Tag: oneness

Remember Your Heart

How do we live through difficulties and challenges with our life spirit intact? The current political landscape is full of such extreme divisiveness and hatred, both nationally and globally, that it is hard to feel optimistic about the future. Almost daily my heart is filled with sadness, and peace on Earth seems like a lost dream. Recently, as I sat staring out the window at a cloudy winter landscape, I sensed similar cloudiness within me. I realized then that I had felt exactly the same way in the late 1960s when the Vietnam War was at its height, and fiery race riots raged in Detroit, Newark, Watts, and other cities. The world seemed to be in hopeless conflict, and I couldn’t see how basic human rights, justice, equality, and peace could ever come to be.

Many others of my generation felt similarly, and it was the birth of movements for nonviolent social change and the possibilities they held that helped us survive. Civil rights workers and peace activists, flower children and feminists, began to grow in numbers (yes, I was among them). The vision we held for a more loving and harmonious planet moved us forward, our hands and hearts joined. Music, speeches, marches. Hope lived in collective actions by thousands against war, racism, sexism, homophobia, and environmental destruction. Over the years, gradual but significant changes took place, even nationally. The end to the Vietnam War. The first African American President and first woman Vice President; a more diverse Congress. Women’s health rights. Voting rights. Martin Luther King Jr. Day; Earth Day. Legalization of gay marriage. Rainbow flags across the country seemed to symbolize the possibility of a diverse and inclusive future for all.

 Yet systemic racism and injustice, misogyny, anti-Semitism, hatred of immigrants, transphobia/homophobia, and the rise of the 1% economic elite continued to grow and become stronger. Right up to the present, when it all burst out into high-profile predominance with the current elected (and non-elected) government and its single-minded focus on power and money. Decades of social change are being battered and broken. Once again I/we are facing hopelessness.

At times like this, we need to remember what lifted our spirits and helped us through in the past. The positive energy that inspired us and encouraged us to continue. In books, articles, speeches, songs, films, meetings, demonstrations—in hundreds of places across the country and around the world, we have been sustained by our individual and collective voices of hope for human freedom, equality, compassion, and love. This is our Survival Kit for Troubled Times.

This past week,  I watched two classic Frank Capra films from the 1930s: You Can’t Take It With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Both films are quintessential Capra: average citizens pitted against ruthless wealthy businessmen and unscrupulous politicians. They struggle against seemingly impossible odds and yet in the end, “we the people” prevail. Each film is a hopeful vision as well as a cautionary tale. One with relevance today. How many times over the years have people been called to stand up and refuse to relinquish the dream of a just and free world, a heart-centered humanity? Sometimes it seems like a horrible replay that we don’t want to relive, but we came to Earth for exactly this. With each generation, there is a shift, a further awakening into recognizing the basic oneness of everyone and everything, even in the midst of our differences.

We have to remind ourselves that possibility lives within impossibility. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit writes about groups and communities of caring, support, and mutual aid that have spontaneously arisen within disasters, both natural and human-made. As unlikely as it may seem, when everything falls apart, humans often turn to one another with kindness and generosity and build connections anew within great loss. Such stories belong in our Survival Kits, along with memories of our own strength and resilience, our own optimism in the face of pessimism. Maybe “hell” will begin to recede as our human hearts reach out to each other with hope and resolve. As my friend Heather recently said, “Remember your heart.” Everything we need is within us and among us.

Breath

The breath doesn’t disappear when you stop breathing at the end of your life. It is the source of your breathing, and it continues, just as your spirit continues. Indeed, breath and spirit are one and the same (identical word in some languages). This is a wisdom we come to as we pass from this world to the next. The Spirit that brought you life as you know it here on Earth, through your breath, is never-ending.

If you are fortunate, you may come to this awareness within your lifetime. Sudden jolts to your habitual way of perceiving the world can awaken this cognitive/emotional expansion. Crises or change, as well as deep spiritual practices, frequently have a transformative effect on your view of yourself and all of life. What seemed solid and unchanging suddenly becomes fluid and ever-shifting. You begin to realize that the “unknown,” that which we haven’t yet solidified into facts, is perhaps your greatest source of expansive wisdom.

Birth and death bookend our physical lives, but eventually we see them as illusions that we invented to explain what appears to be a beginning and ending. In truth, we are part of an infinite continuity of being, the eternal Spirit that fills the universe and our physical forms with awareness. A profound soul awareness that expands with each breath we take, each experience we live. The entire universe is within you, as you are within it. Sounds contradictory but only when your mind organizes the world into inner/outer, beginning/ending. From the soul’s view, everything is one, without polarity or edges.

Some religious traditions see eternity as a heavenly after-life in which we are reunited with our loved ones who have already passed into a world similar to the one we live in here—but where peace prevails. We often picture gods and goddesses who inhabit that world, there to comfort and guide us. Yet perhaps it is we who are the gods and goddesses living on Earth in human form and there is no after-life, only the eternal Now. Divinity is everywhere.

The human mind longs to find truth, to define life and death, so that we can keep fear at bay. Fear, however, is a product of the mind and of the need to know. Peace arises from the heart and soul, from a profound acceptance and understanding that is beyond questions, answers, and definitions. I find that when I become lost in fear of the unknown and the vastness of infinity, it is because my mind is frantically spinning its wheels. If I breathe deeply and allow a deeper awareness beyond the mental to arise within me, I settle into the “peace that passes understanding.” This is the eternal breath. The journey of my lifetime, of all of our lifetimes, is to recognize that peaceful presence as Home and one another as soul family. In doing so, we experience eternity with every sweet breath in each present moment.

Speak Kindness into the World

Finding time for silence in your life is important; it soothes, calms, and centers you in your soul’s presence. When you do speak, your voice then expresses the loving heart of who you are, connected to that inner stillness. Your voice can also be an instrument of peace and kindness in the world, healing separation and judgment. We are currently living at a time in which antipathy is on the rise toward those viewed as outside of a very narrow frame of acceptability (one race, one religion, one gender). Our immigrant and transgender neighbors now fear for their lives. We in the larger LGBTQ+ community are also fearful. Along with many others, including people of color, non-Christians, and all women. Who’s next?

There is a famous quote by Martin Niemoller during World War II, when Nazism was sweeping through Europe. He begins: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.” He continues, each line adding another group that “they came for” (trade unionists, Jews), and he still does not speak out. The last line stands as a powerful statement, then and now: “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” In other words, do not sit silently while your neighbors are verbally or physically attacked. Speak up. Stand with them. It’s happening to all of us.

Speaking up doesn’t have to be a fight or an argument (try to avoid antagonism, if possible). It can be as simple as admiring people for who they are, appreciating “difference” instead of disliking it, answering negative comments with positive ones. It’s a delicate balance, because some people hold tightly to their opinions and don’t want to be contradicted or challenged. To speak with kindness and compassion for all people is what we are being called to do in the world now. We are all different really. We are also all the same at the core of our being. To live with that seeming contradiction, in a space of inclusiveness, is the challenge of the years ahead, the shift from a warring planet to a peaceful one.

It begins in your house, your neighborhood, your state, your country, your planet. In essence, everywhere. With each voice of kindness speaking quietly, soul to soul, the world opens its collective heart a little more. It may seem an impossible task, but all journeys are step-by-step endeavors. Many of us have been traveling this road for decades. I lived through the years of “America: Love It or Leave It.” I also lived through the years of civil rights, women’s rights, Earth Day, Black Lives Matter, and rainbow flags on the White House and national monuments. As human beings on an evolving planet, we are all of these things. Individuals who act with hate or unkindness are often fearful inside; they don’t want to “lose” what they see as their only security in the world. They hang onto their belief systems like a life preserver. And fear can form a wall between people. Actually, we all carry fear of one kind or another in us these days.

So how to find a way for all of us to live together in mutual respect and open-heartedness? Without fear. Without anyone thinking they are better than anyone else. No easy answers to that. The walls can feel like they are closing in, angry and hateful voices speaking louder and louder. Doing nothing is not an option. My/your voice is key—not to engage in aggravated (and aggravating) argument, but to find a way through disagreement to mutuality in spite of difference. We are alive at this time for exactly this reason, as difficult or frightening as it may seem. There are many paths to oneness and community, but they all begin with kindness. The peaceful silence within you will give you the courage to speak that kindness into the world.

The Big Picture

The universe felt overwhelming to me when I was a little girl. One late-night thought of the vast unfathomable cosmos, and my five-year-old brain would freeze in terror. I learned to distract myself as I grew older, but the background fear never disappeared entirely. In college, a class in astronomy activated it again. It was only in later years, as I began to pursue a spiritual quest that some sense of meaning and safety in the universe came to me.

Over the years I have grown in my acceptance of what Native Americans have called “the Great Mystery.” It is multi-faceted and not a puzzle to solve but a vision of oneness that humans eventually learn to surrender to—either in life or in death. In life, we often get lost in the details and a need to control them. But if we can let go and accept everything in the span of our lifetime, inner peace arises within and remains with us always, even, or especially, at death. Some people call this peace God, or infinite consciousness. Language does not capture it, but the heart knows it. In moments of heart-centered connection to the people and the world around us, we are one with a presence beyond words.

When I am in that oneness, I see the perfection in all things, in my own life and in all life. There are no mistakes. In every detail of life is a light visible throughout the cosmos. When we accept our lives as perfectly unfolding, that light shines everywhere, and we relax into what has been called peace beyond understanding. For we cannot really “understand” life and death; we can only surrender to it and thus experience what is outside of the realm of understanding: Presence.

In that space, I have had the most profound sense of being part of a complex tapestry of beingness, every thread interwoven with every other thread, always connected and evolving within Presence itself. Each soul on an infinite journey to know itself. God experiencing God. My soul and divine intelligence chose the design of my life so that I could experience all the details of a human existence and eventually come to know everything as Heaven on Earth. Ultimately, there are no divisions in the universe. Humans experience division in order to return to oneness and know it as who they are. To know the universe as oneself. This is the Big Picture.

It has taken me many years to reach this perspective. Yet within it, I realize that there really are no “years,” or time as humans have defined it. The greatest sages have spoken of the eternal Now. This sweet moment of timeless time is what we have been given. When I surrender to that wisdom, the peace of my limitless soul informs all my life, and every “picture” before me, big or small, becomes one with an ever-changing cosmic kaleidoscope of light and divine connection. And as the full moon rises perfectly over the dark trees outside my window, my fear is replaced with gratitude.

Joy, Grief, and Miracles

My entire life I have carried within me, in equal parts, exquisite joy at being alive and profound grief at one day having to leave this world for the vast unknown of eternity. That unknown, and the sorrow surrounding it, frightened me terribly as a small child. At night, I would cry about this seemingly insoluble dilemma of life and death and the infinite universe. As I explored a spiritual path in my adult life, I came to see that this life/death dichotomy arose as part of being embodied spirit in physical human form. My soul saw no polarized separation; only my mind did.

There have always been times in my daily life when I saw the world as my soul did: expansive, wondrous, flowing, filled with miracles. When I am walking quietly in Nature, surrounded by birds and trees and flowers. When I am with friends and family, feeling the love that connects us. The trajectory of my life has been to balance out the joy and grief, to come to peace with all the varied and sometimes contradictory experiences of living as a human being on Earth. Perhaps this is what we are all doing in our own way.

Immersed in presence in the natural world, I feel that balance. Trees, birds, clouds, flowers, seasons. I am outside of time, beyond the mind’s observations. I connect to all parts of life with each breath. Breathing like a tree, like a flower, like a bird. Therein is calm, a surrender to something greater that is comforting not frightening. Here, infinity is who I am. It flows within me and surrounds me as well. In Nature, I recognize that life holds infinity in everything. Somehow grief falls away in those moments, and I only know the peace that is at the center of my soul.

The key perhaps is to see the entire world as one with Nature, to recognize that Mother Earth and Spirit are a single seamless creation with no beginning and no end. And within that eternal, never-ending Presence is something beyond the mind’s ability to understand. Only in completely letting go of the need to solve the puzzle of existence and accepting the wonders before us each day do we experience peace. And a balance that brings together joy and grief in the human heart and makes them whole.

This is where I am now, sitting silently on the edge of eternity and knowing it as who I am, who we all are. William Blake could hold “eternity in an hour,” infinity in the palm of his hand. He saw a “World in a Grain of Sand, and a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” To me, this is the greatest and most exquisitely beautiful wisdom I’ve ever encountered. Within it is the amazing grace we all hope to find in our lifetimes, no further away than our own miraculous hands or the flowers at our feet.