THE
DANGEROUS POLITICAL DIVIDE
Is
someone you love on the other side?
How can it be that someone you’ve known and loved
all your life is going to vote for those evil liars on the other side, those crazy
people opposing everything you believe in? It happens! But how to deal with it?
Perhaps you’ve tried to reason with him/her, but he/she seems to have been
indoctrinated into believing all the talking points of the other side! What to
do?
The first and most important thing to do, is to
undertake a serious, critical review of what you believe yourself. If the world
seems all wrong, it’s a sure sign that you need to change yourself. If you believe
in progressive liberalism, ask yourself exactly what is it that you want the
country, or the world, to progress into? If you believe in conservatism, exactly
what is it you want to society to conserve? Some things are worth progressing
into, some are not; some things are worth conserving, some are not; and, if we
are open to it, there is a subset of both views that we can agree on. This is
what the debate must center upon, not on the angry demonizing of the other
side.
Deciding that those on the other side are pure evil,
and that those on the side you favor are saints and heroes out to save the
world, is a very dangerous and mistaken dichotomy. It always leads to the
justification of hatred and violence. Hatred and violence are extreme outcomes
that we must seek to avoid this time. Succumbing to hatred and violence has
always led to disastrous results, with many innocent bystanders being hurt or
killed. If you are passionate about what
you believe to be a positive issue championed by one side or the other, then
you must act to promote that issue; but don’t condemn your friends who don’t
see it that way. Wisdom lies in knowing that even you could be wrong. In any
case, ultimately it is not your job to decide what is best for the world.
Finally, if you don’t believe that there is an
intelligence far superior to your own and that of any politician, - an eternal Infinite
Intelligence that guides and protects us as a parent protects wayward children,
then you are truly lost. The real saints and heroes in the history of civilization
on this planet have all spoken of their knowledge of the existence of this Higher
Power, and there is now empirical evidence proving that they were right. The eternal
soul long buried under many layers of egoism, especially in self-promoting politicians,
is deeply connected with the Infinite. It’s our job to open our hearts to receiving
and sharing the Consciousness of the Cosmos. Our prayer should be: Infinite
Heavenly Father/Mother, Jesus Christ, Saints and Sages of all religions, awaken
Thy Love within me; and may I be able to awaken Thy Love in all hearts!
REFLECTING ON THE POLITICAL DIVIDE
Today, America,
and perhaps even the whole world, seems deeply divided. You may feel prompted
to speak out against one side or the other; and that’s OK; but be careful! This
is a subtle trap. If you find yourself being caught up in the vitriol of the
division, if you are begining to hate those on the side opposing the side you think
is right, beware! You are falling into the trap. You are becoming blind to the
fact that we are all One. We all all children of the Most High. Our differences
are quite minor, unless magnified by hatred.
Be advised
that God is in control. If He were not, the cosmos would have devolved into utter
chaos eons ago, the planets of our solar system would have spun into the sun,
the sun would have exploded, and life as we know it would have ceased to
exist. But it hasn’t. This planet has continued
to spin nights and days for billions of years, and conscious beings have spun
their dreams of growth and positive development for hundreds of thousands of
years. Human beings have loved and hated one another as long as two or more
have formed a relationship, or a society. We live in an expanding bubble of positive growth, nurtured by Love
and Light, protected from physical chaos by the meaning and purpose of a Higher
Consciousness which opperates beyond our understanding as finite beings.
Whether you
want to call that Higher Conscious Reality God, or Nature, or the Conscious
Cosmos, makes no difference; It exists. If It did not, the laws of the physical
universe, which we have discovered, tell us that no stable universe could possibly
have developed from a vast explosion without the action of an organizer, and if
the chaos of the explosion was harnesed and molded into the extremely complex stable
reality of even the simplest life form found on this planet, then if that organizer
were to go away, the expanding chaos of the explosion would destroy any existing
stable structure in a nanosecond.
Once caught
up in the dichotomy of political division, we tend to think that this division
and animosity is the worst we’ve ever known. But that is not so. We have been
more divided in the not-so-distant past. In our Civil War, for example, neighbors
slaughtered neighbors, brothers even fought brothers. I am old enough to have
met, when I was very young, yet older people who fought in that horrible war. I
grew up playing on the earthen works of Fort Davidson in Pilot Knob, Missouri,
where hundred of Union and Confederate solders died. I have visited Manassas,
in Virginia, and shed tears for the lingering souls of young men who died there while
local farm families watched the war’s first battle from horse-drawn wagons at the edge of the field. And
many such divisions have split societies on this planet in the past. No, such
division is not unique. But let us pray that we have grown enough spiritually
to avoid bloodshed this time, and in the future.
The Creator
of this bubble of life in an otherwise chaotic universe is not dead, nor is He absent.
That organizing factor exists within each and every one of us. All
consciousness is part of and linked eternally with the Higher Consciousness of
the Cosmos. It is your job (no small task) to reconnect with that Cosmic
Consciousness in your heart of hearts, and then to work to awaken that
awareness in all hearts!
If the
world seems wrong to you, it is a sure sign that you need to change yourself. You
can only do so by making that reconnection with the Love and Light of the Higher Consciousness of
the Organizer in your heart.
WHEN
THE IMPOSSIBLE BECOMES POSSIBLE
When does the impossible become possible? When
opposites become one, when all becomes one, and one becomes all. Then thought
becomes mathematical, science becomes poetry and poetry becomes science.
The day science begins to
study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in
all of the previous centuries of its existence.
Many years ago, I cried out to the
universe: “God, I want to know everything!”
The Universe answered, but it took me 70
years to fully understand the answer, and for science to become poetry.
There is no such
thing as an empty space. …Space and time claim no existence of their own. They
are structural features of the field. - Albert Einstein 1952
The realization that space and time have
no existence of their own, allows us to understand the true meaning of following
poetic statement:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And
a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold
Infinity in the palm of your hand
And
Eternity in an hour - William Blake
1862
But
we seem to live in a very hard, physical world. The minute we are born, our
soul tells us we are infinite and eternal, but the world insists that we are finite,
insignificant and very mortal. Life appears to be the beginning of a journey
that only ends in death. Which vision is reality? The man who discovered that
the physical universe is quantized, said:
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed
science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research
about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and
exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to
vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must
assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind.
This mind is the matrix of all matter. –
Max Planck 1905
Is it
possible that the physical universe is an illusion? Is it possible that life is
meaningless? Is it impossible to know?
When
does the impossible become possible? It doesn’t happen when we take everything
apart to see how it works; it happens when we put it all together. When we come
to know that the physical and the non-physical are one, when a stranger is instantly
known as yourself, when you are everything and nothing at the same time, i.e.,
when you are fully awake and fully conscious.
Yesterday
I met a stranger. But there was a de-ja-vu moment: I knew her, and she knew me,
from the beginning of time, for the past and future are inventions of the mind.
We never experience anything but the present, there is only here and now, then
and there are phantoms of the mind. In reality, there is only the I AM, the
one consciousness that we all share.
A
good friend of many years, formally trained as a scientist, but also a deeply
religious man, once said “science has its limits. There are questions science
cannot answer.”
Are
there questions that are Impossible for the rational mind to answer? He was
both right and wrong. Are there important questions that are impossible for
science? Yes for science as we know it. No for science as it must become. The physical
universe is quantized, discrete, separate. But consciousness is infinitely
continuous, and consciousness is the only thing we experience directly. Matter,
energy, space and time, we only experience indirectly through the imperfect organs
of the senses. Consciousness we experience with our whole being.
Mainstream science today tells us that there
is nothing but matter and energy interacting in time and space. But the great
minds I quoted above, upon whose work mainstream science relies, said “There is
no matter as such”, “Space and time have no existence of their own.” And science
will advance by leaps and bounds when it begins to study the non-physical
phenomena we experience directly.
The truth is: the physical universe, a
fraction of the reality we experience, is quantized, while consciousness, the
only thing we experience directly is infinitely continuous. When we realize
that they are one and the same, the impossible becomes possible, and we can hold
infinity in our hand, experience eternity in this hour, see the world in a
grain of sand, and Heaven in a wildflower.
