Acceptance: The Peace That Passeth All Understanding
I sent an economic consultant two book titles: Sacred Economics and What Do We Do After Money? These two books suggest that our current global agreement of currency exchange is moving through a massive makeover, melting down and rising up into something completely creative and compassionate. My friend’s text response: “My thing right now is how to control greed”.
Knowing my friend I understood that he was not only speaking to global greed, but also how was he to control his own craving-for more, more, more. All that is outside of us is born from within. His question takes us to the root of the money issue. Greed arises from craving. Craving arises from attachment. Attachment arises out of fear.
Money in and of itself is an object. It is a piece of decorated paper. It only holds its power because we are all in agreement with its stated value. Each time we make a currency exchange we transmit cultural, spiritual and psychological beliefs. At a young age we discovered the perceived power of this piece of paper. If there was not a lot of it around, many of the toys, sweets or even school supplies we wanted were not coming into our lives. For some of us, money was used to replace love or as a bribe for love. Some of us understood that money was in unlimited supply. Maybe we were taught that ‘time is money’ or that the more hours we work the more pieces of paper we accumulate, the more stuff we can own and the more prestige we acquire. How we learn to treat ourselves and others is often taught to us by how we relate with money.
A saying was brought into society that ‘Money is the root of all evil’. This piece of paper with a bunch of symbols is the root of all evil? Wow, that is a lot of power for a piece of paper. Evil simply exists, just as love exists. My experience of evil is actions arising from fear and pain inside that harm us or others. Oftentimes, until we act in this way we are not aware that we are ‘evil’. Like Love, evil has many expressions. Money is paper, it is how we relate to it that matters. In my experience I observe that if a person has a handful of this paper or three Swiss banks full he or she might perceive that there is never enough. If we feel that we are running on empty, no matter how little or how much material matter in our possession, we will never feel full-of food, objects, money, houses, or love.
This craving has arisen from lifetimes of living as separate from the natural abundance of Nature. Humanity is moving through an unprecedented cosmic consciousness shift. The Mayans of Central America, the Altai of Mongolia, the Hopi of North America, the Maori of New Zealand and many other earth honoring tribes speak of these times on planet earth as a what the Q’ero of Peru name the Pachakuti-“The Great Turning.” Pacha means world and Kuti means reversal-“world reversal.” The Earth and Her peoples are rapidly turning away from living in a world order founded in fear and hierarchy towards creating a new paradigm grounded in love and harmonic diversity. Each one of us composes the larger body called humanity. Each one of us is given the opportunity, moment to moment, to become aware of how this feeling of emptiness leads us to crave more and more.
Each of us is evolving a New Earth consciousness out of lifetimes of violence. The Mayans say that we are in the midst of “the eradication of the Dark Mentalist or negative forces.” This Great Turning is a turning inward to witness those shadow thoughts and addictive emotional patterns, compelling us to act separate from our inner divine authority. When we engage these rejected parts of ourselves as a mother welcomes home her long lost children, we begin to fill up the emptiness we feel inside with empathy, forgiveness, and understanding.
The Altai of Mongolia refers to these Great Turning times as the emergence of ‘The Age of the Feminine.’ The past 5,000 years humanity has conducted its relationships based on a perpetrator/victim model. This model oppresses and suppresses those qualities that are deemed ‘feminine’-nurturing, feeling, intuitive, sensing and relational. This hierarchical paradigm thrives on what Gautama Buddha said are the roots of human suffering (evil): craving, aversion and attachments. The emptiness that we feel can only be made full when we consciously choose to change inner directions.
I discovered the key to feeling full for me lies in the practice of accepting whatever arises with gratitude. This teaching came to me in a dramatic moment when an Alpha Romeo was speeding towards me. I looked it in the headlights and calmly stated: “Oh, I’m going to get run over.’ In deeply, clearly, honestly accepting ‘what is’ I melted into that deep well within that is ‘the Peace that Passeth all understanding’. My entire body relaxed and no bones were broken. I could not control the Alpha Romeo. What I could be in charge of was how to respond to what is just as it is no matter what it is.
In acceptance we fill ourselves up with the entire cosmos. When I become aware that I am craving, attached or averting something within or without, I sink into my body, breathe, and accept it with an open heart of gratitude. In that acceptance I enter into divine communion with All That Is and become full of a radiant, dynamic ease. Living in an emptiness of craving, desires are never fully fulfilled. Greed is a way to fill it up, yet no matter how much material matter we value as matters, what truly matters is the divine inherent within all matter.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. We are the ones we have been waiting for.— Hopi elder
