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The Highest Privileged Class

I was born with matching skin into a white, middle class family with adequate resources to provide its seven children with shelter, nutrition, clothing, healthcare and the rest of the necessities of life on modest terms. The instability of my family’s home as we moved around to follow my father’s advancing career opportunities did not deprive us of the education that later opened doors to college options if we wanted them. Our home routines emphasized education because both of my parents were college-educated, as were my grandparents before them. Education was not our pathway out of any ghetto. It offered continued upward mobility as measured by social status, finances and clout.

We never lived in a ghetto although we also never lived in prosperous conditions until my youngest siblings entered school full-time so that my mother could go to work as an elementary school art teacher and add a second income to the family’s resources. Out of the house at that point, I still could come home to visit the increasingly comfortable, middle class household my younger siblings enjoyed. As part of a childhood tradition of passing along hand-me-downs, I started each school year wearing shirts that my older brother outgrew plus two new shirts I was permitted to select for myself. Also handed down to me each school year from generation to generation were the more fundamental traditions of parental stability and educational opportunities that opened doors not as readily opened to others even of my race who may have lacked such multi-generational support for their natural developmental progress.

Experiences I had as a volunteer while in college and later experiences I had as an adult opened my eyes to the more limited opportunities of children of other races, economic classes and little or no empowering traditions of parental stability and education. Especially limited were opportunities available to those born into poorer families or not supported by two educated parents who negotiated their way through life as a couple rather than allow their marriage to flounder in the seas of an angry divorce. My experiences with dysfunctional family dynamics were mild compared with those of many who struggle to grow up in this “land of opportunity.” I was not only living in the “land of doors that opened” more readily to people of my gender and race. I was also living in that land while being prepared by my family to advance through those doors as a welcomed arrival within whom those on the inside of such fields of opportunity felt comfortable. In short, I was well trained to conform, keep my alternative thoughts to myself and appear to bow to authority.

At first, I did not realize but gradually became aware that my social training as a child groomed me to be a member of the privileged class that measures its privileges by money, social approval and power to take dominion of whatever territory appeals to its members. I was an unwitting heir apparent within the gender, race and class who had arrived on this continent centuries earlier to claim it for themselves regardless of any pre-existing occupants and explore and exploit its resources as if they were entitled to use any and all of them to feather their own nests without regard to the impact of their greedy exploitation upon anyone else or the future of the continent. Those were hand-me-down attitudes of entitlement that eventually I found did not fit me like a shirt I wanted to wear. The fabric of those traditions chaffed my soul and burdened my heart. The shirts others offered to me as hand-me-downs when I was an adult were too small for me and not my style.

The privileged class in which I found myself entitled to membership was this continent’s original entitlement class. Its traditions were rooted in assumptions of entitlement. The more socially aggressive among the first arrivals either served as agents of the aristocracies of Europe or claimed to seek their own fortune independent of the dominion of such aristocracies in order to establish an alternate aristocracy. Wars were fought for independence from European aristocracies and for rights of ownership of people and things not previously subjected to ownership while continental-style aristocracies emerged upon this continent within the new culture. The culture turned out to be not new but instead a rehash of the old culture relabeled and sometimes disguised behind a thin veneer of democratic principles and necessarily therefore covert in its nature. The Europeans on the continent of North America claimed it for themselves as minor bullies when they overthrew the dominion of foreign bullies posing as European monarchs and then proceeded to bully each other into accommodating each of them.

For reasons of my own, I had no natural inclination to be a crown prince rubbing shoulders with the aristocratic bullies I found within the privileged class of white, educated, upwardly mobile, financially promising males into which I was so readily welcome as if I were one of them. Within that class I was a misfit. Eventually I failed to adequately disguise my misfit orientation and found myself less and less welcome. My skin color, education and other matching criteria could not save me. I became an anathema to those who preferred to exploit their privileges and climb higher over the backs of others. For many years I was confused about where I belonged socially. If not these, then who were my people?

As my mind gained clarity about who my people are, I became aware that there is class of “highest privilege” to which all of us have the power to belong and within which all are welcome. This is the class beyond subclasses defined on ego’s terms as superior or inferior to one another depending upon the criteria selected in each cyclical assessment. Beyond the ego’s constant campaign to separate humanity into variously appealing, variously socially approved and variously designated subcategories, there is a united, all-inclusive class with access to the most rewarding experience available to humankind. Its access to this rewarding experience is only exclusive to the extent that the class is all-inclusive.

One has to join this uppermost class voluntarily to encounter the experience of this highest possible reward but anyone and everyone can join. No one is excluded who volunteers to join and does the one thing necessary to be included with full membership privileges. That one thing is to shed his or her ego and step beyond the ego’s divisive, inherently conflict-perpetuating perspective to see the world through an ego-free lens as a universally unified and symbiotic experience for all forms of life.

Humility is the process needed to shed the ego. Any who will humble himself or herself, give up his or her illusory and meaningless privileges as an ego and seek his or her true identity beyond the ego is welcome to join in the experience of unconditional love that flows freely and abundantly within this class. It is a highest class act and attitude to join. Humility is not a step down into the basement of life, as some mistake it to be. In fact it is the stairway to heaven on Earth. Pride and prejudice do not cause a person to ascend but rather to descend in privileges as measured by a person’s decreasing or increasing quality of experiences of love.

At love’s heights it is authenticity, integrity and humility that matter most — for all of every age, gender, gender orientation, sexual orientation, social status, marital status, financial status, race, nationality and creed. Love is truly all we need and ego has no capacity to deliver it. Just as no electrical energy passes through plastic or rubber, no energy of love transmits through the artificial identity we call the ego. Ego insulates us from love. Let’s let go of ego to know that love abounds infinitely and eternally for all of us.

The Patterns of Our Lives – Tarzan Lives in Us

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How long ago was it that a generation of young adults listened to Simon and Garfunkel sing about life’s patterns?

The night sets softly
With the hush of falling leaves,
Casting shivering shadows
On the houses through the trees,
And the light from a street lamp
Paints a pattern on my wall,
Like the pieces of a puzzle
Or a child’s uneven scrawl.

Up a narrow flight of stairs
In a narrow little room,
As I lie upon my bed
In the early evening gloom.
Impaled on my wall
My eyes can dimly see
The pattern of my life
And the puzzle that is me.

From the moment of my birth
To the instant of my death,
There are patterns I must follow
Just as I must breathe each breath.
Like a rat in a maze
The path before me lies,
And the pattern never alters
Until the rat dies.

And the pattern still remains
On the wall where darkness fell,
And it’s fitting that it should,
For in darkness I must dwell.
Like the color of my skin,
Or the day that I grow old,
My life is made of patterns
That can scarcely be controlled.

Is it necessarily true that we are trapped in the established patterns of our lives? Or is there an effective exit strategy we could adopt? Through that strategy may we come closer to solving “the puzzle that is me?”

The tale of Tarzan tells of the experiences of a man raised in the jungle by apes from boyhood and then later transported as an adult male to live among humans in a society supposedly more civilized than the apes enjoyed. The man Tarzan struggles to adapt to his new society’s rules, roles and rituals after having learned the apes’ rules, roles and rituals by heart. The apes’ 3 Rs had become engrained into his nature and controlled his thoughts and actions. They did not necessarily mesh well with how humans expected Tarzan to think and act. Tarzan’s story is about the choice to extend unchanged into adulthood patterns learned in childhood or to transform patterns and mature as necessary under changing circumstances.

As we are born into an ego’s jungle-like culture, we are raised by egos to conform to the ego’s rules, roles and rituals just as apes raised Tarzan to conform to the apes’. Both egos and apes seek to survive amid competitive pressures by other life forms. For any of us to become members of a culture other than the ego’s culture we must re-examine the rules, roles and rituals we adopted under ego’s training and change our patterns of thought and action to reflect the changed dominion under which we choose instead to live. In this case, to “change” is to intentionally nurture greater developmental maturity.

Without intending to disparage apes, I suggest that egos are a less desirable role model for human thought and action than apes are. We can do better than mimic apes or egos. To be more than the rat in a maze about which Simon and Garfunkel sang, we need to move beyond the choices that Tarzan faced to struggle with a more radical choice of altered life-orientation – a more radical process of intentionally nurtured maturation that excels beyond the ego’s orientation of arrested development. There are patterns we must follow to remain loyally conformed to the ego’s orientation as mere immature survivalist who manage to hang onto life long enough to say we lived a long life.

If it matters that we attain a quality of life more enriching than the egos’ quality and express our capacity to share such a more satisfying life sustainably together with all of us “naked apes,” the ego’s patterns of arrested development will not work. It’s time to admit that the ego requires that we dwell in darkness as if destined forever to scramble and claw blindly along confusing paths in a maze of futility — while seeking endlessly for that never-to-be-discovered, elusive cheese. With all of the ego’s patterns, the outcome ultimately is a decreasing quality of life coupled with an increasing sense of life’s being helplessly out of our control. Must we end up being the cheese that stands alone?

To emerge from darkness, we need to let go of all aspects of our egos and allow the alternative to ego’s orientation to express itself progressively into more complete maturity or wholeness in our lives. So long as we cling defensively to our egos and the ego’s patterns, in the deepening darkness of fear’s increasingly rigid grasp we will dwell. We each have within us the power to rise into the light instead. Our individual and collective choice of radically upgraded meaning, purpose and direction for our lives makes all the difference! Without intending to offend farming lifestyles or any other traditional lifestyles, we need to intentionally develop a culture for humanity that does not eventually relegate some its members to its margins as lonely chunks of cheese.

Let’s Address the Root Cause of Racism, Sexism and Other Egoisms

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Many and vocal are the voices speaking out today against institutional or systemic racism in the USA. A growing awareness emerges that the racism once thought adequately addressed by the civil rights movement decades ago still prevails beneath the surface. Racism may have gone underground and become harder to pin down because of the camouflage it has acquired, but it is still operative in the United States. Like a virulent virus it has formed new strains that resist detection and eradication.

I propose here to shed some light on why this is true. Will this light be all the light needed to illuminate this topic? Hardly likely. But perhaps it will help some see more clearly the patterns that support racism and the treatment necessary to eradicate those patterns. To keep things simple I will draw upon Martin Luther King Jr.’s insights as starting points. The overarching pattern I observe is that we’ve not taken MLK Jr.’s insights to heart and applied them rigorously as far as they would take us if we did so. Having abandoned any commitment we may have once felt to be inspired to action by MLK Jr’s words, we now reap the consequences of abandoning his principles instead of remaining faithful to them while traveling together along the full length to which they would otherwise have taken us. To eradicate institutional racism we need to apply the antidote of principles espoused by MLK Jr. until they work their miracle of transformation fully.

First, I start with this observation made by Martin Luther King Jr.: “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.” We have failed to admit to ourselves that laws may repress undesired actions but that they have never changed the underlying motives for socially destructive actions. Repression by punishment, sanctions, consequences, etc. forces the motivating attitudes underground. “Don’t ever let me catch you behaving that way again, young man!” berates a parent to a wayward son. Some sons change their attitudes within and do not misbehave again. Many sons simply become sneakier to make sure that their parents do not catch them misbehaving again but do not actually cease to misbehave. They learn to misbehave in ways not as readily detected by their parents. Thus it has been with making racism illegal. A change of heart is needed, even among the heartless. It is not enough to threaten to punish or impose consequences upon the heartless for misbehaving. Their thrills come from defying authority and seeing how craftily they can get away with misbehaving. It’s an ego-driven game with rewards of its own. We fail to admit that anyone who has become heartless on account of themselves having been treated heartlessly is likely to have become immune to change forced upon him or her by additional painful consequences. We need to stop the insane practice of trying to out-bully bullies (both within our nation and beyond).

If we are to truly learn anything from our decades of utterly failing to eradicate racism, it must include the insight that passage and enforcement of laws, no matter how artfully worded or rigorously enforced they may be, will not eradicate racism. What might the alternative be? How are the heartless transformed to consider being and then actually daring to become less heartless? How do we release ourselves from the prisons of heartlessness within which we seek to survive and instead make wholehearted empathy and compassion new prevailing norms in the USA? Surely we will not try to legislate empathy and compassion.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream about the alternative I have in mind: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” He took the risk of dying while doing his part to make his dream come true, not merely for his children but for all children. And the risk he took materialized and he was silenced. We have repeated his dream speech many times since then. But as Eliza Doolittle sings in My Fair Lady, “Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words. Is that all you blighters can do?” Words frequently repeated but rarely applied become slogans that lose their meaning. MLK Jr. was not a “blighter” who failed to put his words into meaningful, sustained action. Many of those who repeat his words contribute to the social blight of racism by being “blighters” who do fail to “walk the talk” as 12-steppers might say. Instead we tend to relapse into our egostic pursuits of choice and fall off the wagon of transformation needed to actually accomplish social justice. We are seduced in part by the appeal of social approval to which we remain addicted, an appeal to remain safely hunkered down in the crowd rather than to stick out our necks.

So it has been with MLK Jr.’s inspired dream. It died amid droning repetition of the words not matched by their vigorous application in our lives. His dream inspired and challenged us when he first revealed it. It does so yet today. But we have failed to respond. That is our failure. That is our own heartlessness revealed in stubborn apathy and resignation to the way things are as if that’s how things will inevitably always be. Until we overcome our own failure to respond and transform our own hearts, we are part of the problem and have no standing to prosecute those whose hearts remain hardened along with ours but whose violent actions, both overt and covert, remain expressed without restraint. To end the torrent of racism eroding our nation, each of us must cease to contribute our little stream of heartlessness and add instead our most wholehearted rivulet-grown-to-river participation in the alternative of which MLK Jr. dreamt and spoke and for which he lived fully until his life was cut short. We must stop resisting forward motion and instead begin relentlessly persisting in it.

Are we willing to fully and persistently participate in the alternative society that offers the only solution to systemic racism? Do children’s lives matter? To what degree? Are we willing to risk it all for the possibility that the children who matter to us will grow up to live in a nation that does not judge them by the color of their skin nor by any other superficial and unworthy criteria? MLK Jr. said “No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.” Are we willing to lay down our lives for the sake of the children on whatever terms we are called to lay them down?

I suggest to you that dying for a cause is not the more difficult way to lay down your life. The more difficult ways of laying down one’s life involve continuing to live in the face of intense fears with the courage of one’s convictions no matter how unpopular those convictions may be in the minds of others. We must be willing to put at risk the very social approval by which our thinking, speech and actions are too often unconsciously censured, shaped and stylized. Once again, participating in public rallies, cheering (or even being) inspirational speakers and generally repeating the patterns of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the past are in vogue. Missing are the rigorously probing self-examination and repentance that will help us all let go of our attitudes and beliefs that support racism, sexism, heterosexism, ethnocentrism and other forms of egoism so as to deprive institutional and systemic expressions of those dehumanizing “isms” of support. Doubtlessly, MLK Jr. engaged in such self-examination and repentance. His private process of rigorously examining his own character to root out pockets of hypocrisy must become our own process.

To examine our institutions for signs of any “ism” (including the scourge of intellectualism) while failing to examine ourselves — as citizens of a republic who staff, patronize, support and give legitimacy to our institutions — for attitudes and beliefs that perpetuate all forms of “isms” is to fail once again to learn the lessons of history and doom ourselves to repeat them. Is our only goal to change the current flavor our egoism or to eradicate it entirely in all flavors? Will it be unpopular to call for examination of our individual and collective character so as to be capable of judging ourselves by the content of our character instead of by the color of our skin, age, ethnicity, religion, gender/gender orientation, sexual orientation, economic class, educational level, marital status, family type, etc.? Yes, but MLK Jr. had an insight for us here too: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” He, she, we . . . let’s not quibble about pronouns now. We have more important issues to address. As writer Walter Kelly once said long ago through Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The overarching pattern that we must address radically, at its roots, is the pattern of the ego’s dominance in our personal lives and elsewhere throughout our nation. The ego is based on fear. Fear is the opposite of love, which the ego has zero capacity to honor and share. Love is an anathema to the ego. Yet, love is also the antidote to fear because it is the only true alternative to fear. Fear corrupts our character, causes our hearts to harden and seduces us by alternative temptations to not be true to ourselves and to stray from our paths of transformation. We must apply the antidote of love rigorously as compassionately necessary to ourselves and to our neighbors without judgment or condemnation until all fear is released and we rise up together as “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Again repeating words makes us numb to their meaning unless we live them out radically through our own lives as if the welfare of the children depends on us. It does.

If we truly desire with all our hearts to lean not upon our own understanding, it is time to trust in the Higher Power from whom divine love flows for guidance, humble ourselves to shed our egos, forsake all attitudes of pride and shame as well as guilt and blame, and listen within our hearts to the still small voice of wisdom we’ve so rigorously repressed that our consciences barely make themselves heard. That’s our choice. I invite us all to join in participating in the radical healing of our nation of all the pain that our various forms of “isms” have inflicted upon us all, more upon some than upon others, but not sparing any of us. May we find within us our innate capacity to forgive ourselves and each other and rise up together — not to seek vengeance one against another but instead to seek victory in which we are all included.

I end now with one last quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.” That is the attitude that will save us from all of our less worthy attitudes and beliefs by which we’ve beset ourselves with violence by seeing each other as separate and unforgivably wrong, even as if some form of competitor if not an enemy combatant. Can we love and forgive our competition and our enemies, both those whom we find within our hearts in residence because they caused us pain in the past and we’ve not yet forgiven them as well as those who remain external to us but also remain unforgiven? Martin Luther King Jr. shared inspiring words about the power of persistently applied love as the ultimate solution but I’ll leave that quote for you to find.

Let’s Not Yet Dismiss Jesus As Impotent and Irrelevant

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In the United States, we are surrounded by massive evidence proving beyond all reasonable doubt that Jesus is condemned to impotence and irrelevance within a nation that claims to adhere to consumerism-gutted Christian celebrations such as Easter and Christmas and accounts for large, if dwindling, attendance at churches who give lip service to Jesus as the divine entity they honor. The overwhelming majority of jurors gathering at such places of worship have declared Jesus to be irrelevant as well as impotent within their lifestyles. They prefer to substitute a watered down, plastic, artificially distanced version of Jesus in place of his living vitality at work within their hearts and minds. They prefer to hold Jesus in a social chokehold, silence his voice and condemn him to a life sentence of imprisonment within their egos as they bar the door against wholehearted surrender to his call upon their lives.

Every foreperson of every jury handpicked by the prosecution in favor of violent reactions to other people’s violence has declared the verdict: Jesus is “Guilty as charged” and condemned to oblivion! Jesus has been on trial across our nation for generations and is now presumed to be guilty of irrelevance and impotence until proven innocent, of which proof there scarce is hope. The only evidence he ever sought to leave on Earth was the evidence provided through the lives of wholehearted followers in his footsteps. Today few followers are willing to seek the faded signs of his divergent path among the crowded ways along which as lemmings we scramble towards the cliffs over which others have flung themselves. Thus the evidence he seeks to reveal is faint because we are faint-hearted.

The prevailing presumption in favor of Jesus’ impotence and irrelevance is the predictable outcome of our devoting the resources of our legal systems throughout our lands to exacting retribution for every perceived wrong committed by one person against another through all forms of legal process, both criminal and civil. In the face of Jesus’ model of forgiveness, despite claiming to be a Christian nation, not one state within our Federal system offers its citizens the opportunity to experiment with non-retributive responses to wrongdoing across the board as a systematic norm. Occasional programs of restorative justice and mediation notwithstanding, the social norm of a retribution-purposed legal system offers little room for Jesus’ voice. His has once again become a voice crying in the wilderness. This time that wilderness is our nation of violence and knee-jerk tendencies to use the law to augment personal anger into a national tragedy and twist all legal proceedings into venues for personal revenge.

In Romans 12:2, followers of Jesus are (note: “are” not “were”) admonished, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” In willful disregard of this admonition, the vast majority of those who claim to honor Jesus prefer to react to wrongs with the same patterns of thoughts, words and actions as the mainstream society around them. Patterns socially engrained in our thinking since infancy are not readily uprooted. Like dandelions casually yanked up by their tops, they spring back from deeply buried roots. They are tenacious weeds eradicated only by persistent application of the Holy Spirit as the universal herbicide for the mistake of putting our minds “upon the things of man instead of upon the things of God.”

Based on worldly patterns, we allow the early stage of grief commonly recognized to be “anger” to motivate our actions in response to wrongs we perceive to have been done to us and to others towards whom we feel protective. Anger is the mainstream, deeply rooted pattern of motivation behind both criminal and civil “remedies.” Although called “remedies” as if they offer some form of healing, they are not remedies but reminders of the vicious outcomes of cycles of violence perpetuated by anger. They are institutionalized, socially conformist forms of revenge not anything close to what Jesus presented as the model response to wrongs of criminal or civil nature.

As an innocent human being, Jesus was subjected to harsh treatment as if he were a criminal. Amidst that cruelty, as he hung at the behest of religious leaders of his era on a form of torturous death popular among the politically powerful, he hung there between two others condemned to the same cruelly prolonged death for their petty crimes. There Jesus continued to minister mercy, acknowledging the humility of one of his cross-hung compatriots by welcoming him as a guest of Jesus in paradise. Throughout his ministry on Earth, Jesus encountered, healed and welcomed many whom the mainstream, religiously self-justifying, status-quo-reserving law-abiders called “sinners” and would have stoned to death or banished from their “good company.” He dared then to say (and would say again today howsoever unpopular it might make him), “And neither do I condemn you” to the woman caught in adultery (having no opportunity to say the same to her male collaborator in adultery since no one sought to stone him at the moment of the story preserved in the Bible).

On another occasion, Jesus taught that the person who visited an inmate in prison was counted among those who had ministered unto him. It is doubtful that he had in mind that such a visitor would go to the prison to chastise and condemn the inmate as if he or she were chastising and condemning Jesus. More likely, Jesus expected the visitor to show mercy upon the inmate and share kindness and other acts of mercy with the inmate as Jesus would have done. He would have visited the inmate as an expression of God’s unconditional love. How do we view and treat those we incarcerate or others whom we relegate to the margins of society as undesirables? How rigid is our caste system? To what extent do we dare violate it?

In modern society (one that ironically we claim to be a civil one), we function like a gang of mobsters. We who claim privilege status within the “gang” we call society do not directly sully our hands in the dirty work of harming others. We hire agents to do the dirty work, just as any seasoned gang leader does. We hire prosecutors with orientations as bullies who lust for power and hunger to exercise dominion over others to accuse and condemn members of our society as scapegoats to contrast to the heroes we hold up as paragons of virtue. Sometimes we are so disappointed with our heroes that we topple them off the media-elevated pedestals upon which we had previously installed them and cast them down as scapegoats of the most useful kind. The media profits from both these false elevations to and the subsequent sensationalized falls from social grace. In contrast, regardless of the judgment of people in dispensing social grace for temporary, shallow, self-serving reasons, God’s divine grace remains relentlessly extended to us all — howsoever others may judge and condemn us. Such is an example of the pattern of the world as we put our minds not upon the way of Jesus as an exemplar of God’s way but upon some alternative our egos in our fear prefer.

Followers of the ways of the world who conform mindlessly to its patterns are not following the one who walked the Earth as Jesus, suffered upon the cross of social condemnation to demonstrate his divinity and would even today lead us all to co-create heaven here and now upon this Earth if only we would follow him in all our thoughts, words and deeds. To do so, as Paul wisely and insightfully observed, we could not allow our minds to remain imprisoned within the patterns of worldly thought of our current, ego-confined, adolescent society but would instead intentionally and relentlessly allow our minds to be renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit until our every thought, word and deed revealed the perfect will of God as mature children of God according to our true identity.

As one who had throughout his life on Earth grown in “wisdom and stature in the eyes of man [and woman] and God,” Jesus’ life revealed the will of God in his thinking, speaking and acting. We are called to do likewise to overcome our identity crisis and refuse to linger any longer in it. To fulfill our high calling as inheritors of the Kingdom of Love, we must divest our energies from the false calling of condemning others and re-invest these God-given energies with steadfast, uncompromising devotion of our hearts, minds, bodies and souls to ministering to the “least of these” as if each and every one of them is Jesus – without even one exception our egos would prefer to make because we are afraid to appear foolish in the eyes of those who conform to the patterns of the world. Whom would Jesus reject from his ministry? Which social leper do we condemn as if he would?

One pattern most fondly adhered to by the world who condemns Jesus to impotence and irrelevancy is the pattern of carving out exceptions to the lifestyle principles he both espoused and modeled. If you claim to believe in Jesus, follow him as he has called you to do, not compromisingly or lukewarmly – at risk of being spit out of his mouth – but instead radically, wholeheartedly and passionately as if Jesus is not only your savior but your Lord as well. Allow fear to carve out no exceptions to his mercy and grace lest you discover that the exception you carve out also encompasses you. Seek full release from the pain you struggle to deny you feel as you fail to live according to your true identity as a child of God. It is that pain that causes you to believe you are being punished and sustains the guilt you feel. That pain is not punishment. It is merely the natural result of not allowing yourself to expand beyond your ego’s concerns and undertake your own growth in stature and wisdom. It is the pain an eagle’s developing chick feels while confined within its egg. Struggle to peck your way free of the ego’s imprisoning shell. In the pattern of your creation, you are like Jesus, destined to grow relentlessly in your unique expression of God’s grace. It is painful to allow your socially reinforced fears to stunt your growth and confine yourself within your ego as if it were your identity. The ego is a false identity. You are a good egg but more than an ego. Accept your true identity as a sibling of Jesus within God’s family and let go of the pain of denying that identity. Through letting go of your ego, you will discover the freedom from painful guilt and shame your heart desires.

No longer be careless about your heart’s desire to do the right thing even when it is socially unpopular to do so. Instead care less about the opinions of those still entrapped in the judgmental attitudes of their egos and care more about the judgment of Jesus upon your life. Seek his mercy as you extend yours. Let divine love be perfected within you as it was perfect in Jesus so that love casts out all fears that might otherwise falsely convince you that some exceptions to the universal extension of unconditional love to all have merit. Argue with if you must (as most of us do!) but eventually do not defy your Friend and Master. Surrender to his loving, merciful wisdom so as to come to know your true, forgiven, grace-empowered nature as God’s child ever as much as Jesus knew and knows his own. That is what it means to belong to him. It is the path to service by which you come to know the fullest joy life offers. It is the pathway to relief from grief that otherwise lingers when it need no longer linger.

To whose pattern do we conform? Whose view of us matters most to us? To whose image and likeness do we seek to conform so as to beam the radiance of God’s grace across the heartscape of our nation’s ills and bring forth relational healing instead of condemnation? We have a choice between the pattern of the fear-filled, fear-controlled ego or the pattern of the love-embodying, love-surrendered follower of Jesus. Let go of ego’s reign and embrace the reign of love offered to you unconditionally by God through Jesus.

In that manner, let your heart not be troubled, nor let it be afraid that upon your death bed you’ll find yourself alone, while drowning in regrets and awash with grief you could have faced and overcome so many years earlier. Why let the anger of grief rob you of years of peace, hope and joy that await you here on earth as a gift? Accept the gift. Linger no longer in the darkness of your prolonged grievances. Instead allow the light of love to shine forth from within you as you know in your heart you can and desire.

The impotence and irrelevancy you choose to assign to Jesus is actually a false belief in your own impotence and irrelevancy. Neither you nor Jesus is impotent or irrelevant when you team up to respond with grace, mercy and love by faith in the Divine Parent whom Jesus called “Abba.” The time of the grace of our Father/Mother God/Goddess is upon us. Accept and embrace who you are and cease to hide isolated in the shadows as if you are impotent and irrelevant to making a difference in how others experience their lives. Join love’s revolution as a welcome member of the team who wholeheartedly, without reservation embrace Jesus as our wayshower. And find yourself welcomed home as you welcome others as your sisters and your brothers.

Affinity for Divinity

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Within each of us is an affinity for divinity. Why? Because we are each “originally” created as an expression of the divine and yearn deep within us to return to our roots. (By “originally” I mean both “from the beginning” and “as a uniquely distinctive expression of the Creator – a one-of-a-kind original.” That’s a paradox of our existence: we are each uniquely, distinctively different and yet we are all also united as one within the human race according to universal qualities we all share. We, as the entire, eternally interconnected human species, express diversity within unity to express all of the Divine Source with Whom we are eternally united as one. As Divine Love flows through us we reveal the Divine Source’s nature and favor towards us.)

Our yearning to be free to be and express who we truly are is surging up from within us from our roots. Within us the S.A.P. we are (Spiritually Anointed People) rises relentlessly to the surface, as surely as in northern climates the sap in trees rises to renew life each spring. By acknowledging our yearning and cultivating, watering and nurturing the soul-soil within which our roots thrive, we encourage our depth of yearning to rise closer and closer to the surface until it emerges into expression within our daily lives and blossoms here as us – who we each are and who we collectively as the human species or “humanity” are. (Within the sequence of time here on Earth, some of us will rise up before others but eventually we will all rise up so that time and space will matter less and less because our eternal and infinitely powerful divine nature will have come online collectively.)

We are inherently and resolutely as determined to know our own divinity (divine identity), be true to it and express it as dandelions are to rise again from the slightest bit of root or tiniest of wind-borne seed. When our divinity emerges collectively, as a human race we will cease to engage in oppression, exploitation and conflict towards each other and be unstoppably resilient and brilliant as caregivers for all forms of life within and around us. Until then we’ll simply fail time after time to achieve our heartfelt dreams and desires to end violence because being untrue to ourselves is the ultimate violence and guaranties our failure to achieve lasting peace. To paraphrase Shakespeare, we must know our true identity – our authenticity – and be true to it at least simultaneously with, if not before, being false to no one else. As we learn to be honest with and accept others non-judgmentally, we learn to be honest with and accept ourselves non-judgmentally. This is the feedback loop process for recovering awareness of our true identity. Acceptance of others leads to greater acceptance of self, which in turn leads to greater acceptance of others, etc. – all with growing inner peace as well as outer peace. Thus we implement the principle “As within, so without.”

Before we rise up to blossom as we truly are in fulfillment of our own hearts’ desire and of The Divine’s will for us as beloved children of The Divine Source of Life, we are buried beneath the illusions and false images the world of fear teaches us to worship as survivors but not thrivers. To thrive we must come alive as who we truly are and dare to share our true identity with at least one other and then more and more with all others as sisters and brothers in the same divine family. It is irresistible, this urge to emerge and share!

Recently I’ve been thinking again about how this emergency took place in my life. Emergence felt like an emergency because it felt urgent to my heart that I emerge and it felt threatening to my ego that I might emerge as me from behind the cloaking device my ego had become as my social image. Pride and shame held me back, inhibited my emergence and tried to thwart my fulfillment in living true to who I am. After living many years as an ego and hiding within the social roles egos train us to play, it upset many people who had known me in my ego roles to behold the real me emerging. “What’s wrong with you, Art?” they’d ask, if not overtly to my face then privately to themselves and perhaps as well to others. What was “wrong” with Art was that I was no longer willing to play charades and hide myself from others. The process of emerging was awkward, more awkward than it need be for others if only we’d all welcome such emergences more openly and not do our best to control or even repress them as unwelcome challenges to the status quo within which we profess ourselves to be so comfortable. Repressive social reactions on the part of frightened conformists delay and even disfigure emergences. Being scalded by shame and blame wounds our hearts and can leave long-lasting scars.

I was no longer comfortable with hiding within the status quo as a conformist. I was troubled by my affinity to divinity. I did not know my troubled waters initially by such a concept. I did not know how to identify my troubled state. Indeed, I was more inclined to ask of myself “What’s wrong with you, Art?” than to claim the truth that something miraculous and beautiful was happening – something possibly more “right” than yet understood let alone socially acceptable. Today I hope to be here to encourage others to emerge beyond merely surviving within ego’s fearful darkness to enjoy thriving within the love-bathed lightness of wholeness, authenticity and integrity. We need to give each other emotional support as we emerge as authentic but diverse expressions of the divine instead of bashing each other for being different. Let us learn to bathe wounds rather than bash the wounded, wash away grief rather than wander astray and wallow in its initial stages of denial, anger, bargaining and depression.

For each of us, the process of emerging is motivated in some way by our affinity for divinity. Yet, our identifying links with divinity may differ. Mine is merely an example of what may be possible for all of us. If your links to divinity are of a nature similar to mine, I welcome you to share your experiences with me and others. If, however, your links to divinity are of a different nature, please honor them as well and feel equally welcome to share them. Perhaps in our sharing we will find the common threads and themes that link us all.

As briefly as I can manage let me describe linking themes I have traced throughout my life that opened doors to phases of my emergence:

First Theme: I will call this linking theme my desire to enjoy relationships with authors and other storytellers, both of fiction and nonfiction. Throughout my life, I have enjoyed reading, listening to and watching stories that are well presented and have depth and breadth of symbolic meaning. Allegories and metaphors need not dominate but a story that reveals patterns of human thinking, emotions and character development intrigues me. Call them archetypes, themes or common patterns, their presence revealed within a story captures my imagination and draws me inward to participate in the experiences of characters in the story. My imagination allows me to “there” with the characters even while remaining “here” in my own life. Truth be known, sometimes I tend to become more “lost” in the story than remain aware of my surroundings. Ironically it is my tendency to become so lost in my imagination that allowed me to encounter my true identity and recover from having mislaid and forgotten it as ego’s social training taught me to do.

I became lost in stories told by others to become found in my own living story. I now realize that my whole life has been symbolic and in some way identified with the common allegories and archetypes of humanity. (It is likely that you will find your life story is as well.) In some ways, my awakening to this realization while surrounded by many people who do not yet realize that it is also true for them caused me to feel lonely. I yearn for the companionship of others with whom to share my story and listen to theirs too. Knowing that every one of us has a story worth sharing has held up to me a path from loneliness to more expansive connections with others past, present and future. The Eternity of Divinity embraces all time frames and is part of the divinity for which I now feel such affinity. I began as an expression of an eternal story and now know myself as continuing to be such an expression.

Among the many story tellers who have encouraged me to grow increasingly aware of my nature as a child of God none has been more influential than Jesus. The stories he told that remain in our records are likely not the only ones he told. His whole life remains largely an untold story buried beneath myths and legends that have been layered on by various story tellers’ for a variety of purposes. What marvels my imagination most is that the most outlandishly generous and merciful of the stories of Jesus’ life are the most likely to be true. Within stories of helpful Samaritans, prodigal sons, women at wells, women at risk of being stoned, reviled tax collectors and others honored to share meals and the like, I found myself invited to imagine what it might be like to have known Jesus as a disciple walking with him as he revealed and shared the nature of his Father as the Divine Parent of us all. Through my imagination my heart tapped into inspirations that gave birth to actions that taught me much by experience that formal, ego-censored education could not show me.

Second Theme: I will call this linking theme my desire to be helpful. Perhaps mostly as a result of my middlish position among seven siblings and my desire to earn my parents’ attention, appreciation and approval, I acquired the disposition and habit of being helpful early in life and could not shirk it afterwards. I believe that this habit was hard to break because it is rooted in the nature of the Divine Source of Life. The Source is disposed to helpfulness and habitually helps us whether or not we ask. As this second theme shaped my development from childhood throughout adulthood, I stumbled along, many times failing, as how to be most helpful was revealed to me. Throughout my life, I had to change many of my ways of offering helpfulness to more closely correspond to how divine aid is offered, but I could not shake off the desire to be helpful even when I became discouraged about ever learning how to be helpful in truly helpful, lasting ways. Just as Edison experimented with many materials as he searched for ones to serve as filaments in his early light bulbs, I experimented with ways of helpfulness that shed little light or burned out all too readily. There are ways to help as the Divine Benevolent One helps, to be an extension of Divine Benevolence as Jesus was while walking upon the earth, and to shed a warm and gentle light to radiate within the darkness of a violence-tossed and troubled world. Mastering how to do so remains one of my primary goals. Stories of those who have done so gracefully and effectively throughout the ages continue to inspire and guide me.

Third Theme: I will call this linking theme my desire to share. Again this theme began when I was growing up amid seven siblings and observed that if we did not share, there’d not be much left for the smaller and less aggressive ones of us. Thus, sharing began as a survival principle. Later it morphed into a principle by which to thrive as me as I discovered that the Divine Source of Life had created and still creates all that is by sharing Divinity with all. Organic, natural sustainability models itself on the Divine. In time, I learned how to engage in feedback loops with the Divine and my fellow human beings and to enjoy the empowering unity that such feedback loops generate. My life has been enriched by sharing all that I receive. I know now with certainty what I had previously only believed was possibly true – that giving and receiving are the same thing, a unified and unifying process we call “sharing.” The Golden Rule rules our whole lives as surely as the Law of Gravity rules our physical existence. Whether or not our affinity for divinity will ever defy gravity I do not know except to say that the gravest and weightiest of earthly problems seem to grow lighter as we approach their solutions from the perspective of Eternity. In my experiences, the Creator has turned out to be more lighthearted than I was initially led to believe.

These three themes have grown over my lifetime as branches of a stout and sometimes fruitful tree. Within those branches I have found myself nourished, nurtured and lifted beyond the ego’s mind-clouding fogs of pain and confusion into awareness of my own identity as a child of God. My discovery of my divine identity led me to discover FIRELIGHT as an acronym to partially summarize my story. Faith Initiates Rising to Excellence by Learning to Implement God’s Highest Truth. What is that Truth? That we are each and every one of us without exception a child of God, by whatever name we may refer to such a Supreme Parent or Source of Life. (And by whatever names – deriding or uplifting – that we have from time to time called ourselves and have been called by others.)

When I call this ultimate Truth “highest” I also mean it is the deepest, reaching to the taproot of our creation within which all our roots are joined. Designed to explore the truth of divine love within the depths of our beings, we are also designed to express this truth within our relationships from the most intimate ones outward in ever-expanding circles of new life. Ours is a love story, a story of mutually helpful beings designed by Divine Love to grow in evermore powerful capacities to express and share love in ever-ascending, upward spiraling feedback loops – giving and receiving as a unified Divine Companion and Loved One for our Creator. “As the Creator Is so We Are.” We are here on earth to discover what that observation means and how to live according to it in all the fullness of our beings.

(For more about FIRELIGHT, please visit the Firelight SJL tab above.)

We Kill Those Who Come to Save Us

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On a Memorial Day weekend as we honor heroes, it seems apt to remember that not all who threaten the status quo are enemies that we need to eradicate as if the gardens of our minds have no room for new ideas. Not every plant not previously encountered is a weed. Some newly arriving people in our monolithic culture . . . including incoming young members of our society who immigrate from heaven to our lands . . . bring gifts of healing and restoration to new life beyond the culture of violence to which we’ve become so well adjusted that we consider its norms sacred. Truly sacred bearers of glad tidings of great joy arrive moment by moment to serve as reminders of what’s truly valuable. In fact, the more violent our culture becomes, the more frequently and earnestly these message-bearers strive to capture our attention and tell us that violence is not the only alternative. Might such nonconformist violators of the status quo not also be heroes we could welcome and value more?

Certainly we are grateful for the heroes who have protected and continue to protect us from harm. We are also increasingly aware that a hero’s experiences in the face of violence include being harmed, emotionally if not also physically, as he or she stands up for us to stem the tide of violence that threatens to overrun us. We ask our heroes to endure the pain we’re afraid to experience on our own behalf. And to help us remain blind to our decision to use others as heroes to protect our comfortable lifestyles, we deny that the enemies our heroes fight are products of our own self-indulgent creature comforts and conveniences. We deny that there are consequences to our choices and prefer to fashion scapegoats to excuse our self-indulgence lifestyles by blaming others for being envious of us — and eventually perhaps hateful towards us when we deny the legitimacy of their envy.

Although we perpetuate the expansion of our lifestyles through the operation of institutionalized envy, we refuse to see the woe we cause to others by not taking their wants and needs into account as we satisfy our own. We are driven by our habit of comparing what “little” we have to what “more” others have. This habit of comparison is selective. It selects for justifications for our continued pursuit of more while keeping us blind to our own envy of those with more. Other habits of valuing socially approved images and superficial, materialistic possessions keep us focused on “things” and luxuries as objects of desire, feeding our envy continuously to keep our economy in motion. Earn, spend, earn, spend, earn, spend . . . the never-satisfying, ever-accelerating cycle of our lifestyles.

And yet when others seek to join us in our plentiful opportunities, we protest as if there’s not enough to share. That we might no longer gain more and more threatens the foundation of our aspirations. How could we go on comparing ourselves to what others enjoy if everyone has nearly the same? What good is our socially popular image and our material possessions if they do not make us “special?” How can we prove that God favors us if we live as if the concerns, needs and wants of others might be equal to our own and equally worthy of satisfaction? Does not God play favorites just as we like to play favorites? Is not that how one proves one’s power — by dispensing power and its accompanying perks on some basis one personally defines with little or no regard for any other standard? Does not Facebook’s system of “Like” and “Dislike” prove the value of being liked even when we are not truly known or loved for ourselves because we hide behind the social images we project to score points as heroes and avoid becoming scapegoats?

Let us this weekend honor those who believed in the values of superiority claimed by the United States in comparison to other nations, or if not fully believing, nevertheless put themselves at risk to defend our claim and our opportunity to prove ourselves right rather than be destroyed by those who violently disagree with our claim of superiority. But . . . and here’s a “but” worthy of due consideration . . . let us also carefully review the basis for our claim to superiority and remove from it the arrogance and ignorance we’ve religiously cultivated concerning the claims to value put forth by other nations and cultures. In what way might we be right in claiming superiority that does not deny the value of other people’s claims to equally high value? Might we be most right in the ideals to which we claim to subscribe such as “liberty and justice for all” and most need now to reveal our humility in admitting how far short of our own ideals we’ve often fallen? Is a blend of humility and superiority possible or must one exclude the other? Might our greatest claim to superiority be in the fitful but relentless progress we’ve endeavored to make in upholding and living true to our ideals? Perhaps this weekend is one occasion among many to be grateful from the depths of our hearts for all who have stood up for us and sung our praises even when we’ve stumbled badly — or may yet be stumbling now.

Is this weekend an occasion to soberly consider the sacrifices we expect of heroes and ask ourselves, “Are we letting our heroes down when we fail to live according to our highest ideals?” Are we mocking these heroic sacrifices when we fail to examine our own lifestyles for ways we’ve not ourselves been devoted to our stated highest ideals and instead neglected them as readily as we neglect our heroes when they come back home to our care? Might we too often be a neglectful culture hypnotized by our pursuit of image-based, materialistic definitions of happiness while remaining blind to the consequences of our shallow pursuits as they spiral more and more out of control? Our pursuit of shallowness and trivialities as a way of escaping from the deeper, heartfelt truths may be why our ship of state has run aground. Deeper waters are calling to us from within our hearts. Will we heed their call and learn to navigate their depths again?

Let’s Dismantle Our Egos to Accept an End to Violence

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If we continue to think only within the ego’s thought system we are lost in a world of violence and illusions about the cause of violence. As each anger-triggering interpersonal issue arises (whether it be private or political, local, national or global), we will inspect, dissect, analyze, categorize, theorize, shelve, institutionalize, aggrandize or minimize the issue and thereby perpetuate violence. In short, we will perform an autopsy on each issue and then then enshrine it and our findings in a mausoleum without changing anything because we will not see the issue as a living opportunity to learn something new that points us towards a better future but as a dead thing of the past we must find a way to normalize or pretend to get rid of. The ego plays such games with our minds for the purpose of steering us away from the truth that awaits within each issue that causes us to feel anger in some range from irritation to outrage.

The ego feeds and thrives upon anger. Conflict is the ego’s birthing ground, nursery and most developed expression. It does not want us to find an alternative way to think about life because it fears that we’ll discover that it is the cause of violence and totally disinterested in ending violence. Yet, within every issue that might arouse our anger to any degree lies a message of peace. That message is “It need not be this way.” Violence and anger are not necessary when issues are seen from the perspective of divine love – not the ego’s pseudo-love but love defined without regard to ego’s preservation. All we need to do is to learn to walk with humility in God’s shoes (free of pride and shame as well as guilt and blame) and see life from Eternity’s perspective. Then we’ll relax into accepting peace of mind, hope of heart and joy of spirit – what’s sometimes called “joie de vivre.”

The joy of life! Where has it gone missing? Why is it so elusive and once encountered so likely to slip away again? The ego’s hold on our minds is the reason. We cannot continue to indulge our egos and continue to think mistakenly that ego is a trustworthy guide to any answers worth discovering. The answers exist but they exist beyond ego’s grasp. We can begin to recognize them amid ego’s final gasp. Our minds’ capacity to encounter “Ah, ha” moments is evidence of our ability to think beyond ego’s limitations and grasp insights and understandings that elude ego. We can gasp “Eureka!” at our ability to receive the truth that sets us free of ego. We cannot grasp this truth and hold onto it too tightly any more than we can grasp a butterfly and squeeze it tightly without robbing it of life. To become aware of the gentle touch of truth’s butterflies upon our minds, we must first open our hearts to let them land there, where our minds may be trained to notice their arrival. We cannot inspect, dissect, analyze, etc. the butterflies truth sends to our hearts. We can only receive, appreciate and marvel at their graceful, simple elegance and accept them as gifts from Divine Eternity.

Gifts from Divine Eternity are our natural inheritance. As children of God, every one of us is poised to receive our inheritance. We need not wait for God to die to inherit from our Creator. All gifts from the Creative Realm are ours here and now – while we and God yet fully live. The ego would have us believe that we have somehow murdered God or at least so offended Him/Her that any possibility of our having a favorable relationship with God/Goddess is dead. To believe in God’s uninterruptedly abounding grace towards humanity in general and towards ourselves in particular seems impossible but it is only impossible to the ego that seeks to keep us in the dark, unaware of and inaccessible to our Divine Nature.

The ego cannot participate in divine grace because it disappears in the presence of such grace. It’s not that the ego is “bad” or “not good enough” to participate in divine grace. It’s merely that the ego’s way of thinking and feeling about life lacks the capacity to participate in grace because the ego’s way of thinking arose when we believed grace to be absent from our lives, when we believed we needed to protect ourselves from pain because there seemed no other way. Grace and its progeny forgiveness, mercy, love, compassion, healing, reconciliation and other gentle-natured qualities of human beings exceed the ego’s realm of thought. They manifest from our hearts, the realm of empathy and wisdom that ego knows not of. In the presence of grace, the ego’s purpose vanishes and it crumbles into dust for lack of purpose.

The ego teaches us to deny our hearts. Yet our hearts continue to desire more than the ego’s limited perspective on life can ever offer. Our internal conflict between, on the one hand, striving to find satisfaction through our constant efforts to win approval through our performances in social roles and, on the other hand, simply desiring the free gift of satisfaction demonstrates that our hearts are aware that the ego does not serve us well. We cannot win divine approval that brings us abiding deepest satisfaction because what is given freely cannot be won by effort or performance. Abiding deepest satisfaction is an unearnable gift from our Creator to each of us without exception as His/Her eternally beloved child.

Instead of striving and struggling with egoic effort to prove we are worthy of love and all of life’s best, we can simply accept what our hearts most desire. We can accept as divine fact that we are already loved and permanently poised to receive life’s best as freely given gifts. How do we engage in such a radical shift in perspective? We can begin by accepting the gift of our innate capacity to shift from reverse to neutral before we engage any forward gear. We can reverse the devotion of our minds to ego’s way and restfully receive awareness of the alternate way and discover our natural affinity for it. There is only one alternative way that truly exceeds ego’s grasp. It is the way of divine love. Ego honors fear. The alternate way honors divine love and allows it to gradually dissipate all fears at a pace we can regulate according to our heart’s desire. A text entitled A Course Of Love will tell you more about this way. Visit http://acourseoflove.com/ to explore and engage in love’s more promising possibilities yourself.

You are poised to dive into love’s sea of serenity within you. You are poised but like most people hesitate. Diving into the unknown both intrigues and frightens you. The ego would have you remain afraid to take the dive. It would have you believe that taking the dive means forfeiting your opportunity to win the fight and exposes you to ridicule as an incompetent competitor. The Divine Source of Love seeks not competitors but collaborators who will build the new world according to Love’s Master Plan. Might you want to be one of the building blocks of such love – even when in the eyes of some others you may appear to be a loser rather than a winner in the ego’s endless rounds of competition? If you have grown weary of the ego’s invitation to yet another round of competition for social approval and the supposed “perks” of ego, choose to let go of both ego’s perks and irks. Instead, let love be you and bond you to the Divine Source and others as Divine Grace is freely manifest within and through you.

You Were Born to Have an Impact

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Saying that you “were born” implies that you originate from a source that gave birth to you. A source gave birth to you. In a materialistic, scientific worldview, the idea of “birth” focuses on the origin of the physical body and traces your body’s origin back to your parents and then backward genetically through a timeline of gene pools that contributed to your body’s genetic makeup. Then, according to science, the genes of your body – as influenced by your environment and your interactions with your environment – determine the development of your body. If all you are is a body, then that’s the whole story – cellular growth determined by genetic makeup and the influences of your environment as you experience being exposed to your environment, including the things you eat, the activities you undertake and the locations where you choose to be active. If all you are is a body, then having “an impact” is limited to your body’s presence, consumption of resources and production of output, if any, beyond waste products. That’s a pretty dismal view of a person’s life, value and impact.

However, it’s possible that you are not merely a body. It’s possible that your body’s brain does not entirely explain the mental activities you experience during your lifetime. It’s possible that you develop mentally on account of factors beyond the genetic makeup of your body and your interactions with your environment. Although your mental development may be heavily influenced by genetic makeup and environment, you may not be merely a product of your environment. You may have options beyond being a mere “product” rolling along a socially oriented assembly line to your final destination as a socially acceptable (popular and praised) or unacceptable (cast out and shamed) by-product of your social interactions. What if you do have options? What if there is more to the story than genetic makeup and social environment that helps your mind understand who you are? What if fully and completely answering the question “Who am I?” requires you to see yourself as more than a structurally arranged, unique set of cells engineered by genes and adapting to its environment?

Of course, you do not have to entertain possibilities beyond genes and environment in consider your nature and nurture. That is your choice. In fact, having that choice illustrates an aspect of you that cannot readily be explained by genes and environment. That aspect is your capacity to make choices. If you fully honor your capacity to make choices – your willpower – then you begin to experience yourself as much more than a by-product of genetically coded cells interacting with their environment. In fact, because our exercise of willpower opens doors to infinite possibilities, recognizing willpower as a valued dimension of human life invites us to see a greatly expanded meaning of “having an impact.” The greatest impact may be revealed in a lifetime of choices made that defy options and opportunities offered in our normal social environment because we reach for more creative options and opportunities that our mind allows us to imagine. I suggest that it is within the exercise of our imaginations as the source of our options that we will find the fuller meaning of being “born” and “having impact.”

My own life journey has taught me that my choices bring consequences. One of the most promising consequences proved to be that one choice may lead me to awareness of other options and opportunities I did not previously know existed. For example, making the choice to step beyond my comfort zone as a fence-sitter and avoider of conflict and controversy eventually led me step by step to encounter a progression of uncomfortable but educational environments in which my range of options and opportunities was more expansive, diverse and enriching than the range previously known to me. Had I remained too scared to explore this progression of uncomfortable but educational life experiences I would have remained ignorant of the greater possibilities of life and not encountered the Ultimate Source of Life personally. No matter how admirable my intentions might have been in investing myself strictly within my previous comfort zone, my growth as a person would have been stunted and I would have remained a fence-sitter, people-pleaser and conflict/controversy-avoider. And I would have remained a perfectionist out of fear of being criticized for mistakes that inevitably come with exploring wider environments where unimagined often unforeseen challenges and lessons remain to be encountered and mastered by faith.

More importantly, had I not grown more understanding and insightful and progressively wiser throughout the course of my journey, I would have continued to unwittingly inflict harm on others through my ignorance and well-intended foolishness. I would have misled many others into believing that what I said was true was true instead of encouraging them to risk taking their own journey of discovery as I had and learn what is true for themselves from the same Source. Having mistakenly crucified others on the cross of my own ignorance, I would have had to continue to cry out “God forgive me for I know not what I do.” Instead, having taken the risk of venturing beyond my comfort zones into zones of progressively less comfort, I have learned who I am, who the Source of Life from Whom I was born is and of the reality of my and all of humanity’s solidarity and oneness with the Source. As a result, I have learned to seek and receive the Source’s guidance as to what I do and how I do it in regard to every living being I encounter. Having learned the art of humility and surrendered my life to serving the Source, I am now more apt to actually cause the good I intend than ever I was before because I have learned to be the Source’s instrument for extending Source-defined, Source-provided good to others. I have learned to no longer rely upon my own ideas about what is “good” or trust in my own best intentions. Instead, I’ve learned to trust that the Source knows best — even when my own more limited mind still puzzles over how the Source’s ideas work. I do not pretend that the providence of miracles is mine to rule. In short, I’ve learned to no longer lean upon my own understanding.

It is true that I was born to have an impact. It is also true that my most helpful impact would have been stillborn had I allowed myself to remain trapped in the belief that I am essentially a body composed of cells engineered by genes and developed, molded and trained like some form of artificial intelligence through interactions with my environment. As tempting as it may be to conform one’s thinking to the popular ideas of one’s society, I encourage others to take the risk of deviating from those normative ideas and daring to encounter criticism as many bold explorers and thinkers have endured. Why? Because it is true that love endures all things — even the criticism of those not yet inclined to overcome their own fears and ignorance. The best way to prove that you are born as a being of love to share love with increasingly expansive impact is to discover that all you are is love no matter in what environment, subculture or social setting you may find yourself immersed and engaged from stage to stage along your journey — no matter how harsh the criticism may be.

Just as there is no limit to the capacity of the Source of Love to love there is no limit to your capacity to love because you were born with an enduring connection to your Source and can tap into infinite love flowing from your Source by exercise of your willpower. The willpower of the Source chose to give you the experience of being born with this enduring, unbreakable connection because the Source created you to be just like your Source, a spitting image of your Source but not a splitting image of It. Never are you split or separated from your Source. Never are you born to cause or perpetuate splits or separations to occur between you and your Source, you and anyone else or anyone and his or her Source. The Source of Life and Love for each of us is the same Source. We are all one with that Source – our Source, not yours, mine, his, hers or theirs but ours.

You were born to have an impact, too. No matter what distinctive details may emerge in your manifestation of love as you come into awareness of the Source of Love in your mind and heart, you are here to have an impact comparable to and compatible with mine. We are all here to help bind up heartache and other wounds and to heal relationships wherever we may travel. Whether our model of healing is Jesus who was born to have an impact that included healing broken hearts and restoring relationship between humanity and our Source or some other healing entity, our mission and purpose remain in line with the Source’s vision for all humanity to see ourselves as one loving community overflowing with love because we are connected to an infinite flow of love.

On March 4, 1865, following a great conflict that he was not able to avoid and ceasing to attempt to be a fence-sitter or people-pleasing politician, Abraham Lincoln said it this way:

“With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Towards this endlessly unfolding destiny I encourage all of us to strive together by faith in the Source who is ever faithful. Therein awaits the impact for which we were born — each individually and all collectively.

Humanity at the Center of God’s Will – Part 2

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God has a center or core of Being that we might most closely associate with Will. As the Supreme Power and Story Teller, God is free to do whatever pleases God. I submit that it always and unfailingly pleases God to have all of Divine Creation know Life’s fullest abundance in the context of Love. God is willfully 100% committed to creating and sustaining Life within which that goal is fully satisfied. Just as God wills to be fully God, so God wills that every expression of Life be fully free and empowered to be what God creates it to be. In short, God shares the essence of the Divine Will with every form of Life God creates. Most if not all spiritual thought systems address the “Origin of Life” by sharing a Creation Story. The key common point in each of those stories is “God did it.” Throughout sacred stories, the name of the God may vary but the Creator role of God remains constant. Science has substituted other stories to explain the origin of life, stories that do not give credit to an undetectable Being by any name except the Big Bang. According to a Unified Theory of Life, “why” Life exists is a factor to consider in determining “how,” “when,” “where” and “for and through what” Life exists. Scientific thinking has produced the illusion that the “origin of life” is a past event, a matter of history of one or another time frame long ago.

The theory of Life that I propose here includes the reality that life is still originating from God’s core (or care, the heart of God’s care power) and taking on new qualities that differentiate it from previous versions of life, even within each species, including the Human Species. For example, in response to human needs, God creates new versions of humans capable of expressing the progress of human development more completely or of offsetting the harm caused by previous generations of humans. For this and other reasons, I submit that we must stop judging each other as if God is no longer creating anything not observed or witnessed before. Some of those we judge unacceptable in comparison to existing models of humanity may in fact be God’s most exquisite upgrades. We must open our minds to the reality that God is still the Creator and actively creating originals. The Origin of Life is still actively originating. In fact, we’d see Life best from God’s perspective if we were to see each other as one-of-a-kind originals and stop trying to make each of us a clone or stereotype as if God has lost all originality or insist upon conformity to some uniform standard humans prefer to adopt in place of God’s prerogative to continue creating originals for God’s higher purposes than we yet know about or can acknowledge. We need to come to grips with the question “Did God do it or is this caused by some other cause?” So long as we insist on telling God what’s acceptable for God to create, we’re out of our orbit (as well as out of our minds and out of our position with God). Surely the fact that we often call tragic events “acts of God” suggests how little we honor God’s true nature and how much rethinking we need to undertake.

To assist their orderly thinking and rethinking, scientists have developed “constants” to help reconcile what appeared at first to be irreconcilable anomalies observed by scientists. A list of many generally accepted scientific constants named after people appears at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_constants_named_after_people. I propose that the dimensionless, non-quantifiable Divine Constant named after God is also helpful in reconciling what otherwise appear to be irreconcilable anomalies humans observe in Life. What appear to be paradoxes to humans may not be paradoxes within the Divine Constant. But I also propose that the Divine Constant of God is not what most religions have described it to be. Most human religions have made the mistake of describing the nature of God in human terms and failed to take into the account the true nature of Divinity that lies beyond human understanding, no matter how advanced human understanding may appear to become (scientifically, religiously or otherwise). As one of its primary contributions, my proposal reaches towards and points our (re)thinking in the direction of Divinity beyond current human understanding. It assumes the existence of Divinity and the existence of a vitally essential relationship between Divinity and humanity. Plus it assumes that this theory, like all others developed before it, is only “good as far as it goes.” My hope and purpose in sharing this theory is to promote greater progress in humanity’s relationship with God – a going forward farther together, no longer as separately as we’ve allowed our jouney to become in modern times. My hope is to contribute a means of rekindling a well-reasoned investment of time and energy in our faith in God as well as comparable investment in God’s faithfulness to us – all of us.

God’s constant will is that all expressions of Life know their true nature as manifestations of Divine Love. No aspect of Life is left out of Divine Love. However, humans have developed many theories by which to divide humanity between one part that is included in God’s favor and at least one part, often several parts, that God purportedly excludes from Divine favor. In creating such categories of inclusion and exclusion, humans err. We are mistaken every time we assert that God has excluded any element of Life from the Divine Constant of willfully being 100% committed to The Goal. To help us keep in mind what this “goal” is, it may be helpful to create an acronym from the word “goal.” I propose that G.O.A.L. stands for “God’s Ongoing Articulation of Life.” The Divine Constant is that all of Life is included in GOAL favorably and never excluded from it. Attempts by humans to explain how some part of God’s creation has lost its standing with God and no longer receives God’s commitment to its well-being are entirely, without exception mistaken. Likewise, human attempts to impose on some subparts of humanity conditions under which God will favor them are mistaken. Such human attempts are always based on human fears of aspects of humanity that seem unacceptable to those humans who fabricate their supposed explanations. They are afraid. They assume God is also afraid. That is a fundamental error. Whether a human deems himself, herself or his or her group to be superior or inferior, more favored or less favored by God, the error is the same. We are all God’s favorite flower. That seems impossible only because our language is limited and cannot adequately express the Divine Constant’s fullness.

God is never afraid of any aspect of Creation/Life. Nor is God blind or unaware. A key feature of the Divine Constant of God is vision. God’s vision extends far beyond human vision. That the theory of Life that I am sharing here is visionary and idealistic simply reflects the nature of God’s vision and idealism and our human capacity to receive that vision and idealism if we intentionally, with patient diligence and discipline, open our hearts and minds to receive it. Some may call me an “idealistic visionary.” If that means anything it means that I’ve discovered how to receive a sense of God’s vision and ideals and share them as best I can. If what I share offends some human beings, it may be because I’ve received and/or shared inaccurately. It may also mean that they are offended by God’s all-inclusive visionary Constant Will because they prefer to feel proud of some imagined preferential standing with God that does not actually exist. I encourage those who object to my theory to examine their own hearts for the presence of pride and shame (flipsides of the same coin of ego) and identify the fears that cause their thinking to be more rigidly heartless than God’s. May God’s Spirit of Love soften our hearts and open our minds to see as God sees and embrace divine ideals as the most promising avenue along which to walk together in peace and good will.

In all reconsiderations and extensions of past theories in light of my proposed theory, I urge thinkers to realize how the ego has trained our minds to ignore our hearts and pretend that the heart is not important, especially when compared with the mind. The ego is prejudiced in favor of ideas and against emotions. Why? Because Divine Love is an idea awash with the emotion of joy that dissolves the ego entirely. The ego has no standing before God within the Divine Constant because the ego is the Nothing in comparison to God’s Everything. The ego is the antithesis of God’s will that no aspect of Life should suffer and that only Love infused with peace, hope and joy be known by experience. In contrast, suffering fascinates and sustains the ego. Because the ego feeds on suffering, it generates as much conflict to expand suffering as it can persuade humans to participate in. The ego seeks to reduce humans to heartless automatons and clones who participate heartlessly and mindlessly (reactively) in cycles of ever-expanding conflict, violence and suffering by attacking other aspects of humanity with which we do not see eye to eye because we lack God’s vision. When blinded by pain and enraged by grief to the point of seeking revenge, we are in no position to see as God sees or to recall to mind God’s GOAL within the Divine Constant. In such blindness we lose our way. We stray outside the Divine Constant in search of an alternative and seek to justify exercising our will in a manner contrary to God’s will that all Life be honored within the Divine Constant. In our quest to justify our plans for vengeance, we may even invoke God’s name as if God has changed the Divine Constant. That too is error. The Divine Constant remains resolutely true to itself even when we may disagree with it most vehemently.

God’s will is the opposite of the ego’s rage-motivated revenge. God seeks instead to show humans how to rely upon divinely defined forgiveness as our lens through which to look upon and appreciate the full diversity of human authenticity. Through this lens of nonjudgment, God invites us to see all things (including widely diverse expressions of humanity) reconciled within the Divine Constant, regardless of how far afield from the Divine Constant some elements of the human race may stray. The ego points us in the direction of becoming increasingly heartless and cruel in tearing ourselves apart in cycles of self-condemning violence that spiral in upon themselves. As the alternative to ego, God draws us by Divine Magnetism in the direction of increasingly recovering our wholehearted enthusiasm for Life and our natural desire to join God within the Divine Constant as an expression of God’s will that we live together as a single unified Divine Species at the center of a Creation filled with a full Spectrum of Species. Humanity is the rainbow through which God seeks to shine forth all of who God is as a Being of Grace fully capable of carrying the human race far beyond cycles of vengeful violence – if we’ll allow ourselves to be carried away in that trusting manner. We are the arc of Divine History written from the perspective of Eternity. But the pen and paper (or digitizing mechanism) must cooperate with the Author, Director and Composer if the Sacred Story is ever to unfold as it is told. A human species crippled by pain and blinded by rage makes a poor medium for revealing the Sacred Story of the Divine Constant.

God is not blind and never will be blind. God is eternally visionary – the light by which we may see Life accurately. Although God designed humanity (the Human Species) to be a single, unified and integrated expression of the Ultimate Divine, we have become so engulfed in the modern world fabricated by scientific thinking that we’ve all but entirely lost our capacity for vision. In place of our native capacity for inner sight, we’ve substituted physical sight oriented towards the physical world around us and shut down inner sight and other inner senses. We’ve substituted for all of our inner senses an orientation to the outer – for all practical purposes to the exclusion of the inner. If we listen at all, we listen to and heed messages outside of us rather than messages deep inside. We turn all our senses externally to the exclusion of our deepest, most serene and joyfully heartfelt inner world (which, as adults, we’ve often forgotten entirely so well adjusted to ego’s angry, competitive orientation have we become!). In this manner, we allow the fear-based, anger-perpetuating egos of others to imagine and present through multiple media a non-unified world of terror and suffering to which we must learn to adjust instead of imagining for ourselves a unified world of love, healing and sustainable health for all forms of Life within which we are empowered to co-create more Life as collaborators within the Divine Constant. In this and other ways, we’ve misdirected the use of our sacred imagination and forsaken our own capacity for sharing God’s vision and expressing Divine idealism as elegant, effective and exalted integrity.

Under the influence of ego as enhanced and entrenched by scientific thinking – and while imagining (as ego counsels us to do) that fear is the dominant power in the Universe – we’ve opted to participate in relentless, increasingly more pervasive and destructive dismantling of life in defiance of God’s Divine Design. We’ve mistakenly pulled ourselves out of Life’s Integrative Equation and stifled the flow of energy by which all elements of Life are drawn irresistibly together like iron filings into Divine Love’s magnetic field. The Unifying Field of Love can be resisted by only one power in the Universe. That is the power God entrusted to humans as a quality of Divine Supremacy, the power that anoints the Human Species as the Ultimate Expression of Creation in God’s image. We call it will power. We also call it “free” will. By surrendering our will to the ego’s fragmenting agenda and disintegrated worldview, we’ve enslaved it to fear and exercise it to thwart God’s will as if in rebellion against God. Our will is no longer free so long as ego rules it. God stands ready, willing and able to set our wills free again if and when we seek God’s help in doing so. To seek God’s help requires that we admit the errors by which the ego became so uncompromisingly the master of our lives and let go of the habits by which the ego has trained us to maintain our enslavement to ego. In every moment of time we have the potential to be free again. To regain our freedom requires that we reverse our commitment to living by fear and allow ourselves to master the art and science of living by Divine Love within the Divine Constant. The ego is a tyrant whose propaganda machine has convinced us that it is the protector of our tiny fragment of life. We must regain our visionary wisdom to see the ego as the generator of fragmentation and sustainer of fears and repudiate its authority in our lives.

As a tyrannical shredder of humanity, the ego is both unwise and insane. By instituting habits of denying our emotions and numbing awareness of our hearts (within which we would otherwise sense our emotions), the ego cuts us off from the wisdom that flows into our hearts from God’s heart and renders us incapable of reasoning in ways that fully honor the sanctity of life. In our futile attempt to permanently enslave us to the ego’s madness, we’ve come to act as if the human race is an embodiment of guilt and dishonor rather than an expression of our true nature as innocent, honorable creations of an innocent, honorable God. Our popular concept of God is modeled on the all-too-common stereotypical male human who is angry, condemning and punitive in reaction to any experience he does not like. We are mistaken to characterize God as a Supreme Bully who seeks to prove superiority over humans by adopting socially admired attributes of masculinity and power equated with dominance and aggression unbalanced by less admired femininity and power equated with nurturing and receptivity.

Unlike emotionally insecure humans who may harbor secret feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness, God has no need to prove Divine Power by dominating others and causing pain. In all acts of terrorism by which humans treat each other inhumanely (or by ecoterrorism mistreat other forms of Life), the ego is at work. The ego is the terrorist. Anyone acting as a terrorist is acting out of unrelieved pain and feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness that egos may sometimes manifest in the extreme. As egos cut us off from each other’s hearts and from the heart of God, we are left to struggle as isolated, finite bodily expressions of the Infinite with which we are otherwise naturally connected. We are not merely bodies nor are we beings measured primarily by physical criteria.

Never burdened by feelings of inadequacy or powerlessness, God is confident in being God. We are mistaken to attribute to God symptoms of men or women’s hidden feelings of inadequacy and lack of confidence. Beyond the ego, we have the capacity to admit our errors and learn from them. Divine Love encourages that we do precisely that – regardless of how inadequate, guilty and ashamed we may feel temporarily while making such admissions. Ultimately we will like ourselves more for having had the courage to be honest. The ego’s dishonesty is one of the reasons we feel so low about ourselves when we act out of ego and mistakenly equate our identity with ego. In our honesty we will feel release from ego’s tyranny.

In modern times, in place of building confidence within our inner being and expressing it outwardly in caring honesty, we’ve institutionalized the importance of “liking” or “disliking” each other’s social personality (ego), equated it with approving or disapproving of each other and use social media to exaggerate the importance of such superficial assessments. We keep score of trivia to ignore what’s most important. By this and many other means, we’ve substituted trivial activities and images of popularity for self-confidence rooted in deeply satisfying acceptance and expression of our true, sacred nature. The more we ignore our sacred inner nature, the more we give importance to external substitutes. God is neither unbalanced nor concerned with trivia, popular admiration or social approval. Ego is. God is not. To rise beyond ego in renewed awareness and expression of our Sacred Selves within the Divine Constant, we must join God in giving far less value to trivial pursuits, social approval, popularity and what those who remain enslaved on ego’s terms may think or value. We can learn to value caringly expressed honesty and integrity instead.

How did we go this far astray from sanity and reason? How may we restore ourselves to our true identity and destiny? Our true identity as creations of God is our ultimate, continuously unfolding destiny, achieved by accepting both our identity and our destiny within the Divine Constant and remaining aware of both instead of adopting ego as the alternative. The foolishness of the ego does not represent our true nature or our most promising future. When we shed ego as our standard by no longer allowing pride and shame to dictate how we feel, think, decide and act, we’re on our way to freedom in mastering the art of loving and being loved in return. We went astray when we stopped depending on God for help and guidance in being our authentic, Diverse-yet-Divine Selves as designed by God. We will experience restoration (to sanity, reason, wisdom, love, peace, hope, joy and all that’s worthwhile in life) when we admit that we cannot restore ourselves on our own but need only ask wholeheartedly for God to pour forth fully all the helpful power of restoration we need and desire. Whether we call it restoration, healing or redemption, the power and the process it sets in motion come from God. We both need and want it.

To consider more about the possibility of a Unified Story of Life, please read Part 3 of this 3-part series.

Humanity at the Center of God’s Will – Part 3

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Wholeheartedness is key. To once again know ourselves to be the heart of Life as God created Life, we must be wholeheartedly committed to serving God in this role as an act of our free will – and apply for the position as if we were applying for the most rewarding and amazing career we could imagine. At first it may not feel like an expression of freedom to do so. It may feel like an act of obedience or surrender as if contrary to our freedom to do whatever pleases us. So long as we equate being free to being neglectful, thoughtless, indifferent, undisciplined and wild in self-indulgently pleasing our individual selves no matter the cost to others, we will resist restoration to the heart of God. Under that false definition of “freedom,” our egos will continue to convince us that pleasing God means sacrificing what’s important to us. When we value individuality above community in unbalanced ways, we cause suffering – to ourselves and others. To foster the continuation of such unbalanced living, the ego will continue to value pride as the alternative to shame and argue that cooperating with God’s will is humiliating and can only be done at a great cost to our pride.

The ego is correct that submitting to and cooperating with God’s will and learning to live within the heart of God in line with the Divine Constant is not prideful. But neither is it shameful. It is having the humility to reconnect with true power rather than A) remaining disconnected, isolated, lonely and devoid of the joys of healthy intimacy and B) trying to hide from deeply dissatisfying feelings of powerless and loss. The experience of being restored to alignment with God’s will is vastly rewarding but not on ego’s terms. So long as we value ego’s terms, we’ll resist God’s terms. The choice is stark. We cannot live by both ego’s fear-controlled, loveless terms and God’s courageous, love-enriched terms. We must eventually choose one or the other. And we must choose wholeheartedly and remain committed to that choice no matter how the ego tries to tempt us to return to or compromise with ego’s terms. As we gain progress in implementing our choice to forego the ego entirely, we’ll become increasingly eager to continue making that choice.

For a while, it will seem as if doing what pleases God requires that we do what does not please ourselves. That sense of loss will continue only as long as we continue to mistakenly identify with ego as our “self.” That God’s will for Life and our will for Life are one will is not immediately evident to us because our ego-oriented habits will not immediately give way to the new set of habits we will acquire as we master the discipline of living within the Divine Constant as an expression of God’s unconditionally loving heart. One of the most persuasive arguments the ego will present in favor of remaining loyal to the ego and avoiding learning to live as G.O.A.L. will be to point out that awakening to our emotions and becoming less numb to our hearts requires that we become aware of the negative emotions that the ego convinced us to store away earlier in life. Under the ego’s influence, it is true that instead of processing our emotions on a current basis we bottled them up and allowed them to accumulate. The ego will argue, “Look, you’ve stored up a lot of pain trying to avoid feeling it earlier in life. Do you really want to feel that pain now? Why not keep bottling it up and avoid feeling it as the ego allows you to do?”

Yes, the pain is there, stored up from years of habitually avoiding being honest about your emotions. With God’s able assistance you will be empowered to look directly at this pain, be honest about it and grieve through it to the brighter life beyond it, where pain will no longer accumulate as a plague upon your heart and mind and motivate you to participate in cycles of violence – as victim or victimizer. You gain God’s assistance by asking for it and being wholeheartedly committed to receiving it in all the forms it takes. You can remain enslaved to pain (and to its accumulated version called “chronic suffering”) by continuing to live by your ego’s false identity and obeying the ego’s demand that you condemn and punish yourself and others for “sins,” wrongs and guilt that can be forgiven instead. Or you can become free of pain and suffering by envisioning life beyond the pain, beyond the suffering and beyond the ego and engaging in the process of grieving to attain relief, a process through which your vision of the Divine Constant draws you like iron filings to a magnetic field. Which option really pleases you? Are you really pleased by the prospect of enduring pain and suffering forever as you condemn yourself and others to it by identifying with ego or are you likely to be more pleased by the prospect of ending pain and suffering? Endure or end pain and suffering? Is that really a difficult choice? The main difficulty in the choice presents itself at the beginning – are you willing to take the risk that the Divine Constant exists and will prove to welcome you to life within it? Are you willing to risk giving up the power to inflict painful revenge in order to discover your natural power to share love and healing instead? Your sense of risk will gradually fade the more you experience the fruits of your exercising faith in God and allow God to prove Eternity’s favorable faithfulness to you.

Only our egos resist God’s will. Our true nature as created by God does not resist. It remains receptive to God’s presence, power and purpose as a beloved child remains receptive to the caring presence, power and purpose of a trusted, nurturing human parent. (Much of our resistance to trusting God as a nurturing Divine Parent is rooted in our past experiences with human parents and other authority figures whom we expected to care for us on favorable terms but instead treated us according to ego’s terms and – by neglect, abuse or both – failed to express the qualities of God’s care and caused us to feel betrayed. Now many of us fear being betrayed, rejected and abandoned by God as well as by others.) As we let down our ego’s guarded stance towards God as Supreme Authority and Caregiver and risk exploring the ego-diminishing experience of God we will be amazed and delighted by what we discover. The wonderful features and benefits of being human that we’d not known or encountered before – or thought we’d never know or encounter again – come alive and energize life more completely. We feel the magnetic field of God’s love flowing through and around us and become convinced that we are detecting what scientists have not yet been able to detect. In this experience, we will know that we are the God-detectors and that our subjective experiences of God are like the responses of iron filings to a magnet’s magnetic field. Being susceptible to magnetism, the iron filings cannot resist aligning themselves with the magnetic field. Being susceptible to Love’s Power because we are created by Love, we similarly cannot resist aligning ourselves and all we are with Love’s energizing invitation in our hearts.

Our struggle to let down resistance and trust takes place within our wills and minds. God has no struggle. God is wholeheartedly committed to our well-being and always has been and always will be. God knows no other way to Be. The struggle is ours, between our ego’s orientation and our divine, natural orientation. God trusts that our nature as created offspring of the Origin of Life will ultimately prevail. There is a struggle within each of us only because we’ve been raised to believe in the ego as our identity. Our minds have taken up that concept of ego-identity in powerful ways to do our best to adopt it and adapt to it. We put our faith in those who taught us to be egos and in the rules, roles and rituals by which we learned to belong as an ego in an ego-oriented society. We may feel betrayed when we discover that “obeying” God’s authority is not humiliating – as it may have been for us to obey human authority figures. We will discover that “obedience” to God’s will is not a sacrifice at all. It’s a privilege. It’s a decision to cooperate, collaborate and co-create with Love’s presence, power and purpose so as to cease to feel little or no personal significance, power or purpose within our own lives. We will come alive with our own incredible personal presence, power and purpose because we aligned our wills with the Divine Constant and learned to live wholeheartedly committed to all it asks of us to be true to ourselves.

We are not our egos. The ego is a false identity we adopted to survive in the modern, ego-dominated society where God’s true nature as the Source of Love has been denied – at best relegated to an accessory to modern lifestyles and at worst discredited and discarded altogether. God is not a handbag, necktie or other accessory to Life. God is the main point of Life, all that makes Life worth living. Modern lifestyles that relegate God to a minor role or dismiss Divinity from the team are not actually lifestyles. They are deathstyles masquerading as lifestyles. They are deathstyles to the same extent to which they define God, the Creator and Sustainer of Life, to be irrelevant or indifferent – or worse our hostile adversary. As we learn to restore God to supreme relevance and benevolence at the center of our lives, we will awaken in our hearts to experiences of the Divine Love that have otherwise been missing in action in our lives. Without God, our lives may be filled with endless action but still be empty of love. Divine Love will be our reward for “obeying” God and discovering that our free will is truly an honored element of God’s will. In fact, our will cannot be truly free unless it honors God’s will as its source. The negative connotations of “obedience” fade away as we realize that all God asks of us is to consent and cooperate in allowing God to deliver us from ego and its fears so that God may gracefully deliver to us all our hearts desire. The ego asks for our compliance with its subtly manipulative, seductive tyranny. God invites us to openly, honestly and transparently explore investing our wholehearted consent and cooperation within the Divine Constant and with each other so as to create together the world beyond ego we may have sometimes dared to hope is possible.

Learning to relate to God as a gracefully generous and gentle lover requires renewal of lost trust. It requires that we trust a Power Greater Than Ourselves to have our best interests in mind and at heart and to show us step by step how love reliably works within the Divine Constant. The process of trust-building between ourselves and God requires that we risk trusting and appreciating (instead of judging and condemning) each other too. Through experiences of broken promises and other types of violated trust that we’ve experienced at the hands of other people’s egos, we have learned 1) not to trust God or each other, 2) not to feel our emotions or be sensitive to and aware of our hearts and the hearts of others, and 3) not to talk about things that really matter (as Claudia Black points out in her helpful book*). To rise beyond ego means to let go of the ego’s dysfunctional rules of distrust, heartlessness and superficiality and move ever deeper into and throughout Life’s enriching, adventurous journey as explorers, pioneers and settlers, not to displace anyone but to find our own place within the infinitely expansive Divine Constant. In contrast, modern society majors in maintaining distrust, heartlessness and superficiality as our steady diet and as the defining features of the tightly defended, closed comfort zones within which we cower as egos.

The Divine Constant is not our ego’s comfort zone (or status quo, sheltering bubble or closed social system) but it is our Natural Self’s native creativity zone within which we come fully online and enlivened and dare to take the risk of changing for the better and unfolding to be all God created us to be. It is not the realm where human scientists can detect all phenomena and control all experiments on human terms. It is a realm of risks. Some experiments may blow up in our face and splash egg on our egos. Yet, even experiments that seem to end in ignoble failure contain valuable lessons. Within God’s grace, no matter how our explorative experimentation may progress as we discover more about who we are and how to express ourselves, we remain secure in our knowledge that we are loved and cared for by a God who is wholeheartedly devoted to us personally – each and everyone one of us singly and all of us collectively. God’s solidarity with each and all of us is unshakeable, even during our most adolescent phases and fascinations. And God is wholeheartedly committed to our learning and making progress through all of our experiences as divine “works in progress” who are ever evolving and emerging to be, represent and express the more comprehensive nature of God’s mind, heart and will.

We are God’s will power set free to either live according to the Divine Constant or repudiate it and remain apart from it until we tire of being apart from it and opt to join with it as an expression of our freedom. Freedom is what it’s all about. That is why Martin Luther King, Jr. reported after his encounter with God that he was “free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.” My life purpose is to encourage us to all join MLK Jr. in fulfilling the dream he asked us to envision with him. He saw what God was seeing and rejoiced to share with us what God had shown him. So every visionary dreams of doing to the ever-evolving enhancement of the quality of Life on Earth.

A visionary’s inspiration of the Divine Constant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld6fAO4idaI.

Fast forward several decades, the Divine Constant remains constantly honored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Osbub_iTZg.

And articulated in a variety of ways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziLiIPViM2E.

I propose that we are here on Earth to explore the fullest expanses of Life in the context and under the guidance of Love as shared with God and each other. We are not here to pursue our lonely, misguided explorations as egos in the context of isolating fears that deprive us of the immense joys of sacred, enthusiastic, heartfelt intimacy. We are here instead to serve each other as expressions of the Divine Constant, encouraging all of us to participate in that renewing, ancient territory. Let us agree together to value all that God holds valuable and offers to share generously. Let us let go of all the valueless that ego once convinced us to value. It feels miraculous to realize that God encourages us to try new experiences beyond pride and shame and guilt and blame and there – in the beyond – engage with Life playfully as innocent children are free to do if given that latitude by those who watch over them as authority figures. That is the latitude God grants us. It is also our hearts’ desires come true.

Could life be as simple as deciding to wholeheartedly have faith in a benevolent and merciful God who has no need to argue with anyone nor punish or make anyone feel guilty or ashamed for disagreeing or being different? What would it feel like to be totally safe while expressing a creative idea or heartfelt feeling to which the mainstream majority may at first react adversely? What would it feel like to say, “Hey, I have something to say that’s controversial and I’m not sure if it’s correct, but I feel the need to say it anyway because I believe it may be helpful?” and not be ridiculed or in any other manner made to regret speaking up? What if such uncensored freedom of expression allowed solutions to social issues to arise from the depths of our hearts as we listened to the Spirit of Love within us? What would it be like if we all did our best to be nonjudgmental as God is instead of defending our egos and projecting our fears on one another?

It is easy to project fears upon the defenseless innocents and make them play the role of scapegoats. Would it not be more honest and require more courage to recognize our own fears directly and admit how we’re tempted to pretend we are not afraid? Would our relationships work out better is we did not allow our undisclosed fears and their resulting temptation to pretend to dictate how we think, speak and act? The ego counsels that we hide all our emotions, including our fears, but also our anger, sorrow, peace, hope and joy. It counsels that we project images of pride (or second best, shame) as substitutes for honest emotions caringly expressed within our relationships. The ego tends to characterize anger as an expression of power when in fact it’s an expression of deep-seated feelings of powerlessness. In contrast, the Spirit of Love counsels that we find within our hearts the courage to stand together humbly as honest citizens and live at peace with one another. The Divine Constant welcomes us to be a constant source of peace, hope, joy and love and a model of emotions of all types expressed caringly. Constantly. Can we be it? Yes, we can, by God’s grace and with God’s empowering assistance.

Would it not be amazing to discover how right both scientists dedicated to the highest principles of science and believers in God dedicated to the highest principles of sacredness have been all along in seeking to be more than superficial observers of Life? May we all learn to look deep into our hearts and there find persuasive cause to see eye to eye and cease to take an eye for an eye. May we discover within our shared experience of the Divine Constant that

I – I = O and

I + I = WE as US (Wise Explorers as United Spirits)

amid a never-ending quest to experience our deepest satisfaction as GOAL.

*Black, It Will Never Happen to Me, 2^nd Edition, MAC Publishing, Bainbridge Island WA 2001.