Multi-Racial Unions In The Extreme

I read an article recently that stated that there is a rise of inter-racial marriages in the US. Although there is no sin in inter-racial marriages, no ethical or moral prohibition against such marriages, I am still left to ponder the wide scale results of such marriages if it were suddenly the case that everybody everywhere were to do it.

I awoke this morning to the glorious sound of numerous birds greeting the new day with beautiful song. Each species has its own unique melody. Each has it own unique attributes. No two species of bird are the same. All are birds to be sure, but each has its own colors, form, behavior and song. There are thousands of species of bird and each is an expression of a limitless creative genius.

Now I understand that it is possible that birds species could cross breed if they were somehow moved to do so, but it is something that rarely, if ever happens in nature. Each is programmed to breed with its own thus preserving the uniqueness of the species. If there were suddenly to be a massive cross breeding within the bird kingdom the uniqueness of each individual species would ultimately be watered down and made muddy brown as happens when we mix all the primary colors together.

It seems to me that although there have been beautiful babies made as a result of cross-race unions, in the end the question comes down to whether we want to preserve the races as they are, or lose the beautiful uniqueness of each race. Personally, I love the uniqueness and variety of the birds in my yard. The diversity of color and song are magical. It would become boring to observe the same brown bird singing the same song where ever I went in the world.

The Two Aspects of Forgiveness

Recently I was in on a discussion about Senator Ted Kennedy and his recent diagnosis with brain cancer. This kind of cancer, I am told, leads to fairly certain death, usually within a year. The discussion lead to his involvement in the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident in which Kennedy drove his car off a bridge late one night and his lone occupant, young Mary Jo Kopechne, was drown. Kennedy, for various stated reasons, some very suspect, did not report the accident until the next day and only after discovering that the police had been alerted to the car in the water before Kennedy could inform them. The incident sunk Kennedy's chances of ever being President, and left lingering animosity and suspicion in some that Kennedy had literally gotten a way with murder.

During the conversation someone said that they thought that no matter what the truth of the matter was Kennedy spent the rest of his life making up for the incident by his dogged defense of the poor and championship of the underprivileged. His life, they said, had been an expiation of his youthful error and that he should be forgiven. This is where my ears really perked up for that was an interesting point. Forgiveness indeed should be extended to all who err, I said, "but there is a right way to forgive, and there is a wrong way."

I went on to explain that there are actually two aspects of forgiveness. One aspect is universal, and the other conditional. Allow me to explain. We are to universally forgive everyone. This means that we are to not hate, resent, bear angry grudge against or emotional judge anyone. For this reason Jesus showed us this universal example when being nailed to the cross saying "Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do". He said this because people who "sin" are not in their right mind, are under the influence of compulsion, and therefore can not be "hated" for what they do, for it is not "them" who do it, but "sin" that has made a home in them that does the "sinning".

The second aspect of forgiving others in the conditional aspect. Just because we do not hate or resent those that do us, or society wrong, this does not mean that we are to have a normal relationship with them. We do not go fishing with the person who has stolen our car, nor should we vote for any person for political office who has done wrong and has not owned up to the error. How we relate to those who do wrong is conditional. Those that truly repent are to be brought back into the fold. We forget their error and move on as if it never happened. But if we have ordinary relationship with the unrepentant we only encourage the error in them and enable the idea that "murder can be gotten away with". By not holding the errant accountable we help to keep the truth hidden and while enabling the lie to flourish in the place where truth should be. Human beings are meant to be noble and upright beings but human beings are also imperfect. Perfection is a matter of learning from ones mistakes, this allows the arising of perfection from imperfection. Forgiveness is a two edged sword. It can build up character or it can bring it down. Often the outcome of error depends upon the wisdom and love of those who have been offended how the errant will survive themselves.

The Original Star Spangled Banner

War of 1812 - Original Ft. McHenry Flag

Memorial Day - Remembering True Patriots

Wearing Your Clothes On Backwards

If everyone wore their clothes on backwards would the fact that everyone else were doing it make it right? Would the fact that everybody went along with it, and by doing so enable everyone else to feel comfortable wearing their cloths on backwards be the right thing to do? What would happen if everyone knew everyone else was wrong but didn't say anything to anyone else for fear that someone might tell them they themselves were wrong? What kind of world would we be living in when everyone was lying to everyone else?

Luckily no one wears their cloths on backwards, but everyone does wear something that everyone else sees and everyone else knows is not quite right...the ego. Everyone who comes into this world is strapped with an ego...an environmentally, culturally imposed self that suppresses the True Self. Everyone grows up "forced" to wear a "suit" of personality that is not who we really are. No one is in their right mind, acting out, as it were, the complex "self" we "think" we are because we believe in the thoughts implanted in us from birth that "inform" us as to who we come to "think" we are. It is in the "thinking"... about how Italian we are, or how German we are, or how Pygmy we are that we come to identify with our culture to the exclusion of how "child of the Eternal" we really are, but so few discover. As long as we live in unconscious agreement with our unseen thoughts we will remain in our ego and never find the true purpose for which we were created.

One of the main problems with living as one with our ego is that it is a very shaky situation. Egos are fundamentally insecure entities founded as they are upon a faulty mental foundation. Being creatures of the mind and thinking, past and future thoughts, the ego, having its own intelligence, works very hard to avoid the Present Moment because it knows that in the Now it will be exposed and annihilated. The ego can not be still. Therefore the ego, insecure as it is, requires constant reinforcement. Approval from other egos is one of its main support systems. Judgement of others is another. Its easy to see the faults of others and to mentally condemn them so as to raise oneself up in comparison. But it is funny how the ego can not...will not see its own faults.

If you try to point out the faults of an ego you could be putting yourself in danger of loss of friendship, a black eye or worse. But make no mistake about it, pointing out fault in another, like telling them their clothes are on backwards, may cause pain and embarrassment, but is an act of real love. For everyone who wants the best for another will take that risk. Anyone with any real caring for another does not want to see the other less than their full potential. Love will strike at the ego with words of truth hoping to expose it, but bringing the light of truth to a situation, like exposing a vampire to sunlight, will also cause some pain. But love knows that it is not the Real Person who is pained, but the ego. If the Real Person is to be allowed to emerge, the ego shell must be cracked. Love is willing to speak up and speak out at the right time and in the right way for the sake of his brother, at all risks, for everything else is a lie.

Knowing What You Don't Know

Sure signs of overcoming the ego is knowing what you don't know and knowing when you are wrong. Knowing when you don't know something is a real blessing and a sign of spiritual maturity...especially when it comes to trying to understand what motivates others. Knowing what you can't possible know is wisdom because it allows one to "watch" with an open mind until they you can see what is up. Some things can never be known and it is wise to know this too. Since the ego is a know-it-all and never wrong it is a most healthy sign when you can see your wrong and admit it. Assumptions, denial, inability to acknowledge wrong (at least to ones self) are all indicators of an active ego the Watcher Self has identified with.

Objectivity Is A Spiritual Muscle

The ability to become objective to your thinking mind is a spiritual muscle that grows with exercise. When I went to the gym to lift weights last year for the first time in many many years I did not leave the gym with any obvious gain. My muscles did not show the slightest sign of growing strength but the process of growing strength and tone had begun. How do I know? Because eventually I would come to see the improvement. The continuing exercise accumulated and the results began to show up.

Exercising objectivity to your mind is spiritual exercise that does not usually appear to show any meaningful improvement at first, but with continued exercising the benefits accumulate and one day you will discover that you are gaining control over morbid or incessant thinking and feeling and have developed growing ability to control your emotions and thinking so that you respond less and less to the thoughts and thinking you do not agree with, and more and more to what you know to be right.

In his book "A New Earth" Eckhart Tolle points out a couple of wonderful little spiritual exercises that I have recently begun to incorporate into my daily life with wonderful results. He speaks of God as silence and stillness, which many of us know already, but he also speaks of God as the "no thing" out of which all form, all material things come. For example, sound could not be but for the silence...the "no sound" that surrounds it. A room could not be but for the space, the "nothingness" that allows the room and its contents to be.

So here are the little meditations one can incorporate into ones daily life that will help you grow in ability to come out of your mind and grow more into the Aware Self you are meant to be. I will tell you about them by way of example. This morning, when I awoke and began to look at my mind as is my practice, I also began to listen to the morning birds singing. And what I began to notice was the silence between the notes...the space between the refrains the birds sing. Birds sing a kind of melody of notes, then silence, then more song and if one pays attention to the silences between the notes one finds oneself very quiet and still within as you pay attention to the silence without. You can not be aware of silence and be in your thoughts at the same time.

Also, in the same way that one can be aware of silence, one can also become aware of the space between things. I do this often at the gym while on the stair climber, but it can be done anywhere and at anytime. At the gym I tend to look around with big room whirling with machinery and people exercising, but I pay attention more to the big open space the machines and people are in. I look at the distance of space between the walls, between the machines, between the TV's on the wall, between the huge hanging ceiling lights, between all the people inside the room. I look at the space between my eyes and the digital read-out of the machine I'm on. I look outside the big windows into the sky and see the space that makes the building possible, the space between the building and the trees, between the branches of the trees. And again, like listening to the silence between noises, one finds that one can not be in ones thoughts and be aware of space, the nothing out of which all things have existence, at the same time. And what ones find in meditating like this, in entering the space and silence outside and between thought, is a marvelous imperturbable, quiet peace and joy that grows in direct proportion to the accumulated objectivity to mind regular spiritual exercise develops. Now how beautiful is that?

How Thinking Distorts Perception

Man: Do we see things accurately? Emotion biases perception. It magnifies some things and minimizes others. Even if I am in the moment, I believe there is a background of stored or recorded emotion and emotion based conclusions that will influence what I see.

Rick: Perception, when we are calm enough to perceive it, is always pure, but most people do not remain calm/centered upon perceiving something. There is all but no gap between perception and taking to thought about what they just observed.

Perception is of the moment, but taking to thought is where we abandon the present moment because as we dwell on thought about the moment that just happened we stay in the past and are lost to the next present moment where informative Reality lives.

Here, now caught up in the past, we are cut off from new perception and/or intuition that might otherwise have informed us if we had a need to know and had not looked to inferior/flawed mental thought, to the now past for that information. This is why/where we can rightly see something at first, but then get things so very wrong afterwards.

The Intelligence of Natural Medicine

Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea)

In my last article I was discussing the natural versus the man-made in the production of food and medicine. In a continuation of that examination here is a clear example of the superiority of the natural versus the man-made I have recently learned. Let's take a look at natural foxglove or digitalis versus man-made Digoxin, a medicine synthesized from the natural.

But before I begin let me just warn that no medicine, natural or otherwise, should be taken without the advice of persons knowledgeable about such things. Failure to understand what you are taking, and any interactions with other medicines you already may take, can be deadly.

From the website: "http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbotany/Digitalis/index.html
"Unlike many medicinal plants, which have a long history of uses, foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) was not an important medicine until the late 18th century. In 1776, William Withering was a physician with a large country practice in England. A lady was dying from a disease called dropsy, or edema, in which liquids accumulate in the body and cause swelling of tissues and body cavities. He left her, expecting her to die shortly, but he later learned that she had recovered after taking an old cure of a garden plant called foxglove....Digitalis is very toxic and fatal with an overdose, so its potency was measured very carefully against an unusual standard...Digitoxin (the man-made synthesis of natural digitalis) is a stimulant that improves heart tone and rhythm, which then improves circulation...This then slows heart rate and also reduces heart size, which lessens myocardial oxygen demand. Digoxin is used instead of crude extracts of foxglove leaves because it has a short half-life in the body and is, therefore, easier to treat for toxicity. Digitalis is not now universally accepted for treatment of heart disease."

Now for the rest of the story. As the article said, foxglove, used in excess is toxic and can kill, but then again so can the man-made synthetic Digoxin. (http://www.medicinenet.com/digoxin/article.htm) Both the natural and the man-made used in excess can actually cause a heart attack and kill you. But the interesting thing is that natural foxglove will give you a warning before that point. It will create a headache and cause you to vomit when you have taken too much. It may even make your heart begin to race, all clear signs of nearing toxic levels doses. It is a clear warning to back off because you've taken more than you should. But, interestingly, with Digoxin there will be no such pre-warnings for nearing toxic levels. If you have taken too much you will know it only when you have the heart attack. That seems to me to show a kind of natural, built in intelligence factor in foxglove that is lacking in the man-made.

Over and over again we see that there is an intelligence of sorts contained in naturally growing herbs. Many herbs are, for example, naturally amphoteric. That mean that some herbs, such as hawthorn berry, will bring intelligent balance to your system. If you have high blood pressure it will lower it, if you have low blood pressure, it will raise it. So, on the face of it it seems to me that yes, man can synthesis and standardize naturally growing products, but at a cost. In the case, at least, the making of Digoxin causes the natural ability of the foxglove herb to warn you of taking too much is lost, and at a very high cost. And in this case, at least, I would have to say that the natural is a superior in that it will "talk" to you about its potent side effects, even as it keeps you take care of your heart. This is something that the man-made seems incapable of doing.