Greetings Brother & Sisters,
As I contemplated what to address in my letter the obvious topic to reveal itself was the Autumnal Equinox. However, following the Spirit and disregarding the obvious, I have chosen a different but somewhat similar topic: Thanks. I was reading Mother Ruth’s book, Pondering, on a day that I was not feeling very well and came across her thoughts on the topic of Thanks. She insightfully writes, “Giving thanks often during the day for whatever good comes your way helps to build up a positive attitude.”
Who in their right mind is going to argue with a simple yet profound statement like that? 100% accepted by the whole of humanity except for maybe a few. Well, like I said earlier, I was not having a very good day. My cancer was giving me a lot of grief. I’ve had prostate cancer for nearly 10 years and I’ve cultivated an intentional attitude of gratitude. Where that intention gets tricky is giving thanks for not only the good things that come my way but also for the not so good things that come my way (i.e. prostate cancer) as oddball as that might sound. Why the not so good things?
Well, in those experiences I encounter a reveal of myself that I otherwise would never have had. In some of my experiences with illness and loss I have encountered what I would consider to be important lessons and teachers in my life. So by giving thanks for even the not so good things it helps me to integrate them into my life in a positive framework and experience the support and the love of God internally and externally through a loving community of family and friends. So I guess what I am saying is: “Under all the s..t, is a pony”, to quote a very dear friend and teacher who shared this sentiment with me after we discussed the topic of Thanks.
Thanks for all your love and support. I give thanks for all of you each and every day. And thank you God, for all that you have given me and for all that you have taken away.
Rev. Hats-N-Jackets
“I find hope in the darkest of days, and focus in the brightest. I do not judge the universe.”
― Dalai Lama XIV
From Father Paul
Brotherhood II – Lesson from May, 1970
What is this man…this creature, your brother. There is nothing more worthy of his being than the right direction and his following it: being employed, moving, doing and carrying out his thoughts, since upon this depends his usefulness to God, to his brother, and to the public which he serves. Man the creation of God, through his own present and future, may benefit his own place in the next life. In all these aspects he is concerned.
The consideration of this has often obliged us to lament unhappily about the condition of those outside–the unhappiness of mankind. But after all, that is what we are here for, to turn this unhappiness through its transmutation and the transmutator, into the knowledge of God, the Christos and our blessed Master.
Through the great mixture and confusion of thought, sometimes we are hardly able to make a right thing out of the material judgment of man. But through our work we are attempting to bring further the real Light of the Christos; that beacon Light that cuts through the fog of confusion and the intemperate zeal of some people in the outer world to do the wrong thing.
It is difficult at times to bring ourselves to think of some as brothers also–God’s children. Of our brother who is next to us; also in the Order, this is not so difficult because we see him at prayers. We see him in the morning at Communion. We know he has faults, and of course we see our own in him. To this also we attribute the imperfect knowledge that we have of things and the slow progress we feel we are making in attaining a better level of consciousness.
Like the children of Israel who were 40 years upon their journey from Egypt to Canaan, which might have been performed in less than one year, sometimes we feel as if we were doing the 40 years. But in reality it is a few days, comparatively speaking.
Clearly therefore, we see that we must clear our heads and rally every once in a while in managing our thoughts rightly. We will have saved time, saved our efforts, saved our brother’s feelings. We will see and do those things which we are instructed to do to give us better judgment, better understanding. We will free our mind of the confusion and make our faculties stronger, more steady and steadfast.
I would advise you at all times to be particularly careful of the many bombastic books that you will see advertised with glaring titles…You will probably find that they have a lot of very nicely written words, but no real information This precaution will save you money and us time, to get rid of the ideas which are of no use to you. Many new books are merely compilations on well established writing rearranged with showy covers to make them enticing to the public…
In our series of lessons you will always find that they will cover distinctly those things which are needed by you. They will be given to you as tools, not as theorems and not as a dogma or a creed. But their functions you will find sooner or later drop into place and become the tools of man. You must keep this in mind when you read them. Know that we are not selling you a new book. As a matter of fact we are not teaching you anything new.
Just as an exercise in accordance with your teacher’s work, we suggest that you learn to eliminate from your conversation for a period of time the personal “I” in your daily relationships with others. This process is not an elimination of yourself, or an attempt to make your selfhood secondary. Self is so real and is so closely related to what we can see with our individual eye that it is hard for us to think other than the relationship of this other being. But actually that is not what we are interested in. It is the true man, the true being, that accomplishes the great things without being forgotten about. And the more attention you give it the more work it will do for you.
To think first of self, the outer man, is to promote selfishness. This is a word derived from the same source. In the belief of many eastern religions, there is a continual inference that until man can think of himself other than as an individual and an isolated physical being, he can never partake of his true nature and feel and express the true movement of God and the power of Christ within. Or to express it in familiar words: we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
A prerequisite to man’s fuller life is considered in the light of these teachings as being a renunciation of those things which tend to cause the individual to be selfish. God may be conceived as one who manifests Himself purely for the purpose of service or for the creation of better things.
God is described as synonymous with love. This is because God, the Creator, the Father, is too great to describe. But He is ever giving and so we use the term love as an active expression of description.
Also with selflessness, God creates according to this theory. Not for his own pleasure, but according to His own nature and according to the needs of all His created beings.
God is selfless because alone He senses not. Through the mutual interchange of His giving and the receiving and giving on the part of man, God realizes Himself through Man. All things in nature give that they may live, for life is in the giving and not in the withholding.
In selfless giving to others, we are becoming what we are, because we have provided the channel through which those qualities given us may manifest.
Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year observance, begins at sundown on September 13 and ends at night fall on September 15th. Yom Kippur (day of atonement) begins in the evening of Tuesday, September 22nd and ends in the evening of Wednesday, September 23rd.
Shanah Tovah, Shnat Shalom
(A good and peaceful New Year)
Feast of the Fall Equinox (excerpts from ritual)
Equinox is the point of balance between light and darkness. We receive the power of the Spirit and the Light both of which we seek, both from above and within, and below this holy orb in which we live. This is the time of the Fall, which is a point of equinox, the time of the sun crossing the great solar equator of this orb. The enlightened student, who is searching for higher Self and reaching for higher life through service, will find this day important.
We can only make ourselves a sacrifice in the temple when and if the fire that burns within, what you might call conscience, is activated and we realize that this offering must originate itself within us. For we are offering up ourselves to the Holy One, which tells us right from wrong and holds us accountable for all errors more strictly than the laws of man.
Every night during retrospection we stand before this One and judge ourselves according to the needs of the body; we stand in humility and we look only to the Light, that we may see the true way.
The rich young man asserted he kept the law, but he was not ready to follow the Christ: to give up, to let go, the content of the world. Too many are content to escape condemnation; they are lukewarm. They fail to seek commendation such as the diligent merit of service. To gain and to have that “well done, good and faithful service” from the God within.
Let us now consider this night in the holy temple within and search for the Light, and keep the fire that has kept the Light burning as admission in the temple, that Solomon in all his glory could not hold one tiny candle light to the great Light of the Christ in you.
For love is ever the beginning of Knowledge, as fire is of light.
Carlyle—Essays. Death of Goethe.
Excerpts from “What the Father Wanted of Jesus” by Father Paul
“Some 12-14 years ago, I was given information to the effect that the psychic world and stuff was in the act of uniting with earth and, that at about this time as the new heaven and the new earth were forming, so would man’s sight become much more evident.
It is also becoming quite evident that right now students are seeing and hearing things without normal development and without having been trained in the sight of the psychic world.
They are seeing manifestations of people who have passed on and other psychic phenomena of negative nature. This is not insinuating that the students who see are negative or evil, but only that they have in some way accidentally opened up to the psychic realm or are seeing those things which are trying to manifest on this plane.
As I have told you before, as this time and age manifest in consciousness of change, many people without necessarily any training will see people manifest out of the psychic realm and some, or many, will be frightened at the unusual sights and, therefore, wish to leave or ask for help. Leaving will not change the situation at all, neither will panicking change anything.
What is needed is a little comprehensive understanding that they do not have to take looking or watching or doing anything about it. This is something that the Holy Order of Mans cannot stop for it is part of the change of earth and so if you see your long lost brother or wife or husband who has passed through transition prior to this come walking down the street–don’t be shocked….”
[Later in this lesson, Father gives instruction on calling upon the living Christ Jesus, nearer than hands and feet, to enter safely into this psychic world and its union with the earth:]
“Now on the first day of the week all the brethren were gathered together, and John began to speak to them, saying “My brethren, my fellow heirs, and my partners in the Christ Jesus, our Lord, know ye that unto you hath the Lord given from His hand power, and that He hath wrought for you very many mighty works, and miracles, and acts of grace…He hath never made Himself manifest unto you through the eyes of the body, neither have ye hearkened unto Him through the ears of the body, but He hath made Himself visible unto you through the integrity of your heart, and by visions, and by works which are Holy. Strengthen ye yourselves, then, in Him, and ye shall remember Him at all times; moreover, ye shall also remember the mystery and the associations which hath come unto you, and which our Lord hath fulfilled.”
Children Often Have Strong Memory Of The Time Before They Were Born
As you read these stories, I encourage you to practice something that I learned from a 10th-century scholar in India named Tilopa. His advice was to “have a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing.” Allow yourself to turn in peace to the memory of God, which is possibly still shining in your own quiet mind. -Wayne Dyer
One night at dinner, our younger foster/adopted son(he was around four years old) started talking at great length about his life “in the stars” and how he had all these brothers and sisters who lived there. He said he’d seen my husband and me from there and tried to get our attention many times but we never could see him, so he decided to be born through his mom so we could find him.
My husband and I were floored to say the least. I’d had a few miscarriages after my first son, so once my younger son told us what he’d seen, I knew his soul had been trying to come in through me even though my body was not able to do it.–Longmont, Colorado
My son was around age four when we were playing our game of “I love you more because…”
I told him, “I love you more because…I love you beyond infinity, around the moon two times, around Mars, and touching every star on the way back to you.” Pretty great answer, right? I had him beat. Or at least I thought I did. Very seriously, my son placed his hands on either side of my face, locked his crystal blue eyes with mine, and said, “Mommy! I love you more because I picked you while I was in heaven.”
Needless to say, he won the game.–Taft, California
At the age of five, my younger son announced out of the blue that he had chosen my wife and me to be his parents. Intrigued, my wife asked how he had done this. He matter-of-factly stated that while he was in heaven before he was born, he had been allowed to go through one door to pick his parents, and through another door to select his brothers and sisters. We were not churchgoers, and have no knowledge of his having obtained this idea from any external source. –Orthez, France
I had just returned from a weekend retreat in which I was totally immersed in Spirit, when my four-year-old grandson climbed up on my lap. Snuggling as close as he could, he looked me in the eyes and very seriously said, “I am forgetting how to fly.”
It was a profound moment in my life, and I have never forgotten it. My grandson taught me the truth of where we come from and who we are within. This truth is so easily forgotten in the business of living on this planet. Consistent meditation and prayer time help me to remember “how to fly.” O’Fallon, Missouri
–Excerpts from Memories of Heaven by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
Brothers and Sisters,
Again we have arrived at the time of transition and the harvest of the fruits of our labors. With this in mind I got a message a few weeks ago about a friend in Georgia who had passed on. He had fallen down a flight of stairs and passed quickly. Mike was a mentor as well as a friend. He taught me how to be a good care taker of those with mental illness as well as those with substance abuse issues. At one time in his life he had been chosen as Social Worker of the Year in Georgia, but this is not what I’m writing about. Mike was born with Cerebral Palsy which affected both his speech as well as the gait of his walk, also at a young age he had fallen out of his parent’s car in the driveway and got run over by it. Mike was a dedicated worker who worked long hours both in his work at the state, as well as his own private practice. We had long talks about life, sometimes sipping single malt scotch to bring clarity to the conversation. I remember one conversation with Mike when he told me he was looking forward to the day when he could rest from his body. When I got word of his passing I reflected on this conversation. Several night ago I had a dream, in it I was standing in a hallway when Mike came in, he walked up to me and hugged me, he did not speak but there was a smile on his face, he then turned and walked down the hall as he walked he had his same CP gait, but as he continued down the hall his gait became more and more normal till he reached the end of the hall and was walking perfectly, he turned toward me and waved and passed through the door to his right. I am mindful from this experience how temporary each experience is in this life and that we remain whole as souls and spirits in the mind of God. Happy Fall (no pun intended) to us all. God’s blessing to my good friend Mike, walk in peace. -Donald
Even after all this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,
“You owe me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.
-14th century Sufi poet Hafiz