The Power Of Being

Fear originates in the belief that I am separate from you and from everything else in the world.    Being separate - I am obviously alone, therefore I have reason to fear.  We are programmed to survive.  It is the first instinct that we have.  If I believe that you are separate from me, I then have every reason to fear you, regardless of what you say.  It does not matter whether or not you, today, are intent on my harm, what matter is that you are in a position to cause me harm unless I can control you or protect myself against the possibility, however small, that someday, for some reason, you may feel the need or desire to harm me.  All of this is predicated upon the belief that this reality that I can see, touch, and hear is the ultimate reality.  When I say “I”, I believe that it is as true for me, as it is for each cell in my body.  I am the totality of the consciousness that pervades every atom in my body and so I cannot claim that each cell does not see itself as, as much of an “I”, as I see myself.  So it is easy for me to see a liver cell finding it hard to conceptualize a lung cell as sharing a common “I”.

If we understood that we are all cells in the same body, whether I am a brain cell, a heart cell or a cell in the rectum.  The body requires the use of each cell in order to survive, therefore each cell shares the same I in every way that matters - each cell shares the same “I” in every way that matters to the ultimate survival of the body.  Every cell in my body is not in a me, you, them relationship with each other cell but in an “I” relationship in the only way that really matters.  If the liver goes down, soon the pancreas will follow, then the kidneys, the lungs, the heart and the brain.  One day, we will realize that the health of our bodies and all of the diseases that seem to plague it are closely tied to our sense of separateness that would logically pervade every cell sharing the same body consciousness.

If I was taught from an early age that I am because you are, which is because they are, which is because we are One.  If we were taught to believe that the illusion is our separateness and not our connectedness - we would have not fear of the “other”.  We do not see the air, but we are taught to believe that it is there even if we cannot see it.  Ants, bees and many other insects function as one body - we may say colony but that is only our vision of their reality.  To the ant and the bee, they are only separate in function and contribution but not in being.  Therefore the one is never alone, and the whole is never unguarded.  There is no fear of each other, and together they act upon that which should be feared.  There are places in the world where it is only a matter of minutes before one bee becomes one thousand bees.  One bee may seem threatened, but with those odds, it soon becomes the threat.

The Golden Rule tells us to do unto others as we would have others do unto ourselves.  In Genesis, we are told that, yes, we are our brothers keepers.  In Leviticus 19:33-34 it is said, ³³ “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him.  ³⁴ But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.” Jesus and other spiritual teachers tell us that we are to go further - that we are meant to go further.  Jesus, in Luke 10:25-28 ²⁵ “And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? ²⁶He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? ²⁷And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself. ²⁸And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do and thou shalt live.” 28 And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.  29 But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour? “

30″ And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.   31 And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.   32 And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.   33 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,  34 And went to him , and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

35 And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.   36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?   37 And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.” To understand what God means by “neighbor” or “brother”, Jesus uses this example which, at the time, would be the equivalent of telling the story to an Israeli and instead of Samaritan - using a member of Hamas.

I consider myself to be a very spiritual person, yet, it has taken me until now to understand the full import of loving my neighbor as myself.  I have heard so many people, Christians, say to me that they live a certain lifestyle while there is such poverty in the world because, “They worked hard for what they have, they earned it.”  Or, they may say that they, “give to the poor” or to charity.  But that is not what Jesus is saying here, it does not say give what is left after you give to yourself. Or, give what is comfortable, after you give to yourself.  It is saying, think of others in the same way as you think of yourself.  Care for others as you would care for yourself, not after but in the same moment, in the same breath with the same love.  It says give to others what you would give to yourself, because you earned it for yourself and for your brother. If we all did this, then no one would be without enough.  This could be called many names, it could be said that I am talking about socialism or even worse, communism - but I am quoting the Bible, I am speaking about religion.  Yet, I am really speaking about the topic I began this with, fear.  Fear is as responsible as greed and selfishness for the mess that we are in.

We fear that we will not have enough to share, yet in truth, if we do not share we will not have enough.  No one rises up with a full belly.  No one steals when his needs are met.  The storehouse is dwindling and if the owners don’t begin to share, the peasants will take it over.  It is a story that is repeated time and time again throughout history.  We must begin to allow ourselves to open to the belief that we are not separate unless we separate ourselves.  We are all connected by the Spirit that runs through the One Body. We are One in reality, we are One in necessity, and we are One in God.  The only way that we will guarantee our own health and survival is to care for the health and survival of the entire Body of which we are all a part.  Here is another of my favorite stories that exemplifies this point.

There is a story told in Kabbalah:

“With an angel for his guide, the visitor is first ushered through the gates of Hell, which, he is surprised to find, are made of finely wrought gold. The gates, in fact, are incomparably lovely, as is the verdant land­scape that lies beyond them. All this is quite astonish­ing to the visitor, who turns to his angelic guide in disbelief. “It’s all so beautiful,” the man says. “The sight of the meadows and mountains . . . the sounds of the birds singing in the trees … the scent of thousands of flowers. . . .” And then another scent catches his atten­tion: the aroma of food being prepared.

The angel leads the visitor toward an immense ban­quet table laden with every sort of delicacy. However, something is terribly wrong. Hundreds of people are seated around the table, but they all appear to be starv­ing. Their emaciated condition is painful to see in the midst of such bounty, but even worse is the frustration and anger they are obviously experiencing. Each person at the table has a long-handled spoon chained to his wrist. The handles are so long that no one can place food in his mouth. But that does not prevent the con­demned souls from trying. For all eternity, they are struggling to feed themselves a meal that is right before them, but that might as well be a hundred miles away. Taken aback by the tragic spectacle, the visitor is now more than ready to visit Paradise, and the angel immediately complies. At once they pass through an­other set of golden gates, alike in every detail to the gates of hell. In fact, a great deal about the two locales seems to be identical, including the banquet table and the diners chained to their utensils. But the people around this table are well fed and happy, despite the fact that their circumstances are identical to those of the damned. The difference is not in the physical situa­tion, but in how they respond to it. As you might have guessed by now, instead of trying to feed themselves, each of the souls at this table feeds the one across the table.”

So many people have asked me the meaning of the Age of Aquarius. There are those who believe that we are in the Age of Aquarius and those who believe that we are in the final days of the Age of Pisces. It seems to me that if we are not sure which age we are in it is because we do not understand the meaning of the ages. So, I will describe the characteristics of this age that we are in and the age that we are entering.

To understand the Age of Pisces we must understand two things, first there is the symbol for Pisces, it is two fish tied together swimming in opposite directions. So we must immediately understand that it is a sign of duality, a sign that emphasizes opposites with enormous passion. If there is any word that must be stressed during this age that word is passion. If we do anything, we do it passionately, if we believe anything, we believe it passionately. And we think that passion is a part of our makeup. It is not. We are all portions of the Divine. We are all Divine Seeds. This means that we are all love and that kind of love, that level of love that I am speaking of Divine Love is not passionate. Passion is the cause of suffering. Passion is not even a quality of the material world; survival is the only natural quality of the material world. When a lioness kills her prey it is without passion, it is a requirement of survival. This is why animals do not hate, they are a part of the earth and there is only hate where there is passion.

We have been living for at least two thousand years in a passionate age. How does that affect us? We are here to absorb and work through the existing energies of this planet in order to grow. And so we are like clear sponges. And when we enter the world during an age, we first absorb the energy of that age, this age of Pisces is red with passion and so although we are clear sponges when we enter the environment, we become red because we absorb the energy of the environment. The age colors everything. Why? It does so because everything on earth absorbs its energy from the Sun, and the constellation that the Sun is in during its own 25,000 plus year rotation will color the energy that we absorb from it.

Every religion has its legends of destruction and new birth, whether it is by flood, fire, air or war, periodically in the history of mankind there have been reseedings. Each species evolves through mutation physically and spiritually so as a new age or seeding is about to occur, there are mutations that incarnate to generate the change. This has been happening for about three hundred years culminating in a major seeding of souls during the late forties and fifties. These were the souls who bloomed during the sixties with the energy of Aquarius and as they bloomed, their seeds were carried by the wind of Spirit to be planted and spread throughout the world to begin the slow process of change into the energy of Aquarius. It is certain that the Age of Pisces created the divide between man and his God. Before this age, man saw the universe as one great body of which he was a part. There was no God out there far far away in Heaven. There was only God in everything and everyone who existed upon the earth. The power of these ancient beings is the stuff of legends, but because they are legends does not mean that the powers were not real.

I wondered, if all is perfect and for our growth, there are no mistakes and no accidents, then why was God taken from within man and placed at such a distance that we could feasibly lose our belief? What is the good in that? Yes, I know that on the mundane level it was done by the greedy to maintain power, but I know that even the greedy are only playing their parts in the Plan. Then it came to me, many mystics believe that God created the world in order to experience himself. How can we understand the power of God that exists within us, unless we are apart from it, a drop of water cannot conceive of the power of the ocean unless it is separated from it. So we have, during this Age, reached the greatest distance that we can from the Power within us.

We have taken our manipulation of the external world to its peak during this age. We will soon run out of things to invent – then what? I had a vision the other day while driving in my car. I saw a group of students perhaps five hundred years from now talking about how backwards we were with all of our airplanes, rockets, bombs and gadgets. Laughing at how hard we worked to build things with our hands when all we had to do was build them with our minds. I saw them studying war (a concept lost to them) and having war explained as how barbarians functioned before civilization. To the humans of the future, civilization will be living in at-one-ness with the Power from which we all come and the universe of which we all are a part. There will be no God, no void, only a continuous circle of life. There will be no heaven or hell because theirs will be a holographic universe where they naturally see that the whole is within each part and each part is a mirror of the whole. But in order for us to get to this place of non-duality, we must be the fish swimming in opposite directions with passion and commitment, going nowhere, but going but willing to kill anyone who stops us from getting there.

Unless we passionately exhaust our beliefs, however delusional they are, we cannot choose to change them. This is the purpose of the age of passionate confusion – the age of Pisces. And to really see how this works in our lives personally, we must understand the planet the rules Pisces and that is Neptune. Neptune is somewhere in all of our charts and is moving through some part of each chart at all times. Where ever it is, life will never be the same again. Neptune is a very strange energy. It enfolds us in a blanket of blind faith and passionate commitment to a path that appears to be clearer than any that we have ever known before. However, in the midst of being so certain and so committed we find that everyone else in our lives sees something seriously wrong with the vision of the world we are holding. Usually we find ourselves making the most outrageous sacrifices almost joyfully because we feel that God has ordained them. We fly in the face of overwhelming odds. We take the most irresponsible risks with passionate abandon. We build castles in the air, move into them, and have absolutely no qualms about paying the rent.

The positive face of Neptune is that it can be compassionate and self-sacrificing. It allows us to believe in the loftiest of ideals and aim for the most spiritual of heights. The negative face of Neptune allows us to fight to build a nation based on freedom and delude ourselves into thinking that owning slaves is not a contradiction. It can cause people to believe in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, and find no contradiction in waging the most brutal wars in His name. It permits us to break every one of the Ten Commandments and still consider ourselves pious, own multi-million dollar mansions while eighty percent of the world is starving, and consider ourselves righteous human beings. In other words, it is the great deceiver.

On the personal level, we may find that we have endured ten years of torture and abuse in a marriage because we believed our spouses every time we were told that it would never happen again. Or, we could join a cult and spend fourteen years giving all that we have to that cult not ever feeling that we were being taken. Then one day Neptune moves on. When this happens we wake up wondering where or even who we have been for all of those years, lost and humiliated wondering at what point we lost our sanity. It is easy accepting that everyone makes mistakes, but when it is a Neptune mistake—we find that it has cost us something that we would never have given up were we in our right mind. That something could be financial security, emotional security, our position in society, even those whom we love the most. Neptune also rules drugs and alcohol. Neptune strikes us where we feel we are the least vulnerable. And when it is over, we find that the golden chalice we risked everything to own was no more than a tin cup. We look back at the signs that we missed, the warnings that we refused to heed, the writing on the wall that was as clear as the noses on our faces and wonder how on earth we could have ever been that stupid.

Imagine the feeling of the devout Christian monk who, in the fervor of Neptune’s delusion, joined in the slaughter of hundreds of people during the Crusades. Neptune moves on and all that he is left with is the bloodstains on his hands. The reaction to our Neptune actions range from, “This is going to be hard to fix”, to “My God what have I done?” What underlies all Neptune experiences is that somewhere in our lives we have placed too much dependence upon something that is directly in the way of our spiritual connection with the Divine. Neptune lessons are probably the most difficult to learn because we don’t wake up until all of the damage has been done and for us to face ourselves and the world at this point takes an amount of humility that most of us just did not come in with. Neptune teaches us what we can live without, which is usually the one thing in our lives that we have determined we cannot live without.

Neptune shows us that nothing is real except faith because while it is affecting our lives, we truly believe what we are living in is the only reality and our delusions—the only truths. And when we awaken, we find that we cannot ever repeat the justifications that we once lived by, with a straight face. We can never put back together what Neptune has destroyed. It is a spiritual planet – it is the hand of God. It does not work to make us rich in the earthly garden, it works to make us rich in the spiritual garden. It does not work to strengthen our relationship with the opposite sex, it works to strengthen our relationship with Spirit. The Spiritual world and the material world are opposites, what is good for one is not good for the other. “Seek and ye shall find” – not if it is a Mercedes. “What does it merit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul?” This is the lesson of Neptune. This is the lesson the Age of Pisces.

Neptune rules illusion and delusion, it rules everything that sparkles and shines, the bigger the better. It rules glamour. It is the god of temptation. It lies, it helps us justify, it entices us to take more and more until we die to the physical world and are reborn to the spiritual.

When Neptune entered my house of money I had my own business two homes and all that glitters and glows. By the time Neptune left that house in my chart, I had the clothes on my back and was not too sure how long I would have them. I had no choice where the loss was concerned, the tighter I held on the faster it slipped away – the more ideas I came up with to make more, the more crooks entered my life to steal it. My option was not to find out how to be smarter about money, my option was to let go or suffer. Neptune give us an opportunity to learn detachment. I say offers us the opportunity to learn because we do not have to learn Neptune’s lessons. This is where free will comes in. Many people, I am sure, come out of a Neptune cycle such as mine having learned nothing. For those who learn nothing, joy will always be something that belongs to someone else. Because those things that Neptune takes away from us, are the things that stand between our joy, and us, whether they are money, power, status, fame, pride or just plain ego. Our load is somehow lightened in the area that Neptune travels, whether we like it or not.

So, during the age of Pisces we have fought for our personal form of worship of God, while at the same time somehow finding ourselves completely justified in breaking His laws as often and with as much passion as possible. During the Age of Pisces we were willing to give up our lives for all to be free, but we were not willing to give up our slaves. We said the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, repeating the words, “With Liberty and Justice for all” while ensuring that there was liberty and justice only for the privileged few. We spoke with forked tongues and were equally committed to both forks. Two fish swimming in opposite directions. We repeated the words, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” while simultaneously judging everyone whose beliefs differed from our own.

So now, we say that we are in a war to bring freedom to a country at the cost of the lives of most of those to whom we are bringing this freedom. And that works for many of us, or at least those of us who are still heavily under the influence of the Age of Pisces. Yet, those of who have been awakened by the Age of Aquarius, are finding it difficult to understand how we have spent our lives believing that black was white and finding it impossible to explain to our Aquarian children what the truth exactly is. We wonder why our children lie so much without realizing that in the short time that they have spent in our world, they have seen no truth. The Age of Pisces has been a dream and a nightmare, and whether we believed the dream or lived the nightmare, waking up is feeling more and more like hell.

I cannot count the number of beautiful happy families I grew up watching on television and believing in where the actors and actresses who played the happy children went home only to be abused by their real parents. Yes, waking up is hell. But, wake up we must because as Neptune is the great deceiver, Uranus, the planet that rules the Age of Aquarius is the great awakener. Pisces allows us to live in blind faith. It allows us to believe that we are being faithful and remain blind to our own deceit. Now, with the Age of Aquarius upon us we must give up our blind faith for Enlightened believe, and that means awakened belief. The wonder of this new age is realizing that we can have faith, without being blind, and that faith, awakened faith—can never lead to disillusionment. In the lie we have been enslaved because we have had to live in the fear.

Although we have not officially entered the Age of Aquarius, it is here. It is here drawing out the truth and awakening the souls whose true vibration is Aquarian. Losing the illusion does not mean losing Santa Claus, it means finding him where he lives, in the human heart. A faith born of blindness is one, which will be lost if sight is restored, but a faith born of vision, and light is one that can guide us forever. The Age of Pisces demanded that we believe blindly in a God that can never be seen, and never be attained. The Age of Aquarius tells us to open our eyes to the mystical beauty of the God that animates all that is. In the Age of Aquarius we will not need to go the a church, synagogue or mosque in order to find God, we simply have to look at the trees, the sky, the people and life that is all around us to know God as once our ancestors did. We will live in peace because we will know that we do not need to go to heaven, we simply need to live it. This is the Age of Aquarius, it is the freedom that comes from truth, the truth that God is where our love is and also who we are. Pisces rules prisons and asylums, bondage and our deepest fears. What we have come to fear most in this age is the truth.

In Pisces we have placed God so far from our reach that we have become convinced that we would be forgiven for not even trying to reach It. We have invented our own scapegoat and named him Satan. We have turned Christ into a martyr who died so that we can remain imperfectly pure and tell ourselves that we are faultless in the sight of God. In the Age of Aquarius there is no devil out there and there is no God out there, both reside within us, both reside in the light, and it is within that light that both become One and that One becomes Us. We must make our choices in the sight of God and the world and know that we are our choices. In Pisces we have been enslaved by the lies and hypocrisy within which we have lived. In the Age of Aquarius there will be no lies, no hypocrisy and so no fear of exposure. Without the fear of exposure, there is no prison.