Sunday Sermon (Heaven and Earth)

¡Hola! Everybody...
I remember when my son was a young boy, we would look forward to the sci-fi blockbusters that usually begin in early spring. It was a spring ritual -- a harbinger of summer. I wrote the following partly because people are questioning if there can be morality without religion. I would say religion is not enough for a true ethical society. Also, the following is what takes me through my rough patches and my hope is that it will be of use to any who are going through a challenging period...

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-=[ Heaven on Earth ]=-

I do not pray to a super Being -- a God. I do not subscribe to a belief in a Divine Bureaucracy that we must pray to in order to get favors. For me that is a juvenile and immature form of spirituality. For me...

My purpose is not to offend anyone's beliefs. Rather, I am expressing mine.

Some would call me an atheist or at the very least an agnostic, but I am neither. Frankly, I don’t give a fuck about whether there is a god or if there is an afterlife because it’s irrelevant. The issue, my friends, is so: you’re here -- what are you going to do about it? Worrying about a god or if there is a heaven is a lot like a person who, being shot with an arrow refuses treatment until he’s told who shot him, with what bow, and why.

Life is a precious gift; it’s what happens while you mull over such things.

People sometimes ask me to pray, but I don’t pray to a God-in-the-sky because I don’t subscribe to that belief. What I usually say is that I will hold you in my heart. Some people might think I’m being funny, but I’m not -- compassion and the oftentimes arduous task of opening the heart is at the core of my spirituality. I don’t take such things lightly.

From my experience, genuine spirituality is a journey you must undertake by yourself. If you doubt me, then take the power of example left to us by all realized beings throughout history: the historical Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Gandhi, etc. They all said it: you must be a lamp unto yourself. You must walk the path, experience the Dark night of the soul, sit at the bodhi tree. God, or whatever you want to call it, is in you.

If you’re still here, then good! LOL For those that stopped reading, may your Higher Power save you. For the rest -- Here’s my gift to you today...

The secret to life lies in the realization that everything is always perfect. To put it in Christian-Judeo terms, the Glory of God is the perfection of all things at all times, in all places through all circumstances. Even earthquakes, swine flu pandemics, and bloody warfare -- that too is the Glory of God.

You see, from a larger perspective, the eye of the Higher Self sees The Universal Principle and makes no distinctions. Heaven and hell, good and evil, everything known and unknown, seen and unseen are all recognized as different expressions of the One Principle beyond name and form. Beyond all pairs of opposites, the Absolute Truth is all there is -- just absolute, incomparable perfection.

Now here comes the tricky part. It’s tricky because to attempt to understand the infinite with the intellect is like trying to empty the contents of the universe into a small glass -- it just doesn’t fit.

Before time and space, before this reality was born, there was The Void. Then suddenly from that void came something. There was an explosion, and what we all are right now -- including you and me -- is that explosion in motion. That explosion in motion is one radiant entity -- conscious, whole, undivided. Sometimes I call it the Universal Principle, or my Higher Power. Some call it a Him or Her or It or Jesus -- it really doesn’t matter what you call it. It is the force of that cosmic explosion. That is who we are...

To borrow again from Christian terminology, grace is the direct recognition of one’s own true face as none other than that force, that energy in action -- conscious, whole, undivided. And it is the recognition of your true face that releases you from the prison of your self-centered life. -- the fearful hypnotic grip of ego-consciousness.

Think about the implications of this when you’re faced with a crisis. If you’re looking at your situation from a purely ego-driven consciousness, you will see yourself as something small and frail the seemingly overwhelming currents of your life threatening to take over -- pushing you around like a little bit of debris in the raging stream of life. Or perhaps your point of view will be as a small row boat caught in the utter and horrific power of the ocean.

However, if you see yourself as a wave of that ocean, then your perspective changes. You’re no longer weak and small, and alone, suffering this Cosmic Joke known as life. As a wave, you’re part of that ocean -- its power reverberates through you. You, me, everybody -- we’re all part of that ocean. We're all part of that explosion, bits of stars that exploded long ago. We are that perfection, that radiance, that power in motion.

I know too well, that whn faced with mortality, the small ego-mind wakes up and there is a fearful contraction that comes with that. That is how we are wired to a certain extent. But we are also beings constantly evolving, and we can choose to go the route of fear (ego) or the route of liberation (love).

Part of your job here is to remember this and to choose to integrate it into your mind/ heart. It really does not matter if you can spout scripture or whether you attend church or not. It does not matter if you are a better Christian, or if you call this explosive energy Jesus or Gaia or whatever. They're all parts of the same hand -- fingers pointing in the same direction. What matters is what is in your heart and whether you can free yourself from the scary illusion that you're not connected to all this.

Love,

Eddie