RELATING TO OUR PORTION OF SUFFERING...July 17, 2021

 

But our inclination, due to our inherited cultural attitudes, encourages us to try to ignore, make light of, outdo and deny our actual portion of real human suffering. This is not healthy or healing. Suffering comes in many ways: physical/material/relationship losses, health decline, family stresses, poverty or threat of it ....to name a few. It can be felt in body and mind as physical, emotional and/or psychological pain. 

To deny our own suffering is to deny caring for ourself. It separates us from our self. It's a failing effort to escape our personal humanity.  

It must be no accident that the gospel  refers to Jesus not only as one "following his discovered joy' but at the same time a 'person of many sorrows'. These opposing realities must paradoxically go together and mark us, perhaps more than anything else, as a maturing human adult; not pretending life to be what it is not or denying our own incarnate real personal  experience. 

Often denying our personal suffering runs along with denying the suffering of others and of the world. So denying the reality that we do personally suffer as human beings is not a winning attitude toward this mystery of human life and our individually unique suffering consciousness.

THE USA HAS SUFFERED A STAGGERING MASS DECEPTION.. July 16, 2021

In most common language what the quote below describes is really this awful and simple. 

A significant part of our nation has got caught up in a mass psychological deception.( I'm of the uncertain opinion that Trump actually believes  his own deception, that he won the election. That is not hard to psychologically explain given his demonstrated extreme truth 

-avoiding temperament. But we should avoid the temptation to think Trump or any individual can cause such a phenomenon. It is much more deeply anchored than that.)

Before any of us say this means others are crazy while we are sain, we should know such a fully believed deception, given just the right balance of inner needs and fears and outer enticements, can happen to ANY of us. Because such invasions into our overly trusted conscious minds have their origins in the deep more powerful, creative and destructive, levels of our common Collective Unconscious. It is from this deep, real yet unconscious to us all, level that our more delicate human ego consciousness (which we generally feel  can keep us safely anchored in reality) has only recently evolved. A diverse nation finding intellectual/emotional balance has at times very narrow dangerous passages.

NO ONE is so strong of mind that she is above being deceived by such a dark collective psychological storm. It has surely happened numerous times before to otherwise smart persons such as in advanced Germany only eighty years ago. Then six million persons were murdered at the consent of  a majority of 'respected' citizens.

CG Jung, founder of analytical psychology, in Switzerland  took great pains in the first half of the 1900's to learn and to explain how mass deception happens in world history.  He also indicated  it was likely to happen in the amazing and youthful America. And he understood no one can know, including himself,  just how destructive such a phenomenon  once begun will turn out to be in the world. 

But, for whatever reasons, those who are not swept up this time by it must do their all to not deny what is happening, to resist its growth and call it what it is, a mass public deception involving  complicated psychological/political/religious factors combining.  And it can undo any nation if enough clearer eyed  persons are not present and in fact do strongly, calmly and openly resist it. 

https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F04%2F07%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Fjohn-boehner-trump-capitol-riot.html%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR3YjHJAjH-m8r0Nzloh7crHsepNYcdm7OlnDXBFwp3kPdUw_hW94jtVbBc&h=AT3I_Iy0WI53RRUO0JkR2TGmSe9ET07vt7N0eQgg5mM0RqHl_CJK-T3qIGquP9bkArDmbgGWo5oEZTsk25taP4TY71b8Q1x67msdWHrvmbZcOdq_BnitHCKsMolFo-qBY7k

CAN WE RESPONSIBLY AVOID POLITICS?..JUNE 13, 2021

There are individuals in high leadership positions in our government who have healthy respectful views of the many natural differences among us human citizens. 

And there are also many in high positions who see 'other than their circle or kind' as negatively different. These high-end persons are NOT devoted personally to protecting by law the equal rights of all of us. This includes not standing up for persons of all colors, ethnicities, religions, sexual/gender identifications and any 'other' minority demographic. 

If we don't think it matters what kind of persons we vote for in this regard then aren't we essentially saying to all minorities, ' To hell with you. You just don't really matter as much as I and my kind do." ? Isn't that the opposite of what America, and for that matter the Christ story, professes to be about?

Don't we deceive ourself to claim to love, value and respect all citizens and still decline to make focused, deliberate, thoughtful political choices for the 'healthy' kind of candidates wherever they come from or what party they may be? 

And don't we deceive ourself to not realize times in our history, like now, when generally a whole party, with its one-man leadership, openly doesn't seek 'healthy' open-minded candidates? Ones interested in the rights and protections of all U.S. citizens? 

Can we vote for such persons and still claim to care about securing equality for all, a national 'democratic' atmosphere. I'm not personally seeing how.

FINDING ONE'S MORE COMPLETE SELF..June 1, 2021

 It is seeming to me that for most to find and follow ones true self one must make mental contact with and be influenced by some, at least one, of the greatest human genius creative minds.

 Instead we tend to listen and follow some watered down worn out values and principles and cliches of our collective cultures , groups and institutions. Or easily fall into some form of the obsessive materialism of our times.

I know little of Tolstoy except that he is one of those gifted genius minds, one of those who is actually a spiritual gift to all of humanity. Jim Rigsby happened onto him it appears. 

These creative genius minds turn out, often in spite of themselves, to also be the greatest lovers, lovers of all humankind. So they all are teaching the same thing, that the greatest of all things is indeed love. If we can only discover what that means to us and spend a significant part of life doing do it. Then we might more fully, and perhaps more consciously, become what we are intended to be.

'Abortion' A WORD THAT HAS BLINDED AMERICA ..May 30, 2021

 

Wonder why this is the case? I fell under this delusion about the nature of abortion in 1968. Little did I know that all of 'evangelical' Christisnity was about to make it as it's new marching orders and a new political ideology. Most Republicans, acknowledging it or not, have become for all practical purposes one issue voters. If a politician, no matter his character and competence, claims to be anti-choice he gets the vote.

The misguiding and tragically destructive spell the word abortion casts was fully lifted from me by 1980 while I was still a preacher in an evangelical church. I'm grateful for that and wish it for so many others. 

Imo our nation would be so much healthier emotionally, spiritually and politically if there were not this single emotionally based sentimental obsession, which blinds people to the issues we need to nationally face now. This was also the beginning of many ordinary folks turning to an anti-science attitude regarding many crucial issues facing us.

If this word abortion were not such an immediate obsession with so many I don't think there would have ever been a Trumpism. Yet it's important to understand the nation had been groomed for a Trump type leader for many decades by an anti womens' choice attitude. And I suspect he would be quick to allow his own family women to choose abortion.

This political hostility toward women and opposing the human right for her own timing to have children I'm confident will not stand against the slow but strong evutionary trajectory for the full equality of women. Such a backward societal leaning will not imo survive against modern scientific/psychological kowledge or the emerged urgent need of America to discover a new redeeming spiritual/religious attitude in our land.

CAN ONE MOMENT OF JUSTICE BRING MANY MORE..OR NOT? April 20, 2021

 This can be a genuine turning point in America living up to its highest ideals and its potential greatness. For it to stick though citizens must hold ourselves and our officials accountable to follow through with its meaning. 

This great historic reminder that "justice and equality' of all persons need not just be a pious phrase but an ever growing reality in this nation. That we can more clearly see the astonishing value and beauty in each human life. And can agree more and more that ALL persons deserve the same protections and supports from our laws and officials.

VOTING SHOULD BE EQUALLY CONVENIENT FOR ALL... March 7, 2021

 It seems like white America continually forgets from one generation to the next how horribly we and our laws have treated our black  brothers and sisters. 

We may be nearing our last chance in Congress to make the votes of black persons just as strong and alive in shaping our country's culture as white votes are. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/07/time-some-more-good-trouble-voting-rights-56-years-after-bloody-sunday/?fbclid=IwAR3olg_t6ZCptKCUAbw7sP8YsyiJTtM5relj9X0rbAvHb8ijIgoXqyqaEaw

White persons must rise above the fearful and backward need to make Americ a white  culture rather than truly the mixed skin color culture that its evolutionary and divine destiny is. We need to determine to have America's laws truly, freely and fairly support a nation whose culture is a natural product of ALL its people. 

We still don't know what that would look like but we could trust it will be more beautiful, strong and inspiring than our white dominated one forced by political suppression of the votes of dark skinned citizens. Oh happy  glorious day to come, a more genuine United States of America.