A universal assembly for true discernment
Weekly Sunday Gathering with Rev. David Dov FishmanTopic: I Rest in God.
Description: Dov gently reminded us, that in times like these, the best adage is to stay calm and rest in God. You are already cared for, but the question is do you trust that truth?
Reading: Shiryl Kaplan read A Course in Miracles Lesson 109, I Rest in God.
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Please read quotes 1397-1400 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. Here is the last quote:
In the darkness of ignorance, the fool thinks he experiences pleasure or happiness in the objects of this world.
Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.
A Parable of a Woman and Five Daughters
There was a woman who had five daughters. Each of her daughters loved Disney, so one day the woman surprised her daughters with a day of Disney fantasy. She let each of the girls dress like the Disney princess of her choice, and she took them to Disneyland. This was especially fun, because other people at Disneyland addressed the girls using the names of their characters. For example, “Do you want fries with that, Cinderella?” Also, “Please slide over, Princess Jasmine, to make room for another rider,” and etcetera.
When the woman and her daughters arrived home that evening, each girl ran off in a different direction, continuing to play the character she’d pretended to be all day. Since each of the girls had a smartphone, the mother sent a group text to her daughters, which read, “Please take off your costumes and become my daughters again. When you’ve returned to yourself, join me in the kitchen for strawberry shortcake and milk.”
The twins were the youngest daughters. They were six. They helped each other change out of their costumes quickly and easily. They arrived in the kitchen first, giggling and smiling, excited to eat strawberry shortcake.
The eldest daughter was thirteen. She was excited to get the text that promised strawberry shortcake, but then she became distracted by another group text with friends. It was half an hour before she finally took off her costume and joined her mother and sisters in the kitchen.
The next eldest daughter was eleven. She was dressed as Snow White. This daughter was particularly imaginative. She pretended that her mother, four sisters, the family dog and family cat were the seven dwarfs. She swirled down the hallway toward the kitchen in costume, hoping to have shortcake with the seven dwarfs. Her mother saw her in the hallway in costume and said, “When you are ready, come into the kitchen as my daughter, and you can have strawberry shortcake and milk.”
The next eldest daughter was eight. She was dressed as Sleeping Beauty. When she got home, she ran straight to her bedroom. She lay down on her bed and closed her eyes, pretending to be Sleeping Beauty, but she fell asleep and did not see her mother’s text. When she did not come into the kitchen, her mother sent the twins to look for her. The twins woke her up and relayed the message about strawberry shortcake in the kitchen. The little girl felt guilty for falling asleep and missing her mother’s text, but when she arrived in the kitchen her mother smiled and said, “It is as it is. Now let’s enjoy strawberry shortcake.”
With all of the daughters in the kitchen, the day of pretending was over. The woman thanked her daughters for changing out of their costumes, told her daughters how much she loved them, and they all enjoyed strawberry shortcake and milk together.
The End.
Thoughts of Awakening #19
You are at peace.
Nothing in all of reality
can destroy your peace.
Anything within your mind,
and anything that seems to be without,
that seems to have the power
to destroy your peace,
has only the power
you have given it.
And that must mean,
you are at peace.
~From our Holy Spirit
Please read quotes 1393-1396 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. Here is the last quote:
The body can have no relationship whatsoever with the Self.
Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.
Today’s NTI reading is a gentle introduction to what can become a hard-hitting topic. I call it a “gentle introduction,” because anyone who is not ready to see what today’s reading points to can not see it in the reading. However, anyone who follows this path to its end will eventually come to the point of questioning every expectation and everything he has ever put faith in.
I am not going to rob you of the gentle introduction provided through today’s reading. One will arrive at “hard-hitting” when one is ready. All I want to do in this tip is highlight one paragraph:
Peace comes from laying down your expectations and your judgments and accepting truth as it is. There is no other way to accept the truth, for to accept it in any way other than as it is, is not to accept the truth. It is to accept delusion over truth, and in delusion, you are lost from truth.
There is a term that is used frequently these days. The term is “his truth” or “her truth,” as in, “She has to find her truth and live by it.”
The problem with that idea is this:
There is only one truth.
Anything other than truth is not truth.
It’s imagination.
Most people live by imagination. In fact, there is so much imagination in most people’s lives that I couldn’t begin to point it all out. Nor would I. Each one is allowed to live by his imagination. However, the problem comes when one person’s imagination conflicts with another person’s imagination, or when one group’s imagination conflicts with another group’s, or one nation’s with another nation’s imagination. The problem with imagination is that it isn’t consistent—it can be anything—and when it is heavily believed and invested in as if it is truth, it creates conflict.
Conflict comes from believing one’s imagination.
Peace comes from accepting truth as it is.
That’s why everyone who follows this path to its end eventually comes to the hard-hitting point of questioning everything she’s ever believed. You can begin that questioning whenever you are ready. Life will provide the starting point for you. Every time you are upset, you are provided with the opportunity to discover where you’ve mistaken imagination for truth.
Note: I recommend that you read Matthew 21 in the Bible before reading NTI today, since today’s reading refers directly to the stories in the Bible.
Thoughts of Awakening #18
Judgment seems to guide you
within a world of differences,
and it seems to bring reason
into chaos.
But this is not so.
Judgment is a false guide
that distracts from your true guide.
Lay down judgment,
that you may see with true perception
through the eyes of One who knows
what it is you look upon.
~From our Holy Spirit
Topic: I Rest in God
Description: Dov will share about a timeless metaphor that we are the sky. The truth is that everything else is just the weather. He gently wants to remind us, that in times like these, the best adage is to stay Calm.
Reading: Shiryl Kaplan will read A Course in Miracles Lesson 109, I Rest in God.
*Weekly gathering is held every Sunday morning at 10:15 am ET/8:15 am MT in the Awakening Together Sanctuary. Join us after the Gathering for our Fellowship Time, hosted by Rev. George Maddox.
Rev. Jacquelyn Eckert facilitates this program, in which Awakening Together members and friends join together to watch and discuss TED talks that reveal the Truth of ourselves and our universe based on the actual experience of ordinary people. Their insights are genuine—not based upon theory or dogma—and give us a “man on the street” perspective on what we are coming to learn through Awakening Together.
Regina Dawn Akers reads selections from books by Bernadette Roberts. The purpose of this inspired book study is to learn from one who walked through the final doorway to no self, no world, no God–Only Reality.
Rev. Regina Dawn Akers will be facilitating for this month’s movie, Shall We Dance, starring Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez and Susan Sarandon. This is the movie Regina was guided to see the day she received her initial calling from Holy Spirit.
Why would Holy Spirit send Regina to see this movie just as her path of following guidance was about to unfold? Watch the movie, join us for Movie Discussion Group on March 22, and discover that answer for yourself.
Use the Shall We Dance Playsheet to help you contemplate the movie.
Film Synopsis: John Clark is a man with a wonderful job, a charming wife and a loving family, who nevertheless feels that something is missing as he makes his way every day through the city. Each evening on his commute home, John sees a beautiful woman, staring with a lost expression through the window of a dance studio. Haunted by her gaze, John impulsively jumps off the train one night, and signs up for dance lessons, hoping to meet her. At first, it seems like a mistake. But, as his lessons continue, John falls in love with dancing. Keeping his new obsession from his family and co-workers, John feverishly trains for Chicago’s biggest dance competition.
Please read quotes 1389-1392 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. Here is the last quote:
In whatever the mind tends to sink, retrieve it from it and direct it towards the truth. Thus will the wild elephant of the mind be tamed.
Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.
A Parable of a Woman and Five Sons
There was a woman who had five sons. All of her sons were comic book fans, so she took them to Comic-Con. Each boy dressed as his favorite comic book character and spent the entire day at Comic-Con pretending to be the character he dressed as.
When they arrived home that evening, each boy ran off in a different direction, continuing to play the character he’d played all day. As the woman walked through the house looking for her sons, she came across her youngest son first. She said, “Go into your bedroom and change out of your costume. When you are done, come into the kitchen for chocolate cake and milk.”
A few minutes later, the woman came across her eldest son. She said, “Go into your bedroom and change out of your costume. When you are done, come into the kitchen for chocolate cake and milk.”
The woman continued through the house in this way until she found each of her five sons, saying to each of them, “Go into your bedroom and change out of your costume. When you are done, come into the kitchen for chocolate cake and milk.”
The last son that the woman found loved cake the most, so he changed his clothes the fastest. He ran into the kitchen and saw a round chocolate cake cut into six slices. The boy said, “Mom, since I was the fastest can I have two pieces of cake?”
“No,” the woman said, and she gave her fast son one piece of cake and a glass of milk.
Next the eldest son came into the kitchen. He looked at the five remaining slices of cake and said, “Mom, since I am the oldest, can I have two pieces of cake?”
“No,” the woman answered, and she gave her eldest son one piece of cake and a glass of milk.
Two more boys came into the kitchen and the woman served cake and milk to each of them. Finally, the youngest boy came into the kitchen. He was only four years old, and so he had worked very hard to take his costume off all by himself. “Momma,” the youngest said, “Since I worked the hardest, may I have the extra piece of cake?”
“No,” the woman answered. “Each one of you took off your costume, so each one of you get the same amount of cake.”
Why didn’t the woman give the extra piece of cake to the fastest boy, the eldest boy or the boy who had worked the hardest? It is because each one was her son. The differences made no difference.
There are apparent differences among us. Some of us gain wisdom quickly. You could say we are fast, like the woman’s fastest son. Some of us have been on the spiritual path for many years. You could say we are the elders, like the woman’s eldest son. Some of us are very committed and work very hard at awakening. We are a lot like the woman’s youngest son. However, we are all already consciousness, so our apparent differences make no difference at all.
Today’s reading focuses on letting go of the differences we see in one another. That doesn’t mean that differences won’t appear. It means that differences are appearance only.
When we focus on differences, we focus on appearances as if they are reality. When we let our sight soften around differences, and we look for sameness—for the fact of each human, in which there is no difference at all—we open to reality.
(Before reading from NTI today, read Matthew 20:1-16 in the Bible.)
Thoughts of Awakening #17
Trust in your Self.
Trust in you.
Trust your guidance.
Trust in Love.
Trust everything that comes your way.
Trust,
for trust is not fear.
~From our Holy Spirit
What a brilliant opportunity for us all to think of one another, at our very core, our very nature, at the same time. Hello everyone, we are humanity, and this is a human theory about divine connectively and-also a divine essence of a conscious observation. This is an acknowledgement of great solutions being discovered within and throughout the grave problem because “when the solution is simple, God is answering.” -Albert Einstein
If the planet is sick,
(and the planet is sick)
then the worms that eat the earth are sick, too
and if the worms are sick,
then the birds are sick
and when the birds get sick
they poo
on the ground
and fertilize the soil
where the pigs and cows and chickens eat and
corn grows, and man farms and
man researches and man eats.
Nature has a virus and it is performing a self-cleaning balancing act,
a natural law.
The fear around it is entirely optional,
don’t we come to find that the solution most often turns out to be more beautiful than the puzzle?
Faith
lives
in the relationship
with the lover of the unknown,
unpredictable to the ego,
at first uncomfortable, then at last, ceaseless comfort and joy.
If the planet is sick, it communicates that it needs to stop,
a broken leg stops walking,
a breakdown seeks a breakthrough,
we are the planet and we communicated this to ourselves.
With Italy and China on lock down,
the nitrogen dioxide is already significantly lower in the atmosphere,
(the harmful emission from fossil fuels fuming the air and continuously contributing to pollution we have protests against, ozone thinning, contaminated water, and climate disruption).
Ironically, we use these fuels every day to go to work to turn on the world,
which runs the world
to fight over these fuels – so yes – the air is feeling better,
thanks for asking.
Not many planes,
giant decrease in hundreds of thousands of hours of diesel gas for clouds.
If planet earth was one of those poor kids stuck in a car with the windows up when their parents smoked cigarettes, this is the child’s reaction – like – after, 70 years of not changing.
Happy air. Happy lungs.
The air needs us to be sick
to wake up,
to sit down,
so we take notice that our chronic lifestyle is poison;
and that we are also: the air, we are the burning countries.
Bentinho Massaro says, “our hate has set fire to the forests burning the koala’s feet, we are burning koala’s”.
Our greed poisons the sea,
we could be so healthy but
everything wants
more
concrete.
The Tao Te Ching, a classic virtuous path of inner strength, 81 verses, written for rulers and emperors in fourth century BC, shepherding a way of integrity, delivers harmonized guidance to live in the world with qualities of goodness and incorruptibility. Co-existence and war-less, the Tao presents a way of life intended to reconstitute unity and tranquility, it is amity for a world oppressed by our self-perpetuated dis-ease. This practice is wisdom, a way, for leaders.
Verse #80, written by Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell, says:
If a country is governed wisely,
its inhabitants will be content.
They enjoy the labor of their hands
and don’t waste time inventing
labor-saving machines.
Since they dearly love their homes,
they aren’t interested in travel.
There may be a few wagons and boats,
but these don’t go anywhere.
There may be an arsenal of weapons,
but nobody ever uses them.
People enjoy their food,
take pleasure in being with their families,
spend weekends working in their gardens,
delight in the doings of the neighborhood.
And even though the next country is so close
that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking,
they are content to die of old age
without ever having gone to see it.
The Tao habilitates peaceful governing by showing us:
within the core of our very nature, by being content,
great power dwells and balances people naturally.
The intellectual phenomenon of the Western mind
this (un)desirable successful hierarchy of a corporate planet
produced a love triangle of simultaneity: pride, fear, and control.
We have maxed out at 499 on Dr. Hawkins chart of consciousness,
megalomania abounds, transcendence awaits.
3rd, 4th, 5th dimension.
Our brothers and sisters have a God-sized-void
external fixtures
can no longer touch.
Marianne Williamson says “Return to Love” and I say
yes,
then go even further,
return to zero, before love had a name, before you had a face,
return to you
before
we all had such an opinion about it.
This is the inner pulse
of the opportunity
we are all submerged in.
To see
that all knowledge is a form of ignorance
is itself a movement of reality,
“renounce this phenomenal world”
– we have been taught for centuries by the sages and masters,
the Self will be gained,
the pure blue sky of grace
free from sorrow
is innately yours.
Corona means crown in Spanish,
in Latin, it signifies the plasma aura around the sun, the “sun’s corona” so to speak.
This virus started in China, and each continent is associated, energetically, with a chakra, the seven chakras,
in China,
specifically Mt. Kailash,
standing 21,778 ft tall
(2+1+7+7+8=25, 2+5=7),
symbolizes the crown chakra
(7th chakra) of our planet.
The crown on our body is our head; we are collectively (the planet, the cosmos, the animals, the elements, the trees, the people) demanding through the one consciousness to have this bridge energy connection between what survives and what dies, what is eternal, what is temporary, what is real and unreal, what is human what is divine.
This higher bright clearer conscious energy
wants to be sourced by us.
We are cutting ourselves off
from our Self,
suffocating in a clouded hallucination of confusing illusions.
“These are dark times, there is no denying.” -The Minister of Magic, Harry Potter.
In order to live with a connection to our highest good guiding our thoughts, emotions and behaviors,
our bodies and minds will have to go through the dark knight of the soul experience,
the Harrowing of Hell, Voldemort and Harry’s Resurrection, The Odyssey,
the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plato’s Cave of shadows and puppeteers, inviting the now realized ability to turn your chained head – the stark transition into a more expansive, unitive life experience. i.e., pandemic.
During this time the feeling of being lost or dark or confused is met with a deep yearning for something bigger and truer, collectively compassionate, globally respected, co-existent idealism meets passionate devotion for a life where“everything is a miracle.” – Einstein
This period demands us
to break the systems and conditions
of our old thought systems
and lope
into a new unknown of superior potential
from a more expansive,
unlimited resource.
To upgrade our faith to go beyond the logic,
beyond Newtonian thinking of reductions and determinism,
materialism and reflection based on knowing “things and stuff”,
beyond what all religions best efforts attempt to say
but what they unconfidently point to,
behind the words of good ideas and
half-measured explanations,
lives the undying, ceaseless, mysterious imperishable ISNESS
within us all,
the human agency of valued life through intuition and creativity – our true north, our god, our safety, our eternity, Lord not with-out but within.
Our heart IS the common thread,
our quiet mind,
our stillness,
gives birth
to
genius “material”
in its
paradoxical vortexual
rapid-slow movement.
It provides us with the answers we need.
In the quantum fields above the battleground of despair, fear, anger and regret,
sanity is restored,
confusion fades,
and peace engulfs.
Inspiration and forgiveness supersede.
Our human limitations
and divine explorations
can dance and transcend,
this corona is playing the music for us to connect all the dots.
We have the answers, now more than ever;
but do we have the integrity
to admit
that our very fear of being disloyal to the ego-state-mind
perpetuates the worship of the seven deadly sins
more than the “attempted action”
of beholding the beatitudes?
What if we admit our belief system and churches rest in the story of Plato more than the cosmic consciousness of Jesus?
True humility is joyful.
If your “familiar” hurts you, can you change your mind?
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” —Joseph Campbell
What if we are being called
to this wonderful ascension
to live WITHIN what theory has always suggested?
What if this calling
is reversing our motion to
say YES to what we have been denying to ourselves
and NO to what we have been a slave to saying yes to?
What if the
YES from the UNIVERSE
is to cultivate a connection
to your own unlimited supply of life.
Nature is pointing us to the sun as the most gigantic symbolism to start resourcing from an unlimited fountain of pure positive energy. i.e. Tesla.
Nature says, “Watch! Watch what I’m trying to show you!”
Do you wake up in the morning and tell your stomach to be hungry
or ask your heart to beat itself?
The ears know how to listen and we call it sound,
we know how to see, dissect the retina and show me happening.
Can you verb your day like a cicada?
The body knows how to do
what it does
automatically for us,
so let nature have some of this
similar control
back, it knows us better
than we do right now
and always.
Rest. Allow nature.
As Tom Robbin’s says, “The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.” Amen
We are going through a reboot
and a drastic internal change —
a greater more aware consciousness is upon us,
spiritual radiation, self-love, and clarity;
everything we’ve wanted through escapism and addiction
is within this global flare
of unconditional recognition from Source,
spiritual solution – the air, the water, needed a break,
we are 60% water and this is our air to breathe;
please, planet family, see the connection.
The worldly system collapse
f u s e d with internal survival from divine essence
merged with our brilliant inherent nature
would transform living and surviving
into a Taoist solar provided lifestyle,
humanity would shift the priority and
perspective of life and society.
The mission would be globally restorative, regenerative, and sane.
The distorted manipulation and corruption
would be faulty fast and socially transparent
because the corona within
and now manifested externally
outshines worldly limited resources.
Humanity will innately line up with nature
and create proper power
and sober control
toward an experience of life which is rewarding and fruitful.
The service of self and others will be mutually recognized on a base level
and acting from this starting place will feel more at ease.
Do you remember the story of Moses,
the laws, the mountain, failure, and glory?
Moses broke the first copies of the law,
went back up the mountain and gave them another go around.
The Dali Lama proclaims,
“Learn and obey the rule’s very well, so you will know how to break them.”
It isn’t until the first understanding of law and order fails and disappoints us
that we can come to an honest face to face encounter with divine law,
the same order which transitions winter to spring,
blinks our eyes when we don’t think,
waters the earth when the clouds burst — and so — without our puny input,
this is the same order that lives within us
and can enliven a civilization.
We had to get sick
to STOP
these lower levels of living,
to kill off,
starve,
this distorted darkness of external immortality.
We were not stopping our
self-destructive, sabotaging, wealth-over-health mentality
any other way.
Just like addicts are illuminated
through the shadows of the darkest hours
and deep surrender,
Saints share their testimonies,
so did nature just sneeze and cough all over itself,
it created a gross, deadly, new bacteria in response to needing a fever
just to scorch the accumulated wrecked toxins.
We are at the end of tolerating our venomous mindful ways and words,
our processed food,
our vacant little lives
which wait for a fantasy retirement
in a future too old and sick to enjoy.
The world is septic but it will renew.
Better times are ahead after
this collective necessary suffering.
Saint Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:10 comforts our dismantled projection: “It is when I am weak, that I am strong.” And it is when we understand the empowerment of what powerlessness entails that we become able to endure great paradoxical strength. A trans logical experience, unburdening our senses from duality.
Father Richard Rohr reaffirms in his written word below that this
immutable cycle of broken structures
is an external affair,
held together
by a temporary system
of false security and
not faith, not the steady, still, unaffected, nurturing place that is never harmed, never broken.
Every unawakened person, place, situation
is encapsulated within a belief system
in a world
being smothered by recycled oxygen
and we have temporarily forgotten the purity of
awareness’ love of primordial existence ….. “I exist”,
unaffected, primarily sustaining,
poke a hole in the bubble.
Exhale, b r e a t h e .
Rohr says, “The loss and renewal pattern is so constant and ubiquitous that it should hardly be a secret at all. Yet it is still a secret, probably because we don’t want to see it. Normally a job, fortune, or reputation has to be lost, a death has to be suffered, a house has to be flooded, or a disease has to be endured. The pattern in fact is so clear that one has to work rather hard, or be intellectually lazy, to miss the continual lesson.
He goes on to bog our memories with Scott Peck’s (1978) awesome book, The Road Loss Traveled, saying that “most people were just spiritually lazy. And when we are lazy, we stay on the path we are already on, even if it is going nowhere. It is the spiritual equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: everything winds down unless some outside force winds it back up. True spirituality could be called the “outside force,” although surprisingly it is found “inside.”
So here we are,
everything is on fire,
we are infected at
fever-pitch,
we are all going into
collective meltdown,
but with charisma and trust,
this incubation of solitude, meditation and contemplation
can be used for
recovery and longevity.
We had this chance at 9/11,
to unite,
but fear won, again,
please do it better.
When we go within, we enlighten,
even truer,
when we disconnect from the external stimulation,
we can more powerfully
make
the magnetic changes of magnitude
that are really needed to
connect a grand universal totality — because this homo-sapian interlacing divine essence activates your personal crown, your corona, your healing is the world’s healing
because we are all Oneship on the S(u)n planet.
Turn the soldiers into farmers,
offices into greenhouses,
if the “world-stuff” leaders and
the “spiritual-stuff” leaders could come together now,
we could bridge our hearts to home
and make a
great
new
earth.
Please read quotes 1385-1388 in The Seven Steps to Awakening with your inner teacher. Here is the last quote:
The mind is not subdued without persistent practice. Hence, take up this practice of renunciation. Until one turns away from sense-pleasure here, one will continue to roam in this world of sorrow. Even a strong man will not reach his destination if he does not move towards it: no one can reach the state of total dispassion without persistent practice.
Note: The next Daily Contemplation will be available tomorrow morning after 2am ET at this link.
