The Election – How About Adding Some Grace?

The following is an excerpt from the October 2016 Online Salon.

I am sure that many of you, just like me, are exhausted with all this endless political garbage filling the airwaves – and the air. The collective psychic field feels like this thick, invisible bog clouding our common sense and our higher reasoning abilities. I’ve witnessed friends exploding at one another over dinner, turning what began as a pleasant evening into a battlefield with bullet-sharpened opinions flying across the table. And for what?

Like the fanaticism that often arises in a “discussion” on religious topics, the obvious becomes apparent all too soon: Neither side is listening to the other and both will fight to the death. The posturing is tribal, not intellectual. People are screaming emotional blatherings at each other, not sharing sound positions backed by research, facts, and history (not that facts are easy to come by when it comes to politics). Each side wants to defeat the other, wants to make them admit that their candidate is a loser, a fraud, a liar – even if both are guilty of the same behaviors. In the end – in fact, from the very beginning – all attempts at an actual discussion are futile. The psychic climate got heated under Bush/Cheney, to be sure, but it’s far more extreme in this election, as can be witnessed in some of the televised incidents of street confrontations and the like. Granted, the media love this sort of thing, but some of it is actually happening.

So, what do we do about all this muck that we are in? Turning off the television does not free any of us from all the psychic free radicals that fill our air space. We are psychic creatures, gathering dark energetic sparks into our energy fields all the time. Remember how the Laws of Attraction and Action/Reaction work, not to mention the Law of Constant Motion. You are always engaged in acts of creation, in attracting and repelling energy. Just because you are not looking directly at something does not mean that you are protected from what that source is generating. Consider how much we are affected by pollution centers, though we do not see them.

We could all use a serious infusion of grace. Grace manifests in numerous forms. It pours into your life continually, adjusting thought patterns and realigning emotions, for example. Grace is not an obvious force. It is not something magical. It is subtle, mostly unnoticeable until you take notice that you are acting out of character or that something somehow prevented you from doing or saying something you would regret for a very long time. That is the way of grace.

The grace of Understanding is one I especially love to teach about, as it stretches the conventional meaning of that word is such an extraordinary way. We usually strive to want to be understood. I have been in conversations with people who will not stop repeating their position, as if I was hearing impaired, because they were so determined to get me to say, “I guess you’re right.”

That forceful posture, however, is exactly opposite the nature of the grace of Understanding. The grace of Understanding elevates your inner perceptions and your gifts in a way that allows you to better “understand the other”; that is, to use all your skills to assist a person in understanding what he or she is trying to personally express or resolve. The focus, in other words, is on understanding what is unfolding within the life of another person or within the greater field of life that you share with a person. The object of the discussion is not about you making a singular point about yourself in a conversation that needs to be understood. Take note that an indicator of the presence of grace is that grace is a force that works to transform any situation/thought/emotion from a negative to a positive. Grace pours into a circumstance as a means of assisting a transformation on behalf of all who are present.

With that understanding of grace in mind, it is fair to say that we are all feeling the psychic weight of this time, this remarkable, extraordinary time in which we are sharing a journey of transition/transformation. I require both words to describe this epoch passage through time, space, and evolution that we are sharing, as transition is a more grounded term that refers to how you shift from one type of technology into a computerization of your business, for example. Transformation, as I use it, refers to a personal shift in conscious understanding or comprehension of a truth or the shedding of an illusion or making an animated connection with the living fabric of the world around you. That transformation could be ecological or an awakening to the fact that we are a global community facing overwhelming humanitarian crises that are only going to get bigger. Inner awakenings as such do not necessarily have a direct connection to a God; that is, the spiritual connection may not be conscious (though they most certainly can be and often are profoundly conscious).

What people frequently tell me is that they had a sudden realization that the Earth is a very, very small planet. In a sudden epiphany, many realize that every and any problem is everyone’s problem on this small planet. To believe that money or a particular personal home address is a safety net is, in the language of Buddha, the ultimate illusion. There is no unreachable safe space in a global crisis, drought, disease, nuclear war or any of the predicaments threatening us today. The result of such an awakening inspired a transformation in them – a fundamental shift in their values and in the choices that they now make in terms of how they invest their life force. A transformation is an awakening, a coming out of one’s personal emotional coma and surfacing into the realization that we are connected to the whole of life. What we do, think, and feel matters to the entire fabric of life.

There are many ways to describe this remarkable age in which we are living. For the purposes of this Salon, let’s just focus on how are living through – actually, truly – living the experience of transforming into a multi-sensory species. That is so amazing! But it’s real. We now speak about our intuitive instincts and our “energy senses” with an almost ordinary tone of voice. It’s been years since I’ve heard people whisper about being intuitive. And we are finally getting over the need to frame being intuitive as a gift. Intuition is a sense, like our emotional senses and our psychic senses and our energetic sensory system. We have yet to adopt a lifestyle that reflects that we understand the nature of our energetic senses and their operating systems – that will require years of research. We are just discovering our inner space. Imagine that it is a mirror image of outer space – a macro to micro match – and perhaps you will glean a tiny perspective of how sacredly extraordinary the depth and width and eternal-ness of your whole timeless Being is.

In the meantime, however, here we are, coping with the day-to-day business of ordinary life in a fractured world. How are we to Understand all this? How do we keep ourselves centered and even think clearly? Here’s where I turn to grace – all the time. It’s very tempting to lose it when your “feet touch the ground” too much, especially during this year with all the political poison hitting us non-stop. But it matters most when you can find a way to stay centered in a storm.


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