Perspective: Part II

It's a sad day when a mass killing like the one at Virginia Tech is simply no longer shocking.

We've had war, hatred, death and killings on mass since 9/11.

I miss the feeling of unity and the outreach of Columbine. There are no vigils out in my neighborhood for the lives lost at VT like there were then.

We've been wading in the stentch for so long we can no longer smell it.

I wish I could say there is something being done, but then The New York Times published an article today on how our so-called leader has re-negged on promises of helping the victims in New Orleans -- helping those still alive as opposed to merely honoring those dead and sending more to be killed in a foreign land.

The ball's been dropped so many times it's hard to do much anymore but just watch it roll away.

I know that from the darkness can come great light. But that is a choice, isn't it? A perspective chosen.

So what about you guys? Are you getting used to it all?

Or are you just waking up?



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Perspective

I think a lot of times we can forget how important perspective is in nearly every situation of our every day life. We all hear the phrase, "It's all in your perspective," but how often do actually sit down to choose what glasses we're going to put on before taking action?

And again, as in all things, there is a gray area here. Deluding one's self into thinking all is well as the world crumbles around them is no answer, but nor is the feeling of utter helplessness that one can feel from that tower shaking.

The best example I can give comes from my song of the week.

When someone -- let's say a bank teller, for example -- says something as simple as, "Have a nice day!" we can take this one of two ways. Some would think, "Well that was nice. So many people forget to say things like that anymore or don't bother to take the time." But on the other hand, another person might think, ""Why would they say that? You don't even know me and couldn't care less if I even died."

Both perspectives? Absolutely true.

So now it comes down to personal choice. Which are you going to choose?

Song of the Week: "Almost Rosey" (Live) - Tori Amos, American Doll Posse

And when I hear of one more bomb, yes we have all been robbed of song and nightengales who throw their arms up -- when is enough enough?

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What Is Evolved?: Part II

As a follow up to yesterday's post, if you're having problems coming up with 10 things you love about yourself (NOT your physical self, remember, but WHO you are!), you might want to try this Kabbalah meditation on Self-Esteem.

Self-love/esteem is actually a translation of one of the 72 Names of God, and thankfully it's one of the easiest to remember because all three letters are the same! You can scan them forward, scan them backward! And the letter itself is pronounced, "Hey!" So, when you're feeling really gay and queening out with your friends, you can say, "Hey, hey, hey!" Or if you're straight, just sing that song, "Hey, hey, hey... goodbye!" God's name, right? Who knew?

Anyway, the full meditation is here: http://www.geocities.com/ichthys7/meditations/41.swf

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What Is Evolved?

I recently found a tape of a psychic reading someone did for me back in 1999.

I remember thinking at the time, "This really has absolutely nothing do to with what I'm going through. This woman is a quack."

And that may have been true, but as we know there are no coincidences, and for whatever reason I kept that tape, only to find it as of last week to be appropriate to absolutely every facet of my life. The things that came out of her mouth were things I had written in my "Diary" and on KabbalahCurious.com just days before!

It's ironic that I would be going through this during the holiday of Easter, but what it has come down to for me lately is how to make my faith greater than my fear. My confidence has always been based in anything other than my true self. When I was a teenager, I created this fantasy world and pretended to be someone else, someone who had that confidence. As I got older, I found ways of at least putting it somewhere in my own skin, even if only in the physical form. I have put my sense of value, worth and self-esteem in everything from money to power to my hair to my dick size -- all of which are things that come and go, wither or fade away. I have unconsciously sought out relationships that I thought would be "sure bets" because I am petrified of rejection. I didn't believe anyone would really want to be with me unless they... were diseased, were high maintenance, were my best friend, etc. I found situations where I felt certain the other person would never leave me and only then could I truly open myself up to them and allow myself to fall. This might shed some light on that line in my poetry I posted last week that says, "All his eggs in his inches. Needs a map to get him there, sniffing out that one sure thing." This has been my M.O. I am even a big fish in a small pond when it comes to my career, knowing that staying here is another "sure bet" despite the fact that it is not my ultimate dream and what I feel I was put on this Earth to do -- or at the very least what I came to Los Angeles to do.

On the tape, I kept talking about wanting to be "evolved." Not enlightened, but evolved -- which is interesting because I don't think I even realized there was a difference at the time. The psychic asked me what I felt evolved was. I gave her my answer and she said to me, "You know what evolved is to me? Self-love. When you love yourself and put your confidence in who you are instead of what you do or what you look like, that is a state of evolved being because it is so difficult for so many to do. What traits and characteristics do you have that you will take with you to your death bed? What do you love about you that will never change? These are the things to love in yourself because they are also the reasons you would want someone to fall in love with you. You can do all the yoga and all the Kabbalah classes all the good deeds in the world, but it doesn't mean you'll love yourself. You'd just be putting your confidence in the fact that you do those things and then what happens when you stop?"

She makes a good point. There is no one 'thing' any of us can do to reach this state of "evolved" being because it is a process. We can only ask that we love ourselves (our true selves, what is inside) and treat ourselves better than we did the day before.

So I am suggesting this Easter Sunday, for those of us who so often put our sense of worth into their physicality, to make a list of 10 things you love about yourself that will never fade away. Put it somewhere you can look at it every morning for the next few weeks and see if the way you feel about yourself and carry yourself changes.

These are the things that make up who you are as a person and will never be taken away from you. They are the reasons we should be confident in ourselves as opposed to having a good hair day.

Some examples would be: Honest, Loyal, Spiritual, Ambitious, Creative, Sharing, Funny, Perseverent, Devoted and Talented. Oh and Sexy can be one too. That's something that comes from within that you'll never lose, even with age. ;-)

If you can find more than ten, go for it. But ten is a good start. Feel free to comment here and leave your personal top ten. Love it enough to put it out there for all the world to see!

Happy Easter!


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What Would Jesus Really Do?

A lot of times, readers assume that because I question the Christian faith that I am anti-Christian. Let me take this holiday weekend to I clarify that I am certainly not. In fact, I am a firm believer and follower in many of the teachings of Jesus Christ. What I am against is hypocrisy and the hijacking of Christ's walk. I believe Jesus came to illuminate for everyone, not a selected few.

Ronald Martin's special, What Would Jesus Really Do?, is being rebroadcast several times throughout the weekend on CNN. It is a brilliant and much needed example in these times of the extreme conservative and right winged, of the good that can come from the Christian faith -- something easy to forget when so much blood has been shed and hatred spewed in his name. While I didn't agree with everything that was said from the panel of pastors and reverends, I was so impressed with certain standpoints, I had to jot them down.

I never thought I would be quoting Jerry Fallwell, but when asked if he believes a Christian is the only right person to elect as our President, he says, "I think that the ideal is that we would have a man or a woman of [Christian] faith who also is right on the issues. But I've known men and women of faith who didn't have a clue regarding national security, didn't have a clue about how to deal with terrorism, had no idea about how to change the federal courts and to defend the unborn. So it's like this, I would rather have an atheist who is a neuro-surgeon of excellent talents operating on me if I ever need a brain surgery than have the best Sunday school teacher in the world who doesn't know a thing about it. We've got to elect a President who, whether he or she goes to church or which church or whatever, understands the issues and the top issue today in our culture is survival. It's the most dangerous time I've known in my 73 years and I've lived through Hitler, nazzi-ism, communism... This is the most dangerous time America has ever faced and the next President has got to have a grip on the gravity of this and the survival of the people."

Pastor Frederick Douglas Heinz III had so much passion in his delivery that when he spoke of the oppression of homosexuals, I was moved to tears and screaming "Hallelujah!" at my television set. He says, "I think it's quite ironic that on this weekend as we celebrate the passion and crucifixion of Jesus Christ that a fresh Jesus has been crucified on the cross of identity theft. Jesus is now associated with those who are against same sex marriage. Jesus is pro-life, yet his pro-life stance stops when we exit the womb? I'm bothered by the fact that we have not really taken Jesus, we've divorced him as it were from the reality of his teachings from the days in which he lived. Jesus basically has been de-radicalized and sanitized to the point where he is totally divorced from the social, political and economical realities of his day. How can we do this when Jesus spent his time as a part of an oppressed people under Roman occupation and oppression? You can not divorce Jesus from that context. What would Jesus do? He'd give the most to those who have the least. He'd be concerned about the fact that we are in a misbegotten war. One that we have no exit strategy for! Jesus says the truth shall set you free. I believe that we can come together as Christians if we put Jesus back in context. Put him back in context and I promise you we'll follow him and we'll be following him together."

Even Pastor Rick Warren, who I disagreed with the most in fact, reminded me by his interview's end, "I don't have to agree with every belief in a person to find common ground. I don't agree with everything that some of my gay friends do and they don't agree with everything I do, but we also have our similarities like working together to fight AIDS. And that's not saying it is a gay disease, but gays agree with me that if Jesus were here today, he'd be hanging out with people who have HIV and AIDS. They are the lepers of the 21st Century. People are scared to death of it. And he hung out with people who had leperacy in those days."

But the most important contention of the evening, to me, of course, being a practicing Kabbalist, came from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach who felt that the stories of Jesus's death were not nearly as important as the stories of how he lived his life. He says, "We hear almost nothing about the humanity of Jesus. We hear Christians speak about how inspired they are by the life he led, but if you go to their church, or a Catholic church in particular, you will only see the death that he died. You see him hanging there on the cross. I think this has direct repercussions on how religion is practiced and how religion is preached. It focuses so much on death and what happens after death as opposed to taking responsibility for how we should be living in the here and now, taking a page from Jesus's book, so to speak. He struggled with issues like you and I. His humanity is what truly makes him so inspiring."

The point Ronald Martin was trying to make in his special, he says, is this: "Faith should be used to break down barriers, not solidify them," he says. "How can people who say they love Jesus be afraid to speak to their neighbor because of their differences or eat with a co-worker or have their children play with their peers across town?"

I wanted to shed some light on one question that Martin posed to almost everyone on the panel that went unanswered. He wanted to know, "How did the Easter bunny and Jesus get hooked up?"

Great question. And the answer is yet another reason to open our hearts and become tolerant of individuals with ways and belief systems separate from our own. Holiday comes from the term "holy day" and though all holy days become secularized, many began as Pagan. The Pagan holiday of Ostara actually means "eastern star." This Easter-n star's movement towards the "rising sun" is where we derived the term "Easter." In ancient times, the Goddess Ostara, sometimes even translated as Eostre, was the Goddess of Spring and Morning Redness. She would often be depicted as standing in a grassy field with chicks and bunnies around her, a red egg (hence the Pagan "ritual" of dying eggs) in her hand. Sometimes she would even be depicted as having the head of a hare itself! The "bunny" and the Goddess Osara were closely related, both being creatures that thrive at night, under the ruling energy of the moon. So this is where we get our symbols of the holiday, Easter, way before the time of Christ. Is it a coincidence that it went from a holiday of the "rising sun" to becoming a holiday of the rising Son? Hmm... doubtful.

Also to check out this weekend, CNN is doing a two-part special called After Jesus on what happened during the years between his death and when Christianity was formed, and for an alternative view om the early days of Christianity, The History Channel brings us Banned From The Bible, a look at all of the gospels that were stricken from the record and why.

I prayed to Ostara on the Spring Equinox to bring us her sense of balance, to wash away the past and to start us anew like the season before us.

This weekend, I pray to Jesus Christ, for all of the things he symbolizes. I pray for my faith to be greater than my fear, for the strength to overcome obstacles in times of oppression, for a tolerant and unjudging nature and to remind me in times of crisis that we are all, in our own ways, the sons and daughters of God who created us in his image and have access to the divine within.


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A Little Toasty Here

So a friend of mine who is heavy into past life regression therapy has this theory on why so many people are afraid of success or scared of shining their brightest.

I have written here in my own introspection, I have felt like it's a protection device. I know there have been times in the past where I have sabotaged myself or not allowed myself to really feel the bliss of a moment for fear that it might be taken away from me. I think a lot of us feel this way.

And my friend's theory would actually fit this line of reason but is rooted in past lives. She believes it goes back to the tens of millions of people deemed heretics or "witches" and sentenced to death over the course of so many years. Women couldn't dance, garden, own a pet, etc.

Any talent? Burn her!

Those were harsh years and that's a ridiculous amount of people, which means a lot of souls, if you believe in past lives, coming back with their tikun being to rid themselves of this implemented fear of shining their brightest and showing the brilliance of all they may be.

Again, it's just a theory! Not neccessarily mine, but I will say it strikes a chord.

If it strikes one with you, next time you feel yourself scared of being "loud and proud," just remember the only one burning you at the stake today is you.


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Always In The Beginning

With the blossoms of Springtime, all around me I see people going through their own personal death and rebirth these days. I have one friend in particular who is having a very rough go of it, currently experiencing that dark night of the soul that has to be walked through before the sun comes out again.

Being on the other end of that journey (for the moment), I'd like to remind him, and all of us who go through this at one time or another, to take solace in knowing he is closer to his rebirth than he realizes. Something must end before something new can begin. When going through that dark night of the soul, we can all take comfort in knowing that we're closer to renewed faith, optimism and light than ever before.

The end holds hands with the beginning.

And what is a beginning anyway? When does it occur?

Taking it back to Genesis, what do you think they meant when they wrote, "In the beginning..."? Did they mean the beginning of time itself? What happened before that? How did God get here? Or what happened before the Bang, if that's your theory.

Kabbalah teaches us to apply the wisdom of the Bible to modern day life, to the right now.

Right now, every moment is our "in the beginning." Every second is an opportunity for the paradise that the garden had to offer. Will we take this second for granted, as Adam & Eve took the garden? Will we indulge? We are given this choice every second of every day.

We're always in the beginning.

I was thinking of the Tree of Life this morning and wondering if maybe it only looks like a totem pole on paper. Sort of like how we used to think the world was flat? Perhaps the tree too is round. Maybe Malkuth is closer to Keter than we realize.

Maybe we're all closer to Heaven than we think.



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