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.

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.

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.

Making a Difference 2

On Eagles Wings

Did you know that an eagle knows when a storm is approaching long before it breaks?  The eagle will fly to some high spot and wait for the winds to come.  Then, when the storm hits, it sets its wings so that the wind will pick it up and lift it above the storm.  While the storm rages below, the eagle is soaring above it. The eagle does not escape the storm.  It simply uses the storm to lift it higher. It rises on the winds that bring the storm.

When the storms of life come upon us - and all of us will experience them - we can rise above them by setting our minds and our belief toward the Divine living as us and through us. The storms do not have to overcome us.  We can allow the power planted in us by the Creative Force of the universe to lift us above them. We are invited, encouraged, called, to ride the winds of the storms that bring sickness, tragedy, failure and disappointment in our lives.  We can soar above the storm, and call forth the Good even in the midst of tragedy.

In doing so, we contribute to lifting up all our brothers and sisters of the earth.  Our lives become not only an example for others, but even more importantly, a powerful force of energy helping the human race shift the balance toward evolution of the spirit.  Hold in your heart the thought that every difficulty that plagues you is presenting an opportunity to grow in strength and achieve greater spiritual power.  It is the only true power.  Remember, it is not the burdens of life that weigh us down, it is how we handle them, and we always have a choice.  

This is not a new idea. "Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles."  Isaiah 40:31