The Power Of Being

Sometimes a belief cannot be overridden in normal conscious states. I have had many beliefs in my life changed, but each time the change came under my radar, it came in a way that did not assault my ego. This time it came to me in a dream. It wasn’t a dream in which I played a real role; it was a teaching dream.

Letters of life

In this dream I was shown symbols. They symbolized us. We were letters much like the ones above. The bottom portion was soil, in which seeds were planted, and then above the soil was the harvest of those seeds. In my dream I was told that together we form words and the words that we form create the reality that we live. We could call the words - the collective unconscious that Jung spoke of.

These words formed a reality based upon the belief system of the souls who were incarnated during a period of time. It would be like the foundation or core curricula of the lesson we all came in to learn through. All life forms on earth do not live in the same reality, or belief system. The ant does not live in the reality in respect to the laws of Newtonian physics - they naturally lift many times their body weight on a daily basis. The bumble bee lives in the same reality as the ant because it too lifts itself off of the ground although it is not physically capable of it according to Newtonian physics. But that fits in later. It was not what the core teaching of the dream was about.

Last night, I was watching 60 minutes and Joel Osteen was on. He has a positive message, one that seems too positive for many Christian Evangelists. One such Preacher that was asked to comment on his message said that it was an easy listening kind of Christianity - he asked, “Where’s the suffering for salvation?” Where and why the suffering for salvation was formed the fundamental message of my dream. I never believed in the idea that we had to suffer to be ‘saved’. I did not believe that we had to be ‘saved’, but I did believe that suffering was important for the soul.

There are those, like the Buddhists who do not believe that we have to suffer at all, and, they don’t. You don’t hear stories of long painful bouts with Cancer among Buddhist monks. They seem to know when it is time to die and they do so. Then there are the Taoists whose teaching is not much different than Ecclesiastes, that there is a time for everything and the wise being lives in the flow of that timing, if one does so - there will be no suffering.

Basically, I believed that we had to push through suffering - in other words suffer through suffering, until we were beaten down enough to let go - then we could flow. But, in my view, the journey through the suffering to the freedom from suffering was the difficult journey of the seed to becoming the ripe harvest. The seed, struggles through the dirt, around the stones, until finally it breaks through the ground (internal journey) now it has to make its way at the mercy of the elements (external struggle) to finally become the harvest. “No“, they told me in my dream, “Your suffering is not God’s choice for you.” “No”, they said, “Your suffering does not turn you into anything, it does not transform you from a seed to the harvest, or from the caterpillar to the butterfly”. “You all”, they told me, “who are incarnated over this time of your known history, have chosen to work through a belief that suffering perfects the soul for return to God. But your journey is not to perfect yourselves it is to see yourselves as the perfect image of the God from which you have been created. You have chosen suffering as your means, and so you write a world of separation, hatred, fear, judgment, prejudice, disease, war, lack, and limits - but that is not the path determined by God, it is the path chosen by you.” They showed me, through the symbolism of letters that we are the soil, the seed and the ripe harvest - from the moment that our souls are born. We have chosen suffering as a means of opening our eyes, widening our view of ourselves from only the view of the soil, to growing enough to see ourselves not as the soil, or the seed, or even the harvest, but as all three - as always perfect and complete.

The story of Jesus is the story of a life lived in love, generosity, integrity, compassion, wisdom, humility, and the joy of knowing faith, knowing God, and knowing love. In terms of the number of days in his life, Jesus suffered only a very short time, we have chosen to build our story on those few days of suffering - and to ignore the life lived in compassion, generosity, love and joy. Millions have suffered and died from the moment that we decided the message was in the suffering death rather than the life lived in forgiveness, generosity, compassion and love. They died through the torture of heretics, the crusades, the inquisition and on through the killings still going on today. Why was he crucified? It is easy to say that the Jews did it, but they did not do it, people did it, people who believed in suffering and torture, like the people who went on as Christians to kill those considered heretics, those Christians who believed in worshiping Jesus another way, the Jews and the Muslims who worshiped God their way, and committing genocide against all of those Indians in Latin America who would not be converted. Did he die so that others could suffer the same torturous fate or worse in his name? Or did he live his life teaching that we should all embrace love as a means to seeing our true selves - instead of suffering? When he said that God’s House had many rooms, did they think that it meant it was a Christian Comfort Inn?

1 John 4:8
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Before the world was created there was only God. Therefore the world was created out of God. No soul, no creature, created out of God is less than perfect. We do not need to be saved; we do not need to be transformed, purified, or cleansed - we just need to love enough to see that we are all sewn from the same cloth - we are all dyed by the same Dyer. Our souls already are all that they can be.

I know now, that suffering does not cleanse the soul because the soul does not need cleansing. It does not transform the soul because the soul does not need transforming. We are the last of the suffering generations. We are learning, but we need not learn through suffering, it is not a required course - it is an elective that we have all too eagerly embraced.

Let us begin choosing joy by learning the secret of the ant and the bumble bee. They each individually have the strength of a thousand, because they each contain a thousand. What one does, one does for all and so the power of all becomes the power of one. This we cannot see - if we only see the description of the world and not the spirit behind the description. If we all become one, then one can say to the mountain “move” and the mountain will move.

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.

“It is not enough for us to say: ‘I love God,’ but I also have to love my neighbor. St. John says that you are a liar if you say you love God and you don’t love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? And so it is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt. I must be willing to give whatever it takes not to harm other people and, in fact, to do good to them. This requires that I be willing to give until it hurts. Otherwise, there is not true love in me and I bring injustice, not peace, to those around me.” - Mother Teresa

I am familiar with love and with pain; and when I have felt pain, while loving, the pain was never caused by the act of loving, it was caused by the actions of the ones I loved. To me, it is like a hose - the faucet is turned on, the hose fills up and the water pours out. And so the process is like this, one’s being is filled with love - so filled that it must be released out towards another being, towards God, or even towards nature itself. Still, it is a filling up of the heart and soul with love and so long as that love is being released, the vessel is being constantly filled. Being filled with love leaves no room for pain. I recall a story that Wayne Dyer told about a woman with a disabled daughter, totally bedridden for many years, and for all of those years the mother lovingly stayed by her side, changing her diaper, feeding her, loving her. She did this without it hurting, other than perhaps the empathy that she felt for her daughter. After being moved by the enormous suffering of Mother Teresa I went back over the things that she had said, and I cannot imagine an instance where love hurts.

The act of giving does not hurt either. Again, giving is a gesture from the heart. What does hurt is when we do not give from our hearts but we give because we feel we must. In doing this, we are not giving in essence we are taking from ourselves. Another quote from Mother Teresa which stood out to me was this:

“I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.”

I was never much on placing importance on the death of Jesus, but I was deeply inspired by his life. I don’t believe that the value of a life should be overshadowed by the manner of death. After all, no matter how you cut it, living takes a lot more work than dying, and living an exemplary life, at any time, trumps an exemplary death. I read a bumper sticker the other day that really brought the point home, it said, “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you are car.” In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus’ followers asked him, basically, how to get to Heaven, a question he never seemed to answer to the satisfaction of the questioner.

[6]. His disciples asked and said to him: “Do you want us to fast? How shall we pray, how shall we give alms, what rules concerning eating shall we follow?” Jesus says: “Tell no lie, and whatever you hate, do not do: for all these things are manifest to the face of heaven; nothing hidden will fail to be revealed and nothing disguised will fail before long to be made public!”

When I was young, I was given the impression that I was not really capable of amounting to anything in the world. So, when I became successful in my own business I bought many very expensive things, jewelry, art - things that said I had made it. These were my trophies that I told myself I would never let go of, they proved my ability to succeed. But as my life would have it, my health caused me to leave my business and it reached a point in my life that to keep a roof over the heads of my children, I would have to sell my trophies. They were the only proof that I had left. While I was struggling with this I read a book on the Kabala and it said that we should gather everything that we believe that we can live without in order to give it away, but then, after we have gathered everything that we feel we can manage without we should then double it and give it away. The essence of it was that only the ego attaches to things, only the ego benefits from things, and not the soul. This allowed me to ‘give’ those things for the good of my family without pain, because I knew that in doing so I was purging my ego. My husband, feeling badly for the sacrifice that I had made promised to replace all that I had given, but I did not want them back, giving it opened my heart and freed my ego, I felt gratitude and joy.

Using the parable of the seeds as an example, the things that we do so that God will know our love for Him, are the seeds that fall by the wayside. They are a lie, the heart is not in the action itself. For Mother Teresa to see a leper and feel to herself that she wouldn’t touch him for a thousand pounds, says that in the depth of her heart she does not see Jesus in that leper. The act of curing that leper is an act of doing what you should do, like fasting or going to church, but it is not heartfelt and so the heart derives no joy from the act, in fact, it causes pain because of the feeling of uselessness of the sacrifice. To sacrifice is to make sacred, but only the heart can make sacred.

In Mother Teresa’s youth she was filled with an ecstatic love for Jesus and for the work that he did in his life. She was filled with the spirit of Christianity, but the church robbed her of that. The church robbed her of the loving Jesus, the joyous Jesus, the Jesus free of ego attachments and laws, filled only with the desire to Love, teach and heal his brothers. The church forced her to believe that only through suffering could she find the love of Jesus, only through suffering would she feel the love of Jesus, and worst of all, that only through teaching the value of suffering to others could she save their souls for Jesus. The teachings of the church were in direct contradiction to the yearnings of her heart, and because she believed the church to be the appointed messenger of God, she deafened her heart to its cries, and dedicated herself to the work, but without the spirit in the work, without the love in the work, she was empty and alone, not seeing God and not feeling his Love. She loved Jesus, but she could not feel his love because she was indoctrinated only towards his suffering. There are many Saints who are marked by their “Dark Night Of The Soul”, but each one emerged with a greater sense of mysticism and spirituality and a far lesser sense of righteousness of religious doctrine.

She gave her life to the God that she loved, but she was denied the fullness of His love in her heart, not by God but by the church that taught not the beauty and joy of love, but only the vows of suffering. I feel that it is a crime for her suffering to be used by atheists as proof that there is no God, but I believe equally that it is a crime for the church to use her suffering as an example of the natural path of a true Christian.