Optimist?

Recently, I was referred to as an “optimist” because I commented that humans were capable of achieving a world of peace.  The person I was talking to thought I was suggesting that we would avoid such outcomes as wars or climate change, which is not what I meant.  I suspect that wars and climate change will happen, along with very possible dire consequences.  I simply know that we humans have it within us to avoid those dire consequences.  I also know that whatever outcome happens, will be fine, though I do not know what form that will take. I  realize that it is possible for humans to “wake up”, as happened in my case, possibly before extinction of the species or destruction of the planet.  Personally, I will continue to do everything I can in order to help achieve a world of peace.

Natural Bias

Many years ago, while reading the words of  various mystics and spiritual leaders, I became aware that they each had biases and that some of their information reflected those biases.  They “filtered” their information.  Which, of course, is just fine.  At this point, I receive much of my information through meditation and contemplation, and I try to remain neutral and bias free, allowing for a complete and unaltered set of information.  However, I also realize that I continue to have biases and filter my information, in spite of my efforts. As I said yesterday, I simply do the best I can, and stay as open and unattached as possible.

Different Choices

Rather than judging others or myself for the choices I make on a daily basis, it is important for me to realize that the various choices are not better or worse, but different.  The different choices are simply a matter of free will.  I don’t mean that the choices do not have consequences for this life, or the next, they clearly do.  Every choice I make, no matter how small, has an impact on myself and everything around me, which is why I am careful to make choices based on love.  I make an effort to recognize that I simply do the best I can, as does everyone else.

Choices

The ego and intellect lead me to make largely fear based choices, which are very good and sometimes important for survival and protective purposes.  What is commonly called the heart or God part of me leads me to make love based choices, which are very good for my spiritual growth and development.  For example, I am a mental health therapist and my intellect/ ego says that I should never give my services away and that I should be on guard against people trying to take advantage of me, anxiety producing and very tiring.  However, acting out of love, within limits, I frequently give my services away, with the assumptions that some people will take advantage of me and that overall, most people will return the favor and I will be given what I need, a much more relaxed approach.  Both approaches are completely valid, one of them feels better, to me, and advances the integrity of the universe.

The Love Or God Part

During a recovery meeting today I mentioned that within myself I have encountered both a dark, negative, potentially destructive part and a love/God, very compassionate, nurturing part.  I also mentioned that I have found that loving/God part in all of the individuals I have had the privilege of working with, even the most antisocial.  As the Quakers have pointed out, we all have the love or God part and we can all choose to act on it, which is my choice.  To me, it feels right to make that choice.  Unfortunately, due largely to cultural and soul age factors, others often make the more negative choice.

Love And Connection

The other important lesson from the events I described yesterday is a sense that as Sylvia Fraser says in  The Book of Strange “We as a species seem to have been created as vessels of consciousness.  Apparently, the deeper, spiritual journey is not requested of us but demanded, with the stakes being higher than earthly happiness and perhaps even life and death.”  We, as a species, place a great deal of importance on the feeling of happiness, and the processes of life and death, which is very understandable, given the brevity of life on this planet, a very necessary and important point of view.  However, taking a more long term or eternal view, the presence of life, death and suffering is not a big deal if it promotes our appreciation and understanding of love and our connection to the earth and all of the things on it.

Using Intuition

On the way back from Mexico. An event took place that seemed, intuitively, to have some weight to it, an event that I should pay attention to.  I have learned, over time, to pay attention to such events.  What happened was that, as we were driving along at 35-40 miles per hour, we approached a road kill which was being devoured by around half a dozen or so turkey vultures.  As we approached they all took off, but the last of them waited too long and ended up crashing into the window right in front of me, killing the bird, breaking the window, setting off the crash bag (which did not actually deploy) and startling me.  Within less than a second, I flashed back to a similar event in which a crow crashed into a window right in front of me, in my home a few weeks earlier.  Both events reminded me of  getting hit by stone fragments in the sweat lodge.  Shortly after the event, the driver commented that “his buddies are probably eating him now”, which, in turn, reminded me of a previous scene where one dog was eating another dog, similarly,  struck and killed by a car.  Through meditation and contemplation, I have gotten as far as realizing that I should be alert/pay attention for some sort of startling breakthrough and that it will probably have something to do with life, death and survival, but that is as far as I have gotten.  My intuition tells me that there is more.

Meditation, Contemplation & Rest

I just returned from a weekend, spiritual retreat in Mexico, a wonderful weekend of connecting with each other and God or love.  Much was absorbed and experienced by all of the participants.  It was also an exhausting experience with a great deal of intense information exchange.  As a result, I need to spend the next few days doing a lot of resting and quietly processing the events of the weekend.  That means a lot of meditation, contemplation and rest, until I feel balanced once again.  I just realized how different my current approach is from my historical approach of plunging right back into life and not respecting what just took place.

The Healing Power Of God/love

One of the most important concepts that does not fall readily within the scientific model is the ability of the power/force of God/love to cause physical healing and change lives.  Some aspects of this ability can be and have been evaluated using science, such as demonstrating that healing touch can expedite physical healing in mice.  Earlier today I did some healing with a woman who had just had surgery.  The healing seemed to have a positive effect and she and I could feel the presence of the energy, without really understanding it.

I will be guiding a spiritual retreat until 4-27 so I will not be recording anything in my journal for a few days.

The Scientific Model

I used to be a relatively normal Ph.D. biologist and researcher, but the events of the last several years have changed me.  As a scientist, I was trained to be totally open and objective to contradictory data, but realized that I was being biased in favor of information that fit within the scientific model, thus restricting the information I would even consider.  The model is excellent, however a good deal of spiritual information does not fit within it, though that model can probe and elucidate the outskirts of some spiritual ideas, as we are finding out.  The scientific model, like most things, is limited.  Using the parsimony principle of Occam’s razor and attempting to look at all of the information objectively, I have realized that there is actually a great deal of reality that falls outside of the scientific model, that there is really something there.  I am passionate about finding out what that something is and making optimal use of it in my life.