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The Power of Change Within to Change the World
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Despite our personal growth, as a society we're
not yet transforming the educational system, the
political system, or the economic system. Depression and physical illness can be
interpreted as signals that we're not accessing the
deep codes of our creative selves. When you learn to shift your identity to the
essential self, the wisdom for healing your local
self is present.. If we trace a behavior back to the belief that
sponsored it, and correct our belief, we have a
chance to correct the behavior. At jump time, we create a whole new cosmology
that results in the construction of new collective
realities around politics, economics, education,
government. When a leader requires others to hold him as
flawless, or simply unaccountable, his flock
becomes self-toxifying. An overwhelming majority of our social,
political, and ecological catastrophes can be
traced to the Spirit/Matter split in individuals
and in societies. Institutions and nations are always selfish and
self-interested, and…usually coerce
individuals to behave in immoral ways. Because modernity makes science the big picture,
consciousness--which cannot be seen--has received
short shrift. In the last couple of centuries we have begun to
think of change as a good thing…That is a
fairly new idea for human beings to have. Nonviolence is not a diplomatic word, it is
compassion in action. As the world becomes smaller and smaller, the
concept of "us" and "them" is almost outdated. America, as a nation, spends six cents out of
every dollar on educating its children, four cents
on health care, and fifty cents on the military
industrial complex. Russia's early warning and nuclear command
systems are in a state of deterioration and
disrepair. We can easily turn members of our own family
into enemies when we communicate from the paradigm
of domination rather than focusing on human
needs. When I judge someone, I fuel the enemy image
rather than seeing the real person in front of
me. f we can't see the dark side we cannot harness
the power it holds because we displace it with our
denial. That is what shadow work is about: detoxing the
emotional body. Enshrined in the depths of all the traditions is
the essential secret wisdom that total destruction,
absolute stripping, horrible pain, apocalyptic
annihilation and death are the birth canal of a
wholly new reality. God is on the side of those who are brave enough
to go into the storm with their divine truth and
their divine beauty and their divine power
radiating from a full heart, mind and body. Evil is not a poetic metaphor. I have met it,
and I have been wounded by it. Love and evil are in
a profound cosmic war. There is a universal tradition of people who
complete the path of meditation, who transcend
their intellects, open their hearts, and come into
tune with that from which the universe flows. Only in this silence--the silence that lies
behind thought--can one hear the symphony of the
universe. We are continuously under the control of
negative emotions and thoughts. And as long as we
are under their control, our very existence is a
form of suffering. The sages teach that each of us has a pattern,
like a fingerprint, that is stamped on every erg of
energy we use. Our unconscious is actually the vast majority of
our consciousness. We'll have to wean ourselves of the illusion of
safety and become familiar with the way of the
fool--following the call of life, regardless of
where it leads. It's not we who are living life. Life is living
us. Live with the question of your purpose
unanswered. In truth, you can't define your
purpose. It defines you in its own time and in its
own way. People who received intercessory prayer had 50%
to 100% fewer side effects from these invasive
cardiac procedures. This is what scientists call
"big data": a huge effect. These studies show clearly that we can change
the state of the physical world by our thoughts, to
say nothing of our actions. There are certain operations of consciousness
such as those we see in distant healing and prayer,
to which the categories of space and time simply do
not apply. Things we want out of life--better health,
better physical performance, better mental acuity,
longevity, better emotional stability--are all
controlled by our hormones. Today, for the first time in history, we have
more overweight people on the face of the earth
than malnourished people. The more you control the hormones in the body
through the food you eat, the less drugs, if any,
you need to maintain a state of wellness. The lessons of the new science, which I call the
new Biology of Belief, teach us that we have the
power to change ourselves, and our planet, using
the power of our minds. Our greed is so sanitized and our image so
polished, that we are totally unaware of the people
we hurt and the earth that we destroy in securing
the life we have been programmed to seek. "Sub-optimal health" affects more than
two-thirds of the world population. That's about
three times the number of people diagnosed with
diseases. The impact of massive population growth affects
every aspect of life&emdash;behavior,
relationships, food, sense of well-being&emdash;at
a speed that does not allow time for biological
adaptation. As we reassert the magic of stories in our
lives, we cannot simply appropriate mythologies
from other wisdom traditions at face value. One of the most elegant ways to foster
generative narratives for living is through
developing the elegant art of conversation. Our lives are so dominated by technologies of
distraction that we can easily live for long
periods without pondering a single question of
meaning. Super size your dreams, then focus, commit and
lunge forward with your heart. Each act is another chance to grow the
unyielding power, hope, and focused positive action
necessary to embrace and recreate the normalized
insanity filling our daily lives. In the end, what helps me most is to constantly
experience gratitude for everything I have. As long
as I keep my awareness in the experience of
gratitude, the grace of God is there. What you behold with your physical eyes is a
function of the state of awareness you are in, and
as that state of awareness changes what you behold
changes. If you want to go beyond suffering, you have to
experience it. We have to be intimate with our
suffering. Bringing this vision into the world of social
and cultural forms is a lived process. Every true
teacher and every sincere student must reinvent the
means anew. Through prayer, I believe we can tap a source of
solution-thinking that is not of the same
consciousness that contributed to the world
problems. We need not wait for internal harmony before we
can contribute to the world. Being the one who stands up and says, "Enough!"
is difficult, because it constitutes a threat to
the others involved. On my three highest values--spirituality, family
and friends--combined, I spent less than five
percent of my earnings. It is an act of courage and strength to embrace
reality on its own terms rather than on our fantasy
terms. We can always change our internal emotional
climate, and that changes everything. When opportunities for social change present
themselves, inner calm allows us to notice them and
be available to them. Start with yourself, and the world will
follow. Humanitarian and environmental concerns are one
and the same. When we try new behavior and our biochemistry
changes, it feels uncomfortable at first. Moving to
new states of experience may feel foreign to our
bodies. The first problem you have to confront, whether
you have a married couple or a room full of
Bosnians, is despair that the problem is not
solvable. By programming television primarily for
commercial success, the mind-set of our
civilization is simultaneously being programmed for
ecological failure. Nothing short of our evolutionary intelligence
as a civilization is being tested as we work to
build a mature and compassionate social mind. Common sense is the radar that helps us navigate
without getting sunk by hidden dangers under the
surface. Involution evolves and evolution involves. As we
process our inner experience, we become more
involved in the collective human experience. War represents a failure of humankind's
intelligence. Love, truly and deeply felt, is a transcendent
power. Trust that the problem is part of a flow of
creation and that it is an opportunity for you to
handle it differently. By connecting at a soul level with each other,
we find a place of commonality that is spiritual
rather than religious. Women gathering together in groups and telling
the truth of their lives can actually change the
world. Soul loss ultimately leads to amoral behavior-
acts performed with oblivion to their eventual
consequences. Part of the problem in medicine's loss of soul
is that death is seen as unnatural, as the
enemy. The fabric of reality is like a Gossamer web,
woven by consciousness, to constellate "the
real." When one individual suddenly breaks through the
glass cage of separateness to the freedom of
awake-awareness beyond, we call that person
"enlightened"&emdash;or crazy. Nature is a worldwide symbiosis of love,
mutuality, and nurturance. Making beautiful things for the presence of
spirit heals, mollifies, and balances the forces of
nature, maintaining the web of life. By employing a proven model of environmental
economics, we demonstrate that the rainforest is
more valuable alive than dead. What I had never realized before was that the
treasure of the Amazon was the Amazon itself. The shaman believes that we live in a benign
universe. We live in a collaborative universe that
will actually go out of its way to conspire with
you on your behalf. My mentor believed that the new shamans, the new
caretakers of the Earth, would come from the
West. |
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