Roberta Grimes

Emotional

Posted by Roberta Grimes • November 23, 2024 • 1 Comment
Afterlife Research, Human Nature, Jesus

Love is but a song we sing. Fear’s the way we die.
You can make the mountains ring, or make the angels cry.
Though the bird is on the wing, and you may not know why,
Come on, people now, smile on your brother,
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.

Some may come and some may go. He will surely pass.
When the one that left us here returns for us at last.
We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading in the grass.
Come on, people now, smile on your brother,
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.

 If you hear the song I sing, you will understand. Listen…
You hold the key to love and fear, all in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both. It’s there at your command.
Come on, people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together. Try to love one another right now!
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), from “Get Together” (1963)

The single characteristic that most uniquely defines us as human beings is that we are driven by our deeply complex, highly nuanced, and often overwhelming-feeling emotions. Of course, even non-human creatures will recoil from whatever they fear; and we who have pets know that non-human animals will experience an affinity for those who feed them that looks something like love. We humans, though, experience a very much vaster range of more complex and much more intense emotions, like rage and jealousy, yearning and craving, humility and compassion, sorrow and joy, embarrassment and many other various emotions, with our emotions often experienced by us as being supercharged sometimes, or as feeling exponentially better or worse because they are happening in various complex combinations. And we have not yet even mentioned here the three greatest human emotions. Those three core emotions which quite literally define our relationship with the ineffable Divine are, of course, gratitude, forgiveness, and love.

Human beings alone, among all the creatures of this earth, are intensely emotional. We are intrinsically emotional, and altogether driven by our emotions. And that, my dear friends, is all by design! We are born on earth to have experiences that will enable us to learn how to raise our personal spiritual vibrations ever farther away from fear and other negative emotions, and ever closer to ultimate, perfect love. Insofar as any human being ever has been able to determine, learning how to ever better perform that process is the only reason why we even come to earth. And to give us an ideal place where we can raise our spiritual vibrations well is the sole reason why this material universe even exists at all.

It is all so amazingly simple, really! Afterlife researchers were astonished to figure all of this out very soon after the turn of this new century. But the truth seemed at first to be just too simple. The afterlife evidence overwhelmingly suggested it all to be true, and then of course we were open-minded enough to take the father of quantum mechanics, Dr. Max Planck, at his literal word. Dr. Planck told us early in the twentieth century that his work in quantum physics was suggesting that consciousness is the base creative force which underlies all of reality. As he said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Dr. Albert Einstein came toward the end of his life to agree with Dr. Planck, saying among other things, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” And the great twentieth-century polymath Nikola Tesla agreed with them both, saying, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

So the world’s greatest minds of all time understood by the middle of the twentieth century what actually is going on! And yet, incredibly, even almost a century later, still materialist scientists are so profoundly clueless about the primary role of what you and I experience as consciousness –  or we might call our experience of it “conscious awareness” –  that even today, materialist scientists cluelessly continue to seek a source of consciousness inside the gray meat that is encased within each human skull. And of course, we know that the foolish folks at the Institute for Noetic Studies, who proudly claim for themselves cutting-edge status, still imagine that consciousness might somehow arise from within the human brain.

Yet still, despite all these various materialist Luddite laggards, by now most of us do know better. And most of us understand by the time that we reach young adulthood that for human beings, our core work of being alive is to learn how to ever better govern our own emotions so we can with ever more efficiency grow and perfect ourselves spiritually. As our frame-verse for today tells us, you do indeed “hold the key to love and fear, all in your trembling hand.” And yes indeed, “just one key unlocks them both. It’s there at your command.” This is truly the greatest core human lesson of all! Fear is the literal opposite of love. The two emotions are polar opposites, just as darkness is the opposite of light. And until you learn to trust in God’s love completely, to the point where with God’s protection you can vanquish all fears, you flat cannot love at all without reservation.

My beloved guide and I therefore strongly urge you to at once banish all fear-based entertainments from your life. Scary movies, scary novels, and so on can seem like harmless fun, but they are not at all harmless! Since they inspire the emotion of fear in us, they make it much harder for us to feel unmixed love of any kind, so they work to negate the very purpose for which we each have come to earth in this lifetime. My dear one, if you still fear anything at all, whether it is nuclear war or the darkness of night, then please insulate yourself from scary entertainments for a while. Instead, concentrate on following Jesus’s precepts. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And He said, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear” (1JN 4:18).

Some of our greatest modern spiritual teachers immersed themselves in using the original and highly spiritual and contemplative Way of Jesus as the only way to right great wrongs. Wow, if ever there were gigantic opportunities with complete justification for feeling and expressing self-righteous rage, for even going to outright war, then my goodness, it would have been if you were a black person in the American South of the early 1960s! But if those who were then fighting for their civil rights had not managed to control their emotions enough to remain peaceful and loving, no matter what might have been their provocations, then their whole cause might have been forever lost.

The recently transitioned Dr. Barbara Holmes of the Center for Action and Contemplation (cac.org) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, talked about using the contemplative aspect of human emotion in these situations. She tells us that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were classic contemplatives, deeply committed to silent witness, and to what she calls “embodied and performative justice”. Dr. Holmes tells us that the civil rights marches of the 1960s were deeply contemplative. “Sometimes silent, sometimes drenched with song, but always contemplative. This may mean within the context of a desperate quest for justice that while weary feet traversed well-worn streets, hearts leaped into the lap of God. While children were escorted into schools by national guardsmen, the song “Jesus Loves Me” became an anthem of faith in the face of contradictory evidence. You cannot face German Shepherds and fire hoses with your own resources; there must be God and stillness at the very center of your being…. What saves you is the blessed merger of intuitive knowing with rationality, pain, and resolve.”  

Dr. Holmes adds that, “Like a spiritual earthquake, the resolve of the marchers affirmed the faith of foremothers and forefathers. Each step was a reclamation of the hope unborn. Each marcher embodied the communal affirmation of already/not yet sacred spaces…. The sacred act of walking together toward justice was usually preceded by a pre-march meeting that began with a prayer service, where preaching, singing, and exhortation prepared the people to move toward the hope they all held. This hope was carefully explicated by the leadership as a fulfillment of God’s promises. As a consequence, the movement that spilled from the churches to the streets was a ritual enactment of a communal faith journey toward the basileia [realm] of God….” And Dr. King could maintain this contemplative love even when hatred-filled bigots firebombed his house with his wife and infant daughter inside, while he was away from it and preaching! He rushed home, reassured himself that his family was safe and only his porch had been damaged, and then he went outside and confronted the enraged and heavily armed mob that was ready to go to war for him. Dr. King told the mob calmly that they must peacefully disperse. Go home, because nothing will be solved by fighting.

We are living now in the very much better America that sixty years ago Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called into being with his movement that was conceived in and powered by the pure contemplative love that Jesus taught. I myself live in a formerly Confederate state which is one-third black, one-third white, one-third Hispanic, and full of beautiful, peaceful, shining faces of all shades. We are free now of any form of hatred, and all of us happily live our lives in friendly, integrated neighborhoods. Dr. King gave his life for the hope that his four little children would one day live in just this kind of hatred-free nation. And while back then, when the evil was at its height, this kind of America might not have seemed to be possible so soon, now indeed, here we already are! Oh, a few old race-crusaders still try to keep the hatred going. Shame on them.The rest of us know, thanks to Dr. King and his generation of spiritual giants, that race truly does not matter at all. We even see interracial dating and marriages now, and we don’t look twice. Love is the most powerful force there is! What Jesus’s teachings have proven through those, like Dr. King, who are His greatest disciples, is that there is no force that can stand against the power of love when it is used by those who empower themselves with sufficient love to wield it. Only listen to Dr. King as he teaches us, and he thereby transforms us all!

“So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow,” He said, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.

“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

“This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

“This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!”
            – from “I Have a Dream,” delivered 8/28/63 at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Human beings are fundamentally emotional beings. And each of us has the power to employ our emotions for good, or for ill. When we do as Dr. King did, and live lives always driven and empowered by a tremendous love which then can inspire that same great love in others, we truly can transform the world!

Come on, people now, smile on your brother,
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
I said, come on, people now, smile on your brother,
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now!
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), from “Get Together” (1963)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)