A Plan of Being: Love, Gratitude and the Golden Age
A time for reflection and introspection. This is what we're going through. Christmas is traditionally spent with family and loved ones. We share in each other’s love and can feel good about ourselves and the people around us. Unfortunately for many years the original meaning of Christmas as well as its experience have been diluted, skewed and disempowered. It is now less about the love that binds us and more about the attachments to that love. It’s about thinking what gifts we buy our loved ones, what gifts we buy for ourselves, where we will go to celebrate Christmas, what we will wear to look our best or how we will behave or appear to make the best impression on others at the expense of the light-heartedness within us when we are about to celebrate a feast of love, hope and joy.
So, what has changed? Well, we have changed. We have become less caring for each other because of the demands of life, a life that we have complicated to the extreme. Life was easier to navigate in the past. The cost of living has increased extremely making it almost absurd to live. The cold and ruthless way with which our society is pitting us against each other is astonishing. Managers against employees, politicians against voters, companies against consumers, governments against citizens, etc., the list is endless. All the above claim to respect each other, but unfortunately, the hypocrisy and application of double standards, with which man treats man is apparent in all interactions. However, that’s not all. We accept the status quo. It is not just concerning, it is dangerous for the coherence of society, as one by one, the social pillars are being eroded. Well-being, social justice and community engagement are crumbling away, leaving a void that the above-mentioned ruthlessness is only too eager to fill. Business as usual is undermining social foundations, based on our conditioned mind, and it is only worsening our condition, sustaining a vicious circle that is challenging to break free from.
One might say that we need a new plan of action for humanity. Plan of Action? Why can we not just be who we really are, without vengefulness, without malice, just pure being? We need a plan of being. Let’s set the past aside for a moment and just live in the present. Let’s live for a future that we can be looking forward to, a future that’s yearning to be realized from the sad, desperate remnants of the old ways of life that have become detrimental to living a life with meaning. We live in a world with many interconnected crises, ranging from survival crisis, mental health crisis, emotional health crisis, uncertainty crisis, thus increasing worry, concern and anxiety and exacerbating our predicament. Worry leads to ineffective and narrow-minded decisions, while restricting rational thought and increasing separation from each other. The perception of a survival threat can bring us out of balance, frantically trying to address it, while we are increasingly becoming more and more separated from each other.
It is high time to start savouring the world, instead of drowning and clinging to it. Let’s flip the script. Let’s vow to take more care of ourselves than others whenever possible, so that we may nurture ourselves to feel better. If we do that consciously then we will feel better. Our obligations will still exist, but they will exert less control over our mental and emotional health. When we feel good ourselves then we will be able to appreciate our environment more. Our loved ones will suddenly become more important than they were earlier. We will appreciate nature. We will appreciate our home. We will appreciate our job. And most importantly we will begin feeling gratitude regarding what we already have. We will consider our loving family, our job, and our Self from a completely different perspective. Our Self has been with us through innumerable incarnations. It is literally our BFF, our Best Friend Forever. No other friend comes even close to the BFF concept. It might sound weird to think of our Self as something or somebody external or separate, but that’s normal from the viewpoint of the ego. From the ego’s perspective, the Self is separate, as the ego tends to label anything outside itself as external or separate, until we learn to be more of our true Self and less of being the ego. If we think about our Self in this way, then we will feel a soft, cozy and warm feeling as a response from our Self. It is a response to the recognition of the importance of our Self in so many ways.
The only obstacle to the recognition of the immense value of the Self is the ego. If this concept is challenging to accept, then the ego is interfering. However, persistence will succeed and overcome any challenge that comes from the ego.
Learning to be more of our true Self brings us closer to it. It will bring us also closer to our fellow humans and all other beings. That’s because separation begins within us, because of our internal parts of consciousness that are not integrated. Separation is not a visible, external thing like the trunk of a tree. The tree’s roots are invisible, yet the trunk is an extension of those roots, leading us to believe that the visible trunk is the tree, when in fact the tree trunk stems from the roots. Like so many things in life we have misperceived and therefore misunderstood their value and their place in the universe and within us. Being less ego and more of our true Self aligns us with our infinite existence. It opens our awareness to more than what’s visible, allowing us to feel life, instead of perceiving it through our physical senses.
Being the ego is both a blessing and a curse. It allows us to prioritize ourselves by focusing on our physical integrity and our physical needs in third density consciousness. This narrow focus on life enables our immersion into a psychological state of being that allow us to focus on the details of life. That’s the blessing of the ego, without which we’d be powerless to survive in this ruthless and unforgiving third density consciousness environment. The visceral intensity of the details in our experiences is teaching us life lessons. Through those details we can perceive our life experiences beyond the obvious and thus we become aware of the backstage of life. We discover through life experiences that whatever we perceive with our physical eyes and by extension through our physical senses is not all there is to life. We gradually become aware of the fact that we place too much value on focusing on the perceptions of our physical senses. We also become aware of our conditioning through our ego’s belief systems. We understand that those belief systems are created by the ego to keep us exploring life from the perspective of gathering life experiences in a process that leads from the detail to the whole. That anchor in physical reality that the ego represents is the curse of the ego.
There comes a time though, a divine time, when all of us understand all the above We begin feeling gratitude for the ego and give it a pat on the back for having our back all those years in all our incarnations into physical reality on Earth. We are grateful to the ego for allowing us to learn the hard way and to become aware of the option of consciously perceiving what’s invisible, after we have experienced subconsciously what’s invisible, accepting it as visible as it moves from the darkness into plain sight, realizing all along that life and its experiences are mostly unknown and therefore invisible. Once we reach that level of comprehension about our limited existence on Earth, we can begin comprehending our infinite presence on Earth by looking for our true Self and for ways to embody it, deconstructing our belief systems in the process. This is a natural development and emerges in divine time.
The closer we are embodying our true Self, the closer we come to experiencing the fullness of life. The more we are living life striving to be our true Self the more we are exposed to aspects of it that we didn’t consciously experience before. We consciously recognize synchronicity in our lives, that we labelled as dumb luck earlier. We recognize the importance of love in our lives, that we thought was an important decoration of life. We recognize that beneath the complexity of our characters, we have more in common than we thought earlier and that whatever binds us together is much more compared to whatever seemingly separates us. We recognize that following our tendency to being attracted to the appearance of somebody without considering their essence is potentially a road to more pain and suffering. We recognize that we all have our own issues to work through in life and are more understanding of others. We recognize that burdening others with our own issues will lead to more pain and suffering for all involved. We recognize that assisting others without their consent will also lead to more pain and suffering for all involved. This internal recognition is based on our own life experience and couldn’t be ours without the innumerable incarnations on Earth. One does not become wise without having endured pain and suffering.
At this point you might ask yourselves, what the heck all this may have to do with Christmas. Christmas and by extension all celebrations that are rooted in any of Earth’s religions are opportunities and permission slips for us to move away from ego-based attachments to becoming our true Self, based on the meaning that they have for us. Christmas is a time of joy and happiness, a time to celebrate our bonds with our loved ones, a time to live and be in the present, a time to push aside the demands of our conditioned mind. Guess what, this is something the ego also allows, as part of our belief systems.
Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, two of the main celebrations of Islam, are celebrations of being connected to each other, celebrations of joy and charity, as well as celebrations of heeding God and sharing abundance with family. Ramadan is another Islamic festival and a significant aspect of Islam, promoting self-control during fasting, as well as moderation and simplicity. Diwali in Hinduism celebrates victory of light over darkness. Hannukah in Judaism also commemorates the triumph of light over darkness, reinforcing faith and hope. Beltane in Celtic tradition was a time to appreciate fertility, abundance and the flourishing of life. The Day of the Dead is a celebration in Mexico, blending Catholic traditions and ancient Aztec customs, honouring and paying respects to our ancestors. Inti Raymi in Incan tradition celebrates the sun god Inti and the arrival of the new year. It expresses gratitude for the past harvest and seeks blessings for the future.
No matter where we look, we are viscerally reminded that we are all the same, stuffed into different mindsets and Heart-sets and born into different cultures and societies that are built around different belief systems. This is the meaning that I personally get from Christmas and religious festivals from other religions. We are the same and we are all equals, grateful for our heritage, sustained by the knowledge passed down to us from our ancestors, empowered by hope for the future, tempered by respect in our relationships and immersed in love, that is far more than a decoration of life. Love binds us together, allows us to be more of who we are and fosters appreciation of everything, while expecting nothing in return.
All these enlightened perspectives that replace the current narrow-minded perspectives, which arise from “me versus you” and “us versus them”, require an internal rewiring that could not happen, if we didn’t experience life the hard way, while being many times left to our own devices and forced to constantly “work the problem”. We are at the precipice of a new consciousness, which is offering a new way of learning life’s lessons, a new way of how we feel within our skin, a new way of doing things and most importantly, a new way of being. All this has come at a cost. We have paid for this ability dearly, now let’s integrate this ability into our lives, feeling our way through it instead of thinking of solutions. We can initially appreciate our neighbours before we love them, understand them, before we help them if and when they need such help, thus paving the way of openly sharing and blending our hopes and aspirations with theirs. Approaching our neighbours can be through simple things, like saying hello to them and actually meaning it, or looking at them that says “I know” without saying it, conveying support and understanding regarding the common struggles we all face. Let’s overflow with love and compassion when we interact with neighbours, work colleagues or any human being for that matter, to the degree where it is appropriate. Hugging people which we don’t know for example is inappropriate, unless they indicate with their behaviour and communicate to us non-verbally, that it is appropriate and welcome. Let’s create a Golden Age within us, free from separation and conditioning, while more humans around us follow us and we all manifest that Golden Age collectively. Change comes from within. The external aspects and benefits of living in a Golden Age manifest first within ourselves.