Many people are astounded by the number of homosexuals there are today.  Some would say that there were always as many, just not so many out of the closet.  I don’t think that this is true.  I believe that there are many more than ever before and the number will continue to increase.  Today, woman who are attracted to younger men are called cougars, this number too is increasing and the relationships between older women and younger men will increase as time goes on.

In time homosexuality will no longer be an issue that drives politics and religion, and older women with younger men will no longer be stigmatized by a label.  This is because these are genetic directives meant to address the overpopulation of the earth by humans which left unchecked would lead to human extinction.  There are even ancient legends regarding war, telling tales of how the gods used to come down and eat men and women.  Finally there was a truce wherein man promised to fight wars rather than to be eaten by the gods in order to prevent the world from being overrun by humans.

There are many of our behaviors that seem to become epidemic before them become commonplace, evolutionary mutations, so to speak – genetic reprogramming that we are unable to override because to do so would be to cause our extinction.  Older woman and younger men, homosexuality, sexually transmitted diseases that cause infertility, and wars upon wars upon wars – all leading to an inevitable and necessary population decrease.  Whenever there is a societal change of direction – we have to ask ourselves what will be its outcome?  Today the greatest threat to the earth and to our species is not war, it is overpopulation.  Overpopulation causes a greater drain on our resources than anything that we do.  In order to intelligently deal with overpopulation, we would have to deal with the problems of poverty and ignorance, problems that we as a species have not evolved enough to adequately tackle without Divine intervention.

If we were to go back in time, as far back as recorded history permits we would find that man has not evolved into a higher form of human.  Our chimpanzee cousins live in groups in which men form bonds of kinship, and patrol the borders of their territories.  They live in their own little countries and have distinct power structures.  For all apes, it is good to control the most power, to have to most resources and to form alliances that guarantee these things.  Although the males fight each other to show who is the most powerful, more and more research is revealing that behind every chest pounding males is guiding female.  Our chimp cousins have rudimentary tools for building what they need to build and for foraging for food.  They have a number of medicinal plants that they use for wounds or infections.  They do not use words, but through the teaching of sign language we now know that they have the capacity to communicate their desires.  With few exceptions, we have not evolved beyond our ancient ancestors or even our ape cousins.  What we have done I find very hard to label evolution because it is really only an increase in an already existing ability. What we have done is that we have far exceeded all other animals in the making and use of tools to satisfy our basic animal instincts.  We have become technologically advanced apes.  We still haven’t broken off of the family tree and formed our own.  A chimpanzee is not a gorilla, and a gorilla is not an orangutan – but the differences among them, and their differences from us do not amount to enough to move any of us to a new tree.  Yet, I believe that we were and are meant to strive for that.

It is through our ability to connect with the spiritual, with the intangible, with God, love, art, music, poetry and a sense of connectedness with and responsibility for every other living organism on the planet that is the key to true human evolution.   It is not through the left brain that we will evolve, the left brain is basically good for making and improving tools.  It is through the right brain that we have the capacity to reach up and become the meaning of the image of God.  Obviously, man was created with the ability to live as the image of God, loving unconditionally and being caretaker for all life on the planet and the planet herself.  But we clearly have a choice.  God changed Abram to Abraham and thereby changed him from being a man to being a man of God.  Saul’s name was changed from Saul to Paul thereby changing him from a persecutor to a follower of Christ.  If we, can change from being the human race, to becoming the humane race, this could signal our own evolution from the greatest ape – to the image of the God.

Evolution is always building something better upon what was.  The new brain built not instead of the instinctual brain but built from it.  We have instinct and we have choice.  That choice allows us the option of not just perfecting the ability to fulfill our instinctual desires and protect ourselves from our often self-perpetuating fears by designing better tools.  It allows us to rise above those desires and fears and see them for what they are – to use love and compassion in finding ways to eliminate them without fight or flight.  The animal instinct does not transcend me and mine.  The God in us cannot see me or mine as less than the whole.  We only need to be the race of beings that we came here to become.

It is the animal nature to hoard, to become fat before winter.  It is the animal nature to find the richest territory and defend it against all intruders.  It is the nature of the beast to take and to keep and the nature of God to give and to share.  We will be called upon now to show our true nature.  In the end, all that is hidden – even from ourselves will be disclosed.

Matthew 12:1 In the mean time, when there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.  12:2 For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. 12:3 Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.

12:15 And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. 12:16 And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully:  12:17 And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?  12:18 And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods.  12:19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.  12:20 But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?  12:21 So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.  12:22 And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on.  12:23 The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment.  12:24 Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?  12:25 And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?  12:26 If ye then be not able to do that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest?  12:27 Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  12:28 If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field, and to morrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?  12:29 And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind.  12:30 For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: and your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.  12:31 But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto you.  12:32 Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.  12:33 Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.  12:34 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.  12:54 And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is.  12:55 And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass.  12:56 Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?  12:57 Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?

Just as the God gives to the raven so we are given.  Nothing that we have belongs to us it is all given to us as steps in Jacob’s ladder.  We each have been given what we need to shed the animal and become the human.  We are each unique and through our uniqueness we are to find that which we can give to God by giving back to the earth and its inhabitants.  We can only truly say that have earned that which we give to others.  Whatever we have in abundance we must give abundantly.  The signs are all here, the change is approaching.

The world is on the threshold of a new beginning.  It will not be one in which the power of the few rules over the many, but of power in the whole.  It is one of those evolutionary leap times.  Those of us who have felt like mutations throughout our lives will finally see that evolution is only accomplished through mutation.  This “economic downturn” that seems to be the catalyst of change in the world will continue until we all let go of those things of the world that stand between man and God.  Whatever we cling to is our treasure – therein lies our hearts.  It is the end, at least for a millennia – of the world of mammon.  Those capable of giving away what they have hoarded to those in need will make the transition.  Those who cannot let go, will find that it is taken anyway and there will be no place of comfort.  It is the blessing and the responsibility given to man to become the image of God.  It is that image that will shine in the times ahead.  Those who hope to evolve, who see the path to evolution and hear its call must know that the time is now.

I am familiar with love and with pain; and when I have felt pain, while loving, the pain was never caused by the act of loving, it was caused by the actions of the ones I loved. To me, it is like a hose – the faucet is turned on, the hose fills up and the water pours out. And so the process is like this, one’s being is filled with love – so filled that it must be released out towards another being, towards God, or even towards nature itself. Still, it is a filling up of the heart and soul with love and so long as that love is being released, the vessel is being constantly filled. Being filled with love leaves no room for pain. I recall a story that Wayne Dyer told about a woman with a disabled daughter, totally bedridden for many years, and for all of those years the mother lovingly stayed by her side, changing her diaper, feeding her, loving her. She did this without it hurting, other than perhaps the empathy that she felt for her daughter. After being moved by the enormous suffering of Mother Teresa I went back over the things that she had said, and I cannot imagine an instance where love hurts.

The act of giving does not hurt either. Again, giving is a gesture from the heart. What does hurt is when we do not give from our hearts but we give because we feel we must. In doing this, we are not giving in essence we are taking from ourselves. Another quote from Mother Teresa which stood out to me was this:

“I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.”

I was never much on placing importance on the death of Jesus, but I was deeply inspired by his life. I don’t believe that the value of a life should be overshadowed by the manner of death. After all, no matter how you cut it, living takes a lot more work than dying, and living an exemplary life, at any time, trumps an exemplary death. I read a bumper sticker the other day that really brought the point home, it said, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you are car.” In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus’ followers asked him, basically, how to get to Heaven, a question he never seemed to answer to the satisfaction of the questioner.

[6]. His disciples asked and said to him: “Do you want us to fast? How shall we pray, how shall we give alms, what rules concerning eating shall we follow?” Jesus says: “Tell no lie, and whatever you hate, do not do: for all these things are manifest to the face of heaven; nothing hidden will fail to be revealed and nothing disguised will fail before long to be made public!”

When I was young, I was given the impression that I was not really capable of amounting to anything in the world. So, when I became successful in my own business I bought many very expensive things, jewelry, art – things that said I had made it. These were my trophies that I told myself I would never let go of, they proved my ability to succeed. But as my life would have it, my health caused me to leave my business and it reached a point in my life that to keep a roof over the heads of my children, I would have to sell my trophies. They were the only proof that I had left. While I was struggling with this I read a book on the Kabala and it said that we should gather everything that we believe that we can live without in order to give it away, but then, after we have gathered everything that we feel we can manage without we should then double it and give it away. The essence of it was that only the ego attaches to things, only the ego benefits from things, and not the soul. This allowed me to ‘give’ those things for the good of my family without pain, because I knew that in doing so I was purging my ego. My husband, feeling badly for the sacrifice that I had made promised to replace all that I had given, but I did not want them back, giving it opened my heart and freed my ego, I felt gratitude and joy.

Using the parable of the seeds as an example, the things that we do so that God will know our love for Him, are the seeds that fall by the wayside. They are a lie, the heart is not in the action itself. For Mother Teresa to see a leper and feel to herself that she wouldn’t touch him for a thousand pounds, says that in the depth of her heart she does not see Jesus in that leper. The act of curing that leper is an act of doing what you should do, like fasting or going to church, but it is not heartfelt and so the heart derives no joy from the act, in fact, it causes pain because of the feeling of uselessness of the sacrifice. To sacrifice is to make sacred, but only the heart can make sacred.

In Mother Teresa’s youth she was filled with an ecstatic love for Jesus and for the work that he did in his life. She was filled with the spirit of Christianity, but the church robbed her of that. The church robbed her of the loving Jesus, the joyous Jesus, the Jesus free of ego attachments and laws, filled only with the desire to Love, teach and heal his brothers. The church forced her to believe that only through suffering could she find the love of Jesus, only through suffering would she feel the love of Jesus, and worst of all, that only through teaching the value of suffering to others could she save their souls for Jesus. The teachings of the church were in direct contradiction to the yearnings of her heart, and because she believed the church to be the appointed messenger of God, she deafened her heart to its cries, and dedicated herself to the work, but without the spirit in the work, without the love in the work, she was empty and alone, not seeing God and not feeling his Love. She loved Jesus, but she could not feel his love because she was indoctrinated only towards his suffering. There are many Saints who are marked by their “Dark Night Of The Soul”, but each one emerged with a greater sense of mysticism and spirituality and a far lesser sense of righteousness of religious doctrine.

She gave her life to the God that she loved, but she was denied the fullness of His love in her heart, not by God but by the church that taught not the beauty and joy of love, but only the vows of suffering. I feel that it is a crime for her suffering to be used by atheists as proof that there is no God, but I believe equally that it is a crime for the church to use her suffering as an example of the natural path of a true Christian.

Filed under: love, Mysticism, Religion, spiritual development, spiritual healing Tagged: brotherhood, Catholic, empathy, God, love, mother teresa, pain, Religion, religious doctrine, sacrifice, selflessness, St. John, suffering ]]> http://oceanofconsciousnes.com/2012/01/25/the-suffering-of-mother-teresa-was-religious-not-spiritual/feed/ 3 Denise http://oceanofconsciousnes.com/2012/01/21/choosing-our-own-way-2/ http://oceanofconsciousnes.com/2012/01/21/choosing-our-own-way-2/#comments Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:20:21 +0000 Denise Gibel-Molini http://oceanofconsciousnes.wordpress.com/?p=76 ]]> “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Viktor Frankl

Often, we decide what the right direction is for us based on what it is for others. Then we find that we are stuck with a goal without the necessary desire to reach it. A person may decide to go into his own business because he does not like authority. He does not consider how much he hates paperwork, long hours, paying people from money that he has not yet earned, and that he can’t do it all by himself. Instead of looking within to find what the real problems are and what the personal solutions might be —he looks outside to see what others had done.

This is the kind of confusion that we are faced with when we try to follow guidance from outside, and not of from within. When this choice becomes difficult, instead of seeking a different solution, most people just stick with the plan but find any number of obstacles to place in their paths to prevent its completion. They tell themselves and others that it is not that they won’t do it; it is just that there are too many things going on which currently stand in their way. What is really in their way is that it is not their goal. They do not have the passion to walk the chosen path. If we have no passion for what we do with our lives, we cannot do those things well or for long without getting sick, or off balance in some way.

This causes us to consciously face a direction that we are unconsciously running away from. This results in deadlock. I have seen many people in this position one way or another. They complain that everyone else gets opportunities except them; something always gets in their way. Or it is their karma to fail. That is just not true. What they are doing is building their lives from the plans of others. They are making choices based upon the successes of others. It is easier to walk the beaten path than to pave ones own. There was a time when that it worked for most people. Now, we are in an age of individuality. Difficult as it may seem, we are being forced from an inner need for satisfaction from a constant lack of external reinforcement to forge our own path to our own goal.

We have traveled far from that sacred connection to our true selves. Instead of deciding at which place we want to arrive, we first need to decide what inner satisfaction awaits us there, how much we are willing to sacrifice, and most importantly, before we follow another’s path, we must be certain that where others have gone holds the same treasure for us. Once we know the price we are willing to pay, and what it is that we really expect for that price, we have something that we are capable of working with. There really are two different soul paths: those for whom the destination justifies the journey and those for whom the journey is the destination.

It is not a question of one being the right way, and one being the wrong way. It is a question of which way is right for each individual. Some of us become workaholics because we want more and more; we do it for the prize at the end. Others become workaholics because their joy comes from the work they do. Again, neither is right nor wrong. To try to develop the attitude that others say is right, or to attempt to see the truth as others see it, can only lead to miserable and unfulfilled lives, if it is not our own way. There is a difference between what feels right and what others say is right. In these times, we are being asked to find that difference for ourselves.

Those who live their lives based on what works for others cannot remain committed to what they do. Who we are is what dictates what we can do well. We can only do well and for a sustained period of time, that which is in alignment with who we are. Otherwise self-esteem suffers; either we feel like failures, or we feel unsatisfied which leads us to feeling that we are defective because we are missing what we have been told is the obvious.

This is a time when personal truth, rather than conformity is needed for our own inner well-being and for the well being of the whole, every aspect of our living must reflect the inner self. The Native American names such as: Lone Eagle, Running Bear, Night Watcher, are given based on the persons own unique qualities. They are invited to live their lives in fulfillment of those names. There was a time when we all took names that mirrored who we were. We were once in touch with ourselves and with our environment. We are being asked by our souls to return to that ancient spiritual center. We are being called from within to live who we are, to love who we are, and to do what reflects who we are. This is the dawning of a new age, an age of truth. We neither find happiness, nor satisfaction in living anyone else’ s life. No one ever stands in the way of those who know where they are going. We have to go where we know from within.
When the world was disconnected, and there were such a things as distant shores, the structure of society was much stronger. The strength of a society or a religion to influence its members or followers rests strongly on the limitations of outside information that could otherwise be an influence or create choices that do not exist within the structure. The rules worked, not because they were right but because they were the only rules and pertained to everyone.

Since the end of WWII, slowly but consistently distant shores have become neighbors. Members of completely different societies have been unable to prevent the exchange of information. The world of yellow and the separate world of blue remain intact and self-fulfilling so long as yellow remains separate from blue. The rules of right and wrong, and even cause and effect work for all members of the yellow society or religion as they do for the blue although they may be in total contradiction with each other. However, when the members of the blue group and the members of the yellow group begin to mingle and share beliefs and information, a new green group emerges which inevitably destroys both the yellow and the blue. It does this because suddenly there exists and option, a choice, a way not previously known to either yellow or blue. In actuality it does not destroy the two separate groups but instead it is what they become, the product of their evolution.

The internet has completed the erasure of true borders, the world has now become a melting pot, and so, we can no longer look to any external governing principal for our lives, and how we live them or the direction that will work. We must now look within. There are too many truths ‘out there’ to find the one that will work; we must now journey deep into our own hearts and our own souls to find the truth that supersedes contradiction. This is the inner truth.

Mankind has mastered the lessons of leadership and brute force in the Age of Aries; it mastered the lessons of the herd mentality, the pain, suffering and fear of standing outside of the group, and the manipulations of power in the age of Pisces. It has now entered the school of equality through individuality. In this course, pain and suffering will come from inside when we feel our sense of self diminished. These are the ultimate challenges and lessons of the Age of Aquarius. It is not the energy of the individual merging and losing itself into the group but rather the group growing and becoming greater through the distinctly unique contribution of each individual. We are beginning to suffer depression and illness – not from being isolated from the group, but from being isolated from the self. Many of us think to ourselves, ‘I have what everyone says that I should have, I do what everyone says I should do, my life contains all of the pieces that everyone says should make me happy, yet, the pieces will not fit and I am slowly dying’.

Most people are too embarrassed to admit the panic and confusion that overtakes them when someone says, “Just be yourself”. The truth is, very few people know how to do that, or who that self is. So our first step in finding a fulfilling direction is finding the self that is seeking fulfillment and becoming an expression of that true and unique self living within each of us.

There was a time when your choices were beautiful sparkling diamonds or dull glass. It made some sense, if even in a superficial way, to want a diamond. But today, there are faux diamonds that cost a fraction of the cost and sparkle with equal brilliance – so one has to ask oneself why buy the diamond? What is it’s value in our world today? What if you have a ten thousand dollar diamond, trade it in for a one thousand dollar cubic zirconium and give the nine thousand dollars that you have left to buy mosquito nets for children in Africa? Then your diamond would have value., it would show much more than what you can afford to have, it would show what you are willing to give. Wouldn’t it be cool, rather than wearing a five thousand dollar blouse that says you are filthy rich, wearing a five-dollar tee shirt that says, “The money I planned to spend on a blouse is feeding a village in India”. How cool would you be?

Bling says to the world, “I am wearing this because I can afford it and I have nothing better to do with it than waste it on show”. Yes, it just does. No one can watch the homeless and displaced, the diseased and dying in this country and around the world and then spend thousands of dollars on things, which announce, “It’s about me”. Not today. Today we don’t need to spend thousands, millions of dollars on precious gems in order to sparkle. We can spend a fraction of that on semi-precious gems, give the rest to those in desperate need and not only sparkle from the gems, but glow from the heart. I believe that today it would be much more satisfying to wear something that doesn’t say “I have made it because I can afford to drip in diamonds” but something that says, “I have made it because I can afford to feed a village”. The oohs and ahhs are much greater today and much more long lasting when you show what you give rather than what you wear.

If our success in a profession is measured by the amount of money that we are paid, that is ok, if we understand that our true worth is measured by what we give. The point is that there is no need for bling today, it doesn’t look better than faux bling, but trading that bling in for heart does look better. We cannot outlaw bling anymore than we can outlaw fur, but it would be nice to ask someone dripping in bling, “How many children’s bellies could be filled by those earrings?” “How many villages could be educated against AIDS with that ring?” And perhaps, while we are at it, we should ask ourselves how much does it cost to make a house a home, and how many children can we give a home to for the price of a ten million dollar house?

I am not advocating ego denial. I am advocating a sense of satisfaction that not only feeds the ego but also feeds the soul. Trust me, it feels better to give to give to children in Somalia than it does to give to salespeople in Harry Winston, Proving to a child that faith has reason, God is alive and that there are angels is so much more gratifying than the stares you get from sparkling down the street in jewels. And who could honestly say that a tour of a mansion you built could hold a candle to a tour of the hospital you built in a village that has not even seen a doctor. Save a mink, don’t buy fur, Save a child, don’t buy bling.

My son has a close friend TJ. I had noticed his father at different school functions. Jerry was blind and had one leg. His attitude was so completely at peace with his situation that I thought he must have spent most of his life this way. After all, how could anyone seem so happy unless he had had a lifetime to adjust to such tragic circumstances?

I learned that it had only happened a year and a half before. I was shocked that such relatively little time had passed and that everything was so normal. This caused me to look back over my life and the many crises and tragedies I myself have had to face and I found that the only thing I had to regret was the length of time I spent on self-pity. Regardless of what we go through, eventually, we must face that moment when it becomes necessary to evaluate the living of our lives and not our lives themselves. You see, we have no control over what happens to us, but we do have control over how we react, and how we react could possibly determine the quality of the rest of our lives. Although it may seem difficult to control a reaction, reaction is a function of the lower mind. It is a habit. I had my hair pulled when I was a child so as I grew, anytime someone reached their hand in a way that appeared, to me, to be coming towards my head, I would flinch and pull back. Once I became conscious of this reaction, I began to do it less and less, first intentionally, and later not reacting became a habit. It took time to build up our reactions and it will take time to change them, but they can be changed.

We are each being faced, right now, with some form of personal crisis, within a national crisis within a world crisis. At this time, as perhaps at no other, it would be difficult to find one individual on the planet who is not at this time dealing with a crisis. We, in this country, are dealing with the effects of the Iraq War, the destruction caused by the climate changes, and our evaporating economy, while at the same time every individual is dealing with some form of personal, political, financial, racial or religious crisis. So, it helps to know that we are not suffering alone but have actually joined the suffering of mankind.

Putting it in this perspective, we must rise above our personal situations and understand that this is a time of change in the universe. There have been unprecedented increases in the sunspot activity in recent months. The atmospheres of various planets including our own have been going through drastic changes. We have just entered a new millennium, but with all things being synchronistic, we can say that the entire universe is also entering a new era.

For change to occur there must first be a period of breakdown; logically, there cannot be a breakdown without chaos and crisis. That which is not built to move to the next level must be transformed. The beginning of the last millennium was dominated by the advent of Christianity. The first years of breakdown and realignment of previously held beliefs were difficult years. They were not easy years in which to be incarnated, yet many souls chose them for their growth.

I read a book, “Life before Life<!–[if supportFields]> XE “Life before Life” < ![endif]–><!–[if supportFields]>< ![endif]–>“, by Helen Wambach which is now out of print, in which she, during the course of a few years, regressed over one thousand people from all over the country, to the time before they were born. She asked each person to find out the answers to a list of questions, one of which was why they chose this time to be here. The overwhelming reason was that this is a time of so much change and chaos on one hand, and so much available spiritual knowledge on the other, that it offers each soul the rare opportunity in which to fit many lifetimes worth of growth.

When life doesn’t work the way that, we planned or hoped it would, we can’t sit around until we rot; feeling miserable because we were given lemons. We just have to make lemonade. Sure, it is never easy, but the history of the world and the history of our own lives tell us that this too shall pass. And when it does, it is important that we have not wasted this valuable time in self-pity. When God closes one door, He opens another. It may be a struggle at first to face a new door, but it is worth the effort. For every pain, and every heartache there is a seed of equivalent benefit. If we take this as an opportunity to move to the next level, we will find that many of us are being given an opportunity to recreate our lives in a way that we never before believed possible. For so many years now I have been living under an cloud of debt. In the past few years I have felt like the commercial where a couple want to move their house is hovering over their heads. It has been a constant panic, will we lose the house, the cars, the insurance – or even, will we eat. I constantly fear that I will exhaust my reserves of faith if this goes on much longer. Then, as irony would have it, Easter Sunday my husband walked outside to find that both of our cars had been repossessed. I was initially distraught, I felt violated, lost, and how could we work without transportation? I just felt that this was the domino that would knock the whole building of dominos down. And it could have, no car – no work – no money – no home. But, a funny thing happened after the shock wore off – I felt just them most exhilarating sense of relief knowing two more payments that we could not afford to make were no longer hovering over our heads.

Just a few years before this, I was in the same position only this time I was renting and six months behind in my rent. I had this moment – you know – a movie moment when everything stops in mid-action, and I said to myself, ‘I have done all that I can do, I have tried everything that I can try, if we lose everything and end up in a shelter – it will be God’s will, and we will all learn what we arrived at this experience to learn and climb up from there.’ In that moment there was an energy shift in my life. A crisis can last ten years, or it can last ten minutes. It lasts as long as we remain in crisis mode and ends when we enter acceptance that what is – is, and move on to plan b – or at least to formulating a plan be. Anything that we do, that is not wallowing in the approaching trauma or existing trauma will shift the energy. I shifts from what was or will be lost – to what was or will be gained. Acceptance is the train out of suffering. It is the open door that allows new air to come in. Above all, acceptance allows us to realize that we are in good hands – always. And nothing happens that we did not choose before we came – and for the highest of reasons.

For I will fear failure,

Do not love me for my wisdom,

For I will fear error,

Do not love me for my looks,

For I will fear time.

Love me for my living

And you have freed me from fear.

Kahlil Gibran

God makes good matches, not good mothers or good children. There are many reasons why we have children, but the overwhelming reason we choose to have them is to be loved unconditionally in a way that we believe only children can. It is rare that we make the choice in order to sacrifice ourselves to be a vessel for a soul needing to incarnate.

We think about the feeling of being so loved by this beautiful little creature. We think about this wonderful bond we will have as the years pass and we rock back and forth on the porch swing just basking in the moonlight of our unconditional love for each other. We think of Hallmark moments and our eyes swell with tears of joy and anticipation. It is almost like the allure of that bright shiny apple on the most beautiful tree in Eden. Yes, we who choose want to pour our love into this child we seek to bring into the world, but we want, very much to have some love poured back. Some people see a baby as this perfect piece of clay that they can mold into this perfect being that they can sign and send out to the world as their perfect creation. Whatever the reason, it is misguided and selfish – in a good way.

There is no good mother, however we want to believe ourselves to be, and there is not bad mother, however some of us like to think ours was, for the soul there is only the perfect match for the journey that begins with the union the creates the souls human form.

I remember the moment I was standing in the mirror with my hair in curlers, looking at every flaw on my face and my oldest daughter who was 2 at the time, saying, “Mommy you are so beautiful”. I just felt at that moment that no pain in the world could ever touch the depth of love that she poured into my heart at that moment. Well, surprise, surprise, those beautiful babies who can heal us like a salve from God, can cut us like a knife from hell. And why? It is because we forget that we give them skin, bones, flesh and blood, but they are not ours, and from the moment that they are able to understand that within them is an separate and living “I”, we are no longer the moon the sun and the stars, we become the bars, the locks and the chains. They accept no responsibility for our sacrifices, and in truth, they bear none, as we bear no responsibility for their failures, their falls and the trials along their journeys.

There are no accidents, and no contracts made without benefit to all souls involved, whether or not we see it as a benefit while here. We are not given children to fill our need to be loved for who we are, we are given children to test our ability or to teach us to love not only our children unconditionally, but to love ourselves when it seems to us, and sometimes when they tell us unequivocally, that we have failed them horribly. They come in to live the life their souls have chosen, and to learn the lessons that their souls have chosen to learn as have we all. As Gibran continues:

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

We can neither sign our names to their successes, nor fear our names blazing on their failings, both are equal on their journey and both belong solely to them. They did not come into our lives to fill our need for love, but through them we may find a way to value ourselves for being chosen, as the bow, by the One who makes all arrows, even ourselves. Children don’t hurt us; our expectations of our children hurt us. Children cannot heal us, our faith and love can only do that.  We over estimate our effect on our children, they come to us fully cooked, we only wrap them.  We try to insulate them with warmth, or structure, or freedom, or whatever tools God gave us to use.  But we do not create the seed of the child, we only provide the soil and water.  The seed will grow into what it came to grow into.  I have recently met outstanding, loving, tender souls, who survived abuse that is almost painful to hear recounted.  Our children teach us that love is not dependent upon an exchange of equal measure.  They teach us, as do our own parents, how much we can love.

Children are individual souls with lives and lessons that they have lived and learned before we met. They have personalities that we do not create, if we like each other it is a nice thing. If we don’t, that is ok too, because children to do not incarnate to like their parents, they incarnate to live their lives and travel their journeys. As parents, we have been given a great gift, if we have learned to love unconditionally, even when we ourselves are not loved.  Because even that is only a part of the physical journey, for souls are nothing else but love.

There is no pain greater than that between parent and child, because we live a myth on earth, one that is emphasized in greeting cards, those often heart wrenching Hallmark moments.  We have created this unreal drama, of bad parents, or bad children, which leads to blame and guilt within the family.  And the family is the seed of the society, and so bad and good, blame and guilt spread out and become hate, and war.  It is just not that simple, or that complex.  God doesn’t make good parents, or bad parents, good children, or bad children God makes perfect matches. Need for need, lesson for lesson and gift for gift. It is our journey, both as parents and children to go through this fire. And find, that holy grail, that golden chalice, that love that waits for all of us to discover once the illusion has been burned in the fire of illusion.

And on a lighter note, if dogs could talk, there would be no overpopulation, maybe just Adam, Eve and their faithful dog Fido .

To be responsible is not simply to accept burdens, more than anything else it is to accept power. We are the actors in the play that is our lives – we are at all times spiritually responsible for our actions in that play. However, until that spiritual responsibility becomes emotional and material within our lives we will be destined to enact the same play over and over again with nothing changing but the period wardrobe and props.

When I was a child my father taught me how to play Gin Rummy. We would play for hours and most of the time that we played I would win. One day I was feeling very full of myself as a great card shark and I decided to play for money. My father tried to talk me out of it, but I insisted. I bet my entire allowance and in about five minutes my father won. Now the game was over and he had won and I believed that he should give me my money back. My father refused. I cried, I begged, I sulked, I even tried to borrow the exact amount, but he absolutely refused. I could not believe that my father could actually love me and not give me back my money. I decided that he did not really love me. I believed that if he loved me he would give me anything that I wanted. This was what I really felt. It took a long time for me to understand that my fathers’ love had nothing to do with my responsibility for my own actions.

After many months, perhaps even years, I finally understood what he had given to me. I could never again act in any way or say any words that I was not prepared to be responsible for the outcome of. I realized that my father would never make idol threats, if I wanted to do something that I should not, he would tell me the punishment that I would receive if I did it. He was no longer attached to my choice, and when I ultimately did what I wanted to do anyway, he was not attached to the punishment. I am now grateful for this lesson. The one good thing about this lesson is that it is never too late to learn, and never too late to teach to your children. It only takes one time, which was all it took for me. I may have pushed the envelope many times after that, but the difference was that I was responsible and prepared for whatever the outcome. I was in my power.

I suppose that when our belief in reincarnation was taken away from us, so too was the possibility of ever really being right – so we went for the next best thing which was appearing to be right. Of course if we could do neither, we had to place the responsibility for our being wrong on someone else – blame – so that we could escape whatever repercussions we envisioned. The concept of reincarnation has always felt right to me. I always knew that God was Love, and it just made sense to me that placing us in the darkness and giving us only one chance to find the right light – without a manual was not a loving act. To me, it was like taking your child and putting her out at night having this discourse:

Parent: Go find it and you can’t come home until you do – and if you don’t you will be lost forever.

Child: Find what?

Parent: Figure it out.

Child: Which direction do I go?

Parent: Look in the Book.

Child: Which Book – there are so many?

Parent: Figure it out!

Then having the parent close the door on the child. So, reincarnation made sense to me. As someone who has practiced Astrology for many years, I have looked to the chart for past life content. But a chart may be easily verified in this life, but when referring to past lives it is really theoretical. However, since I started doing past life regressions, I find that the chart does give very accurate information as to the issues we need to take responsibility for in our lives that we have failed to do the same in past lives. I see people repeating the same theme over and over again. In the sixteenth century the theme may have been “Romeo and Juliet”, while in the twentieth century it may have been “West Side Story”. Over and over again I see people making the same ultimate choices, life after life, suffering the same consequences only with a slightly different story line. My father put the responsibility for my actions in my lap. I am still growing into that lesson, it is still a work in progress, but at least there is progress. I thought that my choices were pre-determined. I now realize that they are not pre-determined but they are hardwired into my make-up, because they are the choices that keep my ego where it is the most comfortable – on familiar ground. I love the saying, “Better the hell you know than the hell you don’t”. That is straight from the ego’s mouth. When we take responsibility, full responsibility – “The buck stops here” kind of responsibility, we will very likely end up in unfamiliar territory. I know how to function in a bad relationship, but do I really know how to function in a good one? Even happy is scary if happy is unknown. I always go left, maybe I should go right. I always wait, maybe I should act. I always go for the one who needs love, maybe I should go for the one who has it.

We choose the lessons we will learn. We have to accept responsibility for the choices we made before we came here as well as the choices that we make while we are here. We did not choose to suffer; we chose to learn we chose the areas of growth we would work on in this lifetime. This was how we determined our moment of birth<!–[if supportFields]> XE “birth” < ![endif]–>; we chose that moment so the energies of the planets would create the right atmosphere for the growth we came in to achieve.

Taking responsibility automatically puts us in the present. It puts us in a situation in which we have choices to make. As soon as we acknowledge that we have choices, we will realize that we have power. Finding someone or something to blame for our situation relieves us of the responsibility of changing it. It also prevents it from changing. Even if we blame ourselves, we tend to blame something that we label as an inadequacy rather than our own action or inaction, which we can do something about. I will not permit my children to say, “I can’t”, they have to say, “I won’t”, “I can’t” is a great deal more comfortable than, “I won’t”, “I won’t” implies responsibility.

Some people prefer to be miserable; they prefer to be victims. These people are constantly seeking and rejecting answers. Everything that goes wrong in their lives is the responsibility of someone or something other than themselves, and no amount of facts will convince them otherwise. This is a pattern built up over lifetimes.

The wrong people find them; they don’t find the wrong people. They remember the harsh things said to them but not what they might have said to provoke harsh words from others. If they are ever wrong, it is because they were provoked, tricked, or in some way forced to do whatever they were being held responsible for doing wrong.

If there is any good in their lives they find someone to compare it with who has it better. They do not compromise, because if it is all or nothing there is a much better chance of getting nothing. These same people tend to be luckier than most, they tend to be taken care of although they don’t notice it. These people probably live the most tortured lives because they have to keep validating the external source of their misery. The catch is that when we are not responsible we are not in our power, we hand over our power to those people or circumstances that we consider to be responsible. We are not blocked from having a wonderful life, we miss the chances life presents to do so because we are so deeply engrossed in our need to elude responsibility. “I won’t call her because she hasn’t called me”, “I won’t show love because it is never appreciated”, “I won’t try because I always lose”. Even when we blame ourselves, we say, “I am not tall enough, smart enough, attractive enough, strong enough…” We blame an attribute or lack of an attribute; we don’t take responsibility for an action or lack of action, a choice made or refusal to make a choice. We do not take responsibility, as beings.

This is all perception. If you perceive yourself as not responsible, as helpless then the positive side is that you are off of the hook, you didn’t make a mistake, fail, etc., the negative side is you are helpless, a victim of an unsafe world.

Lets look at an example, say that you have a good job, you have never been late, and have never been sick. One day you walk into the office and the boss’s lover is sitting at your desk and you’re out of a job. Well that is a classic case of victimization if ever one existed right? Perhaps, it really depends on ones perspective. This could be an example of how nothing you do works out, so it is a good reason to go get drunk, or lock yourself in your room. You can add this to the list of wrongs done to you. Or you could tell yourself that you’re lucky that you got away from a losing situation. Perhaps you might perceive it as a sign from the Universe to go on your own, or that it is just a sign to move on.

Most people are afraid of responsibility because they fear being responsible for the outcome of our actions. However, taking responsibility for the outcome is unrealistic. When we take responsible for a child or a valuable piece of jewelry or anything left in our keeping this is in a moment. It is not something that we do twenty-four hours a day. However when we accept responsibility for our actions we are taking responsibility for everything except the outcome and we are taking that responsibility in every moment that we are alive. It is being responsible for each thought, each movement and each word that we say. We cannot control the outcome of anything. I may drink and drive and have an accident or not. I am responsible for having been drinking. I am neither responsible for the fact that I had an accident nor am I responsible if I did not have one. To be responsible is to be present and aware in each action that we take in each thought that we have. This is to be in each now of our lives.

There is a part of our brain that works automatically. It regulates our body, it breathes, it pumps blood to our organs it does not take our presence or our awareness in order to function.

When we are toddlers and we begin to walk we are present. Each step is an effort it takes mindfulness. After we walk long enough it becomes automatic. I watched my son focus and strain while he tries to put his socks on. Eventually he didn’t even notice that he was doing it, because it became automatic. Even when we drive to a certain destination enough times it too becomes automatic, as though the car just knows where to turn.

How often do we bump into a piece of furniture and say, “excuse me”? When our living, becomes automatic we cannot be responsible, we are sleep walking. We are not present. Many times the loss of passion in our relationships and even the loss of growth in our relationships emerges simply out of our having sent the functioning of the relationship to automatic. Where once we experienced each word and movement of our lover and were present within the relationship now the relationship becomes automatic. The relationship becomes part of our unseen unfelt automatic world. So we cannot find where we went wrong because we were not really there. We need to relegate the functioning of our bodies to the automatic brain and the functioning of our lives to our active selves.

When we meditate we are taught to focus on our breathing because that connects us with the present. That connection is the key. When we are connected with our present, with our actions we can then assume responsibility for our lives. When we are truly responsible we are again empowered and in control. It may take work and time to disengage our lives from automatic. It will certainly take walking through our own fears. Yet once this is done we are finally connected with our lives, our loves, our souls and our God. When we are awake we can hear sounds that the sleeping cannot hear and feel things that the numb cannot feel.

When we are awake and responsible nothing gets past us or slips through the cracks. When we say something it has value because it is not just an automatic response. When we are awake we awaken those around us, merely by our presence. Our lives do not just happen; we don’t wonder where the day went. We are aware that we have lived it. Each moment is fuller because we are aware of all the wonders within it. In a relationship we feel all the things that we felt in the beginning because each moment is a beginning when we are alive. Life becomes awe inspiring because we are in it. We feel empowered in the knowledge that we are responsible for how we have lived our lives.

In the transitory material world, the value of a man or woman is based upon how much he has amassed. Yet, in the Spiritual World, the value of a man is based upon how much of what he has amassed, he has given to those in need. We are all here to contribute what we have, and who we are. What is expected of us is dependent upon the level of evolution of our souls. A young soul is here to contribute to building of material structure. Young souls translate the spiritual concepts into material form. They immerse themselves in the material world, without them, and all of their apparent superficiality there would be no material world from which the spiritual may emerge. All life is symbolic. A caterpillar represents the soul. The cocoon symbolically represents the material world and the ego. The young soul dissolves into ‘both’ while here on the earth. Remember the cocoon is hard, and it is dark. The caterpillar is lost to itself inside of the cocoon, however, for a time in the beginning it is also safe.

Without knowing why, the young soul is drawn to the material world so opposite from its spiritual origin. Just as the caterpillar is compelled to leave the world of the familiar to create and enter the cocoon. They build the ego structure. The young soul learns to depend upon the material world and all that it has to offer. It learns to be greedy, lustful, and all of those non-spiritual drives that form the walls of the ego structure. Once the young soul has mastered the material world, the ego has no more to learn and so it has no more to give to the soul. The cocoon is complete. Now the soul, once enclosed by the ego must consume the knowledge of the ego and transform the material back into the spiritual and the ego back into the soul. At which point, it becomes a butterfly free of the world. As the young soul begins to find it is no longer nourished by the world as it had once been, it seeks that which is higher than the world. On this part of the journey the soul seeks spiritual nourishment, and still guided by the ego, it seeks this in the world that it knows, the world outside of the self. Thus, it sees God outside of itself. It only does what it knows to do. It recreates spirit in form. It worships God in the image of man, a superman – but still with the feelings and emotions of man, of a father creator. It has not yet seen the world for what it is, but it knows that it needs something more than it sees, or at least above the world that it sees. In order, to reach the God that is above the world it creates religion as a stairway up to that God.

As the process continues, the soul becomes immersed in emotional situations desperately seeking fulfillment of the need to merge, to fully feel at one with something that it does not yet understand. Severed from the ability to identify and merge with the things of the world, it now hungers to identify as one with another. Through the pain and suffering of this part of the journey the soul matures. It begins to find that nothing and no one can satisfy its ‘hunger’ or its ‘emptiness’. Nothing outside of itself can reach into the emptiness within itself and fill the growing void. Again the soul seeks God, but now it can no longer be a God that ‘communicates’ from without nor ‘dictates rules’ from without nor ‘has a home’ without. It must find God within – hear the voice from within and become filled from within. Now the soul finds itself betrayed by the world, betrayed by its things unable to find another soul who can fulfill its expectations and nonetheless, forsaken by its religion. Then, certain of God, certain that what it needs can be found, the mature soul begins to change the direction of its quest from without to within.

Finding less and less value in what it posses, it begins to give. The more that it gives, the better it feels. Without knowing it, the soul has begun the process of turning form into spirit – material into spiritual – and as it does this it finds itself nourished and ‘made full’ in a way that it could never have imagined. The mature soul begins to see beauty, miracles and perfection in the spirit of the world and the spirit of each living spirit on it. And so it releases its attachment to having, and to holding and finds its only joy in giving and sharing. Miraculously, the love, respect, self-worth and value that the soul has spent lifetimes seeking in the world are found in an ever-flowing Source – the God Self within. Diamonds are hidden within coal. The greatest joy in the world is hidden within our fear. Why do we not give more? It is because we fear not having enough.

Once I had a job where I worked very hard. I did my job and my manager’s job. When it came time for the end of the year review, the person in charge of giving out the raises gave me a $2000.00 a year raise and gave him a $5000.00 a year raise. When I complained, he told me that although looking at the amounts it seemed that his raise was greater than mine, if I looked at the percentage increase in his income compared to the percentage increase in my income I would see that my work had been given much greater value. At first, I thought it was a really good line. However later I realized that it was true in everything. In the marketplace, money is money, and one hundred dollars does not buy as much as one-thousand. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. However, when it comes to giving, the value lies not in the face value of the gift, but in how much of what you have to give, you want to give to a person – or to the world.

We live with God within us: we are of God. When we give, to whomever we give, we are expressing how much we care – how much of ourselves have merged with our Spirit and how much of ourselves are yet with the world. That amount has no figure on it, there is no great sum that shows how giving and loving a person is, there is only a great percentage of what we have. If a person has only a penny and selflessly gives that penny, it becomes a mustard seed and grows not only in the works it performs but in the heart and soul of the person who gave it. If a person has a million dollars and gives one thousand to others, the gift will supply its market value and little more. It has little spiritual energy, and it will end up taking more from the giver than it gives. When you give all that you can to those in need, you will be given more than you can contain in love and self-worth.

Contrary to all of your fears, what you give is returned to you ten-fold because you gave beyond what your ‘worldly self’ could release, and you placed your God before the world. No one ever needs to know what you did, nor does anyone need to praise what you did, because the praise flows from within and the gift grows nurtured by Spirit as do you. Here is a true story:
A sobbing little girl stood near a small church from which she had been turned away because it was “too crowded.”

“I can’t go to Sunday School,” she sobbed to the pastor as he walked by.

Seeing her shabby, unkempt appearance, the pastor guessed the reason and, taking her by the hand, took her inside and found a place for her in the Sunday school class.

The child was so happy that they found room for her, and she went to bed that night thinking of the children who have no place to worship Jesus.

Some two years later, this child lay dead in one of the poor tenement buildings. Her parents called for the kindhearted pastor who had befriended their daughter to handle the final arrangements.

As her poor little body was being moved, a worn and crumpled red purse was found which seemed to have been rummaged from some trash dump.

Inside was found 57 cents and a note, scribbled in childish handwriting, which read: “This is to help build the little church bigger so more children can go to Sunday School.” For two years she had saved for this offering of love.

When the pastor tearfully read that note, he knew instantly what he would do. Carrying this note and the cracked, red pocketbook to the pulpit, he told the story of her unselfish love and devotion.

He challenged his deacons to get busy and raise enough money for the larger building.

But the story does not end there…

A newspaper learned of the story and published. It was read by a wealthy realtor who offered them a parcel of land worth many thousands.

When told that the church could not pay so much, he offered to sell it to the little church for 57 cents.

Church members made large donations. Checks came from far and wide. Within five years the little girl’s gift had increased to $250,000.00-a huge sum for that time (near the turn of the century). Her unselfish love had paid large dividends.

When you are in the city of Philadelphia, look up Temple Baptist Church, with a seating capacity of 3,300.

And be sure to visit Temple University, where thousands of students are educated.

Have a look, too, at the Good Samaritan Hospital and at a Sunday School building which houses hundreds of beautiful children, built so that no child in the area will ever need to be left outside during Sunday school time.

In one of the rooms of this building may be seen the picture of the sweet face of the little girl whose 57 cents, so sacrificially saved, made such remarkable history. Alongside of it is a portrait of her kind pastor, Dr. Russel H. Conwell, author of the book, “Acres of Diamonds”.

As a soul matures, it finds that all that it clings to and becomes addicted to, in the world, only makes it emptier and hungrier. The emptiness and hunger is only satisfied by letting go, and giving. This turns matter into spirit. It turns what is transitory into what is permanent. The soul learns that only by emptying can it become filled, only by giving can it receive. Then happiness is replaced by joy and the journey to find self-esteem and self-worth finally ends.

We have been given the gift and the curse of the use and enjoyment of our minds and our hearts. From the moment that we rose above the other animals to become co-creators of our universe, we were given the heart to love, and appreciate the world. We were given the mind to classify, and the ability to blend the two for the creation of solutions to our problems, ensure our survival, and to develop the wisdom that comes from the balance of the two.
How far have we come in the evolution of these gifts? Not as far as we believe we have. The mind has been developed to the point that without the heart it cannot go any further. Scientifically, we have traveled to the point where we are now dealing with a quantum reality that requires creativity, imagination, and even a bit of faith to explore.

Still, the heart is well behind in its development. To kill in cold blood, or really, to kill at all, requires functioning without the heart. Hate is a cold product of the mind. Yes, it does become impassioned, but passion is not a quality of the heart. Passion is a remnant of our primitive ancestry — the energy that drives animals to pursue food, pursue a mate, and scare intruders from its territory. It is an energy, which is directed by a healthy ego or it directs an unhealthy one. The ego, which separates us from the other creatures on our planet, coordinates the use of mind and/or heart. The ego is the decision maker; it is the mediator. It is the health of the ego that determines which we use.

The heart and mind are in balance in a healthy ego. Working together they choose when, how much, where, and if the fuel of passion should be utilized. The decisions, guided by creativity and wisdom, are born out of the combination of heart, and mind. Hate is an instinct based by-product of an unbalanced ego. It is instinctual fear harnessed by the mind without consideration of the heart. Hate is the absence of love. Love is the only ingredient that the heart has to contribute. Even a balanced ego may become unbalanced for a moment when it considers the stresses of life on earth and the different ingredients it has to balance.

Anger, however intensely it is experienced at the moment, is soon extinguished by the warmth of the heart. It doesn’t turn to hate. Not if the ego is balanced and the heart is strong. Where hate has a place, the heart energy is not developed, either because there is too much reasoning mind, too much primitive instinct, too much fear, or too much of them all. Whatever it is, there is no room for the heart to grow.

Mankind was given, or we took — when we bit the apple — this enormous Pandora’s box of mind, heart, passion, and fear. How we mix them would determine whether we survived outside of the garden or not. And so we struggle with this mixture of cold reasoning mind, hunger for more, and divine love. And it is my belief that as part of the Divine Plan, the souls that incarnated at a particular time, are balanced in a way that will bring all souls, the lessons they have evolved to learn. There are no new lessons, the lessons we face today are the lessons that have been faced by mythic and historical figures, and mythic and historic lands, only the setting is changed.

Ultimately it all comes down to this, can we face the enemy without becoming the enemy? Or can we, as a species, be the hero who faces the enemy and allows the enemy to become one with us? Acknowledge, after thousands of years, that the battle waged out in our world must be won within our own egos, so that, as a species, our progress can be seen in the world around us. As long as we seek the enemy outside of our own beings, we will diminish our chance of winning with each outside enemy that we kill.

We fight the same war, century, after century, without finding peace, until it is found within our own hearts. There is no good or evil; there are no boundaries, no pure white hats, or pure black hats. There are only human beings torn within their egos between spiritual or material. It is a battle that the unbalanced ego does not want to face, because that battle requires letting go of those big shiny idols which the little mind finds such pleasure. It means embracing the small eternal flame, which the heart longs for. And so, we enter the battlefield like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, with God as our charioteer, patiently telling us that these bodies are not real, only symbols used by the soul for the true battle within. And this war, whether it is fought on the battlefield, in the playground or in the living room, is a battle of duality, one that continues for as long as we cling to our belief that first the other is bad, and second, that there is any other at all.

We battle those we label evil because we believe they seek to destroy us. They fight us for the same reason. No one marches into battle with a picture of Satan on their flag. We all go off to fight evil, to fight the devil we imagine we are facing. As we all wear both labels at the same time, saying to the enemy, “I am evil”, to myself, “I am good.” We fight to protect our lives because we do not really believe in the eternal soul. We fight to revenge the deaths of those we love, because as Krishna told Arjuna when he was questioning the battle that he was about to fight,

“One man believes he is the slayer, another believes he is the slain. Both are ignorant; there is neither slayer nor slain. You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies. Realizing that which is indestructible, eternal, unborn, and unchanging, how can you slay or cause another to be slain?

“As a man abandons his worn-out clothes and acquires new ones, so when the body is worn out a new one is acquired by the Self, who lives within. The Self cannot be pierced with weapons or burned with fire; water cannot wet it, nor can the wind dry it. The Self cannot be pierced or burned, made wet or dry. It is everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundation of eternity. The Self is unmanifested, beyond all thought, beyond all change. Knowing this, you should not grieve.”
( Bhagavad-Gita 2.19-25)

When we are able to see that the entire world is a symbolic battlefield for the individual soul and the larger groups of souls to play out their eternal battles, we will be able to deal with that apple, understand that the dark and the light are two sides of one coin that each exists because of the other. One cannot exist without the other because both exist within each of us. Only when we have a balanced mind and heart, can we be released from war and suffering.

spirituality

Fear is self-perpetuating. Once we are afraid, that energy grows. What makes fear so much more powerful is that it is actually an ominous feeling that has absolutely no words. When dealing with worries we can rationalize them because there are things that go through our minds. Yet when we are struck by fear it is really this huge dangerous overwhelming nothing. It is a nothing because we don’t think it, we don’t see it – it is just a feeling suspended in the gut. Fear is a ghost in the machine of our being. There is no enemy so powerful as the one you cannot see – this is fear and fear is the greatest unknown.
Fear has a moment in which it immediately propels us back to a feeling that we had.

We actually fear only two things death and abandonment. Every experience in our lives that instills an unexplainable overwhelming sense of fear in us is infusing us not with reality, but with the translation of the subconscious mind. The subconscious sees something that could cause one of those two dangerous outcomes. If we have had past lives, we have died. When I was born I spent two weeks in an incubator – I had an enormous fear of abandonment – abuse me, berate me but don’t abandon me. There was a time that I could not even handle anyone saying, “Goodbye”. We are transported back to a time when we were in a situation that reminds our subconscious of this one. It shows us how we suffered, but not why or where or when. It is not impressed by the fact that this is a different situation. My mother used to pull my hair when she was angry at me. My father used to catch me by my braids to beat me. Into my thirties I automatically jumped or covered my head if someone raised their hand for anything, it was embarrassing. As soon as my hair gets too long I cut it off. I cut it off because I like it better short. But I don’t really know if I do. I don’t know that my subconscious mind which causes me to flinch or jump back when someone raises their hand – doesn’t cause me to feel the overwhelming need to cut my hair off and I simply interpret my subconscious fear of long hair as a fashion statement. It just tells us that something feels dangerous, if we ignore the warning, it will cause us to sabotage our efforts. Most often, we can’t simply walk through fear; we have to fight with all of our might, as if we were walking through an emotional hurricane to get to the other side.

Sometimes it just finishes the sentence for us, we don’t even feel the anxiety of it but we react to the situation as though we know how it will turn out. In this way we sabotage our efforts and begin to destroy a successful situation because our fear writes the script of the future. The subconscious mind is one of symbols, not words. It began creating its database before we knew words. I was afraid to ask for help, afraid of the pain of rejection. I don’t ever remember not being afraid to ask. As I mentioned before I was in an incubator when I was born. This was not a time when there was an understanding that infants need to be held and touched. So for the first two weeks of my life my needs, my cries probably were not really responded to. This fear had a terrible effect on my life on my relationships.

We have to remember that the subconscious mind is like a computer, garbage in garbage out. It tells us that it feels like something familiar. We re-feel a past event that had a painful consequence. We re-feel the situation but we do not necessarily re-play the situation. This is the value of fear and this is the problem with it. It says, “Danger, danger!!” but because it does not re-play the situation we cannot see exactly what that danger was so that we can compare it to what the current situation is. From this moment on it is up to us to examine the situation. It is important that the moment that fear advises us that something feels familiar it must be checked. Just because it smells like smoke does not mean the building is burning it could just be a stick of incense. However, fear will go there if it is free to travel at will. Take from fear its only gift. Allow fear to awaken us, allow fear to awaken our senses, but not our imagination. Listen to what it knows but never let it think. Fear is always attached to the past; its eyes are in the back. Fear makes us react much faster than we ever would if we consciously processed the information. Sometimes that saves lives, and sometimes it destroys them. We have to question our reactions, our fear and if it is in the way of a better life, we need to fight our way through it – once. After we make it to the other side once, it becomes easier and easier. Once we make it through we have taken the threat out of the program.

When we feel fear, we need to be in the current situation. Fear is there to tell us to wake up to the situation. So each time that we feel fear we must see clearly. If the situation that we see is really not related to what we are feeling, we must fight through the fear. Each time that we do this our fear will diminish. Fear is part of our survival instinct. Instincts do not discriminate. Our fears hold us back. There are often possibilities just on the other side of our fears that we never realize. I have wanted so often for someone to touch me but could not reach out. This invisible wall stood between the other person and me, this wall of fear. I was a bundle of fears, fear of reaching out, fear of confrontation, fear standing out, even fear of showing fear. I finally made the decision to act as if I were not afraid.
I reached the point where the pain of living within the limits set by my fears felt excruciating than having whatever I feared actualize. So I began, slowly, each time I was in a situation where I felt constricted by fear acting as if it were not there. It gets easier. I don’t think that it goes away. I am still encircled by my fears, but today I can walk through them with much more ease and not cower within their limits.

There are two distinct kinds of fear. One is rational one is not. A fear is rational when what you are afraid of is clear. If you are on the edge of a cliff, what will happen if you fall is clear. If someone is facing you with a gun, what could happen is clear. Even when we have unprotected sex, what could happen is clear. These are real fears that should be heeded. Fear is based on protection. We just have to know if we really need to be protected from what we are afraid of. We must confront our fears, and analyze our reactions, because the subconscious mind is powerful, it can trick us into believing that we are acting out of choice when we are really acting out of fear. We can be made stronger by our fears they force us to faith because it is the antidote. And when we have enough faith, we realize that the very worst that can happen isn’t anything compared to fearing the worst that can happen.

To understand the Age of Pisces we must understand two things, first there is the symbol for Pisces, it is two fish tied together swimming in opposite directions. So we must immediately understand that it is a sign of duality, a sign that emphasizes opposites with enormous passion. If there is any word that must be stressed during this age that word is passion. If we do anything, we do it passionately, if we believe anything, we believe it passionately. And we think that passion is a part of our makeup. It is not. We are all portions of the Divine. We are all Divine Seeds. This means that we are all love and that kind of love, that level of love that I am speaking of Divine Love is not passionate. Passion is the cause of suffering. Passion is not even a quality of the material world; survival is the only natural quality of the material world. When a lioness kills her prey it is without passion, it is a requirement of survival. This is why animals do not hate, they are a part of the earth and there is only hate where there is passion.

We have been living for at least two thousand years in a passionate age. How does that affect us? We are here to absorb and work through the existing energies of this planet in order to grow. And so we are like clear sponges. And when we enter the world during an age, we first absorb the energy of that age, this age of Pisces is red with passion and so although we are clear sponges when we enter the environment, we become red because we absorb the energy of the environment. The age colors everything. Why? It does so because everything on earth absorbs its energy from the Sun, and the constellation that the Sun is in during its own 25,000 plus year rotation will color the energy that we absorb from it.

Every religion has its legends of destruction and new birth, whether it is by flood, fire, air or war, periodically in the history of mankind there have been reseedings. Each species evolves through mutation physically and spiritually so as a new age or seeding is about to occur, there are mutations that incarnate to generate the change. This has been happening for about three hundred years culminating in a major seeding of souls during the late forties and fifties. These were the souls who bloomed during the sixties with the energy of Aquarius and as they bloomed, their seeds were carried by the wind of Spirit to be planted and spread throughout the world to begin the slow process of change into the energy of Aquarius. It is certain that the Age of Pisces created the divide between man and his God. Before this age, man saw the universe as one great body of which he was a part. There was no God out there far far away in Heaven. There was only God in everything and everyone who existed upon the earth. The power of these ancient beings is the stuff of legends, but because they are legends does not mean that the powers were not real.

I wondered, if all is perfect and for our growth, there are no mistakes and no accidents, then why was God taken from within man and placed at such a distance that we could feasibly lose our belief? What is the good in that? Yes, I know that on the mundane level it was done by the greedy to maintain power, but I know that even the greedy are only playing their parts in the Plan. Then it came to me, many mystics believe that God created the world in order to experience himself. How can we understand the power of God that exists within us, unless we are apart from it, a drop of water cannot conceive of the power of the ocean unless it is separated from it. So we have, during this Age, reached the greatest distance that we can from the Power within us.

We have taken our manipulation of the external world to its peak during this age. We will soon run out of things to invent – then what? I had a vision the other day while driving in my car. I saw a group of students perhaps five hundred years from now talking about how backwards we were with all of our airplanes, rockets, bombs and gadgets. Laughing at how hard we worked to build things with our hands when all we had to do was build them with our minds. I saw them studying war (a concept lost to them) and having war explained as how barbarians functioned before civilization. To the humans of the future, civilization will be living in at-one-ness with the Power from which we all come and the universe of which we all are a part. There will be no God, no void, only a continuous circle of life. There will be no heaven or hell because theirs will be a holographic universe where they naturally see that the whole is within each part and each part is a mirror of the whole. But in order for us to get to this place of non-duality, we must be the fish swimming in opposite directions with passion and commitment, going nowhere, but going but willing to kill anyone who stops us from getting there.

Unless we passionately exhaust our beliefs, however delusional they are, we cannot choose to change them. This is the purpose of the age of passionate confusion – the age of Pisces. And to really see how this works in our lives personally, we must understand the planet the rules Pisces and that is Neptune. Neptune is somewhere in all of our charts and is moving through some part of each chart at all times. Where ever it is, life will never be the same again. Neptune is a very strange energy. It enfolds us in a blanket of blind faith and passionate commitment to a path that appears to be clearer than any that we have ever known before. However, in the midst of being so certain and so committed we find that everyone else in our lives sees something seriously wrong with the vision of the world we are holding. Usually we find ourselves making the most outrageous sacrifices almost joyfully because we feel that God has ordained them. We fly in the face of overwhelming odds. We take the most irresponsible risks with passionate abandon. We build castles in the air, move into them, and have absolutely no qualms about paying the rent.

The positive face of Neptune is that it can be compassionate and self-sacrificing. It allows us to believe in the loftiest of ideals and aim for the most spiritual of heights. The negative face of Neptune allows us to fight to build a nation based on freedom and delude ourselves into thinking that owning slaves is not a contradiction. It can cause people to believe in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, and find no contradiction in waging the most brutal wars in His name. It permits us to break every one of the Ten Commandments and still consider ourselves pious, own multi-million dollar mansions while eighty percent of the world is starving, and consider ourselves righteous human beings. In other words, it is the great deceiver.

On the personal level, we may find that we have endured ten years of torture and abuse in a marriage because we believed our spouses every time we were told that it would never happen again. Or, we could join a cult and spend fourteen years giving all that we have to that cult not ever feeling that we were being taken. Then one day Neptune moves on. When this happens we wake up wondering where or even who we have been for all of those years, lost and humiliated wondering at what point we lost our sanity. It is easy accepting that everyone makes mistakes, but when it is a Neptune mistake—we find that it has cost us something that we would never have given up were we in our right mind. That something could be financial security, emotional security, our position in society, even those whom we love the most. Neptune also rules drugs and alcohol. Neptune strikes us where we feel we are the least vulnerable. And when it is over, we find that the golden chalice we risked everything to own was no more than a tin cup. We look back at the signs that we missed, the warnings that we refused to heed, the writing on the wall that was as clear as the noses on our faces and wonder how on earth we could have ever been that stupid.

Imagine the feeling of the devout Christian monk who, in the fervor of Neptune’s delusion, joined in the slaughter of hundreds of people during the Crusades. Neptune moves on and all that he is left with is the bloodstains on his hands. The reaction to our Neptune actions range from, “This is going to be hard to fix”, to “My God what have I done?” What underlies all Neptune experiences is that somewhere in our lives we have placed too much dependence upon something that is directly in the way of our spiritual connection with the Divine. Neptune lessons are probably the most difficult to learn because we don’t wake up until all of the damage has been done and for us to face ourselves and the world at this point takes an amount of humility that most of us just did not come in with. Neptune teaches us what we can live without, which is usually the one thing in our lives that we have determined we cannot live without.

Neptune shows us that nothing is real except faith because while it is affecting our lives, we truly believe what we are living in is the only reality and our delusions—the only truths. And when we awaken, we find that we cannot ever repeat the justifications that we once lived by, with a straight face. We can never put back together what Neptune has destroyed. It is a spiritual planet – it is the hand of God. It does not work to make us rich in the earthly garden, it works to make us rich in the spiritual garden. It does not work to strengthen our relationship with the opposite sex, it works to strengthen our relationship with Spirit. The Spiritual world and the material world are opposites, what is good for one is not good for the other. “Seek and ye shall find” – not if it is a Mercedes. “What does it merit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul?” This is the lesson of Neptune. This is the lesson the Age of Pisces.

Neptune rules illusion and delusion, it rules everything that sparkles and shines, the bigger the better. It rules glamour. It is the god of temptation. It lies, it helps us justify, it entices us to take more and more until we die to the physical world and are reborn to the spiritual.

When Neptune entered my house of money I had my own business two homes and all that glitters and glows. By the time Neptune left that house in my chart, I had the clothes on my back and was not too sure how long I would have them. I had no choice where the loss was concerned, the tighter I held on the faster it slipped away – the more ideas I came up with to make more, the more crooks entered my life to steal it. My option was not to find out how to be smarter about money, my option was to let go or suffer. Neptune give us an opportunity to learn detachment. I say offers us the opportunity to learn because we do not have to learn Neptune’s lessons. This is where free will comes in. Many people, I am sure, come out of a Neptune cycle such as mine having learned nothing. For those who learn nothing, joy will always be something that belongs to someone else. Because those things that Neptune takes away from us, are the things that stand between our joy, and us, whether they are money, power, status, fame, pride or just plain ego. Our load is somehow lightened in the area that Neptune travels, whether we like it or not.

So, during the age of Pisces we have fought for our personal form of worship of God, while at the same time somehow finding ourselves completely justified in breaking His laws as often and with as much passion as possible. During the Age of Pisces we were willing to give up our lives for all to be free, but we were not willing to give up our slaves. We said the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, repeating the words, “With Liberty and Justice for all” while ensuring that there was liberty and justice only for the privileged few. We spoke with forked tongues and were equally committed to both forks. Two fish swimming in opposite directions. We repeated the words, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” while simultaneously judging everyone whose beliefs differed from our own.

So now, we say that we are in a war to bring freedom to a country at the cost of the lives of most of those to whom we are bringing this freedom. And that works for many of us, or at least those of us who are still heavily under the influence of the Age of Pisces. Yet, those of who have been awakened by the Age of Aquarius, are finding it difficult to understand how we have spent our lives believing that black was white and finding it impossible to explain to our Aquarian children what the truth exactly is. We wonder why our children lie so much without realizing that in the short time that they have spent in our world, they have seen no truth. The Age of Pisces has been a dream and a nightmare, and whether we believed the dream or lived the nightmare, waking up is feeling more and more like hell.

I cannot count the number of beautiful happy families I grew up watching on television and believing in where the actors and actresses who played the happy children went home only to be abused by their real parents. Yes, waking up is hell. But, wake up we must because as Neptune is the great deceiver, Uranus, the planet that rules the Age of Aquarius is the great awakener. Pisces allows us to live in blind faith. It allows us to believe that we are being faithful and remain blind to our own deceit. Now, with the Age of Aquarius upon us we must give up our blind faith for Enlightened believe, and that means awakened belief. The wonder of this new age is realizing that we can have faith, without being blind, and that faith, awakened faith—can never lead to disillusionment. In the lie we have been enslaved because we have had to live in the fear.

Although we have not officially entered the Age of Aquarius, it is here. It is here drawing out the truth and awakening the souls whose true vibration is Aquarian. Losing the illusion does not mean losing Santa Claus, it means finding him where he lives, in the human heart. A faith born of blindness is one, which will be lost if sight is restored, but a faith born of vision, and light is one that can guide us forever. The Age of Pisces demanded that we believe blindly in a God that can never be seen, and never be attained. The Age of Aquarius tells us to open our eyes to the mystical beauty of the God that animates all that is. In the Age of Aquarius we will not need to go the a church, synagogue or mosque in order to find God, we simply have to look at the trees, the sky, the people and life that is all around us to know God as once our ancestors did. We will live in peace because we will know that we do not need to go to heaven, we simply need to live it. This is the Age of Aquarius, it is the freedom that comes from truth, the truth that God is where our love is and also who we are. Pisces rules prisons and asylums, bondage and our deepest fears. What we have come to fear most in this age is the truth.

In Pisces we have placed God so far from our reach that we have become convinced that we would be forgiven for not even trying to reach It. We have invented our own scapegoat and named him Satan. We have turned Christ into a martyr who died so that we can remain imperfectly pure and tell ourselves that we are faultless in the sight of God. In the Age of Aquarius there is no devil out there and there is no God out there, both reside within us, both reside in the light, and it is within that light that both become One and that One becomes Us. We must make our choices in the sight of God and the world and know that we are our choices. In Pisces we have been enslaved by the lies and hypocrisy within which we have lived. In the Age of Aquarius there will be no lies, no hypocrisy and so no fear of exposure. Without the fear of exposure, there is no prison.

From Summons it is known that male and female were created together as their two bodies were connected at the backs. There is no energetic connection and no interrelation between them until they disconnect and turn face to face. Rabbi Shimon said that a union of male and female is called “Oneness” because a male without a female is considered as “half person”. A man and a woman are considered by the Kabbalah as one soul that its two halves were enrobed in two physical bodies. Only when the two halves are connected, they become “one” complete soul. And so it happens by the will of God, that from the moment of birth until the moment of union the two halves of the soul are departed and remote from each other. Sometimes the distance is large and the two halves are oceans and continents apart. At the moment of union, they become one essence.

We can keep a body functioning indefinitely through artificial means, but only a soul can give it life. The body kept animated through artificial means is not alive. It is an organic robot. Only the soul can live and only the soul can love. When we love, it is not something that we create, and it is not something that we discover – it is something that we remember. The person with whom we share love has awakened within our souls a memory of divine union, a perfect fit that can only be created spiritually. So the idea of making someone fall in love with us, is to me, unnatural.

Love is a cord that connects us to our spiritual source. If real, it offers us a glimpse of that which is beyond knowing. It opens our hearts not simply to the object of our love, but to love itself, the love and oneness of all. It is divine and it is eternal. Of that love, it is possible to say, that “it is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved”. It is possible to say this because, if authentic, it is never lost. Just as it is never found, it is remembered; it is awakened. There is the story told in many forms of a person who wishes for the love of another and a genie, a fairy, or some acquired spell, brings to that person the lover that they wanted. And soon, in every tale, that person who longed for the love of the other becomes heartbroken overwhelmed by despair knowing that the love, however devoted and beautiful, is manipulated, manufactured, soulless.

There are books teaching the art of attracting a marriage partner. In the end, it is never satisfying believing that we made someone else love us. Love comes from the same source as life. It is the reunion of souls promised to each other before birth. Anything else is a cheap knockoff, an ultimately painful fit. In advertising artists create hamburgers that look mouthwatering. But to eat one, would make you sick, if it did not kill you because it is not made of food, it is made to look like food. This is the same as creating a persona to lure a partner into our lives. The persona is empty, and betrays both parties, poisons them or just leaves them malnourished.

We enter this dream that we call life, into a family. That family is chosen because all of the needs of all of the participating souls can be met through this union. The individual souls in this family may not be related to all or any of the other souls within it. They into this family because they will be bound together long enough and in the type of social environment that requires the working through of whatever issues they came in to deal with. Children choose their families because they will be trapped within this unit long enough to be imprinted with whatever is needed for their spiritual growth on this material plane. Our experience within this family is determined by whether we are meant to grow within it or from our ability to survive and escape it.

Sometimes a family comes together because there is karma to be balanced between souls within the unit. The souls have so little in common that no other situation would bind them in a way that would resolve it. This is a union built on the loving premise of growth, but not necessarily the loving bond that exists between soul mates.

The idea of family here, (as above so below) comes from the knowledge of our spiritual family. They never desert us. They are always somewhere in the vicinity of times of need. Sometimes our paths are too different to allow time for more than a chance meeting and the words that we need to hear in that moment. We call them Angels, and they are, but in the sense that is personal to us. Sometimes they gather as friends circle around us from a distance, and somehow, as we draw closer to a time of great trial, the circle draws nearer and nearer until at the moment that we are in our greatest need, they are around us to catch us if we fall, and protect us from incoming assaults. We call them friends, but they are brothers and sisters of our souls and have been since we, together, chose to venture into this valley of the shadow of death. This love is expressed with or without words. This love, the love of our soul family hears the cries of our hearts and not the protests of our egos. It is another form of love. It cannot be bought, it cannot be built, it can only be realized. It was before time, and will be after time, that is why time and circumstance have no effect on it.

We are sparks of the Divine, we are ideas. The Divine contains innumerable ideas, and innumerable manifestations of each one. A soul family consists of many expressions of one manifestation of one idea. So, at the core, and within all channels that flow from the core – we fit. The fit allows flow. We are words in a sentence, we each have a place as noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, etc… Together we flow. Together we have a meaning that cannot be misinterpreted and so, with so complete an understanding there is no judgment, no competition because we all have a place in the Divine sentence that we express. This is love.

I have a very close friend who came in to learn and grow through the suffering that can be contained in relationships. And her reward is the experience of love in the highest state attained through a relationship. Only for all of the years that I have known her, it has been a painful string of suffering. I tried to tell her to stop the relationships and find some joy in being alone. Of course, although that sounded like the logical thing to do, I was not wise enough at the time to realize that the track, the only track that her train could ride was the track of relationships. So, we agreed that I would use Astrology and any other gifts that she had to sensor all of the applicants for the role of her partner. That got tired very quickly as she, too long in between relationships inundated me with birth data for each woman that she met. And I realized that by the time I found the paper that I had written the information on, she would already be over the woman or the woman over her. So, I stopped putting effort into figuring out who was right or wrong, because history had proven that none of them were right. But I did notice one thing. Every woman that she wanted to be “the one”, all looked alike. She had a very definite type.

One day she asked me to look at a chart and before I gave it any thought, I actually did. Then she asked me to look at the woman’s picture which entailed much more work than I would have ever done under normal circumstances. So, as I was logging in here, and searching there, it occurred to me that somewhere inside I must know that this is the “one”. When I finally made my way to the woman’s picture, two thoughts ran through my mind simultaneously. One was that this woman was her type, and the other was, that this was the “one”. As hard as it was to make a commitment to something that my logical mind had long since disregarded as possible, I told her this was the one. And when they met, it was instantly clear to each of them that each was the one the other was dreaming of, praying for and seeking.

For me, I felt that I had learned something very new. I learned that all of the women who physically fit the mold of my friend’s type, were not her type at all. Imprinted in her psyche was the image of her true other half. She could make it out enough to fall head over heels with everyone who resembled her eternal lover. And the great Unnamable, Unknowable One, dressed each soul committed to teach her the lessons that she needed to discover her power, value, and greatness in bodies that would draw her to them like a moth to a flame.

We cannot attract a sunny day, nor control the direction and strength of an earthquake. Putting on a raincoat will not entice the rain to fall, nor will putting on a sundress lure the rain to stop. No amount of money, or the toys that money can buy, and no amount of doors money can open or connections that money can bring, can come close to helping us to survive what lies ahead of us, once we realize that all we have has come at the cost of love. If courage comes after we do the thing that we most fear, and not before, then it is understandable that full belief in our value and our worthiness of being loved, comes after we have risked allowing ourselves to be loved without seeking the answer to why. One, who will love us, will first see our souls, and love them fully. Then, as an afterthought, will notice that the material manifestation of who we are, is beautiful too, but the thing is, that this will be seen through the eyes of love so it will be seen as a reflection of the inner being that is loved. This is why, we grow old together, yet, our love does not see old. It sees the ageless, timeless, unchanging beauty that can only be love.

spirituality

We have evolved in many ways since the days when the major religions were founded. We live in a world that is now explainable in ways that our ancestors could never have understood. We no longer fear the darkening of the sun, because we understand the science of eclipses. Religion used the mysteries of nature to prove their validity. Now, we understand the forces of nature and although we cannot control them, they are no longer a mystery. It is a different world. We have evolved by leaps and bounds intellectually, now in order for us to continue to live on and be sustained by the earth that we have come to understand scientifically, we must evolve, we must mature spiritually and “put away childish things”. We have access to great Spiritual knowledge; we must make the spiritual leap.

Before we can understand good and evil, we must be able to stand mentally and emotionally firmly in the understanding that we are not these bodies or these lives, we are souls experiencing these bodies and these lives for a great purpose. We are energy and energy seeks to expand, we are the stuff that God is made of, and as we expand so does God. Thinking logically, the earth is not the only game in town. Ours is not the only dimension in town, and we are far from the only intelligent species in town. I believe that the earth is a unique school, one in which a soul can study the most diversified subjects and master the most diversified abilities. We are all creators, this is part of expansion, and the earth provides so many different mediums to learn to create within. There is the earth itself, there is the body, the emotions, the intellect, so many areas to perfect, and so many opportunities to grow.
Then there are those difficult courses, such as overcoming temptation, overcoming greed, selfishness, fear, hatred, prejudice – what we call the seven deadly sins are actually the seven challenges that we must overcome in order to graduate from this cycle. This is a very difficult topic because it seems to easy to declare one person evil and one person good, one act evil and one act good, but spiritually there just is no evil.

To say that a lie is evil causes most of us to immediately put up a defensive wall, against hearing anything else. The ego becomes angry and prepared for this attack on its goodness. Yet, this is not meant as a judgment of goodness. It is mean to help us to question our concept of evil.

In a belief built world, good and evil are concepts that arise out of perception. When we life in Maya, illusion, we are already living in a world built in the sky so to speak. Like those castles so readily attributed to neurotics. But what grounds that illusion, what connects it with God is the heart. The heart is where we find the doorway to God. So we can say that what we believe in our hearts, whatever we believe to be the truth, is as good as it gets.

The illusion, the Maya into which we are born is ultimately created by God for the purpose of teaching the soul its own value, its own essence which is God. Man once understood this and so created initiations for the purpose of changing the boy into the man, the boy into the warrior, or the shaman. The boy at a certain age would be sent away from the tribe to some place where he was totally unfamiliar, a place that was wrought with peril so that he could confront the many challenges that would force him to reach deeper and deeper within his being until he was in contact with the source of his power, God, which would then guide him through the dangers. He would then be led back home changed, clear, the illusions of childhood replaced with the knowledge of the true self. Just like Jesus truly became the Christ not merely at the baptism but when he went away for those forty days to confront his last temptation.

This is symbolic of mans time on earth. We must confront the ego which controls our little minds, with its wiles, its rationalizations, it justifications, its cunning and its judgments, which are, in fact, all different types of lies.

Evil is merely an illusion created in the mind of man. It is only “bad” because it takes us further away from our Source, which is connected to the heart. Good is anything that is truth, which originates from the heart and leads us to our Source. Look at it this way, if take one letter, the “o” out of good, you have God, they are connected. If you take one letter the “v” out of evil, you have lie they too are connected. Anything that is a lie, is not good, not of the heart.

When we hear the word evil we immediately seem some red horned figure, or some darkly cloaked sinister shadow lurking somewhere in a corner. Evil is in merely that which points us away from the truth which is that path to God. It is a sign that has been turned in the wrong direction, intentionally, for whatever reason. It is ultimately not in the best interest of anyone if it is away from God.

Am I saying that understanding this will put an end to conflict…an end to war? No, I am not. In a world that is built on a foundation of illusion, which is inhabited by souls who are all on different levels of evolutionary progress, there are bound to be different truths. Those truths will be defended or not based upon the age of the soul, its understanding and its inherent nature. But while the ego seeks domination and adherence at all costs to its beliefs, the heart seeks understanding and acceptance. What I am saying is that coming from the heart, living in truth, even if it is a very personal truth, will put an end to weapons of mass destruction. The heart, every heart, contains the essence of God, and even within the illusion the heart can never justify the death of one innocent being as “acceptable collateral damage”.

The ends do not justify the means in the heart only in the mind. And so a man or woman might very well see that the only way to defend what he or she believes in their hearts is to defend it with their lives. But, at no time will the heart defend its truth with someone else’s life. A noble battle is fought with honor by the one whose belief is being defended. Jesus did not send anyone else to the cross for him. And so, although we will not end conflict by coming from our hearts, we will end dishonor, and find our way to God. We will all emerge from the wilderness with the heart of a true warrior.

It began to deteriorate after about nine months.I begun compromising myself for the sake of keeping the relationship going.After a year he was not the man that I fell in love with, but what was so much more painful was that I was not the woman he fell in love with.I was not even the woman who fell in love with him.

The Answer

To why I lost you

Lies in the place

I left me.

No one ever leaves a relationship before its expiration date.I don’t care if it the immediate cause is another woman, another man, or just a better life.The relationship had already reached a point of diminishing return.Most of us have a tendency to stay in a relationship long after it has become moldy and begun to stink up our lives.We stay for many reasons, but the greatest reason is the emotional investment.It is like investing in a stock.We invest in a great stock and as it rises in value we increase our investment.Then it starts going down, little by little.We hold – knowing that it will go up again; we hope that it will go up again at least enough to break even.We don’t sell because until we sell, we don’t realize the loss.

In a relationship, the initial investment is time is very low in comparison to the enormous return of happiness.We invest our love, our dreams, our beliefs, then our trust and commitment. If it begins to lose the value that it once had, we start increasing our investment by over-compensating, giving more of ourselves, giving all of ourselves, and in the end, giving up ourselves. When that does not work, and the signs of a failed relationship begin to show to the world – we up the ante by investing our pride, and as a last resort our integrity.Then one party finds a way out – finds a way to recoup some of his or her emotional investment through another woman or man.Someone who will re-establish the value, the self worth that we feel we have lost through having over invested in a relationship that has nothing left to return.But this does not happen out of the blue, if it’s an affair, it is kept secret while the other partner still believes both are equally vested, even if they are vested in a sinking stock.Yet, it’s not equal.One partner is secretly siphoning off his share of the emotional investment and putting it into another stock.This doesn’t have to be another person, it could be a plan to see the world, join an ashram, it doesn’t matter.One partner had found a way to begin rebuilding his emotional portfolio while the other still believes they are in it together.One partner has his entire being immersed in the relationship while the other has been quietly extricating herself.Then – when the departing partner feels secure enough that the new investment will assist in recouping what was lost.He or she abruptly – in the eyes of the partner being left behind – closes the account.All of the emotional losses fall on the partner who remained.

By the time a relationship comes to an end through the actions of one of the partners, the only thing left the investment is its definition.The one who was left behind believed that, as long as there was a shell and two participants, there was hope, and, even more importantly, believed that he had nothing left to leave with – everything was spent, was invested.A relationship ends when it has stopped growing, the only reason anything stops growing is that it is dead.The only thing that happens when one party ends the relationship is, the loss is realized by the partner left behind.By the time one party leaves a relationship the only thing left to do is bury the rotting corpse.There is no bond left, there is no shared vision, no shared desire, no shared hopes – nothing left to save or to hold onto.

It is devastating to be left.This is true even if most of the time we can no longer stand to see our partner’s face, because by this time the lack of return is equal to our diminished expectations. By this time our only hope is that our partner is willing to settle for as little as we are.It hurts to be left, and when it happens we just want that person back, it doesn’t matter if they are mean to us, or abusive to us, or ignores us, or humiliate us, we just want him back.But if we stop to think about what we are willing to endure to have that person return, we will realize that the things that we are now willing to endure are things that we would never have considered suffering for anyone.Of course, those were things that we would never do when we still had self-respect.And it feels very much like that leaves with our former other half.The reason that we are willing to humiliate ourselves is not because we want that person back.It is because we want ourselves back. We don’t want the person back who left us; we just want to be unleft.We don’t want to feel like someone worthless enough to be left behind, it’s not about the one who leaves us – it’s about what we feel that we are left with.

A funny thing happened to me on my way to, “Losers Anonymous”.I heard a song that had one line in it that said, “Every cloud don’t have a silver lining”.It is funny, but that changed my life.I realized that he was, or at least had become an a—hole, and there was no silver lining in this cloud.It wasn’t the loss of him, or even of us that I was mourning so deeply, it was the belief that I could have made it work because it was workable.It was workable because every cloud has a silver lining.It was workable because I believe that ‘all you need is love’.So, if I had love then I was just the biggest loser in the world because nothing else could explain my standing here alone.But that song made me realize that if something has a limited shelf life, like my relationship had, I did not lose it, break it, mess it up, or ruin it.

I had made a huge emotional investment in the relationship.But the only way that I would be forced to realize a loss, was if I still believed that there was something left for him to offer me.And I really didn’t – we left each other long before he left the relationship.So, what I lost was the part of me that I invested in the relationship and if I could now gain insight and growth, I would not only recoup my investment, but I could turn a profit, because the stock of Me, Inc. had risen remarkably.Whenever someone walks out, they are doing us a favor because for us, there just is no more water in that well.Those we love may die, and cause us to feel a temporary sense of separation, but anyone who we truly love will never leave us in spirit. They move on to what is next for their growth, and allow us to do the same, and all in the spirit of the love that we shared.

Regardless of what we tell ourselves in the moment while we are looking at our joint plans shattered on the floor around us, we knew that we had nothing more to share with the one who left long before the door closed behind him.And after the pity party, and the hangover – comes the enlightenment of a new and stronger sense of self-worth and an even greater sense of power than we ever had before the experience.

FOUND

In pain

I found strength

In lies

I found truth

In deceit

I found trust

In being lost

I found my way

And in rejection

I found myself.