A New Story: Rewriting the Future

Our true self is like that pearl of great price or treasure buried in a farmer's field. It's like a beautiful, glistening radiant diamond, carved and shaped and worn as the most precious jewel as a forever keepsake from a lover.  Only, the Lover is our beloved Father Creator and the diamond is our eternal spirit which he has always and will always love as His own self buried within us.  We were created in love and live in love.  We are beloved forever and always will be.

Yet, sometimes it just doesn't feel like that.  The past has darkened our hearts leaving an ashy footprint in the ruined days it caused us, and when we look into the future through the lens of the past, it looks just as bleak.  It's been a long time since love graced the doors of our hearts and life has been a long thankless, tedious, empty journey.  Where did the hope for a bright future go?  Where is the music that sang in the heart?

The past was only our perception anyway, just as the birth of the future will also be from this moment on.  How will it be?  Will it be darkened by the ashes of our past, or can we leave the past behind and create our future with new hope, a new vision. Without a new story, we will perpetuate the old one, chapter after chapter, year after year.  We will drag the old into the pristine new future, only to darken it too. It's time for a new story.

The new story is the one we write, not the one that was etched into our lives by others.  It will require courage, trust, faith, and a genuine, sincere, desire for something better, something new. It is our story.  It is our life.  It's time to cut the cords to the past.  It's over, so we have to let it go.  The future is ours to dream new life into being just as a fresh new canvas calls to our inner artist.  How beautiful do we want it to be?  How colorful, how alive, how radiant, how joyous?  What, where, when, how and with whom do we want to live our new life?  The possibilities are endless.  Life is long.  Life is good.  Life is joy. Life is a gift given to us by the great lover of life itself.  As love is the ultimate inspiration for creation, there is no situation that love can't remedy.  The solutions are endless - as endless as life itself and love itself.  It is all good.  All of it.  

A new hope dawns

You have no need to travel anywhere.  

Journey within yourself,

enter a mine of rubies and bathe

in the splendor of your own light.

 - Rumi

The times were a-changin' when Bob Dylan* sang to a whole generation awakening after the Second World War.  Today, the times have changed. 

While we continue to pick up the pieces of a fallen cultural empire, the revolution is complete. An ancient religious hierarchy which had controlled the western world is crumbling and now revealing a truth unseen in 20 centuries. Today its once suppressed and hidden message has been discovered revealing a timeless truth with unimaginable power in the daylight of our new age. 

When Dylan sang his prescient lyrics, the country was immersed in a counter-cultural call to end a bitter, ruthless, immoral and illegal war.  Courageous college students around the country stood up (well, actually sat in) to protest the war.  In their righteous call to end the war, they ripped off the government's covert political agendas revealing an astounding level of corruption. As they tore down systems of national and international exploitation, they effectively left no stone unturned.  Everything from national and foreign political agendas, health, environment, education were scrutinized and challenged.  No sacred cow was left unexamined.  

Then, as if heaven itself was herding the rebellious generation's mission to find light in the darkness, the Nag Hammadi, which had been found in the desert in 1947, was translated from Coptic into English. The translation shocked the Christian world.  It shed truth on the last remaining untouchable system of control - The Church. The authentic and original teachings and ministry of Jesus was revealed and is anything but what the church had taught over the centuries. 

In fact, it seems the church had gone to great pains to hide the truth.  It had effectively crucified Christ's teachings so badly that when the post-war generation began exposing its errant systems, the church began to lose its ability to guilt and control the masses, leaving a spiritual vacuum in the wake of its fall.  

Dark angels took hold in the decades that followed as the next generation staggered and stumbled in a spiritual void. Slowly and persistently, many continued to seek the truth amid the ruins of a theologically fallen spiritual empire only to discover -while the truth was hidden - it was always there. 

As the image of  the Good Shepherd painted on Catacomb Walls, where once persecuted Christians hid from their Roman oppressors, Christ stands in broad daylight and in full power to gather the people of the earth together in love and in power. (The irony is not lost on those of the new revelation and only drives home the ancient truth that what was hidden in the dark would one day be revealed in the light.)  

The Good Shepherd still lives, and delivers a message which resonates around the world in alignment with those of other ancient faiths.  Today, as the earth is hurtling on a collision course to self-destruction, if the world now has ears to hear and eyes to see the power in this spiritual truth tragedy may be averted.

The following is from the Gospel of Thomas, verse 3, in the Nag Hammadi:

"Jesus said, If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you.  If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you.  Rather, the kingdom of God is inside of you, and it is outside of you.  When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons (and daughters) of the living father.  But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

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Bob Dylan's The Times are A-Changin:

Living in Love

Artwork: Goxwa Borg

Peace is born within the silence of our minds. As Martin Luther once wrote, the mind is a war zone and we struggle for peace there first. It is always there.

Tragically, too often peace is lost when we are distracted by fears, worries and the million other thoughts that bombard us. They overtake us.  While we fight them, struggle to gain control over them with the use of alcohol or drugs - prescription or otherwise - to dull their power to inflict emotional pain, they ultimately cause us to suffer.  This is Buddha's definition of suffering and its root cause.  There is another way to peace and relief from the suffering for which all the great masters and teachers as Buddha, Christ, Krishna and the Yogis advocate.  That way is simple. We can all do it. We all do it every day, yet too many of us just don't know it. The masters invite us simply to breathe and enter the rich, palatable silence within. Christ calls this an inner kingdom, a vibrant and beautiful place of encountering the divine knowing.

Breathing slowly amid incoming thoughts, yet mindfully hearing them, even briefly lingering with them before departing again into the silence, we begin the way into the "kingdom within."  Breathing deeply, inhaling, exhaling while directing the mind, as a plane slowly lifts off from a busy airport, softly an inner space is finally reached. Imagine the deep silence of space outside the earth's orbit. While the same thoughts or even more thoughts and worries attempt to reach the mind as heat-seeking missiles would search and destroy the peace, once the outer ring is reached, it's too late for the invasive thoughts. We've reached the quiet inner plane of mindfulness where thoughts cannot enter or contaminate the peace.  Eventually, the outer mind - often called the ego or "monkey mind," dims into the distance.

Quieter now, having lost the power to distract, thoughts sound more like a distant radio in a neighbor's garage. It becomes easier to tune into the interior plane and rest in that quiet. Time seems also to disappear.  While thoughts will return occasionally, we can steer our minds away from them, concentrating on a word or thought-feeling, which keep our minds on course by pushing consciousness deeper into the silence. This may be a bit of a process for a while, but eventually, the thoughts dim and peace is reached. As a cool breeze and warm embrace from a lover, we are overcome by peace. The longer we remain in the silence, the deeper the peace.  It can last the entire day until we return to the silence. 

Rapt in peace, now we respond to daily life with a calm we didn't have before. Decisions are made with more clarity, mindfully and intentionally on behalf of retaining that peace.  Love becomes an easier choice to make. That place of peace we'd encountered and lingered in earlier in the day is recalled throughout the day. Small minor thought corrections are made throughout the day to retain that inner peace. We find ourselves often turning away peace-sabotaging thoughts. This is just the beginning of entry into the presence of the Divine, the peace of Christ. 

This is the peace of Christ that surpasses all understanding.  It becomes an experiential even intuitive knowing rather than a deductive theologically rational understanding.  You don't need a college education to enter the peace of God.  All you need is the unwillingness to be swamped and controlled by the world's cacophonous control and predatory mind-sweeping any longer.  This is freedom, ultimate freedom.  The thoughts are generated by the world's reach into your mind. 

The great masters and yogis call us to still our thoughts for just a while until we gain control of our minds - and consciousness - through that mindful awareness.  Then we can choose what we want to think about and what we want to avoid. Once we can do this, we can think with our bodies, sense how thoughts make us feel.  Does a thought make us feel lighter, happier, more inspired, more motivated, calmer?  Or, does it make us feel tense, frustrated, slower, sadder, apathetic, somehow dimmer?  As we regain the power of choice over our thoughts we learn to choose to release our power into all the choices we make.  This is what it is to be a powerful being.  

Jesus said we are all sons and daughters of God.  He said we could be like Him, if we so chose.  He did not ask us to worship him, He did not come to create a new religion. He came to teach us how to unplug from the world's control by stilling our minds until we could gain control of them and make more conscious and loving decisions, including reaching for a more enlightened dimension far beyond this one.  When we enter into the divine presence, we can become instruments of peace and that will change our lives and the world. We can become troubadours of peace, ambassadors of love by gently impacting life itself with our peace.  

Maybe, we can bring a little bit of heaven to earth with each breath. Maybe, we can just imagine a world as one, at peace.

True peace awakens in love

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: 

not as the world giveth, give I unto you.

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

   John 14:27 King James Version (KJV)

As global political tensions sweep across nations in cresting waves of fear as palatable and dense as the toxic air pollution seeping into our bodies, minds, hearts and homes all of life as we know it is threatened. 

This dark smog of fear gnaws at the hearts and minds of everyone, slowly eroding any hope for happiness as it tempts each one's sanity with an outlook so bleak many find themselves descending into suicide's bitter pit of despair.  This global poison is everywhere.  

Survival for each of us, as it is for all of us, depends not on our denial, or optimism, or community organizing or even democratic caucuses. It is an infection of the mind with no medical remedy.  It is most certainly evil as wicked as humanity's ancient foe.

Yet, there is an antidote that would free each mind from its cold, grip of despair.

It is peace. It is the peace finally penetrating a landscape the brutal cacophony of war pummeled with gunfire, bombing, and screams of terror. It is even in the eerie silence after all the men have gone home when the battle is finally over.  It is the morning after, when a soft rain washes the blood of death away, readying the land for the lark and nature's recovery.  And, yet, that is only an outer peace.  As all outer events are first born in the heart, for there to be peace anywhere, it has to begin in the mind. 

When Jesus breathes His peace on His disciples before His final departure, He says His peace is not like the peace after a war.  He is describing the most important peace, one that has the power to prevent wars, neighborhood gang violence, drug addiction, and so much more.  If each mind could find this peace, we would evolve into a peaceful world.

His peace is the gentle breath of peace which calms the heart when the mind finally is reassured that only love is real and that self-condemnation and judgment destroys our individual self-determination and self-valuing. It is that inner destruction that breaks down our inner peace, creating a war zone in our minds. So, the remedy is in realizing the world spins on judgment, not love, and we have been infected with its lies.  It is a frothy place of deception, corruption and predatory exploitation of innocence.

It is not eternal or divine reality.  It is only our collective illusion. Blindly, we all play a part in that global theater.  But, what if we could awaken and know, really know, that this world is NOT real and that there is something, somewhere that is.  It is that place of love and peace that Jesus is steering us to.

His peace comes when you realize and know in the furthest recesses of your soul, there is another world that is real and that world only loves.  Once you realize this, you will be able to cast off all your worry, fear and judgment. To embrace this truth - that love is the fresh air of our real world - the world's power to control our minds by feeding us the poison of anxiety, fear, and violence, is eliminated.  It melts as fast at the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.

Then, you can look across your inner mind and breathe in the peace of the silence where once the terror of wrong thinking, of self-judgment, where once the thoughts of controlling others seeped into your mind and caused you so much despair, and know you are finally free.  Jesus' peace is liberation. It frees your mind from anyone else's control of you and sends away all your fears, anxieties and worries. 

As you take back control of your mind, you may want to sit in meditation and put in place an inner watchtower to guard your mind against the outer world's control of it through judgment.

Jesus' message was never about religion. It was always about peace which prevails in the knowledge that while you are in this world, you are not of it.  You are from a place that is real and you can return whenever you choose to love yourself and others.  This peace is compassion, first for yourself and then for others.