"Jacob had a dream: a ladder was there, standing on the ground with its top reaching to heaven; and there were angels of God going up it and coming down. And Yahweh was there standing over him" (Genesis 28:12).
The fourteenth century Dominican priest and mystic, Meister Eckhart, emphasized that the kingdom of God is not apart from us but is within us and all around us. In Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox reveals how Eckhart does not separate God from His creation. Really feeling the presence of the Divine in nature became a daily experience for me during my time in Tikal. As I sat with the Mayan shamans and walked through the jungle near Tikal, I found my heart awakening to the Divine in everything.
For centuries, Jacob’s ladder has been a major symbol for Christian mystics. Meister Eckhart reveals that the true essence of the ladder is not as a way to leave Earth and literally ascend to God. To him, it is about how when we awaken our consciousness to the spiritual dimension of life, we realize God is always with us and around us. Matthew Fox points out that Eckhart calls us to be like Jacob and wake up in joyful celebration.
"Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Truly Yahweh is in this place and I never knew it!’ He was afraid and said, ‘How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God; this is the gate of heaven!"’ (Genesis 28:16-17)
Jacob’s Ladder can be seen as an ancient bridge between the apparent opposites of heaven and earth. Jacob sees angels both ascending and descending. All we need to do is to wake up like Jacob and see through the eyes of love that the Divine is in the ordinary. The sacred is in the profane. Our journey is one of becoming whole in an inner marriage of body and spirit, of head and heart. It is a journey of becoming practical mystics.
The image of Jacob’s ladder ties in with the Mayan idea that within our heart we are all connected to both heaven and earth. Jacob’s ladder had angels ascending to heaven and descending to earth. It appears that there is a continuous flow of angels. It seems to be a telling image of how there is a continuous energy flow of love, angels, to help us work the magic necessary to make our world a more peaceful and loving place as the Maya urge us to do.
The ladder in Jacob’s dream can be seen to remind us that there are higher and lower levels of consciousness. The angelic energy of love descends to us and returns to heaven. This is a metaphor for the idea that there are levels of consciousness beyond our ordinary state of consciousness. Like a radio tower broadcasting different bandwidths and frequencies for different stations, the rungs of the ladder of consciousness take us into other levels of reality. When we have our radio tuned to 106.1 FM, we do not hear 96.5 FM or 1290 AM. And yet these stations and countless others still exist even when we are not tuned into them. Thousands of stations are broadcasting simultaneously.
The ancient wisdom of the Kabbalah and modern physics concur that reality is made up of ten levels or dimensions. In our metaphor of Jacob’s ladder, we could say there are ten rungs but this is beyond the scope of this book. Nine of the dimensions are said to be beyond space and time: the coordinates of our physical world. These nine cannot be accessed by ordinary consciousness.
Like Eckhart, the Maya believe that awakening to the spiritual dimension of life involves the recognition that God is not separate from His creation. Instead, God infuses everything with His Spirit. God is talking to us through nature. Right after I finished writing this about Meister Eckhart and the Maya, I took a short break and turned on the television. The end of the movie Stigmata was on. A priest was reading aloud from the lost Gospel of Saint Thomas that we are told in a postscript was found in the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels in Egypt in 1945. The passage is right in line with what I was writing. God is not separate from nature but is hidden within nature. Christ is quoted as saying:
"The kingdom of God is within you and all around you
and not in mansions of wood and stone. Split a piece of
wood and I am there. Lift a stone and you will find me."
Now compare the similarity of the following words Gerardo shared with us during one of our meetings with him.
"The angel of life, the meaning of life, is not written in
the scrolls. The living word of the living God is found
in stone, in the rocks, and trees, and within yourself."
• Today, pay attention to the meaningful coincidences in your life. For example, moments after my friend Bill's father died, Bill turned on the car radio to hear the words of a song that summed up his father's approach to life: "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together . . . gonna love one another right now." A year later, on the anniversary of his father's death, Bill thought of how he had not heard that song all year. Right then, walking into the kitchen, Bill heard "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together . . . gonna love one another right now." The dialogue with the Divine, the living God, continues even as I write this blog posting. I will keep sharing this part of the journey as it appears. However, I will not be able to share all of the times the messages come as it happens often. I will have to pick and choose the messages that seem most relevant. After all, as the Maya tell us: God talks to us all the time.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
After O'Reilly: The Unexpected
After an appearance on Fox News Network’s nationally televised The O’Reilly Factor, I had an experience that was right out of the movie The Sixth Sense. It was only a few hours after my appearance when I was watching television in my bedroom. The room was well-lighted. During a commercial, I nodded out for a few seconds. When I opened my eyes, I saw a striking woman, a brunette, wearing a black suit. She appeared to be in her thirties.
This elegant woman’s beauty was a cross between Gloria Vanderbilt and Jackie Kennedy Onassis. She was seated in the chair at the foot of my bed staring directly into my eyes. I had a thought that she was the spirit of Ann who was a woman in her forties who had died a year earlier. Ann was Gretchen’s friend of twenty years. Gretchen, who was also in her forties, had called me the night before I was to go on The O’Reilly Factor. However, I was puzzled because somewhere I had gotten the impression that Ann was a blonde and not a brunette.
Gretchen was consulting me for help with her continuing pain over the loss of her dear friend Ann. As I looked into the eyes of this brunette in black, I said, “Ann?” With that, I felt the sensation of energy come through the back door to my heart and fill me from head to toe. At the same time, the woman atomized before my eyes the way perfume becomes tiny droplets when sprayed into the air. I say atomized because it was as if her spirit had coalesced into a mass of some kind of misty molecules or atoms.
Immediately after this apparition atomized, I called Gretchen and asked her what Ann looked like. I told Gretchen, “I think I may have had a visitation from Ann’s spirit.” Gretchen said she would e-mail me a picture of Ann.
When I received my e-mail and looked at her picture, I saw it was as I suspected. Ann was blonde. I wrote Gretchen an e-mail to tell her that it was not Ann. I went to e-mail Gretchen but the e-mail would not go through. I tried four times. Then I thought that maybe the visiting spirit was Gretchen’s mother. I added this thought to my e-mail. It went right through. Gretchen called me and confirmed that the description of the woman in black sounded like her mother. Shortly after her mother’s death, Gretchen told me she was visited by the spirit of her mother.
The interesting thing to me was the clinical significance of this vision of Gretchen’s mother. Her appearance gave me insight into what was complicating Gretchen’s bereavement. Gretchen was losing her mother all over again with the death of Ann. For Gretchen, the wound of losing her mother had been ripped open again by Ann’s death.
The other thing I noticed was that Gretchen’s loss of Ann was complicated by what could be termed the ugly ducking syndrome. Just like the ugly duckling in the children’s story, Gretchen did not appreciate her inner and understated outer beauty. From my vision of her mother, I could see that Gretchen grew up in the shadow of a very beautiful mother. Ann stepped in and filled her mother’s shoes as she was flamboyant and charismatic.
Again, Gretchen was overshadowed. Ann was outgoing and popular. Having compared herself first to her mother and then to her friend, Gretchen had never developed a strong sense of self-worth apart from her mother and her friend. This insight helped me help her begin to deal with the loss of her mother and friend as more than the loss of two very important people both of whom she had loved deeply. She experienced the loss of her mother and friend as a loss of the external source of her self-worth.
For Gretchen, feeling good about herself was tied up with Ann’s charismatic qualities. With Ann as her friend, she could borrow a sense of worth—worth by her association with an attractive and dynamic friend.
Gretchen’s situation reveals how time, distance, and even death do not interfere with our being connected to each other. As I mentioned in 8 Steps to Love, I have felt the palpable loving energy of people’s deceased loved ones bringing comforting messages of love during Reiki healing sessions. I would get a small snapshot of the person’s departed loved one. But with Gretchen, the appearance of her mother from beyond the grave was much more dramatic. Her deceased mother appeared to me to be as real as any fully alive full-bodied flesh-and-blood person.
It is interesting to note that just a few hours before this paranormal experience, I had been on The O’Reilly Factor to discuss Dr. Phil McGraw who had made his weekly appearance on Oprah. I was to critique Dr. Phil’s work with individuals and couples. My role was to draw on my clinical experience in my work as a psychologist.
Here I was engaged in trying to help Gretchen only a few hours after my appearance on national television. Then it hit me, my approach could be described as Dr. Phil meets John Edwards. On his show called Crossing Over, John Edwards helps audience members with their grief by communicating with their departed loved ones. I was attempting to use my clinical skills to help Gretchen with her grief only I was blessed with the added benefit of having seen the spirit of her deceased mother. This paranormal event helped me apply my clinical insights.
• Today, consider how love and concern do not die. In this case, a mother returned nearly two decades after she had died to help her daughter through me. Reflect on what this story tells us about who all of us really are in the core of our being? About our true essence?
This elegant woman’s beauty was a cross between Gloria Vanderbilt and Jackie Kennedy Onassis. She was seated in the chair at the foot of my bed staring directly into my eyes. I had a thought that she was the spirit of Ann who was a woman in her forties who had died a year earlier. Ann was Gretchen’s friend of twenty years. Gretchen, who was also in her forties, had called me the night before I was to go on The O’Reilly Factor. However, I was puzzled because somewhere I had gotten the impression that Ann was a blonde and not a brunette.
Gretchen was consulting me for help with her continuing pain over the loss of her dear friend Ann. As I looked into the eyes of this brunette in black, I said, “Ann?” With that, I felt the sensation of energy come through the back door to my heart and fill me from head to toe. At the same time, the woman atomized before my eyes the way perfume becomes tiny droplets when sprayed into the air. I say atomized because it was as if her spirit had coalesced into a mass of some kind of misty molecules or atoms.
Immediately after this apparition atomized, I called Gretchen and asked her what Ann looked like. I told Gretchen, “I think I may have had a visitation from Ann’s spirit.” Gretchen said she would e-mail me a picture of Ann.
When I received my e-mail and looked at her picture, I saw it was as I suspected. Ann was blonde. I wrote Gretchen an e-mail to tell her that it was not Ann. I went to e-mail Gretchen but the e-mail would not go through. I tried four times. Then I thought that maybe the visiting spirit was Gretchen’s mother. I added this thought to my e-mail. It went right through. Gretchen called me and confirmed that the description of the woman in black sounded like her mother. Shortly after her mother’s death, Gretchen told me she was visited by the spirit of her mother.
The interesting thing to me was the clinical significance of this vision of Gretchen’s mother. Her appearance gave me insight into what was complicating Gretchen’s bereavement. Gretchen was losing her mother all over again with the death of Ann. For Gretchen, the wound of losing her mother had been ripped open again by Ann’s death.
The other thing I noticed was that Gretchen’s loss of Ann was complicated by what could be termed the ugly ducking syndrome. Just like the ugly duckling in the children’s story, Gretchen did not appreciate her inner and understated outer beauty. From my vision of her mother, I could see that Gretchen grew up in the shadow of a very beautiful mother. Ann stepped in and filled her mother’s shoes as she was flamboyant and charismatic.
Again, Gretchen was overshadowed. Ann was outgoing and popular. Having compared herself first to her mother and then to her friend, Gretchen had never developed a strong sense of self-worth apart from her mother and her friend. This insight helped me help her begin to deal with the loss of her mother and friend as more than the loss of two very important people both of whom she had loved deeply. She experienced the loss of her mother and friend as a loss of the external source of her self-worth.
For Gretchen, feeling good about herself was tied up with Ann’s charismatic qualities. With Ann as her friend, she could borrow a sense of worth—worth by her association with an attractive and dynamic friend.
Gretchen’s situation reveals how time, distance, and even death do not interfere with our being connected to each other. As I mentioned in 8 Steps to Love, I have felt the palpable loving energy of people’s deceased loved ones bringing comforting messages of love during Reiki healing sessions. I would get a small snapshot of the person’s departed loved one. But with Gretchen, the appearance of her mother from beyond the grave was much more dramatic. Her deceased mother appeared to me to be as real as any fully alive full-bodied flesh-and-blood person.
It is interesting to note that just a few hours before this paranormal experience, I had been on The O’Reilly Factor to discuss Dr. Phil McGraw who had made his weekly appearance on Oprah. I was to critique Dr. Phil’s work with individuals and couples. My role was to draw on my clinical experience in my work as a psychologist.
Here I was engaged in trying to help Gretchen only a few hours after my appearance on national television. Then it hit me, my approach could be described as Dr. Phil meets John Edwards. On his show called Crossing Over, John Edwards helps audience members with their grief by communicating with their departed loved ones. I was attempting to use my clinical skills to help Gretchen with her grief only I was blessed with the added benefit of having seen the spirit of her deceased mother. This paranormal event helped me apply my clinical insights.
• Today, consider how love and concern do not die. In this case, a mother returned nearly two decades after she had died to help her daughter through me. Reflect on what this story tells us about who all of us really are in the core of our being? About our true essence?
Monday, April 12, 2010
The Simpsons & The Soul
When I was coming back from a weekend trip in Maine, I discovered my car starting to slow down mysteriously even though I had a full tank of gas. The battery went dead and the car died. I was surprised because I always thought that once a car was running, the battery would keep recharging.
The mechanic told me that the problem was with the alternator, the electric generator that keeps circulating the electrical energy that charges the battery. It was then that I realized that the most essential part of the car is something that is basically invisible to us, namely, the continuously circulating energy from the alternator. This energy charges the battery so it can ignite the engine and keep it alive. Without this continuously flowing energy, the car dies and cannot be driven.
Later, after I returned home, I happened to watch The Simpsons, a television comedy with cartoon characters that pokes fun at American family life. In this episode, Bart Simpson, the school age son, who is always getting into trouble, sells his soul for five dollars to his friend Millhouse. Bart finds himself unable to enjoy life. Things that made him laugh, no longer have any impact on him. He loses his energy and power. For example, when Bart goes to the local convenience store, the automatic doors don’t register his presence and so, don’t open for him. Finally, some other boys come by and let Bart in. Once inside, he can’t even make the glass door to the freezer by the check-out counter steam up by blowing on it as the other boys had done. The other boys laugh at him, calling him, “no breath.”
These two events fit the criteria of synchronicity, which, as was mentioned in the last chapter, refers to meaningful coincidences. It is a scientific way of describing the lessons that we can learn from life or that life may teach us. From a traditional religious perspective, it is a sign from God. In the psychology of dreams, a car often symbolizes our body, that is, it is the vehicle which carries our consciousness, our spirit and soul through life.
The meaningful coincidence led me to the following observation:
A car is a lifeless mass of matter without the continuous current of electrical energy generated by the alternator. This continuous flow of energy is what charges the battery, which, in turn, provides the spark that ignites the engine and keeps it alive. And, like a car, our body is a lifeless mass of matter without the continuous current of the enduring energy of love generated by the core of our being–our heart, spirit and soul. This continuous flow of the enduring energy of love is what charges the battery of our physical heart, which, in turn, provides the spark that ignites the engine of our body and keeps it alive. [Excerpted from 8 Steps to Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
• Today, as you notice cars, think of how all that is visible (metal frame, nuts and bolts, glossy paint, rubber tires, cushy seats, and fancy dashboard) is worthless without the invisible spark and current provided by the battery. Consider how the invisible essence in you cannot be found by a surgeon cutting into your brain or heart. And, remember that it is this invisible essence or "ghost in the machine" (as it is called in philosophical circles) that determines whether what we see and touch is real or whether it is an hallucination. Ask yourself, "What does this say about my true identity? About who I really am?"
The mechanic told me that the problem was with the alternator, the electric generator that keeps circulating the electrical energy that charges the battery. It was then that I realized that the most essential part of the car is something that is basically invisible to us, namely, the continuously circulating energy from the alternator. This energy charges the battery so it can ignite the engine and keep it alive. Without this continuously flowing energy, the car dies and cannot be driven.
Later, after I returned home, I happened to watch The Simpsons, a television comedy with cartoon characters that pokes fun at American family life. In this episode, Bart Simpson, the school age son, who is always getting into trouble, sells his soul for five dollars to his friend Millhouse. Bart finds himself unable to enjoy life. Things that made him laugh, no longer have any impact on him. He loses his energy and power. For example, when Bart goes to the local convenience store, the automatic doors don’t register his presence and so, don’t open for him. Finally, some other boys come by and let Bart in. Once inside, he can’t even make the glass door to the freezer by the check-out counter steam up by blowing on it as the other boys had done. The other boys laugh at him, calling him, “no breath.”
These two events fit the criteria of synchronicity, which, as was mentioned in the last chapter, refers to meaningful coincidences. It is a scientific way of describing the lessons that we can learn from life or that life may teach us. From a traditional religious perspective, it is a sign from God. In the psychology of dreams, a car often symbolizes our body, that is, it is the vehicle which carries our consciousness, our spirit and soul through life.
The meaningful coincidence led me to the following observation:
A car is a lifeless mass of matter without the continuous current of electrical energy generated by the alternator. This continuous flow of energy is what charges the battery, which, in turn, provides the spark that ignites the engine and keeps it alive. And, like a car, our body is a lifeless mass of matter without the continuous current of the enduring energy of love generated by the core of our being–our heart, spirit and soul. This continuous flow of the enduring energy of love is what charges the battery of our physical heart, which, in turn, provides the spark that ignites the engine of our body and keeps it alive. [Excerpted from 8 Steps to Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
• Today, as you notice cars, think of how all that is visible (metal frame, nuts and bolts, glossy paint, rubber tires, cushy seats, and fancy dashboard) is worthless without the invisible spark and current provided by the battery. Consider how the invisible essence in you cannot be found by a surgeon cutting into your brain or heart. And, remember that it is this invisible essence or "ghost in the machine" (as it is called in philosophical circles) that determines whether what we see and touch is real or whether it is an hallucination. Ask yourself, "What does this say about my true identity? About who I really am?"
Friday, April 9, 2010
I Am Free!
"I am free! I am free! He kept me locked up and didn’t believe in me!"
—Sandor Boytar, M.D.
The red October sun disappeared behind the trees as Gizella gazed out of the window; her teary eyes focused on the beauty of autumn. She momentarily looked away from the couch where her husband, Sandor, lay dying. The array of autumn colors: gold, orange, and red seemed to match the mixture of bittersweet feelings Gizella felt during her husband’s final hours. She was sad as she remembered the good times, and yet, she did not want him to suffer anymore from the ravages of bone cancer.
During Sandor’s final hours, Anna, his stepdaughter, sat by his side sending him Reiki healing energy to ease his pain. He didn’t believe in energy healing but he allowed Anna to lay her hands lightly on the painful areas of his body. Anna got the impression that Sandor was accepting the Reiki with the attitude: “If it makes her feel better to do something for me, why not let her.” He passed away in peace as Anna kept sending him Reiki until his last breath.
Suddenly, Gizella’s peaceful yet painful reflections were interrupted by a swirling energy of golden-speckled light encircling her just seconds after Sandor took his last breath. Within her mind, Gizella heard Sandor’s voice. She felt his energy direct her attention to his lifeless body lying on the couch. He then cried out: “He kept me locked up and didn’t believe in me!” She was stunned. Here was his soul proclaiming its freedom. Sandor’s next words were, “I love you and I’m sorry I was not able to show you how much I loved you!” Like so many men, Sandor had found it difficult to express the deep love in his heart.
Gizella felt the energy of her husband’s liberated soul encircle her and she heard the words of his soul in her mind. To whom was Sandor referring when he said to his lovely Gizella, “He kept me locked up and didn’t believe in me?” He was referring to his body-mind that had prevented him from believing in the spiritual reality of his soul. In the months before he died, Sandor had often told Gizella, “There is no soul! When I die I will just be chemicals. My body will just go back to the earth, to nature.” All his life, he had refused to believe in the soul.
Dr. Boytar was an otherwise sturdy and physically fit eighty-year-old medical doctor. His physique reminded me of the ageless and forever-fit Jack LaLane. A man of courage, he managed to escape from communist-occupied Hungary in the 1950’s. When I sat with him six months earlier, I silently wondered what, if anything, were the underlying emotional issues related to the bone cancer. As I talked with this distinguished and learned medical doctor, I thought to myself what is eating you to the bone? His very next comment was that: “If Gizella and I had remained in Hungary, I would never have been able to be with her.” Sandor and Gizella met in America years after they left Hungary.
In Hungarian society, Sandor believed his beautiful wife would have been out of his reach. Thrown together by circumstances in America, they had found each other. Strangers in a new land. They had a common bond through their roots in Hungary and both were in the medical field. I could see that he couldn’t believe that she loved him. He seemed to think that she stayed married to him only for convenience and the comfort of a common heritage. Sandor was wrong as Gizella did indeed love him very much.
During his life, Sandor denied the reality of the spiritual dimension of life. His paradigm as a man of science did not allow him to believe in his own soul. The soul is not quantifiable and cannot be seen by cutting someone open with surgery. He believed in the organs of the body and in the chemical processes regulating our health and determining our life and death.
So Sandor’s proclamation after his death is not simply the reaffirmation of cherished beliefs held while he was alive. These were not the words that Gizella would ever have expected to hear. Moreover, Gizella was not one to have spiritual experiences.
Gizella felt Sandor’s presence for two days following his death. On the evening of the second day, Gizella felt Sandor’s energy begin to leave and then she saw him ascending toward the top of the cathedral ceiling of their home. She heard him say, “I have to go. Know that I love you!”
Gizella asked, “Where are you going?” Sandor replied, “I am going to the place where you wait before you are sent to where you are supposed to go next.” In the book entitled, Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives, Dr. Newton calls the place Sandor was first going to, “the staging area” or “the orientation area.” It is where the soul first goes after death before going where it needs to go for its next phase of learning and evolution.
Sandor had never read any books about spirituality or the after-death experience. Yet, here was the soul of a dyed-in-the-wool scientific materialist ascending and telling his wife that he was heading for the staging area. Throughout his entire career as a medical doctor, he vehemently maintained, “There is no soul! When I die I will just be chemicals. My body will just go back to the earth, to nature.” [More on the above can be found in A Matter of Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
• Today, as you go through your day, ask yourself, "Do I really believe that who I am, my essence, the I who is looking through my eyes at the world, is the product of chemicals and firing neurons?" Consider that, as Dr. Boytar discovered, consciousness or awareness is primary and matter (your body and the material world) is secodary. This is part of what the Maya predicted. It is part of the great shift in understanding ourselves and our world that is taking place as we approach 2012. For more about the power of our consciousness see February 2010 blog entry entitled One Candle Shining.
—Sandor Boytar, M.D.
The red October sun disappeared behind the trees as Gizella gazed out of the window; her teary eyes focused on the beauty of autumn. She momentarily looked away from the couch where her husband, Sandor, lay dying. The array of autumn colors: gold, orange, and red seemed to match the mixture of bittersweet feelings Gizella felt during her husband’s final hours. She was sad as she remembered the good times, and yet, she did not want him to suffer anymore from the ravages of bone cancer.
During Sandor’s final hours, Anna, his stepdaughter, sat by his side sending him Reiki healing energy to ease his pain. He didn’t believe in energy healing but he allowed Anna to lay her hands lightly on the painful areas of his body. Anna got the impression that Sandor was accepting the Reiki with the attitude: “If it makes her feel better to do something for me, why not let her.” He passed away in peace as Anna kept sending him Reiki until his last breath.
Suddenly, Gizella’s peaceful yet painful reflections were interrupted by a swirling energy of golden-speckled light encircling her just seconds after Sandor took his last breath. Within her mind, Gizella heard Sandor’s voice. She felt his energy direct her attention to his lifeless body lying on the couch. He then cried out: “He kept me locked up and didn’t believe in me!” She was stunned. Here was his soul proclaiming its freedom. Sandor’s next words were, “I love you and I’m sorry I was not able to show you how much I loved you!” Like so many men, Sandor had found it difficult to express the deep love in his heart.
Gizella felt the energy of her husband’s liberated soul encircle her and she heard the words of his soul in her mind. To whom was Sandor referring when he said to his lovely Gizella, “He kept me locked up and didn’t believe in me?” He was referring to his body-mind that had prevented him from believing in the spiritual reality of his soul. In the months before he died, Sandor had often told Gizella, “There is no soul! When I die I will just be chemicals. My body will just go back to the earth, to nature.” All his life, he had refused to believe in the soul.
Dr. Boytar was an otherwise sturdy and physically fit eighty-year-old medical doctor. His physique reminded me of the ageless and forever-fit Jack LaLane. A man of courage, he managed to escape from communist-occupied Hungary in the 1950’s. When I sat with him six months earlier, I silently wondered what, if anything, were the underlying emotional issues related to the bone cancer. As I talked with this distinguished and learned medical doctor, I thought to myself what is eating you to the bone? His very next comment was that: “If Gizella and I had remained in Hungary, I would never have been able to be with her.” Sandor and Gizella met in America years after they left Hungary.
In Hungarian society, Sandor believed his beautiful wife would have been out of his reach. Thrown together by circumstances in America, they had found each other. Strangers in a new land. They had a common bond through their roots in Hungary and both were in the medical field. I could see that he couldn’t believe that she loved him. He seemed to think that she stayed married to him only for convenience and the comfort of a common heritage. Sandor was wrong as Gizella did indeed love him very much.
During his life, Sandor denied the reality of the spiritual dimension of life. His paradigm as a man of science did not allow him to believe in his own soul. The soul is not quantifiable and cannot be seen by cutting someone open with surgery. He believed in the organs of the body and in the chemical processes regulating our health and determining our life and death.
So Sandor’s proclamation after his death is not simply the reaffirmation of cherished beliefs held while he was alive. These were not the words that Gizella would ever have expected to hear. Moreover, Gizella was not one to have spiritual experiences.
Gizella felt Sandor’s presence for two days following his death. On the evening of the second day, Gizella felt Sandor’s energy begin to leave and then she saw him ascending toward the top of the cathedral ceiling of their home. She heard him say, “I have to go. Know that I love you!”
Gizella asked, “Where are you going?” Sandor replied, “I am going to the place where you wait before you are sent to where you are supposed to go next.” In the book entitled, Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives, Dr. Newton calls the place Sandor was first going to, “the staging area” or “the orientation area.” It is where the soul first goes after death before going where it needs to go for its next phase of learning and evolution.
Sandor had never read any books about spirituality or the after-death experience. Yet, here was the soul of a dyed-in-the-wool scientific materialist ascending and telling his wife that he was heading for the staging area. Throughout his entire career as a medical doctor, he vehemently maintained, “There is no soul! When I die I will just be chemicals. My body will just go back to the earth, to nature.” [More on the above can be found in A Matter of Love. See www.drsrj.com.]
• Today, as you go through your day, ask yourself, "Do I really believe that who I am, my essence, the I who is looking through my eyes at the world, is the product of chemicals and firing neurons?" Consider that, as Dr. Boytar discovered, consciousness or awareness is primary and matter (your body and the material world) is secodary. This is part of what the Maya predicted. It is part of the great shift in understanding ourselves and our world that is taking place as we approach 2012. For more about the power of our consciousness see February 2010 blog entry entitled One Candle Shining.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Hearts Weep & Spirits Smile
I just learned that my dear friend Joe lost his daughter Nicole to cancer on Easter Sunday. Last fall, on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, he lost Cynthia, Nicole’s sister, to cancer. Both were in their late thirties with families and children of their own. How unbearable it must be to be the parent of two inwardly and outwardly beautiful young women cut down in their prime by cancer.
However, Joe’s awareness of the spiritual dimension of life has helped him with his heart-ripping grief. An hour after Nicole died, Joe and other family members were startled by what they saw; Nicole had a smile on her lips. It was not there the moment of her death and did not appear until the funeral director arrived. It was as if her spirit were communicating through her body. “I love you all and I’m glad to be released.” Nicole and Cynthia had suffered hard and long. Both endured the pain of the cancer intensified by all the surgeries, radiation, and painful side effects of the chemotherapy. (In the next posting, I’ll share my experience with a medical doctor that illustrates how the deceased communicate joy at being released, especially when it is from a body wracked with pain.)
“Was there a symbolic message about death here? Thanksgiving? Easter?” I wondered if an aspect of the legacies of these remarkable young women is to teach us all how gratitude, the essence of Thanksgiving, and joy, the essence of Easter, can also be experienced at the loss of a loved one. Then, as so often happens in the daily dialogue with the Divine, I received an answer to my question. “Yes, they can,” I thought as the following passages from 8 Steps to Love came to mind.
Grief, Gratitude & Joy
On a cold and gray autumn afternoon, I was walking in the graveyard of an old country church. The air was especially chilly as the church stood only a few miles from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The winds coming off the Chesapeake bay cut right through my overcoat. Suddenly, I was struck by the following words inscribed on a gravestone.
All that’s bright must fade
All that’s fair, decay
All we loved was made
To bloom and pass away.
[And yet, "our love is here to stay."]
Thank you for those inspiring lyrics, Mr. Gershwin.]
At first, the message seemed depressing, like the coldness and grayness of the day. Then, it was like a ray of sunshine, shooting through those gray clouds as I saw the comfort and significance in these words. When we come to accept the truth of these words then we discover our capacity to love freely. It hit me that there is a primary and a secondary source of human suffering. I now knew what one of my mentors meant when he said, “According to Freud, in order to be emotionally healthy, we must replace neurotic suffering with real suffering.” I thought to myself:
We suffer because we love. This is unavoidable. We suffer
more because we deny the reality of love. This is avoidable.
Repression and denial of the reality of our love and of our essential identity as the enduring energy of love cause us more pain. The emptiness we initially feel when a loved one is lost stems from our holding back our love out of a wish to avoid the pain of our loss. Our restraint is based on a denial and repression of our essence, of that which makes life worth living, namely, our capacity to love.
To ease our suffering, we need to come to terms with how the bodies or the concrete material forms of the people, pets, places and things we love in our lives eventually “fade, decay or bloom and pass away.” Then we can learn to love who or what is in our life while it is in our life with an attitude of gratitude. Rather than grabbing on tightly and possessively to what we love as though our life and internal security, peace of mind and well-being depended on it, we learn to love freely. We joyfully recognize the transitory nature of concrete material reality. As William Blake wrote:
He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise…
We transcend the primary source of our suffering when we realize that the important thing, that which lasts, is the process of loving. In remembering that the essence of our heart, the treasure of love in our heart, is the capacity to care and love, we remain in touch with our inner fullness. It is having the courage to love, knowing full well the concrete form will inevitably be lost to us. Hence, we can learn to love freely, without grasping or clinging for dear life to that which we love. We transcend our suffering as we discover the joy of loving freely.
The secondary source of our suffering comes from the fact that our body depends on the external world, on air, food and water to survive. Our spirit, however, can transcend the physical circumstances we find ourselves in as prisoners of war survivors and near-death experience survivors have done. It is when we identify with our body only, that the loss of our loved one leads to aching emptiness. We long for the physical presence of our loved one in order to feel our own fullness again. However, when we identify with our spirit, the treasure of love that we are, we feel a fullness. In reliving our love for our lost loved one, we can forever feel and bring back the joy we felt before we lost our loved one. We can transform our suffering into joy.
Therefore, even though the losses we experience in life may cause us great suffering, it is through the losses that we discover we are not simply our bodies.
• Today, remember, "The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble (or, is it the other way around? Rockies tumble? Oh, well, it works either way.) They're only made of clay. But, our love is here to stay." Now, consider the following Sufi saying. It succinctly describes the joy that comes from loving freely despite the heartache and gnawing pain of loss:
When the heart weeps for what it has lost,
the spirit laughs [smiles, in Nicole's case] for what it has found.
However, Joe’s awareness of the spiritual dimension of life has helped him with his heart-ripping grief. An hour after Nicole died, Joe and other family members were startled by what they saw; Nicole had a smile on her lips. It was not there the moment of her death and did not appear until the funeral director arrived. It was as if her spirit were communicating through her body. “I love you all and I’m glad to be released.” Nicole and Cynthia had suffered hard and long. Both endured the pain of the cancer intensified by all the surgeries, radiation, and painful side effects of the chemotherapy. (In the next posting, I’ll share my experience with a medical doctor that illustrates how the deceased communicate joy at being released, especially when it is from a body wracked with pain.)
“Was there a symbolic message about death here? Thanksgiving? Easter?” I wondered if an aspect of the legacies of these remarkable young women is to teach us all how gratitude, the essence of Thanksgiving, and joy, the essence of Easter, can also be experienced at the loss of a loved one. Then, as so often happens in the daily dialogue with the Divine, I received an answer to my question. “Yes, they can,” I thought as the following passages from 8 Steps to Love came to mind.
Grief, Gratitude & Joy
On a cold and gray autumn afternoon, I was walking in the graveyard of an old country church. The air was especially chilly as the church stood only a few miles from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The winds coming off the Chesapeake bay cut right through my overcoat. Suddenly, I was struck by the following words inscribed on a gravestone.
All that’s bright must fade
All that’s fair, decay
All we loved was made
To bloom and pass away.
[And yet, "our love is here to stay."]
Thank you for those inspiring lyrics, Mr. Gershwin.]
At first, the message seemed depressing, like the coldness and grayness of the day. Then, it was like a ray of sunshine, shooting through those gray clouds as I saw the comfort and significance in these words. When we come to accept the truth of these words then we discover our capacity to love freely. It hit me that there is a primary and a secondary source of human suffering. I now knew what one of my mentors meant when he said, “According to Freud, in order to be emotionally healthy, we must replace neurotic suffering with real suffering.” I thought to myself:
We suffer because we love. This is unavoidable. We suffer
more because we deny the reality of love. This is avoidable.
Repression and denial of the reality of our love and of our essential identity as the enduring energy of love cause us more pain. The emptiness we initially feel when a loved one is lost stems from our holding back our love out of a wish to avoid the pain of our loss. Our restraint is based on a denial and repression of our essence, of that which makes life worth living, namely, our capacity to love.
To ease our suffering, we need to come to terms with how the bodies or the concrete material forms of the people, pets, places and things we love in our lives eventually “fade, decay or bloom and pass away.” Then we can learn to love who or what is in our life while it is in our life with an attitude of gratitude. Rather than grabbing on tightly and possessively to what we love as though our life and internal security, peace of mind and well-being depended on it, we learn to love freely. We joyfully recognize the transitory nature of concrete material reality. As William Blake wrote:
He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise…
We transcend the primary source of our suffering when we realize that the important thing, that which lasts, is the process of loving. In remembering that the essence of our heart, the treasure of love in our heart, is the capacity to care and love, we remain in touch with our inner fullness. It is having the courage to love, knowing full well the concrete form will inevitably be lost to us. Hence, we can learn to love freely, without grasping or clinging for dear life to that which we love. We transcend our suffering as we discover the joy of loving freely.
The secondary source of our suffering comes from the fact that our body depends on the external world, on air, food and water to survive. Our spirit, however, can transcend the physical circumstances we find ourselves in as prisoners of war survivors and near-death experience survivors have done. It is when we identify with our body only, that the loss of our loved one leads to aching emptiness. We long for the physical presence of our loved one in order to feel our own fullness again. However, when we identify with our spirit, the treasure of love that we are, we feel a fullness. In reliving our love for our lost loved one, we can forever feel and bring back the joy we felt before we lost our loved one. We can transform our suffering into joy.
Therefore, even though the losses we experience in life may cause us great suffering, it is through the losses that we discover we are not simply our bodies.
• Today, remember, "The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble (or, is it the other way around? Rockies tumble? Oh, well, it works either way.) They're only made of clay. But, our love is here to stay." Now, consider the following Sufi saying. It succinctly describes the joy that comes from loving freely despite the heartache and gnawing pain of loss:
When the heart weeps for what it has lost,
the spirit laughs [smiles, in Nicole's case] for what it has found.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Inner-Freedom Fire Ceremony
The air was chilly at 5:15 A.M. To the left of the chruch coutyard, just above the roof of the stone chruch, I could see the moon shining brightly in the darkness of the predawn sky. In an instant, I heard the crackling of dry sticks and branches in a large barrel. The priest had lit the fire for the beginning of an ancient ceremony, dating back to those first century Christians. Small white candles were handed out to each of us in the congregation. Standing in a crescent shape by the blazing fire, we watched the priest light the large, white Christ Candle. Eventually, the fire was spread to the single candle held by each and every one of us. First, two of us received the flame directly from the Christ Candle. They both turned to light another’s cnadle who in turn lit the candle of someone else until all of our candles were lit. The ceremony corresponded to the vow we all shared later in the service: “to seek and serve the Christ in others.” Alice Howell’s comment came to mind, “There is one flame but many candles” (see blog entry entited One Flame . . . Many Candles).
What else was God, the Divine Beloved, revealing to me that was a refinement of what I experinced in the sacred fire ceremonies of the Maya? The fire ceremony of Easter morning reminded me that we have within us all a small flame of the all-consuming and, paradoxically, all-embracing, fire of God’s love. I say paradoxically because I find myself remembering the Burning Bush scene with Moses (Charlton Heston) in the Cecil B. DeMille classic The Ten Commandments. Rather than consume the bush by buring it to a crisp, the fire of God simply contained (embraced) the bush. The Christ Candle is a symbol of how the fire of God’s love was exemplified in the life of Christ. His great love, compassion, and capacity to forgive was both all-consuming and all-embracing, by being extended to the discarded and rejected of society—the lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors (April 15th is getting closer), and beggars.
That was it! God, the Divine Beloved, was showing me somethig to share with you about how Christ forgave those who crucified Him. He asked His Father to forgive them in their ignorance of what they were doing. “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:24). Jesus appeals to His Father, the I AM THAT I AM to forgive them. He did not call out from the cross, “I forgive you.”
I wondered what this might mean for us as a model for how we can learn to forgive and find inner peace? Sure, it means we can simply pray and ask God to forgive those who hurt us. And, we can also ask God to help us forgive. To me, it also means that we can place the offending person, object, or situation into the sacred fire of God’s all-consuming and all-embracing love. It struck me that the fire of all the little desires fueling our emotions can be consumed by the fire of the greater desire for inner freedom and peace.
Visualizing the all-consuming aspect of the sacred fire was what I learned from the Mayan fire ceremony. We could place into the fire the stress of our inner life of desires and emotions, especially what Swami Rama called our “psychological trash” (see blog entry entitled Sacred Fire). But today’s ceremony revealed a way to deal with the stress that can arise from surface differences. We can seek to remember the one spirit (flame) of love hidden in the surface diversity of our various shapes and sizes of soul suits, our corporeal costumes as well as the surface differences in race, religion, culture, education, etc.
Moments after the service ended, my reflections on the sacred fire were interrupted. A woman I know, a self-taught biblical scholar, took me by the arm and led me to an icon hanging on the church wall. Excitedly, she told me, “On icons of Christ, you will see Greek words contained in the nimbus, the cloud-like halo. They translate as, ‘The One Who Is.’” I was receiving an answer to my thoughts in the daily dialogue with the Divine. I then thought, this “is” is something fundamental and universal that is beyond the boundaries and forms of any one relgious tradition. “Is” is in Christ (Chr-is-t), Krishna (Kr-is-hna), Vishnu (V-is-hnu), Isis (Is-is), St. Issa (Is-sa), the name given to Christ in India and Tibet, Ishtar (Is-htar), and, let's not forget Islam (Is-lam), though many angry Americans might like to since they mistakingly equate terrorism with this sacred tradition.
“Ah ha!” I thought. “The word ‘is’ contains a message.” Peace comes when we are still, cease striving, and rest in just being, not in doing, getting, or having. Rest is found in aligning with the awareness that I AM. It is the recognition that I simply exist beyond labels and conditions. By bringing our attention to this simple, unadorned truth, we find rest from our hectic schedules. Worn down by wearying days of doing, we find a brief respite in simply being one who “is” with no place to go and nothing or no thing to do in that moment. We enter the timeless of what we might call no-thing-ness. We get out from under all the “things” or “thingness” weighing us down. “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind, “ Emerson (Ralph Waldo, that is) once said over a century ago.
• Today, resolve to get back in the saddle by taking a moment to just BE, before you begin your day. Instead of starting your day by praying to God for certain blessings, conduct your very own inner-freedom fire ceremony. Take some slow, deep breaths and visualize a fire on an altar before God, your Divine Beloved. This fire is the sacred inner fire of your being, the flame of the one who simply “is” within you. This fire is the flame of the I AM consciousness within you that is not identified with anything but just being. Now, reflecting on the day ahead, place into this fire all your desires, hopes, dreams, plans, frustrations, fears, anxieties, joys, resentments, loves and hates, and son on. With each breath, imagine you are enflaming the fire with fresh oxygen until all that is left is the fire burning brightly. Feel the peace of being at one with God and the sacred fire of God’s all-consuming yet all-embracing love. Take a moment to repeat this during the day when you feel stressed and remember the one flame of the One Who Is resides in us all despite our surface differences.
What else was God, the Divine Beloved, revealing to me that was a refinement of what I experinced in the sacred fire ceremonies of the Maya? The fire ceremony of Easter morning reminded me that we have within us all a small flame of the all-consuming and, paradoxically, all-embracing, fire of God’s love. I say paradoxically because I find myself remembering the Burning Bush scene with Moses (Charlton Heston) in the Cecil B. DeMille classic The Ten Commandments. Rather than consume the bush by buring it to a crisp, the fire of God simply contained (embraced) the bush. The Christ Candle is a symbol of how the fire of God’s love was exemplified in the life of Christ. His great love, compassion, and capacity to forgive was both all-consuming and all-embracing, by being extended to the discarded and rejected of society—the lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors (April 15th is getting closer), and beggars.
That was it! God, the Divine Beloved, was showing me somethig to share with you about how Christ forgave those who crucified Him. He asked His Father to forgive them in their ignorance of what they were doing. “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:24). Jesus appeals to His Father, the I AM THAT I AM to forgive them. He did not call out from the cross, “I forgive you.”
I wondered what this might mean for us as a model for how we can learn to forgive and find inner peace? Sure, it means we can simply pray and ask God to forgive those who hurt us. And, we can also ask God to help us forgive. To me, it also means that we can place the offending person, object, or situation into the sacred fire of God’s all-consuming and all-embracing love. It struck me that the fire of all the little desires fueling our emotions can be consumed by the fire of the greater desire for inner freedom and peace.
Visualizing the all-consuming aspect of the sacred fire was what I learned from the Mayan fire ceremony. We could place into the fire the stress of our inner life of desires and emotions, especially what Swami Rama called our “psychological trash” (see blog entry entitled Sacred Fire). But today’s ceremony revealed a way to deal with the stress that can arise from surface differences. We can seek to remember the one spirit (flame) of love hidden in the surface diversity of our various shapes and sizes of soul suits, our corporeal costumes as well as the surface differences in race, religion, culture, education, etc.
Moments after the service ended, my reflections on the sacred fire were interrupted. A woman I know, a self-taught biblical scholar, took me by the arm and led me to an icon hanging on the church wall. Excitedly, she told me, “On icons of Christ, you will see Greek words contained in the nimbus, the cloud-like halo. They translate as, ‘The One Who Is.’” I was receiving an answer to my thoughts in the daily dialogue with the Divine. I then thought, this “is” is something fundamental and universal that is beyond the boundaries and forms of any one relgious tradition. “Is” is in Christ (Chr-is-t), Krishna (Kr-is-hna), Vishnu (V-is-hnu), Isis (Is-is), St. Issa (Is-sa), the name given to Christ in India and Tibet, Ishtar (Is-htar), and, let's not forget Islam (Is-lam), though many angry Americans might like to since they mistakingly equate terrorism with this sacred tradition.
“Ah ha!” I thought. “The word ‘is’ contains a message.” Peace comes when we are still, cease striving, and rest in just being, not in doing, getting, or having. Rest is found in aligning with the awareness that I AM. It is the recognition that I simply exist beyond labels and conditions. By bringing our attention to this simple, unadorned truth, we find rest from our hectic schedules. Worn down by wearying days of doing, we find a brief respite in simply being one who “is” with no place to go and nothing or no thing to do in that moment. We enter the timeless of what we might call no-thing-ness. We get out from under all the “things” or “thingness” weighing us down. “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind, “ Emerson (Ralph Waldo, that is) once said over a century ago.
• Today, resolve to get back in the saddle by taking a moment to just BE, before you begin your day. Instead of starting your day by praying to God for certain blessings, conduct your very own inner-freedom fire ceremony. Take some slow, deep breaths and visualize a fire on an altar before God, your Divine Beloved. This fire is the sacred inner fire of your being, the flame of the one who simply “is” within you. This fire is the flame of the I AM consciousness within you that is not identified with anything but just being. Now, reflecting on the day ahead, place into this fire all your desires, hopes, dreams, plans, frustrations, fears, anxieties, joys, resentments, loves and hates, and son on. With each breath, imagine you are enflaming the fire with fresh oxygen until all that is left is the fire burning brightly. Feel the peace of being at one with God and the sacred fire of God’s all-consuming yet all-embracing love. Take a moment to repeat this during the day when you feel stressed and remember the one flame of the One Who Is resides in us all despite our surface differences.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Forgiving Nero on Good Friday
Last Saturday night, I watched a film about the life of the Roman Emperor Nero, entitled Nero. I did so on the recommendation of a close friend, a gifted artist, who is well-versed in ancient Greek and Roman history. He prepared me for a film with a psychological slant on Nero. To my surprise, there was a spiritual message about forgiveness. Just moments earlier, on what was then the eve of Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, I had been reflecting on forgiveness. This was the other synchronicity in the daily dialogue with the Divine (remember that, as the Mayans say, “God talks to us ALL the time”), I alluded to in the previous posting.
In the final scene, Acte, the love of Nero’s life, stands by the unlit funeral pyre where Nero’s body is lying. We hear Acte’s thoughts, “Nero had a dream of Rome, a dream of a better world.” Acte takes a flaming branch and lights the pile of sticks encasing Nero’s body. Referring to the fire that burned Rome during Nero‘s reign, we again hear her thoughts, “He [Nero] did not light the fire but the fire in his soul consumed him. Let us forgive him as we hope to be forgiven.”
What! Forgive Nero who fed all those innocent early Christians to the lions? But how can we? We can because we are all Nero. We are all consumed by the fire of desire to change the world everyday. It is as if we say to ourselves, “I need the world to be different before I can feel good and be at peace. I need my unreasonable boss to see I’m right and he’s wrong before I can feel good and be at peace. I need my wife or husband to agree with my point of view or I will remain disturbed and unhappy.”
Yes, the desire to improve conditions around us is fine but we can do so by taking a breath, relaxing, and doing so as we are strengthened by feeling good first. Then we are inspired to change the conditions around us as we breath freely with less tension. But we do so not because our peace of mind and well being depend on it.
The word spirit in many languages is equated with the breath. When Jesus died on the cross on that first Good Friday, he did so after he commend His Spirit into God’s hands. In little ways each day, we can choose to do the same by exhaling the tension we feel when we want to change the world. We can commend our spirit into the hands of the I AM That I AM awareness within us. It is the awareness that is not dependent on conditions: it is conditionless. What can I say about myself that is not subject to change while I draw breath on this planet? I AM. I exist. I AM this or that, a butcher or baker or candle stick maker is subject to change. Even my gender can be changed if I were to elect to have an operation.
Right now, allow yourself to feel the peace of choosing to cast the fire of the desire to change any conditions into the sacred fire of the all-consuming love of God Whose name is I AM THAT I AM. We can then tap into the peace of that consciousness within us when we become still and cease striving to change the world. Then we stop being consumed by the fire of our desire as Nero was. And, we can stop seeking revenge against those we feel wronged by as Nero did. According to the film, when his pregnant second wife died, Nero asked Saint Paul to raise her from the dead. But when Paul was unable to do so, he told Nero that it was not God’s will. Nero became enraged and thus began his slaughter of Christians.
When Jesus commended His Spirit into God’s hands, an earthquake shook the Earth. The thick curtain barring the way to the inner sanctuary of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The barrier to intimacy with God was removed. Just as the 8.8 earthquake in Chile shook La Tierra Madre to Her core and shifted the coastline of South America, practicing forgiveness today as Christ did is capable of causing an inner earthquake that can shake each one of us to the core of our usual sense of ourselves. As long as we cling to a body-based sense of ourselves, centered in the reactive reptile brain, forgiveness makes little sense. Revenge makes more sense. “You hurt me verbally or physically, I’ll get you back.” But when we remember that who we are is spirit, and the essence of that spirit is both breath and love, we can aspire to forgive as Christ did those who crucified Him.
• Today, resolve to retain your inner freedom by not allowing anyone or anything rob you of your ability to feel good and be at peace. Reflect on how it is in remembering that who we all are is love, we can learn to forgive the world for not being as we would like it to be at any given moment. Breathing in, commend your spirit to the inner freedom of the I AM awareness within you by silently saying to the offending condition (person, place or thing, e.g., an unreasonable boss, a traffic jam, or unpleasnat weather), “I AM NOT dependent on you being other than you are at this moment for me to feel good and be at peace.” Breathing out, silently say, “I will maintain my inner peace no matter what you do or say.”
In the final scene, Acte, the love of Nero’s life, stands by the unlit funeral pyre where Nero’s body is lying. We hear Acte’s thoughts, “Nero had a dream of Rome, a dream of a better world.” Acte takes a flaming branch and lights the pile of sticks encasing Nero’s body. Referring to the fire that burned Rome during Nero‘s reign, we again hear her thoughts, “He [Nero] did not light the fire but the fire in his soul consumed him. Let us forgive him as we hope to be forgiven.”
What! Forgive Nero who fed all those innocent early Christians to the lions? But how can we? We can because we are all Nero. We are all consumed by the fire of desire to change the world everyday. It is as if we say to ourselves, “I need the world to be different before I can feel good and be at peace. I need my unreasonable boss to see I’m right and he’s wrong before I can feel good and be at peace. I need my wife or husband to agree with my point of view or I will remain disturbed and unhappy.”
Yes, the desire to improve conditions around us is fine but we can do so by taking a breath, relaxing, and doing so as we are strengthened by feeling good first. Then we are inspired to change the conditions around us as we breath freely with less tension. But we do so not because our peace of mind and well being depend on it.
The word spirit in many languages is equated with the breath. When Jesus died on the cross on that first Good Friday, he did so after he commend His Spirit into God’s hands. In little ways each day, we can choose to do the same by exhaling the tension we feel when we want to change the world. We can commend our spirit into the hands of the I AM That I AM awareness within us. It is the awareness that is not dependent on conditions: it is conditionless. What can I say about myself that is not subject to change while I draw breath on this planet? I AM. I exist. I AM this or that, a butcher or baker or candle stick maker is subject to change. Even my gender can be changed if I were to elect to have an operation.
Right now, allow yourself to feel the peace of choosing to cast the fire of the desire to change any conditions into the sacred fire of the all-consuming love of God Whose name is I AM THAT I AM. We can then tap into the peace of that consciousness within us when we become still and cease striving to change the world. Then we stop being consumed by the fire of our desire as Nero was. And, we can stop seeking revenge against those we feel wronged by as Nero did. According to the film, when his pregnant second wife died, Nero asked Saint Paul to raise her from the dead. But when Paul was unable to do so, he told Nero that it was not God’s will. Nero became enraged and thus began his slaughter of Christians.
When Jesus commended His Spirit into God’s hands, an earthquake shook the Earth. The thick curtain barring the way to the inner sanctuary of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The barrier to intimacy with God was removed. Just as the 8.8 earthquake in Chile shook La Tierra Madre to Her core and shifted the coastline of South America, practicing forgiveness today as Christ did is capable of causing an inner earthquake that can shake each one of us to the core of our usual sense of ourselves. As long as we cling to a body-based sense of ourselves, centered in the reactive reptile brain, forgiveness makes little sense. Revenge makes more sense. “You hurt me verbally or physically, I’ll get you back.” But when we remember that who we are is spirit, and the essence of that spirit is both breath and love, we can aspire to forgive as Christ did those who crucified Him.
• Today, resolve to retain your inner freedom by not allowing anyone or anything rob you of your ability to feel good and be at peace. Reflect on how it is in remembering that who we all are is love, we can learn to forgive the world for not being as we would like it to be at any given moment. Breathing in, commend your spirit to the inner freedom of the I AM awareness within you by silently saying to the offending condition (person, place or thing, e.g., an unreasonable boss, a traffic jam, or unpleasnat weather), “I AM NOT dependent on you being other than you are at this moment for me to feel good and be at peace.” Breathing out, silently say, “I will maintain my inner peace no matter what you do or say.”
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