Embracing Forever

New Piece of Fiction

March 9, 2014

by Michael

Fiction

I have made modest progress over the past eight or nine months on the draft of a novel. If the 100k word mark is what puts you in the ballpark to being able to say a novel has been written, I’m just over 2/3 of the way there– sans editing.

I have no previous experience in this sort of thing, but I figured the first and most important part was just to write and don’t get too distracted by coffee, snacks, the birds outside, or things that actually need doing. It is amazing how something you enjoy, like writing, can begin to seem like work once you layer onto it things like goals, objectives, schedules, etc., not to mention judgments as to its merit and worthiness of continuing. I’ve tried to do as little of that as possible.

Overall, it’s a story about the narrator learning to see the world with the vision of Christ, and to thereby release his fullest potential to the world– to discover a way of living in the world that is seamless and whole, and emptied of contradiction. The miracle would be that the reading or writing of such a story might in some way assist the full acceptance of this reality into the heart of our daily lives. It is meant to be a celebration, a glimpse, and a window– at once a yearning, an expression, and an answer– and hopefully ends up being at least a few of these things, if not a novel.

The chapter I have uploaded onto the Fiction page here is the most recently completed and I thought it read alright as a stand alone despite being out of context of the preceding ten chapters. Some allusions to earlier events of the story won’t quite add up, but I think the core content of this sequence works.

Witnessing One’s Self

March 8, 2014

by Michael

comments 4

Course Ideas

The places within us that are not yet healed, and have not yet been dissolved into the pure and guiltless and shameless and never-confounded substance of being, are like movie stars, and the events of the lives we lead the flash bulbs of a traveling horde of annoying paparazzi. Our wounded places simply can’t avoid them—can’t get a break. Offstage, without their make-up on, these stars just want to be left alone. Can we not just have a day of peace and quiet? What about—Heaven forbid—a day when everything goes right? Just a taste of effortlessness…

Nope.

Life keeps dragging these places buried within us back out into the open. Look at yourself, Life says. Is this you? Because this is what seems to be going on in there… Some days I don’t much enjoy this looking. The problem I say, is the paparazzi, not the movie stars within. If those hooligans would just leave me alone… Unfortunately for these secret inner places we’d like to keep stashed in the corner, but ultimately of good fortune for us as whole beings, they can’t stay indoors forever. Even the most distorted of self-concepts must get out and buy groceries at some point.

These hidden places are the contradictions we can feel within our inner lives, the twinges of hesitation and unrest. When the flash bulbs go off, we’re smiling and hiding our face with our hands at the same time. When we are conflicted about how to respond to a situation, we know… we’re of two minds. I had an experience recently in which my personal and professional integrity felt not only questioned, but more or less bullied in front of a small audience, and this came in circumstances in which free speech simultaneously felt as though it would have been potentially detrimental to life as I know it.

Wham! Flash! Pop!

There’s that contradiction: the knot of anger bound up with restraint, the shame of thinking I’d been too weak and failed to appropriately mount a defense in the ring, the shame of thinking I’d gone too far with the few statements I did make, the guilt of having been drawn into the scenario at all, the perplexity at the fact that ultimately the one by whom I felt accused and I share a similar desire and yet somehow my efforts to clarify this fell on deaf ears, the swiftness with which I was the victim of other parties’ previous decisions that had ultimately led me to this point… (It wasn’t of my doing, right!?) It goes on and on…

Then last night I watched an interesting video and the subject happened to be about just this sort of thing. About living without contradiction. About letting go of drama. Then I really felt like an idiot. Nothing better than getting burned by the coals and flipping on the television to watch people walk across them one after another unscathed. I started to think about what I should have done differently, what I would have done differently if I had possessed the type of inner composition being described, but I was honestly not making all that much headway.

A day later, my wits about me, I am thankful for these events. I have seen firsthand where I would set aside equanimity to defend concepts. I have witnessed a contradiction latent within myself, and felt myself interpret on the fly against the vantage point of Love. The funny thing is while this was all transpiring I had those moments when I felt as big as, larger even, than the whole room. I understood the various vantage points and felt no grievance about the events as they unfolded, but then I had these loyalties. Professional loyalties. Prideful loyalties. Thoughts of what I should be doing and thinking. They momentarily outflanked me, and once they’re out of the barn, they like to kick up their heels and tear ass around the pasture for a bit before you can corral/dissolve them.

I don’t think sitting passively by is the thing, but I do think I could have recognized the drama and blessed it rather than diving in and making it my own. I probably could have offered my own statements from a holier place, less defensively. I probably could have smiled inside at the whole charade, and remained in communion with the deepest possible content the room had to offer. And now I have witnessed these loyalties that bind me up in contradictions.

And now I bless them, and choose again…

I invite the paparazzi in for tea and we sit awkwardly together as they look around into space, wondering what it was that we were going to talk about…

Being Both Here and There

March 6, 2014

by Michael

comments 4

Christ / Creative

I was standing on the end of the pier on a crisp morning, leaning against the half-petrified rail, watching gulls weave in and out of one another without ever getting anywhere– watching my breath roil into translucent clouds that caught the sun and held it for a moment, and then fizzled. In the background the gulls were rising and falling on the wind, their heads swiveling back and forth with the persistence of algorithms as they looked for possible sources of edible debris.

I was standing on the end of the pier, in a brooding mood, taking stock of everything I’d ever thought or known, getting about as far as those gulls, when the Messiah came up and leaned against the rail next to me. He was wearing a black watch cap, a Fear the Beard t-shirt, an unzipped black leather jacket, jeans, and a pair of weathered Vans.

He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a pack of Doublemint gum, and offered me a stick. I took one and then he took one, and then he put the pack back in his pocket.

Didn’t take you for a doublemint man, I said. Figured you for more of a Minty Mayhem kinda’ guy.

Then I unfolded the thin foil wrapper, pulled out the sheet of gum within and placed it into my mouth, folding it in half as I did so. He unwrapped his own stick of gum and then held it out for display for a moment, pinched between his thumb and fingertips, thinking.

He said one day I’d remember that creating a body to represent my interests in this plane was about as complex as going out and buying a pack of gum. When I remembered that, he said, things would fall into place pretty quick.

I tried to play it cool, but inside I felt like a hot air popper. Just like that? I said, snapping my fingers as casually as I could muster.

Just like that he replied, and he was gone.

I looked at the gulls and shook my head in bemusement, chewing my gum.

Then in my heart I heard his voice telling me it was my turn. And where exactly did I think he’d gone, anyway?

He told when I could answer that, things would fall into place pretty quick.

A New Color of Thought

March 2, 2014

by Michael

comments 34

Christ / Course Ideas / Science

I have had a longstanding interest in both science and spirituality, and since I don’t even know what these words mean anymore, let’s just call it a longstanding interest in desiring to know and understand the experience you and I have found ourselves within. This process of coming to know has been alive within me since early days, and it has been fueled by my daily encounters with a broken world, with a self whose feelings I can no more control than I can shut off, with sensations of light and buoyancy that have snuck into gaps in my consciousness and beckoned, with friendship, with the magic of discovery, with failures and disappointments, with dreams that have now passed by me and wafted up through the leafless branches of moonlit trees, back to the beyond.

Along the way my thoughts have changed color. I have changed my mind about some things I once believed. Some of the endeavors I dove into with as much passion as I could muster, the ones I thought would bring the greatest good to the world, have come up short, been stymied, or sprung a leak and wilted. My heart has dilated and contracted– then flowered. I have behaved other than I would have desired to behave. I have had reactions leap out from the shadows within me of which I’m not proud. I have sat down with demons and thanked them for their time. I have stood quietly within a sunlit moment, and been flooded with gratitude for it’s finding me and not caring about anything other than the way we, together, collaborated in a spontaneous collage of peace and wholeness.

It’s hard to look at oneself, at one’s fellow human beings, and at the world at large and say there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s nearly impossible. Try it, and you will realize just how clean a break this is with who we’ve been, with the meaning we have assigned to things, with the purpose we have given to our lives. As soon as you work up the gumption to spit that one out, even before the first whisper has passed through the canyon of your larynx, the voices materialize in the air around you, seeping into the very medium of your thoughts, and start yelling in your face. They’re angry. They’re right. They know what’s going on here. Have you looked around? Have you looked within? The furies rush in to be sure this little revolt is suppressed before it even gets going. We shudder to think how close we came to irreconcilable folly, to walking away from our fellow men and women, from all those who shoulder the yoke of the world, who shoulder it’s burdens. Don’t they need our help? Our contribution? I’m just going to walk away…? Abandon them…? Commit the most horrid act of treason imaginable…?

What about the big governments and big corporations? What about the genetically modified food, the atmospheric pollutants, the greed, ignorance and hypocrisy, the failures of our educational systems, the instability of the economy, the magnitude of our indebtedness, or the pains in my body? What about the unbelievers, the wrong believers, the scarcity of natural resources, or the poverty and famine that shreds some entire countries? What about that?

What I’m trying to say here is that today I have realized I am abandoning worldly solutions. I am abandoning the notion that what we need is the right policy, the right education, the right idea or point of view, or the right persons in the right roles– all of the perspectives that come from the accomplished study of the disciplines available to us. I am abandoning the notion that things would be alright if only this group of people didn’t think or act a certain way. I’m tired of turning on the radio or television and hearing someone explain why some other group of people have got it all wrong, or why their latest idea is the one we’ve been missing all along, the one that will set things straight. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s pointless to think any one of us will complete the hero’s quest to bring back what was lost and save all the others. That implies there’s a whole passel of helpless people that need to be saved. That implies we know what needs to be done. That implies our broken views of self and world are correct. And if I do abandon these notions of a solution, I have to look at myself, at the world at large and all those within it, and say, “There’s nothing wrong with this picture.” I have to commit this final act of heresy.

Before you dismiss me as a lunatic, let me just say that the picture one has to be willing to see in order to commit such an inner act is not the picture the world presents. One has to be willing to look at the invisible heart of the world, and recognize its profound and indomitable spirit of goodness, and recognize that nothing is but what is an extension of that Source. To see otherwise, is to insist on a broken perception, to insist that our false beliefs about ourselves and the world and the effects those false beliefs have had upon the drama of the world are accurate, and that the deep and abiding Love at the heart of the world is a lie.

What solution can we offer that is not a stopgap, a temporary measure until the deep awareness of Love has returned? In the context of Love’s return, our ideas and inspirations are no longer attempts to achieve individual greatness, or to fix or correct a broken world, but a means of expressing and sharing the heart of the world, the reality we share together. It is hard to admit in the meanwhile that our stopgaps are postponing the inevitable we have so long desired. It is hard to admit our insistence on the validity and meaning we have assigned the world is creating the very problems we are seeking to solve. It is hard to admit we’ve been mistaken… that the world is not broken, but merely reliving for us the deepest myths we carry inside… the myth that we are broken and alone… the myth that something has gone wrong… the myth that we are guilty of ancient errors for which we cannot atone…

I know I’m not a solution guy but I wonder: what would the world show us if we let these deeply held errors be washed clean? I don’t think this a worldly solution per se. This isn’t something for which we have to lobby or convince, as this only asserts the opposite. This isn’t something we do rightly or wrongly. This is the abandonment of falsehood. This is Love quietly growing within us. This is being who we are. This is simply a new color of thought.

A Fire Taffy Mind

March 1, 2014

by Michael

Breakthrough

February 24, 2014

by Michael

comments 10

Christ / Creative

It’s easy to think I have made a breakthrough, put the pieces together just right, as if I were a scientist grappling with and making plain the mysteries of salvation. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to conjure an image of myself twirling a dry erase marker in one hand and sloshing a cup of coffee absentmindedly in the other while pacing back and forth in front of wall-to-wall white boards. On them are scribbled the equations of forgiveness and a few inequalities describing the asymptotic approach to Love a self-concept can make, without ever really getting there. In addition there are the experiments, the managed encounters of my life, efforts to prove or disprove the theories, but these are almost always indeterminate. I can always second guess myself– admit that I had unrealistic expectations, expectations period, was in my head, or didn’t pull off the loving clarity of purpose and Self-expression I intended.

The situation is a little bit like the one a geologist faces: one planetary body of evidence, a subject not of the human scale, and no way to control the independent variables, really. Maybe it was a comet or an asteroid. Maybe the caldera beneath the area we call Yellowstone National Park blew up. Maybe it was aliens. Maybe all three. What we can say with certainty is that the dinosaurs no longer roam the Earth. The rest of it we can keep pushing around on the plate until we’re excused from the table.

And then the real breakthrough comes, shatters a mindset that has become engorged with contraposed thoughts like a fjord packed with ramshackle chunks of shattered glaciers that is struck by a comet. Hafiz enters the building, puts his finger to his lips, pulls the fire alarm, and we sprint like hell across the parking lot to hide in the trees and see what comes next.

What are we doing? I ask, breathless.

An experiment, he replies. Keep up.

Then he sprints off into the forest with me stumbling along behind, exuberant as a puppy. I know I could get fired for this– abandoning my post, the equations only half writ, the on-line students rebooting their routers or smacking their monitors back home, the front door open, the fire alarm pouring out through every opening in the building like a defective dog whistle, but… what the hell. My thoughts were tripping over themselves anyway.

* * * * *

Words. Those little buggers can be our defeat. And formed of words, logic. What does it really mean that we’re experiencing an illusion? What does it mean that the world could be transformed by our acceptance and expression of unity? Are we trying to forgive everything and find peace so we don’t have to come back to this type of world? So this type of world becomes more bearable? So we can escape our pain? If we were really awake, would we be different? What?

Hafiz wants to trade experiences, not speak in code– not communicate through any medium that relies upon rules in order to contain a meaning. He wants to put a sunrise into your chest, to have you step into the auditorium of his heart and play the concerto of who you are.

* * * * *

The questions inside us are notorious for demanding a written answer. That is their tactic. How can we proceed, they tell us, if we don’t know what’s happening? …if we don’t know what this is, or how to fix it? Explain that. Whoa! they shout. Time out! Everyone just settle down until we get this figured out here.

When that question comes slinking around, it’s head bobbing along the outside of your house, passing in view from one window to the next, insanely circling, take a moment to realize you’re as big as the whole sky. You don’t have to peer out at the blue beyond through streaky windows. Take a deep breath and recline for a moment at the center of the sun. Try to imagine what Jesus felt like just before he rolled up into a seated position, hopped down off the stone, and walked out of the tomb. Then ask your questions if they think they’re ready for the big time. Snap off a few jabs in their general direction. Stay on the balls of your feet. Thwop! Thwop!

Here’s something else you could always try if this is all seeming a tad unreasonable: call up Jesus and tell him you want a refund. Just tell him whatever it was he did, it didn’t work. Explain to him your situation. I did it once and eventually I realized… I don’t know where he ends and I begin. Then I realized… I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about.

That’ll at least turn your prose into poetry.

And then you’ll go around town for days at a time whispering in the ear of everyone you meet… you don’t need to see any identification… these aren’t the words you’re looking for.

A Question We All Must Answer

February 21, 2014

by Michael

comments 6

Christ / Course Ideas

When I sit down to write, I try to put forth a fresh take on what is. The result may not always be top shelf, but I find you can always find a way of expressing yourself that is authentic to who you are in that moment. When you do, it is delicious. It is revealing, at least to you. It is awesome.

Sometimes you have to dig for it, sure. You have to get over being clumsy with your little pile of half-dried idea tinders, and the fact that you’re trying to build a fire while standing in a field of tall grass in a rainstorm, and go through a few books of matches, maybe even rebuild the entire fire a few times, maybe even just light that damn navy surplus flare you were hoping to save for another rainy day, but eventually ignition occurs. If you invite it, that wisp of something creative and original will take up residence inside of you. You will be inspired. You will be moved, touched by this new life that is moving within you. You will realize you have a living relationship of some sort inside of yourself, and that it’s an opening through which the Sacred Something that you are flows, in and out, like the tides, filling you up, draining you out.

That is what writing provides me.

Having said all that, I can’t imagine trying to be creative without the influences that Life supplies in no small measure- the daily encounters, happenings, movements and shuffles, well-done television commercials, wing dings and sundry changes of state happening all around me onto which my heart can latch and go for a ride. This is Creation. We did this, and yet we didn’t. We are this, and yet we are constantly surprised.

Every day is a fresh take on what is.

* * * * *

Do you remember when you wondered if the world could ever run out of new songs? I don’t remember precisely when, but at some point I decided the answer is no. I think this is one of those questions we all have to answer one day. We can try to avoid it, but Life will eventually drag us back to the spot where we started, stand us up straight, pat the dust off our shoulders, lift up our chin, and nod.

Go. Your answer is…?

No. Hell no.

Good. Now write this down…

* * * * *

Eventually you realize that just when you think the number of remaining possible songs is dwindling, and a lot of music is starting to sound kinda’ the same– just squeaking by as being new on a technicality of artifice– you encounter an entirely new style of music. Then it’s like holy shit, man, I was way off. I had no idea.

I think it’s a lot like that with this new world we are birthing. We keep thinking in terms of the songs we heard before, but as this experience dawns on us, we’re going to one day look up and say to one another, holy shit, man, we were way off. There’s a whole new style of world out there. There’s a whole new room of possibility.

The thing about you and I is that we are creators. We are the extensions of the Creator, formed of the Self same substance, the same material, the same Light, the same Awareness– and we can’t help ourselves. We create. We give every last bit of ourselves away, and we love it. We create and we don’t even know we’re doing it half the time. We create, even as we walk around bemoaning our ineffectualness. The world around us eddies and shakes, slips, slides, creaks and rustles, freezes solid or scampers off into the forest, and we think (in the old style of world) that most of that had nothing to do with us.

Little do we know.

We’re used to being disconnected from the world around us. We think the weather just happens, like a sack of potatoes tumbling down an escarpment. We think the economy is a bag of rutabagas in hot pursuit. Tragedies strike. A few people win the lottery. Do the best you can while you can still do it. That has been our style, but it’s no more than a style. And it’s getting old. It’s been old, frankly.

We’re just not used to water changing into wine in simple response to the need. We’re not set up to permit that to happen. (But if it did, and we were there, we’d say to one another, holy shit, man, we were way off.) We’re not used to needs being met for the simple reason that it makes perfect sense to have needs be met. But, just go with me here for a moment, maybe Creation is sitting there right now, inside of us, thinking, uh… isn’t that, kinda’ like, what you want…? We could just… you know… (swirly hand gestures…) water… wine… No big deal, really… No, no, stop crying. Gracious sakes. It’s all good. It’s no problem. This is what is. This is who you are.

What do you mean no…?

Well, they didn’t know any better themselves, did they.

Well, they spoke in error.

Whoa, hey, calm down. Don’t panic. You want this to stop? Okay. No problem. Just remember, when you’re ready, uh… we’re here if you need us…

(You’re us and we’re you, actually, not to put too fine a point on it. But whatever. You’re calling the shots today and we respect that. We love you. Water is water. Wine is wine. Got it.)

* * * * *

A new style of world comes about from a new style of being. You want me to tell you what that is, same as I want someone to tell me what that is, but it can’t be done. I do know this: since we’re creating whole worlds without even knowing it most days, this thing we do about setting aside time in our lives to officially create something, to give it the focus it deserves and all that, well… that won’t work. That’s like standing on top of the ridge with an entire army behind you, and calling each morning for a fresh bugler to go down in the valley and trumpet the horde of bad guys to death, or win them over with an acoustic fandango.

A holy cavalry complete with a company of archangels is lined up behind us as far as we can see, and the next day we just do the same thing all over again. We send in another bugler, our hopes hot as suns, and then we cry and gnash our teeth and tear our garments into shreds when they’re dashed once again. To know power, we have to carry on with it a bit. Call up Gabriel and ask him what he’d do. Know that you belong in that conversation.

One way to adopt a new style of being is to stop playing with the old. Just put it down. Submit to the awkward, and the unknown. Find ways as often as you can to stop knowing what to do with yourself. Go out in a field of tall grass in a rainstorm with a bag full of dried plans that didn’t work, and try to make a fire. Eventually you will realize you have a living relationship of some sort inside of yourself, and that it’s an opening through which the Sacred Something that you are flows, in and out, like God’s dry erase marker, scribbling out worlds… It might just whisper something in your ear… A whole new style of world could come from that.

That Sacred Something…

February 19, 2014

by Michael

comments 6

Christ / Course Ideas / Poetry

Each of us has a flight data recorder housed
in the deepest recesses of our being.
In a commercial jetliner, the
flight data recorder is a physical object
capable of receiving and storing the
facts of every flight.
It has a part number.
It has physical dimensions.
It is manufactured somewhere.
It can be damaged, broken or lost.
It is but a crude caricature of the real thing.

In a human being, the
flight data recorder is the Sacred Something
we sense at the core of our being,
the one thing we know– without
needing to know how we know–
can never be taken from us,
the ineffable Continuity that has witnessed
every moment of our existence.

When we reach back for a memory,
we sense this sacred reservoir from which they are drawn,
this holy identity,
this reality that is not quite a being
but which is forever being.
What Jesus is asking us to consider,
is that the sacred something we feel deep inside
is the place where every last thing is joined,
the true meeting place of “you” and “I”.

In a human being, the
flight data recorder is but one face
of an Infinite-sided gem, a
window if you will, a screen,
a surface on which to etch one’s Name
or paint one’s Picture.
Each of us is a Light extended into Creation
through this window,
colored by this window,
patterned by this window,
written upon by this window,
and… every window is unique.

But, oh man, that Light pouring through it…
That Sacred Something.
What Jesus is asking us to consider,
is that It is the same Light in all of us-
a Light by which we already Know one another.

What Jesus is asking us to consider,
is wiping the heavy oil-based paints
we’ve been slathering around,
the ones that divide Light from Dark,
from our facet of the gem,
and trying water colors,
or bits of colored glass instead,
so the Light can pass through,
and our unique patterns
can finally Shine together.

On a final note for the technical crowd:
you may be wondering where all this Light “goes.”
Well… as you surely can guess,
the geometry of an Infinite-sided gem
requires that the Light shining through every
facet falls directly upon It’s Source.
(Meaning: all that is given is returned.)
(Meaning: there is no “outside.”)
(Meaning: yes(!), this is non-Euclidean geometry. Get over it.)
The result is an Infinite-sided gem
flooded everywhere at once
with living, sculpted Light,
which is the very Art of Being–
a.k.a. “Creation.”

Symptoms of the Perfection That Is

February 15, 2014

by Michael

comments 21

Christ / Course Ideas

The question in my heart today is this: what is possible?

That is actually a poor translation of what is in my heart, because this simple question is so abstract it permits responses like, what is possible… ever? And the answer then is… well… anything, I suppose…

This is not the question. I am not filled with a question about what might happen in places and times so remote from where we stand today as to be seemingly unrelated to who we are and what we are able to grasp right now. If one posits the passage of sufficient time, all bets are off. If you are a glass-half-full person, the prognosis is infinitely good. If you are a glass-half-empty, maybe not so good. Thinking really long term boils all the trends down to just two seemingly plausible alternatives: either everything gets worked out or it doesn’t. Endless grace, or endless suffering.

(There is a third class of outcome I’m not all that interested in, I admit, which is that we won’t exist or in any way be a living part of such a distant future reality, so it doesn’t really matter and whatever happens happens.)

But we live, today, in this place we might call the meanwhile. It could be better– in some ways far better– but at the same time for some, perhaps many, there are niches in which life is not all that bad either. Very few of us would be hard-pressed to imagine something worse. Living in the meanwhile allows us to postpone judgment on which way the trend is going until we have more data. We can say…

…everything still hangs in the balance, so we’ll have to wait and see what comes.

…it is too early to tell which way this world is leaning.

…like our forefathers, we can probably carve out for ourselves a few incremental improvements, but we can hardly imagine what the world will be like one day far in the future… The implication is that “we” probably won’t be around when the trends have drifted far enough to be clear. Such glories are far beyond our limited means…

In the Prelude to A Course of Love, Jesus noted that while A Course in Miracles coached infinite patience– a patience that brings with it peace of mind, for it is a patience that rests upon knowing the end game is assured for each and every one of us– that we who dwell in the meanwhile here are getting antsy. While the Christ within (and I use Christ here as a word referring to our genuine non-egoic, eternal identity), forever knowing our true nature, is already basking in the grace and beauty of what is, Jesus describes us as having been filled with “a spirit of compassion that reels at the senselessness of misery and suffering.” In other words, he’s aware that there’s a palpable sense of urgency on the surface of this planet.

So my question is: what is possible… for us? Could we, for instance, actually hatch from the egg of the meanwhile?

* * * * *

Reflecting on this question and how we might answer it, my first impression is that I think we are, in general, far too sophisticated in crafting our answers to really contact the truth. This is not an attempt to forecast the outcome of the Super Bowl based upon talent, match-ups, or having an edge in coaching. Nor is this an attempt to prognosticate trends in the stock market, knowing for instance that recent discoveries of hydrocarbon reserves in geographic location X will in 3-5 years’ time begin impacting the cost and availability of goods such as Y and Z. Answering this question honestly and fully is likely an act of treason against history itself, and much of what it has taught us. This is a question about what might come to pass if forces present in the world previously only dimly acknowledged or permitted, the creative force of inner authenticity, were given reign.

I, perhaps like you do or once did, have all too often correlated progress in hatching from the egg with outer transformation, with states of the world around me that would surely evidence this change, and thus once or twice, or let us say forty times forty times, have hitched my wagon to particular mechanisms in the world around me whose existence I thought could help usher in transformation. I think these ventures are worthy of posts all their own, which may be the next step to this vein of exploration, but very briefly, I had a business that didn’t work out that hinged upon endorsement and application of new technology that seemed to do “something for nothing”, (although that wasn’t the case at all), that was in my mind an eye-opener about what might be possible were humanity to work in partnership with Nature. I also at one time was passionately interested/involved in a project that wasn’t a business, but more like a community venture to host a “technology” that would have been something like a symbiosis of spirit and humanity, of divinity and earthen materials. We floundered a bit. Neither venture firmly created a beach head on the New World of what is possible…

I contrast these experiences with the relationship I have with my wife, which is not only a miracle and an obvious answer to prayer, but perhaps more importantly an inner reality of joining first and foremost. Through this commitment and love, beauty and truth emerge, but we don’t have any agendas for what it is supposed to “look like”. In these other ventures I described, which to be fair were peppered with thoughts and desires every bit as heartfelt as in any other area of my life, my mindset was related to outcomes. I thought the world would be a better place if it had these particular “somethings” in it. I submitted to the awareness that the inner reality was vitally important to these other ventures, as a matter of principle, but you know… the real success would have been the result I could hold in my hand, the one I could have held up to the light and shown other people. In my relationship with my wife, the real success is the living reality between us.

So, I’m ultimately trying to say that this hatching from the egg of the meanwhile seems like it can only come through submitting to the nebulous, to the placement of unity as our primary desire and mode of being, as an end in itself, and letting all externalities go. I think there will be a myriad of spin-offs from this point of ignition, and that the outer world will change markedly, but these outer changes will be like side effects, or temporary outpourings of an infinite resource we discover we are. They will be symptoms of the Perfection that already is within us, of which the Christ within each of us already and always partakes.

Buckminster Fuller called this type of phenomenon precession, where the expression of who we are results in highly desirable but perhaps unintended consequences. These are not the negative side effects with which we are all too familiar, the treatment that threatens skin rashes, blindness, paranoia, and possibly death. These are the moments of grace we could never have anticipated, never made on our own if we had tried. They occur simply as a result of us being us.

I think so much is possible, and I think so much is possible for us, but I think every time we focus on the form this everything will possess when it arrives, and place our focus on being part of that, we somehow step out of the living flow on which every good thing depends. Can we trust that the outer forms will be perfect when they arrive, even if we don’t manage them every step of the way? That they will surpass the greatest forecasts of our limited imaginations? Can we commit this one act of treason against history, and whisper in it’s ear that it is our destiny to step beyond it’s shadow? Can we accept that all this will come, arising as easily as the next sunset, if we would but remain in our hearts, as living, realtime responses of Love to Love?

Look Snappy

February 12, 2014

by Michael

comments 5

Creative / Poetry

We are interference patterns in the Mind of God.
What I mean,
is that a miracle emerges in every moment
where our two (or three) waves intersect,
where they merge for just an instant
as they ripple along their way.
Your wave is who you are,
given freely into limitlessness.
Our waves, our gifts of Self and Love,
extend ever outwards,
pass through one another,
illuminating each to each,
giving grace to grace,
birthing patterns and distance and fire,
and then return ever inwards,
forever transformed by their myriad encounters,
echoing home from every corner of emptiness at once,
concentrating all that is
into the immense gravity of Recognition.

I send out myself,
and you return.
(Laugh, for this is true.)
You return,
and I discover who I really am.
(Cry, for this is the content of beauty.)

We are light sources adrift in the Mind of God.
What I mean,
is that there is a field
of lights
emanating waves
through all of space,
and the Mind of God
is that which
makes all of this possible,
that which arises at every intersection,
that which gives of itself in all directions,
that which receives from everywhere at once.

What I mean,
is that the Mind of God is a local phenomenon,
happening everywhere.
We are it’s agents on the ground,
it’s under cover manifestations.
We are the showing available in our area.
Showtimes are right now, and then,
with a matinee at four.
Now stop standing around and look snappy.
You never know Who might show up.