Powerful compassion

They were the darkest of times, streaked with blood and fear, a terrible time when children died in concentraton camps, gassed to death alongside their parents and grandparents and siblings.  Death held its grip over Poland and all of Europe during the 1930s and 40s.  

Many films have been made about the soldiers who fought to free Europe from Nazi Germany's hate-filled hold.  Young, strong mud-clad male heroes have come to represent the opposing side of that dark conflict. Yet it was a young Polish Catholic woman, Irene Sendler (1910 - 2008), who faced one of history's most heinous political regimes, to whisk little children to safety in Warsaw, Poland. 

She was not much more than a girl herself as she risked death daily to smuggle children out of Poland during the Nazi occupation.  As much as she feared the probability of torture, even death, she couldn't bear that children would be hauled off to camps where they would starve until death came in a gas chamber.  

It's too horrible to think about, even remember.  It was a living nightmare on the big screen of real life. It was hideous and unimaginable what prejudice and hatred could manage to inflict on such precious innocence.  It was a cancer of the human body, one so pernicious that it would take the power of compassion fueled by a kind of superhuman vision, courage, persistance, physical and moral strength to overcome.

Sendler was a social worker and a member of the Zegota resistance organization who worked undercover to rescue Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto.  Armed only with her strong, defiant human compassion, she slipped into a borrowed nurse's role to sneak into Warsaw's ghetto where she persuaded frightened Jewish Polish parents to let their children go to her, to save their lives.  After the children were safely in her care,  she and her resistence group provided them with false documents and sheltering in individual and group childrens homes outside of Warsaw. She is credited with helping to save more than 2500 children.  

She was caught. The Nazi's were on to her skilled smuggling of the children out of Warsaw. Even under extreme torture and certain death, she still wouldn't give up the lists of their names and whereabouts, which she kept in a jar.  She was sentenced to the gas chamber, but as she was being led to her death, she was rescued by members of the resistance organization who managed to bribe a guard for her freedom.

After the war, she attempted to rejoin the children with their parents, but found that most of their parents had died in the camps.


Her simple courage is an amazing testament to the power of one woman's depth of human compassion.  It was stronger than the fear that was everywhere then.  It was stronger than the probability of torture and death.  During her travails, she lost two unborn babies through miscarriage.  Her personal sacrifice was great - monumentally huge - and yet her heart could not have done otherwise. It was even greater.

We can only pray that we also would have hearts that strong and determined. None of us know the future, what may lay in wait for us or our world, but if we prepare our hearts, free ourselves of any ego-based prejudice, selfishness, hatred and fear, we will at the very least prepare the good soil for when heaven calls us into the sacred conflict.  What price would we pay for the children?  What price are we willing to pay right now, today, in our sick, spiritually poisoned world? The evil of this time is less obvious, but children's souls are being stolen right in front of our eyes every day, every moment of every day.  

When we wake up we will see and when we see we will act. We must all wake up and Irene Sendler is one light in this long dark night which may help us see through a new lens.

A Communion of One

We are entering a new era, a new world, in which we are realizing that we are all connected as one. We always have been.  At the center of each of us is a kind of vast spiritual oasis, which is shared identically by all of us. While this idea may seem strange at first, we are realizing that inner spiritual place is actually in harmony with the one universal life force who is an unimaginably loving, creative and intelligent being, of whom we are all part.


We are all connected on this web of life - to each other and to our Creator - all seven billion of us resonating in a beautiful love song together, a human symphony of love around the world. 


Today, that new world is emerging in this growing awareness that we are one being - all of us together - and are immersed and part of one universal Self. It is the essence - the spirit - the soul - the source of our individual truest self - and is the same spiritual substance in all of us. It is alive and magnetic, eternal and powerful and wonderfully cohesive. Through it we are united with each other and with our Creator, the Great I am. 

While many of us are in harmony with each other and the Creator, sadly some of us are discordant noisemakers, disturbing the peace in wars, exploitation, cruelty, prejudice, greed and fear-based selfishness - all symptoms of a state of ignorance.  Those who are out of sync with the love, can tune in anytime and they will - I honestly believe they will - when they feel and experience the love they so desperately need from us - each of us - all of us.

Together we can end oppression, inequity, poverty, cruelty and help each other back onto our feet and help each other into the most creative expression possible.  The world needs each voice, each heart and each and every life if we are to become a fully conscious awakened people.


Many of us think we are our thoughts. We strive to keep our minds busy, contemplating, solving complex problems, reading and watching television.  Our thoughts are not who we are, nor are our emotions, which stem from our thoughts.  The Great I am is beyond our thoughts which divide us but is in the love which unites us.

Beyond all the noise of our over active minds is a great silence and a kind of vast inner space.  If we imagine lighting a candle within that inner space, and enter into that silence, into that vastness - even for just a few minutes every day - we will feel a change, a newness, a freshness and new vitality.  And, if we can do this everyday -  ideally at the same time everyday - we will grow to love this time of no time, no space, no thing. We will experience peace and love. In that love, we will find great joy and peace.  But, the funny thing is we may not realize it until we've come out of that special time.


That's just the beginning, but an important beginning.  Eventually, we will experience whatever it is we're meant to experience personally during that time.  If we experience love, even the tiniest bit, then we have experienced God, the Beloved. We will experience Beingness as well, both aspects of God, the yin and yang of divinity, the feminine and masculine - the doing and the being of God and of ourselves, also. We may realize that we were indeed made in God's image, an image of both aspects of deity, and an image of perfection in that Love/Being.


Our Creator, the Beloved, is loving through our hearts and is in that love as well.  With that same love, the Great I am created the universe and is still creating the universe and is inviting us all to join in that love-creation, in the great communion of souls who are all One in Him. Life is sacred, more precious than we have ever realized and each one of us is cherished by God more than we can comprehend. As we honor another, we honor God who is in that other and who is also simultaneously in us. If we can love ourselves, we will love others because we are the same One.

When we can get beyond our fear and step around that wall we've built inside ourselves to separate ourselves from another, we will open our eyes and hearts to embrace each other and love each other as God loves - all of us - with no exception.

A Communion of ONE, part 2

Behold, I stand at the door, 

and knock: 

if any man hear my voice, 

and open the door, 

I will come in to him, 

and will sup with him,

and he with me.

Revelation 3:20 (KJV)

You have within you an invisible doorway, a "narrow gate," that enters into your sacred soul, your inner sanctum, that space where you commune with God and your higher self.  It is your own entrance into eternity.  Right now it may only be a closet of space.  But, your consciousness is so powerful that when you simply consider and imagine such a place, your mind can find the soft invisible entrance behind your physical heart. And, without fail, as you search, you will find it and are able to enter.  

As you enter it, you open also the door into the Christ consciousness, and enter a space which also opens into an infinity of consciousness. Unlike places in our world, you cannot bring weapons, defenses, blood feuds, anger, hatred, jealousy, fear into this space. In a sense, it has a filtering system that these negative emotions cannot enter. You will leave them at the door.

If you've ever been angry and tried to center yourself, you know that those heavy emotions are a huge distraction to entering your own inner holy of holies. If you find, by chance, that it is a clear day for you emotionally, if you are feeling good and at peace, you may attempt to enter and if you are lucky enough to enter, you will encounter total acceptance, love, peace and a sense of universal presence. It may take a few attempts and this is where discipline is important. Try to empty your thought bin, your mind racing to be successful. Those are thoughts of the external world and they are only a deterrant in this one. It is a space of just letting go and letting it be. It is a space of just being present. Just show up and watch.

It is the realm of the Christ consciousness and we can invite the graciousness of Christ to reveal himself, to speak to us. He is there and he will speak to you if you are open to his voice. You hear him whether or not you know it. You may think his voice is your voice, and in a funny way, his voice is your voice. You just don't realize it yet.

Try to recognize his voice separately from all the other voices from others in your life.  He has a distinctive message and a presence that almost feels closer to you than you are to yourself. (A quality St. Augustine mentioned also.) His voice calms you, affirms you, loves you and teaches you how to fly.  He will not restrain or restrict you.  

He will tell you that you have free will and any automated behavior of yours, any trained route or learned behavior, any automatic reactions that you have or do because you think you should, needs to be reevaluated.  He will invite you to be more authentic than you have ever been. He will invite you to think about what you think about because of the power inherent in your thought.  He will ask you to become more conscious in general about your thoughts, actions, life choices. 

He will give you permission and even the courage to be yourself, true to your own heart. He will tell you that you are free to be who you were always meant to be.  He will tell you that you are loved beyond your wildest imagination and that when you realize that, drink deeply of that cup of awareness, you will finally find that joy, that peace, that love that passes earthly standards.  

You will need a lot less from the outside world.  You may even want to return.  He will knock.  He will call.  Eventually you will find that what you experience in that sacred inner place is what we all experience.  You will also hear his voice and you may find that he is saying the same things to all of us.  We are all beloved.  We are all free.  We are all children of God, sons and daughters of God.  

In that awareness, we enter into a deeper chamber, where he is also, but it is that space that all our souls enter.  It is endless, beautiful and as spacious as the starry night sky and perhaps even more beautiful. 

Time to Wake Up

A few days ago, I ran this video on Tiger Lilies and later chose not to include it in the "Communion of One" post because it came from a quantum mechanics perspective rather than the mystical / spiritual paradign I wanted to share.  However, it is interesting and may be relevant to this topic. So, I am reposting it for your interest.  Feel free to share your thoughts.

I'd love to hear what YOU think.

The kingdom within

Inside that universe of inexplicable peace and love you encounter as you slip through the stargate, is more than your little limited life could ever grasp and yet you feel compelled to stay and explore. 

This love (for lack of a better word) is an inside job and it only asks for your courage to set sail in your imagination to find it - not out there somewhere - but within the cave, deep underwater, just below your very human, physical heart. God is found through that inner portal, that spiritual gateway. The real stargate is finally discovered at the end of your exhaustion, when you finally put down the sword defending your false self, stewing in a deeply profound sense of separateness. It was a false-life, a mask which you once donned to appease your parents or school tyrants or our society as a whole.

But, it was a false identity generated out of that initial rejection by your parents and other "gods" of your early world. In your own defense, you didn’t know it was a self-defense mechanism to allow you to survive in the beginning. Later, your authentic being railed against it in all kind of life-sabotaging ways that spun you mercilessly all of your life.

You became a slave to those who first instilled the need for you to be other than that beautiful, innocent, loving child of light who you were born to be. Later you became a slave (enabler) to others who resembled the original offenders. If those original offenders taught you to be a slave to their selfishness, then you were taught to be a slave in general. The world hates slaves in its love of pride, greed, power and control, and so it hated you.

The pain grew so intense that it finally broke open the mask's shell, allowing the child to finally step into life. This child, is the christ self born in that moment of awareness. Perhaps in a stable on a cold night, hunted by the power brokers of your life, but it is life, real life and in it is your truth, your potential and eventually, your joy and creativity.

True integrity and integration finally comes when that original self awakens and takes the helm of your life, at the birth of the child. At the revealing of your true courage and light and power, you defeat or foil the plans of all those who had required you to wear the mask of the false self. They run like rats back into the walls of their safe coffins of spiritual paralysis. But, this doesn't come easily. The birth of the real self may be like the birth of your first child. It comes after what seems like ages of spiritual labor. There is no other way into heaven, however.

It comes when you are finally sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. It finally arrives when you tire of the game played and fought among others who also have blindly sought life among the dead, when you surrender. By grace, you are defeated at that useless pursuit and in that moment of agony, as your false self lay writhing and dying on the battlefield of your life, a soft whimper arises from somewhere deep within you, yet you are too lost and forlorn to hear it or to attend to it. Then, a prayer explodes within your hope. In one last final gasp, you cry out to heaven for help.

Now the real journey begins. Blindly you surrender, you offer up your dead self in exchange for peace, for relief of the agony of searching. The false self cannot carry on the fight any longer. Even shame and pride have lost their power and appeal. If you are even dimly aware, perhaps even still a bit blind, you can see, through your tears, an inner ghost, a dim, unfocused someone holding out his hand to you.

Blinking away the tears, maybe you doubt what you just saw within, but someone even deeper within you has seen it and bows before this beautiful presence who has come to welcome you through the gate, through the portal into all that is real, all that ever was and ever will be real. He says to look for the gateway, which he has previewed for you, in that imaginal space behind your heart and slightly below it.

It's a soft place your mind sounds out. You are still blind, yet you see. You realize there is so much more than you ever knew. You gently press against it as it slowly opens like doors on Star Trek's starship Enterprise. As you slip through it into the vast starlight stretching endlessly before you, you feel electric and completely unafraid. Perhaps it's the velvety blanket of quiet into which you submerge yourself that softly wraps you in its love. You know that all our hearts open into this same universe. You know that we are all one with this Oneness.

While you know you must eventually shift your mind back into the outer dimension, the stage on which we all are stars, you will return back to this space within. You make a mental note to come back often. It is the new frontier and a very compelling and real one. You wonder if your parents, grand parents, old lovers and others, are there too, within that sea of consciousness that stretches forever. But, for now His presence is there and that is more than enough.

The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'here it is,' or 'there it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you.

Luke 17:21

Stargate to a dream

An ancient cosmic stargate opens, revealing a magnificent array of universal light, love, joy, power and an abounding, outpouring of potential, an opportunity unlike any other to step into authentic life and real peace. 

Open before us is the great awakening, stretching through our collective history far into the deepest reaches of time in a softly, invisible, even subtle syncopation of breath, rhythmically surging, spiraling us forward, together and individually.  We have sought this, together and individually, from the beginning.  We looked for it in the stars.  We sought it in our poetry, art, music, and in all our human relationships.  Something inside us, perhaps a kind of innate spiritual program, hummed within us throughout our time here, but we thought it was somewhere else, out there somewhere, and we built rocket ships to the moon, space probes to find that unnamed someone or something, out there.  We felt alone, very alone. 

But, we were looking in the wrong place.  It's just that simple. We are not alone.  We were never alone. We are all together on this gorgeous ride through time-space and yet the journey is not what you think.  It's not a space shuttle to another galaxy.  It's a plunge down through the inner rabbit hole of your heart, through a very real stargate within your own soul, awaiting your discovery just behind and slightly below your own physical heart. 

It lies within your spiritual (causal) body, which is one with your physical body while you are alive  It's a soft place your mind sounds out.  You are still blind, yet you see. You realize there is so much more than you ever knew. You gently press against it in your imagination and it slowly opens like doors on Star Trek's starship Enterprise. 

As you slip through this imaginal stargate, which is very real on a spiritual level, you enter a vast universe stretching endlessly before you. You feel electric and completely unafraid.  Perhaps it's the velvety blanket of quiet into which you immerse yourself that softly embraces you in its love. You know that all our hearts open into this same universe.  You know that we are all one with this Oneness. 

This inner universe, accessible through that stargate, is another kind of space, twinkling with a billion stars, in the presence of authentic being, a being in which we are all intimately woven together, yet distinct, who you sense you will come to know more with each subsequent imaginal crossing through that stargate.  While suspended in an inner sea of love, you encounter your own reality as one with the whole.  You never were alone and in that fleeting awareness, now only begun, you realize you are loved more tenderly and compassionately than you ever knew possible.  

Starlight dance

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness 

was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God 

moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, 

"Let there be light: and there was light."

Genesis 1

We all may be familiar with these stirring opening sentences to Genesis, yet there is something so profound right there pointing to the scientific veracity of these ancient words describing how life began. Yes, God, created it all, but it's how God created life here that just overwhelms me.

Ancient and modern mysticism has revealed that God's love, God's creative, powerful love is the source of light and is comprised of God's wisdom and spirit / will. Light has an energetic (creative) quality and that energy is comprised of love. In short, love has a power to it and that power radiates as light. Certainly that light is not the light of the sun, yet surely it lit the sun which continues to bring life to our earth. It penetrates every atom, every subatomic particle, creates photons and leads to photosynthesis. It makes life. That seems so simple and yet really it transcends our minds ability to comprehend something so awesome. God's creative power is a love which is even brighter than the sun. 

For us, life always was and always will be nothing short of an awesome miracle. Yet, love is even more a miracle. Love is a miracle begetting the miracle of life. In creation is both action and substance, born of spirit and power coalescing, male and female polarities each essentially co-creating, together. Love is both the means to creation and the gift of creation. It is the way, the truth and life itself. And, even if we may not really understand love or life, we can feel it, touch it, hold it, experience it and even become it. 

Despite this awesome, gorgeous life all around us that we all share on this earth, there are too many times when we don't stop to gaze up at the starry canopy in childlike awe and wonder gratefully at the miraculous cosmic light show dancing quietly above us. 

Why are we too busy, too worried about things that we miss it? Why are we unwilling and unable to enter into God's great miracle of love, the doorway through which we enter authentic life, that tangible experience of starlight? What could be so important in our lives that we would miss this light show going on both above us in the cosmos and within us in our own hearts, where the essence of life sleeps awaiting our entrance to the dance floor of life? We all seem so serious that we lose the sweetness of engaging in the experience of awe we might feel, the magic, the joy, the beauty, the sheer thrill to be alive. We don't dance wildly in love by the moonlight anymore, do we? Our ancient forebears gathered at the end of the day together, around the fire, and danced, and sang and celebrated life in love together.

It seems an epidemic of apathetic, dull seriousness has become a plaque upon our houses, all neighborhoods and nations, cultures and religions. Long, tightly drawn faces, of those would-be religious devotees, striving to follow the laws of their religions, trying to pour their magnificent beautiful fluid spirits into tiny frozen boxes formed by laws written thousands of years ago until their hearts are so hard, their minds so dim, their lives so barren, so devoid of light, too stern to smile and laugh and sing that they can no longer gasp in awe at the beauty of all this light and life and love above and around and within them. 


Since the very essence of the law flows out of God's great wise heart, out of God's love and light, to meet the requirements of the law, to even enter into the most sincere obedience, we would follow with courage, rather than with fear-based control. (However, this is of a higher school of human spiritual development and does not imply that we should fall away from those guidelines the law sets up, but rather to embrace the great creator / lover beyond the laws.) 


It's a matter of perspective.  Love is expansive, legalism is reductive and diminishing.  Love wouldn't throw away or deliberately disobey the law, yet it would reach to the source of it. St. Paul suggests that to live in love would result in obeying "the law." Even though the goal is to love, the result would include the result legalism seeks as well, only it takes the human spirit into a realm to which law - or the subservient spirit of blind obedience -  doesn't open.

Millennia ago, we learned that love was a higher, more evolved revelation, the awareness of which stemmed from a kind of "higher heaven" which trumped and cancelled out religion's stern, rigid, fear-based controlling law. Love is the substance of consciousness. All of life, right down to a single cell, is created with and by that consciousness. It is both the means and reason for life itself. The gift of love and authentic life can only be received in a state of perfect freedom at a higher consciousness, a higher frequency. Clearly perfect freedom is a result of living without fear and so it follows that the joyous experience of love requires a great deal of courage. This life of love which we all seek asks a lot of us, but most of all is an openness to facing the fear that inhibits our courage. 


Yet, even more wonderfully, it seems that love is so gratuitous, so creative, so powerful and alchemical that with only a tiny bit of it in our consciousness, perhaps only with a flickering faith in the possibility of that love, which we may only imagine right now in this moment, we would be able to sift through and slip out of the grasp of that old fear-based religiosity and world view that holds the world frozen and lifeless in spiritual / psychological / economic poverty, slavery and war.


The letter of 1 John (4:18) says, "There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear because fear has torment. He that fears is not made perfect in love." 

Simply, fear stems from the idea that one will be punished, tortured, killed if he follows his heart that might challenge the status quo, enforced ruthlessly by the world's power brokers.  Which is a worse death: to live bound and shackled in a living death or to walk head up, courageously to the tune of your own heart?  You decide.  As long as we live oppressed and kept low by those who we allow to control and enslave us by our fear of their reaction to us, we are never going to grow up into the full stature of our inborn, innate divinity that is begging to be born in us and across the planet today.

If we could live by the light of God's awesome love, which he has given to us out of his great cosmic heart, poured into our human hearts to share with each other - heart to heart - arm in arm - in a smile, in a handshake, from a kiss to passionate love making, we just might taste heaven on earth. It's all there and it's all love. Pure joy. What a magnificent gift this love is that makes us want to sing in the rain and laugh in the sun. Just to feel life coming and going, to hold an elderly man's hand as he passes out of this life and to caress a newborn entering it, is a cosmic honor, a gift of God whose love has given us the light of consciousness along with the promise that this is all unending, the light cannot be extinguished, nor can the light of our souls.

The new year waxing in today is rich with promise, abounding in hope for a greater abundance of authentic living with more joy for every stage of our lives, for all of us, equally. Although just an imaginary time line, this sense of new beginning is deeply embedded in our collective awareness. Here - now - is the opportunity to look forward to a newborn opportunity to live more joyously, more abundantly, less materialistically, more authentically in love with all of life, large and small, macro and micro cosmically.

Maybe we could laugh more, sing often, tell our children nursery rhymes again and sing them to sleep with lullabies. We could turn off our televisions and cut back on our time on the computer. We could play games, go for walks, talk to each other, play with each other and love each other. We could do with a lot less guilt and fear and with a lot more free abandon. 

Maybe this year we could all take a deep breath, exhale all the heavy stuff that drags our spirits down, turns smiles into frowns, replaces the buoyancy of a happy day with a grievous burden. 

It's a choice. Joy is a choice. Laughter, play, happiness and love are all choices. We can each choose our thoughts. We are not victims. We can free ourselves of those heavy thoughts and replace them with beautiful hopes and dreams. We are all free - no matter where we live or under what conditions. We are all free to choose our thoughts and in that choice, in that very simple one-second choice, we choose life or death. I know that we all know this, but today as we embrace the hope a new beginning offers us all, a little reminding is always welcome. We can embrace the awe, receive the light and allow more creation into our lives. 

Today and everyday, we can choose joy and freedom and love and light. And for that choice, I am most grateful, most joyfully, radiantly grateful to our creator for this grand adventure, this poetic, romantic, beautiful journey of life through time on this radiant earth and this graced opportunity to love with all my heart even as I sing in the rain amid the wild quacking of ducks in the creek where I walk. My only hope is that we all would choose to be less serious and just a little bit more lavish with our laughter and joy.