Mystical Philosophy - Or, Do-BE-Do-BE

One of the things I've noticed about mystics ... no matter what their background ... they seem to come out of a traditional religious viewpoint, and are somewhat reluctantly dragged into mysticism...! (Paul of Tarsus comes to mind...)

This particular mystic, born before the turn of the last century, was originally a fundamentalist Christian ... and for his entire life, beginning with childhood, he read the Bible daily, finishing it entirely each year of his life. As well, he taught Sunday School. And yet, he was led into experiences he could not explain ... most of which seriously messed with what he was taught to believe. Transforming what he believed ...

He remained a very pragmatic man ... his whole life was devoted to serving and helping others ... he put hands and feet to his beliefs. But he came to see part of the "much more" that Jesus spoke of ...

His basic philosophy is much the same as what I've come to see ... I'll share twelve points, and elaborate a bit on each. If it becomes too long (a relative term, LOL!) I'll turn this into more than one post:

~ Everything is Connected - All is One.
Oneness of all life is the foundation. And yet, this cannot be an empty platitude we toss about, mere words, and then continue living our lives founded more on surface distinctions, rather than the deeper truth of unity. Our distinctions of individuality are merely appearances. "Only in Christ do extremes meet." Only in Christ does duality dissolve. We are challenged to be practical mystics -- to bring the sense of oneness into all we do.

~ Life is Purposeful.
It is our purpose to bring the creative/spiritual world into the daily/material world -- "to make the infinite finite." We each have a mission, or a "soul-purpose." We come equipped with talents, gifts, aptitudes that enable us to have a unique way of being in this life. This way of being leads to our own spiritual awakening, and inspires others to awaken as well. We are born to be of service -- to make a difference in the world.

~ Life is an Adventure.
(I love this quote!) "Life is meant to be a playful search for the truth." We are here to research. We learn only when we test, by experimentation, our ideals. We study and apply what others share, taking only that which experientially works for us. We can't jump to knowledge without experience, any more than we can put the cart before the horse.

~ Choose Compassion over Competitiveness.
Ohhhh, but this goes against the grain of our western life...! Consider this: "Nothing takes us away quicker from the sense of oneness, and therefore away from our own soul-purpose, than the drive for competitiveness." Playing sports is one thing -- but this is a deeper thing .. a comparison of ourselves to others, and making a contest for superiority. Competition paralyzes soul-growth ... it is the opposite of compassion. Compassion is when we are present for another person, and thus experience how we are all the same. Not being responsible for another, but being responsive to another. As we do unto a brother or sister, so do we do unto our Creator.

~ Take Responsibility for Yourself.
While we certainly have help available (all the time), no one can "fix" things for us. We are ultimately responsible for the choices that we make, both consciously and unconsciously. We don't like taking this level of responsibility ... all about us we see accountability being shirked, and blame being flung outward. It's far easier to blame and scape-goat others. It takes inordinate maturity for us to see how we create our own problems. Rather than affixing blame, we can learn from the consequences of our choices. We can ask, "what am I now gong to do with the challenges, limitations and obstacles I face in my life right now?" We can find resources, both within and without, that lead to resolutions. This includes, the responsibility to take care of our health. This body is a gift. Time to treat it like one.

~ Look Forward Rather than Backward.
The only time we have is NOW - this present moment. We cannot live in the past, and we cannot project into the future. Now is all that's real. Too often we squander it by being somewhere else, in our minds. Yes, we must learn from the past. Repeating the same things over and over, expecting different results, is the very definition of insanity. But to dwell on the past, to regret the past, to live in remorse, is to forfeit today. Make choices today, knowing that they affect our, and others', future. What we do, think, and believe, today - matters.

I'll continue with the other half, in the next post ...

Shalom, Dena

God Comes to Me Disguised as My Life ~ Welcoming the Unlikely Messengers

So how are we to respond, when we see something we dislike, and strongly react to, within another person...? How do we know what's them, what's us, and what how we are to respond?

I notice that we tend to project our own stuff "out there", because it's easier to see it when we detach from it. What we're blind to in ourselves, we see OH-SO-CLEARLY in another ... and if we know how to use this awareness, we'll see it for the profound *gift* that it is...!

Projecting is ignoring the log in our own eye, and hyper-focusing on the speck we see in the eye of the other. We only SEE the speck because we *possess* the log ... and yet the nature of the log is to blind us to seeing what it is that's blinding us.

Jesus was clear about what we were to do first -- tend to the log. The speck, in all reality, is none of our business. There's three kinds of businesses: my business, your business, and God's business. The only one of the three I'm to tend to is my business. Knowing what's what is a matter of maturity .. too often, when we are filled with "facts" and not the experience of wisdom, when we have an overabundance of self-promoting certaintude and zealous energy (typically found in our youth), that energy can be skewedly put into the trouncing of others. Of course, the tendency is to be blind to this when we're smack-dab in it ... and so we tend to be insufferable for a while, until we outgrow it. We can't see it until we have the wisdom of hindsight ... we have to get out of it before we can see it. God knows this, and we can know this too, and can thus love the one who's temporarily afflicted with it. To varying and diverse degrees, we all "know not what we are doing." We are all the bumbling-beloved of God -- and if we got a clue about how OK this all is with Him, and is even likely a source of hilarity for Him, we might just ease up on each other as well, and enjoy the journey ... free to encourage each other, rather than climbing that tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and lobbing rotten fruit at each other ...!

I can't prove any of this to anyone... this level of awareness transcends "facts" (which are not as reliable as we've been led to believe, but again, we won't know that 'til we see it for ourselves). This comes from experience, and it takes time and long hard lessons learned the tough way ... though some, of course, manage to stubbornly hang on to their own skewed perspective to the very end ... and while it may seem like a "waste" from our limited perspective, they serve as examples/lessons/reminders to the rest of us for how *not* to think/believe/behave -- nothing is wasted in God's economy.

While reading "Practicing the Presence" this morning ... I was struck by what Joel Goldsmith wrote about seeing God in all others ... it requires some focused intentionality, particularly when the ego is loudly broadcasting, drowning out the God-glimpse within them.

He spoke of how those of us who see, who are walking the narrow path (the road less traveled), are called to see and to call forth the God-consciousness in the other ... which is a sort of "dying to self"... my ego-self wants to engage with their ego-self, to compete and to hopefully win ... and thus I'm meeting the problem with the same consciousness wherein the problem arises -- in the realm of the ego. When I do this, I merely exacerbate the problem ...

It is HARD, very much like a "dying" to choose to see the good, the God-essence, in the depth of the other ... hard to see past that which "hooks" me, and "triggers" my old unresolved stuff (pain not yet attended to, losses not yet grieved, assumptions not yet challenged) -- leading me to *react* from my ego rather than to *respond* from my spirit.

Dang, dang, dang, this is HARD...! But mostly, I believe, because of the unresolved things within me that *CAN* be hooked, and thus draw me in to the ego-scuffle. I believe, because I've experienced it in some areas of my soul, that when I attend to the inner-things (when I deal with the "log in my own eye"), then I am free from the "hook" ... then I cannot (in THAT area) be "triggered" again by the externals (whether in the form of a person, or a situation), and I AM then free to respond from my spirit -- from who I really am. (Note the subtle but powerful distinction between "reacting" and "responding"...!)

Then, I notice, I am able to deal with the splinter in the eye of the other, or else realize that it's no big deal, and not my business.

Perhaps the awareness of the splinter in the eye of the other is merely meant to show ME the log in my own ... and THAT is my business, THAT is my work -- the rest is only God showing up as messengers/angels in the people and circumstances of my life ... God comes to me disguised as my life ... my question for myself is: will I reject how God shows up, or will I embrace whatever form He chooses...?

While I can't say I have a "requirement" for how others must believe, I notice that if they are not open to accepting others who have different views, if they believe that everyone "should" believe a certain way, then relationship (of any meaningful measure) cannot thrive ... without mutual respect, mutual sharing, mutual hearing and receiving and acceptance, there is no ground for true relationship.

Words about how they "love" me, and thus must correct/reject me (because I believe differently) are empty and hollow to me ... I don't "feel the love" when others have to withdraw out of self-protection. What they love is their own concept, and the projection of what they think I "should" believe, how they think I "should" behave. They love their concept of me, which is in their own mind, rather than really loving me (who is in continual transformation ... and is that not the point to life?).

Of course, the "me" they reject is also a fabrication of their own mind ... they tell themselves a story about me, and they believe the story, and they aren't connecting with the real me ... aren't trying to hear me, to understand me, to accept me. Perhaps this stems from not really knowing the real them ... perhaps they don't know themselves as God knows them (and who else can truly define us, but the One who made us?). Perhaps they cannot yet love their neighbor as themself, because they do not yet love themself, because they don't yet know how God loves & accepts them...? (and perhaps this is just as true for me)

I also notice that if they withdraw from me, and do not share themselves with me, do not allow me to hear them, then I don't really know them either ... then I only have the story I tell myself about them.

But the glory is in how I have a CHOICE in the story I tell myself about them. I can choose to see them as "wrong" and thus judge them, and end up doing/being the way I'm judging them to do/be (judgment always does that, I notice).

I can choose, instead, to tell myself that who they really are is a child of God ... one of the bumbling-beloved, doing the best they can based on where they are in their own journey with them ... I can forgive what they do (they know not what they are doing), I can look past their projection-of-self to see the real Self ... I can intentionally look for God-in-them, and focus on that, letting the rest go as temporary ego-fluff. I can love my neighbor as myself, when I realize that we're all manifesting the same Self (a huge shift in awareness that makes all the difference ... I'm only beginning to taste the edges of this awareness, and I want more ... I expect to receive more).

I can receive them as divine messengers ... if I see something I do not like in them, I can be sure that I can only see it because I also possess it (something I never like to admit to, initially, LOL!). When I can allow myself to see that, to own that, to accept that, then I can receive that message as a gift -- if I resist it, then I miss the message, and miss the gift. My choice. But I can always learn.

I acknowledge that I resist and miss most of the messages that God is lavishly and generously offering me, because I (or my ego) do not like the packaging ... and so I "cut off my nose to spite my face" ... and for the time being, I remain "stuck" in my own warped perspective ... but such is the human experience, such is the purpose of life, to learn from who & what we encounter ... and I see that I can either learn the hard way, or the easy way ... thus far, my penchant, it seems, is to learn the hard way ...! Ah, the humanity!

But I believe in transformation, and I believe it's happening, and I believe that I'm learning ... albeit ever-so-slowly (according to my perspective, anyway) ... perhaps I need to treat myself with the same patience and graciousness that I sense the Spirit is inviting me to extend to others ... rather than demanding that I strive according to my own ego, I can instead allow myself to respond to the Spirit who is, indeed and always, leading me into all truth.

Maybe I can really trust that ... maybe it's really true.

Wow ... I needed to hear this!

Shalom, Dena

The Seduction of Spiritual Striving ...!

There are SO many good blogs "out there" -- so many folks are seeing wonderful things, and putting glorious insights into spirit-infused words ... but rarely do I feel compelled to take an entire blog entry, or an article, and put it here in my own blog.

Well, today is one of those rare days ...!

My good friend Kevin Beck is a profoundly good writer -- he is able to transmit thoughts and nebulous concepts into provocative words -- and yet, in a way that invites conversation, more than "conversion." His words invite us to enter and consider another perspective, to try it on for size, and walk around in it for a bit, just to see how it fits. I've rarely met such a compassionate, understanding, gracious and real human being. I am blessed by his friendship, and I hope to bless all of YOU with what he writes here ... I'll share what he wrote first, and then include my comments, which burst out of me in a symphony of joy, in response to what I read...!

Parousia
August 3, 2009


Behold! The dwelling of God is with humanity.

Spiritually Undisciplined

"The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it but cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the spirit."
~ Jesus of Nazareth

You feel something is amiss. You want to develop your spiritual self, but you have a nagging sense that something isn't right -- that you aren't right.

Would a spiritual person have unsavory feelings, base urges, and lingering struggles? Spiritual people don't laugh at juvenile jokes, think about sex, or lapse in their religious practices. Do they?

You know the advice. Shape up spiritually. Exercise your inner self. Whip yourself into becoming a better person, into being the person you believe you ought to be.

It's common to harbor some laughably unrealistic assumptions of what constitutes spirituality. You must do, think, feel, and act in prescribed patterns. You must avoid specific places, emotions, and behaviors.

Spiritual people teach profound truth. They walk slightly above the ground, speak infinite wisdom, and spend an inordinate amount of time in an otherworldly trance. Spiritual people wear spiritual clothes, eat spiritual food, and eliminate spiritual waste through their spiritual bowels.

To achieve this advanced spiritual condition we've assumed that we must quell our humanity. Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle. If you set aside all of your lower desires, you can eventually obtain your higher ones.

How do you learn the method of relinquishing your supposedly inferior longings? You might engage in what has been bizarrely called spiritual disciplines.

These alleged spiritual disciplines come in several flavors. Fasting, reading, poverty, self-flagellation are just a few. Theoretically, if you exercise your spiritual will properly it will develop enough strength to overcome your carnal will. When that finally occurs, you will achieve a breakthrough and receive an awakening that will transform you into what you've always wanted to be.

Unfortunately, none of this striving equates to a spiritual awakening.

Of course, if you perform certain activities you will undergo changes and perhaps even attain ecstatic states. There is too much evidence -- anecdotal and experimental -- to suggest otherwise. For example, scientific studies have conclusively shown that the brain changes in and after meditation.

But that does not amount to spiritual attainment. In fact, your spiritual disciplines may deceive you into thinking that you're becoming more spiritual when you are fully spiritual already.

Consider the so-called spiritual discipline of fasting. If you go several days without eating, you will feel great hunger. And if you refrain from food in hope of receiving some enlightenment, you will likely interpret your intensifying hunger as a sign of your spiritual development. If you go long enough without eating, your hunger may trigger experiences that you interpret as spiritual epiphanies.

The same holds true for the innumerable other disciplines. It is akin to the placebo effect. If you believe that activity X will cause a spiritual incident, your expectation will probably be fulfilled when you engage in activity X.

But is there any reason to assume that spiritual disciplines must be physically painful? Does intentionally imposed physical distress trigger spiritual development? Can't there be paths to illumination and inner development that do not involve customary formulas?

Joseph Dispenza is a former monk who eventually renounced his vows when realizing that spirituality can transcend traditional procedures. He writes about his spiritual life in the book God on Your Own. "Poverty, chastity, and obedience formed the foundation of our monastic way of life. The objective was to be free to concentrate completely on the life of the spirit without allowing anything to interfere."

Dispenza makes a brilliant observation. We often suppose that the life of the spirit can be obtained only (or primarily) through an arranged methodology. And to achieve that lofty goal one must not permit any lower distractions. Normal sensations like hunger and libido must be overcome, and this usually involves a certain amount of physical or emotional strain.

Why does spiritual discipline feel like spiritual punishment?

Conventional approaches to spiritual awakening make unnecessary and unhelpful divisions. An individual is set against himself in the attempt to achieve spiritual attainment. Do we really think that the outer life is a hindrance to the inner life? Have we divided ourselves into so many warring factions that we believe that we can have peace only by killing off one or more of our splinter groups?

An unnecessary dualistic separation between secular and spirit overlooks the fact that all is spirit. The physical body is not bad. Hunger is not evil. Sex is not immoral. Natural desires and impulses are not stumbling blocks to be overcome. They are integral features of your existence to be welcomed.

Paradoxically, the desire to achieve spiritual success involves the same act of will that it hopes to quash. If it is assumed that the will is wicked, the will can't be employed to overcome itself without utter failure. Exerting the "spiritual will" to defeat "fleshly will" is still an act of will. It is simply substituting one will (and one desire) for another. The will is still at work, and the false identity is the primary actor.

This approach makes the faulty assumption that the will is evil and human desire must be conquered. If you consider your will and your instincts to be problematic, you may try to kill, destroy, or suppress them. Ironically in this attempt of self-domineering, you practice what you seek to extinguish.

Exerting the will to attain a spiritual goal indicates unawareness of greed, voracity, and craving. Greed is greed whether its desire is wealth, fame, power, sex, or spiritual ascendancy.

For this reason, Jesus reminded his followers, "Beware of covetousness."

When you already have what you long to attain, you are unaware of your abundance. If you try to become what you already are, you are unconscious of your true self. Your thinking about what stereotypical spirituality looks like drives you to grasp for the wind. Spirituality has nothing to do with formulaic practices or hackneyed appearances. It has everything to do with you being you.

If you hope to get spiritual by doing certain deeds, you are practicing greed, and you will not get what you seek to obtain. If you do a deed for its own sake, you will find the presence of God therein. That's why to find, you must stop seeking.

Instead of longing to get a little spiritual something-something by paying the right price, participate in the spirit of the present. This moment is saturated with divinity, and you have done nothing to cause it. Each moment is uniquely spiritual.

The spirit blows where it wishes, and that doesn't sound especially disciplined. Wendell Berry reverentially describes God as "the wildest being in existence." You can't control an undisciplined spirit regardless of how disciplined you think you are.

To live in the fullness of this moment, you may need to unlearn spiritual disciplines. You may need to become spiritually undisciplined in order to experience the kingdom of God as a little child. Living with spontaneity, gratitude, and attentiveness today is discipline enough without greedily looking to get more in a future that never arrives.

BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT, Kevin!!!!!!!

Oh, I could just kiss you! In a wholly-holy, completely spiritual, utterly spouse-approving way, of course...!

YES! My whole being reverberates with a YES to all you've said here!

I've been reading/dabbling in the teachings of many spiritual teachers ... and while there's much good insight there (as with almost everything), something has felt "amiss" ("you must go deeper, you must meditate rightly, and more, and often; forsake what you see, it's all an illusion") ... and lo and beHOLD, it's the age-old seduction of "trying harder, striving, thou shalt suffer to attain" message that keeps on sneaking into everything -- we just can't seem to stay on the level of "God is enough, I am enough, it is good, here and now - so BE (it)!!!

Oh, my heart sings at that, my spirit does back-flips, and my poor, long-maligned body dances at the thought of being enjoyed, honored and CELEBRATED!!! My (egoic/unrenewed) mind may continue to yammer a bit, but it's ok ... I can laugh with it as it keeps catching up with the "too good to NOT be true" reality...!

How I sense God delighting when we *get* this...! I can "see" His head thrown back in exuberant laughter, arms thrown open wide, as the universe is filled with His joyous welcome: "Yes! You see, you see! Join the dance, celebrate this life as your gift, your unearned, unstriven-for, un-yank-awayable inheritance! Just because you're MINE -- and you're ALL mine!!!"

What an assault to our "watch-me-earn-this" egos! What an undermining to the system of meritology & believe-the-RIGHT-theory-ology that permeates the institutions (& the unrenewed minds!) of this collectively-blind consciousness! What a shock to our carefully-constructed-and-maintained sand-castle foundations! What an uber-LIBERATION to all of humanity, all of our planet, all the universe!

Mmmmmmm-WAH! Thou art kissed!

(can ya tell that I liked it?!?)

Shalom, Dena


P.S. If you like what Kevin wrote (and of course you do!), you can subscribe to his weekly Parousia e-newsletter, and/or send comments and/or kisses here: kevin@presence.tv

Healing or Stealing

This speech was recently given at the commencement ceremony at the University of Portland, Oregon. I find it to be beautifully stated, and breathlessly inspiring:

Healing or Stealing?

(by Paul Hawken to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3, 2009)

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there. Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint.

And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity.

Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy
earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss.

The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

~Selah~

Shalom, Dena