Society Growing Up At Last

Women were only just starting to realize they were in prison – or rather in the dolls’ house – back in the middle of last century. They certainly weren’t ready to get out there and take on the world, because they hadn’t yet taken on their own self-images. In other words, they still blamed themselves and hated themselves, and they still thought the way to become equal was to become like men, to emulate all the broken behavior that man exhibited in their quest for power, control and riches, because that brought the rewards society offered. 

But here we are two generations or so further along the path toward true freedom, self-acceptance and manifestation of our own true inner power. It looks quite different from that of men, and it is going to change the world.

Young women of today exhibit a caring that comes solely from within their own beings, and experience a willingness to judge according to their own opinions, not according to opinions that would be approved by men. Young men of today have become far more comfortable with their own inner femininity than one would ever have thought possible within a generation or two. The older generations are denouncing most of this, desperately trying to draw back the youth into the failures of previous times. But it’s difficult when just about everyone agrees what previous times led to was the chaos we see today, the inequality, the over incarceration, the desire to step back from the position as leader of the free world and focus on making the rich richer as a good American should do.

We should have been able to claim our freedom to be ourselves back then after the sixties, but all this inner searching takes time. At that time it proved quite easy for authorities to clamp down, for assassinations to dispel hope, for unthinking politicians to jump on the tough on crime bandwagon to avoid defeat at the polls. Today women everywhere are speaking out, minorities are not just accepting that they can be imprisoned, shot and killed by bad policing, and even those in top positions in many states are working toward reform, because they see the harm that is being done.

The biggest barriers to positive change come from the lawmaking community, the rule of law, and those addicted to the profits that have accompanied the growth industries of criminalizing everything and taking away most controls over the financial services industry. Letting go of these addictions will be a long process, maybe made unnecessary if we have another collapse of the financial system which is certainly a strong possibility, but anyway something we have to deal with in a different way from the past, because women’s values are different. 

Where the law contradicts love, we must go with love. Not the urgent need for love that mimics love, but a real love that extends to everyone on the planet. Where people are thrust into poverty and homelessness, we must provide a basic income and a home. Where people lose their source of support, we must find a way to provide for all of our needs together.

The Future of Religion

Transitions are difficult, as the world is discovering right now. The former focus on sin and salvation has given way in emphasis to further revealing of the universe, and science is now coming into its own as a source of new insights for a new age. While it may be challenging to let go of previous modes of operating as a church or a spiritual movement, we find deep truths emerging today in many fields which must be incorporated into any realistic and comprehensive future for religion itself.

As women have become more involved in the academic and scientific world, a general picture is emerging of the differences between a man’s perspective and woman’s perspective. I remember my boss asking 20 years ago, “but what is women’s science?” I couldn’t tell him back then, but now I would be able to reply, based upon reading and observation, that women see things from a more holistic perspective, they often think more in pictures, more intuitively, and take in the whole of a situation at once.  Men tend to think in a more linear fashion, work out truths sequentially, and build up a worldview according to this method.

As a means for freeing people’s minds from the domination of the church in the early days of Western European science, the more male-oriented methods worked well, cutting out an ever-expanding corner of truth that held its own in rational circles, and gradually taking over as the predominant worldview in the West. However, its own success has brought us to a day when it is not unusual to find accomplished scientists asking if maybe science has simply tied itself up in its own strings. With uncountable solutions to the currently popular string theory (a highly theoretical mathematical scheme that regards a one-dimensional string as the most fundamental building block of matter), and no way to distinguish between these solutions, this has to be a valid question.

Even in the West, certainly since the early days of quantum physics and relativity, there has been a secondary track within science, based on the idea that matter itself is in some sense conscious, or at least has some kind of internal nature. Alfred North Whitehead, Henry Stapp, Rupert Sheldrake come to mind as scientists who have been willing to investigate paths that have challenged orthodoxy in many ways.

Newtonian science presented matter as inert, purposeless small billiard-ball type pieces moved around at random by a similarly purposeless array of forces. The universe was deterministic; even humans were simply living within this scheme of purposeless and meaningless activity.

This perspective is long gone, replaced by various developments of the 20th century, such as quantum physics and chaos theory, and today certainly superseded by theories that resonate with molecular biology and epigenetics (a biological theory, confirmed by experiment, that our life experiences affect the expression of our genes, replacing the old view that genes essentially controlled everything).

Of greatest significance today is the emergence of a worldview that recognizes the internal nature of matter itself, because that deeply resonates with the natural intuition of most women, and indeed the femininity within men. Most of the world easily accepts that consciousness preceded the material world, and can accept that at the basis of all matter is some aspect of consciousness. It is not a new concept that the universe was created with a purpose, and that every aspect of reality has meaning and spiritual significance.

Throughout the last century, most scientists accepted the common view that consciousness emerged as a byproduct of the organization of matter, according to the action of universal laws. Today this is brought into question, and seeing the incredible coincidences that would have been necessary to bring about a universe so perfectly designed for the emergence of life, more and more hardcore scientists suggest that such a universe simply had to be in some way designed for this. Science has been driven to the extreme of positing the existence of an infinite array of universes, a multiverse, in order to avoid having to recognize meaning behind the uniqueness of the physical world. If there are infinite worlds in existence, the reasoning goes, then it is not so unusual that we would find one in which life can evolve.

Our current impasse in science certainly allows the possibility that all existence emerges from a universal consciousness. Mathematically we might propose an infinite dimensional, although undifferentiated, universal field, giving rise through a process of narrowing down into a finite dimensional reality to a material world. For a spiritual person, this consciousness would of course be identified with the mind of God, but there is no need to impose such a thought on everyone.

And there is good reason for that last sentence. If at the very core of our being we exist within the consciousness of universal divinity itself, when we start to look within, that is what we are going to find.
Prior to this time in history, looking within was likely to find a great deal of chaos and what was formerly understood as sin. Now, however, as the feminine perspective grows worldwide, when we look within we find more pain and urgent need for love, built upon a strong philosophical core of acceptance of universal oneness and universal good. Our younger generation embodies this: their inherent goodness and deep search for spiritual truth, along with their often ruthless rejection of our guidelines for how to actually be good.

If human beings emerge from within the consciousness of God, however, and we find deep pain and loneliness within, then that is likely to reflect the real situation of God, both the feminine and the masculine aspects of God. The long, tormented history of restoration in which people judged each other, committed violence upon each other, and sought to dominate by physical force cannot possibly have been what God was expecting when She created the world within Her own being. Never being able to cut off from what was happening, God went through the most terrible of tortures along with everyone in history.

Restoration required gradual shaping of humans through truth and religion (which sometimes managed to manifest truth) and this is why the masculine nature of God was so necessarily dominant. But today we are beyond such a time, so that we no longer need to be dominated by laws and religious doctrines.

In fact, it is a time when Heavenly Mother Herself can reach directly into the world and into our hearts and begin to live in our relationships of love. It is a time when we can start to look within and discover that we are, in fact, divine, although not yet mature, beings. The search for truth on the part of our young people can be our greatest liberation as long as we support rather than judge them.

The basis for oneness then is not our beliefs so much as our very identity. Our challenge right now is simply to know ourselves as manifestations of the one God. Religious differences are nothing compared to this self-knowing. Religious teachings of course are often helpful, but once we know our identity and trust that knowing, we can allow our real selves to emerge without hiding or fear, knowing our deepest core is much stronger than our psychological shell.

While consciousness is at the core of our own being, it is also at the core of every being, even every elementary particle, planet and star. Elementary particles may not reflect on the higher mathematics of their choices, but there are scientific voices now calling for a new model of the actions of elementary particles as due to choice, as part of their seeking relationship in order to allow the emergence of life. Women and men in physics and the philosophy of science are suggesting we have been too quick to identify the mathematical time parameter within relativity with the psychological time of our human experience, and of course there would be no reason to accept the “twin paradox” of relativity if the material world truly existed within consciousness instead of the other way round.

Other scientists are beginning to explore the possibility that the laws of science emerged within evolution, rather than driving evolution. After all, it is hard to reconcile the pre-existence of eternal laws with the emergence out of nothing of a universe obliged to follow these laws. We are at a turning point in our understanding of the universe just as we reach a turning point in our spiritual self-knowledge.

No one can dictate to a divine being. Authoritarianism is not such a relevant course today for that reason. If we discover a desire to still obey someone outside of ourselves, it might be appropriate to ask if we may be just trying to avoid self-knowledge and the process of self-exploration. Obedience is appropriate for a time period to learn from someone and inherit their wisdom, but not as a permanent state of being. Relationships can manifest the masculine and feminine within God, and that balance has seen significant change in its expression on earth, facilitating a much greater expression of original consciousness as a result of our spiritual growth and evolution.

Suddenly the idea of simply following received doctrine is no longer generally valued in the same way, and we find ourselves searching for a new Prime Directive, one that can unite, not divide. The emergence from within one consciousness shows us the oneness at our very core. So while we are in search mode, we can retain the confidence in knowing that fundamentally we are still brothers and sisters no matter what cracks appear on the surface.

Let’s be kind, patient and respectful of each other’s search. The universe itself urges us to take that path.♦

A Time When Full Consciousness is Emerging

Since the origin of humanity on earth, we have lived as though there is no spiritual world. Our focus has been almost totally upon the external world, and we have lived without meaning and without eternity. Religion has in various ways attempted to bring to our attention an awareness of spiritual reality, but it has for so many focused on an attempt to stop humanity from performing certain “sins”, through various threats and punitive actions. The idea has always been that to enter into some sort of spiritual reality, however that has been conceived, one has to be “saved” and approved by God.

Now in the present day we have reached a state where we know clearly that there is another side to this, that “sinful” actions cannot be eradicated simply by forbidding them, but only by clarity of vision of wholeness, and by healing the hurt within.  We have, as humanity, reached the place where the motherly nature of God is being expressed by women on earth, and often even by men on earth, and this means that Mother God is able to manifest that part of Her nature which has remained unexpressed throughout so much of the history when men dominated all things.

Uniting the physical and spiritual worlds requires us to be able to perceive the deep meaning in the nature of all things in creation. Perception of the internal nature of all things requires us to accept that the earth itself is not just a commodity which we can use to make profit to enhance our personal small economic life, but is our earth-mother. The earth yearns to supply us all with resources to express the love of the mother, to guarantee us all survival, and to be the basis from which we grow to express our unique, eternal, human and divine natures. 

Humans live as though they are animals with reason, and miss the beauty, the infinite potential all around at all times. But science is truly on the verge of making the step into a vastly greater vision of humans and all of reality.

It is time now for us to look at the land and see the spirit within, as has been practiced by indigenous peoples worldwide. We have destroyed our greatest treasures in the quest for recovering the spiritual world and recovering our awareness of the spirit within us and within nature and all things. Now we can clearly recognize the forces of violence and unchecked desire for power through material wealth and position that have so impoverished our lives in recent centuries. 

No one is looking to take away what so many people rely on for their security, but rather to establish the value of all people, and to ensure that every single person is valued, and able to inherit the earth’s promise of life and security in the physical world, as preparation for eternal joy and life in the spiritual world. We are God becoming, both men and women. Even God lives in potential without manifestation of God’s full nature within the universe, and for the feminine heart of God to have been hidden from humanity, unable to develop within humanity due to the damage done in history, is tragedy.  We are beyond that. 

We can now expect to hear the voices of women, to see the values of the mother gradually emerging within the nations and communities of the earth. 

I want to see the emergence of full health, the overcoming of all disease and the enabling of people to reach spiritual maturity before moving on to the spiritual realms. I want to see much greater ease of travel within the physical world and the universe in the near future, including the revelation of faster-than-light travel. I want to see two-way communication between people in the spiritual world and physical world emerge rapidly in the coming years. The idea that a human can just be dismantled and done away with is so devastating that no one who believes that could ever truly know that God loves us, and yet so much evidence seems to endorse that point of view. This has to be overcome immediately, not as a point of belief but as an actual accomplished fact.

Thus Endeth the Jewish State

Plagued from the beginning by the religious Zionist absolute unquestioning assumption that the land currently occupied by both Arabs and Jews was directly given to the Jewish people by God, Israel has always had to struggle with the duality at the core of its identity, dividing the population into many different factions. The religious, maybe messianic, zeal which determines that almost anything is acceptable in the taking of the land has finally brought us to the point where the very next step takes the region maybe beyond the possibility of the two-state solution. Israel now must decide between democratic values, which would demand equal protection of the rights of all residents, and the apparent the convergence of religious values and politics that seems to be driving the new U.S. administration.

Imagine how devastating it must be to Arabs in Palestine that they don’t even get to vote about such decisive steps! Their fate is being decided by leaders of nations who seem too often to know or care nothing of their daily reality and their recent history. U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May seem more concerned with settling issues between Palestine and Israel according to their own benefit at home, leaving Palestinians as simply chess pieces to be used and moved around the board as they deem best.

Although Prime Minister May has offered some assurances that Britain still believes Israeli settlements in Palestinian lands are illegal, to distance the UK from Europe and the previous US administration for her own purposes is a dangerous and disrespectful course on which to embark. It disrespects all those Britons who actually care deeply about the Palestinian people, and are aware of Britain’s very checkered past in taking on the role of overseer. Let us hope that seeing the jubilant reaction in the far right corridors of power has been enough to convince Mrs. May that she needs a more considered approach.

And President Trump? Initial thoughts that emerged from his own mouth in early days of his presidential campaign seemed to indicate that he was ready to bring his purportedly powerful experience in making deals to the arena of Israeli/Palestinian relations. Yet, Trump’s statement that he intends to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem has led Israel to believe that he will totally support its extreme right wing agenda. The president should stick to his strengths; he is not the elected representative of either Israelis or Palestinians, and simply caving in to the opinions of people motivated by religious conviction will not help any quest to do well by the world.

The people of Israel have other concerns to address, maybe most prominently that of their own identity. Who are they? Who do they want to be in 30 years or so?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has required, as one of his major conditions for a deal, that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Is this a religious identity? The most religious people in Israel would be the ultra-Orthodox, in the sense that they consider themselves to be the only ones following the laws of the covenant made thousands of years ago with their God. But they have actually deeply compromised their own status, since as a result of them joining the governing coalition in order to gain power, their own children are moving towards a more secular form of Judaism.

Religious exemption from the Israel Defense Forces has been a point of strong contention with the rest of Israel, as well as support of the spiritual lifestyle which requires young men to study Torah instead of acquiring a more secular education and entering gainful employment. But in choosing to rely on Netanyahu’s benevolence rather than on the power of their God in supporting these goals, the ultra-Orthodox find themselves compromised. Their own children see them bowing to secular power, and thus themselves are choosing in unprecedented numbers to join the IDF and abandon the spiritual path.

The perspective of religious Zionists and revisionist Jews has allowed for the violence that was an integral part of the founding of Israel to continue today. Palestinians have suffered under this religious zeal, and we are led now to ask, What is the plan for the six million or so Arabs who will be living within the boundaries of a Jewish state? Naftali Bennett, for example, seems to expect them somehow to evaporate and disappear.

Israel has almost become simply another secular country relying on military power more than on spiritual power, and thus one is left asking the question, What is a Jewish state? In accepting the values and the support of outside powers rather than tackling the actual issue of making peace themselves, Israel has essentially eradicated its own agenda of establishing a Jewish state.

At this point, the only way to turn this around may be for the parties in the governing coalition to truly sit down and enter a phase of deep soul-searching as to who they are and where they want to go. Most are happily embarking on the final stages of adopting a path which will leave the Palestinians homeless and stateless, occupied by a foreign body. Everyone should know that this cannot last as a stable reality, with the prospect of morphing into a single state in 30 years or so, with almost equal Jewish and Arab populations. In the meantime, life in the Middle East will be filled with hostility and conflict. Netanyahu seems so focused on today’s reality and on holding on to power that he doesn’t care. Do all the parties in the ruling coalition feel the same way?

​Annexation of the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, a determining step in extending Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, would appear to be the end of realistic opportunity for the two-state solution to retain viability. Opposing this annexation seems to be the only path that can assure Israel’s existence as a Jewish state—as something other than just another secular democratic state.

The MIssing Gospel of the Mother

And God saw Her people living in plenty and harmony in the bosom of Mother Africa, and God was pleased. But God knew the great potential of Her people, and wished them to fill the earth with their descendants.

A great number felt the call to leave the motherland, and left following various paths, to explore the Blessings of the earth, and multiply until the earth was filled.

But as they explored, they found the earth was not welcoming and hospitable, but rather was full of challenges. Winter claimed many lives, floods and wild animals and many dangers accompanied every path. And God saw the suffering of Her people, and was filled with sadness.

Gradually those who left to explore and multiply found themselves mostly looking to conquer great dangers, and came to think of subjugating the earth, not living in harmony. Those masculine qualities of bravery and strength became favored over qualities of peace and joyfulness. Those who traveled lost their continual contact with the sun, and became pale, and over time, they began to fight each other, as they had fought nature for their survival.

And then gradually they began to settle, and manifest a dominion, but found they had lost some part of their heart. They no longer felt secure and embraced by Mother God, but felt abandoned, and they closed off that part of their heart that had felt loved and valued.  And they made science, and they made the law, to free themselves, but God saw that they had become trapped by the law. And Mother God lamented Her children’s pain

One day Mother God resolved to open up a new land, a land where Her children could come and be free, a land of plenty, and a land where all would be equal, dark and pale, male and female. But Mother God pondered in Her heart for many years before She could do this, because Mother God knew Her children would not easily regain their hearts. She knew She had to send to this new land a special people of heart, those who still knew God’s love. And Mother God grieved and lamented because She knew the fate of these people, that they would have to suffer deeply at the hands of those who no longer felt loved.

But without the people of the heart, Mother God knew She could never establish the place on earth where She could dwell in harmony and peace with Her children. The pale peoples had closed their hearts and become people of the intellect alone, a capable and excellent people in many ways, but a people who had too great a pain to be kind any more.

And thus Mother God guided those across the ocean fleeing from oppression and lack of freedom, and watched with great agony as they failed to love those native people who already lived there. And even more painful for Mother God was to have to watch as Her people were brought from the Motherland under chains and oppression, to be in slavery for 400 years.

But Mother God never left the hearts of Her people, and watched with both deep pride and deep suffering the agony of those enduring great cruelty.

And as time went on, a wondrous thing happened, as some of the anger and hurt of those men who had fought against the elements for so long became directed onto their slaves instead of on their wives and children, and as time passed, those wives and children gradually became stronger and more free, and gained power within the society of men, until one day it became clear that women were totally the equal of men, and the time of men’s dominion was over. Mother God became empowered, and found those women who could give voice to the Mother who dwelled within their hearts.

The great sin of slavery was ended, although it took many generations for healing to truly take place within all people. Men gradually came to see the empowerment of women as a good thing, and the new nation, already several hundred years old, came to realize there was no way forward except through embracing the heart.

And it came to pass that one day, Mother God said No More. From this time, heart will come first. No longer will violence be visited upon my people for they have proven themselves worthy in heart. And God’s people rose up and claimed themselves worthy, and refused to accept any more prejudice and hatred.

And Mother God loved and celebrated Her children, those who had endured and absorbed so much injustice so that their brothers and sisters, and their descendants, could be free. God bowed down to those who had stood strong under the greatest injustices without losing faith in their God, because finally Mother God saw She would live on earth in peace and joy with all of Her children.

How the Justice System has excluded input from the people

Last time I was called for jury duty in Delaware there were 42 cases scheduled. We figured we were just unlucky, and we’d surely be called for a jury with so many cases, despite all the tales we’d heard about people getting out of the courthouse by noon. But indeed we were out by noon. Only one case went to a jury. That means 41 people pleaded guilty to something that day, either a crime they’d committed, or a crime they felt was the least they would get away with given the system and the warnings from their defense attorney, the only person who might be expected to be on their side, that coming before a jury would be a crapshoot.

If over 90% of cases are decided by attorneys, prosecuting and defense attorneys together, we are no longer looking at an adversarial system. The only adversarial part of the system is that of the accusation versus the accused. Both prosecutor and defense have accepted the prevailing wisdom that everyone is guilty of something, the system must be preserved or total chaos will result, and therefore their roles have reverted to  highballing the punishment (prosecutor) and lowballing the punishment (defense). The prosecutor is building his or her reputation, the defense is trying not to be swamped amidst a case burden that might have applied to a whole law firm of defense lawyers in a previous time.

Nobody takes time to discover if the facts presented are true, hardly anybody even thinks about if the accused had criminal intent when he did what he was accused of. The police and prosecutor pile on enough charges to ensure that something will stick. The accused is bulldozed into pleading guilty to something so as to avoid a bigger charge. Sometime she did something criminal, sometimes she didn’t. Either way, once arrested the chances of being declared innocent are remote, and require much more money than a typical defendant is going to have.

Preserving the system is already a lost cause. The only thing attorneys are preserving at this point is their jobs. The man in the street thinks of TV shows when he thinks of the justice system, believing juries decide cases based on impassioned pleas from defense attorneys, that lack of evidence will be sufficient to free the innocent. This isn’t a part of the current system.

The first exposure to the system comes in meeting the police. Police are so overwhelmed and cynical about  whole communities that they see their job as being to preserve order, not to bring justice. Therefore when they say “If there is anymore disturbance, someone is going to be arrested” they really mean that. It really is fairly random who gets to go into the system and lose the next decade of their life to court appearances, jail time, probation, supervision, fines, etc. Add on to that reality the fact that police are often given quotas, or offered rewards to make more arrests, and sooner or later no one wants to call the police in the first place. Antonio LeGrier could tell us that, having watched his son (and an innocent neighbor) be gunned down by the Chicago police he called to help calm his son during an argument last December.

There is no point now to try to go back to the past. We have to move forward. A very helpful  first step would be to require the prosecution to prove criminal intent before someone can pay for a crime. Second, given the almost complete responsibility and control placed in the hands of attorneys today, who negotiate sentences without any jury oversight, we must surely demand that such attorneys be well qualified to make decisions concerning human motivations. Legally trained professionals cannot be expected to make decisions concerning criminal intent without further training in behavior and personality theories when they are the only  professional making decisions about people’s lives, and when they have a conflict of interest, their careers often being enhanced by gaining guilty pleas.

Given the overwhelming case burden of attorneys in the system today, this part may be facilitated by a third party involvement, not necessarily a trained psychologist, but a person trained specifically for this position. In the past guilt of motivation was decided by a jury presented with enough facts, having heard arguments from both sides, without need for psychological training. Today this assessment simply doesn’t happen, even if only because usually a jury doesn’t happen.

If a law can be passed that requires proof of criminal intent, then there must be some way that this can be decided. Here we can bring together the wisdom of age with the needs of society, given the huge numbers of older people who are retired but not ready to do nothing. Even without a cadre of people trained for careers based on a new role within the system, many such people would perform this function well based on life experience and training without great expense. The human factor can be restored to the process leaving the legally trained professionals to focus on the law.

One argument typically brought to bear when it is suggested that anyone else be brought in to the system is that it opens up the slippery slope to the privilege of privacy. Given that the public defenders’ role is now reduced to assuming guilt and arguing for reduced sentences rather than for innocence, this becomes something of a moot point. Guilt already seems to be assumed.  And whereas previously it seemed reasonable to argue for protecting the system and its safeguards, now it doesn’t seem reasonable any more. The system has already changed beyond recognition, so why not demand further change?