Submitted by Larry Pearlman

I have chosen to come live in Johannesburg, described as the crime capitol of the world, for a period of 3 months or more.  I have now been here just over a month and this morning I became part of the crime statistics.

Sitting in the front garden over breakfast and reading the daily lesson of The Course in Miracles, Louise Broomberg and I were relieved of her cell phone and my wallet and pocket knife by three young men who simply walked through the front gate, which we had inadvisedly left open, calmly walked over to us and quietly asked us to come with them into the house.  I won’t rehearse the details of the encounter here other than to say that we weren’t hurt and lost nothing but the items mentioned above.  My aim here is simply to explore the options of creation.

It has been said that we create our own world.  Does that mean that I created those three men and invited them to steal from me?  I don’t believe that is the point of that statement.  The fact is that the robbery took place.  The world that I create has to do with how I see that fact and what I choose to express internally and externally with regard to it.  Course in Miracles teaches that I am not the victim of the world that I see and that there is another way of looking at the world.

Nothing happened today that caused me to lose my sense of peace or my knowing that I live in a world of beauty and love.  I don’t deny the fact of what happened today, nor that there are ugly things that happen in the world every day.  But the world that I live in is the world that I express.  I don’t wish to live in an ugly, hateful world so I continue to express love and compassion into my ENTIRE world, which includes these three men.  What would I create if I choose to express anger, hate, and vengeance towards these men or self-pity about my loss of money and the inconvenience of cancelling/replacing credit cards, etc.?  Conversely, what am I creating by choosing to handle this circumstance in a peaceful, loving way in my interactions with Louise, the police, my banks, and all of those friends and relatives who inquire about the incident?  Does it serve me, or my world, to spit out hurt and indignation each time I relate the incident?  Other than to those people directly involved, does it serve me to even speak of the incident, unless, as in this article, there is a creative point to be made?  I can choose to let it flow into my past as just another event that happened during this twenty-four hour period.  I choose to move into my next moment creating joy, peace and harmony that is alive right NOW, even while filling out police reports and cancelling my credit cards.

So, it is true that I became part of Johannesburg’s crime statistics this morning, but I did not become a victim.  That is not the world that I choose to create.

Larry Pearlman is a personification of the evolution in consciousness that recognizes that spirituality and the material world are not mutually exclusive. While working 32 years in corporate America, Larry also taught courses in “The Art of Creative Living” and served as a faculty member for “The Opening” – an 8 day experiential class in discovering your full potential. Larry hosted the radio show Evolution in Consciousness while living at Sunrise Ranch. He served in the Peace Corps in Ghana from 2007-2009.  For more information, see his website.

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Fort Collins Coloradoan – March 19, 2013

LOVELAND — A small herb garden and plentiful grove of fruit trees sit just steps from the kitchen, easily accessible and vibrant in the crisp light of early spring. Rivulets of water escape from under mounded snow piles and muddy the sandy garden soil. In such a serene setting, nature speaks emphatically. Chef Joel Navejas, executive chef of Farm to Table Culinary Academy, has been listening, and says the message is driving his dream.

In a valley a few miles west of Loveland, on the 400-acre Sunrise Ranch, Navejas is heading a new cooking school that teaches harmonious interaction with food. He hopes to help established chefs and those beginning their cooking careers to rethink their connections with food, and to get their hands dirty in the process.

“We actually get a chance to interact with food throughout its life cycle,” Navejas said. “We know exactly how the food is grown. We’re harvesting directly to the kitchen and we’re making a meal the same day the food is harvested.”

The academy will take advantage of the bounty of the ranch, including grass-fed beef, organic vegetables, pastured poultry, eggs, fruit and grains. Culinary students, with the help of resident Sunrise Ranch community members, will help steward the land and animals, and in that way, Navejas said, become more conscious of the natural cycles of life.

“We’re focusing on our carbon footprint,” Navejas said, “getting away from the industrial complex and GMOs (genetically modified organisms) completely.”

For Navejas, that purposeful move is all about lifestyle and health. As a 10-year-old, he worked on huge farms as a migrant worker harvesting potatoes in Idaho and Oregon. “They’d dump chemicals on those fields,” he said. “We didn’t think much of it then; it was part of the job.” Later, he moved to San Francisco to attend California Culinary Academy and said he began to see how important GMO- and pesticide-free foods are as part of a healthy lifestyle. He frequented fruit stands and met with local farmers, using as much local produce as he could in his recipes. “The things you put in affect how you are and feel,” Navejas said.

In Colorado, Navejas worked at Biaggis in Loveland, opened both Rustic Ovens and cooked at Crown Pub in Old Town. But his time as executive chef at Whole Foods provided the “big piece,” for him, he said. “That’s where I got my food education. And now I’m coming full circle,” he said, “putting my hands back in the soil.” Navejas, who has been executive chef at Sunrise Ranch for eight months, is working toward accreditation for the new school, which he says will probably take two to three years.

The six to eight students of the inaugural class of the academy will learn how to make dishes that follow the offerings of the seasons, according to Navejas. They’ll also learn traditional skill sets and food presentation, as well as how to cook with various fresh produce to preserve nutrients and maximize flavor.
“We already have four students, and we’re still accepting applications,” Navejas said. The hands-on curriculum, which runs seven months from April through October, costs $3,500; more for housing onsite.

Gary Goodhue, a member of Sunrise Ranch community and kitchen worker, said the recipes are far from ordinary. “There’s an amazing array of culinary cuisine, from all around the world — there’s Mediterranean, Asian, Caribbean and African. The diversity of cuisine that can be created while still maintaining a healthy style of food is just incredible.”

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Spring does bring regeneration as nature calls forth for birth and growth and new life cycles begin
And reminds us of a life once lived as love incarnate, that transcended death around to life again
I honor and celebrate that life example greatly given and embodied some few short millennia ago
Preserved and anchored into the grid so as to know what the spirit of humanity would one day show
Regeneration, resurrection, re-creation and unlimited, beautiful and creative forms of life being born
Happens in the empty, receptive space following death, dissolution and all attachments being shorn
Cracking the shell and melting the hardness, breaking through and opening space to let and to allow
The most heavenly and finest frequencies of love and life, existing in the moment eternally here now
Can begin once again to move right in, set up shop, become comfortable and make a home in the mind
Gently infiltrating dissonant patterns and perceptions until the spirit of creation is all the mind can find
As nature very gracefully shows… to release, dissolve and surrender clears the path and calls into play
The spirit of resurrection, fueled by Creator Love for life’s abundance to come forth and re-pave the way
Rich, full and vibrant; Love surrounds and soaks into the self, and life is seen again, yet with new eyes
Separated senses of Self fall away revealing the Wonderful One Within as powerful, loving and wise
Potently present, perfectly aware, peacefully perceiving being and existing in the patterns of perfection
A journey of ever ascending heights of inter-connective perspective, repainting the canvas of perception
Undulating waves of joyful reveling in the matrix of the mystery and knowing I Am in the shared creation
Kinetic, colorful, coordinated molecules of love dancing ecstatic concerts of harmony and shared elation
Another blessed soul awakens and the divine intelligence of nature surges forward in following her plan
Infinitely resourceful, wholly committed and ceaselessly working toward the conscious evolution of man

Gary Goodhue is an author, actor, poet and spiritual aspirant. Gary has been exploring universal success principles, personal development and spiritual concepts for most of his life. He has studied at the School of Metaphysics, as well as teaching classes and serving as branch director for one of their sixteen school centers. He was also involved with the Community of Light and is currently living at Sunrise Ranch, headquarters of the Emissaries of Divine Light. He is involved in their Full Self Emergence Program and serves in multiple capacities on the ranch and in the community. He works within different departments and also has started participating in the EDL ministry program, sharing spiritual truth and reciting original works of poetry, as well as writing blog articles for the website. Gary is looking forward to deepening his relationship with the Emissaries and serving in greater capacities as the spirit of love expresses through him into larger levels of manifestation and experience.

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Submitted by Jerry Kvasnicka

Something happened on December 21, 2012. Those of us who celebrated and otherwise marked this Birth 2012 event know that we moved through a cosmic portal into a new cycle, a new age where love, light and life are supposed to rule the day. So what, one might ask, are the evidences of this change? The world continues pretty much as it did before. Wars continue in the Middle East, parts of Africa and other places. Gun violence seems to be increasing in the United States. Financial tribulation still afflicts Europe and the U.S. Disappearing glaciers and polar ice confirm the reality of global warming. Droughts, floods, devastating hurricanes, tornadoes and atmospheric pollution seem to be increasing. And from what I can observe, turmoil in individual lives has not abated. So where are we to look for any evidence of positive change and transformation that movement into a new age is supposed to bring?

The initial change, of course, occurs in consciousness, specifically in the consciousness of those who have awakened to the reality of the creative process that, contrary to all appearances, is still the controlling force operative on earth. This change is for the most part invisible and vibrational, and though there are some external evidences of its impact in individual lives and in the groups to which they belong, objectively measurable change remains primarily below the level of physical observation. According to a report that I recently heard on the radio, the vibrational rate of the earth has risen in recent years from eight cycles to eleven. I have no idea how this is measured or exactly what it means, but I suspect it is indicative of the movement of the earth into the new cosmic context heralded by the Birth 2012 event.

So obviously something is moving; something is stirring; something is changing. The origin of this change is in human consciousness and the intensification of current that is occurring there. Though the measureable visible evidences of positive, life-enhancing change on earth may yet be sporadic and insubstantial, the negative, life-destroying changes, the so-called “doomsday curves,” the unspeakable atrocities, are painfully obvious and there for everyone to see. And I submit that these graphic evidences of disintegration constitute the most incontrovertible proof that life is on the move, that something of tremendous intensity is shaking the very foundations of the planet.

Andrew Harvey hits the nail on the head in this quote from his book Radical Passion: Sacred Love and Wisdom in Action. “In preparation for the birth of the Divine, the entire human race is now going through a global dark night, which will result in a new humanity that has been humbled and chastened by tragedy, so that it may open completely to the mystery of divine grace. This dark night cannot be bargained with, explained away, leapt over or mitigated. It is the destined crucifixion of a communal human ego now clearly revealed to be suicidal, matricidal, and dangerous to itself and to the whole of creation. No one and nothing will stop Kali dancing Her terrible dance of destruction and re-creation. There will be no resurrection of an embodied divine humanity without a systematic, perfectly organized, brutally complete crucifixion of everything in us that keeps us addicted to the systems of illusion that are now rapidly destroying everything.”
The creative process that governs all life and being in the cosmos is in essence an integrating process—bringing and holding all things together in a beautifully coordinated whole. But it also has a disintegrating or deconstructing aspect, a cosmic waste disposal system. Obviously the integrating work of the universe cannot be fully consummated if there are “systems of illusion” and pockets of resistance such as the self-seeking human ego blocking the way. Insofar as the body of humanity is concerned there is a massive collection of trash and assorted clutter in individual subconscious minds and the collective consciousness accumulated through thousands of years of subhuman function on the planet. All of this garbage has to be disposed of in the cosmic recycling process. The intensified currents of life referred to above are now stirring things up in this subconscious realm, bringing all of this stuff –this grisly toxic effluent—up to the surface of consciousness and prompting human beings to act in extremely destructive and even barbaric ways. Hence the exponential increase of conflict and corruption, pain and suffering we’re now witnessing in human affairs.

All of this debris has to rise to the surface in order for it to be dissipated and dissolved; this is the only way to clear the subconscious mind and heart of humanity. No one is exempt from this clearing process; even those far advanced on the spiritual path, even those who could be considered enlightened, will experience these negative currents rising up into feeling and thought, bringing “dark nights” and Kali’s “terrible dance of destruction.” This puts those who have found their identity in the wholeness of life, in the truth of who they are, particularly on the spot. Knowing something of what is happening, it is incumbent on them to override all of the negative and destructive energies surfacing in consciousness with the irresistible current and absolute power of unconditional love.

I like the way Bill Isaacs describes what is required in his essay The Ending of Separation. “I suppose everyone has had, at one point or other in their lives, a so-called ‘dark night of the soul’—a moment where difficulties have mounted, and where the intensities have seemed very great…. As things proceed it will become more and more important that there are those who are not only unwavering, but happily committed to including and letting be brought into the fire anything and everything that comes into consciousness. This has always been the missing ingredient—a truly safe place on earth for the factors of distortion to be allowed to pass away. I suppose this is the unadvertised part of the experience of touching the invisible and magnificent nature of heaven. Initially there is joy and thrill, but as we know, what’s equally required is a fierceness of focus.”

Yes, a fierceness of focus is essential so that everything that comes into consciousness is immediately exposed to the fire of love that burns at the core of being. All distortions and destructive energies are thereby consumed and the truth of love remains. There may be an inclination to fight or try to flee from the dark energies, but this would not allow the essential work of dissolution to be done. What is required is simply to stay focused, embrace everything that comes into consciousness and just let the fire of love burn whatever needs to be burned. This allows the remaining substance to descend to a level of the creative process where it can begin to ascend again.

It is all part of a grand creative cycle governing the cosmos and there is no need to become involved in the disintegrative or waste disposal part of this process, no need to even think about it. It all happens automatically as long as attention remains centered in the integrating aspect of the creative cycle. David Karchere beautifully describes the spiritually mature approach in his piece The Rising. ”Deconstruction is a natural thing. For the most part, it’s not our business. It seems to take care of itself…. There is something else calling, which is the creative process. There is creation calling; there is glory calling. Part of glory is the composting—part of the glory of the garden is that the compost gets put in the garden. But it isn’t all about the compost. It isn’t about the undoing of the human ego…. There’s something else to be passionate about and to be part of. There is a rising, there’s a coming together, and there is something glorious that’s coming through humanity. That’s the point!”

Yes, the point for all who have to some degree awakened to the reality of the creative process is to be absolutely centered in the integrative aspect of this cycle as the beneficent creative power of the universe does its constructive and deconstructive work in birthing a new world. The intensifying currents of life brought by the new cycle may bring up experiences from the mass consciousness of humankind that are extremely uncomfortable and even life-threatening for individuals and humanity as a whole. No matter what the experience, if fierceness of focus is maintained and passion unwaveringly given to unconditional love, the inevitable outcome is glory. It is as if the universe will say to the earth and its inhabitants, “Welcome back. Let us join together in making all things wondrously and gloriously new.”

Jerry Kvasnicka, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, has had a varied career as a youth minister, a radio news reporter, a writer and editor for several magazines and journals and a custodian with the Loveland, Colorado school district. Jerry currently edits and writes for the spirituality section of the online magazine The Mindful Word. He has lived at the Sunrise Ranch spiritual community in Loveland for twenty-four years. He can be reached at jerry@themindfulword.org.

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Submitted by Larry Pearlman

Peace is a process. It’s something that we’re going to create and develop and share over time. I think it’s dangerous to think that some magic wand is going to be waved over the heads of humanity and from that moment on there’s no longer going to be any conflict or war.

People sometimes ask me if I think that we’re ever going to get to the point where there will be complete peace and the cessation of all violence. You may be surprised at my answer, but I don’t really think that that is how it works. This world that we’re in, this world that we created in order to learn certain very important spiritual lessons, this is the world of duality. This is the world where we learn from our mistakes, where we learn from everything. One of the things that we learn from is the way that we relate to one another, both skillfully and unskillfully. This is all of the evolutionary trek, both individual and collective, that is bringing us to a spiritual maturation.

So maybe there comes a point where each individual makes that choice to such a degree and such a level that they no longer have a need to reincarnate, if you believe in that. Or we move on to the next schoolroom, the next classroom, where we have different lessons. The main thing that I’ve learned over all these years that I’ve been doing this work, over all the years and decades that I’ve been in spiritual practice, is that I don’t know anything. So these are my theories, just like we’ll all have our own theories.

I don’t really know what is meant to happen here. The only thing that I really do know is that I am meant to continue to choose peace in very dynamic ways in my own life, and to try and share that whenever I can. How this ends, what happens, I’m not attached to it, because I know that in the end we’re all going to see that we created this world and we can create a better world. And in doing so, peace may happen in exactly the way that you described. I hope it does—that would be wonderful. But I’m not attached to it, to tell you the truth. I’m more attached to the spiritual growth that’s there.

I think the thing that is happening is that we are beginning to focus much more on the ways that we are the same, rather than the ways that we are different. I mean, you brought up the situation in Ireland, and I think that’s probably a very good example, because clearly, whether you’re in northern Ireland or whether you’re in the Republic of Ireland, they’re all Irish. And whether they’re Catholic or Protestant, in the end, does not supersede the fact that they’re really the same.

The one thing that I’ve learned as I’ve traveled around the world, often to these war zones, is that we’re not really all that different from one another. If we could begin focusing on the ways that we are the same, and build from there, as opposed to the way we’ve been doing it, which is to begin where we are different, beginning where we are the same fosters a new attitude that ultimately does lead to peace. Now, of course, the Internet has been fantastic at that. I mean, we have broken down boundaries and walls in ways that we never would have thought possible twenty years ago, mainly just through connecting through the Internet, email, Facebook, whatever. And this is an exciting time to live in—there’s no way around that. I mean, we have opportunities here today that are just remarkable.

I remember the first time I was invited to Iraq, back in 1998. I was invited there by Saddam Hussein himself to perform the Peace Concert there in Baghdad. I was pretty nervous because of course I thought, “These people are so different from me—what’s going to happen? Am I going to be safe?” and all of those questions that one would ask. Without going into too much detail, it was one of the best experiences of my life. After I did this major concert there in Baghdad, they had a party for me. It was one of the most fun parties I’ve ever been to, and all we did all night long, really, was sit around singing Simon & Garfunkel songs! And this was in Baghdad. So we really were a lot more similar than I thought that we were.

It also makes me think of how I got into this work in the first place. You may remember that twenty-five years ago this year, there was a gathering that took place in Assisi, Italy, the home of St. Francis, where for the first time in history, the leaders of the twelve major religions of the world came together, not to have discussions, but just to pray. Each one brought a peace prayer from their tradition, and there was an amazing, beautiful gathering where each one of them prayed that prayer. Those are the prayers that I ultimately arranged to music, which is another story.

That was the beginning of something very important, especially in terms of our spiritual history and the way that we relate to one another in religion. Even though obviously all the different religions are very different, they all have a common denominator, and that is that desire for peace. Everyone has a peace prayer.

We see this happening in so many ways. Allowing these boundaries, between individuals, cultures, and nations, to continue to dissolve, is what ultimately is going to lead to peace.

James Twyman is an internationally renowned, best-selling author, filmmaker and musician who has a reputation for traveling to some of the world’s greatest areas of conflict, sharing his message of peace.

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       Submitted by Jerry Kvasnicka
While we frequently hear of global summits and conferences on such issues as climate change, the world economy and AIDS, it isn’t often that news comes to us of gatherings that address what is perhaps the key causative factor underlying virtually all of the world’s problems, namely overpopulation.  Or do we seriously believe that an earth without human beings could environmentally and economically threaten itself?  No, there is really only one reason why ecological catastrophe looms:  too many Homo sapiens vying for a slice of the planetary pie.  Until this fundamental issue is addressed, the plethora of programs to patch up the planet will all be for naught.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, world population reached seven billion on October 31, 2011.  That this milestone fell on Halloween perhaps indicates the devilish nature of the problem!  The online encyclopedia Wikipedia estimates births per year worldwide at 134 million and deaths at 56 million.  At this rate world population is expected to grow to as much as 10.5 billion by 2050.  This is far beyond the carrying capacity of the planet, especially considering that 90% of the growth will occur in underdeveloped countries.  And since one person in the U.S. annually uses 50 times the energy of one Bengali, population growth in the industrial nations, though slower, will put enormous stress on world resources.  Despite these sobering facts, programs to limit population growth often have low priority or engender outright opposition from political conservatives, religious organizations and prolife groups.  Wikipedia notes that “the use of abortion in some population control strategies has caused controversy, with organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church explicitly opposing any intervention in the human reproductive process.”

Why?  Why this stubborn refusal to apply discipline in this area?  Obviously we are dealing with mindsets embedded in the deepest levels of human consciousness.  In the opening chapter of the Bible, God reportedly commanded man to “be fruitful and multiply,” and perhaps the fervor to reproduce represents one way human beings try to compensate for their failure to observe the rest of God’s (life’s) commandments.  If people are not secure and fulfilled in the expression of their true nature as representatives of the Creator on earth, then having children may be a way of compensating for this lack of meaning and purpose.

Do we suppose that today God (or whatever this term represents to you) is still urging us along the path of accelerated procreation?  I very much doubt it.  The message I’m getting in the stillness of meditation is something like this:  “All right, already!  Enough is enough!  With all due respect, may I suggest that the totality of life in the universe is in no way diminished by the failure of human beings to reproduce?  Life can manifest in an infinite number of ways, and right now it would be better for the earth and for the cosmos as a whole if it manifested in ways other than the multiplication of human forms.”

Religionists down through the ages have labored under the illusion that the earth is a “soul factory”—i.e. that it’s primary purpose is to mass produce souls (human beings) for the kingdom of heaven, where they have a chance to go after death.  I suspect this notion is a baseline belief of the prolife movement—people who insist that life is precious.  Indeed it is, but the supreme value of life is degraded when it is forced beyond the saturation point into human forms.  The universe is less interested in quantity—the gross production of human forms—than in quality—the creative output of the earth system.  The point has now been reached where quality will be better served by fewer births rather than more births.  For those whose identity is in the individual human form such an idea may be anathema.  But for those who have expanded their vision to embrace the larger purposes of the celestial order, the need to limit human forms is easily accepted.

So the “soul factory” delusion is one element of human conditioning that must dissolve if we are to move from indiscriminate breeding to wise life management.  Another is the belief that my significance and sense of fulfillment are shortchanged if I do not have children.  This belief is deeply rooted in cultural traditions throughout the world, particularly in developing nations where population growth has been so explosive.  Again, it is a matter of basic personal identity.  If identity is at the level of human flesh, obviously the more of it one can produce, the more seeming significance one has.  But if identity has risen to the level of Spirit, to the nature and purposes of Being, then it is seen that meaning and significance come from within and in no way depend on external accretion.

Something similar could be said about sexual activity and the supposed need to be loved by, and have sex with, another human being.  Again, if identity is at the level of the human form with its drives and impulses, fears and insecurities, sexual intimacy will seem crucial to personal well-being and significance.  But if identity is with the essence of Being that informs the form, passionate love for that provides total fulfillment.  This certainly doesn’t rule out relationships, even of a sexual nature.  It just puts first things first.  Sex becomes a creative option rather than an irresistible urge.

Another deep vein of conditioning concerns the notion that human forms must be saved and preserved at all costs.  We find medical doctors making heroic efforts to keep brain-dead babies, hopelessly mutilated accident victims and vegetating elderly alive at some level.  Some scientists drive themselves relentlessly to find cures for AIDS and Alzheimer’s or to discover the miracle drug that will prevent aging.  Why?  What if they were 100% successful at keeping people alive indefinitely? Would the earth be better off with all these forms on it?  I think it would be overrun in short order and probably have to self-destruct.  Though we may be reluctant to admit it, it is actually a blessing that human forms pass away.  Given the present state on earth, aging, disease and natural disasters are nature’s defense against the human plague.  In this sense we can actually give thanks for them.  Sure it would be nice if the earth had a way of clearing itself of clutter without causing so much pain and suffering to human beings.  But as long as they insist on maintaining impurities in themselves and show little interest in voluntarily limiting their numbers, these uncomfortable options are the only ones nature has available.

Clearly what is called for is spiritual education on a massive scale, so that people of all countries and cultural traditions begin to glimpse their inner worth and the creative role of the earth within the universal whole.  Changes in consciousness consequent upon individual spiritual awakening should prepare the way for lifestyle changes that will gradually rid the earth system of its nemesis:  the resource-eating human breeding machine.

What this comes down to for each individual is this:  Am I willing to relinquish embedded religious and cultural beliefs about children, birth, death, heaven and hell?  Am I willing to acknowledge that life is too precious to be imprisoned in vegetating and unwanted human flesh?  Am I willing to let irreversibly deformed, depraved and decaying human forms mercifully return to their maker, even if it means my own?  Am I willing to alter my own sexual habits for the sake of planetary stabilization and healing?  Abstinence (yes abstinence!) may be indicated.  The world’s population could be brought into balance if human beings would stop reproducing for just one generation!  But how many would be willing to make such a sacrifice for the benefit of the whole?  Yes, these are seemingly hard choices, but they are actually very easy when identity rises above personal wants and desires to embrace cosmic design and purpose.

Jerry Kvasnicka, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, has had a varied career as a youth minister, a radio news reporter, a writer and editor for several magazines and journals and a custodian with the Loveland, Colorado school district. Jerry currently edits and writes for the spirituality section of the online magazine The Mindful Word. He has lived at the Sunrise Ranch spiritual community in Loveland for twenty-four years. He can be reached at jkvasnicka@emnet.org.

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Submitted by Jerry Kvasnicka

“What the world needs now is love, sweet love.  It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.”  These words, from a song popularized by Jackie DeShannon in 1965 and subsequently recorded by many well-known vocalists, are still repeated by those wishing for a better world than the conflict-filled and corruption-ridden world in which we presently live.  If there was just more love, wars would come to an end, crime rates would go down, poverty would decrease and virtually all of mankind’s problems would begin to be solved.

At the risk of offending all such idealists I would offer a resounding NO to this notion.  No, what the world needs now is not love, sweet love.  What it needs is truth, sharp truth, or we could say the truth of love.  Granted, love is what makes the world go ‘round.  I believe this was first affirmed by Aristotle.  Love is the elemental force that drives all creation, not only on earth but throughout the whole universe.  Every living thing is powered by love:  plants, trees, insects, animals and human beings.  In view of this, there is plenty of love on earth, and when it comes to human beings, since there are more of us on earth than ever in recorded history, there is more love moving through human beings than ever before.

So obviously the problem is not a lack of love.  Everything anyone does is initiated and carried out by love, otherwise there would be no power to do it.  Bank robbers are motivated by love, probably the love of money and what it can bring.  Terrorists, including those who perpetrated the 9/11 atrocity, are motivated by love, love for an organization or some kind of cause.  On July 20 of this year a man walked into a theater in Aurora, Colorado, and gunned down twelve people and injured scores more.  Yes, even suspect James Holmes was acting out of love.  You might say that he was motivated by hate.  Probably true, but hate is not the absence of love, it is the distortion and misuse of love.

Seeing that there is no lack of love on earth—indeed, there is a surplus—what is the problem? The problem is a deficiency of truth.  In the measure that love is not released in accordance with the design and control of truth, it is destructive.  Human beings have very little understanding of what the authentic design and control of truth is.  Instead, exercising their “brilliant” intellects, they have made all kinds of guesses, and most of these guesses are way off the mark.  Hence we have the world that we have, filled with corruption, violence and lies.

Love is the power of fusion; it is the nature of love to bring things together, to bind.  Acting from love, human beings bind themselves to all kinds of things:  countries, cultures, causes, traditions, religious beliefs, scientific theories, creature comforts of all kinds, relationships and of course food, sex, alcohol and an assortment of illicit drugs.  Each and every one of these beliefs and behaviors obstruct the truth of love and actually prevent it from being expressed and known.  Yet people become so fastened to their beliefs that some are even willing to kill for them.

“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”  This statement was made by a man who could speak with authority on the subject because he had personally experienced the truth of himself in his own living.  Even though he was in a sense consumed by love, he did not say that love would set one free.  He knew that love binds, and he sought to convey this in various ways to the Pharisees and the Sadducees who in their passionate love had bound themselves to doctrines and practices quite at variance with the true design of life.  He was free in his love because it was given to nothing but the truth.

And what is the truth and how is it found?  The truth is found in the design of creation.  Human beings were created (or designed) “in the image and likeness of God.”  In other words, they are creator-beings and partake of a divine nature.  They are human Beings, but insofar as their present function on earth is concerned, the human part has overridden and all but erased the Being part.  They have forgotten the truth of themselves and consequently have used the power of love in all kinds of distorted and destructive ways.

So obviously the great need on earth now is not for more love.  Rather it is for human beings to begin to remember the truth of who they are, their authentic identity.  And not to merely mentally remember this truth, and form some kind of intellectual concept about it.  What is absolutely essential is that this truth be expressed in living.  For it is a fundamental principle that “you only know what you express.”  To know the truth the truth must be expressed.

The first step in allowing this to happen is to clear out all of the beliefs, cultural and political loyalties, addictions and other structures in consciousness to which one has bound oneself in love.  A thorough deprogramming is required so that love may be redirected to the truth.  In the measure that love has been given to these structures, this cleansing process may occasion some discomfort.  But as long as this clutter occupies consciousness there is no room for the truth to come through.

Emptying the mind and heart of this extraneous matter brings one into contact with the core of Being, the very essence of the truth of oneself, the very spirit of the Creator.  In union with this essence it becomes natural and easy to express the qualities of the Creator in living.  These are the properties or attributes of divine or true character and include such qualities as integrity, nobility, creativity, serenity, generosity, stability, patience, thankfulness, humility, dependability, kindness, transparency, courage, honor and many other beautiful expressions.  Every time one of these qualities is given expression in living, an individual confirms his identity with the Creator and the truth of love becomes more clearly known.

So what the world needs now is not love, sweet love, but the sharp sword of truth that cuts all the clutter out of human consciousness, allowing more of the inexhaustible supply of love to be released in divine expression via the qualities of true character.  When love is thus liberated from the assortment of beliefs, wants, desires and other structures in which human beings have imprisoned it, the Creator is known again on earth and a new and glorious world is born.   “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

 
Jerry Kvasnicka, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, has had a varied career as a youth minister, a radio news reporter, a writer and editor for several magazines and journals and a custodian with the Loveland, Colorado school district. He has lived at the Sunrise Ranch spiritual community in Loveland for twenty-four years. He can be reached at jkvasnicka@emnet.org.
 

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Submitted by Linda Haupt

After a busy week at Sunrise Ranch I found myself enchanted by the voice of Coleman Barks and the cello of David Darling at the Wake Up Festival held in Estes Park a mere 40 minutes away.  Clarrisa Pinkola Estes introduced them as our elders, the ones who hold the stories of life and truth.  She has played with David and Coleman in life and continues to laugh with and love them.  Laughter is God waking up and it was truly manifested through their combined gifts and wisdom.  Hafiz says, “One true moment of love will last for days.”  My being is awakened, my heart no longer sleeping, as I drive back through the canyon filled with gratitude for the elders’ true expressions of love.

Below is a compilation of some treasured love messages.  Language is only one of the many portals to love.

 “Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love, ancient Persian has eighty, Greek three, and English only one.  This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling. Eskimos have thirty words for snow, because it is a life-and-death matter to them to have exact information about the element they live with so intimately.  If we had a vocabulary of thirty words for love … we would immediately be richer and more intelligent in this human element so close to our heart.”  Robert Johnson, Fisher King

 “You know the way you can get when you have not had a drink of Love: your face hardens, your sweet muscles cramp, children become concerned about a strange look that appears in your eyes, which begins to worry your own mirror and nose.”  Hafiz

“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different.  You know that your name is safe in their mouth.”  Billy age 4

“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”  Henry David Thoreau

“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love.  It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” W. Somerset Maugham

“The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here, Eat.  You will love again the stranger who was your self.  Give wine, Give bread. Give back your heart to itself.  To the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart.  Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.”  Derek Walcott

“From the Toltec perspective, everything is made of Love.  Love is Life itself.  When we master Love, we align with the Spirit of Life passing through us.  We are no longer the body, or the mind, or the soul.  We are Love.  Then every action we take is an expression of Love and Love in action can only produce happiness.”  Don Miguel Ruiz

“Love for God is no longer only about joyful emotions but is a true surrender of self.  A sense of selflessness, and an ability to love for love’s sake alone is born.”  Teresa of Avila

 “Love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths.  We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another.  Passion dies and is brought back.  Pain is chased away and surfaces another time.  To love means to embrace and at the same time to  withstand many many endings, and many many beginnings – all in the same relationship.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes

 If you want to be more alive, love is the truest health.

May you all be well.

May love visit often.

 
Linda is a retired Special Needs School Teacher. Her mission in teaching was to provide the space for each student to see their magnificence rather than what was perceived as wrong. While living in rural Maine, she held spiritual retreats. Her peaceful cottage by the sea was a perfect place to be shared with others. Here she provided a place to be still and encouraged all to see the wonderful one within. In March of 2011, she moved to Sunrise Ranch in Loveland, Colorado and enjoys sharing time with parents in Maine and sons in Colorado. She entered the Full Self-Emergence Program at Sunrise Ranch. She also studies with her spiritual teacher Megan Don. Going on pilgrimages and walking in the shoes of the Mystics has helped Linda to find her innocence and let go of the stories of past experience. In 2011, she was blessed to visit The Findhorn Community and the island of Iona in Scotland. Linda loves travel, both in person and via photography via her brother’s God given talent and vision on chuckhaupt.com. When she isn’t on the Front Desk in Guest Services at the Ranch you will find her moving-dancing, hiking, drumming, or swinging in her hammock “with the Beloved”.

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Submitted by Jerry Kvasnicka

Some thirty-five years ago on a warm summer evening I was present as a very wise man lectured on the theme, “Bless Your Circumstance.”

It was the most simple, yet profound, prescription for personal and planetary healing I had ever heard, and I endeavored from that point forward to make it the theme of my own living.

He said there is no circumstance, no matter how difficult and painful, that we are incapable of blessing. What he had in mind implies more than simply giving thanks, although that is a necessary first step. It involves actively receiving the circumstance, loving it and taking life-enhancing action in relation to it. He said that when this is done, whether it involves an ill condition in the body, frustration at work or a person with whom we’re angry, the condition loses its sting and is integrated into the larger creative process that is steadily at work conforming all activity on earth to the universal whole.

Circumstances of all kinds come to us continually for the sole purpose of being blessed. They come for no other reason. This is why we are here. This is our natural mode of function. Our bodies, minds and emotional facilities were specifically designed to be conduits of blessing. When they fulfill this function they are healthy and that health spills over to bless the immediate environment and the world beyond.

However, as we well know, the usual response to troubling circumstances is a curse rather than a blessing. When Job in the Old Testament lost his home, family and all of his earthly goods and was reduced to sitting on the ground in agony day after day nursing the sores and boils all over his body, his wife advised him to “curse God and die,” i.e. curse your circumstance, curse life and be done with it. And indeed if Job had followed her advice he would have died and much would have died with him, perhaps even his wife. But because, even in his anguish, he maintained an attitude of thankfulness and blessed his circumstance, his health, wealth and family eventually were restored.

How strong the inclination is to curse our bodies when we get sick. “Damn this cold. Damn this headache. Why is life torturing me this way?” In this foul mood we extend the curse to those around us. Then, beguiled by an ad promising immediate relief, we often fight the symptoms with harsh chemical concoctions and other invasive procedures, treating the disease and the body itself as enemies to be subdued. No wonder, despite all the advances in medical technology, health worldwide continues to deteriorate and disease is more rampant than ever.

This whole combative approach, based as it is on cursing the body and doing battle with disease, is fundamentally flawed. Fortunately new treatment modalities are emerging as alternatives to hard-line allopathic tradition. In what some healers refer to as “vibrational medicine,” including such techniques as attunement and Therapeutic Touch, the emphasis is on blessing the physical capacity and its corresponding chakra system. The body is regarded as a friend. Its signals (including pain) are welcomed, lovingly listened to, blessed.

This promising change of approach in the world of medicine has its counterpart in the field of psychotherapy, where the importance of encompassing and integrating the “shadow self’ is acknowledged by many therapists and spiritual advisors. Why not apply it to every field, indeed to every facet of human behavior? Can we not unconditionally welcome and bless all physical discomforts and pains? All feelings of anger, grief, depression and fear? All the “evil spirits” that lurk in the dark caverns of the mind? All the tyrants and terrorists, manipulators and marauders that inhabit our world? Can we not unconditionally welcome and bless even death itself, thereby depriving it of its terror? Yes to all of the above, and how relaxing and restorative this would be to ourselves and the Earth.

I understand that the state of Hawaii officially blesses all new public facilities and infrastructure projects upon their completion. This sign was posted at the beginning of a new blacktop highway: “This road not yet dedicated—proceed at your own risk.” Any time a blessing is withheld, we proceed at our own risk; the creative current through body and mind is blocked and disease and disintegration begin to set in. So, quite obviously, it is wise, if only for the sake of self-preservation, to keep the blessings flowing.

“Bless your circumstance.” What formula for individual and collective healing could be so simple yet so powerful? For many years, almost every night before retiring, I took a mile walk around my neighborhood, silently offering a blessing to each home I walked by, to each car, to each tree, to each bush, sometimes pausing to direct the current of blessing through my hands towards something in which I perceived a special need. It is easy to cultivate the habit of blessing everything. It soon becomes second nature, maybe because it is actually our first nature. It is what we were built to do, and neither we nor our world will feel well until we are doing it continually. Every circumstance comes to us to be blessed and no circumstance can resist that blessing.

Jerry Kvasnicka, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, has had a varied career as a youth minister, a radio news reporter, a writer and editor for several magazines and journals and a custodian with the Loveland, Colorado school district. He has lived at the Sunrise Ranch spiritual community in Loveland for twenty-four years. He can be reached at jkvasnicka@emnet.org.

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Submitted by Jerry Kvasnicka

Torrential rains and flooding in China and Thailand, record snowfall in Alaska, Texas and Oklahoma burning up with drought, hurricanes and tornados vicious enough to kill hundreds and destroy major sections of cities, history-defying extremes of temperature. What is going on with the weather? Why these imbalances and extremes? Has Mother Nature lost her sense of fair play or simply gone wild?

Many environmentalists and scientists put the finger on global warming and “greenhouse effect,” in which the sun’s heat is trapped in the atmosphere by various “greenhouse” gases, mainly carbon emitted by smokestack industries and coal-fired power plants. Some meteorologists point to ocean currents in the Pacific—El Nino (warm) and La Nina (cool)—that trigger atmospheric disturbances capable of displacing the jet stream. The result can be flooding in South America and drought in Southeast Asia or, as in 2011, in Texas.

Some scientists as well as politicians still deny global warming and insist that the climate change we’re observing is entirely the product of natural cycles or evidence of an impending ice age. This despite the massive melting of artic ice and the gradual disappearance of glaciers around the world. Can anyone seriously believe that the staggering amount of carbon dioxide we pump into the air every year from power plants, automobiles, airplanes and many other sources has little or no effect on the atmosphere and climate of this planet?

So while a growing number of scientists now embrace the basic mechanism of global warming the jury still seems to be out on the extent to which it is responsible for currently observed climate changes. And while ocean currents undoubtedly do affect wind and cloud patterns on land, what accounts for the fluctuations in these currents? In short, what is the underlying cause of these and all the other physical phenomena associated with global weather?

It is customary to dismiss all destructive weather-related events as “acts of God.” But why would a supposedly beneficent being be interested in dishing out such suffering to human beings, not to mention the torment visited upon the planet? So are we to conclude that violent weather is purely random with essentially no underlying cause? I believe there is a cause, and whenever there is violence of any kind on earth, it can always ultimately be traced back to one source: human beings.

For example, earthquakes reflect major shifts in the structured patterns of thought held in human consciousness. They are destructive because human beings generally won’t release their rigid ideological and religious mindsets until the tension along the brain’s fault lines becomes overwhelming. Tornadoes and volcanic eruptions mirror the turbulent emotions in human consciousness—the irrepressible spasms of jealousy, resentment and ethnic hatred that frequently explode in wanton violence and murder. Floods represent human thought run amuck; the truth (water) is so diluted by human interpretations and distortions that it overflows the banks of natural control and design. Widening temperature, wind and precipitation extremes mirror the extreme length to which human beings increasingly go to get what they imagine they want. Drought and searing heat reflect the intensification of the power of love (fire) as the earth moves into a celestial context where the impurities in human consciousness are burned away. In other words, there are no destructive “acts of God,” just the resistance and senseless acts of human beings out of alignment with universal law and purpose. We impose our own violence on nature, then complain about it. How ridiculous!

Seeing that weather climate is a product of human emotional climate, it follows that climate change requires a change in the climate of human consciousness. Clearing clouds in the sky requires clearing clouds (conditioning) in my inner sky. Calming global atmospheric disturbance involves discovering and abiding in the great calm within myself, letting the atmosphere of my expression convey peace into the world.

You and I are custodians of the earth, including nature and the weather. As a school custodian for ten years I came to realize the importance of maintaining a clear and life-enhancing atmosphere in the school, not just good air ventilation but good vibrational ventilation, and much of this had to do with the quality of atmosphere in my own consciousness. The earth, one might say, is our school building and our custodial responsibility requires the consistent expression of the highest and finest qualities of character to sustain and elevate the atmosphere in this “school of living.”

The sun is currently at what is called “solar max.” Some very strong solar flares have recently been observed and some have impacted satellite transmissions and other communications systems on earth. Could these coronal ejections be the sun’s attempt to tap us on the shoulder and urge us to defrost the rigid structures, and otherwise change the climate, in human consciousness so that the earth’s climate is brought back into harmony with the universal order?

It has been said that “the earth is reserved unto fire.” This could be the equivalent of hell fire in which global warming turns the planet into another Venus where green-house gases have raised surface temperatures to nine hundred degrees. Or if human beings cast off ego identity in favor of identity with the creative fire of divine love at every person’s core, then the possibility exists for the earth to be returned to the beautiful, pristine garden it was created to be. The choice is ours.

Jerry Kvasnicka, a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, has had a varied career as a youth minister, a radio news reporter, a writer and editor for several magazines and journals and a custodian with the Loveland, Colorado school district. He has lived at the Sunrise Ranch spiritual community in Loveland for twenty-four years. He can be reached at jkvasnicka@emnet.org.

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