ON COMING TO AGREEMENT

Long ago realization: All that is necessary for us to live free in our own head (meaning, nonresistant) is for us to realize that we will never agree one hundred percent with everybody, but we must come to agreement with the person we are in disagreement with right this very minute. 

The hidden pearl: We must come to agreement. There it is, the key that opens our closed mind. We err when we listen to our ego and speak agreement before its time...peace on our lips, resistance on our mind. 

Offering peace just to get ugly behind us...or with a holy heart led by a self-determined will...simply keeps us stuck in the egoic mind. There is no God there...surface peace may appear but it cannot last for it is self-bred, self-fed, self-led. 

Only by the grace of God can true agreement between disagreeing parties be achieved. Our ongoing mistake is trying to get God's help...we strain for the right words to pray, the most spiritual thoughts to think. That's a useless struggle...think of it as trying to build the Brooklyn Bridge. That's done. It is there. Use it already.

Same goes with God. His hand has already transformed the disagreeing hearts...there is no disagreement. The minute our thoughts turn to God, we are righted...as are everything and everybody else. 

Hey! We have ceased fighting because there is nothing to fight. We don't even have to sweat how to do that...like the Brooklyn Bridge, it is done. 

I will go before you and make the crooked places straight. -- Isaiah 45:2

Thank you.

LOOK BENEATH TO FIND

To understand spiritually, we must look beneath the obviousness of our bare-naked eyeball. The gift is hidden within us...our chore-turned-joy is seeking to find.

We were gifted with the Sermon on the Mount early on. My first read? Did not make a lick of sense. I remember reading if someone slaps you upside your head, turn the other cheek, then if someone steals your cloak, run after them and give them your coat. What I got  was angry. 

I do recall when resist not evil became the one I felt was so blatantly wrong that I was forced to realize this was all about a new way to learn. That my reasoning mind was useless in understanding the message of the Sermon. Which led to my becoming willing to want to understand from a spiritual perspective.

For simplicity's sake, to me spiritual perspective is upside-down and backward from the material mind perspective. I came to this when I realized how often my perceived "worst-case" turned out to be my special blessing...that which I tried to pray away, stayed to bless me. 

This allowed me to see through the layers of judgment and doubt and to discover beneath them clarity, openness, presence, and love. (Author's name not noted.)

Looking beneath our own reality, we are freed to see. Looking beneath our own reality, we are freed. 

Thank you.

CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR LIFE

From our first glimpse that our answers are in the realm of the spiritual, we have sought still more spiritual growth. It has not been an easy road to walk, but not seeking spiritual growth is a lot harder...we know from experience.

A word about learning: Here's me in the first grade learning the word "orange," a real puzzler for me. All by myself, sitting in my little chair, staring out the window, I worrited with "orange." Punchline: I remember when I connected the word with the color, then connected the color with the fruit, and "got" they were two different things meaning the same thing, namely, orange...I can still feel my awe from back then that I had just learned how to learn. 

I may need to resurrect that very learning experience with the word "love." Impersonal, universal love. I know I've got it from my eyebrows up, but I keep feeling that something is missing in the breathing it part of my life. It may be I've got it, only it's so simple I can't believe I've got it.

Which leads to the straight-up question...then why not leap to do that? Why linger in that ego-victory land of angry hurt (right's righteous masquerade), where we hurt so justifiably and so futilely? 

Which returns us to another lesson learned...basically, spiritual growth boils down to the need to change our mind. Just one change of our mind can change our life beyond our happiest dreams.

Here comes reasoning mind strutting its stuff...if we know it, why change our mind? To what? And, if we know it, how can we not do it?

Blinding flash of the obvious:  If we will change our mind, we can know God disclosing himself to us as love. With laughter bopping along behind.

Thank you.

TO RISK FOR THE COMMON GOOD

I'm pondering the common good this morning, and I'm thinking in our walking-around world that the common good is us. Period.  

Why am I reminded of Pogo? Oh yeah, We have met the enemy and he is us. Well, if that be true, if we be the enemy and we be the common good, then dig deeper: There...the need for spiritual help aborning. 

The common good does not need us to fancy it up, study spiritual tracts, quote Saint Benefactor or some such. We are the common good just as we are. 

Our need is simple really: To accept that we are the common good our own self and that our acceptance cannot be done without our inner realization of that reality for him, her and them, too.

The common good is simply meeting the need for spiritual help. Not in religious form, not self-ideated, but with an honest, open and willing heart, and mainly for the benefit of others. 

This is a call to love our neighbor [and our enemy] and is the foundation for reestablishing and reclaiming the common good...[to have a] willingness to risk for the common good. -- Fr Richard Rohr's "Daily Meditation," November 6. 2012.

Thank you.

MEETING OUR NEED

The following is a virtual how-to manual for meeting the need for spiritual help: 

First is calamity. We must meet utter defeat in some vital area of life. All human resources having failed to solve the problems. We are utterly desperate.

The next common point is admission of defeat; we acknowledge our own defeat as utter and absolute.

The third common denominator is an appeal to a Higher Power. This cry for help could take many forms, and it might or might not be in religious terms.

 -- adapted (lifted} from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

It is important...it is vital...to remember that in our walking-around world, meeting the need for spiritual help can come by way of a dreaded medical diagnosis, the death of a relationship, or a broken fingernail...each qualifies as "calamity" to the material mind. 

Equally vital to remember is the bottom-line: the need to appeal to a Higher Power which might or might not be in religious terms. In short, love and laugh.

Thank you.

VARIOUS THOUGHTS, BFOs & REALIZATIONS

Three components of spiritual growth comprise the not-just-for-Sunday Trinity...God, grace and guts. [BFO while watching Simone Biles recently as she exhibited all three...with a few tears and a big smile.]

Stuck in the reasoning mind, we must be aware of the lurking arrogance of faux self-acceptance which  is ego's cover for insecurity. When we are raised deeper into the spiritual mind, self-acceptance encompasses the acceptance of all others, most especially the one(s) to whom we are feeling resistant.

   

In talking to ourself about a feared outcome, we often tell God to let whatever we're fearing happen...and think this is the acceptance God needs from us. God needs neither our acceptance nor our permission, he has already set the wheels in motion for a perfect outcoming. Our mental invitation is to stop our worrying about it since the feared may just be God's perfect outcoming...thus our pearl beyond price.

To find our center, to become Oned, we need upgrade our attitude toward that which we resist...be it people, things or dogma. 

Resist not evil, trust God, love and laugh.

Thank you.

GOD'S HAND IS IN THIS...ALWAYS AND ALL WAYS

I am told, and I choose to believe: Trust of God manifests as trust in our own self.

It is by giving love...plain and simple, no frills, no ifs, ands, or buts...impersonal love given out is how our dealings with life moves us forward in peace...no matter how those dealings appear to us as they come marching in. 

It is our original decision to trust God that we rely on...it is that decision that opens the door upon which God knocks, releasing impersonal, universal love.    

Love released is the making of life going smoothly no matter the appearances. When we only give, show, know love, love is what comes back, regardless of how it looks and/or feels on its return. In today's language, It's not what happens to us, it's how we react to it...in the Now, how we respond to it. 

The material mind is not built to recognize spiritual love, and life's dealings are filtered through our material mind. Thus the need for a spiritual base. Still more spiritual growth having become our go-to, our inner knowing reminds us God's hand is in this. 

As our faith grows and deepens, we rely on those five words, God's hand is in this. We pray our thank you...then we can rest in love.

Thank you.