Saturday, February 22, 2020

THE POLITICAL DIVIDE




THE DANGEROUS POLITICAL DIVIDE
Is someone you love on the other side?
How can it be that someone you’ve known and loved all your life is going to vote for those evil liars on the other side, those crazy people opposing everything you believe in? It happens! But how to deal with it? Perhaps you’ve tried to reason with him/her, but he/she seems to have been indoctrinated into believing all the talking points of the other side! What to do?

The first and most important thing to do, is to undertake a serious, critical review of what you believe yourself. If the world seems all wrong, it’s a sure sign that you need to change yourself. If you believe in progressive liberalism, ask yourself exactly what is it that you want the country, or the world, to progress into? If you believe in conservatism, exactly what is it you want to society to conserve? Some things are worth progressing into, some are not; some things are worth conserving, some are not; and, if we are open to it, there is a subset of both views that we can agree on. This is what the debate must center upon, not on the angry demonizing of the other side.

Deciding that those on the other side are pure evil, and that those on the side you favor are saints and heroes out to save the world, is a very dangerous and mistaken dichotomy. It always leads to the justification of hatred and violence. Hatred and violence are extreme outcomes that we must seek to avoid this time. Succumbing to hatred and violence has always led to disastrous results, with many innocent bystanders being hurt or killed.  If you are passionate about what you believe to be a positive issue championed by one side or the other, then you must act to promote that issue; but don’t condemn your friends who don’t see it that way. Wisdom lies in knowing that even you could be wrong. In any case, ultimately it is not your job to decide what is best for the world.

Finally, if you don’t believe that there is an intelligence far superior to your own and that of any politician, - an eternal Infinite Intelligence that guides and protects us as a parent protects wayward children, then you are truly lost. The real saints and heroes in the history of civilization on this planet have all spoken of their knowledge of the existence of this Higher Power, and there is now empirical evidence proving that they were right. The eternal soul long buried under many layers of egoism, especially in self-promoting politicians, is deeply connected with the Infinite. It’s our job to open our hearts to receiving and sharing the Consciousness of the Cosmos. Our prayer should be: Infinite Heavenly Father/Mother, Jesus Christ, Saints and Sages of all religions, awaken Thy Love within me; and may I be able to awaken Thy Love in all hearts!

ERC 2/22/2020

Saturday, February 15, 2020

REFLECTING ON THE STATE OF THINGS



REFLECTING ON THE POLITICAL DIVIDE
Today, America, and perhaps even the whole world, seems deeply divided. You may feel prompted to speak out against one side or the other; and that’s OK; but be careful! This is a subtle trap. If you find yourself being caught up in the vitriol of the division, if you are begining to hate those on the side opposing the side you think is right, beware! You are falling into the trap. You are becoming blind to the fact that we are all One. We all all children of the Most High. Our differences are quite minor, unless magnified by hatred.

Be advised that God is in control. If He were not, the cosmos would have devolved into utter chaos eons ago, the planets of our solar system would have spun into the sun, the sun would have exploded, and life as we know it would have ceased to exist.  But it hasn’t. This planet has continued to spin nights and days for billions of years, and conscious beings have spun their dreams of growth and positive development for hundreds of thousands of years. Human beings have loved and hated one another as long as two or more have formed a relationship, or a society. We live in an expanding bubble of positive growth, nurtured by Love and Light, protected from physical chaos by the meaning and purpose of a Higher Consciousness which opperates beyond our understanding as finite beings.

Whether you want to call that Higher Conscious Reality God, or Nature, or the Conscious Cosmos, makes no difference; It exists. If It did not, the laws of the physical universe, which we have discovered, tell us that no stable universe could possibly have developed from a vast explosion without the action of an organizer, and if the chaos of the explosion was harnesed and molded into the extremely complex stable reality of even the simplest life form found on this planet, then if that organizer were to go away, the expanding chaos of the explosion would destroy any existing stable structure in a nanosecond.

Once caught up in the dichotomy of political division, we tend to think that this division and animosity is the worst we’ve ever known. But that is not so. We have been more divided in the not-so-distant past. In our Civil War, for example, neighbors slaughtered neighbors, brothers even fought brothers. I am old enough to have met, when I was very young, yet older people who fought in that horrible war. I grew up playing on the earthen works of Fort Davidson in Pilot Knob, Missouri, where hundred of Union and Confederate solders died. I have visited Manassas, in Virginia, and shed tears for the lingering souls of young men who died there while local farm families watched the war’s first battle from horse-drawn wagons at the edge of the field. And many such divisions have split societies on this planet in the past. No, such division is not unique. But let us pray that we have grown enough spiritually to avoid bloodshed this time, and in the future.

The Creator of this bubble of life in an otherwise chaotic universe is not dead, nor is He absent. That organizing factor exists within each and every one of us. All consciousness is part of and linked eternally with the Higher Consciousness of the Cosmos. It is your job (no small task) to reconnect with that Cosmic Consciousness in your heart of hearts, and then to work to awaken that awareness in all hearts!

If the world seems wrong to you, it is a sure sign that you need to change yourself. You can only do so by making that reconnection with the Love and Light of the Higher Consciousness of the Organizer in your heart.

ERC – 02/15/2020

Saturday, February 1, 2020

WHEN THE IMPOSSIBLE BECOMES POSSIBLE






WHEN THE IMPOSSIBLE BECOMES POSSIBLE

When does the impossible become possible? When opposites become one, when all becomes one, and one becomes all. Then thought becomes mathematical, science becomes poetry and poetry becomes science.

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all of the previous centuries of its existence.
-       Nikola Tesla 1856

Many years ago, I cried out to the universe: “God, I want to know everything!”
The Universe answered, but it took me 70 years to fully understand the answer, and for science to become poetry.

There is no such thing as an empty space. …Space and time claim no existence of their own. They are structural features of the field. -  Albert Einstein 1952

The realization that space and time have no existence of their own, allows us to understand the true meaning of following poetic statement:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour                              - William Blake 1862

But we seem to live in a very hard, physical world. The minute we are born, our soul tells us we are infinite and eternal, but the world insists that we are finite, insignificant and very mortal. Life appears to be the beginning of a journey that only ends in death. Which vision is reality? The man who discovered that the physical universe is quantized, said:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. – Max Planck 1905

Is it possible that the physical universe is an illusion? Is it possible that life is meaningless? Is it impossible to know?

When does the impossible become possible? It doesn’t happen when we take everything apart to see how it works; it happens when we put it all together. When we come to know that the physical and the non-physical are one, when a stranger is instantly known as yourself, when you are everything and nothing at the same time, i.e., when you are fully awake and fully conscious.

Yesterday I met a stranger. But there was a de-ja-vu moment: I knew her, and she knew me, from the beginning of time, for the past and future are inventions of the mind. We never experience anything but the present, there is only here and now, then and there are phantoms of the mind. In reality, there is only the I AM, the one consciousness that we all share.

A good friend of many years, formally trained as a scientist, but also a deeply religious man, once said “science has its limits. There are questions science cannot answer.”

Are there questions that are Impossible for the rational mind to answer? He was both right and wrong. Are there important questions that are impossible for science? Yes for science as we know it. No for science as it must become. The physical universe is quantized, discrete, separate. But consciousness is infinitely continuous, and consciousness is the only thing we experience directly. Matter, energy, space and time, we only experience indirectly through the imperfect organs of the senses. Consciousness we experience with our whole being.

Mainstream science today tells us that there is nothing but matter and energy interacting in time and space. But the great minds I quoted above, upon whose work mainstream science relies, said “There is no matter as such”, “Space and time have no existence of their own.” And science will advance by leaps and bounds when it begins to study the non-physical phenomena we experience directly.

The truth is: the physical universe, a fraction of the reality we experience, is quantized, while consciousness, the only thing we experience directly is infinitely continuous. When we realize that they are one and the same, the impossible becomes possible, and we can hold infinity in our hand, experience eternity in this hour, see the world in a grain of sand, and Heaven in a wildflower.

ERC 2/1/2020