Honoring the Beloved

                              Commitment to another is impossible without commitment first to self. 
                              Those who try to act in a selfless way are putting the cart before the horse. 
                              Embrace the self first and then you can go beyond it. It is the ultimate
                              surrender to the divine within.

                             The beloved comes into being with the commitment to self. 
                             He or she manifests outwardly as soon as that commitment is
                             trustworthy. Then the outer commitment and the inner one go together. 
                             In worshippnig the beloved, one worships the divine self that lives in
                             many bodies.  This is sacred relationship.  Few meet the beloved in this life
                             for few have learned to honor themselves and heal from the inside out. *  

Life is an awesome magical mystery tour, a rich and challenging adventure in which we draw to ourselves that which matches what and who we are.  Whatever is challenging us invites us to overcome an existing (and sometimes limiting) belief we have about ourselves.  Like the thorn in the lion's paw, those problems require us to find and remove the belief that's coloring our view of the situation.  Those very challenges are the mountains in our lives that we can move.

We've all internalized what others have said to us and how others have defined us.  If those limiting beliefs we hold are not helping us fill our lives with pure joy, love, abundance and enlightenment, we need to forgive them, cast them out. Often what we think someone has done to us, is really only a mirror of what we either believe we deserve or what we are also doing to another.  We are either mirroring someone else or they are mirroring us.

Much of our time is spent jousting with windmills, thinking we've been injured and are consequently victims when that feeling of injury is only our perspective, our interpretation and a thought we assigned to an action which we had also drawn to ourselves. All of us are being invited to change our perspectives of being victims of circumstances, take responsibility for those events and forgive ourselves (and those to whom we assign blame) for the less than desirable events that are sabotaging our joy.

All moderm psychology (and eastern spirituality) invites us to do a thorough and deep cleaning of our beliefs with the best cleansing agent known to mankind:  forgiveness. Only through forgiveness, expressed in our willingness to forgive the one whom we feel has injured us, that we are healed and empowered. 

Paul Ferrini, author of the above You Tube, is one of my favorite mystical teachers.  He has written the timeless Reflections of the Christ Mind series, which I love and hope will inspire you.  

Enjoy.

*The Silence of the Heart,  Paul Ferrini, p. 43-44.

A Wonderfully Wise Man

Everything in the universe constantly gives off an energy pattern

of a specific frequency that remains for all time

and can be read by those who know how. 

Every word, deed, and intention creates a permanent record. 

Every thought is known and recorded forever. 

There are no secrets; nothing is hidden, nor can it be. 

            Our spirits are naked in time for all to see -

everyone's life, finally, is accountable to the unvierse. *

- David R. Hawkins, M.D, Ph.D

The late David R. Hawkins was one of the world's most awakened, enlightened human beings in the good company of civilization's greatest mystics, saints and wisemen.  He left a considerable amount of information on consciousness rising and how a raised level of consciousness combined with your desired outcome, intention, actually causes that which is in your mind to materialize. 

By raising our consciousness level, we increase our power to attract our intentions into our lives.  Perhaps we always knew this, but the actual way to do it has eluded us or confused those who equated spiritual development with religion and thus were lost in the diverse methods promulgated by the many different world religions. 

Hawkins furthered the science of "applied kinesiology" as a means of determining the truthfulness and accuracy of a statement using muscle testing and a system of numbers from 1 - 1000.  He also used it as way of measuring levels of spiritual maturity (i.e. Hawkins himself was a 1000) It's a vast new science which measures an individual's level of  enlightenment using a "map of consciousness" which Hawkins developed.  This map helps those seeking to identify where they are on the consciousness rising scale and what is the next step. This method assists the spiritual seeker on the path to enlightenment. 

Hawkins' applied kinesiology identifies those who are destructive, harmful to life and those who are constructive, helpful. For example, those who are the least enlightened (and most destructive) are often immersed in heavy emotional turmoil or illness and are often angry, violent, selfish and untruthful and may score below 100 on Hawkins' map. Those who are loving and generous, patient and seeking enlightenment would show up higher on the scale at 500 or above.  Love's number is 500. Liberty, freedom and democracy score a 700 as does the United States' Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Abe Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  We all land somewhere on that scale which is a powerful tool to help us grow up spiritually.  More information about this is in his book, Power vs. Force.

On this short You-Tube, whenever Hawkins mentions numbers he is referring to that scale.  His idea takes Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development and Eric Erickson's scale of behavioral evolution to a whole new level.  This is only a tiny sampling of Hawkins' wisdom. There is much more available at Amazon, Powell's books, your public library and on You-Tube. 

*  Power vs. Force, p. 149; (Hay House, 2002)

Lighting the World

We all carry within us an inner lamp, drawing from a limitless well of light, which we can access from within our imagination. That light is our spiritual light, the source of our being, our creativity, our "goodness." The light in you shines out into the world, merging with the light of all others.  The urgency to uplift our hurting world begs us to discover and turn up our inner lanterns.

Can you see it, radiantly glowing within the inner chamber of your mind?  When you catch sight of it, it dances, glowing brighter as you look at it. It almost rejoices at your consciousness peeking at it as if it's waited millenia for you to find it. The very act of looking at it, seems to delight it and it responds by glowing brighter.  That lamp, placed within your soul from the beginning of time, is fueled by the One who is source of all that is. 

This One who is all that is and source of all that is, is both genius and energy of creation. The One is the ultimate consciousness of creation, ultimate intelligence, power and perfection.  And, in the absence of a better word, both Creator and substance of creation are love.  Intellectually we understand "love" as that which links people and which uplifts us, fills us with inspiration, joy, hope and meaning. It is also what leads us to be better people, more loving, more generous, less selfish. While this quality of love can be felt, experienced in the soul of our being, it is also the ultimate quality and power of creation, cohering thought with matter to create, even empowering thought with focused, intentional emotion for healing.  

Love feels good because it leads us to create more life, which we were created to do. It is that inner flame flaring forth. It is the upsurging of creative light, energy and power from that inner well. It is the spiritual blood in our veins and it always moves outwardly, flowing away from its source, toward life, toward others.  It also sings out loud to uplift, heal, embrace, comfort and embrace.

Love is good because it is positively charged, proactive, creative and life-building, rather than destructive.  It actually has an energy, a vibration which we can feel. And, it feels good. When we feel it, it means we are working with and in alignment with our creator, which is our destiny.  It is truth. It is authentic reality.

Perhaps most of all, love is wise.  It contains an inspired intelligence which offers vision and guidance in how to love others.  To simply love, blindly, may leave one vulnerable resulting in being a servant to evil.  To authentically love, is to love wisely, potently with the intelligence inherent in divine love.  Wise love helps you see what you need to see and how to focus your intention to love, to heal, and to uplift another. 

It may know why the other is disconnected from his or her own source / center and what in that person - or persons' - past has stunted their spiritual growth or built a huge boulder of fear, or taught them money is more valuable than the spirit of love, or that judgment is the way of the divine rather than creativity, acceptance and forgiveness. 

Love listens and learns about the deepest needs of the other, the others' wounds, and how to apply the right spiritual medicine to those wounds. Love is able to step outside its own realm of need and hear the other fully.

Evil, however, in this polarity world, is not real (not in the big meaning of real) because nothing real and eternal is anything other than creative. Evil is actually a lie, albeit a terribly painful one.  It is an illusionary twisted notion causing us to act, and react, to its mistaken understanding of reality.  It is essentially non-creative and is quite literally anti-life. As it is a symptom of being disconnected from that inner lamp, that well of ultimate source, it needs to prey on others for its life source by seducing - through manipulation or control - others into its web. 

It actively moves destructively against creation, and consequently against life. It is also a reaction to what is and is based on fear and ignorance. It is based on false evidence (appearing real.) So, it's already short circuited and limited. Ultimately, it is powerlessness, yet it appears to be powerful because it threatens to (and does) kill and destroy, feeding on the energy of the terrible drama it creates.  

Recently, the new Pope urged us to "respond to evil with good."  This is a necessary, yet challenging task, one that requires great wisdom. We are all caught up in an illusionary stage of reality and we all are tempted constantly to believe what we see, rather than see what we believe. 

There is no question that the world is teetering on a perilious cliff of destruction and yet we still have time, an opportunity, to tip our collective future in another direction.  We must wake up.  We must take a stand.  We must choose life, choose love.  Since love is the creative power of the unvierse, it is our only weapon against the darker forces that lurk in the darkness and yet when the lights are turned on aren't there at all.   We can choose to only see the good, to look beyond what seems to present itself before us and look beyond it.  We can keep looking and looking until we find that small lamp within the other person and by looking at their lamp, we help turn up the God-light, the goodness, within them.  By loving, we draw out the love that is there - really is there - in the other person. 

If people all over the world did that - returned evil with good - loved the person not the deed - could they help to transform this hurting world?  If who we are - who we choose to be rather than who we feel like being sometimes - we might find that inviting our light to shine in grace, love, patience and beauty outwardly, our own light would warm us as well as those who are not particularly as loving. I truly think that we will see the truth in life and be blessed with power and love and wisdom as we do this and find ourselves ascending into a much more evolved and fuller version of ourselves. That is my hope for myself and the world, all of us.

Easter love

"For, lo, the winter is past. the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come."

Song of Solomon 2:11

The last few days in Portland have been nothing less than a miracle.  The sun is brilliant, warm, inviting, gorgeous, drying up winter's puddles and wetlands and forcing the cherry blossoms into bloom. The birds waken the sleepy morning, arousing the interest of various neighborhood cats, including our two.

The long dark winter is indeed past, as is Lent's lingering fast and darker tempest.  Almost on cue, all of nature is reflecting the new life, promised and exemplified by our Lord's own rising from his earthly life into his eternal life.  His death would offer tangible proof of his teaching.  He overcame death, which clearly breaks the hold the powers of control have over us.  The single one tool of control used to oppress us is that death could somehow be final, lights out, fini.  But death is only a threshold from this limited existence, darkened consciousness, fear-based and oppressive place, into a place of infinity, of light and beauty, love and joy. 

At Jesus' cross examination by Pilate, he is asked, rhetorically most likely, "what is truth?"  Pilate, as too many other power brokers in our world, searched for truth somewhere in the limited realm of the intellect, where it cannot be found.  Truth is love and only found in love, especially by lovers - those who love all of life.  Real life is love.  God's power is love, a love which we do not really know, but which is hinted at by the love of a man and woman. 

As in Solomon and Sheba's awesome love, larger than life itself really, is a kind of heiros gamos of the gods.  God is both male and female, bride and bridgroom.  The ancient symbols of God, stemming from time before time of the Star of David, indicate the ancient Jews knew this.  The symbol is a merged, overlapping, male and female tetrahedron.  Love is freed, loosened and abounding now on the earth. 

The bridegroom has returned to heaven.  His job is done.  Now, fear cannot imprison our sweet, precious hearts and minds and souls.  Death is no more.  This reminds me of the comforting and powerful final message, words of great hope and promise, from the Book of Revelation:

"Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Rev. 21: 1-4

There never was death, we only thought there was.  There is only life and love and in that awesome awareness is a power beyond anything we've known yet, but which we are finally grasping. 

The world isn't out of trouble yet, but maybe today - on this gorgeous, sunny Easter - we can entertain, meditate on and hold onto a vision of God's love embodied in Jesus' resurrection which we honor and celebrate today, and ideally, everyday.

Recreating the Future

I looked into his tired eyes, wrapped in shadow, tinted by an old wound, one he faintly remembered yet one which still had the power to cast its shadow over his life. Young, in his mid-20s, not yet to college, he was about 1,000 miles from his mother and his home, chasing a dream - as young men are prone to do. He shared his discomfort with his current job and lightly touched on a dream he occasionally dared to stretch his imagination around, but only just a bit. It was something he'd always wanted to do. But, that dream was aborted time and time again as he diminished his own ability to find work once he'd attained all the education he needed to pursue it.

The young man's father had died when he was five and he only barely remembered his dad. He had older brothers and sisters and his mother had deeply loved his father. That was all he told me about his father. His mother, who he described in loving terms, sounded like an artistic, creative loving woman, who cares deeply about her son, enough to give him the loving space to follow his dream - even to the west coast. She had been an English teacher, following her own creative literary dreams, when her husband died. Family financial pressures forced her into a business career which she greeted kindly while wistfully longing for her former life in the classroom, among ideas and words and a home with her husband and children. Those days were gone now, never to return. Even more than 20 years later, she had never remarried.

But, why the dark circles, the sad eyes? I wondered. Is it that this gentle, proud and brilliant young man didn't know who he was? I wondered. He couldn't see his own genius as he pursued an illusive other, a dream that drew him further and further away from his origins and his self.

Was he a modern-day Don Quixote chasing his own Dulcinea? What in a man does an illusive woman represent? What unrealized aspect of his own self, is she? Whose love is he really seeking, longing for? I wondered. Why does anyone do that? What is it we really seek and don't find, that propels the endless odyssey? What could stop the pursuit? What could end the fruitless pursuit and set this dear young man back on course with his dream, a path he must resume?

What causes any one of us to seek and never find? Is it possible to find the source of that unfulfilled longing and somehow, through our creative imagination, rewrite that moment in our own personal history, that moment when that initial wound was created, and somehow steer ourselves back onto the course that would allow us to realize success in finding/attaining what we really seek and need for our lives?

How long are we to be in the wasteland before we lose confidence in our ability - or even value the dream at all - to achieve what we need for our lives to be successful in drawing out of us our creative talents which themselves allow us to open our hearts to our true selves? The longer in the wasteland, I think, the harder it is to correct the fallacy that we have invested in believing about ourselves that we are somehow unable or not good enough to have what we really want and need, which, in this case, is this young man's dream to be a computer game designer.

While the pursuit is indicative of our own illusive search for meaning in this life, it has a negative affect on one's ability to achieve their dream. The longer it hangs out there, unattainable, yet teasingly present, the less we believe in our ability to fulfill our longing. Even my playful cat will eventually give up on catching the laser light from his toy. He'll try again and again to catch it, but eventually he gives up and goes back to sleep. Is it like that with us?

Gnosticism, Jungian psychology and South American Shamanism would point us back to that moment in our lives when we were disconnected from our source of emotional sustenance, when a fragment of our essential self - our soul - was left behind. We don't need to have had an abusive parent to have been cut off, although for others that will do it. The death of a father is certainly the most powerful event in anyone's life. I will never recover from the death of my own father. It still breaks my heart. I loved him so much and he was the catalyst for so much of who I am. For a boy to lose his father is the greatest of wounds.

If my young friend could go back to those early years and realize again his own father's love, allow himself to crawl up into his dad's lap, and show his father his dream for his life now, his desire to pursue a creative career and listen to what his father would say to him. In the deepest part of his soul and imagination his father's wisdom is there. He can draw on it in his imagination. It is into the imagination that our departed parents do really speak, in real time, yet in a past setting. What would his father say to him? Could he feel his father's love and his father's wisdom and would that comfort his longing soul? What would his father say to him about his relationships with women? How would his father affirm him and show him, even in a lingering glance, how much he loved his mother? Would his father's glance point him in the direction of his own heart for another?

I truly believe that our present is molded out of our memories of our past. If we can revisit those memories and rewrite them in our imaginations, can we change our present? If, by rewriting them, we are able to open our hearts now, hearts which were once closed due to a traumatic childhood loss when we were too young to know what was happening and those around us were too grief stricken to help us, can we experience the awesome power of real love, of God's creative potential and power in our lives, to achieve our dreams and fulfill our heart's desire in our lives?

That question lingers in my heart and mind as I listen to the young man. I may suggest it or I may not. I may wait until he wants to find the answer to his life, when the endless quest no longer opens up a vast inner world of longing. When he is ready, he will find the answer. That answer can be found. God has promised that one. And, is it possible that his long lingering journey, away from where the wound was first experienced, is his own personal dark night of the soul in his search for himself? How long do we linger in the desert? How long do we odyssey, until we find our way back home? Long enough. 40 years? 40 days? As long as it takes.

In the meantime, wisdom listens and loves and hopes and sends light for his journey. Blessed is he who seeks, for he will find and be found.

Valentine's Day

To love another person is to see the face of God

- Victor Hugo

Softly, an effervescent light dawns, awakening love's sleeping presence. Then, sparkling in the eyes of the beloved, this new love lures the couple's submission, as Cupid's arrow pierces all their defensive layers, to its den of light. This powerful, intoxicating love is only a teaspoon from the ocean of God's great universal love. It is a taste of divine love.  As these two surrender to each other, open and trusting, love magically flows, transforming time and space, changing their lives forever.

Jesus said whenever two or more are gathered in His name, He is there.  He is love as God is love and so our very human love is a touch of God's very presence within and among us.

Valentinus, c.100 AD, a great teacher and poet of the Gnostic tradition, understood perhaps more than others about the power of God's love to transform our mundane human experience in this illusionary experience of life. He taught that it is only through the heart that we enter into relationship with God and each other.  In less sentimental language, he espoused through poetry the means to open the inner chambers of the heart and enter the gateway to heaven.

As this is Valentine's Day, named for the Valentine who trumpeted romantic love, it is an awesome coincidence that this greatest of all should-have-been pope's mystical theology brings us face to face, heart to heart with each other in our pursuit of something more loving, more divine, in our escape from this transitory realm of pain and darkness. All love offers us that escape. 

An interesting thing about romantic love is that it is not only the beloved's love that gives us love.  It just feels like that. Rather, it is our own love we feel which the other invites or calls forth from us.  The other also experiences his own love drawn from the divine well within him which he trades for our love. While it is an exchange, it is also the same substance drawn from our two wells that we share. For both, is one's own love, buried within,  that is drawn out by the other whom we so dearly cherish.  It is in sharing our love that we are able to experience it at all.

When our beloved is gone, sadly the light dims in our heart, and we are sorely tempted to close up shop. But, the love was not his love to give in the first place.  It was always ours, called forth by his open invitation, his enamored need and plea to be graced by the love he saw dancing in our eyes as they met his. It was light from light, love from love, that drew us together into the most gorgeous dance of life. 

It is no wonder that love, romantic love in particular, is a frequent visitor to people who also dearly love God. It is a dusting of the divine that so often brings us to our knees and often to the altar.

Lent's dark night

His disciples questioned him, (and) they said to him:
"Do you want us to fast?
And how should we pray and give alms?
And what diet should we observe?"

Jesus says: "Do not lie. And do not do what you hate.
For everything is disclosed in view of truth.
For there is nothing hidden that will not become revealed.
And there is nothing covered that will remain undisclosed." *

You are all so amazing. You are more joyous, more radiant and wise than you could possibly imagine.  You are an unlimited, radiant, powerfully creative, free and loving eternal spirit.  There is no end to you.  You contain within you the most incredible diamondesque radiance, a light which is both wisdom and power, love and infinite knowledge. 

And, that's not all.  It's only just a glimpse of who you really are.  You are boundless and within your own inner being you contain the entire universe and in that infinity you can and will experience your own self as also unlimited and a joy beyond anything you know today. You will also encounter each other in new and more fully expansive and loving ways. When (if) we attain ascension consciousness in this life, you will remember your life and the others you knew in this life.  You will live eternally either way, but you will remember your life here if you enter it while you're living. 

So, what does that have to do with Lent? 

Imagine you plant a little seed in the Earth and you water it everyday, knowing that the potential in that seed is a beautiful tree.  Everyday you watch it, consider the tree it will be one day, water it and protect it.  Meanwhile the tiny seed it gestating in the earth, responding to the water it's getting, and slowly it puts out a root and then another, and then eventually it sends up a shoot which then greens after a little while above ground in response to the sun's warmth. 

Lent is like that.  You contain within you your real spiritual self, the eternal seed which contains all that is most beautiful in the universe.  During Lent, you water it, you protect it, and watch it and you learn about it.  Then, finally, after a 40-day gestation period, your newly Christed self is born and you are resurrected spiritually as Christ Himself was.  It's Easter and you are reborn.

That's the idea anyway.  So, now, what does sacrifice have to do with this?

It has nothing to do with this, which is why Jesus somewhat dismisses the question posed to him by his disciples.  His response is simple and yet profound. "Do not lie and do not do what you hate."  Isn't that what most of us do?  Don't we all lie and don't we all do what we hate?  Yet, we don't know it because we're all in denial about who we are.  We don't know who we are.  We are all enslaved to the world.  We are feasting at the world's table while Christ is calling us all to the Great Banquet.  The world's table is a lie and we are doing it and we hate it.  We just don't know it because we don't know anything better.  But, there is something so much better.

Elsewhere in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says:

Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and outside of you."
"When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known,
and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father.
But if you do not come to know yourselves, then you exist in poverty, and you are poverty."  

And, in Luke, Jesus says, "a good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart .... For out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks." (Luke 6:15)

And, in the Gospel of John is the famous nightime conversation Jesus has with Nicodemus in which he says that unless we are "born again," we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. (John 3: 3)

That "born again," is the birth of your true self, your own personal resurrection, your own birthing of your true self out of the dark night of your own life.  Easter is the very real birth of your true self, your Christed self as it is the resurrection of Jesus, which is what he is calling us - his own disciples of today - to do also. 

Lent is that time of gestating.  It has nothing to do with abstaining from chocolate or wearing ashes on your forehead.  It has everything to do with prayer, meditation, studying and challenging yourself in every way to be more authentic, to bring forth what is in you.  You may find that by uncovering your creative talents, you may find some inner tools to help you dig deeper.  It is a very deep dig, but with the help of the Holy Spirit it can be done.  

This is not easy and every year we once again consciously try again, begin again, remember again that this may be the only thing really worth doing in life. Yet, Christ is there, He is very alive and very there and is able to help you.  He is calling.  He is knocking and if we even limp toward the door of our heart, He will help us open it to our true selves, to eternal life, to Him and eternity. 

P.S.  I'm not saying I'm there, but, I am saying that I'm working on it, just like you are.  The hardest temptation though is doing Lent and not getting sucked into the whole sacrificial mindset that only forces us further down and farther away from our true destination.

*THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS;
TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN J. PATTERSON AND JAMES M. ROBINSON