OVERVIEW
Have you ever asked yourself, “why am I still dealing with this?”. Whatever “this” is, IS a part of your life and you will always deal with your life. The journey of awakening is not about getting to a perfect destination, it is embracing the process of continued growth everyday for the rest of your life. Join us this Sunday as we learn to embrace this journey with the practice of disciplined dedication.
TRANSCRIPTION
That’s a great song. Awake my soul in these bodies, we will live in these bodies. We will die. The lyric says, and I think a lot of us realize that in these bodies we will die, but we forget that in these bodies we live, this is, this is where we’re living, right? Oftentimes we’re often the distance, well, I’ll really get to living when, or if I can go back to what was then I’ll be living. Nope. Right? Where you are is where you’re living. This is the body that you have. So let’s get into it and live well. Yes. This is what we’re talking about with the journey of awakening.
So you’ve asked yourself that question, right? That, uh, was alluded to at the beginning here. Why am I still dealing with this? Really? This is circling back around again. Anyone? Am I the only one? Okay. All right. Just making sure. Whatever this is for you, it is a part of your life. This is the body that you live in, not just this physical body, but the body known as your life experience. You tracking me here, the past, what’s to come and what’s happening right now. All of that is your body. All of that is where you live. The journey of awakening is not about getting to some perfect destination out there, and it’s not about getting rid of aspects of ourself, although most of us probably would like to.
It’s embracing the process of continued growth every day for the rest of your life. Amen. That’s it. But let’s unpack that a little more. The reading says, rather than having an awakening that occurs once and lasts for the rest of our lives, we usually vacillate, which means going back and forth between unaware and aware, awake and asleep. However, we gradually become less and less attracted to being asleep or unaware and more attracted to being awake. Sounds good. These past three months of exploring a Course in Miracles has been quite a journey. I don’t know how many of you read along either reading the book, a Course in Miracles, or the book that we were focusing on as a community, the Heart of A Course in Miracles by Michael Mayor, dod, and you don’t have to to be present here today, but if you are interested at all, I highly recommend bringing both of those books or one of those books into your regular spiritual reading. It’s just, um, some powerful words that can ground us, that can anchor us, that can pull us back from all of the shenanigans that happen up here in our mind to some truth that can help us relate to life.
Everything that I’m saying today that Reverend Amy has said, Reverend Linda, Reverend Mark Anthony, Reverend Judy, Reverend Jackie, Reverend Roderick, minister and training John and all of the cityside practitioners culminates today. Whether we are meditating or praying, eating dinner, going to work, taking a shower, driving to the grocery store, experiencing a great moment of joy or yelling at someone in the midst of an argument, you are in the midst of your journey of awakening. The journey of awakening is your living. The journey of awakening is not about getting over anything. So when we ask ourselves, why am I still dealing with this? There’s nothing for you to get over. You’re dealing with this because it’s a part of you. So the journey of awakening is not about getting over it. It is the journey of liberation from the belief and notion that we are separate from God or from life itself.
Almost everything we do in our humanity promotes separation, even the way we designate ourselves as humans, we separate ourselves from nature, from life. This separating ourselves from our inherent wholeness, from our inherent godliness. We do it all day long. The journey of awakening is not about making sense of things. The journey of awakening is not necessarily an intellectual activity. It’s about bringing love and forgiveness to our perceptions of things in life. Let me say that again. The journey of awakening is about bringing love and forgiveness to our individual perceptions of what is going on out there. Awakening from the dream of separation to the truth of wholeness and interconnection.
The journey of awakening is right here in this moment, sitting here in a chair, wearing what you’re wearing, doing what you did yesterday and doing what you’re gonna do after service right here, right now is the moment of awakening. We’re all on this journey of awakening, and I will say that some of us are light sleepers, so we’re a little weakened. We, we wake up easy and some of us, man, we we’re just in there cutting some logs, no clue what’s going on. But regardless, we all are asleep or we all fall asleep. At least I, all I can do is speak from my experience. I fall asleep every single day, and I’m not talking about the sleep that I do in my bed. I’m talking about when I actually open my eyes and I step out of the door into my life, I fall asleep and I start telling myself those lies of, oh, I, I’m not a part of that. I I’m separate from that. This isn’t me. That isn’t me.
But as much as I can, I seize the moment and I awaken again, and I awaken to what you may ask. I awaken to the fact that right here, right now, regardless of my ego’s and my personalities opinion of what’s going on, I have the opportunity to forgive myself and to forgive others for believing that somehow we are separate from the divine. And in so doing, I, you, we get to remune, we get to reconnect, we get to awaken again to the truth that there is only one life happening, and that is the life of God. That is the life of love.
Sounds beautiful, right? All right. It is. I, I have to speak. So John and I sit on the diversity equity inclusion committee for the larger international organization of centers for spiritual living, and we do a lot of work in that field. Uh, I teach on this, I coach on this, and even in that work that is oftentimes very righteous and we know what’s right, there’s a lot of separation that takes place, and we set ourselves up for a little bit of failure to use the words, the journey of awakening. What’s one of the words that get u gets used around this is that we’re woke, right? And it implies that we are woke and we’ve, we’ve hit some level of wokeness and we’re just gonna stay there for the rest of our lives.
It’s so easy in that work and in our journey of awakening to other, the others that other, we sit over here and go, oh, they’re doing that, and we do the finger pointing, and where are most of the fingers pointing back at ourselves? This time in our history is ripe for healing. Every moment in history is ripe for healing, but just, just, just take in all the shenanigans and the craziness of our world on the planet right now, and if we could let go of healing everyone else and focus on healing ourselves, think about that for a moment. There’s over 8 billion people. I li did the little like clock this morning on some British something and it was like 8 million, blah, blah, blah, and it’s like every second there’s another birth happening. I’m like, dang. So over 8 billion people on the planet, what if every single person took responsibility for just one hour? Just, just see if you can let your mind posh on this for a second. Everybody, all the dictators, all the people that we point our fingers at and say that they’re screwing up the world and and harming people, including us and everyone in between. What if everyone stopped for an hour and we had a day of healing, a day of responsibility for healing our stuff?
That’s the journey of awakening that will transform the world. Yes, there’s policies, there’s procedures, there’s things we can do societally and collectively, but ultimately, regardless of what side we may be on, we’re pushing something on someone else. And we’re not taking care of our own stinkiness, if you will, today. I beg of you to let go of other people’s awakening and focus on only yours, your life, the one place, the body that you live in, the one place that you can awaken.
Start with yourself. Take a deep breath in. Close your eyes. Those of you online, you can, you don’t need to look at the screen for a minute. See if you can, if you can tangibly feel in your body what it is, like all the people that you want to tell them what they’re doing wrong and right around you. What if you stopped that for just one moment? Then imagine if your friends and your family that tell you all the stuff you’re doing wrong, if they stopped doing it for a moment, it would feel pretty good, right?
I want to expand the reading today. So the, the, the section that, um, was read, there’s more before it, and it says A course in miracles. And I and personally am putting in here any authentic earnest spiritual study and practice. It leads inevitably to our awakening. So there is an, a path, of course, in miracles is just one philosophy in one way. This awakening, it doesn’t depend upon our iq. That doesn’t depend upon our diet, our weight, our age, or how much money we have. Ultimately, our awakening depends primarily on two things. It’s that simple. Two things. One, the raising of our consciousness and two, the holiness of our relationships.
Rather than having an awakening that occurs once and lasts for the rest of our lives, we usually vacillate from anywhere, from unaware to aware and from awake to asleep. However, we gradually become less and less attracted to being asleep and more attracted to being awake. So the reading says that our awakening is dependent upon these two things. The first being the raising of our consciousness. I’m a definition person, so let’s break it down. The definition of raise is to move to a higher level or increase the level, uh, the level, increase the amount or strength of something. So what does it mean to raise consciousness? Consciousness means the state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings. So to raise your consciousness is to increase your awareness of your surroundings. Spiritually speaking. This is to increase our awareness of the surrounding of God or love in every moment. The journey of awakening is the path that you are on right now, increasing your awareness of love in the moment.
There’s so many ways to do that. We practice lots of them here. Someone give me one meditation, prayer, visioning, spiritual study, journaling, yoga, mindful eating, sleep. Sleep is good. If you don’t get enough of it, it’s pretty hard to recognize God around you. I’ve had many of those days. So the second thing that our awakening is dependent upon, uh, uh, beyond raising our consciousness, right? So this is just something, this is the journey of awakening. We’re doing it constantly, right? We are constantly engaging in the practices that bring us to a greater awareness of God in our surroundings. The second thing that awakens us and that it’s dependent upon in terms of our journey, awakening, is the holiness of our relationships. And I’m gonna call a lot of you back cuz I’m assuming your judgmental, discerning mind and your humanity is jumping around that guy going, mm-hmm <affirmative>. Well, that relationship’s holy, that one’s not holy. <laugh>. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, that’s not what we’re talking about here. And the very fact that we are saying one relationship is holy and another one is not. That’s the journey of separation, not the journey of awakening all capital A, capital L, capital L. All of our relationships are holy.
Our awakening is dependent upon us, declaring for ourselves, realizing and embracing. All of our relationships are the place where love, where God, where light is realized. The fact that you don’t like a relationship or that a relationship is a relationship is difficult or hard. It doesn’t mean and isn’t holy. It just means you don’t like it and you have an opinion about it. That’s all. It’s still a holy place.
Let me come back to this great book, the Heart of A Course in Miracles, to maybe help us wrap our head around why all of our relationships are holy regardless of our opinion. Most of us, he writes, most of us fail to recognize the reasons why we like or don’t like someone pay attention. This is, we’re getting to the good stuff. Now, the bottom line is that generally the people we like and think of as positive relationships are merely those who bring up positive emotions for us, right? I was just talking to a dear member saying that you, your presence in the room when you walk in, it makes me feel better.
This means of course, that the people we don’t like are merely those who bring up negative emotions or whom we project our negative stuff or our unhealed stuff upon. So imagine he goes on to say, so imagine what it would be like if people refrained from saying, I like that person, I don’t like that person. And instead, were responsible and self-aware enough to say that person reflects some of my negative unhealed stuff, and that person reflects some of the positive gifts in me that I tend to ignore. Taking such responsibility would result in our experiencing a different, more peaceful world.
I just got, I, every time I read that, I get chills. How many times do we, you may not say it out loud a whole heck of a lot, but inside that little discursive chatter box in there, it’s like, I like that. I don’t like that. I like them, I don’t like them. They can get close to me. They can get away from me all day long. Even when you sleep, sometimes you’re like, you wake up and you’re like, why was I dreaming about that person? I don’t even like them <laugh> wasting my time and my sleep.
But what if every single person we came into communion with? Now, you may not be able to do it necessarily right in the moment, but I get I think you can. We are complex beings that can actually do this. As you come into connection with someone and you feel that visceral sense of repulsion or attraction, whether it is they’re sexy, whether they’re beautiful, whether they are intellectually stimulating to you emotionally, you feel like they get you, they are there as a holy relationship to go, oh, mirror, look at yourself. The thing that you see in me, the beauty that you see in me, the intelligence that you see in me, the emotional intelligence that you’re drawn to, all it is, is something that you’re not paying attention to in yourself. So all of the people in our life, it’s okay to like them. I’m not saying, you know, to have those feelings of attraction is bad, but just for a moment, what if it was an opportunity to heal and help you remember how awesome you are, how beautiful you are, how intelligent you are, how caring you are, how compassionate you are. The only reason you can experience that in someone else is because it lives within you. And then here we go. Then there’s the people that drive you crazy and you got all kinds of data and facts about how they aren’t living right and doing stuff, and they just drive people crazy. They drive me crazy.
What if that was a holy relationship to remind you that there’s some unhealed stuff in you? I’m not saying that we don’t, you know, ask people to take responsibility for themselves, but everyone is has an opportunity to take responsibility for themselves, including you and the people that come into our lives that push that button. It’s the button of awakening. Awakening to what is still there for you to grow from into the the next, becoming in the greater loving light that you are to remind you that even in this uncomfortable feeling, this discomfort, this rage, even the light of love is still here. If we just turn towards it.
Yeah, somewhere long ago in our humanity, we got the notion that punishment is the way to positive change. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could like go back to whenever that first came onto the human vernacular, we’d do it to our children. We do it in our schools, we do it in our romantic relationships, our colleagues, our clients. We definitely do it to and through and around our family and our friends. We punish one another all the time. We do it to other nations. We do it to other political beliefs and systems. We do it to ourselves.
We punish ourselves. We think punishment will lead to correction or to use the language of the course of miracles, salvation, or right mindedness. Here’s a direct quote from a course in miracles. Punishment as a concept is in total opposition to right mindedness. Remember a few weeks ago I spoke on, are you in your right mind? Right? To be in our right mind is to be in love, to be in compassion. Punishment is not loving. I’m not one to be that kind of harsh, but it doesn’t really do anything except cause pain. I think of all the times in the ways I punish myself and I’m like, yep, that has never done anything to actually make me a better person. I just feel worse in my skin.
The dream of separation is our history. The book goes on to say, and all of it can go away when we awaken and awaken and awaken again. The undoing process of this falling asleep of this punishment, of this condemnation involves making a commitment to spiritual healthiness. So many of us make these huge commitments to be healthy in our body, right? And we’re constantly awakening to ways that we can be greater in love and caring of our body, but to be in spiritual, mental, and emotional healthiness that furthers us in our living just as much as the physical healthiness that we engage. It’s ultimately choosing the voice of God or love over the voice of the ego, which is fear. And I know many of you have heard this before, but it just gets more and more poignant every time I read it. It came up in this book, fear as an acronym, false evidence, appearing real, appearing real. Our perception, our judgment of a situation, the process of healing, the process of awakening and involves recreating the universe as we know it, replacing fear and separation with oneness and love.
And it’s not up to anyone else to do it. It’s up to us to do it and to be it. That’s it again. What if everyone, 8 billion plus people stopped and said, okay, I’m gonna commit to living a life that I see and experience and practice oneness and love over separation and fear be a pretty awesome experience we’d all have. So bringing us to a close here, there’s a great quote that was used in the book from Martin Luther King Jr. It says, human progress never rolls in on the heels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless effort of people willing to be coworkers with God. Some of us still walk around going, how can God let this happen? Uhuh, we gotta take responsibility. Everything that is at our disposal took care of billions of years ago. We’ve been mucking it up for 13.8 billion years. Now’s the time for us to be coworkers, collaborators, colleagues with the divine. Don’t wait for some inevitable thing of someone else to do. Bring your light, bring your love, bring your consciousness into the world. Learn to embrace this journey of with what I like to call disciplined dedication. That’s ultimately what spiritual practice is. Disciplined dedication to love.
There’s no one way to do it right. There’s no one way to screw it up. Just keep being disciplined and practice every day in your journey. Your journey of awakening will continue, it will emerge, it will grow, it will strengthen, it will expand. Your consciousness will grow. Your awareness of your surroundings, your awareness of the divine will expand and all of your relationships will become that much more holy. Not that they aren’t, but in your perception and in your awareness, they will be. So if you keep these two little phrases that Michael Murad threw in, that person reflects some of my negative or unhealed stuff. If you were to say that to yourself the next time someone makes you upset, and then the next time you feel that strong attraction that draw and you’re like, oh man, I wish I could be like them. That person reflects some of the positive gifts in you that you tend to ignore. Let’s take this into a little bit of dedicated discipline to practice. If it feels good to close your eyes, do so. If not, find something to focus on that is pleasing to you. There is a power and a presence that
Is unconditional. It is in all conditions. It is your journey. It is your journey. It is your life, and this power and presence wants to collaborate with you today and every day it has said yes from the moment you were born and will continue to say yes. Even when you leave this body, it needs your active, disciplined, dedicated willingness to work with it. This is what we are doing right now, collectively in this moment of prayer, bringing ourself into collaboration with the thing itself. Call it God, call it life, call it beauty, call it creativity, call it peace, call it abundance, whatever it is. It’s so magnificent. We just shower so many different descriptors upon it and still we don’t know how awesome it is, but we can know and experience its awesomeness on our journey in this moment, in this day. So may all of us awaken again and again and again and again and sleep lightly as we step out from this talk and from this service into whatever awaits us in this day. Whatever awaits us in the week to come and the rest of this year and the rest of our lives, may we continue on the journey of awakening to love. And I affirm that that is what we are doing, and we do it to the best of our ability. So let us bless our journey of awakening. Let us bestow prosperity upon our awakening. May it be graceful,
May it be light, may it be good, and so it is. I’m Amen.