Reflecting on our communual communion with sweet, thrumming Nature in the GANG early morning on Summer Solstice, Ted, who led our group meditation while gazing into the garden, sent this:
Which reminds me of another recent offering:
War, Iraq, Enlightenment
June 19, 2014
by Marianne Williamson
Sometimes, it’s when all hope is seemingly lost that the greatest breakthroughs occur in life. Whatever forces us to recognize the limit to what we can do by ourselves, opens the mind to consider the possibility that there might be another way. When everything is all messed up, we’ve played all our cards, and we don’t have a clue what to do now – that often becomes a magic moment. Commonly called “bottoming out,” it’s the point when we realize that our way isn’t working – and then miraculously, things start working.
Nations can bottom out, just like individuals. And the situation in Iraq is just such a moment. You know the government is running out of cards to play when they’re thinking that maybe Iran can help. Or when the media’s idea of great coverage is to call and ask the people who got us into Iraq for any great ideas they might have now that it’s all exploded in our faces. To say we’re grasping for straws is an understatement. Looking at the power of ISIL leads to horrifying possibilities that make the most varied sets of people, from the most disparate places and viewpoints, all ultimately come to the same conclusion: “We really, really have a problem here.”
So what now?
From a spiritual perspective, the first thing we all do is to admit that the situation is not solvable by the mortal mind alone. That admission is both death to the ego and birth of the wiser self. It puts us into a different place of consciousness, a more humble attitude that doesn’t make us dumber – it makes us smarter. It moves us beyond that small number of brain cells that we’re currently using, taking the evolutionary leap that is the challenge of humanity at this moment – to realize that the human species will not survive unless we evolve beyond our material, mechanistic, Newtonian notion of how the universe operates. Our task is to embrace the primacy of consciousness as both the reality and the power that it is. There is more to the mind than the intellect, and the intellect alone can’t solve every problem. This is not bad news, by the way; it’s good.
Next, we move, en masse, into the level of consciousness that is the deeper Reality underlying all things, a self-organizing and self-correcting matrix of energy (some call it God, some do not) that is the natural intelligence of the universe. It is the mysterious guidance by which embryos turn into babies, acorns turn into oak trees and buds turn into blossoms. Our self-will only interferes with this intelligence; our lack of love obstructs it; prayer and meditation release it to work on our behalf.
As we can see from simply looking at a flower, nature knows how to organize itself. And this same force would organize human affairs if we would allow it to. This allowance occurs whenever we place our minds in correct alignment with the laws of the universe — through prayer, meditation, forgiveness and compassion. Until we do this, we will continue to manifest a world that destroys rather than heals itself.
Iraq is a perfect example.
Participating in the creation of collective field of prayer and meditation is something that each of us can do to help end the cycle of violence in the Middle East. Taking the mind to its natural state of alignment with the Truth at the center of things, these activities of the mind act like a magnet to attract the healing potential inherent in the universe. In the words of Martin Luther King, internal changes in the direction of non-violence are “materially passive but spiritually active.” There are, in that field of collective meditative/prayerful consciousness, infinite possibilities that the conscious mind can simply not formulate.
