The Mystical Path

Hypocrisy is Everywhere

2010-11-10T06:42:00.000-08:00

Only 20% of the people in the world actually have a spiritual life or real spiritual strivings. There are hoards of people who claim to be religious, but they are mostly hypocrites who do not do what they tell people to do. Most people hate lots of people or groups of people and that is not spiritual. Jesus said to love your enemies and not to be angry with anyone. Multitudes of people are lazy and selfish and out for themselves. Only a few people are truly focused on spiritual things and have a goal to improve themselves in order to be loving to everyone. There are millions who say they support these things, but they don't act that way. Hypocrisy is everywhere. The ones in power, as public servants and leaders, are out for their own wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. The bankers who were supposed to have our backs, turned against the people in order to save their own skins. The warmongers run the world. If each household spent 37% of the income on surveillance and defense of their home, they would all be impoverished and destitute. Our country spends that on war, hatred, fear and defense each year. We are told by the accountants not to spend more than 28% on our mortgages or rents in order to be above poverty. So our country is impoverished and is in great decline because the military budget has taken over our lives. When will people wake up to how wrong this is? What about spending most of that budget on educating people well? We have everything backwards and a malaise is in the air as the vultures come to feed on the carrion of our people and our country. Pray, because it is the only solution.

This is Your Wake Up Call

2010-06-16T06:47:00.000-07:00

The storms are getting more outrageous and wild. They seem to be shocking in their power and suddenness. Are you waking up? Do you get it that our own animosity, violence, hatred and intolerance is pushing Nature into a response to human beings? Our angry insensitivity to the rights of others and our resistance to loving our neighbor and respecting God is causing a great reaction. If you think these natural events are unconnected and random, if you think these storms are just cyclic, then you have a real wake up coming.

How long can you go along indulging yourself in your thoughts and desires without some comeuppance and karma? The Law of Cause and Effect is the only organized pattern in creation for those people who do not listen to truth, wisdom or good advice. If you are going to remain oblivious to the signs of the times, then you will experience some stiff wake up call in the form of justice and hard times. You have to wake up and get some meaning in your life. You have to get a relationship with God while you still have time. Don't wait because you will regret not listening and paying attention to the warnings.

Do you think you have plenty of time to keep screwing around and being irresponsible and childish, doing whatever you please? Every word, thought and action has a result (an effect) that will come back on you. Can afford to be so cavalier and casual about your future? Will you close your eyes to all the signs and the prophesies that say things are coming to a head and there is hell to pay for our crimes against love? If you prepare yourself now by changing your ways, the hard times will not be so bad for you. If you learn to love, you will have already moved in the direction of growth and spiritual consciousness that God is calling every soul to grow into.

Above you and your ego - there is God. God is watching and God is in charge of the ultimate lessons of human beings. If you believe there is no God - oh my, are you going to be surprised by the fact of you being a created being much smaller than the Creator. Remorse and sadness will be your experience when you find out for real.

Prepare yourself as you will be tested and, at present, you are not ready and have done almost no preparation. Have you forgiven all those you are angry at, or hurt by or resentful of? Do that now while you have time to clear the air and clean your slate. Have the humility to ask God for help with your condition and you will be in better shape for the changes that are coming.

Father Peter

Be the Change, Now!

2009-10-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

Is there something dreadfully wrong with people? Teens can kill people in the street and not feel any pangs of conscience about it. People can yell at other people without feeling that that is hatred and thus wrong. Hating anything or anybody is wrong. Stop it. Cut it out. What kind of hell are you trying to make for yourself? What kind of lie are you an example of? If you are putting out angry, hateful thoughts and words, you are contributing to the pollution of the planet and the disturbance of the peace of the world. I admit that there is little peace in this world since most people do not do any work on themselves to become peaceful and to heal their wounds. Where is the courage of the people who were willing to fight for their rights in making this new country? Where are the heroic attributes of those who would lay down their lives for other people or at least for a noble cause? We are becoming so jaded that we don’t care what happens to other people and have no feeling for the suffering of others. What is wrong with human beings now that life is hard, economics are tough, health care is uncertain, and love is so sparse? Where is the faith of billions of people who used to trust in God? Remember when, “In God we Trust” used to be a saying that meant something? Now we have to tiptoe around those who don’t want God mentioned and have no conscience when it comes to taking sides in an angry hateful manner. People yell and scream and hate and attack each other's reputation without any reflection on their behavior. If we put out that kind of negative and destructive energy, it is going to coming back to you. There is so much prideful bad-mouthing of the leaders we elected as we attack everything they say or do with such short-sighted antagonism and malice. Is it any wonder that no one respects good intentions or even hard work anymore? The country is divided over the silliest concerns – health care, gay rights, and whether to keep sending troops into Afghanistan. We have to keep supporting our wars, you know. It is imperative that you have to have military operations if you want to keep your troops in practice and what better way than to have an actual, real conflict in order to get our young people the practice they need in defense and conflict situations. I am not disparaging our troops. I am questioning the rational for war.

Everyone is so volatile emotionally that they attack anyone and everything just because they are angry inside and have not looked to what can heal their hearts and minds. Why don’t you go to what can heal you and fix you and cease all this invective and slandering of other people. It is not to your credit that you can prideful attack someone and rip their reputation into shreds as you miss all the good that person is and tries to accomplish in their life. You know that you would fall just as easily as they if that scrutiny was placed on you. Your door step is not so clean, so you should be very cautious about attacking anyone. You could be as lacking in good judgment as others sometimes are. So be more compassionate on the foibles of others who have good intentions and sincerely are trying to do the right thing. I have hope in the goodness of human beings. It is just that so many are losing their inner peace in the fits and reactivity to the situations around them.

Are you going to be on the side of the angry, hateful scoffers of goodness and those who resent the idea of a Divine Being? Or are you going to be one of the courageous ones who refuse to contribute to the anger, retaliation, and prideful hatred of others and the escalation of fear that is so prevalent in our world? Are you going to take responsibility for making the world better in terms of the atmosphere around you and the emotional energy you are putting out into the world? Peace starts with you. Others may or may not help you, but you can make a difference in the relationships you have in your communities. I see this country going down unless a few strong people get it together and stand for peace, compassion and caring for other people. We are going down the tubes morally and socially if some people don’t start being a positive force for change and consideration of others. I see less and less respect for law and order, for authority, for integrity, for doing things for others, for selfless acts of caring. I see everyone thinking only of themselves and being selfish, prideful, back-stabbing and mean. You will pay for those things and it won’t be pretty when the karma hits you. It will come back on you. You better change or we are in for a really bad time, much worse than anything any of you have any idea of. We are almost at the point where we have written our future by the devastating things we have done and the hardness of our hearts is going to seal our fate. It is not too late, but you have to get busy and do something about yourself now.

Meditation is not for the Undisciplined

2009-06-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

The purpose of meditation is to get your consciousness in a place where you can listen to something higher than what your frontal lobe can generate. It takes courage to stop the cackling thoughts from meandering around in the head trying to distract you. It might be interesting to watch a rapid file of scenes displayed in your cortex like so many commercials on television. You might experience time moving along as you are lulled to sleep by the drone of images that inundate you every second. Meditation is something entirely different. In meditation you stop all of that insane activity of the mind and you cease being attached to what is outside you. In fact, in the ideal state of meditation, you should not be feeling your body at all. You should not be aware of your flesh body or what it is going through. You can’t allow your body to itch you to try to disturb your peace or pull you away from the subject of your meditation. If you are meditation on peace, then only thoughts of peace or experiences of peace should be accepted in your experience. Other things that are not related to peace should be left outside and discarded. You need to focus and not be passive. You must be vigilant and not stressed out or worried.

Meditation requires stilling your mind to focus on something other than mundane worries and situations. You slow your breathing and you get very simple in your mind until you slow down enough to wake up from being outer- focused. You relax and observe what your inner being brings up to your awareness from a much wiser place inside of you. We say that is God within. God inside you is going to give you an experience or the knowledge or words about some subject that you hold in your mind. The reason this is possible is that God has been waiting to speak to you for so long and finally has your complete attention and can inspire and guide you in ways that are good for you. This can only happen when you turn you gaze to something higher than what your body, mind and emotions can generate. You are not your body. You are not your mind. You are not your emotions. You are something entirely different and you will find out when you get proficient at meditation. Many people meditate just to relax and so do not go to the deeper levels off humility and purity where they experience a divine Source within them that teaches, guides and directs things. They only go to the superficial levels of relaxing a little and never dive deeper into the sacred streams of blissful connection to the God that made them. All of the mystics had this experience of ecstatic embrace with God at the center of their being. God actually has been waiting to get your attention for years and finally in a successful mediation, you might actually be able to ear God speak to you in your meditations. This is for the advanced meditators however.

Meditation is for the spiritual adults and not for those too scared to let go of their own ideas and anxieties. Meditation will reconnect you with God and thus with real love at the source of all. God is within you and that’s why you meditate.

PURITY – WHY IT FEELS BETTER

2009-05-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

As long as we are not jostled or disturbed in any way, we can maintain a reasonable balance and equanimity. Most of the times we function fairly well and can handle circumstances and relations with others without a tremendous amount of controversy and agitation. Most people are like a glass of water with some sediment in the bottom of the glass. As long as they are not stirred up, the sediment is not a problem and not noticeable. If you shake them a little or disturb their tranquility even a smudge, all that sediment rises into the solution and clouds the water of their experience. It is when life’s circumstances are difficult that we see the true colors come out in a person. If we haven’t done very much soul searching or introspective work on ourselves, there is years of unexamined feelings, resentments, fears and anger waiting to rise up when the storms come to disturb our waters. The storms are a blessing in disguise because they show up the things that need our attention and we get a chance to examine and sort through the things we were trying to avoid.

Purity is one of those words that immediately attracts or repels us. We have associations with words that bring up prejudices and fears inspired by memories in our past. Purity might have a negative connotation if you think of it as inexperienced or shut down. Purity might be positive if you think of it as saintly or holy. Purity means unadorned, uncontaminated – innocent. To be pure means to have no contaminating or competing elements in your solution. Purity means to have one goal, one ideal, one desire without conflicting complications. Pure is clear. Jesus said in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure, for they shall see God.” In God there is only light. In God there is no darkness at all. God is pure and those who are pure will become like God. In the heart are so many positive feelings and negative desires. As you sort through them and decide which to keep and which to let go of, you clear your solution, your psyche and soul of any elements that you really don’t want. That is a purification of your soul and your whole nature. This takes time. As you let go of things that are absolutely no good for you, you become more and more purely yourself and as a result you feel a whole lot better. Your real soul nature is like God, so that core of your being is pure. If you purify the outer nature and clear yourself of conflicting desires and ideas, you will start to become more and more like God and thus pure. In a much deeper way, if you really do the inner work of getting rid of the sediment and impurities in your being, you will actually be preparing yourself to come into real relationship with God at the center of your being. You will see God.

Spring Has Sprung

2009-03-21T15:33:00.000-07:00

The powerful energies that come into the Earth at this Spring time quicken the planet with vitality and life. Everything is moving and life infuses leaves and flowers unfolding a magnificent pageantry of nature budding and blossoming. People are motivated to start cleaning and organizing, removing clutter and making room for the new. If you respond to this incredible force unleashed in the Earth at this time by the powers of the Sun, you will feel the lift and elevation of spiritual energies as well as physical. The spiritual energies are Resurrection energies. Renewal. rebirth, transformation and change accompany this natural cycle. The frozen waters of winter melt and moisten the ground, waking up the seed embryos and trigger an awakening impulse to reach up to the Sun. Animals get busy. Humans are fired up to to renovate or fix things. The quiet waiting in winter is over because it is time to get moving and do. Action is the hallmark of this season of Spring - renewal and exposure of the light after the darkness of winter. You can use this time to motivate yourself to make those changes you always wanted to make. You should get rid of those things that you have not used in over a year - circulate them or sell them. Paint a room or change a fixture; move things around and try something new. What are you waiting for?
Inside your soul, the urgency to come close to God is also calling you to be more inner connected and responsive to the urgencies of God speaking to you. God has been trying to reach you through dreams and whispers for so long. Are you going to listen now? God is always available and longing to help you become like you were created - in spiritual image and likeness of God. Don't be dense - that doesn't mean physical likeness. It means spiritual likeness and image. The more like God you become, the more you will be happy and fulfilled. There is no real happiness or fulfillment outside of God. Doing your own thing will not make you happy. That will make you more angry and sad. Learning to still that noisy mind will help you hear what God has to give you.
Blessings
Father Peter

Religion Today

2009-03-15T17:31:00.000-07:00

Fifteen percent of the people in the U.S. don’t believe in anything. There has been an 11% drop in religious belief and fervor in the past ten years. Judaism, Protestantism, Catholicism all show drops in the numbers of the faithful. Only 47% of the people think they are going to Heaven. Much of this trend has to do with people changing their faith and moving on to shop at other churches. But the fact remains that people are less entrenched in the religion of their ancestors. As the population ages and the elders die off, there is a drop in traditional patterns among the young. Most people find discussions and topics of religion worthy of mockery and disdain just as politics is often disparaged as a topic for lunch conversations. Religion and politics are so subjective that people don’t want to get fired up about a discussion that can’t go anywhere because it is all a matter of opinion, or so they say. Times are changing and the old ways are not working. In fact, religion has become the shopping mall mentality with the mega churches and the parking lots with the shuttles moving large masses of people into a world of disneyland like mall-of-America type experience. It is exciting because of the sheer massiveness of the venue and the incredible number of offerings, support groups and classes available. The family neighborhood church is fading away. Wiccan is on the rise because they believe in nature and goddesses as a reaction to mainstream religious thought. What is clear is that people are disillusioned by traditional theology and religious training and are looking for anything that might free them from the wretchedness of fallen human beings that was taught for centuries in the churches. We are good at the core, but don’t frighten people with that revelation because then they might have to start living and acting like their true nature. That would be a spiritual revolution.

Voluntary Mind Numbing

2009-03-09T10:32:00.000-07:00

I just read that the average person in the U.S. spends almost 150 hours a month watching television. This means that most of the available waking hours are spent in just plugging in and submitting oneself to a barrage of programming and useless information. Commercials make up almost fifteen to twenty minutes of each hour of programming and these are repetitive and relentless. Some television is informative in the best sense of the word and much of it is scenes of life in families, offices and households where people are made out to be humorous, undeveloped, mean or insulting. Some shows have decent messages of heroic strength, moral integrity, choosing the right path or courage against all odds. These are more rare but refreshing entries. Picking and choosing is really required if you are going to have a good experience of television. But what happens in your brain and consciousness with all of those wasted hours where you are doing absolutely nothing but vegging out on the menu of the evening. Who is minding your store and being selective about what you take into your system, into your consciousness and heart. It actually matters the kind of time you spend and the company you keep. If you are not engaged actively in the interaction, then you are passive and merely absorbing. This slows the activity of your imagination and shuts down your feelings to the point that what you think and what you feel does not matter. In a slow and effective way, this passive time warp of activity erodes your ability to have any say over things and makes you feel that important things don’t matter. It slowly develops apathy in your being that accepts that you can’t make any changes, that what you feel doesn’t count. This is the beginning of despair and hopelessness. If you subject yourself to forces that you have no say over and continue to have minimal involvement with, soon you will feel that you don’t count and don’t matter. So the next step will be that you feel like an automaton, free falling into a morass of helplessness. You might go through a phase of having lots of critical thoughts and feelings about what you are watching, but the worm is already in the apple because you are caring less and less about things since you matter less and less about what you are doing. You go from alive to merely existing and passing time in the vacuous meaninglessness of other fictitious lives that you essentially aren’t living. You have no life. When you are numb, you can be led around by the ad folks and they begin to control your world by the needs they sell you. Consciousness is involved in decisions and in your life. Apathy makes you not care anymore because your life has become the lives of others on the television. Please think again about how you are spending your time and be consciously involved in your life.

Free Will

2009-02-25T09:25:00.000-08:00

Human beings are made spiritually just like God, in God's image and likeness. We have all the abilities and capabilities of God as co-creators of the little world we exist in. We are free in our choice and can will either constructive or destructive things. There is no power in a human being that was not been loaned to us by God, so all acts become directed by human beings using the power of God to do them. That does not mean that God condones the evil acts of people, but that there is no power or energy except God's power for any of the creation to do anything without God's energy. So we are free to choose and use the one will of God whatever way we want. Then there is the Law of Cause and Effect (Karma) which says we get what we put out. We are inherently good at the core. We have steered a sharp course away from the presence of God to live more like animals, fighting and struggling - by choice. We can come back to God by our own efforts working out changing ourselves over time and coming home. Or we can open to grace from Jesus and God and also by cleaning up our actions and thinking to more align with how God thinks, feels and acts. Our inner nature is exactly like God, but most people do not do the spiritual work of going that deeply within to find that core of goodness, love and light. God can help us if we request it, or we can slog it out alone and take a whole lot more time coming home to God.

Hope and Love

2009-02-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

Hopelessness is exactly the first step to complete despair. Not having hope is the result of not feeling love, either from you to others or from others to you. When you lack hope, you have no faith in the future and it is a short stone's throw to despair. If you despair, you abdicate control over your life. You throw your steering wheel to the curb and drive without your hands on the wheel. You don't care because no one cares about you. You have decided that those around you don't love or cannot love or cannot see you or don't know you. In every instance of this kind of indictment about people not loving you, you have narrowed your gaze to those who you already know. This is a very limited view of who could love you. Why is it that everyone assumes it should be your family who loves you when you have some very good proof of their fickle love? Often the love of families is the most abusive and disrespectful of loves. They can be the most demanding the most conditional of loves because they demand the you be the way they want you to be in order to shower love upon you. But they are not able to love well and cannot love unconditionally most of the time. Most people who say they love unconditionally are actually not so good at evaluating real love. They love as long as you please them or suck up to them or do what they want you to do. Their love grows very chilly indeed when you don't do exactly what they want you to do. That is conditional love, conditioned on whether you obey them and please them. That is a deal or a business or an arrangement, but not love. So when you are starting to go down the road to despair, look outside the ones who should be loving you and I think you'll find people who genuinely care and are able to love much better than the people you have surrounded yourself with. That is scary to go outside your circle. But to me, it is scary to stay inside your circle where so little love exists. Branch out and hope will come back in to resuscitate you and bring color back to your cheeks.

How Can You Help?

2009-02-19T23:10:00.000-08:00

In the middle of the night sometimes I am awakened with a feeling that someone needs my help. I look around at the room and I can see without lights on because there is so much light, interior light, in the room from years of devotion and prayer and meditation. My room is a sanctum, a holy place where no darkness can enter. But I am available to help and be awakened by someone who is troubled who is calling out for help. That call goes out to those who are trained to help or who have enough love to be willing to help and it reaches their ears and their hearts. It awakens in them a compassion to care and rise up and be actively supportive and helpful. I listen inside and get where it must be coming from and I go to them in mind and give blessings and aid as the case may require. It does not take much and it does not take much time, but it is necessary for that person in that moment. Maybe they were being assaulted by someone, maybe they were in pain, maybe they were fearing for their life, maybe it was a spiritual crisis, maybe they were in despair or contemplating suicide. Whatever it is I will register the need and then pray and ask God, Jesus and Mary to fly to them to help in their struggle or bless them if they are moving more deeply into a relationship with God. Everyone can use prayers. Everyone has need of help to be more loving, more patient, more thoughtful of others, more clear in their minds, more courageous in their hearts. Since no one is completely perfect at this point in their development, everyone can use blessings and prayers and help from God. In this impossible world, people are so jaded and shut down that they barely feel they can take care of themselves let alone everybody else. But in blessing others and giving to others, you gain a great blessing. As Jesus said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." Try to imagine you being useful and helpful to others. Visualize yourself being that "on" and see how it feels. Then try it yourself.

Let's Get Started

2009-02-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

It is about time you took a thorough assessment of your life and stopped dancing around the fact that you have a lot of things to fix, clean up, take care of and change. What are you waiting for. Do something. Start with one thing in one corner of your life and make that change over the next three days. Then you will have a track record of success which will inspire you to take on the next challenge. Get busy. Follow through and make yourself do stuff. If you don't do something with what you have declared you want to do that very day, then give yourself a consequence that stings a little and makes you think about falling short of that commitment the next day. Don't let yourself off the hook. Be firm like you would be with a child that you love. You want them to behave or do something and you are not about to let some small human tyrant run the show. You make them do what you ask or they will have a consequence. It works the same way. So follow through on your own new regime and make yourself do it. It is not rocket science. You already know it is a good thing that you should and you see already that it is best for you. So get with the program and start today. In actual fact, you see that there are many things that need your attention. So you have a whole list. That list does not dissolve or resolve all by itself. Someone - You - has to take the bull by the horns and move things along by your desire and your will. Get going.

Look for a Teacher

2009-02-15T09:18:00.000-08:00

Many people search and search, shopping in one spiritual school or another, looking for just the right feel and the teachings that are most compatible with their personal likes and dislikes. I call them spiritual shoppers. They are not planning on finding anything or committing to a process that will get them where they want to go. They are definitely not about to turn over the navigating of their ship to God or a teacher. If you are looking to really know yourself and find help in becoming more who God created you to be, then you will look for a real spiritual Teacher. A real Teacher knows God and knows who they are. They have integrity. They don't say one thing and do another. They don't teach love and patience in public and then act mean and irritable in their private life. They are consistent which means they do what they say and relate to everyone with respect, caring and understanding. Some people just know from within that they need to find a Teacher in order to lead them to God. They feel an intense desire within to find someone who really knows and can lead them into a real relationship with God at the center of their being. Look around and interview people until you meet the person who is to lead you into that deep and lasting relationship.

This World Is Tough

2009-02-03T13:08:00.000-08:00

This world is a place of darkness and meanness. People are cold and difficult and stubborn. There is little devotion in the hearts of people for the God who made them. There is only a smattering of consideration for other people in human relationships, as people are so focused on their own problems and needs. The addictions are growing stronger, supported by the demonic forces. All addictions have their seed of contamination in a wound, usually around the mother. The love was not deep enough or long enough or clear enough and the person becomes reactively angry. They may not be conscious of it, but they are furious they were not loved deeply. They turn to unsatisfying and death-producing substances and scenes for comfort. The world supports and thrives on those weak souls who fall into the trap of looking for cheap comfort and cheap love in all the wrong places. Those who are sexually addicted either to pornography or the sex trade have been sold the lies that they will find some comfort there. But they find, instead, misery and a downward spiral of degeneration. Their minds and conscience are dulled more and more to any true values and they sink into the slime of humanity. People laugh about it and consider it normal. But it is of the darkness and supports the demise of the human spirit. The demons laugh at anyone who falls into the slime. There are demons, you know. Jesus was not stupid. He cast out thousands of them when he walked the earth. He was not just psychologically unsophisticated. He saw them and they acted out harshly when he was near the person who had them. He cast them out with his word. He was not afraid of them as he was master over those forces. You can master them too by seriously removing any traces of negative energy from your being through self-discipline and love. You have the means to control yourselves, Now you must apply those means, one of which is prayer. If you want to prevent your slow decline into numbness and callousness, you must discipline yourself and pray to God for help. You are not alone. Thousands already are on that path of return to God. There are not as many as you think, but there are some strong human beings who get it - that the dark path is destruction of all the noble elements of a human being. Are you going to be one of the ones with courage to defy the world and not be allured into the slime like so many billions of people. Life matters. God matters. You are not here for no reason. You came to learn and grow, not to enjoy yourself as if you had only one life. You will account for every thought, every word and every deed. Karma is inexorable and no one gets away with anything on this planet. Examine yourself to see if you have been sinking into the slime. Then pull yourself out by heroic effort to re-unite with God. Pray. Ask for help and God will send his angels and human messengers to help you.

The Real Priesthood

2009-01-31T13:26:00.000-08:00

There is such a shortage of real Priests in the world. This is a sign of harsh and negative times where the darkness is so strong as to push people so far from God that they are discouraged and empty, without hope for the future. A real Priest is one whose whole life is an outpouring of grace, love and light to people. They do not use other people for their sensual or selfish ends. They do not hold power over other people pretending to know things that they do not have any personal experience of. They do not enter the clergy to hide from other people or to pursue more private, secret and clandestine purposes. They are not sensual or lascivious. They are not alcoholics or mean. They do not pretend holiness. A real priest is not a predator of children. It is almost insane to have to spell this out, but in such a screwed up world, it is necessary to help you know what a real priest is. The examples of the Roman clergy are appalling in that 15% were indicted or accused of sexually molesting children and others. No other profession has had such a statistically high level of incidents of abuse of other people in recent times. A true Priest is one who is a grace and a blessing to those around them. They give of themselves. They are not selfish or stiff. They love and are a personification of love. They give of themselves to all who are in need and they think of others first before themselves. A real Priest has a real relationship with God at the center of their being and has seen God because they are pure in heart. A real priest is a disciplined person who does not allow any negative attitudes or behaviors, is not addicted to anything, and is poised and balanced without being stiff and aloof. A problem priest is a contradiction in terms. A real Priest is not what is cranked out by the seminaries, since they are not required to have any experience of God. An experience of God is really meeting God, knowing God and listening to God. Then the next step is because of God's love for us and the experience of being with God, one gives their whole life in service to that love and that relationship. They cannot be taught in the seminaries. Only a true Teacher can mediate that relationship with one who is striving for that kind of deep relationship with God.

In Hope of Peace

2009-01-20T10:59:00.000-08:00

No good has ever come from violence. The most primitive parts of our nature want to attack others, get mad at people for wronging us and make other people pay for our suffering. How many people have the higher motive of teaching by example how to endure suffering without retaliating and attacking other people. How many of us can take an insult and just let it ride and let it go? How many of us can pray for others and bless them without cursing them when they do something or say something to us that is mean or attacking? Most people feel entitled to be angry. Most people feel justified in attacking back. Most people have a short fuse when it comes to patience and they just blurt out a retort in kind without thinking about it or weighing the options. I would ask you to wait 60 seconds before you reply to people who insult or are insensitive to you. That way you can think about what you want to say without going into a full boil and exploding with your pride and anger spewing all over the place. If you think of all the times you got away with something or you thought you did, you could see that maybe this person was a vehicle for karma to come back to you for things you have done in the past. If you think of all the times you were sneaky and tricky and hid your faults and lied, you could let this negative action by someone be the vehicle through which your karma was balanced. That means you deserved it on some level, so why are you so indignant and upset when the karma comes back to you. It has to come back some way, so why not let this person in front of you be the avenue through which it comes and not get so bent out of shape and reactive about it. Let it balance itself out and stop going up into your lofty pride. Stop imagining that you are so good that you deserve very much or are entitled to great consolations. You have not given that much of yourself. You have not loved very much at all. You have mostly taken from others and worked the angles and manipulated audiences to get strokes and love and affection and compliments. You have been mostly selfish. You could turn over a whole new leaf and try to think of others for a change and stop thinking of yourself. You could love instead of take for a change. You could stop thinking of yourself as a piece of flesh and remember that you have a soul and you
are a soul. That would change your whole perspective. Then peace has a chance to live in your heart and mind and body.

Hope of the Nation

2009-01-20T10:46:00.000-08:00

We need to have universal health care for all. That would be much cheaper than the insurance companies spending so much money trying to avoid paying benefits to people who really need it. Also the physicians would not have to make so much since the cost to insure them from liability would be substantially less. We need to bring the troops home and train them to be builders, contractors, carpenters, engineers and metal workers to rebuild the schools, bridges, roads, water and sewer systems of this country. Our infrastructure is falling apart. We need to rebuild with conservation and environmental consciousness at the forefront of our thinking. We need to create some serious economic solutions to the financial crisis in the home mortgage and commercial mortgage sector. Then we need to make an education a right and not a privilege since most of our college grads have what constitutes a home mortgage with tuition debt. That is ridiculous and burdens our citizens immensely by creating so much debt before they even begin to be productive in the work place. That is a vicious scheme on the part of institutions to support the credit card industry of banks to put a heavy yoke on the necks of the young. Then we need to address the flagrant disrespect and meanness on the part of our citizens who do not care about other people and mostly act selfishly and aggressively toward their neighbors. We are a violent nation and have tolerated and passively supported acts of aggression against women, against families and neighbors. We need a different kind of law enforcement that actually is an example of working differences out without violence. We need many more law enforcement officers in our cities. We could use thousands of our troops coming home who could be trained to take these positions in society and it would be less expensive than this insane billion a day wars. We also need to quickly become energy efficient and energy independent so that we do not have to fight with other nations over oil, gas, water or any other commodity. We need to be resourceful and use the natural solar, wind and hydro energy that is abundant on our own soil. I pray that our citizens open to the realization that we have to do things very differently than we have in the past and we have to make very big changes and we have to do immediately.

What Do You have to Be Proud of?

2009-01-14T18:07:00.000-08:00

What talents, skills, abilities and ideas do you have to be proud of? List them and inventory your advantages. You will see that some of those were gifts to you from your parents who helped you get the training to receive them. Some of them were from hanging around other people and those abilities, skills and insights rubbed off on you. Some were inherent in your nature from the beginning and needed only a little coaxing to bring them into full expression. All of these good things come from God. Believe it or not, all the good things anyone could ever think, do, say or imagine come from God. Those things are already in the Mind of God and are given to those who open for them or who earn them from becoming a manifestation of the love of God. Everything good in you is from God. Everything evil in you is from you. The bad stuff is created by human consciousness or non-physical influences. All the negative tendencies, the hatred, war, anger, illness, fears, and prejudices are created by beings created by God. God cannot will evil and always is good and helpful to the creation. In God there is no darkness at all. Darkness is in people. So you can be proud of being bad. You can be proud of being stingy, jealous, mean, angry, hurtful or hard hearted. But all the good things were gifts and you did not generate them out of your own will and desire. God planted those inspirations and possibilities inside you when you were created. It is just like a flower that is encased in its greenery before it blossoms. The flower does not have to get puffed up about being so special. It has to relax so that in time the blossom opens and demonstrates it nature and scent. The flower is already there because God created it that way. It just takes time to become what you were created to be. You can't take credit for the beauty or the fragrance. You just let it flower forth and stop being self-conscious about it. You don't take credit for what God built either, because in humility you get it that you cannot add another couple inches to your height. Relax and let your real spirit shine forth and forget all of the rest. Stop being mean and angry and prideful and sullen. Get over your need to make a big stink on the planet and be like you were created to be.

How to Change

2009-01-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

If you just change the outer patterns of behavior or the outer circumstances, you won't be successful at changing. You have to change yourself and how you feel about yourself in order to experience any lasting change. In AA people try to stop drinking. I say try, because only one person in 29 actually permanently quit drinking successfully. What typically happens is that the alcoholic stops drinking for a while and starts two other major addictions to replace the alcohol: cigarettes and coffee. So now they are addicted to two other drugs but have improved (not quit) a little. That is what happens when you try to change a bad habit, like criticism. You try to stop criticizing and then find you are feeling a lot of self-hatred and beating yourself up inside. You have just changed one bad habit for another - so no real change. You have to change how you feel about you if you want lasting change. You are powerful in your ability to choose what you want and how you want to be. If you are a nervous type of person, you will have many experiences that support and foster more nervousness. If you want to change that, you would have to stop fretting and start relaxing. That can be learned by breathing deeply into experiences instead of tensing up at the slightest shift of breeze. You would have to choose to decide to feel safe with life no matter what circumstance come up or what the wind drags in. You would have to stop thinking that everything should go well. When you can relax about being entitled to some kind of stress-free existence (which is usually pride), then you can just experience what comes along as what life is giving you and not get bent out of shape about it. You flow with life and since you have discovered that existence is a benevolent process, you no longer fear what comes. What do you see in yourself that is no good for you. Change it. Decide you don't want it because of how it makes you feel or what it makes you do and then change it. Leave it. Don't go back to it for comfort in your loneliness. I have seen so many people feel lonely without their problems. That means they have decided their problems and habits are more comforting than becoming different and just changing. You decide to change and it will happen. You might have to ask for some help from something higher than you. But then, step out and do it. Don't look back.

Path of Life

2008-12-21T23:24:00.000-08:00

For those who have been jaded on the path of life, I send out an invitation to you. Please come in from the cold. For those who tried to begin the spiritual path and feel you have wasted your time, open yourself to the possibility of transformation once again. For those angry by misperceived hurts from Teachers where you feel you were not understood, continue to strive for connection with God. Often your perception is wrong, you have to admit that. What you thought was mistreatment might possibly have been love, like holding a high standard that your rebelliousness could not stand at the time. No real spiritual Teacher is working to please their students, but to help them grow, and learn and open and change into the God beings they were created to be. So their methods may be stern or difficult, but they see the goal of you as a transformed, loving being and will do everything they can to help you get to that place. Often the student has attitudes, moods, anger and nasty things inside them that have to be surgically cut out of them and the process is difficult and precarious. But if the student has faith, they will allow the loving hand of the Teacher to take that out of them and they will grow and be changed. Sometimes a student will get so mad and reactive that they leave and then months later decide to attack the Teacher because they are blaming the Teacher for their own lack of courage and self-discipline in not changing habits and patterns that were addictive or no good for them. It is a free country and there is always choices to make. Students are free to come and go whenever they like, but they are not free to imagine they can do whatever they like and call themselves a spiritual student. There are standards and ways to be that cannot and will not be violated in the presence of a Teacher. For those of you who have had negative reactions and feel wronged, think again about your pride and your anger. If you are full of those things, then you have a whole truckload of work to do on yourself to rip those negative traits out of you and start to learn the heroic path of forgiveness, love, patience and understanding. You are not alone. There are billions of people who are angry like you. There are billions who are addicted to porn, to drugs, to alcohol, to meanness, and to fear. Do you want to be like everyone else?
There is a way for you to come in out of the storm. But you have to be humble and accept help if you want things to change. Ask yourself :What problems do I still have, that I had before working with a particular Teacher - things I have not overcome in myself that are still there? Then you will see that the Teacher was not successful in inspiring you to change those things and you were way too attached to them out of anger, pride and fear - to let go of them and get over them. So you kept them which is your right. But you are still plagued by those things and have not busted through to master them yet. The teacher was and is on your side in overcoming these impurities of heart and mind. They know how and will help you if you let them. Come in out of the storm and put your hand back on the plough again. If you have the heart, you will.

Blessings This Christmas

2008-12-21T23:18:00.000-08:00

I send out my heartfelt blessings to all my readers this Christmas as I know you are searching and hoping for transformation this Holy Season. The angels and the Host of Ascended Ones draw very close to the earth and to human beings at this time to bless those who have been making even a slight effort to unite or connect with God. If you have been trying to pray or meditate in the last month, or at least have longed to spend more quiet time looking at the real meaning of life, you will be greatly blessed for your efforts. God wants people to invite God in to your hearts. God will not intrude or interrupt or otherwise force God's way into you. So you have to make a space inside yourself by clearing out all of your unnecessary junk, concepts, fears, wants, desires and attitude problems in order to make a clear and pure space for God to come in. God will not compete with any of y our lesser gods and will wait until you are able to value what God has for you. If you are lonely, stop looking for the world to fix you or fulfill you. If you are sad, don't look for family to comfort you. If you are lost in darkness, don't comfort yourself with addictive substances or false assurances. Go to God with your heart empty and open. Hold the stillness and silence long enough for God to enter and help you. In that embrace of joy and love, you will begin to understand how Mother Mary and Joseph felt as the hour of Jesus' birth drew close. They could feel the love descending from Heaven in a blaze of light and were absorbed completely in contemplation of God and God's graces pouring down on suffering humanity. They were in awe of the gift and did not distract themselves with busyness or any other fretting or worrying. They were totally still and waiting for the blessing of living with and taking care of the Messiah. For those who are still waiting for the Messiah, that is just plain stubbornness, as he already came in the fleshly body of the little child Jesus. That was the only time the Messiah is going to be granted by God to the people of the earth. That one visit was perfect, so there will be no other physical incarnation of the Christ. Christ may come back again in the hearts of people if they are open and ask for that and prepare themselves. But Jesus or Mary incarnating again will not happen. We had our chance to appreciate it and if we did not, we can learn to accept and appreciate it now by opening our hearts and asking for Jesus and Mother Mary to come into us now. Be humble and open, knowing that you cannot make one hair white or black. Receive the blessings of these two most perfect beings that ever walked on earth - Jesus and Mary. Don't let your pride or arrogance keep you from experiencing their love, forgiveness and grace this year. Open your heart and ask them to come in.

Make a decision

2008-12-09T12:45:00.000-08:00

When I was 19, I had been smoking for four or five years, two packs a day, camels unfiltered. My lungs were sputtering and I was kind of addicted and would use them to have something to do with my hands. I quit one day and that was that. I decided. I was not hoping I could, or wishing I would quit. I just said, "That's it, I'm done. Enough, it's over." I never smoked again. In fact, six years later I got this cold and still was coughing up that nasty cigarette taste and different colored mucus. I know that was over-sharing. But the graphicness of that experience made me see how much damage I had done to myself and I never wanted to do that again.

Addictions are difficult to overcome - I would never take that away from any of you that feel like you are working very hard getting ready to begin to start to commence to get over something. You need, sometimes, to make things much harder than they are. You have a right to do that. But with drinking alcohol, it is the same thing. You have to really decide you are done with it. That means you are not recovering from it, you are finished and will never do it again. It's over. But the trouble with those who drink is that they always have a back door of anger where they visualize the possibility of needing to indulge again should things get bad. This means you have not decided. When a person decides never again, it is a done deal. There is no discussion or argument - they are through. But with AA, alcohol, drugs and other addictive practices, you get to stay in a constant adolescent state of not being sure you can decide and secretly not wanting to make a complete and final decision to never do it again. That is adolescent since you never have to really hold yourself to your own word and stay consistent with what you say you want. The disease model of being in recovery holds that you can only do today because you never know what will happen tomorrow. Translation - if tomorrow is really horrible or too difficult, I will drink or indulge again. That is adolescent. That is not a commitment or even a firm resolve. That is a back door and an exit plan and it is adolescent and weak minded. Why don't you grow up and make a decision. You say, "It is hard." I think it is harder to live like you do than to make a firm decision. I stole some stuff from a friend in elementary school, but I never did that again. I am not in recovery as a thief. I am over that and I am not a thief anymore. I decided and that's history. You see, if you plan on drinking again, go to AA. If you decide never again, you won't need AA. Don't get me wrong, I think AA is very good for people because they get to be honest about their problems and get some support from people who don't play a lot of games. But after a year, you either get it or you are stuck in the disease model and stay engaged to the possibility that you will drink again. Often I have seen a person trade alcohol addiction for coffee and cigarettes. One addiction is now exchanged for two.

Bottom line - addictions are related to mommy and wanting to stay an adolescent and not grow up because you are mad. That is the problem. You were hurt, now you're angry and have a right to treat yourself horribly with addictive substances until someone comforts you and makes you feel better. It is pride and entitlement as well. You were hurt and now you want someone to pay, so you will not care about yourself until someone else does.

If you are sick of yourself, you will make a decision and keep your word to yourself. You will decide for good. Then you will never go there again no matter how bad things get. That is a real adult decision.

Overcoming Emotions

2008-12-03T09:50:00.000-08:00

Everyone seems to think that their feelings and emotions are sacred. But I want to tell you that your emotions are about as changeable as the times and not lasting. There is a lot of support in the world for emotions and for reactions of all kinds. You can boil emotions down to two things, fear and pride. People get very emotional when they get scared and then they will get angry and pouty and raise a lot of hell. When people are entitled and proud, they will express all kinds of anger and meanness disregarding respect for other people. In fact, when people are really angry and really hurt they can do some very horrible things. What we need to do as human beings is to begin to be honest about what we are feeling and see if it is coming from pride or fear. If it is pride then we have falsely assessed our importance. We are not that important because we are created beings and we can only be as good as our creator. All of the good qualities that we could ever hope to have are within us and were a gift from God. We do not own anything and so have no prideful right to imagine that any good qualities were dreamed up by our own imagination. Every good quality we have was a gift from God and the only credit we get is that we express it and should be thankful for it. If you have an emotional reaction, then instead of lashing out at somebody, we should look at what is scaring us and see if it is real. In other words, is this thing that scaring us really that big a deal? Often the thing that we think is scary is actually not and the fears we have are not in our control anyway. Having control is completely overrated. Emotions are things that you experience from reacting to something outside of you. That means that you are not feeling powerful in yourself and are attributing power to your environment or to the people around you. When you give your power away like that you are not in charge of yourself, everyone else is. Get a grip on your emotions and tame them because they're wild horses. If you don't train them and manage them, they will control your life and you will be in chaos. It is up to you. You have to learn to find peace in a deeper place within yourself than how people feel about you or what the circumstances around you are.

What I am Thankful For

2008-11-27T09:03:00.000-08:00

I am thankful for life itself. I am grateful for my Teachers who taught me everything about what is real, what is important and what lasts. They taught me love and integrity and honesty. They introduced me to God in the center of my being. They came through on their promises and did not fail me as so many regular people have done. My Teachers were wise because they were truly humble before God and allowed themselves to be taught and led through all of the trials and tests so they could be introduced and come to know God. They were courageous in defying the whole world in order to stand for the truth. They did not compromise or make bargains with anyone. They could not be lobbied or influenced by power, ambition, pride or fear. They were steadfast and obedient to God, Jesus and Mary. They earned my trust because of their love, not because of a desire on my part to be like them, although more and more I wanted to be like them in the ability to love. Their wisdom and spiritual sight guided me through the stages of initiation and spiritual growth to enable me to become the Teacher I am and to be one of the wise ones on the earth. This is not a pompastic statement. (Pompastic is pompous and bombastic together = pompastic). I have attained God consciousness because of the sacrifices and prayers of my Teachers. Their prayers and love for me made it possible for me to rise up and do what they did. And now that they are passed into the spiritual world, they continue to support my work here and I continue to honor them for the love they had for me and the opportunity I was given to be able to learn from them. I am thankful to Jesus for being my Teacher and calling me from the world and crushing my human ego so that I could actually take direction from God. Jesus' love is beyond anything you can imagine as it is so deep and wide that words cannot express. Jesus is real. Mary is real and Her love is so still and powerful and deep that one can only be in awe of Her. I am thankful also for all of the souls I have been able to inspire over the many years of teaching and training people. They are joy to me. Their development and unfoldment has been astounding and continuous and I want to thank each of you that has had the guts to allow the Teachers to teach you. I am thankful for our spiritual community which is growing larger and larger and stronger and stronger for their willingness to give and love. They make all of this work on this planet worth it. Blessings to all of you in this Thanksgiving season.

Don't Just Talk About It

2008-11-25T19:08:00.000-08:00

Don't just talk about how you think you are spiritual, that you have studied and trained in this and that process. Most of what I hear, especially in the so-called spiritual communities is a lot of talk. They do yoga, they meditate, they go out in the woods and look at birds or sit by some bush on the mesa or at one of the vortexes in Arizona. So many people have read books, but more honestly, people have bought the books and not read very much of them. If they did read them, it didn't change anything in their lives. I don't know if you have figured this out yet, but you don't grow spiritually by reading. Jesus said, "Search the scriptures, for in them, you think you will find Eternal Life." You don't grow spiritually from reading. You grow spiritually from going through something. That takes having a real experience in order to really and truly grow. Mostly what I hear is people talking about what they heard or read and I hear very little actual experience that is life changing for people. When people lose their job, that's an experience that makes them look at their life and evaluate where they are going and how they got there. When a person loses a loved one or a relationship crashes, that is life altering and we go through big changes from those. But when we merely read, nothing happens. No change - no transformation. You have to go through something to change. You have to experience something to know about it. In a Teacher - student relationship, you go through changes and transformations that nothing else can compare to it. In the interaction with a spiritually conscious Teacher, you are faced with all of the things in yourself that you are uncomfortable with and you are pressed to change them. You are kind of loved into changing them and inspired by the confidence of the Teacher in you for your possibility of transforming. It takes guts to be in that kind of relationship, because you will never be the same. The puny loves that you are familiar with will pale considerably in comparison because you are actually feeling seen and known in extremely deep ways that parental units were not able or willing to do. They tried, but... So don't just talk about changing, place yourself in a situation with the right people to support you in your transformations. Don't just sit back in your pride imagining that you know things when you haven't even had the courage to let anyone help you or guide you. Without that humility, you cannot grow. You will be stuck with what you already know, which is, sadly, not very much.

Bashed Again

2008-11-24T08:12:00.000-08:00

I just saw the TV stream from New Haven last week about a 35 year-old daughter of one of our Order of Mercy Sisters, Sister Julia, on the 11:00pm nightly news about her mother being in a cult, the Centers of Light. This is the Order I co-lead with Mother Clare Watts.

This woman squeals and whines like a four year-old about her mother dropping off boxes of family photos of her as a child to her aunt's house for storage. This was the gist of the complaint: My mom dropped all the family photos off at her sister's house and joined a destructive cult. Actually she didn't have room for the photos in her small apt.

That is the news these days. The woman whines further, "How could she do that?" Then she says that nowhere in the Bible does it say that you should let go of family ties and move into a spiritual order. Actually, Jesus said, "Unless you leave father, mother, sister, brother and everything, you cannot be my disciple." She needs to read more.

Sister Julia is in her 50's and rents apartment space in the Center of Light building in New Haven. She has become a sister in a spiritual Order that meditates and has Communion in the morning. She goes to work as a school teacher during the day. She comes home and prays at night and a couple times a week attends classes. That is dangerous? Please. Thousands of people have joined spiritual orders, convents and monasteries throughout history and have left the cares of the world to meditate and pray and have a relationship with God.

I was portrayed as a cult leader who brainwashes people and mind controls them like the Chinese did in the war. I have to say that Steve Hassan, so-called cult expert, is really unintelligent and kind of dense as a person if he can tout things like this. He is a psychologist, I think, and still has not read the literature on brainwashing. The American Psychological Association says that brainwashing is not possible and has no scientific validity. Only when you torture people, like the US government has done, can you get compliance temporarily, but as soon as people are not being tortured, they return to thinking what they have always thought. Mr Hassan should read more and not get on TV spreading lies and serious meanness.

Then I was made out to be someone who owns lots of properties which is completely false. I have a 650 square foot cottage in California which I rent out to people. I rent a flat in Chicago. That is the extent of my vast possessions. I am paid about $50,000 from the Order I co-lead.

I find it interesting that Mother Clare is never maligned as I am. I think she feels left out (humor) and it is part of the sexist, gender-anxious society we are living in that in 2008, only the man gets attacked and not the woman. That is just a humorous comment on my part.

But this TV station that aired this has got to take the cake for being the most unintelligent news folks I have seen in a long time. It was not a story and it was embarrassing that they let this 35 year old child get on to complain like an emotional twit about something that was just between her and her mother. In fact, I have heard that her mom was paying her cell phone bill up until recently and that this is why her daughter got mad, not because of her mom's spiritual inclinations.

Isn't this the country that allows people the right to follow and practice whatever religious inclinations they choose? Is it still the United States of America?

I am not in control of anyone. Everyone is free to come and go or not, to listen or not. I have a very high level of respect for people and for their decisions and choices and do not force anyone.

Where a President Goes to Die

2008-11-23T18:04:00.000-08:00

I was motorcycling on the back roads of Southern California a number of years ago and I noticed a small roadside airport with a sign that read "Glider Rides." I turned around and pulled in to inquire. The rides were for an hour with an instructor flying behind you. I had more money then and being of an adventurous spirit, I signed the waivers and climbed into this very small cockpit of a glider that had wings as wide as a much larger plane. The bubble of windows let you see almost 360 degrees and the instructor climbed in behind. The lead plane dragged us out behind to the runway and we accelerated. It was so quiet. We were off the ground in moments and rose quickly. There was nothing to do but look around and drink in the sights. When we were very high up, but not needing oxygen, we were released by the launch plane. I had been briefed on the steering and the angle of descent and other features of the experience. It turns out if you bank the plane (make a turn) too sharply, we could experience some 'g' forces and perhaps nausea would result. We just coasted and glided into the silence with only a slight breezing sound of the wind flowing over the cockpit window and wings. It was mostly silent and beautiful. We were flying like a seagull over the wind lifting gradually, almost imperceptibly, descending in this graceful gentleness. I could see the ocean on our right and we flew south towards Ronald Reagan's Ranch. I didn't know we would fly there until the instructor pointed it out. It was a large sprawling ranch on the top of the Sierras, quite impressive from the air, like in some Bonanza episode. I could feel ex-President Reagan there with Nancy relaxing and gently going into the twilight of his retrospection. It was sad to know he was leaving this life and was deteriorating in health. I felt his friends visiting less often and his reveries during the day getting longer. I could feel Nancy just watching one of our leaders pass gradually into the beyond. We circled a couple of times to get the whole lay of the land and we had dropped in elevation a few hundred feet every few minutes or so. That's why the flight was an hour long. The instructor had calculated how high we would have to be to descend in time for a one hour ride. So we were very high up when we were released by the plane. I couldn't shake the sadness of a very outgoing President taking his chair most of the day and thinking over all the experiences of his life as the last pages of his book are written. We headed back to the landing strip. On the way the instructor asked me to take one of those gravitational turns. I must admit I just about lost my lunch on that one because the nausea really came on strong. I motioned to the instructor that if we didn't want to experience my lunch a second time, we should go in conservatively and not risk any accident inside the cockpit. The landing was like a seagull gliding onto the waters of a still bay, so quiet, so graceful and then the slight bumping of the asphalt runway. We were grounded and I got out a little altered in consciousness from being so far from the concerns of the world. But I couldn't shake that feeling of a President going away to rest, recollect, reminisce and pass into the spiritual world alone.

Openness to Forgiveness

2008-11-17T11:24:00.000-08:00

God cannot forgive you unless you forgive people what they have done to offend you. You have to have the courage to stop holding people hostage to your assessment of how much they have to pay to make you feel better about what they have done. Let it go. You have to let it go if you want God to release you of your faults. No one is without blame before forgiveness comes. We can all inventory how we have been mean, withheld love, silently criticized others or were downright disrespectful to people. Since we are not without fault, we also need to be patient and understanding of other people. Forgive means you let karma and God take care of the other person and you stay out of the way. You don't see very clearly in the beginning of the spiritual path and cannot tell the motives of other people, so you should definitely leave that to God to figure it all out. Karma takes care of those matters without you trying to orchestrate things to fit your picture of how things should go down. Clean your own doorstep so that you don't have time to worry about how other people are doing. If you hold onto resentments and hurts from the past, it means you are still mad and have not let go yet. You still want someone to pay for how hurt and mad you are and that will prevent you from growing or allowing God to forgive you for what you have done to yourself or others. After you learn this rudimentary skill of forgiving, then you have to open to the revolutionary idea of forgiving yourself.

Stop Thinking

2008-11-13T11:11:00.000-08:00

Stop thinking so much. It is thinking that gets you into more scrapes and jambs than anything else. In thinking, the brain shows more tension and stress. There is less smooth alpha waves in the brain frequencies. Worry and anxiety are what most people call thinking, but it is precisely strained mental processes that tighten up the mind and tense up the stomach. The mind is a force of energy that moves through the brain. If the brain is tight, rigid and upset, the mental energy has to crunch down and squeeze through all the pressure to get thoughts in or out. Try to slow down all that jabbering in your head. Let the thoughts just slow down and still as you breathe deeply and relax your abdomen. Stop referencing everything to yourself as if you are the center of the universe. You are created being that is not the most special creature in creation. So stop jacking yourself up to be something wonderful when you haven't even started to give of yourself to anyone or anything yet. When you start cooperation with the universe and God, then you can complain that you aren't taken care of. Before that you haven't done anything to deserve any benefits because it has all been about you and what you want and what you're going to get and how hurt you are that no one considers your feelings, etc. Wah, Wah, Wah.
Complaints galore. Try relaxing the worry muscle and see what happens to you.

The Order of Christ Sophia

2008-11-10T17:50:00.000-08:00

The Order of Christ Sophia is a mystical, Christian spiritual Order. We have men and women Priests ordained to give the Sacraments, to forgive sins, to heal the sick and to teach the ways of God. Each of our members has a career that supports their families. Our purpose is to bring anyone who wishes into a direct relationship with God at the center of their being. Inside the soul is God, as Jesus said, "The dominion of Heaven(God) is within you." Heaven is not up in the sky. It is actually an experience of connection and union with God that is tangible, palpable and real. Anyone can have that experience if they open to it and ask for it. The churches teach that it is after you die, but that is only half true. One can experience the bliss and power of love right here in the body if you let go and get out of the way and open to it. The Order of Christ Sophia brings each person who wishes into a direct experience of God, which is the meaning of the word "mystical". Mystical does not mean dangerous. It means an experience that brings a deep and inner awareness of the divine within. All the saints and prophets were mystics because they came to know God through direct experience rather than through book learning or academic pursuits. We are a spiritual Order meaning we have a method and a way that is inspired and directed by God to bring people closer to God. Through mystical Baptism a person can start to experience the presence of God in their body as their senses are opened to the spiritual world. They can feel the closeness of the Teacher in the person of Jesus and Mother Mary, who are the Masters of our Order. They are the ones that establish all of the practices and teachings we use in our teaching of students. We are an intense school where much work is done, much inner work. Inner work is going within in meditation and prayer, focusing the heart and mind on God to discover the meaning of life. One needs a Teacher to do this, so every conscientious student in our Order has a Teacher or Priest who works with them on their spiritual exercises and devotional work in counseling. It is not easy and it is definitely not for the weak of heart or the complacent or lazy. It is work. But the benefits of the spiritual Path is that you will come into a direct relationship with God and be completely transformed in the process. www.centersoflight.org

Alcoholism

2008-11-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

Addiction is a choice to stay mad and be angry and that is the simple reason for so many people wanting to numb themselves and not change. When a person is done with something, it is over. Never again. Alcoholics aren't done and so they still choose to be sick. Not a disease. They still hold out for the possibility they might need it in the future and so can't say "No" and keep that back door open for an exit. The other main problem with people who do too much alcohol is that they are unwilling to make a decision and say forever "no" to the stuff; alcohol is an over-dependent need for maternal care and so they get everyone around them to mother them. 70 million people with major trouble with alcohol are numbing themselves so they won't feel the pain and are basically angry inside.

Still the Mind

2008-11-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

In order to really enter into the stillness, you have to lose all consciousness of the surrounding environment and your physical body. You have to discipline your mind to stop synapsing on everything that comes along. That distractibility is a sign of self-indulgence and lazy mind. When your mind is divided, then any thought that comes in stimulates desire or anxiety and you will not be able to center yourself in the silence. Silencing the desires and mind is necessary in order to have a real meditation. Most people are just trying to relax, emphasis on just "trying." Trying means you are not ready to really start to begin to commence to get going to actually have a meditation. It takes concentration to keep your heart and mind still long enough to open to the higher Mind and Being of God. Some of you think there is no personal God. What a surprise you have in store for you. Some of the people who think this way have never really been close enough to the stillness or the Divine to actually get to know the Being who created you and knows and loves you. When you do, you will be floored and humbled by how awesomely huge and intense God is. But you have to get to stillness, not having any sense of the physical body and then slow your breathing to relaxed and then open to feel, see and know something bigger than you. It is definitely waiting for you.

Tribute to Bob Dylan

2008-11-06T08:11:00.000-08:00

I grew up in Newport, Rhode Island where the Newport Folk Festival was held each summer. I was 13 and I met Bob Dylan who happened to be hanging out with John Hammond. Bob was 21 or 22 at the time and had just come on the folk music scene.

I was completely impressed with his poetry, his facility with words and his rebellious temperament. I walked up to him and asked him for his autograph. He turned to me, looking a little sardonic and said, "How old are you, kid?" I said "13." He laughed and then signed my matchbook cover. I don't think I kept that signature. The second song I learned on the guitar was "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down". The next year, Bob went electric and I was one of 13 people, including my brother and his friends who did not boo when Bob started Highway 61 in front of thousands of booing, angry, disrespectful people. Bob walked off the stage. That was really sad because he was changing and people wouldn't let him grow through his changes. So I have been a devoted fan of Bob Dylan for many, many years. When he went through a conversion to Christ, I was a little surprised, but was impressed with his courage to say what he believed. I remember the one song that really struck me was, "You've Got to Serve Somebody". That says a world of wisdom.

Then in 1970 Dylan's new album, New Morning, came out with the song "Father of Night." What a beautiful acknowledgment of God and praise to something higher that created all this. I want to give you the words to that song since those words were not recorded in the jacket of that album.

Father of Night

Bob Dylan 1970

Father of night, father of day
Father who taketh the darkness away
Father who teacheth the bird to fly
Builder of rainbows up in the sky
Father of loneliness and pain
Father of love and father of rain

Father of day, father of night
Father of black, father of white
Father who build the mountain so high
Who shapeth the cloud way up in the sky
Father of time, father of dreams
Father who turneth the rivers and streams

Father of green, father of wheat
Father of cold and father of heat
Father of air and father of trees
Who dwells in our hearts and our memories
Father of minutes, father of days
Father of whom we most solemnly praise.

Finally, I want to say, that Bob Dylan has moved so many people to really think about things and the meaning behind what people do and say. He has rebelled in the healthiest way at the things that are wrong, the things that degrade human beings. He has been a perennial voice for truth and acute observation skills for decades now. Inevitably he will pass through these gates of desolation and become one of the honored members of our humanity for ages to come. I honor him as a beacon of truth, honesty, verification in the storm and most of all someone with the courage to stand and deliver. I leave you with his words, "I'll be with you when the deal goes down."

Blessings to you Bob Dylan.

Father Peter Bowes
11/6/2008

New Leadership

2008-11-05T15:08:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the people of America for coming through with a major statement that things have to change in the U.S. As a people, we have been duped into involvement in two major wars that seem to be unending. We have suffered the loss of at least 30% of our savings and retirement. Millions are without jobs and millions of people have their homes in foreclosure. Universal health care has not happened and our children are less educated than kids 20 years ago. Our new President has his work cut out for him as the legacy of the greedy liars has stolen so much from the security of the American people. We need to pray that he has the help he needs to do a good job to fix all of these problems. We need to pray for the courage to tighten our belts and help make the sacrifices that need to be made to stop the hatred, the killing and the insane greed that has been cultivated by so many examples out of control. Without peace in one's heart, nothing will be accomplished that will actually change anything for the better. Anger and reaction will make matters worse. Hating people makes things worse. I was actually saddened and appalled that supporters of the opposition candidate actually booed the new president. That kind of hostility is so primitive and so mean. We are talking about a human being. No self-respecting person thinks the opposing candidate is a terrorist or a racist or crazy or lazy or stupid or evil. People's intentions are good, but their actions are sometimes deplorable. There is a human soul that God made, that is how we should look at another human being no matter whether we agree with them or not. They are made by God and loved by God the same as we are and deserve that intense consideration that we demand for ourselves. Can we please wake up?

Animal, Nature, Human and God

2008-10-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

We like the animals and the birds and the fish because they are uncomplicated. They have no ulterior motives, no unsavory aspects. Okay, they can eat each other sometimes and that is the dog eat dog world of survival. But it is not angry or mean. It is because they are hungry and since they are instinctual creatures programmed to be that way forever, they do what they do and will always do what they do in the same way they have always acted. It is simple and beautiful because it is not vicious or vengeful. They are programmed to eat or be eaten and that is the way God made it. Humans are much different. They can kill when they are not hungry. They can desire sex even when they take advantage of someone or steal from someone. They can devise strategies in cunning ways to outdo and usurp power from others in the most ruthless style that no aggressive animal can match. Humans are unmatched in cruelty and meanness since they have to deaden their conscience to be so harsh and cruel. But watching the birds and animals seems so peaceful and tame compared to the devastation the humans can bring down on others, that we are in awe of the beauty, the stillness, the peace and tranquility of nature. Nature is a balm of healing for those practically drowning in the sea of despair or hurting so much they want to die. Nature seems like a pristine spring flowing over a cliff in spray compared to the ruthless power of rage that human beings can unleash.
When will we stop the aggressive energies, the fighting and complaining? When will the hearts of human beings make peace and love more important than anger and separation? If we go on like this, we will destroy all that's good and all that's holy. Keep it up because God is definitely watching.

Simple Act of Kindness

2008-10-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

I was at a cellphone store and the simple act of kindness of one of their agents impressed me so much because she was so thoughtful, faithful and helpful above and beyond anything really required. She was paid the same no matter who she was serving and she expressed a deep concern for everyone who entered the store. She was vigilant to the nuances of each person's needs and would come to each person with the answer and the help each one came for. In a way, customer service was exemplified in this simple person's commitment to be caring and supportive. She was just doing her job, but it was much more than that. Few might have noticed, but I watched as she kept her consciousness of each need and each situation and as each person was greeted as they entered, they were brought into her energy, her desire to fulfill the wishes of each one. She actually nurtured each person that entered. She didn't have to. She could have been as jaded as many people are who have to greet people and answer their questions. But she looked at each person and went out of her way, taking more time than most people in their impatience and intolerance would have been able to stand. This is an example of loving one's neighbor in the most simple way. It is not religious and has no over-arching self-righteousness in it. It was simple as a child and it was a light in the otherwise opaque landscape of most people's dull lives. Thank God some people get how to care for other people and get a kick out of being conscious of people.

Response to Angry Soldier

2008-10-21T22:09:00.000-07:00

I got a response from my war blog that I was one of those crazy liberal types who is an advocate for peace and that I was stupid. I think he was saying I was stupid because I said war was stupid. War is stupid because it is the most primitive response to violence and aggression known to human beings. We go over and kill those who offended us. I am not saying we have not been terrorized and violated by certain extremist groups. But I am saying that responding with violence and aggression is not the most productive or spiritual of answers to it. We are instructed by Jesus Christ to love our enemies. That means to not hate anyone. That means to forgive even if we are wronged. That is the heroic and courageous thing to do. To attack in reaction is against everything Jesus taught his disciples and so is not Christian. The sons of the soldiers we kill remember their fathers and with tears in their eyes vow to retaliate for the loss of their fathers by killing those who killed them. It goes on and one until someone forgives and lets go the hurt and anger and stops the cycle of violence. When will this insanity stop? Who has the guts to make it stop? War does not end violence. It begets violence. International sanctions work in the long run. Soldiers can sometimes be a little short-sighted when they don't think about the reasons we are in certain countries in the first place. We are not spreading democracy. We are terrorizing as evidenced by the lives we have taken. We are not innocent as the media and politicians would have us believe. Peace cannot be attained by violence. Ghandi and Martin Luther King taught us that. But we still have not learned it. My position is not liberal. My position is the same as Jesus - forgive and turn the other cheek. Don't forget the years and years of Christian hostilities that invaded the Islamic world for hundreds of years. This goes way back before oil was the central theme of the conflict. When will we take the higher road and break the cycle of violence?

Father Peter

Stop War, Stop Killing

2008-10-21T09:44:00.000-07:00

The war is completely stupid. I am talking about Afghan and Iraq. We are wasting lives as the most important issue. I am not just talking about the lives of the U.S. mercenaries (contractors) and the troops that we have sent over there. I am talking about the countless lives that we have destroyed of our brothers and sisters who are from Iraq and Afghanistan who bleed like you and I. They might have a different religion, but they are created by God and have souls just like you and I. The outer religion is of not matter whatsoever since before God, a person's religion is less important as the heart that beats inside the intelligence which is a human being. The heart of the matter is that we are so similar before God that the differences are just not important. But our leaders have brain-washed so many, encouraging people to fear those that have some differences in culture and beliefs and so we fight against them and consider them enemies. We are enemies to ourselves when see in another human being something completely different from ourselves. We are all human beings on this planet and we have to start to work together to defeat those who keep trying to convince us that we are in danger. We as a country have inflicted such egregious wrongs on other countries, we actually have no leg to stand on in the accusation department, since we have wronged far more than we have been wronged. Where is the country's conscience that is just keep sleeping amidst war cries by little wounded boys who have not grown up yet. Spiritually, those little leader boys have not even become fully human. They are still reacting like animals around a bleeding victim - one they created for their won amusement. The real victim when all the sins have been weighed and inventoried will be our own viciousness that we have let grow wild against anything our little minds get scared about. Are we going to wake up, or does a huge calamity have to come down on us as a people to help us see God as higher than the stupid things humans think up?

Christian Mysticism

2008-08-10T15:25:00.000-07:00

The word "mystical" means a spiritual reality or experience that is not perceived by the five physical senses. A mystical experience is different than having a belief because a mystical experience involves coming into a direct relationship with God. Feeling God, seeing God and knowing God cannot be accomplished by belief alone. Belief in something may nudge you in the direction of finding out something or inspire you to hope for something. A belief in God may move a person towards having a relationship with God. A direct, personal experience of God is what every mystic strives to attain. Christian mysticism is the process of coming into the experience of God at the center of one's being. A mystic meditates and prays and strives to be in close relationship with God throughout the day and throughout their life. Only through a direct experience can you say you know anything for certain.

Christian Mysticism refers to the Christian approach to the experience of God within, coming under the teachings of Jesus and Mother Mary. Mysticism is at the center of every world religion and involves the seeker in a serious search for God at the center of one's being. The mystical side of Buddhism is called Zen, that of Islam is called Sufism, in Hinduism it would be called Kriya Yoga and in Judaism, Kabala. In Christianity it is simply called Christian Mysticism. Jesus was certainly a mystic, as was Buddha, Krishna and the founders of all the major religions. All who have similarly sought to move beyond dogma and concepts into the direct experience of God and God's love are known as mystics. The mystics from any of the traditions understand one another because the inner experience is the same. There have been many mystics: St. Teresa of Avila, St. Francis of Assisi, Paramahansa Yogananda, St John of the Cross and Rumi to name a few.

Ancient Wisdom Teachings

2008-08-10T15:11:00.000-07:00

All the teachings from all the world religions throughout time comprise the Ancient Wisdom Teachings. Those Master Teachers and Sages that have been sent by God to human beings over thousands of years have demonstrated and taught those who were open. These became the disciples of the Ancient Wise Ones and their lessons and teachings have been passed down through history. If you study these teachings from each of the world religions, you will note a common theme: love of God and love of neighbor.

Some Eastern religions do not have a direct conception of God, but do consider compassion and respect for all of life as very similar to the Western version of love of God. These teachings are universal and everyone who comes into a direct experience of the ONE understands anyone else who has this experience. In this unity of experience, we are all sisters and brothers in God.

We teach the Ancient Wisdom Teachings to our students. They can be summarized to be mindfulness of life, respect for others, compassion for the suffering, and understanding for those that do things differently, patience with those who are different or slower, helpfulness in the face of difficulties, reverence and support for all of life. Included in these teachings is an understanding of how God works, how things are created and how to become one with the being that created us. So we teach how to communicate in prayer and meditation with the Being that created us. We teach the Law of Cause and Effect or Karma, that whatever you put out, you will get back. We teach that everything matters and we are responsible for what we think, say and do. We teach the way to overcome problems and heal our broken hearts and twisted minds. We demonstrate how to come into union with God through our practices and teachings. All the saints and sages have taught the same things, from a different cultural and language perspective. They are the same.

The Order of Christ/Sophia

2008-08-04T12:41:00.000-07:00

The Order of Christ/Sophia is a mystical Christian Order of people who are devoted to the experience of God within. The OCS is a spiritual school and a spiritual practice. This means there is a set of teachings that deepen the understanding of the student and also meditations and spiritual exercises which bring the opportunity for a real spiritual experience of God, light and love. The OCS is made up of Teachers, Priests, Deacons, students and community members all joined together for the purpose of becoming one with God. Some teach, some strive to serve and help other people and some simply learn.

Through the patterns, teachings and disciplines of the OCS, people are brought ever deeper into being who they were created to be, sons and daughters of God.

Because we are a Holy Order, our practices and style of life brings into manifestation the plan God had when God created us. We are becoming lighted beings clothed in flesh bodies. What most people experience is heavy flesh imprisoning the divine soul. Reuniting with God after a long exile is our process and growth. Another purpose of the OCS is to raise up a true priesthood of women and men who will express God in their way of being. This real priesthood is divined by Jesus and Mother Mary as the ultimate attainment of each human being who returns to the Creator transformed and healed. The seven Sacraments are means of obtaining the graces necessary to become one with God, as all of our OCS Centers of Light hold meditation and Communion services each morning.

Visiting Sedona

2008-07-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

I am visiting Sedona, Arizona. It is a beautiful place and people are friendly if not a bit touristy. The red rocks are impressive and seem from another time and place. I noticed a theme developing with those who have settled here: everything is energized with spiritual energies because of the existence of special vortexes of energy. These vortexes are said to connect people to higher energies. I do notice the connection with nature being more intense here as the beauty if overwhelming, but the kind of spiritual frenzy that people profess and attribute to Sedona is really in their imagination. What I mean is that most of the people have this spacey head energy where everything is spiritual and truth is relative. So anything goes and everyone has God in them, which happens to be the truth, but only a few have any idea what that means much less have any experience of God within. God seems as conceptual and misconceived as any opinion on the latest fashion or popular new age method of knowing something. What I saw was a boatload of opinions and almost no real experience of God. Sorry to deflate the great balloon of the ego, but living somewhere does not have anything to do with being spiritual. Genetically descending from a biological line has absolutely nothing to do with being spiritual. Knowing some jargon and having some superlative words or all-inclusive pseudo-true words makes absolutely no difference in reality to whether you have any real spiritual experience or not. Psychics are advertised on many store fronts and psychic readings are going on in almost every little shopping plaza. They pretend to be reading your soul, but are actually reading your astrology chart or your aura. Some of them are quite good at what they do, but most are fairly untransformed beings themselves that know almost nothing about God or themselves. I am not talking about anybody personally, but I wanted to mention the flavor or spirituality in Sedona. There is not real substance to it at all. There is a whole lot of talk and a great deal of spaced-out mind, but almost no real backbone of courageous spiritual connection with God at the center of our being. Talk is cheap when you can attribute spirituality to some hill or mountain or grouping of red folds of rock. But inner spiritual work is hardly being done anywhere regardless of the location on the planet. It is rare.

Why Is It So Hard?

2008-06-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

What makes changing so hard? Because our habit inflicted life gets some positive strokes out of the things we choose. We get some payback for the ways we have learned to be, or we wouldn’t do those things. We are barraged by things in the world that might make us happier; better looking, more popular, less troubled and a thousand other things. The advertisers sell us on emptiness, and fear. They show us in images what we lack (what we are empty of) and then make us feel insecure about being empty and lacking. Then they provide us with the solution that will fulfill all of our dreams and remedy the problem. We look and listen and drool and otherwise go mind-numb after each installment. Then we simply and efficiently adopt the language and the ideas behind the ad and we got out looking for the thing that will make us feel less empty. Always, Always, Always, you look outside of yourself for the goodies and the healing of your emptiness and woes. You are forlorn, so you look for a man or a woman. You are empty and you fill it with food. You are lacking and you strive for more money and more power over others. All of these things make you angry inside and more empty. So you have to look more voraciously and ravenously for more outer things to fill the void of your empty life. That is the hardest thing to watch people do and it has got to be the hardest thing that people will invest time and energy into.

The hard way is not what a spiritual person does. A spiritually motivated person figures out the cost of the separation and pain from losing oneself in a million empty promises and mirages of promise. That cost is the loss of your sense of soul. It is to lose the joy of being. In being, there is nothing you have to do, just be. In being, you don’t have to get anything, or prove anything, or acquire anything or struggle with anyone. You just have to relax in the simplicity of being yourself, knowing God loves you and God is inside you. When you know God inside, you stop looking outside for anything. You see things and people outside, but they cannot add anything to you if you are filled with love and feel peace inside. What can the world give you when you have God’s love inside your heart? Nothing.

If you want it hard, struggle like crazy to acquire adulation from other people. Beg for recognition from those who do not know how to love yet. Pine for a partner who can really appreciate you, when in fact, you cannot show that same level of appreciation for others, much less for yourself. To be outside yourself, looking outside yourself, that is hard.

New Centers of Light

2008-05-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

In August, new Centers of Light are opening in Chicago and in New York City. We have not been ready to start Centers in such large cities before since we were not sure of the housing situation and the logistics related to serving the needs of students in those busy places. But our Order of Christ/Sophia is 9 years old and it is time to be a major presence for people to come and be taught the real teachings of the spiritual path. We have Priests who will be able to serve the needs of people there and I personally will be moving to Chicago after having been in the Bay area for some 7 or 8 years. I definitely will miss the great weather in the Bay and the smell of the ocean. I have some lack of fondness for really cold weather, but I will manage and my skin will get tougher to handle the chill.

For those of you in New York and in Chicago, look at our website for offerings of classes, services and seminar weekends in September as we begin to spread the light in your cities. What we offer as a spiritual Order is unique in this world. We offer loving spiritual community where people are real in their conversations, honest and clear. We have a process of spiritual development and unfolding that is designed to take you all the way into the center of your being within the soul to where God resides – the God Self. On the way, many things will have to be cleared out of you in order for you to connect with the real part of you. Your outer layers of defense and self-protection will be peeled away as you let the love heal you. You will finally be able to relax in God’s love under the guidance of our Teachers – Jesus and Mother Mary. Our Priests were taught by Them and those Teachers that stand in for Jesus and Mary guide the Centers of Light across the earth in bringing people the experience of God.

We are not a head-trip school where students memorize a new jargon and participate in empty practices that jack up people’s pride. We teach how to really pray, how to successfully meditate and be in communion with God, and we provide all of the Sacraments to those who are open. We provide spiritual counseling and healing to those who are sick. We are trained to see the cause of the troubles that everyone is plagued with and we have been taught how to overcome those and help each of you overcome them. Our Priests are not trained academically, by rote memorization and indoctrination. Our Priests have to demonstrate a level of consciousness and connection and relationship with God that is real and life-changing. Because of their connection to God, they are able to mediate that love, light and reality to you who come to us for teaching.

So, if you are serious about your relationship to God, come and check us out.

In Christ

Father Peter

Complacency

2008-05-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

Complacency may well be the attitude that sends civilization into a nosedive. Haiti, Malaysia, India, Indonesia and now places in Europe are feeling the full weight of the food crisis. With every ethanol hound turning vast portions of farmland into corn fuel for the auto industry, people are feeling the pinch at the register. When the stomach is deprived, the senses turn livid and the mind leans into rage. Food is a basic necessity of life, and without it, we revert to acting like animals. There has been a plethora of recent riots in the streets over the price of corn and rice. Can you blame people for being mad when the leaders of government spend billions a month on war and defense and cannot even feed the people they are supposed to be serving? As the economy tanks more and more, will we actually do anything about it? Or will we complacently suffer the loss of savings and retirement so hard won? It is an election year and it is easy to blame a political party. It is easy to blame an actual government leader. But many people stood by and refused to care enough to vote. A majority was not even informed about the issues at stake. Complacency is the precursor of calamity. That has been repeated so many times in history and is still not motivating people to change how they vote, how they think or act.

The catastrophe I see is jaded hearts and minds and then less and less autonomy for citizens of various countries. As people are more and more constrained by dire necessities and trying circumstances, opportunists and hateful, violent individuals will take advantage and make big trouble for others. As Carl Jung said, “When people think like a crowd, and not like an individual, they get less intelligent.” That’s not an exact quote, but it is close. For most people, violence is a definite possibility.

We Messed it Up

2008-05-14T15:03:00.001-07:00

Human beings were specially gifted with a soul that had the goodness and intelligence of God placed inside of it. This is why God said we were made in the spiritual image and likeness of God. We can create like God. We can love and bring things into manifestation just like God. But when we were newly created, we were inexperienced and did not know the meaning of many of our choices. This is the explanation of the fall of human beings from the close connection of love and friendship with God.

The Garden of Eden story is an allegory which means it is symbolic. The part that is not symbolic is that God decided to create human beings and breathe a soul into them and that was a new creation, not any primate graduate. A human being has a soul, an animal does not. I know some of you are going to be mad about me saying that because you instill human characteristics into your dog or cat and think they are equal to you. You have not been paying attention very well if you think that. They cannot innovate or be creative. They are the same day in and day out because they are instinctual beings. They have emotions and can learn responses and tune into your energy. But they do not have free will and a conscience or a mind like the human mind. They are under human beings and we are responsible for them to love and care for them.

You may be angry now because worms, cabbages and horses are not all equal to human beings. I would just ask you to have a conversation with your cabbage and see how responsive it is. Then try to make a horse do what you tell her just by words and you will get an interesting response. They do not have mind like human beings have. God mentioned that in the early days those human beings were the stewards of creation. Admittedly humans have fallen quite low in the last many thousand years and have barely lifted their heads and hearts up to God who made them. So I can see how easy it is to mistake humans for animals.

We were created like God. Jesus said to the disciples, “Know you not, that you are gods.” He was referring to what we are to grow into and learn if we follow him and learn how to create and be uncorrupted by the world. That is our heritage, like God. Not greater than God – but like Jesus and Mary, able to be one with God.

People Are Good

2008-04-30T22:55:00.000-07:00

At the core of every human being is goodness. Yes, I am definitely saying that everyone is good at the core. That is a fact which God verified when God created human beings and said the creation was “Good.” For those of you who do not believe in God and think that things happen randomly, then you can stop reading because the rest of this will only make you angry. God formed all the myriad life forms, including human beings, from God’s Mind and then breathed them into existence. When God said the word, “Let there be Light,” then creation began. All the processes and developments that were to take place over eons of time were already conceived in God’s mind and foreseen. There is actually nothing new under the Sun because God saw all of those potentialities and possibilities before they came into manifestation. You probably are asking a few questions at this point. 1.) Does living matter evolve? Yes, it changes and mutates and goes through improvements and some false starts that go extinct. Some plants and animals are compromised by the way we have harmed the environment, but some just atrophy and pass away because they are not needed any longer. 2.) Has the earth existed for millions of years? Yes, the earth is much older than some of the religionists believe – for example, some say that the earth is about 5000 years old. That is ridiculous under a heavy weight of scientific evidence to the contrary. The earth is millions of years old and humans have lived on the planet a very long time. 3.) Did God make us perfect? Yes, when a human being was created, it was created perfect with a soul. Since a person who was just newly created was good and perfect, they did not err in the beginning. They were inexperienced because they were newly created. Very quickly the first parents chose to be jealous of God’s knowledge and wanted to steal that knowledge for themselves. The dark force instilled in our first parents the desire to obtain things that they were not ready for. This was the corruption of pride and malice that entered the first human beings. All the suffering on the earth from that time forward has been because of that sin of pride which everyone has had to pay as our inheritance in being human. You might think it unfair for many to have to pay for what the first parents did, but we have tendencies in ourselves that are just like them and so we are inclined in the same direction. If you have noticed, people are still acting out their negative patterns and have not changed into little angels yet.

Jesus Really Rose

2008-04-11T22:00:00.000-07:00

As Easter is a time of healing and celebration once again of Christ’s victory over death, we celebrate the Atonement and Redemption brought by Jesus and Mary, the most advanced and perfect human beings that have ever walked the earth. Jesus volunteered to come here and consciously took on the suffering to pay for the sins of the people. He was the perfect scapegoat who was lacerated by our sins, soiled by our corrupt lives and through His love, became one big sore, covered in the negative energy of all of humanity. He loved us so much that He did this for us. He wanted to. Many people think God made Him do it and was unfeeling and unkind to Jesus. But Jesus wanted to do it and loved so much that through the outpouring of His love, He came into incarnation as a perfect being, not wanting to fall into temptation and so defeated sin, Satan and death. I know many people think that evil does not exist and Satan does not exist. But evil was a main feature of the Lord’s Prayer. If Jesus did not think that this was important, He would not have mentioned evil and temptation in the most perfect prayer. It is vitally important for people to cling to love, light and truth and to stay away from selfishness, fear and pride – the instruments of Satan to destroy human beings and ultimately separate them from God who created and loves them. All darkness and disturbances are caused by this dark force that successfully and very easily influences human beings to become angry and destructive. Any action that does not love, does not ennoble human beings, or otherwise raise up people to the status of daughters and sons of God is of that dark force that debases human beings. Jesus showed His victory over death. One proof is the Shroud of Turin which wrapped His body for the burial. The intoxification of the kidneys and uremic discharge combined with the spices He was anointed with before the burial imprinted an indelible image of His tortured body on that Shroud. Science cannot verify it, but Jesus spoke of this in the Poem of the Man-God, by Maria Valtorta verifying its authenticity. Some claim Jesus never rose from the dead. At the time the soldiers were paid by the Jewish priesthood to tell people that His disciples stole the dead body and made up a story that He had arisen. In fact, the real truth is that people were paid to lie about His death and resurrection. Jesus did rise and was seen by upwards of 1500 people many different times. He ate with them and was touched by hundreds of people who realized that He rose with a completely perfect flesh body, even the five wounds shining with light streaming from His hands and feet and side demonstrated He had come into a completely lighted and raised up body. But people with little or no faith would not have any reason to believe and would scoff at this most powerful sign of Jesus’ divinity.

Difficult Times

2008-04-03T11:29:00.000-07:00

The times we are in now may seem like other times of difficulty or similar to painful periods in our history. But it is not so. Times are inching more and more toward a crescendo of decision. Economically, there are many challenges. A person just told me yesterday that they did not have any health insurance and had a severe appendix attack. The operation was $15,000 for a 24 hour stay in the hospital. How is an average person able to come up with that kind of money? It will set a family back six years just trying to get out from under that kind of debt. Advanced countries like Canada and France provide health care for every citizen as a matter of course and their economies are perfectly strong. The U.S. prizes itself on its Robocop status for the world and egotistically imagines it really understands the mentality of the people they invade. Isn’t it obvious how little we understand, now that we are engaged in the longest war we have ever engaged in? The money from a month of war costs would provide the health care necessary for each citizen of the U.S. for one year. What is wrong with the congressman and senators, governors and leaders that they do not care enough to help their own people? Why are we still debating this? Isn’t it obvious that this health crisis is not getting better? The morale of the people is slipping right out from under us. Foreclosures are at record levels. Credit card debt is at an all time high. The strength of the U.S. dollar is at an all time low. The climate is changing. The environment is getting ravaged by oil companies trying to pretend that ethanol is a wise solution. Even if you put all of the horrible things on the table like WWI and WWI, Vietnam, the Stock Market crash of 1929, the 70,000 GI’s that experience major disability either mentally, emotionally or physically from the Afghan or Iraq wars, the 100,000 U.S. citizens killed and the 1 million Iraqis killed, it is actually looking worse than it has ever been before. We still have 17,000 murders a year in the U.S. We have 1 out of 100 people in jail at any given time. The main thing that is saddest for the people of this planet is by far and away the lack of devotion to God and the compassion and love for neighbor. The more a population enters into feeling like life has no meaning, the more they are in survival mode. When a whole people are merely surviving, then atrocities of all kinds plague the planet, the countries and cities. We are in such a state.

Hermit

2008-03-15T17:53:00.000-07:00

Beverly Adderfish was the spiritual student of an aesthetic hermit who accepted one student every ten years, to teach them in the ways of God. Beverly was accepted by this hermit teacher after she had stumbled into him on one of his rare appearances in a local town, when he was shopping for supplies. Beverly was instantly taken with him and was desirous of learning all he had to teach her. Beverly had learned early in life that she was quicker than most and could understand things faster and more efficiently than the slower-minded folks around her.

She excelled in school, gobbling up facts and figures more readily than many of her schoolmates. She even got special attention from her father when growing up, as he would match his skill at chess with her, teaching her the techniques of strategy and forethought. Beverly became quite proficient at most things she did, and she was happy that she had a decent mind to make her way in the world. She became an excellent writer and speech-maker, able to proficiently sculpt words in phrases that made people wake up and listen. She was articulate, smart, and witty.

For a couple of years, Beverly would meditate with the hermit one day a month. Only occasionally, the hermit would say a few things to guide her along. Beverly could ask questions only on special occasions. When these opportunities were given her, she would cleverly pose the most intricate questions, questions that would make anyone go into long reveries as they tried to unravel its depth and attempt to answer. Beverly had learned to make people think, and of course she was quite aware that only a few people could actually appreciate her mental abilities, as she had practiced for so many years to perfect her rational faculties.

The hermit was not impressed and was flatly a little rude when she was talking. He would busy himself with other tasks as she was talking, almost as if he was taking special pains to make sure he had other things to be doing, when she got to talking and expounding some fine points of her ideas. When she saw this, Beverly would talk a little more loudly and with more expression and animation, while the hermit would seem preoccupied and distracted. Beverly got exasperated one day; she could not understand why the hermit was not able to pay attention while she was talking. She got the courage to ask him directly why he had such trouble paying attention to what she was saying.

The hermit stopped what he was doing, looked deep into her eyes, and smiled. He said, “I could not help hearing you trying to impress me, as if I did not care about you. I could not get past that feeling that you were trying to convince me to love you. I was not able to listen anymore, because it was a lack of understanding on your part. Because, you see, I accepted you when I first said you could come and meditate with me. So I never needed you to convince me that you are intelligent or worthy of love.” Beverly was dismayed and had no idea what to say, for the first time in her life. She then fell apart, when she realized that she was being what she thought would get her love, and it was all wrong. She just sobbed and sobbed. The hermit smiled with compassion and was very attentive, now that she was being real for the first time in her life. Now she could really learn who she was, and she could really pay attention to the hermit and follow his example, instead of trying to make him see how smart she was.

Rabbi

2008-03-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

Alan Albright was a warm and considerate young man studying to be a rabbi with a scholarly and well-published Kabbalah teacher. He was on course to be the head of a large temple and would soon graduate and start assisting an experienced rabbi, as a means of learning how to support a large congregation. He was notably very good with people, and so he could almost always get people to like him and see him as understanding and kind. He felt his greatest gift was his ability to get people working together for different causes and to help everyone get along with everyone else. The greatest joy he had was when he could use his emotions to help others share themselves with each other.

He would practice this to the point of it becoming an automatic skill and ability, where he could get others to feel deeply about themselves and whatever they were talking about, in almost any setting. He knew that, if people could feel deeply, they would remember the experience and more likely try to repeat it. So in relationship with others, his teacher noticed, Alan would only be interested in conversations where the emotions would run high and feelings would be expressed all around. In this atmosphere, Alan felt most at home, and he would be especially interested. The teacher began to feel uncomfortable with the one-sidedness of this approach and asked Alan to talk with him one day.

Alan was enthusiastic and open as he approached the teacher. As the teacher assessed him with his wise eyes, he asked Alan to explain why he had to have everyone like him in his interactions with them. Alan was taken aback and a little confused, since this was the area in which Alan felt most gifted and capable. Alan asked the rabbi to explain. In doing so, the rabbi told him that he was not so sure Alan was doing a useful service by emphasizing the emotional area of the interchanges, to the exclusion of more rational kinds of things. Alan needed much more explanation to understand what was wrong.

The rabbi said that being liked seemed to be the most important thing to Alan, and that this would definitely prevent a more analytical approach to situations and problems. He told Alan that he was being trained to help and teach others, not merely how to be liked and admired. Alan was not sure what was happening to him, as he was so shocked at the rabbi’s words. The rabbi continued: “When you emphasize the emotions and feelings to the exclusion of everything else, you are selling out principles and the presentation of truth.” He said, “If your emotions and feelings are the most important thing, then you are teaching people that God is not God. Instead, emotions and feelings are God.”

The rabbi was compassionate, as he noticed how devastated Alan had become. He was not even sure Alan knew what he was talking about. Then Alan asked him why it felt so good to have others around him feel so good and express their personal appreciation to him, for representing that for them. Alan obviously needed to understand better what he had been doing. The rabbi told him how important it was for him to be balanced between both thinking and feeling, that both were equally important.

In addition, the rabbi told him, there was another problem with emphasizing the feelings and emotions as he had been: he asked Alan if he was not proud of the fact that he could get others to feel, and whether or not he often celebrated emotional connection with people to the exclusion of everything else. Alan began to see it. Alan said that one of the things that made him most happy was getting enthusiasm going in a group of people, and to have everyone start to feel very emotional. Usually, he just let all the feelings and emotions flow wherever they wanted to go, and everyone said they felt good about it. Now, he was seeing how important he made those moments and how much he received from the others who would participate with him.

As Alan and the rabbi continued to discuss this problem, Alan realized that he had made emotions a god. Emotions were all that was important to him, because by using them the way he had, he got other people to like him and feel good being with him. He was really using others to get himself to feel good, because he was not so sure he was feeling all right without this habit. Alan’s world came crashing down around him, as he realized how he had been proud of his ability to feel and make others feel. According to his habit, if no feelings were being expressed, then he generally was not interested. And if others would not feel the way he felt, he was a little disappointed, and he would thus not participate very much in the conversation.

Soon it became obvious to Alan how important this whole expression had become to him, and he agreed with his rabbi that he had gotten off track. The rabbi told him to let this over-emphasis of one expression go, in order to get back in balance. He must train himself to both think and feel, without being attached to either, or being proud of his ability, or tormenting himself because of his inability. Alan realized how much work he had to do to become a balanced rabbi.

The Swami

2008-03-05T13:08:00.000-08:00

Audrey Newsome was a disciple of a swami in the East, who spoke with her one day after many years of their meditating together. The swami thought it was about time to have a conversation and teach Audrey about some of the finer points of the spiritual practice and the spiritual life. She was dutiful and obedient in everything, and she participated fully in all of the practices of the ashram. She would not think of missing any meditation or question the swami in any skeptical manner. She was a model spiritual student, and the swami considered this the first task for her to master, in order for her to receive some of the higher teachings. As she had been faithful in many little things and shown her dedication, he decided to speak with her and give her something more.

The conversation consisted in the swami inviting her to speak with him, saying she could bring up anything she thought was important, and he would guide her to the next step of the Spiritual Path. She began by saying that she found herself so enjoying her meditations, as they uplifted her so much. She was transported away to spiritual spheres unimaginable, and she wept at times with awe and amazement at what things would come up inside of her when she did this. She was especially pleased when, in the course of conversations within herself, she would have intuitive flashes that inspired her or brought her some clarity.

She went on to explain that one of the joys of the Spiritual Path was when she would be talking to her friends and would find fascinating and interesting images and ideas come up in the conversation, things she could not have thought up herself. These, she concluded, must be coming from deep within herself, for they were far and away more profound than anything she could have created herself. The most exciting times for her were when, in the course of being with other people, she found these connections being made almost spontaneously from the intuitive side, and she would be very happy to be able to make such connections for others. She spoke with some happiness about these powers of her mind, attributing most of her creative ingenuity to her meditative practice

The swami smiled and listened attentively without much outward reaction or obvious indication of what he was thinking or feeling. When she was done, he asked her to examine if she was taking credit for her thoughts and intuitions. Audrey reflected and said that she found her ability to connect ideas and allow these intuitions to come up in her had been very helpful to other people. She knew, in fact, that many people reported being very much helped by her reflections and interactions. She was confused by the swami’s question and began to wonder if she saw things correctly.

The swami went on to ask if she felt that these creative inspirations and intuitions were generated from her, or whether they were given to her by God. She replied that they were from God. He then asked her why she was so proud of them. Then he said, “If they were from God, why would you take so much credit for them and act as if they were coming from you? In reality, the fact that you are so pleased with yourself indicates that you are very much attached to the fact that you see them generating from your mind and not from God. If God created them, then why would you feel so special to have expressed them? You see,” he said to her, “your mind has fooled you into thinking that it is the most important thing. You have been tempted to think that what comes out of your head is the most valuable gem you have to offer.”

Ms. Newsome was, of course, very upset, and she was humiliated to have been so revealed in so short an interchange with the swami; she resolved to turn all of her thoughts over to God and never to think anything that was not what God wanted her to think. She resolved to make sure that she would not imagine that she could create anything of herself that would even come close to comparing to or being better than God. As an afterthought, she asked the swami what she should do. He said, “Stop thinking or using your mind as if it was God. Get control of it, so that it does not run automatically wherever it wants. Still it, so that you can be proud only of God.” She was humbled and brought back into alignment with the swami, who had been watching her development for many months.

She realized that she had been proud of what her mind could generate, and she so enjoyed making it come up with nuances and clever expressions that others would find amusing or would admire. She began to see her pride in most of her expressions and interactions with other people, and so she was sad and disappointed with herself. She was thinking of putting herself down, but she began to see that that would be pride too, since it would imply that she should have known everything before the swami pointed those things out to her. She would have liked to take the swami’s place, so that she would not have to be told what she did not know. She wanted to be the one who designed and guided her spiritual development, so she could impress the swami and be recognized for the smart, intelligent, and creative person she is. All of these thoughts came to a screeching halt in a half hour because of her talk with the swami.

Perhaps you see yourself in the experience of Audrey. Maybe you might be able to learn something from her mistake, in order to free yourself from the trap of thinking that your mind or your thoughts are so important.

Living in Spiritual Community

2008-02-20T08:22:00.000-08:00

Living in a conscious spiritual community is a powerful support to taking on real love and honest communication with brothers and sisters. Adults in spiritual community learn to respect the feelings and expressions of other people and hold each other in love and compassion. If the spiritual community has true Teachers, then all the participants are directed to interact with each other in a loving, respectful and honest way - no games, no underhanded energy or back-stabbing. If there are conflicts, the teachers guide the members in working out of their differences with the goal of coming to understand each other. Really receiving and listening to someone and striving to know how they feel and how they think is key to the removal of all bad feelings and hostility. Each person is taught to understand what makes the other person tick, trying on their perspective without any reactivity or negativity. Any fears that come up are addressed without retaliation or accusation so that those fears don't turn into anger. Anger is always a sign of not feeling powerful in a relationship or situation and so is the most negative emotion. People do feel angry at times and need to talk about that without taking their feelings out on anyone. Acting out is most decidedly not something that the community accepts as productive of resolution or peace. Peace and love is the goal of communication.

In spiritual community, members learn to really see one another and listen to one another non-judgmentally.

There is little room for holding grudges or resentments as they poison the atmosphere. If a person refuses to come to resolution or drop a negative attitude, the whole community is supportive in helping them see how it is damaging to their relationship with themselves, with God and their neighbor. Love is the way to understand oneself and each other. The other benefit of spiritual community is that invariably one person will trigger another in the very same ways that have irritated or otherwise scared a person in their family of origin. So this situation is a very constructive way for those energies to come up in relationship with another where it can be worked out positively instead of disappointingly. People project all kinds of things on each other until they learn to withdraw those projections and own them and take responsibility for them and have them healed.

Much of what is learned happens in the day-to-day closeness and relating that people in close spiritual community experience. It is a crucible not very different from a marriage where you have chosen to be close and want to work things out, even if it is hard sometimes. It is a great blessing that people value for the rest of their lives.

What's Going to Happen?

2008-02-18T13:53:00.000-08:00

I think something big is going to happen that is bigger than science or human beings can explain. This is the only thing that would wake people up from their sleep. I agree most people are sleeping complacently and not in any hurry to perfect themselves or change anything in their lives. There has been a lot of prophesies about 2012, the Mayans, Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, etc. They all agree that the beginning of this century will produce massive changes in terrain, the areas around sea level and other things. But most seriously, the changes coming are going to be where people get much, much more indulgent, aggressive, mean and sensual, while the few will get more and more pure, saintly and powerful in love and compassion. The dichotomy will become clearer and clearer. I think those who cannot handle the changes will be leaving the planet, contrary to those who imagine that the rapture will come and they can pack their bags and go up with their suitcases on a mountain somewhere and wait for the spaceships to come and get them. That is not going to happen. That would be silly. God is just and there is karma. Intentions will not cut it. A change of heart will be the ticket to make sure you have enough peace and love inside you so that the changes don't scare people half to death.

Jesus said he would come like a thief in the night and also like lightning shining from the east to the west. It will be fast and intense. People are getting more and more stubborn and less and less open to God's love and direction. That means we are being left to decide and mostly we are deciding against anything God would try to hope we would adopt as a style of life and movement of heart. A few have suggested that God could cause in a twenty minute span of time that all of the consciences of all the human beings across the earth could see their sins and their negative actions and thoughts and desires all at the same time. This would be very difficult for most people to see and cop to. Some would die of fear and others of heart attacks. But that is only speculation since Jesus said only God knows the hour and the time.

I do feel that around 2012 or 2013 there will be big changes, but there is little astrologically to indicate anything really big in the planets during that time. So it must be something that is only perceived spiritually and will be above the usual ways people understand things. Suffering is a way for people to wake up and also a way for people to make sacrifices for the growth and betterment of other people. That's what Jesus and Mary did.

Discerning Between Good and Bad

2008-02-18T09:58:00.000-08:00

Discerning between good and bad can be difficult at times, but not in the more blatant things. For example, when something we do or say hurts someone physically, emotionally or mentally, then it is clear that that is bad. On the other hand, thinking a negative, hurtful thought about someone is subtle and not obvious and yet, still hurts the other person because it puts out a bad energy in their direction that has an effect on them. Hurting oneself may be a little tricky because you can imagine that it does not hurt anyone and then you might try to think that it has not effect on other people. But remember, if it expresses a negative energy, then it moves out in to the atmosphere and the air and the home and the neighborhood and has a vibratory quality that affects other people. it might actually influence others to do the same kind of thinking, behaving or feeling that you are putting out. The basic violations of the Ten Commandments have to do with consideration for the rights and feelings of other people. They involve laws that seek to prevent people from violating the boundaries of other people and so are given to human beings to help them respect their neighbor. Jesus was more explicit and more simple as he told us to love God first and then love our neighbor as ourselves. Our neighbor is everyone, not just people we like and have economic alliances with.

The trouble comes in when you have shut down your conscience and have stopped feeling your feelings. In this case, you may not actually get that something is bad for you because you want that thing too much and it has some power over you, since you want it. In the world, many consciences are shut down partially and people are not in touch and don't want to be in touch with whether something is good for them or others or not. They say, "If it feels good, then do it." That does not take into consideration the affect those thoughts, feelings and behaviors have on other people and how they are actually saying to the world, "Live this way; act this way."

So, I say, "If something feels good for you and all other people, even children, then it is good." Otherwise, it might be bad, or at least questionable. If you would not want to see an young girl or boy witnessing the event or the thought or the action, then don't do it. I know everyone is thinking of sexual things, which are not appropriate for young people anyway, since they are not ready for those experiences. Also, there are very few good role models for healthy adult romantic relationships or even marital relationships for young people to look up to. I am referring to all of the thoughts and actions that should be an example to everyone of how to live. If the action, thought or feeling, lifts people up, inspires people, heals people; if it makes life more whole, peaceful, loving; then do those kind of good things. If the thoughts, actions, and feelings are critical of self or others; if they are tearing things down; if they discourage and make people angry, then they are bad and emit a poison that others pick up on and get polluted by.

All good things come from God. Bad things come from people or from demons. It is simple because goodness has a signature of light and love and peace, while badness has a signature of tearing down, discouraging and turning to hatred. Anything that takes you into despair is bad because it is suggested by the demons to make people lose hope and fall into lethargy and hopelessness, which is exactly where the demons want you. The demons want you numb so they can have their way with you, even though many people are not even awake enough to know that they are being influenced by them. God is good.

Good and Evil

2008-02-17T19:30:00.000-08:00

The good people are getting kinder and more charitable. The bad people are getting more and more jaded and bitter; meaner and meaner. The world is dichotomous and people are lining up on the side of considerate and kind opposed to the ones that are shockingly disrespectful of the rights of other people. The evil ones are getting more aggressive and intolerant while the respectful ones are growing in compassion for other people. The lines are getting drawn more deeply with the passage of time as people gravitate to what they care about. It is no longer a time where it is an option to be mean or an option to be compassionate. Philosophically, the scales are weighing the direction of no turning back as one chooses one side or the other. If you are delirious and imagine that there is a middle ground, then you might actually be too numb to know the difference in these energies and thus firmly entrenched on the mean side of things. If you don’t care and your have to had the paddles applied to your chest for your to feel anything, then you are firmly planted on the dark side and growing in jadedness and numbness to the feelings of others.

Do not get me wrong: I have tremendous compassion for the pain of other people, even for the pain the makes them conclude that every has to be in for themselves. They feel that no one has watched their back and everyone has to take care of themselves since everyone is effectively alone and on their own. I understand what pain creates. I see the craters left by the boulders of selfishness and dejection on the hearts of human beings. I know how those craters were made and I know the damage report. But shutting down and closing out other people is not the best way to handle that. To find supportive people who care and will listen and will understand opens the floodgates of so many tears and makes it possible for the heart to heal after so much sadness. I am an optimist and I know that anyone can change for the better. Anyone can heal their broken hearts. Everyone can pick whatever they want. I am just seriously concerned that people are lining up on a side from which it will be almost impossible to reverse their direction. When you go down that road of depression and anger and meanness, you will have such a hard road to hoe to reverse your direction and move onto the side of love and compassion and respect.

If you think this idea of two sides is absurd, please wipe your glasses and look again. Before you know it, you will be saying that there is nothing you can do about Darfur, about war, about genocide. Then the tide will have changed for humankind and the lights will go out on compassion and understanding. Pray that this does not happen to you.

Sex Trade: Is it real?

2008-02-13T10:18:00.000-08:00

There are over a million under age girls, some under age 9, being sold into slavery for the sex industry each year. For a fee of around $1500 you can buy a young girl and sell her into prostitution which ruins her for the rest of her life. If she is not killed or introduced to drugs, she may survive jaded and depressed for the rest of her life. If you think this is not happening, google it and you will see. What feelings run through the heart of a person who has no consideration for the feelings of a young, innocent child? What hurt destroyed the conscience of so many men who feel no shame or remorse for destroying the life of a young child? With porn internet sites corrupting the minds of millions of youth and adolescents, not to mention adults, is it any wonder that the world is devolving into more and more numbness and callousness each month. If you watch videos, youtube clips, movies or TV series, one would think that pornography and rampant sexual predatory behavior was acceptable and normal. If it is normal and acceptable, then what is going to happen to the kids when they start having sex at 9 years old because they have watched other people or parents having sex. Or worse, what are you going to do to give their innocence back when the neighbor kids have introduced your seven year old to all of the things their parents have exposed them to around the house – magazines, videos and unsupervised channel surfing. I hear a new story every week from a well-meaning parent who was unable to prevent and unaware of some sexual acting out between their own child and that of another. It was not the innocent exploration of two bodies because of playing doctor – patient. It was practicing the things that were taught by someone around them. Any sexual behavior that is acted out before puberty is because someone taught those behaviors to the kid before they were naturally curious or ready for that experience. We call that a violation of innocence and it is incredibly damaging to the emotional development of the young person or child. If you really knew what was happening in the world and how little respect for other people, some people are willing to inflict on others, you would be shocked and horrified. Can you please wake up out there?

Real Spiritual Teachers

2008-02-06T10:11:00.000-08:00

A real spiritual Teacher has humbly allowed themselves to be taught by one who really knows. They have done what their Teacher told them to do and practiced their spiritual exercises obediently in just the way the Teacher taught them to do them. They allowed their Teacher to mold them and shape them and love them into they were formed and transformed. It is up to the Teacher when they will say you are formed. But I see so many would-be teachers who went for a few months of years to live near a Teacher and then left when they felt they should and not when the Teacher released them. A real spiritual Teacher will bless and sanction a student to begin to teach when the student is ready and not until. For those who met a teacher for a while and then got inspired and then put up a shingle with the word Teacher beside, without that blessing of their Teacher, is false. The ego was running the show and not humility and love.

A real spiritual Teacher does not try to get you to like them and does not have a political agenda. They are about peace and love and connection to the Divine. A real spiritual Teacher always acknowledges their created status and God’s powerful energy. A real spiritual Teacher is patient and will not force their will on anyone. They teach and pray and bless and love but do not coerce anyone. They do not try to convince through a barrage of heady words to numb their students into submission. They encourage and teach and sometimes say hard things that will break the hard crust of obstinacy in the student. Students come with a hard shell of resistance, pride, pain an hurt and this will have to be softened and cut away in order to reveal the real soul underneath all of those defenses. Not many can take the reality of what a Teacher says because it can hurt the pride and jostle the fears on most people.

But, be at peace, most people do not seek a teacher and more people would not want one. There are real ones around, but they are not as plentiful as you might think. There are a lot of mind candy teachers, but very few real ones.

Spiritual Teachers

2008-02-01T09:38:00.000-08:00

Let’s face it: only a handful of people are interested in finding a spiritual teacher. Most people cannot imagine wanting one much less understanding what one might gain from being in relationship to one. So the bulk of the people are not interested. For the ones that are, I have a few simple things to say. Search carefully because there are many who have no business pretending to be Teachers of others. The first criterion is whether the teacher has integrity. Integrity means that what they say is how they live. Do they live what they are preaching? Do they feel all the way down into their center of being the way they are speaking? Do they live by their own words, or are they speaking one thing and doing another? The next thing to examine is whether they live a clean and pure life. I am not talking about something superficially outer like whether you eat vegetables and not meat. That is extremely trivial and unimportant. But on the inner level are they lecherous of the opposite sex and willing to use their students for sensual needs. If so, then they are false and dangerous and not true teachers. Do they use power to manipulate other people? If so, then they have a wound in their psyche that is acting out on the people that follow them and thus they are not to be followed because they are lacking in wholeness, real love and connection to God.

Many teachers sound really good and talk a good stream of words and people find that impressive. In fact, the more vague and general the words, the more people are impressed. That is because most people can be easily duped into thinking that if someone can talk, then they must know something. It is important to examine whether the teacher actually has experienced anything real or are they giving mind candy to gullible recipients. Mind candy is flowery words about what might be possible for a human being to experience while the teacher has not had any such experience and cannot describe anything real since they are only hoping for the possibility of such an experience and never actually went through anything. Some teachers had a little experience of a beginning of something and then left to start a spiritual school without ever receiving the sanction and blessing of their teacher. They start teaching from a place of being half-baked and not even spiritually formed yet and so give conjectural and speculative teachings about how wonderful spiritual experiences must be if one ever had such a thing. This is mind candy. Also, mind candy is getting super-complicated and wordy about things one has not experienced in order dazzle and otherwise put to sleep the audience who is wowed by the words, thinking they are substance. The truth is, if you know from experience, then you will be simple in your communication knowing that many words often makes it harder for the listener to understand. The truth is profoundly simple and uncomplicated. Words obfuscate the real meaning of things, even though the simple words can profoundly point the way to an actual experience of God.

Another thing to watch out for is the ego of a teacher who does not acknowledge the One Source of All things and keeps the credit to their own development and ego. That is dangerous pride and leaves out the Being that created everything. Even on the Eastern paths, there is the danger of not knowing this Being of Love that formed us. If you leave out God, then pride will put you in the place of God and then you will become corrupt.

War: Justification for greed

2008-01-30T10:06:00.000-08:00

Are there any courageous people anymore? Is any senator or congress person going to have the guts to say, “No,” to all aggressive actions on the part of our government? Can anyone stop this virulent military mentality that justifies destruction and killing when oil, power and money are at stake? We sell countries on their need for protection against forces within their territory that destabilize their economic lives as well as their peace of mind. We offer to come in and be peace-keepers while our own operatives have done the destabilization and weakened the governments of the countries we are feigning to help. We have so often sold these governments on the idea of our benevolent intercession while we capitalize on keeping their countries weak and unstable in order to justify our vampire greed for their resources. Who does not know this? And yet no one in power is doing anything about it. We are sapping our own strength to keep this insane war going while lying to the people that we are there to help the Iraqis figure out how to manage their own troubles.

There is a major need in the U.S. for our people to get an education in order to see both sides of these issues. We need to educate our children so that they have a choice over whether they will believe the lies the leaders of our country tell our people. If they are educated, then they will learn that things are never simple and that many needs have to be addressed in order to make any decision in support of interfering in another country’s affairs. The U.S. has almost never been self-sacrificing in its excursions into foreign soil. We have exploited and destroyed many governments with the eye of gaining an advantage and getting a leg up of control over that particular part of the world. It used to be Panama, then El Salvador, Guatamala and Honduras. Then there was Chile for the copper rights since Chile has 40% of the worlds copper. Then there was Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Somalia, Serbia/Croatia and many more conquests in the hypocritical name of peace. The U.S. has a terrible reputation in the world as being a bully and using people for our own political ends.

Is anyone going to figure out that we are the enemy?

We have violated human rights and the sovereignty of so many governments, is it any wonder that we are hated and feared by billions of people.

We need to educate people about the world and about the devastation caused by use of force waged in the interest of peace. Peace has rarely been the result of any U.S. action in the last 50 years. Does anyone care about this?

Are Ghosts Real?

2008-01-15T08:43:00.001-08:00

Ghosts are real, excepts ghosts don't have material bodies. They have a spiritual body that has an energy to them and a consciousness. A ghost is a spirit that is either earthbound and hanging out on the earth in the usual places they used to hang out and live in when they were living on the earth in physical bodies. If they are dark and negative, or indulged in any addictions while they were alive on earth, then they often try to hang around those who are indulging themselves in the same way so they can live vicariously through people and their addictions here. These negative spirits are human beings who got lost in the spiritual world or who were so undeveloped and ignorant of the many mansions of life that they just go back to the same house they used to live in and haunt that place. If they are very dark and negative they will hate the new tenants or owners and try to disturb them into leaving. What is sad about a lot of people, is that when they die they don 't know they are dead. This is usually because they carry so little light in their consciousness that they are dense and sluggish. So when they die they still think they are alive and go back to the same places they used to hang out in when they were here on earth. For those who are little more evolved spiritually, they go through a personal judgment where they see the deeds of the body and the things they were supposed to learn and get evaluated. Most people will see that they grew very little and accomplished only a very small part of what they signed on to accomplish before they incarnated.

Sometimes a spirit will hang out somewhere because they were so dense spiritually that they did not know they were dead and so do not even get that there is another realm and something important to be doing out of the body.

If you run in to a negative spirit haning out in a house, you should pray to Jesus and Mary to come and escort them off to the judgment so they can move on and grow in experience away from the earth. they will be able to move along faster if they don't hang out anywhere on the planet. The real negaties will need some major coercion to get them evicted. But they have to go if you decide they have to go. The more ignorant ones are not nasty or negative, just completely unspiritual and so very dense. These just have to be escorted into the spiritual side of life and in to the light for review and new working papers. Spirits are not trapped in any condition in the spiritual world and so with help they can be moved along. The negative spirits are stubborn and prideful and so do not take suggestions. They must be told in no uncertain terms that they are not welcome and then call Jesus and Mary to throw them out and guard your house to keep them out. You prepare yourself in prayer before you confront any spirit to make sure you carry a peace and a light of Jesus and Mary that is strong enough to withstand any confrontation or doubt that the spirit reflects to you. You have to know and be sure in order to throw these out. Without a relationship to Jesus and Mary, you will not be effective in throwing a negative spirit out of your house. This is the job for the trained, spiritually conscious Priest.

You Don’t Own Your Children

2008-01-02T08:41:00.000-08:00

You have heard that your children come through you and that they are not yours. They are God’s children because God made them souls. Yes, you gave the gift of love in forming a physical body for your children, but you had nothing to do with the making of that soul. That child’s soul existed for ages long before you came into the picture. They were having hundreds of experiences before you meet them. That child’s soul is not new. It is old, just like yours is. They are not a blank slate that the parents write the new code and information on. The child is a person who does not need to be shown how to exist in the world. What they need most from parents is training in three areas: body, mind and emotions. First the child needs to figure out how to run their body, reach for things and hold things without spilling. Then they need to form words and figure out the rules of this material life on earth and then they need to get a grip on the explosions of emotions that come with adolescence. It is a tumultuous time and parent’s job is to guide and support the development of the child’s body, mind and emotions. You don’t make their personality so you are not installing philosophy. Parents train and discipline and love the child visitor, doing everything you can to bring out the qualities of this new person. Then around 19 or 20, your job is over and you need to let them go. The young adult needs to make their way in the world and get some education and then they need to be self-supporting. Until then, parents worry a little about the ability of the launched young adult to handle things well in the world and among their peers. That is normal. But worrying too much and helping too much means that the parent feels guilty that the kid is not prepared. It also sends a strong message that you think they are incapable of handling their own life. So be careful not to hover and over manage each step of independence. Let the young adult learn some things on their own without your voice and energies in everything they do. Back off a little because you don’t own them and they need to be given back to God who made them.

Atheism is a Religion

2007-12-21T10:16:00.000-08:00

Everywhere there is talk of freedom of religion and Atheists are banding together to create support and political power to make sure their beliefs, or lack of them, will be as valued and respected as any other belief. There are schools where morals and values are taught as long as no mention of Jesus, or God or any other Avatar, Sage or Saint slips through the lips of the teachers. It is felt that everyone is entitled to their beliefs and in fact, it is a country where religious belief is protected and respected. Is Atheism a religion? It looks like it is since it has the same chances of being proved right as any other religion. What I mean is that when it comes to beliefs, there is little proof they can be tangibly convincing. Even the belief in God cannot be proved; it can only be felt or hoped for. Atheism is defined as believing there is no God. It is the firm trust that there is no God. I do not hold that belief, but it is as hypothetical as any other belief. A belief is something that one hopes in or has faith in. A belief supports a person’s idea and fits well with their picture of the world. To the atheist, God is not relevant and does not explain anything, so they have no use for God in their scheme of life. It is interesting that you have to propose a God, in order to suggest that God does not exist. You have to think of God in order to say that God does not exist.

As long as we are in the realm of beliefs, we cannot prove who is right about whether there is a God. When we die, we will find out. It is amusing for those of us who have been out of our bodies many times to hear of this question. When you are out of your body, you take your feelings, your thoughts, your consciousness, your memories and your spirit and soul with you and are fully conscious and awake while your physical body is resting comfortably on the bed or couch. Immediately you are impressed with the feeling that the body is the smallest, most insignificant part of you and that most of you is floating there hovering above your body. Being out of the body does not prove God’s existence either. But it does give you the experience of a liberation from the confines of the three dimensional world and the material world. Some might say it is an unreliable experience since it is subjective. Well, so is your feeling happy when the sun comes out.

We can’t prove much. But real experience of something goes a long way to convince most people that there is something very real going on in the Universe that is both ordered and conscious and loving. I will be amused to see some of my non-believing friends leave this world and be fully conscious in the spiritual dimensions. I would love to see the look on their spiritual faces, because that look will be priceless.

What Is Love

2007-12-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

Most people don’t have the slightest idea of what love is. It is not a fantasy or an imaginary idea in your head. Love has very little to do with a self-conscious feeling of how you feel while getting someone else to like you. It is not about me watching myself noticing you watching me. That is selfishness and really gives nothing of you to another human being. It is self-serving and so, could be done alone. Love is honoring and respecting another person to the point of being very interested in their feelings, who they are and what makes them do what they do. Love means you care about someone and you are willing to be transparent enough to allow the other to care about you in return. You open your heart and share everything that they want you to share. You do not engage in any games or manipulations because you value each other too much for that kind of gyrations.

Love has nothing to do with control. Control is for those who don’t trust life and can’t trust other people. Control is orchestrating another person so that you don’t scare yourself half to death, making them give you guarantees and pledges of love so you can coast in some false security. Life is not secure because anything can happen. Life is an adventure because a person’s longevity or survival is unknown. You cannot secure a partner or friend and garner some kind of guarantee that nothing will change between you. I can guarantee that one of you will change and that will upset the delicate balance of the relationship, especially if you have formed a rigid view of what your relationship is supposed to represent or be for you.

Love is for those who know themselves, because if you don’t have a solid core of self-esteem and self-awareness, you will not have a self with which to love anyone. You have to have a self in order to give it to another person. Most people are secretly hoping that they will become a whole person by being with the one you love. But if you are a broken or only half a person and you find a person to love or be loved by, they will not be able to fix you and make you whole. You will have to do that all by yourself, whether in or out of a relationship.

What Is A Saint?

2007-12-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

According to the dictionary, a saint is a holy and extremely virtuous person. Throughout all cultures, stories have been told about people who graced this planet with a life and spirit that left a lasting impression on the soul of humanity. Their deep connection with and love for God and people edifies us spiritually as we study their lives. It is for this reason that the Order of Christ teaches the lives of various saints in all of our Centers of Light around the world.

Each Saint was not like any other saint. Each one was unique in their qualities and expression and had their own personal way of relating to God. But each led a life of intense love for God, exhibiting great courage and determination to do whatever they felt God was calling them to do. Their contemporaries often treated them with disdain and hatred, persecuting and killing many of them. The Roman Church, who determines the criteria upon which sainthood is measured, were the very ones who persecuted and had difficulty accepting and honoring the saint while they lived. After some time, and after the saint’s writing and deeds were recognized and attested by those whom they had helped, they were often seen to have been souls of extraordinary spiritual connection to God. In some religions, saints would be honored with different titles, such as “holy person” or “master.” But such honors did not come easily. The Roman Catholic criteria for canonization requires specific and difficult standards to be met. The reason for this is that once a saint is canonized, a saint can be asked to intercede for souls on earth, granting them special blessings from God. There has to be some evidence of a miraculous life on the part of the saint in question. In many instances, the physical body of the saint, regardless of his or her religion, did not decay after death, sometimes for centuries. In Europe, many such examples are displayed in Christian Churches, lying in glass-sided coffins, showing bodies that are entirely or mostly preserved. This is evidence that these saints had the ability to change what was corruptible into something incorruptible. Mystics understand that this is due to the amount of Light that these great souls took into their body. Their body became more Light than flesh, and Light is not corruptible.

While it is true that many people have become saints historically, the ones who judged whether a soul was a saint were primarily those who had questionable spiritual lives and were often poor examples of the spiritual life themselves. Political influences often darkened the process of selecting and evaluating whether someone was a saint. Many real saints were killed and tortured, while some people who were sainted were hardly more honorable than an average person. This lack of discrimination on the part of church leaders is precisely the reason they persecuted the real saints in the first place. Many horrible things have happened in the name of God throughout the centuries. Those leaders of the church with real spiritual sight and holiness were few and far between, and most were not spiritually developed enough to perceive real holiness in another human being, while they were themselves dark and corrupt.

In our Order, we find the study of saints to be spiritual uplifting and inspiring. We are inspired by their love for God and their service to people. We seek to emulate them, so that our lives can be an inspiration and a blessing to others as well.

WHAT IS A SPIRITUAL SCHOOL?

2007-11-28T20:46:00.000-08:00

How is the Order of Christ/Sophia one?

A Spiritual School is an Inner Path. The inner Path of Islam is Sufiism. The Inner Path of Judaism is Caballah. The Inner Path of Buddhism is Zen Buddhism. The Inner Path of Christianity is Mystical Christianity. The Order of Christ/Sophia is an Inner Path and a Mystical Christian Path. We are a Spiritual School because we teach the ancient wisdom that all students have learned from a long oral tradition passed down from Teacher to student. The inner teachings were always passed down in this way from ancient times to this day. A Spiritual School has Teachers and students; Masters or Priests and disciples. The disciples learn from the Teachers or Priests about the spiritual life and about themselves.

In a Spiritual School, book learning is less emphasized than interior, meditative training. Students are asked to go within in meditation to learn about themselves and about God at the center of their being. They work with spiritual exercises and meditations designed to bring them into the Illumination and into Self-Realization. In our Order new students are assigned a Priest to teach them who will watch over their spiritual growth. The student will be given exercises, meditative practices and will be counseled on various aspects of their spiritual life. In time, the student opens their awareness of their own purpose in life and of the nature of their own being in relation to God. Spiritual development and spiritual consciousness are the sole basis of advancement into higher consciousness or deeper levels of responsibility.

The purpose of a real spiritual school is to bring the student face-to-face with God at the center of their being. This is not a mental concept but an actual experience. Spiritual experience changes a person from someone who is speculating to someone who actually, really knows what is real. The purpose of a spiritual school is to bring a person as far as they can go spiritually in any particular lifetime. Through dedication to the Way and obedient devotion to the process of the spiritual lessons given, the student comes to know what the Teacher knows. The knowledge is experiential rather than cerebral and so demands a complete transformation of our personality. All the old concepts about life are shattered in the awakening of who one really is and how each person was created.

A spiritual school is as different from a theological seminary as a recipe is different from the food that one will experience when eating it. Theology is for the brain while spiritual experience is for the soul and the heart.

The Priesthood

2007-11-18T21:58:00.000-08:00

The Life of Jesus Christ and Mother Mary are the prototype of the outpouring of the Priestly expression. They are the perfect embodiment of the Mediators between God and human beings. Through their example we know what it is like to taste of Heaven and become sons and daughters of God like they demonstrated. Jesus and Mary are the High Priests for all the people of the earth. They were the perfect Masters over creation and had complete power and authority over all the lessons and experiences of earthly, human life. No human beings have ever walked the earth who had more perfection or love for human beings than these two advanced souls. All the future expressions of the Priesthood come from them. In the Order of Christ/Sophia, Mary and Jesus are considered to be the High Priests and the prototype pattern for any true Priesthood on the planet.

A true Priest is one who has patterned their life on Jesus and Mary, because they are learning to embody the role of mediator between God and human beings. A Priest is a person who is set apart and made holy by virtue of their spiritual consciousness. It is not by academic training in a seminary that one becomes a Priest. A Priest has to demonstrate a consciousness of their own divinity and they have to know God if they are to bring souls back to God. A Priest is one whose every thought and action becomes a blessing that guides, a light that inspires, a comfort that heals and a teaching that reveals the mysteries of creation. A Priest is not a title, but an action and a grace pouring through a human vessel. If a Priest does not serve and does not bless, then they are no Priest. Jesus talked about coming “not to be ministered to, but to be the servant of all.”That is the example. A Priest gives their life in service to raising up, teaching and training disciples in how to follow God and ultimately become like God.

A true Priest is not dedicated to an institution, but to Christ. They are called to serve and are given the job of bringing people into direct relationship with their Creator.

A Priest stands in for God until the disciple can make the connection to God by their own striving and devotion. A Priest has the obligation to be a midwife to souls that long to return to their Creator. The Priest has given their life for those they serve. Their life is an outpouring of grace and blessings with the purpose of moving people along on the spiritual Path towards oneness with God. In our Order, a Priest can Baptize, Marry, Absolve sins, train and teach disciples, give Last Rites and bring people into the Light of Christ, or the Illumination. They are the shepherds of souls who guide human beings into the spiritual life of grace and truth .They have the responsibility to give people the keys to the Dominion of God and must take anyone who seeks, into the inner teachings. The Priest must be Self-Realized, meaning they must know God from first-hand experience if they are to be able to serve as a guide for others.

WHAT ARE THE SACRAMENTS?

2007-11-11T09:03:00.000-08:00

BRINGING HEAVEN INTO EARTH

A Sacrament is a visible form of an invisible grace. Each of the seven Sacraments involves an outward sign that moves spiritual power into the life of the person receiving them. Baptism, Communion, Confession, Confirmation, Marriage, Last Rites and Holy Orders are the seven Sacraments. Only two were formally instituted by Jesus Christ: Baptism and Communion. The others are realities implied by the words and actions of Jesus. In each of the Sacraments a spiritual power and grace is brought into the life of the disciple so that Heaven will be experienced in the flesh body.

The Priest or Minister directing the Sacrament must be spiritually conscious for the graces and powers to be fully present in the action of the Sacrament. In the Order of Christ/Sophia, both the recipient and the Minister must be aware of the purpose of the Sacrament in order for it to be most effective. The Word of God manifests through the action of the Sacraments and brings human beings into a closer relationship with God and the Holy Spirit. All the movements, actions and words of the Sacrament are important as they give the recipient a place to focus their minds while the grace and divine energies of God are moving through into the physical world because of the Word used by the Priest or Minister. The Sacraments are a window or door through which divine powers and blessings come into the life of human beings. The result is that human beings are moved into a higher spiritual consciousness and closeness to their Father-Mother God.

Some might say that Sacraments are empty rituals and thus are unnecessary for spiritual growth. It is true that empty rituals are meaningless and not helpful. But a Sacrament that is infused with spiritual consciousness and the knowing of a spiritually developed Priest makes a tremendous difference in the feeling and presence in the Sacrament. The Priest then becomes an integral part of the Sacrament, having themselves taken on a sacramental character in the process of being raised up in the Sacrament itself. The Sacraments we use are the form created to hold the Presence of God while it manifests in the physical world. Only one Sacrament can be done more than once and that is Communion. Communion is repeated daily in some cases because the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ gradually and effectively changes and transforms the outer, earthly person into a son or daughter of Light. In time a person is transformed into a Lighted Being just like the way God created them in the beginning.

What Is Light

2007-11-08T15:32:00.000-08:00

Light comes from the Sun and shines enabling each of us to see. Light is both physical and spiritual. The radiant light that exists in atoms, photons and electrons is a manifestation of a spiritual light that is much less dense. In the Gospel of John it says: ‘And this is the Light that illumines every person that comes into the world.” In the Order of Christ/Sophia we teach that light is present in everything and everyone. As a person consciously steps onto the spiritual path and begins to work consciously with a teacher who takes them on as a student, the light begins to develop within them. At the Baptism, a conception of light takes place in the body of the recipient and this begins to grow during the process of training until the full Illumination of the physical body takes place. This Light is an experience and not merely a word or concept in the mind. It is real and actually causes changes and transformations of the flesh body.

It is not possible for the Light to be present in someone if they are putting out all kinds of negative thinking and angry thoughts. Negativity and light are incompatible because one is expansive and loving while the darker thoughts are constrictive, fearful and eclipse the light coming from God within us. Jesus spoke of light when he said, ”The light of the body is the eye. If your eye be single, your whole body will be full of light. If your eye be dark, then your whole body will be full of darkness.” This rather mystical teaching of Jesus shows the formula for how to come into the Illumination and how to experience light in the body. In our Order and our Centers of Light we show you how you can experience this as you work with one of our Priests. As you come to the classes and receive the sacraments and carry out the spiritual exercises and meditations your teacher gives you, you will gradually unfold your spiritual senses and your ability to handle the power of God in your body over time. The spiritual path is a series of changes and openings, as well as cleansing of the old patterns of thinking and misconceptions about life.

The Christ Light will show things up for what they are and you will see things more clearly than ever before. This Light will start a healing process in the body that starts the process of regeneration of the physical cells of the body. The Light will be an experience where in a darkened room when you look inside in meditation, you will see your whole body filled with the Christ Light. It is an experience and not a mental concept. The Light is not an analogy or an allegory. It is a real experience that our students experience, who have been with us for a little while. The more one places their attention on God, the more Light they will experience and the more Light they will emanate to the world. Remember God is within us.

Who Was Mary

2007-10-31T10:23:00.001-07:00

The Bible says that Mary was a virgin of exceptional purity and devotion to God. Many people get very hung up on whether She was a virgin or not. It seems funny that people often question that more than whether God created the universe. Surely it would be no big deal for a God who created the universe to fertilize an egg in a young girl's womb. But more importantly, we of the Order of Christ/Sophia teach that Mary's life was given as a model for how one is to come to birth the Christ within our beings. We know for a fact, that she was a virgin. She was the most evolved human being in a feminine body to have ever walked the earth and came with a mission to be the vessel for the Christ to be born. The reason for this is that the first step on the inner path to God is for us to begin to long to experience the Presence of God within our beings. We begin to ask God to come into us and make God's home within us, and start to grow in us. When we have prepared ourselves by cleaning up our acts in our inner and outer lives, i.e., becoming pure as it is said was the chief characteristic of Mary, then we are ready to receive the seed of Light to be planted within our beings.

Through the Sacrament of Baptism, when done by a Priest or Deacon who is conscious of what they are doing, the seed of Divine Light is brought down into the person where the conception of the Light within that person's being occurs. The place in you into which God enters and in which the Divine Light is conceived and begins to grow is by necessity virginal, which is defined as "untouched by man" or in this case, untouched by the mind of man, the human mind. What this means is that your conscious mind cannot go there, it cannot control this conception of the Light within you, neither can it understand what is happening. This place of conception of the Light in you is pure and holy and untouched by your mind, virginal. So we in fact know that that part of the story of Mary is true, because it is true within us.

We also know that the human part of our mind is not the father of that Light of God that gets conceived in us. That Light has no earthly father, which means it is no creation of ours. It births THROUGH us but we did not make it happen. So this also confirms that the conception of the Light in us is by necessity is an Immaculate Conception.

When Mary had prepared Herself during all of Her early life to be a vessel for God's Will to move through, God did not simply suddenly impregnate Her. God sent God's messenger, the Archangel Gabriel, to tell Her She had been chosen, and to ask Her to become the Vessel for the Christ to birth through. Only after She gave Her consent, did the Immaculate Conception occur. So it is with us. God will never force God's Will on us. When we have prepared ourselves to be carriers of Light, God still awaits our open and willing consent to being impregnated with God's seed of Light, before that seed is planted in us. So a person wanting to begin to walk the Mystical path to God must ask for baptism, do a thorough preparation for it, and then confirm that they are ready and willing to receive the Christ Light within them.

Who Was Mary

2007-10-31T10:23:00.000-07:00

What is the Inner Meaning of the Scriptures?

2007-10-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Scriptures refer to all Holy and inspired writings of the world’s basic religions. Each world religion was founded by a great Teacher who was sent by God to bring a particular set of teachings to raise up human beings. There is the Holy Bible in Judea-Christian teachings, the Koran in Islam and the Zenda-Vesta in Hindu teachings. There are many others all inspired by God. But in the Order of Christ/Sophia the New Testament is used primarily along with selected readings from the Old Testament. The simple reason for this is that Jesus came to fulfill the Mosaic Law and embodied the Grace and Truth for the future generations of human beings. There are many books and writings that are inspired by God and contain beautiful truths. Truth can never be confined to one book or one place only, for God can reveal God’s truths whenever and to whomever God wants.

To understand the stories and teachings in the New Testament it is necessary to put yourself in the place of the characters in the stories and internalize what the experience must have been like. There is an actual historical emphasis to many of the stories and some of the things actually were first-hand accounts of witnesses. Then there is the inner meaning that can only be realized if you see all the characters and parts of the story as parts of yourself. The part of us that is like Jesus Christ or Mother Mary are the divine, godly aspects of ourselves that perform the most magnificent miracles and give the most real teachings and lessons for us to learn. The various disciples are aspects that really want to learn and enter into training by God. The Pharisees and Sadducees are the parts of us that have to know the rules and carry those out rigidly to the letter. These are the inner theologians and the lawyers that argue the truth into fine shreds that are barely recognizable once digested and processed by the lower mind. Students of the Order of Christ/Sophia have weekly Bible Contemplations that focus on one particular story to gain the interior understanding of what the passage reveals as it works inside of us. There is the part of us that recognizes the Master Jesus immediately and leaves all to follow Him. There is the part of us that has secret pride and wants to convince the Master to take us on as a disciple even though our ambition is to be famous and powerful along side of Him. That is the Judas part of us that will eventually betray the Christ.

As we gather in one mind and one heart, the inner teachings of Jesus’ teachings are revealed as energies and forces within our own being. The most humble event is the moment when something is conceived within us as in the Immaculate Conception of the Christ within Mother Mary by the Spirit of God. As we prepare ourselves spiritually we too are able to give birth to the Christ Child within our own being. Those are very humble beginnings and the Herod part of us quickly feels threatened and wants to kill the child. Our own ego and lower conscious mind wants to kill anything holy and sacred because it feels threatened and feels it will be dethroned. Each step of the way of the life of the Master Jesus is a portrayal of what a spiritual student will have to go through in an internal way on the way to God. The New Testament is the road map of the process of spiritual unfoldment for every true spiritual aspirant.

What Is Love

2007-10-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

When people “fall” in love they are usually afflicted with a condition that borders on intoxication or ecstasy. The endorphins start flooding the system and people start doing things they would usually think better about doing if they weren’t “in love.” But there is a complete disconnect in most people about what love really is. In the Order of Christ/Sophia we teach people that love is something you decide, something you create because you want to. This takes the ethereal fluffiness out of being in love or falling in love. Romantic love conjures up feelings of celebration and passion, while the attraction is intense and powerful. But those feelings are often mostly physical and frequently people have not even taken the time to find out who the other person really is.

Love is a channel for the power, force and energy of God to move across the ocean of space, flowing towards a person of your choosing. Most people don’t think of love as a choice, but it is. It does not come from out of the blue like a contagious disease spread by the wind. You can’t catch it by accident. Our students are taught the mythology around love and shown how they can become channels of love in all they do and in each relationship. The sticky, suffocating love that most people grow up with is replaced by deep respect for another human soul. We need to be taught how to get to know someone before deciding to commit to a relationship. This getting-to-know phase of a relationship is vital in order to find out whether two people are compatible and have similar strivings and goals.

One of the blocks to love is a secret hatred of oneself that is hidden and unshared with a potential partner. If you love someone and secretly hate yourself, then you will not be able to receive love in a deep way and you will block the other person’s love from entering that walled-off part of yourself that you loathe. You can’t really love another if you don’t love yourself and you can’t receive love if you don’t love others. In our spiritual school, we are taught the subtleties and patterns in relationships and how to communicate respectfully and responsibly with others. Love is seeing God in another person and knowing that the God in them is the same as the God in you and honoring that. We are able to love, because God first loved us by creating us. We can’t know anything we don’t love and so our interest in God or a partner is required so that we can know them in order to love them. The infatuation, attraction energy of most early relationships is not love yet. It is chemistry maybe. It is intense, yes. But love may not be present until they each come to know one another deeply.

Another pattern in relationships is for people to look for a remedy and healing for all the love they did not receive when they were little. So they seek out a partner who has a complementary wound like they do and then work to get the love they did not receive. Both partners are doing the same thing and so at some point realize they might not get what they want and start to compete with each other. This causes all kinds of problems. Power struggles, protecting oneself and attacking each other result from the wound of not getting love the way you demand it from the other person.

Love is the bond that connects one part of God with another part of God.

How to Find a Spiritual Teacher

2007-10-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

Many people are looking for a spiritual life. There are many religions in the world that help people learn about God. However, when a person wants to truly experience God within themselves a teacher is required. In the Order of Christ/Sophia, every student is assigned an individual teacher who will personally guide and counsel the student in the spiritual life. The teacher will instruct the student in their spiritual exercises and guide them in developing a clear and real relationship with God at the center of their being. The teacher will teach the student how to meditate, to pray and to open themselves to connect with God.

There is a vast difference between someone who has read books on various subjects and then begins to teach people those things they have just read, and someone who is a real spiritual teacher. A true spiritual teacher must have humbly submitted to the direction of a spiritual teacher themselves in order to be called a true teacher. This humility is necessary as it was God’s plan that only those who are humble enough to allow themselves to be instructed and led have any divine right granted to them to teach others. The ones who teach in the Order of Christ/Sophia have all been trained and empowered to teach and counsel spiritual students. They have allowed themselves to be taught and know how to bring students into a direct relationship with God. Deacon Ministers and Priests teach classes, counsel students and serve the Sacraments as part of their mission.

Choosing a teacher involves some practical sense. What you should look for is integrity in the teacher. The teacher needs to be honest, loving and dedicated to God. They have to have the experience of God or how can they impart that relationship to prospective students? Many people believe in God, but few have entered into the “narrow gate” that Jesus talked about where they experience God. The teacher must have the experience of the spiritual path in order to guide students through the many transformative changes that are necessary to come into real communion with God.

Our Order is a real inner spiritual path with the clear mission of bringing students into the Light of Christ or Illumination. There are steps along the way that every soul must follow. There are many things that have to be unlearned along the way that have been taught by being in a physical body on planet earth. The teacher has the ability to see the blocks in the students that need to be released and cleansed away in order for the student to become who they were created to be.

Beliefs Will Not Help

2007-10-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

A belief is a wish, a hope a longing or a faith in something. It is a start. It is one child’s step towards something. If you are disciplined you might arrive at a place of real experience. Experience is a much deeper place than a belief because an experience is something that tangibly happens to us and creates the condition of knowing. We know for sure only if we have an experience. Beliefs never bring this kind of certainty because they don’t know for sure yet. Experience brings a knowing that is solid and real and not open to argument or debate. When one knows, then all arguments or debates become silly. When we know, there is nothing that can prove this experience to someone else. Another person might believe we have had such an experience, but the experience cannot be understood through explanation. We would have to go through the same experience ourselves to know in the same way as one who already had such an experience. When a Katrina, an earthquake or a devastating war occurs, only what we really know for sure will help us get through it. If we merely have a set of beliefs, we will not be able to make sense of the death and sorrow around us. Beliefs will not help us when really bad things happen. If we have a real experience of peace or love or God, then we will be able to keep that center of peace, love and God inside us and we will not be knocked off the track by the catastrophe. We are tested severely in such times and most of us fail the test because we do not have that rock solid knowing which comes from experience to hold on to.

We believe in God but have not experienced God. We have not seen God or heard God’s voice and so we do not know from experience who God is and how God is in relationship with us. Beliefs should move you toward an experience, but they are not enough.

No Problems

2007-10-08T19:11:00.000-07:00

Do you have a lot of problems? Are you plagued by concerns and worries and fears and sadness? Are you carrying those burdens all by yourself? Because, if you are, then you need to learn to be more practical. Being practical is doing something constructive about a problem. For example, if you are sad all the time, what are you sad about? What is making you sad? Is it a situation or a person? If it is a situation, then what might you want to change about it? If it is a person, what would you want that person to know so they would help change it? If you are sad, then you have to make some serious changes. You cannot keep being sad for very long without more trouble occurring, like illness or trouble in relationships. Sadness is there so that you are called to attend to what is bothering you. You are sad because something is not going the way it should or someone is hurting you or a situation needs dire attention so that it can be changed. A feeling is there so that you will make a decision about it.

Something needs to be decided or you would not have a strong feeling. It is purposeful much like an alarm that sounds off in your home. It is designed to be an early warning that something dangerous or important is happening and needs attention. So get up and do something about it. Your feeling is not there to just space out and keep feeling it without doing something about it. It is there are as fire alarm to wake you up so you will get up and take care of it, by making a decision. The decision you make should move the energy along to solve the problem. When you have a feeling, it either needs to be expressed or it is there to make you decide something different than you have been deciding. That is what the feelings are for.

When you treat your feelings with respect and honor them by responding constructively to them, then you will have no problems. You will have progress and growth since you don’t hold things inside you mulling over them and not acting by deciding how you are going to change something. You have to change when something is not working. That is practical.

Life Is Short

2007-10-02T17:56:00.001-07:00

You don’t know how long you have to live. You don’t have any idea how much time you have to learn the things you have not mastered and the things you still want to contribute to life. There is no guarantee you will see your grandchildren and if you have them, there is no guarantee that you will see them grow up. I just got the news that my 19 year old nephew died in a motorcycle crash a couple of days ago. He was a college student studying Engineering at an Eastern college and was riding in Boston with his girlfriend. The girlfriend was brain dead for 12 hours before she died and my nephew was dead at the scene after he ran the motorcycle into a tree.

Life is short. I prayed for him and my brother and his wife. When I went into meditation to visit my nephew a day after the accident, he was stunned and confused about where he was and what had happened. He was really shook up and sad that he was catapulted out of his body and his life, as he knew it, is over. He has to re-assess his life and what is next and will have an adjustment time out of his body until he is able to be ready to come back and be born as a baby again with a different set of parents and a different family line. He cut his life short by 50 years because of a driving mistake and not compensating for a curve in the road sufficiently to make the turn at the speed he was going. Now that he is a soul out of a body, he gets to see what his life might have been and will have some regrets for whatever he did not take care of while he was here. He is very much alive and well, but has not mastered the lessons of earth and the material plane. So he has to come back and do that next time.

In the last three months, my 26 year old niece died of a heroin overdose and then my nephew. In my family of 12 brothers and sisters and 22 nieces and nephews, there have been no deaths since 1978 when my last grandmother passed away. That is kind of phenomenal for a very large family to not have any deaths in almost 30 years.

So now we get to experience two deaths of the younger ones in three months. Many people would get mad and blame someone or blame God. God has sole power over life and death and that is where it should be respected. But people often interfere and then have to suffer the karma of forcing death or manipulating a life or killing another person. That is a very heavy karma. We did not create life or death and so we have no rights, whatsoever, over that department. You can definitely learn to trust that the process of life and death is well in God’s hands. Respect it.

Don't Celebrate Your Children - Teach Them

2007-09-12T19:49:00.000-07:00

For years now, parents have been coddling and celebrating their children, enjoying everything they say and do. There has been a tendency to think that children just grow up on their own with all of the necessary ingredients installed. It is true that children grow physically as long as you feed them. It is true that their curiosity and interest in things develops with stimulation from the world, from school and from circumstances. But it is not true that they grow up emotionally unless someone takes them under their care to watch them and teach them. Children need plenty of structure or they won't feel safe and secure. They thrive on structure and knowing what to expect, so give them plenty of structure. But if you are laissez faire in your parenting style and just coasting along thinking time will grow them up, then you are headed for one of those kids they say have a deficit of attention. That simply means the parents were too busy to pay attention and did not know how to teach their kids. Or worse, they felt that instructing the kid in how to behave and interact with others, how to help mom and dad, how to use their inside voice as opposed to their outside voice, were not useful things to teach. What about telling your child about life, about how things work, like the tides, the sun and moon, how cares work, what lightning and thunder come from and all those interesting things. What about letting the child hear the sound of your voice reading and getting used to who you are as a person instead of some working icon that vanishes in the morning and is hardly alive in the evening. You have to teach your kids if you want them to grow up independent and capable. You have to instruct them and discipline them if you want them to know how to make decisions competently. You have to give them structure and consequences and encouragement if you want them to be able to walk out into real life at 19 for college and expect to thrive out there. You have to wake up to your responsibility to train that little body so it can make itself do things when it is old enough to expect its own performance. Academics is only partially important compared to character development. I see so many parents who have no clue how to train and teach their children. Please learn to speak to the child and not yell at them. Look them in the eye and talk to them like a person, not like a little toy doll. They understand completely what you say to them, so talk in a regular voice, but don't yell. It hurts them and scares them.

Is Jesus God or Is Jesus A Human Being?

2007-09-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

There is a notable confusion about the topic of Jesus being God and Jesus being merely a human being. Many evangelical and fundamentalist churches say Jesus was God. I wonder if they are aware that he was a human being? They may give lip service to his humanity, but the sense I get in talking to many people is that Jesus is either God or you are not a Christian. I have been asked this question many times and I have an answer that you probably won’t like. Jesus was a human being just like you and I are human. Jesus was also God cloaked in human flesh, just like you and I are God cloaked in human flesh. Now, that difference is (before you react and lose your perspective) is that all human beings are gods in the making and have the Divine Being within them, just like Jesus did. With most human beings, it is difficult to see or witness any godly energy coming from them and so many have concluded that we are completely different from Jesus. Jesus said, “Know you not that you are gods.” That means he was aware that by teaching his disciples we would become like him and like God. Jesus also said, “It is enough that the disciple be like his/her Master.” Jesus was not stupid and taught with the full consciousness that those he taught could become like him. That is, in fact, what happened. The Apostles and many of the disciples demonstrated the same gifts of healing, raising the dead and demonstrating a transformed humanity that Jesus and Mother Mary did. So we have a long way to go to become like God. We will never be greater than God, but we are to become like God. That was the whole purpose of Jesus teaching and showing us how we could be. But the churches have consistently mis-taught Jesus’ teachings and made it impossible for mere mortals to reach such heights. They apologize for our humanity and still encourage us, try as we might, to be good, but the expectation is that it is nearly impossible. That is discouraging to so many. Jesus did not teach that way.

What Is A Mystic

2007-09-01T17:25:00.000-07:00

I am a mystical Christian, called a mystic. The word “mystical” means a spiritual reality not apparent to the senses. Mystical experience means an experience of God that does not necessarily come through the five senses. A mystical experience is different than having a belief because a mystical experience involves coming into a direct relationship with God. Feeling God, seeing God and knowing God can not be accomplished by belief alone. A belief in God can get a person started moving in the direction of eventually having a relationship with God. A direct personal experience of God is what every mystic strives to attain. A mystic is one who has the courage to find out who God is at the center of their being. A mystic meditates and prays and strives to be in close relationship with God throughout their day and throughout their life.

Only through a direct experience can you say you know anything at all. Belief in something may push you in the direction of finding out and may inspire you to hope for something. But knowing firsthand what is real and what God is will bring you into a solid and tangible relationship that does not wobble or falter.

Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” So if we look within for the experience of God, we will eventually find it. God is inside and not in some distant Heaven. Heaven is a state of experience where those who are with God and feel God’s presence start to live in Heaven, even while being in a physical body on the earth. The ministers made a mistake in teaching that Heaven was in the sky when you die. Heaven is an experience of God’s presence within the human soul and heart.

There have been many mystics and saints through the ages. Theresa of Avila, St. Francis, St. Clare, St. John of the Cross, and many others all entered into a deep experience of God within their own soul. They saw God and talked to God and were given great blessings and gifts that the average minister or Christian does not seem to have. To really follow Jesus Christ and Mother Mary, we would start to have the same experiences that they did while they were here on earth. The major feature of a mystic is that they are in union with God. They see god, they feel God, they hear God speak and they are in love with God who created them.

Let Yourself Be Helped

2007-08-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

When was the last time you really had to pray so that something bad did not happen? When was the last time you got very concerned that unless you prayed and asked for help from God, things would not work out well? Our lives often have many of these kinds of crisis moments which become opportunities to discover that without help, we cannot succeed. Sometimes it is the help of people that we need and more often than not, it is Divine help that we most certainly need. If you are not of the mind that God can help, then you are left with only one option of trying to do it yourself or get other people to help you. That might work. But mostly, it doesn’t. Because even Jesus said, “I, of mine own self, can do nothing.” He had to enlist the help of his Father/Mother God in order to demonstrate the many miracles and healings and teachings that he did. He was not above God and invoked God’s help always. If you want things to go better in your life, ask for help. Stop imagining that you were created to do things yourself or take care of things all by yourself. It is a sign of an egotist to think that you can do things without the help of the Creator who built you. Try asking for help. Then have the openness to allow God to help you and see how your life can be very different.

Hope

2007-08-23T12:49:00.000-07:00

Everyone needs hope. Hope is the scaffold that moves you to the next level of expectation. Hope has an emanating flavor and scent that makes people excited and enthusiastic when they come near you. A hopeful person is not brooding over an unlived life. A hopeful person has a confidence in the eventualities of life that make it possible to face the future without fear or worry. Some people are just unhinged enough to expect that good things are coming. Are they delirious or misguided? Have they no sense of perspective or reality orientation?
Hope puts your mind into a state where you know something is possible and you are expecting it to happen. When you hope, you have to ignore the doubtful, fearful ideas of your unworthiness to receive blessings from life and from God. When you hope you are going to be making people mad because a hopeful person is not open to fear and doubt and despair. Powerful, angry people want other people to be worried, fearful and almost despairing of things getting better around them. Oppressive people and oppressive powers want people afraid because then they won’t have the courage to say anything about how things are going. They have been scared into thinking things could get much worse if you speak up and ask for what you want. Things could get worse if you anger the parental authorities and so you should hide in your hole and keep your mouth shut and not speak up about what is important and what you hope for. A hopeful person is not afraid of what other people think or do or say. They go right on knowing that karma works out for all and whatever people put out they are going to get back. So the heavenly score card is well tallied and no one gets away with anything in the next life. Hope in what you want and don’t look to the right or the left and soon you will have what you have visualized.

Your Sexual Thoughts Really Have an Affect

2007-08-15T08:43:00.000-07:00

The world is getting darker and darker. Pornography is rampant and people imagine that since it doesn’t hurt anyone what they do all alone in their office or bedroom, that it does not matter. Everything human beings feel and think affects everyone else. Just because another person is not watching or does not witness your actions does not mean everyone is not affected by them. You put out a sexual energy or a lustful thought and it goes into your blood first of all and stirs you up. It poisons your blood first and then it starts to spark off in fantasy to the people you are visualizing and imagining actions with. Those people are slimed by that lustful energy and then your desire nature is fired up.
This repetitive desire causes a fire in your energy and lower chakras that start an addictive energy that craves for indulging. If you let it burn, then it starts to capture your whole attention. Now everyone is seen as an object of your fantasy and a target of your desires. You can’t get the images out of your mind for months and you start to obsess and yearn for these things. You are addicted and you don’t even know it.
When rats hooked up to electrodes in the brain area responsive to orgasm in a lab and were allowed to press a bar to get really good food pellets that rats crave or to press a bar that would induce an orgasm in their brain, the rats pressed the orgasm bar so many times that they forgot to eat and died. That is how addictive it is.
But sex is almost never about love on this planet. There is always craving, desire, attachment, fear, anger and entitled pride firing it up. If you are honest you will admit you have absolutely no control over yourself and you will start to think there is something wrong about that. You need to get a grip on that lower energy and raise that energy up to your heart so you can start to begin to commence to get ready to allow love to move instead of what you are calling love, which is just lust and desire.
Everyone is sold this pill and takes it daily and it is making them sicker and sicker.

What Are We Doing With Our Money?

2007-08-02T19:26:00.000-07:00

I have noticed lately all of these entrepreneurs loaded with money in a big race to fly people up 200 miles into the earth’s atmosphere for a few moments of weightlessness. Actually 2 minutes. And this is at the cost of $200,000 for a short ride in space. I guess if $200.000 is like $20 for them it makes sense. But think of how many poor kids could be fed or how many kids could be educated for that money.

Why are we shooting up in space when our earth has so many problems that incredible wealth could alleviate and fix? What the heck is happening to common sense? Does money make everyone stupid? I can see some noble examples of a good use of money, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and George Clooney, Oprah, and Bono, but those are a drop in the bucket of the sheer incredible needs in this world. I think people should land on the earth and get grounded and start to pay attention to their brothers and sisters on this planet and lend a hand.

Educating people is the one thing that will make a difference and help people to see the bigger picture. Only 20% of the US population has a college education which is sad and pathetic and makes for a rather unenlightened electorate. People don’t know the issues and don’t want to know. But going up in space costs $10,000 per pound of payload to put a payload into a low earth orbit. Why bother at that cost? Yes, I agree at some point we will be colonizing other planets, or we will be colonized by others, but we need to develop much cheaper and more efficient technologies to get there.

While we are doing that, we should be making a big difference here with the inhabitants of this planet.

You Cannot Grow Spiritually Through Words

2007-08-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

Jesus said, “Search the scriptures for in them you think you will find eternal life.” Some translators changed this over time and made it read: “Search the scriptures for in them you will find eternal life.” That is completely wrong and not what Jesus said at all.

Jesus taught one-on-one Teacher to disciple. He was saying that studying words will not get you into the Realm of God. It will not bring you into oneness with God. Only learning from a Teacher and hanging out with them will bring that consciousness to you by example and maybe it will rub off on you and you will acquire it by practice. Imagining that you could attain spiritual consciousness by academic study is ridiculous. All the seminary training in the world will not get anywhere close to God. You will have to be taught by one who has the experience and that connection or you cannot hope to obtain it. I get comments on www.youtube.com from people who get disturbed that I am not on board with their idea that the only truth is in the Word.

They mean the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles. I agree that very true things are taught there but I have to tell you that not all the truths are taught there. There are many books with truth in them. There are thousands of teachings of Jesus that were not recorded there and Jesus has recently made them known through Maria Valtorta in the 1940’s in five volumes The Poem of the Man-God. Check it out. It is his voice dictated to Maria Valtorta and is very real. I knew Jesus before I found out about these books and it is his voice. You will see how he taught the disciples. Dogma does not teach. Seminaries can’t teach about God. They teach about words and etymologies and definitions. So Jesus was specific that you cannot grow spiritually by study alone.

Constant Tension In Your Life

2007-07-23T18:19:00.000-07:00

Many people live in a state of tension in their bodies that they are not aware of and hardly ever notice. This tension in the body produces all kinds of trouble and disease from the stresses of life and holding onto feelings and attitudes that have a definite effect on the physical body. That is not news to anyone.
But how to decipher what you are feeling in your body is kind of mystery for most people. When things get really hard or really bad, it is easy to understand that something is wrong. But what about the slow, long-term state of tension in one's thinking and feeling that goes on for months and years? We often only realize too late the state of things when the effects of such low-burn, long-term tension, fear and worry has compromised our health. When there is a lull of activity or a vacation or an illness that puts us out of action for a while, we slowly realize in contrast how we have been living and what pressure we felt inside for so long. Most people tolerate and cope with such long-term circumstances and do not register they are suffering under its weight.

Take a few moments and breathe deeply and center your attention and consciousness on your belly below your heart. Breathe in full breaths and relax your belly and your mind. Notice the energy of your flesh body, how thick it is and how sluggish it is and see if you can tell how it feels separate from your feelings. Then feel your body and notice how it is of a different energy and substance from your mind. See if you have been carrying it around like a large trunk of clothes. Then feel you your emotions and feelings and see if they are relaxed or peaceful or radiant. If they are not feeling really light and warm and peaceful, then change them with your breathing so they move towards being more peaceful, light and airy and relaxed.

Then ask yourself if your life is going the way you want it to go. Ask yourself if you are tense in heart, mind or body and if you live that way most of the time. If you do, then you need to make some major changes so that things don’t deteriorate and become a real problem. It is up to you.

All Religions Need More Spirituality

2007-07-22T01:06:00.000-07:00

The world religions are composed of millions of people who believe firmly in God by whatever name. God could not actually care less what name God is called, but God definitely wants people to put God first, above all other considerations. I know some of you who are Buddhist will say Buddhism does not have God or a concept of God. But they do have Peace and compassion and mindfulness. With millions of people who are adamant about their belief being more right than another person’s, is it any wonder we have so many wars and such lack of peace? We need to respect each other better than that. There are millions and millions of followers of each religion that have no more spiritual life than a person who goes to Mass on Christmas and Easter, like millions of Christians. Once a week consideration of God is not enough. Twice a year devotion to God is no spiritual life at all. If you do not think of God each morning when you wake up, you are still too selfish to have any love for God at this point in your spiritual development. There is just as much hypocrisy in Christianity as there is in Islam and in Hinduism and in Buddhism. The founders of the religions taught a particular practice and the followers watered it down to something much more meaningless and superficial. Hypocrisy is everywhere across all religions. Jesus said, the present state of the world contains mostly Pharisees.
Someone who really practices a spiritual life is very rare in any religion. Most religions are tribal affiliations of generations and generations of families who believe the very same way. They don’t know why and they hardly ever examine what those beliefs are, much less put them into practice. Tribalism is the nemesis of all culture because it pits one group against another. Tribalism makes everyone else wrong or unacceptable. That is against God and is against love. Spirituality is much different than religion.

Jesus's True Voice

2007-07-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

I will quote from Maria Valtorta's 1943 The Notebooks p.261
Jesus is speaking to her: "Maria, now I will take your hand to lead you to the most obscure point in John's book. The annotators of it have exhausted their capacity in many deductions to explain themselves and to the multitudes who the 'great Babylon' is. With a human view, to which the jolts left by desired events or by events taking place were not unconnected, they have given the name Babylon to many things.
But how is it they have never considered that the 'great Babylon' is the whole Earth? I would be a very small and limited God the Creator if I had created only the Earth as an inhabited world. With a beat of my will I have brought forth worlds upon worlds from nothing and cast them as luminous fine dust into the immensity of the firmament..
The Earth, about which you are so proud and fierce, is nothing but one of the bits of fine dust rotating in unboundedness, and not the biggest one. It is certainly the most corrupt one, though. Lives upon lives are teeming in the millions of worlds which are the joy of your gaze on peaceful nights, and the perfection of God will appear to you when, with the intellectual sight of your spirits rejoined to God, you are able to see the wonders of those worlds. Isn't the Earth really the great harlot that has committed fornication with all the powers of earth and hell, and haven't the Earth's inhabitants prostituted themselves - bodies and souls - just to triumph during the earthly day? That is certainly the case. The crimes of the Earth have all the names of blasphemy, as the Beast does with whom the Earth and its inhabitants have allied themselves just to triumph. The seven sins are like a horrendous ornament on the head of the Beast, who transports the Earth and those of the Earth to the pastures of Evil, and the ten horns, a metaphorical number, serve to demonstrate the limitless acts of wickedness committed just to obtain, at any cost, what his ferocious covetousness wants."

Jesus goes on for some time explaining this if you want to obtain it.
This is Jesus' voice. I know how he speaks and how he teaches and it is really his undistorted words.

Universal Health Care

2007-07-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

I would like to see the people of this country become courageous again and demand universal health care for everyone who lives in this country. I would like to challenge a few Governors, Senators and Congressman to launch this on a state level and make a particular state the first in the country to insure everyone in the state providing everything they need to take care of their health for life. They must also remove all insurance companies from the equation. No premiums, no deductibles and no managed care. The one thing that must be addressed is the quality of care issue. People will not be allowed to sue their physician because that will unnecessarily raise the cost of care. Physicians will continue to be licensed by the state Board and will be paid salaries based on incentives of getting people well and encouraging preventive life syles. The Government will make sure health care workers are compensated for providing health care and will make sure each sick person receives the highest, state-of-the-art healthcare regardless of illness, ability to pay (because they won’t have to pay) or medical necessity. Because medical necessity will be decided by the physicians and hospitals that treat and not by a financial management team or an insurance company or paid Doberman doctor who is paid to turn people away from needed care or given a bonus for the number of people turned away from care or the amount of money they saved an insurance company. Scores of other countries manage to provide health care to their people and have not gone bankrupt. Far from it. It works. We are the slowest to get on board with this because we have allowed politics and insurance companies to run our country for financial motives instead of concern for our citizens. What is wrong with us that we have stood by and allowed this to happen?

Help the Sophia Retreat Center

2007-07-06T22:45:00.000-07:00

The Sophia Retreat Center in Dolores, Colorado located up on the Mesa in the Four Corners of southwestern Colorado has a charitable mission. That mission is to be a place of rest, healing and restoration for those Peace workers from around the world to come and relax and regenerate. The mountain air is pristine and clear, with a view of mountains in all directions. There is a profound silence and a restful atmosphere. The Sophia Retreat Center is dedicated to Peace among all the nations and religions. I want to ask all of you who really support Peace between people and nations to send generous donations even if small and humble of say $20 to the Sophia Retreat Center, by contacting Ruth or Amanda at 970-882-4920 and place your donation through credit card over the phone. Or if you prefer, send a check to Peace Temple Initiative, 19581 County Rd 31, Dolores, CO 81323. If you prefer to not have to think about it, we can set up an automatic checking deposit of a small amount each month to support the Retreat Center.

We have two large buildings now, one Main Lodge and our Mesa House that can house 75 people comfortably in a gorgeous setting and accommodations. Our goal is to provide lodging and rest for minimal or no charge to those who dedicate their time and life energies to helping other people in the area of peace action and peaceful co-existence around the world. Eventually we want to be able to rely on people’s generous support to be able to invite all peace workers to come and retreat with us to recharge and become invigorated and renewed before they go out and help in this very important mission of peace on earth.

Our goal is to build a conference center and a Peace Temple for meditation and prayer for all faiths to come and experience the peace of this pristine environment.
I thank each of you in advance for your generosity and participation in this incredibly necessary Peace Center. We have received $47,000 in the last month. We need a few million to make this a completely sustainable, solar energized place of peace. Please help us make this vision manifest and come true.
Father Peter

What Happens When Your Body Dies

2007-07-03T22:06:00.000-07:00

At the end of your life, you will have to account for the actions, thoughts, feelings and decisions of your lifetime. This one lifetime will be seen in the light of judgment and you will understand how you learned, whether you learned and what you experienced that moved you along spiritually. There is no other reason for life than to be connected to God and moving along spiritually. If you have no spiritual inclinations at all, then you have shut down your connection to the Source of God inside you. You have failed to listen within to God nudging you and trying to guide and help you. You have forsaken the only perfect Love you will ever have in life. That is what you will confront at the end of your life. God will be there and you will understand how important the most important Being in the Universe is to you. If you had no thought about God, then you will be very sad for having separated yourself so thoroughly from the Being that created you out of love. God will not be angry. That is your idea. God will be wondering what is wrong with you, a creature endowed with reason, who does not see that the one who created you is important to you. Since you came into incarnation on the earth for a reason, you will see after death all the ways you did not learn and did not accomplish all the things you set out to do while you were here on earth. You will see that those things still need to be accomplished and you will still need to learn things if you have not learned them. And since you didn’t learn them and refused to care about why you were here, you will have to come back and go through those lessons again in a different family with a different set of circumstances. It will be sad because you will have progressed so little on your soul’s journey. You have a soul, by the way. So you should attend to it and get some people to help you who know about soul, so that you won’t have to feel embarrassed for not learning anything from your stay on earth.

The People of this Country

2007-07-02T17:55:00.000-07:00

Do people really get that there is little time to change and straighten out your life? Is anyone noticing the signs of the times? The climate change alarm has sounded and has been heard and people are starting to be serious about making some small changes. We are fighting over making a 10% reduction in carbon emissions, but really we need to have 90% reduction within the next five years or we will be in very bad shape. This climate alarm is long in coming. But the real problem is the unrest in the hearts of people. People are more and more avaricious (greedy) for power, for sex, for money and for control over other human beings. There is more disrespect of other people now than there has been in decades. There is more cut-throat desire to indulge the senses and the sexual appetites than ever before, except maybe during the demise of the Roman Empire. Our American Empire is being exploited by those in power and I am not talking about politicians. Politicians seem impotent on every level to make the kinds of changes that would be in the interest of the people. The American Empire is collapsing. We no longer have a democracy. Only 20% of the U.S. population has been college educated. That is really sad, since being uneducated makes for very poor choices in the voting box. Politicians have to capitalize on the stupidity of people to get the votes, while the majority of the population does not understand complex issues and has not been taught how to think about things that are not simple. People are actually pretty sharp when it comes to sizing up other people even though there is a tendency for people to expect the worst from others.
How many people take 100% responsibility for what happens to them? How many still blame everyone else for the problems in the world? The world is run by those whose vices are pervasive and whose virtues are almost unnoticeable. It is very simple: unless you have a relationship to God, you cannot be happy.

The Garden

2007-06-25T20:14:00.000-07:00

I noticed on my return from traveling that our vegetable garden had not been weeded in quite a number of weeks and was overrun with weeds. I noted also that the regular watering schedule had been maintained and the ground was very moist and damp. The vegetables were growing well among the many weeds and it was difficult to determine which weeds are and which useful plants are. One observation from planting is that usually seeds are planted in straight rows which make it easier to identify them as similar and useful if they happen to have sprouted in a straight line. As I observed and watched, I could see certain ones that were in a straight line and those I did not weed. Everything else was a weed. That was simple. I know some of you who have gardened for years as I have, would have identified which ones were vegetables, which were flowers and which were weeds. But for those who are new at it, this basic practice will help. Then I got to the business of weeding and pulling and getting the roots out. Because if you don’t get the roots out of the plants you don’t want, they will come back stronger and tougher in a few days. It is just like problems in your psyche, if you just cut them off so they can’t be seen at ground level, the root system proliferates and gets tougher and stronger and more difficult to eradicate. Then another lesson revealed itself. If a person who did not know what was needed in the weeding department would just observe the different plants, soon it would be obvious that there was a whole bunch of weeds that had the same feel, the same look and the same color which would identify them as random, since they grow all over the place. Those are not planted in rows and so are wild and need to be cultivated and pulled out to stop them from growing everywhere. It is the same with a bad habit, if it happens anytime and anywhere in your life, it is random and out of control. Thus it is wild. That will choke the good plants when they come up and will starve the good plants of needed nutrients as it steals from the soil what it wants for itself. That kind of opportunist will take over and make it impossible for the useful plants to thrive and bear good fruit. The last thing that the garden taught me that morning was that if I loved the soil and the area I was working in, it would feel like I had been there. In other words, if I placed my whole attention on the soil and the weeds and the good plants and really spent concentrated attention and love in what I was doing, then the whole area would feel like a human consciousness had visited and it would thrive because of that attention. This is much the same with paying attention to who you are talking to. You spend the time focusing and letting your attention rest with them and appreciate what they are and how they are speaking and what they are saying and you don’t let you mind go anywhere else. Then they will know you met each other and were really in contact. Otherwise, you glaze over with your eyes the people you see, but never meet.

Your Shadow

2007-06-24T00:57:00.000-07:00

The part we see the least is our shadow. This is the part we often see in others but don’t recognize in ourselves. It is mostly out of view, but it comes into view through our dreams. It is personified in our dreams by the same-gendered characters that are near our same age. These people in our dreams carry the part of us that we usually project onto others and therefore do not see in ourselves. It is easy to get mad and intolerant with other people about a trait of character that is obnoxious and painful to experience, even though that trait is most likely within ourselves and we don’t recognize it. In dreams it shows up and we must learn to integrate it by accepting that it is a part of our own psychological makeup and not just in the other person. People may have that trait too, but we would not be so reactive and upset when we see it unless it was firmly lodged in ourselves. The shadow has some aspect of us that needs to be recognized and worked with as us.

God is Within You

2007-06-18T21:27:00.000-07:00

There is a Presence within you that completely understands you. There is Light and Peace at the core of your being that is perfectly intelligent and knows who you are. This center of Light within, knows how to help you and what to give you to make you feel better. If you would apply to it and ask it to help you, by whatever name you call IT, you will be surprised at how responsive it is to you when you sincerely have a need. I call it God. You don’t have to, but it might have more reverence if you call It, God. Underneath all your confusion, God resides waiting for you. Inside all of the swirling motion of your activity and sometimes confusion, God is trying to help you. Deeper than your fears and your darkness and underneath your sadness, God is resting comfortably hoping you want a relationship with God. God tries to contact you and communicate with you quite often, but you are busy and distracted, thinking you have to do everything by yourself. God wants you to ask God for help so God can help you. You have but to think of God and you will start to feel better. Then don’t do all the talking when you talk to God. Listen at least half the time so that you don’t interrupt all the time with your random and busy thoughts. In any relationship where there are two parties, there has to be rules of how to talk to one another. One doesn’t do all the talking. One person doesn’t do all the listening. It is an exchange, but there has to be some etiquette of how to take turns in a dialogue.

What Anger Is

2007-06-14T23:13:00.000-07:00

In the heat of anger, you can’t think straight and you say things that you will most definitely regret. When you allow anger to run through your blood, you are letting a poison circulate in your bloodstream and put toxins everywhere. The first person that gets affected by your anger is you as you are the first to experience it. Your anger is a hurt clothed in an entitled pride. You cannot believe that you should be treated in this way and your pride is tweaked. You think anger is strong, but it is the weakest of the emotions. It is completely without any masculine energy. It is all feminine – all negative emotion. So it is impotent and powerless and based on fear. The fear is that you will be overwhelmed or might have to put up with the disrespect for days and days. Your pride and fear feed the fermentation of righteousness that you should never be treated this way. There is no peace in your energy because you are scared that you are not going to be treated fairly. Anger is also intimidating. There is a tendency to imagine that anger is strong when actually anger wants other people to see how mad you are to cut you some slack. It is a request for respect and consideration. In many cases, the person who is offending you does not even intend to offend you and did not want to offend you. If you start off asking questions instead of making accusations, things will resolve much more effectively and quickly.

The First Thing About Meditation

2007-06-12T21:52:00.000-07:00

When you meditate, stop worrying. Stop mulling things over and over in your mind. The Buddhist practice of right mindfulness is not thinking a lot. That is a western aberration. Some people think through their meditations and do their shopping lists and call that meditation. That is letting your head wander around aimlessly and mindlessly. Right mindfulness is focused awareness and relaxed attention on a particular subject of topic. You don’t just let a skunk wander into your mental house smelling up the place. You make sure unwanted varmints do not come in and disturb the peaceful and still atmosphere of your meditation. Be vigilant and not tense. Stop tensing up. It will make you sick. Start to observe with unattached clarity. But still and know that God is the only watcher animating your flesh. God is the only one who acts through the instrument of each human being. Our purpose is to express God and not just do our own thing. If you are still willful enough to do your own thing, you don’t know the first thing about meditation.

What Dreams Are

2007-06-09T21:31:00.000-07:00

Dreams are communications from your soul.
The soul makes the dream out of images and symbols that are taken from a vast, infinite pallet of colors that only a divine intelligence can create. The dream is untainted by the conscious mind and the ego and so comes pure and simply what it is. There are dreams that compensate for your waking attitude. There are dreams that show the state of the union, how you are really feeling even though you may be unfamiliar with what is really going on with you. There are simple dreams that work out the things of the day or of actual relationships which we call objective dreams. Example: having a dream of fighting with a spouse when you are actually in waking reality having a lot of fights with your partner.
Every part of the dream is inside you. The feeling you had inside the dream is the most important.
How you feel looking from the outside into the dream is not so important and often, emphatically wrong. A dream is a book. If you don’t read it, you don’t get anything out of it. So write down you dreams and read them back in the morning and turn the images over and over in your mind until something comes to you. Someone else hearing it might have some insight into its meaning. One who works with dreams, such as I, would have many things to say about your dreams. But start with how you feel inside the dream and stay with the energy of the dream and you will be much closer to knowing what it means. If you get a repetitive dream, then your soul is really trying to tell you something and deems it very important for you to get it. If you don’t get it, then you get the dream again and again. If you finally understand it properly, then you never have that dream again. You got it.

Childhood Angst Will Fade

2007-06-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I was leaving adolescence, struggling with the same desires and insecurities that most people experience. I left my family at 16 years old since I had the conviction that I was finished with being a dependent and done with needing harsh and mean discipline. I could take care of myself and I could work on my own and make my way in the world. I actually worked to make my living from age twelve onwards. I bought all my own clothes and a good portion of the food, as well as my own entertainment and travel needs. I enjoyed that and never resented that decision. But adolescence has a magical haze overshadowing it where one can feel almost superhumanly powerful over their own fate. I was sure that nothing was impossible and that my own efforts were all that stood in the way of success in any chosen direction. I was more confident than one would think prudent. But it worked. The insecurities of not knowing, the challenges of being young, and the awkwardness that an adolescent refuses to register in his senses, all of these were part of me. But I had a sense of being on the planet for a reason and I felt I had a spiritual mission. I just didn’t quite know what it was back then. It would unfold over the next four years. Then, after finding a true spiritual path and real spiritual teachers, I was amazed at how quickly those memories of childhood angst faded in the healing power of divine grace. Jesus and Mary became real living beings and I was starting my relationship with them.

Past Lives Can Be Humbling

2007-06-03T00:40:00.000-07:00

My first experience of reincarnation was given to me while I was meditating one morning in my 21st year on this planet. I was engrossed in meditation for some twenty minutes and then suddenly I was shown a large wooden bowl with a wooden utensil, like a spoon or something. I was wearing a brown Buddhist robe. I was overweight – fat and had no hair. I was aware of my heaviness which at the time seemed a contradiction to the life of a Buddhist begging for his one meal a day around 11:00am. That was the only food for the day. I was conscious I was in another time, another life. I could not make this up and my ego would not have wanted to see me having troubled begging for my food and still being kind of fat. I had been recently working with my spiritual teacher, a Christian Priest, on gracefully receiving gifts and help from other people. I was having a bit of a struggle receiving as I was more comfortable giving and taking care of myself and not being beholden to anyone. I was shown this life not because it was going to puff me up of make me feel special in any way. Quite the contrary, it was humbling simply because I was not very developed in that Buddhist lifetime and was fat because I was resisting receiving gifts in the form of food from others. Because I was having trouble receiving and letting people give to me, I was eating my one meal a day and not digesting it. It was sitting in my belly and turning into fat because of the state of my mind. When I saw this, I knew that the pattern of having trouble receiving from others was lifetimes old and I needed to straighten this out once and for all. I resolved to learn to receive and let people give to me without feeling uncomfortable or ungraceful in the receiving. I was left with the feeling that many of our lifetimes were not so glorious or fascinating and that most were kind of dense and slow moving, with slight inroads of spiritual growth and development. Those who want to be humbled need only look at some of your past lifetimes with some objectivity and you will see that you have a long way to go to be truly spiritual beings.