Tag Archives: Oneness

It’s Cool To Be Kind

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Enlightened beings are magnanimous givers, bestowing whatever they have with equanimity, without regret, without hoping for reward, without seeking honor, without coveting material benefits, but only to rescue and safeguard all living beings.
Buddhism. Garland Sutra 21
There are so many phrases that characterize these times such as, “Only the strong survive,” and, “People mistake kindness for stupidity”. “It is a dog eat dog world”. It seems that there has been a consistently growing trend against being nice. Today if one is too nice, they either need to join some religious order or seek a therapist’s couch.

When I was young, I was deeply affected by the emotional pain experienced by the people around me. I was especially sensitive to the fact that it was not inescapable pain but really self-inflicted. The greatest pain seemed to be caused by those we care for and sometimes even by those who care for us. My reaction to the pain of those around me and to my own, was to determine to live my life in a way which would focus on helping those in pain, and trying not to be the cause of pain for others. I was naive enough to want to see people happy. I grew up in an environment so devoid of trust and faith that I was going to carry enough for everyone. To me, it was so important to trust and to be trusted. Although I was often hurt or disappointed, it did not stop me from being true to the person that I believed I should be.

One day, in my early twenties, I was with a group of co-workers, speaking openly and honestly, when a friend pulled me aside and told me that everyone was not laughing with me they were laughing at me. She told me that I was kind and trusting, and people just saw it as stupid. She said that I had to change to protect myself.

A few years later, I had a friend who started calling me a weak ass. It bothered me but I wasn’t comfortable confronting her about it at first. I knew she thought I was too nice especially to people she didn’t feel deserved it. One day, I asked her why she called me that and she told me that if everyone in the world was like me—it would be a beautiful place, but since everyone was not, I was a weak ass. I respected her honesty and I also knew that in her way, it was a compliment. In the end, my being what she called, a weak ass was the reason she had chosen me as one of the few people that she really trusted.

During my early twenties, I did a great deal of soul searching. The truth was, that people were very difficult for me to deal with. I didn’t find it easy to make friends, because most people saw me as someone to take advantage of. Each group was somehow formed around its sense of superiority to other groups. I didn’t feel superior to anyone, and that affected my ability to fit in. At some point, probably during one of those painful times, I thought of the ways in which I could change and so avoid the endless hurts and disappointments that seemed to be a permanent part of my life. I realized that I could put up a cold wall, I could expect the worst from others, and take before I was taken. I could choose my friends based on how much they had to offer me, or how good it made me look to be with them. I could do those things that I had for so long been advised to do—or I could accept that who I was, was who I had always wanted to be. Because I realized that I was the person I would have wanted as a friend, and that, was the highest goal that I ever wanted to achieve within myself. I would rather have been who I was—alone—than to have allowed the experiences of my life to control me and to determine who I was as a person.

This is what is called dharma. It is living the life that is truly natural to your soul. It is really being your true self and living in accordance with that true self. There is a story of a Bodhisattva who was sitting by the water’s edge. A priest who was approaching him heard him saying “ouch” repeatedly. As he drew nearer, he noticed there was a scorpion that was drowning. As he watched the scorpion and the Bodhisattva he was astonished to see that each time the scorpion began to drown, the Bodhisattva reached into the water and pulled it out. And each time after each time it was being pulled out of the water the scorpion would sting the Bodhisattva’s hand. Afters it was pulled out the scorpion would return to the water and the scenario would be repeated.

The priest looked at the Bodhisattva in frustration and asked, “Master, you know that the scorpion is going to sting you, why do you repeatedly lift it out of the water?” The Bodhisattva responded, “It is the dharma of the scorpion to sting—and it is my dharma to save.” In this lifetime “to save” is not everyone’s dharma. There are even those humans whose dharma is to “sting”. Yet many, whose dharma it is to save, to help, and to love his fellow man—hold back out of fear of rejection or ridicule. So instead, they do what others do and, in acting against their dharma, they sadly create unnecessary karma.

It is my belief, and this is very personal, that it is the innate desire of each person to be loved unconditionally and to be allowed—regardless of past actions—to be the best one can be. I once read somewhere that loving is giving what you most need to receive. And this is why I say that this is personal, because it is what I would want to be given to me. So I chose to give others an opportunity to be trusted, even if they had not shown themselves to be trustworthy in the past, and to create a non-judgmental space for people to feel safe enough to change if they chose to do so. Perhaps, eight out of ten times this proved disastrous for me, but it wasn’t a personal loss because, having given something consciously, it was not taken from me. When I claimed my power, I claimed my right to give, to love, and to succeed in what I measured as success which was to be the best human being that I could. I no longer perceived myself as being a victim because I made the choice. I no longer perceived myself as being used or taken advantage of because I made a choice. Regardless of the perceptions of others, within myself I was becoming successful and that feeling was empowering.

Someone said that there are no bad people—only bad choices. I believe that because society is so fearful and so judgmental that some of us become forced into living out the persona of those bad choices in spite of an inner desire to rise above them. This is what happens to us during the Christmas season. It is a frozen moment in time when we may safely, without fear of loss or judgment, bring out what is best within us. We may experience the joy of giving and of sharing without feeling foolish, without fearing that we will be used or taken advantage of. The fears of our society have made those for whom giving and loving are the source of joy feel weak and defective. We have equated kindness not only with stupidity but with what this society considers to be the most detestable fault that one can have—that of weakness. My own father went to his grave fearing for my survival because of those exact traits that most endeared me to him.

For too long, people who do really care about the welfare of others have been made to feel ashamed of that feeling. They are either labeled, “Bleeding Heart Liberals”, or made to believe that they suffer from some form of inferiority complex. And to a large extent they do suffer from a complex. This is because there has been no place in the everyday world for good people. Even hearing the word in my head as I write makes me almost feel as those I am describing a leper. Good people have to find their own path and fight the world, their loved ones, and even themselves so as to stay on it. It has been very difficult after goodness lost favor with the general public in response to the sixties. So, unless one fits into the category of being an aged hippy, or a left over love child—good people have little or no support for their beliefs about life and the way to live it. I found that it is easy to feel confident when you believe in who you are. It was the believing that took some time, but it always does when you are swimming against the tide. The thing to remember is that it only takes one person to make a path—anywhere—and everyone else will eventually follow. It takes belief to develop confidence, and a willingness to walk alone to make that path, but once the path is made, you are not alone for long.

Now, it is time for all of the bleeding hearts to be proud that their hearts are not too cold, or too hard to bleed. It is time that we acknowledge that it is neither bad nor stupid to be good. It is spiritual. And one does not have to join an order to be spiritual and to live a life that exemplifies the spiritual principals taught by every Light that God has sent down to earth to lead us. For too long, we have bought into that dog eat dog world. We are not animals we are spiritual beings. We are meant to rise above survival of the fittest and that dog eat dog belief. We are meant to love, to care, and to be our brother’s keeper. We don’t have to wait until it becomes cool or in, to be good we have to be good long enough, and with enough courage and conviction that it becomes cool. There are no catchy phrases which praise being a good person. There are only phrases denigrating it. If someone is too good—then they are not true, or they are a stupid, a wimp, an easy mark, or a sucker. It actually amazes me that one can’t be too thin, or can’t be too rich, but one can be too good! We have gone so far down the wrong path that when someone does something right or is too decent, or humane, either their motives or their intelligence are immediately suspect.

It is time to lift ourselves out of the jungle where only the strong survive. It is time to leave the kingdom where dogs eat dogs and enter the kingdom where mankind can love and care for all living things. It is time for us to rise to the position that is befitting those who were created in the image of God, that image of the loving, caring, and forgiving caretaker that God is. How can we speak in His name, when we ourselves celebrate the animal in us and demean the God in us? God is goodness. If enough people find the courage to be proud of caring, proud of giving, and proud of trusting, then others will find it wise and cool to do the same. The world is in sore need of all the loving, giving, caring people it can support. And that does not mean confined in a religious order, but out in the world living an example that others can be encouraged to follow. There is an infinite distance between nowhere and the first step, but once that first step is taken, we find that the universe takes our hand the rest of the way.

Oneness

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Each of us is God and all of us are God, in the sense that we are aspects of Him spread out over all of time and space. When we love ourselves we love God. It is not looking up saying “God I love you, you are perfect.” It is looking in the mirror and saying “God I love you, you are perfect.”

We are special; we are all on a mission to spread love and light. If we can learn to love ourselves completely, each part of our being, then by doing that from within we will automatically love each other. It is by loving and accepting all of our different qualities that we will love and accept all of those souls who represent those qualities around us.

That love will infect the energy of the entire planet and the Universe. This is each person’s individual mission. Understand that love and hate are like air born viruses. They travel through the energy field and infect others. As a virus begins first within an organism, so love and hate each begin first within the individual. I cannot spread something I do not have. I must love or hate myself to spread it into the energy environment.

Hate is simply fear. Love is acceptance as oneness. Love is being whole. We do come from one source. We are all different aspects of All that is, and we each contain every aspect of All that is. As we meet others we are meeting ourselves, like the same piece of the cardboard, just cut into a different shape. It is truly, as above, so below, as within without. If I can only love one person, I still am only accepting those aspects of myself that are represented by that one person. If I cannot love a certain person, and worse, if I hate that person, it is the aspect of myself that is represented by that person that I am not accepting.

We speak of good versus evil, of us versus them – Satan versus God – these are all imaginary divisions. They are not real. If you look to Satan as he appears in the old testament, he is not the enemy of God. If he is the enemy of anyone he is the enemy of man. The impression is that he just thinks that God gives man too much credit. He doesn’t believe that man is capable of loving God as the angels do. So God gives Satan carte blanche as to how he tests mans love of God with one exception – he can’t kill him. Knowing that Satan, being an archangel, is no dummy – he would use the division and distraction to distance man from God and prove his point, that man doesn’t have what it takes to love God. Religion is the first and the best tool to divide and conquer humanity. It makes sense; people are so busy defending their particular religion from other people who are defending their own religion, that God – becomes an afterthought. The focus becomes the bathwater and not God, the baby in it. If we were to overcome all of our other boundaries – race, nationality, economic status, religion will still remain Satan’s trump card. We commit more actions that distance us from our own loving hearts and God, in the name of religion, than even our greed commands.

Remember that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We are each links. If we are not individually in love with the totality of our beings, we cannot benefit the whole. I can teach you to understand a concept, even the concept of self-love, but I cannot give it to you or to the energy of the universe until I have it. If we can love ourselves unconditionally – we will see no one as unworthy of our love and embrace the Oneness that we all share.

We are God, in the sense that we are aspects of Him spread out over all of time and space. When we love ourselves we love God. It is not looking up saying “God I love you, you are perfect.” It is looking in the mirror and saying “God I love you, you are perfect.” It is looking at all beings and saying, “God I love you, you are perfect.” When we understand that we need not look to what we cannot see to love God, because we each are a cell in the body of God. We are not born from God; we are each and all forever a part of God.

The “veil,” the “Maya” is what keeps us looking at a liver cell as opposed to a pancreatic cell as opposed to a skin cell when we are all simply and divinely cells of one beautiful body, and our individual work is what keeps the body alive.

We are a part of All that is. This is why there is no death. Even our physical bodies do return to the physical substance from which they came; that is not even dying, it is transforming into something greater than before. When our physical vehicle is no longer of use, we are re-incorporated into spirit. Until we choose to utilize a physical vehicle again.

If we go back to the theory of cells, we can understand that we have an ego, which in its highest sense, is the attachment to our individuality and the experiences we have had throughout our history of incarnation. The Aquarian Age is a time where we do not blend our individuality into the brotherhood of man. We add our individuality to aid the betterment of mankind. It is also about taking that individuality and bringing it into the perfect working of the whole. Just as a liver cell cannot forget it is a liver cell and start functioning as a pancreatic cell. Ideally it should realize that it is a liver cell of the same material and a part of the same whole as the pancreatic cell and without both there would be no body.

Individuality does not mean that we are floating unattached. Individuality means that we have our self, our gift, and our unique identity to contribute to the whole of which we are a part. We are a drop as well as the Ocean. We need each other because we are each other in the greater sense. We need God because we are God.

To say that we are children of God is beautiful and it conjures up a beautiful loving image. Yet it implies that we are separate from God so when we are then told to look within for God, we become confused trying to find something separate but within. My child comes from me, she loves me and I love her, however we are separate physical beings in life and that separateness is what impels her to perfect the gifts that are contributed by her being and knowing her whole self.

My cells and my organs, on the other hand, are a part of me; they bear the same connection to me as we bear to God. I may look at every part of me and say this me in this lifetime. The power and strength of each part of me is at my disposal. So we must incorporate the premise that we are not children of God but parts of the body of God. We do not have to look within to find God, we are God within and without. Not only are we parts of God, but so is everything that exists as far as we can see and as far as there is.

If we can understand this concept and break free of the belief that we are merely creations of God but not God, then we can understand that everything else is connected to and a part of each of us.

God created man in His own image. Perhaps what that is saying is the God created man from His own image, and a soul that is, His own image. Understanding that all that exists is God, as each cell within our bodies are connected to the other and dependent upon the other, and the body upon the whole of all if its cells, so too are we connected to every living organism and in some way, aware of it or not, we are dependent upon each. God is economical. There are no left-over or dispensable parts. Each species, each organism has a purpose, and if we remove one from existence, we will eventually feel the repercussions of its absence.

We cannot pollute the atmosphere without somehow polluting ourselves. We cannot weaken the immune system of the earth without having problems with our own immune systems and the immune systems of every living organism that exists on the planet. Not in just affecting from without, but mirroring the effect within our own organism. We must remember that as above, as below as within as without.
We cannot consider ourselves separate from God nor can we consider ourselves separate from another individual, even if that individual lives thousands of miles away worships in a different church, speaks a different language and has a different color skin. We are all connected by the atmosphere that we all share. We live under the same sky and breathe the same air. We are each connected by air. Everything on earth is made of atoms. How then can we not be connected?

To be a part of something larger than ourselves does not make us less in reality it makes us more. When we look at the night sky and see all of the stars and all of the universes, this should not make us feel small and insignificant; it should make us feel great and limitless. Only the belief that one is great can give one the courage and motivation to do great things.

Changing our Concept of Good and Evil

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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.