You can't be neutral on a moving train!!!!

Howard Zinn coined that phrase.  Do you know who Howard Zinn was?  He was a great scholar and  social reformer who studied social disobedience.  His interest was in change through non-violent demonstration and small change leading to eventual big change.  We are so in need of big change right now as a species.  A change in our thinking in order for our existence to be more aligned with Life and progress and expansion.

Life is pulling us and in some cases dragging us unwittingly along in this needed change of how we think.  There is an evolutionary impulse prodding us to make the necessary changes for a sustainable existence on Mother Earth.  Some of us are balancing surrender to that impulse with the confidence that by surrendering we are being deliberate in facilitating expansion and sustainable progress.  Others are resisting this impulse and resting in a naive denial of who we are at our essence.

Do you believe in Spirit?  I mean really believe in Spirit, like as in an innate knowing that you are Spirit?  Most people would answer that question affirmatively, after all something like 92% of all humans believe there is something larger than us behind our existence.  Yet collectively, we act as if  we are separate from everything and asleep at the wheel most of the time.  We have those brief moments that we feel connected to each other or Spirit, but before too very long we relapse into a mechanistic daily grind.

Why is that?  Why is it that so many people can get some degree of connection to spirit on Sunday in their house of worship, and then Monday morning relapse into behavior that is so contradictory to the sermon they were taught just hours prior?  Just look at how Corporate America or our Governing bodies behave!!  Greed and Fear are the presiding states driving most of Corporate America and certainly our politicians.  But don't take my word for it, do some research on your own.

Most people won't take it upon themselves to do the research.  Most people won't even get curious about the way they feel.  Most people have turned over their free will to some "authority" and in essence said "tell me what to do, tell me how to think, tell me how I should behave" which is in essence thinking they are neutral on a moving train.  That is some scary stuff if that is the case.

The challenge is that taking ownership for your thoughts and connecting with your Spirit is pretty scary stuff, at least as it is perceived.  It's just so foreign to our conditioned way of thinking.  "Actions speak louder than words" is what we are taught, yet we forget that actions start from our thoughts and we end up doing some really stupid shit.

That is how deforestation takes place.  That is how literally destroying entire eco-systems happens.  That is how Bankers can commit criminal acts but face no punishment.  That is why there is more student debt now than credit card debt.  That is why dictators that the US subsidized with Billions of dollars were allowed to brutalize, torture and kill their own people all while the US government was completely aware of these atrocities.

The train is moving, and everyday that goes by is a stop we will never come back to.  What are you doing in your sphere of influence to apply the brakes.  You can't hold a thought pattern of "well I can't affect big government or big business or what is happening on the other side of the world".  That is thinking your neutral, when in fact you are contributing to the perpetuation of the problem.

So, how do you get out of neutral?  Go within, after all as one of my favorite spiritual teachers said, "If you do not go within, you go without".  Go within, get quite, and ask yourself, "What will you have me do?  What will you have me say?  What will you have me be?  If you will do this from an authentic place, you will get the answer.  Then act on it from your heart and see what happens, it will be miraculous!!!  But don't trust me, trust yourself!!!          

But, What about me?

What about you indeed!!  This is at the essence of every problem any person has and they don't even know it, because we get so wrapped up in our little world called our life and totally forget or tune out the idea we have a choice to change our perspective.  We forget that we could have a different thought and change everything in an instant.

Here is a real life, 100 pound example.  I work with a young lady with great talent, but is a little quirky.  One day she told me that she had a panic attack earlier and it was almost debilitating.  I told her if she experiences that again, come to me immediately and we can talk through it.  So, a few days went by and I was sitting in my office working on something when she walked in and plopped herself down in a chair and announced that she was having a panic attack.  She was visibly shaking, but clearly was open to discussing how to move out of that state.

I should mention that how I work with people is that I completely clear my mind of any expectation of outcome and I get curious about where the conversation goes.  Through dialogue, the solution emerges and its what I love most about what I do.  So, I asked her what she had been thinking about right before the onset of the attack.  She said her fiancée was leaving for a 4 day trip to the Midwest and she was not looking forward to being away from him that long.

Now if I had my "coach" or conventional counselor hat on, I might have gone into thinking that she has some esteem issues, or separation issues, or some other reason that caused her to physically react the way she was to the thought of being away from her fiancée for 4 days!!!  But the thought dropped into my mind "Whenever we experience angst, fear or any negative emotion really, our thoughts are centered on ourselves and knowing that, if we move our thinking to someone else, we can eliminate our problems".  She was already shaking her head when I asked her if that made sense.  She asked, "How do I do that?".

I told her to think about someone close to her that she could focus on.  She said she had a friend that just had a baby.  I asked her to close her eyes, and visualize her friend cradling her baby, maybe rocking the baby, and seeing her friend smiling with the bliss of being so close to her child.  She said she had that picture.  I asked her to visualize and "send" her friend and the baby her Love and picture it as pink energy surrounding the visualization of her friend and baby.   Now, I had never had that particular concept in my head before, I had no pre-conceived idea of what I was going to tell her when discussing her panic attack.

As I was walking her through this impromptu visualization, her shaking stopped, color began to return to her face, and I told her to just rest in that place and enjoy it for a moment.  She did and then opened her eyes and smiled.  I asked her how she felt, "so much Better" was her reply.  So we chatted a little bit about the shift that she experienced and the fact that anxiety or frustration or sadness is nothing more than our choosing that state over a much more positive state that is always available.

Sure, bad things happen in life, but its what we do with those things that determine how we experience them.  Do I get frustrated or down right pissed off at times?  Sure, but by being deliberate, I can very quickly move out of that state into a much more progressive state that also feels better, because I have made that process a practice.  By eliminating my thinking from be self centered, I allow wisdom from my higher self to come forth, and I have learned to listen to it because it always leads to awesome results or insights.

A mantra that I like to use is, "Do I want to be right or do I want to be at peace".  We tend to get so wrapped up in, "I'm going to do it my way, even if it means fighting and struggling and being miserable, I'm right and I'm going to pitch a tent in misery until everyone realizes I am right".  If we just stepped back and looked at the situation objectively, we could see it ain't working that way, and just maybe if we got curious about another way, the solution would raise its head.

The problem resides in the concept that we know how things "should be", you know, the way things work.  Well look around you, the way things "should be" and the "way things work" isn't working out so well.  The solution is "You could have a different thought" about the way things should be or how things work.  So do it, have a different thought and see what happens, it will be miraculous!!!  But don't trust me, experience it yourself!!!

What is wrong with humanity? I Am!!!

G. K Chesterson, an English Author was asked in the early 1900's by a London newspaper "What is wrong with the World?".  He answered very concisely, "I Am".   My gut tells me that what he meant can be distilled down by another quote of his, " Beware of no man more than yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us".  This is so true, but we refuse to even accept it might be accurate.  

Don't believe it?  Look around you at what is going on in society, around the world, and in nature.  We place so much "Value" on things outside of us that our society has become mentally ill collectively.  We are so easily accepting that an ideology or doctrine is "the truth" that we have checked our senses at the door and then wonder why so many people are miserable and are medicated with prescriptions let alone other substances or behaviors.

The Native Americans have a word they use for the behavior our society has embraced as the driving force of many people today.  It's "Wetico" and it means a sort of cannibalism where one culture eats or destroys another culture's way of life.   I think it pretty aptly describes what the Europeans did to the Native Americans when they came to North America.  The basis of the meaning is that Native Americans like many peoples of the world who feel a connection to nature and the earth and all living things believe that to own or hoard more than you need to survive is a mental illness.  Nature does not take more than it needs to survive, predators do not kill more than they need.  

I Am, being what is wrong with humanity means we need to wake up and see what we are doing to ourselves let alone all other living beings including Mother Earth.  If Human beings are living on Planet Earth 100 years from now, the term "Natural Resource" will be referenced only in teachings of un sustainability and the past.  They will live a dramatically different lifestyle and think dramatically different.  Darwin's "survival of the fittest" will have been replaced with a philosophy of "cooperation between species".  

Herman Hesse's book Demian has a passage that sheds light on our situation today.  The passage reads:

Each man had only one genuine vocation -- to find the way to himself.....his task was to discover his own destiny, not an arbitrary one, and live it wholly and resolutely within himself.  Everything else was only a would be existence, and attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of ones own inwardness.

Read it again, take some time to immerse yourself in its meaning.  Joseph Campbell referred to a life lived less than wholly as the waste land or the inauthentic life.  Collectively we are living in that waste land.  There is immense wealth (not abundance mind you) held by the vast minority of the population, yet thousands of children die of starvation every hour.  We have industries that are built on falsehoods that prop up "the economy".  Just those two scenarios are an example of attempts at evasion and flights back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of our own power.

I'll leave this post with a passage from Martin Buber (tapped in dude) talking about Grand Will as opposed to the Puny Unfree Will:

The free man is he who wills without arbitrary self-will.

He believes in destiny, and believes that it stands in need of him.  It does not keep him in leading strings, it awaits him, he must go to it, yet does not know where it is to be found.  But he knows that he must go out with his whole being.  The matter will not turn out according to his decision; but what is to come will come only when he decides on what he is able to will.  He must sacrifice his puny, unfree will, that is controlled by things and instincts, to his grand will, which quits defined for destined being.  Then, he intervenes no more, but at the same time he does not let things merely happen.  He listens to what is emerging from himself, to the course of being in the world; not in order to be supported by it, but in order to bring it to reality as it desires.  

He listens to what is emerging from himself (you have to go within to do this), to the course of being in the world; not in order to be supported by it, but in order to bring it to reality as it desires (we are not in this world, we are part of it).