The world situation being presented to us in the 21st century is a natural outcome of the state of consciousness that created it. People navigating through life guided by thought processes that are based on a view of themselves as separate and insecure individuals, naturally would create a world full of conflict and fear. But consider that this may also be part of a perfect unfolding.

This may be how life works: that each level or stage of development along the way brings with it, as it approaches obsolescence, its own crisis. Each time of crisis forces individuals to question their current reality system, and to try to find a new stability by stretching into new versions of themselves with more advanced capabilities. We are also pushed by crisis into outgrowing any old habits that no longer help us survive successfully. As our old paradigms and models begin to fail us and we can’t find answers on the same level that we find the problems, we are forced to let go of our old ways of constructing reality and look again to see what we might have missed.

The world seems to have a habit of presenting us with problems for which we have no solutions within our existing mental frameworks. Take overpopulation as an example. There seems to be such limited responses we can make as individuals to overpopulation. An alternative way to live with something like overpopulation without frustration or without avoiding thinking about it, would be to develop new ways of perceiving, understanding and responding to what is happening. The ability to change our perceptions, understandings and responses is not a capability humans have when totally immersed in current thought processes and can’t see beyond them. This is a relatively new development; a new option. People are currently evolving the capacity to observe their thinking from a vantage point that is slightly outside of the limitations of that thinking – to see their own thought processes at work. The ability to find adequate solutions to something as difficult as overpopulation may seem out of reach at first, but the possibilities are far beyond what could be seen when we looked through old mental filters and obsolete ideas about what is possible.

© 2011 Alice Gardner

All that was empty
Has inexplicably been filled.
All that was separate and alone
Swims now, in the warm, sweet waters
Of the one life, living itself in awe,
Animated by vitality and love,
Moving forever towards
Who knows what…

Far beyond our power
To imagine the new land
We travel
On wings built of
All that has troubled us.
Not above life
But firmly and
Solidly in it.

Alice Gardner, 2011
Author of “Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living As Spiritual Practice”

This photograph is from a recent trip to Yosemite.  There is a deep snow-pack in the mountains at this time of year, but the weather during our trip was warm and water was running in little waterfalls from every rocky crevice, except in the deep woods where the forest floor was still buried deep under heavy snow.

This is such a wonderful metaphor for what is happening in the larger cycles of our world.  Egypt is in turmoil as I write this.  Its young people are no longer willing to live without freedoms that we Americans take for granted.  Both snow-melt and current events are about (sometimes tumultuous) change and about how life is never frozen in place for long, but needs eventually to break into motion.Our human ability to change and what stops us from fundamental change that is needed (as opposed to surface-level improvements) has everything to do with our overall human condition. It is about our ability to adapt, evolve and be creative in a fast-changing world that requires us to let go of the things that worked for us previously and move forward into new habits of mind that work better for us now, just as the winter’s snow is transformed by warmth into waterfalls.

We are at a significant and exciting evolutionary transition-point in our human development!Life is giving us the opportunity to notice the limitations and blind spots of our current ways of making meaning in our lives, and to stand free of what no longer serves us. Our essential identity, our beingness, does not change at all, and does not need to.  But of all the things that do shift in our lives, the deepest kind of learning and change seems to be exactly what is required of us to fully meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Meanwhile the bedrock of who we truly are rests like a foundation, below all the changes, supporting and steadying our creative movements in response to whatever is happening.In the heat of the drama, the frozen places in us change form and move on into something new, like the waters from the mountains running with tumult and beauty on a warm day.

Fra Giovanni Giocondo (c.1435–1515) was a Renaissance pioneer, accomplished as an architect, engineer, antiquary, archaeologist, classical scholar, and Franciscan friar.  Today we remember him most for his reassuring letter to Countess Allagia Aldobrandeschi on Christmas Eve, 1513.

I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep.  There is nothing I can give you which you have not. But there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven!

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant.Take peace!

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see.  And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!Life is so generous a giver. But we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love by wisdom, with power. Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel’s hand that brings it to you.

Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe me, that angel’s hand is there. The gift is there and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. Your joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.

Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it; that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country home.

With grateful thanks to www.gratefulness.org

Many of us have spent the last few days doing the traditional American Thanksgiving holiday with families and friends and are already in the mood for appreciating what is wonderful about our lives.

The holiday is a good reminder to be thankful, but one that we can too quickly leave behind.

Gratitude can go deeper than counting our worldly blessings and giving thanks for our health and loved ones, yes? The more we stay in the mood of giving thanks and keep our eyes open, the more we can begin to notice something different about our surroundings.

Maybe giving thanks isn’t just something that we do in our minds or hearts! Maybe there is an invitation here into a whole way of living that we are being reminded about in this yearly ritual – an invitation to begin to deepen our experience and satisfaction with life.

Perhaps at one moment we might take a sunbeam on the table for granted, but with thankful eyes we might see the blessedness of simply existing in a world where the sun penetrates our home, highlighting the simple objects we enjoy.

Perhaps the motion of a breeze flitting through a tree as we go for a walk can now capture our attention with its dance-like motion and lift us in ecstacy, when we would have otherwise ignored it because we were thinking of other (more important?) things.

These are windows of the mind giving glimpses into new awareness of what has been with us all along. Nothing new. Just openings into what is already here.

Sometimes it can take the feeling of the closeness of hunger and suffering in the world to get us to be grateful by comparison to other’s misfortune. When someone dies we are renewed for a moment in our awareness of the preciousness of life. But, again, are not these all just small partings of a veil that our minds are making over the reality that at each moment life is already incredibly and unbelievably precious, just the way it has always been, even when we were ignoring the fact by paying overmuch attention to the mind’s habit of judging what is relevant and what is not?

Thankfulness has the power to open us to what is already here.

What is here is a dance beyond all imaginings, this dance we do as we wake up in the morning and go through our days, one after another.

It is beyond magic, beyond belief; just in the fact that we are here at all!

No thoughts
about how perfect
or how awful it is,
can compete with the
flat fact of its arrival
each time we look again.

This is just the way of things:
This that comes to us
when we awaken each morning
lurch out of bed
and proceed
to whatever is next.

The way things are
slides by our window
on our daily commute,
showing up in all
those activities
our lives consist of.

Flowing with
the way of things
we receive all
that we are given.
we allow life to
be what it is.

Thus we are moved along
un-resistant, without protest,
like the water of a stream
moved by gravity
towards the sea.

Our lives come to us
as we flow along.
Our opportunities like rapids.
Our disappointments like eddies.
The work we have come for,
as a strong, clear
and ever-present current.

Do not be afraid.
We are being carried
by a force
mind cannot encompass.
All we can do is
move with it
willingly or not.

© 2010 Alice Gardner

If we have learned
Our lessons from life’s
Losses and failures, and
All that makes it worthwhile…

If we have learned
From our journey
And found the new fullness
Of our human-hood,
We begin to see
The patterns beneath
The surface of things.

Everywhere there is
Something that is lasting…
That doesn’t change
In the center of all
The changes made…
All along the journey
To what we are,
Where we are
In this moment.

Deep and untouchable
Divine patterning
Like arrows
Pointing always to
Something undefined by mind,
Something still
but in motion,
Not old or new.

Gathering both together
Seamlessly being
What has always been
In the unabashed
Nakedness of reality,
Just here, just this,
Unadorned.

© 2010 Alice Gardner

Tightly bound,
Each bud stands
Complete, still and perfect
Being a bud.
Yet there is movement too.
Imperceptibly the bud
Rests in the change,
The movement of opening.
Flourishing.

Still and at peace,
Being the epitome
Of life as it is
Simply as a bud.
Yet also it is
Pure motion personified
As slowly it opens
Into a full-flowered
Version of itself.

In the forest,
We find fiddleheads,
Perfect just as they are
At each moment
Of their unfurling.

Yet they slowly unroll,
Becoming the ferns
They somehow already are
In a vision far beyond
The thought of it.

Even the scent
Of springtime
Penetrates
The virtual world
Of thought,
Bringing us
To the real life
Where stillness
And motion meet,
And life comes
To its flowering
In us and around us.

© 2010 Alice Gardner

This is often seen when we also see that we are not our minds. We are something else even more wonderful!

We then can begin to see exactly how it is that our minds can cause us to lose touch with reality and go off on all sorts of tangents and suffer needlessly. This is a great turning point! When this is seen, then we are no longer simply at the mercy of whatever happens to us, but begin to accept the role of creator of our own experience.

The word has been out for decades that we create our own (mental) reality, but we can’t begin to be creative in this way until we see exactly how mind has habitually been ruling us.

We have fallen into a trap of believing the stories that mind has told us, believed the mentally mediated version of reality it fed us with for years. But we weren’t fooled. We weren’t satisfied. And now its rule is ending.

Many of us have been seeing through mind’s antics for years. And for many of us there remains a suspicion against mind, probably because of our 5000(?) year foray into egoic consciousness where we were so thoroughly led astray into suffering. There is a natural hesitancy about picking up mind now as a useful tool to be employed in the service of whatever life wants of us.

Yet these amazing tools we call our minds are the most wonderful instruments, able to calculate far beyond the capabilities of the smartest computer. Our minds are able to construct mental reality by using two (almost separate) hemispheres which perceive in very different ways to compile the information collected through the senses and then put them together and know what to do next!! How extraordinary!! What computer is capable of such sophisticated processing? None.

Without the guidance of something beyond itself however, mind seems to have hit a wall. We experience so much suffering from our having detached ourselves from our true nature while developing these minds. Yet now the world seems unable to proceed much further in the same direction without self-destructing. Out of necessity and the natural preference for survival, mind is being forced to abdicate its throne (to stop pretending to be in charge). Yet, with guidance from that which we are beyond thought, and with an attunement to the well-being of the whole, rather than the preservation of the ego, suddenly the possibilities for the future open wide.

A partnership between the two (inner guidance from what we truly are (call it God by any name) and the incredible usefulness of our amazing mental toolbox) is what will move this planet from the current critical status towards the kind of a future that we want for our children and grandchildren. And this movement is being driven by an evolutionary impulse to survive that we feel in both our archaic nature and our most modern facets. All that stands in the way are the vestiges of egoic identification which have to show themselves in order to be seen through. The way is open.