Category: awaken

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from the heart . . . from you

Prayer is the one thing that can make a change in your life. If you will go direct to God in simple, affirmative prayer, you can heal your body, bring peace and harmony into your life, and make well-being a reality.Paint splatter heart
– Emmet Fox, Around the Year, January 10

O God, give me light in my heart and light in my tongue
and light in my hearing and light in my seeing and light
in my feelings and light in every part of my body and light
before me and light behind me. Give me, I beg you,
light on my right hand and light on my left hand and light
above me and light beneath me. O Lord, make light grow
within me and give me light and illuminate me.
-The Prophet Muhammad, from Light the Flame- 365 days of Prayer Andrew Harvey- January 11

“It is not so important how we pray, but from where we pray. Thank you can be enough. I Love You, says it all, and in the silence is the recognition of the infinitude of divine source.”1

From wherever we are -I am- in this moment, I say Thank you! I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of God, except in nature, which is always forgiving, always moving forward, in spite of my errors or successes. Nature is the perfect, unfolding instrument, nay, example of the divine, Mankind, its social experiment.

So, I turn within, and with outstretched hands, I surrender to the will of the divine with faith that Its presence in each of us, the divine within, percolates to the surface as a loving expression of that divinity, offering up new possibility, new direction, and greater transparency in all our institutions and leaders everywhere.

I sit in the silence with only my breath and the beat of my heart and am grateful first and foremost for just that. From that place of gratitude, I know this same breath and beat is repeated 7 billion times a second, maintaining humanity as each of us tries to figure it all out.

I complete my prayer knowing love, compassion, joy and equanimity flows through each emanation of God in Its own time.

In gratitude for this knowing, I move into the flow of life, allowing God to do Its work, and know that it is so.

And so it is.

 

1 Jim Starke

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Our Spiritual Nature

Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world.

~ Anam Ċara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

 

spi-natOur spiritual nature is an inextricable part of us. Yet, while we do not wear it on our sleeve, it does live within us and there is evidence of it all around us. Nature is all spiritual, because it never exists in opposition to the divine. Man is the only creature on earth that tries to defy nature, creating artificial substances and devices in an attempt to “cheat death,” part of the birth-death-rebirth cycle, which is common to all life.

We are the only creatures, that think ourselves to death. Rather than living in a flow, we create blocks of resistance, which cause us to become out of sync with the world around us. We are the only creatures on the planet that don’t give back to the earth in a natural way. We use, abuse, rape and pillage its natural beauty and resources and leave behind refuse that is indigestible and non-renewable.

Yet, if we just looked to the mystical roots of all of our religions or spiritual paths, we would find that if we did the inner work, spent time looking within ourselves, we would find all the answers to living a gloriously, happy life, that isn’t about consumption and destruction. We would find that whatever we do and whoever we are is enough. We would find that we don’t have to keep up with the Joneses, because we have already surpassed them in the only way necessary. We are happy with our life as it is.

When we are in the flow of life, we find that everything we need is already provided for us. Just as all of nature, unobstructed by man, receives everything it needs, we would receive all that we needed and more. The natural ecosystem is a phenomenally complex system, which provides what is necessary for life. When the system is attacked, it makes necessary corrections to bring itself back into alignment.

We can do the same thing with our lives. If we get out of alignment, we can change how we do things or think about things to bring ourselves back into alignment with life, and find ourselves happier, healthier and more energetic.

~rev jim

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What is Chaos?

Chaos is the product of our ego. It is that part of us that has to be in charge and has to be right. Does it sound like anyone you know? It is part of our overblown self-worth that tells us everyone is out to get us, that we can’t trust anyone, that they’re all out to get us.

It is the untruth trying to save our ass. It makes things up to reinforce our point of view.

Just imagine for a minute, if we examined those thoughts of distrust. Where would they lead? Probably back to beliefs that have unconsciously been injected into our psyche from external sources, like our family, our friends, politicians, and even the media. It probably started with our parents saying something like “don’t play with matches or you’ll get burned!”  That was true. And so we began to trust this ego, because it saved us, or could have from a worse fate.

Pretty soon, we’re beginning to believe more things our sources tell us, some not so true. We form a basis on which to build a philosophy, albeit a false one, based on others unchallenged beliefs. It was easy. We didn’t have to think about a thing, and we’ve written our book of life and how to blame it on others.

All we need to do is a little self-examination of these things we’ve allowed ourselves to be told, to begin to look at our thoughts critically, to reexamine what we have believed with the reality of what is actually going on around us, and we might find a whole new way to think and believe. We can walk our own path to freedom, to liberation from the fear of everything we thought we knew until we found out they weren’t even our thoughts.

That’s what happens when we begin to think for ourselves. When we decide to stop being sheep and walk upright, the view becomes less confused, less obstructed by  the sheep we are following. We begin to rise above the crowd and begin to see clearly.

~revjim

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1st Century Mystics  October 4th
https://spirit-edu.com/learn/1st-century-mystics

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Who are we?

flag-stamp“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

When I was a kid, we used to say this every morning in school, and, for those New Englanders who grew up in the fifties and went home for lunch every day from elementary school and were lucky enough to watch Big Brother Bob Emery at noon, we toasted the then President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the American flag with a glass of milk. Then we had lunch and returned to school.

The “under God” was added one year after I began reciting the pledge, but because we have always been a nation of diverse faiths and numerous variations of a deity, we didn’t specify a particular religious institution or faith. In fact, the foundation of this nation was religious freedom, and, while there has unfortunately been discrimination against people and/or their religious beliefs, the clause “liberty and justice for all”, which references the constitutional rights of ALL our peoples, has always reigned supreme against any overt actions to the contrary.

So, how could we allow ourselves to come to this place where we ban whole countries access to experience what we have for so many years.

Are we going to allow our freedoms to be taken away? Make no mistake, these are OUR FREEDOMS that are being attacked and diminished!

Even more insidious is the fact that only Muslim countries in which the President’s companies don’t do business have been singled out. Worse yet is the fact that the Muslim countries that aren’t banned are the ones that most of the terrorists have come from.

Islam shares the same Old Testament that we do, with the addition of the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. It is a religion of Peace. It is founded in Love. Jesus is considered a teacher or prophet in Islam. It is the politicization of Islam, which foments war and hate, much in the same way the Christian Right in this country has politicized Christianity. Why are we not living by Jesus’ words and deeds as Christians?

The basic tenets of all religions are the self-discovery of our divinity and discovering love for all humanity, and learning how to become stewards for all its peoples and the planet.

When will we move beyond the love of money and power to begin to care for everyone? When will we begin to embrace our divinity, so that we can embrace our love for humanity as a nation and as a planet?

~revjim

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