Daily Reflections, Day Sixty three, Are you ready to accept Oneness?

Day Sixty three

Are you ready to accept Oneness?

“The revelation that the Father and the Son are one will come in time to every mind. Yet is that time determined by the mind itself, not taught.” ACIM.W-158.2:8-9

Nonduality is a hard concept for the Western mind to understand. We are raised to see the world in terms of separation or subject/object duality. We understand, on the path of the ego, through the mechanism of comparison and contrast, the ying and yang, which we take for granted in our perceiving and miss the whole.

A Course In Miracles assures us that awareness of the Oneness will come to every mind and in this awareness lies the belief among the Universalists that everyone is saved in the end and will be in heaven. This awareness is achieved through acceptance and need not be taught or learned. The question becomes when will the mind be ready?

Readiness is a matter of choice. Do we choose the path of the ego or the path of the spirit? Do we choose the path of fear and guilt and attack, or the path of love, forgiveness, and peace? Once we know we have a choice, we are in control of our destiny.

Today, I will remind myself several times that I am a part of a transcendent mystery. I will accept that other people and other things are not responsible for my unhappiness. The responsibility for my happiness is mine alone. In this understanding, the path to peace and bliss reside.

Climate justice - Can UUs create a compelling mythic story to save homo sapiens on planet Earth?

My file of stories grew daily, but very few of the clips, even those drawn from new research published in the most pedigreed scientific journals, seemed to appear in the coverage about climate change the country watched on television and read in its newspapers. In those places, climate change was reported, of course, and even with some tinge of alarm. But the discussion of possible effects was misleadingly narrow, limited almost invariably to the matter of sea-level rise. Just as worrisome, the coverage was sanguine, all things considered.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (pp. 8-9). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

The story of the anthropocene, human influenced climate change, is so enormous that the story tellers among us have yet to find a narrative that resonates with a frightened audience.

The climate change narrative will have to ascend to mythic proportions to have an effect on the planet's population motivating change to rectify the conditions we have created.

Is there an eco theological story emanating from Unitaran Univeralist theologians which has resounded with the participants in the denomination? The UU "living tradtion" draws from its six sources, and with its seven principles, one might expect that some guiding light, some beacon of hope, could emerge from a denomination which covenants together to affirm and promote a responsible search for truth and meaning.

Up until now, no compelling narrative has emerged which one can hope for. The recognition that a respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are  part is a good start. What does this principle mean and how can we enact it for the benefit of the earth?

Daily Reflections, Day Sixty two, Choosing the path of the ego or the path of the spirit?

Day Sixty two

Choosing the path of the ego or the path of the spirit?

“Only the healed mind can experience revelation with lasting effect, because revelation is an experience of pure joy. If you do not choose to be wholly joyous, your mind cannot have what it does not choose to be. Remember that spirit knows no difference between having and being.” ACIM.T-5.I.1:3-4

Which do you choose: the path of the ego or the path of the spirit? The path of the ego brings fear, guilt, and grievance, and the path of the spirit brings love, forgiveness, and joy. When put in stark terms, it seems like an easy choice for the spirit but our conditioning and socialization into the world of the ego makes it hard for us to remember the world of the spirit from which we came and to which we can return.

The key to whether we experience fear or love is innocence. The innocence we experienced with our birth is an innocence born from naivete. Being babies, toddlers, and young children we have to be taught what evil is, born from the ego. As we go through life we lose our innocence of childhood and must regain it by remembering our birth right which is love. Jesus said that unless we become like little children we can’t enter the kingdom of heaven. It is this innocence of maturity that he is describing.

Revelation, becoming one with God again, is a choice, a choice many people have forgotten they have. When we join with others to remember our Oneness with God, a healing occurs which is experienced as great joy which can also be called bliss. The key point here is that people have a choice. Do we choose the path of the ego or the path of the spirit? When we choose spirit, peace and joy is experienced. This peace and joy is not about what we do, but who we are.

Today, I will remind myself that I have a choice between the path of the ego and the path of the spirit. The path of the ego will bring me fear and guilt, and the path of the spirit will bring me love and forgiveness and peace. At any given moment which do I choose?

Climate justice - How do we manage our guilt?

By the time my father died, in 2016, weeks after the desperate signing of the Paris Agreement, the climate system was tipping toward devastation, passing the threshold of carbon concentration—400 parts per million in the earth’s atmosphere, in the eerily banal language of climatology—that had been, for years, the bright red line environmental scientists had drawn in the rampaging face of modern industry, saying, Do not cross. Of course, we kept going: just two years later, we hit a monthly average of 411, and guilt saturates the planet’s air as much as carbon, though we choose to believe we do not breathe it.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 5). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

David Wallace-Wells in his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, pulls no punches and states it like it is.

We have done it and crossed the threshold set by scientists for carbon emissions to mitigate the negative effects of climate warming. Wallace-Wells writes that "guilt saturates the planet's air as much as carbon, though we choose to believe we do not breathe it," although of course we do.

Denial, avoidance, attack of truth tellers is promulgated by the 1% who have a vested interest in the profits from fossil fuels and the fossil fuel based capitalistic economy from which they benefit while we foul our own nest and create our own hell.

We are told we are now in the "anthropocene," the human influenced ecology of the planet. The question is one of moral responsibility. Will we, as a conscious species inhabiting and influencing this ecology, take responsibility for our own behavior and policies? How do we manage our guilt if we are willing to recognize and acknowledge that we have some? Will we work together to rectify the harm we have done or will we blame one another and carry on with our destructive behavior?

What we choose, and how we behave, is the gravest moral question of this age. Will our religious institutions take the lead or secular institutions or a combination? What part do we, as indiviudals, have in influencing the organizations and groups we participate in to engage in moral activity to mitigate the damage and enhance the respect and support for the interdependent web?

Daily Reflections, Day Sixty one, Clearing the way for amazing grace

Day Sixty one

Clearing the way for amazing grace

“God has kept your Kingdom for you, but He cannot share His joy with you until you know it with your whole mind. Revelation is not enough, because it is only communication from God. God does not need revelation returned to Him, which would clearly be impossible, but He does want it brought to others. This cannot be done with the actual revelation; its content cannot be expressed, because it is intensely personal to the mind that receives it. It can, however, be returned by that mind to other minds, through the attitudes the knowledge from the revelation brings.” ACIM.T-4.VII.7:1-5

Sometimes people will tell a story about how their life was changed by a near death experience where they glimpsed heaven and returned with their consciousness changed and their lives will never be the same again. People listening to this kind of story can perceive that the person’s life has changed and yet the listener can only guess at what the teller’s experience has been like.

Similarly, people have revelatory experiences which they may attempt to describe to others but this attempt to convey the experience is difficult and rarely understood by the listener and so often the teller stops telling others and just keeps such experiences to oneself.

While the revelatory experience is kept to oneself, the person’s attitude toward life, the way the person conducts oneself and interacts with others is different and people around this person sense this. Often the other recognizes that something is different in a positive way, and the positive attitude has a calming and warming effect that is extremely pleasant. There is no fear, no tension, and a kind of relaxation that is soothing.

Revelatory experiences change people from fear, guilt, anger, resentment in the world of the ego to Love, forgiveness, peace, and bliss in the world of the spirit.

Revelatory experiences are nothing the individual can control. All the individual can do is remove the obstacles and obstacles of the ego to make way for the awareness of Love’s presence which is always with us, but, in the world of the ego, forgotten. All we can do is make way for the awareness of God. The revelation is experienced as an amazing grace.

Today, I will clear the way by removing the idols of the ego for the awareness of Love’s presence in my life. I will take several moments throughout the day to ask the Holy Spirit to help me be willing to do God’s will and open my heart to God’s amazing grace.

Climate justice - Will we take responsibility?

Will we take responsibility for human impact on ecological systems or continue with our human exemptionalistic thinking?

“Writing in the late 1970s, William Catton and Riley Dunlap, early environmental sociologists, wrote an oft-cited paper that argued that virtually all sociological theories were anthropocentric; that is, they view society as the center of the natural world, with humans controlling and using the environment without regard for the human resource-based limits to social growth. They termed this sociological worldview the “human exemptionalism paradigm” (HEP).” P.6, Gould, Kenneth A, Lewis, Tammy L,. “An Introduction to Environmental Sociology” in Twenty Lessons In Environmental Sociology, 2015, New York, NY, Oxford University Press.

While the sociologists note what they call the “human exemptionalism paradigm,” the theologians noted the “human domination paradigm” with oft quoted verses from Genesis in the Old Testament where God tells Adam and Eve to go an multiply and dominate the earth.

These narratives from sociology and theology are both at odds with the spiritual teachings of the Earth Centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature which is considered one of the six sources of the Unitarian Univeralist Living Tradition.

While UUs pay lip service to this Earth Centered tradition, their daily lives rarely exemplify the teachings of this source, but rather exemplify the teachings of a capitalistic consumer based society..

Human beings in the United States have seen themselves as the conquerors of nature and have lived their lives based on a nationalistic ethic of manifest destiny by taming the wilderness, domesticating the indigenous savages to comply with the norms of western, white civilizaiton, extracating the earth’s resources for personal and capitalistic enrichment without considering the ramifications for the interdependent web of which they are a part.

Americans consume and then “throw away” naively ignoring the understanding that there is, ultimately, no “away.” We are only beginning to understand that our exploitation, taking for granted, and ignoring consequences of our behavior on the ecosystem which we inhabit may have dire consequences for our survival as individuals and as a species.

With this dawning awareness will we work together to rectify our relationships with one another and nature or will we continue our irresponsible ways, and turn on each other where it will be a matter of the survival of the fittest and richest?

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote the respect for the interdependent web of which we are a part. How are we as a denomination of religious people impacting the systems that promote improved balance between our social systems and the ecological systems of life?

To be continued

Daily Reflections, Day Sixty, The power of choice.

Day Sixty

The power of choice.

“Against this sense of temporary existence (offered by the ego) spirit offers you the knowledge of permanence and unshakable being. No one who has experienced the revelation of this can ever fully believe in the ego again. How can its (the ego’s) meager offering to you prevail against the glorious gift of God?” ACIM.T-4.III.3:6-8

We know in our unconscious that we have come from God and it is in God that our real home is to be found. It is a matter of remembering and returning. The socialization and conditioning of the ego does not constitute our real home. The world of the ego is a classroom which provides us with learning which has made the unconscious conscious.

Through the socialization and conditioning process by the world of the ego we have lost our innocence and naivte, and through pain and suffering, fear and guilt, resentment and attack, we come to realize the hell which the world of the ego has made for us and which for a long time has seemed so real.

Having served the idols of the ego we have in our despair come to realize that there must be a better way, there has to be more than what the ego has offered us and so we begin to search, and the search takes us within, back to the altar of our essence, our very being, and the world of the spirit is revealed to us and now we know that we have a choice. We can choose the world of the ego or the world of the spirit. Would we have guilt, fear, anger and attack or forgiveness, peace and Unconditional Love? Our power resides in our ability to choose. We realize that we have free will to choose the world of the ego or the world of the spirit..

Today, I will take several moments and reflect on my ability to choose the path of the ego or the path of the spirit. Do I want to attack or love? Do I want fear and guilt or love and forgiveness?