Meditation: A Historic Cure for the ADD of the Human Mind

I had a chance to make it to Lake Shrine today, for those who live in Los Angeles, it really is a spiritual treat not to be missed.

I was sitting in the chapel meditating when I heard a mother and her kids outside. The young boy was apparently interested in entering the chapel since "it's not labeled private." Mom dissuaded him with the fact that it was a quiet place.

The following scene played itself out in my mind; I'm asked why the chapel is a quiet place and I say, "because we all hear so much all of the time. Listen for a moment to the world around you, the cars on the street, the birds chirping, the water in the lake.

"But that is not all, if you close your eyes and listen, you will hear the constant yattering of your mind with things like, ooh, that's pretty, I don't like broccoli, and Susie tried to kiss me, ick, girl cooties!

"We go into the chapel to help us quiet all the noise in our lives so that we can finally hear the most important voices, those of our Spirit and our big brother, God. Quiet places like the chapel help to make it easier to find that space."

So I guess we all suffer from a touch of ADD in our lives, it is just part of the human condition. Meditation; a cure for "One sheep, two sheep, cow, goat, Old MacDonald had a farm, Heyyyyy Macarena!"

I haven't been writing much, well publishing at least, lately.  I have been writing several pieces but never actually felt they were ready for the world.  That, is a cop-out, they are ready, to a degree, but I have not been sure I want to put them out.  Some are extremely personal, others are kind of dark, seeing the horizon is not always a happy-joy-joy thing.

So, with a little editing, I will likely put them out eventually, but lets start with this one from September 2nd, as I think it sums up a lot of what has been happening with me as of late.

Blessed Be!

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As a general rule, I am a pretty happy person, I let things roll off and do not really allow things to get to me. Of course, like everyone I have my bad days when I hold onto every little slight as if it were the biggest insult ever handed out since fish-to-face slapping.

There are areas in my life where this is completely reversed, "go there and die" would be an appropriate warning sign for the unwary and then on days like today, everything falls into this category.

I do not really like being in that space, it sucks at best and sometimes turns into a personal Hell that can feel inescapable. Before you go there, I am not suffering from depression and I do not need to up my meds, but I might if they gave me a decent high!  ;-)

I wonder where these feelings come from and why they happen more and more as of late.  In other areas of my life, I would assume they were symptoms of something I need to deal with, a lesson that I have been avoiding, so I thought I might approach them from this place. What a can of worms I opened up!

Human thought, feelings and emotions are in many ways like an onion, you think you know what you are looking at, but once you touch it the wrong way, the surface gives way and you find a completely new world to explore that is not as known as you might have thought.

We live in a realm of fear most of the time, anything not "me" is separate and out to harm me, "it's a dog eat dog world" and such statements really are what the majority of the people in this world live in, even when they try to wrap themselves in a cloak of spirituality or religion. Before you get all pissy and think I'm accusing you, only you can know the truth of that perceived slight, I freely admit to having my days where my attempts to take refuge in my sādhanā is complete bullshit and I'm just hiding from the truth.

As if the fact that I am a human with all that entails were not enough, being a "sensitive" (I hate that word but cannot think of a good alternative) there are days when the outright pain of this realm comes through and I feel as if Atlas stepped out and dropped the weight of the world on my shoulders.

During these times, I want to love and allow the growth of those around me to continue, but I sometimes want to run around and slap the living piss out of the world.

I used to be ashamed of feeling this way, I thought it was hate for the often sheer stupidity of the masses and more-so for those who intentionally manipulate those masses for their own greed and empowerment at the expense of everyone and everything around them.

Eventually I came to realize that it was not really hate, but compassion. I can often see the eventual outcome of the path the masses are on and I do not want to see them have to go through the pain and suffering waiting there. No truly "human" individual wants to see other creatures suffer.

It has recently become apparent to me that I have two major lessons to learn from this:

1. Do not fight what the world has chosen for itself, consciously or otherwise.
   
   All entities choose the time and places of their lives for their own growth, to interfere with those choices would be more cruel than the witnessing of them. Thea Alexander in her book "2150AD" gives an excellent analogy of this.
   
   Jon, our central character, has been going through hospitals and healing the patients, but eventually he becomes aware of their Spirits and they start to stop him from healing them. One is an old lady with debilitating arthritis who has lost the use of her hands due to the condition. When asked, she pleads for Jon not to heal her as she has chosen this methodology to learn from and to heal her in this moment is to condemn her to going through the lesson again.
   
   
2. Experience the moment of the pain and then let it go, as with all things, it will pass.
   
   Often I find the world around me to be like a horror/slasher film.  If you are thinking about what is happening, you know the killer is behind the door and hiding in the dark and waiting for the victim to stumble into the trap. You are sitting in your seat at the theater and everyone is thinking the same thing, "don't do that, the killer is going to get you," you start crawling up your seat and when the killer pops up, you jump even though you KNEW what was about to happen.
   
   Afterwards, you might think what a stupid S.O.B. the character was, but you release and get ready for the next episode.  It is a collection of moments and experiences, it is not the totality of the existence.

Between these two lessons, I cause myself a large amount of pain at times. I fight what I pick-up from the world around me, it is painful and who wants to experience that? The ironic aspect of it is that in fighting it, I increase the level of pain.

At least December 21 is a Friday...

I often wonder what it is with those of us from Christian cultural backgrounds and our apparent obsession with apocalyptic scenarios?

When I was a kid, Hal Lindsey was writing books and making films like "The Late Great Planet Earth" about how the Last Days of the Bible were upon us. I was enamored with reading Jack Chick's tract comics and in particular, his "Crusaders" series (which I still have and read on occasion. What... they are fun reading).

Christians had started making inroads into making their own films, some better than others, but other than Billy Graham's "The Hiding Place," my favorites were always the after Rapture movies. Years later the "Left Behind" books would become quite popular and Cloud 10 Pictures would make their "Apocalypse" series of films (my personal favorite, "Judgment" with Corbin Bernsen, I kind of like the creative story idea  of God being put on trial for his crimes against his creation, by his creation).

Then we had the end of the world on December 31, 1999 at midnight when every computer was destined to crash and the underlying technology of our time would cease. The biggest thing that happened as far as I could tell, was that the Sunset Strip was completely without traffic and people, it was a ghost-town, till midnight. Once the world did not end, Sunset was its usual traffic nightmare and I saw my first accident of the new "millennium" (which did not really start until January 1, 2001) by 12:30AM.

Now the western disaster fascination with the end of the world has taken hold on the end of current b'ak'tun of the Mayan Long Count Calendar that ends in just under three weeks on December 21, 2012. Mayan mythology says nothing about the world coming to an end, at most it requires the beginning of a new cycle; the b'ak'tun (about the scariest part of that might be that it is the beginning of b'ak'tun number 13, ooooooh).

There is no Planet X about to collide with or knock Earth from its orbit. The Earth, Sun and the super-massive black hole, Sagittarius-A*, at center of the Milky Way Galaxy align every year on or about December 21^st. Sure, they are not always on the exact plane of the Milky Way, but I would not be to concerned, they are not this year either, last time was 1998. So I would not suggest quitting your job or making any other questionable decisions, at least not based on the publicity machine of the disaster mongers.

So lets get together and have a great party and celebrate the beginning of b'ak'tun 13, after all, it is Friday night and like the song says; "Everybody's working for the weekend."

To my friends in the Middle-East

To the nations of the "Arab Spring," you have a lesson before you that may be tough to accept and learn;

You can be authoritarian and dictatorial and make sure that such offensive expressions are not made, at least publicly, or you can have the Freedom to use your own judgment, knowing that their will always be those out there who will misuse and abuse those Freedoms.

This balance just comes with the territory of Freedom, I find ALL good things can be misused.

As Americans, we walk a fine line between freedoms and responsibilities. This fine line is not easily understood by us, little less by those who are not Americans and definitely not those with an axe to grind.

This current issue in the Middle-East, for example, likely a response to a hate-filled, intentionally offensive, anti-Muslim film, "Innocence of Muslims," made by an Egyptian born man living in the US, if Wikipedia is correct.

As an American, I have to accept his right to make the film, no matter how offensive, as a protection of the First Amendment section on Free Speech. As an American, I realize that this is one of those places where rights are proven to come with great responsibilities, as we have seen as of late and, sadly, many people forget or just outright ignore.

To the Muslim world, I ask for your understanding, that to step on his right to make the film, due to its likely intentional offensive nature, is as egregious as the Reverend Roy Phelps and his "church" and their protests in, I think, inappropriate circumstances has also been declared protected by the same First Amendment.

Hateful people will use good things to dark ends. To destroy the First Amendment to keep it from being misused would begin the toppling of the Freedoms and changes that many Middle-Eastern nations protested for so shortly ago and continue the degradation of the great experiment in Democracy in the US.

The hypocrisy of judging

When I watch television or read the news, I am so often saddened to see just what a judgmental people we have become. Sure, we have always judged one another, but as of late we seem to be seriously more vicious in our attacks.

We judge one another on a wide range of areas, race, gender, orientation, religion, financial status, education, clothing, speech, body-language, etc...

I take a lot of heat from my Christian friends (yes, I still have some, the ones that know its not personal). I am often accused of being anti-Christian, I am not. I tend to ride them tough since they are the dominant religious group in the United States. Riding Muslims hard would work if I lived in Saudi Arabia or some place that is an Islamic state, but in today's America the point would be completely missed by most.

Here is an example of one aspect of where Christianity is failing I think:


I will be the first to admit that I have some serious issues where it comes to the Westboro Baptist Church (frightening that the church's homepage is the "GodHatesFags.com" site). Surprisingly, my biggest issue with them is not their strong dislike of homosexuals or their completely tasteless tactics of protesting, but the use of their children in their protests. Hate is something that has to be taught, Denis Leary put it so well:


What chance do these children have to be anything more than their parents? I do not even want to think about the pain and anguish that one of their children will go through if they grow up and find themselves to be LGBTQ.

What does the Bible say about judging and the law

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One of the most famous quotes from the Christian Bible on this subject is the King James Version of Matthew 7:1; "Judge not, that ye be not judged", but look at what follows it.

7 Do not judge and criticize and condemn others, so that you may not be judged and criticized and condemned yourselves.

2 For just as you judge and criticize and condemn others, you will be judged and criticized and condemned, and in accordance with the measure you [use to] deal out to others, it will be dealt out again to you.

3 Why do you stare from without at the very small particle that is in your brother’s eye but do not become aware of and consider the beam of timber that is in your own eye?

4 Or how can you say to your brother, Let me get the tiny particle out of your eye, when there is the beam of timber in your own eye?

5 You hypocrite, first get the beam of timber out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the tiny particle out of your brother’s eye.

Matthew 7:1-5 (AMP)
My experience is that this is proven true by the realization that what we dislike and hate in others, hence judge as wrong, are nothing but the reflection of what we dislike and hate within ourselves. No, I am not accusing the members of the Westboro Baptist Church of being homosexual (gay men everywhere are breathing a large sigh of relief).

Some say that we dislike and hate what we do not know and that causes fear, but I think that is more a response to our sense of lack in knowledge and experience and most people hate having fear within themselves.

People like the members of Westboro and sadly others who are just looking for justification for their distrust of anything different often use the Law of Moses and the Levitican Code as their weapon of choice.

They almost always pick and choose which parts are valid, the parts that address themselves are overlooked; their favorite foods (bacon, ham, shrimp and lobster), the availability of cheap cool clothing from Walmart (mixed threads), cheaper meats (non-Kosher), touching the skin of dead pigs (football), etc. My personal favorite is that I have yet to meet the Christian man who has the balls to put his wife out during her monthly menses.

It has become the common belief that the Law of Moses is there by God's direct intent, literally the will of God, but Jesus tells us that is not necessarily the case:

8 He saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so.

Matthew 19:8 (KJV)
So we know that parts of the law are there by the knowing of Moses, not by God's decree, how do we determine which is which?

The answer is a few chapters away, Jesus not only tells us the basic framework for all the law , but gives us a direct key to its implementation:

35 Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,

36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

38 This is the first and great commandment.

39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Matthew 22:35-40 (KJV)
emphasis mine
If you apply the Law through the filter of Love, you will never use it as a tool of destruction against another, how would you honestly bludgeon your brother to death in the name of love?