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Wake Up Now

The time to awaken is now! Given the world as it is, and certainly we are in a time of great World transition, the time to awaken for all people in the world is now. The world as it is does not have time for people to be in process, for instance in therapy or doing spiritual practice, for the next ten, twenty, or thirty years, with some hope that at the end of all that time they will have an experience of awakening, and then perhaps be of use in the world. Part of the shift in perspective that I have had is that the process is actually reversed.

The purpose of spiritual practice is not to gradually improve to a point where one awakens. It is actually the reverse! We choose to awaken now, in this moment, and then we have spiritual practice-meditation, attunement, whatever it is-to sustain and deepen that. The only reason, in any moment, that I am not experiencing the fullness of myself is because I want something else more. In other words, awakening does not take time. It is not a process. It is a choice in the moment to be one's authentic Self and to drop the ego, to drop the sense of separateness, to drop the sense of separation from the core of one's being, which is the Source of Life, our Ground of Being. Once that choice is made, it is important for there to be meditation and other practice to sustain that in the midst of this chaotic world. But what is in the way is not time. In A Course in Miracles there's a little excerpt that says, "Love (or awakening) waits not on time but on willingness." So what separates us from being our divine Selves, from knowing ourselves as divine beings and dropping the sense of separateness from each other, from our world, and from God is not time. It has to do with desire and willingness. I have that experience of being my authentic Self in any moment where I want that more than anything else. This was a wake-up for me in realizing that there is nothing in the way, and that what is needed is for me to be my authentic Self for the good of the whole so that our world might awaken. Then my presence may inspire others to do the same.

The ego, the self that sees itself as separate from Source, from God, from each other, from the earth, from all of life, was like this piece of paper (holding it up in front of his face). It occupied all of my vision, all of my perception, all of my perspective. This is all that I saw-this small, separate self, the self-active mind, the ego, attachment to thought and feeling. This is all I was, this was my experience of myself. If this (paper) represents the ego, then dropping the ego does not mean it is completely gone. It means that if I have 360-degree vision, then it is like this (holding the paper edgewise in his peripheral vision). It is one degree of that 360-degree vision. It is still there, but it is one piece over here-it does not loom so large in my consciousness.

Since this shift in perspective, I have been more courageous in sharing this perspective with patients and students It is not enough for people to be on the path of incremental improvement for the next several decades. The world just does not have time. The chaos created by war, the incredible political and governmental darkness, the rapid rate of environmental decay-are far too extreme, so that things are coming to a point of climax. The world transition is happening much too quickly for people to be in process and gradually getting better for long periods of time.

Part of the function and workings of the ego-this separate self, this self-active mind which is based in fear and shame, that sees itself as separate from each other, from God, and from our world, that aspect of ourselves that is not us, that gives rise to the human personality-always tells you there is plenty of time. Just keep working on it. Just improve a little bit. You have plenty of time. I am working with a patient who has an ulcerative, inflammatory bowel condition. She smokes. This is the absolute worst thing she can do. Her bowels are inflamed. I said to her, "Every time you smoke a cigarette, you're taking a flame thrower to your intestines." She says, "You're right. I know I should stop." I said, "You have to stop smoking now. This is like not OK." She said, "There are a couple of things I have to take care of first at work and at home. I'll definitely stop in two months. Three months tops. I just need a little more time." Three months goes by and I say, "Okay, it's time. Drop it now." She said, "Oh, that's right. But I just need a little bit more time. I used to smoke a pack. Now I'm smoking ten. That's better, right?" A month went by. "Oh, I'm down to eight or maybe nine." She is always pushing it a little further. Finally, she said, "You know, I don't think I can stop smoking." At this point, I knew it was not serving her for me to support her in this delusion. I said, "You're not smoking right now. You are not taking a drag on a cigarette now. So you can stop. The only reason you continue to smoke is your attachment to your feelings of discomfort, your identification with your feelings." She got it, and we will see if she lets go of the addiction.

What is the ego but attachment to thought and feeling, and this physical form. These are my thoughts. These are my feelings. This is my body. This is my illness, my, my, my. It is all self-centeredness. Ego is identification with the body, identification with thought, identification with feeling. To the extent that I am attached to or personalize thoughts and feelings--"This is mine,"-as long as I am attached to any of those things and have the mistaken belief that that is me, I am sunk. This is Emissary 101: You have a body; you are not your body. You have a mind; you are not your mind. You have emotions; you are not your emotions or feeling realm. You are the divine spiritual being back of all of them, which is meant to manifest through them abundantly and clearly in the world for the good of the whole and the healing of our planet.

I can know this experience of stepping back in meditation and just observing my thoughts, without judging them as "This is a good thought, bad thought. This is a good feeling, a bad feeling. My body feels good today. My body doesn't feel so good today." Who cares? It doesn't matter. It does not change who I am. Who I am is far beyond any of those things. As long as I am attached to or have some investment in or personalize any of these things, "These are my thoughts. These are my feelings. My feelings are really important," all of that, I cannot do what I came to do. So the point is-and I say this to myself first, because unless I do this myself I am not walking the talk-is to drop the ego now, to drop my past, my history, my issues, my personalization and attachment to what I think and feel. Drop it now! It does not take time. There are no excuses, and there is nothing in the way. The only thing in the way, if I do not have that experience now-is if there is something else in this world that I want more. As long as I want something else more than being my authentic self in service to the world for the good of the whole, if I want something else more than that, then I will never have it. So it is not a matter of time. It is not a matter of being in process. It is a matter of now. What do I want now? What do I love now? What do we love?

Deanna and I were on the subway. There were advertisements with this mean-looking guy saying, "What do you love?" It is an advertisement for basketball shoes. This ad asks in huge letters, "What do you love?" What a great question. What do you love now? What do you want more than anything now? That determines our experience instantly. This is not to discount the value of spiritual practice, because having made the choice to awaken now, it takes something to sustain and deepen it. It takes meditation, gratitude, and thankfulness, attunement, forgiveness, and more meditation, all of that, to sustain the choice to be one's own authentic self.

What most religious traditions have done is put the founder on a pedestal-Jesus, Buddha, or Lao Tzu, for example. In the Catholic tradition I grew up in, the tradition, it is Jesus. If you go through the motions he went through, if you do this and renounce that, go to confession (even though he never did that), then maybe when you are dead something creative will happen. After you do whatever things you are supposed to do-get confirmed and baptized, go to communion, and all the rest of it, then maybe in fifty, seventy, or eighty years from now, but particularly when you're dead, then there may be something useful that will come of all of that stuff you did to emulate the founder. This is complete nonsense.

In Martin's services, particularly in the eighties, in service after service, he must have used the word "Now," a million times. Now. Now. What is your experience now? It is not about time. Time is a trick of the ego. Who we are is eternal. Eternity meets linear time in the present moment. So we can know eternity and experience our eternal selves only in the present moment-as we let go of our past, let go of our attachment to our future and what that is supposed to be like, drop the ego, drop our past, our history, our issues, and all of that, and wake up now. If I do that, then automatically by my presence I can inspire others to do the same. That is the only way that our world has a shot because there is a lot of work to do. There is plenty of action to be done in the world. This era of history, at the end of history, at the end of time, is not about people just going off to caves and meditating, or just sitting and hanging out. There is stuff that needs to be done in the world. People cannot assume they have to forever be in process, or that they cannot really serve until they have been in process or therapy for decades. There is nothing really wrong necessarily with therapy. Like anything else, there is really effective therapy and really useless stay-stuck-in-your-past therapy. The point is that it does not take time. It is now. This ultimately is what is called for today, now.

Shame and delusion does not go away. It does not completely disappear, but it is this (indicating one degree of vision with a piece of paper). I can still see it. It is there but it is not this (holding the paper in front of his face), where it looms so large and all I can see is my thought, my feeling, my circumstances, my injuries, my problems, my process. Choosing to awaken is in a moment. I can stay there forever as long as I want that, love that, more than anything else. So the choice is to awaken now. Once that choice is made, you never have to go back. You only go back if in a moment you want or love something more than that. That is all that it is.

Our friend, David Karchere, had this to say in a recent service from November 17th, entitled "Context For Transformation":
…I appreciate that there is something happening over time, and human consciousness has tended to be very focused on that--things are improving. But there's another kind of movement in consciousness that is not simply the movement through time but it is the movement of coming to center, coming more fully into this eternal moment. That's what is emphasized in a morning such as this. Here is a way to describe the breakthrough. It is allowing all that we are to come fully into this present moment, to be available for the expression of the spirit of who we are.

So what matters is the vertical now, the vertical component, the vertical connections in being, to the ground of our being, which is God. Sure, as long as we are in the world, we are experiencing linearity and the progression of time and things enfolding over time. But the process of awakening is not about time. It is about one's willingness and desire in any given moment.

In that same service, Jerry Kvasnicka had this to say
…And I feel that's what we're primarily responsible for doing in these days, these days of turmoil when there is so much disintegration--to maintain that heart space and our focus in God; in other words, not "going external," as David Lesser warned us against recently, but maintaining absolutely that focus in God in our hearts, that strong context of love. And on this basis, the invitation goes out to the world with power so that all who hear may come to join us in this same precious context.

David Karchere then concluded:
We are up for holding this context, for standing at the place of origin so that the processes of transformation can blaze away. And as they do so, let's stay here. Let's stay here and hold our world as it goes through tremendous changes.

Jerry spoke of love. Since I first touched into New Age things in the eighties, there was this idea of unconditional love, of loving a person unconditionally. That can be a huge trap. Unconditional love, if distorted, and I think it frequently is, means I can do whatever I want. I can be a sinner, in a religious sense; I can do whatever I want because I want to do it. "I wanna do what I wanna do." It doesn't matter what I do because I am loved unconditionally. I think that is the huge, potential trap with unconditional love. What is needed in these days is highly conditional love. What is needed now is not to coddle the ego, not to coddle that sense of separateness, not to say, "Oh, whatever. Just keep working on it. Keep working on yourself and it is okay. Anything goes." No. What Jerry was talking about was maintaining absolutely that focus of God in our hearts. In the Native American tradition, there are four directions, but there is an absolute center; and that center is unmoved. It is the rock of Being and it does not move. It is absolute. So from that place of absoluteness, which we all, as awakened beings, are here to bring in these days, from that place of Being it is completely clear what is on tone and what is not. There is an absolute ownership, a complete lack of coddling, for lack of a better word, of the ego. Roger (De Winton) would say, when you get up in the morning, that your attitude, speaking of the divine One that we are, to heart and mind is not to coddle them but to say "Let's go." This is where we are going, like it or not. This is what is needed in day, now, whether it is washing the dishes or whatever. This is what is needed now. Here we go. It is not moaning, "Oh, not this and that. I'm feeling this and I'm feeling that. My mind is over here." No, a sense of absoluteness is absolutely what is needed in these days for us to be what we came to be and to manifest what we came to do in our world.

It is important to be aware of the context in which we live. This is a piece I wanted to touch on briefly. It is beautiful, and quite relevant to what we are exploring today. It is referred to as "New Insights Into the Mayan Calendar." There are seventeen different Mayan calendars, the most popular of which is known as the Tzolk'in or Cholq'ij. This calendar ends on the winter solstice, December 21st, in 2012. Carlos Barrios, is an indigenous tradition-keeper of the Mayan tradition. An article based on his work states: "The calendar that has steadily drawn global attention since 1987 is called the Tzolk'in or Cholq'ij. Devised ages ago and based on the cycle of the Pleiades, it is still held as sacred."

This is very interesting, considering the cosmology we have learned, particularly from Uranda, of the union of the Pleiades and Orion, which linked together to create the vibrational factors for our world. Carlos Barrios continues, "With the indigenous calendars, native people have kept track of important turning points in history…from 1987…"

I remember that day, actually. I was 17 or 18 at the time. I remember sensing that there was something important about it. I did not know necessarily why, but I took my blanket and went up to the roof of my parent's house early that morning. I sat on the roof, and it was pretty cold. I put a blanket on and just meditated as the sun came up. It was quite an expanded experience of Oneness. There was something I just knew I was part of, something very great. There was something happening in the world in a new way. It was quite memorable. The article continues,

"From that 1987 date until now, we have been in a time when the right arm of the materialistic world is disappearing, slowly but inexorably. We are at the cusp of the era when peace begins, and people live in harmony with Mother Earth…This is the time in-between, the time of transition. As we pass through this transition there is a colossal, global convergence of environmental destruction, social chaos, war, and ongoing Earth changes. All this, Mr. Barrios says, was foreseen via the simple, spiral mathematics of the Mayan calendars. 'It will change,' Mr. Barrios observes. 'Everything will change.' He said Mayan daykeepers view the Dec. 21, 2012 date as a rebirth, the start of the World of the Fifth Sun. It will be the start of a new era resulting from and signified by the solar meridian crossing the galactic equator, and the earth aligning itself with the center of the galaxy."

This is quite remarkable. This is exactly what Uranda was talking about when he explained the Grand ages, the grand cycles of 26,000 years. What he referred to was this time of global transition. Even in 1936, he said we are in a time of world transition. He just knew what was going on. Martin later referred to the earth as coming out of a vibrational cloud which allowed the fallen state to exist. He said we are coming out of this cloud, like it or not, and the ego will pass away. It is going to happen. Now we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way, but it is going to pass away. The ego will die. Vibrationally, this world will not sustain or allow the habitation of ego, the sense of separateness, the sense of identification with anything but eternal being, anymore. This piece goes on to say, At sunrise on December 21, 2012 for the first time in 26,000 years the Sun rises to conjunct the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic. This cosmic cross is considered to be an embodiment of the Sacred Tree, The Tree of Life a tree remembered in all the world's spiritual traditions. Some observers say this alignment with the heart of the galaxy in 2012 will open a channel for cosmic energy to flow through the earth, cleansing it and all that dwells upon it, raising all to a higher level of vibration. This is quite consistent with what both Uranda and Martin laid down for us in decades past. It is quite remarkable that for the first time in 26 millennia, the earth will have a direct view, so to speak, an unobstructed, clear, straight shot to the central sun at the center of the galaxy. The focus of this planet is the Lord of Love, and that being is a differentiation of the being which manifests as the Sun. That One is a differentiation of a higher point of focus still, which is the Being which manifests as the central sun of the center of the galaxy. There is only one past that which is the central sun of suns, at the center of the universe. Without getting too cosmic, that's really big. If you want to get a sense of that, any of you who have not yet done the Hayden Planetarium Tour of the Universe, I highly recommend it. So, this is big. The earth on that day will have a straight shot to the center of the galaxy. That's big.

The article's author continues,
…This process has already begun, Mr. Barrios suggested. "Change is accelerating now, and it will continue to accelerate." If the people of the earth can get to this 2012 date in good shape, without having destroyed too much of the Earth, we will rise to a new, higher level. But to get there we must transform enormously powerful forces that seek to block the way…

We are living in the most important era of the Mayan calendars and prophecies. All the prophecies of the world, all the traditions, are converging now. There is no time for games. The spiritual ideal of this era is action. Many powerful souls have reincarnated in this era, with a lot of power. This is true on both sides, the light and the dark. High magic is at work on both sides…

Just now the dark side is very strong, and very clear about what they want. They have their vision and their priorities clearly held, and also their hierarchy. They are working in many ways so that we will be unable to connect with the spiral Fifth World in 2012…
…the dark side works to block fusion through denial and materialism. It also works to destroy those who are working with the light to get the Earth to a higher level. They like the energy of the old, declining Fourth World, the materialism. They do not want it to change. They do not want fusion. They want to stay at this level, and are afraid of the next level. The dark can only be transformed when confronted with simplicity and open-heartedness. No more darkness or light in the people, but an uplifted fusion. But right now the realm of darkness is not interested in this. They are organized to block it. They seek to unbalance the Earth and its environment so we will be unready for the alignment in 2012. We need to work together for peace, and balance with the other side. We need to take care of the Earth that feeds and shelters us. We need to put our entire mind and heart into pursuing unity and fusion now, to confront the other side and preserve life."

These are just a couple of excerpts; the entire article is certainly worthwhile reading. The point is to realize that at this pivotal moment in history, the whole purpose for waking up in the morning is nothing less than, "I am here to be the presence of the awakened Christ, the awakened Spirit of God in flesh on earth now, in selfless service to the whole, for the healing of the world." Any lesser goal, any lesser priorities, any lesser purposes, totally do not cut it anymore.

As I said in the beginning, it was self-centeredness that destroyed the world. It is only self-centeredness, the ego, the self-active mind of man, human nature, which needs to pass away now so that we can do what we came to do. Any lesser goals for one's life are futile, a forsaking of one's heritage and birthright. Each of us here and millions more have incarnated - all of us ultimately - at this time, specifically, to wake up, be awake, stay awake, and in so doing wake up others to who they are and why they are here. This is IT, with a capital "I" and a capital "T." Our being together, in this instance, is so crucial; it is not just individuals doing this on their own. The unified, coordinated body of God is the One Christ Body, as Uranda referred to it. Regardless of what their associations are throughout the world, this body needs to come together, at least in consciousness, (and what is truly needed is transformation in consciousness), so that this world can be healed and uplifted, and even make it the next ten years. Again, there is much to do, and it comes from the release of identification with anything external to the core and ground of One's Being. Releasing that completely and acting in selfless service, so that all action in one's life is for the good of the whole, is exactly what is needed right now. This is the great and glorious commission to which each of us are called. I am particularly excited to be with you in this, to share this awareness with you and to share this work of regeneration, which is the real deal of what is happening. Usually we point to disintegration. But the real story is regeneration, which you will never read in any newspaper or see on the news or CNN or in any mainstream media, which may be giving 10% of what's really going on. What is really going on is the regeneration. That is what's really going on. Turn our hearts and minds toward that very deliberately. It is the key to victory in these days. That is why we came.

Lord of all, Lord of Love, Ground and Source of our Being, we are here now, your awakened angels on earth, your Spirit differentiated uniquely through each of us, completely committed to that for which we came and to that which we are. In this moment we release all that which is not of you, which is not of love, which is not of the eternal Spirit that we are. We drop it now. In so releasing this, claiming fully our divine heritage as eternal spiritual beings come into the world at this time for the end of time, the end of history, we heal and awaken our world and let the regenerative, healing cycle be. It is so now and we ask that your Spirit so infuse us in each moment that we would never turn our hearts and minds to anything that is not of you, that we might be a shining beacon to all those we meet, all those we bring to mind, providing an invitation to come home now. We join with all those in this moment in the world around who are awake and who are coming to the point now of choosing to awaken to this eternal moment where all is possible. We do not forsake our spiritual heritage. So with thankful hearts and minds, we stand together as One body, many members of One body. And so it is. Au-men.