Category Archives: Artful Thinking, Wise Choices

Essays about how to reason with a sane mind to arrive at wise choices.

Intellectualism: Its Harmful Nature and Its Cure

During one of her talks, Esther Hicks presented her Inner Voice as saying, “Your Inner Being likes to skip and laugh and think about things; your Inner Being likes to offer compliments and feel appreciation and contemplate something that is not fully understood and then feel the understanding come forth. Your Inner Being is just like your frisky two-year old who is eager for life experience. To meet up with your Inner Being just be more like that now.” That quote shares one angle on how to avoid the pitfalls of intellectualism. For a corresponding observation we need only turn to Aldous Huxley who said, “The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”

Intellectualism is the practice or habit of using the mind to conceive of ideas that are heartless and cruel in their impact on others, consider them viable options and logically explain why they are most effective. It’s the byproduct of a mind trapped in ego. The ego requires that we deny our emotions and become progressively insensitive to own heartfelt emotions and the hearts and emotions of others. When we cultivate our egos as our false identities, we must tune out our natural capacity for empathy to avoid being overwhelmed by the obvious messages of pain that ego causes us and others to endure as if suffering is inevitable. Intellectualism assumes that suffering is inevitable and that the primary purpose of human life is to decrease the pain and suffering we encounter no matter what the cost of our decisions may be in pain and suffering that others endure. To avoid pain and suffering, a person guided by ego can decide to climb over others on the way to the top because the top looks freer of pain or insulate oneself from others because separating from others looks like a way to protect from pain or at least from awareness of other people’s suffering. Ironically, the ego’s tactics end up isolating us from one another, increasing our agonizing loneliness and leaving us feeling confused, betrayed and powerless. In teaching us to be emotionally uninvolved with ourselves and others, the ego teaches us to avoid forming bonds of love, be alone and accept loneliness as our inevitable lot in life. It’s not our only option. We can choose to reverse the ego’s trapping logic and let the truth in our hearts set us free.

The quotes by Hicks and Huxley emphasize the value of retaining our wholeheartedly childlike (but not childish) nature as we develop into maturity. They underscore the truth that healthy maturity is not discovered in denying our childlike qualities but in extending ourselves beyond childhood into adulthood while retaining the best qualities of childhood. Children are naturally curious, playful, care-free, sensitive, compassionate, innocently trusting and open to love’s natural flow. Adults who abandon those traits in order to survive in the adult world impoverish themselves and help to fabricate an artificial adult world that inflicts pain and suffering on children and others as if to punish them for being childlike. Such emotionally impoverished adults adopt intellectualism’s emotionless logic in some form to “explain” or “justify” their repeated decisions to abandon their own “inner child” in favor of neglecting and abusing it as they neglect and abuse themselves and others in order to prevail as an adult in competition for ego-valued rewards. What’s really being “explained” and “justified” is the ego’s preservation of itself. When one mistakes one’s identity for being an ego, one can only logically fight to preserve that false identity, remain trapped within its blindly clawing attempts to survive and intellectually excuse and rationalize its fight for survival as “survival of the fittest.” In truth, no ego is fit because no ego can experience and share love. Ego is the antithesis of our capacity to experience and share love.

Moralists try to counteract the “evils” of ego’s intellectualism by arguing for ethics and laws that control everyone’s actions by confining our permissible actions within limits that supposedly minimize the harm of pursuing ego-valued rewards. Moralists argue in favor of drawing lines and enforcing them through systems of reward and punishment primarily because moralists are themselves limited by their cognitive development to thinking in terms of reward and punishment as the top level of adult maturity. They conceive of “adults” as those qualified by age, longevity of service or elegantly and subtly manipulative (or mere brute) force to administer the systems of reward and punishment. It’s understandable that those whose thinking is not yet developed beyond the reward-punishment duality will think in those terms and not realize that there is a more highly evolved alternative. But it is not necessary that a whole society be run into the ground by the limited capacity of moralists to think simply because, in their fear of the unknown and uncontrolled aspects of society’s emerging diversity, they demand conformity, are persuasive and present their arguments forcefully by invoking religious texts to back them up.

Since moralists wrote most of the religious texts, of course these texts back them up. Their argument that God totally agrees with them amounts to their citing dead authors’ claims to speak for a living God. A living God does not need dead or living authors to speak for the Divine Truth that God shares with every one of us within our hearts. If only we would learn to listen and receive what God shares in our hearts we’d know. Hick’s quote makes that point by noting how our understanding will grow into increasing clarity through our life experiences not through memorizing or quoting dead or living authors. As a living author, I encourage you to be frisky, take risks and encounter God and Divine love within your experiences, even those experiences that others may counsel you not to have. Surely wisdom does seek to guide you but the fears of others are not necessarily the Voice of Wisdom. It’s your responsibility to listen and decide for yourself what Wisdom is saying to you. Don’t take my word for it. If you prefer to jump through other people’s hoops and submit yourself to their authority, by all means do so. Perhaps in this stage of your life that’s what’s best for you. I did that for many years in my life. Fortunately, I was blessed to have teachers, mentors and other authority figures worthy of my attention and cooperation until I ran out of them and had to learn to listen to God as my eternal and internal Authority Figure. God, as it turns out, is the only infallible source of Wisdom and Guidance. Stop, look within and listen. God is speaking to you in your heart even now, as you read this sentence . . .

It is one of the natural results of moralism for moralists to gain control of social institutions and use traditions to climb higher within those institutions so as to gain the power to write and enforce the rules as if they should apply to everyone. Moralists are accomplished social climbers – and conformist and apologists for rigorously enforced conformity. By imposing external rules on us all, they would make clones of us as if manufacturing Model-T Fords to roll off a single, rigidly controlled factory line. (Witness the super-conformist Common Core Curriculum generated by intellectualism in service to a conformist society’s demands for more clones to fit into predetermined slots in a modern mechanistic economy – whether capitalistic, socialistic, communistic or otherwise defined by values that are materialistic.) In fact, metaphors idealizing the mechanistic, replicative processes of the industrial age have heavily influenced the power of conformists to insist that theirs is the only way that works. They can mask all of their inner conflicts and struggles behind their egos’ facades and pretend to qualify to be in charge of our materialistic, factory-like consumerist society. When one of their club members reveals a moral lapse, the moralists gasp in surprise and oust the offender as their way of purifying their club and retaining claim to power over others. Few among the intimidated masses notice or dare to point out that the emperor has no clothes on – in fact, that none of the emperor’s counselors and hangers-on are clothed with true authority to govern.

As the tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes reveals, it takes a child to notice and speak the truth about the nakedness of those whose actions are motivated by their desire to have power over others that they acquire through competition. The capacity to see with one’s heart and have the courage to speak up is a childlike trait that conflicts with survival in the adult world as a seeker of ego-valued rewards of competition. The truth offends the ego and those who subscribe to the ego’s way of adulthood. Most children learn to keep their thoughts to themselves for fear of losing rewards and reaping punishment. Fear censors and silences the truth that we’d otherwise naturally observe and talk about if we were feeling safe to risk sharing what’s on our hearts and minds. Intellectuals masquerading as moralists want us to feel unsafe so that we rely upon them to protect us from making mistakes and taking risks that might result in adverse consequences imposed by them. Their logic is circular but fear often keeps us from noticing. Bullies cow the rest of us into submission unless we simply don’t value what the herd heard and instead listen inwardly to our own Inner Voice. The Inner Voice of our Inner Being or Inner Child conveys the wisdom of the ages to each of us but most of us have tuned it out. No one warns us that tuning out our hearts and learning to be progressively less sensitive, less empathetic, less compassionate and less altruistic carries a price – a high price. That price is the loss of the most rewarding qualities of life that wisdom would preserve, uppermost of which is Divine Love.

If you want to investigate the possibility of regaining your capacity to see life through the heart and eyes of a child and experience and share divine love, I highly recommend reading It Will Never Happen to Me by Claudia Black. Read the second edition. She applies her principles to all of us in that edition after describing them as applicable to survivors of alcoholic families in her first edition. She espouses a simple solution to the dilemma imposed upon our minds by ego’s roles, rules and rituals. She encourages us to risk violating the ego’s rules and learn again to trust, feel and talk about things that matter. If you’ve appreciated reading this article you’ll likely find great value in reading Ms. Black’s book, not because she necessarily has all the answers but because she knows the truth about how each of us can regain our natural access to answers supplied to us in our hearts by the unconditionally loving Divine Being who leaves no one out of His/Her family. We are all – every single one of us – a child of God favored by God, unforgotten and unforsaken by God. Whether you prefer to refer to the Divine Being by God, Goddess or any other term, Divine Love awaits you as an experience as you turn inward to allow your heart to awaken and blossom under the influence of the energy of the Lovelight within you. Perhaps it’s time for you to be under its influence instead of under the influence of any alternative mood-altering substance, experience or intoxication. Try being high on Love. You’ll enjoy discovering and returning to that high as the healthy alternative to all others. It’s the only true cure for intellectualism.

As innocent children know it so can you. Learn to let go of ego’s teachings about guilt and shame as if those painful features of your experiences are permanent. They need not be permanent. Suffering is perpetuated by the belief that pride is the antidote and cure for shame and blame directed at another is the antidote and cure for guilt. Such nonsense only perpetuates suffering by recycling it. Forgiveness lets it go and releases you from the cycle of suffering. Only you can choose to forgive. And no one else can prevent you from forgiving if you desire to follow your heart and be free of all the past that the ego says you’ll never be free of. You may feel afraid of stepping beyond your ego. That’s understandable and only need be shared to be overcome. By sharing your fears you’ll find within you the courage to overcome them. By sharing your heart with others you can trust and talking about all that matters most to you, the True You will come forth from behind the ego’s shadow and discover that like the moon’s shadow the ego’s shadow only temporarily blocked the Lovelight of the Divine Son or Daughter you are. Once you’ve tasted the Lovelight you’ll never really want to retreat into your ego for long again.

To quote another source of wise spiritual guidance on this topic, let me set out the text of Matthew 18:1-4: “At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.'” (English Standard Version.) To turn from the heartlessness of being an intellectualizing adult and once again embrace the endearing qualities of childhood allows us to resume our natural relationship with the Creator of Heaven, who is our Father. As beloved dear ones of the Creator we know the qualities of heavenly love are ours to cherish and honor within our hearts and share with one another as sisters and brothers in One United Divine Family. Intellectualism is one path by which we forget who we are and blindly stumble into treating each other as if we do not all belong within our Father’s family household. By the power of paradox that defies our human capacity for reasoning, every one of us is greatest in the greatest kingdom. No superlative outshines our Father’s love for each of us who stops thinking of himself or herself as an ego and instead humbly accepts his or her nature as a Divine Child. Within God’s family of sibling rivalry there is no need or cause because each is greatest.

While the Unrepentant Church Defies Jesus’ Authority Believers Can Still Be Faithful Followers

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Despite the best efforts of teachers of divisive doctrine who have risen to falsely represent Jesus throughout the centuries since Jesus walked the earth, Jesus continues to this day to espouse the same all-inclusive, non-divisive plan for building the Kingdom of God on earth that he announced originally. He foresaw what was necessary and put it into motion. He has not changed his mind. To carry out his plan it is his followers (“us”) who need to change our minds from being faithful to the Church in some Church-institutionalized format to being faithful to Jesus in his non-institutionalized format. Anyone who seeks to modify Jesus’ plan simply is defying his authority and failing to acknowledge him as Lord as well as Savior.

Many have been the modifiers and defiers in the time since Emperor Constantine first declared himself to be a believer in Jesus and insisted that leaders of the Church defy Jesus’ authority and instead knuckle under to the Roman Emperor’s authority. The first council of Church fathers who gathered by Emperor Constantine’s command in 325 CE at Nicaea formulated a conformist creed that sought to impose on all believers a uniform set of beliefs akin to the uniformity of thinking Caesar demanded of his subjects. In publishing this creed, the Church fathers adopted the political pattern of the Roman Empire and rendered unto Caesar what was God’s. From this centuries-old error the Church has not yet repented nor recovered. The Church remains a monument to institutionalized cowardice-induced error, a whitewashed sepulcher filled with dead men’s boneheaded ideas instead of the light of Christ. Until Church leaders humble themselves before Jesus as the only head of the Church, believers have the option of acknowledging Jesus as Lord independent of the failure of Church leadership to do so.

Since 325 CE, Church leaders have continued to adopt Caesar’s pattern of political oppression and repress all other voices of diversity and disagreement within the body of believers. Each fragment of the Church designated different voices to repress but all repress some voices to make repression and censorship their universally accepted norm. In ancient times, those who did not adopt the Nicaean Creed or disagreed with the conformist Church fathers suffered and were silenced by the Church. Caesar lacked the capacity to tolerate open dialogue about the distribution of power among men and about the purposes of power when wielded by men (let alone by women!). Although Jesus cautioned against seeking power over others and advised that the greatest in the Kingdom would humble themselves to serve others as he had done, Caesar demanded absolute authority over others and claimed to be a god. Caesar was in no way servant of anyone. The Church fathers who conspired together to appease Caesar bowed to his claims and substituted him for Jesus and God within the Church. By doing so, Church leaders subservient not to Jesus but to Caesar abandoned their responsibility for teaching believers how to share and wield God’s power of love in the best interests of the human race as stewards of God’s power and servants of God’s people. To hide this blasphemy from common people who believed in Jesus, the Church fathers assumed the role of the Holy Spirit and like blind men led their congregations downward and stray into ditches rather than allow the Holy Spirit to lead them upward in God’s way into all truth. In this manner, truth became the enemy of the Church fathers. Truth became unknown to any but the most daring members of the congregations and to those who fled into regions beyond the reach of Church authority.

Those who dared to listen to the Holy Spirit and not limit their thinking to ideas authorized by the Church fathers, disagreed with the Church fathers’ politically expedient and cowardly positions. The Church branded them as “heretics” for sharing ideas of leadership in the direction the Holy Spirit led. That label was accurate, because “heretic” means “one who thinks for himself” instead of knuckling under to false leaders. However, the Church fathers added another element to that definition by declaring that one who thinks for himself or herself apart from the Church fathers – especially anyone who heard the Spirit accurately as revealing the errors of the Church Fathers – was guilty of offending God, as if offending them and Caesar automatically equated to offending God. And they took another step in declaring that anyone whom they declared offended God could not be forgiven even by a gracious, forgiving God and had to be punished severely, ultimately put to death if he or she were unwilling to be silenced in any other way.

In taking these regressive steps in abusing their roles as leaders, Church fathers took upon themselves the role of declaring who offended God and what consequences the offenders they identified should suffer. Their pattern was not Jesus’ pattern of forgiveness and reconciliation but was instead the pattern of Judaism, the Old Testament Jehovah and the New Testament Caesar – a pattern of unforgiveness and retribution. This was the very pattern that had led Jewish leaders to conspire with Roman leaders to crucify Jesus. When Jesus’ pattern of forgiveness and peace among men did not suit their political ends and threatened to be inconvenient for those who preferred to appease Caesar to preserve their comfortable lifestyles as Caesar’s cronies, the Church fathers dispensed with Jesus as an authority figure in the Church and substituted themselves in his place. In this manner, the Church fathers insured that believers would be conformed to the world Caesar wanted to rule over and not be transformed by a renewal of their minds. And they insured that believers who conformed to the world about prove the popularity of the polluted and polluting will of Caesar and relegate to obscurity the perfect and perfecting will of God. That is why Caesar’s will that we be as unholy, selfish, arrogant and ignorant of love as ego is has long prevailed in the world despite Jesus’ will that we all become holy as God is holy. If the Church as spokesperson for Jesus will not speak up honestly in his behalf, how will the truth of Jesus’ living presence on Earth be shared? It will be shared only as the Holy Spirit whispers in the hearts of those who doubt the validity of the Church’s stands and confirms their doubts about the Church. Ironically doubters of Church authority now have the best chance of learning the truth that sets us free.

Thus it came to be that the Church was indeed founded upon the example of Peter who denied Jesus when his personal safety was threatened. When Roman persecution threatened the safety of Church leaders, they ran for protection under the cover of conformity to Caesar’s demands. Cowardice rather than courage became the Church’s norm in the face of opportunities to stand up to injustices generated by abuse of power. With rare exceptions such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s standing up to Hitler, modern Church leaders adhere to the ancient norm of supposedly benign cowardice today. Modern politics models itself after Roman intolerance for courageous freedom of thought and expression and the Church knuckles under as if God were powerless in comparison to popular opinion. Church leaders justify their cowardice as necessary to keep the collection baskets full, their salaries fully funded and attendance numbers high. They are willing to betray Jesus and those who look to them for trustworthy spiritual guidance in order to maintain their opportunities to rub shoulders with the rich and famous and collect retirement checks at the end of their illustrious careers as cowardly frauds.

Almost 1700 years have passed since the Nicaean Creed was first published and imposed as the conformist thought system of the Church. Subsequent councils have revised the Church’s creeds but have not repudiated the Church’s choice to knuckle under to Caesar and substitute political and social conformity for God’s supreme authority. For centuries this unrepentant attitude towards God has been passed down from one generation to the next leaving Church-trusting followers of Jesus with a diluted, inaccurate vision of God. Only those who dare to defy the Church’s politically expedient stands and listen to the Holy Spirit directly become aware of God’s true nature and position on issues central to life.

By and large, as predicted in Revelation 3:16, Jesus has spit the Church out of his mouth as lukewarm, rendered neither hot nor cold by its compromising ways. The Church has failed to align itself radically and unequivocally with Jesus and will continue to fail to do so until it repudiates and thoroughly roots out the doctrine of political appeasement that the Church fathers adopted at Nicaea. The Church must muster the courage instead to stand for all-inclusive peace, justice, mercy, forgiveness and grace at any cost to the Church’s relationship with politicians and no longer stand for appeasement at any cost to the Church’s relationship with Jesus. If ever Jesus is to build his Church upon the Rock that the disciple Peter represented, the Peters within the Church will have to repent of their habits of political expediency and learn to but their minds upon the things of God and not upon the things of man, as Jesus admonished the first Peter to do. They will have to step out of the comfort zones of their political boats, walk on the stormy waters of life and learn the self-disciplines needed to “serve a risen Savior who is in the world today” and no longer serve their ravenous egos over whom the world holds too much sway. It is time for Church leaders, individually if not yet collectively, to decide whom they serve, for they cannot serve two masters. Each must decide for himself or herself who is the Master he or she serves. Each must learn what it truly means to sing and live “What a friend we have in Jesus” as well as “O, Jesus, I have promised” with Jesus being truly honored as Master not merely trusted as Friend.

The issue yet to be decided righteously is the identity of the Chief Authority in Christ’s Church. Who reigns supreme as head of the body of believers – Caesar and his political successors in humanity’s various forms of government or Jesus who has and needs no successor because he lives beyond death? Who among us desires to honor God and Jesus no matter how the egos of Caesar and his minions inside and outside of the Church may take offense? We need not wait until the Church leaders repent of their errors. We can repent, seek God’s face, pray, humble ourselves to experience God’s dominion beyond ego’s dominion and forsake the ways of the world in favor of the most excellent way of Jesus. (See 2 Chronicles 7:14, Micah 6:8 and Matthew 6:33 for interlocking Biblical guidance on this point.) In doing so, we will make ourselves available to enter into oneness with the Father as Jesus did and set a flood of healing power free to sweep across all nations of the world. By that flooding power of God’s presence, we will do the works Jesus did and greater things shall we do, just as Jesus foresaw. It is up to each of us to stop inhibiting the flow of God’s healing grace by our adherence to socially conformist ways. We must dare to be radically alive as Jesus sets before us his model of life! Jesus did not wait for the permission of religious leaders of his day to step forth as God’s child and we need no wait for permission either. To defy the Church’s mediocre, lukewarm leadership is either to reject Jesus entirely or to embrace Jesus as the Holy-Spirit-fired leader he is and become Holy-Spirit-fired ourselves. To stand with Church leadership in this day of suffering and loss is to stand not on compassionate holy ground but on cold-hearted, stony ground. Jesus was moved by compassion to work miracles. What moves you to what work? Does money move you to work for a paycheck and that’s it?

Perhaps if we show the way, the truth and the life, Church leaders of modern, technologically overdeveloped and spiritually underdeveloped societies will join us by following our example. Or they may continue to follow the example of the religious leaders of Jesus’ time on earth and declare that the long-awaited Messiah has not yet come. That may be their choice but it need not be yours or mine because we are free to be heretics who faithfully invite the Holy Spirit to liberate us from chains forged of our appetites for social approval. It is by this appetite that Church leaders have enslaved us to conformity rather than trained us to be transformed by the power of Divine Love. To be liberated from the mind-and-heart-enslaving chains of social approval, we need not flee along the Underground Railroad. We escape to freedom within God’s kingdom by seeking first His/Her Presence within our hearts and allowing the Holy Spirit to add there all the love, grace, wisdom, courage and power that we ever need.

As God comes to reign within our hearts, perfect Love will cast out all fears. As clouds of fear and doubt fade from our minds at the Sonrise of our renewed lives, we will see God’s nature with increasing clarity and never again wander into ditches under the Church’s fear-befuddled blindness. Those who Jesus sets free are free indeed – free to live and move and have our being in the Holy One for Whom Jesus is Ambassador Supreme on Earth. For believers in Jesus nothing else really matters.

Imagine the chagrin of Church leaders if they were to open the doors of their bogus churches and no one showed up because all their former sheep-like congregants heard and heeded the Holy Spirit’s voice within their hearts and no longer went astray. Sheep who learn to hear and heed their Master Shepherd’s voice do not need compromising Church leaders to show them the Most Excellent Way Jesus reveals. They already know it by heart and remain faithfully within its gracefully disciplined and elegantly anointed pathway by using the GPS guidance of the Holy Spirit — the God-Positioning Spirit.

Higher Technology Cannot Insure the Integrity that Higher Wisdom Offers

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In the modern view, the best way to address every problem is through a new or upgraded product. This is the default reaction of a materialistic society governed by profits instead of by prophets. By referring to prophets I do not advocate for a religiously oriented, legalistic society. I’m in favor of an open, faith-based society that also tolerates those whose faith in a higher power has been so shaken as to cast the possibility of such a faith out of their lives entirely. We who continue to cling to our faith in a higher power have our reasons for living that way. Those who reject faith in a higher power have their reasons for living that way too. Let us celebrate our capacity to reason and even share our reasons openly. And let us embrace the integrity that may yet arise from such open-minded sharing instead of embracing the idea that every problem requires the introduction of a new or higher level of product or technology. If our society’s violence is rooted in dishonesty (lack of integrity, hypocrisy, whatever label), as I believe it is, then no amount of new technology will restore us to the integrity we need to resolve all problems without violence and instill peace and healing throughout our land. Video-graphing violence will not prevent it. Blaming others for it will not diminish it. We must admit our responsibility for promoting it as a symptom of our collective lack of integrity.

I am inspired to address this topic by recent proposals that more cameras be trained on police officers as they perform their duties so that we can hold them accountable for their actions in case their actions fall short of integrity when they face violence. Surely those who make profits from the sale, installation and maintenance of video equipment will be glad to have their businesses prosper under such proposals. Police officers who already operate with integrity will adjust to having their actions video-recorded. Police officers who already operate without integrity will also adjust – by developing ways to manipulate the records made by audio and visual recordings and to avoid their completeness by turning them off when it’s convenient for them to fail to make a record. If wardrobe malfunctions can occur, so can equipment malfunctions of other kinds by accident, neglect or intention. Nixon is not the only public servant who showed all of us how to manipulate the record. Technology is not infallible. Humans can brazenly manipulate it to create whatever outcome they prefer. If they have something to hide, it will remain hidden at all costs.

Accountability for being men and women of integrity applies to all of us. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was not of a nation that prospered because of how our profits rose but of a nation that prospered because of how our integrity rose. He dreamed of the day when we would judge ourselves not “by the color of [our] skins but by the content of [our] characters.” When our characters are filled with the content of integrity we will all be free at last. Integrity matters. Authenticity and Integrity Matter – AIM must become our highest purpose and ideal. No recordings audio and visual will insure our achievement of that goal. If we want to achieve it, we must allow not profits but prophets like MLK Jr. to guide us.

We live in an age awash with profit-making enterprises and especially devoid of prophet-honoring ones. We teach our young people to pursue careers that are profitable without teaching them to do so with enduring, unshakeable commitment to integrity. We teach our young people a compromised, lukewarm approach to life because that’s how we live. We’ve settled for mediocrity as the lowest common denominator by which to add up the fractions of our disintegrating society. We find common ground all too often in reassuring ourselves that everyone lacks integrity and no one stands up for being a whole person instead of a fraction. We will continue to fall into the void where fractured souls lacking in integrity huddle together in the dark until we decide to honor our shared need to be here as musketeers, standing one for all and all for one – each as a life worth living and as a person worth standing alongside of with gratitude.

Who will insure that our police officers are armed with integrity and not merely armed with the latest weapons and video-recording equipment? Who will stand alongside officers who dare to live as men and women of integrity amid the physically dangerous and emotionally harsh environments where we expect them to pursue their careers without sacrificing their health and well-being? Who will make it possible for us to entrust our communities’ welfare to men and women who bring to the challenges of law enforcement and protection of all citizens the integrity we need them to embody? We need officers to be protected by bullet proof vests but not by case-hardened hearts and coldly manipulative minds. If we entrust deadly weapons into the hands of those whose hearts and minds are not empowered by integrity to guide them in their use of their weapons, we will suffer the consequences we now witness – and more severe ones yet to follow. Violence will continue to escalate until we cultivate the courageous integrity needed to de-escalate it.

We must prepare officers to respond with integrity even in the midst of emotionally stressful conditions that threaten to escape their control and make them feel inadequate, foolish and at risk of harm. We must invest in their adequately empowering training and back them with adequately encouraging emotional support or they will not believe they matter to us enough to serve and protect us as we expect them to. We cannot lay upon them our most challenging emotional burdens while providing them with only limited emotional resources. And we must take care not to assume that a man or woman experienced in the use of weaponry under conditions of war is necessarily well-prepared to wield weapons in times of relative peace. The heart-rending hardship of war-torn battlefields does not necessarily translate well into the leadership needed on our embattled streets. Battlefield reflexes do not necessarily translate into responsible actions when confrontations take place between officers and citizens. We must be careful not to reap at home the violence we’ve exported abroad. Men and women who have served abroad may well be the best prepared to serve at home once we have honored them enough to help them heal and be restored beyond the emotional wounds of overseas service. To help them to heal reflects our commitment to peace at home and abroad. To fail to help them heal reflects our callous disregard of heroes we put up on pedestals while we pretend they have no sensitive human emotions worthy of our notice and compassion.

If we are to expect integrity and self-control from our men and women who are armed with weapons of warfare and charged with protecting those of us who are not so armed, we must stand with them with the same integrity we expect of them. We cannot expect of them what we do not expect of ourselves in less stressful situations. Loss of control under the duress of intense fear is a common threat we all face. If we cannot live as men and women of integrity while we enjoy the protection that police officers afford us, how can we expect our protectors to live up to higher standards while they are directly exposed to harm? Our protective heroes need our wholehearted support every day of their lives. Token praise at award ceremonies and eulogies at funerals are not all our protectors deserve.

If we are to invest resources in the lives and welfare of our police officers, let us invest wisely in their integrity and help them to feel our support for their health and welfare throughout every fiber of their being. Let us reassure them that we don’t take them for granted while sending them out onto our violent streets by day and night as we go about our routines as if we’re entitled to be safe but not responsible for their safety too. Let’s help our officers face the dangers of our out-of-control society by taking risks ourselves. Let’s risk stepping into the flow of violence and pluck from its flow those young people whom we see to be at risk of being confronted by police officers.

Let’s reduce the stress on officers who police our streets by tackling the cause of violence at its root. Let’s be men and women of courage and integrity who show young people who doubt that anyone cares about them how wrong they are. Or we risk confirming that the abandoned, rejected and neglected youth of modern times are right about the rest of us. As we witness solitary young men being confronted by police officers, might we ask ourselves why those young men are so alone and lack the high quality companionship that might well make all the difference in their lives? Do we have the integrity to do the right thing and care enough to be in their corner with them to help them know that they are not alone uncared for?

Why are we first meeting young men at risk of confrontations with police officers when they star in YouTube videos? Why did we not meet them earlier and let them know that they could star in our lives in more productive ways? How might it make a difference for us who are protected to let our protectors and the young men from whom we feel the need to be protected know that we care about every one of them and leave none out of our protected circles of protective care? Might our own intentionally cultivated greater integrity overflow to lift us all to higher ground together? A rising tide of integrity might float the boat we share and free us from the storm-tossed reefs of violence upon which our Ship of State is floundering. Before we abandon ship let us consider how we might voluntarily contribute integrity to seal the hull and add ballast to keep us upright.

A Diablog about the Movie “Fifty Shades of Grey”

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Might anyone be interested in a dialogue about the movie “Fifty Shades of Grey?” Frankly, I don’t intend to see it but I’m interested in opening up a dialogue about it with anyone who has seen it. I recently read an article about the sex toy industry that is blossoming in response to the book and expected to blossom even more on account of the movie. It reminds me of the marketing of so many spin-off products related to other movies. Apparently we are removing the social taboos about the openness with which the marketing of sex toys and instruction in their use is occurring. What promises, pitfalls and perils await us in this development?

What I’m wondering about and would like to diablog with others about are these points, at least for starters:

1) Is “Fifty Shades of Grey” a dramatization of a man who has become trapped in intertwined addictions to sexual pleasure and power over others? Does power corrupt and absolute power corrupt absolutely, as Lord Acton long ago suggested? Does this story reveal how all addictions are progressive diseases that spiral increasingly out of control as they descend into the depths of depravity in pursuit of greater “highs” when past practices no longer produce the same appetite-satisfying results? Does this movie warn us of the patterns predators use to groom and seduce their prey? Does it warn us of the naivete involved in not being prepared to recognize and steer clear of predators instead of being fascinated by their charm and claims of pleasure and power beyond our wildest dreams? Does it enlighten us at all about the numbing of emotions and acceptance of self-devaluing required to engage fully in any addictive practice? Does it reveal how ruinously dehumanizing addictions are for all participants once they become entrenched?

2) Does the exploitation of life for fun and profit always lead to a declining quality of life? Is “Fifty Shades of Grey” merely a string of product placements, a multiphase infomercial for sex toys others hope to market to naïve consumers who do not understand the risks of becoming sexual addicts themselves? How completely unethical are the movie producers and sex toy marketers in their willingness to throw their market members to the wolves of predatory addictions and promote the decline of modern society so long as their profits pour in? If the movie were about the cocaine drug trade, would there be no serious questions if retailers began to openly sell and promote the use of cocaine? Are we aware enough to note that the chemistry of sexual pleasure and the social dynamics of dealing in and consuming sexually stimulating products parallels the chemistry of drug-induced pleasure and the social dynamics of dealing in and consuming chemically stimulating products? Are we wise enough to discern how to respond to these potential parallels and steer clear of the hazards of addiction latent in them?

Because I’m not going to watch this movie, please pardon my ignorance about it and my unwillingness to critique it or take a stand in favor or against it. I’m interested in allowing this movie to benefit society in any way it may raise interesting questions and promote a dialogue about the wisdom it may or may not suggest is not yet operative in modern society about addictions and the path to entering into one and becoming unwittingly bogged down in it. What does this movie tell us about the distinction between healthy intimacy and the alternative of exploitative relationships that can only lead to harm — physical, emotional, mental and otherwise? Does this movie help us have a clearer vision of this distinction by pealing back the cover from one man’s secret lifestyle to allow us to learn from his dilemma of being out of control and never satisfied with life? Does it educate us in any way about the danger of pretending to be satisfied with gaining increasing power over others while we feel more and more utterly powerless in our own private lives? Does it educate us about how it feels to have lost all control to compulsive activities we may have once thought of as innocent fun?

I’m interested in learning about this movie secondhand, not so much to focus on the movie itself but instead to focus on the lessons it may offer us, intentionally or otherwise.

Social Justice Impact of Idealizing the Nuclear Family

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Many conservatives among Christians, including those grouped as fundamentalists but also many members of mainline churches, idealize the family structure of a married man and woman together with their one or more biological children as the optimum goal for families. This idealized configuration is called the “nuclear family.” Some flexibility is allowed for adding non-biological children and perhaps even an occasional step-parent into the mix. Typically little or no flexibility is allowed for parenting by same-sex couples or for recognition of single-parent families as potentially healthy models for raising children. As is typical of moralistically oriented believers in God, the top-down thought-structure of this ideal renders anything less than its attainment a failure to comply with God’s only ordained family lifestyle. Those who fail to engage in child-rearing as continuously married, opposite-sex parents are second class citizens who deserve to be burdened by guilt and shame for their failure to “do family” God’s way. Conformity to the “model” nuclear family many conservatives claim as their narrow definition of family is frequently at the heart of what conservative advocates mean by “family values.”

In the days when wealth was deemed proof of one’s worthiness in the eyes of God, poverty was a sign of sinfulness and disfavor with God – or at least a sign of second class citizenship and loss of voice and influence in the Church. In modern times, participation in a man-woman nuclear family is similarly argued to be necessary to prove one’s worthiness in the eyes of God and to qualify to be empowered within the Church while participation in any other style of family is deemed a sign of disfavor with God, mostly likely associated with sin. In Jesus’ days on earth, legalistic religious folks asked him if a man were blind on account of his sins or the sins of his parents on the assumption that sin had to be somewhere in the family tree to cause his blindness. Today, legalistic believers now seem to ask if a child’s participation in a family structure other than a man-woman nuclear family is due to the child’s sins or the sins of the child’s parents. The assumptions inherent in this question overshadow the child with dark implications of unworthiness and disfavor before God – either directly or by parental association. Although the child has no choice in structuring the family in which he or she is raised, legalistic folks place false burdens of guilt and shame on the child on account of the family’s structure. Where poverty once condemned children regardless of the fact that they did not determine their economic status today both poverty and family structure often cause a child to suffer from self-doubt and loss of social status regardless of the child’s lack of power to control either social factor.

Children raised in poverty and/or within non-nuclear family structures have an empowering opportunity just as the blind man had. They can turn to Jesus to gain freedom from any blinding pain and distress caused by their society’s misrepresentations of God’s standards. They can regain clarity of sight by learning to allow God’s grace to be proven to be sufficient just as the blind man proved it in Jesus’ day by accepting sight at Jesus’ hand. So long as believers in Jesus continue to adhere to their myopic prejudice that gives higher social approval and value to families structured as a married pair of opposite-sex adults plus child(ren) they will remain at odds with God’s position on this matter and continue to mislead many others to believe as they do. God’s position is based on grace, not upon any moralistic rules or rigid definitions about family structure. If believers want to reflect God’s position on this issue and “do justice” towards children raised in non-nuclear families, we must “love mercy” beyond the law and “walk humbly with God” as if God knows better what our position on this issue – and our response towards members of these families – should be. We distort and impair social justice so long as we allow any position other than God’s gracious one to prevail within the body of believers upon whom Jesus calls to comfort, heal and bless the children who come unto him. We are precisely the ones Jesus expects to set the children free rather than burden their innocence with false guilt and shame on account of matters beyond their control.

James 1:27 reports that the “[r]eligion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” At the outset of the industrial age, as family units moved from rural settings, where extended families were normal, to take up residence in urban settings, many family units rapidly trimmed down to parents and children as older adults failed to survive the transition. To make ends meet the parents in many families worked long and exhausting hours, sometimes even dying in their attempts to provide for their children. Children were also put to work. This two-tiered, struggling family unit became the new ideal due to economic realities as interpreted by adults who proudly strove for independent self-reliance in cities where they often did not know who else to trust. Success was defined as having struggled to achieve financial stability sufficient to support a nuclear family while not allowing anyone to play you for a fool. The stresses of the identity crisis of the industrial age coupled with the assumption that independence was the touchstone of maturity as an adult drove a wedge between adult generations. A similar wedge-mentality now justifies a belief among many youth and young adults that older adults are too “out of touch” with modern advancements to have much of practical value to offer to the young. What some conservative Christians lament as the “breakdown of the nuclear family” began as a breakdown of the extended family and advanced into a breakdown throughout all strata of society. Over the course of several generations, the cohesive village so needed by children vanished into a pile of disintegrated lives.

At the dawn of the industrial age it was deemed necessary to set aside the traditions of extended-family, village-like societies and adopt the nuclear family as a new-era practicality. The tyranny of the old had to be thrown off just as the tyranny of King George had been thrown off. Pioneers moving into the industrial age to settle it with a new population capable of surviving there had to leave old ways behind and fend for themselves in self-reliance as they fashioned a new set of values and priorities suited to the industrial age. By institutionalizing the nuclear family as ideal, subsequent generations of settlers in the industrial age have kept pace with the demands of change that became even more accelerated under the influence of increasingly expanding technology.* Today the accelerating pace of this technological revolution is driving wedges between thinner and more fragile layers of society and splintering the whole into wafer-thin shards.

Along with the wafering of society came a decline in parental energy, focus and attention directed towards child-rearing. When parents allowed conformist pressures of the marketplace economy to shape them into income-earners and product-consumers, the quality of life for all family members declined as media-driven standards of comfort and convenience became new social norms. The absence of extended family structures and “villages” to offer children alternative havens of physical safety, emotional comfort and exposure to elders’ wisdom has been an unrecognized source of harm one might call “passive neglect” of the best interests of the children. Yet this neglect is hard to spot when it is the normal condition under which children grow up. What is missing and forgotten for generations becomes invisible. This invisibility is a form of blindness that Jesus would help us to overcome if we ask him to. He will restore the sight of those who want to see what’s best for children.

On account of social wafering, emotional as well as social orphans and widows abound in modern society in various disguises. Yet many who call themselves Christians fail to look after them in their distress and instead look down upon them to add to their distress. Such so-called followers of Jesus fail to follow his example when to follow would conflict with their desire to ascend into and conform to the conveniences and cordiality of modern society’s more privileged ranks. Even the modestly privileged focus on advancing up the social ranks rather than follow Jesus into fields that are white with the harvest. Of course, those who conform to the world rather than be transformed are reluctant to classify their conformity to convenient social norms as “being polluted by the world,” but that’s precisely what it is. To focus on building, maintaining and providing for a nuclear family to be proud of on society’s terms too often leaves the orphans and widows unlooked after in their distress, feeling ashamed as second class citizens in both the world and within the body of believers. Prideful glorification of the nuclear family and of so-called family values that idealize a narrowly defined family structure shortchanges Jesus’ ministry to all whom society (including many Christians) presumes to be unworthy of God’s grace and favor.

Social justice is the core of God’s outreach on Earth. God would use believers in Jesus as restorers of justice – as ones who give sight to those who are blinded by the guilt and shame that society shifts to them to excuse its neglect. There is no excuse for conforming to the values of the modern industrial-technological era in place of the values, priorities and perspective Jesus modeled while on Earth and calls us to honor even now. Perhaps for a person who never heard of Jesus or, having heard, chose to ignore what he or she heard, there may be the excuse of ignorance. But for those who claim to know and honor Jesus there is no excuse. It is not enough to rely upon the grace of God and assume that Jesus will once again pray “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” It is time to stop relying upon God’s future forgiveness. It is time instead to repent of our mistaken preference for worshipping socially approved pride in place of spiritually disciplined humility, accept forgiveness now and rise up to serve as the Father would have us serve. As Jonah demonstrated, the forgiven make powerful messengers of God’s grace and forgiveness.

As he promised, Jesus has sent us the Spirit who leads us into all truth. The Holy Spirit exists. Its holy function is to comfort us in our afflictions and lead us beyond them in service to others to whom God assigns us. The afflictions of pride are multiple. The afflictions of pride associated with idealizing the nuclear family are not our only afflictions but we need to be set them aside and overcome them for the sake of the orphans and widows who remain in distress until the people who call themselves followers of Jesus come to their aid. In God’s eyes, the race, religion, creed, ethnicity, economic class, educational status, gender or sexual orientation and historical background of the orphan or widow do not matter. How they may have become orphaned or widowed does not matter. Jesus calls us to care for them in their distress until their distress is fully relieved and their vision of God as their loving Divine Parent is restored. Jesus calls us not only to pray for them but to be his means for answering those prayers as we welcome them into his Kingdom.

If we have any style of family we take delight in, Jesus does not object so long our delight remains laced with gratitude to God and does not turn into pride and cause us to fail to invite others to participate within those experiences that delight us. If our families are valuable to us and to God, sharing them with others who lack such family delights will relieve them of their lack-based distress and loneliness as social outcasts who are all too well-acquainted with grief. To invite orphans and widows to be included in our family delights and to welcome all who co-create delightful families by any structure pleases the Divine Parent of us all. It matters not to God whether our family structure is traditionally rural, industrial or post-industrial or innovatively adaptive to prevailing social conditions. It’s time to focus on pleasing the Head of the Family instead of making elaborate plans to please ourselves while we forget the orphans and widows routinely left out of our self-indulgent plans. It’s time to suspend our habits of judging those who live within non-nuclear, non-traditional family structures, especially if they are reaching out to orphans and widows in distress more effectively than we are. Until we’ve learned to reach out at least as effectively we may need to admit how much we have to learn from those we’d previously looked down upon and failed to welcome with humbly open arms and hearts.

* The potentially toxic bloom of technological algae has been labeled “high technology” but it remains to be seen by what measure it is deemed “high.” Perhaps the high is false. If “high” refers primarily to the capacity of such technologies to produce higher outputs per units of input by humans at faster and faster rates in order to generate greater financial profits with declining payrolls and other benefits to human resources, it may not, in the long run, be directing humanity towards anything higher. It may promote the worship of mammon. As a reflection of the worship of the false idol of maximized profits, “high tech” may be leading humanity towards adopting lower and lower standards of character and conduct as “normal” while humans fail to learn to make wise decisions in nano-seconds. Wisdom may take longer to process and adopt – perhaps the length of time that councils of elders used to take before deciding the fate of their communities. Data-crunching computers may not be capable of discerning wisdom at any speed. Like the Corvair, computers may turn out to be unsafe at any speed unless their friendly users are intentionally setting adequate time aside to commune with God at the speed of Stillness. Stillness may be the escape velocity humans need to attain in order to escape the downward pull of ego’s brazenly self-congratulatory gravity. Otherwise we risk remaining trapped in orbit around the ego while spinning evermore chaotically and oblivious to the more expansive and enriching possibilities that await us if we were to travel serenely inward to know ourselves as one with God and not as a separated, self-reliant, lonely egos at all.

Ask Not What Our God Can Do for Us, Ask . . .

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If humans want to experience ourselves as fully divine beings of light, we must position ourselves in God’s position. How do we position ourselves in God’s position when we cannot replace God? We do so by loving and serving humanity as God wills that humanity be loved and served, thereby aligning our will with God’s will. When our wills are aligned with God’s will, our spirits, hearts and minds will come into alignment too. Our wills will become extensions of God’s Will, our spirits and hearts will become extensions of God’s Spirit and Heart and our minds will become extensions of God’s Mind. Without replacing God, we will manifest God through our human forms, the very expression of the divine made incarnate that Jesus modeled while on earth. This is oneness with God in the fullness of our capacity to know it while yet expressing life through our bodies. This is what it means to be fully human and fully divine, to live the paradox of being gods and yet not God. And that is the manner in which we become aware that Love is all we are just as Love is all God is.

To attain our highest evolutionary ideal as diving beings of light, humans may yet be inspired by lofty words accompanied by daringly compassionate deeds. As he boldly accepted responsibility for leading his nation, John F. Kennedy once inspired listeners by declaring “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” His call to reverse our aim from narrowly self-centered targets to broadly other-focused goals still resonates with many who heard his inaugural speech on a cold January day in 1961. Today the Spirit of Love calls to us, “Ask not what God can do for us, ask what we can do for God.”

If we ask we will hear the Spirit say, “As earthly channels of grace and blessing upon which I must rely, love and care for all of My creation. Raise up all the children whom I entrust to you as if they are all Beings of Light and Love created by Me as their Divine Parent. Let harm come to none and heal those who have already suffered harm of any kind. Come into My arms of love with humility that I might love you as an example of My mercy and justice towards all of humankind and then go forth to tell others of what you have experienced of Me according to My will that heaven come to be on earth.”

If all adults throughout humanity were to re-order our priorities to make the welfare of children paramount among the issues we address with all of the resources, energies and time available to our hearts and minds, we’d revolutionize the world because we’d all become one global village united in our devotion to every child’s well-being. We would make no weapon or tool of destruction until we’d first served all the children according to all of their needs in body, mind, emotions, relationships, will and spirit. Before we counseled together about how to make war, we’d counsel together about how to ensure lasting peace so that the abiding safety and tranquility children need to develop into wholeness according to God’ design for their unfolding fruitfulness would be, like the soil in an orchard, undisturbed. To nurture our children as trees within their global orchard, we would order our lives after the ideal of the infinitely patient and merciful Parent and discover the totality of our Divine Parent’s commitment to us as well.

In the process we’d experience the Answer to life’s most enriching riddles, “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “In both the short and the long run and in all ranges in between, what really matters most?” We’d come face to face with our neglectful as well as abusive inhumanity towards other human beings and sort out our personal responsibilities for perpetuating that inhumanity, learning along the way that we are not as powerless to make a meaningful difference as we’ve managed to convince ourselves we are.

We’d learn to tune out our ego’s constant chatter about justifications for our being neglectful and even cruel and abusive towards others, and instead tune into the still, small voice of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe who whispers words of wisdom in our hearts but never insists that we obey them. We’d come to understand the meaning of “free will” and how it offers us both the responsibility and the power to create the world we live in, be it healthy or unhealthy, kind or cruel, sane or insane, uplifting or oppressive, encouraging or disheartening, empowering or intimidating, creative or destructive.

In mastering the disciplines required to undo our allegiance to ego’s tyrannous reign on earth in modern times, we would come into increasing awareness of our ancient native realm beyond earth and learn to practice here those principles honored there. We’d uproot our tree of life from the soil of dualistic social approval and disapproval and transplant it into the richer and more rewarding unified soil of unconditional love, appreciation and affection. We’d forsake futile efforts at intimacy on ego’s terms and instead enjoy the abundant sweetness of intimacy on Divine terms. We’d learn to set aside all learned obstacles to the flow of love as a natural life force and rest in peace within that flow’s refreshing stream long before our bodies decline to function and we rest in peace beyond the body’s realm. In this way, we’d learn to live in the Present as if the Past, Present and Future were one within Eternity.

To make our peace with God while our bodies remain here on earth is the wisest re-orientation we can choose to make. We can emigrate from hell to heaven while yet remaining on the earth in bodily form. Our free will empowers us to make that choice for ourselves and for loved ones who remain faithful to us. If we choose hell-on-earth’s orientation, we can hardly expect wiser loved ones of any age to remain attached to our way of life. Our hearts call for them to detach from hell and enter into heaven before us, waiting patiently for us to come to our senses and choose to join them in earthly heaven too. No political considerations will separate us from God’s peace of mind, hope of heart and joy of spirit unless we remain allied with the mistaken belief that God/Goddess favors some of us over others of us.

That there is no hell except by reason of having chosen poorly to believe in the divisive illusions of the ego is a paradox worth discovering in person. By choosing to invest ourselves in unforgiving orientations and insisting that vengeance be given its day on earth, we can adopt hell as our future just as others adopted it for us as our past. Yet every day of our lives we have the power to choose to step away from the mistaken choices others made that so heavily influenced our thinking and chiseled our beliefs, as if epitaphs upon our gravestones, and with Divine help learn to think again more sanely.

Never has violence begat anything but greater harm within expanding spirals of violence. Never has a whitewash over unresolved emotional issues begat anything but festering wounds and ugly outbreaks of heartrending violence. Because forgiveness allows buried bodies to rise up to new life without burdens of guilt and shame, we need not remain chained to the buried pain of anyone’s past woundedness – including especially our own. We are free to choose to rise beyond past pain and present suffering to soar together as mighty eagles above the storms – somewhere beyond the rainbow that symbolizes the Divine promise that grief need no more flood the earth to deprive us of our second birth.

Let each of us ask our Divine Parent how we each can more fully participate in awakening peace on earth among people of good will so that ultimately all people feel free in their hearts to become and live as people of good will. No child of God of any age or station in life need be left behind in the School of Highest Education in which each member of the student body is devoted to the welfare of the whole.

The Hazardous Happiness of Daring to Be Different

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In an age when unhappiness is so widespread, it’s hard to believe that happiness is our natural state of being. When we are unhappy, we’ve fallen into an unnatural state based on holding in our minds beliefs that are not true. Remembering the truth sets us free of unhappiness into awareness of our natural state of joy. We sometimes encounter brief glimpses of joy and even some stretches of happiness that seem like happiness is cruelly teasing us (again!) before it vanishes like smoke. Few of us manage to experience sustained substantial happiness or joy for long because we fail to keep our minds steadfastly focused on what is true and instead allow our minds to drift off focus to entertain (often again) beliefs that are not true. Many of us have come to accept as if it’s fact that unhappiness or despair is our natural state of being. There is a reason for the lack of sustained substantial happiness in modern society. Let me share some ideas about why our individual and collective happiness is neither sustained nor as substantial as we’d prefer it be.

What I said in the first sentence bears repeating. Happiness is our natural state of being. A loving God created us to be happy by sharing divine happiness as our natural condition. Some call that condition “joy” while others call it “bliss,” “joie de vivre “or a care-free state of uplifting emotional “ecstasy.” This is the substantial happiness we crave beyond fluffy, frivolous and fleeting fun, funniness and flattery that the ego offers as poor substitutes for divine happiness. It is substantial because it expresses the nature, scope and qualities of God, the Most Substantial Being in the universe. And it endures throughout all stages and conditions of life because it expresses the timeless quality of God – Eternity. God’s eternal divine happiness contains no artificial sweeteners and needs no unhealthy preservatives – and it knows no limits to its capacity to bring us infinite energy not measurable in calories. It’s the organic, sustained and nutritious feast that deeply satisfies our souls. It is the uplifting energy that heartfelt, full-bodied laughter expresses from our hearts when laughter proves to be the best medicine. We are all native citizens in this state of bliss but many of us have allowed ourselves to immigrate or be exiled from our native land into an alternative state in which we are not true to ourselves or to our divine origin and cultural heritage.

Why do we not encounter on a sustained basis this substantial, soul-satisfying experience that is natural to us? The answer to this puzzling question is simple. We don’t because we’ve been offered, accepted and adopted the unquestioning “thinking” of a society that is based on assumptions (beliefs) about human nature in general and ourselves in particular that simply are not true. For example, under the influence of the industrial/technological revolution, for several centuries these mistaken assumptions have included the idea that individual humans are undifferentiated, interchangeable components of a mechanical system whose minds can be trained to perform like machines or automatons within a materialistic economy (or a government bureaucracy, military unit, corporation, religious or educational institution or any of civilization’s other institutions and social systems) for the “good” of the group as “good” is defined by the trainers.

Social conformers train us to set aside our innate capacity to think creatively and instead to adopt the mental habits needed to survive in conformity to social standards by which we are rewarded like caged rats pressing levers for food. Our minds reflexively press the levers of our habits in order to receive the reward of social acceptance, approval, admiration, affection and adoration for which society keeps us ever starving and insecure about receiving. Having a natural, legitimate appetite for these A-list rewards, we are vulnerable to being manipulated by our trainers into seeking them through social conformity because society does its best to deprive us of them if we fail to conform. (Our habitualized nonthinking is supported by traditional systems of “scientific thinking” too. The logical progression of such thinking is to envision creating “artificial intelligence” that governs robots who replace humans entirely. Ironically, by following this line of habit-subjugated false “thinking” we’ve subordinated the human mind to focus on continuously upgrading artificial intelligence in hopes of equaling and perhaps even exceeding human intelligence. As a result, we’ve managed to replace our natural “native intelligence” in many humans with artificial intelligence of such conformist, mediocre and inadequate quality that we’d ridicule and reject if it turned up in robots. And we’ve failed to cultivate our natural genius for creative thinking in our collective development of more satisfying experiences for all of us.)

Most of our socially oriented mind-trainers are not concerned about what is natural for humans to experience. They are themselves trained to believe in mistaken assumptions about the need to overcome human nature by replacing what is natural with what is “superior” to natural. (Some trainers go so far as to believe that human nature is, at its inception, naturally defective, sinful, immoral, irresponsible and depraved. Because their thinking begins with these false ideas, they mistaken interpret the adverse “effects” of social conformity as the “cause” of what they believe is true. Conformist thinking reverses the roles of cause and effect in order to rationalize the losses humanity suffers on account of our conformity to modern society’s artificial standards.) As a result of their past training, social trainers now unwittingly past along their thinking’s internalized systemic fallacies. By definition, what is “superior to natural” means what is “not natural” – or in other words, what is “artificial.” Whatever standards trainers use (as those standards change from time to time and from culture, society or group to culture, society or group) all recipes for “superior” are artificial standards. To keep their social privileges and gain promotions, recipe-developers often formulate and justify their recipes for “superior” based on comparing short-term performance outcomes between one person and another person or between one society, subculture, organization, team or group and another and seek to advance the status of the group with which they identify over any other group with which they don’t identify. In this competitive orientation of group against group, the welfare of the whole of humanity is overlooked.

When humans impose short-sighted performance standards to override human nature in order to make it a priority to achieve relatively short-term goals set by humans in competition with other humans, the quality of life declines as the reign of artificiality takes over all aspects of planning for the social lives of human. In this seductive manner, short-sightedness that caters to the ego’s appetite for instantaneous gratification takes precedence over long-term sustainability. Short-sightedness, taken to the ultimate extreme towards which all ego-addictive processes progress, imposes such lack of foresight as to become the equivalent of blindness to our own good. Along this path of artificiality’s progressive dominance, modern society has wandered farther and farther afield from the reality of genuine humanness and genuine happiness. In place of genuine, natural humanness, we’ve adopted artificial substitutes for humanness to which we humans now expect ourselves to routinely and rigorously conform regardless of conformity’s harmful effects on humanity and all other forms of life. We adhere to conformity that is now self-imposed because we are afraid to even consider an alternative for fear of the social consequences of nonconformity. As a logical outcome of this downwardly spiraling progression, we are now experiencing humanity’s dehumanization as people treat each other less and less humanely. As a result, we now routinely inflict pain on each other rather than promote shared happiness and create deep emotional wounds that we bear for life because we are not encouraged nor give opportunities to grieve and recover from these wounds. (That religions, while purporting to espouse God’s viewpoint, have, in the main, justified our acquired distrust of (and disgust for) what is natural to humans and failed to promote healing of our hearts’ wounds is a topic for other blogs.)

Happily experienced humanness is sustainable only if and when we dare to be true to our natural, native, created Self at every step along our life’s journey – throughout every phase of our natural development as whole human beings designed by God to express all that is heavenly while yet living bodily on earth. By God’s grace we can always return to our natural state of happiness any time we choose to set aside our conformist mind-training and resume listening to our hearts and thinking with our minds’ full capacities. It’s impossible to sustain joy when we deny our hearts and pretend to be someone we are not. Pretending in this manner distorts – and may even arrest – our natural development and definitely derails our natural happiness. No matter how popular we may become in an artificial society by adopting more artificiality (for example, by materially reconfiguring or chemically augmenting our physical features, expressions, images and activities to be more charming, appealing, entertaining or profitable or to maintain a youthful appearance or performance), we’ll not experience divine happiness while adopting pretense and artificiality as our way of life.

In the social context of a tightening downward spiral of unhappiness, happiness is hazardous to one’s social approval rating because, by conflicting with the preservation of the social status quo, happiness invokes the penalties a conformist society automatically imposes on controversial nonconformity that questions the value of society’s downward spiral. We all hunger to belong among other people because our true nature includes our friendliness and desire to generously share our happiness along with all the A-list qualities of life. We are by nature social beings who enjoy sharing with utter generosity a quality of life flowing with A-list experiences. We want to share ourselves and our lives with others as God lovingly shares with us. Against the grain of our heart’s desire, the society we are currently enduring pressures us to abandon our authenticity and our native capacity for heart-to-heart connection and honest, open, generous sharing in order to fit into the artificiality, independence, reluctance to trust and share and resulting loneliness our society promotes as “normal” and wants to convince us is “best for us.” As a result, the quality and sustainability of our relationships decline along with the decline in the quality and sustainability our happiness. Relationships are the field of shared experiences. As our faith in sharing generously within bonds of trust fades, relationships become pointless.

In this age of artificiality, in an attempt to satisfy our natural desire to be connected with others and to share, we come to believe that we have to abandon being true to ourselves in order to participate in this society as a “socially acceptable” person on society’s unnatural terms. The only price society asks us to pay for our participation on its terms is our happiness. If we are willing to give up being happy and learn to be less humane, we can fit right into this depressing society’s way of surviving without thriving. This dilemma is a natural consequence of living in fear of being authentic and instead adopting the mask of an ego as our false social identity in order to win social approval and belong as best we can by passing ourselves off as someone we’re not. That’s how most people learn to survive but not thrive throughout all of their lives.

As diverse as we may make our egos’ images appear to be so as to fabricate the illusion of diversity, there’s still one core conformity that’s operative at all levels within a materialistic society – conformity to the ego’s determination to rob us all of our happiness. Our claim of social diversity is one of ego’s most masterful illusions. The ego hoodwinks us into believing that our society honors diversity while the truth is that we demand conformity to universal unhappiness as the price of participation in society. Ego permits diversity of superficial images but demands conformity to unhappiness at our core as our common ground. Society exiles truly happy people just as surely as it exiles all other “undesirable uncooperatives.” Anger and envy directed towards happy people reflect society’s judgment that “too much” of a natural high is somehow wrong, perhaps even irresponsible. Society prefers to market myriad versions of artificial (often chemically induced or enhanced) fun, funniness, flattery and other “highs” that make money while condemning as childishly naïve the idea that happiness can be experienced naturally. The truth is that we are more likely to be deeply aware of happiness at our core when we lack financial resources to purchase temporarily escapist distractions from our unhappiness. In the context of financial poverty we are more likely to encounter our spiritual prosperity. So long as we remain aware of our spiritual prosperity, our increasing financial prosperity will no deprive us of happiness no matter how wealthy we may become. An adverse risk of financial wealth is that making its maintenance a priority distracts us from the joy of sharing all we are as well as all we have.

To remain true to our ego and the egos of others we must remain false to our true nature and accordingly accept our need to give up being happy. Give up being happy and the ego wins. Your ego will feel proud but your heart will feel grief. Grief is a natural response to all the losses we suffer under ego’s dominion. Which do you choose to honor – your ego or your heart?

If you fail to honor your heart and fail to discover within you the courage it takes to be truly who you are, your happiness will fade away because happiness is only sustainable when you honor and like yourself. If you don’t honor your True Self, you’ll not like yourself and you won’t like how others treat you either. In fact, you’ll come to hate yourself for not having the courage to be honest and stand up for what you believe in no matter how your beliefs may conflict with society’s beliefs. Once you come to hate yourself enough, you may even invoke society’s capacity to punish you for secretly being you.

This cycle of dishonor, self-distain and self-punishment can spiral radically out of control to express itself in violence and self-destructive behaviors. Dishonoring yourself attracts others into your life who will agree with you, dishonor you and invite you to dishonor them too. Within this cycle of shared unhappiness, mutual devaluing leads to habits of neglect and abuse directed both towards ourselves and towards others, perpetuates the ego’s dominance over our decisions and produces the illusion that there is no other option. The alternative of being true to ourselves seems so farfetched, unrealistic and impossibly out of reach as to be too risky for most people to contemplate let alone implement. As this downwardly spiraling cycle progresses, we feel increasingly powerless to live in any other manner because, as our minds become blinded by pain, we lose track of our vision of a brighter future and become trapped in recycling pain from humanity’s collective past.

Why risk the hazards of being unwanted and unwelcomed in ego’s society when hiding behind the masks that society teaches us to wear seems to be so easy? – or so the ego argues. What’s the big deal about being happy anyways? Happiness, the ego contends, is just a myth, a child’s fairy tale and a figment of children’s imagination. When we grow up, the ego counsels, we’ve got to stop trying to be children and learn to be like the “real” grownups who have raised us to strive with utter futility to be happy and successful on society’s terms even when they are not happy trying to live that way. An artificial society teaches us the way of futility and then expects us to put up a believable, polite front while we smile and pretend to enjoy ourselves. Ultimately our society then expects us to train the next generation to do the same thing all over again.

Is it not strange that adults who have failed to be both happy and successful on society’s terms continue to teach children to model their lives after unhappy and unsuccessful people such as their parents, teachers, celebrity figures and others who conform to the ego’s demands for surrender of joy as the cost of success? We sacrifice our children’s hearts (and our own) on the ego’s altar of fear in order to win social approval and not feel alone. And ironically even while complying with the ego’s terms of conformity in order to fit in, we feel alone. Why is that? Such loneliness is caused by our egos’ refusal to allow us to make heart-to-heart connections, the only kind of connections that will ever relieve our loneliness. The ego aggravates our grief layer by layer as it entombs our hearts beyond reach within the ego’s supposedly protective walls. That’s our real choice: on the one hand, perpetual and ever-growing grief and on the other hand relief and rediscovered happiness.

The hazards of happiness include being rejected by those who choose in favor of preserving their egos and maintaining their pretense of happiness instead of joining in the restoration of their genuine, soul-satisfying happiness along with us. For the time being at least, they think that they prefer to envy our happiness and try to tear us down again instead of lifting us up and joining in our rise beyond the ego’s pathetic playpen of immature rantings and ravings about the unfairness of life. Letting go of the ego is the same as reaching for greater maturity so that we can live happily ever after.

Ever after what? Ever after the times when we allowed the ego to rule and ruin our happiness and progressively learned to substitute pride for happiness, ambition for hope and temporary political arrangements for lasting peace. Pride, ambition and negotiated temporary truces offer us nothing of the divinely enriched happiness that plants its roots deep within our souls and lasts a lifetime.

I invite you to set your heart and mind upon the path of courage and compassion that allows you to be true to yourself and encourages others to do likewise. If you do, you’ll find joy and all life’s A-list qualities waiting all along your journey. By so choosing, you are electing to value the quality of life you encounter over the quantity of material things you acquire and popular opinions that agree with your choice. As unpopular as your choice in favor of happiness (and your own natural humanness) may appear to be, you are not alone. The ego merely wants you to believe you are alone to keep you hostage within its walls and convince you by its illusions to believe that there is no escape and that any other alternative is too risky to consider. It’s true that the ego’s way lacks risks. It lacks risks because it is guaranteed to kill your happiness and make you wish for extinction. Life’s only truly risky route awaits you beyond your ego along the adventure of humility that is the only true alternative to the ego’s futility. That’s another way to frame our choice: on the one hand continued risk-free futility or, on the other hand, courageously hazardous humility within which we discover joy-filled freedom to fully participate in life’s grandest adventure as it continuously unfolds before us.

Note the word “us” at the end of the last sentence. The false belief that is the root of all unhappiness in the depth of our hearts is the belief that we are included in no “us” we can trust to stand with us through thick and thin – in sweet times and in sour and all mixed times in between. When we believe ourselves to be utterly alone, we are sad in a way that seems beyond overcoming. We have the power to recover the happiness we seek that will last beyond this lifetime by adopting the alternative belief that we are all connected as one worldwide “us” and that smaller squads of “us” are swarming everywhere hoping to find and include each of us. Learning to trust again is key.

In the middle of the word “trust” is “us.” It is bracketed by “t’s” on either end that embrace “us” with an “r” that leads before “us.” Each “t” stands for “truth.” The “r” that leads “us” stands for “raises.” The “r” points “us” in the right direction – upward in reversal of our previously downward spiral through steadfast reliance upon truth that was in the beginning and ever shall be in the future. Both T’s are not actually ends but rather T-intersections or links with eternity. The truth always links us to eternity because that is where it comes from. Truth Raises US to Truth = TRUST. In God we trust is our most gracious privilege and most enduring and rewarding wisdom.

Pure Cooperation Enriches Life

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Do you want to tap into the power of the Divine Life and experience its flow through you as Divine Love’s joyful radiance so that you know who you are, know why you are alive, understand how to reap value from hard times and feel deeply satisfied with your life? This essay tells you why purified cooperation frees you to receive increasing power, insight, understanding and satisfaction as you purify your motives for cooperating.

The more you purify your motives for cooperating with another person, the more Divine Power flows through you as Radiant Love that fulfills your heart’s desires, including your desire to be empowered to pursue your passions and to feel deeply satisfied with yourself. Ulterior or mixed motives for cooperating dampen Divine Power’s flow. To share in and reap the benefits of Divine Power’s miracles, it’s necessary to purify our hearts so as to live as God’s lives towards others. Purity of motives matters maximally in God’s Life Enrichment Plan. One benefit of purifying your cooperative connection with the Divine is that God creates the future and will help you have the best future possible. If you tend to worry about the future, focus instead on purifying your cooperation with God now and leave your future in God’s hands as you help others to enjoy and appreciate their lives more in the present.

Spiritual teachers are plentiful these days. Many promise to teach you how to experience more power by tapping into your inner realm where power waits to be released through you into your life experiences. They are pointing in the right direction. Much of what they teach is good as far as it goes but it does not go all the way to the heart of the matter. Your power does abide within you, in the core of your being. It’s there waiting to be tapped into and drawn to the surface to be expressed by you as you. I want to add a tip of wisdom to your endeavor to tap into this power. The wisdom is this: don’t mistake your own puny power to develop your own “improved” lifestyle as measured by personal convenience, wealth and social status as Divine Power. That’s the measure many teachers use to entice you to pay attention to them. They seduce you with promises of increased convenience (a parking space!), prosperity and social approval. If that’s all you seek as a goal, then you’ll not be interested in the wisdom tip I’m sharing here. However if you’d like to experience Divine Power as Radiant Love and a promising future on God’s terms, keep reading. The most direct way to tap into Divine Power is to cooperate totally with its Divine Purpose.

Divine Power is God’s to share with all who seek it on God’s terms for God’s purpose. God’s terms do not focus on our personal convenience, wealth and social approval. God’s terms focus on our learning to deliver to others experiences of divine love, heartfelt comfort, healing oneness and blessings of life in abundance. Please take note: The key is our capacity to deliver the goods to others, not merely our capacity to soak up the goods for ourselves as if we are the end consumer of God’s Divine Power. If we truly want to experience Divine Power in all of its miraculous nature and scope we simply must cooperate with God on God’s terms and not try to dictate terms to God or impose our limited purpose for its use. God’s terms include God’s wholehearted commitment to demonstrating God’s oneness with all people. Most people are not comfortable with humbling themselves before God so as to receive as generously as God is willing to give. Their egos get in the way because their egos are rooted in belief in separation from God and from one another. God’s purpose of demonstrating the Oneness of Life, within which all things are interconnected, violates the ego’s basic premise that separation is real. The ego resists humility because humility offers no place for ego. If you want to receive and deliver to others the divinely enriched good life that God has in store for you, be prepared to cooperate with God even when your ego protests that you’ve offended it and all it values.

Here’s the scoop: God has always wanted every human being to receive Divine Power and all of its life-enriching benefits. It’s never been God’s will to shortchange anyone or leave anyone unfavored. There’s a way to share Divine Power among all of us that God knows and reveals but our egos ignore and obscure. We are each created to express Divine Power but we adopt egos as false social identities to survive in our society where egos and ego’s values and priorities determine how social approval and disapproval are distributed. If you want to set Divine Power free to flow through you, be prepared to encounter turbulence as your own ego and egos around you react to your violation of ego’s rules, roles and routines and accuse you of being a boat-rocker and rule-violator – too “different” in your attitudes, beliefs and social orientation for a conformist society to approve of – while you are not a social deviant except to the extent that you exceed social standards by deviating towards excellence. The ego may declare you a hero one moment, a scapegoat the next and then do its best to ignore you entirely as it exiles you from its company. More than likely our ego-based traditionalist society will do its best to make you feel unwelcome and regret siding so radically with God as to value God’s will that Love reign supreme over our pathways to freedom and joy. You will not experience the flow of Divine Power as your natural inheritance until you reclaim God as your Divine Parent and participate fully in Divine Family Life, treating every other human being as your brother and sister, as beloved of God as you are.

Purifying our hearts means letting go of all fear so as to allow Divine Love to radiate where fear once imposed the gloom of separation and loneliness onto God’s celebration of oneness and companionship throughout all circumstances from lovely to harsh and back again. Purification of our hearts is a process that conflicts with modern practices and principles now widespread throughout our fear-based, fear-saturated society. Social norms support our maintaining hearts filled with fear as if that’s a desirable goal. Purification sets our hearts free of fear so that we become social nonconformists (even sometimes feeling like a freak) until being pure of heart becomes the new social norm. In the transitional phase during which society shifts from being fear-based, fear-saturated to being love-based, love-saturated, mutual encouragement to make the shift is vital. We most need to learn to no longer fear Divine Love and instead to share it generously with mutual appreciation for all we are daring to be and to become.

In modern times, while fearing Diving Love, humanity mistakenly subscribed to the lie that human life evolves towards an ideal standard of improvement on account of the “survival of the fittest.” In fact, quite the opposite is true. The ideal standard of improvement for humanity is an increase in the flow of Divine Power to comfort, heal and bless us all. (Students of A Course In Miracles may recognize this statement of Divine Purpose.) Human life evolves towards increased flow of Divine Power through the service of the fittest in promoting the welfare of the whole so that all members of the human race thrive, not merely survive. Service by, not survival of, the fittest is what matters. In other words, empowerment for humanity is not about outdoing the competition by being fitter for survival than others. It’s about being fitter for service than others may currently be. Empowerment and life-enrichment happen naturally from learning to be more helpful towards others – with pure hearts, based on motives as pure as God’s.

Those who serve others on God’s terms (e.g., not co-dependently, compulsively or fearfully) are models of humanity’s divine nature as they serve the best interests of the whole, including those who may at first appear to be least suited for survival or service. It is wise for honored leaders of society to be spiritually oriented servants of those with the least social status. When those at the leading edge of humanity’s social privileges reach out to aid those at humanity’s trailing edge and lift them forward along with the whole of humanity, we all move forward together. Within the dynamics of service of “social bottoms by social tops,” progress sustains itself because those previously at society’s trailing edge learn to participate meaningfully on leadership teams at society’s cutting edge of positive developments.

In sum, God’s plan for humanity’s progress in awakening to our divine nature is a wrap-around process that leaves no one out of the circle of mutual service – the Circle of Life. Humble service means that socially privileged people do not use spiritual principles and practices to continue to feather our own nests and expand our experiences of convenience and privilege. Instead we adopt humble lifestyles that free our discretionary resources to be applied voluntarily to benefit less privileged members of society, elevating everyone together into a sustainable range of lifestyles that are totally adequate but not extravagant or self-indulgent.

How can this idealistic “bottom served by top” social dynamic become reality? It is guaranteed to become society’s new reality when we commit to cooperating with it wholeheartedly because God’s orientation to humanity is as our Wholehearted Supreme Servant. Serving us all with Divine Delight, the Ultimate Top will orchestrate the creation of the new society rooted in purified cooperation. God asks not that we serve Him/Her but that we serve each other while we also allow God to serve us all without imposing any restrictions on God’s faithfulness and generosity towards all of us through each other. We become God’s means of equity, liberty and justice as well as creativity and multimedia beauty when we cooperate with God’s will. While we have been uncooperative with God instead of serving each other with grace and joy according to God’s divine plan for our evolution (awakening), we have learned to crucify (do a disservice to) each other by habits of our egos while we know not what we do. We are ignorant of what we are doing because our buried guilt and shame numb our sensitivity towards others and cause us to ignore how we are harming them (and ourselves) emotionally as well as in other ways. Our natural sensitivities that would alert us to our wayward ways are offline because development of an ego and its social habits requires that we deny our hearts, tune out our emotions, limit our listening, defend against change (including improvements offered by God) and turn away from each other in distrust.

A forgiving, attentively listening, trusting God waits patiently for us to repent and turn back to Him/Her to be restored to awareness of our innocence (free of guilt and blame as well as pride and shame) so that we might once again walk with God in humility to love mercy, do justice and liberate all captives of the ego – setting them free to walk, dance and sing along with God as well. Universal mutual service will set us free of ego’s cruel tyranny and resurrect us from the deadening effects of benumbed hearts and painfully confused minds. In serving each other’s best interests as God defines what is “best,” we will regain clarity of mind as we regain purity of heart. God’s mind is clear. God’s motive for serving all of us is pure love. To serve as God serves and become living channels of service under Divine Authority, we must purify our motives by learning to love as God loves and to trust one another as God trusts us.

“Let he or she who would be greatest among you be servant of all.” Such a calling strikes at the heart of the heartlessness of the egoistic culture modern society has become. In modern times, shrines are built to egos while hearts are shrouded in despair. Their kinds and styles vary but the purpose of each shrine is the same – to glorify to a lesser or greater degree an ego-imprisoned person who has failed to serve with humility on behalf of the health and happiness of many who would have benefitted from a life lived egolessly. Pervasive neglect of the needs of others and studiously maintained ignorance of God’s divine plan to bless us all hide behind every enshrined failure of an ego-bound person to serve others. Some who are popular in the eyes of fans (or Facebook friends) may protest, “But I mistreat no one!” Yet all of us are at risk of allowing our craving for social approval to cause us to be more concerned about cooperating with other people’s egos than about cooperating with God.

Eager to get along (survive) socially, we please others at the cost of being empowered (thriving) spiritually. We protest against being called “indifferent” towards the needs of others only because we are unaware of the many we could serve but fail to serve when we focus our energies and resources on cooperating with egos to conform socially instead of cooperating with God to transform spiritually. We are more inclined by ego’s habits to use our resources to insulate ourselves from people in need than to come into contact with them personally as we naturally would do if we serve them with all our time and resources. Once society makes cooperating with God its standard procedure, we’ll be able to conform both socially and spiritually. But not yet while social norms ignore God’s offer to enrich our lives through service empowered by purified cooperation.

Under the ego’s current reign, with few exceptions, the socially privileged are blessed and yet of little blessing to others. In catering to our egos, we divert into shrines of varying degrees of personal isolation, convenience and self-aggrandizement time, energy and other resources intended by God for the welfare of others. God blesses us to empower us to bless others, but we restrict the flow of blessings by diverting them into futile attempts to satisfy insatiable egos. In so doing we continue to mislead generation after generation of children to believe that the path to greatness lies along the ego’s way and not along the way of service to those God calls us to serve. All shrines, tiny and elaborate, divert resources. It is time to awaken to the error of the ego’s claim upon our lives and rise free to serve as our hearts’ wiser nature is restored to its rightful preeminence as guide and counselor in place of ego.

For centuries, men and women have clambered over each other to acquire greater fame and fortune through socially valued achievements ranging from minor to major in the eyes of other ego-oriented people. Today we accept the approval of others and amass wealth in excess of our basic needs on account of our performances as employees, employers, entrepreneurs, professionals, politicians, captains of industry, entertainers, sports figures, experts, critics, religious leaders, middle managers and other paid and unpaid roles – and as common citizens who allow social approval to be our false god. We admire others for their performances, allow others to admire us (often for our pretenses as much as for our performances) and bask in the glow of spiraling social approval as often as possible. Often we blindly accept our social approval ratings and fail to point our admirers to God as the only Being truly worthy of admiration and imitation as a role model. Instead we accept praise as if it were truly due us. If we mention God, we do so only in passing. We tip our caps to God but do not topple ourselves from the pedestals our adoring fans and friends erect for us – or emerge again from the tombs of shame we may endure if we offend our fans and friends. To be clear, there’s only life-enrichment to be gained through expressing and receiving heartfelt gratitude and genuine compliments. It is awe and worshipful praise we must reserve for God alone.

Of course, because we are not A-list celebrities and rarely attract media attention, most of us will deny that we are heavily invested in self-serving lifestyles and continue to participate in moderate mutual admiration societies we call friends, co-workers and other restricted-entry social gatherings. By the ego’s trick of comparing ourselves to others and finding ourselves “not as excessive as ‘them,’” we justify our modest participation in a society that is blind to God’s plan. But ego’s success in diverting our attention and investment of our lives from God’s plan is still controlling our decisions and blinding us to the truth of how God would have us serve if only we were more cooperative with God and less cooperative with egos.

We prefer to applaud and admire the few who serve in exceptional ways and call then “heroes” than to become one of them according to God’s calling in our hearts. If we share a portion of our wealth and other resources with others, we do so only according to some token measure that assuages our guilty conscience but does not honor God. Our tokenism reveals our egoism. All we have received we hold in trust as endowments from God yet we give back to God only the little that legalistic social conformity requires. A tithe perhaps, but not the whole. We trust not God’s promise to return to us a thousandfold all that we might give cheerfully to God. We trust not the engine of universal prosperity that would function for the benefit of all if only we would honor God and give all to divine service as God gives so generously to us. We take credit for God’s part in our successes and fail to express our gratitude to God as fully as God expresses His/Her generosity to us. Today there are many who continue to make excuses for glorifying ourselves according to the ego’s subtly deceptive model rather than step entirely free from self-serving lifestyles to serve God and let God be glorified. The time for undiluted, uncompromised cooperation with God has arrived to save humanity from extinction. It’s likewise time to be entirely free to love as God loves and to be loved in return with equal power and commitment.

Our devotion to the ego’s way results from competition that epitomizes the deceitful proposition that survival of the fittest causes humanity to evolve. As evidenced by events and conditions worldwide, the truth is that competition dehumanizes the human race and causes us to dissolve, not evolve. Cooperation is the way of Life – of ever-expanding Vitality. Symbiosis and mutuality of living are features of Life. The ego belittles being truly helpful as humiliating and debasing “obedience” as if living humbly in harmony with God’s will is evil or at least an embarrassingly nonconformist way of life to be avoided at all cost. The ego declares generosity to be a sacrifice instead of a sacrament that expresses God’s nature and an opportunity to live in oneness with God, with one another and with all forms of Life according to God’s plan of creation and sustainability for us all.

Life is God’s to design and implement. When we gracefully serve God in all humility with joy in our hearts, we return to God the grace God first extended to us with divine joy. By grace, we participate in Life fully and it flows through us as joyfully as a bubbling brook of crystal clear water. Many are those who come to the Water of Life that God shares through us when we cooperate with God and serve as God serves. Only then can we declare as protector of the socially less powerful “Such grace as has been given to me I give unto you” and open the way for the healing of our lands through the healing of our hearts. Such gentle generosity and grace compose the way of true power because it is the way of life amid which we encounter and embrace God as He/She encounters and embraces us.

Life is not a process primarily characterized by disintegration and lack of integrity as ego’s false version of life presents. Life is a process primarily characterized by continuously upgrading integration of creative ideas around a core of integrity that is eternal as well as internal. Spiritual principles and practices of many paths of faith invite us to experience the wonders of this expanding process called “Life Everlasting” or “Limitless Creation.” An apt analogy for this expansion from the inner core outward is found in the growth rings, spreading branches, abundant fruitfulness, towering majesty and longevity of ancient trees. That is one reason the Tree of Life so frequently appears as a universal symbol of Eternal Life. Our pure cooperation with God creates a reality that will outlive all physical symbols used to convey its nature through human languages other than the universal nonverbal language of love found in smiles, twinkling eyes, heartfelt laughter, music, dance and other signs of peace and goodwill among all peoples of the earth.

How did we go astray from God’s plan for a continuously upgrading integration of creative concepts around the core of timeless wisdom? We strayed off target when we mistakenly equated our lives with the physical expressions of other kingdoms of life – of minerals, plants and animals – and failed to recognize 1) the human kingdom’s unique identity and qualities as the pinnacle of God’s creation and 2) our developmentally unfolding wholeness as an expression of God’s nature being progressively revealed throughout humanity with some individuals unfolding in time ahead of others. We misunderstood our status as God’s most exalted creation as an excuse for exercising power over all other kingdoms of life without regard for the counterbalancing responsibility that comes with greater power. Even Spiderman had to learn that “with great power comes great responsibility.” It is time for humanity to learn that lesson too. When we wield power over others for the sole purpose of serving supportively under those we serve we achieve the delicate balance required of stewards of divinely augmented power wielded on behalf of all. Through this spiritually enriched, ethically administered paradigm of power we achieve the greatest good for the greatest number by ensuring the best for all in the long run. Such are God’s ethics.

Each of us can personally wield the power of life ethically if we wield with wisdom and committed cooperation the power God entrusts to us. As we grow in wisdom in its wielding by allowing God to purify our hearts, God entrusts more power to flow through us. We maximize this power’s potency and perseverance by minimizing our ego’s intensity and interference. We cause death – and impose upon others fates worse than death – through all forms of abuse and by a thousand slices of neglect when we fail to exercise our divinely entrusted power wisely with pure motives. God is relying upon us to master the art of wisdom so as to cooperate with Him/Her fully before all forms of life upon the earth are damaged too heavily to sustain life for human beings. God ensures the sustainability of all other kingdoms of life. They will thrive well without humanity’s presence if we humans insist that they do so. They will thrive well with humans present only if and when we are present as God is present in relationship to all such kingdoms and serve them well so that they may continue to serve us well in turn.

We have a choice to live in harmony with God and all created kingdoms of the earth and thereby share in the mutual benefits that flow from the symbiotic miracles of nature or to defy God’s plan of creation and render it unsustainable for humanity. The other kingdoms will recover from our abuse and neglect once we are gone. The issue is only whether we want to render ourselves extinct on account of failing to cooperate with God and with each other as children of God or prefer to perpetuate our race as one race under God with liberty, justice, beauty and grace for all – for all of Life in every form created. To choose in favor of purified cooperation with God – with total commitment to accepting and adjusting to its terms and conditions – is to choose to be true to ourselves as expressions of God, to perpetuate the human race as God created us and to place our futures in the hands of a Most Competent Supreme Servant who knows how to lead us into the experience of our Divine Home on earth modeled on Heaven’s Home now imagined to be only reachable beyond earth. We need only imagine that Heaven is already here on earth for us to begin the transformation God has in mind for all of us.

Knowing What to Do in Times of Change

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Modern society is passing through a chaotic transition. Old ways are no longer producing desired results and new ways are not yet in place to serve as new routines and traditions. We are trapped in a chrysalis of change, no longer the caterpillar we once were and not yet the butterfly we will become once we are successful in completing our struggle to transform and emerge — paradoxically restored to vitality as ourselves and yet no longer ourselves as we once were. The times they are a’changing, as Bob Dylan wrote some years ago:

The Times They Are A’Changin’
By Bob Dylan

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

What approach is most helpful during times such as these? It’s most helpful to learn to listen closely to wisdom and to increase our capacity to hear and to heed what wisdom is saying. Wisdom is not swept away by rising riptides of change because wisdom is rooted in ancient truths that stand up well even to the severest tests of time. Wisdom may be time-worn but the wear and tear it’s endured only makes it all the more valuable like well-polished jade in a setting of gold.

In times of tumultuous change when former traditions cease to serve well as guides, you can easily lose your bearings as you discover how unprepared you are to navigate through turbulent waters. The more you’ve previously lived a sheltered life, the more shocked and afraid you may be as you are exposed to the turbulence today’s changes entail. Even if you’ve been exposed and vulnerable to hard times before, it can still upset you to face them again, especially on the intense, society-wide scale we are now enduring. Feeling ill-prepared for life as you are forced to face it is unnerving. Discouragement and despair may come knocking and perhaps even take up residence for a while. Being thrown off balance by turbulence is natural. It’s not necessary to fault yourself for how you react to unpleasant conditions. It’s more helpful to have confidence that you can find your way through the turbulence to better opportunities beyond it. And you surely can if you apply yourself to learning all you need to learn to achieve that goal. One thing that may seem puzzling is that you are better prepared to succeed than you yet know. Part of what you’ll learn if you apply yourself with focused attention is how to recognize your hidden qualities that make you more prepared than you realize.

As Dylan points out, you can hardly tell at the beginning how things are going to turn out. But wisdom knows how to guide you through winds of change and clouds of doubt to an outcome you’ll welcome along a journey you’ll enjoy as an adventure. And you can know what wisdom knows if you’re willing to listen closely to its cues and allow them to guide you forward through the confusion and chaos of storm-tossed times. We are surely going through stormy times as modern society wrestles with the unforeseen consequences of its past decisions and tries to find its answers within the very patterns of thought that caused its current problems. There are many wise sayings that describe society’s current dilemma. Among them are two attributed to Albert Einstein:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“The solution cannot be found at the same level of mind at which the problem was created.”

These quotes suggest that we’ll only drive ourselves more and more insane if we continue to try to address society’s currently deepening problems from the same perspective or traditional thinking from which we created the problems. It simply does not help to dwell upon them as if they are both worrisome and hopelessly unsolvable. We dig our hole deeper by worrying our way around in it in circles. We’ll only worry ourselves into self-sabotage through this limited approach. Wisdom knows that we are capable of a much less limited and immensely more promising one.

The dilemmas facing society signal that we’ve reached the limits of the way of thinking in which we’ve mainly been indulging for many centuries. With rare exceptions like Einstein, most people have simply failed to master the art of thinking for themselves and instead allowed others to tell them what to do. We’ve become so accustomed to looking to others outside of us to do all the thinking that we don’t know how to think for ourselves and may only panic when expected to do so. As we learned how to be accepted and belong within our society, we entrusted the responsibility for thinking to those to whom we looked as our teachers/trainers – authority figures whom we believed to be in charge of our society for us. What we don’t realize is that those to whom we looked to tell us what to do are not running society “for us” in the sense of “for our benefit.” They are running it for other purposes that are not necessarily beneficial to us in the long run – and many times not even beneficial to us in the short run. In fact, one of the signals that we are in trouble is the reduced “duration of benefit” we’ve received on account of our letting others do all the real thinking for us while our minds are pre-occupied with trivial pursuits.

Allow me to expand upon the example of shrinking “duration of benefit” to explain what I mean. “Duration of benefit” refers to the time elapsed between purchase and disposal of a product or service. As this period of time becomes shorter, the lack of correspondence between the cost of our investment in the purchase and the value we receive from our investment becomes increasingly obvious. Examples that are hitting home include the decreased time during which material goods remain useful to us – before we either pay dearly for their repair or upgrade or replace them entirely. Equipment once classified as “durable goods” has become progressively less durable and now approaches the status of disposable. For example, common household items like clothes washers, driers, dishwashers and refrigerators have proliferated in options and styles that only make it more likely that one of their complex features will fail and cause a repair bill that rivals the cost of replacing the equipment. Due to equipments’ increasing complexity, reliance upon electronic controls and rapid turnover in models composed of parts not used in previous models, home repairs have become less adequate as a solution. Artificial complexity and shifting models has put the handyman-homemaker out of business and required homeowners to seriously consider throwing away equipment that in earlier days would have A) lasted longer in the first place and B) been repairable by the homemaker. Similar rise in complexity and decline in useful lifespan have afflicted automobiles and other formerly durable goods.

The arrival of computers and accessories like monitors, printers, scanners, modems, routers and methods of interconnection has added a new category of consumer goods subject to change-induced obsolescence that the common user rarely has the know-how or access to repair parts to address when something breaks down. In addition, “new and improved” models rush to market before many owners of previous models have learned how to use all of the features of their existing equipment. New software requiring larger memories and storage capacities as well as upgraded monitors and modems drive older equipment out of use before they are actually failing as products. Expanding demands of Internet web sites expect visitors to connect through equipment with the latest features and capacities. New methods of interconnection challenge users to keep abreast of the latest developments. The whole interlocking world of computers, software, accessories and their uses has expanded at a rate that is incredibly profitable to those who provide the equipment, software and related services but leave most users at the mercy of market-driven motives to render existing investments inadequate to perform and require consumers to spend more money to remain current with the latest state of affairs. Whom is this reduced duration of benefits serving?

It’s as if the universe of computer technology has replicated the cosmos as a system of infinite possibilities that is expanding at the speed of light and far outdistancing the finite resources of many explorers of that universe. Many explorers resort to debt to keep up. In fact, all too often “duration of debt” now exceeds “duration of benefits.” Another example of this phenomenon is the proliferation of ever-upgraded cell phones and accessories that render the previous models old news within as short a time as six months. Related to this example is the spectacular meteor shower of accessories and apps to use with cell phones. Keeping track of the inane number of such cell-phone-related features and their various uses occupies the minds of many users as a distraction from more significant alternative uses of their minds. Functioning in a similar manner to interfere with slower paced contemplation is time spent reviewing and commenting upon Youtube and Facebook postings and watching engrossing movies, TV reruns and entertainment programs ranging from supposed “reality shows” and talent contests to hit fiction shows of all kinds. Add sports broadcasts and commentaries plus endless newscasts, pundits and, heaven forbid, bloggers commenting upon life from every possible angle and who’s got to time to think for oneself?

Those with the youthful curiosity to master new skills and the desire to prove their competence ride the leading edge of trends in the age of high tech electronics and information overload. These trends now wash across society like a multi-wave tsunami to sweep all previous technology into the trash bin long before many older users have discovered how to use their features and reap their benefits. Although it is developmentally appropriate for youth and young adults to be curious and to exercise their minds to learn new competencies that prove their worth to themselves and others, to place a significant market that affects society at many levels into the control of young adults who are also discouraged from asking why they are doing what they are doing is another outcome of insanity’s reign in our society. Society is not well-served by intentionally occupying young minds with electronically hyped and accelerated trivial pursuits with the effect of diverting their attention from the core issues with which our society struggles. We need the minds and hearts of youth and young adults focused more intentionally on social issues if ever we are to resolve them successfully. We cannot address and resolve significant societal issues without the full engagement of youth and young adults. Their participation is essential to our success! It is their future and the future of those who follow close behind them that is at stake and must now be clarified and implemented in a manner meaningful to them. It is vital to the health and welfare of all of us that young minds not remain hooked on fascinating electronic stimulation that draw them to focus on trivia and away from focusing on what is truly significant to their futures.

I mean no offense to youth and young adults when I question whether it is wise to turn over our society’s major techno-trends to their controlling passion for mastering new technology and exploring new territory of experiences as their natural appetites and passions operate in their legitimate quest for a vision of a life worth living. I mean only to caution us all that wisdom percolates into our hearts and minds through experiences which take place at slower paces, occur over longer periods of time and require more intense and deeper personal engagement with other people than most fast paced endeavors promoted by the technology market cultivate. Many youth and young adults have such lire-enriching experiences. We need to help them to tap into the empowering wisdom of their library of experiences that are stored deep beneath trivial pursuits.

Modern society does not encourage youth and young adults to identify, appreciate and process such slower paced, in-depth experiences but rather leads youth and young adults in circles in the shallows chasing meaningless superficial changes that matter little or nothing in the long run. I really do mean no offense to youth and young adults. In fact, I devote my life to helping to correct the way society is misleading youth and young adults to ignore they capacity to think for themselves and listen to and be led by wisdom from an early age. I have met youth and young adults who have proven to me that they do sometimes listen to themselves in this manner and experiment with thinking for themselves. I’ve also learned that it is precisely when they do listen to their deepest inner guidance and think for themselves that they are most likely to come into conflict with modern society’s shallow values and priorities and be labeled “rebellious,” “uncooperative” or “misfits.” We need to encourage rather than discourage such independent, “rebellious” thinking that resists cooperating with the norms of modern society and instead develops creatively activated “misfits” better suited to leading the new society that is arriving in our midst than to remaining loyal to the old society that is fading from our midst. It would be wise for all of us to switch our loyalties from the fading society to the emerging new one.

Youth and young adults have an inborn capacity to listen to and reap the benefits of wisdom as guidance for their lives. However, modern society teaches us all to ignore our in-born, wisdom-oriented capacity and instead to listen elsewhere for guidance. Based on our past social training, too often we listen to the fading society’s standards and expectations instead of to the emerging society’s standards and expectations. As children we are naturally inclined to listen to our parents, teachers and other older adults for guidance. But as the guidance from those adults proves less and less useful (largely because it’s not all that helpful to resolving the issues we face during times of transition), youth and young adults understandably turn away from that source of guidance and seek for guidance among other voices available to them. Many of these alternative voices are found among media of various kinds. Others are the voices of admittedly well-meaning but similarly misled peers. In a society where everyone is taught to have an opinion no matter how little investigation and analysis may go into forming it, media personalities and peers can sound as if their voices are authoritative when in fact they are voices of ignorance and arrogance. Most media and peer voices do not yet convey the wisdom and understanding needed to provide truly helpful guidance for life, especially guidance for navigating turbulent times such as we face now. In effect, by teaching us to orient our listening outward into the turbulence rather than inward into the deep inner calm at the core of our beings, social norms and traditions have cut us adrift from and now block our awareness of the wisdom and understanding we would otherwise naturally access within ourselves. Our submission to social pressures to think, act and live as social-approval seekers sabotages our ability to enjoy higher quality lives and robs us of the inheritance we would otherwise naturally receive from Divine Love’s Presence within the calm at the core of our beings.

Bob Dylan was a voice to which many of his generation listened and through which many found comfort. He voiced the thoughts and feelings of many in his generation. Lyricists and spoken-word artists today frequently voice the thoughts and feelings of their generation too. Many are their cries for greater understanding and wisdom. Fewer are the voices by which understanding and wisdom come forth in response. I hope that my voice will provide some of the understanding and wisdom that youth and young adults hunger to discover is present in the world on their behalf, at their service.

Knowing what to do in changing times is a mystery worth addressing. It is a valid question to ask “How do I know what to do when traditional answers no longer point the way forward?” My response to this question is simple: Learn again to trust yourself to know deep inside what is best for you. Take the time necessary now to stop, look and listen inwardly. Your native-born, inwardly tapped guidance will encourage you to be true to yourself because that is best for you – in times of turbulence as well as times of calm. That is why I focus so much of this web site on helping visitors to regain confidence in their authentic nature. To do so, one must abandon every attempt to fabricate an artificial or false identity because pretending to be someone you are not gives too much value and power to what other people think of you. False identities emphasize image-making (social approval and reputation) and pleasing others by words and actions that are not true to your own heart. You access both your short-term happiness and your long-term joy and success when you stop pretending and instead live true to yourself under all circumstances. When you master the art of remaining true to yourself during turbulent times, you emerge from these times as a master surfer emerges from waves that tumble others off their boards. Once you master the art of authenticity amid challenging waves of change, you can rest in calmer waters with ease and grace.

Being true to your own heart is key. To trust yourself to know deep inside what is best for you is the same as trusting yourself to love and care for yourself even when it seems at the moment that no one else agrees with you. Your heart is the “deep inside” where I encourage you to learn to listen. Listen to your heart and heed its guidance and you’ll learn to hear the wisdom that it shares with you from the divine realm of inner peace with which it is in touch. The “heart” of which I speak is not the physical organ. It is the core of your being associated with the fourth and central chakra (energy center) where your spirit listens to your emotions. It is your sensitive, intuitive nature. It is what some call our “feminine side” mainly because men are taught to not be in touch with and express their emotions openly and caringly. The attributes of humanity that society associates with being in touch with and expressing one’s emotions openly and caringly are stereotypically considered “not masculine” and therefore by default “feminine.” In addition, masculinity is associated with the male body’s procreative capacity to thrust and penetrate and not with the female body’s procreative capacity to open and receive. When we see ourselves as merely bodies, we remain blind to our more expansively authentic nature and fail to grasp the far broader picture of who we really are as spiritual beings engaged in a human experience through our bodies. As whole, authentic human beings, we are not merely bodies but also spirits, wills, minds and emotions expressed within relationships.

There is a myth afoot in modern society that the aggression associated with masculinity equates to being strong and powerful and that the gentleness associated with femininity equates to being weak and helpless. This myth is so pervasive and persuasive in modern society that women who seek equality with men tend to think that becoming more like stereotypical males brings them greater power. This tendency to equate stereotypical masculinity with power is based on the false notion that power equals aggression and violence. It escapes our notice that aggressive behaviors are symptoms of internalized insecurities that aggressors fail to honestly admit and prefer to cover up. Aggressors use aggressive words and behaviors to distract the rest of us from noticing and addressing underlying emotional issues and discourage us from calling their bluffs. Aggressive men and women are not displaying their power. They are in fact displaying their buried feelings of insecurity, inadequacy and resentment as they use intimidation to silence, confuse and dominate others by shifting their negative emotional energy onto those they seek to control. These negative, crippling emotions are not the energies of a truly powerful, self-confident person of either gender. Gentleness, tolerance, defenselessness and patience are signs of true power in both genders.

Our gender-neutral capacity for tuning into inner guidance and flowing with its nuanced leadings grows as we nurture our wholeness and learn again to be aware of the full spectrum of our emotions and become comfortable expressing our colorful emotions’ full range. Our wholeness unfolds like a satellite dish to capture more and more of the signals that wisdom sends to us constantly as guidance. As we learn to unfold our sensitive antennae and tune ourselves to wisdom’s broadcasts, we’ll find the guidance we seek. Wisdom wants to give us our heart’s desires. Our hearts are listening for what wisdom says is ours to do and ours to enjoy. The harmony between our hearts and wisdom is akin to cooperation between an orchestra and its conductor. The music of our heart is unique to each of us as individuals and yet also plays in harmony with the chorus of life within which we are all valued participants. Our confidence to participate in this chorus grows as we become increasingly aware of our creative capacities and interests that blossom as our wholeness comes online through mutually interactive encouragement within the communities that we serve and benefit.

Wi-Fi is an apt analogy for the capacity of human wholeness to empower each of us to thrive as happy, productive contributors to the welfare of various groups and communities to which we belong. We are naturally equipped to pick up energy signals wirelessly and to translate them into guidance received in the form of intuition, hunches, gut reactions, day dreaming, sleep time dreams, creative endeavors and selective listening to others. A writer may receive wisdom as he or she listens within and records to share with others what he or she allows to flow from within while also listening to messages in the environment that resonate with and lift up his or her spirit, heart and mind. A poet or lyricist may do the same. Composers, painters, dancers, actors, sculptors, ceramicists and other artists and creative thinkers may likewise share with others what they are discovering deep within themselves – especially when encouraged by others through social connections to dig deeper and share abundantly.

As Einstein and others demonstrated, scientific discoveries surface to be shared in a similar manner. The creative process is natural to all of us because we are created by a Creator who shares the power and dynamics of Creativity with us. The quality of human life as shared within a society or any smaller group of people is determined by the process of inner listening and outward expression. In fact, all relationships are always shaped and energized with meaning and significance based on the voices to which we listen inside. To the extent that we listen to internalized voices of former external authority figures who in turn conformed to former external authority figures generation after generation we participate in a chain of conformity and replicate the past, imitate rather than create, conform rather than transform and cause our destiny to come forth as a repeat of our history. To the extent that we question and, as wisdom guides, set aside such internalized voices of others who bought into the artificiality of modern society and listen instead to the gentle voice of Wisdom whispering within our hearts, we contribute to the creation of a wiser alternative society on terms of love and truth in which authenticity is honored amid ever strengthening bonds of trust.

Within such a trust-bonded society, we will appreciate and respect rather than judge and condemn each other. We will cooperate with one another to bring peace to troubled waters and dispel clouds of doubt as refreshing breezes of clarity appear in their place. Beyond modern society’s chaotic transition, we are sailing together through storm-tossed seas towards a more highly evolved expression of humanity than our human memories can tell of. It is recorded in our imagination as visions of the brighter, gentler and more promising future our hearts have long desired to share. Into open hearts wisdom freely flows. Let us open our hearts together and, with persistent playfulness and ceaseless celebration, grow forward into this vision of a better world to come and wholeheartedly welcome our transformed selves as manifestations of that better world.

A Heartbook of Healing Wisdom – Summary Introduction

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