Planet Waves | June 10, 2005 Every morning I wake up, hopefully with a bit of sunshine streaming in the window, and my little dog, Widget, bounds across the bed -- overjoyed at open eyelids -- to get his first scratch of the day. I speak to Holy Spirit, evoke a blessing on the day, on the work. I invite in the Angels and thank them for their counsel. I glance at the pictures of my kids, my grandbabies, I offer gratitude and ask protection for their precious lives -- and then I make that bigger, for all the kids ... all us kids. I get my bones out of bed and head for a mega-cup of coffee. Then I crank up the computer to see what fresh Hell the world has accomplished while I slept. I expect you remember when it wasn't like that -- not so long ago, actually. What is five years? 1800-some days? Do you remember the bright promise and stunning expectations that came with the millenium turn? The hope for international collaborations and peaceful means? The intention for prosperity and mutual respect and a global community? Gosh -- time flies when you're having a crisis of consciousness. "Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people." ~ Jawaharlal Nehru A friend of mine, raised uber-religious but having come to spirituality, had an epiphany the other day, reading The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy for the first time. It happened as he read a conversation between Arthur, a space traveler from the now destroyed Earth and his alien companion, Ford, when they ponder eating fruit that they consider suspicious: "Garden of Edan. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?" "Yes, of course I do." "Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, "Do what you like, guys, oh -- but don't eat the apple. Surprise, surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush, shouting, 'Gotcha.' It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it." "Why not?" "Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them, you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end." It was an "A-HA!" moment for my friend. The God he'd been taught to worship was a practical joker, a guy who got off on confounding his children. It was the first time he'd seen through the essential Biblical rhetoric to get to the nature of that Old Testiment God that kicked ass, punished frequently and frowned constantly. It was a liberation for him. That's the problem with religion -- it's always based on some "book." Some story. We're left to interpret the meaning of cosmic wisdom with a brain that tops the evolutionary scale but, frankly, that ain't saying much. Spirituality, on the other hand, is experiental ... if we are instructed in some marvelous way that doesn't dovetail with anything in the "book," we still get to celebrate that we've been given to by the Universe. I had an ephiphany of my own a couple of years back. An ephiphany is not so much a new thought, but a nuanced thought ... like a kaleidoscope shifting to show us the same picture with brilliant new colors. What isn't loving, I saw clearly, is violent. What isn't done, said, thought in love, is hurtful, violent and life-defeating. "In the hearts of people today there is a deep longing for peace. When the true spirit of peace is thoroughly dominant, it becomes an inner experience with unlimited possibilities. Only when this really happens, when the spirit of peace awakens and takes possession of men's hearts, can humanity be saved from perishing." ~ Albert Schweitzer We are caught in the cross-hairs today between a group of people who think that God is a great, vengeful punisher who can be summoned to defeat their enemies -- and those who have had an experience of God as a loving, nurturing force who unfolds their understanding to encompass all the beauty and bounty that life offers ... or those who are seeking such a discovery. Each of us is outpicturing just Who we think God is. Course in Miracles tells us that guilt is the culprit, here -- we have a huge well of guilt within us, and we're looking for ways to avoid dealing with it. Mankind projects that guilt outside of himself to make someone else wrong ... to see that someone else gets punished in an attempt to hide his own "mote" from God and escape punishment himself. Strange, isn't it, that the New Testament, the "new deal" revealed by the Christ-consciousness, gave us a "get out of jail free" card on guilt ... but that isn't the option that half of our nation wants? Instead of accepting the forgiveness of the Christ message and actually heeding the content of the New Book, the religious have tagged belief in Jesus as the "only answer" to the Original Sin premiss of the Old one ... and left the brick under the hat, waiting for some unsuspecting pilgrim to kick it. As Richard Bach put it in 'Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah' -- "Argue for your limitations, and they're yours." If the religious want to argue for Original Sin, that's just where they are on the evolutionary scale, today -- but they aren't the majority, dearhearts. That may come as a surprise if you read the headlines, but it's true. How can the majority of us be "regular church go'ers" when in the 90's all we heard about was the failing numbers in congregations and synagogues? Oh, I expect 9/11 brought a bunch of them back, briefly ... but that isn't a true return to church, that's a return to fear -- and fear takes a LOT of energy to sustain, it's not our natural state. So, there's a disconnect in the information -- as with all the smoke that's being blown at us, we have a choice about what we buy for a buck. The "war for hearts and minds" that is going on today is just a kaleidoscope shift away. The spiritual are the majority, quietly living their lives in discovery of what is loving and gentle and kindly, discerning fears and struggling with them, informing themselves. It's that energy signal that will bring us back to good sense, at some point ... and God/dess make it soon! As the spiritual energy grows and becomes more potent, the Old energy of hate and vengeance will fade. Our assignment is to notice where we still believe in punishment, where we still hide our guilt and are afraid something terrible will happen to us, where we still assign blame to another. None of that is loving ... all of that is violence. That's not who we are ... or where we're going. All of that is the illusion of an old paradigm notion of Diety -- we must stop allowing such faulty mythology to drive us, our relationships and our politics. Just look what's happened in 1800 days of the Old Energy -- think what the 21st Century can look like with 1800 days of the New! Celebrate what it can look like when the Old is retired to its place in antiquity. The gift we receive on the inner journey is the insight that the Universe is working together for good. ~ Parker Palmer Links to some thoughtful pieces, below. Peace ~ Jude The Answer to Religion in Politics: Spirituality -- http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0606-32.htm Can I be God for a little while? -- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/paul-feig/can-i-be-god-for-a-little_1909.html You Are Spartacus -- http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0604-23.htm Jude, the editor of Political Waves, is currently standing in for Eric Franics on his daily blog. You can subscribe to Political Waves (our all-politics news distribution list) for free at the link below. You'll receive between five and 10 news articles each day. You may write to Jude with your responses to her commentaries at moderator@planetwaves.net. Political Waves list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/political_waves/