Caroline Myss  with  Andrew Harvey

A  Mystical  Spring

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Jesus and the Birth of a New World

Andrew Harvey

Jesus has had terrible press. The horror of the sexual scandals in the Catholic church (and the church’s slow response to it), the scandal of the politicization of fundamentalism, the pervading ignorance among most seekers of the subversive glory of the Christian mystical tradition, the painful personal experience of hundreds of thousands of men and women at the hands of patriarchal churches: These are just a few of the reasons why so many spiritually awake people recoil from the name of Jesus. For them Jesus and the often-disastrous history and practices of the religion and churches created in his honor are synonymous. While such a reaction is understandable, it is a tragedy; the glorious and powerful message of the real Jesus is prevented from reaching us at the very moment when we need its hope and galvanizing joy the most, when its all-inclusive invitation to all of us to live a sacred life of service to all beings could provide one essential key to human survival.

It is time to come to know the real Jesus, the pioneer, inspired by the universal cosmic force of love and wisdom of a new humanity and the great tender revolutionary of love in action. What modern scholarship and the discovery in the 1940s and 1950s of long-obscured “gnostic gospels” has revealed is that Jesus never wanted to found a religion, let alone one that vaunted the exclusive possession of the truth, and he never aimed to create churches in his name, let alone ones that betrayed his egalitarian all-embracing vision in homophobic, misogynistic hierarchies, dedicated to the love of power and not the power of love.

Jesus’s mission was to forge a path for all human beings, a path of direct connection with an all-loving God that would increasingly divinize them, revealing to them who they really were and making them joyful, compassionate agents of transformative love in action. He did not come to preach a way to another worldly heaven; he came to show us how to transform ourselves in mind, heart, soul and body so as to live here on earth and in a time that he called “the life of the kingdom”, and so become powerful and wise enough to transform earth life into what he knew it was destined to be—a living mirror of the compassion and justice of the Divine.

Jesus lived a life in radical unity with the cosmic force of divine love and wisdom and shows us unforgettably how to do the same. He shows us the compassion for all beings this breeds, the holy joy it engenders, the sometimes miraculous powers this gives us all access to, if we are willing to surrender to and discover our divine identity and put our faith in a God that loves us magnificently and unconditionally. And he did so not to be worshipped as a unique son of God, but to demonstrate and share with us the power of the direct relationship with God that could birth us all into what St. Paul wonderfully called, “the glorious liberty of the children of God”.

The tragedy at the heart of Christianity is that this vision was lost, betrayed and perverted in ways that have profoundly damaged the history of the world and blocked the real astounding good news his whole life was dedicated to giving us from reaching and empowering us. By worshipping Jesus as a unique “son of God” instead of celebrating him as a revealer of our own divine human potential to ourselves, Christianity separated him from us and obscured the sun of the truths he lived to inspire and ennoble us with.

As Jung wrote, “the Jesus ideal has been turned by superficial and formalistically-minded believers into an external object of worship and it is precisely the veneration of the object that prevents it from reaching down into the depths of the soul and transforming it into a wholeness in keeping with the ideal. Accordingly the divine mediator stands outside as an image, while man remains fragmentary and untouched in the deepest part of him.”

 Edward  Abbey

 Greenlights

Matthew McConaughey

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/635407/greenlights-by-matthew-mcconaughey

A beautiful, exhilerating read by an immensely creative man,

one who comes across as a lover of life itself,

a brother, a servant, a genuine good friend, and a real man.

Read this book!

Academy Award–winning actor Matthew McConaughey is a married man, a father of three children, and a loyal son and brother. He considers himself a storyteller by occupation, believes it’s okay to have a beer on the way to the temple, feels better with a day’s sweat on him, and is an aspiring orchestral conductor. In 2009, Matthew and his wife, Camila, founded the just keep livin Foundation, which helps at-risk high school students make healthier mind, body, and spirit choices. [jklivinfoundation.org] In 2019, McConaughey became a professor of practice at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Minister of Culture/M.O.C. for the University of Texas and the City of Austin. McConaughey is also brand ambassador for Lincoln Motor Company, an owner of the Major League Soccer club Austin FC, and co-creator of his favorite bourbon on the planet, Wild Turkey Longbranch.

This is not a traditional memoir. Yes, I tell stories from the past, but I have no interest in nostalgia, sentimentality, or the retirement most memoirs require. This is not an advice book, either. Although I like preachers, I’m not here to preach and tell you what to do.

This is an approach book. I am here to share stories, insights, and philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it.

This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life. Adventures that have been significant, enlightening, and funny, sometimes because they were meant to be but mostly because they didn’t try to be. I’m an optimist by nature, and humor has been one of my great teachers. It has helped me deal with pain, loss, and lack of trust. I’m not perfect; no, I step in shit all the time and recognize it when I do. I’ve just learned how to scrape it off my boots and carry on.

We all step in shit from time to time. We hit roadblocks, we fuck up, we get fucked, we get sick, we don’t get what we want, we cross thousands of “could have done better”s and “wish that wouldn’t have happened”s in life. Stepping in shit is inevitable, so let’s either see it as good luck, or figure out how to do it less often.

What is a greenlight?

Greenlights mean go—advance, carry on, continue. On the road, they are set up to give the flow of traffic the right of way, and when scheduled properly, more vehicles catch more greenlights in succession. They say proceed.

In our lives, they are an affirmation of our way. They’re approvals, support, praise, gifts, gas on our fire, attaboys, and appetites. They’re cash money, birth, springtime, health, success, joy, sustainability, innocence, and fresh starts. We love greenlights. They don’t interfere with our direction. They’re easy. They’re a shoeless summer. They say yes and give us what we want.

Greenlights can also be disguised as yellow and red lights. A caution, a detour, a thoughtful pause, an interruption, a disagreement, indigestion, sickness, and pain. A full stop, a jackknife, an intervention, failure, suffering, a slap in the face, death. We don’t like yellow and red lights. They slow us down or stop our flow. They’re hard. They’re a shoeless winter. They say no, but sometimes give us what we need.

Catching greenlights is about skill: intent, context, consideration, endurance, anticipation, resilience, speed, and discipline. We can catch more greenlights by simply identifying where the red lights are in our life, and then change course to hit fewer of them. We can also earn greenlights, engineer and design for them. We can create more and schedule them in our future—a path of least resistance—through force of will, hard work, and the choices we make. We can be responsible for greenlights.

Catching greenlights is also about timing. The world’s timing, and ours. When we are in the zone, on the frequency, and with the flow. We can catch greenlights by sheer luck, because we are in the right place at the right time. Catching more of them in our future can be about intuition, karma, and fortune. Sometimes catching greenlights is about fate.

Navigating the autobahn of life in the best way possible is about getting relative with the inevitable at the right time. The inevitability of a situation is not relative; when we accept the outcome of a given situation as inevitable, then how we choose to deal with it is relative. We either persist and continue in our present pursuit of a desired result, pivot and take a new tack to get it, or concede altogether and tally one up for fate. We push on, call an audible, or wave the white flag and live to fight another day.

The secret to our satisfaction lies in which one of these we choose to do when.

This is the art of livin.

I believe everything we do in life is part of a plan. Sometimes the plan goes as intended, and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s part of the plan. Realizing this is a greenlight in itself.

The problems we face today eventually turn into blessings in the rearview mirror of life. In time, yesterday’s red light leads us to a greenlight. All destruction eventually leads to construction, all death eventually leads to birth, all pain eventually leads to pleasure. In this life or the next, what goes down will come up.

It’s a matter of how we see the challenge in front of us and how we engage with it. Persist, pivot, or concede. It’s up to us, our choice every time.

This is a book about how to catch more yeses in a world of nos and how to recognize when a no might actually be a yes. This is a book about catching greenlights and realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green.

greenlights.

By design and on purpose … Good luck.

Matthew and Camila McConaughey

Excerpted from Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey Copyright © 2020

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