Dear Friend,
Over coffee this morning, a thought struck me. As is my habit, I’m reading several books simultaneously. One of them is Charles Eisenstein’s ‘The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.”
I really like Charles’s clarity of thought.
Good writing stirs up the imagination. I recalled a time when I was filled with certainty about my identity. The self bequeathed by culture. A tapestry of untruths.
I read comics where British and American military might crushed deceitful and cowardly Japanese and German soldiers. I watched films where indigenous people’s were portrayed as ignorant and savage, slaughtered by heroic settlers and cavalry.
Culture.
The water we swim in.
Having never travelled, knowing no-one outside of my small circle of experience, I imagined my Britishness made me better than ‘them’, whoever they might be. The others, the one’s out there somewhere.
The ‘great’ in “Great Britain” was thus made real for us, our days organised around work for the adults, school for us and the tv guide for everyone.
We just swallowed it hook line and sinker.
Somehow I imagined my self to possess the invulnerability of those comic book characters. Things falling apart happened somewhere else. The fault was to be found in the other.
How certain we were back then.
What ruined it was moving to the city. Meeting people from other cultures. Falling on love. Forging friendships. Things falling apart on a personal level.
Cracks forming in the shell of the false self.
Somewhere in the depths, shadows stirring. Self reproach, guilt, shame, the stuff that must be projected onto the stranger, lest we become strange to ourselves. The bile that pours from the supremacist. It must find a target, or it will turn and attack the crumbling citadel of the false self.
There’s a period of disorientation that comes as the false self gives way. A long one. Collectively it’s millennia. Two thousand years have passed since Christ taught love as our reality.
Mercifully, on a personal level the time scale is shorter.
You learn to stop judging.
You find others who, like you are determined to live peacefully.
You help each other.
Mirrors.
The people we admire are reflecting back to us our own unacknowledged qualities.
Those we distain, offer clues to the shadows we have yet to bring in from the cold. The parts of ourselves we cannot accept are exactly the parts we must offer compassion and forgiveness.
Who, born into madness, escapes without injury?
Can you imagine yourself completely loved and accepted? That is the task for each of us. No enemies, neither within nor out there in the world.
It’s a tougher gig than you’d want it to be, easier to have good guys and bad guys. The same dynamic at play, wreaking havoc in our personal and collective lives.
If it were easy then peace would reign across the planet.
The second coming of Christ is an internal shift.
Jesus isn’t coming back for a repeat appearance. Why would he do that? The teaching’s perfectly clear enough.
The second coming is Christ consciousness, universal compassion, non judgemental, loving kindness - forgiveness born inside of each one of us.
No matter which path we take.
A personal transformation, that transforms the world.
It’s us.
We save the world.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
W.B. YEATS
It’s not easy to become sane in a culture that is insane.
But we can do it.
We are doing it.
Have faith in yourself.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey
P.S.
Here’s the poem from Yeats in it’s entirety:
The Second Coming BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)