the other – first my love, then us, then me. If you do this there will be times when you sacrifice what you want for your partner, but there will be equal times when your partner does the same for you. You don’t need to be in a relationship to worry about yourself, you can do that alone.

Forget about being right and never even consider winning. In a relationship if one person wins the fight, both lose the war. Sometimes we want our partners to think the same way as we do about everything. Only, if they really begin to do that we begin to feel that the person we fell in love with has been possessed by a member of the Stepford community. And sometimes if they don’t, we fear that we will lose our partner to someone who thinks the way that he or she does. If you are on opposing sides of an issue, respect the other’s right to see things from a different perspective than yours. If you have left your ego, and your baggage outside, an explanation, or saying, “These are the reasons that I feel this way…” may or may not convert the other person, but at least that person will have an understanding of why your beliefs are what they are and understanding in itself should make honoring your right to your beliefs easier.

Some beliefs, often religious or political are never going to become one. However, they are deeply charged with emotion and should not be criticized, discussed perhaps, but never critically. If there are little things that your partner needs that to you seem ridiculous – honor them. You will have you own share of ridiculous needs to be honored.

At some point in a relationship we realize that we do not want to continue without the other person. Not too long after that we have our first fight and realize that this unbelievable, one of a kind, made in heaven relationship is not indestructible. This causes that monster fear to raise its head. We become possessive, and jealous. At which point we remarkably do everything possible to alienate the person that we feel we can’t live without. We forget the most important thing, for some reason that can be articulated, this other person decided that he or she wanted to commit to us. What is important here is that whatever made that person, come to that decision was something about who we were, and what we did. It was never a specific thing, it was a mode of behavior, a way of being – what comes from the heart that beats inside of us. If you love someone and want to keep that person by your side till death do you part, be who you were when that person fell in love with you, and even more, when that person chose you to commit to.

We want to go to heaven but we don’t want to die. We want a guarantee that our partner will never leave us, but we don’t want to do the work to make them stay. If you are not sure as to what you should do, or if you have been fighting for so long that you have forgotten, ask your partner this, “What was it that made you want to spend your life with me?” “What can I do to make you want a life with me as badly as you did in the beginning?” This is not asking who else you should become, or, who else you should act like, it is asking what part of who you are that you have not been lately, or you could be more of.

WORRYING

2008-04-08T21:33:00.002-04:00

It is not as though constantly hitting the ground in our minds means that when it actually happens it doesn’t hurt. It only hurts again

When we worry we focus our attention on experiencing the worst that can happen over and over again. All of this rehearsal time spent experiencing the bad things does not in any way diminish the effect that these things have on us when and if they finally happen.

The most outstanding thing about this is that as often as not the bad things, the things we spend all of our time worrying about just never happen. I have a friend who every time he meets someone new, and sets up a date with that person, he starts playing the whole thing out. He builds each small piece of information that he may have about the person into a long story and compares it with his story and puts the two together and either it takes the entire relationship to the point where one of them has to end it. This is done before he even spends 10 minutes with the other person. Sometimes the date is canceled. Sometimes everything goes great, but never, does his scenario play out. If the date is a week away from the time that they meet, this is a week that my friend goes through the most torturous hell imaginable.

The fact that he suffered for a week is the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that he leads the relationship through all of his preconceived disasters. When we worry, we accomplish nothing. Worrying does not have any effect what so ever upon the outcome of a situation, nor does it effect our ability to handle the outcome. It is not as though we having hit the ground so many times in our minds that when we finally do it won’t hurt. It only hurts again.

Once the ball leaves our hands anything can happen. Careful aim can narrow the margin of error, but the fact remains that anything can happen. When we feel ourselves entering into a state of worry, we must ask ourselves what we can do to make a difference or help guarantee the outcome that we want. If there is something that we can do, we should do it. If there is nothing that we can do, let it go and move on. What will be will be. And what will be is what is meant to be. Our part is throwing the ball and Gods part is hitting the right mark. Every time that we set a goal it is not necessarily to reach an end, it is to reach the next point in our journey. Even if we get to the exact point that we planned, there is no guarantee that it will be in any way where we want to stay.

The fact is that everything always works out for everyone in the end, if it didn't we wouldn't be able to move on. Sometimes everything falls apart at the same time, what a wonderful thing to be able to work them all out at the same time and get it over with. It is time to start eliminating from our lives some of the things that we do to ourselves. There are seasons in our lives there is a time to build and a time to break down.

Things are moving so fast that we really need to remove all of the distractions that we possibly can. It is time to be in a permanent state of awareness. It is as though God is throwing the ball to us and saying, “Heads up” twenty-four hours a day. We are sent enough curve balls from life not to have to imagine them. This is an important time in our history. Let’s live it as it is and really try to be where we are. There is really no time to worry. And if we do not worry, we won’t have anything to worry about.

Let us stop doing things to ourselves and start doing things for ourselves. Let us begin to live our lives as they are not as they could or should be. For every moment that we spend thinking about how something should be, we just missed living it as it is. If we do not worry, we do not have room for fear to grow. If we do not fear we do not have food for worry.