“There was only one Christian, he died on the cross.”
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. … Google Books
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Zoroaster ?????????? Zaraθuštra | |
|---|---|
| 19th-century Indian Zoroastrian perception of Zoroaster derived from a figure that appears in a 4th-century sculpture at Taq-e Bostan in South-Western Iran. The original is now believed to be either a representation of Mithra or Hvare-khshaeta.[1] | |
| Born | c. 1500 BC – 1000 BC[2][3] Airyanem Vaejah[4] |
| Died | c. 1500 BC – 1000 BC[2][3] (aged 77)[5] Airyanem Vaejah[4] |
| Venerated in | Zoroastrianism Manichaeism Bahá’í Faith Mithraism Ahmadiyya |
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Zoroaster (/ˈzɒroʊæstər/, UK also /ˌzɒroʊˈæstər/; Greek: Ζωροάστρης, Zōroastrēs), also known as Zarathustra (/ˌzærəˈθuːstrə/, UK also /ˌzɑːrə-/; Avestan: ??????????, Zaraθuštra), Zarathushtra Spitama or Asho Zarathushtra [6] (Persian: زرتشت), was an ancient Iranian prophet, religious reformer and spiritual leader who founded what is now known as Zoroastrianism.
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy considers Zoroaster to have been the first philosopher.[7][8] Zoroaster has also been described as the father of ethics, the first rationalist and the first monotheist (having belief in just one God) as well as the first to articulate the notions of heaven and hell, judgment after death and free will.[9][10][11]
The religion founded by Zoroaster was the first major world religion and has had significant influence on other religious and philosophical systems, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, the Bahá’í Faith, Gnosticism and Greek philosophy.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18] His teachings challenged the existing traditions of the Indo-Iranian religion and inaugurated a movement that eventually became the dominant religion in Ancient Persia. He was a native speaker of Old Avestan and lived in the eastern part of the Iranian Plateau, but his exact birthplace is uncertain.[19][20]
There is no scholarly consensus on when he lived.[21] However, approximating using linguistic and socio-cultural evidence allows for dating to somewhere in the second millennium BC. This is done by estimating the period in which the Old Avestan language (as well as the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Iranian languages and the related Vedic Sanskrit) were spoken, the period in which the Proto-Indo-Iranian religion was practised, and correlation between the burial practice described in the Gathas with the archeological Yaz culture. However, other scholars still date him in the 7th and 6th century BC as a near-contemporary of Cyrus the Great and Darius I to as far back as the sixth millennium BC.[22][23][2][24][25][26]
Zoroastrianism eventually became the official religion of Ancient Persia and its distant subdivisions from the 6th century BCE to the 7th century CE.[27] Zoroaster is credited with authorship of the Gathas as well as the Yasna Haptanghaiti, hymns composed in his native dialect, Old Avestan, and which comprise the core of Zoroastrian thinking. Most of his life is known from these texts.[19] By any modern standard of historiography, no evidence can place him into a fixed period, and the historicization surrounding him may be a part of a trend from before the 10th century that historicizes legends and myths.[28]
Zoroaster’s name in his native language, Avestan, was probably Zaraϑuštra. His English name, “Zoroaster”, derives from a later (5th century BC) Greek transcription, Zōroastrēs (Ζωροάστρης),[29] as used in Xanthus‘s Lydiaca (Fragment 32) and in Plato‘s First Alcibiades (122a1). This form appears subsequently in the Latin Zōroastrēs and, in later Greek orthographies, as Ζωροάστρις Zōroastris. The Greek form of the name appears to be based on a phonetic transliteration or semantic substitution of Avestan zaraϑ- with the Greek ζωρός zōros (literally “undiluted”) and the Avestan -uštra with ἄστρον astron (“star“).
In Avestan, Zaraϑuštra is generally accepted to derive from an Old Iranian *Zaratuštra-; The element half of the name (-uštra-) is thought to be the Indo-Iranian root for “camel”, with the entire name meaning “he who can manage camels”.[30][a] Reconstructions from later Iranian languages—particularly from the Middle Persian (300 BCE) Zardusht,[further explanation needed] which is the form that the name took in the 9th- to 12th-century Zoroastrian texts—suggest that *Zaratuštra- might be a zero-grade form of *Zarantuštra-.[30] Subject then to whether Zaraϑuštra derives from *Zarantuštra- or from *Zaratuštra-, several interpretations have been proposed.[b]
If Zarantuštra is the original form, it may mean “with old/aging camels”,[30] related to Avestic zarant-[29] (cf. Pashto zōṛ and Ossetian zœrond, “old”; Middle Persian zāl, “old”):[31]
The interpretation of the -ϑ- (/θ/) in Avestan zaraϑuštra was for a time itself subjected to heated debate because the -ϑ- is an irregular development: As a rule, *zarat- (a first element that ends in a dental consonant) should have Avestan zarat- or zarat̰- as a development from it. Why this is not so for zaraϑuštra has not yet been determined. Notwithstanding the phonetic irregularity, that Avestan zaraϑuštra with its -ϑ- was linguistically an actual form is shown by later attestations reflecting the same basis.[30] All present-day, Iranian-language variants of his name derive from the Middle Iranian variants of Zarϑošt, which, in turn, all reflect Avestan’s fricative -ϑ-.[citation needed]
In Middle Persian, the name is ?????? Zardu(x)št,[35] in Parthian Zarhušt,[36] in Manichaean Middle Persian Zrdrwšt,[35] in Early New Persian Zardušt,[35] and in modern (New Persian), the name is زرتشت Zartosht.
Wednesday, June 10, 2020 (unityonlineradio.com)
Rev. Deborah L. Johnson, founding minister and president of Inner Light Ministries, will be interviewed about New Thought’s response to racial injustice and its responsibility to produce a world that works for everyone.
JUNE 17, 2020 (counterpunch.org)
Photograph Source: Rob Young from United Kingdom – CC BY 2.0
If the prospect of the Trump – Biden presidential election fills you with horror and despair, you might give some thought to not just replacing both candidates but the presidency as well, at least as we now conceive it.
For some time now, but maybe since the Kennedy administration (which ended in a hail of voter-suppressed gunfire), I have been thinking that one of the biggest problems with American democracy is the presidency itself, the idea that the chief magistrate of the country should be one person elected every four years by a few swing voters in Ohio, North Carolina, or Florida.
What good can be said of an office that regularly is awarded to the likes of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and George W. Bush, and that this year, for its finalists, has Donald Trump and Joe Biden, men who otherwise would not be eligible to coach Little League teams or lead Scout troops (pussy grabbers and hair sniffers need not apply).
Instead, every four years, because of a document drawn up more than two hundred years ago, the United States puts into its highest office men of stunning incompetence (think of W’s facial expression while reading The Pet Goat on 9/11) and low cunning (“Ike likes Nixon and we do too…”), who over time have managed to turn the office of the presidency into what it is today—a violent reality show that has brought you Vietnam, Watergate, the USA Patriot Act, and Barack Obama’s “necessary war” in Afghanistan.
***
According to James Madison’s notes from the 1789 constitutional convention, the job of the American president was to “execute” the laws that Congress passed. In times of war, the president was to serve as the commander-in-chief of the state’s militias—to exercise civilian control over the military.
At the Philadelphia constitutional convention, the dispute about the presidency concerned which model to follow in creating a template of the chief executive.
John Adams and Alexander Hamilton aspired to create a constitutional monarchy of sorts, with their favorite aristocrat, George Washington, on the throne.
At the very least they were in favor of a strong, lone-wolf executive with centralized powers, while Benjamin Franklin (with the emotional support of Thomas Jefferson from Paris) and others favored a federal council, something closer to the Swiss model, in which the powers of the chief magistrate would be devolved to a committee, not on one person.
James Madison, who had loyalties in both camps and a heavy hand in drafting the new constitution, came up the compromise and helped to shape the American presidency that we know today—that of an elected monarch.
In Philadelphia in 1789, the constitutional framers had hoped they were creating an office-holder along the lines of an auditor-in-chief, someone who would make sure that the Congress (notably the House of Representatives) spent the people’s money wisely and kept the trade lines flowing through (tariff-free) interstate commerce.
It never occurred to any of them that they were creating a monster along the lines of a political Frankenstein who might someday, as if with bolts protruding from his neck and an awkward square haircut, stump his way though Lafayette Square and hold up a Bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.
***
Another problem with the original intent of the presidency in the U.S. Constitution is that it was a laissez-passer for slaveholders in southern states (not to mention their cotton brokers in New York City) to do pretty much as they pleased in terms of exploiting the means of production.
Until the corporate railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln came along, American presidents functioned as trustees for slaveowners, and nearly all (in the manner of James Buchanan during the era of Dred Scott, the runaway slave of Supreme Court fame) bent over backwards to insure that indentured service remained an unenumerated right of the moneyed classes.
A few presidents, Andrew Jackson being one of them during the 1832 Nullification Crisis, pushed back against the notion of states’ rights, but Jackson—himself a slave owner—made up for the hurt Southern feelings by ethnically cleansing Florida and Georgia of the Cherokee Nation, and turning over the rich soil of its land to his slave-holding brethren.
Only Lincoln decided that the constitution (tolerating the slave trade until 1808 and otherwise silent on the question of human bondage) was a document inconsistent with the ideals of American liberty, and he waged a brutal civil war to amend the constitution.
An unintended consequence of that war, however, which broke the power of individual states to operate farms as prison labor camps, was to concentrate in Washington and in the office of the presidency a host of powers (over the budget and the military, especially) that the founding fathers had never intended to confer on one person.
I am not blaming Lincoln alone for the rise of the imperious presidency. Many others—Woodrow Wilson included—can share that poisoned chalice.
In particular, American wars (from Mexico in 1846 through to Iraq and Afghanistan) have remade the presidency into what it is today, a caricature of democracy dressed up in the raiments of a mail-order autocrat.
***
When it came to defining the presidency, the constitution got more wrong than it did right.
The vote wasn’t given to the citizenry but to electors, wise men in the provinces who would gather (in early December) every four years and pick a president. (Golf club membership committees work the same way.) But the way electors have been chosen over time has been a political variation of blind man’s buff.
What went wrong almost immediately were the so-called presidential elections, which since 1792 have been rigged, fixed, finagled, gerrymandered, massaged, bought, and sold—yet another cornered commodity market, although this one trading only in political influence.
Despite what you read about democracy-in-action in your high school civics classes, most accessions to presidential power have come as a result of a deal, bullets, blackmail, or fatal illnesses.
Yet this is the ritual held up to the rest of world, when someone in Washington is delivering one of those hectoring speeches about American exceptionalism.
Only in a handful of presidential elections has a candidate actually taken office after securing more than 50 percent of the votes cast.
Even in the last election, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million but Trump was installed in office, for corralling more electoral votes.
Here’s a short list of brokered, anointed, non-elected, or somehow accidental American presidents: George Washington, Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and George W. Bush.
Mind you, not all of these presidents were bad. As was said of Hayes: “He did such a good job I almost wish he had been elected.”
And here’s a list of some presidents who took office by the grace of providence or its fix-it men: Abraham Lincoln (four candidates were running and he got only 39.8% of the vote), Benjamin Harrison (Cleveland won the popular vote in 1888), William McKinley (Mark Hanna sold him in 1896 as if he were a new line of soap and then bought some extra votes, just to be sure), John F. Kennedy (dead men voting in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Cook County), Bill Clinton (he can thank Ross Perot), and Donald Trump (he lost the popular vote but won the Russian caucus).
My point is that the words “American democracy” and “ the presidency” have very little in common. Most elections in U.S. history are variations on the Supreme Court in 2000 giving the job to George W. Bush much as he was tapped at Yale for Skull and Bones.
Unless I miss my mark, 2020 will be a rerun of many earlier contested elections, with voter suppression, lost and shredded ballots, foreign interference, broken voting machines, absent absentee ballots, and hacked computers defining a dubious outcome.
***
How then to remake the presidency so that the office adds up to something more than a cereal-box kingdom?
Adopting Franklin’s and Jefferson’s Swiss federal council model might go a long way toward restoring trust in government, and it would work as follows.
Instead of the president being one person, the chief executive of the country would be a duly constituted collective body—say of seven individuals—that as a group would share the burdens and responsibilities of the highest office.
In Switzerland (where I live), while there is a person with the ceremonial title of president, it is only the Federal Council as a body that can make executive decisions.
Does it work? Swiss democracy and its Federal Charter have been around since 1291, so something about the consensus of a council at the head of government must function well.
More applicable to the United States: in 1848 the Swiss adopted a constitution largely based on the American model; the only exception is that they made the chief executive a committee, not one person.
The Federal Assembly—both branches of the Swiss parliament—elects the members of the Federal Council every four years in December. (If that sounds familiar, it should. The Federal Assembly is the electoral college of the Swiss system.)
Generally in Switzerland the federal council is a blend of the left, right, and center, and it also has geographic diversity.
Nor does Switzerland tear itself apart every four years with a presidential election that costs more than $1 billion and only gives the illusion of self-government.
Instead, Swiss voters cast about thirty to forty votes a year (in person, by mail, or on the internet, and it all works seamlessly; no one stands in eight-hour lines), on a host of questions, initiatives, and referenda. Every Swiss citizen, in effect, is a parliamentarian.
Only periodically do Swiss voters choose actual candidates; most of the time they are supporting one of the country’s many political parties or voting yes/no on specific questions.
The advantage of a federal council in the United States is that it would introduce into the government a coalition executive that would make decisions consistent with the views of the major political parties and hence (we hope) the electorate at large.
And the idea would be faithful to the original intent of the U.S. Constitution—that of having electors decide on the chief executive.
***
During 2020 I was thinking about a federal council when I followed the presidential campaign trails through Iowa and New Hampshire.
Over several weeks, I saw all of the candidates in person (including the carnival-barking Trump at one of his rallies), and I listened to most of them give more than one speech or interview.
Listening to the candidates speak, I found few of them (Biden in particular) to be persuasive as individuals, but it was easy to imagine that some of the candidates could be stronger if brought together as members of a governing body.
So here’s my federal council from the candidates in the 2020 election:
In no particular order, the most articulate candidates that I heard in 2020 were Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, William Weld (he ran against Trump in the Republican primaries), Deval Patrick (former governor of Massachusetts), Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Walsh (a Republican – Libertarian former Congressman who also opposed Trump).
Could those seven persons run the executive branch of the United States? I think they could. They would represent the left, right, and center; they would have ethnic and gender diversity; and they would speak for a wide variety of constituencies within the country. Plus there would be collective strength in numbers.
On his own as president Bernie Sanders might be little more than a left-wing version of Donald Trump, someone given to sweeping pronouncements (although in a more dignified manner and without the company of porn stars).
On a federal council, however, Bernie’s passion for social justice, education, climate initiatives, and a limited foreign policy might even find allies among conservatives Weld and Walsh, provided he was willing to compromise on monetary and fiscal restraints.
So too would a council be the obvious instrument to rein in some of Warren’s exuberance and professorial hectoring, but still allow her to bring to the government her commitment to economic fairness and health-care reform.
Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Patrick are centrists who speak well for various constituencies, and all three would be valuable team members.
The way the council operates in Switzerland is that each member is responsible for certain ministries (education, foreign affairs, treasury, etc.) for a year’s term, and then they rotate jobs (including that of president), which means that council members become well-versed in various government issues.
For what it’s worth, in Switzerland Covid infections are down to about ten new cases a day, and there are only 18 persons with the virus in intensive care around the country, although in the early days infection rates were similar to those of the United States.
Yes, nominally, there is a Swiss president (in recent years very often a woman—there have been six in the country’s recent history), who is trotted out to meet world leaders and to represent Switzerland at forums. But executive authority rests in collective decision. On her or his own, the Swiss president cannot do very much.
***
For a variety of reasons most recent American presidencies have ended in failure. Lyndon Johnson saddled the country with the Vietnam War. Nixon went down over Watergate, clearly nothing a committee would have tolerated.
Carter, although a decent man, was over his head with inflation and Iran, and could have used some adults (more than Jody and Ham) in the room. Reagan was a part-time president and had little interest in the details of government, other than to pay off his friends and large companies.
George Herbert Walker Bush, in effect, served Reagan’s third term but found himself squeezed from the left and right, not to mention by his own incompetence. Clinton’s personal failings would have mattered less if he had been one of seven governing the executive branch.
Both George W. Bush and Obama were symbolic presidents, each representing some lost ideal of their parties, but neither had much to offer in terms of management capability, and each blundered into ruinous foreign wars.
On his own as the American chief executive, the narcissistic sociopath Trump is a train wreck, for the presidency and the country. Even if elected, Biden will be a lame, if not a dead, duck, his presidency over before it starts.
Do we need more examples, especially during a financial and health crisis, that the office is failing us?
I cannot promise that a presidential federal council would not make mistakes, but at least such a body would be aligned with the parties and political interests in the House and Senate, and most Americans would feel that there was at least someone at the executive level who was speaking for their interests. (Look through the list of my federal council, and you will find someone on it you admire and respect.)
Yes, for a council to succeed it needs compromise, but think of all the committees in your life that, on balance, function well. They exchange ideas, barter favors, and in the end move forward, generally for the common good. At least most of them don’t storm off in a cloud of tear gas across Lafayette Square, waving a Bible.
If you are interested to figure out where you fit on the Swiss political spectrum, go to SmartVote and answer the questions.
More articles by: MATTHEW STEVENSON
Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails and, most recently, Appalachia Spring, about the coal counties of West Virginia and Kentucky. He lives in Switzerland.
Do you believe in love? Most of us spiritually oriented people would say that we do. In fact, I often ask people what they consider to be the most important thing in the world—and the answer I receive most often is “LOVE.”
As spiritual practitioners, we may have even at some point had an experience of a kind of divine love, a spiritual love, that was not merely sentimental love for another person or an animal—but a recognition that love is woven into the very fabric of reality. A sense that God is love—and in fact, that our own true nature is love. That who we most deeply are is love.
And in that realization, we may have recognized that this love is not a scarce commodity. It’s always freely given. The universe is held up by a source of infinite unconditional love that’s always present in every moment. There’s never a moment and never a place where love does not fully penetrate and permeate.
When we discover this source of infinite love—whether it’s just a taste or a glimpse, an insight, or a profound moment of spiritual revelation—it tends to bring us to our knees in awe and in devotion for this love that is own deepest nature.
We also realize this love is ever-present. When we get a taste or glimpse of this, we see that there was never a moment in our life and never a moment in all of life where this love was not already present and overflowing.
When we discover the perfection of love at the heart of all of this, there’s an overwhelming recognition that this love is unconditional. It’s not something I have to earn, it’s not something I have to generate, it’s not something I have to create or become worthy of or prove I’m good for. It’s what’s always already so. The whole Cosmos is shot through with love, beginning to end and beyond.
Just take a moment now to allow yourself to be drawn into a recognition of the love I’m speaking about. Maybe you can remember a moment in your own search or in your own life when you knew in some undeniable way some aspect of what I’ve just been describing. When you knew this love. When you knew it was never far away. Allow yourself to remember what you saw about reality in that moment. What was clear to you about love? What’s the source of all of it?
Now, notice that I didn’t ask you how it felt. I didn’t ask you, “How did you feel in that moment of knowing love, recognizing love?”
You see, when we think of love, the first thing most of us think of is that it’s a feeling. We think of it as a really warm, overwhelmingly positive, uplifting, soothing feeling that we want to have more of.
But love is so much more than a feeling. In fact, the most important part of it is not the feeling part, even though love does have a lot of beautiful feelings associated with it.
Here’s the great challenge of love: as long as we take the position that we need to feel more love in order to be love, we’re missing the whole point of love. It means we don’t really believe in love.
I’m going to say it again. As long as our relationship to love is one where we’re seeing it as a feeling that we want more of—that we need to be feeling in order to express it, in order to be that love in the world—then we’re missing what love is all about.
And it means that we don’t really believe in love. Because, you see, if we believe in the love that I’m speaking about here, we don’t need to feel it. If we believe that this love is ever-present everywhere, at all times freely given, never lacking—that every moment is full of that love in every corner of the cosmos, that it’s the very nature of what we are—why would we ever need to feel it again to fully step forth and be it?
Imagine a person who, every time the sun shines, gets all excited and starts running around saying “Oh, my God! The sun is shining! I feel so great! I feel so warm! The sun exists! It’s a miracle. There’s a sun and it feels so warm and wonderful. Everyone exalt in the presence of the sun. Look at this glorious sun that fills our world with warmth and energy and fuels this whole amazing biosphere that we’re a part of. Celebrate the sun.”
But when they wake up on a cloudy day, they always say, “God, I don’t know what I was thinking yesterday. Obviously there’s no sun. Look up at the sky. There are only clouds. That’s what’s real.”
And you try to reason with them, saying, “Wait a minute, silly. Don’t you know the sun’s still there? The clouds are just covering it up. You know the sun exists. In fact, you saw it yesterday and you were celebrating it and exalting in it. You felt its warmth on your skin. You knew it was real without any doubt.” And they just look at you blankly and say, “I’ll believe it when I see it and feel its warmth. Oh, how I long to know the sun. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a sun?”
Now, this might seem like a slightly silly analogy, but it’s actually not that far off from how most of us relate to divine love. Because, truthfully, how much love do any of us need to experience in order to believe in love in the way I’m talking about? What if you’ve already experienced enough love for a whole lifetime?
Arguably, you could choose to believe in love even without ever experiencing it for yourself. You could simply say, “I can see the truth of it and I’m going to be that in the world. I’m going to be a stand for it.”
But let’s say, to give us all the benefit of the doubt, that we at least need a little taste of it to prove it—because we don’t want to just believe something somebody else tells us, or something we read about in a book. And we don’t want to just reason our way to it. Even at that, haven’t we all had a little taste of love—enough to know it’s real?
So then what if, instead of waiting to feel more love, or trying or seeking or stretching or striving to feel more love, we decided instead to believe in love? To never doubt love, to have faith in the power of love? How would we live then?
How would you live if you believed in love?
What if, instead of waiting for God to prove to you that love is real, or waiting for love to prove to you that it is real, your job is to prove to the world that love is real by demonstrating its existence every minute of your life—whether you feel a current of love in that moment or not?
What if that’s the great spiritual challenge? What if the nature of our evolutionary calling is to prove the reality of love to everyone and everything by demonstrating its reality every minute of our life? How would you live if you took that up as your challenge, as your calling?
Now, when we think about what it would mean to be a living expression of love all the time, we tend to bring images to mind like Mother Teresa. We imagine ourselves giving all of our time to relieving suffering in the world. Or maybe we decide that our mission in life is to make everyone we meet feel personally loved by us. I have a good friend who’s done that.
And certainly that represents one level of being love. We all know the experience of encountering someone who is selflessly devoted to serving others, or relieving the anguish of others, or unconditionally loving everyone they meet, or putting themselves in harm’s way for the benefit of others. It’s an elevating experience to encounter that, to hear stories about that. And it is an example of demonstrating that love exists—because that’s what those encounters do, right? Those individuals are demonstrating love. They’re proving it.
In fact, I heard a story recently about something that happened on 9/11 that I hadn’t heard before, and it had that elevating impact on me. Apparently, just after the towers fell in New York that day, the Coast Guard sent out a call to boat owners to help evacuate people from the city. This was a moment, you realize, when nobody knew what was coming next. Nobody knew if this was just the beginning of a whole series of attacks. This had just begun.
But when the smoke from the towers started to lift, they saw that there were hundreds of boats of all shapes and sizes streaming into the harbor, heading straight for the smoke-filled shore, moving straight to the heart of what may have been their own demise.
Those boat owners had no idea what they were heading into, but they went anyway. There was a video posted on YouTube in which they were interviewing a lot of these folks, these boat owners, who were saying “Look, I didn’t know what I was headed into. I just felt this deep call from within me that I had to help.” And over the course of that day they evacuated more than half a million people—just those private boat owners did that. And I was uplifted by this, as I think we all are by any story of self-sacrifice in which someone’s willing to put themselves in harm’s way in order to help or save another.
In a sense, you could say they were demonstrating love. They were proving the existence of love. Just as somebody who turned the other way and said, “Well, I can’t be bothered” might be proving something else, at least attempting to validate our cynicism.
So that is one dimension of what it means to believe in love, or to be a stand for love. And anytime one of us does this, we are helping to prove and demonstrate that love is real. But there’s a deeper layer to this as well, and that’s the layer I really want to focus our attention on here.
What does it really mean to believe in love and to be a stand for love in the world? If we say we believe in love in the way I’m describing—in the “always already present,” fully available love that is our own nature and could never be taken away—then we’re accepting the fullness that’s already here all the time.
If we let in the reality that love is never lacking in any moment, what we’re saying is that the most important thing is always already here—because, as we’ve already noted, most of us will say love’s the most important thing, right?
If love is the most important thing there is, and we accept that it’s never lacking, never not present, never goes away—then that means that the most important thing can never be taken away from me or you or anyone.
The most important thing in the universe is already abundant in every molecule of the cosmos. I don’t have to look for it, I don’t have to earn it, I don’t have to generate it, I don’t have to create it. I don’t have to go seeking to find it. And most importantly, I don’t have to worry about losing it.
So what does that mean? It means I can let go. I can let go of wanting or needing anything else from this world. I can let go of grasping, of living in fear of lack or loss. I can let go of trying to get something that’s already intrinsic to my own nature, because I can accept the glory and the fullness that’s already here in every moment.
This is what faith really means. This is what it means to live a life of faith. Faith means that whether or not I feel particularly loved, or particularly loving, or anything in particular, I know what this is all about and I’m standing for that.
I’m never going to doubt that love is always already here. I’m never going to deny it. I’m never going to demand that God or love prove it to me—because I know. I’ve seen enough to know, and that’s enough for me.
So I’m going to be love, which means I’m not going to hold on to my little grasping self with all of its stories about what I need and what I don’t have, and all the things I want to accumulate or acquire. I’m not going to hold on to my ideas about experiences I need to have, or people who need to love me.
I’m never going to buy into any of that again because I know the whole thing’s already love. It never wasn’t. I had bought into a sham that said it was all about me and that I didn’t have enough, and that life wasn’t enough as it is. But I’m not buying it anymore.
A life of faith means that when the voice of the ego comes back in, asserting that I need something else to be happy, full, or complete, I say “No. I’m not going to believe your story of limitation. I’m not going to listen to your doubt. Love is here. It’s always been here, and I am now going to prove it.”
What I’m saying is that if you believe in love, you can never again listen to the voice of limitation telling you that something fundamental is missing, that life’s not enough, that you’re not enough, or that love is something outside of you that you need to find. You can live a life of faith, a life that says “I know the sun exists,” even after three months of a Portland, Oregon, or Seattle, Washington, winter. Even when you might not have seen the sun for quite a while.
In a sense, where the rubber meets the road with this is when life gets challenging, when we hit difficult circumstances—when the sun goes away, as it were. That can tempt us to doubt the ever-present nature of love, the inherent perfection and fullness of each moment. But to believe in love means that no matter how challenging life gets, I will never give in to doubt. I will never give in to the temptation to believe that something is missing, that love is lacking.
What happens to us when we make the choice to live a life of faith, to believe in love? One of the most miraculous things that happens is that suddenly I’m not an issue anymore. All the things that I thought I needed to have, all the things I thought I needed to get or become or get over in order to be ready to show up as love—they all just sort of fall to the side.
It’s not that those things necessarily utterly cease to exist. It’s just that we’re a stand for fullness in such a fundamental way that we can’t take those stories of limitation and lack seriously any longer. We can’t buy it. We can’t believe in it. We can’t be bothered wasting our time with it, because it seems small and petty and unimportant.
So many things that seemed so important, so meaningful—my personal hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, worries, doubts—no longer seem so significant. Sure, maybe some of those personal hopes, dreams and ambitions will happen. And it would be nice if they did. They’re still there as preferences. We’re human beings. We like certain things. Other things we don’t like as much. We want certain things. Other things we don’t want as much. All of that is still there.
But we’re taking a stand fundamentally for the truth that none of those things are going to add any love to my life. None of those things I think I need and want and have to have are going to add anything fundamental—because the most important thing’s already here and I’m a living stand for it. I’m proving it every day. And part of how I’m proving it is by letting go of all these things I used to believe I needed, or that had to happen, or that were supposedly going to bring more love.
And all the things I feared, that seemed so frightening or potentially threatening to my well-being, my success, my happiness—guess what? Now I know that even if they all happened, all those “worst things” I’m so afraid of, there wouldn’t be any less love. The most important thing would still be here in its fullness and completeness. The nature of life would still be love.
Therefore, I don’t need to be so preoccupied about all those fears, needs, wants, and concerns. They may not entirely go away, and they don’t need to. But I’m not focused on them. I’m living a life of faith, which means I’ve tethered myself to something that transcends every created thing, every detail, every coming and going, every bit of change. I’ve hooked myself to the ultimate. That’s now my reference point.
With no problem to focus on, I start to forget about myself. I have everything I ever needed, really. I have the most precious thing. I always did. I just didn’t realize it or I didn’t admit it. So now I can stop resisting the way things are, because I know that fundamentally the way things are at the deepest level is full and good and indescribably sacred.
As my attention is freed from any self-fixation, I become vast. I become as infinite as the sky, expanding out in all directions, no longer tethered to this little self with its world of lack. I become the whole.
And my heart becomes that big too, an expanse without boundaries or limitation, because I realize that I don’t need to “hold love in my heart.” I don’t need to protect my little heart. I don’t need to be delicate with it. I can let it expand to include everything and everyone. Why? Because I’m becoming that boundless sacred love. Because I made a decision to be love.
What happens then, from that expansive place, when I look upon the world of form and manifestation? Well, one of the things that happens is that care begins to well up. A vast, deep care that knows no boundaries wells up in that big heart.
And what we see is that the world doesn’t know about this. The world at large, humanity at large, does not know love. The human race has not accepted and embraced this love that’s everywhere all the time. Nobody knows about this, almost nobody.
We see a lot of people talk about it. It’s in a lot of books. People preach it on TV. But they don’t know about this. You can tell that nobody really knows that it’s all permeated with love already. Don’t you see, everyone? It’s what we are. You don’t need to hold on. You don’t need to be afraid. You don’t need to just grasp and get for yourself. The thing we’re all looking for is already here trying to be known.
How can I help everybody know this love? How can I help the world know that the love we’re striving so hard for is actually freely given and never lacking—that it’s the ground we’re standing on? Because if everybody knew that, we’d all treat each other so differently. The whole human game would change completely. It would become sacred. Every act would be a sacred act of communion in this love. We’d create heaven on earth. It wouldn’t even be that hard.
So I have to prove the reality of this love with everything I do. I have to show the way. The world needs to know the reality of this. It needs to wake up. And I need to take responsibility for this perfection, for this fullness, for this boundless love—for being it in the world.
Of course, the moment we recognize we need to take responsibility for it, part of us gets scared. There’s a fear of doing it wrong, of failing to meet such an enormous challenge and call. But that fear is just temptation to doubt that love is enough. It’s temptation to think we don’t have enough, or that we don’t have what it takes to do this.
To take responsibility for this means we have to really permanently let go of all of that, and stay true to the reality of this ever-present love, demonstrating it no matter how intense that fear might get. It means we have to be willing to take great risks for that love. We might have to be warrior for that love—metaphorically speaking, of course. We might have to sacrifice for that love, give up something that we really wanted but realized wasn’t important enough to give our time and energy to, so we let it go because something else is more important now. This is what a life of faith means.
Now, the other thing that happens to us when we begin to live a life of faith—to believe in love, to plant our stake there—is that, mysteriously, we begin to know love all the time. It doesn’t mean that we always feel a certain way, like a certain warm, gentle, nurturing glow. Not at all. But in a mystical sense, when we make the decision to be love—to stand for love, to risk for love, to not doubt the truth of love—love begins to become our reality. So we’re not just proving it to the world, it’s being proven to us in our own experience.
Ironically, at the same time we no longer need that proof. We don’t need to have a certain experience. We don’t need to feel a certain way. We know what’s so, and we’re going to stand for it. We’ve gone beyond needing to feel it.
In this sense, love is both unconditional and conditional at the same time. Love is unconditional in the sense that it is always already here. It’s always the nature of things. It’s woven into every fiber of reality. It’s not dependent on anything else.
But love is also conditional in the sense that in order to truly know love, to truly live in love, you have to first take a stand for love. The price for living in love is a kind of ultimate sacrifice: it’s the letting go of everything I thought was so important, me and my little world of problems and fears and needs and concerns. Letting go of the notion that life’s all about me. It’s taking a stand that I’m never going back to that smallness no matter how challenging things get, no matter how tempting it might be. It’s only when we’re willing to do that and mean it—and back it up day after day—that we’ll really know love.
This is tremendously liberating if we really do it, because it means you being an expression of love doesn’t depend on anything other than you deciding to be an expression of love. It doesn’t depend on you feeling any particular way. What a relief! I can be aligned with the most important thing no matter how I feel. Finally I don’t have to be worried about my inner world. “How do I feel today? Am I in touch with love? Am I in touch with God? No. Yes. This moment I was, that moment I wasn’t.” We can let go of all that and just strive to bring it into the world and be an expression of it, live in deeper alignment with it.
And even as love begins to become our reality, we’re no longer attached to it. Even when the spiritual gold nuggets we were digging for all those years finally show up and get dumped all over our driveway, we see it out there and say, “That’s nice, but that’s not what I’m oriented toward anymore. I’m not trying to feel love. I’m not trying to get God consciousness for myself. I’m already expressing it. So the keys to the kingdom showed up, the inner riches are here—great. I’m experiencing love much more often, but I still don’t really need that at all to express love.”
You don’t grab onto it. You say, “Maybe it’s here today. Maybe it’ll be gone tomorrow—but I’m still the same. I’m here to prove love exists to the world.”
— CH
RedFrost Motivation Newest episode to our Powerful Life Poetry series. We hope this finds you well in these troublesome times. – Read by Shane Morris Music by Tony Anderson – Max Ehrmann was an American attorney and poet who often wrote on spiritual themes. During his life, he contributed great thoughts to our literary lexicons, blending the magic of words and wisdom with his worthy observations. Desiderata, which means “things that are desired,” was written by Max Ehrmann “because it counsels those virtues I felt most in need of.”
June 16, 2020 (astrobutterfly.com)
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock… or you don’t read the news, you know that the world is in turmoil at the moment.
Why is that?
Let’s put this into context.
Astrologers have been warning everyone for years about the Capricorn stellium which peaked last March.
We haven’t had 4 slow-moving planets (Pluto, Saturn, Jupiter, South Node) in the same sign since the Renaissance/Reformation. The Renaissance/Reformation were preceded by the Black Death.
One of the effects of the Black Death is that it shifted the balance of power and wealth in European societies, which in turn brought dominance to several city-states in Italy, where the Renaissance first began.
History shows us, again and again, this simple truth: no crisis, no change.
Beyond the Capricorn planetary activity, there are several astrological alignments that are specifically “responsible” with the latest developments. As I was writing in the June forecast, these are, 1). the planetary retrogrades, and 2). the eclipse season.
Let’s start with the retrogrades. In June we have 6 retrograde planets – which is quite a lot – but what makes this retrograde season especially disrupting is that 2 of these retrograde planets are personal planets: Venus and Mercury.
Slow-moving planets are retrograde for almost 50% of the time, so it’s not unusual to have Saturn, Neptune, or Pluto retrograde.
However, personal planets – Mercury, Mars and Venus – go retrograde less frequently – for only 19%, 9% of 7% of the time. Mercury is only retrograde for 3 weeks at a time (unlike Pluto, which is retrograde for 5 months). Venus and Mars go retrograde only once every 2 years.
Astrology is all about probabilities and frequency. If a particular transit occurs rather frequently (for example, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune or Pluto retrograde), it will not bring big changes. However, if a transit occurs infrequently, you can bet it comes with big changes.
Mercury, Venus and Mars Retrograde ARE important, and they DO come with big changes. In 2020 all these planets go retrograde. Venus is still retrograde (until June 25, 2020), Mercury goes retrograde on June 18th, 2020, and Mars goes retrograde on September 9th, 2020. That’s one retrograde after another.
Mercury and Venus retrograde cycles coincide with the beginning of a new cycle. During the middle of the retrograde, Venus and Mercury align with the Sun and transform from evening stars into morning stars.
Mercury is how we make sense of the world with our mind. Venus is how we make sense of the world with our hearts. While Mercury is our objective experience of the world, Venus is our subjective experience. Mercury is our thinking process, Venus, our values.
In the last couple of weeks, while Venus descended into the “underworld”, transforming from an evening star into a morning star, we’ve been witnessing a reset of values, mainly through the anti-racist movement.
Now that Mercury prepares to go retrograde, it’s our thinking process that is experiencing a reset.
In September 2020 it’s Mars’ turn to go retrograde. Mars retrograde is a little bit different.
If Mercury and Venus retrograde coincide with the beginning of a new cycle, so they are in their “New Moon” phases – Mars retrograde is opposite the Sun (not conjunct) so it is in its Full Moon phase; that’s why the keyword for Mars retrograde is “culmination”, not “reset”.
A warning – this particular Mars retrograde (that’s September-October 2020) won’t be pretty.
Mars will be engaged in a tense cardinal T-square with the planets in Libra and the planets in Capricorn. The Capricorn story that peaked in March is not over.
Until Mars goes retrograde, June and July are by no means less intense, because in June and July we are also in the middle of the Eclipse season.
Eclipses are when big things happen. We have a New Moon and a Full Moon every month – but it is only twice a year that the Sun, the Moon and the Earth align to create the Eclipses.
Again, transit frequency is key. Eclipses are not regular New Moons and Full Moons. They are ‘special’ New Moons and Full Moons.
At the Eclipses, we are given a unique opportunity to connect with the Source and get access to information we wouldn’t normally have access to.
Eclipses are a re-calibration of fate and free will. During the eclipse season, your individual path re-aligns with the universal path. An eclipse points to what you need to change, so you can reconnect with your purpose.
There are two types of eclipses – depending on which side of the Lunar Node axis they occur: North Node Eclipses and South Node Eclipses.
North Node Eclipses point us forward to what we need to learn or do to move in the direction of our purpose. They come with opportunities and new beginnings, but they also ask you to adjust to new circumstances.
South Node eclipses are connected with our past and with our deep-rooted patterns of behavior. They come with outcomes, releases of energy, and achievements, depending on your particular karmic load. At a South Node eclipse, it is payback time.
The Lunar Eclipse on June 5th, 2020 was a South Node Eclipse. The Solar Eclipse on June 21st (at the Solstice) is a North Node eclipse. A time for BOLD new beginnings.
In 2020, history will be written in front of our eyes. And what we’ve witnessed so far is just the beginning.
The 2nd half of June and the 1st half of July will be at least as intense as the first months of the year.
The next intensity peak is in September-October.
2020 is not for the faint of the heart.
But what history tells us is that new eras are always preceded by big changes.
Whatever happens, however disrupting, it is part of a process of renewal. A new world is around the corner.
–Astro Butterfly
“To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”
—Good Housekeeping Magazine, a few days before Jung’s death in 1961
by Ernest Becker, Sam Keen (Goodreads Author) (Foreword), Daniel Goleman (Goodreads Author) (Foreword)
Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life’s work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker’s brilliant and impassioned answer to the “why” of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie — man’s refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing.
(Goodreads.com)
