The Need for True Prayer

First of all, I hope everyone receiving and reading this post is well. I ask that, before reading my post, each of you read the bold, blue text (this was a chain email I received) that precedes my post as this is what inspired my post. Also, look at the pictures (if these make it to the post) and contemplate deeply what you see going on with all three parties involved in the email. Then, read slowly and patiently through my email at your leisure. Be especially patient with yourself as you read the words. I know that we can all come to a new, higher understanding just by working to remain aware of what moves through our minds as we read my post and the email that inspired it.

This is the chain email I received to which my below "essay" was a response. There were also pictures of soldiers praying, which I have tried to attach here. If the pictures do not show up on the post, just read the message of this email, and my post will make more sense below. The email content is in bold, blue font, and my post response is in black:

What's wrong with this picture?

If you look closely at the picture above, you will note that all the Marines pictured are bowing their heads. That's because they're praying.

This incident took place at a recent ceremony honoring the Birthday of the Corps, and it has the ACLU up in arms. "These are federal employees," says Lucius Traveler, a spokesman for the ACLU, "on federal property and on federal time. For them to pray is clearly an establishment of religion, and we must nip this in the bud immediately."

When asked about the ACLU's charges, Colonel Jack Fessender, speaking for the Commandant of the Marine Corps said (cleaned up a bit), "Screw the ACLU." GOD Bless Our Warriors, Send the ACLU to France .

Please send this to people you know so everyone will know how stupid the ACLU is Getting in trying to remove GOD from everything and every place in America . May God Bless America , One Nation Under GOD!

What's wrong with the picture? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

GOD BLESS YOU FOR
PASSING IT ON!

Prayer for our Military... Please send this on after a short prayer.
Prayer for our soldiers..
Prayer
"Lord, hold our troops in your loving hands. Protect them as they
protect us. Bless them and their families for the selfless acts they
perform for us in our time of need. I ask this in the name of Jesus, our
Lord and Savior. Amen."

Of all the gifts you could give a Marine , US Soldier, Sailor, Airman, &others
deployed in harm's way,

Prayer is the very best one



My Response:

Have we not all killed in our lifetimes? This is a shocking question with which to open a letter to everyone, but it comes to me from deeply contemplating the below pictures and even the corresponding story - whether true or not - about the ACLU's attempt to suppress the "prayer" of the soldiers. The pictures, as I understand them, are a part of the email to elicit our sentimentality and attachment to the image to these men praying - men whom we are all supposed to show the utmost deference and respect because of their duties to "protect" us - as well as stir our feelings of outrage for the ACLU's supposed actions to end this practice.

I look at these pictures, and I read the captions, and I know I need to pray. The prayer that I send, however, most likely cannot be comprehended by the majority (or all) of the Marines in the pictures, nor the outraged writer soliciting my identification with his/her reasons for rage, nor the ACLU group and their possible disdain for what is taking place in these pictures. God welcomes us in every moment to see the Reality of Life by touching the awareness he blessed us with. Even as we see this email, we can suspend our reactions and look deeper within ourselves, which translates into seeing deeper into the nature of the world. I look deeply at this email, and I see a world lost, I see a world in need of Love, I see a world that lacks the realization of its need for Love, I see and I read fear in the hearts of the men in the pictures and the causes of the writer of the email and the ACLU. I see darkness turning into evil once again in all aspects of the email, and I also see me - who I could be and who I have been.

We can wake up and enter Reality as we reflect on these pictures. As we do, we may begin to see within ourselves a growing agitation with the pictures. We may wonder at what point human beings began to so distort this beautiful gift of prayer. We may remember that we have never really felt that prayer, as it has been taught to us, was anything more than something we do because we're told to. We may dwell on our past prayers in which we asked for this or that outcome or possession that did not come to fruition. We may even believe or feel strongly that we know why we pray and our own prayers are the real and only way to pray. In our awareness, we may see these or myriad other reactions to prayer inspired by these pictures. It is important that we recognize these reactions within us while not attaching ourselves to the pressure created by these reactions. This is because anytime we say that our "self" is for something we set ourselves against something else. If we say or imply that we are against something, we are incomplete. Being either "for" or "against" anything only deepens our attachment to the opposites that bring us so much pain in this life. The stronger we hold to one side, the more fear we have of the other, which keeps us anchored to the "other side" that we fear. We want to go deeper than the reactions that automatically pit us against anything because, when we are in opposition to any one aspect of anything, we, in that moment, exclude ourselves from the potential to live in the Wholeness of God.

Be careful and patient with yourself as you look deeply at these pictures. As I look deeply, past the oppositions within me, I try to comprehend the effectiveness of praying to God to protect me as I train to kill other creatures and human beings or as I ready myself to go into a battle such as one can imagine these soldiers to participate in after the prayer. As I ponder this, I can understand why there is so little real faith in, or understanding of, the nature of prayer. I can see that, if I prayed in this way, I would eventually discontinue the futility of such a practice because, underneath the moral superiority that leads a soldier to pray for protection while he/she kills another human being that is also a part of God's Life, I would not experience any connection through my soul (as it is decaying from lack of nourishment) with God. This is why I see a world lost, a world in need of every individual's commitment to wake up from the collective nightmare or war and fear and anger and hatred that we have created for ourselves.

When we practice true prayer or meditation or awareness, we have the opportunity to lose our isolation from any living creature or organism in the universe. True prayer is a moment of connection with the Father through which we begin to understand that each of us is a part of the Whole of His Life and each of us is the Whole of His Life. We are a part of the Whole because we dwell within His never-ending existence, and we are the Whole because He dwells within each of us.

The entire universe - all of its different elements: sun, rain, dirt, clouds, plants, animals, humans, gases, liquids, solids, and on and on - is in a constant state of change in which each part is constantly remanifesting itself into the creation of all the other parts. My body would not exist without the sun and rain and dirt and all the other elements contributing to its creation, and this same dirt and sun and rain goes into the creation of each one of us. When the body "dies," it decays back into the earth and contributes to the creation of dirt, water, light, plants, animals, and even human beings. Don't get caught up in the idea of what these words are saying, but try to understand the principal behind the ideas: something can never become nothing and, conversely, something can never come from nothing. The body is something, and it never changes to nothing because, even when it no longer moves or functions as it does when we are "alive," it is being tranformed into other "somethings." Even if we can see the simplest implications of this principal, we begin to lose all fear of what we have perceived as the "death" of our life in this world. Yet, we can look at this even further to see that there is more direct evidence of the existence of God because this perfect system of renewal, which is something, could not have come from nothing. I realize that I am not writing this to debate the existence of God, but I had to insert the previous statement to help us see that there must be an Original Source (call it whatever you want) to this system of life in which we presently find ourselves based on this principle of something cannot come from nothing. This Original Source is the Whole, and whatever comes from it must therefore contain the Whole within it.

Yet, I want to go deeper than this. If I come from the same elements that went into the creation of you, and the elements that went into our creation all come from the same Source - let's call this source the Father - then we are all connected. Therefore, there is no "me" apart from "you" as 99.9% of the world presently perceives things. You are me and I am you through God and His wonderful creation in which we are integral parts. We can apply this to anyone. I am Christ and Christ is me. Ah, here's where many people in this world will get angry and want to fight and argue and hate even while professing to be a loving Christian, Muslim, or whatever other religious title man has created. Please do not let the words be the stumblingblocks to understanding the idea that we can all be Christ and Christ is all of us. Most would react right away to such words, labelling me a blasphemer or heretic or infidel, and, in doing so, those people would be cutting themselves off from what Christ taught us with his life.

Saying "we are Christ and Christ is us" has nothing to do with what our conditioned minds imagine it to imply. We may conjure up images of arrogance (a God Complex) on the part of the author or ideas about anyone making such an assertion being punished in some kind of hell for trying to equate such a despicable race of sinners to God's "only begotten son." However, Christ taught us this, only we do not have the "eyes to see." When I write "we are Christ and Christ is us," I am merely getting more specific with the principle that I am you and you are me through the Father. Christ said, "I am the vine, ye are the branches." Do not branches contain within them the elements of the vine? Are not the two a part of the same whole? Christ understood this when he said, "I am the way." His life was his teaching, and if we practice living his life - through sacrificing our human will for the will of the Father - he tells us that we are his brothers and sisters, which, in turn, means that we can all be sons and daughters of God. Christ's life provides us the way to come to realizations of this spiritual fact.

When we make a conscious effort to practice deeply living our lives as Christ lived his lifed, then he is alive within us and we are him and he is us. When we work to see deeply into Reality, we no longer have to rely on empty, abstract thoughts and ideas about the blood of Christ or the cross or trying to understand the resurrection and how all of these historical events translate into our salvation. Rather, we are living his life every moment and the understanding of his life becomes a Living Reality within us. The world is so lost today because it seeks only to worship the history of Christ rather than live his life. The world is so focused on the fact that Christ died for our sins, but his death was an example, not the end of it all. Perhaps and probably there was a real/physical crucifixion, but our externalized minds stop there and never grasp that his sacrifice embodies the internal sacrifice we all must make in order to be resurrected into the Peace and Happiness of the Father. Thus, when we live his life, we allow him to "go before us to make the crooked places straight," and we willingly sacrifice the source of our suffering - our human will - in order to be resurrected continuously into a new order of life. Christ is the way, and when I sacrifice the "self" that sets out to be something by gaining commodities at the expense of the entire world, I live in the way he taught us, and he comes alive in me and resurrects me from the ruins of who I was.

How then do we begin to practice deeply living the life of Christ? It starts with true prayer that I alluded to earlier. True prayer is alive and it can be living in us in every moment. Yet, again, we have let words define and box in and limit the life of prayer within us. We think it is about grand words or requests to be physically protected, or asking that events in the world go the way we hope they will go, or desiring that God will bring swift, decisive justice to those who have wronged us, or following a commandment from Christ out of fear of what will happen if we don't pray. Yet, true prayer is actually the absense of all of these limiting factors that we have attached to it:

1. True prayer is not concerned with the words used because it is about connecting with the peaceful silence of God's life.
2. True prayer is not a request for protection of our physical organism because it acknowledges that we exist within the eternal and that the eternal is in us.
3. True prayer is not connected to our desire to control the events in our lives because it brings us a direct understanding that all events are intended to bring us to the end of ourselves and into a new, divine mind.
4. True prayer would never be a request for God to help us cause someone to suffer based on what they have done to hurt us because, through true prayer, we can see that the other person already suffers, and, as there is no "me" apart from "you," it becomes more important for us to try to comprehend why we suffer to bring it to its end for the good of all.
5. True prayer is not an obligatory commandment or "thou shalt" from Christ to be performed in a ritualistic, unaware manner; rather, it is the way that he showed us to the Father and the Father to us.

Christ spent his life praying and meditating in order to cultivat that awareness in him that allowed him to touch the Father deeply, and Christ gave to us the understanding that resulted from this practice. This is what makes him the vine through which we branches can be nourished.

Now that we have discovered some of the things true prayer is not, we can begin to describe (mind you, in limiting words) some of what true prayer is. Still, we must always be careful not to attach ourselves to these ideas. Instead, let us live in the real practice. True prayer is more than any of us can ever describe, but it involves:

1. A deep longing to know the Father's life directly.
2. A loss of self that leads us to the understanding that we have no self to lose.
3. A genuine gratitude for the life we have been blessed with regardless of external conditions.
4. The true desire to live only from Love in all moments.
5. Looking deeply into the present moment through our awareness of the present moment.
6. Bringing together the conflicting reactions, thoughts, and feelings within us through our awareness of the present moment to form one synergetic whole that is much greater than the sum of it parts.
7. A participation in the whole of life that effectively brings to an end the loneliness and isolation we experience when we look out at the world and see it (the people, the events, the places, even the beauty) as separate from us.
8. The need to do the work each of us can do to help bring an end to the suffering and darkness that is destroying our world.
9. The humility to ask God to direct our lives and show us the way to abide in His Grace.
10. A selfless, yet individual, awareness of each moment that is completely independent of any sanctioning body of government or religion in this world.

This last description of what true prayer is brings us right back to the pictures and the email, does it not? We have the ACLU trying to end the type of "prayer" the soldiers were practicing, and we have the person (and after reading the email, the people) who feels threatened by the ACLU's attempted suppression of this practice. Yet, if we look deeply at the three parties involved in this email, we can see the necessity for each of us to enter into true prayer for each party. We can also understand that, if anyone of these parties practiced true prayer, they would not be involved in this email.

First, the soldiers praying before possibly going out to kill other human beings: we have already said that we are all in One, so it is easy to see that killing anyone is the same as killing an integral part of God. John Donne was speaking with a very illumined voice when he wrote, "Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee." We can realize that, if these soldiers were involved in true prayer, they would not be training or working to kill others, regardless of the wrong done by the nation against whom they are opposed. If they were practicing true prayer, they would know that to kill who they call their enemy is the same as killing themselves because there is no you apart from me. Furthermore, true prayer would gently guide them to a greater comprehension, which is this: our enemy is our enemy only because he/she/they have revealed to us something that is wrong within ourselves. This is another reason Christ said, "Love thine enemies." Our enemies are not really our enemies. We only hate them because we don't like what they show us about ourselves. But if we realize that they are showing us a deficiency, a fault, within our own minds in order that we may let go of that faulty nature, then we see that we should love them for helping us to purefy ourselves. Then, we move through this life in acceptance of the gift of understanding of ourselves each person - whether our minds try to label that person good or evil - can bring us.

As I engage in true prayer for these soldiers, I can see deeply that I am them and they are me. Can you? You see, this is what keeps us from judging others. This is why I asked at the beginning of the letter, "Have we not all killed in this lifetime?" I can see that I have. From mindlessly stomping on bugs to directing anger and hatred to other human beings to, even once, ignorantly kicking a baby bird around like a soccer ball as a young child. Most people do not see the devastating effect of these "killings" on the universe. I want to discuss the first one in more detail because most of the world does not consider this to be killing or a type of murder as long as we do not physically assualt and take the life of another. Christ tells us otherwise. He tells us hating our brother or sister (and we are all brothers and sisters) is equivalent to murder. Why would this be true? If we use true prayer to look deeply at this, we begin to see the truth of it: when we feel hatred for another we destroy that person's humanity in our mind. We are effectively saying that we have judged that person as less than worthy to be a part of our life. When we look at any person or creature from the perspective of hatred, we are saying, "My soul is more important than yours." This is a very strong statement, is it not? What right do I have to make that judgement for God? This is at least part of the reason Christ made hating someone in our minds equal to murder.

It is very simple, then, for me to deduce that we have all committed murder in our lives because everyone of us has had a personal affair with the darkness of hatred. Isn't that wonderful to see: I am you and you are me and we are those soldiers and they are us! We can all recall - if we're not presently involved in it - the suffocating, burning pain of hatred. Therefore, these soldiers who may soon be involved in the hateful act of physically taking someone's life desperately need our true prayer - completely absent of judgement - so that maybe they will come to know that the death they may inflict on the bodies of others also inflicts death upon their souls and our souls. We can pray that they come to realize that we (and they) do not need the kind of protection from violence that they imagine themselves as providing with their own violence. We can pray that they receive true protection by making their connection to God through practicing awareness and true prayer - the precious gifts he gave us for our precious lives. We can pray that each one have the opportunity (and we know deep in our hearts that each one is given the opportunity) to become a new, complete embodiment of the life of Christ by laying down their weapons and refusing to feel superior to, or hatred for, any other human being. And perhaps the greatest part of our true prayer is that we can find real hope in it, and this is the reason why: if we have practiced living with true prayer and continue to practice it, then we begin to see that God is changing us through this practice - purefying us into a people who are no longer interested in killing in any of its various forms. Once we see that we have killed in many forms in the past, but that God has granted us the mercy of his understanding and compassion so that now we know never to kill again, then we have a living faith that true prayer and understanding will find these men one day, if not in this very moment. We now express a new compassion grounded in God's life through practicing true prayer, meditation, and awareness (all are one!), and this compassion would not even kill, with hatred, those who kill. This is True Love, this is God's Love. Finally, we can pray for God to lead us along the path to no killing, either physically or through hatred, for all of humanity. This true prayer is for ourselves and the soldiers (who we know to be us).

We can look quickly at the two other parties in this email. First, the person who wrote the email in outrage over the ACLU's reactions. This person is afraid that someone or some group can take something away from him/her. But this person can only experience this fear if he/she sees himself/herself as separate from the rest of the world. This self-limiting belief translates into a fear that there is something he/she owns that someone else (who is separate) can take away from from him/her. There are many, many ways to look at this, but for brevity's sake, I will look at this from only two or three angles. We have already discovered that no one is separated from anyone else - that we are all one in Christ/God. If we can practice living in the light of this understanding, then we no longer fear what can be taken from us by another human being. We may instead look at willingly giving ourselves for another human being because in that instance we are also giving ourselves to God. This person does not have to fight the ACLU or send out angry messages to make us hate (and kill) the people who form this group in our minds. The only effective way to combat fear is with Love. Love would lead this person to perhaps silently accept the actions of the ACLU with the understanding that the anger rising up in him/her over these actions is another lesson from God, another fault being exposed within that can now be let go. This silent sacrifice is a giving, or transmitting, of God's Love to the members of the ACLU. Also, can not we all now see that true prayer has nothing to do with bowing down our heads in uniformity and conformity as this person seems to believe. Can anyone take away your mind or the mind of God? I only need to stay aware of myself in every moment to be in true prayer. I do not have to be in a group or in a physical pose, and no one even has to know that I am praying. So, we can see that it is absolutely impossible for any group, organization, government, or religion to suppress a true prayer. Engaging in true prayer while that group tries to suppress my prayer is the way to see this clearly, and it also provides that group or person a chance to see the same principle behind true prayer. Yet, if I match their anger and fear over prayer with my anger and fear over their anger and fear, then I have simply chosen to further the cause of darkness in this world.

Now let's examine the actions of the ACLU. The contradiction in their mission and their actions shows us exactly the kind of conflict this group lives with, and, believe me, it is the conflict we all face on a daily basis. They are living with the notion (living with any notion is bad for the spirit anyway) that freedom is dependent upon something. Please, just read that last sentence over and over until the utter silliness of the statement sinks in. Let us move our attention back to ourselves for just a moment. Everyday we set out to find freedom in people, places, things, and events. What do we want freedom from? Suffering. Our minds are in a perpetual search for the next thing that it says will make us free from the pain that it is causing us. Wow! Talk about being duped! We are living a lie!

Just ask yourself this: can true freedom be dependent upon anything? The true answer is so obvious and simple that it will hurt us when we first see it because we will understand that our lives up to the point of seeing this have been spent grazing in the fields of futility. My God! How could we be so stupid! By God, we can see that we never have to live in this false world again. Freedom, by its very definition, would be the absence of dependence upon anything. It must be independent of all conditions. The ACLU, although perhaps having good intentions in what they do, is made up of a group of lost individuals who whole-heartedly believe that freedom depends upon following the rules outlined in a document which "gives us all" certain rights and liberties in this world. The very idea of this is laughable to anyone who understands that no one on this planet can give or take away our freedom. Freedom does not depend upon what you tell me I can or cannot do. Look at this deeply, and you will be amazed that we all have believed in this lie of darkness our entire, miserable lives. Through true prayer, you can discover the truth of the fact that Authentic Freedom is God's gift to the soul, and it is already available in every moment to anyone who consciously chooses to no longer live solely from the deception of the ego, but who instead gives his/her ego to the Father so that it can be transformed by Love. Freedom exists in and of itself, but we have to do the work to participate in it. It is God's promise to us, and the purpose of our lives is to know ourselves within its boundless beauty. Our true prayer for all is that each person comes to understand this. Our true prayer for the members of the ACLU is that they see they no longer have to spend their lives in the pain of fighting for freedom in this world and hurting themselves and others in the process because there is a greater freedom than anyone in this world can offer, but we will not see it while involved in any kind of fight.

I pray all of this to the Father. Amen.

Let Us Start Here

Hello everyone out there. I hope all is well for each of you.

I started this blog because I am interested in documenting the evolution of my soul to the extent that my small mind can work to manipulate some combination of words (words being as fragile and limited as my mind) that will bear some remote resemblance to the unstoppable force of Love that I am beginning to see myself to be. This blog will be very personal at times, but there will also be plenty of talk about things I observe outside of myself as well.

That may be the point: there really is nothing "separate" from me as that phrase "outside of myself" may seem to imply. Whatever I observe in the world, I look first to myself to understand that what I am observing is nothing more than who I am in that moment. From this viewpoint, I understand that even my commentary on the world around me is very personal. I know that I have to accept responsibility for what I see because I am what I am seeing. A simple example will bear this out.

The woman of my dreams leaves me while I am vacationing in the Bahamas. There are people around everywhere absolutely mesmerized by the beauty of the location. Yet, I see only gloom and darkness and betrayal and emptiness in every person, every tree, every ray of light, every grain of sand, and every drop of water. If each one of us could see the very subtle, yet all-powerful, secret Law of Life hidden in this one scenario, life on this planet would cease instantly to be the disgusting, atrocious, and banal charade that it has become.

The example of me getting dumped in the Bahamas and seeing all of the other tourists absorbing the grand scene while I attempt in vain to deflect the despair and loss I see in the same scenery as well as in the faces of those who are enjoying the scenery proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that no event, no situation, and no circumstance holds within and of itself any meaning except what we attribute to it. This is so plain to my eyes now whereas once I was blind - literally unable to see the obvious simplicity of this Life that was right before my eyes. How can any event - anything (and I mean anything) - that happens to any of us have any inherent meaning in itself if two people can see the same event in two different ways. Even more astonishing is that the same person can come upon similar events and one time react one way and another time react another! Can we not all look unflinchingly at what is staring right at us in this one small example I have provided and see that who we are being in the moment creates our experience of that moment. If I am the man who just got dumped, and I choose to be the thoughts about myself and the world that are negative reactions to being dumped, then I am darkness, hopelessness, and lovelessness in that moment, and my reality reflects that, and everything the others see as beautiful seems to me to be all part of one hideous creature eating away at the very fabric of my existence. On the other hand, if I am one of the other tourists sitting in silence on the beach, the Love, Joy, and Power that I am rises up to take its rightful place in the forefront of my being, and I behold the powerful ebb and flow of the waves and the joy of the laughter of the children and the love of the wonder of nature and its healing capabilities.

Emerson spoke of the "indifferency of circumstances," and Buddhists teach that all events are "empty" - of meaning and of self. Christ understood this Law and lived it, and living it allowed him to be Love even in the face of unconscionable hatred. It allowed him to see the reality of Peace and Compassion even in the midst of the most chaotic and destructive (how we would describe it) of events and behaviors (i.e. his "trial" and crucifixion). In fact, all true spiritual masters understood this basic principal behind this worldly life. (I will not get into the insanity of the limits we place upon ourselves by saying we are of one religion or another and denigrating or resisting all other "religions" because they do not fit into our "beliefs" in this article; however, if you like talking about these things, please stay tuned, because I will provide plenty of my own observations on this, and I certainly welcome any opportunity to discuss this and, for that matter, anything any reader wants to discuss.) This understanding is a necessary characteristic of any illumined individual. It is very easy to see that living with the wrong understanding that people and events create who we are denies the work of God in giving us our lives. But let us go even deeper than this. Many of us can agree that there is something special about the quiet love and fearlessness of individuals such as Christ, the Buddha, Krishna and so on and so forth. If events were intended to define us, then how would it be possible for any person to manifest this "specialness" as each of these individuals did? Would not even these spiritually awakened beings have been defeated by what was happening around them and to them? Are we so conceited as to believe that our lives are worse than theirs or anyone else's in this world?

Yet, see this from another view: these individuals embodied what is special about each of us, but we call them "special" from a worldly view of thinking they understood something, could see things, that we are not meant to understand. Their lives, behaviors, and teachings were literally "not of this world," and we have accepted that we are somehow less than them because we see only that we are "of this world." Yet, how can they, as human beings, have transcended this worldly nature in which we think we are so deeply mired if they were defined by what happened to and around them just as we understand ourselves (and all human beings) to be? If we all lived under a law that says we look out and see the world and what we see creates who we are, then it would be utterly impossible for one single human being - including Christ and the Buddha - to achieve what we consider to be Christhood or Buddhahood because what we see in the world through the viewpoint of that false law does not and cannot transcend life and death or pleasure and pain the way these individuals did. Nothing we see in this world can transcend that because this world is impermanence. Every part of it!

I tell you this: these individuals showed us what we are all intended to be! They could only show us this by first realizing who they really are. They could only first realize who they really are by refusing to believe that who they really are depends upon anything that happens or anyone they know. In refusing to believe this (and the very act that they could refuse to believe this proves that this impermanent world is not the only world we are living in), they were able to step outside of the worldly movement of this life in order to see there is no one there that is real when an observed event creates the observer because events will inevitably change and, with the change in those events, the observer changes. Seeing this then lead them to understand that, just the fact that they have the ability to see the impermanence of an observer created by the observed, there must be a source of permanence from whose view they are able to see the suffering of the impermanent "selves" they were witnessing within. Knowing these selves were impermanent, and therefore, not real, they were then able to see that all that was (and is) real is this source of permanence inside of them that allowed them to see the futility of believing they were these impermanent "selves."

This source of permanence - God's Life - inside of them is who they (and we) really are. They were then able to, for the first time, make a real choice of who they wanted to be - a suffering, impermanent, illusory self, or the Loving, Peaceful, Happy Self that is not born and killed by events because it is Permanent and that must exist by the very fact that we can clearly see all that is impermanent. Living from this Real, Permanent Nature - this God Nature - then allowed them to see that we all create our reality because they could now experience the Love and Compassion created by being this ultimate reality even while observing the suffering and fear taking place in the world. Thus, the perfect circle was complete.

So, if, as you can probably sense right now, this Truth is so obvious and so simple, and if it is indeed the very foundation of awakening from the nightmare of our conflicted existence, then it begs the question as to why more of us are not on this path to becoming true spiritual masters. Well, the answer to that is also quite simple: we cannot handle the responsibility that comes with knowing that we create everything we experience and it is impossible to experience anything that we do not create. To our minds, this is a ridiculously overwhelming thought: that even the pain, suffering, hunger, hatred, violence, and fear that we see in the world are our creations, and each of us are responsible for these creations. Our minds will run from this truth every time it encounters it like a woman runs from a shadowy figure in a dark alley. The mind cannot accept this responsibility because it knows it cannot think up a solution that can fix the problem. What's worse is that it cannot know that it is the only problem to begin with.

Oh, but the soul does not shrink from this responsibility. The soul knows that if we listened to it instead of our minds all along, we would not be in the sad shape in which we find ourselves. The soul knows that it has the power, being that it was created in the creative image of God, to clean up this mess in but an instant with its unparalleled creative abilities. The soul knows that the ultimate irony here is that, whether we "accept" this truth that we create our experience in our lives and become "enlightened" through such acceptance or not, we are always creating what we experience, which explains why the world is in the condition it is in today. When you have literally billions of people who live their lives confined to the dark room in their minds that is so dark it doesn't even know it's dark, then they all become that darkness as they blindly bump into life and fear and hate what they (we) cannot see or understand. Ah, yes, the Soul: it cannot be contained by any dark room nor be bound by any universe, and, therefore, changing this world is but a small moment's task for it.

Which brings me back to what started this whole very, very long explanation of why we are not separate from what we see either inside or outside what we call our Self because what we are seeing from (who we are being) in each moment actually creates what we see. In order for the Soul to do the creative work it so longs to do, we must be willing to see what it has been trying to show us all along: that we are responsible for the world in which we now find ourselves, and being responsible means we are also empowered to create it in a Whole, New Way.

This is why any commentary I make about events I observe in the world are always personal because my first and only intention is to see clearly my responsibility in creating those events and in creating what I see. Any thoughts that spill out of my being into this little blog spot are pointed directly at me, and, because we are not separate in any way, at everyone else as well. This is not a "pointing" of blame or judgement, but, for me, an acceptance of responsibility in order that I might allow my Soul to create the Peaceful change in me - and in the world - that it so longs to create.

Watching and Loving the ongoing process of rememberance of who I really am is the sole concern of this blog. Perhaps some will find this interesting and maybe others will even feel invited to share their experiences as well. I certainly welcome this. Until you or I write again, I hope all is well with everyone out there.