Category: fear

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Moving beyond fear!

What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.”
― Sri Aurobindo

MoveBeyondFear“What do you think about that?”someone said to me, referencing something they had heard.
“I have no opinion, because I have no first hand knowledge of what happened,” says I.

Why do people expect you to jump into a conversation you have no first hand experience about? I have found over the years, at least for me, that supporting someone else’s thought becomes a brainless and uncaring act, unless I first know for myself what the many sides of an issue or thought represent and more importantly, where I stand on an issue, if I have a stand at all.

Most of the time I keep my opinions to myself, because I realize that my opinion normally represents a limited understanding of a complex problem, and, if I haven’t fully explored the many facets of a usually simple statement that has been queried, I am only reacting to it, not responding intelligently.

I have found reactions are usually made out of fear of losing something. People are living in such fear today; fear of bodily harm, fear of some right being taken away, fear of being deported, fear of being outed. Fear is a strong and very limiting emotion. It makes us do crazy and unimaginable things. There are people waste their entire lives, promoting promoting fear through words, violence, and making things up about others.

I remember when Hurricane Matthew was bearing down on us in 2016, the SJC Emergency Management Director came through on my cellphone screaming that I had to leave my house right now and evacuate or “I would die!”

I’ve lived through cat4 & 5 hurricanes in the Caribbean and Florida. I’ve been a contractor in both places and had major success in not just surviving hurricanes, but thriving during and after by assisting others. I would never put myself in an unreasonable risk situation. I’ve normally lived on islands where you couldn’t escape anyway, so you hunker down and pray for the best. Florida is no different. There’s no where to go, unless you leave many days before the track is even locked in by our weather guessers. And, as a contractor, I know that, if a building has been built to code, you may get wet, but are probably safe otherwise. If I hit the road, chances are I could end up riding the storm out in the Walmart parking lot in Palatka. Almost a been there, done that. That would be less fun than sitting in a foot of water saving what I can of my belongings.

Anyway, you get the point, fear is our worst enemy, and if we buy into it, we’re already lost. If we are reasonable and don’t allow fear to be our guide, the world really doesn’t look that bad. I approach incidents and situations on a one off. I trust until I’m shown someone or something is untrustworthy. I try not to judge by ethnicity, race, religious beliefs or social position, but I am sometimes ashamed of my behavior, and try to be better, when I catch myself.

There is no place in my life for hate. It only makes life a hell. I see so many people living their lives in a self-imposed hell today. I choose not to. Life in this body is too short. I learned a while ago, I’d rather be happy than right. That’s a story for another time.

-rev jim

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Judge not!

The secret of harmonious living lies in the ability to withdraw all our estimates and judgments of situations and people.

– Joel Goldsmith, The Thunder of Silence

listenOne of the interesting things about our mind is that everything we see, hear, or feel during our lifetime we have an opinion about. While some are observations, most of the time we make an immediate judgment about that thing or idea, rather than an observation.. More often than not, that. Judgment is not always even based on personal data collection or experience. It’s usually based on something we’ve heard and, more often than not, it’s based on something we’ve only heard in conversation and never personally verified. When we do this we diminish ourselves. When we do that we’re not speaking our truth. Instead, we’re giving our power to know the truth to someone else.

When we do make a call on our belief of something or someone, do we do so from the aspect of Love? Do we know what has driven that person to say what they said? Do we share from the perspective of having walked “a mile in their moccasins?” Are the words we use kind? Are they incite-filled or full of insight?

Today, the world seems to be in general state of laziness. The professional people we used to be able to trust for truth, in general, can no longer be trusted to share the truth.

People are speaking before they think about what they are saying. They react to something, rather than responding. By that I mean they speak from their emotions (ego), rather than responding in a way that might invite greater inquiry and discussion, which might find some more common ground, or a common position of compromise. It’s become a “My way, or the highway” kind of world. We would have to be robotic drones to all believe or do the same thing. How boring would that be?

What we can do though, is to begin being more kind to each other, being more understanding of people’s religious and cultural mores, and not prejudging people by the color of their skin, ethnicity, their sex or sexual orientation. When we condemn someone for any of these qualities, we condemn ourselves by our own ignorance. We would do better to get to know someone rather than misjudge them out of the door.

-jts
www.spirit-edu.com

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Oh Woe Is Me?

“We will never get anywhere unless we can accept the fact that politics is an inextricable tangle of good and evil motives in which, perhaps, the evil predominate but where one must continue to hope doggedly in what little good can still be found”.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Pg. 116

 

Fears-are-storiesLife is full of perceived good and evil. Every day we make choices in how we live our lives. We can get caught up in our emotions about all the things that are happening in the world and try to effect change in a haphazard way or worse yet, allow ourselves become emotional basket cases, whereby we become useless to ourselves and those we thought we might be able to help.

Instead of this self-destructive route, we could take pause, first to see how these things we think have so affected us to make us this way by looking at the bigger picture, and ask, “How has my life really changed since that thing happened?” “Can I see this as a lesson in some way that will make me stronger, or do I just give in to fear, and allow this thing to define me.”

Remember, things have no power, except the power we give them of ourselves.

-rev jim starke

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Something You Hope You Never have to Learn the Hard Way!

parachutes

As a former paratrooper we were trained that when you exited the aircraft, you give a 4 second count, and look up to see if your main chute is open. Truth be told, you almost always felt a tug before you finished the count, but you looked up anyway, just to make sure it was fully functional. Luckily, the only time I ever had to pop my reserve was to climb down after I landed in the trees and was about 20 feet off the ground at final rest. Thank you God!

Life is the same way, if you just think about something and never attempt it, you’ll never know what could have been.

Carpe Diem!

from Love, in Peace,

~revjim

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Loving that which is within you.

“Though you may travel the world to find the beautiful, you must have it within you or you will find it not.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

heart-lightThe idea of finding the beauty within you is based on “Loving what is” as it is right now. Can you love the seemingly imperfect you as you are, a little fat, maybe falling short in the hair department, and whatever else shows up as your imperfections? It doesn’t mean you can’t change your appearance, or your temperament. What it means is that you love yourself the way you are right now, and you’re not going to beat yourself up, if you have trouble losing weight, or don’t have Cher’s hair or Bill Gate’s money.

It means that you’re all right as you are and can love you without reservation.

How can you possibly love someone else, if you don’t love you? How can you build a sustainable life without the joy of exploring you first? You are not responsible for your metabolism, but you are responsible for you thoughts, for what you think and say. Love, compassion, empathy, all these things form a positive, fulfilling view of who you are outwardly as your world. Fear, loathing, despair, hate and other dark ideas and thoughts build an ominous, foreboding and fearful world view.

You can buy into the world as it appears to be in the news, or you can build your own view of the world as you perceive it from this day forward.

What are your most outrageous expectations for a life worth living? What are you willing to give up to see you grow into that idea?

~revjim

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From our Week 2 study of The Grace in Aging

“Chaos is the experience of our own ignorance, the experience of the charged contents of an unexamined and untrained mind.”

Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging

~revjim

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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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On Being Happy

be-happy“Happiness is a contagion which could lead to viral happiness and smiles and actually create peace all around you.” ~jts

Everything in our life is a choice and how we choose determines how we see our life.

Are you happy?

Or, do you wake in the morning and wonder “What’s going to go wrong today?” Do you fear that things that haven’t happened yet will? Do you feel that something bad is going to happen to you, and you don’t even have any reason to feel that way, beyond an offhand comment you heard or a news reporting the radio?

Psychologists refer to F.E.A.R as an acronym for False Evidence Appearing Real. I love that. It amazes me how often we fall into this mode of thinking, me included. We really limit ourselves when we allow some future “maybe”may occur for us, bad or good, and that our future is totally out of our control. The truth is that most of the things that happen to us are a product of our thinking. If we think the world is basically a dangerous and unloving place, that is what we tend to see. If we believe the world is basically a good and safe place to live, this is what we tend to see.

Can we control everything that happens to us? No. Most of the things that aren’t under our control are remote occurrences and almost silly to think about. The chances of your house burning down, or getting into an accident or most other things are so small that they really are False Evidence Appearing Real. Something like a bombing is astronomically small. They are also external things to us.

Our real control is in our day to day lives, our personal choices. We have virtually 100% control over those. How we eat. Is it healthy? How we spend our money. Do we choose frivolous things we’ll never use? In business, do we make informed choices, or do we see a resurgence of the “pet rock” or “Beanie Babies?”

There are many benefits of choosing to be happy. The first is that smiling not only makes us feel better, it also helps cheer others up. Smiling is contagious. Happiness is a contagion which could lead to viral happiness and smiles and actually create peace all around you. Imagine how much more you might attract into your life by just changing your primary thought to being happy when you wake up n the morning.

I have always, as long as I can remember, woke up and greeted the dawn with a hearty in-breath, a big smile and, most of the time, a statement to the sun, of how grand life is and how blessed I am to be a part of it! I also intentionally interact with people in public and give them a glance and a smile, and sometimes even a quick greeting, if they actually make eye contact with me. In small towns people are more willing to engage you, than they are in the “big city.”

Still, all in all, being happy leads to you wanting to take better care of your body, mind and spirit. Leaving out any one of these things can lead to you, or me, from being in harmony with our own self and lead us into that quagmire of unhappiness and a pronounced frown.

Did you know it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown. That alone is a good reason to smile.

~revjim

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