disConnected

Sharing our Waffles & Life Boats

If you’ve been following the Field for awhile, it’s probably not news to you to hear me say that at the most essential energetic level, we’re interconnected.

Always.

And yet, our perceived separation or disconnection is also a story we’ve been telling about ourselves that’s as old as time.

We are walking human contradictions.

We have our nephews visiting this weekend for a hockey tournament and in between games we’ve been chilling out and watching some You Tube videos. After a few minutes of “Mr.Beast” there were a couple of sponsored adds.

One was for Eggo Waffles. Most of us know the “Leggo my eggo” campaign where family members fight over a waffle. It started in 1968 and was such a successful ad campaign that it has given Kellogg’s the lion’s share or about 70% of the waffle market ever since by insinuating that their waffles are so good that we’ll fight over who gets the last one.

The second advertisement was for 1-800 Got-Junk. Their company’s tag line is “just point at it and we’ll make it disappear”. A few moment later I noticed our older nephew smiling like the Cheshire cat and then confidently pointed to his little brother like Babe Ruth calling his next home run. It took me a minute, but then I got his silent joke. Clever. We had a laugh again later when the kids pointed at one another the next time it played, but it struck me how this message is everywhere.

Both ads were not a big deal, just tiny reminders of our deeply embedded perceived separation.

We were watching the 25 year old American YouTube personality MrBeast who is the most-subscribed individual and second most-subscribed channel overall, with 202 million subscribers (most are probably kids based on the content of the one I watched). In fact, one of his videos from last week was the most watched video ever on YouTube (without music) and in the part I saw he was giving a tour of what a house worth $100,000,000. He’s famous for pioneering a genre of YouTube videos that centre on expensive stunts and challenges.

He’s a good example of what children love to watch right now.

I don’t suppose showing an ad of someone that really wants the last waffle in the box but first offers it up to others at the table and then if someone else also wants it badly graciously accepts it on the condition that they split it would sell as many waffles or would get very many views.

And yet that last scenario feels better to me and is the experiential proof of our deep connection which is more ultimate than our personal desires and selfishness.

It seems that on some energetic level we even share a mind. Haven’t we all had that experience of thinking of someone and then running into them. It happened to me this week, I thought of my hometown friend Jenny that I haven’t seen in over a year and a few days ago I received a nice text from her apologizing for the short notice, but telling me that she’s in town and wondering if I’d like to meet her today for lunch or coffee?” I’m not sure who started thinking of who first, but with our minds joined in this Field of energy maybe it’s time for us to stop saying… “what a coincidence, I was just thinking of you”, because it’s clearly how we work.

Despite our ego’s delusional insistence that we are separate, we’re all so deeply connected that it easily explains why we feel such deep empathy for the suffering of others and have been physically embedded with a vagus nerve. We’re quite literally wired for connection and empathy.

It might also explain why it felt like something wilted inside of me last week seeing news coverage of the continuing conflict in Gaza and why I keep replaying the image of the sweet limp young Palestinian boy’s body relaxing into a man’s arms with his bleeding face partially blown off. It feels so wrong on so many levels that it makes me feel physically unwell.

I’m writing this piece today from my heart as much for me as I am as a reminder for all of us that have been watching the news and even Mr. Beast with our kids to see past the surface of our competing differences, conflict and separation, to what is most essential.

Our deep connection with all of life.

It feels helpful to be reminded not to allow ourselves to panic or overreact no matter what we face in the years ahead.

Thich Nhat Hanh used to tell the story of how when the crowded refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked, all would be lost. But if even one person in the boat remained calm and centred, it was transformative for everyone. They showed the way for everyone to survive.

The stories we tell ourselves now will either raise us up and move humanity forward in new ways or if we choose to panic it has the potential to lead us farther away from each other and ourselves.

I work in a shared office workspace and my desk faces a friend- not just from work, he’s one of my husband’s running buddies and a good friend. His family is Jewish and his sister is currently living in Israel and we had a moving chat. He has had a tough week. I found myself tearing up listening to him. It struck me in a fresh way how the knocking on doors, execution style slaughters, rape…it’s the oldest story. He’s understandably worried about his sister. She appears to be safe where she is, but he explained how small the region really is and that it’s hard to believe that a solution will be found to resolve so much hate and fear.

I was reflecting after he left that Jews have been blamed and scapegoated for the problems of the larger society for centuries. In fact, I’m not sure if there is a religious community with a longer or more frequent, or deadlier history of trauma. And yet, Jews have remained a remarkably progressive, forgiving and generous people.

Then on my drive home I heard life coach Martha Beck on a podcast describe how when we’re faced with trauma and human atrocities that our fight and flight reactions eventually totally collapse our nervous systems and that is when we eventually stop caring and we become numb. I feel that. I have felt it with the coverage of the war in the Ukraine. The news cycles and feeds seem to zig and zag with our peaked interest and taper off with our eventual numbness. The gem that I took away from her interview was that BOTH are defence mechanisms.

They are our natural animal responses and how important it is for us all to see this.

First we freak out and then we numb out and even ignore it like it’s not even happening.

I’ve seen this pattern play out over and over in my own life.

I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that the most constructive actions we take as human beings never comes from anger or suffering, from fight or flight. And especially not when we numb ourselves. They are all reactive. Nothing we do from that place really makes things better for anyone. It’s simply the reactionary part of us that wants to crush and annihilate the source of our pain out of self preservation.

If we can find it in ourselves to just pause, something new may rise up.

We can calm ourselves in the midst of our feelings, stop paddling our life boat for a short moment to take stock. To still ourselves so we don’t tip our boat when we’re out of balance and shift our weight towards the middle.

Love and understanding brings that balance, not fear. Not hate.

To allow ourselves to feel appropriately sad, THEN we can slowly begin to heal and the solutions will present themselves one after another and we can paddle forward together in unison from and to a higher place of Being.

In the same way that when we have surgery we have an open wound and the healing doesn’t really start until we’re in recovery. Let’s not deny the enormity of the wound. It’s gaping open. First we need to stop the bleeding, do the necessary repairs and remind ourselves that healing is IN our true nature. It’s programmed into our DNA.

And what about Faith?

No matter what our personal concept of a higher power, we don’t need to push ourselves to feel better right now. We can feel it. Allow it and feel it as long as we need while at the same time extending compassion for all sides.

We can get still. Quiet. Contemplative.

And then we’ll be guided to what’s best or in the highest good for all concerned.

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

Martin Luther King Jr.

Because no matter what plays out next in all of our lives with the war or climate change, our faith can hold increasing and even unlimited amounts of chaos. Our Faith makes us spacious, non-controlling, and waiting in awareness. It really has nothing to do with religion, it’s a capacity within us to contain and receive all things, and to hold onto nothing, with almost no need to fear or judge rashly.

When we feel connected we find it unnecessary to secure ourselves because we are secure at a deeper level.

In some ways it feels like we’re being asked to “mend the breach”, the daily meditation from Richard Rohr and his team this morning from the Centre of Action and Contemplation really resonated with me:

Even though the recurring temptation is to separate, analyze, and judge the parts, which gives us a sense of control and “understanding.” Faith, driven by love, enables us to give up our need to understand, allows us to let go, and for Someone else to hold us together. It’s not a giving up as much as it is an opening up and refusing to close back down for the sake of self-sufficiency and mastery.

Today, there seems to be a breach in almost every wall. The “cosmic egg” that seemed to hold us together for a long time is now broken. We now find ourselves engaged in culture wars on almost every personal and social issue. Most of us are beyond being shocked by anything. We are often sad, discouraged, even alienated from the only world we live in. We yearn for breach-menders who can restore our ruined houses, (see Isaiah 58:12). We long for great-souled people who can hold the chaos together within themselves—and give us the courage to do the same.

I pray all of us know such people in our lives and that we be granted such people on the world stage, in politics and in our communities. There have been many that have come before us and paved the way for us—the mystics and saints of all genders, cultures, and faith traditions, those both known and unknown.

One of the most striking examples of mending a breach is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up in South Africa to deal with human rights violations during apartheid. The TRC was headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931–2021) whose leadership embodied forgiveness, love, and justice.

What is so remarkable about the spirit of leaders like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, who are undoubtedly skilled at protest and resistance. While they carried a great burden about gaps of injustice, they radiated conviction and not condemnation, redemption and not final judgment, embrace and not rejection.

The truly prophetic nature of their work in South Africa was pursuing justice with a quality of mercy that shaped a quest for communion with enemies and strangers.

I pray for us to all have the realization that we are also that person deep down. We can simply listen to be guided to the solutions because it’s our true nature. When we get quiet and contemplative we can see things more clearly.

And this feeling we have right now is one that has been felt by humans throughout time.

My Father-in-law read my Substack last week and emailed me and something he said struck me, “Where is Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King when we need true leadership?”

They were certainly both visionary men that singlehandedly helped to begin to shift our cultural narratives of colonialism, racism and genocide, and while they definitely both got the all rolling they are no longer here, so it’s up to us to pick up where they left off.

I think it’s also important to point out that they were also just regular people.

Flawed Human beings like every single one of us.

When Gandhi was a young man in South Africa, he made some contentious statements about the country’s indigenous black population. Also, maybe not as relevant, but at the age of 37 he took a vow of celibacy without even consulting his wife. I’d be curious to hear how his wife felt about that, but he was also an exceptional human being. In his willingness to sacrifice his own desires and life for Universal principles of justice and peace. He embodied the selflessness of pure spirituality.

He was a grounding calm person in our collective life boat and he helped redistribute the weight on board for the greater good.

Martin Luther King was also very human. He chewed his fingernails, shouted at the television, struggled with depression, fear, despair and self-doubt. His nagging sense of unworthiness was attributed to the infidelity and strain in his marriage.

Both have lost their tempers. So has the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh and Jesus according to scripture, tipped over a table and lost it in the temple. Jesus “overturned the tables” (Matthew 21:12; Mark 11:15; John 2:15) in protest against the practice of money changers and lenders setting up in church.

It feels like a balm to my heart to know this about their Humanity. They may not fight over waffles or watch Mr.Beast but on some level we’r eall the same. We still have a chance of making it to shore because we can cross a line or go over the edge and then come back to our essential nature and take more constructive, guided action from a calmer place.

That liminal space made famous by Viktor Frankl.

“Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”.

Viktor Frankl, 1946

There have also been many visionary politicians that cared about the greater good.

I guess what I’m trying to say today is that we don’t need to be a genius, become a prophet or a Saint. We just need to resist our shared initial egoic and limbic reaction to fight, freeze, or become numb and distract ourselves with selfishness. The ball is ALREADY rolling thanks to them and now we’re ALL being summoned to participate in a global movement to do what we can, from where we are, with what we have that will be adumbrative to peace.

The Dalai Lama can often be heard in his addresses to young people around the world emphasizing the importance of altruism and compassion to help metabolize our sense of futility and fear.

It reminded me of something that Mahatma Gandhi did in 1939 after growing increasingly uneasy and concerned about the events in Europe. He was 69 years old at the time and he had already spent most of his life advocating non-violence so he was especially disturbed by the conflict that seemed about to erupt thousands of miles away in Europe.

When he heard the news that Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia, he decided to write the German dictator a letter…

July 1939

“Dear Friend,

It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to a savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worth it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?”

Mahatma Gandhi

When I first heard about this letter my first thought was wow, isn’t that a bit far-fetched, did he REALLY think that snailmail would stop Hitler?

What I didn’t realize at the time was that several years earlier Gandhi had a friendly private meeting with Mussolini in Rome while he was attending a Peace Conference with the British Government. Mussolini was intrigued with Gandhi’s opposition to the British Government and he admired his efforts. He called him “a Genius and a Saint”. He held some sway with Mussolini and maybe he innocently thought Hitler would have heard of him and he might listen too.

Historically, we don’t know for sure if the letter even reached Hitler but if it did, we know that he chose to ignore it because his invasion of Poland happened a few short weeks later which triggered the outbreak of World War II.

A year later after many lives were lost, Gandhi tried again imploring Hitler to stop the war: “I appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war…if you attain success in the war, it will not prove that you were right. It will only prove that your power of destruction was greater”.

He was trying to appeal to Hitler’s sense of humanity but it was doomed to failure.

There is an accused “naivety” for anyone protesting wars or promoting of peace and yet Gandhi was nothing if not a man of pure reason. His philosophy of non-violent resistance was eminently rational and based on his realization that it was counterproductive, since it always leads to more violence. This appealed to the humanity of Martin Luther King Jr. who studied under him and was inspired to become a civil rights leader.

But Hitler could not be reasoned with on a Humanitarian level because he had none. The Nazi regime, was far too psychopathic and brutal to acquiesce to moral principles. The reason why Gandhi’s interaction with Hitler is so significant is because they were POLAR opposites, standing at the extremes on the vast continuum of human nature.

The fundamental difference between Hitler and Gandhi is one of connection and consciousness.

Our connection is the most essential human trait - it determines our behaviour and our level of well-being individually and collectively. We can now measure both our social progress and personal development in terms of how far we move along a continuum of connection.

The more connected we are, the higher our level of consciousness. Please excuse the iphone photo, but I stumbled on this diagram a a couple more made by one of my teachers (Steve Taylor)…

To put a twist on this, it’s not just to one another, it’s a connection to our own bodies. Our internal organs, particularly the heart and gut, are key players in building our conscious experience.

When I struggled with depression and chronic pain, I disconnected from my body.

I learned from Gabor Maté that all cruelty (even inflicted internally on ourselves from addiction, anxiety and depression) is a result of this disconnection.

“Trauma fundamentally means a disconnection from self.”

Gabor Maté, Author of The Wisdom of Trauma.

Disconnection not only wreaks havoc on our individual lives, it leads to separate societies that are patriarchal, hiearchial and warlike.

Did you know that Hitler wanted to be an artist?

Did you also know that most of his siblings died in childhood? His sister Paula of cancer, his sister Angela had a stroke, his brother Edmond died of the measles, his brother Otto of hydrocephalitis and his sister Ida of diptheria. Can you even imagine his state of mind? Not to mention the fact that it left Adolf with a difficult father who dominated and abused his mother. It would be an understatement to say that Hitler’s family life was tension-filled and violent. Adolf was subjected to beatings and humiliation by his father who died through alcoholism when Adolf was 14.

It’s not to condone any of his behaviour, but I’m bringing this up today because it’s unsurprising that Hitler himself developed a brutal mindset and a lack of compassion for people after such a loveless home environment. Hitler’s dreams of being an artist were dashed when he failed the entrance exam to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. It was the academy’s view that Hitler lacked ‘spiritual imagination’ in his art and saw his ‘prosaic’ and ‘painful precise draftsmanship’ as being more suited to architecture.

His mother passed from cancer and his “painful precision” was focused instead on his fears and the eradication of an entire race of people. Hitler was an extreme example of this disconnection which resulted in The Nazis and their allies and collaborators killed six million Jewish people. The “architect” of this systematic, state-sponsored genocide we all know as the Holocaust. In the end, he committed suicide.

Did you know that Stalin wanted to be a priest?

Stalin was known affectionately as ‘Soso’ by his parents young Stalin’s upbringing could be described as lower-middle class. His father was a shoemaker who employed up to ten people until the business failed and drove the family into poverty. As a child, he suffered smallpox leaving him with a pock-marked face but possibly more damaging was the stress of living with a violent and alcoholic father, whose abusive behaviour drove Stalin’s mother to leave and live with friends, taking Stalin with her. Encouraged by his strict and devout Russian Orthodox Christian mother, Stalin showed an early, perhaps naive leaning towards the priesthood. Deciding instead that he was an atheist, with an interest in radical politics took him down a different path, to become a fanatical activist.

Those would be two examples of extreme disconnection. What we call “evil” is simply an energetic intention caused by this disconnection. Here is another helpful diagram from Steve Taylor to show how this plays out…

I’m taking us on this little tangent today to help illustrate that there are no “good” people or “bad” people, we are all on the same spectrum with our levels of consciousness rising and falling based on our own individual level of consciousness or connection.

Alternately, it seems that our goodness stems from connection.

But most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

Connected societies are democratic, egalitarian and peaceful. Altruism and spirituality are experiences of our fundamental connection. The way we regain awareness of our connection is the ONLY way to live in harmony with ourself, one another and the world.

Our levels of consciousness can rise or fall several times depending on our level of connection. It can even slightly fluctuate several times a day and experience a shift as our perception of ourselves and one another shifts.

There are ways we can learn to stay connected with ourselves and each other. To help raise our individual level of connection and eventually our collective consciousness.

How DO we become and stay more connected?

Roshi Joan Halifax is in her 80’s and has spent her life teaching practices to help steady ourselves in the face of adversity. To help us get still and quiet so that we can enter a contemplative state before we take any action out in the world.

While the practices of breath work, meditation, prayer, yoga, contemplation can be helpful tools, it’s important to remind ourselves that they are just the map, not the territory. Our Human egos like to make the practices ultimate but they are simply helping us to make a deeper shift and to have or facilitate a realization is innate in us and it’s this shift that has all of my attention these days and that has the ability to escort us to the far right side of these diagram.

This idea of having an awakening or a realization to this deeper truth that sets us free is the recognition and our ability to lift to higher levels of human consciousness. It comes from our hearts, our guts, it’s intuitive and can’t be taught in a linear rational way the way we’re used to learning so it’s not like taking a University Course and it can’t really be understood by following 10 steps. It’s more like an understanding or an epiphany.

“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”

Eckhart Tolle

Some may just feel a perceptual shift in our level of empathy or compassion as our consciousness begins to rise.

We wake up one day and things just feel different.

I once heard the story of a man in a book called “Extraordinary Awakenings” about a man named Edward Little.

Edward Little was an American man who was convicted of murder while he was still a child. As you can imagine, Edward had a horrific upbringing and was conditioned to view violence as normal. His mother was unfortunately also a very unstable and violent woman who was sent to prison for killing her husband (not Little’s father who had previously left them -but I think you’re probably getting the picture). After four years of foster care he was reunited with his mother upon her release which turned out to be a worse fate with her string of abusive boyfriends and husbands coming and going.

The only person he felt he could trust was his older brother who was a drug addict and a criminal and led him into a life of crime. When he was 15, Little held up a store at gunpoint and shot and injured the clerk. Later the police stopped him and an accomplice in a stolen car. As they fled Little shot a policeman who later died and he was found guilty of capital murder and only spared the death penalty because the jury was moved by his childhood of neglect and abuse.

Eight years into his prison sentence Little started to meditate to try to calm his active mind. One day during a meditation his empathy suddenly switched on.

I started crying for the first time I could remember. It was like a light coming on inside my mind, allowing me to understand what I had done. I cried silently for a long time, trying not to let anyone hear me. I felt so much sorrow for the suffering I had caused and for my family and myself. It was that day that transformed me. I started searching for understanding, and so much new information started flowing into my life along with new people.”

Edward Little

(“Extraordinary Awakenings”, pg. 80)

The steps we take as individuals to move towards connection will shift not just our own experience of our lives, but the one we have with one another and the earth.

There is no one way or right way.

We can follow spiritual paths that can help us move from selfishness towards selflessness and connection. Budhism, Sufism, Judaism, Yoga or the Christian Mystics or from many different traditions. It can be a meditation practice, a life of service or just caring for our family. The method is not important, although some may suit our needs better than others ALL roads lead to this realization, towards connection.

As more and more of us experience this inner shift, our human societies will transition along with our economy and forms of government to reflect this connection.

“After centuries of oppressive monarchies, brutal pathocracies and malfunctioning democracies, we will finally live in empathocracies. Empathocracy is the form of government that naturally arises in highly connected societies. It is the polar opposite of pathocracy, in the same way that wakefulness is the opposite of psychopathy.”

Steven Taylor

The question is whether of if we choose to continue to head towards a catastrophic conclusion towards this pathological ego-separateness that has disconnected us from our environment, each other and even our own bodies.

Or could we shift to a greater state of connection in as short as a few generations?

We can.

We think we have many complicated problems, but we really only have one.

Our disconnection.

And yet the lower we are on the scale of consciousness the less aware we are of any of this. I remember thinking when I learned this, that this is such an inconvenient truth because at the lower levels we’re not just convinced, we’re convicted that we’re right and we’ll fight anyone that disagrees with our way.

When I see the word separation in “A Course In Miracles” I understand now that it really means disconnection. Another way to say it in religious terms is our Separation from God or the source of our being, the earth and one another.

“This is the situation of the world. ⁴The problem of separation, which is really the only problem, has already been solved. ⁵Yet the solution is not recognized because the problem is not recognized.” (ACIM, W-79.1:3-5)

Connection doesn’t mean losing our individuality and identity. We can be an individual without experiencing a sense of separation to the world. It seems to be the ideal human state. To possess our individual identity AND feel our essential oneness with the whole world.

In this state we don’t experience boundaries in the same way a separate wave experiences the ocean. We gain a deeper connection, we don’t lose anything. We GAIN a truer identity.

Our Real or essential self and not the false illusion that we are separate.

Our true nature.

Evil is not innate, it’s an aberration that arises from our unnatural state of disconnection. It’s like we’re paddling hard the wrong way into the eye of a storm.

Goodness IS innate. When we are feeling deeply connected there is no “lifeboat dilemma”. Faced with a situation where there are 10 seats and 35 people waiting to be saved even when our lives are on the line, it’s the deeper part of us that will give up our seats to save our loved ones not as an exception, but as a rule.

While we can’t really cultivate this directly with particular practices, it can be uncovered in unique ways to us we are guided to it with our simple willingness to be shown and to listen.

We are and have always been “one”. We all know this at some deeper level of consciousness, so we only need to become aware of what we have always been to find our way to shore.

We’ve been elbowing others out of the way to save ourselves or even standing up in our boats fighting and panicking for far too long.

Let’s still ourselves for a moment, rebalance our weight in our rafts and once the fog lifts let’s aim for shore before we all drown in our disconnection.

While we’re at it, let’s reconsider the removal of our siblings by 1-800-got Junk.

And please help yourself to the last waffle if you’re hungry.

With love,

Rev Nona

ps. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda started writing poems at age 13 and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

I particularly love this one…

Keeping Quiet (also known as Keeping Still)

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.