Blog Archives

Being Kind Is More than a Job Skill

6/29/2015

I came across this excellent article written by a person working at Facebook who learned that kindness is a job skill. But it's much more than that.

We all seem to be here, for a while, in bodies. Each moment gives us the opportunity to forgive ourselves, our misguided egos and the world around us, and to choose a different way of perceiving what our eyes and ears show us and what our minds concoct to explain our perceptions. Forgiveness is a choice to look past the things we perceive. To find no fault in them. To choose to make no judgments about what we perceive.

Forgiveness automatically brings kindness. When we forgive we see the face of Christ in everyone, no matter who they seem to be: terrorists, shoppers at the grocery store, people driving cars, ghetto gang members, families on the beach enjoying the sun, sand and surf—even those people our egos would identify as our most hated enemies.

They are all the holy sons of God, made perfect in love but believing in their ego minds while they seem to live as bodies. We can choose to look past our egotistical illusions to see the love from which God created them…the love they Are. That's kindness. That's forgiveness. That's truth. That's true vision.

I'm thinking of making a T-shirt that says:

No judgment
No expectations
No illusions
Love Is All That Is

Be kind, my friends. Forgive everything. Love IS all that is.

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Rush Limbaugh on Fear

6/22/2015

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On June 19th Rush Limbaugh told a powerful story that supports one of the fundamental premises of A Course in Miracles: We are driven, ruled and dominated by fear.

He was discussing the recent mass murder in South Carolina. His thesis went like this:

Young people, perhaps up to the age of about thirty, have been inundated with negative messaging almost from birth. But unlike earlier generations, the messaging of the last few decades has focused increasingly on the likelihood that all life on the planet will end soon. That message is a far cry from fears over the spread of communism during the Viet Nam era. Far different than the fears engendered by World Wars I and II. This messaging speaks of total destruction and the end of humanity.

He argued today's young generation have heard stories about global warming, heralded by polar bears dying, ice caps melting and oceans rising to decimate coastal areas of every continent. They've not only heard such stories; they've sat quietly at their desks in school as teachers repeat the latest frightening statistics. They've heard stories about all the honeybees dying and leaving us hard pressed to find fruits and vegetables.

Young people in the last few decades have been told that pollution will kill the planet, beginning with the ever-increasing and verifiable extinction of animal and plant species. Those young people have been unable to avoid the terrifying threat of flesh eating virus pandemics, most recently evidenced with the Ebola crisis. The science channels on TV tell them of the possibility that Yosemite will blow its volcanic lid and plunge the planet into nuclear winter, ending all life. Of asteroid strikes that might crash into the Earth and raise killing clouds of dust that block sunlight to kill everyone in a miserable, drawn out, dystopian fashion. Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX fame and Stephen Hawking both warned that artificial intelligence could spell the end of humanity. Then too, there's always the risk of asteroid strikes, nuclear war and gamma ray bursts from distant super novas.

All this makes me wonder if the popularity of zombies, those undead bodes that threaten our civilization, might not be a natural outcome of all this negative programming. A kind of Freudian sublimation defense the ego puts up to allay the fears brought on by today's disheartening messaging.

The list is interminable. But the two crowning news stories about fear are these: “Mankind Will Be Extinct in 100 Years” and “The Earth Stands On the Brink of Its Sixth Mass Extinction and the Fault Is Ours.”

Limbaugh's wrapped up his thesis with a question: How often, how many times do young people need to hear these grim prognostications before they begin to believe them? What kind of zeitgeist does this create for Millennials and others raised in the past few decades? What effect does it have on their love for life? Their sense that life is safe, good, a happy, joyful thing. What impact on their psyche, on their hope for the future? Could this be the cause behind horrific murders and other forms of attack that grace the daily news?

I pondered those questions for a few moments, but then, with great irony, Limbaugh came to the commercial break and two of his pre-recorded commercials aired. The first was for Lifelock, promising a way to avoid identity theft; the second, for a home security system to prevent break-ins, theft and home invasions. Both are solutions designed to allay the fears peoples' egos carry with them as surely as their bodies breathe.

Those commercials reminded me of days past when I spent time in marketing, sales and advertising. I learned that writing an ad would often be more effective if it were based on helping the potential customer remove a fear, rather than showing him or her something desirable. (To read more about fear-based advertising, check here and here).

Did Limbaugh support a core principal of the Course intentionally? I don't know that he's ever heard of the Course. Yet I could only listen to him with my “Course ears,” recognizing once again that there are two worlds. One that is immersed in fear and needs our forgiveness, another in which there is nothing that could possibly be forgiven.

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Sex—The “Proof” We're Really Separate

6/4/2015

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The core message of A Course in Miracles is that the separation never occurred. Yet the lives we seem to live as bodies give testament to our ego thoughts that, indeed, we are separate bodies. We seem to live separate lives. We seem to be separate people. Separate from God. If the upside-down thinking of the ego isn't already insanity enough, when ego made this seeming world it took an extra step that's often overlooked. That step “proves” separateness at least as powerfully as bodies seem to prove it. Here's what ego did: It made sex.

When the sleeping mind seemed to make this place, this world, this universe, it made two sexes. Two tribes. Women and men. Each tribe has clear, undeniable differences. The forms of their bodies are different. One is usually larger and physically stronger than the other. They express emotions differently. They perceive people, events and situations from different perspectives. One tribe brings new bodies into the world while the other plays only a small role in making bodies. And so on. It's clear we have two tribes. Having two sexes is an extraordinarily clear way to “prove” we are separate. That we are bodies.

But then, having made these two tribes, ego took another giant, insane step. It made an indisputable attraction between members of the two tribes. The attraction is like that of two powerful magnets that slam together when their magnetic poles are aligned properly—or that leap apart when they're misaligned. Thus, we made a duality where some attractive force seems to bring the tribes together, while another splits them apart. What could have been a more remarkable and more insane scenario to set up? It virtually guarantees the two tribes will each argue for their own separateness, even as they try and hope to come together.

But then, the insanity multiplies even further. Ego is desperate to find the peace, joy and love it secretly knows it left behind when it imagined it had separated from God. So, in a move of gigantic irony, it calls that attractive force between the two sexes by a special name: It calls it Love. And, of course, the opposite, as known in this illusory world, is Hate. Now, the ego has made a truly insane scenario that is guaranteed to confirm and endlessly re-confirm that the two tribes are “obviously” separate from one another—in spite of their occasional coming together in “love.”

In spite of the “love” we profess across the sexual divide, we find many examples of attacks on one sex or another. For example: Did you know that some men accuse women of wearing jeans that cause earthquakes? Did you know that it's a sin for women to wear pants? Or, on the other hand, what about women who score men based on their ability to please? Check out this web property to see what guys are saying about women. Then, jump over to this site for the female point of view.

Crazy stuff, huh? Yes, it is.

Sex is just another illusion that pits body against body and ego mind against ego mind. Here is a far better answer to the belief that we're separate.

Yes, my friends. I do like the sweet tension that seems to exist between the male and the female of our apparent species. I like the differences. C'est la vie! But at the same time I LOVE the Holy spirit that each man and woman Is. The Christ that each person Is. Gender. Sex. Whatever we choose to call it is nothing. No. It's all about seeing the beauty of each “person” we perceive as portraying the face of the Christ, that endless perfection that God has cast upon each of our seeming Minds that we access through the Holy Spirit.

Let's not let sex separate us. Let's see each brother and sister as the face of Christ. It's a far better way to go!

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