Decisions, Decisions...

From my Facebook Status:
"OK - decision time... should I, or should I not, take a risk and spend $45 of the $70 I have left on a trip over the water to collect the mail and get a haircut ($25 haircut and $20.20 ferry ticket)?

Will cash come in to refill my depleted coffers in time to get me across the water, get some gas and pay for parking for Friday's court hearing to decide whether boy and I can go back to Australia to live?"...

Friend's response: 

"Maybe getting a cheaper haircut. In White Center it would be $10"...

My reply:

"I know... but I have to go to Shoreline to pick up the mail, and the haircut is a discount someone gave me for a place in Lake Forest Park - basically three streets away... 

Going to White Centre for the haircut and then up to Shoreline to get the mail would be the extra $15 in petrol and time...

Am thinking this is a trust test; have to stay in the NOW and keep moving, not sit at home being scared my resources are limited and if I use them up, there will be no more"...
  

And no, this is not a "poor me, look how hard life is" pity post...

I'm really awake to the fact that at this point, I'm being given the opportunity to look deeply at every situation I create/find myself in, at all its possibilities and at the choices I make...

Am I coming from a place of love - expansion, or fear - contraction?

POST SCRIPT: 
Seems the Universe thought it was a good idea to get my hair cut yesterday; recalcitrant ex-husband overnight deposited some of what he owes in my bank account, so the cheque I wrote to the salon is covered AND we can get around! 

Funny that he puts in the money - that he's been withholding for two months - the night before we go to court to argue over whether I can take our child back to Australia to live...

Guess it doesn't look good in court, when you're saying how much you love your son and how much of an unfit mother his other parent is, to be behind in your payments, so far behind that your child becomes homeless as a result...

What Are We Waiting For?

The Time Is Now...

...Where Are You?

When The Chickens Come Home To Roost...

I'm experimenting with the concepts of "rules are for fools, guidelines are for the wise"...and "cause and effect"...

I initiated a 'cause' a while back and am now seeing how the possible 'effects' might play out... and the stakes are higher than at any other time in my life...

A case of personal will and personal responsibility in action...

Daring to walk the talk... and living the outcomes!

Well, to be more accurate, quite a long time ago, I chose a particular way to respond to someone else's decision/action/cause...

Morally I still feel OK about that decision, though at the time I didn't envisage that my choice would bring this degree of risk and potential loss...

And I guess that person's decision/action/cause was triggered by a combination of his/her beliefs, things I had done previously and the other circumstances in his/her life... 

Can you see the chain of cause and effect in your own life - how everything is connected, nothing happens in isolation... not in our lives and not in the larger world either?... 

The world is a circle without a beginning and nobody knows just where it ends... and because of that, none of us can claim to be victims... we make choices which ripple out to touch other beings and impact other situations and then we must live with/through the consequences...

Burt Bacharach:

 

LYRICS:
The world is a circle without a beginning,
And nobody knows where it really ends.
Everything depends on where you
Are in the cirle that never begins.
Nobody knows where the circle ends.

La la la,
La la la la la la.

And just because you think you're small,
That doesn't mean that you're small at all.
And just the way a tiny branch is like a tree to a twig,
To someone else you are big.

The world is a circle without a beginning,
And nobody knows where it really ends.
Woooa!
Everything depends on where you
Are in the cirle that's spinning around.
Half of the time we are upside down.

La la, etc.

And just because they say you're weak,
That doesn't mean you've a weak physique.
And even if they're partly right,
At least they're partially wrong.
To someone else you are strong.

La, la, etc

And just because they say you're slow,
That doesn't mean that you're slow, you know.
And even if you're never first,
Compared to someone who's last,
They're sure to think you are fast.

The world is a circle without a beginning,
And nobody knows where it really ends.
Woooa!
Everything depends on where you
Are in the cirle that never begins.
Nobody knows where the circle ends.

La la, etc.

The world is a circle that never begins.
Nobody knows where the circle ends. 

 

 

Wisdom Of The Elders - The Land Owns Us

Clarity: Part Two - Rules Are For Fools...

The law will never make men free, it is men that have to make the law free. 

~ Henry David Thoreau

 

Me today is very different to the me that raised my first family...

I "woke up" around 1990, and with my spiritual awakening came a new way of looking at life and how we humans do 3D here on this planet...

I suddenly saw many of the incongruities, the incoherence, the dissonance we live with, enable in our daily life...

And I realised that most of the system and the rules we live by don't make any sense (other than enforcing the power over, and control of, the many by a few) and are really quite silly, if not outright toxic and damaging, and in some cases murderous...

For example...

"Thou shalt not kill... but if you kill someone else, we reserve the right to kill you...

and, 

we reserve the right to conscript you and send you off to war to kill and injure people you have never met and against whom you have no personal beef... 

Oh, and if you refuse to go where we send you and do that, or you run away from it because it's all too much and too horrible, we will punish you, even kill you - THAT'S RIGHT, WE'LL EVEN KILL YOU IF YOU REFUSE TO KILL OTHERS..."

Either life is sacred or it's not... make up your mind, world...

Then there's the fact that absolutely every single situation in life is different - happening at a different time, in a different place, to different people, in different circumstances, driven by different causes and motivations...

If every one of us on the planet saw the same event, we would have 6B+ different versions of that event, 6B+ different sets of beliefs about the morality or otherwise of whatever is playing out...

There is no black and white - everything is grey... and so it seems to me to be pointless to have set in stone a bunch of rules that must apply in all scenarios,  and which never have scope and flexibility built in to take into account complexity and context...

When I lived in Brisbane, I hung out with a bunch of women wanting to live authentic lives... real women... and one of the teachings/truths we were examining in our practice of being real was:

... guidelines are for the wise ...

Most of us have grown up accepting society's laws and rules by osmosis, never consciously looking at what they mean, where and why they originated, whether they're about safety or about maintaining power and control, whether we have ever been asked for our agreement to these strictures being placed on us as free human beings...

As far as I can tell, rules and laws were created by the few powerful 'haves' to protect themselves and their possessions from the many powerless 'have nots', making refusal, rebellion and revolution difficult...

Think about it... we're living in a world where there's no longer any sense of community, of clan or tribe, of working together and sharing resources and the product of that work.

We're each responsible for providing for ourselves, regardless of the circumstances.

And we've developed a system of trade, even of the basic necessities of life,  where goods pass through many hands from creator to consumer, and at each point of exchange become more expensive, with the final "buyer" paying much more than the creator received for the initial transaction.

Imagine a man or woman has no food for his/her hungry children, and is standing in front of a bakery looking at a loaf of bread;  this parent has no money (method of energy exchange) and no goods or services to trade for that loaf of bread in the window...

In other societal and economic structures, the community would have planted the seed, grown and harvested the wheat and made the bread together, and would have shared the fruits of their labours...

There's an order of Divine versus earthly logic that applies here...

Is it more of a "crime" to let one's children go hungry than it is to take (without offering immediate exchange) a loaf of bread that will alleviate that hunger?

Who does the law "thou shalt not steal" protect in this case?   The  most vulnerable in our community, or those who already are provided for?   Surely if the loaf of bread is up for sale, that means it's "surplus to requirements," as they say, and the "owner" already has plenty for his/her own needs?

Our forebears, at some point determined that taking something without exchange, even to feed the hungry, is an offence, punishable by imprisonment, whipping, having limbs amputated, enslavement, banishment and exile, and sometimes death...

And we still say all "stealing" is wrong, no matter what the circumstances leading up to the decision to take something without offering an immediate exchange...

This denies the fact that all of life is a circle, a connected web, where energy (money, food, love, caring, action) flows around the circle and will eventually come back to us...the return will not often be directly reciprocal, but it does return - all major spiritual traditions remind us of that...

When I was growing up in New Zealand, I remember hearing about the butter  and wheat mountains, that the west had, while at the same time we were reminded daily on our television screens about the plight of the starving children of Biafra...

40 years on and nothing has changed... we still have people and governments sitting on food to force the price to rise, while billions starve...

EU butter mountain to return

The European Union's notorious butter mountains and milk lakes are to return after a controversial decision to reintroduce dairy subsidies.

By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels 4:49PM GMT 22 Jan 2009

The European Commission has announced plans to artificially boost prices by buying up 139,000 tonnes of diary products at a cost to the public purse of £237 million.

From March 1 until the end of August, the EU will become the owner of 30,000 tonnes of butter and 109,000 tonnes of skimmed powder milk, paid for at above market cost to support the dairy industry.

The EU is has also agreed to begin new export subsidies for European butter, milk powder and butteroil.

Export subsidies and EU food stocks were last used in 2007 and the Commission last year tried to scrap such payments, a reform that was blocked by France and Germany.

Commission officials have played down the measure as a temporary move after a steep slide in milk prices triggered a 33 per cent decline in butter exports last year.

- Butter Mountain To Return

Which is really the "crime"?   Being reduced to live in circumstances where one has to "take" what one needs for survival, or with-holding the basic necessities of life because the "price" is too low?


And we have fooled ourselves into thinking that some deity set these rules into place, that they are sacred in some way...
  

I can't find it within me to believe that an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, all loving Divine Essence would see life in such a limited perspective... 

Or that it would contradict itself by decreeing "thou shalt not kill" and then order Abraham to sacrifice his son to prove his loyalty/faith, 

or that it would kill all life on earth except Noah and the other occupants of the ark...

Just as I can't find it within me to accept the logic that one must ALWAYS stop at a red light...

What if I have a passenger in the car who is in the middle of having a heart attack?

The light ahead turns red... there are no other cars in the intersection and none in view approaching...

Should I stop for the red light and wait obediently for it to turn to green?

Or does DIVINE LOGIC decree that this person's life, which is endangered, is more important than a "rule" that says: "Thou shalt always stop at a red light"?

How often do you think about the choices you are being asked/expected to make every day, and about what unconscious beliefs you hold about how the world works?   

Do you ask yourself what are the "rules" you give conscious consent to following, every time you have to make a decision?

I believe that the purpose of living in this world is for each of us to come into our own sovereignty, to actualise ourselves as fully evolved humans, making the best, most conscious choices for ourselves (and the highest good) at every moment.

And that means we have to wake up and learn to think for ourselves... take responsibility for our lives and be willing to be held accountable...

Our world discourages us from that.   It exists in its current form through the manipulation of the many by a few, to maintain the paradigm of power and control...

And if too many of us "wake up", we will exercise our power and will no longer be able to be controlled...

“Know the rules well,

so you can break them effectively.”

  ~ Dalai Lama XIV

PS: 

My friend Janice (who's using crutches) today posted on Facebook her experience of being made to wait 20 minutes by the bus driver, at the bus stop, outside in the cold, until she was "officially" allowed to board the bus...

I replied that it's a sad day when common sense and compassion are over-ridden by "rules"... 

And thinking about it, the lack of common sense and compassion and the imposition by others of silly 'rules' are the reasons we can't stay where we are living now, any longer...

Thanks Janice, for creating the space for me to see that!

 

The Universal Human - The New Mainstream

 

Radical new possibilities dependent on conscious evolution...

All The World Longs For Peace...

 

So, if all the world and all the cultures in the world and all the spiritual teachings of the world long for, call for, beg for peace, what are we going to DO to make peace real for us all?

Our leaders don't seem to want peace... 

They talk about it, but nothing they do seems to end the conflict that's killing our planet and everything that lives on it...

Maybe that's because there is too much power and money in war and disease and planetary destruction...

Making peace is a personal responsibility, a personal choice, a personal ACTION...

What will you do today and every day, in your personal life, in your family, in your community, in your society, in your country, to BIRTH AND RAISE PEACE?

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa...

There's an adage that says that for every finger we point at someone else, there are three pointing back at us...

Try it - point your forefinger accusingly at someone... 

Look at your hand - three fingers pointing back at yourself...

And as my friend December commented today: "We're all mirrors. Should you not like what you see in others, then it's time to re-examine what you're reflecting."

Which, coincidentally was what I've been thinking about since yesterday's horrible row with my housemates...

1:  What's my responsibility in this mess?

2:  What echos of old wounds am I hearing/feeling?

3:  Who does my housemate represent in my old, unresolved dramas?

4: How am I behaving/treating others in ways similar to my housemate?

5: What maladaptive behaviour do I do to hide my insecurities from myself and others...

 

The second and third questions are easily answered -  my housemate carries the astrological energy of my father and some of the behaviours of my mother... 

And like most of us, I still have some processing, releasing and integrating to do of old crap that comes from having experienced their dysfunctional relationship dynamics and parenting...

Question 1 is also not hard to answer, if I'm willing to be truthful with myself...

In addition to some physical issues that mess with my biology and mood and some emotional hangovers from really stressful experiences, I'm stuck in a place of stubborn resistance to the changes that have occurred in my life over the past 8.5 years...

I said "yes" to something to which I could have said "no", and I'm mad at myself for that.   I saw the red flags and I knew it was going to be a very hard journey and I chose to go along with it anyway... (And the gifts of going on this journey include my wonderful younger son, as well as uncovering toxic patterns that have played out in my family over many generations, and the chance to use that knowledge and decide it stops with me... which is great and sucks at the same time!)

I went into survival mode to deal with domestic violence and breast cancer (which were happening at the same time) and I took care of us (my son and I) and daily business, but had to leave dealing with the emotional fall out until our safety needs were met... The domestic violence triggered echos of abuse in my family when I was young, that has never really been dealt with.   Now that we are no longer in day-to-day crisis, I'm finally feeling the emotional storm and it's no fun!

I have an inner critic that says at 52, I ought to have my life in order - look at what I had way back then and look at what my life is now... It's certainly not in order - instead, it's in complete chaos...    

The critic conveniently ignores the fact that I was living my former life on "auto-pilot", with very little consciousness and no authenticity.   Yes, it was full of the normal 'stuff' and activity and I had my other children, but otherwise it was pretty much empty... 

In fact, that emptiness became so all engulfing that I knew that if I didn't change, my spirit would die.

Do you remember those old cathode-tube televisions? Remember how when you turn them off, that white dot gets smaller and smaller until it disappears into the blackness?

Well, I felt like I was that white dot, and if I didn't change my life, fast, I would completely disappear into that bottomless, endless black hole...

And while I tell other people - my clients - we all do the best we can with what we've got, my inner critic won't allow that truism to apply to me.   

And what makes me so special that it shouldn't apply to me too, you ask?   Nothing at all, so I need to ease up on me...

And there's value in learning to be comfortable with chaos (which my housemate is not - there's one of the reflections I am for her)... All of creation comes out of primordial chaos, so expand within yourself until you can love and honour and completely embrace the chaos.

All healing takes its own time, so be patient  and loving with self as Self seeks out wholeness.

But, in this household I and my 7-year old share with another "alpha" female, her 20-year old daughter and her 31-year old son (downstairs in a lovely self-contained, new, 2-bedroom apartment - where, logically,  my son and I ought to be living!), there's no time and space to do this healing organically.   

According to my control-freak housemates (it takes one to know one!), my "chaos" (which is confined to our two bedrooms) completely ruins the feng shui of the house and they just want me to get my shit together, to stop being a "fat, lazy slob"...

And we've never had the conversation about how we each like to take care of a house - what's "normal" and comfortable for each family, what housekeeping routines we have, how to split up chores...

Thank you, "spiritually advanced" beings, for your patience and understanding - remind me to be equally kind the next time you go through a hard patch in your life!

But they do have a point - I've been slow to get my act together...

In my defence, in the past, I've had a partner and family to help move, and when I didn't have them, I paid young college women to help me pack and clean and unpack.   There's been very little of that assistance this time and certainly no offers from my housemates, who have a large extended family to call on to help meet their own needs and life changes/challenges...

And I'm just plain tired - tired of the crap, tired of the process, tired of change, tired of a sick and dysfunctional world, even tired of my material "stuff"...

I'm still attached to it, and get some pleasure out of being surrounded by beauty, and at the same time, I can't be bothered with it, am not interested in it, don't want to use precious energy and time maintaining it...

Often I just want to walk away from it all - reduce all we own to one backpack with a change of clothes each and some soap and toothpaste and go "walkabout" without a backward glance... 

And that's a second dilemma - how far into the fringe of western existence to go and still have my son feeling like he "belongs" in the world and has the skills to master it...

I need to give up on my son's father ever doing the right thing - more than the very basic legally required of him - and begin to bring in a regular income myself so that we can live well (in spite of the economic depression!)... 

I need to figure out how to get past my abhorrence of how this world (in its capitalist death throes) operates  so I can transact with it in a sensible manner, so I'm not cutting off my nose to spite my face... 

I need to learn for myself and to teach my son how to be "in" the world but not "of" the world - to do what we need to do to navigate through it, while at the same time planting seeds and preparing for the changes that I know are coming, very fast...

How do I "hide" from my own insecurities?

• I pretend everything's OK
• I shrug off the impact of events... "Breast cancer?   What a girl's got to do to get a tummy tuck around here - otherwise it'd be elective surgery and I couldn't afford it"...
• I indulge in magical thinking - things really aren't so bad, and it'll get better by itself, with no action from me
• I don't ask for help
• I expect things to happen because I "deserve" them
• I do the "ostrich" thing - refuse to open letters, take care of business; then, when I'm finally forced to face it, I find it either isn't nearly as bad as my fear (False Evidence Appearing Real) made out, or it costs me 10 times what it would have cost to deal with it promptly
• I downplay my failures to take responsibility and to stay in integrity
• I don't do what for me would be "big"... much of what I have done in my life would be "big" by others' definitions, but they were comparatively easy for me.   I have steered clear of major stepping up and "success"...
• I give myself excuses and blame life and others for the past, making them the reason for my present, when really many of the choices I've made in the past couple of years have nothing at all to do with anyone else
• I'm lured by the grim seductiveness in the idea of being completely destitute, of falling into complete degeneracy - it would be nice to give up, to not clean, not wash, not take care of business, not interact with the world...

I'm not going to deny that everything that has happened has had an effect - it's all about, and only about, cause and effect...

I'm going to step out of being paralysed by that, of wishing that someone would wave a magic wand and make it all better (too bad I left my wand in the Bardo when I incarnated this time, isn't it?!), of hiding, wishing this horrible world would just go away... 

I'm going to take responsibility - not blame... If it's true there are no such things as mistakes, that everything's a learning experience, then there has to be good in all the choices I've made...

Which reminds that my "enlightenment" moment of awareness was all about Divine Chaos... and the love and joy the Life Force experiences in that chaos...

It was around 1993.   I was newly started on my spiritual journey, sitting in my first meditation class.   I focused on what the leader was saying, following his words in my mind... 

Suddenly, I became aware that my physical boundaries were expanding out and out and out, until after some moments I encompassed  THE ALL THAT EVER WAS, IS NOW, AND EVER WILL BE...

I was all of creation, I was LIFE... I saw/heard/felt/knew everything - I WAS  all knowledge, all knowing... I was infinite and at the same time, all of that was contained within me, within my physical body, sitting there on my hard wooden chair...   

There was no "good" or "bad", no light, no dark, no duality - it all just WAS, and all the Life Force wanted to do was experience itself in all of its infinite potential, through us and the rest of creation,  its infinite manifestations of itself, just for the sheer joy of BEING... If I do this, what happens?   If I do that, what happens?   A Sacred  Dance of Cause and Effect...

I felt my heart and mind and body filled with the most amazing love and awe and pure excitement..... and then I came back to ordinary consciousness...

So our human experience has no objective value attached to it - it just is.   It doesn't define me or who I am - an indestructible, immortal manifestation of the Life Force, an integral part of its essence that's just exploring the "what ifs" of all potential.

MIRROR CARD No. 24 RESPONSIBILITY - 
from “The Mirror Cards – A Powerful Tool to Enhance Your Relationship“
created by Geoff Charley & Lucy Lidell

Take your life in your own hands and what happens?
A terrible thing – no-one to blame. Erica Jong

Taking responsibility means acknowledging, owning and fully stepping into your God-state and power. 

Taking responsibility is the mature acceptance that the only person who controls your life is you.

You’re probably feeling hurt or angry at the cards that life has dealt you, or perhaps you don’t understand why someone is treating you in a particular way.

There’s a tough truth to be learned here that, once understood and consistently applied in all situations, will permanently change your perspective on the world and lead to far more rewarding relationships.

You alone are responsible for everything that’s happening to you.

It is only as children that we are entitled to disclaim responsibility.  As adults we must assume responsibility, or forever remain children.

Right now, it’s time to stop playing the victim, and grow up.  The measure of your maturity is how much responsibility you are prepared to take for this situation.  Yet it seems you are still wanting others to take care of you and your feelings, or wanting to blame them for your difficulties.

Responsibility is the ‘ability to respond’, and that can only come if you take back the power you’ve invested in someone else by being a victim and saying you’re not responsible.  What if you were responsible?  Wouldn’t that give you greater authority?

Whatever feelings you are having, they are your responsibility.  NO-one can make you feel, do or be anything unless you, at some level, choose to do so. 

So step back from the issue and ask yourself:  ‘What part am I playing in this situation?‘

If you are wanting to reject this guidance and are thinking you must have drawn the wrong card, you can be sure that it’s relevant to you.  For a person who takes responsibility would now be searching inside to see how these words are appropriate!

The only payoff for not taking responsibility in this situation is the ability to blame.  But is that such a prize to hold on to?

Recognize that you do have power and you’re big enough to take back the responsibility!   YOU ARE LIFE-GOD...

Namaste...

(the Divine in me recognises and honours the Divine in you)