I AM AN AMERICAN

I am an American





My soul is free,

my heart is brave, I need no war on terror,

I am an American, and I cannot be terrorized.

I live my life, in God I trust,

I worship as I choose, and I speak as I feel.

I am an American, and I cannot be terrorized.

I was born to be free

I was not born to be ruled, I was not born to be safe.

I am an American, and I cannot be terrorized.

I rise and I fall, I win and I lose,

I go where I choose and not where I am led.

I am an American, and I cannot be terrorized.

I am my government – I am ‘the people’

My Constitution is my governor.

I expect my elected officials to keep it safe,

I expect my elected officials to protect my rights,

God holds my life – in God I trust.

I am an American, and I cannot be terrorized.

Freedom is not a meaningless word,

It is not an advertising slogan –

It is a right to live openly, or privately as one chooses

Our forefathers did not die to be free from terror,

They died for the freedoms only governments and slave owners can steal.

They did not risk their lives to keep their shores safe

Kings and dictators keep their shores safe

They died not for safety but for freedom

They died to keep their lives free and independent

Animals in zoos are safe from being terrorized by other animals

but not from being mistreated by their keepers.

I am not an animal – my days are not numbered by terrorists,

and they are not numbered by fear.

My days are numbered by God, and in God I trust.

I am an American, and I cannot be terrorized.

My body is born of this piece of the earth,

this land of the free and home of the brave.

My soul is born of the God in whom I trust.

“Give me Liberty or Give me Death”, but do not presume to give me safety. God numbers my days.

In God I trust.

I do not choose safety over freedom, I choose to be an American,

therefore I cannot be terrorized.





“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government” THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Out with the Age of Pisces In with the Age of Aquarius

So many people have asked me the meaning of the Age of Aquarius. There are those who believe that we are in the Age of Aquarius and those who believe that we are in the final days of the Age of Pisces. It seems to me that if we are not sure which age we are in it is because we do not understand the meaning of the ages. So, I will describe the characteristics of this age that we are in and the age that we are entering.

To understand the Age of Pisces we must understand two things, first there is the symbol for Pisces, it is two fish tied together swimming in opposite directions. So we must immediately understand that it is a sign of duality, a sign that emphasizes opposites with enormous passion. If there is any word that must be stressed during this age that word is passion. If we do anything, we do it passionately, if we believe anything, we believe it passionately. And we think that passion is a part of our makeup. It is not. We are all portions of the Divine. We are all Divine Seeds. This means that we are all love and that kind of love, that level of love that I am speaking of Divine Love is not passionate. Passion is the cause of suffering. Passion is not even a quality of the material world; survival is the only natural quality of the material world. When a lioness kills her prey it is without passion, it is a requirement of survival. This is why animals do not hate, they are a part of the earth and there is only hate where there is passion.

We have been living for at least two thousand years in a passionate age. How does that affect us? We are here to absorb and work through the existing energies of this planet in order to grow. And so we are like clear sponges. And when we enter the world during an age, we first absorb the energy of that age, this age of Pisces is red with passion and so although we are clear sponges when we enter the environment, we become red because we absorb the energy of the environment. The age colors everything. Why? It does so because everything on earth absorbs its energy from the Sun, and the constellation that the Sun is in during its own 25,000 plus year rotation will color the energy that we absorb from it.

Every religion has its legends of destruction and new birth, whether it is by flood, fire, air or war, periodically in the history of mankind there have been reseedings. Each species evolves through mutation physically and spiritually so as a new age or seeding is about to occur, there are mutations that incarnate to generate the change. This has been happening for about three hundred years culminating in a major seeding of souls during the late forties and fifties. These were the souls who bloomed during the sixties with the energy of Aquarius and as they bloomed, their seeds were carried by the wind of Spirit to be planted and spread throughout the world to begin the slow process of change into the energy of Aquarius. It is certain that the Age of Pisces created the divide between man and his God. Before this age, man saw the universe as one great body of which he was a part. There was no God out there far far away in Heaven. There was only God in everything and everyone who existed upon the earth. The power of these ancient beings is the stuff of legends, but because they are legends does not mean that the powers were not real.

I wondered, if all is perfect and for our growth, there are no mistakes and no accidents, then why was God taken from within man and placed at such a distance that we could feasibly lose our belief? What is the good in that? Yes, I know that on the mundane level it was done by the greedy to maintain power, but I know that even the greedy are only playing their parts in the Plan. Then it came to me, many mystics believe that God created the world in order to experience himself. How can we understand the power of God that exists within us, unless we are apart from it, a drop of water cannot conceive of the power of the ocean unless it is separated from it. So we have, during this Age, reached the greatest distance that we can from the Power within us.

We have taken our manipulation of the external world to its peak during this age. We will soon run out of things to invent – then what? I had a vision the other day while driving in my car. I saw a group of students perhaps five hundred years from now talking about how backwards we were with all of our airplanes, rockets, bombs and gadgets. Laughing at how hard we worked to build things with our hands when all we had to do was build them with our minds. I saw them studying war (a concept lost to them) and having war explained as how barbarians functioned before civilization. To the humans of the future, civilization will be living in at-one-ness with the Power from which we all come and the universe of which we all are a part. There will be no God, no void, only a continuous circle of life. There will be no heaven or hell because theirs will be a holographic universe where they naturally see that the whole is within each part and each part is a mirror of the whole. But in order for us to get to this place of non-duality, we must be the fish swimming in opposite directions with passion and commitment, going nowhere, but going but willing to kill anyone who stops us from getting there.

Unless we passionately exhaust our beliefs, however delusional they are, we cannot choose to change them. This is the purpose of the age of passionate confusion – the age of Pisces. And to really see how this works in our lives personally, we must understand the planet the rules Pisces and that is Neptune. Neptune is somewhere in all of our charts and is moving through some part of each chart at all times. Where ever it is, life will never be the same again. Neptune is a very strange energy. It enfolds us in a blanket of blind faith and passionate commitment to a path that appears to be clearer than any that we have ever known before. However, in the midst of being so certain and so committed we find that everyone else in our lives sees something seriously wrong with the vision of the world we are holding. Usually we find ourselves making the most outrageous sacrifices almost joyfully because we feel that God has ordained them. We fly in the face of overwhelming odds. We take the most irresponsible risks with passionate abandon. We build castles in the air, move into them, and have absolutely no qualms about paying the rent.

The positive face of Neptune is that it can be compassionate and self-sacrificing. It allows us to believe in the loftiest of ideals and aim for the most spiritual of heights. The negative face of Neptune allows us to fight to build a nation based on freedom and delude ourselves into thinking that owning slaves is not a contradiction. It can cause people to believe in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, and find no contradiction in waging the most brutal wars in His name. It permits us to break every one of the Ten Commandments and still consider ourselves pious, own multi-million dollar mansions while eighty percent of the world is starving, and consider ourselves righteous human beings. In other words, it is the great deceiver.

On the personal level, we may find that we have endured ten years of torture and abuse in a marriage because we believed our spouses every time we were told that it would never happen again. Or, we could join a cult and spend fourteen years giving all that we have to that cult not ever feeling that we were being taken. Then one day Neptune moves on. When this happens we wake up wondering where or even who we have been for all of those years, lost and humiliated wondering at what point we lost our sanity. It is easy accepting that everyone makes mistakes, but when it is a Neptune mistake—we find that it has cost us something that we would never have given up were we in our right mind. That something could be financial security, emotional security, our position in society, even those whom we love the most. Neptune also rules drugs and alcohol. Neptune strikes us where we feel we are the least vulnerable. And when it is over, we find that the golden chalice we risked everything to own was no more than a tin cup. We look back at the signs that we missed, the warnings that we refused to heed, the writing on the wall that was as clear as the noses on our faces and wonder how on earth we could have ever been that stupid.

Imagine the feeling of the devout Christian monk who, in the fervor of Neptune’s delusion, joined in the slaughter of hundreds of people during the Crusades. Neptune moves on and all that he is left with is the bloodstains on his hands. The reaction to our Neptune actions range from, “This is going to be hard to fix”, to “My God what have I done?” What underlies all Neptune experiences is that somewhere in our lives we have placed too much dependence upon something that is directly in the way of our spiritual connection with the Divine. Neptune lessons are probably the most difficult to learn because we don’t wake up until all of the damage has been done and for us to face ourselves and the world at this point takes an amount of humility that most of us just did not come in with. Neptune teaches us what we can live without, which is usually the one thing in our lives that we have determined we cannot live without.

Neptune shows us that nothing is real except faith because while it is affecting our lives, we truly believe what we are living in is the only reality and our delusions—the only truths. And when we awaken, we find that we cannot ever repeat the justifications that we once lived by, with a straight face. We can never put back together what Neptune has destroyed. It is a spiritual planet – it is the hand of God. It does not work to make us rich in the earthly garden, it works to make us rich in the spiritual garden. It does not work to strengthen our relationship with the opposite sex, it works to strengthen our relationship with Spirit. The Spiritual world and the material world are opposites, what is good for one is not good for the other. “Seek and ye shall find” – not if it is a Mercedes. “What does it merit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul?” This is the lesson of Neptune. This is the lesson the Age of Pisces.

Neptune rules illusion and delusion, it rules everything that sparkles and shines, the bigger the better. It rules glamour. It is the god of temptation. It lies, it helps us justify, it entices us to take more and more until we die to the physical world and are reborn to the spiritual.

When Neptune entered my house of money I had my own business two homes and all that glitters and glows. By the time Neptune left that house in my chart, I had the clothes on my back and was not too sure how long I would have them. I had no choice where the loss was concerned, the tighter I held on the faster it slipped away – the more ideas I came up with to make more, the more crooks entered my life to steal it. My option was not to find out how to be smarter about money, my option was to let go or suffer. Neptune give us an opportunity to learn detachment. I say offers us the opportunity to learn because we do not have to learn Neptune’s lessons. This is where free will comes in. Many people, I am sure, come out of a Neptune cycle such as mine having learned nothing. For those who learn nothing, joy will always be something that belongs to someone else. Because those things that Neptune takes away from us, are the things that stand between our joy, and us, whether they are money, power, status, fame, pride or just plain ego. Our load is somehow lightened in the area that Neptune travels, whether we like it or not.

So, during the age of Pisces we have fought for our personal form of worship of God, while at the same time somehow finding ourselves completely justified in breaking His laws as often and with as much passion as possible. During the Age of Pisces we were willing to give up our lives for all to be free, but we were not willing to give up our slaves. We said the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, repeating the words, “With Liberty and Justice for all” while ensuring that there was liberty and justice only for the privileged few. We spoke with forked tongues and were equally committed to both forks. Two fish swimming in opposite directions. We repeated the words, “Judge not lest ye be judged,” while simultaneously judging everyone whose beliefs differed from our own.

So now, we say that we are in a war to bring freedom to a country at the cost of the lives of most of those to whom we are bringing this freedom. And that works for many of us, or at least those of us who are still heavily under the influence of the Age of Pisces. Yet, those of who have been awakened by the Age of Aquarius, are finding it difficult to understand how we have spent our lives believing that black was white and finding it impossible to explain to our Aquarian children what the truth exactly is. We wonder why our children lie so much without realizing that in the short time that they have spent in our world, they have seen no truth. The Age of Pisces has been a dream and a nightmare, and whether we believed the dream or lived the nightmare, waking up is feeling more and more like hell.

I cannot count the number of beautiful happy families I grew up watching on television and believing in where the actors and actresses who played the happy children went home only to be abused by their real parents. Yes, waking up is hell. But, wake up we must because as Neptune is the great deceiver, Uranus, the planet that rules the Age of Aquarius is the great awakener. Pisces allows us to live in blind faith. It allows us to believe that we are being faithful and remain blind to our own deceit. Now, with the Age of Aquarius upon us we must give up our blind faith for Enlightened believe, and that means awakened belief. The wonder of this new age is realizing that we can have faith, without being blind, and that faith, awakened faith—can never lead to disillusionment. In the lie we have been enslaved because we have had to live in the fear.

Although we have not officially entered the Age of Aquarius, it is here. It is here drawing out the truth and awakening the souls whose true vibration is Aquarian. Losing the illusion does not mean losing Santa Claus, it means finding him where he lives, in the human heart. A faith born of blindness is one, which will be lost if sight is restored, but a faith born of vision, and light is one that can guide us forever. The Age of Pisces demanded that we believe blindly in a God that can never be seen, and never be attained. The Age of Aquarius tells us to open our eyes to the mystical beauty of the God that animates all that is. In the Age of Aquarius we will not need to go the a church, synagogue or mosque in order to find God, we simply have to look at the trees, the sky, the people and life that is all around us to know God as once our ancestors did. We will live in peace because we will know that we do not need to go to heaven, we simply need to live it. This is the Age of Aquarius, it is the freedom that comes from truth, the truth that God is where our love is and also who we are. Pisces rules prisons and asylums, bondage and our deepest fears. What we have come to fear most in this age is the truth.

In Pisces we have placed God so far from our reach that we have become convinced that we would be forgiven for not even trying to reach It. We have invented our own scapegoat and named him Satan. We have turned Christ into a martyr who died so that we can remain imperfectly pure and tell ourselves that we are faultless in the sight of God. In the Age of Aquarius there is no devil out there and there is no God out there, both reside within us, both reside in the light, and it is within that light that both become One and that One becomes Us. We must make our choices in the sight of God and the world and know that we are our choices. In Pisces we have been enslaved by the lies and hypocrisy within which we have lived. In the Age of Aquarius there will be no lies, no hypocrisy and so no fear of exposure. Without the fear of exposure, there is no prison.

In A Conscious Society Bling Bling Should be the New Fur

I remember walking down the street in my fur coat a few years back and having someone ask me if I knew how many minks died for my fur. I stopped wearing fur. I stopped because I did not need it, it was a luxury, it was a sign that I had made it – it was ego food. I understood the question. Now, with the world so small, and the suffering so great – so unavoidable – I wonder if we should not feel the same sense of responsibility that we feel for helpless animals, for helpless humans.

There was a time when your choices were beautiful sparkling diamonds or dull glass. It made some sense, if even in a superficial way, to want a diamond. But today, there are faux diamonds that cost a fraction of the cost and sparkle with equal brilliance – so one has to ask oneself why buy the diamond? What is it’s value in our world today? What if you have a ten thousand dollar diamond, trade it in for a one thousand dollar cubic zirconium and give the nine thousand dollars that you have left to buy mosquito nets for children in Africa? Then your diamond would have value., it would show much more than what you can afford to have, it would show what you are willing to give. Wouldn’t it be cool, rather than wearing a five thousand dollar blouse that says you are filthy rich, wearing a five-dollar tee shirt that says, “The money I planned to spend on a blouse is feeding a village in India”. How cool would you be?

Bling says to the world, “I am wearing this because I can afford it and I have nothing better to do with it than waste it on show”. Yes, it just does. No one can watch the homeless and displaced, the diseased and dying in this country and around the world and then spend thousands of dollars on things, which announce, “It’s about me”. Not today. Today we don’t need to spend thousands, millions of dollars on precious gems in order to sparkle. We can spend a fraction of that on semi-precious gems, give the rest to those in desperate need and not only sparkle from the gems, but glow from the heart. I believe that today it would be much more satisfying to wear something that doesn’t say “I have made it because I can afford to drip in diamonds” but something that says, “I have made it because I can afford to feed a village”. The oohs and ahhs are much greater today and much more long lasting when you show what you give rather than what you wear.

If our success in a profession is measured by the amount of money that we are paid, that is ok, if we understand that our true worth is measured by what we give. The point is that there is no need for bling today, it doesn’t look better than faux bling, but trading that bling in for heart does look better. We cannot outlaw bling anymore than we can outlaw fur, but it would be nice to ask someone dripping in bling, “How many children’s bellies could be filled by those earrings?” “How many villages could be educated against AIDS with that ring?” And perhaps, while we are at it, we should ask ourselves how much does it cost to make a house a home, and how many children can we give a home to for the price of a ten million dollar house?

I am not advocating ego denial. I am advocating a sense of satisfaction that not only feeds the ego but also feeds the soul. Trust me, it feels better to give to give to children in Somalia than it does to give to salespeople in Harry Winston, Proving to a child that faith has reason, God is alive and that there are angels is so much more gratifying than the stares you get from sparkling down the street in jewels. And who could honestly say that a tour of a mansion you built could hold a candle to a tour of the hospital you built in a village that has not even seen a doctor. Save a mink, don’t buy fur, Save a child, don’t buy bling.

How do we live with the way things are?

If the natural disasters of the past years have shown us anything, they should have shown us that we cannot control life. We do not know when we will be struck by a disaster. Personal safety is an illusion, just as homeland security is an illusion. We are each on our own clock’s and they will each stop ticking at the appointed time, whether we are in the Twin Towers or walking along the desert. All that we have built and held onto can be lost or taken away from us in a moment. How much better would we feel if we gave what we had to those who have nothing rather than just losing it? Once upon a time the world was immense, and one could comfortably live a lifestyle of opulent excess, ignorant of the starvation and suffering that our excesses could ease. Now, it is not the case.

And [Jesus] told them a parable, saying, "The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully; and he thought to himself, 'What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?' And he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.' But God will say to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God." Christianity. Luke 12.16-21

Imagine how the earth was created—how the body was created. The earth was given limited resources. The earth could have been created as a garden in which the food and shelter and everything that we could ask for simply grew as quickly as we could harvest it. Or, we could have been given the power to manifest everything we wish to have merely by desiring it to be. But that is not the case. And knowing that the force that guides the Universe is love, we must know that this is not to punish us. No, the earth has limited resources and some men are born with access to those resources while some are born without that access. This is the Divine Design, it places before us the opportunity to choose righteousness, the path must be chosen to have value, one cannot be forced out of fear of punishment or fear of rejection, the path of love must be chosen out of love—the need for love and the desire to give love. It is obvious that in the wild animals do not have this choice. Animals know only one path, and for the lower self in man, the animal way is the natural way. Yet as humans, we are able to reach into our souls and find the strength to rise above the natural choice to the spiritual one.

What causes wars, and what causes fighting among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. Christianity. James 4.1-3

We are containers with limited space within. We may fill that space with the things of the world or with the things of the spirit or, as it is for most of us – some proportion of both. Everything that the world of flesh has to offer contains an addictive quality. From the moment that we take our first breath – we are engulfed in an addict’s paradise. It is through this addictive garden that we evolve and it is our susceptibility to addiction – not the choice of drug, which marks the level to which a soul has evolved. Addiction is attachment plain and simple, but it is easier for us to raise ourselves above judgment (in our own eyes) if we limit our focus to what one is addicted to rather than that one is addicted. For one to be addicted to cocaine is bad; yet to be addicted to attention – is ok. It is bad to be addicted to alcohol – but power is ok. We become addicted to food, to comfort, to routine, to family, to nation, to form of worship, to race, to position, to war, to being divided or even to being united, to injustice or even to justice. Addiction is attachment.

All of these things that we attach ourselves to will one day be no more. And the extent of our suffering – the intensity of our hellfire, will equal the intensity of our attachment. We are all born within the garden of our own struggle. The lesson is to love your brother as yourself without condition. There is a story of a man who went up to the greatest Jewish religious leader and asked him to condense the entire teachings of all the sacred Wisdom into one sentence and the Rabbi, without hesitation said, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”. There are innumerable gardens in which to grow that flower and we are each born in one of them. Some learn through greed, some through religious hatred some through bigotry, some through the need for power and some as victims of the powerful. You can learn the lesson by the choice you are faced with while riding in a limo passing a poor child in a ghetto, or a homeless man on the street. You can learn the lesson being the poor child or the homeless man. Both roles are means to the same end and neither one is a punishment or a reward. The awareness of the other on both ends engenders an emotional response, which in turn forces a choice. The choice that we make in those moments will feed the soil that we sow and determine what we will ultimately reap.

On earth, our parents threaten the harshest punishments on actions that will cause us the greatest harm. They do this out of love for us. So it would stand to reason that the Source of all Love would place the greatest admonishment on those things that hurt us personally the most. And to Do unto others what we would have others do unto us is wise because what we do to others we really do to ourselves. When we harbor hatred, resentment, or anger towards another we create an energetic umbilical cord between the other and ourselves which flows from soul to soul feeding each with poisonous energy. When we are told to forgive, we are really being told to release ourselves from the flow of that poison; to forgive is only to release.

All that belongs to us or will ever belong to us is what we can take with us. All that we can take with us is what we can carry in our souls. Unconditional Love is spiritual tender. Those emotions that can only exist in the absence of Unconditional Love are spiritual debts. When we act selflessly from our hearts we are making deposits into our spiritual retirement accounts. When we act selfishly without regard for others, we are making withdrawals. The account must be full in order to retire from the suffering of this world. How many lifetimes it takes us to fill that account is up to us. There is no judgment. But to retire from suffering, it must be full.

We are here to learn to cherish that which is ours to pass through, with love and appreciation, that which is not ours and to know the difference. We are happy when we receive, when we acquire, when we are applauded, we are happy when we are loved. Happiness is contingent on an action that is happening and when it is no longer happening, we are no longer happy. But our being is transformed into the most elevated joy when we give and the more difficult the gift is to release the greater the feeling of sacrifice – the greater joy that fills us. Remember that to sacrifice is to make sacred. Feed your own body, you satisfy your body, but feed the body of another who is in need and you satisfy your soul.

3. I searched in my heart how to cheer my flesh with wine, my heart yet guiding me with wisdom, and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what it was good for the sons of men that they should do under heaven all the days of their life. 4. I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; 5. I made me gardens and parks, and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruit; 6. I made me pools of water, to water there from the forest where trees were reared; 7. I bought men-servants and maid-servants, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of herds and flocks, above all that were before me in Jerusalem; 8. I gathered me also silver and gold, and the treasure of kings and of the provinces; I got me men-singers and women-singers, and the delights of the sons of men, musical instruments, and that of all sorts. 9. So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me. 10. And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them; I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced because of all my labor; and this was my portion from all my labor. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was no profit under the sun. Ecclesiastes 2:3-10

God, Spirit, All-That-Is, placed a certain amount of resources on the earth for all life to share. It is limited, but it is always just enough. Regardless of what we tell ourselves about the greatness of our effort, we cannot earn more than our share, we do not deserve more than our share. And what is our share? It is that which leaves enough for every other person on the planet to have their share. Those of us who have more than we need to live comfortably are hoarding the food, the shelter, and the medication that could save the lives of those who are dying because of their lack. And the blood of those who die because of our greed is on our hands. The difference between life and death for a child in Africa is a few dollars; the difference between a life of poverty and suffering and a life of hope and possibilities is a few dollars. We are not only our brother’s keepers; we are our brothers. We are one body human containing one Spirit immortal, and to tell ourselves that what happens in the Sudan will not effect us, it the same as saying that cancer in the foot, untreated, will never effect the heart.

All children are our children, all lives are our lives, and any life that we are able to save becomes our responsibility to save. To whom much is given, much is expected. It makes no difference what lies we tell ourselves in order to buy our ten thousand dollar bags, and six million dollar homes, a child’s face is embedded in every one of those dollars and a child’s life or death is written into those choices that we make.

Jesus said to [the rich young man], "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions. And Jesus said to his disciples, "Truly, I say to you, it will by hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Christianity. Matthew 19.21-24

The depression that sweeps the industrialized nations is the price of our greed. The Bible says that money is the root of all evil, but it is not evil, it is the most addictive of all drugs and so it is the root of the greatest spiritual pain. Money is the key to the material kingdom. Money brings worship, adulation, slaves, all things that feed the ego. Yet, it is not money that is the problem it is the hoarding. The more money one hoards, the emptier one is Spiritually because the energy of material possessions in much denser and weighs down our energy fields leaving little or no room for spiritual joy to permanently root itself within us, not because we make money but because we hoard it for ourselves and do not send it back out to do good works.

“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” Matthew 16:25, 2.

Today the Spiritual force of the Universe has made the world one in which we know children are dying needlessly. The world is small enough for us to know where and when men, women and children are being senselessly slaughtered because of the color of their skin or nature of their beliefs. We know, because this has been deemed the time of revelation, when we are revealed for what we are—and what we are is reflected in what we most value, not what we tell others we most value, and not in what we tell ourselves we most value. In this moment, we can stand strong as healthy wheat, wheat that gives nourishment to all, or as weeds nourishing only ourselves at the expense of others. All that we each deserve is enough to live a healthy loving life. All that we have beyond that is what would give that same quality of life to another. I once worked eighteen hours a day and was paid more than generously for that effort; I had a house in the suburbs and three bathrooms in my New York apartment. At the same time a woman sharecropper in Mississippi worked the same eighteen hours a day and could not afford indoor plumbing. I was not being rewarded for being a better person in this life or any past life, what I was being – was tested. It is time for the harvest.

We must learn and not forget that it does not matter how healthy, wealthy or wise we are, the time and manner of our death is not within our control. How long we will keep whatever we have is also not within our control, all outcomes are beyond our control. Now is the time when we are to be seen clearly, we cannot hide or pretend. The true measure of the man is not how much he has, and it is not how much he gives, but how much he is willing to give of that which he cannot bear the thought of living without.

We are being tested, and more than this, we are being given an opportunity through the suffering in the world to show the power of the light that we have within us. The world has become small enough for us to see the needs of others, small enough that we must make a conscious choice with every penny that we waste on selfish pleasures. We are no longer only responsible for the consequences of our actions but we are responsible for the consequences of our lack of action as well.

The Universe is not something around us, it is the substance of our being. God is not a separate entity; God is the Great Self, the Great Soul of which each of us is a part. God is Love; to live in God’s image is to live in the image of love and to love in the image of God. No one is empty, we are all full, those who are empty of attachment to the world are full of Spirit, and those who are filled with worldly attachments are empty of Spirit. Some are half full of the world and half full of Spirit, each have our own proportion of both and that is our choice.

Do you not feel this time as different than any other? This time is not a test it is a gift. It is a gift to us from Our Source, a chance to wipe out our karma with good works, to purify our souls with unconditional love. To strengthen our faith and show our love of All-That-Is by giving without fear of not having enough left for ourselves, for the enjoyment of the world is empty, but the joy of Love is a cup that constantly runneth over. What are the fires of hell? They are the tests and temptations that we must go through on this earth to burn away our attachment to the material – to mammon. The fires of hell are no more or less than the suffering that we endure living with the desire for what we do not need, the fear of losing or actual loss of what we do not own, and the blindness that keeps us from knowing that having and losing in this world are both illusions and what is of value to our souls is always a part of them.

He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may provide in abundance for every good work. As it is written, He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures forever. He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your resources and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way for great generosity.

Christianity. 2 Corinthians 9.6-11

The Growing Field

One of the most important phases of maturing is that of growth from self-centering to an understanding relationship to others. A person is not mature until he has both an ability and a willingness to see himself as one among others and to do unto those others as he would have them do to him.Sir Walter Scott


The earth is a growing field. Imagine a seed planted deep within the soil, a seed having to journey through layer after layer of packed earth, finding its way around rocks and other objects until it finally breaks through to the sun—and break through, it will. Yet what apparent insurmountable odds it faces there, deep within the soil. Still, the same soil which seems intent upon blocking its way, contains the nourishment needed for its survival on the journey.

Here, on earth is where the soul comes to learn its greatest lessons. Yet, what is the earth? Live spelled backwards is evil—and on earth what we consider evil is what the earth is made of. It is a wild, dangerous, greedy, and most of all, insatiable planet—a place where every organism large or small seeks one thing—survival. God said to all life, “Be fruitful and multiply”. To survive, each species knows that it must multiply. Microorganisms, bacteria, viruses, grass, weeds, plants, and flowers—all life on earth fights for the same limited space. The less man interferes with a species, the more instinctively and aggressively intent it is on fulfilling what we, as a species, have labeled ‘manifest destiny’. It is the basic driving instinct of all species on earth. Survival is of the fittest. Weeds, trees, and bushes all grow anywhere and everywhere when not checked. Even concrete cannot arrest their growth. Wild animals fight to maintain and then to expand their territory as they seek to expand their herds. Wars are fought on earth over lines drawn in the sand by every species and every organism on the earth. Each species survives at the expense of at least one other species. The earth is one large hungry, greedy, food chain. This doesn’t make the earth less beautiful, but it is necessary to understand the energy of the earth to understand the energy of the body with its instincts and desires —the body into which we each incarnate.
For some species, survival is for the swiftest, and for others, it is the strongest that survive. For yet other species, it is for those that who are best able to scavenge, or appear threatening—and yet, for others—to hide and appear invisible. Yet for some species, such as ants, or bees, survival is in the inborn ability to know what they have to offer their species and to offer it selflessly and without question. Insects seem to be much better prepared to survive than most species—they appear to have mastered the requirements for survival—united we stand divided we fall.

Man is neither swift, nor physically equipped to adapt to the harsh and changing climate of the earth. He has been given the mental and physical agility necessary to manipulate his environment. Man has also been gifted with the heart and the compassion to manage it with benevolence. We have been given the earth to live on, to grow on and to care for, but not, despite what we believe, to master and destroy. She is not ours.

In nineteen seventy-seven there was an object discovered in space. It was difficult to identify—a comet, an asteroid, a planet. No one was sure at first. Finally it was called a centaur, the first of many objects in its category that would be discovered. This first centaur was called Chiron. Chiron was, as all of the centaurs, half man and half horse. With each new discovery in space, some new door is opened here on earth—some new direction taken—some knowledge finally comprehended or information finally received by man. With the discovery of the centaur, Chiron, came the age of holistic medicine treating the mind, body, and the spirit as a whole—understanding that to cure a part of the whole without addressing the whole—ultimately cures nothing.

In mythology, Chiron was a master of all forms of art, of learning, of philosophy, of self-defense and of combat. Chiron turned each hero who passed through his cave into a true hero—a whole; a hero is not simply the one who can defeat the greatest or strongest foe, but the one who can recognize the greatest foe. This is often within the self. He did not simply give them techniques, he gave them appreciation, value and honor. Chiron did not only train the greatest fighters, he trained the greatest healers, musicians, scholars, physicians, and rulers. To teach these things, he had, in some way, embody them.

Chiron was an exceptional centaur according to legend. There were a few, who, like him, were healers, or philosophers; the majority of centaurs could not really be trusted for they were too susceptible to their desires when they became intoxicated. When intoxicated, they were robbers, murderers, and rapists, simply put, they were untamed animals. One day, as one of the legends goes, a group of centaurs became drunk and went on a killing spree. Chiron went out among them trying to bring peace and was accidentally wounded by Hercules, his dearest student, who mistook him for one of the wild centaurs. However, unlike the other centaurs—Chiron could not die—he was immortal, and as such, he faced an eternity of suffering. In spite of his pain, he continued to teach, he continued to love, and he continued to share his wisdom. In the end, Chiron made the ultimate sacrifice—he sacrificed his immortality to end the suffering of Prometheus who was being punished by Zeus for bringing fire to mankind. Because of Chiron’s selflessness and willingness to sacrifice his immortality to end the suffering of another, Zeus took Chiron up to the heavens and gave him his own constellation.

Since the discovery of Chiron we have all become more and more aware of our lower nature. All that we consider evil—all that we consider vile is nothing more than the natural inherent tendencies of our physical nature—our earthly nature. The earth is void of conscience. We, as spiritual beings, are the conscience of the earth—man brings that conscience from God. Conscience is not natural to our environment—not natural to our physical bodies—and not natural to the spiritually unevolved ego. The earth tests the spirit within each of us. To fulfill our destinies, we must not destroy the earth herself, but the world that man has built on the earth by his egos need to be better than its Creator. Man has built a false world and in seeking to become its master, he has become its slave.

We are not truly human until we conquer the beast and become humane. Until we do this we are no more than centaurs. For most of us, the intoxicant is not alcohol it is money and the wealth and power that it affords us. And, like the centaurs, once intoxicated by money, our higher selves are consumed by the lower nature, unless we are strong and able to resist the temptation to indulge ourselves in that taste for money. We are driven to consume just as every other organism on the earth—we become predators because it is natural to do so.

In the Gospel of Thomas or the Secret Sayings of Jesus, Jesus said,
Blessed is the lion that the human consumes so that the lion becomes human, Cursed is the human that the lion consumes so that the human becomes the lion. When the human eats the lion—devours the beast—it is the soul which has conquered the beast to become humane. The beast, once conquered, serves the soul and thus serves God. The things of the soul are attended to with the aid of the beast that is now lovingly serving the soul. In the twelve labors of Heracles, one of the labors was that he had to kill a lion that had, up to that point, been indestructible. Once Heracles had managed to slay the lion, he kept those parts of the lion that gave it its strength, and wore them as armor. Thus, taking the power of the beast and adding it to his own, he protected himself as he went on his quest. This is man consuming the lion. If the lion consumes the man, however, and becomes human the soul becomes enslaved by the passions and desires of the lower self—the animal self which is of the earth.

I have heard it said that man is the only animal who kills without necessity. I am not sure that this is true. I once had a cat that spent a great deal of his time outdoors. Regularly, we would find dead birds or dead mice that he proudly brought into the house, and presented to us as gifts with no intention of or desire to eat them. He carried his conquests with what appeared to be great pride. Perhaps he was showing us his skill as a hunter—who knows—but what is certain, is that he did not hunt for food—he hunted because it was natural to his species to do so. Perhaps for the cat, like for man himself, the reason for the hunt has been lost in the cans of cat food and bags of crunchy tasty nuggets that he had grown accustomed to eating. But his instincts as a predator were too deeply ingrained in the cellular memory of his body—in the genetic memory of his species since it is born of the predatory earth. My cat, like many other domesticated animals, collected the trophies of his kills because, as an animal, he was a killer. A man mounts his kills on his walls—a tribute to the animal within himself which he has not as yet conquered.

Here on earth there is no evil—there is only the earth. What we call evil is only nature. It is the opposite of spiritual but that does not make it evil. We just need to realize, without judgment, or labels, that we are not this.
Fear is the prevailing emotion on a planet where survival entails eating or being eaten, conquering or being conquered. All that we consider as sins are but the outgrowths of fear; fear of not having enough to survive; fear of not being strong enough to survive; which, ultimately, is fear of death. As we evolve spiritually our fear diminishes because it is replaced by faith. It is faith which raises us above our fears. Faith, affords us the security that we need to rest in the knowledge that there is nothing to fear in God’s universe.

Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations —Delivered October 25, 1985 by Leon Shenandoah, Tadodaho, Haudenosaunee

Listen to the words of the Creator given to the first United Nations—the Haudenosaunee—over 1,000 years ago:
The Chiefs of the Haudenosaunee shall be mentors of the people for all time. The thickness of their skins shall be seven spans which is to say that they shall be proof against anger, offensive action, and criticism. Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will, and their minds full of a yearning for the welfare of the people. With endless patience, they shall carry out their duty.

Their firmness shall be tempered with a tenderness for their people. Neither anger nor fury shall find lodging in their minds, and all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation. In every nation there are wise and good people. These should be appointed Chiefs. They should be the advisors of their people and work for the good of all the people, and their power comes from the "Great Peace."

A chief must never forget the Creator of mankind; never forget to ask the Creator for help. The Creator will guide our thoughts and strengthen us as we work to be faithful to our sacred trust and restore harmony among all peoples, all living creatures, and Mother Earth.

We were instructed to carry a love for one another and to show a great respect for all the beings of this earth. In our ways spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics. When people cease to respect and express gratitude for these many things, then all life will be destroyed, and human life on this planet will come to an end.
These are our times and responsibilities. Every human being has a sacred duty to protect the welfare of our Mother Earth, from whom all life comes.
In order to do this we must recognize the enemy—the one within us. We must begin with ourselves. We must live in harmony with the Natural World and recognize that excessive exploitation can only lead to our own destruction.

We cannot trade the welfare of our future generations for profit now. We must abide by the Natural Law or be victims of its ultimate reality. We must stand together, the four sacred colors of humans, as the one family we are, in the interest of peace.

We must abolish nuclear and conventional weapons of war. When warriors are leaders, then you will have war. We must raise leaders of peace.

We must unite the religions of the world as the spiritual force strong enough to prevail in peace. It is no longer good enough to cry, "Peace."

We must act peace, live peace, and march in peace in alliance with the people of the world. We are the spiritual energy that is thousands times stronger than nuclear energy. Our energy in the combined will of all people with the spirit of the Natural World, to be of one body, one heart and one mind for peace.

We propose, as a resolution for peace, that October 24th be designated as a Day of Peace, and a world cease-fire take place in honor of our children and the Seventh Generation to come.