Choose Love Over Enchantment

"God loves all men but is enchanted by none."

-- Isaac Asimov

It's hard for many people to see that love is truly a totally impersonal phenomena. Love does not pick and choose. Love comes in unbidden, unexpected moments, grabs the soul and embraces the heart, and won't let go. 

Most of us have this amazing experience rarely. And when we do it is very localized -- we love one person to the exclusion of others, or more than we love others. God, on the other hand, doesn't play favorites. Contrary to popular belief, He doesn't love the saint more than the sinner, and He isn't partial to members of one particular religion or believers in any specific mythology. 

God loves. God is love. It's as simple as that. And we, too, are love, in essence. Put for most of us, most of the time, our love is not pure and steadfast. It is love mixed with fear, tainted by desire. And so, we become enchanted by a particular person, and we mistake this enchantment for love.

Here's a simple way to tell the difference. If your overwhelming urge is to have the other person in your life, it's enchantment. If you want what is best for them, regardless of whether it includes you or not, it's love. 

So, our task, our curriculum in this life, is to become more like God, to give up fear and desire and replace it with true, universal love. Seems like one hell of a bargain to me!

But it takes awareness, discernment and opening. And it takes understanding that you don't have to like a person to love them. Their looks, their behavior, their belief systems, are irrelevant. What is relevant is that they're alive, that in essence they, too, are you, are God, are love. See that and the loving comes naturally. Try and make yourself love someone without seeing their divine spark and you're merely wasting your time.

So, today your assignment is to be a soul detective. Look deeply into the sacred center of each person you encounter. See beyond and beneath their human disguise to their divine core. When you do, it will be easy to give up fear and desire and allow yourself to love. Love will be the most completely natural expression of who you are -- God beyond enchantment, God in one and all.

Choose Love!

"God will not have his work made manifest by cowards."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Spirit works through strength. Your strength -- to do whatever is necessary, to meet each challenge that life brings, to let the Divine work through you, even when you're tired, doubtful, or confused. 

Not that you won't be scared. We're all scared. Anyone who tells you that they're never scared is either enlightened, or as dumb as a post, and I'm betting on the latter. Do what Susan Jeffers recommends right there in the title of her book -- Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway! And amazingly, in the combination of feeling and doing, the fear begins to recede. 

As The Course in Miracles says, there are really only two emotions -- love and fear. Each day, each minute, each moment, the choice is the same -- we can choose love or choose fear. Obviously, God's way is the way of love. The coward's way is the way of fear. Our challenge, on a daily basis, is to become less coward and more God.

You're scared, I'm scared, all God's children are scared, and yet, still, even in the face of massive fear, we are encoded,  empowered and emboldened to choose love. And each time we do, our love muscle is strengthened and fear subsides a bit.

It's as simple as that, but it ain't easy. Time after time after time, choosing love over fear, making the loving comment, partaking in the loving act. And as you do, more and more of God's work is manifest through you. More and more of God is manifest as you. 

A path that consists of one simple choice made over and over again. Each choice the same, each situation different. The path from coward to Divine, one step at a time.

Beyond Hypocrisy

"Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you really love."

-- Butch Hancock

What are we teaching our children? Butch's experience is not unique. Too many kids, growing up in supposedly good, God-fearing households, are indoctrinated with the same crap that Butch was. Maybe "God-fearing" is part of the problem. 

Let's make it real simple. First, give up all this talk about God. Or at least don't turn Spirit into a cartoon character God through some sick and misguided anthropomorphizing.  There ain't no big daddy in the sky being the Top Genital Cop and monitoring everyone's sexual behavior just to have an excuse to smote them. God, in the usual sense of the word, is a fantasy on par with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. 

Next, drop the hell nonsense. No one knows what happens after you die. Not you, not your favorite preacher, priest, rabbi or swami. Not even Oprah or Dr. Phil. No one. If you get your twisted jollys fantasizing about eternal fire and damnation, go right ahead, but please keep it to yourself!

Now onto sex. Why is it so hard to be sex positive? Everybody likes it. Hell, everybody loves it! It's better than a summer picnic with good friends, cold beer and fresh sweet corn! To teach kids that sex is anything less than beautiful and awesome is just downright hypocritical. And all this "saving it for one person" is patently ridiculous. Something that good needs to be shared! 

Let's grow up people! Let's give up childish religious fantasies, honestly align our words with our actions, embrace the natural joys of life and quit sewing the seeds of fear. Life is good, sex is good, love is good. We don't need to make up super natural beings or after death destinations to appreciate these things. We just need to be good to each other and enjoy life's bounty. 

Simple and uncomplicated. All of us in this together. One world, one people, on love.

The Reality of Prayer

"I found that prayer works alot better with big players."

-- Knute Rockne

Is here anything that's more of a waste of time than prayers of petition? OK, maybe watching Survivor, American Idol, or any other reality show you can name, but that's about it. In fact reality shows and petitionary prayer have about the same actual degree of reality -- none.

Do you think God really cares who wins a football game? Of course not. So why then would the Supreme Being, the Primordial Energy, the Operating Principle of the Universe care about your petty personal concerns? He/She/It doesn't.

God is not a person. God is Reality, Itself. God is not going to alter the course of What Is merely because your ego is offended by it. God is not going to intervene in what has lawfully transpired. It is up to you to align yourself with Reality; it is not up to God to rearrange Reality to suit you.

So make a resolution, actually two resolutions: Give up watching crap on TV and give up asking some super power to intervene and make the world different than it is. You want the world to be different? Use all the time you're saving by not watching televised bullshit and invest it in making the world a better place. True, your football team still may not win (especially if it's Notre Dame), and your cat may not be cured of kitty leukemia, but at least you'll be actively engaged on the playing field of life rather than enmeshed in a fantasy of being saved by some old, bearded daddy in the sky.

Big players have big ideas, big effort, big joy. And that all adds up to a big, a real BIG, life.

Manners

"Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Manners seems like such a quaint subject. Outside of Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, few people champion the use of manners in these post-modern times. I know all the arguments -- manners are old fashioned, they're phony, they're for old farts, they're irrelevant -- I was a teenage myself once and deftly spouted each attack on manners while feeling oh so self-righteous and sophisticated.

What Waldo (yea, he really preferred to be called Waldo) was wise enough to see is that manners have little to do with social convention and everything to do with the Divine. Huh? Here's the thing: When Waldo uses the term "fine perceptions" he's talking about our innate ability to see God in each and every person. Thus to not use the upmost manners in our dealings with one and all, is more than just a transgression of Emily Post's rules of modern etiquette, it is a slap in the face of God!

Waldo knew, as all true saints and sages of all times and all places have known, that each person is a holographic spark of Spirit. He recommended manners not as social constructs but as modes of worship. If Jesus was about to enter the 7 Eleven at the same time as you, wouldn't you at least hold the door for him? Every time that you, or anyone else, fails to respond to another in a mannerly way, it is because they fail to see that God is right in front of them! The postal clerk, the bus driver, the bag lady, the greedy CEO, the gangsta rapper, even the Governor of Illinois -- all sparks of spirit, all Divinity in drag.

That makes your spiritual practice oh so simple -- see God in everyone and act accordingly. Let manners flow from your "fine perceptions." Treat everyone the way that you'd treat Jesus at the race track, Buddha at the bakery, or Krishna in a cocktail lounge. Enlightened behavior, aka manners, grows out of seeing the Light in everyone.

Here a Christ, There a Christ, Everywhere a Christ, Christ

"Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified."

-- Sherwood Anderson

When my friend Sara really likes something, say a CD by a band she's just discovered or a new flavor of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, she'll say, "Yeah, I like it, but I wouldn't hang on the cross for it." Sort of puts her liking in perspective.

And yet, as Sherwood Anderson points out, we are all, in our own way, crucified. Each of us experiences betrayal and persecution and events in life that slay us, figuratively, if not literally. The Buddha pointed it out, as well - no one goes through life without experiencing suffering. And just because our crucifixion didn't make the front page of the Galilee Gazette, just because no one founded a religion based on our resurrection, doesn't make our suffering less painful, or less instructive.

Yes, we are all crucified by life, but you see the other half of the equation is that we are also all Christ. The Divine spark is harbored within each of us. God did not have but one son -- we are all God's sons, we are all God's daughters. Indeed, that is the only way in which we can bear the crucifixion, the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," the deaths and rebirths of everyday life. We are all direct descendants of the Divine. God has not grandchildren.

We are all Christ, we are all crucified, and time after time after time, we are all resurrected. The ego dies on the cross of life, the Spirit is resurrected. Each day, every day, sometimes hour by hour, sometimes moment by moment. Death and rebirth --an endless spiral -- reaching ever upward, diving ever inward, ever and always homeward bound.