Hatred, fear and tyranny

Two news stories have touched the same nerve in me in this new year of 2011.
Both involve the shooting by a lone individual of another with whom they disagreed to such an extent that they felt righteousness and duty in committing murder - and in directly undermining any due process of communication or law with resort to a justification of ‘might is right’; the act of the denial of life to another; killing the messenger to shut down the message that they - not God - have determined is hateful and deserves to die.

Both gunmen operated out of a sense of support and vindication from the culture of hate that had brodcast itself in self righteous terms; the Pakistani gunman was protecting Holy God from blasphemy. The American gunman was protecting the Divinely inspired Consitution of the United States of America from evil marxists or perhaps ‘We, the People’ of the USA from a tyranous secret conspiracy of a corrupt government. The theme remains the same

This kind of thing can and does sicken many of the whole notion of God, religion and so called holiness. Because it is so clearly hypocritical and deluded. But with what they do have of a sense of the sanctity and value of life they may well be more ‘the messengers of God’ than many who seek to perpetuate their own private or mutually agreed agendas in God’s name.

Because until man awakens from a childish fixation on specific forms, thoughts and symbols as holding fixed and asserted meanings in and of themselves, there will not be a true and consistent opening of the heart to the sanctity and holiness of life and the divine inspiration that guides from within - and not via external gods or externally created authorities that are liable to tyranous subjection of the Living Impulse of our heart.

The uncovering in man of a sense of falsity - or invalidity or wrongness - offers a step toward awakening from a deeper understanding than his own thought allows. But if we are engaged and identified in a mood of fear - that indulges hatred and judgement to its own sense of advantage - we will not awaken to a deeper curiosity that uncovers more than we knew before in a greater perspective - but will seek out and find scapegoats and enemies upon which to project our sense of wrongness upon. And we call it life even while it kills us.

Whether we are to emerge from the thrall of the mind of fear or remain slaves to its tyranny is a matter of individual responsibility now. For only the witness of the mind that disagrees with the god of fear can call it out to be undone. Fear says “If you speak out I will shoot you” - but it can only seem to have the power it wields through a culture of joining in a common hate - a culture that thrives on false witness, gossip and judgemental indulgence.

To partake in hate is to be a party to the acts of violence that are intent on undermining trust, cooperation, tolerance and all of the qualities that ARE the embodiment of love in our own minds - and in human society.

This is not a call to hate the ones who hate. This is a call to refuse hatred and insist on finding an honest, straight and open way to communicate - both within our own mind and with each other. A call to a clearout upon the principles of good housekeeping. The truly good will arise without self-manipulating effort when we cease to hate and so clear our hearts and minds of conflict - and not from setting ourselves against the symbols and messengers of that in our life to which we have aversion to.

Is there a helpful use of hate?
Perhaps only this - that to identify a falsity in oneself and immediately recognize it has nothing that I want and costs you all that I hold dear - is to empty or abhor myself of my thought so as to refuse to validate it in the terms it suggests. I abide in open trust that what is true reveals itself because I am no longer actively accepting falsity as a basis from which to live. Yet even here it is language that suggests that I ‘hate’ falsity - for the falsity itself is the hate - and I am not as it suggests and so I put it behind me by giving attention to the Living.

Desire for Safety

Your desire for safety touches me.
And speaks of a memory that isn't totally buried and forgot.
Under a seeming world of bodies with secret minds in a hostile universe.
All of which arises from a single act in thought-desire.
A contraction or collapse of self upon self in which almost all of what you are is denied - that your thought can continue as yours alone.

In ceasing to activate or reinforce the thinking-self protective contraction - a different experience is discovered. If you are ready to allow this then you do truly desire Safety, for the attempt to make yourself safe - by your own thinking - has not brought the answer.
You have but shafted yourself - not in truth - for truth remains available as it is if you welcome it - but in the conflicting and shifting attempts to fix down life and make it serve your thought.

You are the life that you neglect to love because your intent is elsewhere, set upon thought derived existence - which to the unawake is believed reality itself.
Life is already intent on serving you - as the unified expression of wholeness. But if you would know this, then there simply is no room for the intent that pulls the plug on life and drains it away for the hit of a self indulgence.

The last war I was in was a seeming battle between desire to survive and desire to love. There was in truth no battle but simply a play of dramatic experience arising from the attempt to keep both.

Dignity is not a right I demand from the world but the natural result of the honour I give.
By the grace of Spirit I have awakened enough to refuse the experience of hate as a definer of anything but a split mind - an ignorance. I can release the experience with my recognition of life giving as I have asked - and let it go. I can only fight the way Mind works, imaginatively.

For the movement of attention is the movement of desire - where value is given.
And if I invest in the experience of horror - then I validate it.
Even if this is done negatively - by an attempt to overcome it. For who would seek to overcome a  foe - whose ill intent is but one's own, enacted out in alternating roles?

The uncovering of the special hate relationship is that which would seem to damn. Its undoing requires that you do not damn yourself nor your brother or your world - but wait on a fresh perspective.

Love changes everything.

For love undoes or restores the original to its true appreciation from a mind that had become fascinated by an unlove as if it were a thing you made that then made you.

How does a Child of God fragment and forget its own light in a prodigal wasteland?
How does a wretch rediscover his divine inheritance?

As a man thinketh in his heart - so is he.
By the grace of being joined, I am saved from my own thinking.
All are joined to the Source without which nothing is.
In this world we have seemed to live as if we are actually independent and conflicting with everything. But look and see if this is not simply a game of thought.

There is a basis upon which to question every value this world has ever taught you.
It is the awakening relationship with your innate and inviolable safety - prior to the activity and identifications of mind.

When the definitions that bind, deplete and deprive are refused currency status - the truth is revealed of itself. There is no battle - but there is every reason to hold fast in receiving and therefore giving - from a fresh perspective. Despite every twist and turn of the ego's roller coaster ride which is but a persuasion speaking to an habit no longer truly desired.

Can I condemn a world that arose from acting out a fantasy of possession, loss and vengeance?
Can I condemn myself for the life that proceeded from an ignorance that is no more?
Can I accept forgiveness for myself and be undone of sin?

These are not for thought to answer - but are the heart's intimation - for we don't do truth, but are, by its giving.

In Peace

Brian