Tag Archives: collective spirituality

Letting Go of 9 / 11

In my heart I feel it’s time for us Americans to decide our most important ENERGY FOCUS to carry from past tragedies like 9/11 into our future:

Should we focus on the personal hurts, the torn families, the great damage to our national sense of stability and pride?

Can we find deep emotional and spiritual closure by dwelling on or suppressing the past?

Can we transcend the pain of our dreams and loves lost by daring for a revitalized brotherhood and sisterhood in our homes, our communities, our world?

Or should we continue obsessing over endlessly seeking vengeance on old enemies to the point that we endlessly create new ones?

Can we secure our country’s borders and our citizens’ liberties by letting our naturally spirited, free-speaking, free-acting, free-thinking people be treated as suspects by the endless motley parades of suspicious military, police and political bureaucrats who would “make our world safer for us”?

Isn’t it approaching time for us all to end mourning of the dead so the sparkling possibilities of today can emerge from their hiding places beneath the rocks of our guilt, anger, fear, habitual blindness?

Do I respect the dead? Do I respect those still in sorrow? Do I respect those who have sacrificed for our country and for a more peaceful world?

Yes, I most certainly do–
but I respect the claims of no man or woman, dead or alive, rich or famous, to chain me, you or any human being on Earth to any vision of our collective future that denies the great endless spiritual growth that is everyone’s sacred birthright.

No more excuses, my friends.

Your natural claim to a more joyful, peaceful, creatively sane existence is inextricably tied up in the fulfillment of every other human being’s very same birthright.

No matter how stifled or controlled by others in the past, this vital joy of our collective human birthright is meant to push up through the ashes of the Great Crusades, the Inquisition, the Black Plague, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bhopal, 9/11…

We’re to water with work and bright expectation the unseen seeds of an unknown harvest now germinating in the earth. These seeds now yearn inwards and reach outwards for Divine blessing to awaken their core potential.

How can we do anything but say YES to the opportunities for good that seek our patient attention through the tragedies inescapable to all human life?

I am honoring the dead of 9/11 and the newly born every day since by knowing and trying to live by this scientific fact:

LIFE NEVER ENDS.

Your life, my life, the actual existence of everyone’s spiritual beingness, simply never ends.

It only changes shape, changes focus, changes riverbed. Changes wind current, changes fragrance, changes intensity of awareness for our true hearts’ desires…

Peace, Blessings, Happiness and Solace to you and yours–
living, dead and yet to come–
on this good day of September 11, 2012.

Rev. Scott Ufford
Spiritualist minister
Copyright 2012

A Spiritual Issue? Murderous Gun-Toting Maniacs & Repealing the 2nd Amendment

Our current epidemic of lunatics slaughtering their neighbors at movie theaters, malls, restaurants & old work places:

Depressing beyond the point of shocking.

So should our 2nd Amendment–the right to bear arms–be repealed?
Would it do us any good?
What would make us any safer?

A little-understood fact about the 2nd Amendment:

It was passed in part to guarantee all states’ citizens the right to defend themselves against a too-centralized, totalitarian government like the British one they’d kicked out. Also, to guarantee the right to hunt for their own food in the country & wilderness–

and for self defense against criminals by more than slingshots, karate chops & begging for your family’s life on your hands & knees.

Way back in the late 17th & early 18th centuries, gun possession made groups of American citizens armed about as well as the government–

which forced a respect that kept our bureaucrats from passing & enforcing taxes & rules as vile & strangling as the European monarchies did.

Our revolutionary American philosophy kept governmental powers & taxation low, and personal & community responsibilities high, so the country thrived.

Both the government’s meager armies & the citizens’ ever-readiness-to-form militias balanced each other out. Also, most parties tended to focus on prospering by whatever means available, wherever available, so guns were a natural part of that national semi-rural culture.

Our imperfect national culture unfortunately included systematically destroying the lives, families, religions & powers of Native Americans and of “imported” Africans–

all the while painting them as oppressive enemies to be feared, controlled & squabbled over along with land, water & other resource rights within the new states & opening territories, as “Manifest Destiny” pushed across the continent.

But again, owning a gun was considered, and was, a reasonable, practical part of American life. Almost every farmer & rural person owned one. Kids were taught by parents to use them responsibly, safely and ethically. This was the polar opposite of now being looked down upon by media, society or police as a possible “gun nut”.

But the massive urbanization and over-mechanization of most of our society, with its economic & social stresses, combined with disastrous results of our endless so-called War on Drugs, has concentrated private weaponry in the hands of the imbalanced and desperate as well as the responsible, leading us to our national split personality regarding guns…

Now of course, with many police departments armed to the teeth with military surplus & high tech weapons as if they’re running private fiefdoms–
with you as their untrustworthy subjects, to be looked upon as guilty unless proven innocent–

and with our culture also having overdosed on glorifying violence–
would you really feel safer if the law-abiding citizenry was completely disarmed?

In Australia for example, completely disarming the law-abiding populace recently led to what? Peace and daisies?

No way! It brought far more murderous criminal behavior by thugs emboldened with the knowledge that only they (& the cops) have guns!

Let me ask you:

Do you really think you can trust your govt–
that has invaded and seeks to control & regulate (so as to keep the rich, rich & the powerful, powerful) every aspect of your privacy & your actions–
do you trust that government to act with greater benevolence & wisdom, or think of you as anything but another SHEEP–

if you have NO WAY to even think of protecting yourself?

Obviously, you’re not going to head off the revenooers single-handedly, or cure the ills of exploitation by vicious over-regulation & money grabs by city, state & feds–
but do you really want to surrender yet another historical practical right of an ordinary sane citizenry?

Also:
What about the cities now cutting their police departments in half–
or ditching them entirely–
because they’re going bankrupt?

Who will protect you, the good-hearted but completely weaponless citizen in a land with no Second Amendment rights:

If our soon-to-be-bankrupted country spirals into hard social & economic lessons from our time-honored personal and institutional greed?

If the decades-old restructuring of our EVERY SYSTEM from economic, legal, military and education, to agriculture, energy use, taxation and transportation, makes those systems work as expensively, wastefully & unsustainably as possible–

in order to drain away yet more cash at every step for the rich & powerful and all their wanna be’s–

and leaves you high and dry?

Who will protect you then?

Those who can’t see that our federal & state governments and the military we’ve been seduced into worshiping & obeying are now far too centralized, way too concentrated as they edge towards totalitarianism in their self-appointed legal & technological powers over you–

(whether they so benevolently choose to refrain from using those rights & powers now or not)–

those unfortunates cannot see that we as the American Community have chosen the omnipresent corporate kiss and whip, the all-calculating, all-seeing computer chip & the marvels of the military as our ROLE MODELS for SOLVING our problems–

but with one result being lunatics blasting away at their bosses, their neighbors & fellow shoppers.

All this provides us with a TERRIBLE, CLEARLY FOCUSED MICROCOSMIC VIEW of our national belief systems’ flaws, coming home to roost!

UNCOMFORTABLE CONCLUSION:
WE as a nation and as individuals CAN NO LONGER THROW DOLLARS, THREATS, BULLETS or BOMBS at our problems. We have to get MORE HUMAN.

We have to EVOLVE our country past this crisis of uncomfortably realizing our corrupt comfort zones are scurrying away forever–
and they aren’t coming back.

Maniacs’ murderous rampages, again, are just little local signs in our nation’s unhealthy big picture.

Doesn’t this mean we have to get more self-knowing, more NATURAL and REAL in our SYSTEMS for sustaining and fulfilling our lives and our civilization?

Don’t we have to get more honest, more creative, more generous, more disciplined to create SOLUTIONS that REALLY WORK?

I think so.

What does this “GET MORE HUMAN” mean?
Who knows for sure?
But what other choice do we have?
Do we surrender to our obstacles & our fears?
Do we sink, or do we learn better ways to swim?

Are we not alive today to find our great new answers?

PEACE AND HOPE TO YOU,
Rev. Scott Ufford
Copyright 2012

How to Check Your Spiritual GPS

Do you wonder what’s the right direction to take?
Are life’s conflicting signals confusing you?
Have you lost your spiritual GPS?

Recently, a vivid dream neatly taught me what to do next–
but like the wise fisherman, it wasn’t going to just hand me the tasty fish…

“The Dream Scene:

I’m an African-American man, with six or seven friends surrounding one pleasant but stressed-looking man in his late twenties. Our friend faces a difficult decision.

He has to make really tough choices NOW:

Does he take a big risk for the job & career he really wants? There’s no guarantee he’ll succeed. Failure would prove costly.

Does he marry the pretty young lady standing near him, who’s sweetly stressing him for a ring? We can tell he cares about her, but she’s “not quite the one”. We sense he’d be bending to make her happy–
or avoid her displeasure.

Proverbial buckets of sweat begin to brim on his forehead. We silently give him time for his choice. The young lady gives him a bitty tweak of a smile that says, “You’d better choose me.”

The poor guy’s about to spring a leak, melt down like a reactor or run for the hills, we can’t tell which.

On an inspiration I ask, “Do you want to know how to choose?”

He looks at me with hope & incredulity, like a drowning man would who’s asked if he prefers a life preserver or not.

“You have to take the high road,” I tell him.

“How do I find it?”

Everybody looks at me as if to say, “This had better be good now you’ve opened your mouth Scott!”

These words tumble out:

“Ask.”

“The High-Way is the drive-way God intends you to drive your life upon.”

I repeat this slowly, once, then twice. Everybody’s so in sync with this saying, they smile & nod their heads in agreement.

A fourth time I state this truth, everybody spontaneously recites it with me:

“The High-Way is the drive-way God intends you to drive your life upon.”

A grin of relief breaks through the very tense cloud on our friend’s face.

He understands:

He can get his answer–
by asking his Higher Guidance System.

Anything else would be muddled, half-blind, possibly manipulative guidance.

But his Higher Guidance–
his spiritual GPS–
won’t give him the easy route–
it will give him the BEST route from the perspective of Wisdom.

He has to be willing to lift up his eyes, his energies and his intentions.

Yes, his spiritual GPS will guide him to the High-Way that’s the drive-way God INTENDS him to drive his life upon.

He just has to FOLLOW IT.

The Dream ends with us feeling satisfied, almost giddily happy.”

So remember my friend, your Spiritual GPS is just waiting for you to check–
& keep recalibrating as needed along the High-Way of your life!

Ask me for help if you like.

Peace & Happiness to you,
Rev. Scott Ufford,
The Psychic Philosopher
Copyright 2012