Month: September 2014

It’s All God

/ levelprayingfield

A few days ago, an acquaintance said to me, “No one smiles any more.”

This woman is 90 years old. She still lives independently. She was featured last year on You Tube and the Huffington Post launching her own business, Happy Canes.

If Grandma Pearl of “Happy Canes” is saying “No one smiles any more,” you know things are intense.

I learned years ago that suffering results from expectation. If there’s a way you “think things ought to be,” when things depart from expectation (as inevitably happens in life), you get disappointed, and you suffer.

It’s like that joke: “How do you make God laugh?” Answer: “Tell God your plans.”

You’re a lot freer when you can accept What Is.

But looking around – at Ebola, fires, beheadings, terrorism, religious conflict, humanitarian cruelties, drought, greed, the increasing division of wealth – I know – it’s awfully hard to accept all that as “What Is.”

But it is What Is. It’s happening.

Now at a certain point on the spiritual path (Stages 2 and 3), the indicated response to atrocity is to stand up and fight like mad against it. And today, you see people doing that.

But for other people, people at Stages 4 and 5, the task is radical acceptance – not to fight with What Is. At that point, the task moment by moment is to accept. More: to trust. Life becomes a walk of faith. On a global scale, I believe that’s our challenge: to have faith in What Is. But how do we come to believe and know that everything – yes, even all those atrocities – too, are God?

I came up with a saying, years ago, when personally I was at the point of deep, perplexed suffering that, on a global level, the world seems to be in, now. My saying was, “When brought to your knees, you tend to look up.” Personal challenge humbled me, cracked my heart wide open, illumined a Bigger Picture that embraced all. Sometimes it just takes what it takes to put your priorities and your understandings straight. “Grace with brass knuckles,” I called it.

I believe humanity is in a Purification phase where we’re being brought to our knees so that we remember to look up. It’s not that we have been “bad.” We simply need to atone. To become “at one” again. At One with All That Is. To remember that there is no separation. That everything is God.

In my experience, “at-one-ment” does not come from self-flaggelation and guilt. At-one-ment comes from seeing things newly. Seeing things as a unified whole where previously there seemed to be division.

So how do we get to the point where we organically, genuinely know that anything that happens – anything – is of God?

When you think about it, how can it be otherwise? God created all. We live in a realm of separation, surely. But it’s separation of consciousness only. Not of reality. Physics tells us that energy and stuff are always energy and stuff, regardless of form, constantly converting form. We know that certain people – mystics – transcend separation, even in this world that seems so separated. They know peace: here, now. They see and breathe and experience God in All. Divisions of up/down, good/bad, right/wrong fade away into the bliss of One. So how do we get from the “here” of separation to the “there” of union?

That’s one of the purposes of this blog – to help guide the way there.

I have just come back to my home after spending nearly four weeks far away with Fred, helping him recover after having been struck with sudden, serious illness. Everything happened so fast. An operation that was supposed to take maybe 2-3 hours and be relatively straightforward went on for 10-1/2 hours. A tumor that was, according to 7 prior biopsies, supposed to be benign turned out to be cancerous – high grade. And actually there wasn’t just one cancer in there, but two. Another cancer entirely was lurking in Fred’s esophageal wall behind the so-called “benign” tumor they’d seen. So many expectations were thwarted, so intensely, so fast!

In that context, it would have been so easy to feel that God was somehow missing from the picture. That there was separation, division, even betrayal.

Sedonaprint_MoffittBut when Fred was moved from Intensive Care into his own room, I walked into his room to see this photo on the wall. I knew the place at once: it’s Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona.

In 1986 when I made the choice to turn my life over to guidance and just follow, Sedona is the first place where guidance lead me. I lived for nine months just a few miles from Cathedral Rock. I passed it every day to go pick up my mail.

I met one of the most significant spiritual mentors of my life in Sedona – a priest who continues to be a mentor today.
I met my first husband there. He and I hiked Cathedral Rock together many times – it was a sacred spot for us. After we divorced – without either of us knowing what the other was doing – we each independenty made a trip to Cathedral Rock to leave our wedding rings there. So today, both of our wedding rings are somewhere up on that formation.

And this was the image that greeted me when I walked into Fred’s hospital room.

That image told me, in the midst of all my overwhelming concern for Fred, that God was with me, with Fred. That God is always there; that All Is God, even when it seems, as Grandma Pearl said earlier this week, that “no one smiles any more.”

To come to know that All is God requires a walk of courage, assertion, then faith and surrender.

It all depends on the stage

/ levelprayingfield

It has been a very intense week – for me personally and for the world. Life and death issues play out, with huge unknowns, for my friend Fred. My solace comes in tending to him, focusing simply on the moment at hand, trusting that, in time, what is meant to be will surely reveal itself.

Life and death issues also play out for the world. Ebola is brewing. This week saw the beheading of the third (this time a British) journalist by ISIS. Obama delivered a national address seeking to drum up support for a limited, internationally coordinated offensive.

So many things went through my mind when I listened to President Obama’s address.

I thought of the Dalai Lama’s response many years ago when asked an earnest question by an audience member after one of his speeches. I saw a video of it. The inquirer was a young woman, about 25 years of age. It was at a time when China’s oppression of Tibet was actively violent, headlining the news. Tibet was taking a passive stance.

This woman asked the Dalai Lama, “When China treats the Tibetans so viciously, why don’t you fight back?” I remember her face–confused, sad and scrunched up by what obviously seemed to her a cataclysmic failure to act when action was so clearly indicated.

The Dalai Lama replied softly, “Well, we would be like China, then, wouldn’t we?”

In hindsight, it was a completely appropriate response by the spiritual leader of a country in Stage 5 (Purification phase) of its spiritual development. Likewise, it was a completely unsatisfying response to a conscientious 25-year-old becoming ripe in her individuation stage, building toward her own personal “I Am” (Stages 2 and 3).

Hearing President Obama address the nation, I thought about America – particularly after the President’s concluding litany about “the difference we (America) make in the world.” He spoke of American leadership as “the one constant in an uncertain world,” then delivered a long sequence of assertions:

It is America that has the capacity and the will to mobilize the world against terrorists.

It is America that has rallied the world against Russian aggression and in support of the Ukranian people’s right to determine their own destiny.

It is America – our scientists, our doctors, our know-how – that can help contain and cure the outbreak of Ebola.

It is America that helped remove and destroy Syria’s declared chemical weapons so that they can’t pose a threat to the Syrian people or the world again.” (Hmmm… does the United States have chemical weapons? I wondered.)

and it is America that is helping Muslim communities around the world… in the fight for opportunity, tolerance and a more hopeful future.” (Hmmm… do they see it that way, too? I wondered.)

The President spoke about the values that we Americans have held and embodied for the world “since our founding” – freedom, justice, dignity. They’re all beautiful, essential values; values that brought this nation to its own “I Am” stage of spiritual development.

SeeSawBut remember that spiritual growth occurs in stages. No mental constructs are utterly true always. In fact, in pure Being, mental constructs fall away entirely.

So when President Obama went down his list of “It is America” claims, I found myself wondering: where does that fine line exist between a) appropriately extending our wisdom to others who are striving to attain the spiritual goals we have mastered (what I call “positive karma,” and we’ll look at that in a future blog); and b) sticking too long in egoistic assertion when really the next spiritual step is to let go, as the Dalai Lama knew to do for Tibet?

When does declaration turn into hubris? When does the conviction of the “I Am” turn into “the most dangerous time when you think you know what’s supposed to happen?” If applying the tasks of the right stage at the right time is so key to optimal spiritual growth, isn’t it to our advantage to figure out what stage we’re in, as individuals, members of group souls, nations, races, etc.?

In your own life, this is a great question to ask God directly. Because the last time I checked, “the one constant in an uncertain world” is not American leadership, as President Obama declared, but God.

“Hey, are you okay?”

/ levelprayingfield

I have been called many miles away from my home for the health emergency of a very close loved one. This loved one is very private, so I won’t say any more about his particular circumstances except to call him Fred and say that it’s serious, and Fred is very central to my life. So on Friday when Fred’s health suddenly went “tilt,” I felt like not just Fred’s but my whole world did, too.

I have been praying a lot. Reflecting a lot. Sighing a lot, then remembering to stop every once in a while to let the sighs dissolve gently into tears.

I have been thinking about how I know Fred, about all the history we’ve shared.

I am struck by how this situation might have been prevented many years ago had the people close to Fred at the time said something. “Hey, Fred, are you okay?”

I am struck by how the people Fred and I have known together over the years also might have had different, more happy and productive lots in life if, when we were younger, we had spoken up. “Hey, are you okay?”

So many ambient possibilities for healing, dampened due to words unsaid. And the words were unsaid because we were afraid of interfering, afraid of embarrassing ourselves or someone else, afraid that our concerns wouldn’t be well received. In hindsight, those all seem like pretty flimsy reasons not to speak.

I wish I had known then to separate out the saying from the outcome. I can’t control what other people do with what I say – that’s their choice, their freedom. But I can control that I say it. I can control how I say it. I can bravely, gently offer my heart, mind and observations. (My motto is: say it once and let it go.) I don’t need certainty that I’m correct – in fact, I’ve found that things usually go better when I am not at all certain I’m correct! All I need is the certainty that I care.

What are you holding back from saying? What do you see and believe might really help someone, yet for some reason you are holding back from stating it outright?

If this experience with Fred has taught me anything, it’s that time and love and words are precious.

“Hey, are you okay?” It might just as well mean, “I love you enough to speak up.”