Tag Archives: heart

Is there room in your Inn?

2017-12-31_water-drops-1314990While on our spiritual journey through life, one of the profound discoveries is that we will have many moments of enlightenment. In other words, as we get to a new peak, our overview of the landscape provides us with a new perspective. As humanity continues its climb toward truth and deeper understanding we each notice that certain life events contain the revelation needed to give us that next profound change in perspective which leads us to the flashes of enlightenment. Understanding this pattern is wisdom that sets us up and provides the context for our next experience in life.

At the end of every year we humans enter a worldwide celebration of reflection for the year that is passing and hopefulness for the new year approaching. One of the timeless questions presented to us regardless of culture, asks a simple question. Is there room in your Inn? As spiritual people we take time each day to turn away from the business of the material realm and still ourselves enjoying the peace at the heart of our being listening for the information that gives us insight. Many times, however, we are not willing to make room in our lives to be informed by new messages from our still place.

Some cultures believe that God sends external messengers or avatars to give us information and others believe that internal to our being God or the Universe communicates directly with us. When we recognize the messenger, we accept the message and if the messenger is unfamiliar we usually reject the message. Let’s set aside the reasons for rejecting a message based on tradition or protocol. Let’s for this discussion focus on our capacity and willingness to receive new messages.

Most of us tend to understand ourselves as having a limit on the amount of information we are willing to process or fit into our lives for whatever phase in life we are currently living. If information and outside activities demand our attention, then information from our “spiritual” life must wait until we can schedule time to process it. This, is the reason humans of most cultures slow down toward the end of every year for much needed reflection.

In a world where size is a status symbol one would think having a greater willingness or capacity to process new spiritual information would be a coveted asset. Making room and giving attention to the messages that find their way to our Inn is critical for human well-being in these days. Messages of peace, hope, love, unity, happiness, and joy are powerful, profound, transformative and life changing for us human beings.

Like the babe, who’s birth many celebrate this time of year, new spiritual messages are small, not overwhelming, and mostly overlooked because of its size. However, like the new child, the initial growth of these small packages are tremendous and require attention and nurturing. For this reason, many turn away these true gifts.

We humans are design with infinite capacity like the creator. However, we tend to focus on the limits of our physical capacity and try to manage the influx of additional information through technological means. In the technology driven society with its material global conscious we forget to rely on and develop our spiritual capacity looking only for feedback from the data streams of our material technology. While we focus on the development of Artificial Intelligence we ignore our infinite spiritual capacity.

So, consider this one message reaching out to you through your technical data streams. Make room for the child. Be still and know God. It is the end of another glorious year, and I put this simple question to you. Is there room in your Inn?

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Filed under Christianity, Emergent Church, Evidence Locker, God, non-duality, Spiritual, spiritual but not religious, Spirituality

The Heart of our Reality

2015-09-15_water-ripples-bubbles-1-1393338The reality we experience is very programmable. And the substance with which our reality is created comes from the core of our being. Depending on our cultural background we may use terms like, our heart or our spirit or our consciousness to describe this center or core area of our being. But what is the substance or stuff that makes up our reality? And just how flexible and programmable is our reality?

Proverbs 4:23 (NKJV) Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.

2 Corinthians 4:18 (NKJV) While we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

Hebrews 11:3 (NKJV) By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

We live in a perpetual state of now, as eternal beings.  Yet because we understand ourselves to be separate beings, our minds have created dimensions of space and time to make sense of reality. These dimensions give meaning to our relationships with “other” things we believe to be separated from us. But, is this understanding of reality fundamental, or is this just a mirage that allows us to operate cooperatively?

If our reality is programmable, how do we access and lay hold of the fundamental substance of our reality? Typically religion has tried to fix the problems in reality and bring peace to our world by trying to control human behavior so that individual and collective faith can create a state of Nirvana or heaven on earth. But there seems to be these continual exceptions that appear to be outside of human control. Even when faith is placed in a big God there seems to be calamity like sickness, death, weather related incidents or big social events like war, economic discord and viral infections that randomly occur and opposed to our faith.

Science tries to increase human understanding by breaking down the individual objects and reducing them to their fundamental components. However even with the best tools developed by the human species such as the particle accelerator in CERN Switzerland, or the Hubble space telescope we continue to find the edge of our understanding. Then we have to create more theories to explain phenomena such a dark matter, and re-organize our understanding into systems such as quantum, string or unified field theories.

So let me suggest a different strategy one that does not preclude any humans from participating and one that should be compatible with existing explorations in our cultures of religion or science. I must give credit to author Melody Fletcher and her book Deliberate Receiving for suggesting some really practical ways to explore the programmable-ness of our reality. I do believe our answer lies somewhere in the combination of our beliefs about spiritual truth and our beliefs about objective truth.

Here are two simple but profound beliefs to add to our understanding and our exploration for ultimate truth?

  • Firstly that our being is not limited to this human body, its thoughts, feelings and perceptions; because the nature of our true being is infinite in scope, eternally present and consciously aware.
  • Secondly that we understand ourselves fundamentally to be unified with God and all of creation (human, animal, plant and mineral). Which could mean that our material world is not made of ideas or matter that are external; but is made of the consciousness at the core of our being?

Genesis 1:27 (NLT) So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

John 17:22-23 (NLT) I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one. I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me. (Jesus praying to God about every human)

With these two simple beliefs we can begin to contemplate, pray or meditate a bout our relationship in reality. What we will begin to see is that the tens of thousands of our existing beliefs are immediately in opposition to the emerging worldview being spawned by these two simple beliefs. As we contemplate these two simple beliefs let’s not do so in a vacuum but search your current cultural traditions for existing hints of the emerging reality that is coming into focus.

Many may agree that fundamentally humanity is not evolving the way we imagined it would go. As technology increases our ethics, kindness and love for everyone including the whole of creation must also grow. The traditional concepts of space and time will not disappear but we will soon learn to operate outside of the limiting beliefs  that formed these concepts. As a disciple of Jesus I see that this deeper understanding of reality will increase our faith and enable us to feed more, heal more and love more.

Human evolution does not have to go the way of the dystopian world view. The spiritual visions of reduced suffering and greater compassion resulting in heaven on earth is a possible reality. What is needed is courage to self-reprogram from our traditional belief structures. Those that accomplish this will begin to experience the programmable-ness of our reality. We will notice that the substance of our so-called material  is not hardwired because the substance of this world’s reality is the same substance at the heart of our being.

Hebrews 11:1 (NLT) Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen: it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.

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