Daily Reflections, Day Sixty eight, Experiencing a taste of Oneness

Day Sixty eight

Experiencing a taste of Oneness.

“There is no need to further clarify what no one in the world can understand. When revelation of your oneness comes, it will be known and fully understood.” W-169.10:1-2

God is……………. and what more can be said? The Tao Te Ching states “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.” And the best response to such an idea is laughter. We are so foolish having the tiny mad idea that we are separate from the Divine.

We, humans, arrogant, prideful, narcissistic think we can name God. We think we can label the absolute, the ground of our being, the force, and in doing so control and manipulate what we call God.

A person asked one time, “Do you believe in God?” The wise sage said, “What god is it that you are speaking of?”

God is not something or somebody in which one believes. God is something a person either knows and is aware of or doesn’t. The verse from A Course In Miracles tells us that there is no need to explain, to justify, to describe what it is not possible to explain, justify,  and describe. We either know or we don’t and those that know have no need to describe God while those who don’t know can talk about it for hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, whole lifetimes.

God is not external to us. God is not “out there.” God, if you experience God at all, is in your heart and mind. God is a verb which you experience not a noun that can be objectified.

Today, I will take several moments throughout the day to just be still. I will take some deep breaths, relax my muscles, and just melt into existence. If you can “freeze” you can set your body aside and expand your consciousness and perhaps, if grace arises, you will get a little taste of Oneness.

Virtue development, Faith, part three, relinquishment

The development of the virtue of faith involves the giving up of what doesn't matter.

If the development of the virtue of faith has to do with investigating and deciding on what really matters so as to decide in what to put one's faith, it also implies a choice between what really matters and what doesn't matter.

Giving up and eschewing what doesn't matter becomes an important part of faith development. Some people may experience this as deprivation and sacrifice, and others come to experience it as a liberation and freedom.

Faith development can be understood as freedome from nonsense and counterfeit things which society tells us and seduces us to perceive as desirable and worthy of acquisition and attainment.

When we put our faith in something, we are necessarily giving up putting our faith in other things. We can't do both. We can't have our cake and eat it too.

In Unitarian Univeralism we are very clear that we put our faith in our covenant with one another to affirm and promote our seven principles. Most people, even cultural UUs, don't understand the foundation of their faith nor is the faith consistently and coherently preached, unfortunately, from its pulpits. An uneducated, and uninformed congregation can never prosper and actualize its potential.

Jesus often brought the lack of faith to people's attention. He says four times in the New Testament, "oh ye of little faith." Jesus says in Matthew 6:30 "If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?

Do we worry about the wrong things? Do we strive after the wrong things? What are the right things after which we should strive? In what do you put your faith? In deciding to put your faith in some things, what are the things which you have relinquished?

Lent is coming. It is a time of relinquishment, a time of giving things up. But the giving up of things is not a sacrifice or a deprivation but a making of space and conserving time and energy for things we have considered more important. Lent is a time to consider, reconsider, what I want to put my faith in. And in making this choice, what will I be giving up, rising above, setting aside, no longer paying attention to?

Climate justice - Oh my God, what have we done and what are we doing!?

Global warming has improbably compressed into two generations the entire story of human civilization. First, the project of remaking the planet so that it is undeniably ours, a project whose exhaust, the poison of emissions, now casually works its way through millennia of ice so quickly you can see the melt with a naked eye, destroying the environmental conditions that have held stable and steadily governed for literally all of human history. That has been the work of a single generation. The second generation faces a very different task: the project of preserving our collective future, forestalling that devastation and engineering an alternate path. There is simply no analogy to draw on, outside of mythology and theology—and perhaps the Cold War prospect of mutually assured destruction.

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

What, brothers and sisters, have we done? We boomers and our predecessors during the industrial age have polluted our earth to the point of destroying its life sustaining eco-systems.

We can say that we didn't know. Up until the mid 80s that excuse for our eggregious behaviors is legitimate, but now we know.

A conscientious person is aghast. And what is to be done so that our successors can survive and so that we have taken our legitimate responsibility for what our social systems have done to our eco-systems?

There are some clear actions we are called to:

1. Educate ourselves and others about how our social systems are impacting the earth's eco-systems.
2. Organize a response to the destruction to mitigate its consequences.
3. Vote and impact systems of destruction as well as amelioration.
4. Strike, boycott, and nonviolently protest the destructive practices of our social systems.
5. Covenant with others in support and faith to care for each other and the eco-systems of which we are an integral and influential part.
6. Support and participate in organizations and institutions working to ameliorate the relationships between our social systems and eco-systems.

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.