Thursday, March 27, 2014

Marius

Beautiful Marius in the Coppenhagen Zoo  

Conscious, sentient, gentle-spirited, Marius looks out at those who visit him each day wondering if they are also. Maybe not so much because he was recently killed at the Coppenhagen Zoo to make way for more animals!


Copenhagen Zoo kills 4 lions, weeks after shooting giraff
By Laura Smith-Spark and Bharati Naik, CNN
Updated 11:47 AM EDT, Wed March 26, 2014


(CNN) -- A Danish zoo that made international headlines last month when it killed a healthy giraffe is once again in the news after it killed four lions to make way for a new male.The lions were killed Monday, said Tobias Stenbaek Bro, a spokesman for the Copenhagen Zoo.

Friday, March 21, 2014

Shattered unity


 “My prayer is ... that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are 
  in me and I am in you. May they also be in us ..." John 17: 20 -21

In the debris of antiquity lie the shattered pieces of a once global civilization stretching beyond the reaches of our collective awareness. It seems we were once one humanity, one family. Artifacts dating back many thousands of years are the scattered remnants of a long gone civlization. They indicate there was a time when we spoke one language, communicated and traveled throughout the planet. Then, something terrible happened, suddenly plunging the world into chaos, then darkness, isolating us in pockets around the world. Only recently has the internet and satelite communication restored global communication reconnecting us.

All of this teases the imagination.  What were we like?  Is there something innately human that we might rediscover about ourselves that we once were.  Were we peaceful back then?  Is there something different about us today that wasn't part of our collective psychological makeup then? 

Today, it seems as much as we have always wanted peace and unity, it has eluded us because we didn't know what happened or even that anything happened. Consequently, we lost an understanding of who we were or of our full potential. A full portrait of who we were and potentially could be still remains a mystery.

While we may be able to see who we've become, we don't yet see who we once were or who we could be. If we could understand this, maybe we would reimagine ourselves back into a Golden Age. The key to that vision is discovering what happened to that once glorious period when we were whole. What shattered us and how do we heal?


Today, pieces of that ancient race who we once were and one day will be again, seem to call to us from the bottom of oceans or remote parts of the planet that are ice covered but were once florid landscapes. 


According to archaeologists, the Earth has experienced catastrophic planetary events - two global delugescalamitous comets and another global flood caused by the rapid melting of the last ice age.  These natural planetary changes induced tsunamis, volcanoes, and earthquakes, which wiped out entire civilizations, many times over, sending us reeling in absolute terror, even fearing God had punished us, as we struggled desperately to survive, feed ourselves, and restore communities.

Human beings have faced mass starvation, somehow survived heinous tyrannical oppressive rulers, endured corrupt religious persecutions, armadas, inquisitions which have successfully controlled our minds with fear, terrorism, racial prejudice, genocidal extinction and waves upon waves of global misery - and it continues - all because of our collective fear. It is a cycle of fear, spun possibly originally, by living precariously on a volatile planet itself. 


And, more recent discoveries stemming from our ancient pre-history, reveal other terrors involved in daily life. The ancient pyramid in Crimea, which was built during the Jurassic period (as hard to believe as that is) means we would have lived among wild beasts who stalked us incessantly. 


Yet, just as adults are responsible for healing their dysfunction resulting from childhood abuse, we might heal humanity from those ancient terrors which are buried deep within our collective psyche just as the ancient cities lie at the bottom of the world's largest oceans. Since we know now that memory is carried in our DNA, we know that DNA also carries memories of our ancient terror and acts it out in all our fear-driven violence across the planet. 

This suggests that our collective human childhood has deep, buried memories from tragic events that wiped us out at least five times. It seems the stories of Noah and Gilgamesh and the Rig Veda's story of Manu and the fish are all true. And, there are others, so many others that we now know our ancient writings are loaded with real historical truth. 


On the other hand, through the discoveries of anthropologists we are getting a glimpse of an ancient Golden Age, a scientifically advanced time, even more advanced than we are today in many ways. We can see faintly we were once truly awesome.

While sorting through all this I can't help wonder if there is a way we could recapture that original essence of what it is to be human? Is it possible to return to a Golden Age, a time of creative prosperity, an atunement with the stars and galaxies, a knowledge of how the universe works along with a true and lasting peace?

It may be like surveying fragments of a shattered bowl and imagining what it might have looked like in its original unblemished state. Aren't we like that?  While we 
are aware of our global dysfunction, do we have any idea really who we were and potentially who we could be? Lately, we've even begun to ask where have we come from. We'd always assumed we were created, or evolved into being, right here on Earth, but there are those who suggest we came from another star system and have benevolent brothers and sisters, fully human, like us, among us now, helping us heal from our ancient nightmares.

Scientists have revealed the universe is holographic which suggests the whole is evident in each individual, microscopically.The whole world's modus operandi is revealed in the individual. For example, we know a severely traumatized person is psychologically fractured and dysfunctional. While broken, one can not envision one's potential. It eludes them and remains only in potential until he or she heals. Evidence of that individual's earlier trauma is revealed in its projection, shadowing his or her life. 


A person's potential emerges only once he or she has faced and transcended that earlier traumatic event, integrated it and become whole. Since wholeness is essential for empowerment and creativity, neither the individual or humanity can reach full functionality until all working parts, are working. Until then, the individual and humanity blindly limp along, weak, powerless, destructively exploiting others while fearfully hiding their deep hidden truth from others (and self) behind a mask. Until they awaken from their illusion, they remain stagnated in a state of perpetual fear, subconsciously fearing what happened to them would happen again. What is it we are all afraid of?


A fractured "self" is a broken soul, the human race is a broken people. As an individual reaches for healing and reintegration of its fractured self, humanity is also. 


Humanity is like that shattered ancient pottery, scattered across the planet. As we heal, become reintegrated and whole, we will begin to experience our power, grow and evolve. 


As I write this, Ezekiel 37:1-14 comes to mind, lending an image of a dead world, dry bones in the desert, into which God breathes life. It suggests that our way back to our Golden Age unity is one individual at a time until a wave of healed humanity forms and arises. In addition, healing our world happens as we each heal. As we learn to love ourselves, we become empowered and equipped to love others. There is no short cut to this. We can't evade our own inner work first.  


Through self-discovery, one becomes aware the outer behavior directly mirrors the inner spiritual damage which had been projected outwardly all of one's life. In short, we do what was done to us, but we don't remember what was done to us, nor are we aware of what we are doing. Thus, the cycle of abuse continues through eons of generations. 


Humanity, collectively, is doing that on a global stage.  This may be like Karl Jung's collective unconscious. We share in a long forgotten, subconscious memory of something terrible, traumatic, and utterly devastating. We know this because we have been projecting mirrored images of that buried memory all around the world, everywhere, in unimaginable horrific detail.  


It seems  there was a time back in the midnight of time when we might have known this and lived as one global family. Were we peaceful to each other back then, when we spoke one language, lived within one culture? 


So, to rewind back to the time before the shattering. It seems there was once a time when the human race was like a beautiful piece of fine china and something happened that shattered it into a million pieces and each of those pieces evolved separately. Over thousands of years, each piece evolved separately. 


The evidence that something so terrible once happened to us is in the fear that keeps us fighting and waring against each other - brother against brother - nation against nation. That fear that came in the wake of global disasters seems programmed in our DNA. And, rather than come together, our fear pulls us further apart threatening our planet's very survival.


Yet, despite whatever understanding archaeologists and anthropologists are offering us, we remain separated, split apart from each other.  We are still primitively divided by language and nations, highly competitive, and prejudiced, fearful of each other.  We know that if we remain fractured, continuing to injure further our once beautiful integrity, we will devolve further rather than take the next step in our planetary evolution.  


As much as we know we need to come together as one again, how do we bond together as one humanity, joined with the love in our hearts, our compassion for each other, our common hope, and shared breath?  


I stumbled across a thought - a simple, single one-liner kind of thought that has been simmering in the back of my mind for some time now that I'd like to share here.  It is a new spin on an ancient theme that cracks open the mystery and would point us in the right direction if we can unglue our minds from our misguided collectively believed fear-based guidance.  


For forever, we've individually and collectively been giving our power away to those we fear have something we want or those who control our destiny. We have projected our fear out into the universe on a god who has come to represent our ultimate authority. We have set up a system of thought (religion) that is a kind of idolatry. We are bowing down to something that doesn't exist in the way we think it does. We are looking for God in the wrong place. We have become a world of the blind leading the blind.  


If we really knew who God is, we would realize that God is asking us to do the opposite.  God is asking us to assume our own authority, be our own masters, draw God's power into our beings, and become powerful.  In that state of personal empowerment comes great vision, great wisdom, utterly wonderful intelligence and the power to love in the way Jesus taught us to love.  When we are our own authority, self empowered, we can love our enemy.  We can stop the reciprocity game - an eye for an eye.  That primitive reactionary defensive behavior stems from a terrible ancient fear - a fear that comes from the time when we were fractured, shattered into a million pieces, and scattered across the globe.


It is time for us to know: there is no one above us and no one below us. No one has authority over you or me and we have no authority over another. Each of us is sovereign beings, with the same rights and privileges of another. We are our own master and everyone else is his or her own master. There is no one who judges us, or controls us. There is no one who can destroy us because we can't be destroyed. Even death is only a doorway into another living. 


If we could deeply integrate those thoughts, our oppressive, and oppressing fear would dissolve. Without liberating our minds from fear, we remain subject to everyone else's fear. As it is now, our fear feeds another's fear in a self-perpetuating fashion inviting the other to the fear dance. That fear is a powerful phantom of our long oppression. It is as powerful and real as we have made it.  


Each fear thought feeds that collective phantom a little bit more.  Now, though we have created it, it controls us. It is in us - all of us - every one of us in our own way, because we are all cut from the same cloth. We are all acting out our ancient bondage to an ancient fear. Our personal dramas, community crime, political abuses, corporate exploitation, international conflicts all mirror that one collectively shared thought. As we all reenact that fear age after age, we are unconsciously attempting to eradicate it from our experience. We are afraid of something so deep that we can't seem to reach it to end it.  Whatever happened to us back in the midnight of time has left the entire human race in a perpetual state of posttraumatic stress syndrome.


Yes, we love and love deeply, passionately, and all long for that day when paradise will scoop us up and enfold us in her motherly arms.  Our longing is so dear, so precious.  We all long for that and seek it in our personal relationships, but that dark repressed fear snuffs out that light, drawing our world back into the nightmare.


We all share a collective nightmare from eons past. It is imprinted in our DNA and we have all shared that DNA, so we are already one family.  But, as masters of our own lives, autonomous, intelligent and self aware, even mindful of our thoughts and choices, we can reclaim our power and step away from our fear as we feel it rising up our spine. 


The future begs for a different reality than the misery we have thus induced and repetitively experienced. It is an insanity that has run its course.  It is time to end it. Just stop. Each one must put down his fear and choose courage. The planet's need for cleansing is equal to the cleansing our collective human soul needs.  

We are so marvelously loved by our Father and are part of our Father just as our own children are part of us.  We carry our Father's spirit in our heart, His love deep within our souls. We know on some level the sheer awesome power of His love and yet are afraid it would overwhelm us, overcome us - possibly destroy us.  Maybe we are afraid of who we really are.  Our vision has been stunted by a dimly lit consciousness for so long that the sun blinds us from our true sight. 


We need to know that His love, which is within us, is magnetic, resonating with the pulse, the OM, of the universe. It is incredibly powerful and capable of healing our world if we come together as one. As one body, loving bravely, we will courageously face down the epidemic forces of fear that still seek to control, manipulate, intimidate, and govern our lives, hijacking our sense of authority over our own lives and decisions, stealing our meager incomes by deceptive corporate advertising and multi-national conglomerates, which feed the gluttonous, yet empty, souls of mega millionaires.  


That totalitarian mammoth evil can be faced down when we really awaken to the truth that there is no one better than any one of us individually, or worse either. We are all our own masters. There is no authority over us. There is no hierarchy of authority. We are not just a peg on some ladder, desperately holding on for fear we'll be knocked off. We don't have to beg to be alive. We can unfurl our beautiful spiritual wings and soar in joy and freedom. We will as soon as we look into the eyes of another and realize that other is just as imprisoned by our collective fear as we are.  


Only our love let loose from our fearfully frozen hearts, can glue us back together. This will be released as we accept our self-mastery, claim our divine right of full authority over our lives, and take full responsibility for our own choices, as masters, autonomous human beings, reaching for a more evolved and richer life, for ourselves and our world.  Only then will we be free and able to free another. They are as afraid of us as we are of them. Yet, we are both the same. I carry the same ancient DNA in my body as you, you breathe the same air as I, we drink the same water, listen to the same news, fear the same fears, dream the same dreams.  


When we awaken, everyone else will awaken also. When we all are awake, we can move as one joyous family, freely, happily sharing our common resources, loving powerfully and passionately. When we are all awake we will heal our world.