The Bigger Picture
Heavenletter #3007, Your Heart Is Your Bond http://www.heavenletters.org/your-heart-is-your-bond.html caused a certain stir on the Heavenletter Spiritual Community forum. The comments people wrote helped me to see this Heavenletter in a new light. A Heavenletter that at first did not seem so deep was filled with meaning I had missed.
The upshot was, as Bernie Siegel said so simply and well:
help the person in front of you by doing what they need, now.
Carol Adler from Arizona made two points:
Give people what they ask for, and serving is a form of love....the greatest service.
Carol also added that, with our grown children, we want to give advice, but what they want is for us to listen. I can't hear that one enough.
Patrizia Massi from Italy wrote so beautifully:
Everyone is me and I am in everyone. The illusion is the multitude. Oneness is the reality. Well, we know but it isn't so easy to live it. Love is the difference. Ego is the difference. I think (I also wanted apples and the world gave to me a lot, a lot of oranges!) all lessons in our own life have the purpose to make us more and more malleable, and surely other reasons that I don't know. Like a Zen saying "When a sculptor wants to make a tiger, he takes away from the marble all that isn't tiger" So is with us. I think this is necessary because to reach the reality of love is difficult for us and that is the unique reality when there aren't questions and there aren't answers.( I hope I reach that very soon!)
I had been thinking of this Heavenletter in terms of individuals. Then I started to think of this Heavenletter from a bigger perspective -- in terms of nations.The whole history of the world would be so different had the theme of this Heavenletter been lived.
If nations had just listened and appreciated and not tried to "improve" another nation, the world would have been spared so much misery. If only no culture thought it was better than any other. . .
For instance, after America had been discovered, what if the people who landed had had respect for the American Indians? What if settlers from Spain and England and so forth had seen the natives as people they could learn from rather than seeing them as ignorant? What if the settlers had not taken advantage of the innocent Indians? What if the settlers hadn't stolen the Indian's land? What if the settlers had not thought they were superior and had not imposed their "civilized" culture upon the Indians? What if the settlers had thought: "I want to give these people what they want and not what I want. I want to learn from them. Who am I to think I know what they should want."
All the sweetness the world has missed. All the suffering it has not been spared.
Comments
And trying to "improve" others is only one of very many forms of direspect. What about the need for power, what about plain greed? It's all fear. When I fear that I might be terribly wrong, that's when I start needing to be right and trying to improve others. When I feel powerless, thats when I try to gain power over others or a whole empire. When I feel there is not enough going around, or not enough for me, that's when I become greedy. But all of this, I feel, is not to be regretted. It is our way of remembering who we are, i'ts our way of growing back into love. Being human, living in the illusion of suffering and death, IS difficult. Yes, let us bow deeply to everyone who ever had the courage to play the victim part. But I suspect that's all of us. Perhaps everyone has played every part. And however this may be, it's ending now. Need will be no more, lack no more, envy, hate, greed, violence, direspect, inconsiderateness, knowing it all, making up their minds for them - no more. At least that is how I read Heavenletters™ like ntoday's #3009.
Yes Jochen, you are right, we couldn't have written a different history. So scared, alone, blind, the human being could only survive. But the long filament of history has brought us here, in this special time, and in this perspective, all seems to have had a purpose. From knowingness comes nobility, so if you know who you are you give others what they ask and when others give you what you didn't ask you kindly say thank you and be happy with it. That is what God is trying to teach us.
Emilia
Jochen...this rocks!! Yes, yes, yes!! Do y'all remember the fantastic endings to those old movies, when the music starts to "swell", and so does your heart because you KNOW that it's all going to have a most beautiful climax and everyone's going to live happily ever after? Jochen's comment made my heart swell.
Of course, I'm a "Pollyanna" I know: Even when I was a little girl, upon hearing the story of Little Red RidingHood I was distraught for the wolf. I wanted him to be rehabilitated, instead of slaughtered. I am such a silly fool for happy endings...
And just like today's HL re the "may all your desires" come true. I wish that for you.
Whatever the past, smallness is a choice now. It is up to you. Your alternative is greatness. In your heart of hearts, which do you think belongs to you?
If you wish to leave smallness behind, you will leave it like a candy wrapper. You will not keep it to you. You will not save it. You will drop it. And you will forget about it. What you desire comes to pass, and what I desire comes to pass. It is inevitable. You think the anguish and pangs and sufferings will always be when they never were except as you picked them up and carried them with you.
If you feel a gap, what do you choose to fill the gap with? Familiar angst or the sweet joy that is inevitably yours? What is your state of mind, and who is responsible for it? What is the object of your state of mind? What is your intention? Your intention may be different from your desire. You may not believe in your desire. Then your intention is a flibbertigibbet. Or perhaps your intention is more like a certainty of not reaching that which you say you desire. Perhaps you desire something else more than the peace you attest to.
Perhaps you prefer skirmish.
What Is Your Intention?
Heavenletter # 1431 Published on: October 18, 2004
http://www.heavenletters.org/what-is-your-intention.html