“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

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We experience what we express. If we wish to increase love in the world, it’s up to us to bring it.

It was the 16th century Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli who coined the term: “the end justifies the means.” He championed power as an end in itself and argued that the means used to achieve it are immaterial. A modern interpretation might be “winning, no matter what the cost.”

As we witness the accumulating costs of this strategy in the world today, we may come to the point of saying, “Enough. It’s time for fundamental change.” And we could describe that change with a rework of Machiavelli’s statement into “the means determine the end.”

It’s obvious to every chef that the ingredients they use affects taste. Substituting salt for sugar will make the cake taste different! What prohibits us from seeing this simple truth, for instance, when it comes to our international relationships? The eight-year Iraq war is reported to have cost 1.1 trillion ¹ dollars although that number is often contested and amended, higher or lower depending on the analyst and their political leanings.

Considering the results – which includes inspiring a whole new generation of vengeance seeking terrorists – one might ask what this money could have achieved had it simply been given to the Iraqi people? Instead of bombing their homes and cities and killing their children, what if we had just given them a trillion dollars? It’s a stunning thought.

Outlandish ideas like this are never taken seriously. Similarly, insane ideas like fighting for peace are rarely questioned. To simplify the issue, imagine proposing that turning a green wall blue could be achieved by applying more green paint. Or, disputing the idea that a hungry person would benefit from food!

What blinds us to simple truths? Our own brilliance. We are blinded by the light of our self-illuminated human minds. Human cleverness is impressive… until one looks at side effects and long-term consequences. If you remember the movie, The Graduate, you may also recall a piece of cryptic wisdom offered young Benjamin by a family friend: “Plastic.” ² The reference was to a profitable product worth investing in early. Good idea. But, today, “Evidence is mounting that the chemical building blocks that make plastics so versatile are the same components that might harm people and the environment. And its production and disposal contribute to an array of environmental problems.”

The means determine the end. If we shift to that fundamental belief, we would obviously evaluate every “good idea” to see if it would remain good, generations down the line. “Many people are familiar with the Seventh Generation philosophy commonly credited to the Iroquois Confederacy but practiced by many Native nations. The Seventh Generation philosophy mandated that tribal decision makers consider the effects of their actions and decisions for descendants seven generations into the future. There was a clear understanding that everything we do has consequences for something and someone else, reminding us that we are all ultimately connected to creation.”

Indeed, we are all connected to creation … and we are creators. We create every moment of every day in some way. Imagine if we took this long view and mediated our creativity with a sobering vision of long-term implications. It’s likely we would stop doing some things, do other things differently, and invent new strategies with inherent value and little contrary damage.

Blinded by the light? Perhaps we have been. But here’s a simple remedy. Instead of shining light in each other’s eyes, competing to see who can be the most impressive human, we could shine light on the path forward, to illuminate a future created one considerate step at a time. Who could do this? Anyone who comes to understand that we do experience what we express and understands that if we care about the world changing in positive ways then we must bring the required change through the way we choose to live.

We may dream of becoming more enlightened but what really matters is to be “enlightening,” to light up our lives and the world around us with the brilliance – not of our disconnected human minds – but with the Divine light that shines through all creation. We have the capacity to receive and transmit and herein lies a great promise for our world.

References:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
2. https://www.ehn.org/plastic-environmental-impact-2501923191.html

“To find out if she really loved me, I hooked her up to a lie detector.
And just as I suspected, my machine was broken.”

~ Dark Jar Tin Zoo

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Denial seems hardwired into humanity, especially relative to whatever we desperately don’t wish to see and know.

A question that challenges the status quo and can expand our holistic awareness is, “If I wasn’t already doing this, would I choose to?” We can apply this to any area of our lives. “If I wasn’t working in this job today, would I choose to? If I wasn’t married to my partner, would I propose to him or her today? If I didn’t live in this house, town, country, would I choose to?”

It can be decidedly disruptive to ask this question, answer it honesty, then consider the implications with a second question: “What am I going to do about this?”

If we discover compromise and realize we’re living a lie, what then? Taking action is challenging, even when there’s an urgent need. In fact, as the saying goes, we tend to prefer the devil we know to devil we don’t know. In other words, whatever is going on may be bad but if I change things it could get even worse.

This belief stands in contrast to research that demonstrates how action of any kind seems to have a built-in value. In one famous study, lighting was increased in the production area of a manufacturing plant. Employees reported appreciation for this improvement. In another location, lighting was softened, with the same results – employees registered their approval. The lighting wasn’t the point; it was the evidence that management cared about workers.

We could translate this personally, in order to relax our anxiety about taking action. Obviously, we’ll do our best to determine how to proceed when we become aware of needed change, but it may not be as important to hit the bullseye as to just do something, to break inertia, and to demonstrate that we care … about ourselves!

Procrastination is common in the personal development field where scores of individuals live with self-judgment, wishing they were doing more/less/different than they are but remaining paralyzed to actually make any sort of change. “I know I should meditate but I just can’t find the time,” is a common sentiment. Words are interesting. In this phrase, it sounds like time is elusive and capable of hiding from us. “I can’t find the time” suggests that time got lost somewhere and, regardless of my best efforts, it remains inaccessible.’

A more honest admission would be, “I have the idea of meditating but at the moment there are other things more important to me… so I do them instead of meditating.” What’s instructive and liberating about this kind of honesty is that once we face facts we achieve clarity and are immediately in a better position to either affirm our choice – to own it fully – or to make a new choice.

Any one of us who undertakes this kind of self-examination soon discovers that we are neurotic. A neurotic is defined as being “in a negative or anxious emotional state.” That pretty much covers every one of us, at times. Why? Because we are all connected and are affecting each other’s state of being, via the field of human consciousness that we share. Of course, there’s more influencing us in that field than we can ever become consciously aware of.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung coined the term, “collective unconscious” which he wrote, “comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors, right back to the earliest beginnings.” ¹ In other words, our “free will” is compromised by influences stretching throughout time. We may think our choices are entirely our own but all of us are driven, to some degree, by forces that must forever remain unknown to us.

Acknowledging anxiety, a state that humans in general share and have shared throughout time, we might also consider contentment and note that whatever feeling we are having personally is being broadcast and shared. Returning to the idea of meditation, then, this means that any of us who do prioritize this ancient practice have the opportunity to influence consciousness. The meditative state improves our ability to think clearly, so there’s a personal benefit. But it also extends an influence to others.

All the more reason to do it, which we will, the moment it becomes our natural choice. In the meantime, what if we were to accept ourselves just as we are, right where we are, and learn to take ourselves and our spiritual questing less seriously? As the saying goes, angels know how to fly because they take themselves so lightly!

And, as Gordon Allport wrote in The Individual and His Religion, “The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.” ²

References:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious
2. Gordon W. Allport, from The Individual and His Religion

“Believe those who are seeking the truth.
Doubt those who find it.”

~ Andre Gide

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There’s a reason our pioneering ancestors were called settlers. They settled for what they found. Should we ever stop searching?

Every seeker, whether their desired goal is spiritual enlightenment, success, or happiness, assumes there’s a destination and longs to reach it. But the wise person continues their search, always moving the final goal posts beyond where they’ve reached, so there is always more.

In his classic, The Journey to the East, Hermann Hesse wrote, “For our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times.”

We may agree and glibly say, “It’s the journey, not the destination,” but that’s a bromide, not an actual value for most people; the destination looms important. Goal-orientation is a symptom of a deeper issue, our anxiety about the unknown. In fact, much of civilized life seems to be devoted to turning unknown into known. We light the night to escape our fear of darkness; we spurn the vicissitudes of sun and wind in favor of splitting atoms to generate our power. (Don’t worry about seasons, just flip a switch). And many mothers can remember the assault of marketing around baby formula, insisting it was better for infants. Why? Because nutrients could be measured. Known vs unknown.

In her book, The Journey of Not Knowing, Julie Benezet writes, “The unknown shows up in many ways that we might not recognize. Not knowing is that empty space where the answer is not immediately in front of you. It is the pause in the conversation that you cannot immediately fill with anything that feels like a real answer. It is a moment where you are not sure where to go next. It is a yawning cavern of silence where all you might hear is self-doubt or skepticism. It is a sleepless night where you can only imagine bad outcomes.” ¹

The unknown is also the domain of spirit, because our minds are incapable of defining, understanding, and controlling the intelligence of the cosmos. And regardless of how clever we become in dissecting reality to determine how it works, we will never be able to fully comprehend that which made us. This doesn’t mean we will stop trying, nor that we should. But it could humble us and assure us that there is nothing wrong with being on the road to find out.

Our search for Truth will go on forever, just like the road that Bilbo Baggins sang about when he first left the Shire in Lord of the Rings:

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say. ²

There’s peace in the realization that we will reach many destinations, way stations along the way, but that we will continue “ever on and on.” As T.S. Eliot wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

The truth we seek is and always will be familiar, because what we actually long for is a deeper experience of Self. Not “self,” that body-centered personality with hopes for something better, but Self, the universal truth of who we are and have always been in oneness. This is the experience that we were born with and, before we die – perhaps not until our final moments – we will experience again, not as a discovery but a reunion. Then we will finally know that the truth we have been seeking is the truth of who we are and will always be, in the eternity of unfolding life, forever questing for something unknown.

References:
1. From The Journey of Not Knowing, by Julie Benezet
2. From Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

“To thine own self be true.”

~ Polonius, from Hamlet by William Shakespeare

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Some people become highly skilled at obscuring the truth. But there’s someone who always knows the lie … they do, themselves.

What is Truth?

Joseph Goebbels said that “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.” Likewise, if you speak the truth often enough, it eventually becomes recognizable.

This relates to more than words. We all develop a sense for authenticity but here’s the problem. A person can seem authentic when they genuinely believe the lies they have repeated to themselves often enough that they’ve become their truth.

A controversial case in point is the muddied career of bicyclist champion Lance Armstrong. Quoting from Deadspin, “Lance Armstrong went on Oprah, looked her in the eye, and admitted to the world that his iconic comeback story was fueled by the most comprehensive doping regimen in cycling history.” 1 For those of us who followed this story, his admission was jarring. Because, continuing with the quote, “The seven-time Tour de France winner and cancer survivor had spent his career brashly denying that he’d ever doped, going so far as to shoot defiant commercials about how clean he was and shouting down his detractors in public.”

Millions were deceived, because Armstrong had deceived himself.

How likely is it that we may be playing the same game of self-deception? What might be a lie that you’ve come to accept as the truth? Let’s start with the biggest one, that we are separate from God. Now, not everyone claims to believe in God and to those people I would say, “Don’t worry, God doesn’t believe in you either.” “God” is a word. We can use it or any number of substitutes, like Source, the Divine, Life Force, Love, the spirit, etc. By whatever name, when we refer to “it” as something/someone separate from ourselves, we are lying. And we’ve been lying about this so long we’ve come to believe that it is true.

It’s been 135 years since Friedrich Nietzsche declared: “God is dead.” Those three words launched 135 years of philosophical debate as to what he really meant and what were the implications. But he also wrote, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred yes is needed: the spirit now wills his own will.” 2

This infers both a connection between “the spirit” and personal will and speaks of choice: “a sacred yes is needed.” So, while the God of theory – that separate entity alive in the domain of belief – may be dead, Theoretical God has been replaced by the experience of connection and, taken to its logical end, oneness.

The lie? We are separate from “the spirit.” The truth? We are one.

This reminds me of one of the most memorable lines of movie dialogue in recent years, delivered by Jack Nicholson’s character in the 1992 film, A Few Good Men: “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!”

So, how about us? Can we handle the truth, this truth, that we are one with spirit? Imagine, if we were to truly, deeply, accept this as the truth how our lives would change. You may have seen the bumper sticker, “What would Jesus do?” Well, if we accepted an identity irrevocably interwoven with the Divine, what would we do?

We’d probably stop complaining, for starters! And speaking of Jesus, we might even follow some of his more radical suggestions like loving our enemies. That’s certainly not the attitude or behavior of most people today, including those who profess to be religious. Their faith is theoretical. For them, God – that God who lives in the domain of belief – never died. Worshipping that God seems to absolve them of the responsibility to be God-like. In fact, they likely would shout “Blasphemy” towards those who claimed oneness in spirit.

What is the truth for us? Do we cling to our separateness while yearning for oneness, or do we embrace our oneness and seize every moment as the opportunity to expand our experience of the Truth?

If we repeat the experience of being that which we have yearned for often enough we’ll come to believe it’s true! Because … it is.

References:
1. https://deadspin.com/the-ridiculous-saga-of-lance-armstrong-the-cheater-who-1802288537
2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None