essays posted to God's Green Earth
Titles in this series: essays posted to God's Green Earth - 2008-2009
How to Find God
The Way is Simple
A Conservative Liberal Manifesto
How We Save Ourselves
True Innocence
Heart of Hearts
A Luddite's Reflections
Your Quiet Place
Choosing The Good
A History of Thoughtlessness
Sense and Sensation
Our True Legacy
Grateful
How to find God
Look into the eyes of your children and remember you were once like them, innocent and full of wonder and hope, and think of what we owe to them and what we owe to those who came before us.
And then look in the mirror deep into your own eyes and see the part of you that is holy and still capable of being honest enough to see we do not have answers to life's real mysteries and though we are sometimes afraid and feel small like the true children that we are, we also know we can be strong and can choose the path that brings us into alignment with God's true plan of peace, and harmony.
Added by Barely Ablemann on May 3, 2009 posts from old website, God's Green Earth
Look into the eyes of your children and remember you were once like them, innocent and full of wonder and hope, and think of what we owe to them and what we owe to those who came before us.
And then look in the mirror deep into your own eyes and see the part of you that is holy and still capable of being honest enough to see we do not have answers to life's real mysteries and though we are sometimes afraid and feel small like the true children that we are, we also know we can be strong and can choose the path that brings us into alignment with God's true plan of peace, and harmony.
Added by Barely Ablemann on May 3, 2009 posts from old website, God's Green Earth
The Way is Simple
Posted by Barely Ablemann on April 11, 2009
1. Life is complicated, but the way is simple. Keep your heart free from the confusion of your mind. Let the weight of your worries slip away. Let your compass always point true. When you allow yourself to be free from the petty and the cardinal sins, you will
walk in peace, never fazed by the fury of your unbridled emotions. When you fix your gaze upon God’s Love and the benevolent Green Earth, then your vista and your vision will be a true one.
Our mothers birthed us in love and pain. Our debt to our fore-bearers can never really be repaid. Only a lifetime of sincere effort is required. But once you realize you are not alone, that you are marching in a parade that began before your little behind was powdered and diapered by loving hands, and that even though you do not always see or feel the connection, your life is full of meaning and ritual.
2. What we feel at any given moment is not always a good guide to life. Your personal gyroscope does not spin at a constant rate. And sometimes you must change it’s direction. It needs tending. So too must we tend to our feelings. If you notice yourself getting cranky or thinking mean thoughts, it is time for an attitude check. You have an absolute right to your feelings, but do you really want to spend any of your precious time in anger or upset? Only by keeping your mind free of mean thoughts can you devote 100% of your energy and your attention to doing the things which will have a positive result.
3. Your whole being is more than just your feelings or your thoughts. When you stay poised in your own calm quiet place, your senses and your feelings are free to observe and to enjoy the wonder of life. Small things become intensely pleasurably. You see things with your whole heart. Each sunrise brings you joy and wonder. You can see the good that you do and you can see when your efforts fall short without blaming others or yourself. When you accept all your own feelings without condemnation, you can accept that other folks are also not perfect.
So we all share a similar dynamic. As sentient beings in an industrial (non-feeling) kind of world context, we often have to adapt our normal human preferences in dealing with others to the proscribed or mechanized ways. Sometimes we want to extend the hand of
friendship but our society and our tech is not geared to sharing our joy and our wonder in our ordinary exchanges.
We encounter other humans also dealing with similar situations. All of us pull our pants on one leg at a time and we all share the same air. We all were born naked and we will eventually return to the great cosmic mystery when God calls us back to join Him again.
4. Many of us are locked into the greed game. We seek advantages over others. We must make others wrong in order for us to be right. Are we so full of fears and insecurities that we can only measure our own individual progress by how much we overtake others?
What we create in our own personal dynamic affects our own state of mind, heart, and emotion. You can only be really free if you follow your own moral compass that God provides for us and hold yourself accountable to the same standards that God demands of everyone. You do 'yourself' a disservice if you lie, cheat, or steal because that means you must seek advantages. You do not see yourself as having a right to be here. You do not feel worthy of God’s love. You have the mistaken notion that others are better than you, or that they are more deserving.
5. Once you accept that your feelings are your own, and that you have a right to them, and that only what is in your heart is of true consequence, you can be free of petty concerns. Once you see none of us are perfect and no one always does the right thing, then you realize you have the power to chose, in any given moment, the choice that ties you to the eternal, immutable laws of life and God’s love. By choosing the good, for yourself and for others, you set yourself free. You are in sync with the music.
Conclusion
The blood that pounds in your veins is beating the ancient rhythm of life yearning to celebrate it’s joy in being part of God’s infinite Creation. We are part of the marvelous miracle of precious life on our third rock from the sun. Our wonderous bluegreen world of water and air and rich and robust soil that we spring from and return to is not a machine but a holy, awesome place. We do not own it, nor did we create it. It is not for us to desecrate. We all belong to it and it belongs to all of us. The fire that burns in us is the fire that burns in our Earth. The cosmic forces that keep it in check are more complicated and have achieved their harmonious balance over a time-continuum that is beyond our poor powers to really comprehend.
Fortunately for us, there is nothing we need to do to keep all the heavenly orbs hanging in their orbits. We are blessed to enjoy our sweet air, our clear water, the warmth of our capricious sun as it pours its radiant and actinic rays upon us, and we do not wonder from whence this munificence came.
And so I say to you, my brothers and my sisters, my fellow pilgrim travelers, the yearning spirit of all that is good in our human and God created world is your Spirit. Choose the path that connects you to the beauty and strength of your blood and your generations and find freedom and peace in your acceptance of your absolute right to be a part of the greater miracle of life in God’s great Parade.
Posted by Barely Ablemann on April 11, 2009
1. Life is complicated, but the way is simple. Keep your heart free from the confusion of your mind. Let the weight of your worries slip away. Let your compass always point true. When you allow yourself to be free from the petty and the cardinal sins, you will
walk in peace, never fazed by the fury of your unbridled emotions. When you fix your gaze upon God’s Love and the benevolent Green Earth, then your vista and your vision will be a true one.
Our mothers birthed us in love and pain. Our debt to our fore-bearers can never really be repaid. Only a lifetime of sincere effort is required. But once you realize you are not alone, that you are marching in a parade that began before your little behind was powdered and diapered by loving hands, and that even though you do not always see or feel the connection, your life is full of meaning and ritual.
2. What we feel at any given moment is not always a good guide to life. Your personal gyroscope does not spin at a constant rate. And sometimes you must change it’s direction. It needs tending. So too must we tend to our feelings. If you notice yourself getting cranky or thinking mean thoughts, it is time for an attitude check. You have an absolute right to your feelings, but do you really want to spend any of your precious time in anger or upset? Only by keeping your mind free of mean thoughts can you devote 100% of your energy and your attention to doing the things which will have a positive result.
3. Your whole being is more than just your feelings or your thoughts. When you stay poised in your own calm quiet place, your senses and your feelings are free to observe and to enjoy the wonder of life. Small things become intensely pleasurably. You see things with your whole heart. Each sunrise brings you joy and wonder. You can see the good that you do and you can see when your efforts fall short without blaming others or yourself. When you accept all your own feelings without condemnation, you can accept that other folks are also not perfect.
So we all share a similar dynamic. As sentient beings in an industrial (non-feeling) kind of world context, we often have to adapt our normal human preferences in dealing with others to the proscribed or mechanized ways. Sometimes we want to extend the hand of
friendship but our society and our tech is not geared to sharing our joy and our wonder in our ordinary exchanges.
We encounter other humans also dealing with similar situations. All of us pull our pants on one leg at a time and we all share the same air. We all were born naked and we will eventually return to the great cosmic mystery when God calls us back to join Him again.
4. Many of us are locked into the greed game. We seek advantages over others. We must make others wrong in order for us to be right. Are we so full of fears and insecurities that we can only measure our own individual progress by how much we overtake others?
What we create in our own personal dynamic affects our own state of mind, heart, and emotion. You can only be really free if you follow your own moral compass that God provides for us and hold yourself accountable to the same standards that God demands of everyone. You do 'yourself' a disservice if you lie, cheat, or steal because that means you must seek advantages. You do not see yourself as having a right to be here. You do not feel worthy of God’s love. You have the mistaken notion that others are better than you, or that they are more deserving.
5. Once you accept that your feelings are your own, and that you have a right to them, and that only what is in your heart is of true consequence, you can be free of petty concerns. Once you see none of us are perfect and no one always does the right thing, then you realize you have the power to chose, in any given moment, the choice that ties you to the eternal, immutable laws of life and God’s love. By choosing the good, for yourself and for others, you set yourself free. You are in sync with the music.
Conclusion
The blood that pounds in your veins is beating the ancient rhythm of life yearning to celebrate it’s joy in being part of God’s infinite Creation. We are part of the marvelous miracle of precious life on our third rock from the sun. Our wonderous bluegreen world of water and air and rich and robust soil that we spring from and return to is not a machine but a holy, awesome place. We do not own it, nor did we create it. It is not for us to desecrate. We all belong to it and it belongs to all of us. The fire that burns in us is the fire that burns in our Earth. The cosmic forces that keep it in check are more complicated and have achieved their harmonious balance over a time-continuum that is beyond our poor powers to really comprehend.
Fortunately for us, there is nothing we need to do to keep all the heavenly orbs hanging in their orbits. We are blessed to enjoy our sweet air, our clear water, the warmth of our capricious sun as it pours its radiant and actinic rays upon us, and we do not wonder from whence this munificence came.
And so I say to you, my brothers and my sisters, my fellow pilgrim travelers, the yearning spirit of all that is good in our human and God created world is your Spirit. Choose the path that connects you to the beauty and strength of your blood and your generations and find freedom and peace in your acceptance of your absolute right to be a part of the greater miracle of life in God’s great Parade.
A Liberal Conservative Manifesto
Posted by Barely Ablemann on June 16, 2009
As the African proverb says, "He who shits on the path will meet flies on his return." For all of you who are students of history, we really do seem to be running out of time. I welcome all suggestions toward the end of providing a truly universal set of guiding parameters for the people of the world to keep it viable, to keep it decent for families, to keep it the jewel that it is, and to keep it as wondrous as it has been since God created it.
How We Save Ourselves
- Posted by Barely Ablemann on June 16, 2008
we are here for a reason and there is a divine plan and you are not alone. You have a right and a
divine purpose for being in God's Creation and when you awaken to it, if you are
not already hip, you will realize true joy and peace in your lifetime. You are part
of the grand parade of all life and God has already given you the most precious
gift He can give. Savor it and revere it and see Him in your eyes and the eyes of
all other sentient creatures on the planet. The only thing You can change is how you see the
world. How you choose to relate to all your brethren is the only true measure of how you and all of us revere the Lord.
TRUE INNOCENCE
- Posted by Barely Ablemann on November 29, 2009
- View Barley Ableman's blog
That being the case, we share to some small extent the uneven vista of the idiot savant in all their brilliance and ineptitude. We are totally clueless on the one hand and very deliberately conscious on the other. We are capable of purposeful and directed activity especially when we follow our moral compass and see the world as one entity, complete and whole.
But whether or not one refuses to acknowledge the mystery and the majesty and the miracle of life, it is clear, we are but a small part of something much greater than ourselves. Most call it God.
To the extent we have been shown love and caring during our growing up time, we are able to see how much we are connected to all other sentient life on our lonesome little orb we call Earth. If we have not been well loved or socialized, we may see ourselves as alone and separate, but that is an illusion.
In our worst moments, we may not feel any particular empathy for others. But that is part of the sickness of man. To be unable to sense the pain of another or to share in the joy of our fellows leaves a hollow place in our hearts and in our souls.
For truly we are joined in a web of life that is fantastically intricate and continuous since it began here on Earth. We are literally formed of stardust as Joni Mitchell has pointed out. Every day our science confirms our previously intuitive knowledge of our place in the Cosmos. And our beloved science also confirms our links to each other and to our common origins. The huge irony is we see all the ways we are ostensibly different from each other. We seldom use our mind's eye or our hearts to see how thoroughly we are connected to everything around us.
This myopia of vision, this schizophrenia, is explained in the Bible as Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden. The price of using only our minds to see the world is separation from it. As long as we see ourselves as separate from the World, we permit ourselves to do all manor of things which are asocial, even sociopathic. By definition, if we behave as Narcissus, mindful of only ourselves, whatever we do will be detrimental to the true path of all life.
We live in a symbiotic and synergistic way with all other life on the planet, and we must understand and feel our connection to that life. As other life suffers, we suffer. There is no way any one species exists separately from everything else. As we objectify life as things or material, we stop worshipping the divinity of all life as well as ourselves, and continue to lay waste to our surroundings.
When we fail to acknowledge there is something we call spirit that is immanent in the material forms we see ( with only our eyes), we are suffering from a myopia unique to humans. As long as spirit remains totally invisible to our idiot savant mindset, we will remain clueless. When we fail to acknowledge there is an intention to life, an ineffable desire to live, a undefinable yearning that exists in us all, we short circuit our true connection to what is holy. And what is holy is our desire to live and that is God-given, What is Holy is the miracle of Life on a Blue-Green Orb balanced precariously between thermonuclear fusion and frigid, arid deep space. What is holy is our awakening to a true appreciation of how we can live with reverence for all life, including ourselves.
True innocence exists in a sense of wonder and gratitude. If we have no wonder in our hearts at what a phenomena it is to be alive, then how can we truly appreciate what a precious gift life is? If we do not have an accurate picture of our real situation and our real relationship to our world, then it will be no surprise we create a reality which reflects our fears and not our hopes.
heart of hearts
Posted by Barely Ablemann on December 21, 2008
Saturday, 19 January, 2008
dear Lord, help keep my heart open to you and your wonderous works, help me to hang on to my new found faith in the world of the spirit which is everlasting and not part of the godless ways of man. We are small and our vista is so limited. We see from the vantage point of the next financial quarter or maybe the next season. Sometimes we only see the month or the week or the day.
When we chop up Your endless time into so many little fragments, we forget the big picture. At best we see from the vantage point of a human lifetime, and we forget the precious gift of life is here so fleetingly.
Even if You grant us our normal full span of eighty or ninety or even one hundred years on this golden globe, we forget that in the vast time/space continuum, we are as a firefly flashing our brief light for our few brief nanoseconds. Even if we witness 23,000 sunrises, we cannot comprehend with our prideful minds the vast vista of time You have laid before us.
But to be alive for just one day, to see a sunrise and to hear the birds lilting song, and to see the daily rebirth of all of Creation is to have but a glimpse of a perfection far beyond our puny powers. We try with words to give voice to our sense of awe but words alone cannot convey the depth of what we sense. We must find in our hearts a wordless emotion, a way to delight in Your Day and to be thankful we have been blessed with this richness of life, however brief.
The harmony of the heavens and the terribly fine balance of all the intricate forces we seek to discover and name as scientific laws all indicate our small vista does not compare with Yours. We are Your children and we seek You everywhere we go. Your Spirit is in all things. When we have gone as far as our puny craft will take us, and we call out to You in our grief and in our joy, You will still be waiting for us in our heart of hearts.
A Luddite's Reflections
- Posted by Barely Ablemann on December 21, 2008
- View Barley Ableman's blog
Bless You Lord for allowing me one more day in Your Awesome Creation. My clever little mind sees only with my mortal eyes the surface of Your intricate and complex world, but what I see is so beautiful.
Your Created World is so rich with it’s ever-changing palette if delicate colors and variable breezes and finely graduated Temperatures. In the dead stillness of morning dark, I ponder my self-created problems,
But I thank You for the beauty of a day calm and temperate, sweet with the dew of another fine morning.
The air we all share is an invisible vapor which flows in and out of us and connects us to the fluid medium of a world in constant motion that we do not sense. But Earth’s tumult is padded out in marvelous layers of plastic rock and sediments made from the dust and soil of mountains and meteors, the decayed and distilled essence of our bones and blood, the lush leafy bowers of our forests and swamps, all mixed together in a broth, cooked and cooled and dried by day by Your minor Sun, and made sweet and pure, and laid in sinuous rills across the rocky ribs of Our Planet.
This matrix is made of all of our gruesome excrement mixed and stirred together with ground up radioactive rocks dissolved by minute creatures and the soft grinding of hard tectonic plates and soft flesh, digested and fed to fruit trees to slake their thirst as they work to create a perfect plum out of the dreck and dross of this rich mud pie. And this oh so soft machine which is not a machine at all and only a machine in our poor benighted vision, produces life in all its’ wondrous forms and infinite variations.
This vibrant Life embodies the spirit of something holy which we cannot name; or we give it a thousand Names and we explain it away by likening it to the mechanical devices that we make which are such poor copies. Our creations are ugly and full of protruding bolts and screws and sharp edges and we tolerate what intrudes upon Your Creation in the name of practicality and utility because it is the best we can do right now with our limited Minds. Nowhere do we begin to compare with the precious gift of Your infinite Creation.
If only we would use the rational part of our minds to acknowledge the perfect Oneness of everything We perceive. We are inexorably connected to “What Is “even though we try to escape it. We pretend we are separate from our World, but our too substantial flesh is earth born and star made. Let us gain again our sense of awe and even fear for in the end we have no choice but to live in this holy miracle while we can. Cling to this delicate, precious thing we call Life and value it, for it is priceless and God-given. We have been given the blessing and the gift of life freely and what we owe is only our gratitude and our awe.
Your Quiet Place
- Posted by Barely Ablemann on December 29, 2008
- View Barley Ableman's blog
What gives your life meaning and provides a stable framework for all your dealings with your close friends and family and the larger wide world? Perhaps none of these questions ring any bells for you, but certainly sometimes we pause to think about how we fit into the Web 2.0 World we all inhabit.
In our best moments we are clear about what we want to do with our time here on Planet Earth. We hear the news, we do our daily duties, we pay our bills or not, and we try to live our vision. We work to make a life according to our best wisdom. We look for what works in this world and we develop strategies to reach the next point.
If you are lucky, you were given a compass by your folks and your family, and with this tool you were taught how to navigate this bewildering world of random events and contradictory information. If you are really lucky, you have thought about where you came from and how you got here and you have resolved many of your questions and
any doubts you may have had about how to live this life. God bless you!
If you are not so lucky, maybe your folks are divorced or so wrapped up in their own lives they cannot provide a clear and open channel to communicate to you how much you are loved by them. Maybe they have never found what their true purpose is and that makes it hard to get past all the drama.
I have the feeling that many of us have struggled with personal issues and we have not always been able to reach a resolution. The Big World of human affairs does not make it easy. The Big World often conspires to confuse us and to frustrate our best efforts.
Without good people around us it is harder to find our way. Without a Compass, it is hard to get our bearings.
The real question is how do we find our quiet place. How do we get from the hurleyburley of everyday life, our overstimulated hyped-up world, to that calm center of our own waking mind where life makes sense and we are at peace with all of the seemingly conflicting drives we have. Brothers and Sisters, Your quiet place exists inside your heart and your spirit and you can reach it when you are truly ready. The secret of Life is that there are no secrets. Or you could say there are many secrets, none of which are beyond you.
There is one big contradiction here. I want to tell you that there is a Way, but there is not just one way. But how it works is pretty much the same for everyone. You must understand and know that you alone hold the key.
Each of us must find his or her own way. Once you make the simple decision that you have the control over how you choose to act and to react to what happens in your life, you will find that things begin to work better. You will find that when you take responsibility for your actions and you own your feelings, many demons fade away.
All of us are different. We are individual sentient beings. We all have our feelings and the real secret is to accept our feelings for what they are; expressions of our emotion state, and like the clouds in the sky, they are subject to the errant breezes that blow around us. The trick is to realize we do not have to let every little thought or emotion drive us.
Try accepting everything you feel for one week without blaming yourself for any of your feelings. Allow yourself your personal space to be a human. We are not perfect. We are not Gods. Sometimes we foul up. Sometimes we do a good thing. Thank yourself for the good thing you choose to do. As a matter of fact, thank yourself regularly. The key here is to accept yourself, warts and all.
How does it feel to be accepted? You are not really changing any of the external facts of your life, but you are creating a valance change in your own personal dynamic. That simple change of outlook will make a huge difference in how you deal with others and how the world will deal with you. Once you have made peace with yourself, you will find you are also at peace with the world. When you can work from your own calm center, your world will become what you want it to be.
Choosing the Good
- Posted by Barely Ablemann on November 7, 2009
- View Barley Ableman's blog
Once you achieve a precarious balance between the demands and judgments of the harsh world at large and the self-acceptance of one's own value and integrity in the face of all odds, you can appreciate the adage that "goodness is it's own reward". Without being smug or self-righteous, without placing blame or attributing coarse motives to others, you are free in your mind, heart, and spirit to value and to choose the "good". For those folks who have found comfort in religion, this is known as God's grace and has everything to do with the act of acceptance. Accepting yourself totally without any blame allows you to be free from petty thoughts and emotions. Ironically, it is the very act of letting go of our need to be critical of ourselves and others that frees us to really appreciate our positive motives.
There is a tendency to set up expectations which are impossible to achieve, then we find ourselves in a constant state of upset. Instead of denigrating our own efforts, and feeling dissatisfaction with every result, we can choose to set up standards that acknowledge that perfection does not exist in the realm of human affairs. Although we have words like "perfection" and "flawless", we need to acknowledge that they only point to an ideal. That ideal is rooted in an absolute, but in the real world of human endeavor, actions exist on a continuum. We are not capable of always making perfect choices, but we can value a choice or action by affirming the amount of good it produces. And we realize we can accept our own value as sentient humans knowing that we will make mistakes.
By dwelling in this "acceptance and grateful zone", you find that you are free in your mind and in your spirit to do your best. When your heart is whole and your spirit is untroubled, you can focus all of your energies on dealing effectively and creatively with whatever life brings you.
When you wish no harm to others, you do not have to suffer from any of the mean emotions that ultimately serve to demean only you. Thinking of yourself in the context of your larger community allows you to place a proper prospective on your behavior. It is this act of empathy and compassion which is at the core of both true religion and civilization. Once you accept yourself with all of your flaws and imperfections, you can then see that other folks are also struggling with the same issue. Extending some acknowledgement to them, and including both of you as fellow pilgrims in life's parade, can make win-win equations out of what might have been a more confrontation situation.
Furthermore, if you are concerned with the welfare of others, your concern provides a counterbalance and a respite from thinking too much about your own worries. It puts us in relationship with our fellows and sets up a parameter of possible cooperation and mutual benefit. And finally,it provides a proper base and moral framework for achieving harmonious outcomes in many of your interactions with others. Ultimately, you do reap what you sow.
Whatever the interchange, your true energy will manifest itself. If your spirit is at peace with itself, you will have already achieved a victory. By joining that sacred spark that is inside of you to a realization and acceptance that you are part of the holy infinite energy of all life, you will find a quiet joy in knowing you belong here, as part of a greater harmony that our critical minds are not capable of comprehending
A History of Thoughtlessness
- Posted by Barely Ablemann on December 21, 2008
- View Barley Ableman's blog
There is a continuum in most other areas of life. Halfway measures do not usually suffice but in life we strive to find the middle ground. Except for jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, usually we must chose a course of action which keeps us in the middle of the path. As humans we instinctively know this, so much so, we seldom feel the need to talk about it. Middle America knows this. Mainstream America knows this. And all the specialists like gymnasts, jugglers, acrobats, and ironworkers know it is a fine line between too much and not enough.
The mind alone is not sufficient to guide us on our perilous journey. We employ other skills and finer feelings to keep our balance. As a matter of fact, if we rely only on our minds, we soon find ourselves in trouble. Whenever we try to think our way through a particular skill, we encounter more difficulty than if we just "feel" our way through it. We do so many things just by feel after we comprehend the basic principles of the thing. From shooting pool to driving a car, we have to use a combination of our senses, our emotions, and our intellects in order to perform practically any task in an expedient manner.
Learning a new thing successfully is usually about approaching it in a calm way, patiently putting in the time it takes for our muscles, nerves, and minds to integrate and to coordinate smoothly, until finally we stop " thinking" the task and we just do it. So there is a sort of automatic pilot that takes over once we allow the greater wisdom of our whole selves to find the place where we balance the overwhelming power of our minds and the irresistable power of our emotions. So there is always a continuum of many little choices and fine graduations involved in the doing of every new thing. And we need our whole being focused and harmoniously balanced in order to make true progress. As country folks say, as long as you hold your mouth right, you have a better chance. I would add that also means having a prayer on your lips and a song in your heart.
Some would say to empty your mind of all thoughts. But I think you need to be mindful and mindless at the same time. These are just words we use to describe what we think is happening. Paying attention is a function of allowing your mind to work even if we are getting other signals from our bodies. But without sensory data we soon go crazy in one way or another.
So we are not just a mind in a body, but a whole sentient being . We apprehend the World with our whole selves, not just with a disembodied intellect we can measure with an intelligence test. We all know this. We call it "common sense" which is another way of saying we must listen with all of our senses and with all of our memory and with all of our intelligence and with all of our feelings. The race is not won with any one part of ourselves, but with all parts of ourselves seamlessly integrated and working together.
We cannot use the rational capabilities of the brain if the emotional valance of the body is askew. Also we cannot be at our best if one part of our mind is stuck in a loop constantly trying to replay feelings we were not able to let go of or to integrate into our world view. In order to be free, we must empty our minds. As long as one part of your brain is full of thoughts or feelings that impede the full engagement of your emotions, you will not be able to focus the full power of all your capabilities on whatever your task is.
So the goal of living is to use all of your faculties to their upmost by staying free in your mind, heart, and spirit, by staying in the calm center of your own tranquility. An orderly mind means understanding the world as a meaningful whole thing. Being wholehearted means to have an acceptance of your place in the Universe and your relationship with all other sentient beings in the world. Keeping your spirit alive means acknowledging your undeniable connection to something greater than yourself. All of these various parts are not separate. They are all part of one thing and that thing is a living, breathing, conscious entity. That thing is you. That thing is God.
What we forget sometimes, in our feelings of lonesomeness, is that we are not alone. We are connected to everything around us. We are all made of matter, elements, stardust. We all share the same air. We are the sons and daughters of sons and daughters. We all drink a magical fluid we call water and we think it is common, but the same water we drink fell as pristine rain a million years ago. Everyone of us goes into trance state for some part of the day or night and we think our dreams are just movies in our heads. With our eyes we see how different others look and we forget they also share a joy in being alive. And we all have a right to be here because we all share that same devine spark of Life which God has given us.
Each of us can allow ourselves to be proud of what we share and to be proud of our own power to create value for our families, our communities, and our world. We profit in the world and leave a proper legacy only to the extent that we understand how intimate are our connections and at the same time how delicate our tissue of Life on this planet is. For humans to continue in this worldly domain, we must connect the dots and acknowlege the things we need to do to maintain the viability of both our tacit social contract as a species on this planet and the path we choose for the Whole Earth. If we are really the most intelligent species on the planet, then we need to use all of our skill to continue to choose Life and not oblivion.
Sense and Sensation
- Posted by Barely Ablemann on February 6, 2009
- View Barley Ableman's blog
Without thinking about our miracle life, we forget how uncommon are the ingredients of our world. We are joined in so many ways that we seldom ponder. For one, we all share the same air. We take it for granted. The air is free. It is a given. But this invisible fluid ocean of air is what surrounds us and permeates our being every second of every minute we exist. Only when we are deprived of air do we realize its value.
Blissfully unaware of the precarious nature of walking the Earth and all the things that combine here to permit us to go about our agendas, we forget ourselves. Are we all not wetted by the same clear rain? This tasteless universal solvent, this elixir we also imbibe and rely on to lubricate our marvelous metallic frames is another given. There is something really miraculous about this other fluid, but as long as we have it, we do not pay it much mind. However, we are willing to pay for plain water. Maybe one day we will stop putting crap in our rivers.
Except for those who witness the aurora borealis, we do not contemplate the electromagnetic force field that daily directs our sense of what is up and what is down. The interaction of the solar wind with our gravity permits our world to hang in dynamic balance and hold on to our bubble of air and water. Some suggest that the Earth’s magnetism will diminish and without this “magnetism”, the center will not hold. In other words, without gravity there can be no levity.
So, we are all connected to our world in a multitude of ways we do not think about until we are forced to. We see ourselves as separate from this world. But when we really think about it, we are so closely woven into the fabric of this world, it is ironic that we do indeed see ourselves as separate from it. Like Hercules, we derive our strength from the earth. We need to feel the connection. Without the stream of data which our senses are constantly interpreting for us, we soon go insane. If put in a sensory deprivation tank for two or three days, we start to hallucinate, our brains furiously trying to make up for the lack of sensation.
And in our hunger to feel a tactile connection with our world and to this rough earth, we assume we are well anchored to the ground and indeed we are. We just do not spend many cpu cycles thinking about how really connected we are. But instead of reveling in the miracle of our being and all the various ways we all are part of one huge marvelous whole thing, we define ourselves as apart from mother earth. We forget the pain of our birth and the joy of being alive and connected to the living matrix. We forget how all the dynamics of life on our big rock work in some mysterious way to facilitate our being alive. We forget about God.
Our whole history has been about trying to escape this rough earth, this seemingly solid ground. We seek to escape the very air. Born of water, raised up on land, soaring through the air, we seek freedom from our corporeal bonds. In our fear we take refuge in our logical minds and take pleasure in giving names to everything around us as if knowing a thing has a name makes it more understandable and less fearful. We see what is wild and free and call it “wilderness” and think it needs to be subdued and ordered into neat, well manicured trailer court spaces or large lavishly landscaped mac-mansions.
To be sure, we are just doing the best we can with what we have. We know there is an order to the universe and we are trying to recapitulate it in our man-made world. What we forget is that God has already ordered the Universe and we just need to see ourselves in it and as an integral part of His Holy World. And the thing that makes it holy is that it is not man-made. The hand of the Creator is manifest in every aspect of every tiniest part of the natural world and in us, although we do not want to see it. Our arrogant minds, so proud of our powers, are full of fears. Because we cannot accept that our powers are less than Godlike, we over-compensate to prove we are smarter than all the rest of Creation. So far that has only resulted in calamity.
There is a Way out of the box. The true Path has been pointed and marked by the many avatars who have already given the gift of their lives and their vision to us. We have only to take off the blinders from our eyes. When we remember to see our World as Holy, when we remember to see God in the eyes of our fellows and ourselves, when we remember to see ourselves in the context of His world, we can begin the work of recreating the harmonious balance that is the rule of the universe.
We can see ourselves as part of a divine plan that we can follow by getting with the program and establishing steady-state policies that are benign and non-toxic. We need to realign our industrial paradigm of mindless efficiency with the more reasonable efficiency of the natural processes which have performed for millions of years without eviscerating the very basis for ongoing viability.
Finally, we have to see that the very idea of the “machine” is an inaccurate concept. Insofar as we define ourselves as machinelike in any way is to deny our true identity. Finding our true roots and our true nature will ultimately lead us away from this mistake in our thinking.
Our True Legacy
- Posted by Barely Ablemann on December 21, 2008
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Was your path ever clear and your heart free of fear when you would permit yourself to feel God's great love? When you would accept the cup and drink it down to the dregs. Did you ever feel you had your hand on the rudder of your sturdy and sleek little craft, but that God's plan was the compass that you guided you?
Did you ever feel resolute in your mind and at peace in your heart and soul to know you were at long last on the right path? God's path is always there for you. He lights the way and marks the High way so the phantoms of your fears are nothing but wispy apparitions. Once you have taken the chance, once you have paid the cost of one lottery ticket, you do not have to buy any more.
All it takes is to know He has given you His infinite love and you can allow your heart to be at peace. Once you realize you belong to Him, He is part of you, there is nothing that can take that gift away. No matter where you go, He is with you. He is the breath in your body and when you have no breath left to breathe, He will gather you up and take you back into His enfolding arms and accept your broken form and welcome your soul back into His infinite mystery.
We come from Him and we go to Him and all He asks of us is to see Him in all His works in our world. Those who forget Him are lost in the confusion of thinking they are alone and beholden to no one. They see not the love that brought them here to this golden world. They believe the very life they live is a happy accident and a random collision of heedless forces. No wonder they have no real feeling for themselves or for the miracle of life all around them. They are committed only to themselves and see a very small world where nothing is connected to anything else.
There is no relationship that matters for they have no place to stand and to say I am part of this wondrous world. I am part of the beauty and the intelligence of a fabulous intricacy that the hand of man did not create. What I see with my eyes is not all there is. What I feel with my heart and soul is closer to the truth we all actually live. What I think with my mind is so much less than what I sense with my spirit. Once you see the world as holy and yourself as part of that unfathomable holiness, you can no longer do the small, petty things that comprise many of our so-called human interactions. The veil has been lifted from our eyes and we begin to value what is really precious.
Everything suddenly makes sense. We take pleasure in doing the right thing for the right reasons. Doing what is good is no longer an abstract concept. We no longer harbor envies and jealousies because we understand the gift we have been given is the same gift God has given to all sentient creatures. We have been given the gift of life. We are witness to Creation. We all share the same air. We are wetted by the rain. The sun warms us and sustains us equally. We are birthed by mothers who carried us in faith and hope and shared their breath and blood with us. Our debt to those who came before us can never be fully paid. We were called into Life and given the opportunity to share our special talents. What we give back is the love we have been given. What we give back is our true legacy.
Grateful
Holy Father, hear my prayer, how can I turn to You when my heart cannot bear to let my tears flow. All my sadness is not a treasure to be hoarded up. It does not serve me to hold it.
Let me find the path again.
I walk with You in my heart and mind.
You are my spirit.
You are the marrow of my bones.
You are the light in my eyes.
You are the breath I breathe.
Everything that is good You have given me.
Let me find Your Way.
Help me open my heart.
Allow me to witness Your Miracle one more day.
Make me truly mindful of all Your mysteries.
Amen