Belief and Life

When logics die, the secret of the soil grows through the eye
and blood jumps in the sun. Dylan Thomas

I have learned that we see life not only through what we are, but what we believe. This is the prime filter, the colored glass that interprets the innocent white light of the sun. And I have learned that belief is, more than we most often realize, a choice. We choose to believe what we do, whether from the standpoint of familiarity, or security, or because it resonates with our repressed, traumatized being, or because of mutually shared hopes and dreams. If we want to really change our experience of life we must change our beliefs. This is the primal principle of Life, and there is no getting around it.

This is actually good news, because if a belief is ultimately a choice, we only need to choose to be happy and free and then inspect and question our beliefs that oppose it in order to turn them around, bring them into harmony with an innate sense of joy, that which gives rise to our spirit, that which harkens to us, calling us into a broader, freer place where Love is a free function, the primal reality.

Right now we can look at the world and shake with trepidation, for the shakable things are being shaken. If we believe that the economy is our hope and help, our security and well-being, then we are in a precarious position, for the world order is collapsing to allow space for a holistic, spiritually alive and harmonious new state of humanity. But if we shift our beliefs in ways that open us to the waves of Grace that are sweeping the planet, then Grace will soften us, detach us from old habitual identities, expand us as it opens us to the miracle and divine beauty of Life itself.

We have been in a collective spell and are waking up to the Universe as it actually is. No matter how expansive and beautiful our beliefs can grow, the ultimate reality of Life is forever beautiful beyond our beliefs, beckoning us to open more fully, celebrate more joyously, love more passionately, live more wisely, and thus grow big and strong and tall in heart, becoming all we are capable of being.

Illuminating Happiness

"Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after
years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief,
of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which
has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game,
is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.
Only a feeble light glimmers like a tiny star in a vast gulf of
darkness. This feeble light is but a presentiment, and the soul,
when it sees it, trembles in doubt whether the light is not a
dream, and the gulf of darkness reality."
Wassily Kandinsky

We live in a time of tremendous uncertainty smeared over with thick veneers of ever whiffle-waffling confidence that science and the purveyors of technology will find the way to solve our exponentially escalating problems so that life will continue ever upward towards its peak of material prosperity and thus some semblance of peace for all. There are real lives at stake here: the hopes and dreams of countless parents for their children’s right to live out their lives in a harmonious world.

The “feeble light” that glimmers is the same Light that Moses knew burning in his bones, that Buddha discovered beyond all form and emotion, that Jesus proclaimed himself to wholly be. It is the Light of Life in all of our eyes, purified of the deeply immersed trauma birthed emotions and their pernicious defense mechanisms and strategies.

How shall the Light emerge and harmonize the body-mind with its own inherent nature of Freedom, peace, spacious bliss, and beauty making instincts?

I wish, wish, wish it could happen because people stretch their imaginations, open up their intuition, affirm the facts they don’t want to admit to and thus start waking up from the corporate spell woven by the super rich, the carrot dangled on the end of their enticingly extended sticks. I wish it didn’t have to come through the intensities of pain inflicted when mutual dreams collapse as the oil-based economic systems of ever increasing growth cough, and choke, sputter and sigh into exhaustion.

It is such a small shift, and yet so momentous, when people put Spirit above money, peace above material prosperity, time for leisure above acquisition, the highest good of their own children and all others above their own self interests. But it will take something powerful to enact it, like economic collapse, like total disillusionment, like the anarchy of despair.

This is just how the majority are, so this is how it will be. But there are many, many people out there, right now, who sense what is coming, who are awakening to a deeper realism, who are thinking for themselves, who are making the time to get in touch with their souls. For them the ancient words of the prophet Isaiah hold true:

“Arise and shine, for your light has come, and the glory (beauty) of the One Light, the Great Love will shine upon you. For though dense darkness covers the earth, the Light will arise upon you…”

In the original language of Hebrew this could also be translated:

Be Luminous for your illuminating happiness is come and the splendor and reality of the One who becomes in time is shining upon you. For the dark that obstructs the Light will fill up the world, but the Eternal One(ness) shall arise upon you, and his splendor shall be seen on you.

Materialism as the controlling paradigm of existence is a dense dark. We have enjoyed the bright side of it, for the material sphere is not evil, of course. So much good has come in the form of tools, knowledge, expertise… and yet, because of vested interests of powerful entities, mankind has been exploited, medicine poisened and drug warped. Massive economic ponzi schemes have been developed which are money making machines for the super rich. Do we really realize that for every corporation that flourishes there are countless small, family run business that go bankrupt and with them dreams destroyed, families stressed, marriages failed, children traumatized?

Do you know that during the recent economic crises the number of billionaires have increased in the world? Just recently the news quoted Warren Buffet as saying, “When it is raining gold it is time to get out the buckets.” His wealth has vastly increased as has most of the most wealthy people in the world. Do you realize that his opportunities for profit come at the expense of millions of poor and middle class families who are losing their homes, their business, their hopes? When are we going to wake up to how things really work in a system of ruthless competition?)

The collapse of a civilization is a major historical event. We are in the midst of one. But the future is very bright for the bright and clear souls who are awake to the true nature of the Universe and the laws of Love that govern the higher good and harmonies. This is one wild ride!

SPIRIT IN OUR NAKED CENTER

A new time is upon us:
a time of spirit in our naked center,
land in our circumference:
feet deep in earth, heart in open sky.

In this time of extreme urbanization, when the dream time of merchants which so forms our collective consciousness draws us to the edge of a precipice—will it take the rising roar of waves beating down city streets, filling gutted department stores with foam to wake us up from a truncated vision of what is real, this materialistic spell? Will it take the extinction of the polar bear, or the walrus, or the robin or the bee before we awake to realize the supreme peace and Life-presence inherent in the quick of every cell in our bodies?

Our economies are driven by the myth that mankind’s most natural state is an ache of constant need; that the true nature of man is a ravenous consumer. Is it possible that this belief acutely enhances perpetual, restless, human unhappiness? Could it be that this perception, expressed through the artistry and endless repetition of the advertiser’s barrage spills over into bleak, grieving pain passing itself on: the blind longing for an unknown, missed cohesion in Light, grinding out more pain, inflicting our children through dangerous, degrading words, the harsh slap, the snapped and sapped issuance of loving awareness, plunging adolescents into needless alienation and densities of soul?

I am convinced that what is essential to creating a more just and beautiful world is staring us right in the face, reflected in the Light of our eyes, but our minds are mesmerized by a illusionary worldview propagated by merchants. We are so used to a consummeristic way of beholding life we assume it is “normal”. You need a better this. Life will be better with a better that. What you now have is just not good enough. More and more is obviously better and better. Of course, don’t we all know that this is just how civilization must advance: new inventions driven by human nature’s inherent thirst for something more? But is it? Can we safely assume that we need more and more and more to be happy, that we, by nature, are bereft and bored and need lots and lots of things to stimulate us into happiness?

As long as we believe the lie that who we essentially are in our most naked essence is not enough, that our inherently natural, unbent nature is not relaxed and open, fluid, creative and harmonious, but rather wounded, tense, constricted and in constant need, we will continue in our mutually created and increasingly dangerous dream. We will continue to act out a cultural conditioning foreign to the actual nature of our essential existence at the expense of the Earth and future generations. And we will never discover the profuse and free nature of Life itself as it can be, unburdened from mental illusions, pouring as Love and liberty through our open energetic beings.

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