All we need is a little stretching

Let me begin with another excerpt from “The Gospel According to Jesus” by Paul Ferrini.  I love his stuff.  The book is written as if Jesus is speaking.  Some might call it a “channeled work.”  Channeled or not, it is revelation, it is truth, it is powerful and it is beautiful.  Deep inside it will resonate with you.

Spirituality and religion are not necessarily the same thing. Religion is the outer form; spirituality is the inner content. Religion is the husk; spirituality is the seed. Religion is a set of beliefs; spirituality is a continuum of experience.

You can be spiritual and not attend church or temple. You can find your spirituality in intimate sharing with others, in communion with nature, in being of service. Spiritual experience is simply that which relaxes the mind and uplifts the heart. Meditating, walking in the woods or by the ocean, holding an infant, or looking into a lover’s eyes – these are all spiritual experiences. When there is love and acceptance in your heart, your spiritual nature is manifest and you can see the spiritual nature of other people.

To be spiritual is to see yourself and others without judgment, to see not just with the eyes, but with the heart. To be spiritual is to accept and appreciate “what is,” instead of finding fault with it and seeking something else.

A spiritual person sees beauty everywhere, even in suffering. Wherever hearts are touched by the poignancy of life, there is beauty. Whenever people learn their life lessons and let the past fall away, beauty is present. There is beauty in the rain and clouds, and beauty in the sun. There is beauty in aloneness and in intimacy, in laughter and in tears. Wherever you turn, beauty awaits you.

In my last post I talked about how our spirit or soul is unlimited.  Our bodies and minds can limit our soul expression in this temporal and spacial realm.  It’s like in your dreams when you can’t move very fast or you try to call out and nothing comes out but a whimper.  Our unlimited, divine self can be trying to express our true self through this limited perspective we think is a separate self.  I believe we can experience the unlimited nature of our divine self when we are free to let our divine self express itself.  People like Jesus did this and look at what happened.  Many have “tapped into” their unlimited expression to create amazing things.  For the soul, a whimper here is still so powerful it produces “Grapes of Wrath” or a Hayden concerto.  A soul moving at the speed of thought through the slow motion of our limited self, is an olympic speed skater.  Now imagine if we saw ourselves as unlimited.  What would we create.

For all of us, our souls created opportunities for us to wake up to our true self.  We are gifted and talented in many ways by design.  Through these talents, we are already wired to have an unlimited expression.  Jesus was wired for forgiveness.  He had the gift of no judgment.  He saw clearly the illusion of mankind to create villains and victims.  He knew deep inside we were enamored with concepts like sin and the superstitions of religion and the mythologies of an angry God.  In His unlimited expression, He created a metaphysical wave of eternal forgiveness that still impacts us all today.  He set us free from the power of religious-projected fear to embrace love manifest.  One man as His unlimited truth and He knew it.  He said things like “I am the way the truth and the life.”  He had zero doubt about who He was as a divine expression of the power that holds all things together in love.

What is our gift or talent that is the outlet of our divine expression?  What has our soul created in our physical reality that could be used to “tap into” the unlimited creative power that holds all things together in love?

We all know the answer.  Really we do.  If we think about the things we enjoy, the gifts we have, the peace that we experience when we are doing the things we love, we know what our conduit is.  We know the pipe that was designed as the passageway of eternal love into our reality through our unique self.  Sometimes it just needs some stretching to be ready for the ultimate expression.

Have you ever tried to blow up on of those thin balloons like they use to make the balloon animals?  You know the ones.  If you just start blowing, you will have one really bad headache pretty soon.

If you stretch it, then it is much easier.  If a child wants to blow one up, we all know we should blow it up first, let the air out, and then let them have a try.  It is much easier once it has been blown up previously.

What is stretching in the physical/spiritual/metaphysical sense?  Sometimes it is seeing it done before.  This is why Jesus was such an impactful man of wisdom and expression.  Sometimes we just have to give it a try.  Many great composers had a few “not so great” compositions prior to their masterpieces.  Sometimes we have to get rid of some junk.  Our illusion of separation is a huge pile of junk that we have carried around as a human race for millennia.  And in every case we have to get rid of any form of judgment.

Judgment is the great inhibitor.  Judgment is the mud that slows us down, the clamp on our throats, the water on the fire.  Like the quote from Ferrini’s book:

To be spiritual is to see yourself and others without judgment, to see not just with the eyes, but with the heart. To be spiritual is to accept and appreciate “what is,” instead of finding fault with it and seeking something else.

We have to be free of judgment of any kind.  The key to letting it go is unconditional love.  The bright light that opens our eyes to unconditional love is our oneness.  The open door to freedom from judgment is the divine forgiveness like Jesus showed us.  When we see God is love and He is us and we are connected to all people….and they are just us in another form….then how can we judge another who is just another expression of love like we are?  Jesus said His truth would set us free and we would be free indeed.  The truth is our oneness with each other and our divine nature.  We are an extension of God in this reality to experience God from the perspective of this reality.

When we get that truth, we are really stretched.  The balloon has no resistance.  The mud isn’t mud but the groomed track of an olympic sprinter.  Our squeaks and moans and whimpers become the booming voice as the sound of rushing waters.  We see our unlimited self.  We have no grounds for offense.  We have no judgment whatsoever.  We can then experience our unlimited divine expression through our pre-sent (present) gift.

I encourage everyone to stretch, really get stretched.  You may start small.  You don’t want to pull a hamstring.  But keep stretching.  Keep searching.  Go deep within.  Discover your gifts and talents.  Let your divine self find the perfect expression in this reality as YOU.

Yay God!

Lance