{"id":71146,"date":"2013-10-19T04:17:06","date_gmt":"2013-10-19T08:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=71146"},"modified":"2013-10-19T04:17:06","modified_gmt":"2013-10-19T08:17:06","slug":"on-becoming-miracle-minded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/on-becoming-miracle-minded\/","title":{"rendered":"On Becoming Miracle Minded"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

We can’t go on this way. Seriously. We can’t continue to dither over ridiculous things like a few measly billions of dollars while wasting upwards of 24 billion in these last weeks for no apparent reason other than the intransigence of a handful of people, few of whom understand democratic process nor care to. We can’t keep allowing ourselves to be sidelined back into archaic tugs of war — as Fe so aptly put it, signifying nothing — while the problems that endanger our future not only persist but escalate.<\/p>\n

\"Political We are on the horns of a dilemma. How do we heal a soul-sick nation, clinging to an old paradigm understanding of nationalism and exceptionalism and unwilling to face the changes at hand? Even as a majority of Americans reject both the philosophy and the tactics of the hard-right — there’s the blessing, do not miss it — we are captive to their tantrums, at least for the moment. Economist Bob Reich calls our current congressional agreement a cease fire, describing the GOP’s dogged determination to carry on their war against modernity, populism and all things Obama. From what I read, we can trust that to be true.<\/p>\n

Religious zealot and lawmaker Michele Bachmann has indicated that she finds the reopening of government “a very sad day,” presumably because the GOP got so little out of the bargain, but given her recent remarks and past record, we can assume she’s actually disappointed that Jesus isn’t presiding over Congress accompanied by a bevy of sword-wielding archangels smiting godless liberals.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Former House-speaker Tom Delay — recently of Dancing With The Stars fame, his sentence for money laundering during the Bush years overturned by a Texas Appellate Court — weighed in with an attempt to put an end to battles within the party regarding Texas Senator Ted Cruz, announcing that “real Americans” consider Cruz and the stalwart Baggers in the House of Representatives to be heroes.<\/p>\n

DeLay told CNN<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“When you’re in a fight, people just don’t like the fight, so they’re going to respond negatively… It’s who wins and comes out of the fight that has long-lasting effects. And I got to tell you right now, out here in the real world, outside of New York and Washington, D.C., these people think Ted Cruz is a hero. They think that those Republicans in the House are heroes. And they think that Obama is destroying this country.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s the problem with purists. Tone-deaf, they only listen to one another. Their insistence that all American people are just like them can be effortlessly refuted by the statistics, but they don’t choose to review them, hence their reputation for delusion (and their annoying habit of suggesting they speak for us all). The meme of moment on the right is that they would have won this congressional fight if the liberal media had fairly portrayed their cause to the public.<\/p>\n

The attempt to burn down the village rather than allow it to be ‘corrupted’ by Obamacare shows their deep embrace of an alternate reality that is a mix of Libertarian detachment and End Times rhetoric, buoyed by Koch brothers money and spiked with the white exceptionalism favored by followers of John Birch. It’s as if all the lowest common denominators converged to pull us down into ruin.<\/p>\n

Satirist Andy Borowitz did a riff on that burgeoning carbuncle of nihilism in the New Yorker<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Explaining his proposal to a visibly alarmed Crowley, Senator Cruz said, \u201cObamacare is like a parasite that needs a host to feed on. If you want to kill the parasite you kill the host, and in this case that means killing this planet. As long as there\u2019s a planet Earth, the nightmare of Obamacare could always come screaming back to life.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he was not specific about how he would go about destroying the planet, Cruz said, \u201cThis is something that my colleagues and I have been working on for some time.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Can all the “real Americans” out there shout AMEN? It would do little good to argue that the very concept of a typical American prototype is so antithetical to the principles of this diverse nation that it’s laughable, yet the appeal of such a shallow standard can’t be denied among those who quiver like a rung gong at the suggestion of — buzzword alert! — “leadership.”<\/p>\n

“Ted Cruz is a leader,” Tom DeLay declared. “People in this country for years have been begging for leadership, and Ted Cruz filled the void of leadership.”<\/p>\n

Much as they insist they have an accurate finger on the pulse of all Americans, another annoying Republican talking point has been that there is no leadership in Washington. Being on the progressive end of the teeter-totter, critical of national policy I consider authoritarian if not unconstitutional, I can understand why that might play with the right-leaning population, but to centrists — the majority of this nation, who don’t believe that Obama has waffled from trying to do what he promised — his leadership has been both consistent and measured, if not overtly productive.<\/p>\n

Frankly, he could be Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf<\/a>, hero of an earlier generation, and he still wouldn’t show up on the Republican radar as anything but a fraction of a citizen, unworthy of the presidency. No one on the liberal left (which conservatives deem an emotional aberration) has leadership qualities, especially the black guy who isn’t an actual American, although apparently a Canadian-born politician of Latin heritage is A.O.K.<\/p>\n

And on that topic, I will confess to an uneasy feeling of revulsion whenever I hear or see Ted Cruz speak. In fact, the first time I heard his voice, the vibration set off my Bullshit-o-Meter to the point of hackle-rising and I had to run to the TV to see the pouty, choir-boy face that went with it.<\/p>\n

I remember blogging, tongue in cheek, regarding allegations that George W. was the antichrist years back, suggesting that such a slick customer could not reside in the consciousness of a bumbling little man infamous for Bushisms like “putting food on your family” and allowing your gynecologist to “show his love.” I argued that Uncle Dick Cheney was more the sort, heart as calcified as an olive pit.<\/p>\n

But now, here comes a glib, posturing huckster of a politician that more than meets those oily prerequisites, and the faithful don’t even notice. I suppose being blindsided is the whole point, though. Given the faux-Christianity practiced almost exclusively in the United States these days — although we must not discount ongoing damage done by repressive missionaries, especially in Africa — the Christ\/antichrist question is really what all the fuss is about, from my point of view.<\/p>\n

Having promoted the punishing, judgmental patriarchal prototype of godhood from antiquity to overrule the more compassionate persona revealed through Jeshua bin Joseph, some of us are allowing a (returned) Christ-spirit to grow within our consciousness while others of us are behaving as would the antichrist, seeking to mask our intent, manipulate with fear, and dominate without remorse. We become the vision we follow, we magnify what we fear.<\/p>\n

I can’t say too often that I agree with those who say we need a new version of God\/dess, a new understanding of how that mythos operates in our lives, because it cannot help but define us. That traditionally expresses as the thing outside of us from which we seek approval and assistance and even when we drop religion like a hot rock, we can’t shake the notion that something out there has power over us. That is where we find a dovetail to the “leadership” talking point, loosely translated as the rule book to which all things must conform. Leadership, both political and religious, equates to being told what to do, what to want, what to believe by those who are “worthy” (or have convinced us that they are).<\/p>\n

The faithful are looking for something to be given to them, questioning their own worthiness while all the while projecting, politically,\u00a0the liberals — along with the poor that Jesus loved so dearly — as undeserving “takers.” How can they fail to notice that this right-leaning rhetoric doesn’t reflect well on the very essence of Christianity? A recent op\/ed in our little bitty newspaper repeated a sign on one of the local churches: Go “right” or get “left” behind. Made me fighting mad, but how do you fight that kind of ignorance? I’d have had to fight an entire congregation AND a political party and they STILL wouldn’t have gotten the point.<\/p>\n

There is little virtue or growth in being told what to do and doing it for fear of everlasting damnation, but there is plenty of empowerment in learning to hear our own ego-speak, in finding the courage to battle fearful thoughts and projections, in learning to examine our internal dialogue and trust our instincts. As we carve away those attitudes that impede our authentic growth, we step into the worthiness that eludes so many today, the lack of which is the cause of so much sorrow. And as we surrender all that has blocked our access to Spirit, we become miracle workers.<\/p>\n

Allow me a segue: I’ve seen a few miracles in my time. I’ve gone hunting them. Back in the 1970s, I was given to understand that miracle energy — that which\u00a0ACIM<\/em>\u00a0calls a “change in perception” — occurred when the vibratory rate supported it. Those who meditated and practiced a vital connection with Source were seen to influence events, refining their ability to achieve what we would call the miraculous. I’ve witnessed people sitting Samadhi change the course of dire circumstance and\/or illness.<\/p>\n

Traditional churches that do not allow for individual alignment with higher power, however, require the whole of a congregation, believing in tandem and raising a collective energy field, in order to feel that touch of the miraculous. I’ve been to extraordinary tent meetings, auditoriums full of hand-raising, praise-shouting healing sessions in which one could literally feel the sparks of Spirit in the ethers, tickling the hair on your arms like a restless wind. That — and the advent of 24\/7 cable TV programming — was how the evangelical movement gained, and held, power.<\/p>\n

When we experience such an event — led by a charismatic leader, and attributed to something outside of ourselves that demands a particular belief system — we often stop looking for the portion of that magnificence that lies within us. The fundamentalist religious community is vibrating at a particular rate common to themselves, awaiting their leaders to tell them which Bible verse to read or what Jesus said about this or that, yet they do not take responsibility for their own revelation, for the elevated consciousness of Christedness that resides within them begging to be born and nurtured. They have been trained not to trust their own desires, as born sinners. They have been convinced they are unworthy of the power within them.<\/p>\n

That Christed energy which is universal consciousness is not dependent upon a religious philosophy, but rather a willingness to practice compassion, forgiveness and unconditional love in all things: political, religious, scientific, artistic, economic. All things! This energy cannot unfold in a closed, guarded mind-set but will easily bloom to an open, unthreatened one.<\/p>\n

Much like our current politics, the fatal flaw in fundamentalism is that it creates an either\/or tension that is neither productive nor realistic, and must eventually be found wanting. But meanwhile, it gives the Great Mystery that encompasses all of creation a very bad name, making those who aren’t willing to accept its man-made tyranny of rigid thinking left to cynicism and faithlessness. Read that baby, bathwater, yadda — keeping us from opening to a genuine experience of Spirit that quietly steals our breath at its beauty, that quickens our heartbeat in its presence and forever changes the magnetic makeup of our personal essence and our planetary future.<\/p>\n

In the last decades we’ve endured a kind of hallucination about why we’re here on the planet, coinciding with the end of an era. There have always been movers and shakers, elitists and racists, those willing to throw anyone under the bus to get ahead, but in these last years when fundamental religion and naked corporatism have joined hands, the options that allowed for a middle ground experience — some might call it a middle class — have declined to the place where our inability to get our needs met has turned many of us to either lethargy or desperation.<\/p>\n

If Darwin was right and only the strong survive, then the process going on right now — in religion, in politics, in social consciousness — is a fight between exploitation of the weak for power and profit versus the commonality that allows us all to have a place at the table and a share in the future. Overcoming the smaller vision requires individual responsibility of a different nature than that proposed by our Libertarian friends, who see responsibility to self in the meager terms defined by Ayn Rand, or those of literal Christianists, bound by a philosophical interpretation that grants them exceptionalism and implied safety based on their obedience to unquestioned dogma.<\/p>\n

While this “wake up game” is hardly a new experiment here on planet Terra, it has reached a fever pitch, coming at a time when critical decisions must be made for the continuance of the species. The channelers tell us that we’ve made more progress than we think, that the outcome is assured and would be hastened if only we would stop focusing on all that’s wrong and attend to all that’s right. Perhaps it’s so.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we’re unable to see the forest for the trees. Climate change is no longer at question, neither is the obvious link to pollutants and environmental toxins. There is every indication that if the people themselves had their way, corporations would have to radically change their ways and the marketplace would have to adjust.<\/p>\n

Those who use religion as a seat of power and control are quaking in their boots, thanks to the new Franciscan Pope whose populism and humility might even rescue Christianity’s reputation in this century, and the tumble of Republican influence on all but those few rural strongholds, mostly elder, who are ruled by the inevitable passage of time and tide.<\/p>\n

There is every indication that the consciousness of this world is begging to push forward into a better version of itself, birthing a new thing from the ashes of the old, but those few individuals keep pulling us back into the warfare of competing belief systems, strategically placed and backed by the dark energies — as Eric pronounced them — of superstition, fear, conflict and deception. But where once that front was solid, now it’s more like Swiss cheese, asking onlookers not to notice the many glimpses of Light peeking through.<\/p>\n

No matter what our political inclination, we need to reframe our efforts from internal warfare to remediation of all that is unfair, unwieldy, unworkable rather than a competition with opposing elements. We need to acknowledge the spark of Spirit in all religions while modeling tolerance and lovingness as the larger portion of our own. We need to view our brothers and sisters through the collective lens of family, of non-separation.<\/p>\n

We need to cover — as was recently suggested for the conflicted Mr. Boehner — all those with whom we have differences, no matter how severe, with loving Light and compassion because that has the capacity to lift their consciousness into a new understanding of self and purpose. There is another name for that: miracle. We can author that with our collective intent and mindfulness.<\/p>\n

If we are to bring peace into our world, we know it is not so much about a cessation of warring as it is about an embrace of peaceful intent, while competition always brings us back to who is “best,” who “wins” and who is a “loser.” Yet\u00a0A <\/em>Course In Miracles<\/em><\/em>\u00a0tells us that the Universe of which we are each an integral part supports only win\/win scenarios for all of us.<\/p>\n

That is how beloved we are to the divine, that is what love requires from each of us in return. Anything that does not bless all parties in any transaction is an illusion which we must not give our power to, nor support with our fears. Anything else is the nihilism that we are seeing all around us, pretending that austerity and fierceness are the true way of the world. To prove it wrong is the miracle awaiting us, and the most loving thing we can do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves We can’t go on this way. Seriously. We can’t continue to dither over ridiculous things like a few measly billions of dollars while wasting upwards of 24 billion in these last weeks for no apparent reason other than the intransigence of a handful of people, few of whom understand … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}