Category: Wholeness

Walk Through Walls

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Walls do not exist

They’re figments of imagination

Designed to blind our consciousness

From what we’re afraid of facing

There are walls that are made of money

There are walls that are made of stone

And walls that are made of false beliefs

Passed down but not our own

Our walls are what protect us

They tell us who we are

And they also tell us who we aren’t

To keep those who aren’t us very far

Almost everybody has them

It’s how we maintain our borders

So those who know that they aren’t real

Are often caught defying orders

We see them as the outcasts

At best they are the martyrs

We take those who are simply living Truth

And we make them movement starters

That’s how we define them

Using retrospection

Approving of them after death

While in life they got rejection

In our guilt we make them heroes

We make them even greater in our minds

We tell ourselves we revere them

But in truth we’re drawing lines

“This far and no further”

Is what we’re really trying to say

“The quickest way to get a statue

Is to go the martyr’s way.”

Now we’re making walls with dreamers

And most of us don’t know

They want to make us famous

So we have nowhere to go

But here’s the thing that we don’t get

I was serious about what I said

Our walls truly do not exist

They’re all made up in our head

Taking away the body

Does not take away the being

We think we’ve put a stop to Truth

But we don’t know what we are freeing

Yeshua called it the last enemy

Because it’s the one that never was

And from it we’ve created worlds

Built on the premise that it does

It’s the Wall that shapes all walls

Telling the lie, “There’s nothing left.”

But once we see the other side

We know there’s no such thing as death

Now the walls begin to crumble

Once we know that they’re not there

And all of a sudden Yeshua makes sense

When he tells us don’t be scared

You can’t imagine what you can imagine

When there’s nothing there to stop you

The first thing that you realize

It that the ego self is not you

We’ve just been dreaming limitation

When in reality there is none

But soon we’ll know ourselves as we are known

The very image of the Son

 

© Copyright 2015 Pedro S. Silva II

Out of Order

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What if the very last day

Was really the beginning?

Losers get all the trophies

Because there’s no such thing as winning

Being fair isn’t fair

We just get what we get

And I can change the whole world

Since nothing’s happened yet

The whole world is out of order

Nothing is what it seems

It’ll be your worst nightmare

To fulfill all of your dreams

The void is now full

With infinite potential

Never fully actualized

Just to keep it existential

Freed by our limits

We are living beyond borders

Stifling chaos

In a realm that defies orders

Undoing the Big Bang

Is as easy as folding paper

Everything returns to zero point

In the mind of the Creator

It’s the ultimate “do over”

For that which was not done

Temporal ties cannot terrorize

In unmanifest light of eternal Suns

All things are forever

In the mind that cannot die

But only in not being born

Can you possibly know why

© Copyright 2015 Pedro S. Silva II

Life of Wonder

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So how did I get this life?

This person that I be

I wonder if I’m happy

I wonder if I’m free

The reality is I can’t feel it

These things that people do

The stuff that makes them excited

I can’t tell if it is true

I see it and it makes me wonder

Is this the way that I should feel?

Am I full or am I empty?

I wonder which is real

It’s not like I just got here

I’ve been here all my life

But still I feel unseen out here

Like someone turned out all the lights

I’ve taught myself to participate

I can do the conversations

But sometimes it’s just like Groundhog Day

Repeating the exact same situations

What I want is something different

Almost impossible to describe

I don’t just want to make it here

My intention is to thrive

I’m not just living for my next fix

Like I’m fundamentally broken

I am emerging from the mouth of Wholeness Itself

The Word that never comes back void once it is spoken

That’s why I’m in wonder

Why do so many choose the lesser gift?

Choosing the package over the content

Is like getting high without the lift

While we think we’re going up

We’re really headed down

Heels over head, the world just flipped

Soon to crashland on the ground

And then again I wonder

Why can’t we see this on the way?

We’ve been warned this time was coming

Despite not knowing the actual day

But I guess that’s human nature

We always think that we’re immune

Somehow we believe we can be in harmony

While never seeking to be in tune

How did we come to believe this?

How did this become the norm?

And how did I get caught up too,

Despite my resistance to conform?

Is it because I gave it my energy

When people accused me of being aloof?

In my effort to resist what I called a lie

My actions denied the truth

Now expressing what I do not want

There’s no room for what I do

So I’m wondering how to transcend this trap

And once again, the truth pursue

© Copyright 2015 Pedro S. Silva II

When I’m In Poetry Mode

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I have many states of being

Most of them conditioned

Circumstantial ways I am

Depending on my position

If I’m on top I am a certain way

If on the bottom I’m another

Each one relative to what’s going on

Which determines how I’m covered

But when I am in poetry mode

I’m not circumstantially dependent

I enter into a different realm

Where I am consciously transcendent

There’s no thing as linearity

Removing the cause of the effect

For when life turns into poetry

All frames of reference intersect

At the point of their convergence

We find the poem’s entrance into time

Emerging out of no where

Thus impossible to confine

Always open to interpreting

It’s expression has no end

And as the author I am one with it

So who can say where I begin

Perhaps the poetry created me

To bring itself to form

Pre-existing my corporeal self

A possibility outside the norm

Now I’m not just a person being

But an event within creation

Composed of seen and unseen forces

Forming a poetic destination

I’m not encountered but attended

Participation is a must

If you ever want to know me

Before I turn back into dust

For when I’m not in poetry mode

I am a man devoid of being

Processes functioning mechanically

With eyes that have no seeing

Here to do until I’m done

Trying to get my tasks complete

My meaning and my function one

Until I’m considered obsolete

Then I am replaced

With a newer model off the shelf

That’s why a life without being poetry

Is like living without a self

© Copyright 2015 Pedro S. Silva II

There Are More Important Things

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There are more important things

Than the ones that I am pondering

Thoughts that distract me from all that’s True

And lead my mind to wandering

There are more important things

Than what’s in and out of season

Than comparing myself to others

When there really is no reason

There are more important things

Than what I make up about tomorrow

Fearing a future that might not exist

Or repeating yesterday’s sorrow

There are more important things

Than achieving my desires

If getting what I think I want

Means in truth I yield to liars

There are more important things

Than getting someone to love me

If in doing so I lose myself

And put that one above me

There are more important things

Than living a life of pleasure

If at the end of it I’ve torn your soul

And can’t get it back together

There are more important things

Than what I call religion

If I only use it as a set of rules

Without seeking its deeper vision

There are more important things

Than being protected from what I fear

Since it seems that trying to run from it

Has only served to draw it near

There are more important things

Than me seeking after wins

Since the race isn’t always for the swift

Or for the one with fewer sins

There are more important things

Than always being right

Since almost everything is relative

When seen in a different light

Yes, there are more important things

But what they are I do not know

So I occupy myself with this vanity

Until I’m forced to let it go

 

 

 

One and Counting

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If All is One in the Beginning

Do all endings start with two?

From there leading to many

Countless “Me”s apart from you

In One there’s no division

Therefore nothing torn asunder

Yet in many we seem to forsake the Whole

And make idols out of numbers

Oh to live the Shema

“The Lord our God is One”

If this is true then what do we get

When all of our counting’s done

With our “adding up” obsessions

You’d think we’d find salvation

But all we seem to get from this

Is more miscalculations

All of our opinions

About the way we think things are

Like the six blind men and the elephant

So close but yet so far

We try to measure everything

In our attempts to get control

Not seeing that our metrics all fall short

Of the Undivided Whole

That’s why we’re so crazy

And mostly schizophrenic

Divided minds seeing many

In a world with only Oneness in it

So God please help my vision

To see only what is True

If You are One, then so are we

Since we live and move in You

© Copyright 2015 Pedro S. Silva II

Toward Unfiltered Consciousness

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This morning I found myself stuck on The Root.  For those of you who have never heard of it, it is similar to The Huffington Post, but with articles that are more tailored to the interests of a largely African American audience.  Some of the articles that I got mesmerized by were a 4 page article on African American Slave Holders, one on the push to get Dr. Ben Carson to run for POTUS, and an article about people’s reactions to the new version of Annie being cast with the little black girl from Beasts of the Southern Wild, Quvenzhane Wallis. As I read the articles, I monitored my thoughts around the subject matter to see what I could learn about myself and how I relate to the world.  You see,  I have chosen to be a person who checks in with myself a lot.  If a thought occurs to me that I feel is questionable, such as, “Why is Ben Carson a Republican?”, I am inclined to examine it to see if I can determine where it came from and whether or not it is a thought I really resonate with or if it was one handed to me.  Like with the Ben Carson thought, I can distinctly remember my father telling me that any black man who is a Republican these days must hate himself or other black people. With that in my head, my mind immediately tried to tie Ben Carson to the black slave holders who I had just read about in the previous article. That led me to consider other so called, “black on black” violence and exploitation.  I say so called, because if people of other races exploit each other no one calls it anything.  I’ve never heard anyone say “white on white” or “brown on brown” crime. Anyway, after a single thought starts making too many divergent connections, I usually stop the train and get off and then ask myself how I got there in my mind.  From there I determine whether I want to keep going with that train of thought or move on to other things.

For a long time, if I came to realize that a person I was talking with was jut parroting what they were told by their family without ever taking a look at whether or not those thoughts actually served them, I would start the process of removing myself from the conversation.  My reasoning for this was that I felt like that tendency among people to just go on automatic pilot mode is what allows a lot of dysfunction to keep moving through the generations.  “My mother or father did it so I do it.” never sat well with me. And besides, I really don’t see the point of that line of thinking. In this way, I am like Socrates, who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The way I see it, if my life is merely a consecutive string of undisciplined reactions to my environment and conditions based on what I was force fed to believe through propaganda, then in essence I was never really here. That being said, I don’t merely limit myself to the Descartes[ian] ideology, “I think therefore I am”. I see thinking as a part of “who I be”, but not the whole.  Other relevant aspects of how I express my being are feeling, intuiting, accepting, and surrendering to just name a few.  But all of these aspects or faculties or facilities of my being fall under the umbrella of Consciousness.  For me, Consciousness is the essence of who I am. Consciousness is the intentional observer/influencer of my being and the channel through which I deliver my activities into the world.  In my opinion, without Consciousness, the world is nothing but vanity.

If I were to draw a picture of how I imagine Consciousness being, I would draw Consciousness as the Light of Creative Intelligence, my mind would be the slides or film I want to project, and the projector itself would be my body.  As I project onto the world i.e. the screen, the Intelligent Light of my Consciousness is also observing what I project and engaging with the receivers at multiple levels.  This creates an expansion in Consciousness which then brings greater illumination to the slides or film which represents the thoughts that occur in Mind.  As the illumination intensifies, there is more clarity to the thought projections. This continues until the projections become an ideal representation of the Conscious Intelligent and Creative Light.  When that happens the slides and/or film are no longer necessary because I will no longer have anything to project onto the world or onto others in order to justify my existence. At that point, I will be functioning as pure Consciousness–an uninterrupted and unfiltered, freely giving and freely receiving creative being. I think this is how it works for all of us. I believe that that is our true nature.  As I said in the post Switched At Birth, I believe that we all came here as pure being, and then, for many of us, the inaccuracies and sometimes flat out lies began, starting with the very names we identify with. But beyond our names are the other associations that become the filters through which we give to and receive from Life.  And for me that is where The Root came in this morning.  As I read the articles, I could feel my filters engaging.

Before reading those articles, I was simply Conscious Being. Besides, my dog and some lady bugs, no one was home. I had done my morning devotions, meditation, and prayer.  I had caught up on this campaign called The One Great Hour of Sharing with my daughter, which has the tagline, “We are One”  and was feeling grateful that I have another day to get closer to the Root of my Being–my Source who I most often refer to as God. I will admit that for some time now, I have “fallen off the wagon” when it comes to remaining sober to what I believe is God’s reality of Life.  That is to say that without constantly checking in with myself, praying a whole lot, reading the Bible and other expansive material, and talking about the Higher activities of life, I feel the temptation to get intoxicated with the smaller story of who I am, the roles that I play in the world.  I know that I am not my roles any more than I am my thoughts. I am not a fictional character. But as many of us know, sometimes it seems easier to play one.

Tomorrow, tomorrow I love you tomorrow, just as long as you’re not yesterday.

When I looked at the articles, I felt some of my fictions coming up.  You’d have to read the article on African American slave owners to get an idea of what my feelings might have been, but I will say that, if I jumped into a time machine immediately after reading it, I might have caused some trouble for some of those people.  When I read about Ben Carson, I found myself thinking of him as having become a cartoon character.  He’s a brilliant doctor and I’ve read some intelligent things from him, but I will say that I have my challenges with how it seems like he has straight up bought into the vanity of the political world.  Granted I don’t know him or any politicians, but it all looks like reality TV to me at this point–even President Obama. And finally, when I saw people having a problem with a black Annie, I felt myself wanting to take it personally.  Besides the fact that I am a sensitive person and almost cried both times when I watched the trailer, I could easily project my curly haired daughter into that character and the thought of people tripping off of that bugged me.  Like the author said in the article, “Annie is Black, Get Over It”.

All this being said, I am confessing that my particular black filter was kicking in in every one of those articles. Of course there are purely human elements that I would bristle at such as slavery in general, Carson’s seeming disregard for people who do not identify as heterosexual, or people being overly critical of an obviously talented child actor simply based on her race regardless of what that race might be. Still I have more to examine about how my filter influences my work in the realm of Consciousness and how it effects my ability to give and receive freely.  It is really interesting because, while I believe that experience informs a considerable portion of how we engage the world, I do also believe that we are capable of transcending our experience thus enabling us to live in what St. Paul called the “newness of life”.  In the newness of life as I aspire to live it, everything about life is new and fresh and pure moment by moment, even our very selves and our relationships to others and the whole wide world. I’m not going to get into it right now, but what it basically means to me is that once we identify ourselves as children of God and citizens of eternity, then we live in a realm where as he puts it, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” and ” In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!”  As a person I understand as having examined his own life, I can see Paul adding a whole lot of other categories that we hold onto into that list–married, single, heterosexual, GLBTQ, rich, poor, healthy, unhealthy, red and yellow, black and white.  I know that I am a citizen of eternity where there is no division among us and for the most part I live out of that space with everyone I encounter, but I’m still working on that tension between that reality and how I encounter events in time that seem to thrive in anti-consciousness and denial.

Am I In Love?

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Is this truly my reality
Or the most illusive of dreams?
Because I am living in my fantasy
Well, at least that is how it seems

The death of my emotions,
Has seen resurrection in your eyes.
Is this what I came here for?
Is this the reason for all my lives?

All the mistakes I thought I was making,
All the things I’ve put “Me” through.
It was worth my time in the darkness,
To see the light that resides in you.

This place in which I find “Myself” is uncharted in my universe
A place I’ve only heard of.
I wonder what I should call this place.
Have I found “Myself” in “Love”?

Ah relationships.  Can I say enough about them? It’s what humans were designed for.  It’s how we all got here and probably what takes us out. Well I am joking a little on that last statement.  But as anyone who has ever been in love in the romantic sense can tell you, nothing can make you love life or hate life like romantic relationships. Take it from a guy who had been married three times by age thirty-five. More on that later. What I want to focus on first is what I am going to call “Big Love/Big Relationship”.  This is the Love of all loves and the Relationship which makes all other relating possible.  In the language I use it would be called the Love and Relationship of God with all of life. In Paul’s letter to the Romans he described this love as a bond to God that nothing can separate us from.  The words he chose were:

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38)

Elsewhere in Ephesians 3, Paul go so far as to say that if we had the strength to receive this love that Christ knew so well we could be filled with all the fullness of God.  Can you imagine that–to be filled with all of the fullness of God? Is it even possible? What does that even mean?  Apparently Paul had some idea of what it meant and he prayed that those who heard his words would come to know what it meant as well.

For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Did you notice that in Paul’s prayer that he used the term family to unite heaven and earth through God? The whole family of God includes the residents of both heaven and earth.  God is related to us all and we are all related to each other in God.  This is very important to keep in mind when Paul indicates the goal of his prayer which is that we come to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge–a love that can embrace the whole family of God.  For it is the one whose heart is strengthened to know this love that can be filled with the fullness of God. So what does this have to do with being “in love”?  Well, what it brings up for me is the idea that this feeling of love that we expect from our family and that we often demand from our romantic relationships has its source in this love that Paul is talking about. Think about it.  Why do we get disappointed in almost every single one of our relational bonds?  Well from my point of view, we experience these disappointments because we are comparing all of our relationships to a love that we somehow know is possible even if it is beyond the realm of our experience.  It is a love that passes knowledge.

As children, we enter this world with a sense of wonder and awe.  There is no such thing as ordinary or common.  All things are new. We see everyone and everything as a part of Us–an inextricable whole that is Life and Love itself. This last for a year or two–perhaps longer if our needs continue to be met as we have then.  But as soon as there comes the perceptible space between our need and the fulfillment of that need we begin to experience ourselves as distinctly other–as something different and apart from everyone and everything else. And this is the beginning of common and ordinary experiences.  Wonder begins to recede. It is no longer seen in everything, but only in what we have never seen before.  All things are not new.  Only new things are.  And so we tire of what was and what is and we begin to long for something more.  All this time, this more we are looking for is so close that we can’t see it.  Our parents who were once seen as our heroes, become less exciting and rather than see them as a part of who we are, many of us begin to experience them as the very embodiment of restriction.  Emptiness takes place of fullness and we begin our search for a replacement for a love lost.

For a time we will fill this emptiness with sense gratifications of every kind.  But it will all get old.  Toys we once “loved” and could go nowhere without will find a new home in a box or an attic and only be looked at when in the process of getting rid of things.  Friends with whom we were once joined at the hip will find different interests.  Success in sports or academics or any other venture will cease to challenge us.  And at the end of some day, we will find ourselves wishing we were children again.  We will look back and scarcely remember that newness of life.  But somehow we know it is there.  Our desire for it is proof of its existence.  But the question remains, “how do we get back to it?” And the only answer is relationship.  We need a relationship that fulfills us–that makes everything else in life worth it.  We need new eyes through which to see ourselves and the world.  It is through those new eyes that we will be resurrected.  We will be made new.  And so we look for those eyes that will love us like we need to be loved and will see us as we desire to be seen.  Someone who anticipates our needs and loves us with a love that surpasses knowledge–just like we always felt our parents should have.  And plus we get to have sex with them and accumulate stuff.  What can be better?  When this happens, we will know that we are in love.

That is what this poem is about.  It is about that moment when we realize the we feel ourselves restored through the love of another–that feeling that somehow the love of another redeems all that we have lost through other relationships that somehow failed us.  It is an intense feeling that some people get addicted to.  Like drugs, alcohol, sex, and overworking this “feeling” produces a euphoria that takes us beyond ourselves and yet includes ourselves. In some way through this encounter we may temporarily feel like we even gained more of ourselves.  In their book, Getting the Love You Want, Harville Hendrix and Helen Lakelly Hunt, note that many of the people they work with in healing romantic relationships, express how at the initial stage of relationship they experience themselves as having more energy and a healthier outlook on life.  Some say they felt wittier, more playful, and more optimistic. They even saw themselves as better looking when looking in the mirror.  On top of that, these relationships even empowered some people to give up other substitutes for gratification such as sweets, drugs, alcohol, or recreational sex.  There was even a decrease in overworking oneself or living simply for accumulating money.  At the height of this relationship, some people even radiated that good feeling out into the world and some even experienced greater spiritual awareness.  Sounds awesome huh?

Unfortunately like with any drug or addictive substance, there is the inevitable crash as most of us know all to well.  Some of us more than others.  Speaking for myself, I can say that I absolutely loved my prior wives.  I still do in fact.  I though it was awesome when we were experience each other like we were high. And the fact is we were high.  That’s what falling in romantic love is.  It is getting high off of someone else’s affection.  I know that doesn’t sound very romantic, but if you compare it to any other activity that we participate in to feel better, very few people can refute this.  And that is where I differ from a lot of people on this subject of being in love.  Growing up in a household of divorce, I realized that I had a choice between experiencing our family situation as it was and accepting that it was the best condition for me as a spiritual being evolving into higher consciousness or I could continue to compare it to what I thought it could be or was “supposed to have been” and suffer needlessly.  I chose to accept the variety of family situations in the world as just another part of the diversity of the mysterious Creation rather than assume an entitlement to domestic homogeneity likened to the Huxtables.  Therefore when the high wore off in my relationships, I did not feel the sense of urgency that my partners felt.  I was grateful for how long it lasted and excepted as a gift from God.

What I imagined, was that the initial feeling was a preview of what was possible if we each sought to understand the belief that such a feeling would  last.  If we could follow that feeling to its source, then perhaps we could access it more often.  In other words, that initial euphoria was just a foretaste.  We’d have to work for it if we wanted it more often.  This sounds familiar to people who have ever been introduced to anything new–like drugs.  The first taste is free.  After that it is going to cost you.  I know this might not be an easy pill to swallow, but unless you’ve experienced otherwise, I am sticking to what I know, have witnessed, and have experienced.  But like I said, this isn’t the most romantic point of view and it was one my partners could not buy.  They wanted to get back to a feeling that would never return–like we all do when we look back on our younger days.

Had I understood what they were looking for then, perhaps I would have done a better job of expressing my love for them.  I failed there.  As there partner and friend I could have done more to sympathize with their sense of loss of the dream that I would somehow make up for all of their other losses.  Instead I said something to the effect of, “What?  You thought this was going to last?  Heck no.  The beginning of a relationship is like being on vacation.  Everything else is like working so you can go on vacation again.  What made you think I was going to make up for your relationship with your parents and exes?  I’m not God. I can’t fulfill you. How about I go to God and you go to God and then we can meet up somewhere as two fulfilled beings instead of trying to get the impossible from each other?”  See.  Not very romantic. In those first two relationships I tried to talk them out of feeling that “feeling” because I didn’t want to be a drug.  But what I realized over time was that we could have worked with that desire together.

As I matured through my failures in interpersonal relationships, I realized what I mentioned above–that desire for this fulfilling love comes from a place in us that already knows what Paul was talking about in his prayer.  We in fact were created by and through that Love.  Without getting too religious for some of you, I think John said it best when he wrote that God is love and that one day we would see that we are like God.  In other words, the love that we compare all of our relationships to is the Love that we are.  We know that we can receive this Love first and foremost because we know that we are capable of giving that Love.  Perhaps that is why Jesus taught that it is more blessed to give than receive.  Because we are in Love when we give love.  With that being said, know that I Love You and that this chapter is my contribution to you knowing yourself as Love.

Soul Wide Open

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I was saying grace over my egg, cheese, and bacon breakfast sandwich one  morning reading a book called Realizations by my friend Bill Guillory and I had some realizations of my own.  As I sat on the park bench eating the sandwich in this little country town I thought about how mysterious it was that I found myself there in the first place.  For a moment I glimpsed my entire life and then it hit me that I have been so many places in my life, met so many people, and loved so much.  And yet there is so much room for more.  Realizing this I committed myself to living with my soul wide open no matter what.  That is where the poem below came from.

Soul Wide Open
From this day I’m gonna live with my soul wide open.
No matter how many times my heart has to get broken
No matter how many times I have to die and come back
Living less than who I am is like a train that’s off track

We’ve been taught to live lies, close eyes, be blind
Afraid to look within because we done lost our minds
But I just found mine, gon’ clean it off spit shine
From an eternal space now I choose to bend and break time

Forget about the past
Who can prove it anyway
Keep my focus on what lasts
And live to see the final day

Not the one that’s about judgment
But the one that reveals the Real
Where all souls open up
And we live the love we feel

This poem is for every friend who feels like they have to hold themselves back or are held back by chains to the past or fear of the future that make us feel undeserving of the love that is our birthright. Maybe you never received it from the people you assigned as the ones to validate or approve of you, but love is in no short supply. It is everywhere, because you are love. If you doubt it, I dare you to go to a mirror right now and say, “You are beautiful, I love you, and I am glad you are here.” If it is hard to say ask yourself why. If it is easy to say, you’re in a good place. If we don’t love ourselves how can we expect it from others?

You can learn more on the above statements by checking out the post Coming Out of the Dark.

Judge

Higher Up IDEALS1 Comment

Judge

Am I jealous of your ignorance
Because I wish that I were too?
Do I call your innocence, stupidity
Because I can’t do what you can do?

Why do I judge
When I know that I don’t like it?
Is it because I know I’m you
But I have no way to fight it?

Did I create a “heaven”,
To prove that I’m better?
Is it because I think I am now,
And I just want to be forever?

Well if “God” is always right,
If I try to judge I know I’ll fail
So if I refuse to admit this
That’s what will keep me in this “hell”.

I wrote the poem above when I was on a flight from Baltimore to Orlando.  There was a family coming on the plane who had never flown before.  Out of nervousness, the mother kept apologizing for her family and confessing this fact as they loudly found their way to their seats.  They were the last people to be seated on the plane and essentially the rest of us were waiting on them.    My former wife and I were headed to the Sunshine state to spend some time at the Disney parks and go on a cruise.  I assumed that this other family was headed to Disney as well.  Needless to say their children were very excited and it only made sense.  However, despite the plane having several families on-board presumably headed to the same destination, it seemed that many people were judging this other family.

From my seat I could hear the surrounding passengers mumbling such things as, “find your seat already” and “it’s not that hard”.  Even my wife was a little bothered and probably embarrassed.  You see this family who had never flown and was having a very hard time were African-American like us. Now to some people reading this you might think that their ethnicity doesn’t matter, but you’d be wrong.  With a lot of Black people, we tend to take it personally and feel embarrassed if other Black people are doing something that draws public scrutiny.  I could go into the psychological reasons for it, but I will just make it simple and say that in a world that runs largely on first impressions and stereotypes, there is a frequent and underlying fear that what other people do will reflect back on us if we can be identified with those people.  We fear that whatever judgment someone makes about the offenders will be generally projected onto us.

I have found that this tendency is most prevalent in cultures with a dominant sense of collectivism but it happens with all people who see themselves as directly connected with others in some way such as family, teams, political party, nationality, etc.  It is the whole idea of being guilty by association.  I remember being a child and when the news announced a serious crime my family would be praying that the criminal was not Black.  Largely it was because we didn’t want to hear the bad news of another one of us being accused of a crime, but as I learned soon enough, it was also because we didn’t want whatever crime that was committed to reflect on us; further exacerbating the already existing and deliberate tendency of the larger society to view us in a negative light.  At first I couldn’t understand why my family felt that way until I noticed that if the criminal was Black, the newscasters would always state that fact, but if they were White, they would never mention it in their descriptions.

I thought about this as I watched the faces of the people on the plane.  Being the sensitive type, I allowed myself to feel as much as I could trying to get a sense of what was going on with not only the family trying to find their seat, but also with the other annoyed passengers, and my own inner person.  I tried to turn up my compassion and to think more about what the people were experiencing than my own judgments about how I thought people should be.  As I watched the family struggling to get in their seats and find a place for their carry-ons, I thought about what it might feel like to already be nervous about flying for the first time as adults not to mention having excited children tagging along.  I imagined that they probably were feeling very anxious and likely it was this anxiety that influenced their decision to wait until everyone else was on the plane before boarding.  Having never been on a plane before, they would not have known the carry-on situation and therefore did not anticipate having to try and find a place for their stuff because passengers who boarded earlier took their once empty bin.  Add to this that they were on display as all of the other seated passengers annoyingly waited for them to get their seats, and I could only imagine that this whole situation was torture for them.  Consequently, the wife was subtly pleading for compassion by constantly revealing their inexperience while the husband seemed to be pulling an Adam with a face that said, “this was all her idea.”

As for my wife and the annoyed passengers, I already mentioned part of what I felt was getting to her and some of the other Black passengers who barely looked at the family.  There were some passengers who could care less and were just settling in for the flight and then there were those who were projecting their frustration on the family as if they were doing something to them on purpose.  At first my mind wanted to make it a racial thing.  I wondered if the family was White if they would have been less annoyed.  And I think the answer for some of them would have been yes.  Is it personal? Sometimes yes, but more often it is no.  People just tend to have greater affinity for those who they seem to have more in common with.  It is like a programming.  They don’t even know they do it half the time it is so ingrained.  And then there are the people who are just people who are easily annoyed–which in the Metro-DC area is not uncommon.  There are a lot of people who live their daily lives in a rush.  Anything that seems to make getting to where they want to be take longer is subject to the wrath.  It could have easily been a snow storm and they would be angry with nature.  Everything  outside of themselves is an equal opportunity annoyer (made up word).  These stressed out people probably need a vacation more than anyone.  But it is probably likely that they if they were going to Disney, they were going to try and conquer it and ultimately leave their vacation more tired than they were when they arrived.  I’d say that they were as good of candidates as anyone for Jesus’ insight to “forgive them for they know not what they do”.  And then there leaves me.

I tend to be one of those people who is initially intolerant of intolerant people.  I judge people who judge people and condemn those who condemn others.  In reality, this is probably the worse kind of judge because those of us who have this tendency have the luxury of what people call righteous indignation.  We can convince ourselves that we have the “might of right”.  Usually we can point to religious texts like the one below to demonstrate why our point of view is the more accurate one.  Consider Matthew 7:1-6 which admonishes people for judging others.  It would be easy for me to point to this scripture when attacking someone I see of guilty of judging others unfairly.  Used incorrectly, I could do a lot of harm with this scripture.  Much like the away those who are adamantly against abortion can justify killing a doctor who performs abortions, using the “thou shalt not kill” defense, I could come to someone who is judging and say to them, “you are a no good dirty rotten judger of people and I hope that you get what is coming to you because you are just wrong because the Bible says don’t judge.”  And when I did, I am sure that I would have a lot of people supporting me who also have pent up judgments about themselves and the world around them that they are just waiting to project onto someone else so that they can get the nasty feeling of  self-condemnation off of them.  But here’s the thing.  That’s now passages like the one below are meant to work.

As the second stanza of the poem asks:

Why do I judge
When I know that I don’t like it?
Is it because I know I’m you
But I have no way to fight it?

Passages like Matthew 7 are spoken to and from a place of Oneness.  When Jesus speaks to the disciples and others about why we should not judge, he does not do so only from a position outside of us, but from a place within us as well.  He is speaking from the all encompassing reality that we all know and that we all are.  Paul touches on this awareness when he says in Romans 1:20,”For since the creation of the world His [God’s] invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”  While I will not unpack the full breadth of this passage right now, I will point to the obvious implication made here that all of Creation knows the fullness of its Source.  We are not separate from Source–from God and consequently from one another. Therefore, we have no excuse for living as if the opposite is true.  As the Christ, Jesus lives this reality of Wholeness eternally and speaks to us from this place.  Thus, when he makes assertions like the one you are about to read, it comes from that place.  And from this place his judgments are true, because their only intention is to remind us of who we truly are.  For as it says in 1 John 3:2, “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”  Now, in this Light read the passage below:

Matthew 7:1-6

7 “Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. 3 And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. 6 “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.

This poem Judge attempts to convey the essence of this passage–that the judgments we project onto others naturally returns upon us precisely because, in Oneness, those others are in fact us.  When Christ through Jesus, advises us not to judge, it is because he knows that it is of little effect in transforming our collective consciousness.  Our judgments do not transduce the dark energy of ego resistance into the vibrant all-creative energy of realized potential as we deceive ourselves into believing it will (if you would like this sentence unpacked contact me).  Only consciousness can do this.  This is what Jesus is telling us in verse 3-5 above.  What we often find when we release judgment for consciousness is that once we remove the plank from our own eye, we will discover that there never was a speck in our brother or sister’s eye in the first place.  All we were seeing was our own projected planks out in the world.  However, if after removing the plank from our own eye, we still see a speck in another’s, our conscious Love for them will show us how it can be removed for the benefit of the All.

Rather than unpack the rest of the poem which mentions heaven and hell in the context of being the ultimate in the human struggle with judgment, I will leave you with this expression I found on the bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap, “For we’re all One or none! Listen children, Eternal Father Eternally One!  We’re All One or none! Exceptions eternally? NONE.”  As it pertains to this poem, Heaven is acceptance God’s reality and hell is it’s denial.  When we deny God’s reality to others we deny it to ourselves.  “What we bind on earth we bind in heaven.  What we release on earth, we release in heaven.”  Such is the Way of One.