Living Consciously July 7, 2009

Dear friends,

The death of an internationally known celebrity at a relatively young age is a blow to our collective psyche. It brings home the truth that we are not going to get out of here alive; that is, not with these particular forms. The day will come when every one of us will give up the ghost as they used to say, and move our essence into some other experience. Seeing death as loss is a terrible emotional burden to carry an entire life. Of course it is sad when a friend leaves this plane, and it feels like tragedy when it is a child.

The dilemma for humans is simple: To cherish the life forms we have now, care for them and respect our shared right to live as long as our soul requires and at the same time to know deeply that who we are is an eternal being. This is a healthy perspective on life’s most challenging experience. It frees us to be fully present in this physical life while not becoming mired in it. Knowing that we are immortal in some mysterious way, does not create behaviors that are self destructive or harmful to others. On the contrary, it produces the awareness that life in this form is precious; that it will never be repeated in just this way; that while we are here we are meant to live as a fully empowered and individualized expression of Life.

All of Natural Life is sweetly imbued with Intelligence. It knows what it is doing every moment. It knows when to be born and when to die. It knows no loss, never looks back and remains true to its origins; Where there is consciousness, there is aliveness.

Peace and Blessings,

Rev Carol Carnes

Living Consciously July 8, 2009

Dear friends,

The One Life that is a running stream of consciousness is the self awareness that we are.

This is a simple way of saying that God is being us and is the infinite aspect of our own nature. We might say that our imagination is the field where God thinks, that we tap into that field with our attention to possibility; that when we ask What if? we make ourselves available to the not-yet-known, to the creative answer, to the sparkling newness that comes with invention and discovery.

We spend so much time thinking about and dealing with the outer world of the known that we neglect the inner world of the spiritual. That is where the power to make all things new is alive and awaiting our use of it. In other words, the right use of imagination is not merely to day dream but is the impetus to creation. It includes gratitude. Before we can change anything in the outer world we must diffuse its energy by being grateful that it has come into our life to awaken us in some necessary way. Gratitude releases stuck energy which collapses the fear and allows our own creative intelligence to move into high gear!

When people say Let it go they are referring to the necessity of being at peace with what is so that the mind can contemplate What if. If we are at war with circumstance, we are not available to peace, which is the ground out of which new thoughts arise.

Peace and Blessings,

Rev Carol Carnes