A Bag Lady’s Holy Week

Bag LadyRarely do I want to be that one, the bag lady. But for the next few weeks, I’ll be happily living out of suitcases. The first stop on my journey is the Balcony of Life, where I will stay until Easter is good and over. 

In years past, I’ve tried to tough it out and remain on Earth’s stage during Holy Week’s incessant demonization of the Divine, even though the bludgeoning of God’s holiness annoys me to no end.

As Einstein said, “Doing the same thing, and expecting a different result, is insanity.” So this year, I’m changing course: Rather than take myself there, I’m bringing myself here—to the Balcony. Memo to Self: Install an escalator! There’s no graceful way to lug all this stuff up these stairs.

Hmmm, even from the lower balcony, I can see what a blessing the soul we knew as Trayvon Martin has been for race relations in America. He has both awakened us to our tendency to label, judge and respond to another member of the human family based on superficial characteristics such as skin color and attire. He also has stirred our conflicted sense of justice.

As a species, we are still evolving, still trying to resolve our love-hate relationship with violence and vengeance. Sometimes brutalizing an innocent member of our human family is unacceptable to us. More frequently—in fact, daily—brutality is absolutely OK with us.

Why is the murder of one innocent child of God reviled and the brutal murder of another revered?

Trayvon’s murder falls under the unacceptable category. Hundreds of thousands of citizens in this mostly Christian nation have taken to the streets in outrage over the inhumanity of vigilante George Zimmerman and the insensitivity of the non-vigilant Sanford, Florida Police Department. We clearly revile injustice and violence—except when we’re giddy and grateful for it.

During this, the holiest week on the Christian calendar, we will attend vigils, wear hoodies to church, and post cathartic sentiments on social media in protest of the death of this innocent child and its subsequent cover-up. Then we will get down on our knees and thank God for sending another innocent young man to be slowly and sadistically tortured to death so that the guilty could be forgiven.

Let me play that back for you: According to ancient reports, God was so vehemently opposed to forgiveness that “He” stooped to the barbaric and distinctly human practice of sacrificing a live and innocent being before “He” would forgive the guilty. Yes, it’s the same God that wants mere mortals to forgive 70 times 7.

No one’s protesting the inhumanity, injustice or hypocrisy of this alleged act of God. No one’s demanding evidence that Love would do anything inhumane, unjust or hypocritical. No, instead we’re jumping for joy that we are washed in the blood of Jesus. Isn’t that part of a satanic ritual? Where does the Divine fit in that?

Can we legitimately scream for justice in Trayvon’s murder, when we’re not demanding the same for Jesus’s insanely brutal death? Can we credibly call for Zimmerman to be arrested and tried, but continue to give the Roman soldiers a get-out-of-jail-free card?

All of us carry baggage in our heads. Some of it is information and beliefs that harm us or others. We drag it from place to place and it blurs our ability to see Truth. Perhaps it’s time to let some of it go—starting with all illogical thoughts that demonize God.

From where this bag lady is sitting, if I am grateful for anything this Holy Week, it’s that God really is Love, and that Love forgives absolutely and unconditionally—no matter how much or how long we’ve repeated tales that The Divine does anything demonic.

Death is not…THE END.

Last night I ran across notes hastily jotted during one of the many times in 2003 that Spirit whispered the common sense spirituality that culminated in my first book. Among the wisdom imparted during that time were four profound life principles that have reframed the way I look at life on Earth’s stage, and now form the foundation of my playful Drama Queen Workshop™ exercises:

Life is always fair, God is never far, Death is not THE END, Absolutely nothing is unforgivable

The third Drama Queen principle, “Death is not THE END,” has been uppermost on my mind since hearing the news that Whitney Houston had left the stage. Most around me were focused on this tragic loss. Among them, my singer-songwriter daughter, who grew up worshiping Whitney and has set Whitney’s high musical standards as the bar she strives to reach.

What a thrill it was for Whitney to make a comeback appearance at the Grammys in 2009, the year Maiysha was nominated for best performance in her category. Now this. My child was almost inconsolable.

It was difficult enough to offer adequate comfort across the miles. (Maiysha has always loved to put her head in my lap while I stroke her forehead.) But it was even more difficult—actually, impossible to ignore this truth: Death of a mortal body is not THE END of an immortal soul. The soul who came here as Whitney is very much alive and undoubtedly well.

I’ve learned in the past that those who remain rarely want to hear this when a loved one exits Earth’s stage. Some are actually offended by the possibility that we are more than flesh, bones and blood.

We grieve deeply—not for the departed, but for ourselves because we can no longer be together physically. It matters not that the departed are closer, more accessible as Spirit than when they were weighted down by body costumes.

There’s so much evidence that death of a body is like removing a costume, as I’ve previously posted. I’ve personally witnessed it, as have millions of others. Who hasn’t had a “something told me to…” moment when there was no one else around?

Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone

Something in Whitney’s funeral program reminded me of an incident I recounted in my first book, “EARTH Is the MOTHER of All Drama Queens.” It happened the day my mother made her transition.

Sitting in a hair salon, I heard my mother whisper, “I just wanted to say goodbye.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed with grief. I was crying so hard, I couldn’t visit my mother in the hospital across the street, as planned. When I arrived home, there was a voicemail message that confirmed my suspicions.

At my mother’s visitation, her best friend walked up to me, stunned and a bit spooked. She said that her doorbell had rung the day Mother passed. When she went to the door, my mother was standing there. She just stood. She said nothing. Then she disappeared.

“She was wearing that suit!” Aunt Doris gasped, pointing to the casket.

My heart rose into my throat.

The day Mother made her transition, that gorgeous white suit was hanging in my closet. It was one of my favorites, but I rarely wore it. Days later, I thought it would be perfect for her on this occasion, so I took it to the funeral home.

What Aunt Doris was telling me was that before I’d even made the decision to bury Mother in my suit, she’d had already seen Mother wearing it!

Now we learn that Cissy Houston has a similar testimonial, which she shared in a letter to Whitney published in the funeral program:

Whitney Houston

“[God] came for you. But not without warning. For two months now I have been depressed, crying, lonesome and sad and not knowing why.

“On Saturday before I found out about your transition, my doorbell rang. I went to answer it, but there was no one there. It rang again and again, no one was there. I called the concierge to tell him someone was ringing my doorbell. He checked the camera and told me no one was there.

“You promised me you were coming to spend time with me after the Grammys. I believe the spirits allowed you to come after all.”

As Maiysha said after reading it, “This is the dream we wake up to everyday, but it’s still a dream.”

We thank you, Whitney, for stepping into the dream with us and blessing us with the full concerto that was your life. We delighted in the crescendos, were disappointed by the lows, and cheered for you to thrill us again.

We made your life about us: who we wanted you to be…for us. How excited you must be to step outside of the glare of Earth’s harsh and often painfully judgmental spotlight!

You deserve this time. Bask in the Loving Light of our Creator, Dearest Sister! We celebrate your new life; we love you and deeply cherish your eternal soul.

Pat ArnoldJoin me March 29-31 at “The Gold Rush” spiritual conference for women!

Come hear Iyanla Vanzant, Susan Taylor and other dynamic speakers. On Friday, have some fun in my latest Drama Queen Workshop: “Have You Lost Your MINE?” It’s gonna be a blast! For more information, click here.

How groundhogs and falling leaves affect your prosperity

Years ago, a journalist friend in Washington, DC, who also had walked away from her job with a prestigious media outlet, had a suggestion: Why don’t we enroll in a free online 40-day prosperity class?

We could barely afford to wait 40 days for our ships to come in. We immediately plowed into the program and followed all the directives precisely, keenly aware that we had no margin for error.

From prosperity to prospoority

What do you mean, I'm overdrawn? I still have checks left!We joyfully and diligently did the work, fully expecting that the abundance we sought would be the abundance we’d see. A few days before the end of our journey—and just as my rent was due—someone made two $900 charges on my debit card. I was $1,800 less prosperous than when I enrolled!

I eventually got my money back. But I got a lot more: a lesson in cause and effect. Admittedly, the prosperity class didn’t cause dollars to drain from my bank account. But it also didn’t cause a cent to be pumped into it.

Been there, done it

You can imagine my reaction when another entrepreneurial journalist friend told me a few days ago that she had enrolled in a prosperity class. To her delight, she then began receiving offers for freelance work.

“Are you saying the class is the reason you’re getting work?” I asked.

“Absolutely!”

I probed further: “So, if the class hadn’t been offered—or if you hadn’t enrolled in it—your phone wouldn’t have rung?”

She paused. “Good question.”

She wasn’t totally convinced that the class shouldn’t be credited with her good fortune. After all, several classmates had shared great testimonials.

“Did everyone in the class have a testimonial?” I asked.

“No,” she conceded, getting my drift.

My drift was this: If everyone in a class becomes prosperous—and no one outside a class does—then, and only then, can we logically conclude that the class was the cause of the students’ prosperity.

Correlation, causation and coincidence

A psychiatrist recently told a story about folks who noticed a recurring phenomenon: Every year, leaves fell off the trees. After that, it snowed! They concluded that falling leaves cause falling snow.

Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog DayDon’t snicker. For more than 120 years, we’ve claimed a wacky correlation between spring’s arrival and a hapless rodent “seeing” his shadow. Statistics show no correlation between the two. I think the falling-leaves-cause-snow people get the last laugh!

Looking but not seeing, hearing but not listening

Most of us find it unfathomable that we are made in the image of Our Creator: invincible, immortal, invisible, omniscient and divine. We believe that we are merely the physical shell, and outer conditions and other humans ultimately control our lives.

Our Ego-Selves are outwardly focused, always comparing other physical shells’ possessions with our own. Ego incessantly yammers in our heads: “Let’s go here, do this. Why can’t we have that?” When it’s not dictates our desires, it’s distracting us with fear of loss and worry.

If we don’t own our egos, they will own us

Head for the future, forget the pastThose who have learned to be in this world, but not of it, hear Ego’s fear-peddling messages; but they are not disturbed or distracted. In their view, this planet is like educational theater: instructive, but not always entertaining.

They know that every lesson on Earth’s stage has the perfect setting, props and supporting cast. Human is merely a role we play, even though Ego says it is who we are.

Perspective can land you in a trick bag

Through ego's eyesPerspective is a powerful thing, and it comes with consequences attached. For example, Ego has taught us to judge situations and other actors on Earth’s stage as “good” or “bad,” and treat them accordingly. However, if we’re held accountable for how we treat others, and are treated the way we treat others, we can find ourselves in a trick bag, inflicting unnecessary pain and distress upon ourselves.

Through Ego’s eyes, adversity is bad. It should be feared, avoided, and eliminated. That’s why, when adversity enters the stage, we instantly panic. If it doesn’t paralyze us, we rush into “fix it” mode, running around with our hair on fire, looking outside of ourselves for solutions. Like classes or prayer.

Ego has taught us to pray to a “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. How much can you grovel” God. And he cleverly placed God light years away, in outer space.

Ego’s no dummy: How fast does sound travel? How many light years away is the Ego’s God? Prayers won’t even arrive before your physical life ends.

It’s to Ego’s advantage that they don’t: Frightened humans, whose prayers aren’t always answered, are so much easier to manipulate. And much more apt to believe it when Ego says, “You can’t trust God. You can only count on yourself.”

The prospering power of adversity

Through the loving, nonjudgmental eyes of the Eternal Spirit of Love that others of us call God, adversity is the identical twin of prosperity. But most of us can’t see that because we’re bouncing around like unguided missiles, looking for something to change our circumstances—ideally, inject some prosperity into our lives.

Unguided missiles

We wonder: Didn’t someone say that God wants us to be rich? In that case, everyone on Earth should be rich!

Just as there is no correlation between groundhogs and spring—or falling leaves and snow—there is no correlation between the outer world and your prosperity.

Prosperity is as invisible as the real you, the invincible, immortal, omniscient and divine you that was made in the image of Your Creator. Your prosperity is the fulfillment of your unique life purpose. It cannot be caused, created or discovered through anything tangible.

Your prosperity lives within you, as you. Just because you refuse to look or acknowledge it or your own divinity doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Keep doin’ what you’re doin’ and you’ll keep gettin’ what you got. You have been given free will to go within, ask, listen and follow divine direction. Or you can keep following Ego’s map.

Pat ArnoldJoin me March 29-31 at “The Gold Rush” spiritual conference for women!

Come hear Iyanla Vanzant, Susan Taylor and other dynamic speakers. On Friday, have some fun in my latest Drama Queen Workshop: “Have You Lost Your MINE?” It’s gonna be a blast! For more information, click here.

Opening the eyes in back of your head

I recently reconnected with my college sweetheart and lifelong friend, who initiates a pleasant game of catch-up every once in a while. After all these years, I’m still surprised whenever he and his healthy sense of “what if…” curiosity suddenly reappear on my life path.

During our latest round of shoulda, woulda, coulda catch-up, we had a friendly debate about the value of revisiting the past. He insisted that it’s a healthy exercise, whether our memories are dramatically romanticized or even tinged with regret. Although I didn’t immediately admit it, he was right: Staring straight ahead can be myopic. Worse, we lose the valuable gifts tucked inside those rear view glances: context, life lessons and wisdom.

Rear-view mirror
(c) Bill Frymire

Perhaps you’ve noticed that we can’t always see where we’re going as clearly as where we’ve been. It’s the birthing chamber for those “If I only knew then what I know now” groans.

Ahhh, if our foresight was as 20/20 as our hindsight, life would be so much easier, wouldn’t it? But let’s be grateful that we have eyes in the back of our heads. With that hindsight, we can squeeze every drop of value from our experiences—pleasant and otherwise.

Easier to believe than to think

Albert EinsteinIt doesn’t take Jesus to tell us that putting new wine in old skins will make an absolute mess. It doesn’t take Einstein to tell us that doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is simply wacko. That great teacher, Experience, has told us these things on numerous occasions.

It doesn’t profit us to blindfold the eyes in back of our heads or power down our brains when discerning truth from possibility. By now, we’ve had millions of chances to be “born again”: clear out the debris from thoughts and beliefs that we know, from experience, don’t work and let our evolutionary lessons inhabit this new space—staying open to the possibility that new discoveries might replace them, as well.

Is Earth really flat?

We don’t have to rely on what others told us to believe. For example, several Bible scriptures, including Revelation 7:1, Isaiah 11:12, Job 28:24 and 37:3,  tell us that Earth is flat. Eyes open, brains in full throttle, do we embrace these scriptures as Truth (the Word of God), or as insight into what ancient people believed was true?

During an online search for images depicting the “four corners of the Earth,” as described in Revelation 7:1, I discovered the existence of the International Flat Earth Society. Its members are dedicated to “unraveling the true mysteries of the universe and demonstrating that the earth is flat and that Round Earth doctrine is little more than an elaborate hoax.”

Half of what you see, none of what you hear

I also found the image I was seeking, created in 1893, complete with ten Biblical scriptures that “condemn the globe theory.” Among them, included scriptures claiming that the earth, moon and sun stand still.

Map of the square, stationary Earth

In the tradition of new wine in old skins, this map presents us with a round and square Earth. It was created using the same methodology as the Christian clergy at the Councils of Nicaea in 325 and 787 CE, who poured an Old Testament God inside New Testament wineskin. All over the floor splashed a bi-polar deity who is genocidal, filicidal, difficult to please, smiting, full of wrath, judgmental, homophobic, punitive, capricious, vindictive, sadistic, AND the unconditionally loving, forgiving father of prodigal children.

Does believing make it so?

Every minute of our lives, we have the opportunity to apply the lessons we’ve learned and use them as guides as we progress along our life paths. Instead, we repeat phrases and hold expectations that they will perform as if they are true, even though we’ve learned through observation and experience, they are not. Phrases that top that list: “Believing makes it so” and “What we think about, we bring about.”

Millions of us quote modern scribes who declare that we can manifest whatever circumstances, possessions and relationships into the physical world that we desire. All we have to do is “claim” them or follow a certain formula or invoke a particular spiritual law.

With all due respect to the writers of those theories, nothing we have experienced or witnessed validates their claim. When our eyes open and brains are in full throttle rather than idling in gullibility, we know that laws produce the same result, 100% of the time for 100% of those affected, independent of our thoughts or beliefs. Yet we keep doing the same thing, expecting a different result.

We also know that laws don’t have to be consciously invoked. When’s the last time you you invoked the Law of Gravity so that you could walk, sit or hang a picture without anything floating away?

Is possibility a law?

Anything is possible. But if the Law of Attraction works the way modern sages say, everything to which we devoted dominant thought and emotional energy, and visualized in great detail would appear in our experience. Nothing else.

In other words, there would be no dictionary entries for surprise or disappointment. We’d be in total control of our experience here; in fact, we’d have dominion over Earth, just as the ancient scribes believed. Wouldn’t that make our physical/ego selves’ toes curl with delight?

Opening the eyes in back of our heads

Perhaps it’s time for us to see a bigger picture, and make a game of it, as creative souls do. My dear friend Joe’s wonder-filled game of “what if…” seems perfect for this:

  • What if God is so much greater than the brain-limiting images of a huge being who looks like a human and lives in outer space?
  • What if God is a divine, immortal and invisible intelligence and we are made in that likeness and image, rather than the other way around?
  • What if we have misidentified ourselves as mere mortals?
  • What if we, as divine, immortal and invisible souls are much more invincible and intelligent than the sensory human body costumes we are temporarily wearing?
  • What if, in the divine, immortal and invisible world of Spirit, everything is perfect, in Divine Order?
  • What if, as divine, immortal and invisible souls, we are precisely where we want to be, having the experiences we want to have for this bat-of-an-eyelash moment in Universal Time?
  • What if attempts by our mortal, sensory human costumes to control the divinely perfect experience we’ve designed simply don’t work?
  • What if we let go of our limited vision of ourselves and consciously sought to identify ourselves as the divine, immortal omniscient spirit within us?
  • What if we trusted the Divine Within to be our pilots, instead of using our bodies and the brains within them to manipulate the circumstances, possessions and people in our physical lives?

You don’t go to heaven, and other dawnings

The arrival of 11/11/11 has stimulated lots of conversations about the Age of Aquarius. And no, it wasn’t because the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter had aligned with Mars. Those lyrics gave us a great song in the musical “Hair.” But astrology, the source of all this stuff, tells us that the moon is in the seventh house two hours of every day—and Jupiter aligns with Mars several times every year!

2011 Aquarius Clock

If there is such a thing as an Aquarian Age, I wondered, when does our universal clock transition it from dawning to the full blown thing? And what on Earth will it look and feel like?

If the song was wrong about the planets, it could be wrong about the “Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust, and no more falsehoods or derisions” part. I decided to check it out.

I was surprised to discover that some folks believe we’re fully into the Aquarian Age. In fact, they say it began centuries before the first flower child was born, all the way back as the 1780s. The marker: Demands for human rights began to escalate.

Needless to say, that’s in dispute. Those in another camp clock the arrival at November 11, 2011. And yet another group says hold our horses. The Age doesn’t appear until next year’s winter solstice: December 21, 2012.

OK, so it appears to be a guessing game, even among those who study astrology. Do they at least agree on the effect the Aquarian Age will have on the planet and its inhabitants? Negatory.

Most predict a period of awakening, a more enlightened and less superstitious period in human evolution that resembles the “Hair” lyricist’s description. But at least one prominent astrologer has a darker prediction. Robert Zoller sees the Aquarian world as one in which the “secretive power-hungry elites seek absolute power over others.” (Sound familiar?) Zoller’s other indicator: In the Aquarian Age, religion, which he called “the opiate of the masses,” will be viewed as offensive.

If Zoller is correct, the “Occupy” movement sweeping the planet may fulfill one of his criteria. Closer to home, I may have encountered the other. It was nothing short of offensive when a gentleman bearing a handful of little blue religious tracts interrupted my afternoon stroll on one of Chicago’s last 60-degree days.

He looked me dead in the eye, lowered his voice as if he was giving me an insider tip on a potent stock, and said, “Make sure a place is reserved for you in heaven.”

Are. You. Kidding. Me?

At what point in human evolution are we going to stop imagining heaven in outer space? For centuries, the blissful home of God and the angels was on the other side of the clouds. Commercial air travel busted that myth. Soon after that, space exploration forced heaven’s location farther into the distance. Today, instead of that sunny place we enjoy when flying above the fluffy clouds, heaven sits in the dark, in a void. How divine! Who wants to spend all eternity there?

On one hand, I totally understand why we cling to the idea that the God in the Bible now lives millions of light years away. He’s unpredictable: either loving and forgiving or violently angry, sadistically punitive. And He has been known to kill every living thing.

If God is a gigantic male being who lives beyond the farthest star in our galaxy, isn’t it more likely that our Golden Rule violations might go unnoticed? Secondly, if we believe that this gigantic male being has a history of boastfully committing genocide and harming his creation with plagues and wars, wouldn’t we want some distance—lots and lots of it?

Many of us even believe that God blames all of us for the sins of our prehistoric ancestors, and won’t forgive his sinful children without subjecting the only innocent one to an excruciatingly painful death by torture.

Yes, I truly understand why anyone who believes that God does such sadistic things would have to position him in outer space. I simply wish they’d do it in the privacy of their prayer closets and not on city streets.

Full moon-November 10, 2011
Full moon: November 10, 2011

While taking an early evening walk down Michigan Avenue a few nights ago, I spotted that bright 11/10/11 full moon hanging over the lake. Before I could grab my BlackBerry to capture it, I heard a familiar voice blaring from a nearby speaker.

“You can’t go to heaven unless you repent your sins! You must repent!”

Aaargh! This gravelly voice of doom has accosted downtown Chicago pedestrians for at least 40 years that I can remember. In all those years, I don’t recall ever seeing the al fresco preacher after sunset or anywhere but State Street. Perhaps he was disoriented by the Universal shift toward Aquarius and he landed on Michigan Avenue in the dark, waving his tattered Bible in one hand and a microphone in the other, warning liars, thieves, smokers, “homosec-shals” and everyone “living in sin” that God is not going to let them into heaven.

He echoes the belief of many who are heavily invested in this denigrating portrayal of a god who creates all of us but heinously allows only a few to return home. They believe God will cast the rest of us, billions upon billions, into a fiery pit. Never mind that dead bodies can’t feel fire (or cold), and never mind that only a sadist would subject his child to eternal torture. This is the god they love and worship, and I’m not going to argue with them.

As the sleeping prophet Edgar Cayce once said, “You grow to heaven. You don’t go to heaven.”

As for me and my house, we will serve a God of Love, an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God who lives in the hearts of all—a God that does nothing Love would not do, who holds a space in His heart for all His children, and harms no one for any reason.

Be it Aquarius or cheddar, I await the Age when “Peace will guide the planets, and love will steer the stars.”

(Cue the 5th Dimension): “Let the sun shine! Let the sun shine in! The sun shine in.”

Looking for the Loud Mouth?

The “Loud Mouth in the Balcony” has a new home!

To find the latest thought-provoking posts, please visit http://www.loudmouthinthebalcony.com.

See you there!

The dreaded karma conversation

(continued from “Troy Davis left something for you“)

When we look at Earth’s stage from here, the first thing we notice is that every performer is wearing a costume that functions exclusively in this atmosphere. Most of the actors appear to be following a script., although there are some who are trying to do improv with varying degrees of success. (Ha’ mercy, entering the stage without a plan can be a recipe for disaster!)

You’ll also notice that not one of those actors thinks Earth’s theater is real Life. Not one of them entered intending to stay. Each came with its own purpose, time line, to-do list and exit strategy. If you could see their scripts, you’d have some insight into these souls’ history, and some context for this phase of their eternal lives. More important, you might even discover context for your own.

I believe that is the gift that Troy Davis and others present us when they perform in front of global audiences. If we’re paying attention, we might grasp the lessons they’re teaching. We might ask, “What do they want me to know about myself, as an immortal soul?”

Know thyself

No one is here by accident. If we are to discover and accomplish our purpose for the visit, we must be conscientious and receptive to new information. It could come from anywhere, even from souls playing the roles of former Death Row inmates Troy Davis and Samuel David Crowe.

We can’t intrude and read their scripts. But when we look at their contrasting outcomes, we have some clues about the scripts’ content and their souls’ histories. Through them, we might discover more about ourselves.

Troy Davis and Samuel David Crowe
Credit: Ga. Dept. of Corrections/Reuters

Both Davis and Crowe were in the Death Row section of Earth’s stage, convicted of murder. Davis (left) was executed, despite pleas from Pope Benedict XVI, former FBI Director William S. Sessions, Bishop Desmond Tutu, former president Jimmy Carter and the prayers and online petitions of tens of thousands of people around the world. Crowe (right) was spared, due mostly to the efforts of a lesser known group, Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Why were their outcomes so different?

If we look beyond the color of the costumes these souls were wearing, one answer is obvious: The outcomes served each soul’s purpose and honored each one’s schedule. No one, not even the Pope, can override the will of a soul on a mission. If a soul wants to leave its body—even if the ego in that body adamantly disagrees—the soul will do it. According to the evidence, the soul inside Troy Davis’s body wanted total freedom on September 21, 2011, or it would still be confined to it. Just as clearly, the soul inside Crowe’s body had not scheduled its departure on May 22, 2008, or it would have left behind human remains.

But there’s also a less obvious answer: As souls, Davis and Crowe have been alive forever, and have different karmic histories, which naturally results in different scripts with different outcomes. As far as we know, the soul that became Davis might have gotten away with murder or falsely accused someone else of murder while performing another role, in another play, at another time in its immortal life. Just speculating.

But what if that really is what happened? The soul is very much aware that a human lifetime on Earth is only a bat-of-an-eyelash experience in the Universal time/space continuum. Why wouldn’t it take a second to restore balance to another situation?

In this case, punishment for a crime Davis didn’t commit would balance. It would be considered a victory, a mission accomplished. What if it came with a karmic bonus? What if, in the process, the soul inspired a multitude of people to take the next step in man’s evolution, to move beyond revenge, barbarism and flawed man-made law to become more humane, if not divine. A twofer! Again, I’m not stating fact, just offering some possibilities, based on the real Life principles we use in Drama Queen Workshops:

  • Life is always fair.
  • God is never far.
  • Death is not THE END.
  • Absolutely nothing is unforgivable.

And that brings us to Crowe. Based on the testimonials of those who were advocating on his behalf, Crowe was very repentant, remorseful, and took full responsibility for his crime. With this context, it’s possible that the soul that became Crowe chose a different technique for restoring balance: He forgave himself. That’s a little-known option that substitutes for the “having it done to you” part. I discovered it in one of my readings years ago. After seeing how spectacularly it neutralized negative karma for me, I now highly recommended. (I related that life-altering situation in EARTH Is the MOTHER of All Drama Queens, pp.116-118)

That brings us to the final question in our dreaded karma conversation:

How can we use and share the gifts these souls have given us?

Davis and Crowe remind us to be more conscious as we perform our roles and interact with others on Earth’s stage. I’m reminding you to maintain top-of-mind awareness that we are immortal souls temporarily wearing the costume of human beings. No matter what skin we’re in, the Laws of Balance and Reciprocity will apply to us; so it is in our best interest to doing nothing to someone else that we would not want done to us at some point in our eternal lives: That means everything from being dishonest or taking something that doesn’t belong to us to harming or depriving someone of their body.

It’s also in our best interest to discover why we’re here on this planet at this time. It’s so easy to become distracted by the sights and sounds of Earth. We’re susceptible to messages that we are in control, that we can have anything we want. That applies to the real you, as soul, not your body costume. Use those prayers and affirmations to find clues to your soul’s purpose. Pay attention to what it embraces and what it rejects.

Jobs, relationships,and entrepreneurial income may keep eluding you for any number of reasons. Take the time to cultivate a relationship with your real self to find out why. Ask for guidance and follow it. Part of the reason it’s said that it’s so difficult for a rich man to get into “heaven,” that state of peaceful consciousness, is that he’s too distracted by the outer world to find the real treasure within.

Periods of lack could be the most evolutionary of your soul’s existence. Replace stress with real success.

We keep looking at life from a human perspective when that literally scratches the surface. From the viewpoint of soul, I can confidently say, “This is not Pat’s life, it’s mine. She’s necessary so that I can be visible in Earth’s atmosphere. Through her, I am fulfilling my purpose for coming. The Divine within me is not here to do her will. She is here to do ours.”

Balance is natural; balancing karma is a victory, no matter what it looks and feels like on Earth’s stage. Davis’s victory demonstrates that real Life is greater than our physical eyes can see, and as souls, we are more powerful and present than we realize. Our immortal souls’ desires are more potent than prayers, thoughts, visualizations and other manipulations.

We could save ourselves a lot of frustration and disappointment by trusting our immortal selves to know what is for the Highest Good in any situation. Trusting the Divine within, instead of becoming attached to the one created in our mortal brains, enables us to embrace any outcome, and know that all is well.

Having said that, I was hopeful that barbarism would not rule the day on September 21, and my heart broke when I read the news of the execution. But I trusted that everything was in Divine Order, happening as it should, no matter what it looked like here on the stage. I trusted that by sacrificing his body (not his life), Troy Davis made a huge difference in the world.

And he did.

Troy Davis left something for you (in two parts)

Today we laid to rest the body of Troy Davis, whose execution last week stunned the world and attracted more than 1,000 mourners to his funeral in Savannah. Davis’s state-sanctioned premeditated murder exposed our interminably slow costume change from Ardipitheus ramidus to fully civilized human beings.

Yes, our bodies have evolved over billions of years; but it appears that we have not yet shed our Neanderthal nature. We still have a death grip on barbarism, justifying our behavior with man-made scriptures mandating that offenders “shall surely be put to death.”

With every highly publicized act of inhumanity such as this, it’s beginning to dawn on us that our primordial behaviors are just as beastly now as they were then. Were it not for souls such as the one who came to play the role of Troy Davis, we might still be brutally clubbing each other for sport, and offering the bodies of dead innocents as live sacrifices to imaginary mountain- and sky-dwelling gods.

It’s no coincidence that Davis came to Earth during a period when electronic communication galvanizes millions in minutes to advocate for a cause. He made us stop whatever we were doing and cry out for justice, compassion and reason. Rallying around this cause reacquainted us with the dormant Divine within our souls. It felt good, it felt right to declare that the man-made law of capital punishment is always a barbaric and inappropriate response in a civilized world.

So why were we stunned and outraged the next day by news reports that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, which had been so adamant about killing Davis, had aborted the execution of a confessed killer in 2008? Samuel David Crowe was only three hours away from a lethal injection when his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

“Unfair! we screamed. “Double standard!”

More than meets the human eye

Limited by the sight lines of Earth’s stage and blinded by its footlights, all we could see was the inequity the treatment of the two Death Row inmates: The black man, whose guilt had not been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, was murdered. The white man, whose guilt had never been questioned, was spared.

On the surface, we saw blatant bigotry. But in the balcony of this drama, our Higher Self saw something else. Of course It would: It has crystal clear vision. It sees many dimensions beyond this fantasy called physical life. It sees real Life.

The Higher Self knows that real Life is always fair and it always makes sense—no matter what it looks like from Earth’s stage. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and unconditionally loving God would not have created it any other way.

Looking through that lens, what could logically explain the heartbreaking scene we were witnessing? Rather than give God the benefit of the doubt, most of us are satisfied with concluding that Life and the God who created It are simply unfair. We are too afraid to look on the other side of the stray thread of the Universal blanket protecting our fearful little heads to see what’s there. We are not open to the possibility that anything exists beyond the physical world.

If we dared to believe in an awesome God, we’d discover that real Life is not constantly deteriorating matter; it’s invisible, invincible and immortal energy. Life cannot be saved or taken. It has no beginning or end. Its governed by divine laws that are simple and cause no harm.

The rule is golden for a reason

BalanceOne of those laws in real Life is balance. Like gravity, the physical law with which we’re most familiar, balance is in play all the time; it applies to everyone, equally. Balance is the “eye for an eye” undercurrent that flows through real Life. When we create imbalance in our relationships with ourselves and others, the process of restoring that balance naturally begins. It doesn’t require our awareness or effort, much as gravity doesn’t require anything from us.

We lose sight of that law when our souls are weighted down by human body costumes. Everyday is Halloween: We become totally immersed in our characters; we lose ourselves in our roles; we focus our attention on achieving stature and acquiring physical things. We treat others based on the costumes they’re wearing. If they’re not the same color or class as ours, we become suspect or worse, superior.

We lose awareness of real Life’s simple law of balance: Do unto others as you would have them to do unto to you. We forget that the process of restoring balance is the reason the rule is Golden: Whatever you do will be done to you.

We tend not to believe that, or we think that there are exceptions to the rule, because we don’t always witness or experience the restoration of natural balance within the bat-of-an-eyelash time frame that our souls are wearing a particular body. It only means that we’ve forgotten something else: Consequences are not attached to our mortal body costumes; they are tied to our immortal souls.

It’s the lucky soul who experiences the reaping while wearing the same costume of the sower. At least some dots can be connected. Imagine the whiplash when what goes around comes around while a soul is playing an entirely different role. The occurrence seems inexplicable, maybe event unfair. Those who are familiar with my soul’s checkered past, which I discovered during many years of spiritual sleuthing expeditions and shared in my memoir, EARTH Is the MOTHER of All Drama Queens, know precisely what I’m talking about.

Every goodbye ain’t gone

We’re deluded into thinking that we’re mortals; when our bodies die, we’re dead. But anyone who has felt the presence of a loved one who has “passed” (note the active verb) or experienced a “something told me to…” moment knows that there are more life forms here than we can see with our human eyes.

If you’ve ever attended a seminar with author Rebecca Rosen, as I had the great privilege of doing during her book tour a couple of years ago (Thanks again, Lyle), it’ll remove all doubt: Life is invisible; it’s not a physical body. I didn’t doubt it at all when I walked in the door, and was stunned and exhilarated to witness the exchange of information between souls and the relatives they’d left behind. One of the skeptics there, a young widower whose wife died following childbirth, left the auditorium believing in eternal Life, after speaking with her soul that evening.

It seemed that she and the others were determined to prove that they are still alive. Some repeated things their loved ones had said in the car, on the way to the theater, or talked about food they had just eaten or prepared. One soul thanked his widow for still leaving his slippers next to his favorite chair. He even mentioned that he was hanging out with his long-time buddy. The widow didn’t even know the man was dead! They’d lost contact.

What I’ve learned is that no one “rests in peace,” a phrase highlighting our delusion that at some point, we will be dead bodies, not vibrant souls. On Facebook right now, there’s an “R. I. P. Troy Davis” page. True, Troy’s body is supine; but he’s not resting in it. He is the soul, the life, and the breath that left it.

As an immortal soul, he lives and is active, just as he was actively living before he donned that body costume 42 years ago. I have no doubt he was relieved last week to awake on the other side of the prison walls for the first time in 22 years. But how did he get there in the first place?

Spirit is directing me to delete the rest of this post because everyone’s not ready for the answer. For those who are, meet me at Part Two: The Dreaded Karma Conversation.

Yes, I am going there. If you have the stamina and an open heart, I invite you climb to the next level in Balcony of Life. Quite possibly, things will become even more clear from that viewpoint.

Forgiveness is Only a Math Problem

Pop quiz: What’s 70 times 7?

No, it’s not 490! It’s the number of times we’re supposed to forgive those who offend us. Oddly enough, more than two thousand years after a profound and rather revolutionary Jewish rabbi taught this lesson, most of us—even those who profess belief in this man’s teachings—still can’t do the math.

Should we blame the teacher? I don’t think so. He delivered his lesson quite clearly and simply. I’m more inclined to believe that the problem lies in the text. It is more than a little confusing, as evidenced by the findings of a recent Gallup poll.

Researchers found that 49% of Americans believe the Bible, the text from which our views of forgiveness are founded, is the inspired word of God. But these same people don’t think it should be taken literally. Clearly, someone’s confused.

Man swears on Bible
The truth and nothing but the truth, so help me...

When did we stop taking Truth at its word? And, I’m sorry, if God inspired texts that can’t be taken literally, what was the point of the divine inspiration? Heck, mere mortals could have simply made up some stuff.

Actually, 17% of the poll respondents think the text was totally man-made, a collection of legends and fables. My guess is that the latter were merely brave enough to say what the 49% were thinking. If we do the math, 66% of us have discovered that the Bible contains information that is untrue, conflicting or incorrectly recorded.

The implications are tremendous. When overlook obvious errors in the text and call it the Word of God, what are we saying about the credibility and trustworthiness of that Word?

Some scholars take this very seriously. For the last 53 years, for example, Orthodox Jewish researchers at a Jerusalem university have been poring over ancient manuscripts, separating the wheat from the chaff. They’re trying to strip the Hebrew Bible down to its oldest and most authentic text. So far, they’ve unearthed evidence that people have been toying with the Bible for centuries. According to a report on this pivotal research called The Bible Project, scholars have concluded that

“This text at the root of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was somewhat fluid for long periods of its history, and that its transmission through the ages was messier and more human than most of us imagine.”

That explains why it took more than five decades for the team to complete a mere three books of the Bible. And we think we’re reading The Word of God.

The messy and human transmission (and let’s not forget tampering) is precisely why I think we can’t wrap our heads or arms around the famous rabbi’s lessons on forgiveness. The tampered text, in not so subtle ways, actually teaches us to be unforgiving.

Noah's Ark cartoon
©2010-2011 ~tawfi2 (Mohammed tawfik on deviantart.com)

As kids, we learn that God does not forgive

One of the earliest stories in the Bible is of the Great Flood. For centuries this alleged genocide has been romanticized, most recently in whimsical children’s books. At a very early age, we learned about forgiveness from this story: The Almighty God, Who could do anything “He” desired, preferred to sadistically “destroy everything living thing” [Genesis 7:4] rather than wave the wand of forgiveness over the humans in “His” creation. Not sure what the animals and plants did to deserve this fate.

Of course, our parents and religious teachers didn’t highlight God’s lack of forgiveness; but it is the unmistakable raison d’être in this ghastly story. Instead, we were served a sugar-coated version of the tale, complete with beautiful cartoons depicting the smiling faces of wild but happy animals patiently prancing onto the ark in a polite queue or peeping out of portholes as if they were on a Mediterranean cruise. 

Wait a minute! Portholes? According to the story, God ordered Noah to put only one window in that massive vessel—and, excuse me, it wasn’t in the cargo hold. But happy faces are great subterfuge to keep us from realizing that they were about to suffer a punishment worst than death. What child wouldn’t be horrified by the image of carnivores and herbivores crammed into the same dark space? It was nothing less than a Happy Meal for the predators whose prey had no chance of escaping. If kids could figure that out, certainly God could.

And can we talk about poor Noah and his fam? Those poor folks were not only forced to live with the aroma of wild animals and fecal matter; they also suffered the trauma of smelling the stench and, if they could get to that one window, seeing thousands of bloated bodies—infants, children, adults, the disabled and elderly—floating around them for weeks or as much as a year, depending upon how long it took the water to recede, which depended upon which verse of Genesis you read. If their preservative-free, unrefrigerated food supply could last that long, who in the world could eat under those conditions?

Common sense questions are rarely asked by Believers because thinking and questioning are truly the enemies of “blind faith.” In fact, they are considered heretical. (If you think I’m being sacrilegious, simply pick up the copy of whatever version of the Bible you have right now and tell me how many times the facts change in the Flood story, from verse to verse.) So just in case God really is a genocidal maniac rather than the unconditionally forgiving father of prodigal children, we’ve decided to believe some or all of these stories, even the second major lesson in forgiveness, which is even scarier.

Another Lesson: Forgiveness Requires Suffering

This one’s probably going to make some Christians uncomfortable. The most unforgiving (as in not Christlike) among them might even throw rotting tomatoes into the balcony, dramatically proving my point: Forgiveness is an elementary math problem that we haven’t been able to learn, despite having a Master Teacher. But if we’re ever going to solve this math problem, someone’s got to speak truth to those who would try to control our thoughts and beliefs through fear. Needless to say, the Loud Mouth got the assignment.

Like the Great Flood story, we’ve sugar-coated Jesus’s brutal murder by claiming that he died for us. In this story, as we’ve created it, God’s shows “His” love, mercy and forgiveness in a most peculiar way: God loved “His” bad kids so much that, in the barbaric tradition of those who wrote the story, “He” gave Jesus as a live sacrifice, sending “His” only innocent child to be slowly tortured to death.

We refuse to see that this story, which claims that the only condition under which God would forgive the guilty is by inhumanely brutalizing the innocent, portrays God as satanic. Worse, we promote the idea that if we believe that God placed Jesus in the hands of the sadistic Roman soldiers, “He” will  forgive our sins. The cartoon below graphically demonstrates how this principle works.

Murderer meets Victim in HeavenWrong Lessons, Well Learned

And that, Boys and Girls, is why we need a refresher course in multiplication. It’s almost impossible to learn to forgive 70 times 7, as Jesus taught, when we’ve been told for thousands of years that 1) Forgiveness is not really divine and 2) If the Divine forgives at all, there are strings attached. And oh, by the way, sometimes those strings have human blood on them.

Refresher Course is Open if You Are

It’s never too late to learn elementary math, as many have discovered in the transformative Drama Queen Workshops, where we free ourselves from the drama of Earth’s myths—beliefs that portray us as separate us from each other and from the Divine. Let me share the truths that seem to speed the path toward knowing Self, trusting God, and attracting a steady flow of Divine Guidance:

  1. Life is always fair.
  2. God is never far.
  3. Death is not “The End.”
  4. Absolutely nothing is unforgivable.

Spirit presented them to me as the Drama Queen Workshop Principles. The fourth principle is the most transformative for every Soul. Forgiveness will absolutely change your eternal life, release you from the chains of anger and resentment that have bound you to your offenders since The Beginning. Do we really want to spend time with those who have hurt, disrespected or abused us? The only way to release them is to forgive them.

Forgiveness comes so naturally when we understand the other three DQW principles. When we realize that we are eternal souls that embody the Divine Spark of Love that we call God, Allah or other revered names, it’s easy. When we understand that in a what-goes-around-comes-around world, Life is always fair, it just happens. When we know that we will receive what we give, at the most perfect time in our eternal life, because death of the mortal body is not the end of us as immortal souls, we don’t hold onto thoughts, anger  or resentment about what the other person did to us. We know we won’t be held accountable for the way they treated us, only how we treated them, no matter how they treated us. We release ourselves and move on.

We’ve ignored what Jesus reportedly said in most of the New Testament in favor of scriptures portraying Godliness as unforgiving and mortally vindictive. Let’s not turn a blind eye toward “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven” [Luke 6:37], “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive our trespassers” [Matthew 6:12] or the unconditionally forgiving father in “Prodigal Son” parable [Luke 15:11-32]. Forgiveness appears as a recurring theme. It is the good news. God is Love is the good news. Love forgives unconditionally: Good news.

Despite these scriptures’ message that forgiveness is something we do for ourselves, we believe we’re doing our offenders a favor. We act as if we are giving them a gift they don’t deserve when, in fact, we are only hurting ourselves. We deny ourselves forgiveness when we withhold it. If we want to our sins to be forgiven, we must forgive others for theirs—as many times as necessary, as many times as we’d want to be forgiven. Yes, even 70 times 7, although I certainly wouldn’t recommend remaining in the proximity of a such a repeat offender.

Hope is alive! Just as we learned when we were agonizing over our multiplication tables, practice makes perfect. Lessons are always easier to learn when they’re fun, so I invite you to download a supply of Forgiveness Coupons from the DQW home page. Make a game of forgiving unconditionally. See for yourself that forgiveness really is divine. And discover, while you’re at it, that you are, too.

I love you!

Prayers that deliver your desires–every time

We frequently receive prayer requests. Sometimes they’re personal appeals, but they also come via the Internet. Lately, I have seen a resurgence of the “Pray for Our President” emails. Yesterday a Facebook friend even requested prayer to help our soldiers prevail in Iraq’s sweltering 122° heat. These requests made me realize that we’re taught to make several presumptions when we pray:

Baby begs in prayer

  1. God is a Being that lives outside of us—in fact, in outer space;
  2. Like a genie, God grants wishes;
  3. Collective prayer can influence God to do what we want, and
  4. If we don’t pray in earnest, God will not lift a gigantic finger to help His distressed children.

Rarely do we consider the possibility that whatever is happening—no matter how it appears on Earth’s surface—has an underlying divine purpose. It certainly doesn’t occur to us that an immortal soul inside a person designed the experience because it had some evolutionary, purgative or karmic value.

We’ve accepted the idea that we are merely bodies—a reality created by the same folks who told us that we have dominion over an Earth that is the center of the Universe; the sun, moon and stars revolve around it. The only time we acknowledge that we have a soul is when we discuss its fate. It’s as if its life doesn’t begin until ours ends. Continue reading “Prayers that deliver your desires–every time”