The Garden of Earthly Delights
`Powerful Beyond Measure
The first time I saw this painting it made me stop in my tracks.
Whoah, I thought to myself.
The longer I stared at it the more I began to wonder…is this the fiery fate of humanity? Zooming in closer it feels a bit weird and almost funny at first, and then self-revealing as great art often is.
What do you see?
At first, it struck me as a kind of bizarre exaggeration with an ominous ending. The telling of the story of mankind… consumed by personal desire, compulsions, and pleasure and the future fresh hell created from living in service to self or negative polarity.
Many scholars refer to the world Bosch conjures in Garden of Earthly Delights as a false paradise leading to punishment—the final panel depicts a dusky hellscape.
Theologians have had a hay day with it and there has been much debate but the connection between the world of pleasure and our human concepts of Hell or our suffering (and its common denominator of course is “sin” or more nicely put… is us missing the mark.) Our collective worldly thinking and our vices from lust and greed to vanity are emphasized by a continuous horizon line shared by all three panels.
Any way we interpret it, it sure tells an interesting story.
Is this what the effects of instant gratification look like in oil on canvas?
Our human behavior and choices have consequences. What we each do in our own personal lives does echo in eternity and not with greenhouse gas emissions but how we think and who we are being in the world matters.
The middle triptych in the painting seems to me like the human ego personified. It reminds me of how we’ve known for 50 or 60 years the effects of climate change, but it’s like we’ve been living in denial because of well, I’m not sure why but I guess primarily the economy and just being concerned about our own little lives and making money. Doing whatever we want with our own free will because we can.
We keep consuming and not really changing our behavior in a way that could have even prevented the extreme weather effects we’re experiencing today.
For some of us, this has happened on a micro level with our own personal compulsions. Alcohol, food, gambling, drugs, sex, and even our internal psychological climate. We’re addicted to our way of thinking. To our phones. To consumption itself.
How do we change when we know we’re heading in a harmful direction?
This painting kept popping up in my life and haunting my mind for years so finally when I saw it for a fourth time in the National Geographic documentary Before the Flood (BTW, I highly recommend watching the first 5 minutes when Leo speaks about the painting) I felt so moved I printed a copy of it off and hung it on my bulletin board.
I don’t suppose many of us would automatically think of it as nursery art, but I love that Leo’s parents hung it above his crib because it had a deep impact on him. If you have the chance to watch the movie, you’ll hear the passion, care, and concern for the natural world in his voice. Did the movie stem from the deeply embedded seed that germinated inside his young imagination?
The movie itself is an example of a manifestation in its natural form, as an extension of love. This painting alone may have been the beginning or spark for the movie and any of the good done through his work with the United Nations. Is it just me or does having our babes stare up at dangling pastel pottery barnyard animals seem like a giant mistake now? ha.
Here’s what Leo said to Rolling Stone Magazine in an interview:
“As a child, I didn’t quite understand what it all meant, but through my child’s eyes it represented a planet, the utopia we had been given, the overpopulation, excesses, and the third panel we see a blackened sky that represents so much to me of what’s going in in the environment. ”
As Pilar Silva Maroto, curator at the Museo del Prado where the painting is housed, has explained: “If we look closely, the only thing that connects Paradise with Hell is sin.” (Again for those of you with an aversion to all things religious, let’s just think of sin as the archery term “sin” means to miss the mark although the etymology online dictionary traces it back from Germanic to a Middle English word “sinne”, from Old English synn, meaning a violation of divine law or wrongdoing.
What does this painting have to do with you? With me?
With manifesting and abundance? Or how we can change?
Everything.
Because most simply put, there is a correspondence between the thoughts in our mind and the resulting external life circumstances we experience individually and collectively.
In other words, WE make the world as we would have it.
We can influence or change our external circumstances by changing our thinking.
Shifting our perception of who and what we are and why we’re here.
Mainstream media like the New York Times would say this is complete nonsense. Just by thinking something you’re not going to create it - that, of course, is a misunderstanding because it’s not as simple as that.
Some of us sincerely do believe that we can’t change.
We give up and feel a bit like things are out of our hands.
We’re effed. We energetically shrug it off… “What can I do”?
I can’t answer that for you, but today is my birthday and I always feel optimistic about starting a new year in my life so in the next 20 minutes I’m going to give you my whole heart and lay what I have gleaned in 53 years on the line.
Most of us already intellectually KNOW the steps of how to manifest something:
To ask (get clear on what we want)
believe (feel as though we already have it now)
and receive (be open and unattached)
That is not news to any of you, I’m sure.
Just learning about abundance or the steps of how to consciously manifest something or writing down your goals and imagining they are already done with feeling also doesn’t mean it will be accomplished.
Most of us know this by now as well because we’ve tried our best.
And even if it does work for us, it doesn’t mean we will feel satisfied for long. Next week I’ll give you some humbling personal examples of this.
But today, let’s just do a bit of a compassionate inquiry into how we are living our lives. A bit of a fearless moral inventory.
What are we doing that is helping us or others?
Or hurting us or others?
Can we decide consciously not to react or judge ourselves and just love ourselves no matter what we see when we begin to shine a light on our shadows?
There are some moral constructs we all carry with us about judging what is good or bad, right and wrong that can keep us stuck. Our dual-thinking mind makes a very good servant but a terrible master. Let’s simply take stock and notice and not make a big giant deal about any of the poor choices that we’re making that have harmed us or others as we normally would do.
Let’s look at this differently.
Today our taskmaster can sit down and take a rest. In fact, let’s give the voice of guilt and shame the entire year off.
There is also a myriad of things we do that we think may help but don’t necessarily serve us in the ways we innocently intend.
One small example of this would be goal setting.
Did you know that there never was a Harvard study in 1953 that said that 3% of Harvard MBAs that wrote down their goals made ten times as much as the other 97% combined did? Neither did it happen at Yale in 1979. But people still share that concept in coaching. So how did goal setting become one of the most replicated and influential paradigms in the management literature? It’s an urban myth, but we all bought it hook line, and sinker from reputable business and life coaches. We made it true for ourselves. People like Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, and Tony Robbins. Not to mention the thousands more of us that have believed and propagated it.
I sure did.
As a result, I also have written down a LOT of lofty goals because that’s how we reach them, no? I’ve highlighted and prioritized them too. We purchase time management systems and many of us make New Year’s resolutions, the grand-daddy of global goal setting.
The small point being made is that much of what we keep passing around to one another, passing on self-help concepts like clichés on our social media and filtering them through our mental constructs are just simply not true, and truth matters.
In fact, Harvard has published research showing the opposite, that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored in: Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting” by Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. Bazerman. That article resonated with me because it aligned with my experience of having too many goals.
There is a Russian proverb I always liked that resonated that states that “if you chase two bunnies, you’ll catch neither”.
Some of us have been chasing a LOT of bunnies.
But doesn’t the Bible say “anything” is possible?
And what is the big deal with “sinning”? Who cares if we just focus on meeting our own needs and living our best lives with a business and life WE love? We need to make a living, don’t we? Besides…who are we hurting with our hedonism and our vision boards with all the nice things we want for our families and ourselves?
Is that so wrong?
Environmental concerns aside, our alignment with truth and integrity matters to our own ability to feel fulfilled, to forgive and love others, to rise above our suffering, and to see things differently.
When biathletes want to make sure that their guns are shooting straight they “true” them. We can do the same to make sure we’re properly aligned to our deeper nature and properly prepare ourselves so that we hit the targets we’re aiming for. Not from our personality self or the image we project the way we’re taught to do in our society, but from our deeper KNOWING and intuition to test what is true. To IN - tuit. To go inside ask the tutor inside of you to guide the way. We all have the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.
We’re made to do it that way, but we’re taught to do it other people’s ways. It’s one of the reasons why diets don’t work in the long run, so why do we keep doing them? Cleanses? Detoxes?
Because we feel like we need to do SOMETHING to change and that is what we’ve been taught to do. More on that next week:)
I just did a GIANT clean and purge (I confess I’m still doing it and may still be doing it all summer) of old journals, research notes and so many lists of written-down goals. You would think I may have figured this out sooner if I had just PAID attention to the proof of my own experience.
I was oblivious.
Even seeing and knowing what we may want to change as far as our own harmful behaviors go, many of us feel like we have lost our personal power especially in mid-life. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, right?
Wrong.
Life has its way with us (or so we believe or think). We all have experienced that no matter how inspired we feel at the start of wanting to change. Or by an author, a world-class coach, or our favorite inspiring person leading us through their material, even if we walk on hot coals all weekend we can’t seem to manipulate our Jedi-mind trick our way out of a conditioned mind at a weekend seminar to make long-term changes.
Or can we?
I’ve discovered that the answer to that question can only be answered BY us.
If a miracle is a shift in perception that means ANY change is possible.
A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G, that is, when we tap into where our TRUE power resides.
Not from our egos. That is a short-term fix.
But if we can imagine it, and it resonates as true with us then our conviction and focus, the energy of the Universe will take us the rest of the way if we allow it.
What I’ve learned the hard way is that when we’ve been hurt or failed time and time again we can’t seem to just think our way out of it. There’s a famous saying in 12-step meetings that we can act our way into a new way of thinking better than we can think our way into a new way of acting.
We don’t really even have conscious control over what we think for long so trying to change that way with great efforts or with affirmations and faking it until we make it may help in the short term but in the long run, it all seems a bit futile.
It actually does more harm than good because it is the opposite of what the spiritual laws are telling us how things work and our conditioned mind DETERMINES how we react.
It has to be more effortless. Not effortful.
In addition to that, how we experience our life is not so much determined by what happens to us, but by the way in which we react or respond to what happens.
One of my favorite Zen Koans or teachings to illustrate this is the simple parable of the two arrows:
Teacher to student: “If I shot you with this arrow in the shoulder would it hurt?”
Student: “Yes, it would.”
Teacher to student: “If I shot you with another arrow, would it hurt you even more?”
Student contemplatively decides: “Yes, it would definitely be more painful”.
Teacher: “The first arrow represents your life circumstances and is unavoidable, and the second is the one you shoot or inflict onto yourself with by your thinking about or reaction to the first arrow.”
Are you still with me? I know this another one is long today so please take a break if needed and come back when you feel fresh, because today is really important for what comes next.
Let’s do a quick recap on where we are so far from the last couple of posts on manifesting:
You’re doing it 24/7 whether you are aware of it or not. Creating or miscreating things we want or don’t want by focusing on them. Feeding them.
There is a connection between our external circumstances and our inner state of consciousness.
It’s not just our interpretations or perception of events, it’s the condition of our mind and the LEVEL of consciousness that impact what we see and how we experience our lives. (Remember how I illustrated this in my Substack on “Power vs Force” I used the example of a person experiencing homelessness and how they are seen by others at different levels of consciousness?)
It’s OUR reactions- what WE say, feel and do that contribute to our ongoing experience of life.
Our realization of this usually comes from our suffering. When we can’t think our way out of something, we’re open to asking for help.
Surrounding has power.
When we begin to ask questions and listen to the answers and guidance of what is best FOR us and take inspired action from that inner voice we will save time and energy.
When we have faith and trust, we can stop doing what we’ve always done or what others or society tell us is best for us and allow change to happen from the inside out.
We can true ourselves by aligning to a power greater than us, to what’s deepest in us.
Anything is possible.
Let’s go back to the painting for a minute.
It’s not until we reach that final dark ominous triptych that we allow ourselves to even see the devastation or the result of our unconscious thinking and choices.
It definitely did this for me.
I eventually reached the point when things got so bad that I would finally be humble enough to see that maybe Taylor Swift is right… I’m the problem, it’s me:)
If I changed the way I thought or reacted to things, or how I interpreted the events in my life THEN maybe I’d experience my life in a different way.
It never occurred to me that I was being guided home by my “Higher Self” the whole time.
Albert Einstein is said to have remarked that the single most important decision any of us will ever make is whether or not to believe that the universe is friendly.
Brilliant. Because science and physics have now clearly demonstrated, it is the invisible dimension or unseen energy that GOVERNS THE CREATION of ALL forms.
How you SEE, feel, or perceive something DETERMINES what you see.
When we have a feeling in our hearts we are creating electric and magnetic waves that extend beyond our bodies into the world around us. Our waves travel several kilometers. In fact, it’s why when many people come together with one feeling or in prayer the effect is compounded and it literally changes the world. Prayer and group meditations are not just for religious people, they are for ALL of us.
When the changes happen, we call that a miracle but it’s not, it’s the effect. The cause or the real miracle is us seeing things differently.
The power is coming from inside the house, inside of our own minds.
As Gregg Braden says: “It’s only a miracle until we understand the science and the spiritual teaching, then it becomes a powerful inner technology.”
We have done this with cells under a microscope. Or this famous example of using Qi Gong to shrink a 3-inch cancerous inoperable tumor caught on an ultrasound in 3 minutes on film. The practitioners are simply of one mind with one goal and they are chanting words that reinforce for them a certain feeling, energy, or vibration. It starts at 5 minutes in on the embedded link above and in Western Medical terms it would be called “a miracle” - once we understand the effect of the cause of seeing it as already done. Our egos or brains won’t allow us to even legitimize this, but once we suspend disbelief and allow this possibility into our psyches, things begin to crack in our belief systems.
The practitioners treat the patient as though the healing has already happened.
It happens in 3 short minutes with their conviction and hers.
Isn’t this exactly what Jesus taught and demonstrated to us in his Biblical teachings?
Why is it so hard for us to believe it, even when we see it with our own eyes? It’s like our egos will deny it. Will say this video is fake. It’s so clever at keeping us stuck in fear because if we’re not, it no longer needs to exist for us to live.
All we see is first created in the vertical axis or dimension of our being. In our minds before we see it or sense it on the horizontal or physical “reality” and dimension.
We create tumors with our minds as well. With stress and fear.
Inside the “I-AM”-mage we hold inside our minds. Our imagination. Our feeling.
Don’t you love how “HUMAN BEING” IS broken into 2 words to help us see this?
Human- as in, the part of you that identifies as a body, a separate self with an ego on the horizontal plane AND…
Being - the energetic or eternal part of you that is a conscious awareness that lives and moves and has its being unified with the Universal subconscious mind or God on the vertical axis.
When Jesus taught that we must “die before we die” he wasn’t talking about suicide, he was speaking about our ego. The persona, the small self. The thinker. Not the divine bits of you. The temporary human bits.
Even when you shorten it down to ONE word… simply "HUMAN” it’s so perfect it still plays out to point us to the deeper truth of our identity:
“HU” in Sufism and some African tribes means “divine”, the unamable.
“MAN” in Sanskrit means “thinker”.
Humans are DIVINE THINKERS.
THIS is the lesson for today.
YOU, my friend are powerful beyond measure and you just don’t fully understand that you are not yet firing on all cylinders.
When Jesus looks up or away from the boy’s lunch to manifest more food to feed the masses he’s not looking for God in the sky - he has explained he and the father are one. He’s turning away from the evidence of lack. We can’t manifest from a place of lack. We must deny our senses. We deny our current circumstances and envision them with new eyes.
I can see why I denied this for so long because, to be honest, I really didn’t connect the dots and I didn’t WANT to be individually or collectively responsible for what I or we have all created.
But the good news is that if we created this world with our fear, with all of its issues we CAN create another with love.
I have both celebrated and suffered the humiliating effects of my thinking and how I’ve energized so many of my creations. I like to think of them as “miscreations”, but they are all divine because they all came from me.
My own thinking and imaging have contributed to my own rise and demise.
Over and over and over again.
Jesus taught: “Let the weak man say, I am strong”. In other words, when we affirm with conviction what we are THAT. I am THAT I am. In fact, that is how “God” explained his own identity to Moses.
Whatever we hold in our minds without a single doubt. When we believe it and feel convicted it’s already ours. When we infuse it with emotion see it done in our mind’s eye. When we feel truth bumps and prickling tears when it manifests.
100% of the time without fail it is how waves become particles on Earth.
That is until the next 1000 thoughts you have are backed with emotion and energy or fear and doubts that pulls you the other way. Those thoughts come from the very same powerful mind over the next week. You know, the ones that keep you up at night.
Those powerful doubts and worries are dream killers.
They energetically put the breaks on and bring things to a screeching stop.
Fear. Lack. And Worry.
Not helpful. We can’t shift by focusing on them either we need to turn away.
To look away. To stop feeding that wolf, to stop watering that weed.
It WILL DIE AWAY ON ITS OWN.
Again, all in-house. And please don’t panic there are very simple ways to work through this to experience the shift away from this lack and fear and I will be here to help anyone if you find you’re struggling with how to do this.
There was a Swiss author I stumbled upon called BÔ YIN RÂ who I had heard that Eckhart Tolle had read his work when he was 17 and it got him on his own spiritual journey so I was curious about his work. It was the beginning of Eckhart’s own relief from depression before he had his own awakening. I re-read ALL of his books during covid and this time they felt astounding to me. I actually cried. It was all true. I hesitate to recommend them because, well, they are dense and he just tells it like it is in an otherworldly way but they rang true for me.
He taught that every thought is a building block toward building or developing your destiny. A building block towards good or evil (both man-made concepts to be clear). According to the nature of your “daydreams”, you are accumulating either GOLD or explosive material toward your destiny. Every thought pictured or imagined with sufficient intensity could be materialized immediately.
I’ve since learned this to be true through personal experience. I’ll share some more personal experiences next week but when we are 100% identified as our divine essence or “I AM-ness” (the depth/vertical dimension of our being) and we let go of the persona, the small self, ego, or body which blocks this power it CAN be instantaneous.
This is possible for all of us.
Jesus is an amazing example of this power in action, it’s a quantum or non-dual leap where we can go from A to D without going through B and C. Once I began to see the teaching through a non-dual lens for myself the Bible began making MUCH more sense.
The more we are identified with our body, our ego, or persona the more we block our ability to do this. And not just block, we still do manifest but we slow things right down with our convictions and effort.
He went on to say that THIS POWER is there in potential in all of us.
Instant manifestation.
We are free to choose which we would like to identify and we do.
If we choose to identify more with our body, our circumstances, and the evidence of our lack being shown to us by our senses on the horizontal axis, we can learn from that too. We can still manifest but when we do we are subject to the Newtonian Laws of cause and effect. We need to draw a blueprint, find the resources, build it, and take physical action to get there in a more linear or culturally acceptable way by going through ALL the steps that our minds are projecting from A-B-C-D. This is the goal-setting way we’re all familiar with and it’s a LOT of work for us.
I found BÔ YIN RÂ refreshingly ODD and everything he wrote on a deep level gave me goosebumps like I was meant to read it when I did.
I recognized that I was doing that with all of my negative thinking whenever I was challenged by life. I felt stuck.
I started to reluctantly become aware of my thinking and moods and the correlation of the effects I felt over time. I began to consciously raise my vibrational frequency. I made changes in my life from the inside that more empowered place as my consciousness began to rise.
To. be clear, this had nothing whatsoever to do with my body, my physical health, what I was eating, my spiritual practices, or even yoga. Nothing.
Just me and my mind and conscious awareness. I did play with meditation. Nothing fancy or guided - no timers or expectations, just me getting comfortable, still and quiet, and focusing my attention inwards.
One thing that stood out to me was that I began to see in my mind’s eye during meditations that were so amazing that they are hard to describe. A bright blue light - like burning alcohol on a fancy drink or a pilot light on a gas stove, this electric blue light outlined intricate geometric shapes and patterns of moving fractals and things I knew nothing about. I would even open my physical eyes and see that same flicker of blue light in quiet moments on anything alive, trees, people - almost like I was gaining a range or an octave or hearing that I couldn’t hear before but I was seeing physical matter in a new light or a higher light frequency or wave. It was so fascinating to have this new experience of myself. I had never heard of this happening to anyone it was all so new and strange but I looked forward to meditating now and it used to seem like an obligation and I never enjoyed it.
I was LITERALLY seeing things in a new light and I felt it in my body too. The line in the Bible kept coming to me… “Behold, I make all things new”.
Wow, it was literally happening. This light was otherworldly and somehow felt more real than my own hand.
The other thing that has become clear is that there really is no size or order of difficulty in any of our manifestations.
We are the ones lowering or lifting the ceiling.
Of all things, it was the bible that started to show me this, and then A Course In Miracles helped to fill in the gaps in my understanding and interpretations to see the Bible in a new light. Not a traditional Christian perspective maybe, but it’s like I had to look outside of traditional Christianity to have this epiphany inside of it. To re-experience the Chritic teachings without dogma, doctrine, or our man-made fear and judgment.
Not necessary for you to do that, but I was simply being (reluctantly) shown that we ARE all the characters in the bible and they are in us.
I used to joke that I wished we had a manual for life, on how to live well. We do. The Bible. The Vedanta. The Bhagavad Gita, The Torah, the Tao, and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. They have been right under our noses all along.
It shouldn’t surprise you now with all of this in mind to learn that the word God or Jehovah in the ancient Hebraic language (which were really more like symbols than letters the way we know them) was a mystical language and the symbols worked more like math - a concept to get more than a thought to be processed. The word for “God” in Hebrew is symbolized with something powerful for each letter. A hand or seed, an eye, or a nail and they describe this process of creation that I’ve shared.
The name for GOD LITERALLY describes the process of manifestation!!!
The I AM.
It’s also known as the Tetragrammaton, or the “unpronounceable name of God”, referred to in rabbinic literature as HaShem (The Name) or Shem Hameforash (The Special Name), is the word used to refer to the four-letter word, yud-hey-vav-hey (יהוה), that is the name for God used in the Hebrew Bible.
This was a big deal for me so I hope you bare with me for a moment because I think if more of us understood it, we’d begin to see ourselves differently.
And to be clear, I do not speak or write Hebrew, but for energetics sake, here is how it looks:
GOD/Yahweh - YHVH (Yod Hey Vav Hey)
Y= YOD- I am - you are aware of something (represented by the symbol of a hand or a seed) - a spark in your imagination or what you can perceive in your mind’s eye. The hand symbolized that man molds as a builder, a director to create.
H= HEY- The breath, fully alive and aware of being in God (rep by an eye or a window) seeing through to the end result. You FEEL it like you see it already done. A window frame of tangible evidence in conviction.
V= VAV- The visible objective world then molds itself by that which I am conscious of being. (represented by a nail) - the idea of binding things together. They are physical manifestations of your creation. Establishment. The heaven and earth connection - everything starts as “word” - articulated thought, idea, spirit then is manifest in a form on earth.
H= HEY- (repeating step 2)) - another eye or awareness window- being aware of that which I created. I felt it and saw it as though I WAS what I would be and so it came to pass.
Yod Hey Vav Hey.
Yaweh.
The name for GOD is quite literally showing us that we are God consciousness experiencing itself.
In other words, creative beings.
Creators ourselves.
Jesus’ real name was Jeshua and just like the name Yahweh has a similar meaning with a twist. It spells out Yod Hey Vav…again. Plus a symbol with a tooth which apparently symbolizes our consuming, burning off what we miscreate, and resurrecting from our circumstances as the son of God. All of us united as one mind.
There is energetically only ONE of us here. ONE truth and it’s a divine and scientifically proven one.
Even the name MOSES means “to draw out, to rescue, to lift out of, to fetch”. Moses is the personification of the power in man, to draw out of the man what he sees in his mind’s eye. His name is showing us that everything comes from within us, not from without.
Scripture is so filled with meaning that our minds would probably explode if it was all downloaded inside of us at once, it’s no wonder so much of it is missed. Learning to read it with an open mind and to be guided showed me these truths that I was sadly never taught in church. We don’t need it all now, we can read it and absorb it over our whole lifetimes and make small inner shifts.
The doctrine of original sin that I learned in Catholicism is just not something I believe anymore. I believe wholeheartedly that we are born instead in original blessing. In perfection.
No nipping or filler or tucking is necessary. We may have separated ourselves from God and convinced ourselves that we needed fixing temporarily, but we never really left in truth. We just fell asleep to our true selves like it said Adam did in the Bible.
I can’t help but wonder where along the line did we lose our power or so badly misinterpret or misunderstand Biblical teachings? I’m not sure if it even matters and it’s definitely not about pointing fingers, but what is true is that we can be guided to see any answer to any of the questions we ask for ourselves in a way that will appease our own minds.
I know it’s hard to understand and describe, it needs to be experienced but if we ask and then we can receive.
People often ask me, why do we need to ask?
So it can be given. Why not just give it to us? Why all the mystery and veils? I can’t answer that, but my feeling is that it’s an integral universe and with our unlimited creative powers we are here to see it for ourselves. To evolve and expand.
We are the I am. We create.
THAT’S IT.
I can’t help but wonder from my personal experience that if we’re not doing the asking, we’re probably still being run by the ego or our personality self and the wool is over our eyes. We’re not ready to hear it so we’re simply not listening and we won’t receive the answers to the questions we’re not asking.
I can see the mindblowing truth now that the personifications in the Bible are so much more than simply historical figures and events that may or may not have occurred historically. The writers were writing allegorical lessons with certain basic principles for all of us today and for all time. Many Christians have missed out on the intuitive faculties that can be discovered in ourselves through transcending literal interpretations and finding answers in the allegories and parables.
One great example, in the Gospel of Luke, is the story about two sisters named Martha and Mary. Martha is doing what most of us do as Moms and women when we have company - multitasking. Cleaning, chopping, cooking, and general beavering around the house because Jesus has dropped by for dinner which is a pretty big deal. Mary, her sister is sitting still and listening closely to what Jesus is saying. Soaking up his words and teachings. Martha sees Mary fawning up at Jesus and feels resentful that she has to do all of the work and she can’t help herself she complains to Jesus. By the way, I can see all the Moms nodding in solidarity with Martha. I’m very familiar with this scenario and identify with Martha. But what does Jesus say to her when she does?
Jesus' response to Martha seems less than empathetic, chiding her for her distraction and worry, and praising Mary: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41-42).
Mary is fully present. She’s listening. She’s being guided. The ONE thing is her connection to the teachings about love, God, and the realization of our oneness. Not in the doings of the world that seem so compellingly important and urgent.
Relax. Stop. Sit and listen. Maybe having fun with this is the way to go.
Again, if we see past the surface story to the allegory - we can see that all of us have both sisters inside of us. Martha is a symbol of the horizontal axis, our doing, our taskmaster self, and Mary is a symbol of the vertical in us. She’s still, quiet, and listening intently to be guided. Jesus is warning that if we get too caught up in our Martha or our doing and planning self we are missing the point of our being here entirely.
OUR BEING dimension is ultimate. It’s MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR DOING because when we’re in our doing we have a limited perspective of the whole. Our sight is veiled and we can’t see the bigger picture. That we are the creators of our lives.
I think that firefighters were onto something when they created the campaign…“STOP, DROP AND ROLL”. It just sticks.
So maybe let’s try “STOP, DROP, AND GO IN”!
As in, inside yourself.
I would not have been ready to see this when I was attached to telling my story. Probably because I was afraid that I would have to accept that I was responsible for the giant mess I made.
All of the things that seem ultimate to our egos…our successes, our accomplishments, our jobs, our perfectly clean houses, our bodies, Jesus is telling us we’re not to worry about any of that. He confirms that it will be given. Our needs will be met when we follow his path. Even what we eat or wear. That pretty much rules out fashion week in Paris and all the holistic nutrition degrees we keep getting. It’s not that he’s saying don’t take care of yourself or enjoy ALL life has to offer, but he wants us to put it on the back burner just for a bit to really see this.
In Matthew 6:33 it says “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” In other words, the irony is that once you understand the teachings and how you create, you will not suffer or struggle in lack in the same way. The prosperity you seek and abundance are here for you now.
You’ll finally really get that you are not a victim of the world you see.
None of us are. This is the first step to our freedom.
We manifest easily once we are aligned with love.
With God. With our true nature. With Source.
As compelling as they seem, our worries have never really helped change anything. They just make things worse in my experience.
“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself “is what Jesus reassured his followers in Matthew 6:34.
Of course, you may still encounter some life challenges because of the world we are living in from our previous collective thinking, but we will burn off this karma and be guided back on track. If you are sick, or sad or maybe you will be burning off a bit more personal karma from past thinking that will eventually fall away when you shift back towards love.
When we are not truthful, or aligned we tend to suppress our feelings or are overwhelmed and filled with stress. For me, it’s particularly when the Martha in me has totally taken over and she wants to GSD. Get Shit Done. I don’t stop, I don’t feel my body, I get absorbed and have to rush to the washroom because I don’t even listen to my body telling me I have to go. I’m in my head and out of my body. That is when the trouble starts. It’s when we reach for a glass of wine or ice cream we numb out because we can’t cope. We don’t just have a calming problem, we are the ones making those choices and feeling the effects of them and we’re being shown gently at first, and when we ignore the call or don’t listen the volume gets turned up.
We suffer UNTIL we stop.
The shadow effects we see as ultimate like our anxiety, fear, lack, poverty, illness, war, depression, addiction, and environmental degradation are coming from our own minds. We are the ones responsible, we’ve been empowered with free will to see this for ourselves when we’re ready.
What is your own life triptych showing you?
Jesus is trying to reassure us that we will have what we need and anything we really desire, but once you see this clearly, the most incredible and magical thing happens. When your fear and ego are gone you stop wanting what you think you needed so badly. All of a sudden the Birken bag is lovely handbag art, but you can just window shop and appreciate its beauty. You no longer need to own, possess, shop, or buy more shoes because you feel satisfied.
Totally.
You feel complete.
You’re no longer lacking.
You can walk by wildflowers and without an ego dominating you no longer need to pick them for yourselves to own them, to bring them home to your house to appreciate them, but you allow them to live out their natural lives and just appreciate them again the next day.
You enjoy meeting new people but you’re no longer desperately pine for a partner to share your life with. You no longer cling and size others up as soon as you meet them for their potential as a mate and it’s felt. You become more energetically attractive to others because you no longer care.
There is no attachment to the outcome. And the outcomes flow to you like a bee to a flower. You don’t attract THINGS by trying to seduce them, they are naturally and effortlessly attracted to you.
In every spiritual law, there exists a paradox and this is it for the law of attraction.
We get what we want more easily when we stop wanting it.
Our focus naturally begins to move away from the more negative polarity of service to self to the more positive polarity of service to others naturally because you see how we’re all connected.
In a nutshell, we simply don’t desire what we do for the reasons we think.
This is getting a bit long, sorry but hey it’s my birthday and I’m on a roll so a few more things before I sign off…
We think we want a better job, to make more money, or a better relationship but what we really want is to feel fulfilled, to feel abundant, to love and to be loved if we are not onto it, our egos will keep distracting us by compelling us to set new goals to achieve.
I once heard an acronym for THE EGO that made me smile: “Edging God Out”
The EGO is a thought system that is illusory in nature but has 3 compelling core beliefs that tend to run our lives until we stop feeding and focusing on them:
I am LACKING. All sadness and depression come from this deep seeded unconscious belief. I’m not enough. Something is wrong with me.
I need to achieve an OUTCOME or set and achieve GOALS to be happy. The old “If _____ then_______. “ If I moved to a nicer neighborhood or house, then I’ll be happy. If I lost 30 lbs THEN I’ll be happy. If he just appreciated me then I’d be happy. All of our anger comes from blocked outcomes so it’s never-ending because we keep wanting and expecting more and no one is ever meeting our expectations. The ego’s mandate is “seek and never find”.
I AM in control. It’s up to me to go after all of my desires and wants to be fulfilled. And I’m the one doing it. Making it happen. All OCD and anxiety come from our belief that we’re LOSING control and we need to get it back.
I confess I was driven by all three of these for most of my life and they seemed VERY real and ultimate to live a good life. I was a life coach for crying out loud helping others set their own goals. These three still visit me from time to time, but it takes much less time to recognize them for what they are now.
What we can begin to see for ourselves is that entire life coaching empires are built on helping you find certainty and satisfaction. They promise to help take you from where you perceive you are now to where you want to be like it’s some integrity gap in your life that needs closing for you to live a long, healthy, successful life.
Then you’ll be happy.
No, you won’t.
The genius of Scripture is it points out that we already ARE loved. It’s our natural inheritance. We belong. We are forgiven for all the dumb things we do until we see this for ourselves. Even when we are being giant dicks, we are forgiven. We’re not in our right mind. In our loving minds. We’re unripe and disconnected from our source.
We’re not “bad”. We’re just ignorant assholes totally unaware of how things work. It’s temporary, it’s not even true, but we need to see this for ourselves and no one can give it to us.
It’s SO brilliant AND it makes ZERO rational sense from an egoic perspective and never will. To paraphrase Thomas Aquinas’ famous quote; when we have faith or realize this, no words are necessary when we don’t none are possible.
Jesus was such a masterful non-dual teacher and the Bible is the book that the more you read, the more you can see the layers of brilliance on offer for all of us in modern times. If you prefer a historical or literal interpretation of scripture that can still be helpful, it’s what we are exposed to at church, but you may be missing out on some life-changing teachings that will help you experience a shift in your own perception.
Why not keep an open mind and let the answers come to you?
If you’ve never read the Bible before…maybe this is the year? Or maybe you’ll join me for 15 mins a day to study the daily workbook in “A Course In Miracles” in January 2024 to experience this inner shift for yourself.
Do you have any questions? I have not hosted a Q&R video lately because no one has asked, just some personal things that I have responded to privately so please don’t hesitate to ask for clarification or if something is confusing you for the benefit of all.
In the meantime, let’s all trust our own interpretation of what “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is showing us.
Maybe Leonardo is right and it’s a panorama of paradise lost.
What do you think?
What I know for sure, is that perception IS creation.
A new canvas is just a thought, feeling, and conviction away. We all have a clean slate when we self-empty from our old ways of seeing the world. We can begin again any time we choose to see this for ourselves.
The Universe has provided this playground for us to experience ourselves.
When we are in our rational mind and body identified we have a very limited perspective and we’re using only our own minds, not God’s or the collective unconscious that is available to us.
When I saw this quote it resonated with me. Einstein was asked about God he compared our plight to better understand ourselves to that of a child:
We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a Universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.”
Albert Einstein
Maybe since we may never understand fully it, we can allow things to remain a mystery and at least become aware that whatever you believe it means (as the powerful creator you are) it will be so.
It never fails, it’s a spiritual law.
You ARE “Hu-man” after all.
A Divine thinker. When you make a “mis-take”, when you “mis-create”, you ARE manifesting PERFECTLY.
We HIT the target we’re actually aimed at 100% of the time and our lives are simply guiding and showing us where we are aimed with our thoughts and projections.
If things feel bad or we’re suffering we can see now that we’re simply not aligned with our true nature, but rather with our ego or small self’s will.
The nature of the ego is to convince us that we’re lacking, not enough, that there is something wrong with us that needs fixing. That is your man-made fear or what A Course In Miracles calls an illusion. Left unchecked your ego will convince you that YOU need to take charge, to strive, to plan and that is a story we are all believing and making true in the world.
The ego falls away once we shine a light on it. Once we see the fear for the delusion it is it returns to the nothingness from where it came like a mirage in the desert. We’re all just walking this same path in a diversity of ways. Eventually, we’ll all see this for ourselves and then we help to walk each other home.
A lie cannot be held at higher levels of consciousness. An ego does not exist anymore at higher levels of consciousness.
Fear goes with it. Darkness too.
Love is all there is.
In an introduction to A Course In Miracles it’s stated simply and elegantly:
Nothing real can be threatened (love)
Nothing unreal exists (fear)
Herein lies the peace of God.
Amen.
With love,
Nona