cmad on Nostr: #GM and #PuraVida I wanted to share a short(ish) piece of writing from good friend ...
#GM and #PuraVida
I wanted to share a short(ish) piece of writing from good friend this past week. I hope you are as touched by it as I am.
🫶😌
….…. As I approach my 60th birthday, and our country approaches this election with much of the world seemingly on fire, I have been focused on the question, “What do I truly love when no one is looking?”
This question has led me down a path towards the thought experiment of what if everything that is going on in the world is perfect, just as was intended, all the war, the suffering, the hatred, the polarization, the social media, the dictators and even the disease and hunger? What if this is all part of the process of moving from a world of good and evil to a world of what is?
Part of this process is certainly the realization that my own agency in any of this—elections, war, or even the twists and turns of my own life—are nil. I can get loud and protest and want it to be a different way, but it will not change anything. We are programmed to believe differently in this country, but the reality smacks me in the face every day. I can attempt to swim upstream all I want but the cosmic reality is that the current will always take me where it wants in the end.
When I first started meditating on what it is I truly love what bubbled up from my subconscious was the stars and the moon. I love the entire universe. I truly love everything. That, I believe, is our birthright if we are open to it. Not hate but love.
I am not religious, but for a time now I have been studying the world’s mystics from a variety of traditions. Monks who have devoted their lives to going beyond the surface of things to the interior of human existence.
I have come to the idea that all of human development is a reclaiming of our own divinity. Not a “God” (whatever it is you believe that to be even if it’s the Great Pumpkin) out there but a God in me and us.
I am of God.
It was always that way and will be that way to eternity.
So are you.
We can struggle through cycles of shame and anger and experience all forms of suffering all we want, but none of it changes this underlying fact. Mystics and meditators often talk about this using the metaphor of the blue sky. There can be hurricanes and blizzards, but the blue sky is always there. We can fury all we want at one another and ourselves, but in the end we will come back to the sun and the stars and the blue sky. There is nothing we can or need to “do” to achieve divinity, experience love, to be connected to one another. It is innate, a fundamental property of our existence.
The concept of singularity is that there is no you and no me, but we are all one. When I re-discover my own divinity I am answering the question of what I truly love at its deepest level not only by reclaiming myself, and all the best and worst parts of my life, but I am embracing the whole range of human experience and in fact the entire universe.
Does the election matter? The wars in the Middle East and Ukraine? Global warming? A billion children who are malnourished in our world? Of course, all that matters. But it also really doesn’t. It is exactly as intended. On a spiritual level, everything is perfect.
You can choose to stop worrying and hating (yourself and others). Or at least that is what I aspire to do. Like all humans, I am still in process. Minute to minute my level of acceptance varies. But my ability to see my own divinity and to embrace the world with full acceptance is not an on-off switch. It’s like a dimmer that goes up and down but with no upper bound on the brightness of the love meter. As I lurch back and forth towards greater understanding in my heart of the truth of everything above, I come to greater and greater peace in my soul.
I choose to see the world not as good and evil but simply good. My only job is to observe that goodness, to be a witness, in others by holding unconditional love for them even as they suffer.
For me God is like a bonfire in the woods. I am warming my hands and face by that fire at perfect rest and then, again and again, I somehow find myself off in the cold, damp, and dark forest having no idea how I got there. The bonfire is right there behind me. All I have to do is walk back over to it to warm and dry myself out again. Sometimes I see it right away and walk back immediately, and sometimes I walk deeper and deeper in the woods, miserable for a long time before remembering.
The metaphor works for me individually and for us collectively. There is no shame in finding ourselves in the dark, wet woods. This is not a morality play. It is the nature of things. We just need to walk back to the bonfire of God’s love. Of our own divinity. To accepting the warmth which is our collective birthright. Or we can all wander around in the woods some more screaming at ourselves and each other some more. That is perfectly okay too.
I wanted to share a short(ish) piece of writing from good friend this past week. I hope you are as touched by it as I am.
🫶😌
….…. As I approach my 60th birthday, and our country approaches this election with much of the world seemingly on fire, I have been focused on the question, “What do I truly love when no one is looking?”
This question has led me down a path towards the thought experiment of what if everything that is going on in the world is perfect, just as was intended, all the war, the suffering, the hatred, the polarization, the social media, the dictators and even the disease and hunger? What if this is all part of the process of moving from a world of good and evil to a world of what is?
Part of this process is certainly the realization that my own agency in any of this—elections, war, or even the twists and turns of my own life—are nil. I can get loud and protest and want it to be a different way, but it will not change anything. We are programmed to believe differently in this country, but the reality smacks me in the face every day. I can attempt to swim upstream all I want but the cosmic reality is that the current will always take me where it wants in the end.
When I first started meditating on what it is I truly love what bubbled up from my subconscious was the stars and the moon. I love the entire universe. I truly love everything. That, I believe, is our birthright if we are open to it. Not hate but love.
I am not religious, but for a time now I have been studying the world’s mystics from a variety of traditions. Monks who have devoted their lives to going beyond the surface of things to the interior of human existence.
I have come to the idea that all of human development is a reclaiming of our own divinity. Not a “God” (whatever it is you believe that to be even if it’s the Great Pumpkin) out there but a God in me and us.
I am of God.
It was always that way and will be that way to eternity.
So are you.
We can struggle through cycles of shame and anger and experience all forms of suffering all we want, but none of it changes this underlying fact. Mystics and meditators often talk about this using the metaphor of the blue sky. There can be hurricanes and blizzards, but the blue sky is always there. We can fury all we want at one another and ourselves, but in the end we will come back to the sun and the stars and the blue sky. There is nothing we can or need to “do” to achieve divinity, experience love, to be connected to one another. It is innate, a fundamental property of our existence.
The concept of singularity is that there is no you and no me, but we are all one. When I re-discover my own divinity I am answering the question of what I truly love at its deepest level not only by reclaiming myself, and all the best and worst parts of my life, but I am embracing the whole range of human experience and in fact the entire universe.
Does the election matter? The wars in the Middle East and Ukraine? Global warming? A billion children who are malnourished in our world? Of course, all that matters. But it also really doesn’t. It is exactly as intended. On a spiritual level, everything is perfect.
You can choose to stop worrying and hating (yourself and others). Or at least that is what I aspire to do. Like all humans, I am still in process. Minute to minute my level of acceptance varies. But my ability to see my own divinity and to embrace the world with full acceptance is not an on-off switch. It’s like a dimmer that goes up and down but with no upper bound on the brightness of the love meter. As I lurch back and forth towards greater understanding in my heart of the truth of everything above, I come to greater and greater peace in my soul.
I choose to see the world not as good and evil but simply good. My only job is to observe that goodness, to be a witness, in others by holding unconditional love for them even as they suffer.
For me God is like a bonfire in the woods. I am warming my hands and face by that fire at perfect rest and then, again and again, I somehow find myself off in the cold, damp, and dark forest having no idea how I got there. The bonfire is right there behind me. All I have to do is walk back over to it to warm and dry myself out again. Sometimes I see it right away and walk back immediately, and sometimes I walk deeper and deeper in the woods, miserable for a long time before remembering.
The metaphor works for me individually and for us collectively. There is no shame in finding ourselves in the dark, wet woods. This is not a morality play. It is the nature of things. We just need to walk back to the bonfire of God’s love. Of our own divinity. To accepting the warmth which is our collective birthright. Or we can all wander around in the woods some more screaming at ourselves and each other some more. That is perfectly okay too.