ENLIGHTENING OTHERS

Greetings, Fellow Spiritual Enthusiasts.

So today I’m taking a look at one of my very favorite forms of personal spiritual enlightenment: Enlightening Others.

This is one of the ways you can tell that your Love For Humanity might be intersecting with your Love for Your Own Opinion.  When you feel called upon to point out to other people exactly where they are going wrong.

Especially people you don't know, especially when they're just minding their own business.

But you can tell that they're really asking for your help. Secretly. With their minds. You can almost hear them crying out for your special guidance, and so you go ahead and gently correct the error of their ways.

Now I want to make clear that this is nothing like going around knocking on the doors of complete strangers and asking them if they've heard the Good News about Jesus.

No, in my case, in the particular instance I’m about to relate, it’s much classier. More sophisticated.  It’s more like knocking on the heads of complete strangers and forcing them to confront the Good News about Buddha.

Of course you’re detecting a hint of self-deprecation here.  But this can be one of those tricky things about being human, or in this specific case, being me. 

See, here’s the thing.  On the one hand, there’s what we could call my Essential Self, and this self really loves God, loves spirituality (in both theory and practice!) and loves sharing ideas and experiences with other people.

On the other hand, we have my Social Self, or my Ego Self, also known to our friend Eckhart Tolle as “Mind.” This self really loves showing off all the cool stuff I know.  Or think I know. I also used to be an English teacher, for whom a really great day was explaining the proper use of semicolons, so let’s just acknowledge we’ve got that in the mix as well.

This, it seems to me, is one of the ongoing problems of the human experience.  It’s very easy for our Authentic/Essential selves to get repackaged by the Ego. Or, as one of my good friends says, “Yesterday’s Transformation can so easily become today’s Ego Trip.”

Here’s how this particular mix of Good Intentions and Confused Agenda looked on this particular day a few years back.  You can be the judge of how things turned out.

I'm sitting at Barnes & Noble reading a copy of Wayne Dyer's The Power of Intention. I like reading Wayne Dyer because he's so knowledgeable about so many different religions, and so good at pointing out the elements they have in common. It gives me the illusion that I actually know pretty much the same amount as Wayne, so I don't have to go to the trouble of learning about all those different religions myself.

I'm sitting in one of those quartets of chairs around a small wooden table, and an elderly man and woman in two of the other chairs, strangers to each other, begin a conversation about being elderly.

"It's hard getting older, harder than you might think," the woman says.

"Well, that's what life is about, like the Buddhism says," replies the man. "Life is suffering, that's what they said, and so it's best for us to just accept it."

The woman smiles back at him shyly, happily. "Is that right?"

Here's my chance! I come up from my book and beam a benevolent grin at them both. "Actually, that's not quite right. The Buddha said that it's our THOUGHTS that cause suffering, not life itself."

The woman raises carefully penciled eyebrows in my direction, politely acknowledging my unexpected entrance into the conversation.

The man glares at me. "No, that's not right, it's our desires that cause all the trouble. That's what the Buddha realized. It is wrong to desire." He turns hopefully desiring eyes to the woman's face.  She twinkles back encouragingly. "Oh, well, that explains a lot!" she giggles.

Pulsing with the power of my spiritual conviction that these lovely people will welcome my additional contribution, I decide to offer another nugget of Ultimate Truth. "No, desire isn't wrong. Desire is a good thing. It only feels bad if we believe that what we desire is unattainable. Or wrong for us in some other way. It’s only when we start to judge our desires so harshly that we suffer."

The man and woman exchange a glance of solidarity, of patient mutual suffering at this unsolicited interruption to their potentially intriguing conversation with an attractive, age-appropriate stranger.  

That's a good point, dear," the woman says. "Hrmph!" the man says, and returns to his stack of magazines. His whole being exudes a new kind of desire: the desire that I shut up. Or better yet, go away, and leave him alone to impress this woman with his wisdom.

Ah well. They may not be ready for the Good News. Not on this particular day. But the good news for me is that I am totally and completely ready to spread my half-baked feel-good gospel to all who cross my path!

And the really good news?

This would be that my Essential Self packed up my Egoic Self and took it out of the way of two people who were doing just fine enjoying suffering and desire without my help.

Moon, You are Huge! My Favorite Inspirational Moments

I don’t know if y’all are noticing this, but it seems like life just keeps speeding up and getting stranger and stranger, more and more connected, more and more intensely entangled. Perhaps it’s simply the centrifugal force of the paradigm shift of 2012 picking up energy and sucking us in to the inevitable Something Else. To the end of the world, or to the beginning of what some visionaries call The Great Turning. Being a bit of an intuitive retard, I’m not sure what’s going on. But I can feel something happening.

Or perhaps it’s a personal experience that I, with the charming narcissism so prevalent in my generation, am assuming has global resonance. Whatevs, as my Generation Y roommate would say. I’m just really excited to tell you guys about one of my recent Top Favorite Spiritual Moments, cause it was so so awesome and I think, if I tell it right, you are gonna dig it.

It’s a beautiful evening in early fall. Just past midnight or so. Earlier, an unfairly huge juicy orange moon has risen up through the sky, threatening to take all of Colorado prisoner with its mysterious looming beauty. Now, although slightly less mysterious, it’s still hanging out, basking in its own perfection, like, “Hey. Yeah. I’m the Freakin’ MOON, fool. What you lookin’ at?”

The air is crisp, clean, cool but not cold. I’m sitting on the balcony of my townhouse, looking out onto the mellifluous night and the quiet street below, free of cars for the moment. The night is hushed, waiting, lurking with hidden potential, and I am one with this night. I am in an unusual state of mind, or rather, occupying an unusual state of being—one that comes to me every now and then.

This state has something to do with meditation, something to do with clearing my consciousness of the Business as Usual Ellen Nonsense that tends to go on. For a moment, sometimes many moments in a row, I am free of my story. True, I have done terrible things. I have also done good things. I have made horrendous mistakes and probably am making more as I speak. (Did I mention that earlier I blew off writing my class syllabus so I could watch VH-1’s 100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s? Yeah, I know. But look, does my class really need to know what we’re going to do in this workshop as much as I need to know the back story behind Kellis’s 2003 “My Milkshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard”?)

But somehow, in this particular state of being, none of this matters.

Nature, we are told, abhors a vacuum. Into the temporary vacuum of my non-judgment, all kinds of strong emotion pour in. I feel myself filling up with something huge, warm, and spacious, something that runs through the center of my chest like bourbon, only better. I look at the moon with awe, and remember another Giant Moon: Athens, Greece, 1987. I am on a European vacation with my art class and Bob, who is from Germany, looks up at the spectacular moon looming immediately over our heads and lifts his drink to it, “Moon! You are Yoooge! (translation: “Huge!”) For those of us present, this becomes a favorite toast for years.

As I sit on my balcony, here, in 2011, I am filled with love for that moon of 1987, for the people who were there with me, people who tonight are grownups scattered all over the world, grownups writing checks for mortgages and begging their children to do their homework. I am full of love for their houses and their children and for this moon, the moon that floats gently above us all.

Actually, to tell the truth, I am full of love in general. Wow. Where did all this come from? For just this moment I can look on everything around me with astonishment and wonder—all surrounding objects have dropped their ordinary pretense of “hey, yeah, so I’m a tree—big deal.” Instead, they shimmer with clarity and possibility and intention, with the power of something ELSE no longer hidden. I look and feel more love. Then more love. My love rises up to meet that love and becomes more than that. I am overwhelmed with love, and I must tell someone.

“I love you!” I whisper to the trees, to the moon. “Oh, I love you! I love you!” I whisper to the night, to the planet, to the Universe. I feel all of us—me, the trees, the moon, the night, my old friends, Bob, the children and their homework—all of us pulsing together as one fluid heartbeat: “I love you! I love you! I love you!”

At this exact moment, a lone car shoots past on the street below. A man is yelling at someone on a cell phone, his window open. “I hate you, you f*****g bitch!”

I love this. It is perfect. I love this man for providing the perfect point of contrast to all this love—and for allowing me to observe that this love is large enough to include the man and his anger and obscenities. I love that the Universe brought us together at this precise intersection of each of our emotional lives. “I love you too, you f*****g a**hole!” I say to the man, now long gone down the street. “I love you! I love you! Thank you! I hope you and your girl make up!”

I’m pretty sure they made up. After all, there’s a lot of love available, some of it from sources you would not expect.

Summertime, Spirituality, and Tanorexia

Greetings, Superfriends! How is this beautiful summertime treating you?

I want to apologize for my long absence from this blog. Terrible things have come into my life since last we were together. There’s nothing worse than when you make a bunch of plans to create things and have success and get people excited and then THOSE THINGS COME TRUE. I’m just saying, I had WAAAY more time to blog when the only other competition for my attention was my next spiritual webinar(love you Vishen Lakhiani!) or MTV’s Jersey Shore.

And speaking of Jersey Shore, it’s probably just as well that I don’t have too much time to watch it because it really exacerbates my condition. As those of you who have known me since high school or college are aware, summer is tough for me because I suffer from extreme Tanorexia.

For those of you not familiar with this condition, let me explain. We who suffer from this debilitating disease report being swept by frequent feelings of “not tan enough.” This condition affects its victims on spiritual as well as emotional and physical levels, and is especially dangerous for those of us who came of age during the heyday of Baywatch.

Oh, sure, for a while, you can distract yourself with new clothes or adorable fuzzy animals or addressing your friend’s latest obsessive outrage (I have a friend who has an infinite capacity for outrage and she really keeps me busy). You can even choose to meditate on the Divine Love whose purple velvety majesty keeps this Universe expanding into ever greater dimensions.

And it works. For a while. And then you see Pauly and Vinny and Snookie and you look down at your slightly graying white legs poking out of your slightly graying white shorts and the compulsion rears its ugly head: “GTL! GTL! GTL!” (that’s “Gym, Tan, Laundry” for those uninitiated in the pleasures of Jersey Shore).

I have another friend who pointed out that I am forty-one years old and maybe it’s time I moved on to more mature obsessive compulsions. And I do my best. The reason I haven’t been writing for this blog for such a long time is that I am now writing for three others which actually have something to do with my getting paid and thus being able to support myself. I am actually becoming somewhat obsessed with supporting myself, which, believe me, is not an obsession that’s troubled me too much in this lifetime.

Mostly I like to be supported by others. First it was my family. Then it was my universities and the Ridiculously Generous Souls of the student loan system (three college degrees can buy a LOT of Nordstrom, Anthropologie, and DSW!). Then it was my former husband. Then I turned to Law of Attraction and learned that God and the Universe wanted to support me. So I decided to let God do that by allowing me to win the lottery. God told me to get a job and He/She would let me know about the lottery real soon.

Sigh.

Oh Well, as my dad would say.

My dad Matthew Melko Jr. died last summer at about this time. He was the ultimate Jersey Shore boy, having grown up spending his summers in Seaside Heights, where the show is filmed. I asked him once whether the Jersey Shore had changed much since his heyday in the fifties. And he said that although cultural norms had changed (back then you didn’t, for example, have sex with people in dance clubs as a matter of course), he was glad to see that Seaside and Jersey were just as tacky and pointless and strangely beautiful as ever.

Whether you are tan or not tan, whether you are on speaking terms with God and the Universe or not, whether you love the beach or the mountains or the mall, I salute you and wish you an amazing summer. It’s good to be back.

Expand Into Your Joy, Grasshopper!

As my friend Tammie says, going on a spiritual journey should come with a warning label. Perhaps a Surgeon General of the Universe ought to put a label on our earthly packs of mental cigarettes.

WARNING: THE DIVINE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT SPIRITUAL AWAKENING CAN BE DANGEROUS TO YOUR FRAGILE SENSE OF IDENTITY AND YOUR FIRM CONCEPTION OF REALITY. ALSO, ONCE YOU START ON THIS PATH YOU CANNOT GO BACKWARDS. OH, YOU'LL WANT TO GO BACK, FROM TIME TO TIME. BUT YOU CAN'T. HAVE A NICE DAY!

It's kind of like The Matrix. Once you meet Morpheus and he gives you the blue pill (or is it the red pill?) you start to see the crazy insane huge expansive dynamic energy field that's holding us all together. And once you've seen it, you can't just NOT see it. Oh, I agree, you can try. You can try all you want, but you're going to KNOW differently. And that, my friends, is what waking up to True Reality is all about.

The interesting thing is that it doesn't really seem to matter what handle you grab ahold of. You can awaken within a scientific tradition just as beautifully as within a spiritual tradition. I can run all over the place talkin' smack about Getting Right With Jesus, and you can scamper around babbling about finding your true self with Myers-Briggs, and eventually, if our hearts and minds get cracked open just the tiniest bit, we will both expand into more joyful beings.

Choose whatever concept, whatever label, whatever metaphor makes your heart feel bigger and your mind feel energized. I love what Elizabeth Gilbert says about this in her amazing spiritual-journey memoir Eat, Pray, Love. She's at an ashram, in India, meditating and judging her meditation something fierce. She's trying to find her Authentic Center and simultaneously feeling horribly inadequate that her Assigned Mantra is making her crazy, crazy, crazy. And then all of a sudden the famous line from Jaws pops up in her consciousness, and she can't help cracking a goofy smile. "We're going to need a bigger boat."

So go ahead. Get yourself a bigger boat. There's a big freakin shark out there. Or rather, in here. If your shark is anything like mine, it's hungry, relentless, and pissed. It's the shark of Ego, munching away at your giant, juicy soul. It's the shark of Fear and Judgment, crunching down on your happy little hopes. You can keep feeding it fingers and toes and other non-essentials if you want, but believe me, it's going to keep circling back whenever there's chum in the water.

We are born to be the joyous creators of our own wonderful experience. And we are all creating, all the time. And then, for most of us, we look at our creations and say "Crap! I don't want that! Get that thing away from me!"

Fair enough. Choose something new, something crisp and fresh and tantalizing to chew upon with your own magnificent jaws. There's always this perfect present moment in which you can step into a new boat of consciousness. Oh, the Great White Ego will come swimming after you, its menacing fin piercing through the shining waters of your Being, but it's best not to take it too seriously. Just keep building your boat and let that poor bastard tire itself out.

Overwhelmed by Blog Money Making Info

Holy Freakin Cripes Batman!

How do you people do this? I've just spent the last several hours researching "Blogging for Fun and Money," and I feel like my brain is slowly collapsing in upon itself.

The internet is truly the most prolific, glorious, festering haystack that our species has ever dreamed up--and let's be honest, we've dreamed up a lot of haystacks (also known as "clusterfucks") in our brief time on earth. Meanwhile, my own little needle is feeling lost, lost, lost.

In the past couple of days I have explored the deep recesses of Hubpages, Squidoo, Isnare, Ebay, Ebooks, Ejunkies, Amazon, Paypal, Adsense, Ezinearticles, and once, by accident, Charles Bronson, but that's a whole different story.

My mission is fairly simple: I just want to write and make people laugh. Oh, and force people to be happy. Oh, and get paid for forcing people to be happy.

How hard can it be?

According to my friends Abraham and Buddha and Jesus and Wayne Dyer and Bob Proctor (and also my surrogate mom Carol and next-door neighbor Sharon) it ISN'T that hard. It isn't hard at all for the Universe to shower me with joy, success, and abundant creativity. It's just hard for me to accept, because I don't believe I deserve these things.

I don't think I'm good enough. And until I do, well, I will, in effect, prove myself right. One way or the other.

The Universe is so agreeable that it will support me either way. If I'm saying, "This is wonderful! There's so much good information here! It's going to be easy for me to start making money with my unique gifts!" The Universe replies, "Rock on, Babe! Here, let me give you some more stuff to confirm that feeling!" If I'm saying, "This is too much for me; I'm overwhelmed; I'm not good enough or smart enough to do this." The Universe says, "Hey, no problem! I can totally provide situations, people, and experiences that will add to that belief!"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what being Cut Off from Divine Reality feels like. Call it God, call it your Higher Power, call it Intuition, call it Fate, call it Ayn Rand--the All Being of Everything doesn't mind. It likes you anyway, and all it asks for is this one little thing in return:

"See yourself as I see you, and be happy."

Oh, and for anyone curious about The Way of Mastery, you can get more information at www.thewayofmastery.org.

The Way of Mastery

Greetings, Spiritual Bunnies of the Cosmos.

Wow. I gotta tell you, weird stuff starts to happen when you open yourself up to the Divine in All Its Forms. I'm pretty open these days. In fact, I'm kind of a Cheap Easy Date when it comes to anything wrapped in a "spiritual" package. This occasionally has its downsides. For example, I really don't want to talk about the multi-level marketing spiritual transformation system I purchased for only $1,595 plus tax. But mostly, it just makes life more and more fascinating.

Granted, I am fairly easily fascinated. I really enjoy restaurants that have large selections of sugar packets and liquid creamers waiting on the table so I can make condiment sculptures. We all have our personal muse, do we not?

I met a new friend through the internet who invited me to a Mastery Group. I accepted the invitation eagerly because I thought it was a Master Mind Group. My vague impression is that Master Mind Groups are where people get together for the purpose of communing with other like-minded, goal-oriented souls who want to achieve stuff. Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe they're just groups for like-minded, goal-oriented people to get together and play that game with the little multi-colored pegs where you get ten tries to guess right. Oooo, I love that game! But I digress.

When I arrived, I discovered that this particular gathering is actually a "Way of the Mastery" study group. The Way of Mastery is, among other things, a book, and the group is, among other things, a book group that studies this book. Here's what the book has to say about itself:

"A Guide to Awakening in Christ Mind: This volume contains the extraordinary teachings of Jesua ben Joseph (Jesus) as given over a three-year period through Jon Marc Hammer. These teachings were originally published in 1997 and known only to a small number of people. For the first time, The Way of Mastery is available as one volume, beautifully presented, to be read and cherished for a lifetime as that "way home" taught to Jesua Himself and now offered to the world."

Indeed. Well now. At this point I hadn't started to read the book, and I don't know anything about Jon Marc Hammer, but I am already burning with low-grade envy. Oh, and skepticism, let's not forget that. Really? REALLY?? You're just sitting around, Jon Marc, and JESUS shows up to tell you a thing or to? Of course, Neale Donald Walsh has a whole series called Conversations With God, where he, you know, converses with the Big Kahuna, but somehow that's easier for me to swallow. Even a very brief look at world religions will tell you that there seems to be quite a few different versions of God. In effect, you could say that everybody's got his or her own version. Like God is one of those ceramic lawn geese you see in the American midwest. People dress their lawn goose up in all different kinds of costumes, depending on season and holiday, but underneath, it's pretty much the same goose all the time. Jesus, though, somehow he seems more personal. More specific.

I am amused to observe that my first reaction is vague Puritan outrage. What happened to the good old days when we could just send these jokers to the Dunking Stool? I am even more amused to observe the secondary reaction of envy. I am so positive that IF I am ever chosen to receive the teachings of a non-physical energy, it's not going to be anyone like Jesus. I would probably get someone like. . .like. . . I don't know, what's that Mormon dude's name? I'm not bagging on the Mormons, mind you, but it would suck for me because I am very fond of my fully caffeinated Diet Coke each morning.

Okay. So, this isn't my first time at the Self Awakening Circus. So I know that those two emotions--envy and outrage--are the dubious gifts of Ego. And while my ego-self feels momentarily threatened by this book, this group, my True Self just sits back and crosses its legs in the shade, laughing at me. "Well, what are you going to do now?"

I sit with the group, and for two hours I participate in one of the best philosophical discussions I have ever experienced. And it's not just the verbal wordplay that's ringing my bells. There's an (Oh God, how I have grown tired of this word, but still!) ENERGY that's whipping round the room like a. . . like a. . . shit, I don't have the right metaphor handy. But it's powerful, this feeling. I'm watching the faces around me in the dusky light, and as these people read aloud and talk and laugh, they are starting to glow.

Someone reads a passage from the book's first chapter, and I feel strange things happening inside my chest. I feel like the plates in my brain are shifting. Until next time, I leave you with this passage. And no matter who you think it's from, I hope it does weird and wonderful things to you, too.

"Take a deep breath into the body and let it go. As the breath leaves the body, hold the thought that there is nothing worth holding onto any longer that keeps your peace and happiness at arm's length. Become committed--fully committed--to the experience of happiness, even as you have been fully committed to unhappiness, limitation, and lack. Give your Creator full permission to sweep the basement clean. There really is not anything down there worth defending or protecting."