February 13 2008
From “I can’t be bothered” to “I can’t”; the journey into emptiness starts with apathy. Do you remember the days you lived in apathy? Life was just fine, certainly not worth the bother to make it better. If you don’t remember such a time you are rare indeed. Most of us, in all the places I have traveled, find ourselves frequently going that route. Generally we are bound to it until we get time to reflect.
Unfortunately for most of us that time is granted through some form of infirmity, either disease or disaster. No matter what the circumstances which moved us out of apathy and into conscious awareness looked and felt, they were potentially the best days of our lives. Why? Very simply when we grew tired of our pain, when we decided to make our lives change, our faith began to shift. Often we think of faith as ‘this something’ that if we really grunt a lot we can make bigger. This is a hand me down belief from a paradigm that sought to disempower the individual and promote a theory of individuals as autonomous and independent islands of consciousness. That paradigm is quickly crumbling and we are beginning to understand faith in a new way as we rediscover the magnitude of who we really are as unique divine expressions. Some sixty to seventy years ago Dr. Ernest Holmes pointed out in his volume “The Science of Mind”, we all have all the faith we will ever have, and we each have as much faith as the most faithful in the world. The only difference between us and them is where we put our faith. Most of us put most of our faith into lack, limitation and opinions of disease and suffering. So when we are struck by disaster in our lives we are often jolted out of a dysfunctional and counterproductive way of seeing ourselves and the world. Apathy is no longer acceptable. At this moment, with only the smallest of loving nudges from some angel or another; the neighbour, the hairdresser, co-worker or a loving family member, we realize our role as co-creators of our experiences. We start awakening to how our thoughts, feelings and actions have been the direct cause of our ‘so called’ misfortune, and we start to make concrete changes from an understanding that we never want to return to such darkness. We realize the first step toward creating a new experience is thinking in a new way, in a way that is living from a greater vision rather than in a dysfunctional experience. And this is where the new focus of our faith comes in; just because we change our thinking doesn’t mean we have immediate results. In fact it is just the opposite. As Jesus said faith is believing in the invisible. In other words we must believe in the power of our thoughts alone to bring us into a new experience and we must believe with such conviction that, for no other reason, we start acting from the place of promises fulfilled, of already having achieved the experiences of our desires. We who are now sharing these words understand this on some level already, if not in our hearts then certainly in our heads; nothing I have said here is really new. Yet many people go the other way, the spiral downward continues. When their crisis came they were alone, if not physically then certainly emotionally. They didn’t see their angels, even when angels were there. They moved from apathy to helplessness; they are lost and will remain lost until someone reaches out to them. That is where each one of us comes in, every one of us who is discovering our magnificence in daily meaningful ways has been blessed again and again by angels. Somewhere on my journey I must choose to be the angel who rescued me. I must willingly reach out to another when I hear them say “I am willing to be changed.” I don’t have to know how. It isn’t about knowing how. This is a divine urge afire within each of us and a key step upon our evolutionary journey. Heaven appears to each one of us when we truly learn to give; not of ourselves but of this infinite love pouring through us and becoming the magnificence that we are to the world and each other.”
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