by user_dd | Jun 15, 2020 | Community Conversations
WARNING: this blog post does not contain the messages that you’ve been hearing over and over again from your FB wall and the corporate media or most other sources caught up in the emotion of this tumultuous time in the USA. For the life of me, I cannot ever be a commentator solely on current events, because I’m always observing from a much larger perspective. It’s a double-edged sword, trust me.
Rites of passage
In certain ancient civilizations, your community might have prepared you for transformation via certain rites of passage. These rites were important to the psychological development of the individual and vital to the survival of the greater community culture.
Rites of passage often require that one sees the world as completely different or seemingly backwards, or they were a sort of near-death experience. The idea was that the stress of the rite of passage would inspire the individual to open up to new ways of seeing the world via imagination, visioning, and healing.
Why were these rites so important? Because they taught you that the world is not what it appears to be. These wisdom holders were preparing their people for REALITY.
Modern people might call these rites of passage a type of spiritual practice, with little relevance to daily life. But what about your experience isn’t spiritual?
Transformation is reality, the proof is your lived experience right now. Call that a real experience or call that a spiritual experience, the point is that you’re either prepared for it now or you’re not.
Live Free
While it’s not my nature to be out in large crowds making a show of protesting loudly, I do take actions everyday to support the kind of world that I want to live in: one that is peaceful, joyful, equitable, expressive, connected and free. I do support everyone out there peacefully standing up for the rights of ALL people to live free in our country, unencumbered by racist actions and systems of oppression that need to be dismantled so our society can move forward in a way that gives everyone the same chances to live, love, and thrive.
One of my core values is freedom, and at one time I thought that meant I needed to be able to stand on my own, dependent on no one. The wisdom of years and many mistakes has taught me that true freedom is being able to trust others to have your back so you can create together the kind of world we all want to live in. True freedom will only come from working together, one nation, under God, indivisible.
They knew that every moment was an opportunity to claim your freedom, and thus, every moment required awareness, discernment, and clarity. Life lived this way is transformative, as every action you take has power.
That’s why you need to meditate more, so less stuff happens that you have to deal with everyday. Otherwise, it’s exhausting!
Pay Attention
But seriously, if you are comfortable, you are not paying enough attention…and I don’t mean right now, I mean, always and at all times. What you are resisting by sliding into comfort and inertia is the inevitable flow of human progress and evolution unfolding right before your very eyes. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, as they say.
In this world of transformation, the world in which you are living, your greatest service is attending to your own evolution and healing. Your DNA contains the light code to your spiritual gifts which unlock this healing potential. So get a life activation ASAP! activate.spiritintransition.com
The greatest gift you can give is re-uniting with your own wholeness. Wholeness is the state of being that results when you apply the principle of unity to your life.
Until you act on that commitment for yourself, experiencing it within, you will not see that wholeness reflected outside of you. How can you see unity without if you don’t have the lived experience of it within? That’s why wisdom traditions from time immemorial have stated that you must go within. The Kingdom of God is within, says Jesus. Enlightenment is within, says the Buddha. The “Dao” or the Way is contained within all things.
“God is a unity unlike any other possible unity,” says a Jewish philosopher Maimonides.
Find UNITY and you will find PEACE.
So what can you do right now?
Well, I don’t think a man who has enjoyed the privilege being a white male in society is your go-to for that kind of advice, so I’m paraphrasing Kali Ladd: a Portland Business Journal Forty Under 40 and Women of Influence honoree: who recently spoke publicaly in Portland, and this is a summary of her remarks:
Neuroscience and psychology and child development all tell us that we can create a new narrative. But we need to be careful to do this intentionally rather reactively. Our brains are incredible, miraculous things that can be wired and rewired by our words and our actions. They call it neuroplasticity.
The science tells us that children are not born hating other children or rendering certain people invisible. This happens over time. You see every circumstance is a data point that forms an idea. Watching that black boy in pre-school get kicked out of class repeatedly is a data point, pretending as though the founding of this country did not come at the hands of genocide is a data point, silence in the aftermath of a killing is a data point.
And these data points form ideas. And these ideas begin to cluster and form schema. And this schema dictates behavior.
We are developing racist schema and reinforcing racist ideas in [our minds] when we fail to talk about racism. When we fail to tell the truth about history. When we fail to point out injustice whether it’s overt or covert.
You see, when we put [truth] at the center of our lives, our comfort or discomfort become less and less important. [paraphrasing Kali Ladd]
It’s time to take a look at your narrative. Your narrative is the story you tell about your lived experience. It colors your worldview, your thoughts, and your actions. The question I would ask you is: are you creating Unity and connection with others, or are you creating distance and separation? Is dismantling racism the way that you are actually creating more separation or union? It’s just a question. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. When you argue with people, or get angry at current events, is your intention to build understanding and bridge ideologies to restore unity, or are you furthering separation through violence? I don’t know, only you can answer that question for yourself.
Your answer is the kind of world you want to live in, because it’s the kind of world that you’re creating.
So start telling yourself the truth. Start telling others the truth. Be compassionate and forgiving, and trust others to do the same, even if you know they won’t. It’s all part of the transformation.
Above all, heal yourself to a state of wholeness, and the world will follow.
I’ll leave you with some words from the Dhammapada:
Look within.
Be still.
Free from fear and attachment,
Know the sweet joy of the way.
Be well, Stay Healthy, and make a heartfelt prayer for what you want to bring in. Go in peace to love and serve.
by user_dd | Apr 15, 2020 | Community Conversations
Simply think the highest thoughts you can; feel the deepest love you are capable of; reach up or down to the highest, or deepest, Divinity that you can experience; treat others with the tenderest of kindness and the most caring of compassion that you possibly can; and if you are anywhere near the leading edge of evolution, you will directly, immediately, and instantly contribute to what Whitehead called “an ultimate of the universe”—namely, the “creative advance into novelty.” In other words, you will contribute to evolution itself.
~ pg 219-220 “The Religion of Tomorrow” by Ken Wilbur
I’m reading this book right now. It’s very interesting. The detractor that it weighs as much as a boat anchor is lessened considerably by the fact that I have always been passionate about the contents—consciousness evolution.
I was struck by this quote due to the fact that it makes important commentary in light of the COVID-19 crisis. What this quote is calling for, written in 2017, is even more apropos today.
We all have the ability, through our thoughts, to influence reality.
That’s just a given at this point, so if you haven’t caught up to that, I encourage you to dive into the Upanishads, or better yet the Dhammapada, or some other wisdom teachings that suit you from something older than the NY Times best-seller list. Remember—if it’s still published after thousands of years, there’s probably a good reason. That’s why they’re called ‘wisdom traditions,’ right?
As Lightworkers and harbingers of the New Paradigm (i.e. Shamballah, as we like to refer to it in the Western Mystery Tradition), we have the added responsibility to carefully curate our thoughts in service to molding the kind of future that we want to live into.
We make a choice every day to live in alignment with God, Unity, Source, Creator, Universal Energy—whatever you want to call the highest and most expansive, ineffable power that makes this reality possible.
The dominance of rational thought as a predictor of our lived reality was debunked thousands of years ago, by initiates in the Mystery Tradition, of course. See any commentary on Zeno’s Paradoxes for the weird and unpredictable places that rational thought and logic can take us. In short, rational thought does not lead to a rational reality.
With passion and intention, we increase the power of those thoughts.
Our emotional state has the ability to affect how DNA expresses (see most of Bruce Lipton’s recent work). Metaphysically we know that the emotion of Bliss, specifically, has an impact on how your DNA enfolds/replicates. Long story short, you are more powerful when in a Bliss state because your DNA can enfold/replicate most purely, with less (genetic) information loss, and you are more YOU as each generation of cells replicates.
This is what I really mean by ‘with passion.’ When you are passionate, you are literally and physically more YOU! Your energy flows without interference.
Any delay or obstruction to you being YOU is interference. When there is no interference in your energy flow, there is no loss between information in (i.e. intention) and information out (i.e. manifestation). This is what we mean by creating your reality—matching intention with manifest reality by reducing/eliminating the information delay/obstruction caused by you not being fully YOU.
That’s the metaphysical reason why we say, “Follow your passion.”
I’m Conscious, Right?
But not every part of us is under conscious control. In fact, we are conscious of only about 5% of our cognitive activity. The conscious mind actively pushes information processing to the subconscious to free up valuable cognitive resources for novel information. The subconscious just plays back what it’s programmed to, it’s not creative like your conscious mind.
How much of your thinking each day is novel? It takes less energy to think the same thoughts we did yesterday, and so your body is rewarded for doing so—physically and energetically.
The subconscious and conscious mind work together to mold our experience. It’s just that we spend most of our day responding to the same autonomic thoughts from our subconscious. But when we do interrupt those subconscious processes, bringing a new awareness to our reality, we see things differently.
Whatever the conscious mind focuses on, it can control. Thus, intention is necessary for us to control our reality. What we have control over, we have power over. So intention also increases the power of our thoughts.
COVID-19 is a transformational agent calling on us to create the conditions for a new world—Shamballah.
Yes, of course I acknowledge the tremendous pain and tragedy due to the pandemic. As I write, the outbreak is still getting worse in the USA. The markets are in a terrible state, and you have to arrange your grocery pick-up at least 10 days in advance to have a chance of getting anything on your list. We have to look the truth straight in the face in times like these in order to take empowered action.
I see this time as a transformational opportunity, to slow down or halt certain businesses, cultures, systems and try to recreate a new way of operating coming out of the experience caused by this virus.
As Ken Wilbur notes above, when we can direct our thoughts to the highest energy, deepest love, grandest compassion, we can find something truly novel, something truly evolutionary, something new that this world has never seen.
Are you making choices based on low vibrations of fear and worry? Or are you looking for what you can give? Are you looking to be in service? Are you looking for how you can be open to Spirit? Are you thinking high, deep, and grand thoughts? Or are you thinking small, closed, fragmented ones?
This is a choice you’re making right now that will direct the course of your life for many months to come. Will the new world you create be a slightly modified version of the old, or will you try something completely new this time? Will you stay operating from the old programming of the subconscious, or will you enlist that help of your conscious, creative mind and envision a new way of living?
Meditate on that. I look forward to what you create…
by user_dd | Sep 17, 2015 | Community Conversations
Are we ever truly alone and separate? Or is there something bigger we are a part of?
Holism is the view that everything must be taken within the context of a greater whole. To some, this is an intuitive concept: cells must be understood within the system of the body, individual animals within the ecosystem, each ecosystem within the global environment, planets within galaxies, etc.
But holism has much greater potential than simply an intellectual tool. For example, when we judge ourselves or others for misaligned behaviors, holism asks us to reflect upon what brought those things about: What emotions drove us to that outburst? What in our psyche caused us to react that way? Holism opens ourselves to a greater degree of compassion for ourselves and others through systematic analysis, as well as loving acceptance of another being you are integrally connected with.
Holism posits the paradox that even though we are each an irreducible and un-substitutable individual (one need only contemplate the infinite uniqueness of a single leaf on a tree, a tree within a forest), we are all still informed, shaped, connected to, and fulfilled by a unified system that is us far more than any sense of self divorced from the rest of reality.
This kind of metaphysical holism has astounding implications. It proposes that each person is greater than his or her individual self. It creates a new way of relating to fellow human beings, in that each is understood to be invaluable in his or her contribution and very being, a reflection and powerful element of the system as a whole.
Rather than any individual perspective becoming dominant, all become prisms with which to refract the same light; this is not to denounce critical rigor, but rather to transform argumentation into constructive conversation and curious discourse.
Overall, holism means loving oneself and finding oneself as oneself. We can never fully know, because there is always more to learn, to discover, and to love. The process and systematic whole is reflected in the beauty of each aspect, animal, plant, river, planet, star, and person, and each reveals another verse of the great mystery of life. We need only open our eyes to see and ears to listen.
About our guest author:
David Rauenzahn is a long-time seeker of deeper meaning. A recent Religious Studies graduate from Reed College, David spent the majority of his academic career pursuing perennial truths and the connections between objective truths, consciousness, and perspective. He is currently looking to bring dialectical techniques into politics to engender a holistic political environment that seeks a cooperative synthesis of values and perspective.
