Daily Reflections, Day Sixty seven, What is the right path to follow?

Day Sixty seven

What is the right path to follow?

“For oneness must be here. Whatever time the mind has set for revelation is entirely irrelevant to what must be a constant state, forever as it always was; forever to remain as it is now.” ACIM.W-169.9:1-2

God, eternity, Oneness always was, is now, and forever shall be. There is no time in the Oneness of the Spirit.

When we were born and became socialized and conditioned into the ego world of separation, we forgot this metaphysical truth. We became distracted by and encouraged to pursue the idols of the ego world. We were taught that the idols of the ego world would make us happy if only we could acquire them. And so we craved, we aspired, we went on on a wild goose chase seeking for Love, satisfaction, and fulfillment in all the wrong places.

There may have been times when we achieved and acquired some of these idols, and there were times of hedonic adaptation when we discovered that the idols were not soul satisfying and then we had the crazy idea that it was not the acquisition of the idols themselves that didn’t satisfy but that we didn’t have enough and so we got on the treadmill of attempting to acquire more.

This craziness of pursuing and acquiring the wrong kind of things we thought we loved became futile and we finally hit bottom and it dawned on us that we, maybe, have been on the wrong track for all or most of our lives. We realized that there must be a better way and we turned our lives onto a different direction in our search.

In our search in a new direction we became seekers for what some call “the absolute,” “the ground of our being,” and we call here, “the Oneness” of which we, and everything is a part.

Today, I will take several moments during the day to remind myself that I am in the world but not of the world. I will ask myself whether acquiring things suggested by the ego will really make me happy. I will ask, “What would Love have me do?” I will follow my intuitive sense of what Love is suggesting is the right path to follow.

Roman Catholic Unitarian Universalism - Almsgiving

As a Roman Catholic Unitarian Univeralist I practice almsgiving all year around and especially during the Lent. What do you think about this spiritual practice? Do you engage in it too?

Virtue development, Faith, part two

As we consider in what to put our faith, it has dawned on us that the things of the ego are mere idols who have enticed us with false promises and so we have begun our search for a more authentic and genuine understanding of what will provide satisfaction and fulfillment in life.

We come to understand that it is not acquiring things that are external to us that will make us happy but rather developing our internal capacity to manage ourselves and our relationships in ways that have been called "virtues" or "positive character traits."

Knowing in what to use as our development goals becomes the key to our successful development. There is a period of sorting out what has value and what doesn't. Should one cheat and lie to get ahead and achieve one's goals? The world of ego tells us that this is often the way because everybody does it.

Perhaps we engage in cheating and lying behavior. We lie and cheat on our spouse, on our friends, on our taxes, in school and at work. After years of "cutting corners," "taking advantage," exploiting and using others", we realize we have lost our self respect and authenticity and don't even know who we are any more. Yes, we have the prizes, the trophies, the money, the pleasure, but deep down we realize we have sold our soul to the devil for short term gains which have turned sour and we now recognize as counterfeit.

And so we question what we have valued and the way we have lived our lives up to this point. We say to ourselves, there must be a better way. With this awareness, we start looking and slowly begin to value other things which have been held up to be better choices. One such better way are the principles of Unitarian Univeralism as well as many other philosophical and moral prinicples.

We begin to take more responsibility for our decision making power and we become more discriminating in that which we choose to value. We are more purposeful and deliberate in what to put our faith.

To be continued

Climate justice - Existential crisis requiring we act in great faith.

This is what is meant when climate change is called an “existential crisis”—a drama we are now haphazardly improvising between two hellish poles, in which our best-case outcome is death and suffering at the scale of twenty-five Holocausts, and the worst-case outcome puts us on the brink of extinction. Rhetoric often fails us on climate because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we’ve been trained, by a buoyant culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss, categorically, as hyperbole.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (pp. 28-29). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

Wallace-Wells emphasises in his book, The Uninhabitable Earth that humanity is facing an "existential crisis" and the term "existential crisis" is not meant as hyperbole.

It is time for humanity to put its big boy and big girl pants on and take responsibility for the climate warmth we have created and the consequences. Nine of the last ten years of this past decade have been the warmest years ever recorded. Senator James Inhofe's snowball in the Senate Chamber is the epitomy of a nefarious joke to deny reality so that capitalistic profit can continue to be extracted for the 1% while the other 99% of humanity suffers a terrible fate.

Will Unitarian Universalists and others join together to voice the alarm, organize, vote, and mitigate the terrible consequences of this rapid environmental change? Will we Unitarian Univeralists live up to our principles of affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person, justice, equity, and compassion in human relations, and a respect fo the interdependent web of all existence?

In these prinicples we have invested our faith and now is the time to enact them and live up to them.

Daily Reflections, Day Sixty six, Liberated from the prison of the ego

Day Sixty six

Liberated from the prison of the ego

“All learning was already in His Mind, accomplished and complete. He recognized all that time holds, and gave it to all minds that each one might determine, from a point where time was ended, when it is released to revelation and eternity. We have repeated several times before that you but make a journey that is done.” W-169.8:1-3

What is heaven like? What is the world of the Spirit? It always was, is now, and ever shall be. Eternity, after all, is eternity. It’s a hard idea for our little minds to grasp.

And yet this passage from A Course In Miracles, it tells us that God is…….. Always was……….Always will be. God is “accomplished and complete.” God has no need for time and time means nothing to God. With the revelation time for us is ended and “released to revelation and eternity” where time stands still and is no more. Time has no meaning in revelation. There is no time. There is no time like the present and there is nothing else.

Life is like a hologram according to A Course In Miracles which teaches that what seems to be each part encompasses the whole. And so, we, in the world of the ego seem to make a journey which is already done. We are here to become conscious of the world of the Spirit which has always existed and continues to exist even as we ignore it and forget it.

These metaphysical ideas are very hard for the mind to grasp and yet we sense their truth.

Today, I will take several moments and surrender my ego to God. I will willingly turn my will over to my Higher Power. I will “let go and let God” as they say in Alcoholic Anonymous. In this surrender to the Will of God comes great freedom to be who we are created to be, no longer captured and constrained by the chains and prison of the ego. We are liberated at last to rest in joy and bliss of the revelation.

Virtue development - faith

In what does one put their faith? Is it in the path of the ego or the path of the spirit? Does one put their faith in the things of this ego world or in the things of the spirit in other places? Does a person believe in wisdom and love or in the idols of the world: money, power, sex, sensual pleasure to bring one happiness?

We have been conditioned and socialized by the world of the ego to believe that the things of the ego will bring one happiness. However, to anyone with eyes to see, and ears to hear, and hands to touch, we come to realize that the things of the ego are illusory in being able to provide us with true joy and bliss. It is in this dawning that the things of the ego will not make us happy that we begin to search for something deeper, more substantive, more fulfilling and this search takes faith in searching for the things of the spirit, for things unseen.

This search takes courage, and resolve, and what is called “a leap of faith.” This first step in developing the virtue of faith takes a letting go of the things of the world. We withdraw our attention and start looking elsewhere. This step of letting go often involves finding a guide whether a person or a teaching to assist in the undoing of our conditioning and socialization. This often begins with questioning and growing skepticism that what we have been told by the representatives and marketers of the things of the ego aren’t true. We come to realize that the things we have been told by society are what Holden Caufield, in the Catcher In The Rye, called “the Big Lie.”

This first stage of virtue development of faith sometimes sparks a feeling of “dis-ease.” There is a period of skepticism and anxiety. We aren’t sure how to proceed or where to look and we come to realize that we need help. Who are the helpers and where are they to be found?

Unitarian Univeralists covenant together to affirm and promote the responsible search for truth and meaning. In this covenant to affirm and promote this principle is the support for faith to be found.

To be continued

Climate justice - What are you doing to work for climate justice?

For centuries we have looked to nature as a mirror onto which to first project, then observe, ourselves. But what is the moral? 

There is nothing to learn from global warming, because we do not have the time, or the distance, to contemplate its lessons; we are after all not merely telling the story but living it. That is, trying to; the threat is immense. 

How immense? 

One 2018 paper sketches the math in horrifying detail. In the journal Nature Climate Change, a team led by Drew Shindell tried to quantify the suffering that would be avoided if warming was kept to 1.5 degrees, rather than 2 degrees—in other words, how much additional suffering would result from just that additional half-degree of warming. 

Their answer: 150 million more people would die from air pollution alone in a 2-degree warmer world than in a 1.5-degree warmer one. Later that year, the IPCC raised the stakes further: in the gap between 1.5 degrees and 2, it said, hundreds of millions of lives were at stake.

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 28). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

Unitarian Univeralists covenant together to affirm and promote justice, equity, and compassion in human relations, but the immense threat of global warming due to carbon emissions is ignored because the consequences of our current policies and practices are so immense that we engage in denial and minimization in order to continue to function in our daily lives.

We have yet to be able to get the enormity of the consequences of these climate changes into perspective. We have things to do and other things to occupy our attention like political scandals, sports, internet social media, etc.

UUs as a people of faith can be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We can educate ourselves and others and advocate for policies and practices that mitigate the immense consequences of what we have done.

How important an issue is climate justice when you make a decision to vote for policy makers at all levels of government? How much of your time and energy have you invested in organizing others to advocate for a change in climate justice policies? How do you affirm and promote our seventh principle, the respect for the interdependent web?