Arise and come away

  

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, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land; 

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. 
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Song of Solomon 2:11-13 (KJV)

We need a grass roots movement of joy in this country, in the world.

It seems joy has been eroded from the faces of people around us. Perhaps it's the decline of the economy, the long-standing bi-partisan battle in Washington, DC, the smoldering undercurrent of fear of the imminent 2012  forecast. Who knows what it is exactly, but there is a pallor on our collective human countenance.

Look around, at the faces, into the once sparkling hopeful eyes of people, laughing and smiling, walking and talking with each other. Have you noticed a more sober populace?

People are dressing in dark colors, gray and black, even though it's spring. Are they displaying and wearing their fear, their sense of powerlessness, their wholesale surrender to a sense of helplessness because of the increase in unemployment? Are we as a people, as an entire planetary species, feeling the weight and burden of these times?

During the "roaring 20's," just before the stock market crashed in 1929, dresses were short and fun-loving. Then the economy dropped out below them, and hemlines went long again, dark again. It was a long time before we climbed out of that economic hole and it took a world war and a cold war until the skirts came back up and fun-loving spilled onto the college campus.

I can't help noticing the bleakness in people's faces, the fear, the despair. I feel this urge to hug everyone, tell them they can be happy even if they're homeless, even if they're out of work, no matter what is going on in their lives. 

Happiness, like love, is a choice. It has to be, otherwise, we're allowing our very spirits to be controlled by outside forces. Otherwise, we become puppets of something out there. We can take back control of our spirits, our joy. We are our own managers. We can decide not to let anything that happens "out there" take us down, make us sad, steal our joy.

The spring landscape is beautiful. The apple blossoms are out, the daffodils and tulips are peeking out, blinking in the bright sunshine. We can all come away from darker thoughts, fears, and join in the chorus of birdsong everywhere.

Unfortunately, it seems, we have decided to look like, act like we're sad and depressed.

People, don't go there! We don't know what the future holds. We don't know what kind of economy we're going to find ourselves in. We may all be out of jobs in a few years, but at least, for the time being, put away your sad rags and put on some color. Put a smile on your face, google up some good jokes, make your co-workers laugh. Don't take it all so seriously because in another few years, the economy will swing back up and we'll have spent all these years, controlled by that all-powerful, all-consuming global systemic force - THE ECONOMY - and have spent too many years bummed out, looking down in the mouth, swathed in sad rags.

Recently, I was helping my daughter with some sewing. We went to the fabric store and were just awed with all the beautiful, bright floral, colorful, vibrant fabrics. I just wanted to make her an entire wardrobe of happy clothes. I wanted to see everyone wearing happy colors. I began to notice that the CNN newscasters were wearing red and other bright colors - intentionally, most likely - to keep ratings up. People are naturally bullish; we respond to red. But, when you see the people on the street, the predominant color is gray or black - various shades of pale. 

I have a friend in Buffalo, a high school teacher, who always wears an interesting tie to work. No matter what's going on in his high school, whatever is going on in the world around him, he always has on an interesting tie. It usually draws out a conversation. It embraces you. It says a lot about him and his refusal to allow his spirits to be controlled by anything or anyone - even the high school principal. We all know how bleak Buffalo can be during the long winters there, and yet he wears interesting ties and in that simple act seems to refuse to allow his spirits to be dampened or controlled by any external forces.

So, now, winter is past, and the time for singing has returned to our lands. Forget about the economy, 2012 - whatever that means or will mean, turn up the music, open the windows of your heart and mind, laugh and please put on your happy clothes - even if you have to go to the fabric store and make them yourself. Personally, I might just be wearing fabric for awhile.

We can choose to be happy. We can choose to lighten up, get rid of the junk that has gathered, cluttering up our homes, our lives, and reach for simplicity, freedom, creativity, color and life. If we do this, collectively, over and over and over again, we just might send a wave through the current of negativity that's sweeping around us, and start a critical mass movement, and turn things around again.

Meditating on the sad stuff only perpetuates it. Meditate on joy, on peace, on love, on life and we perpetuate that. Certainly we must care about those in need, reverse oppressive and evil systems, but at the same time focus your minds on joy. Become joy, because joy becomes you! Remember who you are. We are all beautiful autonomous sovereign beings, creators, far more powerful than any of us fully comprehend.  We are all taking this life one step at a time.  But, the time now calls us to command our own ships and choose the highest level of living, and that just might require a yellow t-shirt today or a daffy duck tie.

Love is a sovereign choice

Love is a choice, born from a mature, responsible conscious awareness.

"Responsibility" has become a key word in the new spirituality challenging religion in all its various versions. When we take responsibility for our thoughts, our choices, our actions, even the outcomes of our very lives, our spiritual and life journeys, we step into being whole adult people, rather than dependent children.

When we were children, our days for the most part were scripted for us by our parents and our teachers. Many people have carried that thinking into adulthood and blame others for what feels uncomfortable or "wrong" to them today. That is continued dependence and sets us up for perpetual victimhood and victimization. It is an immature way of relating to the gorgeous, richness of life and innate human autonomy.

When we project our parent (or teacher) onto the big screen of life, that parent becomes God or God becomes the parent, in our subconscious mind. Either way, it is a child's cosmic view. St. Paul meant this when he said, "When I was a child, I thought like a child. Now, that I'm an adult, I put away childish things."

Today, it seems to me that God wants us all to grow up, put away our childhood dependency and take responsibility for our lives. We are literally being invited into the dance of life as co-creators with God. While our parents may have made some pretty big mistakes when raising us, creating lifelong issues that we have to unpack, sort, and make sense of, even heal from, those issues are now ours. They are on our plates. We have to take responsibility for them and work on healing our psyche and souls from the damage and limited potential they cause us. 

We have to grow up and reach for what will make us whole, fill our souls with a song worth singing. When we finally get there, when we finally wake up, we will realize that our lives are what we make of them and we can choose to make them awesome, fabulous, joy filled, loving, long and healthy, or we can choose to make them just down right miserable, filled with long laborious days of struggle and suffering. It is our choice. For anyone still steeped in a victim mentality, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense because a victim mentality is incompatible with a fully liberated, autonomous, adult, responsibility-taking spirituality. But, consider for a moment which view is more powerful, more alive, and more joyous. Which view would an all-loving God want for you?

Old religion - of Christianity, Judaism and Islam - submitted people, the masses, to a kind of slave relationship - albeit "child" relationship - with deity. Today, we realize that was a kind of crime and punishment set-up to control people and keep us as children, unevolved, powerless, victims to a perceived deity who wheels and deals in punishment. Look it, our entire governmental system, in the U.S. and most everywhere, is based on that kind of thinking. We even kill those who kill. How is that an improvement over anything that has ever gone before? 

As long as we play that tired old game, based on a deity of duality, of good and evil, of crime and punishment, rather than one who invites us into a constant flow of forgiveness which would free us and lead us upstream to a higher functioning unconditional, love-based world view, our culture will stay imprisoned by this very limiting, enslaving mentality. 

The duality of the crime and punishment mentality screams at all of us to conform, rub out our creative uniqueness, squelch those who speak out and dance to a different drummer. It was the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the burning of books under the Nazis; it is the banned books by the Vatican. It is Glen Beck. It is anyone who would threaten and frighten us, throw Godism at us, to control our autonomy. 

Beware, the old system will not just lie down and die quietly. When a whole system of control is being overthrown by the emergence of a new, more evolved, way of being, it usually leads to some kind of civil war or revolution. Today, we see before us a war of words, a war of ideology and along with it a lot of mud slinging. Today history is repeating itself. And, just as all wise people in the past did, THINK FOR YOURSELF and be very courageous about your intentions for your life.

The nucleus of our world's system of crime and punishment stems from the original power-brokers who were leaders of the old religions who later led to the fundamentalist religious of today. Any form of system that seeks to control the inner mind of anyone is part of the old way. In less gentle terms, it is evil - which is”live" spelled backwards - it is anti life. Period. End of sentence.

Today, when we embrace the absolute urgency to step into a new way of thinking, of being and living on this Earth, we must all grow up, put away our childish ways, which include that sense of  dependency on a controlling parent-child relationship with God and take on an adult-to-adult relationship. This doesn't challenge our relationship to Creator; rather it honors it even more. If we stand up, take responsibility for our lives, where they are right now, this minute, and reach for a more loving life, a bigger more alive life, we first have to slay the demons that are holding us back, still lurking behind our non-responsibility, our duality thinking, our sense of punishment if we dare to go beyond where we're accustomed to being. 

Anyone who has reached the end of his chain feels the control it still has on him. You can feel yourself being held back because you will feel guilt when you try to reach beyond the extent of the chain. Guilt is ego control. That is a fact. When you feel guilt, stop and take a hard look at what inside you is causing it. It is a chain that is keeping you enslaved by an internalized voice from a former jailor.

As we pull and tug at the chains that has kept us enslaved all our lives, we will come right up against that inner boundary that has kept us in the corral, set there by someone else in our past - a parent or a system. We can stand there all day blaming whoever put it there, or we can sprint over it. That's your choice. One thing you cannot say is that you will be punished by your Parent-God for leaping into wholeness of life, into fullness of being, into autonomy and sovereignty over your own life. 

You cannot authentically love in a state of imprisonment. 

You cannot authentically love if you think that you will be rewarded when you die for loving. What kind of reward do you expect from your controlling punitive/rewarding parent-God if you pull down evil systems that keep everyone enslaved, keep the poor, poor, maintain the wealth of the oppressive corporations that exploit the land, the people and the future of life on the planet? The answer is obvious. None.  Why would a controlling parent reward a child who has become free of its control?  Control wants to control, own, have the life and vitality of that which is being controlled. The only way for social justice, which is love on the big screen, to empower those who have been oppressed, marginalized - politically and economically - is for everyone to become liberated from that which has controlled them, kept them poor, kept them powerless, kept them little, weak and vulnerable and rise up into the fullness of their adult spirituality, empowered and able to love.  So, it seems, that the only way for things to change is for everyone to wake up, choose freedom from any form of control, stand up, take responsibility for their lives and the world around them, and cooperate with life. 

You can only authentically love if you choose to do it for its own sake. Any choice, by definition, is an autonomous act. We can only choose to love.  Since love exists only in freedom, obviously it is cancelled out if it is done for a reward.  The idea of reward stems from a crime and punishment ideology, a childlike one.  We cannot love because we're going to be rewarded when we die for "doing" it. Rather, we love because it lives in us; we are so filled with love that it exists for its own sake.  Love is relational, selfless, and giving altruistically and anything done for reward is not selfless.  It is done for the reward, which is selfish. Perhaps love can be imitated, but the genuine article exists because it exists.  Love cannot be bought.

Love's very nature is to do what it is, which is love. It is as light seeks to be light and shine. Love seeks to love. It is its nature. It doesn't love because it will be rewarded if it loves. It loves because it loves. 

We can only make one decision and that is to become free, face those inner demons that keep us bound to an external authority, and grow up and become love.  We can take authority, take responsibility for our lives, and then choose to live them to the highest possible level of existence, which is to live a life dedicated to the "greatest commandment," which is to love God, love your neighbor as yourself.  

All the great minds of all time have agreed that love is the highest level of existence. It is higher and clearly more fulfilling, more energizing, more life-filled, higher vibrationally than anything else in our existence. It is magnetic. It is creative. It is life itself. It creates life and is life. It is not for the weak of heart, slow to take responsibility, perpetuating their childlike existence frozen by an immobilizing cowardice due to a fear of punishment. It is for the brave hearted. Only the very courageous would or could face down their inner oppressor who would control them and keep them enslaved. 

Today, those tormentors are long dead, yet ruling from the grave because we forgot that when we grew up, we could and should take responsibility for our life destiny. Some of us thought we were no longer being controlled by controlling parents, and unaware abdicated the job to an external system - the Church, the government, the military, the hierarchy of a corporation or a university – who took over where our parents left off. We decided to seek approval and even identity by an external power structure, to which we gave our power, our autonomy, our souls and remained as dependent children, now controlled by a system that sucked the very life out of us in order to self perpetuate. It is the Matrix. It only exists to exist, maybe to feed the egos of those who made it to the top. It is nothing, really, at all. In reality, in the big universal cosmic picture, it is absolute powerlessness.  I see it as the great human tragedy, one that has repeated like a broken record throughout time and human history.

Today, it seems that those who are in charge of the world - political, economic, religious leaders - are all steeped in a position of not taking responsibility for their choices and the world consequently continues to spin closer to chaos everyday. 

It is important for all of us to claim "being" love and "doing" love as part of our essential nature. If we become loving, truly open to the higher vibrations of God, Source, we will fill with that higher vibration and become more light-infused and more eternal in our  "here and now." However, in order to step up the spiritual ladder to being love, we must first have the courage to break the chains that bind us to that old controlling crime and punishment idea of God. It just isn’t true and we can’t pretend anymore that we believe it is. If love is unconditional, that means it is free, and in its freedom, we can become the divine, sovereign beings we were created to be, powerful and loving. Don’t you think the time has come that we step up to the plate and reach for our fullness and wholeness and grow up? Time is ticking.