“Once you are blissful of your own nature your life becomes an expression of your blissfulness, not a pursuit of happiness.  That is the shift that needs to happen in every life.” ~ Sadhguru

Happy Sunday!
Wednesday morning, soon after waking up, I read through my emails as I try to do each morning. I get spiritual messages for the day from some of my favorite teachers, I get heath advice from two top holistic doctors, and I get local and national headlines from Google and Yahoo.  Yahoo gives me the national headlines. As I read through the top headlines for 3-2-16 I said to myself,
 
“I have woken up to a new world this morning!”
Here is a sample of the headlines I read:

• Vatican newspaper praises “Spotlight” the Oscar winning film about probe into crimes by priests.
• New Jersey newspapers call on Christie to resign.
• Alabama pastor locks congregation out of church for questioning his finances.
• Journalist embarrasses lawmaker who doesn’t know how abortion works
• Super Tuesday bringing super meltdown to Republican party
• Catholic Church’s disapproval boosts Girl Scout donations
• Religiously unaffiliated Americans are the new powerhouse political bloc.

I was so taken with the spontaneity of my reaction that I even went down to tell Peter my impression of the morning.
My mind recalled a talk I went to a couple of years back when I saw Carolyn Myss speak at the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen benefit. She called this time we live in ‘the age of light’, declaring it began with the splitting of the atom. Her perception was that everything now changes at light speed, that we need internet and email for communications to keep up with the pace of changes. She spoke about how in the last decade we have seen the destruction of every social structure we have relied upon in society. The economy revealed itself as broken when the banks failed to secure our finances; with this came the loss of job security.  The old idea of family has changed with the high rates of divorce and the acceptance of same sex marriage. There are no firm boundaries to gender and sexuality anymore. Myths about proper means of health and nutrition are day by day being scrutinized and dismantled returning us to natural behavior over corporate manipulation.
On this day the headlines showed to me that the two arenas that have caused the most pain to societies, political ideologies and religious affiliations have lost their hold on the masses.
Sheep no more!
This morning I watched a wonderful lesson “Circus of the Mind” by Sadhguru on Youtube (with the video heading “what’s happening in our mind”). He was speaking about how what we identify with traps us. He spoke of the intellect as a great tool that evolution developed in humanity but we have made it a source of suffering. He related the intellect to a scalpel, when clean it cuts through the physical realm to bring us understanding. When we identify ourselves with aspects of our physical-ness it is like the scalpel is dirty and no longer gives us a clear cut of understanding – we lose clarity because our identifications alter our perception of the Truth of Life.
I think we are all learning to drop our identification with aspects of society as we see, and suffer through, the failing of promises made to secure us in comfort and stability.
Why should we identify with a religion when it no longer provides answers and security for ourselves and our children?
Why should we identify with our nation when the candidates chosen don’t represent our views? Or, when after we have elected them they chose to bend to political or lobbyest pressure and forget about us?
It would be nice to think that we are all on the road to spiritual enlightenment. No I don’t think the political climate is due to the voting of enlightened beings … but I think a change is happening.
There are cracks in all the pillars of society that we have been able to hide God from our awareness. I am thinking of the movie “I am” right now along with the book “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn. These stories were first steps for me toward my awakening. When you start to see through what you thought were the solid and secure things in your reality you have to ask “is there more to this world?”
I think we are going through a change in the psyche of humanity. I wrote on 12-27-15 about Michael Beckwith describing the four stages of spiritual development.  The first stage in victim where we believe we are at the mercy of the physical world around us. The second stage is the manifestor where we realize there is more to life then the physical and that we are creators of our reality – we realize we reap what we sow.
From the dark ages through current times we believed what leaders told us, whether they were Popes, priests, Kings, dictators, presidents, or corporate moguls. They told us what we needed to do to survive; we believed and yet we still died under their direction. Today we do more than just survive (and die), we have the opportunity to seek out happiness. We’ve had more than a century of living above the level of survival; long enough to realize the things our leaders tell us will make us happy do not do so.
We seek more.
I see that society is changing. I think we are no longer sheep as we are starting to take on the responsibility of happiness for ourselves, which we fail at. Yes we have more broken relationships, more addictions, and more violence because of our seeking happiness our own way – no longer listening to some organizational leadership that we identify with.
It is change. It is difficult, but it is a better way. The only way to God is the individual journey within. We could never get there following a group mentality as each individual needs to find that Love and Peace only exists within themselves.
When we look back to the dark ages, yes there were Saints but they were outside of the norms of the culture. They took a path that was different from the masses of people the Church oversaw. And, when they came to enlightenment, the Church isolated them from the masses of common people.
For most people it takes suffering, failing, and a reckoning to break-through the false belief systems to start to ask the big questions: Who am I? Is there more to life?
When Michael Beckwith spoke of the transition from victim to manifestor he said the tool for transformation is forgiveness. We each have to learn to open our hearts.
Many hearts have to break to soften the world. I see that change happening in society. I have spoken many times about the change in the TV programs, and the change in our language. People now regularly speak of being whole-hearted, vulnerable, kind, and compassionate. We are braver to call out the bullies. TV shows and books that are compassionate and expressive of the heart are doing well. I see these as the signs that the heart of humanity has cracked open. It is not just the mind of society that has a say anymore but the heart is also beginning to speak.
When we stop identifying with a group because they have failed us, and we have sought happiness in the world around us and it too has let us down, we invariably turn to God.
When the false idols of this world have been revealed, our hearts are raw from heartbreak, our ego subdued by failure, and all physical solutions ineffective, then we can finally fathom that there may be another way to be. We can ask for help. We can go within to find peace. We can realize we get to choose how to be.
One by one we will get there.
Individually we transform our understanding of Self only to find that God has employed so many to help us along. ‘
Love and well-being waits on the other side for each of us and for all of us together. All That Is contains all of us.
Namaste’
“Salvation is a promise, made by God, that you would find your way to Him at last.  It cannot but be kept.” ~ Lesson 231, ACIM