Conscious Contact

Who am I listening to in my life? So many voices so little attention.The world around us looks more like a world in need of treatment than a world we might aspire to be loyal subscribers to. On one hand our culture and our world is not responsible for us as individuals, we are, and at the same time we are the children of this world and all its conflicts, insecurities, insanity and lies.Attempting to sort the truth out of the agenda is , well, more trouble than it's worth. I may be powerless over the world outside of myself but I am not powerless over myself ,what I believe about me, agree to concerning me, or choose to act on in relation to me.Bringing my attention back to myself keeps me from getting all caught up in all the stuff that in truth does not matter anyway.

My world exists within me. My world is a perception, a matrix of beliefs and stories. In my world there are continuously changing weather patterns of emotion, hunger, thought, sensation and experience.

In the world outside of me there are also constantly changing aspects of life, weather, belief, reaction. We are caught up in a whirlwind of economic, energetic, environmental, political and religious turmoil. What we were taught as kids as the "right" way to live has turned out to have been a very short sighted, unsustainable, addicted, demanding, borderline behaving quagmire of cultural mess. Everybody seems to be lying to everybody about almost everything and all we know for sure is that we can't count on the politicos or the systems as they exist today to save us from ourselves. See what I mean by our World being in need of treatment....

In the midst of all this, change keeps happening and with that change, opportunity comes forward...So, where is our attention? Are we seeing the opportunities or are we fighting to keep up our attachment to what has been familiar to us.

Like an individual in need of treatment, when what you have lived as "reality" stops working, there can be a real sense of the whole house of cards coming down. We are the culture of the world and the culture of the world is us. The rethinking of how we live one day to the next as a society, is , if it's going to evolve toward Happy, Joyous, and Free, going to be a leap of faith into the unknown. My point of view about Recovery has shifted from the goal being to become a "happy, productive member of society" to being re-connected to the truth of who I am underneath all the beliefs , baggage, stories and imbalances that had become my perception of myself. That perception of myself was born of my relationship with this Society and how I saw me, judged me, defined me according to societies rules. I really tried to fit in..sort of...that's funny now..but it sure as hell wasn't funny when I believed Society knew something I didn't.

Where do we go now, people of recovery, society of the USA...where do we go now Humans? Our world has hit the fan and most of our all powerful systems have shown themselves to be incapable of changing toward the opportunity of a new Paradigm.Our systems are reflections of ourselves. We are so attached and addicted to suffering as a measure of accomplishment we seem to be indulging into suffering rather than stepping back with a broad, open minded point of view and being honest about how Huge our collective and individual challenges and opportunities are.

In the USA if you work, work, work then you might believe you are ok and accomplished and headed for some promised land...good luck with that one.Life is changing the stakes to not being about how hard we work and suffer for our causes but how smart we live and how much love and joy we express, minute to minute, day by day.

Some where in the mix of our beliefs we bought into being small and imperfect as the foundation of our experience.We have no idea if we are perfect or not, we have no idea the intentions of the one that created us so who are we to even have an opinion of what we are. We've even been told we were born in Sin and must earn Gods love. So many of our beliefs have been passed on from generation to generation and regardless of how much suffering and fear those beliefs create we stay loyal to them or at best go into a like minded reaction to them. All aspects of the same way of thinking.

There is nothing sacred here but life itself...our beliefs are not sacred,our educations are not sacred...our sobriety is not sacred...the religions are not sacred..the cows may be, at least they were, like us, created by Life, not the minds of men.

What we are being shown today is the truth that our interpretations of ourselves are simply opinions and always removed from the truth, as truth exists within us as Spirit.We are that Spirit not what we have projected into the world as identity and called it "me". We recover from our identity as "Me" or we live as "me" better or less than, in recovery, small and imperfect, same ol' same ol' , Again, same way of thinking that created the problem in the first place.

All of this point of view applies to our societies and our cultures...all of this applies to our Human world as we create it and then live in it.If we want to change the world we must come to terms with the foundation of our personal beliefs. The world is a projector screen for our beliefs, we act according to our beliefs, we experience based on beliefs and we perceive through the filters of our beliefs...no way of getting around dealing with our beliefs if anything is going to change beyond cosmetics and affiliations.

In my life there is, today, a conscious contact with a presence within me. A presence that is always there and always holding me in unconditional Love and awareness. I feel from that presence that everything is and has always been ok...There is a conscious contact that exists within all of us that when we have brought our attention back to ourselves will reveal to us the thread of life that connects us all.Until we have brought our attention back to ourselves we will continue to live from the insanity of our own projections. We will continue to live from the world around us rather than from the world within us. Bringing our attention back to ourselves will require a great leap of faith. We will have to believe we are worth it and let go of the grand excuses that we are small and imperfect, that there is a measure called Normal, that has some relevance to anything. We will have to let go of our Gods and projections, our agendas and affiliations..our diagnosis and cool cards. We will have to be willing to be happy, joyous and Free...all for the sake of a conscious contact.