March 5 | from Political Waves, by Jude     Hey all, this one falls into the "said it better than I can possibly say it" genre, so I am sharing it with you here. - efc I self-edit a lot -- trying to keep a balance between the things I intuit and the things I read. I'm more an "opinionator" than a "moderator" ... but I try not to get too far afield with that. As opinions have a way of reflecting on a persons idiosyncrasies, you know most of mine by now, and my belief that nothing that goes on in the world is without purpose. I've made a kind of peace with current events in the last year.  I haven't had a rant in [gosh, some of you remember when I went off a lot] a long time. Of course, it's pretty easy to find rants now -- what I was intuiting back when I started with this list has come to pass so thoroughly that the op/ed's do it for me these days. As a very reasonable woman putting out very unreasonable news on a daily basis, I walk a tight-rope of a kind; I do not wish to add to the fear consciousness of the world and I don't want to be a simple Bush-Basher. The former makes us reactionary and stupid -- the latter is just too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel -- better, in my mind, to pump out examples of what's going wrong with the clear intention that at some point, we'll right it. It's my intention to focus on good outcome while detailing bad. The game is not lost, no matter what we read -- we're smack in the middle of it ... but it's damned dicey and we're better off knowing the particulars.  Being oblivious to what's going on around us might make us happier at the moment -- but it hardly addresses the injustice or manipulation or meanness that will, in due time, come to visit us or those we love. The world that's being foisted on us at the moment is someone ELSE's nightmare, but we are responsible for it because we share its reality.  As mass delusions go, this is a whopper. But eventually WE are going to fix this government ... if we don't count what's gone badly, and attend to its daily occurrence, we won't have a clue when the time comes. WE, as so many spiritual folks have acknowledged, are God's hands and feet, eyes and ears, on this plane. In short, I never lose sight of the "in the world, but not of it" concept -- I believe that Good will win ... that progress and enlightenment is inevitable; I also know my limitations in understanding the un-sanity of humankind. I know that there was indeed a Holocaust in our recent past -- that my own nation was built on the stress-fractured bones of indenture and soul-crippling slavery, and that now that comes with a two-car garage and a fist full of credit cards but it's basically the same -- that there are echo's today of the Inquisition that attempted to destroy in a frenzy of superstition and power and self-righteousness -- that civilizations at least as profound as ours have fallen into the black hole of history with only hints left to suggest their majesty.  These things happen ... that can't be denied, but it can certainly be learned from.  All of these outcomes were the product of choices. And it is also true that each heart that seeks liberty, that admires justice, and that works to achieve these things for all mankind is testimony to our human ability to rise above such circumstance and seek Light. Value justice. Work for common good. I believe that is the heart-signature of 21st century mankind.  Look how far we've come -- in the last forty years we've spent our energy on looking at ourselves and attempting to heal; now it's time to make that big enough to embrace a planet. All we have to do to know this is true is to look at the polls --  people are responding to specific political questions, but those numbers reflect a bigger picture than just disenchantment with a leader ... what this government IS is no longer what people ARE.  It's taken them a while to get past the smoke and mirrors, the hypocritical lies and rhetoric, to see what they were actually dealing with -- but now it's pretty clear they want no part of what they're looking at. We're working ourselves out of a dreadful situation, and it isn't clear how we're going to do that or how it's going to look.  But we're well into it, we're finally making progress -- in identifying what we DON'T want, we clarify what we do. Day by day there are more of us joining that number, who want no part of torture or rendition or war or government control. And I can't think of better news for the day. A snip from Ekhart Tolle, below -- he frames it beautifully. -- Jude The Arising New Consciousness From "The New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle Most ancient religions and spiritual traditions share the common insight--that our "normal" state of mind is marred by a fundamental defect. However, out of this insight into the nature of the human condition -- we may call it the bad news--arises a second insight: the good news of the possibility of a radical transformation of human consciousness. In Hindu teachings (and sometimes in Buddhism also), this transformation is called enlightenment. In the teachings of Jesus, it is salvation, and in Buddhism, it is the end of suffering. Liberation and awakening are other terms used to describe this transformation. The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness. In the distant past, this recognition already came to a few individuals. A man called Gautama Siddhartha, who lived 2,600 years ago in India, was perhaps the first who saw it with absolute clarity. Later, the title Buddha was conferred upon him. Buddha means "the awakened one." At about the same time, another of humanity's early awakened teachers emerged in China. His name was Lao Tzu. He left a record of his teaching in the form of one of the most profound spiritual books ever written, the Tao Te Ching. To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. A new dimension of consciousness had begun to emerge on the planet, a first tentative flowering. Those rare individuals then spoke to their contemporaries. They spoke of sin, of suffering, of delusion. They said, "Look how you live. See what you are doing, the suffering you create." They then pointed to the possibility of awakening from the collective nightmare of "normal" human existence. They showed the way. The world was not yet ready for them, and yet they were a vital and necessary part of human awakening. Inevitably, they were mostly misunderstood by their contemporaries, as well as by subsequent generations. Their teachings, although both simple and powerful, became distorted and misinterpreted, in some cases even as they were recorded in writing by their disciples. Over the centuries, many things were added that had nothing to do with the original teachings, but were reflections of a fundamental misunderstanding. Some of the teachers were ridiculed, reviled, or killed; others came to be worshiped as gods. Teachings that pointed the way beyond the dysfunction of the human mind, the way out of the collective insanity, were distorted and became themselves part of the insanity. And so religions, to a large extent, became divisive rather than unifying forces. Instead of bringing about an ending of violence and hatred through a realization of the fundamental oneness of all life, they brought more violence and hatred, more divisions between people as well as between different religions and even within the same religion. They became ideologies, belief systems people could identify with and so use them to enhance their false sense of self. Through them, they could make themselves "right" and others "wrong" and thus define their identity through their enemies, the "others," the "nonbelievers" or "wrong believers" who not infrequently they saw themselves justified in killing. Man made "God" in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as "my god" or "our god." And yet ... and yet ... in spite of all the insane deeds perpetrated in the name of religion, the Truth to which they point still shines at their core. It still shines, however dimly, through layers upon layers of distortion and misinterpretation. It is unlikely, however, that you will be able to perceive it there unless you have at least already had glimpses of that Truth within yourself. Throughout history, there have always been rare individuals who experienced a shift in consciousness, and so realized within themselves that toward which all religions point. To describe the nonconceptual Truth, they then used the conceptual framework of their own religions. Through some of those men and women, "schools" or movements developed within all major religions that represented not only a rediscovery, but in some cases an intensification of the light of the original teaching. This is how Gnosticism and mysticism came into existence in early and medieval Christianity, Sufism in the Islamic religion, Hasidism and Kabbala in Judaism, Advaita Vendanta in Hinduism, Zen and Dzogchen in Buddhism. Most of these schools were iconoclastic. They did away with layers upon layers of deadening conceptualization and mental belief structures, and for this reason most of them were viewed with suspicion and often hostility by the established religious hierarchies. Unlike mainstream religion, their teachings emphasized realization and inner transformation. It is through those esoteric schools or movements that the major religions regained the transformative power of the original teachings, although in most cases, only a small minority of people had access to them. Their numbers were never large enough to have any significant impact on the deep collective unconsciousness of the majority. Over time, some of those schools themselves became too rigidly formalized or conceptualized to remain effective. Spirituality and Religion What is the role of the established religions in the arising of the new consciousness? Many people are already aware of the difference between spirituality and religion. They realize that having a belief system -- a set of thoughts that you regard as the absolute truth-does not make you spiritual no matter what the nature of those beliefs is. In fact, the more you make your thoughts (beliefs) into your identity, the more cut off you are from the spiritual dimension within yourself. Many "religious" people are stuck at that level. They equate truth with thought, and as they are completely identified with thought (their mind), they claim to be in sole possession of the truth in an unconscious attempt to protect their identity. They don't realize the limitations of thought. Unless you believe (think) exactly as they do, you are wrong in their eyes, and in the not-too-distant past, they would have felt justified in killing you for that. And some still do, even now. The new spirituality, the transformation of consciousness, is arising to a large extent outside of the structures of the existing institutionalized religions. There were always pockets of spirituality even in mind-dominated religions, although the institutionalized hierarchies felt threatened by them and often tried to suppress them. A large-scale opening of spirituality outside of the religious structures is an entirely new development. In the past, this would have been inconceivable, especially in the West, the most mind-dominated of all cultures, where the Christian church had a virtual franchise on spirituality. You couldn't just stand up and give a spiritual talk or publish a spiritual book unless you were sanctioned by the church, and if you were not, they would quickly silence you. But now, even within certain churches and religions, there are signs of change. It is heartwarming, and one is grateful for even the slightest signs of openness, such as Pope John Paul II visiting a mosque as well as a synagogue. Partly as a result of the spiritual teachings that have arisen outside the established religions, but also due to an influx of followers of ancient Eastern wisdom teachings, a growing number of followers of traditional religions are able to let go of identification with form, dogma, and rigid belief systems and discover the original depth that is hidden within their own spiritual tradition at the same time as they discover the depth within themselves. They realize that how "spiritual" you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness. This, in turn, determines how you act in the world and interact with others. Those unable to look beyond form become even more deeply entrenched in their beliefs, that is to say, in their mind. We are witnessing not only an unprecedented influx of consciousness at this time but also an entrenchment and intensification of the ego. Some religious institutions will be open to the new consciousness; others will harden their doctrinal positions and become part of all those other man-made structures through which the collective ego will defend itself and "fight back." Some churches, sects, cults, or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretations of reality. But the ego is destined to dissolve, and all its ossified structures, whether they be religious or other institutions, corporations, or governments, will disintegrate from within, no matter how deeply entrenched they appear to be. The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will collapse first. This has already happened in the case of Soviet Communism. How deeply entrenched, how solid and monolithic it appeared, and yet within a few years, it disintegrated from within. No one foresaw this. All were taken by surprise. There are many more such surprises in store for us. ++