July 25th, 2019
All a sane person can ever care about is giving love.
Hafiz
As mass extinction wracks the planet and nations ignore the global holocaust, what can we do? How can it possibly not be too late? We need nothing short of a miracle. What can that be?
What if everything we see is a dream, one that could change in an instant? If so, how do we guide the course of it?
Trying to change a dream is like trying to change the reflection in a mirror: it’s both impossible and easy, depending on how you go about it. Where, then, is our power and our responsibility? Is it to change the world or just ourselves?
Gandhi never said, “be the change you want to see in the world.” He probably didn’t think that would be enough. Mother Teresa did say, “don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.” Is that enough?
Eckhart Tolle says the essence of love is presence, and that this is our primary, “inner” purpose. Our outer purpose, what we do in the world, is secondary (A New Earth, 2008, p. 177, 258). Can you do more for the world sitting in a cave than through activism? Is the world “holographic” in this way?
The Hawaiian spiritual system of ho‘oponopono, as popularized by Ihaleakala Hew Len, says yes. Ho’oponopono says that each of us is 100% responsible for what happens in the world. How can that be possible? Here is how I understand it: this world is a dream with one dreamer.
The dreamer is not the person. The person is part of the dream… The dreamer is consciousness itself — who you are. To awaken within the dream is our purpose now. When we are awake within the dream, the ego-created earth drama comes to an end and a more benign and wondrous dream arises. This is the new earth.
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
It can be confusing, but the dreamer is who all of us really are. Let’s call that dreamer “God.” It’s as if God has a split personality. And humans are just a tiny part of it.
It is as if God creates the universe and then experiences through every single part of it. God experiences being a blade of grass and a tree, being an eagle and a dolphin, being you and being me… But we are all one in our essential being. We are all the same consciousness aware of the world through different bodies, looking out of many different eyes, cut off from one another only by an illusion of separation.
Ash and Hewitt, Science of the Gods
What, then, does “living awake” look like? It looks like caring about everyone and everything equally. It looks like prayer, like meditation, like “Thy will be done.” It means not having to control or understand. It means meeting fear with love.
Consider this: what if all these cataclysms — extreme weather events, revolutions and fascism, superbug epidemics, skyrocketing rates of suicide, and mass extinction — are the pangs of birth? What if death is the portal to a new life? If all this is a dream, then what do we have to worry about?
The Buddha once gave a speech by simply holding up a flower. When you get it, the problem is solved. When we get it, the world is reborn.