A CONVERSATION

A CONVERSATION
IS A PEACEFULL WORLD POSSIBLE ? FINAL 1/24/16

The lady was very bright, well educated, soft spoken, and because she was serious and passionate about true meditation, she said she had over time become sensitive to the pain and suffering going on throughout the world, especially the millions of refugees who have had to leave everything behind, having been displaced by one of the many wars constantly occurring, just as they have been for the past seven thousand years. “They are not truly foreigners,” she said. “They are people just like you and I.”

She was also concerned about the deterioration in this country. “The crude, rude and juvenile atmosphere created by some of the politicians, large corporate corruption at every turn, the rapidly growing self-absorbsion into the glass screen of a society,” she said, which may well be in an advanced stage of failing.

“And then there was the boy on the bicycle yesterday,” she added, “hands not even touching the handlebars, ear phones on, sailing through the intersection, eyes glued to the glass, and two seconds later rendered eternally seventeen.

“What will it take to wake us up?” she asked. It seems as if we are in the midst of a psychologically deteriorating society, just like many other societies of the past, destroying ourselves from the inside out, just as the Romans once did, except we are now living in a time of rapid consciousness changes, and are coming apart at a greatly accelerated and mindless rate.”

If a civil war were to develop in this country, and this is not out of the question, as social anger continues to build and Americans are arming themselves to the hilt, the authorities could be out-gunned by we the people who are less than 5% of the world population and armed with 37% of all the guns in the world, one for every man woman and child! What can an individual do? I would think people would simply want to have a peaceful life.

A gust of wind set loose hundreds of autumn leaves hinting of a welcome cooling down as summers are becoming increasingly hotter and much wetter, as scientists had predicted over ten years ago.

Then she said, did you hear Congressman X yesterday? He exclaimed, Global warming created by man! then he threw his hands in the air, and all he could do was offer the usual cliché, “Give me a break!”
“Even some of the candidates for the highest office in the land said that global warming is a hoax and seem not to have a clue that man is the prime suspect for creating carbon emissions, which are diminishing and contaminating the atmosphere, and in turn is gradually destroying the delicate balance of nature on our planet. My true belief about this is that the deniers of global warming in there hearts do know the truth of it but the depth of there pockets is what produces there public denial!”

The friend and companion agreed, and said she was really fired up and covered an awful lot of bases this morning.

Again, the young lady jumped in saying, “The quieter I become through meditation, the more I see, and the more I examine thought and its devious ways, the more I am questioning the validity of prayer and whether it is capable of bringing about a peaceful world.”

“In the 1940’s,” she said, “there was no doubt hundreds of millions of people around the world praying for peace daily and for years, while a thimbleful of grey cells in a single brain led and dominated the destructive events of the world for many years, leaving 14 million human beings dead, cities in ruin and countless millions more suffering for decades.

“You do bring up a serious and interesting question,” said the friend, “and a complex and delicate one which no doubt will cause most possible listeners to jump ship.”

Truth being what it is, (an enemy of the masses) there is perhaps very little too lose, so shall we get out the brain microscope and take a closer look?

It seems obvious that in order to understand whether or not prayer as it is generally understood has any validly at all, we have to understand the root from which it arises, and then be fearless honest and true to ourselves as we approach the truth.

We all use thought every day. Without thought we could not navigate the world. Prayer comes from the same conditioned thought process that Bonnie and Clyde used to create their plan, or that Mother Teresa used to carry out her good works. Thought is capable of endless invention as well as illusion, both productive and counter-productive. It is also quite capable of creating endless justifications in order to cover up layer upon layer of fears which have been created as a result of attachment and dependency, primarily in the area of belief systems, no matter what those belief systems happen to be, weather it is one of the current major, or less major religions or a beloved family stone on the mantle which your great grandfather proclaimed as magic.

Thought as prayer is believed by the prayer to be directed to the God which one was taught to believe in as a child, or one of the many variety of Gods that have been produced by the fearful and manipulative mind of man, who out of his own fear and lack of capacity for self reliance and self discovery will grasp anything which he feels will protect him from himself and give him a security regardless of the truth or falseness of it.

And of course these modern Gods, which began to emerge about seven thousand years ago, have been in battle by their believers with one another for all this time and has produced more pain, agony and destruction in the world than any other institutionalized or organized process that man has thus far created and continues to do so to this day! Yet we do not question it as nations continue to build military power feeling assured that the enemy is “out There” when in truth the enemy is hunkered down in the bunkers of our own skulls!
Pretty harsh words, I do admit, but can we awake to it? Can we get to the other side of it? Can we go beyond thousands of years of conditioned history? Can the brain which continues to evolve come upon a pristine newness which can put to rest our destructive ways?

What needs to be understood is that thought, thinking, always has within it the foundation of time which has structured the past and projected the future, leaving the ever present now completely un -looked at. Man uses the past and then asks that the gods being prayed to, intervene and produce a future result, which in reality is a complete illusion. Truth which is always in flux, always on the move, can always be seen in the ever present now, yet we remain grounded in yesterday thinking we are secure, which could not be further from the truth.

It is true that thought, when set in motion, does have a tendency to create and fulfill, which cannot be denied, and we can examine that reality at another time.
Thought, in fact, is creative but also, most importantly, thought has no relationship at all to anything in the spiritual world because thought is a prisoner of both time and the past and neither time nor the past can produce anything except reformed repetition to that which is not true.
For any awareness or any action or response from the world of spirit to occur then thought must at that moment not be functioning and this condition happens when mindfulness is occurring. Mindfulness is being, is looking, is seeing, is watching, is attention, all without any evaluation, without judging, without accepting or without denying. This very mindful action is true meditation which burns away the old and opens the door to a pristine clarity which will free one from the destructive past. In order to make this discovery, for this door to open one must do it. To talk about it, to intellectualize this idea or to try to impress another or to even believe what is being said here is true, has no value at all. But to act, produces a right action, a healing.

Spirituality and truth comes into being only in the full atmosphere of freedom and silent openness, which is always timeless and always now. Time cannot ever operate in the silent space between thought where meditation lives and where a life completely free of stress, conflict and duality can be found and where the me, or the I, cannot go.

When living in this space, all the violence and all the havoc we have created for thousands of years will have finally come to an end within yourself and you will no longer be a contributor to this world which is in psychological chaos and because there is only one consciousness from which we all draw and share, your new enlightened awareness will contribute, more significantly than you can imagine, to a more peaceful world. So if you want a peaceful world you must discover that peace which exists right now within yourself!

True prayer happens in the silence which is the meditative state of mind. That state of mind, within that silence, perception itself produces the action of what we call I true prayer. Perception is without the word. Perception is clear seeing which is the product of the awakening of intelligence which happens in silence. This intelligence is neither yours nor mine, it just simply is, and it is the gift which has been given by the nameless one.

“What a shocking denunciation of thought,” she said. “But surprisingly I was following and It’s plain to see the world may be many generations from a meaningful change, and hopefully technology will not destroy us before we get there.
Question everything.