Wake Up to Trust
Dump Fear As You Embrace Trust and Prudence
All kinds of news stories are being spread around about radiation reaching American
shores, about more earthquakes coming, about sinister plots and "certain" cataclysm.
What is the best response to these kinds of stories?
It is clear to many, including yours truly, that corruption has run rampant in our
world and that idiotic religion, unbridled greed in our governments and on the part
of certain financial barons is resulting in a lot of challenge an chaos for many.
Part of the challenge with the varying events we have been experiencing is that many
people simply do not want to hear about what is happening. They'd prefer to avoid
what is going on in the world, prefer not to face what is in front of them.
People are upset, fearful, angry. Our planet seems to be mighty angry at all the
abuse her people have been inflicting on her.
So what do we DO? The knee-jerk response is to jump into fear. And there is a lot
of fear mongering going on now, projections of disaster, many of which have no basis
in fact, science or even astrology.
So what is the most spiritually profitable, spiritually wise way of responding to all
the fear mongering going on as we approach the Spring Equinox, 2011?
First, we are called upon to trust. Trust is possible only when one has a knowing
that all the little and big challenges of life will work themselves out in a divinely
purposeful way. Trusting means that when others are panicky and on edge, the trusting
one chooses to accept what is in a calm way, a way that knows that there is a divine
plan behind every apparent challenge just as there is one behind every experience that
is easy to appreciate.
Trust is built by choosing to embrace courage in the face of challenge.
When one trusts, calm is possible.
When one is calm, heart-intelligent decisions are more likely to be made.
It all starts with just dumping fear. If you trust that your life goes on after the
body dies, then there is no reason to fear. Think about it. If we keep coming back
until we get it right, then why have any kind of fear?
Please do not mistake prudence for fear. The reason you do not walk down a dark
alley in a tough part of town at 3 am isn't because you are afraid. It's because you are
wise enough---prudent enough---to make a health-preserving decision based upon what you
know. This has nothing to do with fear.
To cave now to fear plays into the hands of those who want to control us, to bleed us, to
enslave us. Please do not cop to fear!
The more frequently in these changing times that you claim courage and trust and prudent
action, the easier it beoomes to build these same practices and responses in the future.
Choose wisely.
The power of our collective love is huge when compared to the false worldly powers of those who
want to control and enslave us.
Contemplate this thought: I trust myself and I trust the loving power of the Universe to guide and protect me.
Waking Up to the Way It Is
From the perspective of anyone who is paying attention, the world seems to be going into the tank. We are being brought to the brink of destruction by the institutions we have allowed to run our lives.
Our governments are controlled by corporations. We let big business poison our foods. Local governments are allowed to poison our water supplies with the main ingredient in rat poison, fluoride, or with fluorosilicic acid. We let farmers “hormone-ize” livestock for profit enhancement purposes, without listening to what the scientists tell us about how those hormones are messing up our moods. We let our government go to war with other countries’ governments preemptively, as if an initial attack is morally justifiable.
Drug makers tell us the solutions to our problems can be found in little pills.
Religious leaders implore us to choose their god for current and eternal salvation.
Governments pretend that they can solve our social ills, and that they can make us safer by wasting our soldiers' lives and a trillion dollars of your money on war with two small countries on the other side of the ocean. Meanwhile, we let 10,000 people starve to death every day in our world community.
How stupid are we?
Most of our religious leadership practices the opposite of what they preach, arrogantly claiming superiority over other religious entities while reminding the faithful of their god’s unhappiness with our collective inferiority, unworthiness and damnable behavior.
Our food producers feed us poisons, approved by our governments: health-killers like aspartame, brain toxins such as monosodium glutamate and tension creators like excess sugars in darn near every processed food. Without a care as to the long-term effects of genetically modifying foods and seeds, producers rush these products to market in the name of profit and control, humanity be damned.
Our medical institutions bleed us while withholding low-cost, effective modes of treatments and stifling the promotion of natural, more humane products. While nature created many simple products loaded with health benefits---hydrogen peroxide, baking soda and water, to name two---our governments and medical institutions conspire to keep the great power of these gifts to us under wraps because there is not enough profit in selling them.
Most popular media lies to us or give us half-truths while they concurrently provoke us to fight with each other, to judge, to damn, and to be fearful that there is absolutely nothing we can do step off the path to destruction or total despair.
Our experience will soon be so beyond denial that we will be forced to surrender to either our more powerful loving nature or to the essentially minimal forces that we have empowered by collectively staying asleep.
Institutions as the Mirror of Ego
The corrupt behavior of the institutions we wish we could trust serves a very important purpose in our communal evolution: Our governmental, religious and corporate institutions are a microcosm of the human ego as we collectively identify with it today.
What is the purpose of this mirror? It is to show us ourselves by the unproductive examples that stare us in the face every day. Sooner or later we will get it: we will drop the false power of ego and embrace a more loving way of being. One way of doing this is to choose to be aware of how we treat each other and how our institutions are treating us. We learn and grow by paying attention to what is in front of us, and by then responding in a more loving, truly productive way. That we allow our institutions to treat us so poorly is an indication of our sense of collective sense of unworthiness or weakness. Let’s snap out of it.
Collectively, we still think we are the ego. We see power as the ability to manipulate, deceive, dominate or enslave. We always want more of some things and less of something else, never allowing ourselves to be content with what we have. This, too, is the way of life for those who control our governmental, corporate, financial and religious institutions. They want to control everything, no matter the price paid by the larger body of humanity.
We wear masks, just like our institutions. Our government pretends to be the greatest benefactor on the planet when it is actually its most ruthless controller and imperialist. It likes to tell us that we are the richest nation in the world, but the truth is that we’d have to sell every square inch of this country to pay our national debt.
Our religions wear the mask of love, while most of them promote divisiveness and spiritual neediness. Our silly addiction to religion has the world in lethal, potentially apocalyptic conflict. Despite this, our leaders continue to encourage us to exercise the “freedom” to promulgate philosophies that arrogantly suggest adherence to one of several“true” religions as some kind of ticket to either worldly prosperity, a better seat in heaven or at least escape from an eternity that would otherwise be spent in a burning pit.
Our institutions fear the loss of power. Discontent on the part of the citizenry or flock of “sheeple” is met with entrenchment and new rules for control. What does your ego do when you make a loving resolution to shift out of some unconscious behavior? Ego wants control, at any price. It doesn’t matter who gets hurt, just that control is increased or maintained.
Ego says: “An eye for an eye”. Gandhi rightly observed that living that makes the whole world blind.
Like the ego, our institutions prioritize loveless power. While they are willing to subvert morality in the name of control, the ego-controlled citizen makes it important to have a bigger TV than the folks next door, or a shapelier girlfriend—even if she’s got to have plastic body parts. We have been indoctrinated to think that what we have, how we look, and who we can control are more important than being who we really are.
The perverted ego that so many see as what defines them places no practical value in love, seeing it as a facet of powerlessness. We either avoid love altogether or we approach it schizophrenically: When it comes to love, we tell each other: “Come closer further away. I am intrigued but afraid”. We gussy-up our words to our love partners when this is what we really mean: “I’ll love you as long as I can control you” or “I’ll love you as long as you pay all the bills”. And we tell ourselves: “It’s good to have a lover waiting in the wings in case my main relationship dissolves.” This is the way of the ego.
What is the alternative to allowing our institutions to dominate and enslave us? The answer is the same one that would apply to understanding the alternative to identifying with the egoic mind. The answer is a “four-letter word”, to some: Love.
Love exerts its true power when we identify with the heart. It takes trust and courage to make the shift out of ego identification. Like the “Little Engine That Could” shifting into identifying yourself as some combination of your heart and soul is simply a matter of belief creating reality.
Those attached to ego extend the reign of fear. Embracing Love is the ultimate solution to the often apparent chaos of the world.
Change is happening at light speed. Each time someone makes the shift into a life committed to love, the world evolves just a little bit more, becoming a more loving place. As more and more do it, we take larger and larger strides toward a world in harmony.
Our institutions have been showing us the futility of clinging to worldly power as they mirror the stupid ego for us. This is a gift. If collectively we refuse to soon unwrap and productively apply this gift, we will destroy ourselves and our planet.
I’m betting on us to survive and thrive, to become the loving world that is our destiny. Spiritual empowerment will spell the end of anyone feeling terror.
Each response to every experience makes a difference. You make a difference. It’s a revolution that we are in the middle of right now, one of Love. The “weapon” of Love is more powerful than all the bombs and guns on Earth. As we collectively come to realize the power of Love, any worldly forces aligned against it will fade away.
That’s the way it will be. All we have to do is to collectively choose the true power to more and more often lovingly be with what is. If love is not at the foundation of something, then that something has no real power. Artificial power is temporary and spiritually draining.
What brand of power are you claiming?
Push your pause button and consider.
Making More Powerful New Years Resolutions
As we approach the first day of a new year, many of us think about making resolutions: to eat smarter, to exercise more or to break negative habits. The ease with which we transition to more “high vibration” living has largely to do with our levels of self-trust and self-love. Spiritual empowerment is enhanced by making and keeping our resolutions.
Resolutions are basically agreements one makes with oneself, a resolving to do something differently so as to be more happy, prosperous, confident or giving. For many, resolutions are set-ups: we set an ambitious resolution and then find that when we do not keep it, we feel even less confident and empowered than before. When this happens, many tend to lose interest in even making more resolutions, rather than to recommit to something envisioned.
Individually and collectively, given what is happening right in front of us during this time in our history, we are challenged to see more clearly what is in front of us to do and and what we are challenged to be. It is time to wake up and realize the value of keeping our word. If keeping our word—either to our own self or to another---is not seen as important, then our word means nothing and we find that we are not trusted by our own selves or by others.
Many invest more energy in finding excuses for breaking their word than they expend in honoring their word. There always seems to be a reason to either put off making the resolution or to break one that has already been made.
As New Years Resolution season approaches, you might consider the resolutions you might make, and then get clear with yourself as to just how important keeping that resolution is to you. Making small, gradual changes over time---setting a gradual plan---for an eventual goal realization makes much more sense than going from couch potato to someone who is spending 5 days per week in at the health club.
“If you try to do too much”, warned the Russian mystic, Gurdjieff, “you will do nothing.”
One of the true foundations of spiritual empowerment is trust. As we learn to trust our own selves, we find that we experience more interaction with trustworthy people in our lives. The less we trust ourselves, the more we seem to draw to us untrustworthy people.
Let’s take a look at the concept of agreement and how we use it in our world. The following is an excerpt from my new book, “The Wake Up Book”, a guide to inner exploration. The last sentence of this excerpt is one I suggest that you contemplate, asking yourself if this is something that you can truly say is important to you.
Agreement
Agreement is the acknowledgment of a unity. It means little if the parties to it do not feel compelled to honor it. This applies to agreements that we make with ourselves also. As this book is being completed, leaders of the larger of the so called “developed” nations of our world created an “agreement” designed to help curb global warming. In the eyes of many, the time is late for such an agreement. If we would prefer, for example, not to find the city of
Waiting as long as we have to truly attend to this challenge is much like it might have been if Noah had waited until 10 minutes before the flood to start building an ark.
The “agreement” to deal with global warming was called a “non-binding agreement”. Such a term is oxymoronic. This late in the game, it is maybe just moronic, ignorant.
Likewise, what positive outcome does one have when a promise is made to oneself when there is no commitment to honoring that promise?
As a culture, we are still getting lessons from the Universe that creating and honoring agreements with ourselves and each other is a key to our individual and collective expansion. This is an integral part of the foundation upon which a more harmonious world will emerge.
We are in the middle of the 11th hour, not just in terms of global warming, but in realizing what is in front of us with money, with laws, with our leadership and with the general well-being of our world. We are all challenged to feel compelled by our heart to get more and more consistent with making and keeping wise agreements, with ourselves and others.
Can you say this with feeling and truly mean it?:
I look for opportunities to make and keep heart-centered agreements with myself and others.
Please pause here and contemplate the importance you now place on keeping your word.
