Elixir for Joy

Whether or not it is recognized as a right by countries around the world, the “pursuit of happiness” is one of the great motivations that underlie  human actions.  People have fought wars, amassed goods, engaged in philanthropies, pursued holy grails, searched for fountains of youth, all in attempts to find an elusive joy.  It has been said that happiness cannot be found directly, but instead through the process of pursuit; however, only few seem to have found it, although many pursue it.  For most, happiness appears to be like a carrot, always ahead, and never quite achieved.  The corresponding stick would be the misery to which people seem to cling via the tendency to keep the misery in focus and engage in dialogues of complaint.

In fact, happiness is not quite so elusive as it would seem.  It involves a choice, the choice of being truly open to being happy.  The common denominator of those who regard themselves as happy is gratitude, accompanied by the letting go of complaint.  Letting go of complaint does not mean that one cannot recognize that there are things that need to be changed.  It means that one does not dwell upon those things, keeping them in mind by a continued stream of words, vocalized or unspoken.  Gratitude means focusing on those things which in the moment are positive aspects of one’s life. It means that instead of repeatedly reviewing what is unsatisfying, painful or needs to be changed, one continually observes and acknowledges the large and small things in life that create joy.

What is focused upon tends to increase.  Thus, even a small amount of desirability contained in whatever disaster situation can be increased by focusing on it. One evokes such focus by observing and giving thanks.  Observing what is unwanted and complaining about it brings a continuation of things to complain about.  Observing what is positive and giving thanks brings a continuation of things to be thankful for.  Examples abound in history, folklore and literature.  Try it and see. Focus on the positive moves one forward.

That forward movement is enhanced when the positive focus is increased by gratitude, by a heartfelt thankfulness.  This is a habit of mind, and like many habits can seem difficult to change.  Making a conscious choice each day to remember what one is grateful for is the first step.  Little by little, that daily choice can lead to a reorientation of mental process and focus.  Little by little and consistent are the watchwords. Gratitude is the elixir.

What are you grateful for?

Peace,     Diane

Riding the Seesaw of Life

A children’s playground is often a great classroom.  One of it’s deeper lessons is the seesaw.  The seesaw is a simple device; the fulcrum is in the center, flanked on either side by a plank which is the same length and weight on each side.  It is in balance.  The children who are sitting on the plank ends are, for optimal function, also of approximately equal weights (even though it may take two smaller children to balance a larger one).  When one child gives a little push with his feet, he rises in the air.  This is followed by a balance as the opposite child gives a little push with her feet, and takes her turn aloft.  The process continues until both children tire of the game.  Neither child judges either the time aloft or the earthbound time as “good or better” or as “bad or worse”. There is balance.  Things work.  However, if one child, usually a heavier one, decides to anchor his or her end of the seesaw to the ground, the balance is disturbed and the game no longer functions.

Similarly, life is a kind of seesaw.  In our individual lives, there are days when we are up, and days when we feel down. They alternate, one following the other.  Change happens, life flows.  The trick is to be like the children, not judging as good or bad either end of our seesaws.  That judging acts like the spoilsport on the playground, anchoring in place the time that we feel down.  Resisting the down times, believing that they will always continue without change, wondering what one may have done to deserve them – these are all forms of judging. They prolong the time down.  They stop the game of seesaw.

What, then, of the person stuck on the “up” end of the seesaw?  What of those people who seem to be always cheerful and happy, and about whom we hear mostly success and good fortune?  Perhaps we have not looked deeply. Could it be that those people appreciate a gray day because they do not judge it?  If a problem rears its head – financial difficulty or illness, perhaps, could it be that they can anticipate the reverse action of the seesaw, knowing that next comes a time of greater abundance or health?  In many cases, quite probably.

There is also a larger aspect to balance; equilibrium is also manifest in macrocosm.  Do we insist on total peace, lack of conflict, as a condition of our societal success?   Perhaps, and perhaps in our own spheres, we mostly achieve that. How then, is there a balance?   Do we not see the violence and hatred that exists elsewhere?   Do we enjoy great wealth?  Look around, elsewhere in the world is equally great poverty.  Do we enjoy long life spans, and have we eradicated most of our known diseases.  In other areas, life spans are short, and not only are known diseases not eradicated, but new ones arise.  There are infinite examples.   We live in a world of polarities, where opposites are connected by a fulcrum, a central point on the continuum, where truth resides.

It is not that the wealthy are intentionally causing the poverty, or that the poor are content to be on the “down” end of the seesaw.  It is the human tendency to resist change, to cling, to fail to learn the lessons inherent in the ups and downs, and then to let go.  The fortunate protect their fortune, often aggressively, and the unfortunate cling by decrying their misfortune, letting that misery fill their lives, and holding no hope or faith that a more uplifting future exists for them.  There is still balance, just in the macrocosm, not in the individual lives.

Look at the playground.  What is the answer to a “stuck” game?  It is sharing the up and down times.  It is not stopping the game by anchoring the seesaw.  It is not fiercely protecting the “up” or clinging desperately to the “down”.  We are all connected.  The Universe is a whole.  It will always be in balance,  because it exists in equilibrium.  If it did not, it would not exist, at least not as the Creation with which we are familiar.  The particulars may change, but the balance remains.

I invite you to think about the seesaw.

Peace,   Diane

 

The Illusion of Entitlement

In spite of all the political posturing and cacophony of the election year, the assertions of and protests about “rights” has not faded from the media’s attention.  It seems as if everyone is claiming a right and someone else has the responsibility of giving that right to them.  The claiming of a right is not new. For much of written history, kings, for example, have claimed divine rights.  Despite the claim of divinity, these entitlements in reality were yielded to them by the people.  How does one figure out a right or an entitlement?  Who exactly is entitled to what?  Who deserves what?

The proponents of  “new thought” or “new spirituality” tend to assume that people receive what they want or need because they deserve it, or at least, because they believe that they deserve it.  This is not completely wrong, but it still begs the point of who deserves.  The “deserving” seems to assume that only some are deserving because only some have; it is then the fault of  have-nots for not having because they don’t deserve enough.  In other words, they don’t need to be thought about very much.   This sounds as if another word for “deserving” might be “entitlement.”

Who, then, is entitled?  Royalty?  The wealthy?  Warriors?  The kind and gentle?  The populace?  Members of ethnic groups?  Or?     Again, entitlement assumes a right to having something without effort, something someone else has to yield to one.

How to determine, then, who is entitled?  What characteristics entitle one, or make one more deserving of even basic need than another?  If we are all One, as seems to me to be a valid assumption, then how can a part of One be more valuable than another part of One?  If we are all one, we are made of the same substance, and connected to each other in such a way that the benefit to one benefits all, and the misfortune of one also affects us all.  None is more valuable than another, and none is less valuable than another.   The concepts of deserving, rights, and entitlement begins to make very little sense.

In truth, we are all of equal value before that which some call God, some call Energy or Force, some call Nothing, and which has myriad names.  We are all equally deserving, and also equally undeserving.  This being so, the two polarities cancel each other out.  There is no such thing, and no better or worse valued people.   That judgment is an illusion.

We create our own sorrow by arguing over who is the most deserving or entitled, or who has the most rights to the topic of the moment.  If instead of spending all that energy in confrontation, trying to get what we think someone else owes us, we were to all put our minds to figuring out how all of us could have the means necessary to support life and grow in understanding, we would also experience more joy.  Perhaps experiencing that joy is what everyone claiming various rights is actually desiring.

As we put out love freely, we become enveloped in love.  As we work for the benefit of another, we benefit.  What we give comes back to us, sometimes in kind and sometimes in other ways.  There is wisdom in focusing on the well being of another, more so than on the illusion that we deserve to have another focus on us.  I am not saying that it is necessary to follow in the tradition of having nothing, but that the love between people is more important than the things or societal positions that one possesses.  Let us try, then, to give that thing which we think we deserve, and to be open to the ways in which joy returns to us.

Happy Valentine’s Day!              Peace,  Diane

 

An Apology for Babies

In the debate over the right to destroy an unborn child in the womb, called abortion to sanitize it, the term “choice” has always mystified me.   Other than the right to kill another human, women have always had a choice of whether or not to conceive, or whether or not to bear children.  Why should they be demanding this “choice” now, when they have always had it?   Perhaps the word is a misnomer for what is being asked.  True, there are some men who violate a woman’s choice, within marriage or without.  This is called rape, and if the campaign is for the right to choose not to be raped, then I think the vast majority of people would be in agreement with that.  However, that does not seem to be what is being asked.

Human life takes place over an extensive scale of forms, ranging from embryo, fetus, and baby to toddler, school aged child, adolescent, youth, middle aged, elder – I may have forgotten a few stages.  The common link is that at all stages, this life is human.  It cannot be rabbit, or frog or bird, or even simply non-living “tissue”.  It can be only human, and it is alive, be it embryo, fetus, baby or grandparent.  Each stage has different requirements for life support.  A born person, for example, needs food and water and air.  Deprive them of that, and they die.  Depriving them of that as an act of personal will is killing them.  Human life in the womb requires the womb itself to provide it with food, water and air until it is born.  Deprive it of that, and the human life dies.  Depriving it of that as an act of personal will is killing that life.    A part of that debate seems to be whether it is OK to kill some stages of human life, and not others.  In other words, it is assuming for ourselves the right to say that some human lives are valuable and others are not.  Especially vulnerable are those at both ends of the continuum and in general any who are weaker, poorer, in greater difficulty or causing inconvenience, however innocently, to others.

Then there is the argument that abortion is healthcare.  Healthy for whom?  Even assuming that the woman undergoing abortion does not experience any emotional or physical aftereffects, which more often than is reported is not the case, it certainly is not healthy for the human life being aborted.   Side effects of abortion can range from physical damage to the mother to persistent severe emotions of grief and regret, which can be difficult to express to a truly listening ear.  Sometimes abortion can even affect a woman’s future fertility.  However, abortion is a kind of care.  It allows the effects of copulation and conception to be avoided, the costs of raising a child to be avoided, the interruptions to a career path to be avoided.  It is convenience care, which is rarely talked about.  It is the choice to conceive a child without the attendant responsibilities of that act. This we allow, by allowing the killing of the human life that results.     Do we allow the irresponsible use of, for example, marijuana, even though killing another life is not required to expiate us from that irresponsibility?

To prove the assertion that abortion is healthcare, some will cite the example of women whose life is in danger by continuing to carry their baby.  They are at risk of dying from pregnancy, and with them, their unborn child.  Is it right then, to kill the child to save the life of the mother?    The right of self defense is accepted by the vast majority of people, and of the institutions that they form.   It is an event of great sadness that an unborn life attacks the life that shelters it, threatening its very being.  In this case, termination of the pregnancy would fall under the right of self defense, not the right to choose to kill one’s child.  Still, there are mothers who would sacrifice their own lives if there were any chance that their child might live.

Then there are those who assert that children conceived through the horrific act of rape be aborted.   Whose fault is the rape?  Who should pay the penalty?  It is certainly not the child who is guilty of being conceived, and who deserves to die for that act.  Yet, we wish to blame the child by aborting it, and make it difficult to convict the rapist, who, even if convicted, more often than not receives a light sentence, is set free to do it again, does not have to pay child support, and who, often, is ALSO given access to the child, to the distress of the woman he raped.  No wonder women who choose to protect the life of their child then choose to have it adopted.   We don’t need more killing; we do need more certain ways of identifying a rapist (increasingly those ways are becoming available) and by penalties that ensure further rape will not be committed and requirements to provide financial support for the child conceived, without automatic visitation.

There are also those who cite the need to rein in a growing population.  Yet, none of them suggest the surest way of preventing conception, which is abstaining from copulation. We have a right, they say, to one of the most pleasurable acts existing, apart from the fact that that act of copulation is not only immensely pleasurable and promoting of emotional bonding, but also is present for perpetuating human life.  It is a two-stranded phenomenon.  It is a phenomenon which has existed from the beginning of human life as a two-stranded phenomenon, immensely pleasurable to ensure that it occurs for the purpose of the continuity of human life.   Abortion attempts to separate those strands.  If children and human life are separated from the act of copulation, then what is left is no longer glorious, sacred if you will, no longer the powerful, creative act that has existed from the beginning.  It is at best a temporarily satisfying means of mutual masturbation.   Is this what we are willing to engage in killing to acquire?     Better to avoid the conception itself, even if that means abstinence.  Abstinence is certainly a possible way of life, one engaged in by people by choice, in community and independently.  What are we doing, asking for the right to kill to create that which is less valuable

Ladies, not just from religion, but from knowledge from the beginnings of when we became aware, you are life carriers.  It is how you were created or evolved, whichever word you choose.  It is the essence of your being to carry and protect the life within you, and to nurture and guide it when it is born.   If you do violence to that life, you do violence to yourself, and the nature or essence of your being will be harmed thereby.   Men, you are callers-forth of life.  To you is given the privilege of calling forth life within a woman.  It is your being to protect and provide for that life, within its mother and without, and also to teach that life when it is born.  If you do violence to that life or to the woman who carries that life, you do violence to yourself, to the nature or essence of your being.  Those who upon reflection cannot see that, talk to those who are parents or hear the experiences told by those who have aborted.

Increasingly, people are now praying and working for a world that is peaceful, non-violent, and which contains the means for life for all who inhabit Earth.  How can we expect to achieve this if we ourselves are violent, if we condone the killing of others, if we judge some humans to be less worthy of life than other humans?   Let us begin the great task of birthing a gentler, more just and welcoming world by the gentle, welcoming birth of our babies, instead of the continuing violence.

Peace, Diane