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.

Musings on Divinity

Ground of Being

  Some news is so big, so very important, that it's hard to even put into words.  There are concepts that are so huge, so much bigger than what our conscious minds can get around and grasp, that finding a way to talk about them can be very difficult.  I'd like to begin a discussion on what I believe is the greatest concept of all.   Our minds can't wrap around this concept well enough to describe it, and the best we can do is make guesses or assign names and attributes.  Yet it is possible for each of us to come to a deeper understanding of it; one that goes beyond words.
   So, even though our words may fall short and our intellects are too small, there is a part of us that is infinite, that is created in the image and likeness of the Creator of all that is.  When we reach a deeper level of understanding of our connection with all that is and bring more of it into our conscious awareness, then our lives change. 
   Let's start at the beginning.  What most of humanity now calls God is an infinite presence whose nature is love, operating through law.  Two of the great world scriptures, the Hebrew Scriptures and the Upanishads, came to us at about the same time.  In the Upanishads God is described as having the attributes of Presence, Power, and Light.  This is what science now calls "ground of being".  The ground of being out of which all form emanates.  Then in Genesis, God said, "let there be," and creation was formed.  In the beginning of the gospel of John this is explained.  "In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God."  John is speaking of the power of the word:  in the beginning there was a source, a power, a ground of being.  That source created all that was made, and in him was life, and that life was the light of all men.  And the light shined in the darkness and the darkness conquered it not.
  Please don't be misled;.  Don't be fooled by the masculine character of this language.  It's a social convention, not a statement of the maleness of the creator.  But it's a social convention that was necessary because it's talking about a very personal relationship with this supreme power, this ground of being.  A personal pronoun has to be used somehow, to communicate across countless generations that the relationship is personal.  You see, this Presence and this Power that we talk about is alive, and we are in relationship with it. This is a presence and power that is infinite in potential and scope and ability, yet still fully present to us, in our experience.  In this presence there is life, and that life is the light of all of us.  All people.  You and me.  This is the true light that gives light to everyone who comes into the world.

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.

Peace, Passion, Purpose

Get Started Now

   Take a moment and bring to mind something you have not yet fully accomplished that is very important to you.  It could be a relationship with a friend, spirituality, world peace, physical health, education, business success - just one big thing that’s on your to-do list.  Don’t try to define everything you care about right now, just pick one thing that has high value for you.  Just one! 

   I have a challenge for you.  Look through your checkbook and your credit card statements for the past 12 months.  How much of your money have you spent on that one thing?  If you have a calendar or a Palm or any regular way of organizing your time, look through it for the past year and see if you can estimate how much time you have spent on this one, important thing.  If you don’t have something like that, search your memory and come up with your best guess.  How much of your resources have you committed to something you feel is very important to you?

   I’m willing to bet every one of us has at least one thing we say is very important to us, but it gets little of our resources; financial or time & energy.  Why is that?  One possible answer is that it really isn’t that important.  Maybe it’s really a “should.”  Something we feel we should believe is important, some sort of obligation.  Another possible answer is that it means so much to us we hardly dare try.  What if we fail?  It seems emotionally easier to hold this wonderful thing out in the land of “someday” than it would be to give it up altogether because we just didn’t make the grade.  Or maybe we think it’s going to require more of us than we have right now.   You know, all of the "too young, too old, too poor, not enough education, too fat, too thin, too tall, too short" series of beliefs.

   If you want to live with peace, passion and purpose, schedule that one thing.  Start a savings account for it, block out time in your calendar every week, make that first call, shop for those first healthy meals, whatever it takes for your one important thing.  Just start right now.  First thing when you wake up each morning bring that one thing to mind and tell yourself something about it.  “Today I will……………"

Then do it.

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.

Peace, Passion, Purpose

Changes

   If you had been raised as a Hindu boy at the same time Gandhi was, you would have been taught that there are natural stages to life that were relative to your age and learning.  The first twenty years were for your education and developing your skills for work in the world.  The second twenty years were to be spent supporting and raising your family.  The third twenty years were for the purpose of prayer and spiritual growth.  These classifications make perfectly logical sense.  Men learned first how to earn a living, then used that ability to continue the human race by raising children, then completed their lives by focusing on spiritual practice and perhaps even benefit the world in some way by the wisdom they discovered and taught.  That certainly was the pattern that Gandhi’s life followed.

   There were two basic assumptions in that culture; in fact in most cultures at the turn of the 20^th century.  One was that there was no point in educating women, because their purpose was to bear children and serve their husbands.  The second was that living to be as old as 60 was a much longer life than many people experienced, so guidelines didn’t exist for the next 20 years, or the next.  Today with advances in medicine and nutrition, experts are now talking about an average life expectancy of 110.

   So let’s extend those guidelines a bit.  The first 30 years are for getting educated, the second 30 for raising a family, the next 30 for spiritual pursuits.  That leaves 20 years at the end to figure out what’s next, or just play around.  However there is a third basic assumption in categorizing life in this way, which is clearly inaccurate; the assumption that life as it is will always continue in pretty much the same way.  That assumption is the seed of hopelessness and the antithesis of faith.  An old, simple affirmation is a guide out of the rut of hopelessness.  It goes like this.  “Life is an upward, progressive movement of Spirit.” We are on a journey and we have a purpose.   Yet we humans often step into the rut of hopelessness and get stuck there, unable to find our faith.  The way we do that is called resisting change. 

This earth was born in a blast of flaming gasses, and if it weren’t for change, consistent, progressive change, you and I would not be living here today.  What if you and I had never learned to tie our shoes or feed ourselves or crawl?  What if we had so resisted change that we still needed someone else to change our diapers?  The changes in the earth and the changes in us have been an upward, progressive movement of Spirit that has led to more and more possibilities, more and more life.  Change is the very activity of being, doing and becoming.

   One truth that comes through loud and clear from the Hindu teaching is that there are life stages and our life will change from youth to adulthood to old age.