I like this idea. I’m not totally convinced yet that we can *just* sit at home radiating peace and bring it about worldwide. I think that finding peace within ourselves is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating world peace.

Many religious traditions teach that we must first create peace within ourselves and then we must, through our actions, bring peace to our world.

I believe that this is possible in spite of the various powers determined to maintain a state of constant war. Our compassion for one another and all living beings is more powerful than it might seem.
Blessings,
ohnwentsya

A Global Meditation for World Peace, December 12, 2014

For generations, people from all walks of life have been asking for “World Peace;” a time when all can live in love and harmony. Many heroic people have dedicated their lives toward its attainment. They have paved the way for this particular point in time; December 2014. Here’s a big “Thank you,” to those who have allowed us to step on their shoulders.

The term “World Peace” is confusing to me. It’s the word “World” that does not seem to apply. The definition of “World” can be defined, on the internet, as “the earth, together with all of its countries, peoples, and natural features.” When we ask for peace, why are we asking the Earth? If you look out your window, you will see other kingdoms; mineral, plant, and animal. Take a look at the rock, the tree, the squirrel. Are they not already peaceful? Why are we asking the Earth to be peaceful when it already is? Let me reiterate…”It just is.” It’s time to take the “Earth” out of the equation. Let’s be clear that the peace we are asking for involves just humanity.

So, the next question becomes…how does humanity find peace? We already know this answer. We’ve been told the answer for centuries by some of the greatest philosophers and metaphysicians. PEACE CAN ONLY BE FOUND WITHIN. What this means is that it’s up to each individual to find their own peace by nurturing the qualities they already possess within them. Peace has nothing to do with externals and everything to do with what’s inside. It is the cultivating of kindness, charity, compassion and love for yourself and others. It is about acting peaceful in each and every situation we are confronted with.

Currently, humanity is experiencing a mass “awakening” and it’s happening all over the globe to the peoples of all nations, cultures, and beliefs. The concept of “awakening” is not new. It’s just occurring on a mass scale to create a “tipping point” in favor of the peace we seek. What this means is that people all over the globe are doing the work to seek that peace from within themselves. This not only raises their own personal vibration but the vibration of all of humanity; as we are all connected. Evolution was brilliantly designed by the Creator to include absolutely everyone. All people get to play a part in creating that loving, harmonious world we seek.

Each and every one of us has a “master shift” to undergo; that is, stepping away from the lower energies such as hate, greed, anger, competition, and jealously. It is stepping up to love, kindness, forgiveness, compassion, and tolerance. Once you feel that peace at the core of your essence, your whole life lifts up in ways you never knew possible. Additionally, you are in a position to help others by transmuting their negative state with your peace.

With this new energy, we no longer have to picket or protest to seek change. We can create peace right from our homes by staying in that vibration as all the tools we need are within. This is how we take action with the realization that peace is already here. It always has been. We just needed to recognize it.

None of what I speak about is new. If you “seek” you will find this information everywhere. What is new is the ability of all of us to come together as never before in our history. On December 12, 2014, we have an opportunity to come together in unison for the peace of humanity. The Master Shift has written and produced a free online guided meditation narrated by Singer, Songwriter, Photographer, Philanthropist Julian Lennon. Based on the idea that quantum meditation can effect change, the purpose of the meditation is to bring the world together as one meditating force for universal uplifting. The meditation is not religious, but does recognize a “higher power.” Details about the upcoming event can be found at http://www.themastershift.com or by visiting The Master Shift on Facebook. The Master Shift is a 501©3 Non-Profit Organization.

We are living in an exciting time. Because technology has connected people from all over the globe, we are witnessing the acceleration in the evolution of humanity. Our consciousness is rapidly expanding which is allowing us to “see” how to create peace in our minds and hearts. Peace is an individual movement. We invite you to “master” your shift.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-segal-med/a-global-meditation-for-w_b_6285790.html

December 12, 2014
by ohnwentsya Leave a comment

Black Lives Matter — Go to an African American Church in Solidarity This Sunday Morning

Rabbi Michael Lerner 12/10/14 09:15 AM ET

Tens of millions of Americans are deeply disturbed by the racism that has recently gotten the focus that it should have had for the past many decades. The failure of juries to indict police who kill African American males was not new, but the awareness of this reality which has been just one of the many faces of racism that weigh down the lives of African Americans in this society was quite unusual and momentarily broke through the dominant discourse that “that problem has been solved decades ago after Martin Luther King, Jr. saved his people by ending segregation and winning the voting rights laws.”

Of course, even now there are many in the media who try to deny the ongoing significance of racism in our society. Yet the outpouring of anger that we’ve seen on college campuses and in the streets of the U.S. is a reason for hopefulness that when the media turns its attention away from this issue some of the consciousness about racism will remain alive beyond the peoples of color who can never forget it as long as it is shoved in their face by police, unemployment, hunger, poverty, harassment, and endless opportunities to experience the contempt that many whites feel toward them.

Is it any wonder that some young African Americans find it hard to believe that there is a strong connection between how hard they work and how well they will be treated in this society? Does anyone really think that if a Black cop had killed a middle class white youth or strangled and then let die a white man that the grand jury would not have indicted him? What we have been hearing more clearly than ever in the past few years is the tremendous fear that African Americans carry with them at all times — fear of white majority and their occupying force in communities of color that we call police and some of us call “pigs,” and fear of the way the system keeps on undermining them, manifesting contempt for them, and treating them as though their lives did not matter.

That’s why I am so glad that this Sunday, December 14, the Progressive National Baptist Convention has called for a morning of standing in solidarity with African Americans. I strongly urge you to find a Black church near you and show up in solidarity. The focus is not only on mourning but in publicly proclaiming: “Black Lives Matter.” That afternoon, we at the Network of Spiritual Progressives will be holding a strategy conference to assess what needs to change in the way the liberal and progressive forces have developed in the past few decades that has rendered them less influential and hence less able to defend the mini-steps that were taken in the past to overcome American racism. I’m hoping that our event will spur dozens of others.

This is a discussion which can’t stay at the level of pointing out how spineless and hence disappointing President Obama has been, how absent of a positive message the Democratic Party has been, how splintered and unable to cooperate have been the various organizations and movements of the liberal and progressive Left. We need to look deeper.

The issue of racism, after all, is really the issue of “othering” — taking some group and making them the demeaned other. What pain in people’s lives makes this othering so attractive?

We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives point to the corrosive impact of patriarchy and class society in dividing people and making it in the interests of the powerful to foster hatred among groups of the relatively powerless. This has taken much more sophisticated form in contemporary capitalist society where most people have been indoctrinated into the belief that they live in a “meritocracy” in which people end up economically, but also in terms of the quality of their lives, families and love relationships, in exactly the place they deserve. Those who are most successful deserve that, and the rest of us deserve what ever happens to us. The result: massive self-blaming which feels terrible. No wonder that many are attracted to religious fundamentalist or ultra nationalist movements or institutions which promise them support and caring (and this promise is often really delivered). However, the nationalist holidays pass, the Sunday church experience passes, and then people are right back in the very same capitalist marketplace in which they are seen as valuable only to the extent that they can accumulate lots of money and power. The selfishness, materialism and looking out for number one that so undermines loving relationships returns to the forefront, and the religious or nationalist high doesn’t last. And here the ultra-Right comes forward to provide an explanation: “there is some group that is destroying what would otherwise be a wonderful and nurturing society” and then point to whoever is the designated demeaned other, and blame it on them.

Jews were the identified demeaned other of Europe and it led eventually to genocide against the Jewish people (including many of my relatives). But in the US by the time my grandparents arrived here there already was a “demeaned other” that replaced Native Americans (once they had been genocided nearly out of existence), and so the demeaned other became the Blacks brought here as slaves and then eventually freed from legal slavery but subjected to various forms of domination and humiliation that continues to this moment. And the hatred of Blacks is layered over not only to function as an effective way to channel the anger that people might otherwise be feeling toward the larger economic system onto the backs of African Americans, but also as a way of protecting the American public from ever really having to face up to how debilitating and cruel has been the practice and legacy of slavery, then Jim Crow and segregation, then the more hidden but nevertheless pervasive ways that racism continues to function as a central dynamic in American politics and economics. We can witness how difficult it is for the American public to acknowledge the torture we visited on a wide variety of people in Guantanamo and other secret sites, even when a U.S. Senate committee report provides much of the evidence, and that was only a few thousand people being tortured by a handful of distorted people. Imagine then how hard it is for a society like ours to have a serious look at the way tens of millions of African Americans and other peoples of color have been living and suffering. Far easier to deflect attention by blaming the victim — particularly in capitalist societies where people have already been taught to blame themselves for their economic failures, and where othering is the coin of the realm.

A serious anti-racist movement must address these psychological dynamics. It must affirm the possibility of a world based on love and generosity even in the face of being dismissed as “unrealistic” because all of us have to some extent been immersed in the selfishness-generating worldviews that are taught in the schools and media and massively reinforced by our experiences in the capitalist marketplace, so most of us have come to believe that these behaviors reflect “human nature” rather than the products of a particular form of economic and social organization through which we’ve been living and then recreating in our own personal and economic lives.

Yet most people yearn for something quite different, and that is why we at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are building the Love and Justice movement. More of that in my next column! For the moment, I hope you might yet try to get to the Reclaim America conference this Sunday or at least join the Network of Spiritual Progressives and help convene such a gathering in your part of the world.

And given the now-documented torture that the U.S. Senate revealed yesterday that is being highlighted in the media today, we have a lot more from which to be reclaiming America. But in the long run, that torture is just another manifestation of the “othering” that permeates the consciousness of so many Americans. How else explain the collaboration with the torturers by the American Psychological Association? And that othering is most systematically manifested in the racism toward peoples of color and in particular toward African Americans. So do find an African American church this Sunday and show up and demonstrate that they are not alone and that Black Lives Matter to you no matter what your racial, religious or ethnic identity!

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine and chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. He is the author of the national best seller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back America From the Religious Right and of the national best seller Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation. He welcomes responses from people who wish to build a Love and Justice movement in the U.S. with people who will take the psychological and spiritual dimension of human needs seriously–contact him at RabbiLerner.Tikkun@gmail.com

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6301118

December 12, 2014
by ohnwentsya Leave a comment

NEW Post on HighHeartLife! The 6th Uranus/Pluto Square December 14-15, 2014 | Denise le Fey

The 6th Uranus/Pluto Square December 14-15, 2014

‘…We are in crises over the survival of good values, human decency, and love. Four hundred years of scientific materialism have nearly blocked our spiritual access to the higher dimensions that make life meaningful, and two thousand years of religious dogma have weakened our freedom and willpower. What’s going on?…’

That first sentence really got me because that’s exactly what’s been nearly breaking my heart and spirit this year. Trudging daily through such compressed darkness at the end of the long reign of Darkness isn’t easy but we’re doing it, besides, what else is there to do but this? ❤ (Please click the link to read the post on HighHeartLife- https://highheartlife.wordpress.com/2014/12/11/the-6th-uranuspluto-square-december-14-15-2014/ )

December 12, 2014
by ohnwentsya Leave a comment

Truthout Daily Digest Thursday, 11 December 2014

I’m amazed at the geyser of “Disclosure” tales in the news of late! So much that has been hidden continues to be uncovered with light shining into all the hidden crevices of criminality, debauchery and corruption in many countries.

Mindful of Laura’s warnings about the possibility of much we see being pushed to our awareness as part of tactics of manipulation; I wonder how much of what we see is really rooting out the sins of the powerful?

The astrology has been described as favouring the exposure of hidden crimes during several years of our current period. So my guess is the majority is real, but the level of hype or focus may be deliberately amped up to facilitate “manufacturing consent”.

It does seem like a bad time to be a powerful criminal though. No matter why, the majority are discovering so much long hidden. It’s my observation that this process is occurring as the astrology predicted both in the small, local, personal sphere as well as the global stage.

It’s hard to take day after day though, isn’t it?

Don’t forget to get out into nature! Listen to birds, watch the sunrise, play in the snow or just take a walk. Any time we disconnect from the electronic world and just let ourselves be fully present in the moment it is healing. It helps restore our internal peace and connection to life and all living beings.

The tides of history are long and often excruciatingly slow for individuals. But in the long term the mess we are living through is leading to a better world.

I’m often too ill to write much, or to read and comment on friends posts (which I miss a lot more than writing my own!). But I think of you whose blogs I read and I keep everyone in prayer.

I’m in awe of everyone creating this global community both online and off. Despite the negative news we truly are living through amazing and magical changes.

I used to think we had to have huge uprisings to change the world-getting enough people to agree and work together on exact issues. I developed despair when it became apparent that getting humans to do that *enough* is like herding cats.

But people are changing the world by reading one another’s thoughts and stories; by creating direct solutions to problems; by bonding in friendship across political and national boundaries, and many other seemingly “small” acts.

Sorry to ramble on a bit. After reading today’s Truthout I felt it needed a “Don’t let the bastards wear you down” intro.

No matter how much horror is revealed, the sum total of loving, kind and generous acts will always be much greater.

How do I know this?

The human species still exists.

If it were not so our extinction would have occurred long ago. That our core is loving kindness means that we may just dodge it this time too!:-)

Blessings,
ohnwentsya

William Rivers Pitt | The Rank, Reeking Horror of Torturing Some Folks

William Rivers Pitt, Truthout: Bush said it didn’t happen. Cheney said it did. And Obama said those who tortured are patriots, and those who call it wrong are sanctimonious. Meanwhile, everyone walked. That, right there, is why this whole nightmare came to be.

Read the Article

What They Haven’t Told Us About the European Financial Crisis

Michael Nevradakis, Truthout: University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, discusses the ongoing financial crisis in Europe, the economic situation in Greece, the myths surrounding the crisis and the new economic bubble, which he argues is about to burst.

Read the Interview

Fighting for Farm Workers at Our Dinner Tables

Jennifer Keys Adair, Truthout: The movie Food Chains should dramatically raise our collective consciousness – and conscience – about how our food is produced. We need to establish a “slave-free” section at our supermarkets.

Read the Article

Report on CIA Torture Shows Need for Limiting Military Force Against ISIS

Robert Naiman, Truthout: In the absence of greater agitation, limitation and oversight, the national security establishment is likely to get worse, not better, in terms of its accountability to democratic control and the rule of law.

Read the Article

Faith Inc. and Criminal Justice Reform

Kay Whitlock, Critical Mass Progress: Do faith-based programs work better than programs sponsored by the government or secular community-based organizations? That depends on how effectiveness is assessed, what questions are asked and from what vantage point.

Read the Article

“These Are Crimes”: New Calls to Prosecute Bush Administration as Senate Report Reveals Brutal CIA Torture

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!: “In light of the release of the Senate torture report, Reed Brody, counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, says, “When individuals commit torture, we call on those countries to hold the abusers to account.” So far, however, the only one charged with a crime is the whistleblower who exposed the CIA program.

Watch the Video and Read the Transcript

Is the Koch Brothers’ Curriculum Coming to Your Child’s School?

The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program: It’s bad enough that the Koch brothers have a stranglehold on our democracy and political system, courtesy of our Supreme Court. We don’t need them in our classrooms, too.

Read the Article

How the President Who Pledged to Banish Nuclear Weapons Is Enabling Their Renewal

James Carroll, TomDispatch: In order to get the Senate Republicans to ratify the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, Obama laid the groundwork for a vast “modernization” of the US nuclear arsenal, which is already morphing into a full-blown reinvention of the arms cache at an estimated future cost of more than $1 trillion.

Read the Article

When Charter Schools Are Nonprofit in Name Only

Marian Wang, ProPublica: Some charters pass along nearly all their money to for-profit companies hired to manage the schools. It’s an arrangement that’s raising eyebrows.

Read the Article

Twenty Key Findings From the Senate Report on CIA Torture

Staff, Moyers & Company: After months of wrangling with intelligence officials, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a summary of its 6,700-page report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs under President George W. Bush. Here are the key findings.

Read the Article

Would You Rather Get Your Water From Your City Government – or From a Corporation?

Michelle Chen, The Nation: Detroit’s water crisis may seem like an anomaly, but we may soon see more resource crises nationwide if pro-business officials decide water isn’t so much an essential entitlement as it is a commodity to be traded like corn and crude oil.

Read the Article

Call Congress to Oppose Back-Room Wall Street Deal

Isaiah J. Poole, Campaign for America’s Future: Activists are calling for an all-out pushtoday to stop a back-room deal that would reopen the Wall Street derivatives casino that caused so much damage in 2008, leaving taxpayers stuck with the bill for cleaning up the mess.

Read the Article and Watch the Video

BuzzFlash

Marissa Alexander: The Rippling Impact of Injustice and Imprisonment

Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash at Truthout: With the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, the United States uses incarceration as a form of social cleansing and bias against people of color, as well as poor people, gender-nonconforming people and people with mental illness.

Read the BuzzFlash Commentary

Cheney Throws Bush Under the Bus on Torture Program

Read the Article at Talking Points Memo

Elizabeth Warren Leads Liberal Rebellion on Spending Bill

Read the Article at The Washington Post

The Militarized Divide in This Shattered Nation

Read the Article at BuzzFlash

Rumain Brisbon Is Just the Latest to Be Shot Dead by a Cop Over a Phantom Gun

Read the Article at Mother Jones

Only Half of Global Banks Have Policy to Respect Human Rights

Read the Article at Inter Press Service

“Corrupt, Toxic and Sociopathic”: Glenn Greenwald Unloads on Torture, CIA and Washington’s Rotten Soul