Cosmic light dance

As the long dark night slowly slipped behind the dawning new age, awakening our spiritual landscape with its transformative light, our collective consciousness began drifting away from religion, receding from its empty rituals, as something authentically alive and powerfully creative emerged. 

This great awakening is evolving us rapidly. It is vibrant with a new hope for humanity and the entire planet with its abundant outpouring of spiritual enlightenment, imparted by those who have left the mainstream's ungodly pursuit of money, power and control to embrace the great Other, the ultimate and only real divine presence, who, like Shakespeare's rose, "would by any other name smell as sweet."

Those many bright souls who are birthing this great awakening have been blessed with the wisdom and courage to transcend the ordinary, to simply walk away from the status quo and never look back. While we are all collectively evolving spiritually in our own ways, they are well ahead of the herd. I admire them and am grateful for their tireless and wonderfully inspiring work.  

As much as I would love to join their new vision of sacred journey, I find myself still firmly rooted in the original faith, the first light of Christianity - which isn't Christianity as we know it today - in pursuit of something even brighter - a bigger fish, I guess. In my heart I have always felt the answer to our common human condition and all the terrors of this global dark night of the soul in which our world is tragically immersed, is still in that beautiful man of Nazareth. 

We are all on a journey individually and collectively and everyone has their own story. Even where we are right now, this very minute, on our spiritual journeys is not where we'll be in a week or a year from now. The Spirit is alive and moving, evolving everything as it continues to create, always calling us into a cosmic dance, and a greater awakening.

To experience this evolution consciously, is to be lifted up and out of this heavy dimension. It is to see with the mind another reality, another dimension, even if we don't see it with our eyes. Something in us acquiesces to its ultimate existence. It is simply life which is a kind of creation machine, yet of absolute, ultimate being, intelligence, and total consciousness. It may be hard to understand. It's like trying to contain the whole ocean in a tea cup. We can't grasp the whole ocean of Spirit, or our creator, but we can understand what it is in a small dose, which is us.

It seems now - in historical hindsight - the Church's hierarchy, right from the moment it became an established orthodoxy, only had part of the truth. I honestly think they didn't know it because the rest of the story was buried in the scriptures in code and they only had what had been passed down to them. Each generation led us further and further away from the whole story. Without the whole story, the church limped along, vaguely grasping the real message and too often stumbling off the road into some dark stuff. It seems it needed to control the masses due to an unacknowledged, perhaps even unconscious, sense that it was incomplete. It's as if you were to attempt to prepare a chef's finest recipe, but left out a key ingredient. The end result would be a failure. So, when the church's message didn't taste right to me I felt compelled to move on in search of the rest of the story. 

I returned to the sacred scriptures, poured over them and read everything I could until I stumbled across several interesting ideas. I realized as we evolve, mature and ascend spiritually in our current process of awakening, the old stories seem to make sense in another way, a new way, even while all the old interpretations are still there. It seems they are alive in a new way and speak brilliantly to every level of spiritual development we're on.

If someone is new to the faith, they can be read literally. Later, when you're able to see more, you'll find a deeper meaning, a mythic truth. Then, there's sheer mystery and awe as you discover patterns and codes and hidden hints of something else. When you discover that, you've found the entrance into the kingdom, the door, the narrow gate. It is truly a case of when the student is ready, the teacher appears.  The teacher is there all the time, it is we who can't see him. As our eyes adjust to the light, we can slowly make him out.

I read and reread the scriptures and other resources to understand the hints which I was finding with the help of several awesome scholars and authors.* They suggested there was something originally known that the gospel writers wanted to hide but not hide completely. They obviously wanted to preserve and protect it. So they hid it.  It seems the early Christians were good at hiding important writings, with the hope one day they would be found. 

The gospel writers' task then, while under Roman persecution, was to tell the story on a simple level to preserve it but with clues and deeper messages for those "with ears to hear." By hiding the sacred message through codes, gematria and hints, they'd hoped the Romans wouldn't catch on but that we would. 

In the centuries that followed persecution, when the gospels were translated from the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic into Latin, the gematria simply didn't translate, and was lost to us from then on. Evidently, the later church fathers in the third century didn't know about the hidden messages either so the other half of the story remained lost throughout history. Later scholars knew there was some kind of code in the gospels, but only recently were they able to crack it by decoding the gematria with a sophisticated computer system. 

It's been like a treasure hunt, finding clues and piecing stories, myths and legends together and matching them with the hints and the gematria to bring into focus something entirely different from the church's version.  

Typically the historical significance sometimes doesn't matter, rather it's the essence and meaning of those myths that matters. But, in the case of Mary and Jesus the historical truth about their relationship had to be discovered, and assembled to complete the picture, so we could receive and allow it to change us. 

I found what I'd been looking for at an intersection of ancient Jewish theology, decoded gospels, gnostic legends of Mary in southern France, mystical spirituality, and sacred geometry - all of which came together to bring into focus one single realization. 

The picture that is emerging is profoud, beautiful, passionate and powerful.Their love is a perfect reflection of God's reign which is the perfect integration of the masculine and the feminine. The male and female cosmic energies melded together with a powerful divine love forms a unit of God's kingdom, a new Jerusalem. They are the key to understanding the ultimate wedding of God with your own soul and the integration of your own opposing differentiated aspects to bring wholeness.

The new picure offers a glimpse into another world, a kind of new Garden of Eden and a new Adam and a new Eve. They were like gods living among us and were also in another dimension, loving, living, dancing as the Spirit moved within them, sharing, ecstatically enraptured in just being, radiating sheer love, breatless and spinning.  It was about them and it was about us. Their love conveyed our worth, taught us and called us to love as they loved, healed our world-weary souls, set our hearts free of the many burdens that block our ability to love, that reduce our sense of value, diminish our spirits, and keep us locked in this shallow world and feeling separated from God's divine love.

They were a light dance with shekinah wisdom and divine love moving between them, drawing them higher into even more elevated levels of consciousness.They became one with the heartbeat of the universe and they invited us to the dance. He said, "we played the flute for you but you would not dance."

Some have said the "Song of Songs" describes their relationship.  It certainly seems so. It is such a close replica of their story. It is so obvious, why didn't we see it before?  Now, that we see it, what does it mean to the human condition?  How do we unpack it in a relevant meaning. That's for another blog posting, but it seems clear the problem in our world is that we are unable to realize our value and our potential. We are enslaved to our world's limiting belief system, ages of woe and worry, all cold bedfellows. We do not know how to rise up in the glory of God's love. We don't know how to love on an ascended level.  

Sure, we think we know how to love and we fall in love and we get married, but so much of our love language and love culture isbasically an emotional hormonal reaction, almost to the scent of another human more than a soul connection.  For someone who has experienced real love on a soul connection, he or she knows that love is beyond sex and leads the lovers into another dimension, other worlds. That kind of love can and will last a lifetime. 

There is something more profound about their love that can change the world once we accept it and feel it. The call is now, as it always was, a call to enter into a sacred cosmic love affair with the divine Other, and love as they love. 

They can lead you into the same experience and on into the reign of God. However, they must be allowed to take you up to their level, not we reduce them down to ours. They came to redeem us, but we killed him and exiled her by reducing His queen to a whore. With that condemnation, we kept these lovers apart. We need to reunite them and allow them to rise up together, hand in hand, and return to their ecstatic joyful cosmic light dance. Then, we also will be set free to join in the same love dance with the great divine beloved.  

* Thanks to Margaret Starbird for her profound insights that are resonating with mine.  

Leader of the flock

Suddenly it's Christmas when the world celebrates the awesome birth of a king and the promise of a future queen, a most holy alliance.

This king born in the humblest of circumstances would show the world what real power was.  His power came strictly from God through his pure innocence and surrender to ultimate power. This power was also a soul love which, through his teaching and example, would lead us into the truth of who we are potentially and reunion with God.  

With the birth of a genuine king, rather than the arrogant, selfish, narcissistic kings and leaders of this world who usurp their false power from the masses and claim authority and power over them, our hope and potential fulfillment was also born.  

For millenia, rulers of this mad man's world have been models of authority. Too often cruel tyrannical dictators have exploited us and our Earth and just about everything on it. 

For millenia, women were property, used as servants and sexual playmates. Real mutuality between men and women has been elusive and in many cases, reduced and devolved to co-existence without passion, without light and life. 

Afterall, it's still a man's world and where there's no love, there's only control and abusive power.  In a world that only knew abusive power, falseness on every way, there was little love for a man to show a woman, who too often trembled fearfully in her husband's coarse words and action, rather than speak up, stand up for her own dignity. In this man's world that taught fear over love, any woman's courage came at too high a price.

But, it wasn't ever meant to be like that.  In the birth of Jesus the world was given both a future King, and the promise of a future Queen as well. According to legend, as his heavenly partner, she would stay with us until his return, remain to lead us in his footsteps on the true path to God.

Long ago, before there was patriarchy there was the goddess, who empowered all others in her presence, who in humility and grace, expressed the highest qualities of the divine in human behavior.  In goddess communities, archaeologists have never found evidence of any spearheads, or ancient weapons of war.  It is clear in a goddess community, there was considerably less competition among the people than in a male-dominated community, such as we've experienced for the past many thousands of years, in  fact for so long, that we have no collective memory of anything else.

With the coming of Jesus, Messiah, we were introduced again to what a true partnership of feminine / masculine power would look like.  Even in Jesus' teachings alone there is the blended male/female, power and wisdom, merged in a benevolent, life-giving wine for the soul, poured into our thirsty hearts, our own souls as chalice.  

Many of today's scholars, after extensive study of the scriptures - orthodox and Gnostic - are certain Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.  As a Jew, part of keeping the law was marriage. Marriage was terribly important, far more so than today, and Jesus only increased its importance by forbidding divorce.  Marriage was a mirror of God and humanity's covenant and it was to be taken as seriously as humanity's relationship with God.

According to the Gnostics, the birth of Jesus' bride would have held almost equal importance to his own birth.  He was returning to us our lost goddess, whose benevolence carried with it God's grace and Holy Spirit. As his beloved who would remain here after his resurrection and ascension, she would continue as leader of his flock, as Magdal-eder, which means "watchtower of the flock" Hebrew. (See Micah 4:8-11 and Margaret Starbird)

Based on this smallest shred of evidence, it seems clear Jesus fully intended Mary would continue in his place to watch over his flock. Maybe it was even part of his initial mission and plan. Once the good Shepherd was gone, she would remain as his shepherdess, rather than Peter.  

If so, what would that mean to the world if we had received her as Queen? Through the centuries, inspired people have often realized this and expressed it - in art, poetry and more recently in theology. And as many have received her as holy queen, their interpretations of her have become increasingly more respectful. Today we see her as Queen, whereas centuries ago the dark patriarchy of the church saw her as prostitute, perhaps, because it had once prostituted its own soul to the dark powers of Roman patriarchy, which killed the innocents, the children, and the sons and daughters of God.

As Queen, what was her guidance to His people?  How did she lead and what was her message?  Simply, it is that you are loved with an everlasting love, you have within you a pearl of great price, more precious than diamonds and gold, and that pearl is the light, an anointing from God's holy helm, which would continually lead you into your own regal nature.  In your own passion, emotional expression and poetic power, you will find and reflect a little bit of God's divine realm.  You can trust your inner spirit because that inner spirit is God's own Holy Spirit.  Beyond your fear, beyond your sense of inadequacy, is a field - a beautiful, florid landscape - which is heaven.  

In that sacred inner place, you will find your own true partner, your own soul. There, you will see the Queen who will escort you to the gate where her own beloved will take your hand and lead you into all truth, which is life eternal, and a joyous bliss beyond anything this dark place could ever offer you.  

Maybe the only question left for you to answer is how brave are you, how free are you from the world's false kings who have duped, conned and controlled you all your life, to take her hand and allow her to midwife the birth of your own soul and lead you to Christ at the gate of heaven, all within your own precious heart and mind?

His Christmas birth brings you to her and she will return you to him.

P.S.
According to the Gnostics, Mary was born near Bethlehem also, yet not in a stable or cave, rather in a comfortable home, only a few weeks after his birth.  

Wisdom teaching

"Set me as a seal on your heart, a seal on your arm, 

for love is as strong as death."  Song of Songs 8:6-7

Awakening to the Magdalene's teachings, what they are and why they're important, has been a jouney for me. For years I'd had a sense of something lacking from the Church's teachings. As a child, I asked my religion teacher what was the "Holy Ghost."  He didn't know and stammered something like, "it's the third part of the Trinity." So, that was useless. I wanted to really get this and that didn't make sense.

The teaching of the Gnostics informs that question.

Today, if a child asked me that question, I would respond with inviting the child to bring some of his friends into the music room where I would play some powerful praise music and show some videos of how passionate praise can lead to a powerful infilling of the Holy Spirit.  That's ground zero.  I would explain, as Jesus does in the Gospel of John, that God is Spirit and we worship God in Spirit. Yet, even that, I would tell him, is only the beginning.  That power releases something inside you - a kind of power which will guide you, make you free and confident, teach you and make you smart, strong, courageous and full of joy.

It will set you free from anyone's control.  You will control yourself and release your own power which comes from God's Holy Spirit. And, when you are self empowered by the Holy Spirit, you will not need to attempt to control (oppress, use, abuse) others or fall victim to any kind of addiction. You will experience life, real life, and that life is your real self which is eternal. 

So, what if you experienced a taste of that gorgeous power, that love beyond description and with it the knowledge that you would live forever - and not just an intellectual knowledge, but a felt experiential relational knowing, would you let anyone take that away from you?  They can't really, but they tried.  You can kill the body, but not the soul.

Understanding this rationally is only like opening the book to a great story.  It's not the full experience, but it's a kind of map of the new country. It's the experience itself that teaches.  Some things can be read and studied and some have to be experienced because you learn on a different level than simply intellectual.  That too is part of the difference between Orthodox and Gnostic Christianity. I believe we need some kind of an integration of the two, which sadly took 2,000 years for us to achieve. Only now are we finding both in the newly emerging Church, yet still not so much in the Roman Catholic, which still bars women from the sacrament of ordination. In the Catholic Chutch, for women there are only six sacraments, for men, all seven!

For me it would be years and several churches later before I would finally understand who the Holy Spirit was, and she's no ghost, for sure. Rather, she's a beautiful, fragrant power of joy, absolutely pure unconditional love, hope and healing, wisdom that can knit a room full of strangers into an intimate web of friends.  Her spirit is sheer awesomeness. That spirit radiates from within and yet for some it is visible externally.  Whenever Moses came out of the tent to meet with the people, he radiated a light so bright that it hurt their eyes, so he began wearing a veil over his face. That brightness is called "Shekinah," which is what the halos around the saints are really.

The terrible difference between the Gnostic and Orthodox, a difference worth dying for, is the Church then withheld Mary's teaching (which was Jesus' original teaching) that people could access that power of God, that Holy Spirit, personally and that it was already existent within them as part of their initial creation, their own inner programming.

It is their birthright, as it is every one's birthright, and with its access, individuals became free, sovereign, incredibly powerful, radiant, brilliant creatively. The potential for human spiritual development, growth, evolution and awesome ascension has always been available to us. 

Only a fearful, weak, spiritually impoverished, vacant, dark patriarchal institution would attempt to block the people from receiving this gift, this birthright. It forced them into submission to their priestly authority witholding from them the realization that they were always meant to be priests of their own lives. The Catholic priesthood wanted to withhold that from the people and thereby control the masses. They were like the pharisees Jesus condemned in the gospel, whom he calls "white washed tombs" because they were focused externally to the exclusion of the inner reality, where the real knowledge (gnosis), the real power, which is light and life eternal, is. They set themselves as guardians of the well of knowledge, yet didn't drink and didn't allow anyone else to drink from it either. 

Jesus says, "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness." Matthew 23:27 (NKJV)

Then, as if he were speaking to the church in the Middle Ages and Inquisition, he says to the spiritually dead Jewish power brokers of his time, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in." Matthew 23:13 KJV

There are hints and pointers to His real message in the Gospels and yet the focus of the incomplete canon (since it doesn't include Gnostic scripture) seems to return to how we can "control" God through good works or good behavior, obedience to authority, submission to an externally set law, rules; giving to the poor or "doing" without "being."  If just doing was the whole picture, why would they have to present God as judgmental, fearful and punitive, casting people into a fiery pit for eternity? Talk about control through fear! We understand today that control through fear is basically a personality disorder, a kind of psychopathology.  Would the creator of the universe be such a being?  Or, is that more likely a picture of ourselves at that time? 

They held onto their one-sided version of the message with a firm grip over the people.  And, if anyone dared to challenge their stance, he or she was tortured, burned to death. What kind of courage would someone need to have, what kind of faith, knowledge, absolute certainty of their rightness, to stand up to that kind of beast?  The answer whispers from the graves of the many hundreds of thousands of her persecuted spiritual army, Gnostics, Sethians, Cathars, Templars and numerous others.

This was just one of the points the reformers addressed when they called for faith over works. While they were rightly and instinctively resisting the Church's control, at the time they didn't have the whole story and weren't able to go all the way. That full awareness would take a few more centuries and the discovery of the Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Gnostics understood the Holy Spirit in feminine terms, as did the early Jews, who called her the Hokhmah. She is the feminine side of God and is God as much as the power to will and to act is the masculine side of God and is God.

These two reciprocal attitudes - that of being (faith, contemplative prayer) and that of doing (social justice, giving to the poor, systemic change for the better, education/teaching) offer a glimpse into the duality of God, the real masculine and feminine postures of life. Both are necessary for a more complete understanding of God and ourselves. Without both, working together, held in balance by each half, the heinous results are what we've seen happen in the opppressive power of control, in our history and today in the Middle East. The darkside of power set the world ablaze.  The gentle washing of the Holy Spirit would have kept that power in check.  What happened (and is happening) without it, is all over our history books and still in today's news.

The "doing" aspect was always meant to be a reflective response to the "being" aspect. Inspiration leads to wise action. In a sense, our actions need to be informed and guided by our wisdom from God's Holy Spirit. So, it's spirit first then action, or feminine first then male.  And, it's not a heirarchal paradigm, rather it's a reciprocal, relational model. A dance of light.

This duality was seen in Judaism since Moses and is reflected in the ancient symbol of the Star of David - the two tetrahedrons posed over each other in reciprocal position - one is female, the other male.

So, was it something to die for?  Is it still?  The Cathars and Templars were the first freedom fighters of what would begin a wave to the future reformers. Yet they would only bring some of the picture into perspective.  Today the need for a full understanding and experience of God remains as vital and imperative as ever.  Our collective apathy isn't helping to accomplish that which may be our biggest failure today as a global family.
______________________

Above: "Mary Magdalene" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 –1882)

Friday-the-Thirteenth

Icy roads, despite rain and warmer temps, created Portland's infamous black ice this morning.  At first we thought the roads would be deadly, but generally the drive was great and traffic sped along easily, bringing many of us to work earlier than usual.

On this morning's news, the weather reporter said, "It's Friday the 13th, so be careful out there."  

I sighed, thinking, "she knows not of what she speaks."  

The real meaning of this dreadful date may be lost on the ordinary early morning driver on his way to work. The number 13 has since antiquity been the number for the goddess, a number representing the divine feminine who for the earliest Christian Gnostics was represented by the Blessed Mother and Mary Magdalene, to whom (they believe) Jesus entrusted his "church" rather than Peter.  For many Gnostics, the date is one of profound mourning, a powerful and bloody reminder of the cost for those who stood up for another version of the Jesus story, one that could have existed alongside the Roman Catholic version, but was not tolerated and consequently exterminated by the Church.  

More than 7,000 Cathars were dragged out of St. Mary Magdalene church in the Languedoc, France, by Roman Catholic church officials, under the direction of Pope Innocent III, and were butchered to death on July 22, 1208. Then on Sunday, March 13, 1244, 250 Cathar monks were burned at the stake. Once the Cathars were wiped out of France, the Knights Templar took up their legacy, until a century later, on Friday, Oct. 13, 1307 the Knights Templar were gathered, tortured and killed. They had fought to defend Jerusalem against Islam, according to Crusade history. But, they, like the Cathars, had also stood for Mary Magdalene's secret, yet holy, order. 

In Kathleen McGowan's The Expected One, the terrible deaths borne by the Cathars is described so vividly, a reader's perspective on real courage and martyrdom and church history is changed forever.

There are many theories, but the primary one is the Gnostics who were personified in both the Cathars and the Knights Templar believed piously and ardently in the mystical and secret teachings of Jesus as carried to the world through Mary Magdalene and were willing to defend her to the death. They had carried her story, and her truth, soberly and stealthily throughout the centuries, and when they were deemed heretics and bitterly targeted by the Roman Catholic Church, as evidenced by history, they died bravely for her. 

Radiance

All of you are absolutely awesome!  Your light shines in the darkness, your joy lifts you high into the subtle regions of heaven, your love pours through your smiles, your wisdom draws from that great unknown source - heaven's data bank.  

You are beloved, radiant, brilliant and eternal.  That is your true self.  That is who you really are.  You are children of God, all sons and daughters of the great universal creator. You are loved beyond your wildest imagination. If you knew for one second how loved you are, how precious individually and known individually you are, your lives would be transformed in a twinkling of an eye.  

Your life, with all its travails, is a path to that awareness, to that full comprehension.You were created to be vessels for the divine, to experience all the qualities of divinity and hold them together, like a heavenly glue, within your own being, and then, to realize that is who you really are.  You are divinity itself, "gods" as Jesus said. As the Son of God, he said we were his brothers. 

But, when you experience yourself other than pure brilliant joy, then you can know you've encountered a shadow, a blockage, to that light.

Even our beautiful lush fertile earth is in so many ways a reflection of the divine.  Life flourishes in unique ways through the creative presence of God. Even DNA has God's fingerprint. Scientists are continually astounded by life's "cosmic imperative" that may be continually manifesting - for an interesting lecture see:  Paul Davies on the origin of life

None of "life" is a random accident.  Life is never an accident. How it happens is still being researched in your science laboratories and may never be fully understood.  Today a wonderful meeting of minds is occuring between science and spirituality.  It's a scenario of sacred geometry, ancient esoteric knowledge carved on pyramid walls, left in sanskrit and carefully scripted into ancient Hebrew, Greek and Coptic papyrus, meets Einstein, Tesla and our latest quantum and mechanical physicists. Today theologians read Scientific American and scientists read Genesis.  

We're all on a path of discovery, if we're honest, if we haven't given up, if we haven't succumbed to the temptation to either fall under or reign over the resistance powers heaven has allowed in our lives to challenge us to grow. Some can spend a lifetime trying to get it right by our culture's standards only to realize they had it right all along.  Fitting in is something we seek in our teens and resist in our wiser years.  

Our path, "the way," which is the original term of the Jesus movement of the first century, is that very journey to find and live into our reason for being here.  It's not so much "finding yourself," as it is losing yourself.  You who are brilliant light beams, resonating to the great OM of the universe, synchronized to God's own breath and yet wonderfully conscious and individual simultaneously may have already realized that when challenges arise in your life, those times when life feels heavy and dark, murky and fearful, those are the very obstacles in your path that point you back onto the path of light.  Fear is a warning that you are thinking wrongly.  Fear is a dark spot in the light.  It also blocks the joy.  It is a bolder, a darkened window, a piece of shrapnel from our warrior past.  It is a piece of unconscious material that can be overcome. There are ways to overcome it, but the original wise ones suggest transforming it with light and thus widening the path of light we're on.  

Recently, I was dealing with some heavy fear, stuff that I just couldn't sort out, so I went into quiet meditation and visualized the fear floating out of my body. Then I imagined a strong beam of brilliant light flowing down into my body through the top of my head.  After awhile, I felt the fear had left completely. 

Later that day, I could see inside my mind the inner place where the fear had been. It was a clear, empty container within my mind, now filled with light emiting sheer joy and the conscious awareness that we are all designed in the image of God and that "image" is pure spiritual conscious joy, love, power - the very tools to carve out our life purpose.  

I realized that when we find that precious gift of being, there is only joy. Joy is the marker on the path to authentic being, ultimate truth and life itself - real life, the only kind that is eternal. It is that joy that opens our hearts, gives us courage to stay on the path, the narrow way, and to love.  The joy itself sang through me as love and in that love there was more self love which offered me the kind of inner guidance I needed to confront what needed confronting and the wisdom to peek down the road to make sense of some of my challenges which required wiser choices.  Most of all, I realized that joy is the pearl of great price, the ancients talk about in parables and poems.  It is God-stuff, and who wouldn't sell everything he had for it.  It is life itself.

Above video:  http://beyond.asu.edu/media/video-paul-davies-origins-life

Feeding the Children

God moves through our hearts and hands to reach our precious brothers and sisters in need.  This video speaks for itself.  It will break your heart but open your soul.

from the website:
http://lifetoday.org/outreaches/mission-feeding/

The generous will themselves be blessed, 

for they share their food with the poor.

—Proverbs 22:9 (NIV)

Hungry children need the nutritious food mixture specially formulated for them in Mission Feeding. It’s filled with the vitamins, minerals and proteins that can restore them to health in less than 6 months. I like to say, “There’s a blessing in every bowl.”

It’s the answer for children before they spiral further and end up at a malnutrition clinic. (And I know for a fact all the clinics are currently filled to capacity.)

Mission Feeding can change the lives of these desperately-hungry children the day we begin feeding in their villages.

Your gift sends food to where it’s needed most. Supplies from our latest campaign have been effectively used, and the mission workers are anxious to hear that we will continue feeding every child depending on us.

In the next few weeks we must raise the additional funds necessary to continue feeding over 400,000 children in Angola, Mozambique and South Sudan for the next six months – especially in Angola where drought is having a devastating impact.

Over 400,000 mouths to feed! It’s a big challenge to be sure. What they cannot provide for themselves, you can. Today, I’m asking you to give your best to help support the life-saving work of Mission Feeding and ensure we can feed in areas of greatest need.

Dollars for votes

It's long been no secret that our country has slipped under corporate control. When you unravel the unmitigated and limitless power of the corporation to not only invade third world nations, exploit their fragile economies, and ecosystems, destroy whole cultures in the name of economic growth, there is even something else perhaps more incidiousness. For the mainstream this has gone unchecked.  

Today there is a virulent, rampant situation that was unimagined by our founding fathers. It is the power of the banking system to support the wealthy, unblancing an egalitarian people-driven, people-based democracy. Warning against the dangers of a central bank to our fledgling democracy, Thomas Jefferson, feared a centralized bank would give the wealthy more voice, consequently undermining the voting power of the individual. Despite his urgent pleas urging our country not to allow the then Bank of England, unfortunately his warning went unmet.  The long term result has been a slow eroding of the original egalitarian vision for this national. 

Today, our government remains closed for business yet another day because two very strong factions in Congress debate an already legalized national health care policy. I wondered how our corporations had actually voted in terms of contributing who would comprise these two politial parties. Backed by corporate campaign contributions those elected are those very people butting heads this very day in Congress. Their decisions, or lack therof, will determine both the immediate future of our nation, and perhaps even the emminent future of the global economy.

The results were not what I thought I would find.  I expected to see mammoth campaign donations to the Republican party by big business, and lesser donations to the Democrats. I was surprised to find more was given to the Democrats. However, much of those donations were from people-based organizations which seemed to have more clout than the corporations. That was a relief. Maybe the system isn't as broken as I thought.  I hope this is the case. 

However, it was sobering to realize how much money is given to campaigns by corporations. It seems it's the dollar power of the corporation that is determining who gets elected and who doesn't.  It has almost become a situation that you really are casting your vote when you spend your dollar, perhaps even more so than when you actually vote.  This makes Jefferson's fear a reality.  The rich are the ones voting.  It's the board room, rather than the voting booth, that is determining who gets elected, not the old guy in the homeless shelter or the single mom in the suburb or even the millions of hard working, exhausted middle class Americans. 

Rather than a democracy, have we become a market-driven government? Are we now government of the corporation, for the corporation and by the corporation?  It seems we have is a corporate-heavy free market that drives our government, unbalancing the entire system.  Rather than a people-driven democracy, or even republic, we have a market-driven government chosen by the voting power of a corporate democracy rather than a people-based democracy.  With the passage of a law that recognized a corporation as a "person" with an equal right to vote as an individual, you are actually voting when you spend a dollar wherever you spend it. Clearly, only those who have dollars can spend them and the more you have, the more you spend.

Admittedly, I was uninformed on so much of this, but am making a point to wake up and become informed. There's no excuse for ignorance. Our free education system in our country was designed to create an informed population so their votes would be made from informed individuals.  In short, the hope was that the population would be wise enough and knowledgeable of the facts well enough  to make intelligent voting decisions.

Today, people snooze in front of their television whether or not they know it. because it is well known that the television emits alpha waves which induce a hypnotic state. Obviously, corporations know this and capitalize on it by running compelling, psychologically targeted advertising late at night, to hypnotize us and direct our purchasing choices.  Have we become a nation of zombies driven to participate blindy in a system that feeds off us and controls Congress and the world? I realize what this sounds like and you might even wonder why is something like this on a sweet little Tiger Lilies blogsite that purports to raise the spiritual consciousness of the masses toward enlightenment and ideall closer to a collective ascension?

The first rule of life is to become free of any oppressive forces, toward autonomy, self government and the total liberation of the human spirit.  The story of Moses leading the people out of Egypt is the archetypal story for the human race.  Jesus build his entire spiritual liberation on that archetypal story.  Today, we need to follow that story line to the next level.  As long as we are trapped in the matrix - so to speak - we are not free.  when we realize this, as i think we are collectively doing on a massive scale, I think we will take back our country and that will free the world also.  it will also feed and clothe the children in our country and the third world.

This would build a wave of sytemic change.  The unbalanced system we have now is not due to malevolent forces by either Democrats or Republicans or even bipartisanship itself. Rather it is due to our blind nonparticipation or taking responsibility of become informed. Isn't this own non watchfulness or lack of mindfulness over our own complicity with the whole game corporate business is playing here and globally.  While we sleep Rome burns.  

So, I share the above video to offer you one place to turn for some information and possibly just one place to start to help you wake up.  It is the morning coffee for governmental and economic mindfulness.