A New Phase

Imagine you had a friend with good and bad qualities and one of their bad qualities was that they murder thousands of people on a regular basis.  If you wanted to help your friend to become holistically healthier and happier, you might prioritize the improvements.  You might even come to the conclusion that all other negative issues are symptoms and by products of the primary anomaly of ongoing murder because the mass murder violates universal law in such a profound way that overall health and happiness simply cannot be achieved until this foundational issue is addressed.
The country of the United States is that friend with good and bad qualities and a monumental problem with ongoing mass murder.  72 bombs dropped per day in 2016 with an incalculable loss of human life.  We are the most aggressive,  violent and dangerous country on the planet, in the history of the world even with the modern level of war technology.  Our military budget is more than the rest of the world combined.  Healing first requires clarity of vision.  THIS IS WHO WE ARE.
 (We are the ones who do the knocking if you watched Breaking Bad.)  It is convoluted vision to see the US as great country or committed to social equality or committed to elevating humanity while perpetrating this kind of violence.
Our own domestic weak minority groups will never be safe as long as we continue to bomb weak minorities in other countries; this is karma.  We cannot be committed to growing strong together until we start performing global actions that are in alignment with that goal.
I am certainly not a Trump supporter but one thing I am extremely hopeful about is that now this ongoing global mass murder is on Trump's watch and I think American citizens are proving to be more outspoken about criticizing Trump's actions and holding him to a higher standard than with the previous administration.   I get it; Obama was smart, classy, a great orator and very handsome yet he still elevated the level of ongoing global mass murder to dramatically higher levels than GWB.  The Janus head concept of saying one thing and doing the opposite is actually taught in some circles and for whatever reason the vast majority of people were able to overlook or turn away from the global violence.  He is a mass murderer but he is pro gay marriage.  He is a mass murderer but he created the Affordable Care Act.  That kind of cognitive dissonance creates a deep level of emotional conflict in everyone of us and is an obstacle to individual healing and growth to be complicit in that kind of deception.  I voted for him twice; I know personally I was trusting him and counting on him to do the right thing for us so I honestly got caught up in regular life and stopped looking so much.  There was such relief when GWB was gone that I thought I could let my guard down and relax.  I got lazy.  That's on me.  It was when I stopped looking that all hell broke loose.
Now, I'm looking again.  I'm wide awake and seeing things with a new clarity.   What I see is so painful to look at that I understand why people don't look and turn to whatever instead.  But, it turns out I'm not alone.  The whole world is beginning to wake up to what we have allowed to happen.
What can we do?
1.  State in meditation or a quiet peaceful state of mind your intention-  I choose to live in a world where all beings are happy, safe and free, where we all enjoy abundance and personal sovereignty.  I call forth now a peaceful world where we live in harmony with Mother Earth and with ease of heart.  I bind any actions by negative forces and invoke my deity of choice to assist the world in this transition.
2. Talk about your choice on social media: if there is one thing a politician hates it is to become irrelevant.   Our leaders will change as we change.
3.  Choose hope over fear.  Optimism is success oriented.

This time of awakening is why we chose to be here now.  We are here to bear witness to a New Earth.  We are the ones we've been waiting for.

Consent by Apathy

21,000 humans die every single day by starvation, most are children.  The fact that this happens is intentional by those who govern at the highest levels.  Yes, it is intentional.  How could it be any other way?  The surplus of food is there; the financial resources are there; the means of delivery and distribution are easily made possible by modern infrastructures; a detailed plan to end global poverty created by Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of economics at Columbia, has been sitting on desks at the UN since 2001.  The political will is simply not there.

This week in the studio, my dharma talk was about the archetypal energy of Hanuman.  Sita is the archetype of unconditional love and Ram is the energy of preservation.  Sita helps us to love people who are different than us and to hold space for people to achieve excellence. The Ram mindset is what allows us to stay in the same career for 20 years.   Hanuman is the outcome of love and sustainability coming together.  He is the embodiment of devotion.  Hanuman is being of service in the world in a heart centered way.

We all have access to all the archetypal energies within us- the hero with one thousand faces as Joseph Campbell called the concept.  At certain times in life one archetype becomes perhaps more dominant.  When we are faced with adversity, the warrior force steps to the forefront.  When we have small children, the parental energies and concerns dominate.  At one point along the path of a dedicated spiritual practice, we become more aware of devotion.  Through self study, we observe where our devotion lies- what people, habits, ideas and circumstances are we devoted to?  It is a natural part of spiritual awakening for our vision to expand.  We see things that we didn't see before and wisdom and understanding begin to develop.  Instead of dwelling on our own, big or small, problems or those of the people in our favorite circle, we begin to expand our concept of "us" to think globally.  (A reminder here that we had a unique presidential candidate within our grasp who understood this larger vision.). We begin to understand that 21,000 global citizens dying each day affects us all.  We understand that we all rise as each of us rises and we all suffer when one suffers.

The first reaction to this understanding by many is what can I do about that?  We are so busy staying busy with the business of day to day life that one more obligation can  seem overwhelming.  I would say first that the very existence of our busyness with the day to day struggle is just as intentional as letting 21,000 people die every day.  An oppressed citizenry is more easily managed.  And when you add tv zombie programming, misinformation and fear distributed by the lame stream media, with negative changes to our air, food and water, you have a nice manageable herd of sheep.  Gaslighting is also used to make people who question authority or existing structures out to be crazy "conspiracy theorists ".  But, there is one very simple way to be of service to the world, to take back a little personal sovereignty and it doesn't take much of your time.  What's even better is that, if you do this, I guarantee that you will start to progressively feel just a little bit better.  Thanks to patriots like Edward Snowden, we know now just how much we are being watched by big brother.  All it takes for a politician to start caring about gay marriage and legal marijuana is for us to start caring about those things and TO TALK ABOUT THEM ON SOCIAL MEDIA.  If you are reading this, there is a good chance that you are on Facebook.  When we talk about what we want, rather than what we don't want, young men in hoodies and quantum computers take notice and record the new data.  If we talk about it, our friends will talk about it.  Before long, it's on a political platform.  If you are not interested in politics, I'm sorry to tell you that politics is interested in you and does and will affect you.  If you are awake, please let your social media persona reflect that state of awakeness.

The singer Bono gave a speech to the UN years ago about ending global poverty.  He said in the same way that people today look back at Nazi Germany and ask, how could "they" have let that happen, that future generations will look back at us now and ask the very same question.

The world is in a beautiful state of transition- The Event that 25 different spiritual traditions have spoken of.  What is needed now are spiritual leaders who are willing to step forward and get some skin in the game.  This is a call to action.  You are needed.