Learning To Think Like God

Two Little Boys

Shinichi Tetsutani (then 3 years and 11 months) loved to ride this tricycle. That morning, he was riding in front of his house when, in a sudden flash, he and his tricycle were badly burned. He died that night.

Taking a moment out of our busy lives to reflect on the past can enable us to humbly move forward in new ways.

A retrospective.

I’ve made so many mistakes in my own life, but then knowing better I made a better choice the next time. Well, mostly. I definitely have stuff I’m still working on, and there are things that still trigger my ego. Picturing Donald Trump back in office lights up my lizard brain like Griswold’s house at Christmas.

As far back as I can remember I’ve been wondering the truth about how it all began, who we are, and why we’re here. I think it’s why I became a History and Geography teacher - I was optimistic for our future and I wanted to help get the kids fired up to learn and find something they loved and cared about to help them engage them with the world. I have to admit as hard as I tried, puberty is a pretty powerful distraction and to them, I probably sounded a bit like Charlie Brown’s teacher: "Wah wah woh wah wah" because mostly I could see they didn’t see the relevance.

Last night we went to the movies and during the trailers I belly laughed at a scene in the upcoming movie called “The Holdovers” where a grumpy Prep school teacher played Paul Giamatti has been assigned the task of watching a handful of kids over the Christmas holidays that are stuck at school. In this scene, he’s walking around with one boy at a Museum and he’s saying that “History is not simply the study of the past, it’s an explanation of the present”, but at that moment they also happen to pass by an ancient terracotta disc sculpture with a carving of two ancient Egyptians entangled in an erotic scene (doggie style) and the teenage boy’s response: “When you see it that way and then you throw in some pornography, it’s a LOT easier to understand”.

Funny because he’s telling the truth.

History can be tedious and boring but it really points to how we got here and believe what we do.

Teaching today must be so much more exciting with cutting-edge technology. Science seems to change daily and none of the textbooks we used are not accurate anymore. We were mostly wrong about many of our assumptions even our scientific ones, but by letting go of the past and being open to new discoveries we can begin to experience ourselves in new ways which is exciting!!

One example is what is happening in space. We recently watched the Netflix Documentary about the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (which can see light from at least 13 billion light-years in the past, located in galaxies over 33 billion light years away!) I was so riveted and moved when it successfully launched after 15 years in the making that I cried. Tears of joy. I was so happy for all of us to have this treasure in space for us to better understand our place in the Universe. I’m sure you’ve seen some images already, but here’s a quick preview of some of the unique perspectives opening up to us from space with this new technology. It feels like a miracle that it launched because so many things had to go right for it to work. There were 344 single-point-of-failure meaning that if one of those 344 possible things went wrong it would have failed.

It didn’t fail and the results as you can see are astounding.

I imagine it won’t be long before we find life on other planets or in other galaxies. Who knows what’s out there even close by? I recently read that 75% of the Mars scientists surveyed who have reviewed fossil evidence believe that there was definitely life on Mars. To me, this is nail-biting teaching material.

photo credit: NASA

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

~ Carl Sagan ~

If our science can be wrong, we can be too. It makes us more open-minded as a species but Carl Sagan's famous dictum is so true. Our egos need commensurately extraordinary evidence to support them or we just won’t believe it. Even WITH evidence like climate change. Did you know that your home insurance premiums are going up this year by just over 8% on average because of inflaction mostly but also because of climate change? The effects of our choices and thinking are affecting all of us in so many unseen ways.

The thing I find so fascinating now that I’m a bit older is that even within one generation it seems like the insignificant little day-to-day life things that no one is documenting of the past are gone with the minds of those that experienced it. Don’t you love those viral videos… “If you were born in the 1970s, you probably know what this is….” and then they show all the odd things that were so familiar but we haven’t thought about in 50 years, but are now long gone?”

For example, our own kids really have no way of knowing what an 8-track sounds like, or how tricky it can be to tape-record your favorite song off the radio so you could memorize the words, or even fathom the possibility of having to share one phone attached to the wall with your whole family. Or what day-to-day life was like without cyberspace or the way our backpacks used to cut off the circulation in our arms from carrying so many library books. They will never need to, it’s a part of our past story never to be seen again along with the fake wood paneling on our cars…

Although weirdly I just saw this rotary phone on Indigo.ca with Heather’s seal of approval, so never say never.

I sometimes wonder how our parents even managed us on long car trips torturing each other in the back seat without screens. Stranger danger wasn’t a thing yet in the 1970s and we spent a lot of time roaming free on our own in our neighborhood swimming and riding our bikes, it was also considered normal to be left in the car when our parents would run a quick errand inside a store. My husband tells a funny story of wrestling with his brother Todd in their mom’s Volkswagen Beetle and accidentally kicking the emergency brake and rolling backward down the hill in the grocery store parking lot. Their mom returned to find the car missing from where she left it and eventually, she saw the boys with guilty looks on their faces peering through the windows with her vehicle blocking the grocery store entrance, but luckily no damage was done.

Maybe the students I taught both here in Canada, Switzerland, and Uganda were right and our collective history is irrelevant today.

Isn’t it all perception anyway?

Have we not carefully curated and cooked our history books? It seems pretty clear that the one with power is always holding the pen. If Hitler had won the war, I’m not sure we’d all be fascists, but there would probably not even be a Substack. I’m so grateful for our freedom of speech and lifestyle. We may not be there yet, but I’m so grateful for the issues that are finally being brought to light so we can heal.

So in a sense then YES, regardless of who is writing it, our History DOES matter because even with its skewed inaccuracies it shows our future generations snapshots or points out our predominant collective beliefs, our level of consciousness, and the dominant thought systems at different times in the past.

The world wars, genocide, slavery, and persecution are certainly hard to look at, but as one of my favorite teachers and holocaust survivors Viktor Frankl shares, these are things we must not ever forget. It’s okay for us to forget the heavy feeling of our index finger having to re-dial a busy number for the 18th time on a rotary phone, but not the ethical or moral mistakes we’ve made as a species.

Today let’s zoom back in history exactly 78 years ago…

August 6th, 1945.

It was a significant day personally in our family and in our global history.

The true story of two “Little Boys”.

The first little boy was the happy story of the arrival of a little boy in Canada named Edward Gordon Morrow (aka Ted) my father-in-law, which was a great cause for celebration in the Morrow family and significant for me as it was the catalyst that made my own marriage and children possible.

Our family is up at Redstone Lake this weekend celebrating his life together.

This picture is from 9 years ago of Ted in the middle of his birthday dinner with his two sons and grandchildren at Redstone Lake. We joked that we should try re-recreate it this year for fun because there are two new Morrow boys in the mix. (If we do get around to it I joked that Scott may need to sit on Charlie’s lap this time:)

That perfect day 78 years ago was overshadowed by something else that was happening on the other side of the world.

It was the day that the atomic bomb landed on Hiroshima.

The U-235 gun-type bomb, named “Little Boy”, exploded at 8:16:02 a.m.

In an instant, 80,000 to 140,000 people were killed and 100,000 more were seriously injured.

Many of you may have already seen the new movie Oppenheimer, which depicts the story of the “father” of the atomic bomb. What has always struck me about this brilliant scientist is the haunting disenchantment that followed his actions. Two years after the bomb was dropped he was quoted saying: “The physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose”. His invention and the devastating outcomes didn’t end fascism as he’d hoped or result in the renunciation of all the weapons of war.

Just the opposite.

It fed the machine and consciousness of war and still today we are caught up in a loop of retributive violence.

I hope you get to see it this summer so I’ll try not to spoil it, but the very last line of the movie when Oppenheimer is speaking to Einstein is the most jarring and heart-stopping final movie line.

It’s still haunting me.

Oppenheimer knew that the world would not be the same and he carried the burden of his creation until his death. It sickened him as it would any human being to see the photos of innocent disfigured and burned victims of the air raid, in the movie they show him being unable to even look at the screen.

Maybe he sensed our own apocalyptic potential of simply using our rational intelligence to invent and plan technologies of war without integrating or developing spiritual intelligence to balance our deterministic behavior.

One of our retrospective lessons from this bomb is that just because we can do something to get the upper hand, doesn’t mean we should.

On the drive home, my husband asked us if we thought what he did was the right thing, that is, making the bomb.

The car was divided. Interesting.

We had all just watched the same movie and it quietly struck me as I was enjoying hearing about the opinions of the others that maybe the German philosopher Hegel was right. Our views of violence and war are so baked into our cultural crust that it’s like it is our second nature to think the way we do.

The implications of that fateful day have been profound, but we still truly believe that war is what is keeping us all safe.

Whether that is true or not we may never know, but it assured us a freedom of speech we may not ever have enjoyed if Hitler had won the war. And sadly it also precipitated an arms race and more deeply embedded an existing military culture that continues to this day.

It’s divided us geopolitically farther than we’ve ever been and has spurned a kind of East vs West and a sense of nationalism that compels us all to want to stand out as special, stronger, and in power. Or to try to redeem some fantastical “greatness” that may have been illusory all along.

Today I’m wondering… does having more nuclear weapons define our greatness as a country? Or having more money? More colonized land? More resources to extract and sell? Having others fear us so therefore being more powerful?

Is it the same for individuals?

Or is being great something potential in us that we learn to become from a more humble, loving part of ourselves? Something inside we listen to that makes us not want to harm others. To care for the earth and one another. “Greatness” means exceptionally outstanding; notable; remarkable for doing GOOD and being outstanding for the world, not just themselves.

In that sense, I think the only thing that IS truly great is God.

What WOULD God or even enlightened prophets like Jesus or Buddha say in our car ride about this bomb? Jesus would probably tell us a parable about how he and the Father are one or ask a clarifying question back. Maybe Buddha would smile lovingly and stay silent. Buddhist scripture condemns violence in every form but I get the sense that they would be both loving and quietly oppose it or redirect us to a better way of seeing ourselves and the world.

What about God?

Can we learn to see one another the way the source that created us does?

We’re suffering. The stories and beliefs that define what we consider “greatness” that have led us to this point in time, may need to be changed if we are going to thrive in the 22nd century.

The final image of the movie of our world on fire is something I don’t want to forget.

I spent some time researching military spending and it’s jaw-dropping. I won’t bore you, but here’s a simple snapshot from 2021…

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I feel hopeful for us because things are not set in stone.

Could we imagine and create a new reality for ourselves moving forward?

What if even a fraction of the 2.1 trillion could be spent on peace initiatives? Would things begin to slowly shift on a planetary level if we put fewer resources into killing one another as a security measure?

When I watch the news it sometimes feels like things will never change. In the same way, it’s hard to even imagine, if we keep focusing on what is wrong and being defensive, we will keep getting what we’ve always had.

History is repeating itself in the same way that our own life patterns repeat themselves. Can we begin today to see things differently and vibrate at a higher level of consciousness?

That’s what today’s Substack is really about.

Change. First internally, then externally.

For us to access our own inner peace and freedom regardless of our circumstances and then to show up and extend it out into the world in our own unique ways.

I am imagining new generations being born within one generation grasping this concept even in kindergarten. So much so that in the back seats of our cars, they will feel inwardly encouraged by their own minds to turn the other cheek as the point of greatest personal power. The new story will be to see that it’s much more admirable NOT to hit back and see hitting as a loss of personal power.

This higher level of consciousness is often now referred aptly to as “Christ Consciousness”.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “Christ consciousness” it is simply an identified higher octave of expression within ourselves, the consciousness of God or, in the words of Dawn DeVries, "the part of the human mind that is capable of transcending animal instincts". It’s the very awareness in us that tells us when something is wrong.

The way Oppenheimer felt about his actions, in the end, is something profound for all of us to consider.

Even pressured by his wife and those around him to defend himself he quietly accepted responsibility. It was not fair that others lied to serve their own agendas and save themselves, but he did not fight back in his “trial”, he showed up and had a quiet grace and a deep sense of atonement. He even shook hands with co-workers that betrayed his trust.

He reminded me of the story of how Jesus similarly accepted his own end peacefully. There is a sense of quiet austerity in both stories about the inevitable outcomes. Like they knew that their fate had been decided by people in power and it was futile to fight back.

The Christ frequency as it is understood is a high one, and it has been misappropriated or entitled by most people who have assumed it to be a Christian basis in religion. A religion I love, but that, unfortunately, has received alignment to the wrongmindedness of men throughout time that has done the opposite of what is prescribed by Jesus. Neither does it belong to the Pagan Belief of the Goddess or any other man-made ideas of a higher power although they all point to it in their own unique ways.

I’m beginning to see even in my own life the irony of how coming at this in a more neutral or less religious path makes it easier for all of us to understand and to have our own experience of what Jesus was trying to teach us. The manifestation of Christ in man has been shared on earth for the last 2000 years but it has not been fully understood or known even though the teachings have been present in every single major world religion on this planet and by many prophets in every religion.

Once you bypass the dogma and judgemental human element of our world religions and understand Christ as a consciousness or a frequency, it is an offering for all of us to align to, and we can begin to have a new felt experience of who we are.

There can be no Christ in any human without man’s aligning with it. There is a way to access this new frequency. To know our worth.

PEACE IS global work, but it’s only realized first through the individual.

There is a miracle of understanding that can bring forth a new story and a new experience.

In Psychology Carl Jung spoke of a “moon-like consciousness” or a way of seeing in which we more readily perceive oneness than differentiation.

Robert Johnson called the “Golden World”, the world of unitary vision rather than separation.

Ken Wilbur and others in the new psychology have helped us to conceive that all things are so inextricably linked that everything in the universe holds within itself a type of physical memory of the first moment.

This is a time when we can begin to have a new understanding of our identity. A time of great change when we individually and collectively see things differently and face our “creations” and “manifestations” individually and collectively.

The attachment to our old narrative and the old beliefs that we have placed on ourselves that separate us to experience the world in a certain way needs to fall away by feeding something new.

The structures we have given to ourselves to feel a sense of specialness, safety, prestige, or a belief in the necessity to do certain things like get revenge need to crumble.

If you believe these ways of viewing ourselves are permanent structures, you would be wrong.

9/11 did something very similar to the consciousness of the West. At first, we aligned to victimhood, then to outrage, then to a belief in retribution. ALL were required by our collective consciousness and thinking of the experience, especially by a country that thought it couldn’t happen.

I remember where I was when I heard about the plane hitting the twin towers. I was holding our year-old boy in my arms when my Mom called to tell me the news and I felt so shocked. How could North America be under attack?

Right or wrong, “They” were doing what they believed was right out of care and concern for their own families and their freedom by getting revenge on the United States for its military presence in their own countries. They rationalized their own insane actions with narratives that painted the United States as the “bad guy” in the victim triangle.

It felt so haunting to see news coverage of people watching footage on public televisions and cheering for their fallen enemy, the Americans in the EXACT same way the scientists and their families did watching the footage of the Atomic Bomb falling on Hiroshima. EXACT same reaction.

So who exactly ARE the bad guys?

9/11 was a sad example of our knee-jerk reaction that led us into a war based on a lie. We now know there were no weapons of mass destruction. The September 11 attacks of 2001 caused the deaths of 2,996 people, including 2,977 victims and 19 hijackers who committed murder–suicide.

During the War in Afghanistan, according to the Costs of War Project, the war killed 176,000 people in Afghanistan: 46,319 civilians, 69,095 military and police, and at least 52,893 opposition fighters.

We can’t be truly conscious and be in revenge no matter what side we’re on.

There is nothing Holy about war.

There IS no such thing as a Holy War.

All of our reactions come from a certain egoic mindset and a lower level of consciousness than is potential in all of us.

I found this victim triangle diagram that one of my teachers drew for me once helpful to have a greater awareness of how this works.

In a retributive violence triangle, the characters change places in a never-ending loop of suffering. Anyone with children will be familiar with this routine!

The point I wanted to make today is that there is only one way to get off this endless spinning triangle. It’s being the first to restrain. NOT to hit or fire or smart back with a cutting comment.

And choose love instead.

To bring this home, if you are driving across the country and your sibling who is bored out of their mind or annoyed by something you did hits you in the back seat… in this scenario he, she, or they would be the “Victimizer” or persecutor, and you would be the “victim”. If your Mom goes after your sibling (with a 1970s sword- aka the wooden spoon;) she becomes the rescuer or heroine for a hot second but now the triangle shifts and your sibling is now the victim wanting to seek revenge in a never-ending loop of conflict.

We transcend our ego when we become AWARE of it.

Being able to see this is BADASS. It’s the end of all conflict. The most powerful position is to step OUTSIDE the triangle to freedom and peace.

Being the first not to seek retribution or make our point or want to be right.

This can be difficult to do from an egoic perspective. That is, to keep “taking it” when others are projecting their stuff onto us consciously choosing not to pick up a stone.

Jesus taught that. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. did too. I’m not sure what Oppenheimer believed, but the other three taught about eternal life. They were showing us how to play the long game.

We’re all in this incredible process of ripening so we first need to focus on getting the splinter out of our own eyes and correcting our own mistakes, not judging others for making their own mistakes.

“You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”

~ Jesus Christ ~

The teaching is to love one another and stop judging.

That’s it. Simply learn how to forgive from a higher part of us that can never GET angry or triggered and only someone who has not experienced this freedom will deny its plausibility.

No dogma. No doctrine. No belief systems are required to “get” this.

We’re all the same.

I recently heard a story about the movie critic Roger Ebert on his deathbed.

Chaz  Ebert, wife of the late Roger Ebert, described her husband's final words in her interview in Esquire in 2013: 
 
“That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: ‘This is all an elaborate hoax.’ I asked him, ‘What's a hoax?’ And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn't visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can't even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once.”

That is EXACTLY what our spiritual teachings are trying to tell us about the truth of who we are. Like my cartoon drawing in our Q&R last week, but here’s the kicker. If we choose to deny this and stay at the level of ego, of entitelment, or outrage, and keep congratulating ourselves for past conquerings we will have to face many more challenges ahead environmentally and geopolitically.

It’s okay if we have more to learn and stay stuck because we can also learn just as well from the negative polarity of service to self and we suffer as I did quietly for about 2 decades, or the positive polarity of service to God and others. Although life seems to go a bit more smoothly with the latter. We get to choose.

The good news is whichever path we choose to learn our lessons, there is a perceptible shift happening on our planet that we can choose to be a part of.

The tables are starting to turn.

How do we change our trajectory? First, we need to become aware and NOT react. Contemplate. Put down our dukes for a hot second and allow ourselves to see the bigger picture.

To be open to it. Willing.

We can’t simply use our ego and intellect to solve our big problems or use reason alone because our thinking and self-determinism are a part of the problem.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 18th-century teachings are a perfect diagnostic of our current predicament. In particular, his work on what he called our “Second Nature”. His retrospective is about us becoming aware of the set of conditions and tensions that have landed us here.

Hegel is telling us that we won’t recognize our flawed worldviews until the effects force us to because it’s the water we’re swimming in. Our second nature. We can’t disentangle ourselves from it.

The solutions will come to us from another level.

From a higher wisdom.

It’s a much more complicated historical process because in a way ALL of our minds have been contaminated. Hegel describes that the seeds for our transformation are here now and in our higher self’s ability to discern which is the same teaching in every world religion.

Descartes, Kant, Bacon, and others in history taught that we ourselves shape and control the world and that the future is in our own hands. We think therefore we are but now we know that’s not true. We separated ourselves when we believed that. Even our minds and bodies were separated in the shuffle and our brains landed front and center as the star of the show.

This created the whole basis of our own definitions of personal success and how we serve our own ends by setting personal goals and making things happen, we need to get the job done (right as in, our way) or no one else will. We have unknowingly sealed ourselves off from any reciprocal relationship with one other, a higher power, with nature and all species.

Our wanting to manifest and do what’s best for us means that we can easily rationalize taking something to meet our own needs no matter who or what is harmed along the way.

If Christopher Columbus thought he was discovering new lands, he was wrong. New to him. Imagine how History may have gone if he arrived with more of a “Namaste” or Christ consciousness and saw the light in the 5 million and 15 million Indigenous people living he encounter when he stumbled upon the Americas in 1492. One man’s actions caused a ripple effect so by the late 1800s, that led to circumstances when there were fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people left. History’s so-called “Age of Discovery” has begotten centuries of genocide.

The big thing is that with a self-determining rationale, we never need to face the fact that we are wrong, We’re rationalizing that we’re taking what is our right to take by being #1 and that is the right thing to do! It’s a negative service to self-polarity and it disconnects and weakens us.

We have also slowly become blind to our co-dependence on the non-human elements of nature. Our environment is not separate from us and we’re not separate from one other so our first task is to become aware that we need to reconcile our self-determinism.

Native tribes around the world and hunger gatherers understood that they were co-participants with other humans and all of life.

The word Philosophy quite literally means the love of wisdom. Philosophers like Hegel and pretty much all ancient wisdom teachings have been whispering something to us since the beginning of time and we’ve consciously chosen not to listen to our own peril, individually and collectively.

We have been warring with one another since the Stoics in Athens, but A Course In Miracles points out that there are limits to how much we can miscreate.

For example, there’s an agreed-upon term for our new geological age or our cooking the planet with our extractions and consumption called Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene Epoch is a new unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth's history when human activity is having a significant impact on the planet's climate and ecosystems.

More than nature itself, for the FIRST time in 4.54 BILLION years. This diagram shows us moving out of the Holocene Epoch into Anthropocene which is a fancy way of saying that our human species has a greater impact on Earth than naturally by the Earth itself.

In 2009 limits were made to be adhered to and were agreed to on a planetary level and four of those have already been broken and exceeded. Politicians are feeling pulled to make decisions for our own individual short-term good with the economy at the expense of the unknowns of us entering this zone of no return.

On a personal level, it’s a bit like struggling in your relationship and then having an affair or seeking solace in a new partner rather than working to repair the damage done in your existing relationship, the way you know you should, but maybe it feels good to fulfill your short-term desires and forget your troubles so you do. You’ll deal with it all some day when the other shoe drops. It may be too late to repair your marriage and it may affect your own sense of well-being or the wellbeing of your family to make that decision. You may destroy your family in the process.

Our modern, dominant story or narrative is not a sane one.

It’s the story of separation.

It says that we are separate individuals, religions, sexes, countries, and races and that we are separate from nature.

In the Celtic world, the ninth century John Scotus Eriugena taught that all things are hidden in “the secret folds of nature” waiting for their time of manifestation. We carry the essence of all things within us and us in them.

Even the word cosmos comes from the ancient Greek word kosmos meaning “a harmony of parts”.

Everything in the universe moves in relation to everything else.

We are realizing scientifically what our blessed scriptures have been saying for thousands of years, that the whole of reality is one. In every dimension of life - economic, religious, scientific, environmental, or political there is a growing awareness of our interrelatedness.

What gives me goosebumps is that the deeper we move into the mystery of matter, the closer we come to understanding ourselves and our interconnectedness.

The farther out we go into space, the closer we come to understanding ourselves and our interconnectedness.

Meister Eckhart in the 14th century held this tension in balance when he said that “height and depth are the same things”. Transcendence and immanence belong together. The ONE who is beyond us is also the very Ground of our being.

Individually we witness that splitting ourselves off from wholeness is the neurosis at the heart of much of our society.

We can’t be well by pursuing paths of separation so we can begin to do this work to bring things back into alignment.

Jung described the spirit as “a complexion oppositorum”, a bringing together again of what has been torn apart.

Heaven and earth.

East and West.

Spirit and matter.

The feminine and the masculine.

My own well-being and the well-being of my neighbor.

The new holiness is the recognition of our wholeness.

Many of us struggle to use the word “God” to describe this ineffable oneness. There is a brilliant Sufi Muslim tradition of the ninety-nine names of God that has much to teach us. It’s based on a belief that the true name of the Holy One is the hundredth name but no one knows that name, for it is unspeakable.

I like that idea.

We keep feeding a fundamental stream of ideas that as Hegel pointed out was born in the 17th century as self-determinism. No wonder we work so hard that we make ourselves sick.

Our concepts are so embodied we believe them to be reality.

They’ve become as Hegel said, “second nature” even though they are a man-made human construct that is harming us as hosts of the idea itself.

When the effects multiply Hegel wisely pointed out the paradox that our suffering could be a catalyst for our higher awareness. That we would all eventually realize that our beliefs are so hardwired in us, they inhabit us like customs inhabit our cultures.

Hegel sees and identifies the inner conflict and is clear that it’s our higher mind or “Christ consciousness” observing our behaviors that will understand and become enlightened. It’s not our intellect or rational mind but this deeper awareness of the harm that can eventually help show us where we have gone wrong.

There is a dissonance and our knowing or reflective capacity is telling us as Oppenheimer’s conscience did that something is wrong with killing people by bombing and burning them alive.

If the picture of the charred tricycle makes us recoil, that is our answer.

It’s a simple knowing that is felt in our body, not intellectualized. It’s telling us that it’s not okay to burn 4-year-olds alive no matter what has been done to us personally.

I love the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich’s idea that we are not simply made by God. We are made “of God”. It’s a radical statement with huge implications. It means we carry within ourselves the essence of our Source. It implies there is a holy truth within ALL of us, not just some of us.

A profound wisdom that resides DEEPER than the ignorance of what we have done.

It must seem a bit absurd that from God’s perspective, we are basically Divine Beings killing Divine Beings. In an analogy, it would be like God is the parent driving and we’re in the backseat taking things to lethal levels and he’s trying to tell us that we’re his children and he loves us both.

The word revelation is from the Latin word revelare, which means to “lift the veil”.

We are living in a unique moment in history. Thomas Berry calls it a “moment of grace”. We’re being offered a “NEW-ANCIENT way” of seeing with which to transform the fragmentation of our lives and the world we perceive back into wholeness. Back into a healthy relationship with the whole.

We can manifest the more beautiful world we all know is possible with this revelation.

I appreciated that Einstein was portrayed in the movie the way he was. Almost as a “has been” but Oppenheimer respected his mind and sought his advice.

The rest is JUST details.

Yes.

The whole will not be well if the parts are neglected and the parts will not be well if the whole is neglected.

In the same way that we can’t be well as parents if our children are unwell.

We can’t be well in our nation if other nations are unwell.

Our human species can’t be considered healthy when species are becoming extinct and the earth is unwell.

Our wellness is found in our relationship with our wholeness.

The good news is that we CAN learn from our “Mis-takes” or our “mis-creations” not by judging them or being hard on ourselves or one another with layers of guilt and shame, but by simply releasing our misconceptions about ourselves.

Hegel is convinced that this higher awareness can drive us forward in new ways and I am too.

Sure, maybe it’s a shame that it’s taken 192 years for these ideas to trickle down into our mainstream consciousness but if I can see this, anyone can. As we move into the third decade of the 21st Century we are beginning to finally learn that our suffering and happiness depend on what stories we tell about ourselves, the world, and each other.

As above, so below.

What stories are you telling about your life?

What old stories are you ready to let go of?

Next week for fun, let’s begin to re-write some of our stories. Let’s replace them with a new story and imagine the life and world we want to live in.

On some higher level, I’m grateful for the lingering effects of both Little Boys.

Lincoln was quoted after the civil war: “A world that appears to be fallen can sometimes veer towards moral progress”. Looking at the picture of the burned tricycle gives me a sickening feeling. Can you imagine your own 4-year-old child or grandchild riding their tricycles in front of your home and having such an experience? It’s insane. I’m so sorry for this devastation and loss of innocence.

I’ve been thinking about that bomb all week and now how nuclear weapons are spread over the surface of our planet today and I pray that we feel inspired to elect leaders in positions of power in our nations that are fully integrated human beings that want to cooperate and support UN initiatives to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons, destroy chemical weapons, and strengthen the prohibition of biological weapons – all of which pose the direst threats to humankind.

It’s complicated. I get it.

I heard an old song the other day that I forgot and loved growing up. All of these changes we are going through may take time but Tracy Chapman said it herself in her song Talkin' About A Revolution - I used to think her song was about the poor rising up, and maybe it’s true on one level, but now it feels more to me like maybe it’s about hearing the whispers and not being apathetic. I love the line “Finally the tables are starting to turn”. To me, it means the momentum has shifted. We’re not stuck and we can reverse our fortunes in our favor to some capacity by turning a position of disadvantage, lack, suffering, or mistakes into our advantage by seeing things differently and realizing that we have power that we never knew so let’s RUN in a new direction. We can gain the upper hand when we shift our perception and experience the miracles waiting for us that have been there all along.

I’m so grateful for artists, books, and movies like Oppenheimer that can take us back to feel the inner struggles the scientists faced to do what was right so that maybe we can rethink how we tell our stories from the past and be better prepared if there is a next time.

And last but not least, I’m thankful that the other “Little Boy” is alive and well.

Ted Morrow has lived 77 wonderful and full years and his effects are still being felt in a positive way. “Bobber” (as we affectionately call him) is an incredible human being. Humble, not flashy and he oozes integrity and kindness. His quiet demeanor and great sense of humor put others at ease. He’s a cancer survivor, his heart has shown signs of wear and tear and his hearing loss has been a challenge, but he’s still impossible to beat on the pickleball courts and he loves to bike, sail, and canoe. Over nearly eight decades he’s silently demonstrated to all who know and love him how to be a good person, a fair boss, a loyal friend, a good neighbor, a generous and supportive father, a grandfather, and a loving husband.

Ripples are still being felt from this day August 6th, 1945 and they will echo in eternity.

Now is the time to create our NEXT story in our lives and the world.

What is it going to be?

With love,

Rev Nona