Musings on Divinity

Authentic Power
Now that all the excitement and rhetoric, sometimes cruel, over the elections has settled down and we have had the Thanksgiving holiday to remind us of what is truly important in life, perhaps it is time to start thinking about what we want for our planet in the coming year.  Of course that means we will have to let go of the "what can I do?" attitude and realize we all have to participate.  Perhaps a good place to start is making decisions about how we choose to treat each other, right in our own families and neighborhoods.
The Dalai Lama teaches the simple idea that we all want the same thing.  David Friedman is one of the most successful composers on Broadway with a career spanning decades.  He wrote a beautiful song titled "We Can Be Kind" which puts the Dalai Lama's idea to music.  Here are a few lines from that song.

So many things you can't control
So many hurts that happen everyday
So many heartaches that pierce the soul
So much pain that won't ever go away

How do we make it better?
How do we make it through?
What can we do when there's nothing we can do?

We can be kind
We can take care of each other
We can remember that deep down inside
We all need the same thing
And maybe we'll find
If we are there for each other
That together we'll weather whatever tomorrow may bring

 The invitation I would extend is that each of us daily examine our thoughts, words and actions toward each other for the presence or absence of simple kindness and caring.  The truth is that what we think we will speak, and how we speak is how we act.  Therefore, rather than being powerless we have total control over our own experience of life and over the influence we have in the world.  You can claim your authentic power through this simple practice.

Never forget that you are a daughter or a son of the Living God, by whatever name you call that power.  All power is yours to claim when you align with the loving force of Creation.

What Do You See?

Seeing

   There are many ancient teaching stories from different traditions.  The heritage of the Sufi’s contain many wonderful stories, and often the chief character is a fellow named Nazrudin.  One day Nazrudin heard about a holy man, a very wise man who sat on a mountain pass not far away.  Being a seeker himself all his life, Nazrudin decided to travel to visit this wise man, and sit at his feet to see what he could learn.  He had been sitting there all day when a traveler came up the mountain toward the pass and asked about the village in the distance. What are the people like? The wise man asked why he left his former town.  The traveler said he was leaving because it was full of unfriendly, dishonest, unkind people.  “Such as the world has become,” said the wise man.  “You will find the same people in the next town.”
   Then a second traveler stopped and asked the wise man the same question.  When asked what the town he was leaving was like, he said it was a village full of loving, wonderful people.  They even paid for his move to this new town so he could find work.  Nazrudin replied, “such as the world has become.  You will find the same kind of people in the new village.  After the second traveler passed, Nazrudin looked at the holy man in confusion, and asked “Wise one, do you speak the truth?  “Yes, of course I speak the truth,” was the answer.  “Then how can you speak the truth and give a different truth to each man?”
   And that is the question.  How can it be that we can each go to the same place and find very different experiences?  You can see it powerfully in churches in transition.  Part of the congregation thinks the minister is the source of all the problems.  Part of them blame the board.  The larger part thinks everything is just fine and can’t figure out what the others are making a fuss over.  One church, filled with people who know each other; people having a different experience of the same community.
  What each of us, as people committed to making the world a better place, has to realize is that we don’t see the world as it is.  We see the world as we are.  If I am hasty to judge the actions of others in spite of not having complete information, then I have stepped into the energy of keeping the world the tense place that it is.  Each of us is accountable for our response to any situation and quick judgment blocks us from gathering complete information.
   Having said that, we know some people are not good at boundaries.  That’s why we lock our cars and our houses.  We must learn to set appropriate boundaries, while maintaining compassion for those whose path we can only see partially, and therefore have no way of  truly understanding.  What we do, what we say, how we respond to people face to face is very important but there is something even bigger.  The energy we carry in our body is broadcast moment by moment, and if that energy field is negative, we do damage even if we never interact with anyone.  There is an old saw that's been around for years, but it's still around because it's true.  "What we focus on increases."  Let's focus on what's good.

Becoming

Who am I?

   I am not trained in the science and discipline of astrology but I've learned a lot from a good friend who is very well trained and very good at it.  So here's a tidbit from astrology that I learned from her. Everyone's birth chart is divided into 12 areas of life expression called houses. The 10th house indicates our career, what we're supposed to be when we grow up. The sixth house details the work we do, which may or may not be how we achieve our career, and may or may not be how we earn a living. Income can come from several places, such as the eighth house of shared resources.  Florence Nightingale is a classic example. Her 10th house pointed to compassion and healing as her career, her sixth house pointed to physical labor as her work, and her eighth house accurately pointed to family wealth. She achieved her ultimate career by doing the physical work leading to the founding of the nursing profession, which was made financially possible because she inherited a lot of money.
   The principle at work here is "remember who you are," and learning about your natal astrological chart can help you do that.  Become intimately familiar with the callings of your heart, the values you will not compromise, and the understanding that those things are gifts meant to be expressed.  You will find these things detailed and supported in your natal chart if you get yourself a good astrologer to read it for you.  If you don't remember who you are, how can you become all you're meant to be?
   We live as the presence of the divine by expressing our true nature. We could express it joyfully and effectively in a number of jobs. We will not enjoy any job or career not in alignment with our true nature. Our true nature is this; we are spiritual beings, ideas in the mind of what we have named God, created in that same image and likeness.  This divine idea is the Christ, or Brahman, or Buddha, all names for the part of us that is divine. Our inner Christ nature is what is real about every human being and is the source from which all life takes shape. That divinity expresses uniquely through each one of us.
    If anyone ever tells you again that you were born in sin and need redemption, you simply look at them gently and say "that's not possible. I am made in God's image and there is no sin in God's image."  Those who can see that you know who you are will believe you.

Response-Ability Our Dreams

What and How?

   Chris and I are traveling from Arizona to British Columbia in a few weeks.  We are going by car and taking our time along the western coast.  Chris has created an itinerary that includes daily driving time, overnight stops and special sights.  We have a desire to see all of this country and we have the ability to respond to that desire.

   Many of us have had dreams that we never really reached for because we just couldn’t see how they could come true.  We are such a task oriented society that we want to be able to see the whole road, from the first idea that struck us all the way to its final outcome; manifesting our dream.  We want road maps and time lines and motels along the way.  Launching our dream can be sort of like driving across country without a map or GPS.  If we can’t see the entire path we have a difficult time taking the first step.  Yet we do have the ability to respond to the urge contained in that dream.

   There is a quote from Laurence J Peter, which goes something like this:  “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.”  That speaks to the most important part of making dreams come true.  You have to know what it is.  You have to be able to pin down your final destination.  For instance, I want to be interviewed by Oprah Winfrey about one of my books.  Do you suppose I have any idea how to make that happen?  Not so much, but its clear the first step is writing the book and getting it published.  The next step is calling attention to it.  That could be steps three through umpty-hundred.

   The point is, each step you take reveals the next step.  You see, we are not responsible for the “how,” we are only responsible for the “what.”  When you nail down your “what” and begin taking steps in that direction you might get a great surprise.  The “what” just might morph and change into something else; something so great you never would have dared to dream it in the beginning.  As you are guided in the steps to take, you may also be guided to a higher path and that higher path is guaranteed to give you greater joy.  That always happens when you choose your “what” and trust to Spirit to guide your steps.  You’ve got the ability to respond to your dreams.  Let’s get walking!

Peace, Passion, Purpose

The Song In Your Soul

I have often said that for the first time in recorded history, humanity is living long enough to grow up.  It’s even better than that.  Mid life is no longer somewhere between thirty-five and fifty.  It is possible now to have a thirty year career, retire, and still have an entire adult life ahead of us before we get really old.  We can start looking at midlife as between fifty five and sixty-five, or older.  That means we have lots of time for lots of changing!  Isn’t that wonderful?  I would like to share a passage with you on midlife from the book “Create a Life that Tickles Your Soul,” by Suzanne Willis Zoglio.   “In midlife the need to accumulate material things becomes less significant than the need for time to enjoy what we have.  The need for the approval of others becomes far less compelling than the need to follow dreams of our own.  …… As we assume positions of leadership in our careers and communities, we want to exercise that same level of influence in our personal lives as well.  We become more insistent on living deliberately and according to our own rules.  As we begin to lose parents, older siblings and even peers, we become keenly aware of our own mortality.  Just as we hit our stride, time starts to really fly.  Suddenly we have an urge to do what we’ve always wanted to do, before it’s too late.  We want to taste life more fully, connect with others more honestly, and somehow have a hand in making the world a better place.  So we set out to reinvent our lives, seeking peace, passion and purpose.”

   Peace, passion and purpose.  We are seeking to regain what we were born with, then had trained out of us or forgot as we were growing up.  Let me give you a little reminder lesson on the 1960’s in middle class America.  Not the part about the hippie generation, rather the part about conventional social expectations.  Education for girls was still not necessary, but most of society had recognized by then that girls who went to college were more likely to marry the really successful guys, the doctors and lawyers and such.  If you find a college town movie from the ‘60’s, many of the girls would be wearing suits that Jacquie Kennedy or Barbara Bush would have considered socially appropriate for the upper class.

   I grew up being told that whatever my life was like, that was God’s will for me, and my job was to live that life in humble service, hoping to die free of sin so I could then spend eternity in paradise. 

   Do you know how far away eternity feels to a 10 year old in Sunday School?  And just how much weight will that teaching carry with a 16 year old, in love, or maybe it was in lust, for the first time.  Of course it didn’t help that the young man was three years older, drop dead gorgeous, and a natural born smooth talker.  Motherhood, here I come.  Funny, a hundred years earlier I would have been the success of the community, bagging a husband with a job at such a young age.  In 1960-something, it was a shameful stigma that locked the door to church that I had already slammed shut.

   I can remember hitting my first round of mid-life crises.  I was directed to a psychic – the first time I’d ever met one – and the first words she said to me were; “You’ve spent years trying so hard to fit into all the little boxes other people built for you, and you almost succeeded.  If you had, you would have killed yourself in the process.”  That was the beginning of me reinventing my life, and I began a long search for the peace, passion and purpose that had for so many years been buried under obligation, duty and, yes, resentment.

   When you give up the song in your own soul in exchange for pleasing others, or for what looks like the easy road to success, resentment becomes a growing cloud that darkens your days and separates you from joy.  The only cure is to find your own song again and start singing it.  Stay tuned.

Paths of the Gods

Mastery through Changing Our Minds

The great teachers of all time say pretty much the same things.  Life is good, relationships are holy, and all we want in an abundant universe is ours for the claiming.  If each of us could fully accept those three ideas, what would our world be like?

I have an idea what our world would be like.  We would live without fear.  We would live without anger, without competition, without war, without hatred and discrimination, without pollution and crime.  The only reason we experience these things, hatred and fear and war and the rest, is because we believe that there is not enough to go around, we believe some people are dangerous and bad, and we believe mistakes are inevitable and deadly.  Are you ready to give up those beliefs?  Let’s see if I can tempt you.

Without fear and anger and competition, we would all be free to live our lives in an ecstasy of creativity.  Remember for a moment how good it feels to do something really creative.  Wouldn’t you like to feel that way all the time?  Creativity and fear cannot live in one mind at the same time.  The only reason for fear is a belief in lack, in not enough for me.  Not enough money, not enough resources, not enough love.  War is simply ongoing scrabbling for the top of the heap which we are compelled to do because of our belief in “not enough”.

Without war and hatred and discrimination, all of our resources could be spent on making this a better world.  For example, an international study was done that concluded every human being on the earth could be provided with adequate housing, food, medical care and education, and it could be done in six years.  The total cost for this huge project is less than the nations of the world spend on armies and defenses in a single year.  What’s it going to take for us to give up our belief that some people are evil and war is necessary? What is it going to take to realize that if enough of us change our beliefs and begin to live fully creatively, experiencing abundance and safety, we will be able to handle the relatively minor problems such as crime and pollution easily?

Stay tuned.  More next week.

Paths of the Gods

Mastery

   Each of us is on a sacred path; a path to freedom, a path to growing, a path to the heart of love that lives at the very center of our beings.  A path to knowing we are an extension of the energy field that created the universe, and as living extensions of Divine life, we are, in the daily lives we share with each other, walking among the gods.

   Our journey is toward mastery, the state of being in which we no longer see events as happening “to me” or even “through me,” but “as me.”  As Nelson Mandela proclaimed, “I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.”  We come to realize that the energy field we generate with our thoughts and feelings creates our human experience.  The great gift we must discover and learn to trust is that every experience, joyful or painful, brings us growth.  Our human understanding grows into the mastery that is our souls, stretching and enhancing our souls as we do so.

    Mastery is a state of pure grace and can't be forced.  As spiritual masters, we model a pattern of life fully in harmony with the greatest good possible.  We live at the "As Me" level when we experience no separation from Creator or Creation.  The dreams we build on the earth are temporary, but the transformation in our soul is eternal.  Building our life as a co-creator within the creative force of the universe is the most important thing we will ever do.  As you move through each step of building your dreams, you grow not only closer to achieving a harvest you can smell, taste, and feel, but into the eternal harvest of awakening.

Now you begin to awaken to the truth of you.  So enter freely and safely into the halls of the Gods.  You are one of them, one of us.  You belong here.  Love is your source.  Love is your nature.  It is the ground of your being, and the lens of your life.  Walk, and be welcome, on the paths of the Gods.

Prayer

What is prayer to me; my personal experience of prayer?  In childhood I thought my family was the universe and I was the center, literally with “Now I lay me down to sleep.  I loved praying as a child, especially the rosary.  Then in my late teens, it seemed to me that all that praying didn’t do much, and that was the beginning of resistance.  Life became busy, and there were more important and effective things than prayer that I could do.  It was the stage of believing the illusion that I could consciously master my fate, and that no one out there was listening anyway.  My universe had gotten much larger than my family, but I still had the unconscious perspective of being the center of that universe.

Robert and Janet Ellsworth defined three major types of prayer.  The first is results oriented prayer, in which you pray for specific requests for yourself or someone else.  The next is defined as consciousness expanding prayer, or affirmative prayer and prayers of praise and thanksgiving.  The third is defined as non-directed prayer, or meditation and the experience of the silence. 

All three of these types of prayer have a place in my life.  When I am troubled, or when another is in need, results oriented prayer brings me great comfort.  God is within me, but God is also much more.  I turn within to find Divine contact and surrender my concerns and the needs of others to that one Presence and Power which sustains all of us in love.

Consciousness expanding, or affirmative prayer, is a tool to break down the barriers in my own mind to the good of God’s will.  It is my path to discovering and activating the power of creation in and through me.  It is a method to transform my own negative thoughts, my fears, my false beliefs, into realization of the love and power active in my life, often in spite of me.

Non-directed prayer, or meditation and the experience of silence, is the source of my joy.  This is where the thoughts of my mind, the feelings of my heart, and the knowing of my spirit come together and meet a “something” that is so great and so beautiful that touching it, even for just a few moments, sustains me and give me a serenity which lasts for days, sometimes weeks.

I invite you to examine your own prayer history, and your prayer life now.  Which forms of prayer seem to work best for you?  What brings you the most joy, the most comfort, the most growth?  Is it different kinds of prayer at different times, or is there one way that always suits you best?  Become familiar with what stimulates you to pray, which forms of prayer you use, and which kinds of events lead you to the various forms of prayer that are a part of your prayer life.  This is where the conscious mind and will can make a positive contribution to mastery of your fate.  Know yourself, become consciously aware of the truth of who you are, and use your will to make the choice for comfort, for growth, and for joy.

Occupy Your Heart

Love’s Energy

Do you know that people can feel you?  It may not be conscious but they will respond to the feeling.  The energy we send out will repel or attract and those around us will behave accordingly.  Our job is to offer the energy of love.  That’s it.  That’s how we each transform our own little corner of the world and co-create a world that works for all.  Where do we start?  With our relationships

Dr Michael Beckwith once said,  “All the love your heart can hold, all the success you are meant to experience is already within you, begging to be released through your love energy. Today, open the floodgates of your heart and pour out a blessing of Love into your own life. Then see how outrageously rich you are in the gifts of the Spirit.”  There are a couple of things worth noting here.  First, you already are all that you need; love, success, joy.  All of it.  Second, open your heart and pour out all that energy and you are outrageously blessed.

The first relationship we have is the eternal one between our Spirit and our Creator.  That is why we already are all that we need.  Our next relationship is between our Spirit and our human self.  Our human self must come to realize the truth of our nature and once it does, the pouring out of love can begin.  This comes gradually, over time and with practice, but it is there for every one of us.  The more in touch we are with our own love nature, the better all our relationships will be. 

I heard this story of a man overcome with joy during a great Sunday service and he began dancing up and down the aisles shouting, “Lord, fill me.  Fill me Lord, fill me now.  And he hears a voice say, “I am filling you, but you keep leaking.”  That’s exactly what happens, it’s an energy leak in us.  When we have a relationship rift with someone, the energy of love is leaking out of us.  There’s a place in us where darkness is, where love cannot live and we bring light into that darkness by healing the relationships within ourselves then with others.

I think that’s the kind of thing Jesus was saying.  Our whole life is on the line.  “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly,” and when the energy of separation begins to build in me, he’s saying, “make this primary.”  Make it primary in your life that you don’t allow this stuff in you.  Reschedule your day if you have to.  If you recognize a breach in love, climb all over it right now.  It’s primary to heal that because if you don’t, it leaves another measure of darkness in both of you.  “Oh there’s a relationship hurt, I feel something, I feel separation, what am I going to do?”  Allow your Spirit to shine through your humanity and radiate the love that you are.