Heaven and Earth

> Image Credit <
Nneka is a blogger to reckon with!
I scan many blogs most days, looking for topic ideas for this blog and, always, making an effort to stay tuned-in to where the culture's heading. My scanning is always slowed to a stop--to pause, read, and reflect--when I arrive at Nneka's blog:
Balanced Life Center ~ Spirituality Applied to Life
In her blog post from yesterday ( On Earth As It Is In Heaven ), she writes:

"When asked by his disciples how they should pray, Jesus responded with these words:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

"I pray the Our Father as it is written when I feel separate from God. It helps me to clear the seeming space between us. It reminds me that God is always with me, ever near."

She goes on to speak of the results of her "meditations" on what "heaven" means:

"Heaven, in this context, is not a physical destination in some time in the future. Heaven is the unseen realm of All there is. It is the space in which God abides. The place of radiant health, unconditional love, infinite supply, joy, harmony, and all good. It is like the steam form of H2O. Conversely, earth is the manifest realm. The place that we see, smell, taste, hear, and feel. We may experience challenges and triumphs. It is like the ice form of H2O.
"Between the two is our lens. A space of our own creation. The prayer, “On earth as it is in heaven,” helps to thin the layer between, or clear up the lens so that we may experience all that there is in the invisible."

Fascinating... I highly recommend your regularly reading her blog!

The very last sentence of her post is:
"Do you have any prayers that you learned as a child, but have come to understand as an adult?"

I had to answer yes and I had to bring the interaction between me and Nneka's blog here.

I published my first book of poetry last year. In that book was a poem that incorporated a prayer I'd said a gazillion times when I was a child. Scared me to hell but I said it; partly at the prompting of my parents, partly out of fear of God.
Here's the prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

As an adult, I'd come to realize that this is a most positive prayer; yet still, in my late fifties, I added four more lines to the prayer, to calm the fevered bosom of my little boy self, alone with God, headed toward sleep, and afraid of death...

Here's my poem:

Child’s (?) Prayer

Now I lay me down to sleep
And hope for dreams of bliss.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
His wish may I not miss.
If I should die before I wake,
May He make loved ones glad.
I pray the Lord my soul to take
But let folks not be sad.

This Just In !

That image is from a nice PhotoBlog called, WhatISee, and this post is happening because our first E-mail Reporter, Sandy, has already sent another report (in spite of being busy with getting ready to be a grandmother...) This report responds to my post, Life Is Deadly:
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"Death is full of life too. The two can't be separated. In life we can either find only death (an end) or we can find our purpose, live it, and through that living find eternal life.
"There is so very much to be said for being positive. It's a very practical approach to getting through this difficult physical world. It was said of `Abdu'l-Bahá [who spent 40 years in prison because of his spiritual beliefs] that: "he treads the mystic way with practical feet." I think this is how we all should tread the path of life.
"To me, being positive and spiritually centered is part of being practical because it's not practical to be negative. Negativity is nothing, it's void of anything useful and therefore is useless."
~ Sandy
P.S. I found the quote below which I thought supported your view.............

"Unless one accepts dire vicissitudes, he will not attain. To me prison is freedom, troubles rest me, death is life, and to be despised is honour. Therefore, I was happy all that time in prison. When one is released from the prison of self, that is indeed release, for that is the greater prison. When this release takes place, then one cannot be outwardly imprisoned. When they put my feet in stocks, I would say to the guard, 'You cannot imprison me, for here I have light and air and bread and water. There will come a time when my body will be in the ground, and I shall have neither light nor air nor food nor water, but even then I shall not be imprisoned.' The afflictions which come to humanity sometimes tend to centre the consciousness upon the limitations, and this is a veritable prison. Release comes by making of the will a Door through which the confirmations of the Spirit come."

(`Abdu'l-Bahá, `Abdu'l-Bahá in London, p. 120)
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Whew!
Thanks, Sandy!   Can I call you Grandma yet? ;-) I recently watched my sister become a grandmother (for the third time) and the most obvious thing to me was that she began to twitter and glow--her soul was singing...

Breaking News !!!

I'd mentioned last week that I was encouraging a few individuals to become "E-Mail Reporters"--those who respond in special ways and offer material that becomes a Post.
Comments are extremely import in a blog because Comments are "FeedBack". A Post from a "Reporter" is more like "FeedForward"...
In my Post, Synchronicity & Conflict, I asked for folks to "submit some 'evidence' or give some 'testimony'" and, even before any Comments were posted, I got this response from our First E-Mail Reporter, Sandy:

"Yes, I think under or overlying spiritual forces have the ability to create similar and related events that become noticeable through their repetitiveness. This repetitiveness then becomes so noticeable that it gets to the point of being obviously spiritually motivated in nature and not just coincidence.

"When my father was delusional and dying from brain cancer , the synchronized theme was butterflies. Butterflies were to be seen everywhere I looked. For instance, on one particular day while my father lay in bed so sick, butterflies were on the ear rings of someone in the room, on the belt around someone else's waist, on the wrapping paper of the gift my aunt was opening, and in the yard fluttering and fighting their way in the wind and on that same day my father even mentioned butterflies in a few of his last words. Before he became bedridden, he had given me some tea cups that had belonged to his grandmother and they had a beautiful butterfly design on them. Butterflies represent change. I believe there are just some things, like synchronicity that can't be fully explained. I do think they are for us to take notice of, however, to see that something of great spiritual value is happening."
~ Sandy

Life Is Deadly

A recent article in Guardian Unlimited, has the ominous title: Doctors fear TB strain could cause a global pandemic if it is not controlled .
It seems the news about disease is as pandemic as the germs that cause it.
I've even got one of my friends urging me to do some major research on the insidiousness of our world's current diseases...

Let's see:

* ravaging disease
* godless terrorists
* evil pollution
* flourishing crime
* political betrayals
* Fill In The Blank...

All these concerns can cause three very basic responses:

~ Find or dig a hole to hide in.
~ Start ranting and keep ranting.
~ Seek spiritual solutions

Seeking spiritual solutions has two basic components:

> Seeking solutions in your personal spiritual response to such a deadly world.
> Seeking practical spiritual solutions to eliminate the things that make life so deadly.

People who say things like, "We'll always have war!", or "People will never change!", or "How can there be a loving God with so much evil in the world?", are people who haven't found their own Spiritual Center--they're letting the external determine the internal.

Final thought:

This life is getting more deadly every day because of the worst disease there is--lack of
True Spirituality...

Synchronicity & Conflict

Weird things happening of late...
My read is that they're spiritual in origin. But it can be difficult to decide if a string of events is mere coincidence or something more...

Synchronicity is up there in the the title of this post and, for those of you that don't use that word everyday, here's Wikipedia's link to it. And, here's a brief quote from that article:

"It differs from mere coincidence in that synchronicity implies not just a happenstance, but an underlying pattern or dynamic that is being expressed through meaningful relationships or events."

If you've read the last 4 or 5 posts here, you'll see what may be synchronicity in action. This post will focus on just one instance of this train of Related Events:

Yesterday I wrote about Conflict. Right after I posted, my friend walked in the room and asked me to go to an event with him. I was particularly exhausted but felt the event would be interesting so I said, "Yes!".

We arrived and others arrived and the group finally consisted of:
*Two white males in their 60's
*Two black males in their 70's
*Two black females, one in her 70's and one in her 20's
*Two white females, 90's and 60-70s

I was a visitor but all the others were there to talk about Unity--specifically, action to end racism and bigotry in the city.

After a lot of agenda checking and goal and vision talk, one of the men (black) started a rant about the police and fire department's totally lack of racial integration. Everyone else sat there in, what seemed to me, placid acceptance (found out after the event that he was prone to do this).

Suddenly, the other black man challenged him to put up or shut up (his words, however, were mild as milk) and dared him to go the next day to those civil services and do, at least, some investigation of the problem.

Everything calmed down and the man who'd been ranting praised the other guy for being extremely positive! [ Hey, I mean, these were people seeking unity, right? ]

So what happened? Was this mere coincidence--writing about conflict then experiencing it so Dramatically?

Has there been some deeper Spiritual Reason for my week of apparent synchronicity?

My jury's still out on this issue:
but...
please, submit some "evidence" or give some "testimony" in the Comments...
Or, take your concerns over to our BackYard...

So Who's Right ?

Here's my Supremely Obvious comment for the day:
"There sure is a lot of conflict in the world !"
From disagreements between friends to bloody sectarian war, it's all around us. Something else that may be obvious to you is that there are a lot of ways being touted to "manage" or "reduce" or "eliminate" conflict.

Image Credit

I'm reading a book now, The Anvil of the Spirit by Morris Taylor, and I came across a fascinating comment about understanding conflict (seems to make sense that we must understand where it's coming from before we can manage, reduce, or eliminate it...) This quote may seem as Supremely Obvious as that other one up there but if you slow down and think about it (try feeling your way into it, too...) I think you'll find it as helpful as I did:

"Every individual is following a sensible strategy for getting along in the kind of world he thinks he lives in."

This blog really isn't about offering solutions, though I will point to quite a few as time rolls on. It's a place to give spiritual perspective to what we all are living through. Still, I want to offer these results for "conflict" from the B.I.D.E. Custom Spiritual Search Tool.

Many folk will tell you that conflict is inevitable. What matters is how we "deal" with it.

Just to indicate how inevitable it is (and, indirectly, how important it is to learn how to deal with it...) here's a closing quote from a Supremely Spiritual man:

"The shining spark of truth cometh forth only after the clash of differing opinions."

What do You have to say about conflict?

We Are All One?

Saw this widget on a blog I scan and tried it out. Not really sure the technology is working too well but one or two of those faces "might" resemble mine...{I'm the guy in the middle}

Guess it just goes to show that our True Similarities lie beyond sight--in the Spiritual Realm...

Oneness of Humanity

Yesterday I posted about a good friend's comment merging with current events and my past history and politics and a few other things...

Today that friend sent a link to their blog (image over there on the left) that had a link to a poem they'd written about Oneness, plus a link to my post of yesterday.
Right after I'd set myself up to write this post, I quickly checked my e-mail and found the prayer, We Are One, from BeliefNet.
As if that weren't enough to weave the web of synchronicity ever tighter, right after I wrote about that BeliefNet prayer, I checked my e-mail again and found another post from the same friend saying they'd gotten a response to a Google alert which they really didn't want; but, then, they said: "Weird, so I figure its "for" you?"

I hadn't yet told them I was crafting a blog post around their blog post (about my previous blog post...) so the topic of the alert link was astonishing--the exact opposite of Our Human Oneness: Persecution !

Sometimes the rhythm of events seems to underlie the music of the Spheres...

Chaos of a Mighty Wind

We are all One...

Nice sentiment or actual fact?

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Made a phone call yesterday to my friend and, rather than answering with "Hello.", they said, "A Mighty Wind...".

>>>This set all kinds of things swirling in my mind and heart:

***I'd just become aware of the big European wind storm with headlines like, "European storm leaves 47 people dead", and:
***because of my previous post about the Doomsday Clock and its hands getting closer to midnight attributed, in part, to global warming, and
***news channels talking about the wind storm in the context of global warming, and
***politicians starting to dance around that Issue, and
***other news channels pointing to the storm of 1999 and claiming this storm had nothing to do with global warming, and
***a concurrent virus attack called Storm Worm that used the European storm to lure people into opening infected e-mails, and,
***finally (Whew!), remembering the 2003 movie, A Mighty Wind, which was funny and made all the other connections in this swirling mind/heart assume their proper perspective,

>>>I pondered the Butterfly Effect: small changes here making big changes there (usually refered to as Chaos Theory) and...
the whole swirling mass of thought and emotion made extremely clear the interconnection of weather, news, history, hackers, comedy, danger, social action, and the comments of friends...
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We are all One...

Nice sentiment or actual fact?