April 25, 2007
In recent months I had been wondering if it would be Korea that would bring the U.S. to its knees. Perhaps it just did.
The perpetrator of this recent horror, a tormented young soul who was unable find a speck of light amidst his own inner darkness, has been a searing reminder of my beloved brother Lt. Cmdr. Robert J. Kennedy, who came home from Viet Nam and took his own life. That was of course, many years ago, and for the most part the numbing effect of time has allowed the loss to become bearable until an event like Virginia Tech crashes through my shields.
My brother's suicide and the endless grief that followed, was the catalyst for me to spend the rest of my life trying to learn about the nature of consciousness, and its effect upon our individual and collective reality. I pleaded with the only notion of god I knew at that time, to help me to understand what has gone wrong if someone so beautiful, so full of intelligence and promise could take his own life? So, in his dying he also gave me a great gift. My prayer today, is that Virginia Tech and Cho Seung Hui will do this for our country and for all the world.
Is it too soon after this bloody slaughter of innocents to imagine that Cho Seung Hui has also in some perverse way, given us all a great gift?....A gift of riveting reflection on our current human condition, and the burning need to ask the question, "What's it going to take to turn this unsafe world around?"
Tears filled my eyes last night as I listened to Oprah interview one of Cho's professors. She described a barely adult Asian male who seemed to be..... 'crying behind his sunglasses'. She was not depicting a brutal unfeeling savage,.... but a sad, frustrated and angry young man, who did not have the interpersonal skills to have the love and attention he needed, and that he probably never ever had. Was that a way that my brother felt in the years before his suicide? Is that how I might be living, no... existing, if I had not received the grace and wisdom of a 'higher' consciousness and intentional loving community?
Today I realize once again that the transformation of consciousness holds the only possibility for a true culture of happiness to take root on this planet. I know those sound like strong and perhaps arrogant words in their certainty, but please allow me a moment to explore here some of the shifts in perception that happened for me in my early days, months and years at Cornucopia Institute.
In the late 1970's I was invited to participate in a Living Love training at Cornucopia Institute, in the rolling hills of rural Kentucky, that took place in the week from Christmas Day to New Years Day . I was told very little about where I was going or what I might be experiencing. I just knew that the place was called The Living Love Center based upon the teachings of Ken Keyes, Jr. the author of The Handbook to Higher Consciousness, and other books pointing to personal and interpersonal pathways in the Science of Happiness. I thought, If happiness had been boiled down to a science I sure wanted to know about it. I had concluded during my years in parochial school that this very life is the only heaven there is, but wondered why is no one living as though? It frightened me to think I was the only one who saw it this way? But heavy hearts and lives of quiet desperation surrounded me, and I just knew this wasn't right.
It would be difficult to describe all that happened for me in that profoundly life changing week, but if you'll bear with me I'll give it my best shot and touch on a few of the highlights. First of all, there was no stereotypical Corn. U 'student'. We came from every walk of life, and from all over the globe. There were the granola types, and the suburban homeowners, the corporate types, the doctors and lawyers and professors, and the college students, young and old and everywhere in between. There were a few classically beautiful people, but most were somewhere between average, and downright plain. But by the end of that week, everyone was radiant and decidedly more beautiful. And the common denominator was that everybody...... handsome, homely, rich or poor, everybody.... had 'stuff'. At Corn. U. "Stuff" was the vernacular for the thoughts and feelings that kept happiness at bay. Some seemed to have heavier stuff than others in content, but it didn't really matter much....all 'stuff' did the same thing. It kept each person from experiencing the happiness he or she knew was a possible but elusive reality...But how...to get there, to get free .... free from the hold of our stuff...?......That was the big question. And we were given big answers.
The way to get free put forth at Cornucopia, was The Methods. The Methods were a synthesis of ancient Eastern Mysticism and Western Humanistic Psychology...and basically the Methods taught us first, to go within, and to become increasingly more aware of our inner states. That it was the conscious and subconscious messages and limiting beliefs that were the cause of our unhappiness, and not our actual circumstances. And by invoking the ability to witness all of it, offered distance from their hold, and then eventually, freedom. Ken Keyes, Jr. the developer of this system was a shining example of this truth. He was a loving giving happy and productive man..Yet he was also a paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair for most of his life, and who who never seemed to be without a lover. And so, that led me to my first big shift...Happiness is an inside job, and not dependent upon outer circumstances. Hmmm???!!! If that was all that I had gotten that first week it would have been huge...but there was more...So much more.
The single most important thing anyone could learn at Corn U. was that they could learn to love themselves.... That anyone and everyone deserved this value, simply for being alive.....Yep, even a mass murderer at Corn U. would have been nurtured and supported to love and accept himself..So, the old Judeo-Christian morality notion was crumbling, and my heart and mind were enormously relieved, ..I recognize truth when I feel it.....Sin, and its companion guilt, began to look like a ridiculous and antiquated ideas, and that was another huge perceptual shift for me, having been raised Catholic. And original sin now looked like the sinister plot of organized religion to control and disempower people under the heavy burden of unworthiness. In this new construct, I was good from the gitgo. And this felt really right and true, in my body and in my mind...It concurred with my original sense that everyone is, in their true nature really innocent, just acting out a karmic script, a play of intersecting energies, an outcropping of the one mind.... And if they knew better, were more nourished, had better skills, all would play out at a more refined level corresponding to their level of awareness. So, the key in each situation to more or less positive outcomes is the level of awareness of the individual.
The next most important thing that I learned at Corn U. was that "There is Only One"....That beyond all of our apparent differences,...there is only..One..One Thing Happening, and that is this,,,All of this, in an eternally unfolding dance of emergence and dissolution. And once one knows this and lives this as an abiding truth then one cannot intentionally harm another because one knows it affects both the whole and one's own self.
So, now for this first time in my life I was living in a temporary community of people committed to loving...both themselves and one another...to finding the perfection of soul and spirit that was behind or maybe obscured by the circumstances of each one's life. And in this community my whole self was welcome......I did not have to hide any part...in fact, there was little place where I could hide even if I had wanted to. So out came my heartache, my self esteem issues, my judgments and my fears, and mingled amidst the processes of beating pillows, endless crying, primal screaming and raw encounters with one another, there was tons of laughter, singing soulful love songs to one another and to life, and playing with each other like a bunch of eight year olds at recess. We scrubbed each other up in showers, supported each other in seeing our stuff, and learned to fight fair, so that out of any disagreement everyone could win. We were learning to create conscious community. And the experience of connectedness was paramount to our healing. We were learning that we were not alone in our stuff, that we were not sick, just human. Or it may be more accurate to say that the whole human race is sick, and it was comforting to not feel alone in it any more, ever again.
Lives were changed that week. Changed forever. Many things had been revealed to us that were so obvious... that may have been too obvious to be seen before. We were sick because we were isolated from one another's love, living in energy fields that did not support life, and did not nurture emotional freedom and wholeness.
It's too late to wish that Cho Seung Hui could have had such an experience, but it's not too late to learn from his life what must be done to save the world from many repetitions of Virginia Tech, and other heartbreaking events in the making. We are at a perilous crossroads in our evolution and we have to take conscious control of our destiny if the human race is to survive and thrive...that is becoming more clear every day now. Eckhardt Tolle, a contemporary spiritual teacher talks about the legacy of the accumulated pain body. Each individual has one, some more burdened than others, and every country has one..... and similarly, some are more burdened than others. And it is this 'pain body' that is now coming up for clearing, everywhere we look creating the enormous chaos we see all around us. It is this pain body that must be seen and healed if we are to move in the direction of a loving and peaceful earth.
Ones like Cho Seung Hui just bring it more clearly into view.
Jivanak @ aol.com
www.TantricHealingTouch.com
Source: WVNS