Tag Archives: life

The Fallacy of One-upmanship

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Jiddu Krishnamurt

As modern society became increasingly competitive, we adopted as one of ego’s justifications for competitive modes of living the “survival of the fittest” aspect of Darwin’s theory of evolution. We thereby chose to glorify one-upmanship as the wave of our future. Competition became a dominant theme in economic life as well as personal life, with professional sports offering a way to combine the two and fabricate vicarious opportunities to be a winner or loser by over-identifying with other people’s achievements. In doing so we neglected to notice that Darwin’s theory also incorporated cooperation among members of a species for survival.

In our self-deprecating neglect, for centuries we’ve been one-upping each other as if that process carried to its extreme and unbalanced by concern for the human species as whole creates a better future. By measuring our progress mainly in materialistic terms and accepting collateral damage (even among our own loved ones) as a norm, we’ve ignored other measures of the quality of life and failed to notice life’s decline. In glorifying one-upmanship as the wave of the future upon which to surf to shore as champions of injustice, we failed to notice that we are riding that wave into shallower and shallower waters and waving good-bye to a deeper, more enriching future. Now storm-generated waves of competition crash upon the shore to produce tremendously powerful undertows that drag many of us along the grinding bottom to drown in self-pity and self-contempt for our failure to thrive as upmanshippers.

If you are one of the disenchanted surfers who wants to find a way out of the shallows to avoid the grind and not be as likely to drown, consider what I share in the ABCs of love portion of this web site. There you will find promising ideals to put into practice in cooperation with others as practitioners of love. The principles of love are worthy of your heart’s desire for an upgraded lifestyle as you renew your capacity to sail the high seas. The adventure of truth-seeking awaits you as you discover the treasure chest of love that your fear of pirates has caused you to bury in your heart.

God is an Authority Figure Unlike Any Other

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The heart of Jesus’ mission has always been to reveal that God is an authority figure unlike any other we may have known – or even heard of or imagined – throughout our lifetimes. Followers of Jesus have the same mission. Most of us have resisted the opportunity to fully benefit from this mission because we remain hung up on our experiences with human authority figures. We acquired hang-ups as earthly authority figures exercised power over us in clumsy, perhaps even cruel ways and now we tend to automatically hang up on Jesus when he calls us to walk with him through our past experiences to know and show God as an authority figure unlike the earthly ones of our past. I write this post to encourage all of us to listen when Jesus calls and hear and heed the more completely heart-satisfying message about God’s authority and power as he offers it to us. We miss out on the grace of God when we ignore Jesus’ call to share the true nature of God with a world that hungers to know an authority figure of His/Her qualities.

How does God differ from earthly authority figures in offering to relate to us? Let’s explore several differences among the many that exist.

As we grew up, we experienced parenting figures, older relatives, teachers, coaches and others who wielded authority that we were taught to obey (or at least appear to obey) as quickly as possible to reduce the risk of wearing out their patience and tolerance. When we did not obey quickly enough to satisfy our authority figures, we usually endured punishment in some form, what the authority figures commonly called “consequences” for behaving in ways unacceptable to them or for being too slow or inattentive. Even when not caught misbehaving, we often still felt guilty about violating our authority figures’ rules and not complying with their expectations. We took their values, rules and corresponding expectations to heart and learned to feel guilty for not following them instantly even long after they ceased to be actively in our lives as authority figures. As we adopted their values, rules and expectations as our own, we learned to believe them to come from God “on high.” In this manner, we learned to confuse God with earthly authority figures and failed to see the significant distinctions highlighted in this post.

In contrast, God is an authority figure who 1) holds us to high expectations of progressively greater excellence but not instantaneous perfection and 2) does not punish us nor want us to feel endless guilt when we fail to uphold divine standards in our human lives. Our conscience’s feelings of guilt may be helpful guidance when we realize we’ve not met God’s expectations but God does not want us to hang onto any guilt we may feel. She/He wants us to forgive ourselves and let guilt go because He/She knows that guilt interferes with our freedom to learn the lessons in wisdom and grace that we gain from our failures to fully satisfy God’s standards of excellence. He/She also knows that fear of punishment does not improve our capacity to learn and grow on account of our experiences in life. Fear only inhibits our growth towards the mature wholeness God wants us to enjoy. In helping us to grow strong enough to clear every hurdle of God’s expectations, Jesus introduces us to God’s forgiving nature that we might be free of guilt, no matter what we may or may not have done to fall short of God’s healthiest expectations or how many times we may have stumbled on our journeys. Lightened of all burdens of guilt, we are more likely to gain mature humility and soar higher to clear each hurdle the next time it appears in our lives. God generously grants us limitless opportunities to do so.

Throughout our lives, we likely encountered earthly authority figures who played favorites and recruited people to their side in order to demonstrate the influence and significance they held and impress us with the losses we risked in being uncooperative. These experiences set us up to assume that other authority figures, including God, would relate to us in similar ways. We learned to believe that popularity and social status are desirable, especially popularity and favor with influential authority figures whose opinions of us might make a difference in how things turn out for us. In the process of relating to such authority figures we may have developed habits (mostly unconscious ones) that came to control our words and actions – perhaps even our thoughts – as we did all we could to seem to be on the side of the authority figures who ruled our lives and remain in their favor. On the other hand, we may have developed habits of rebelling (perhaps secretly) against authority figures and did not allow them to directly influence our lives much at all. From either perspective, many of us failed to develop close, meaningful, mutually respectful and fear-free relationships of trust and transparency with our earthly authority figures.

In contrast, God is an authority figure who does not play favorites in any way and has absolutely no need to be popular or have others on His/Her side in order to be powerful. It’s a mistake to believe that God needs approval from anyone to be the Supreme Authority Figure in the Universe. He/She has no more need for social approval than He/She needs to inflict pain, guilt or punishment in any form on anyone. If you think about it, you’ll realize that earthly authority figures react to our mistakes as if they’ve taken them as personal insults – as if their egos have been bruised by our failures to live according to their expectations. Since God has no ego and does not need our approval, why would God react this way? It is only in the interests of earthly authority figures to claim that God reacts this way so that they can claim that God backs up their earthly authority. Such claims are the ultimate expression of the desire for earthly authority figures to recruit others – including even God – to their side to demonstrate their power. God takes no sides in expressions of earthly authority and seeks only to guide earthly authority figures to exercise authority with wisdom born of humility and to avoid hubris. Since God does not play favorites in any way, He/She does not favor one earthly authority figure over another but rather seeks to guide them all, regardless of the degree to which any may be inclined to listen to Him/Her. As Jesus’ life reveals, as our Divine Parent, God invites us all – earthly authority figures and the rest of us – into close, meaningful, mutually respectful and fear-free wholehearted intimacy with Him/Her even as She/He serves as our Ultimate Authority Figure.

It is commonly said of earthly authority figures that power tends to corrupt them and absolute power tends to corrupt them absolutely. In this manner, the higher up the ladder of power that an earthly authority figure rises, the more likely it is that he or she will wield power with decreasing empathy, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, humility and grace and with increasing hubris. Studies have discovered scientific evidence of changes in our brains and how we think as we rise to wield earthly power. Although these changes do not occur uniformly in everyone, the risk is great that they will occur unless disciplines are in place to curtail their development. (For more about this topic, visit http://www.daedalustrust.com/ and read “Power Causes Brain Damage” in the July/August 2017 issue of The Atlantic Monthly at theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/.)

In contrast, God is an authority figure who is not corrupted by any degree of power, even absolute power. By nature, God is infinitely powerful and yet also incorruptible. He/She never stoops to bullying, bribing or being bribed. If anything, His/Her grace and mercy expands the more we try to no longer conform to the patterns of the world and instead allow our hearts and minds to be transformed as the means of demonstrating God’s good and perfect will towards everyone. That is, the more diligently we strive to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God regardless of social disapproval we may encounter and the failure of others around us to do likewise, the more He/She welcomes us to be close and comforted even in the midst of our most troubling testings and trials. How few earthly authority figures compare well to God on that standard!

By their nature as “earthly,” our human authority figures are physically outside of us and rule over us while we grow from childhood into adulthood. As they train us to conform to their spoken and unspoken rules, expectations and way of life, they hope that we’ll internalize their dominating values, ideas and attitudes and allow them to rule unquestioned for all our lives as if our parents and other earthly authority figures are eternally with us and as absolute in knowledge and power as God is. It is common for this to happen. We are apt to struggle throughout our adulthood trying to take back our true power from such internalized authority figures in order to value ourselves and recover our freedom to outgrow their training and become our own persons with power to question what we’ve been told.

In contrast, God is present within us from the start – when we were first created – and reigns beneath, alongside and around us as the nurturer of our true nature and source of health and wise guidance. Rather than be a source of rules for us to obey and expectations for us to satisfy, God is the source of all we need to fulfill our divine destinies as Her/His children. God’s resources are offered freely and abundantly to us from within as well as outside of us. Guidance, wisdom, love, motivation and the energizing opportunities of life are some of His/Her most precious gifts extended openly to each of us. We are each God’s favorite child of the model and design we are because we are each uniquely who we are. No one can compete to take our place in relationship with God. If a person tries to compete with us for a relationship with God, that person is merely abandoning his or her natural relationship with God and trying mistakenly to substitute a lesser quality relationship. That’s a foolish choice made by all who continue to fear God and seek to come into Her/His presence disguised as someone else rather than to approach the throne of grace “just as I am without one plea.” Unlike many earthly authority figures, God is not poised to pounce upon us with a judgmental, fault-finding attitude as many people mistakenly believe but rather is peacefully and lovingly at rest within us, continuously inviting us to be at ease within Her/His inner embrace. As we accept love’s invitation to be at ease, we release stress and have far less reason to take on any dis-ease.

Unless a human authority figure masters the art of humility and disciplines himself or herself to rise beyond ego’s claim on his or her mind, to one degree or another, he or she will engage in hypocrisy. His or her actions will to some degree conflict with each other and with his or her words. He/She is likely to hold differing standards for himself/herself as well as for others as part of playing people against each other or currying favor with some in preference to others. She/He may make mountains out of molehills while overlooking some mountains as if they were molehills. Blowing hot and cold, using double standards and playing games with emotions will be part of his/her typical patterns. Worse yet, he/she may be petty, vindictive, heartless and too little concerned about the welfare of others whom he/she tends to undervalue as a matter of routine.

In contrast, God is free of hypocrisy and remains steadfast in His/Her orientation towards each and every one of us as a divine child welcome to participate in the divine family business as Jesus did. God holds out holiness as the universal standard for Himself/Herself and for us too. Since holiness is the same as healthiness and wholeness shared in oneness with God and each other, it is a high standard worth attaining. It is also natural to us because it is the nature in which we are all created as extensions of the Holy Parent. God indulges in none of the traits of an ego and sustains positive regard for all of us regardless of how well or poorly we may satisfy His/Her standards of health and wholeness from time to time. Jesus told the story of the prodigal son to illustrate God’s commitment to our well-being for all eternity.

I hope that these thoughts stir up hope that many of your assumptions about God’s nature and your relationship with God are based on fallacies acquired along the way in your life. None of these fallacies needs to continue to interfere with your awareness of God’s presence within you because you have the power to change your mind and allow your heart to be cleansed of all fear moment by moment by God’s love flowing freely from the throne of grace to you as a tree of life planted astraddle the river of life. The river of life flows with God’s love for all of us, without exception – no matter what we may have said or done or what we or anyone else may think of us.

I encourage you to set time aside to rest with God as Jesus frequently did as he spent time away from the crowds and even from his disciples. Put down your roots into the soil of unconditional love and drink of the river of life as often and as deeply as your heart desires. There is no more promising way to use your time than to put a smile in God’s heart by smiling there with Him/Her. She/He delights to share your joys as well as your sorrows and other heartfelt emotions throughout your lifetime because in your open sharing She/He knows that you have come to trust that you are best off when you spend time regularly in God’s home within your heart. None of us is banished to live as a prodigal child for any longer than we want to. When we decide to come home to God by welcoming His/Her presence within us, we’ll know it has happened forever.

Internalized Theophobia

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In our discussions about what is causing our modern world to self-destruct, digging deeper for answers has become more commonplace. We are even becoming more willing to look deep within our collective psychological condition in our quest for understanding borne of insights. To contribute to this line of inquiry, I suggest these concepts are worth exploring and considering on their merits:

The mindset of the collective tends to reflect the mindset of its longer-term members, shape the mindset of its newer members and sustain the mindset of its middle-term members.
As within, so without.
Inquiries into our fears are revealing worthwhile insights.
A pattern discovered to be true of how we handle one fear may manifest in how we handle other fears.

To apply these ideas at a depth perhaps not as well explored as might be beneficial to humanity’s welfare, let me back through these concepts as they apply to our relationship with a Divine Being, who for simplicity’s sake I’ll call here “Generous Origin of Daylight” or GOD for short.

Concept 4 applies only if we fear GOD. I submit that there is abundant evidence to reasonably conclude that the majority of human beings fear GOD because we fashion a host of ways of relating to GOD that reflect our essential fear of the power we assume GOD wields. Some of us fear GOD enough to banish It from our thought system entirely and call ourselves “atheists.” Others declare ourselves to be believers in GOD and immediately construct various images of a GOD who wields power that limits our freedom in one or more ways, as if GOD does not trust us to exercise freedom responsibly without GOD’s restrictive guidance and control and we don’t trust GOD to have superior power without abusing it as most of us would do.

Believers thus set up a variety of rules, laws, dogma, doctrines, creeds, rites and rituals to codify our relationship with GOD with a degree of certainty that permits us to point out our errors and the errors of others, establish systems of punishment for each and tame GOD within the confines of these systems. These regulations also govern who may approach GOD to what degree of proximity and who may expect benefits from GOD and on what terms. We assume that GOD relates to humans on terms similar if not identical to the terms on which we relate to each other. We are especially prone to assume that GOD is a Supreme Authority Figure who relates to us as inferior beings on the same ways in which we relate to humans we deem inferior to us, including children. In essence, we assume that GOD relates to us “from on high” and wields power “top down” as we do in our social systems.

In this manner we tend to envision GOD as being external to or outside of us as other authority figures are. As we externalize GOD in our thinking, we simultaneously internalize our fear of GOD as a permanent feature of our mental orientation or mindset (set of attitudes and beliefs). We each establish our individualized fear of GOD as a core element of our personal mindset and join together in societies that fear GOD as one our basic shared perspectives (common ground) about which we may all agree. Each of us may characterize GOD as having different features and qualities but the vast majority of us agree that GOD is to be feared above all else.

The term “theophobia” means “fear of GOD.” Internalized theophobia, like internalized homophobia, runs rampant throughout the human race, especially in the modern world where we have so many reasons to believe we’ve massively offended GOD by our ignorance and arrogance in exploiting, misappropriating and abusing the Daylight that originates from GOD. Daylight was GOD’s original gift to us as the condition in which our fear of the dark could be set aside and we might venture forth to explore the world. GOD so loved us that It sent forth Daylight to banish the dark. And yet we know in our hearts how poorly we have received and made use of this gift. Instead of honoring GOD with our use of Daylight, we squander it on trivial pursuits unworthy of GOD. In our minds, our cycles of Daylight-squandering are ever before us as proof we must fear GOD’s wrath for our transgressions. In our hearts, beyond a shadow of doubt, we are convicted that we are guilty of misusing the greatest gift GOD has ever given us and deserve only retribution for our errors in its use. That GOD might have any other attitude about the matter totally escapes our imagination. It’s unthinkable that GOD would not be angry because we know how angry we would be if we were GOD and had been insulted by misuse of our most precious gift.

Concept 3 suggests that since our inquiry into the nature and origin of other fears has revealed insightful understandings about the dynamics of fear in our lives, perhaps an inquiry into our fear of GOD might reveal similar patterns in our handling of fear. For example, if we’ve discovered that our biases and prejudices about each other and about a variety of topics arise from past experiences that we had – or others who influenced our upbringing had, might it be possible that our fear of GOD as passed along generation after generation is based on past experiences that have been overgeneralized and mistakenly attributed to GOD? In this way may we have acquired individual prejudices unfavorable to GOD? Due to our internalized theophobia may we be unwilling to give GOD a fair chance to reveal Its true nature to us personally and prefer to remain sequestered from GOD by conforming to the biases and prejudices of our group of choice? Might our fear of social disapproval inhibit our open exploration of GOD’s nature and how GOD might not be the same as the image of GOD we’ve been taught as we grew up? Might we be hiding from GOD in the dark shadows of such images instead of making full use of Its gift of Daylight to encounter, evaluate and welcome GOD fully? Does our fear of strangers parallel our fear of GOD?

Concept 2 suggests that the Daylight GOD gave us may be as needed inside of us as outside of us. It suggests that the dark image of GOD reigning over us may reflect a dark image of GOD enthroned within us. It is likely as well as understandable that our internalized theophobia colors our feelings, thoughts and attitudes about GOD and deprives both GOD and us of the fair opportunity to explore possibilities of relating to each other with decreasing fear. Is it fair to GOD or ourselves to allow fears we acquired along the way in life to limit our relationship and establish a lower quality of relationship (or no relationship) than GOD wants us to enjoy – and we might discover we also want to enjoy? Might GOD intend the gift of Daylight to be an open invitation to become better acquainted with GOD and thereby find relief from so many problems that trouble us, individually and collectively?

Concept 1 suggests that we as individuals have responsibility for how we as a collective race are experiencing life, including experiencing GOD and our relationship with GOD. As individuals re-examine our personal relationship with GOD and discover that it’s possible to live with less fear of GOD, might we as a race discover our collective fearlessness in regard to GOD? Might we want to explore what it feels like to no longer fear GOD? Might we there, in that fearless state, discover the true meaning of unconditional love? Might we there also discover the true value of the gift of Daylight and revel in its revelations as co-creators with as much generosity as GOD in sharing Daylight with each other?

My exploration of these four concepts compels me to conclude that it’s time for all of us to come out of the dark tombs of our fears and gather in the Daylight together as we allow our fears to ebb and love becomes our worldwide web.

The Blaming of the Screwed (Or Letting Sleeping Gods Lie)

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It is the nature of the ego to twist the truth into pretzels well salted to cause more pain to those already wounded. The ego produces both heroes upon whom to heap praise regardless of its unwarranted nature and scapegoats upon whom to heap blame regardless of its irrational nature. To make sure that an ego-based culture appears to be balanced, the ego assigns some members roles of heroes and other members roles of scapegoats or anti-heroes. In this way, the culture is divided between two opposing forces who play out their competing roles before audiences populated by the ego-culture’s majority of members who prefer to avoid being noticed as their best way to avoid taking the risk of being praised as a hero or critically judged and later blamed as a scapegoat.

The masses cower in fear of being singled out for the ego’s heartless judgment – to be praised or scorned – because they have noticed how routinely praise turns into scorn as heroes fall under the overwhelmingly unreasonable and unhealthy expectations placed on them by the masses. Heroes desperate to please the masses overtax themselves to perpetually warrant praise and avoid scorn. When heroes fail to live up to the expectations of the masses, the masses turn on them to convert them into scapegoats. The feeding frenzy is brutal as hero-worshippers fall upon their wounded former heroes to tear from them every shred of human dignity. From the perspective of the masses, it’s better to never ascend to the heights of public praise than to descend into the status of publicly scorned fallen hero.

Students of birth order identify the first born as predisposed to compete for the roles of heroes or standard bearers of an ego-culture’s most rewarded and idealized values – even when those values are myths honored more in the exception than in the rule. Heroes are taught the value of keeping up their image to remain objects of praise as false idols regardless of the declining substance behind their image. To cultivate and maintain their images as heroes, initially first born or otherwise born, the heroes must climb over others to ascend ladders of success they identify as theirs to top in order to tower over others by comparison. Inflicting pain on their competitors is necessary to ascend most rapidly because pain causes competitors to be at least reluctant to challenge them if not crippled in capacity to challenge. Thus heroes need wounded competitors to prevail as heroes. What would be the significance of praise if it were not contrasted with scorn? All the ego’s world is colored by such comparisons between winners and losers by whatever criteria winning and losing is measured. In obedience to the ego’s rule, we heap praise upon winners, heap scorn upon losers and do all possible to distinguish one from the other! Such is the fundamental order of the ego’s culture.

Those who are born into circumstances rich with opportunities to earn praise seek to preserve the culture into which they were born. Those born into circumstances deficient in opportunities to earn praise naturally feel screwed by what seems like “fate” and suffer within the circumstances they did not cause. The injustice of such suffering is apparent and yet prevails so long as the ego’s culture remains the status quo. Changes that only change how circumstances favor one group over another group merely change how injustice is distributed and who is encouraged to become heroes most readily and who is encouraged to become scapegoats to keep the ego’s culture in balance. The ego will always demand the existence of heroes/winners and scapegoats/losers. Which members of society take up which roles is a matter of indifference to the ego so long as the clear distinction between the two is preserved. Cycles of hero-worship and scapegoat-blaming will continue until the ego’s system is entirely replaced by an alternative that is based not on fear but on love – love as defined by Love’s Divine Source.

A sure-fire way to disrupt the ego’s system is available. All we need do is to no longer allow sleeping gods to lie. Every person who survives in society by masquerading as an ego is in truth a sleeping god. While asleep every god who adopts the ego’s roles as his or her means of survival is lying. He or she is participating in twisting the truth into well-salted pretzels by twisting the truth of his or her genuine, divine nature into a false image of a human being who values social approval over authenticity and personal integrity. All of us hunger for the freedom to be and express authentically who we are as children of God. That’s what being a “god” means. So long as we remain too afraid to explore and express our authentic nature as God’s children amid the ego’s pressures to conform or be scorned, we will suffer (often in silence but suffer nevertheless). When we dare to be true to ourselves as God created us, we will cease to suffer. We will still feel pain as inflicted by those who inflict pain on others as their means of climbing ladders of social success as rewarded by the ego. But we will need no longer endure the chronic suffering of one who has betrayed himself or herself out of fear of the ego’s methods of enforcing conformity upon the masses.

Our choice is not to avoid pain. It is to embrace the pain of standing out among the ego-conformists to be neither hero or scapegoat and no longer value “winning” or “losing” on ego’s terms. The ego-enslaved will characterize us as “losers” but little do they know because they have yet to discover the relief of release from fear’s pretzeling social pressures. Being twisted by our own lies causes our own suffering. We have the choice to awaken as God’s children and rise beyond ego’s enslaving twisted definitions of happiness and success to explore, embrace and enjoy freedom to be ourselves. No longer hero, scapegoat or cowering member of the masses, we are free to envision the alternative to the ego’s fear-based culture and flock together as birds of a feather – as eagles who soar where the sky is no limit.

Let’s stop blaming the screwed for the ills of our society or holding heroes accountable for “fixing” those ills we are helping to produce and maintain. Let’s instead no longer be sleeping gods and awaken to our true nature as God’s children. Let’s move forward together as co-creators of a culture rooted in the soil of God’s unconditional love for all humanity, rising up relentlessly beyond ego’s hard-heartedness and branching out in all directions to welcome all who would take up our common cause – the call of our hearts to end the interpersonal violence and planetary exploitation that distresses us all. No matter how much praise we offer to heap, no hero can do for us what we must do for ourselves. No matter how much scorn we offer to heap, no scapegoat can be blamed for not substituting for the responsibilities only we have the power to carry as we contribute to our society’s freedom from fear.

Overcoming Pampered Class Short-sightedness

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In the United States and many of the developed and developing nations, we are creating a worldwide culture that aims as its measure of success to provide ever-expanding creature comforts and conveniences to as many of its members as it can or bust. And bust it may because the unspoken way of achieving this goal requires that it do so without including everyone in the pampering. We seek to balloon the pampered class as large as we can make it but recognize only vaguely that our way of doing so cannot include everyone. It is only our way of doing so that prevents us from succeeding in including everyone.

The flaw in our plan is the incentive aspect of our way of achieving a pampered class. We mistakenly seek to pamper as many of us as we can by measuring all achievements by the money we have to spend to acquire pampering and by setting up comparative scales of pampering that indulge our ego’s tendency to seek to have more than others to prove our greater self-worth. Our egos would have us prove our greater self-worth by climbing higher on ladders of our preferred ways of self-pampering. So long as we indulge our egos’ envy, greed and lust for comparatively “more and more without end,” our way of pampering ourselves will not achieve universal pampering because our egos need to have disparities to prove their success in achieving comparatively more than others have achieved. Our standards of comparison may differ among our egos but they invariably translate into the relative cost of each achievement in greater pampering. The incentive to participate in this competitive way of life translates into increasing the money that flows to us so that we can spend more of it to increase our self-pampering – and to thereby mistakenly try to prove our self-worth, when the very system of incentives implies that we have little natural self-worth.

We establish incentive plans because the ego initially comes into being to cover up our mistaken sense of low self-worth and by circuitous rationalization convinces us that no one will participate as a productive member of society without being essentially bribed to do so. We think so little of ourselves (and by projection of others) that we believe we’ll all slack off and indulge in sloth if we were to receive a share of pampering without tying that share to earning it. The possibility of everyone’s being willing to share in both the work and the rewards simply because it’s our nature to want to be productive, responsible members of our families and communities and to celebrate life together escapes most people. It seems too idealistic. And given how our society has been functioning on the ego’s basis for many generations, our skepticism seems firmly supported by evidence. When we see how many people initially act once incentives to produce are reduced or removed, we point to their behaviors as “proof” that sloth is a part of human nature and will take over in the absence of an incentive program sufficient to overcome the predictable entropy of sloth. We refuse to recognize as fact that the very incentive programs we insist on putting in place themselves cause the reaction of lower productivity when incentives seem inadequate or are removed entirely. We are trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy by the very social training by which we establish the social norm of productivity tied to economic incentives.

Can we ever transition to a culture in which productivity is entirely voluntary and pampering shared with at least less regard and perhaps with no regard for levels of productivity? Might this idea be worth trying experimentally? I suggest that some people may not be socially oriented to be included in this experiment at the outset due to their prior social programming that has caused them to feel extremely low self-worth. But some people who have a sense of their value as human beings regardless of how much they may be compensated for their productivity could band together to co-create a subculture in which the group’s collective productivity is shared among the members of the group equitably without regard to any one individual’s measure of productivity. I suggest that such an alternative subculture would be by its nature non-competitive, non-comparative and egalitarian in its values. It would be based on trust in the natural tendency of people to want to maximize the development of their gifts and talents and to invest them in ways beneficial to the greatest good of the greatest number.

Suppose the “incentive” for participating in this alternative subculture were defined not in terms of disparities in pampering (economic power, social status, etc.) but in generously and equitably available, expansive opportunities for self-development and expressions of creativity and curiosity lightly monitored by a nurturing leadership who is concerned about the development of every member of the subculture and who arranges for resources to be available to encourage self-development. Might some people realize that this “incentive” appeals to their deepest inner natures (their very souls) and allows for and encourages the most enriching lives possible? Infinite opportunities to participate as a responsible member of a self-nurturing culture might draw together the most creative, socially responsible people to collectively “make it happen.” That it has not yet happened does not mean that it cannot be created today. Perhaps the time has come for this experiment to be explored and placed in motion by those drawn to its promise to defuse the ego’s tendency to progressively escalate problems out of control and cause all things of any significant value to humans to be disparaged as irrelevant and subordinated to the ego’s relentless pursuit of power, wealth and pampering as indications of its ascension up ladders of success by which monetarily incentivized economies operate.

In essence, I’m wondering out loud whether the time has come to recognize the error multiple generations have committed in worshipping money as their cultural god and putting their trust not in each other’s responsible, trustworthy nature but instead replacing trust with bribery that insults our true nature and corrupts the very fabric of our society. What if the very system by which we currently expect to achieve success as measured by money’s power to purchase pampering has itself corrupted many of us into being less willing to act responsibly for the good of the whole when opportunities to do so are available? What if the idealism older folks once held dear when we were younger were to resurrect itself to throw off the chains of economic incentives and guide us forward not into some form of godless communism as the only possible alternative to godless capitalism but into a third, now largely invisible alternative that will become visible as it is co-created by those who dare to believe in its vision for humanity’s long-range benefit? What if the faded idealism of members of older generations were revived and joined forces with the idealism of members of the younger generations to create the most powerful blend of idealism known on Earth? What if multi-generational idealism took root, connected with and drew strength from the Eternal Optimist and bore fruit for the healing of the nations?

Out-Sourcing Our Responsibilities, Privileges and Power

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When Paul wrote his letter preserved in the Bible as the book of Romans, the pattern of the world was in an early stage of the pattern typical of all addictive lifestyles. The Roman Empire dominated his social environment with its militarily imposed solutions. Merchants thrived only if they catered to the politicians of their day who controlled the military. The common folk survived only if they submitted to the authority of the those higher up in the hierarchy of a class-conscious society. That pattern of so-called civilization reflected the addictive qualities of lust for power and pleasure, greed, gluttony, sloth, envy, vanity and anger. The seven “deadly symptoms of addiction” were at work in their early stages of destruction of humanity’s destiny.

Paul wrote then “Be not conformed to the pattern of this world but be transformed by a renewal of your mind.” (Romans 12:2) And he urged this wisdom upon his audience because that was the way to “prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” In short, the pattern of his cultural context failed to reflect the will of God as Jesus manifested it. Paul saw the contrast between the Rome-dominated culture in which he lived and the way Jesus urges us to live. Today the contrast has become many times starker because our current culture has advanced beyond an early stage of addictive living into a very advanced stage. (All addictions are progressive diseases. That is their primary pattern. That is the kind of “progress” we’ve made over the centuries since Paul wrote his letter.)

Failing to heed Paul’s wisdom, we now stumble all over ourselves in relentless pursuit of universal irresponsibility as we head for the bottom like alcoholics, after spiraling downward over the centuries into a culture awash with addictions so blatant that we market many of them heedlessly as socially desirable qualities of life — while we bitterly complain about others as spouses of alcoholics complain about their spouses’ habits and try to control their addictions. Even the institution that people set up to supposedly reveal the truth about God that Jesus’ life made known has succumbed to the temptations of the addictive lifestyle called “co-dependency” or “enabling” to become primarily a version of society’s social networking for fun, comfort, convenience and profit. Maximizing social approval and amassing wealth and power through popularity has consumed our dignity as well as our integrity. We’ve become more the bride of an addiction-addled Frankenstein than the Bride of Christ.

We who populate the Church that is based on the one foundation of Jesus Christ our Lord fail miserably to honor Jesus when social pressures to conform to the pattern of this world press hard upon us. Like those in Paul’s day, we prefer to conform to get along rather than be transformed at the risk that we might no longer be welcomed to belong. To belong within the profit-driven, convenience-supporting culture of our day tempts us too much. We prefer to give lip-service to Jesus’ teachings rather than risk standing out as an expression of God’s unconditional love, mercy and grace wherever such love, mercy and grace is needed. We avoid the social lepers of our day rather than walk among them to welcome them into the Kingdom of God’s grace. And when we do invite them in, we mistakenly equate God’s righteousness with the prevailing norms of our society and help the outcast to conform as we have to the pattern of this world. We have not allowed it to sink it that that conforming to the social norms is not a high ideal, clearly not an ideal worthy of calling it Jesus’ best to which he calls us.

Instead of following Jesus into the trenches to comfort, heal and bless those to whom he ministers, we out-source our responsibilities to others. We set up and fund governmental and nonprofit agencies to care for the sick, the lame, the outcast and the socially undesirable rather than care for them ourselves directly within our lifestyles. We insulate our lifestyles from such misery and prevent the flow of God’s healing power from reaching them as adequately as it reached the woman with an issue of blood who reached out to dare to touch the hem of Jesus’ cloak. We fail to walk among the disabled members of our society as Peter and John did so that we might meet them in the city gates and offer them Christ’s amazing power that Jesus generously makes available through us when we gather two or more in the name and nature of the Christ.

By out-sourcing our responsibilities as Jesus’ followers, we attempt to out-source our privileges and power too. The power to heal does not flow when government officials and employees of nonprofits gather together as paid servants and pursuers of personal income, power and glory. That is not the opportunity for which Jesus waits patiently to empower his followers. He waits for his faithful followers to actively engage in ministry to the least of these for no purpose other than to “prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” God wants us to demonstrate His/Her divine nature as Jesus once did while walking on the Earth in the flesh. All who place their faith in Jesus are welcome to model God’s divine power on Earth as it is in heaven. Few bother to take up God’s offer to do so. For that reason alone, many are those who fail to encounter God’s love and healing power today. So long as we refuse to hold ourselves accountable to God for the use of our life, energy, time and resources, we are conforming to the pattern of this addiction-driven world. And we are failing to live according to our privileges and power as we shirk our duties.

When Jesus lived on Earth, he walked in his power and privileges as an expression of the responsibilities God wants to take for His/Her creation. Jesus honored all of humanity and all of Nature throughout his life because he knew his oneness with God, us and Nature. We can do the same because he shows us how and expresses himself as the Christ through each of us who surrender our lives to that same purpose. We cannot conform to this world’s patterns of hard-heartedness and still demonstrate the will of God to share Himself/Herself with all of us. We must serve a risen savior who is in the world today. As this hymn reminds us, we know he lives because he lives within our tender hearts: I Serve a Risen Savior.

To this mission of mercy and power we are all called. Let’s band together to heed this call so radically that others will notice as we dare to be that nonconformist — even controversial among the members of the congregations who claim Jesus as Savior and Lord. It is time to claim him as Lord, the one who rules our lives because we allow him to rule within our hearts and minds without holding anything of our lives back from his dominion. Either a worldly realm or a heavenly realm holds sway in our lives. As it has been said before, we cannot serve two masters. Remaining divided in our allegiance will perpetuate our decline as addicts and co-dependents of addicts. It matters not the details of the “type” of addictions to which we succumb. The pattern of all is the same. We must no longer conform to it if we are to serve according to our responsibilities, privileges and power.

R.I.P. – God is the Lap of Luxury

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How much better off everyone would be if we were each to accept the gift of intimacy that God offers all of us! This gift is a crown of purest golden love bejeweled with many precious gems of wisdom. It adorns both our minds and our hearts to interconnect us within ourselves and with each other wholeheartedly in peace, hope and joy. As children of the Reigning Monarch who Creates Universes, while we accept this royal gift as our natural inheritance, we need not die to receive it. Not does it do anyone good to try to kill God to usurp the throne of grace and take it from Him/Her. We need only be willing to thrive beyond our wildest hopes and dreams, coming fully alive to R.I.P. with God while yet experiencing and expressing life through our bodies and for all Eternity beyond such physical limitations once our bodies cease to function. No one will succeed to God’s throne and replace Him/Her. Yet everyone can succeed in joining God within the realm of grace set before us as a gift for everyone to share.

No amount of wealth can supply the luxury that personal intimacy or oneness with God supplies. That’s the irony that those who seek worldly wealth fail to admit is true. Whether you seek it for yourself or envy it when others have it, worldly wealth in any form – money, power, social status or any other – at best covers up the insecurities that come naturally from worrying about how God looks at one’s life. At worst the endless cycles of pursuit, envy and worry associated with making worldly wealth one’s primary life-goal and measure of success aggravate the internal turmoil one experiences when an intimate relationship with God seems not available to be enjoyed at our leisure.

The gift of intimacy with God is available to everyone freely — without cost of any kind. Most people find that reality too unbelievable to grasp or act upon. We are raised to believe that everything costs something and that nothing worth having is free. And it’s often true that possessing something to the exclusion of others comes with its costs. Carving out a piece of the pie for ourselves to enjoy as our personal dominion costs whatever we have to trade or give up to carve, possess and retain it. So, how could a personal, intimate relationship with God not also cost whatever we have to trade or give up to enjoy it? The best bargains in life still have trade-offs and costs, so we believe. We believe it until we experience life differently from the way we’ve been taught to expect life to be. Only by strange experiences beyond our expectations and immediate comprehension can we learn that our expectations have been holding us back from the best life and God have to offer.

Many people postpone resolving their issues with God until as late in life as they can. They assume that resolving their issues with God early will deprive them of the pleasures and other satisfying qualities of life they crave. They crave to carve a huge slice of the pie, perhaps a larger slice than anyone else has ever carved or perhaps a modest slice compared with others. Craving to carve consumes most of us to one degree or another. We measure our success and happiness by the slice of life we can call “ours.” We may even prefer to call it “mine” if we have no one with whom to share it whom we trust enough to share it without taking it from us.

The key to revisiting our beliefs about carving and the necessity of constantly craving more rests in realizing that we are making assumptions about life that are not necessarily true. For example, we are assuming that sharing will result in loss because others will take advantage of our generous nature and run off with the wealth we crave to call our own and keep control over. But, suppose that the type of wealth that truly allows us to R.I.P. with God cannot be taken from us nor ever run out no matter how widely or wildly we share it?

Suppose that intimacy with God is available to me without making it less available to you or to anyone else? Does it not make sense that an eternal, infinite God is expansive enough to share the Divine Heart of Love with you, me and everyone without anyone having less than anyone could possibly crave? How huge a slice of God might you want to taste in order to prove to yourself that God is huge enough to satisfy you while satisfying everyone else too?

Think of it this way: How much water do you imagine dipping out of the Pacific Ocean to have all the water you’d ever need or want? Assuming you did not want to claim a monopoly on the ocean and sell it to others for your own personal profit, how much of the ocean’s water do you actually need or want to possess at any one time? Do you imagine having to hoard your desired portion and keep it safe from others or do you realize that there’s no lack of water in the ocean that requires you to hoard it? Any water you dip out and use will find its way back into the ocean through the Earth’s never-ending hydrological cycles. It will return to the ocean for you or anyone else to dip out again later if you want or need it. The same is true about God’s love and all other aspects of Divine Nature. The supply of God is more than oceanic. And the replenishing cycle of Divine Love is more reliable than our planet’s hydrological system. God is not finite as the Pacific Ocean is. God is infinite. God is a reliable resource to draw upon for all of our life. Why not rest in peace with God now instead of postponing your rest while you spend decades of your life scrambling after slices of pie in various forms that matter so little in eternity – and are defined only in illusory terms anyway?

When I say “in eternity,” I mean “in your heart.” Your heart is inseparably linked with God for all time and beyond time. When you learned according to the ego’s rules to deny your emotions and numb or harden your heart to the world around you, your motive was to protect yourself from pain. Despite this worthy motive, an unforeseen side effect took place: you taught yourself to forget your naturally restorative intimacy with God within your heart. You do not need protection when the powerful energy of divine restoration is available to you. Divine intimacy and all it offers are still there in your heart, waiting for you to resume any time you decide to seek God’s presence within you. God is waiting patiently for your return home to your heart’s dominion. God is waiting for you to make room in your awareness for what has been missing from your awareness – your heart and all that your heart deeply desires.

Do you suffer a loss when you resume awareness of your heart? Not in truth. But for a time it may seem like you’ve lost the protective schemes you set up to protect yourself from awareness of your heartaches and your heart’s not-yet-met desires. In returning to intimacy with God by turning inward within your heart to connect again with God where God waits, you are making the choice to unlearn all the lessons of ego-protection that you so diligently learned under the ego-mind’s dominion of fear. The ego even convinced you to fear God and expect only punishment and pain from God on account of shutting Him/Her off from your awareness and from your life. You control the tap for shutting off or turning on your God-intimacy-awareness. The free will that God created you to enjoy remains yours. For a time you’ve been exercising your free will to ignore God’s call to return to intimacy with Him/Her. And yet in so doing you’ve ironically lost your sense of freedom. Why? Because we can enjoy being truly free only if we enjoy our freedom within our intimacy with God and make our intimacy with God a primary focus of our attention and our commitment within our free life.

Is it time to reconsider where you’ve allowed the primary focus of your attention and commitment to aim? Are you willing this season to begin an experiment in R.I.P. with God before you are on your death bed? I encourage you to run the experiment throughout 2017 to see what difference it makes in your peaceful enjoyment of life. Wisdom can be yours to exercise and invest as you choose. All you need do is stop (meditate), look within (contemplate) and listen to (commune with) your heart. Your heart is well-stocked with wisdom to guide you on your adventure in intimacy with God. Within that divine intimacy awaits all the love you’ve ever craved to experience and share. There’s no end to the wealth that is the most precious in the universe. It is yours, mine, his, hers, ours and theirs merely for the allowing and receiving.

Let’s all rest in love’s lap of divine luxury this season and for the rest of our lives – here on Earth and afterwards. Prove to yourself that there is life after death of your body by experiencing it fully while yet experiencing your body too. Fully physical, fully divine!

Pointedly Evolving or Pointlessly Revolving Spirituality?

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Politicians refer to the “rubber chicken circuit” as shorthand for going around shaking hands and eating meals with an array of their constituents at various local gatherings. That’s an ego’s way of cultivating popularity and votes while avoiding making tough commitments that might cause controversy and lose approval and votes for the politician. Although not openly announced, politicians’ unspoken mantras are “Stick to topics the are safely trivial or trendy and popular.” “Avoid dealing meaningfully with anything that is controversial.” “Get elected or re-elected to office at whatever cost.” Based on the rubber chicken circuit, as much as possible politicians remain amiably bland and elastic much like the chicken they learn to stomach and smile over during their meals with constituents. Nothing really changes. Constituents cease expecting anything to change. Ah, now there’s a sustainable comfort zone so long as the chickens don’t come home to roost too often and cause constituents to wonder how to hold their elected officials accountable for the mess in the barnyard.

As spiritually cloaked politicians seeking favor with audiences who will elect them “Pope” of their gathering and donate money to pay the bills, popular speakers and teachers of popular spiritual constituencies travel around similar circuits to maintain their amicably bland, noncontroversial positions as leaders whom their constituents are willing to follow and keep in office. These “leaders” make sure not to expect “too much” of their constituents and carefully espouse ideas and address topics that allow their constituents and themselves to remain on the circuit as chicken-hearted practitioners of whatever path of faith they identify as theirs. That’s the ego’s way of co-opting spiritual principles as tools for gathering people together in social groups for mutual admiration and self-congratulatory celebrations. The ego is slick. It does not have principles that require it to honor the actual substance of spiritual principles and practices. Its solitary principle is self-preservation. All other supposedly sacred principles may be sacrificed on the altar of ego-preservation. Egos within the leader and constituents silently conspire to lead everyone on circuits of different configurations that have one thing in common, namely that they always wind up back at the same point at which they started. And they manage to dress up that starting point as a new destination and celebrate arriving there. It’s so safe – for the ego but not for the community supposedly served by the leader.

Here’s a web site illustrating how widely varied racetrack-like circular thinking can be while the vast majority loop back to the starting point:

https://www.pinterest.com/explore/race-tracks/

Spiritual evolution does not happen on any circuit that makes continuous revolutions around the same track. If a supposed leader’s role is merely to appear to be ahead of the pack on every lap of the track and keep the pack entertained enough not to notice how repetitive their experiences actually are, then most leaders of most spiritual communities are excelling in their roles. The ego would like us to believe that they are “doing their best” to lead. The truth is that they are doing ego’s best to covertly mislead. To avoid actually allowing us to experience spiritual evolution, the ego’s goal is to keep us spinning our wheels around the same track or switching to alternate tracks as we explore a variety of spiritual paths that distinguish themselves in their details but all race around some form of a closed circuit. No matter how convoluted the loop, it’s still a closed loop. True spiritual evolution progresses along an open path. That’s scary to the ego. Uncharted territory? Rough patches? Going off track may happen? Unexpected developments that require us to use our spiritual principles under extremely taxing conditions so as to enhance and deepen our understanding of our principles through practice? “Heaven forbid!” cries out the ego. But actually such an open path of ascension through unexpected rough patches and off-track exploring is our way to heaven at heaven’s bidding. Not “Heaven forbid” but “Heaven does bid!”

I write this blog simply to bring this matter to your attention. Are you following a leader around a closed loop that leads back to the point you began? It might take a few years to wind back around and there may be window dressing to cloak the old as if it’s new, but what’s really going on? When spiritual leaders rotate from audience to audience are they conspiring to hide the fact that none of their audiences are actually making progress? Dare to ask yourself. Your heart will tell you. Listen closely and watch what your wise heart brings to your attention. Ask for clarity and your experiences will reveal it to you.

Is your organization’s supposed spiritual leadership actually a closed shop of politicians carefully screening their inner machinations from your view? How willing are the leaders to hear your pointed, probing questions and respond with honest disclosures of both the facts and the process by which they lead? Are the leaders typically talking to you about the latest books they’ve read? Are they simply appearing to stay ahead of you by reading the latest teachings of other ego-encircled, ego-circling authors so that you are relieved of the responsibility for finding time to read those books and think about them for yourself? Do you notice any patterns in the process? Is it convenient for you to pay someone else to do your homework for you and keep you feeling smugly safe within the cocoon of your existence rather than to shake up your comfort and stir you to explore on your own?

Watch out for patterns of convenience and complacency. Leaders who allow you to pay their salaries so that you don’t have to do the homework required to make your own spiritual progress are hoodwinking you. Ask to have the blinders taken off and see what’s going on for real. A rubber chicken life is not worth living. In the end, you’ll feel cheated because you allowed it to happen to you. You’re only cheating yourself by being unwilling to ask tough questions and find out how your leaders respond. Don’t chicken out now or you’ll regret it later. Neither a rubber nor a plastic life is anything but ultimately a disappointing exercise in futility. Keep your heart open and see what’s there to be seen. It’s not so much about having eyes in the back of your head as having the sense to listen to your intuition and see with your heart too. Your heart holds a vision for the life you earnestly desire to live. Are you letting that vision lead you or are you perishing without a vision simply because you won’t turn into your heart? Remaining out of touch with your heart and blind to the grander vision is a choice. It’s your choice, a choice you have both the power and the responsibility to make moment by moment.

We Brought the War Home to Us

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While I was in college and exiting into the work place, the Vietnam War was still actively causing US citizens to take a stand for or against war in general or for or against that particular war. It hit home for many of us because of the draft. We could not avoid struggling to make up our minds whether or not we agreed with the use of weapons to impose our will on other people and, more intimately, whether or not we’d kill anyone to end a difference of viewpoints of any kind. Could I see myself learning to use weapons in order to kill someone? That issue remained a struggle for me. I did not resolve it in my own personal life until many years after the Vietnam War was over.

Today I’m less concerned about death than I used to be because my experiences with God reassure me that there is definitely life beyond the death of our bodies and that no one is going to hell after his or her body ceases to function. It’s amazing how knowing those simple facts to be true has clarified in my mind whether or not I’d use a weapon to settle a dispute or protect myself from harm. Since I no longer believe in settling disputes by any means of violence, there’s no question in my mind that I’d not use a weapon to protect myself. I’m simply willing to go to be with God free of my body’s limitations under whatever circumstances may come along to free me from my body.

Meanwhile, as I was gradually increasing my awareness of God’s reality and my opportunity to relate intimately with God’s reality while yet in the body as well as beyond, I watched us bring the Vietnam War’s issue about taking another person’s life home to us. It’s no longer a question of whether or not we’ll kill or harm another person who is one of “them” beyond the US borders. It’s become a question of whether or not we’ll kill or harm another person here at home to settle a dispute “once and for all” or do so to revenge a wrong we believe has happened that matters enough to us to use violence in anger to redress it. The violence we used to export we have domesticated. It’s ironic that at the same time we’ve out-sourced so many life-sustaining jobs to places beyond our borders we’ve managed to in-source use of weapons as a more and more acceptable life-terminating solution. Is there some sort of correlation? Has the growing hopelessness of finding the means to support ourselves and our families increased our willingness to kill someone we may be able to blame for our loss of self-sufficiency and accompanying sense of dignity and self-worth? Has our gradually declining sense of self-worth caused us to view life in general as less valuable and assume that everyone’s life has little worth?

I’m not in a position to answer all aspects of the questions that were commonly on many people’s minds during the Vietnam War – nor those commonly on many of our minds today. I still don’t know what I’d do if I were armed and had the choice to protect a loved one or even a stranger from harm by using my weapon. I’d hope that I would be well-trained in the use of my weapon and in taking full responsibility for exercising wisdom and calm reason in deciding whether or not to use it under any circumstance that confronted me. I could make conscious decisions to undergo such training to the fullest extent possible and remain current in my training. But what I’d do after that remains unknown to me. How would adrenaline and other by-products of fear affect my decision-making and performance? Would I want to be trained so at least I had the additional option of appropriately using (or not using) a weapon?

Unresolved. By default I’m not trained or likely to ever be trained. So, unarmed I continue to be. After being so grateful for having not been in combat at any time in my life, I’m reluctant to participate in domestic combat now. My saying that does not denigrate those who have made an alternative choice to become well trained in the use of weapons under the terms specified by the law and according to wisdom and reason. Until we’ve resolved the issue of violence in our society at large, we need to carefully consider how widely available weapons are and in whose hands we allow them to come. Continuing to escalate violence as an option while arming ourselves with increasingly more powerful weapons seems unwise to me when we seem to have so little control over the emotional and mental state of those who access those weapons and what their motives to use them may be.

For now I remain committed to investing all of my time and energy in promoting ways to reduce violence and reduce motives for using violence to settle disputes or seek revenge. It seems to me that to the extent that we can reduce tendencies towards violence in our society and truly promote domestic tranquility intentionally by A) nurturing emotional and mental health for all of us and B) encouraging us all to be forgiving rather than vengeful, the issue of weapons and their use will fade in significance. We simply would not need to bring any kind of warfare home to us anymore because we would have ended the emotional warfare that rages within so many of us in our private inner battles and spills out as domestic violence in our homes, onto our streets and into our schools, businesses and other gathering places. Our emotional battles within us extend outward into acts of violence. It’s time to learn how to nurture lasting inner peace and allow our peace to extend outward instead.

United in Opposition is Not United

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Current dynamics at work in US politics highlight the false idea that our nation will ever be truly the “United States” while the call to unify is based on opposition to some identified opponent, here or abroad. Check out the pattern prevalent in US history. You will see example after example of groups of various descriptions supposedly uniting in opposition to the identified opponent of their day only to have their “unity” disintegrate once the occasion for opposition ends. Today we see this pattern at work in our presidential election as two main parties call for unity within themselves by clarifying and rally around their opposition to the “other” party. Within our republican form of government where one vote more than 50% wins all the marbles, this practice works temporarily to put some people temporarily in power but is not a sustainable practice for the welfare of the nation or the world we so heavily impact.

We have become participants in this pattern as if it is the only option available. The media hypes this pattern in order to gain market share and profit from the controversies it helps stir up by sensationalizing them moment by moment as entertainment. Are we truly entertained by watching our nation cycle through this pattern of futility decade after decade? Do we truly want to elect and empower men and women to lead us around and around in this pattern without hope for any alternative of true, universal, national unity? Where might we find the common ground for sustainable unity not based temporarily on identifying an enemy abroad or at home?

We will find that common ground buried beneath the rumble of painful emotions we harbor in our hearts. We harbor them out of ignorance. We neither know how to release these painful emotions and the memories seared into our brains by pain or to establish the noncyclical stability of peace we’d prefer “if only.” But we can overcome our ignorance if we truly want to. We can learn what we need to learn. It is not beyond our capacity to learn. It’s actually child’s play, more natural to children than to adults but still within the capacity of adults to relearn. Adults do struggle with issues and responsibilities by which children are not typically burdened, although many children are bearing such burdens these days in earlier and earlier years. In failing to release our emotional pain in caring, healthy ways so as to discover how to enjoy sustainable peace (domestic tranquility instead of domestic violence in all its forms), we are dumping our buried pain on children and expecting them not to be harmed by being dumped upon.

Buried pain, like harmful toxic waste, leeches from the dumps where we think we safely bury it to contaminate the waters of life within which we expect our children and ourselves to swim and find clean water to drink and bathe in. Our buried pain poisons our lives and robs us of the most enriching qualities of life we’d otherwise enjoy. We must cease to use our hearts as waste dumps for toxic emotions. To cease to participate in this pattern, we must learn to grieve through our pain and find peace again beyond it. In our present state, our society allows no one to avoid experiencing pain. Thus, we all must learn to release pain as a necessary life skill. To fail to master this skill means to guarantee that the pain will pass along to the next generation for them to deal with.

We adults must stand up for protecting our children from the pain we’ve not yet processed, stand up as adults before us likely did not do for us. In some period of our history, the cycle of pain must stop. Our current generations of adults can be that time. The cycle can wind down and be replaced with healthier conditions if we are willing to participate fully in those conditions. It’s up to us to have the courage, compassion, commitment, creativity and curiosity to discover again how to cooperate with each other in unity about this process. It is a process that requires no opponents and instead welcomes all to participate. By definition, grief is universal to us all. We can stand together not in opposition to pain but in unified commitment to learning how to release pain in all its forms and reasons for existing.

Pain need not be as prevalent as it is. It need not be endured forever as we’ve been taught to believe. We can learn to stop perpetuating it. To release our personal pain one person at a time releases the nation from pain. Let’s help each other enter into a process of grieving through the lifetime of pain we’ve endured as dumping grounds for other people’s pain and unite in peace beyond our pain. Peace will not come immediately because the process of grief must allow time to identify, express and share our buried pain for healing and release to happen. But our commitment to the process of grieving is enough to ensure peace will come in time.

Peace is actually our natural state of being. It is the tender condition that exists within our hearts but is now buried beneath the rumble of the patterns of opposition we’ve endured. We have the power within us to seek no longer to engage in artificial reasons to perpetuate our pain and instead to free ourselves of the rumble and return to our natural state of peace and goodwill among all peoples – of every age, gender, station in life and other demographic parameter by which we measure ourselves. Let’s now measure ourselves as peacemakers and peace-sustainers instead of as participants in the internal warfare to which politics currently calls us under the mistaken notion that that’s the only way. There is another way. It leads to the end of suffering for us all. Might not that outcome motivate us all to explore this possibility?