A Light In a Pandemic

 We are coming up on a Year of Pandemic.  Many of us have been in lockdown for 11 months.  There is a national mental health crisis occurring.  Depression and anxiety as well as substance abuse are at record levels.  So are divorces.  How do we find Light in all this?   To answer that question I engaged in my prayer practice (previously mentioned) of holding a question with sacred (to me) texts and opening to the wisdom they reveal.   So this is what I got:

From Emanuel  Book I: "Look to understand your negative feels as a loving Mother would understand a confused and frightened child...Do not deny the part of you that is in darkness or it will manifest again. ...With awareness, you give yourself the gift of an opening for growth and change.  Do not criticize yourself because in darkness you could not see."

Those of you familiar with the classic, The Prophet by Kahil Gilbran know that the section on Laws talks throughout it about the contrast between a rigid law following spirit and a joyful and free spirit.  He goes on to say: "What shall I say to these (the rigid law following ones) save that they too stand in the sunlight, but with their backs to the sun? ... What is the sun to them but a caster of shadow?...but you who walk facing the sun, what images drawn on the earth can hold you?

For me this passage serves as a reminder about getting caught up in shoulds or preconceptions which when rigidly held mean we are turned away from the sun and thus in shadow. It means having to face this pandemic with spiritual orientation - looking towards the Light.  Which leads to...

Our beloved Thomas Kelly in the Testament of Devotion: "Continuous renewed immediacy, not receding memory of the Divine Touch, lies at the base of religious living.  Let us explore together the secret of a deeper devotion, a more subterranean sanctuary of the soul, where the Light Within never fades, but burns, a perpetual Flame, where the wells of living water of divine revelation rise up continuously."

I love the rich poetic imagery that Kelly always uses.  He emphatically brings home here are need for each other, for spiritual community, to help renew each other - that our sharing keeps us in a living experience of the divine.  Thus as we face the pandemic community is essential.

Illusions by Richard Bach from the "Messiah's handbook": "Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there.  What your choose to do with them is up to you"  

This one serves to me as a powerful query.   If the pandemic is not in our life as an accident but as collectively created event, then it is incumbent that we understand it on the spiritual level.   I have previously written about this:  http://thefriendlyseeker.blogspot.com/2020/05/i-sent-you-warning.html and   http://thefriendlyseeker.blogspot.com/2020/07/covid-is-still-teaching.html  But he also says all the people in our lives (and that means yes when they are annoying the heck out of us).  Why have I drawn this teacher to me?  As record divorce levels are occurring, and other personal ruptures it is important to ask this question.  The next reading also emphasis this point of how we engage each other right now.

Emmanuel book II:  "Everyone on the planet is your soulmate.  If there is a man selling newspapers on the corner and you are connected to that person with your openness, your love and truth, you are with your soul mate for that moment."   

You may long for an encounter with a stranger right now, but most of us are still going to the grocery store.  We interact with people on zoom, we talk on the phone to people.  And now more than ever it maybe critical to see the soul of the person before us and know that they are sharing an emergency with us.

Neil Donald Walsh: "When you wish to manifest, seek not merely to think of things, but to feel it.  Feel what it would be like to have that.  Feel what it would be like to experience it....Feeling is the way we identify and magnify the energy we wish to experience more of, by resonating with it."  

This is a reminder to those of us who belief in manifestation, as I do, that we must see and feel the thing.  It is particularly hard right now because many of us long for contact with people and trying to imagine that taps into painful longing.  The trick of course is to imagine a party of people, feel the feelings, and then offering it into the hands of God, knowing it will again be and releasing it.  If one can do it with non attachment it is actually a nice little mental vacation trip.

Michael Singer in The Untethered Soul also reminds us that what we do with our mind can also be the source of our suffering and calls us into mindfulness: "You must stop telling your mind that the jobe is to fix your personal problems...Your mind has very little control over this world.  it is neither omniscient nor omnipotent.  ...Nor can it control all the people, places and things around you. ...Whenever it starts telling you what you should or shouldn't do in order to get he world to match your preconceived concepts, don't listen.  ...The truth in everything will be ok as soon as you are ok with everything.  All you have to do is stop expecting the mind to fix what's wrong inside of you. ... The minute you stop putting your whole heart into the mind as if it where your savior and protector, you will find yourself behind the mind watching it."

This is such a helpful reminder about not ruminating about all the political crap which has been happening - it points to how to do some of the above, how to turn towards the sun, how to notice why people an events are in our lives, how to touch into manifesting but in a non attached way.  By stepping back and watching our mind, by adopting a posture of acceptance for what is.

Finally Wayne Dyer from The Power of Intention.  Wayne frequently talks about having our intention (like in the Walsch quote) but being in alignment, noticing thoughts that take us out of alignment.  He urges that we set an intention like: "I feel lovingly connected to others and hopeful."  He encourages us to repeat this to ourselves when negativity arises.

So to summarize all this wisdom: Be gentle and accepting with your negative feelings. Turn away from rigidity and preconception and turn towards the Light.  Use spiritual community to keep you in touch with Living Waters. See all the events and people in your life as teachers.  See the soul of everyone you meet, and it will be a spiritual encounter.  Hold a vision for a good life feeling into that without attachment.  Stop trying to solve your life from your mind - observe instead the events of your life from a place of acceptance.  Have a positive affirmation to say to remind yourself.

To Pray as If Climate Change is Over

I try to pay attention to synchronicities because I believe they are a definite sign of God speaking to us.

Recently while going to Quaker Earthcare Witness national gathering I first while listening to a Wayne Dyer tape in the car heard him quote Nevil, a guy from the early last century, who talked about prayer in a different way.   Then someone at the conference also handed me a flyer about prayer with a quote from Nevil.  Dyer talks about a concept that Neale Donald Walsch also talks about as well: the idea that we are also divine, that we were created by the divine as part of the divine, not separate from, and that when we are connected to our Spiritual Source we have the power to create and experience everything.  All three postulate that we (the collective we) co-create the universe with God.

This carries with it some implications for prayer, that Walsch talks about in his book Happier than God.  The implication being that if we pray “I need money” that we are simply creating more need. If we pray “stop the war” we are simply focusing on war and thus bring more of that energy- that the Divine matches what we bring.   So a better prayer would be ….well not to pray for peace to come because that still carries the idea that peace is “not yet”.  But rather to place ourselves in the frame of mind of really sensing and feeling in our body the world at Peace, getting totally in touch with what it would really feel like.  Interesting the Kabbalah which was practiced by Jewish mystics also directs people to imagine as if it were now that which the person prays for.

So all of this has lead me to really think about the idea of what if we really focused ourselves on the end of Climate change.  (There is almost not right words for this – like how do you describe the absence of oxygen that does not still really convey oxygen?)  The trick of this is not to just sort of imagine going back to some idealized notion of the 1970’s as if climate change was not then beginning.   It means having to fully embrace all the science of climate change – to acknowledge that the burning of fossil fuels, as a reality of physics, warms up the atmosphere.   So it means having to go to a state of living that does not include burning fossil fuels.   That also does not mean going to a time before the industrial revolution.   It means actually seeing a new future that we live into now.   Does anything sound familiar about this?  Early Friends believed that the Society of Friends were trying to live the Kingdom of God NOW, not later.   That we were going to live it into existence.   That Kingdom was also believed to be a world of social justice.

You may be familiar with the Naomi Klein’s idea that we will not be able to solve climate change without addressing the deep flaws of capitalism (and I would add colonialism) which has created climate change.   In other words, a paradigm that allows us to see the earth as something we have dominion over and to take from, a paradigm that can see people and places as sacrifice zones is a paradigm we must abandon.   It is literally not possible to solve climate change from that paradigm.

So my invitation to pray into a picture of the world whole, with climate balance is an invitation as well to see a world of environmental care, of humans living in a new paradigm of being part of the earth and all living things.  Climate change involves how we build buildings, grow food, transport ourselves, heat and light our homes, manufacture objects, and interact with trees to name a few things.   So this prayer is for a radically different and reorganized world.   It is to vision a world of social justice and peace.  Nor does it mean being released from the need to do anything for in fact it means being drawn passionately by that vision of a world made whole to live into it.   It is what I believe early Friends envisioned the Kingdom of God to be.  Can you feel your body relax as you imagine it?  Breath into that image.   Hold it in your heart every day.   Believe in it and start to live into its reality.   Hurry we have no time to waste.   We have lived too long in the kingdom of destruction, hubris and greed.

Climate Change, Duality and The Triune Truth

I have been doing Climate Change organizing for 7 years.  It is hard work because it is a depressing subject that most people wish to avoid.  It very easily evokes in people feelings of good versus evil, and a great deal of discouragement about the ability of David to beat Goliath.  However, in my spiritual life I have come to regard duality as a false consciousness, so this creates an interesting tension for me.  Neale Donald Walsch writes very interestingly about the falseness of duality and how there is always a third possibility.  I quote:

"This Triune Reality is God's signature.  It is the divine pattern.  The three-in-one is everywhere found in the realms of the sublime.  You cannot escape it in matters dealing with time and space, God and consciousness, or any of the subtle relationships.  One the other hand, you will NOT find the Triune Truth in any of life's gross relationships. 
   The Triune Truth is recognized in life's subtle relationships by everyone dealing with such relationships.  Some of your religionists have described the Triune Truth as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Some of your psychiatrists use the terms superconscious, conscious and subconscious.  Some of your spiritualists say mind, body, and spirit.  Some of your scientists see energy, matter, ether.  Some of your philosophers say a thing is not true for you until it is true in thought, word, and deed.  When discussing time, you speak of three times only: past, present, future.  Similarly, there are three moments in your perception - before, now and after.  In terms of spatial relationships whether considering the points in the universe, or various points in your own room you recognize here, there, and the space in between.
   In matters of gross relationships, you recognize no "in-between".  That is because gross relationships are always dyads, whereas relationships of the higher realm are invariably triads.  Hence, there is left-right, up-down, big-small, fast-slow, hot- cold, and greatest dyad ever created: male-female.  There are no in-betweens in these dyads.  A thing is either one thing or the other, or some greater or lesser version in relationship to one of these polarities.
   Within the realm of gross relationships, nothing conceptualized can exist without a conceptualization of its opposite.  Most of your day-to-day experience is foundationed in this reality.
   Within the realm of sublime relationships nothing which exists has an opposite.  All is One, and everything progresses from one to other in a never-ending circle."
Conversations with God: Book 1  p.30-31

What Walsch writes is so helpful to me because of my own spiritual path.  I feel I have come to earth to work on issues of violence and injustice.  Yet in both, it is so easy to quickly get caught up in good versus evil sorts of ways of thinking which I have come to see actually perpetuate "enemy think" and the continuation of the spiral of violence and injustice.  So it has become clear to me that part of the path forward is to step out of duality, and yet I find that in many of the things I feel most passionately sort of pull me towards some sort of right wrong thinking.

This past week I went to a "dialogue about climate change".  Obviously this is a topic which brings strong feelings: fear, despair, grief, anger, etc.  It is not a dispassionate subject.  After showing a very depressing TED talk we were divided into groups of three and asked first to share our feelings about the statement: “Things are getting worse”, then about the statement “Things are getting better”, and finally about the statement: “Things are perfect as they are, or things are as they are”.  During the first part you could hear  words like destruction, grandchildren, politicians, species loss, etc. whirling around; it was somber in deed in the room.  This was the "easy" part.  I think for many of us the second part was most challenging - how to be with it without feeling like we were going into denial or whitewashing what is happening.  For myself I can both notice various solutions and initiatives people are taking that are indeed hopeful - and yet I know if we do not get the political will quickly to implement these things they are all pointless.  From a cyncial point of view I can say "Well Gaia is healing herself; she is throwing off the leaches that suck her dry and poison her.  She will live in the much longer span of the planet even if all human and mammal life perishes." 

My first gut reaction upon hearing the word perfect anywhere around climate change was “bullshit”.  But when I just sat with the sentence, I found it was a huge change in perspective.  It was like a lens that moved me out looking at the earth as big marble and at our past, current, and future time.  From this perspective I could notice we are each individually learning lessons both personal and collective.  We are playing roles both personal and collective in the fate of the earth.  It took me back out into the mystery...into all that we do not know.  A man burned himself in the Middle East and it spawned the Arab Spring.  Who could have predicted that?  Humans have accidentally discovered all kinds of technologies and all kinds of love and all kinds of ways of organizing ourselves.  In the face of crisis they have suddenly behaved differently.  Who are we to know what the experience or the meaning will be of a global crisis shared for the first time in history by every person on the earth.  And honestly we have no choice but to live into the mystery.

When we returned to the whole group the woman next to me commented that the first two questions were the polarity, but that the third question took us out of the duality.  In fact I see the third question is what Walsch calls the Triune Truth: there is the getting worse (or the Great Unraveling as Joanna Macy calls it), and the getting better (Or the Great Turning as both she and David Korten call it), and then there is things as they are (which Joanna might call non-linear time).  As long as we deal with the political issues before us in the language of "gross relationships" (as Walsch calls it) rather than the sublime which transcends polarity then we continue to beat our head against a reality in which we just take turns playing bad guys and good guys.  I think many of our answers will be found in the third space.

An example of this has to do with good guys and bad guys.  When we believe in a world of gross relationships then we are duty bound to fight the bad guys often engaging as President Obama has in actions that create bad karma for oneself and enrage others who then arise against us as the “bad guy” and the circle continues.  Whether you believe in reincarnation and your own string of past lives, or simply in your ancestors and know enough of their stories to know: you will then observe that each of us is enmeshed in centuries of being both oppressor and oppressed, powerless and powerful, kind and cruel, and that we contain within us all of these experiences and possibilities.  Part of the heart of non-violence is to call out to that other set of possibilities that exist within the person currently acting as oppressor or “wrong doer”.  We can really only do this however, as we drop the righteousness of wielder of Good and meet the other on the plane of the Triunal Truth…where we are all one and share the same fate.  I think as we face climate change this way of approaching the issue will become increasingly necessary.