RE-MEMBERING 1&2

p.281-283

I am not quite sure how we got there, but as we were completing this section before chapter 15, we were drawn into a discussion about attachments. It would be easy to fall into moralistic arguments about the right and wrong of attachment, but those debates are terribly nonproductive. The Buddha suggested in the first Noble truth that “life is suffering;” the second Noble truth says that “All suffering comes from attachment.” It is a reflection of that often misquoted piece from  Old Testament, “Money is the root of all evil.” Whereas the correct expression  is “The love of money is the root of all evil” or, we might say, “the attachment to money is the root of all evil.” It is also very easy, in our search for spiritual meaning, to deny the things of the earth, but this is not the point either. There's a difference between enjoying something as opposed to being attached to it. I believe we are meant to enjoy the things of the earth and to do that in a loving, respecting kind of way. 

If we were to imagine what the energy of attachment is like and compare that to the energy of, let's say, enjoying something. Let's take a simple example: I have a new car; it is both a practical thing in my life—it takes me to and from work, to and from family, but it is also very cool looking. I like the the admiring looks I get driving it.  I have a sense of power as I upshift and downshift. 

I am encouraged to enjoy and to embrace the enjoyment that comes from my connection with this material object. And I am also encouraged to be aware that my attachment to it will actually take away from my enjoyment. Again let us look at the vibration of enjoyment as opposed to the vibration of attachment. 

Some members of the class were suggesting that attachment can keep us grounded. And that's very well true. But then I might ask. “Why am I so attached to being grounded?” Now there is a difference between being in Lala land and not being attached. Not being attached does not mean meaninglessness, does not mean that I don't enjoy the things of the earth. 

Non-attachment is not the same as having a “spiritual by-pass.” It is simply an awareness that reminds me that all things are changing, in and that attachment by its very nature is an attachment to something that no longer exists and that is where most of the pain and discomfort come from.

We also explored the various roles in our lives that we are attached to, and I know we've talked about this many other times in the past. Again is not that roles in our lives are bad or even negative, they are not, but they are not a definition of who we are. All of those roles will change, will be discarded, will be exchanged for other roles, and yet the self the essence of self will remain.

There was also some discussion of being attached to the body, and that's a tough one. “Who am I without my body?” While I still can retain my divine Sonship with God, I might no longer belong here on planet earth; that might be a difficult one to contend with.

Often, when we discover what we are attached (physical bodies) we tend to work on getting rid of that attachment. I do not think that works terribly well. It would be like discovering that I am fearful about something and fighting with that fear attempting to dissipate it. What we are doing is enhancing that fear; we are making it more real by the attention we are paying to it.

So there are a number of things, in a positive way, to be done when we discover attachment. Let us stay with the example of attachment to the physical body. Instead of trying to rid ourselves from that attachment, we can begin to notice that, yes my physical body is important. I do all of those things that are necessary to keep it healthy as best I can, and yet when I begin to find myself heading towards obsession, attempting to hold onto our youth that is no longer there, then I need to stop and evaluate. Again instead of fighting my attachment, I can go deeper and ask myself, “What is it that I I am really yearning for here? What is it that I seek? What is it that I am asking for? 

I realize there is some who were attached to the body who are looking for immortality. Yet I think for most of us, in our attachment to our bodies or any other aspect of the physical world, simply want to be safe want to be OK. Perhaps as somebody spoke of in class I want to have an anchor. And again there is nothing the matter with having an anchor, we just need to realize that the anchor will probably change and shift and occupy a different sense of reality for me from moment to moment to moment. I am also thinking, and this might be stretching things a little bit, what we are being asked to do in this spiritual life of ours is to make God our anchor, to make love, learning, the truth of our divine self, into the anchor.

You know what is the difficulty here, and that exposes another attachment that we are all very familiar with, that attachment is to feelings and thinking that feelings define us, our moods, and our relationships. 

And so as we enter into this new realm of what is called re-membering let us know that nothing is done here by force or by a ‘gritting of your teeth” act of the will. It is done through embracing; it is done through acceptance; it is done through love. Giving too much power to feelings  can become troublesome because even though the soul understands things like safety or security, it also knows that the answers to those yearnings only lie in the deepest part of our psyche. What we seek is beyond feeling good and is only revealed deeply listening and responding to the earnings of the soul.

“Now the choice that you have to make now, in this moment, is to give permission:

“I am now choosing to realign my energy field in Christ consciousness. I am now choosing to realign my thinking to activate itself in higher knowing. I am now choosing to become myself in truth as what I am intended to be: an aspect of God in its creation as Word.”

Here we go, everybody:

“As I make this choice, I decree that I am now coming into my ownership as a Divine Being and the recognition of this will be in my own knowing and in my own experience of this existence. I am in my knowing as an activated aspect of the Creator. I am Word through this intention. Word I am Word.”

As this is said, your frequency is lifted and you are moving patterns of change throughout the auric field to realign your knowing to the vibration of the Christ consciousness. This is manifested in you in choice on a moment-by-moment basis by saying this:

“I am in my acceptance of my knowing, I am in my knowing. I know, I know, I know. As I am “in my knowing I express myself in frequency as the Creator as part of an offering to the Almighty. I choose to gift myself to Source to be recreated in full manifestation as who I am in truth. I am knowing myself as Word. Word I am Word through this intention. Word I am Word.”

I believe those prayers/affirmations above are a Baptism, a sanctification, a benediction. As we recited those together, I was thinking of the message Jesus gave to Nicodemus about being “Born Again.” 

This is truly being born again. Amen

AIKIDO MASTER STORY FROM EASTER

The quieter you are, the more you hear the true nature of compassion. The intuitive compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity. 

This story from Aikido master Terry Dobson is one of my favorites because it shows how to bring about harmony by embracing conflict with compassion and understanding: The train clanked and rattled through the suburbs of Tokyo on a drowsy spring afternoon. Our car was comparatively empty, a few housewives with their kids in tow, some old folks going shopping. I gazed absently at the drab houses and dusty hedgerows. At one station the doors opened and suddenly the afternoon quiet was shattered by a man bellowing violent, incomprehensible curses. The man staggered into our car. He wore laborer’s clothing and he was big, drunk, and dirty. Screaming, he swung at a woman holding a baby. The blow sent her spinning into the laps of an elderly couple. It was a miracle the baby was unharmed. Terrified, the couple jumped up and scrambled toward the end of the car. The laborer aimed a kick at the retreating back of the old woman but missed as she scuttled to safety. This so enraged the drunk that he grabbed the metal pole in the center of the car and tried to wrench it out of its stanchion. I could see that one of his hands was cut and bleeding. The train lurched ahead, the passengers frozen with fear. I stood up. I was young then, some twenty years ago, and in pretty good shape. I had been putting in a solid eight hours of aikido training every day for the past three years. I liked to throw and grapple. I thought I was tough. The trouble was, my martial skill was untested in actual combat. As students of aikido, we were not allowed to fight. Aikido, my teacher had said again and again, is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection to the universe. If you try to dominate people, you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it. I listened to his words. I tried so hard. I even went so far as to cross the street to avoid the kids, the pinball punks who lounged around the train station. My forbearance exalted me. I was both tough and holy. In my heart, however, I wanted an absolutely legitimate opportunity whereby I might save the innocent by destroying the guilty. This is it, I said to myself, as I stood up. People are in danger. IfI don’t do something fast, somebody will probably get hurt. Seeing me stand up the drunk recognized the chance to focus his rage. “Ah ha!” he roared. “A foreigner! You need a lesson in Japanese manners.” I held on lightly to the commuter strap overhead and gave him a slow look of disgust and dismissal. I planned to take this turkey apart but he had to make the first move. I wanted him mad so I pursed my lips and blew him an insolent kiss. “All right,” he hollered, “You’re going to get a lesson.” He gathered himself for a rush at me. A fraction of a second before he could move, someone shouted “Hey!” It was ear-splitting. I remember the strangely joyous, lilting quality of it as though you and a friend had been searching diligently for something and he had suddenly stumbled upon it—“ Hey!” I wheeled to my left, the drunk spun to his right. We both stared down at a little old Japanese man. He must have been well into his seventies, this tiny gentleman, sitting there immaculate in his kimono. He took no notice of me but beamed delightedly at the laborer as though he had a most important, most welcome secret to share. “Come here,” the old man said in an easy vernacular, beckoning to the drunk. “Come here and talk with me.” He waved his hand lightly. The big man followed as if on a string. He planted his feet belligerently in front of the old gentleman and roared above the clacking wheels. “Why the hell should I talk to you?” The drunk now had his back to me. If his elbow moved so much as a millimeter I’d drop him in his socks. The old man continued to beam at the laborer. “Whatcha been drinkin?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with interest. “I’ve been drinking sake,” the laborer bellowed back, “and it’s none of your business.” Flecks of spittle spattered the old man. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” the old man said, “absolutely wonderful. You see I love sake too. Every night me and my wife, she’s seventy-six you know, we warm up a little bottle of sake and we take it out in the garden and we sit on our old wooden bench and we watch the sun go down and we look to see how our persimmon tree is doing. My great-grandfather planted that tree and we worry about whether it will recover from those ice storms we had last winter. Our tree has done better than I expected though, especially when you consider the poor quality of the soil. It is gratifying to watch 

when we take our sake and go out to enjoy the evening even when it rains.” He looked up at the laborer, his eyes twinkling. As he struggled to follow the old man’s conversation, the drunk’s face began to soften. His fists slowly unclenched. “Yeah,” he said, “I love persimmons too.” His voice trailed off. “Yes,” said the old man, smiling, “and I am sure you have a wonderful wife.” “Nah. My wife died.” Very gently, swaying with the motion of the train, the big man began to sob. “I don’t got no wife. I don’t got no home. I don’t got no job. I’m so ashamed of myself.” Tears rolled down his cheeks. A spasm of despair rippled through his body. There I was standing in my well-scrubbed youthful innocence, my make-this-world-safe-for-democracy righteousness. I suddenly felt dirtier than he was. The train arrived at my stop. As the door opened, I heard the old man cluck sympathetically. “My, my,” he said, “that is a difficult predicament. Sit down here and tell me about it.” I turned my head for one last look. The laborer was sprawled on the seat, his head in the old man’s lap. The old man was softly stroking the filthy matted hair. As the train pulled away, I sat down on a bench. What I had wanted to do with muscle had been accomplished with kind words. I had just seen aikido tried in combat, and the essence of it was love. 

You and I are in training to become conscious, compassionate beings, in the truest and deepest sense. Become an instrument of joy, an instrument of equanimity , an instrument of presence, an instrument of love, an instrument of availability, and at the same moment absolutely quiet. Since we all spend so much time in our relationships, why not turn them into a yoga for getting free? Living a spiritual life is a strategy for working on yourself for the benefit of all beings. That’s another way of saying that the optimum thing you can do for someone else is to work on yourself —not out of some idealistic sense of altruism, but because getting to oneness for yourself means resolving your sense of separateness to where we’re all family. Use every situation you have with other people as a vehicle to work on yourself. See where you get stuck, where you push, where you grab, where you judge, where you do all the other stuff. Use your life experiences as your curriculum.  (FROM RAM DASS)