Peaceful Paradise

I wrote the following on November 26, 2011, when I lived in Portland, Oregon.  It was a powerful time in my life for many reasons.  I share this again because I still feel and believe it as much as I did then.

Our magnificent Earth, spread out before us like a rich banquet, was always meant to be a lover's playground, a paradise in which we would sense and feel the Great Lover's presence, who also shared with us His own love, wisdom, and perfect union with our own souls.  

This beautifully diverse planet was meant to be our home, with challenges to our survival to teach and evolve us spiritually and with gifts of food, companionship of the animals, beauty from the flowers, rivers, mountains and valleys.  The ecstatic beauty around mirrored the passion and joy of our own love embedded within us, the greatest of gifts from our Creator.  

Our life here was always meant to be about love, the spiritual essence of the Great Lover, who with His love courted our love and was overjoyed with its return. Whenever we loved another, the Great Lover felt His own love returned to Him. We were created to love. We were made into material form from spiritual substance, to be a container for the Great Lover's own love, to experience in the deepest regions of our eternal souls the greatest of loves, borne first on the wings of our very ordinary human love - the love of two people.  

It was always meant to be simple.  Love is simple.  It flows like a river, as the I Ching says and as Jesus says to the woman at the well.  Are we not all like that woman at the well, seeking eternal truth in a world now flooded with deceit?  But are we all willing to offer a cup of water to a stranger?

When we open our hearts, we are lifting the stone rock that covers the well.  When we sing in joy; dance in free abandon; selflessly hold another's secrets or wounds or hands or embrace another in love to share that great love the Great Lover has placed within our own beings, we draw from the great well.  

When we look into the eyes of our human lover, we see into his or her soul with our own. In that moment, we are the most honest, the most holy. In those moments, we are drawing from that well. 

When we love another, our minds are freed from our ego, own fear, competition and greed.  Love breaks the bondage of the ego.  It is the ultimate freedom from a world of judgment, criticism, selfish consumption, punishment.  

When we are drunk in love, we can sing in the rain, push through winter's stormy ferocity without feeling the cold or wet. That love makes us courageous and free.  In those moments, we move beyond our own limited humanity and are connected with our truest, most sacred nature, our divine nature, our most human nature.  In those moments, we touch God in the flowing of His love through our own inner wells into the heart of another.

                                   

                                   There is no salvation for the soul

                                   but to fall in Love. 

                                   It has to creep and crawl

                                   among the lovers first.

                                  Only Lovers can escape 

                                  from these two worlds 

                                  This was written in Creation.

                                  Only from the Heart

                                  can you reach the sky

                                  The rose of Glory

                                  can only be raised in the Heart.

                                                        - Rumi

When fear or trauma closes our hearts, we can sink into the darker layers of our human experience, a den of thieves where the ego reigns, oppressing, hungering to feed itself until it grows into a dragon, frothing in fiery hate and anger, preying on others with its lies, which are a mockery, a broken mirror offering only shards of love. 

Maybe the world has forgotten there is or ever was a well in the heart. We could slay that ancient foe if we were willing to open our hearts, risk the scorn and ridicule of fear.  Are we willing to open that dark den of pain, where our soul has been languishing a lifetime?  Are we willing to hold our own self, our "inner child," separated for a lifetime from the source of its life by our own betrayal, our own self victimization? It takes great courage to open our hearts - maybe first to another and then to ourselves, where we can encounter our own divine child.  

In each chance to love, we are given a gift from the Great Lover to try again, to love again, to enter into the great marriage, the divine love relationship. 

This great love, is what it was always all about.  It may be the essence, the center, of the teachings of the very earliest church, the one I see as the only authentic Christian church, which met secretly centuries before the formation of the Roman Church with its popes, male hierarchy and magisterium, which came to rule the western world like the oppressive monarchies with which it once kept intimate company.

The first of Jesus' miracles was the wedding at Cana, a living parable of what real love, a wedding of our selves with the Great Lover, would be like.  It transforms us from ordinary beings into spirited beings.  It changes our dull lives into lives of so much joy, so much vitality.  It lifts off the stone that covers our inner well, where the light of love, the sacred substance of God flows freely, unrestrained by any of the dark powers of this world. 

When we accept the invitation life gives us to love another, despite our simple, flawed, frightened and broken human lives, we meet the divine lover, the Beloved, in the eyes of another simple, flawed, human being.  I truly feel that God would rather we reach to love another than live in fear's dark pit.  It may be the most courageous thing we ever do, but to live with a closed heart is not to live; it atrophies our soul, diminishes our light and wastes our precious time here doing nothing.

                       Those who don't feel this love

                        pulling them like a river,

                        those who don't drink dawn

                        like a cup of spring water

                        or take in sunset like supper,

                        those who don't want to change,

                        let them sleep.

                       This love is beyond the study of theology, 

                       that old trickery and hypocrisy.

                       If you want to improve your mind that way;

                       sleep on.

                       I've given up on my brain,

                       I've torn the cloth to shreds

                       and thrown it away.

                       If you're not completely naked,

                       wrap your beautiful robe of words around you,

                       and sleep.

                                                         - Rumi

Our Ascension

As you search your mind, your soul, your heart, you may find that you've been living in a dark dream for most of your life, or maybe you haven't.  Maybe you've been living a life of great joy, of on-going enlightenment, one day after another and are now so full of the power of light and love that you could lift up to the highest heights.

Did you know that we were born to fly, to soar spiritually, and become powerful enough to change matter and create - maybe even the great pyramids? Maybe we really once did - maybe a million years ago - during an ancient golden age that is long lost from our collective memory.  Hopi (Native American) sages say that the human experience on Earth has had five rounds and each one has somehow self-destructed.  We are now in our fifth round. This time we won't self destruct.  We are going to make it.  I believe it.

We will each begin to spread our wings when and as we access our own power, our own self-determination to pursue our own dreams, our own blueprint, which I discussed yesterday. Until we do that, we are locked down, tethered to the cave, by our fear.  When we become free and filled with the joy of life, the power of our own creative spirit, we will begin to extend our spiritual wings.  Fear is an anchor, a cage, a dungeon.  Liberty and freedom open us to our own power and creativity.  The world needs each and every one of us to extend our wings as far as they can reach and then lift up, feel the power throughout our selves, our lives, our bodies and allow that power to extend through to the tips of our great magnificent spiritual wings, filling us completely with the power of God's light, love, and life.

Then, we will restore our beautiful Earth. We will reduce our populations by honoring the dignity of each person which includes limiting our population.  We will honor all of life on this precious planet. We will remember how to be kind.  We will ensure that every child has clean water, nutritious food, education, and love. We will grow spiritually until we are so full of God's great spiritual light and love that we will all become like angels in our ability to create, heal, and love - love as we've never loved before. 

This is my prayer for all of us.  My prayer, my blueprint on my own internal vision board, is that we would all be filled with the light of heaven. It's there if we would open our minds, our whole selves to it and be very intentional about what we seek for our lives individually and collectively.  I pray and envision that we would all become joyous, loving, great beings of light.  I pray that we would all unfurl our tightly bound wings and spread them until all their tips touched and we wrapped the globe with our light and healed our beautiful Earth, a perfect home for us.  And, in that great celebration of life, light, and love, I pray we would all ascend to a higher dimension while still on the Earth.

Cosmology of liberation

If you are ever to find peace - and joy - you first have to free your mind.

The single predominant mystical path to God in the teachings of Jesus and Moses is the concept that we, as children of God, are called to be free as God is free, filled with the creative power of love as God is love.  It is a cosmology of liberation, a paradigm of whole-life freedom beginning first with a free mind. Some worry that liberation means freedom from the law as if there is no other kind of freedom.  There is another kind of freedom. 

Perhaps Buddhism has the best description of it, but then so does the Gospel of Thomas.  Buddhism calls us to detach from everything and the Gospel of Thomas calls us to "be passersby."

The ultimate freedom is freedom from our own thoughts, which stem from the thoughts and emotional manipulations - even physical oppression - of others that have been handed down to us, even taught to us by well meaning parents and others.

To test if your mind is free, ask yourself: "Am I in a deep, all pervading state of bliss?"  "Do I feel God's love for me?" "Do I feel peaceful no matter what is happening to me or around me?" 

Probably, like most of us, you will grasp the idea but still feel little things nagging at you.  It's winter in the northern hemisphere and the lack of sunlight has a depressing effect and so we enter into that state.  There's never enough money to accomplish our goals and so that takes a toll on our joy.  Etc.  Then, there's the fear of what your boss will say or do next, what your kids will do or who they might bring to the dinner table, or the million other things that seem to sabotage your day.  There will always be these things.  There always have been and there always will be. 

The challenge is not how we will pay our bills or children's college tuition.  The challenge is how are we going to stay centered in our Christ-consciousness where there is only peace and bliss.  How are we going to stay in an inner state of paradise and not get dragged out into the mental hell of all these demanding things.  That is the challenge.

When our mind is free, it won't be attached to any thought that will take it away from its natural state of bliss.  If we are not in bliss, our minds are not yet free.

As you consider this, you may want to take some time to think again about what you're thinking and feeling.  Even make a list of the thoughts that seem to torment you and trace them back to their source.  That source will be some dragon of sorts.  Once you unveil them, like the little man behind the curtian in the Wizard of Oz, you will dispel its power over you.  You can do this with all the thoughts that hold you captive in a perpetual state of dis-ease.

Remember that God's reality, authentic eternal reality, is an endless sea of God's perfect, powerful, abounding love for you. It is a love so powerful, so radiantly creatively alive, that you would be immediately transformed by the simple awareness and acceptance of it.

The new world will be about this.  It will be about liberating your mind from all those old thoughts that hold you in a state of dis-ease through guilt and manipulation in all kinds of little incidious ways.  And, while you're navigating through those thoughts, like sunken barges in a shallow marina, consider that all that is true, that is authentic and real, is love.  It is the power and life, the creative power to create the world you would rather have.  It's yours once you claim your mind back from all those others who have gotten into your head and are holding you captive in a dungeon of on-going spiritual poverty. 

This is just a thought I share with you as I also work on this.  It's a journey and maybe the most noble of any journey we'll ever take.  I know it is for me.  So, join me, as we set sail for paradise right here, right now, right where we are.

Give Me Your Hand

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, 

then walks with us silently out of the night.  

These are the words we dimly hear:  

"You, sent out beyond your recall, 

go to the limits of your longing.  

Embody me.  

Flare up like flame 

and make big shadows 

I can move in. 

Let everything happen to you; 

beauty and terror.  

Just keep going. 

No feeling is final.  

Don't let yourself lose Me.  

Nearby is the country they call life.   

You will know it by its seriousness.  

Give me your hand."  

Rainer Maria Rilke, 

The Book of Hours

Creation Spirituality: Regaining Paradise

In the beginning, there was light. It was, and still is, a light so bright it has the power to create whole worlds beyond our wildest imagination. That light created us and imbedded itself within us forever.  But, something happened, and we forgot what we are.  We didn't lose our light.  We forgot that's who we are.  And, the world's long sad story is the result of a forgotten dream, a lost paradise.

As beings of light and nonmaterial, in our perfect unclouded state of light, we are enlightened, powerful, visionary, wise, loving, merciful, compassionate, kind, creative and contain most of the qualities we ascribe to our Divine Creator.

It may not look like that from where we are today, but that is what we are if we stepped out of the grand illusion we have all come to believe and by believing it, make it real. It's a very bad dream, a nightmare, and we need to wake up. 

There is a profound truth revealed in the creation stories in Genesis which will help. Since the creation stories are the foundation of the three Abrahamic faiths - Hebrew, Muslim, and Christian, and most of the world's population is at least one of those religions, clearly these stories are fundamental to the world's understanding of life itself. 

The origins of these creation stories are ancient and stem from oral tradition, from a time when myth was understood at a deeper level, closer to spiritual truth. 

When read aloud, the stories lead the listener on a journey into an imaginal, poetic state, a deep interior realm. This other realm is humanity's primordial psyche or our a priori condition, common to all humanity, and it is the beginning to which we can and must return.  

Genesis 1:1:  "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth." Then, after creating every living thing, God said, "It is good." That's the first creation story.  

The second one concerns the creation of man and woman, the serpent, the temptation, eating of the forbidden tree of life, and being cast out of paradise. 

Then, life as we know it begins. Misery, alleviated by intermittent pleasure, joy, tears, struggle, pain, and ultimately suffering become the daily state of affairs. Adam and Eve leave a world of light - of peace, enlightenment, spiritual wisdom and eternal life and enter into limited lifespans marked by disease, pain, fratricide until finally devolving into a state of insanity - which is obvious today.

St. Augustine (c. 380 AD) claims the second story in which Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden is reflective of humanity's "original sin." That concept has spun a global story that needs to be rewritten to uncover a deeper truth which is understood by those "who have eyes to see" or have the inner spiritual vision to perceive the deep truth in it.

(If you're sick and tired of the misery, then you have eyes to see and a mind ready to listen.) 

Today, the world needs to hear that other story. It is the real truth and has the power to turn things around.  

Over the millennia, the doctrine of Original Sin gestated in western civilization's dark subconscious weaving into it a toxic psychic sense of deep unworthiness, inferiority, shame, judgment, condemnation, fear, and spiritual impotence. In fact, over the centuries it bred the very thing it claimed was our downfall - sin and death.

(Many assume the doctrine of Original Sin is actually in that second creation story, but it's important to know it is not. St. Augustine developed the doctrine after Rome accepted Christianity as the official faith of the Empire at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD ending a couple centuries of torturous persecution of Christian believers. Soon after, Rome fell, leaving the Church head of its former holdings, which were now languishing in desperate poverty.  For the next 17 centuries, the western Church and western civilization have focused on sin and death, rather than spiritual life and our potential for incredible goodness. This is obvious in our media and everywhere in our western culture.)

Today, the western world has stagnated into an apocalyptic worldview of impending damnation. We definitely need a new story and it might be in that second creation story if we look at it again without the Original Sin lens.  

This may be a new story, a new way of understanding ourselves which opens the door to a new world: 

We are made in God's image, and since God is Spirit, God's image is Spirit, which means we are Spirit.  If we are made of God, then we are like God, and this is important - we are Love, and we are Good.  In our original perfect spiritual state, after we discard all the lies, the neurosis, the limitations of the illusion, the killing, and self-condemnation, we are made of God's light.  

After Adam and Eve ate of the tree, they became infleshed and subject to the qualities of being embodied in denser material.  They appeared separate and were fearful of their vulnerability. Their original and authentic identity of light seemed blocked by their new state of being infleshed. They lost the ability to see and hear the divine as before. Also, the qualities of being infleshed gave rise to the "ego," which is the great and terrible judge both within us and in our communities. It is the ego that judges, condemns, and creates that sense of shame Adam and Eve had when they realized they were naked. They didn't feel naked when they were light. They felt naked when they weren't.

This is the original story, the true one.  It was always there, waiting for when we would be ready to see it again.  It is the new beginning which calls us to return to the garden, now, without shame, without judgment, clothed in our light. 

The garden has always been there.  Seeing it, and accepting it is all a matter of free will.  We can choose to see ourselves as sinners and lost from God's love, or we can see ourselves as beings of light who have been blind, temporarily in the context of eternity.  We can choose to accept our innate divinity, and accept it, live into it, and help each other regain paradise. We have - as a human race - matured enough to see this now.  We are able to pull off the lesser cloak of condemnation and judgment and stand bravely in the light of Divine love.  We are ready.  It is time to do this.

It seems the Eastern religions, and Gnostic Christianity, the Yugas, Vedas of India, and Sutras of Tibet, along with the Jewish Kaballah, Sufi and Islam's holy writings all offer us a way back into Paradise, into the Garden. Jesus describes that garden as the kingdom within. Now, we see with our inner vision of which we had been blind. Now, the blind see, the deaf hear.  Now, all the words of the prophets, sages, seers and wise men and women of the past make perfect sense.  

Today, the world is poised on the brink, driven there by our global ego and darkened consciousness. The world has become a culture of sin and death.  What if we chose a culture of goodness and life?  If we can return to the Garden, regain our sense of blessedness and holiness as the beings of light we always were before we fell into delusion, we may be able to reverse what looks like an apocalyptic global holocaust.  The urgency to do this is now.

We can begin by having compassion for our deluded state for so long, that has mired this beautiful creation.  We can love ourselves again and each other.  We must stop judging. If there is one single thing we must do, it is to stop judging ourselves and others and start loving ourselves and others.  It sounds easy, but it is the hardest thing any of us can do.  As you listen honestly to your own words and actions and challenge your intentions and motivations, you see there's work to do. And, to love your neighbor - not to mention your enemy - will ask for all the faith, love and courage you have - and you may need to be on your knees to receive it.

You are the beloved

With what instrument do you measure or come to know yourself?  Are the voices of your tribe your authority?  Your school?  Your country - the laws or the culture of your land?  Do you have any idea, really, who you are?

You are the Beloved.  You are the lovely human face of the most beautiful love in the universe.  You have the most powerful creative power right there in your imagination.  Your thoughts create what you think.  You know this, so why do you think negative thoughts when they only hurt you and degrade all that is?  Why not think beautiful thoughts that would extend out beyond your own personal self into the world and make it more lovely?

Can you realize that, feel that, allow the very idea that you actually have both the power of creation and the passionate experience of that eternal endearment within your very own self?  Is it so hard to believe that you are part of the on-going creation of everything?  But, the importance of that realization is of an absolute dire necessity today.  As we forego that consciousness, that deep awareness of who we really are, we allow the world to continue to spiral out of control by those who are at the mercy of their blind lower natures and unconscious drive to control. 

Why is it so hard for people to feel loved, to feel safe, to trust life?  Why do human beings go to the lowest common denominator and judge others, blame others, think the worst of others, rather than consider more loving reflections?  It's so sad that so many steep their lives in fear and in that contracted state of existence squeeze out the love that is waiting for release into their hearts, their lives, and the world.

What if we simply loved ourselves, treated ourselves as we would like others to treat us and then treat others as we would also like to be treated?  What if all of life were a lovefest, a celebration of all that is beautiful and alive all around us?  What if we slowed down just a little to feel more and think a little less?  What if we gave our brilliant brains a bit of a rest and allowed our senses to experience the sheer delight of life all around us?

What if we all fell in love again with eveything and everyone and allowed ourselves to be loved and allow ourselves to drop our defenses and trust and allow the divine beloved who is within us to smile upon our lives and life itself?  

And, what if we allowed ourselves to dream luscious visionary dreams about what we would really like to see in our lives?  

And, then what if we allowed ourselves to imagine a world without war, without any cruelty full of brilliant creative alternatives to fossil fuel and more beautiful cityscapes? 

Awakening Faith

"Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven."

-The Lord's Prayer

An iridescent radiance mysteriously flows into the inner chambers of our being like liquid light beams, transforming us by its warmth and words of wisdom. This ineffable presence seems to whisper to us with a unique kind of knowing, reminding us of who we really are and by this knowing knits us to itself with a love we only faintly can remember, if at all.

We are empowered by our own self acceptance, knowing that by just accepting ourselves as we are, we are filled with a joyous peace - a peace that does transcend all understanding, that does accept the power of the divine other, surrendering to its care, compassion, wisdom and guidance.  We become wise with a mysterious intelligence which reveals itself as a profound humility, a kind of non-doing that illuminates our minds and life by an ingenius choreographic design. Filtering into our lives, it stirs a recognition, daystars of awareness as we realize the synchronicity of little things occurring in our daily lives.

It is clearly in surrender to that invisible divine presence, inviting and allowing the goodness and intentionality of that vast consciousness, that births our faith. This newborn act confronts and soothes away our need to control, once created by our fear, to allow a real and potent faith to bloom within us. 

It is seeing in the dark, allowing an unknown other to guide us, help us, inform us and love us, even when we don't have a clue how to do anything, that evolves our spirits, growing us up into the powerfully creative humans we were meant to be.  It's in our most helpless state that our divine parent most clearly and powerfully delivers us from all that would tempt us back into the fog.

While we do not see with our eyes, as Shakespeare wrote, we can see with our mind, our inner wisdom catalyzed by our imagination. 

Love does not see with eyes, as we do, because it if did, in our dark, oppressive dimension here, it would not see at all. Love sees the truth of the soul, even loves that which we cannot. It sees with the eyes of the divine. We would experience the greatest encounter of our lives and meet the most joyous of loves if we simply invited the light of that great presence to enter into our dark inner caverns.  
How do we encounter this great lover and creator?  How do we catch the scent of the fragrance of the divine?  We ask, summon the great presence closer at our invitation, surrender our need to control the outcome into the care of this brilliant creator. 

I don't know how it happens, but the sacred other, master or mistress of the universe is consciously aware of our need and pauses only for our sincere invitation, borne on the sweat of our brow, the ache in our back and the longing in our hearts. Our divine parent seems to always show up when we are finally and completely out of our own resources, when all our own plans have been exhausted and we have absolutely no idea what we're going to do.

Candidly, it is as if our divine master, while casting a lifted eyebrow toward us, says with a kind smile on his face, "So, are you really ready this time?  Do you really want my help or are you going to try to take over again?" 

Softly we surrender, and then when the intense moment of our need, presented respectfully and intentionally into the care of our great lord passes, something seems to happen.  It may be a kind of deep, vague knowing that somehow our need has been heard. 

Then, when we are least aware, something happens, a little unexpected answer or opportunity is offered.  As we recognize the answer to our need in that little unexpected e-mail, or phone call or however it shows us, our faith takes hold, rooting and blooming in that instant.  In that single instant, we are changed.  Now, we know. We really know we are not alone.  We never were alone and we will never be alone, ever.

But, I'm sure, unlike anything we may have heard from some of the new thought out there, this is not our doing.  We did not control this response from the divine, or gift from heaven.  We did not make this happen.  It is God's will to respond to us, to give us that which we need.  The divine is in some incomprehensible way working with us, as a dance partner, nudging us along but not taking away the hard challenges and lessons, only lifting the burden when we're truly ready to release it.  

In our world, raging in a turbulent sea of violence, wracked in fear, succumbing almost daily to dark oppressive powers, we may have forgotten the way to the divine other who waits patiently for us.  Too many of us have felt let down by our religions, which have become polarized, prejudiced and have failed.  Someday the recognition will come of  a "Heaven" another realm beyond this one, perhaps existing in another dimension, which our scientists will discover, or we will find ourselves in as we become more whole, less fearful, more peaceful and more whole, embodied by and embodying love.  Maybe.

But, in the meantime, we continue to reach for hope, for healing and for an answer. We reach for the very substance of the divine, which is love, to fill our empty hearts, bodies and souls.  It is by invitation and surrender that we encounter our great lover, parent and partner. Today, while the whole world is throbbing in pain, each of us can decide to invite the light in. We can choose to lighten the heaviness everywhere and anywhere we find ourselves.  There are many who are still lost, fearful to the bone, wearing masks, or spending their lives at the helm of their egos building images and personal empires, spending their time and money on soulless endeavors. Those are the shadows that stalk us at night.  We have to get out of our way and allow the light to shine through us, into the world.  When we're finally finished attempting to build these false lives, then we will hear the angels sing and catch a rainbow in the eyes of another.  

When we let the light flow, like a river, bubble up and through us, overflowing into the cities and streets of our daily lives, the world will change.  This, I truly believe, is the only way we will ever have Heaven on Earth.