The Reassuring Universe: April 2021

Sunday, April 25, 2021

Seeing through our dreams and scars

SEEING THROUGH OUR DREAMS AND SCARS

What would I see?

I'm not asking to see anymore.

I will see what I'm supposed to see.

I see blessings.

I ask not for visions but for open eyes to see what is right in front of me.

Peace in not knowing. Peace in the condition.

Peace with the changes of time.

The perspectives of age are not necessarily right, but instead reflect what we became. The perspectives of youth are distorted by what we wish to become. Scars and imagination distort our views from either end of life. Fortunately, in between life keeps us sufficiently occupied to not be too deceived by the distortions of our dreams and scars.

Most of all we are blind to what we are. That also is just as well.

Eventually we figure out there is very little to see that is not of our own making. If this leads to the further deception that there is nothing beyond that of our own making our souls are rendered destitute and hopeless.

With luck and faith, we will discern that in the absence of specific sights and visions there is still much to perceive. We want to see, for seeing is delightfully specific and incontrovertible. But what matters, what is real, is not constrained to this temporal - corporeal existence discernable by photons impinging upon retinas.

In this life there is very little to see beyond our worldly contrivances, but there is an infinity to sense, discern, and know. Life consists of learning these more subtle discernments that are liberated from corporeal perceptions. Soul consists of what we do with those discernments.

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Terlingua

The graveyard. Crude crosses lie on the graves, often not even erected above the grave. Many graves look like stone piles, barely dug into the ground. Graves are randomly crowded together, in no order or pattern. There is not a hint of green or anything living. Most of the rough crosses are falling apart. There are few names or dates on graves. Several graves are covered in beer bottles. Fences around a few graves are falling down. There is no pretense of life here. There is nothing pretty and no attempt at pretty. It is the most reasonable and realistic cemetery ever.

Terlingua town: A post apocalypse scene of houses built in the midst of crumbling rock wall ruins that could be Puebloan. In the center an amazing store with candy suckers with a real scorpion at the center (how long dare you keep it in your mouth), display cases with dusty fossils, including a mosasaur skull, and 1960’s and 70’s Austin music posters for sale for $900.

Decorative tiles grace the old theatre cum bar entrance. Shafts of cinnabar mercury mines grace the barren ground.

The little rustic Roman Catholic church brings a critical touch of grace to this place of undisguised harshness of life.

Terlingua can’t afford the luxury of pretense. Dig deep for the mercury for use in explosives detonators, but don’t bother digging too deep a grave. Scorpions in candy is about as eloquent a summary of life as you’ll find, rivalling the Day of the Dead postcard with the innocently hot corpse-chick pulling the strings on marionette romantic partners.

This place has to work on the mind of anyone living here, but more honestly if less gently than modern digital city life.

Terlingua is absurd because it is an honest statement of life. Drive through, browse a moment, then uncomfortably climb back in your RV and pretend your modern life makes more sense than unlabeled graves, scattered pieces of crosses, and the scorpion patiently waiting at the center of your candy.

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Combat and Compassion

COMBAT AND COMPASSION

People are generally as programmed in their behavior as any cat or dog. Acknowledging that fact makes forgiveness a little easier. Perhaps the role of spiritual practice and well-practiced religion is to liberate people from their programming. The fear and anger and lust and stupidity abide, but we are empowered to at least slightly temper them, to take some nominal responsibility for our actions, or better said, to submit our course of action to a higher influence, something more noble than genetic programming and parental abuse.

In exploring that potential, we see the Christos in all, in the paradoxical opportunities for a Creation based on claw and combat to give rise to decency, compassion, and Love.

Saturday, April 17, 2021

Unnatural Peace

UNNATURAL PEACE

PEACE! Scream it loudly. Grab people by the shoulders and scream it into their face. Force people to experience it. Demand it. Make it legally binding

Well, why not. Nothing else has worked to get either individuals or nations to take seriously the pursuit of peace.

Perhaps there is nothing natural or automatic about peace. Our genetic evolutionary background prepares us for mass sporting events and mindless entertainment and serving in the army, but not for peace. The pursuit of peace, inner or international, was never a prerequisite to survival.

Cultivate crops, kill food, compile money, these reflect our genetic inheritance. Conquer, combat, control, these have sustained our survival.

Pursue peace?! From where did such an impracticality arise? Exactly. That is the question. For it does arise, a longing, an instinct, an evolutionary anomaly never quite fully quieted by even a few million years of fang and claw survival.

Pursue peace. Whence arises this nagging admonition? Why do we wish it were viable, even if we don't believe it is? All that has made us human, uncompromising biological and societal evolutionary dictates, lead not to meditation or mediation.

Peace. Within and between. Still unrealistic after all these millennia. But what about the next millennia? Do we not hope that our descendants might individually and collectively experience a little more peace than we? Might it be that it is not our carnal evolutionary development that has made us human, but "human", in the greatest potential of that word, is what we are called to in spite of that family background of survival of the most ruthless.

Pursuit of peace, an indefensible longing detracting from personal productivity and risking tribal vulnerability.

Longing for Peace, a whispering hint of the nature and potential of our souls, of what "human" can mean when liberated from the carnal evolution with which Creation and Creator cast us toward our destiny.

You Will Be Touched

YOU WILL BE TOUCHED

The human spirit, or is it soul,

or do we have no name for it,

something individual,

something lost,

or was it forgotten?

Something survives in the face of it all,

something of the God that we would deny.

Something survives,

inextinguishable,

always nascent,

a potential.

Do not turn from it,

you distant listener,

you detached observer,

you bored reader.

This is about you.

You have either survived too much or you will survive too much to deny that pricking at your unnamed soul.

Flee for now if you must, but there is no escape.

Consciousness will catch up to you.

The whole Universe orbits about your life,

waiting for you to look at something other than yourself.

Uncomfortable, isn't it?

Squirm a little.

Maybe this isn't the first time you felt the touch of something trying to wake you.

It's Love you know. Calling you to your potential.

No hurry.

You have all eternity to grow into it.

Relax. You’re not to blame.

No one is to blame.

Your failings were all part of the learning.

Their failings were all opportunities for forgiveness.

Let it catch you unawares,

clueless and lost,

or maybe you think you have all the answers.

Maybe you are in denial or secure in genuine peace.

Maybe you are frightened of life or hardened to its threats.

Maybe you pray for delivery or give thanks for it or curse the decider of the outcomes….

….as if anyone or anything decided the outcomes.

Yet something survives in the face of it all….

something of you….

something that expresses the Source that underlies you.

For now go on your way. Think not too much about it,

not that the world allows much chance for such thought.

Know that you were momentarily touched,

and you will be touched again,

by Love, for lack of a better word.

You will be touched,

ever so gently touched,

and someday you will be ready for it.

No hurry.

You have all eternity to grow into it.

Friday, April 16, 2021

Accept What You Want

ACCEPT WHAT YOU WANT

Why do we not get answers? Why do we have to invest time in contemplative prayer if we want a little conscious experience of Communion with God?

Because that maintains the holy and precious balance that gives us freedom as children of God.

We are indeed free, but the sustaining Spirit, the Christos by whatever name, does long to embrace and in its inscrutable way guide us.

We are not left alone. But we don't get detailed instructions and answers.

We don't like. We want detailed instructions and answers when we want them, and we want to be left alone and independent the rest of the time. Instead, we face crises without unambiguous worldly answers that we can understand in our terms and we get pesky irritating reminders of rules and regulations when we least want them.

Welcome to childhood, or maybe it's adolescence. Welcome to freedom, including freedom of belief, and most terrifying, freedom with consequences.

Yes, you have to make some effort and invest some time to experience the joys of Deep Communion with your Creator. Yes, you don't get all the answers and specific guidance you might desire. But dear God, you are never left alone. You are, in spite of how it sometimes feels, an integral part of the Wholeness of Creation. The Christos that permeates all time and corporeal existence also permeates your existence. You are part of it. Yet you are free. You are loved and independent and part of Wholeness and you are empowered. You are a child of God, learning to surrender not to specific directions and guidance but to encompassing Love and embrace.

Accept the lack of answers when you demand them. Accept the nebulous guidance. Accept the embrace and Love and eternal security and belonging that ultimately are what really matter, regaining the naked joy of Communion in the Garden while growing as a child of I Will Be What I Will Be, a child participating in growing Unity with the First Born in ongoing and eternal Creation.

Question Revealing Truth

QUESTION REVEALING TRUTH

Each experiences the Christos by the name they were taught.

But God help the soul taught there is no Christos!

But even they know there is more. Everyone knows there is more. In the moments of testing it becomes hard to deny.

Embodiment of Christos takes many forms, depending on how one was raised. It is always a Choice, deep belief that grows into certainty.

"Might it be?"...the heart questions, the question itself bearing testimony to the Truth.

Christos….we long for it, always mistaking other things for it. We grab at whatever first image of it we saw in childhood, whether Ganesh or science or UFO's or gold. We imprint on that first view, remaining fixated on it usually for the rest of our worldly life. But it is the Christos we crave, the Source of all, the Love that underlies and permeates all Creation, the embrace that awaits.

We once knew it, before our birth into time. We have not forgotten it. But we lost the touch.

Oh that welcoming baptism, cleansing healing baptism, when we immerse in the Christos that awaits, the enduring embrace, joy and beyond joy, security, comforting reassurance, embrace of the Light we always sought.

The Reassuring Universe

Pages

Topics

Contact (speaking engagements, book purchases, and feedback)