And God Was Happy

In the beginning man created God. And man said: “Let there be God of Light and let there be God of Darkness.” And man separated those Gods and he called the Light God, Sun, and he called the Dark God, Moon, and so it was for 10,000 years.

Then man asked: “Why are the buffalo easy to hunt one day and another day hard to hunt?” And hungry man said: “Let there be Buffalo God who sacrifices his life so that I can live and he thanked God Buffalo for his concern,” and so it was for 10,000 years.

Then man asked: “Why does it rain sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t?” So man said: “Let there be Rain God who determines who is worthy of rain and who is not.” And man planted wheat and barley and prayed to God Rain for rain. And so it was for 10,000 years.

Then man said: “Let there be my God who prefers me and not your God who prefers you.” And man took his God with him to war against the other man and his God. And man enslaved his captors and brought sacrifices to his God, and so it was for 10,000 years.

Then man said: “Let there be ‘The One God’” which was another way of saying, “let there be my God who prefers me and not your God who prefers you.” And man murdered without mercy all those infidels that didn’t believe in The One God, and so it was for 10,000 years.

Then some man said: “Imagine there is no ‘The One God’ who is really ‘my God who prefers me.’ There is sun and moon, wheat and barley, buffalo and rain and me and you.” And that man asked: “How can we all exist together as one?” And so man freed his slaves and let the buffalo roam and developed hydroponic farming. And that man said: “We must stop being so fruitful and multi-plicitous and be responsible citizens of our world,” and so it was for 10,000 years.

And God was happy. Finally.

7 Comments

ed towbin · January 21, 2016 at 10:44 pm

Nice piece of work.
Alevay!

Thanks,
Ed

Barry Winograd · January 27, 2016 at 7:48 pm

Very simple, very truthful, very clear.

David Fournier · February 9, 2016 at 4:25 pm

Excellent short article and right on target. The War of Religions starts on this theme,, my god is bigger than your god…

anitakhaldy@comcast.net · November 15, 2018 at 10:08 pm

In the face of so much continued environmental destruction and the looming climate crisis we, like many of you, find ourselves wondering, are the forces against us just too entrenched and powerful? Is it possible to turn this ship around? When are we too far down the path of climate change to save ourselves?

Just last week we got some alarming but clear information from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on the state of our climate. The report assessed more than 6,000 scientific papers, with input from 91 authors and editors from 40 countries; they found that we are already seeing severe climate impacts and that’s with just 1 degree of temperature rise.

Texas had its third 500-year flood in the span of 3 years. In the past decade, we’ve had the 10 hottest days ever recorded. And get this, the North Pole is on track to be ice-free for the first time ever next summer. The report went on to say that if we allow the global temperature to rise 2 degrees Celsius, it will be much worse than previously projected.

Let me paint a picture of what a 2-degree-Celsius world would look like:

Collapse of all the world’s coral reefs – let’s remember the coral reefs are the nurseries of our seas.
10 feet of sea level rise by 2100 in some regions
Permanent drought covering one-quarter of the Earth
More than 100 million climate refugees migrating from global South
Clearly this isn’t a future we want.

Finally, the IPCC report went on to say there is a significant risk of crossing critical thresholds and even triggering tipping points if we allow the planet to warm beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Given this news, how does the historic Paris Climate Agreement that 190 countries signed in 2015 help us? Unfortunately, right now it falls far short. Analysis of the commitments made under the Paris Agreement shows that they will ultimately lead to a world well above 2 degrees Celsius.

It’s clear now that if we want life – all of life – to have a future on this planet, we simply cannot allow global temperature to rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius.

We are all in this together. We have got to be in total solidarity.
The I heart revolution…Grounding to our planet for heart health and grounding to re-connect with our beautiful planet.We seem to be in self-sabotage mode, and it is leading us into illness, heart break and grief for the planet and the full spectrum of life before us.But there is hope for our blue planet.People aren’t the worst…they are the only hope for the planet.
Despite our Dark President Trump and his denial of climate change…America’s leading businesses, cities,states,colleges and universities are joining world leaders to tackle climate change.
And the woman said,”Gaia is life. She is all, the very soul of the earth. She has no tolerance for cruel family members. As she is life. She offers nourishment for all her children…as she is the primordial deity and personification of the Earth. She is the celestial body which houses all of life. She is the one to nurture and shelter humankind, providing for all the needs of life. She can see that part of her, the environment is dying. Mother has gone through hellish experiences surrounded by war,human trafficking, and environmental damage. Mother nature is not to be feared,as she has put up with our ignorance and greed. The rising water levels due to climate change, which caused the St Marks Basilica in Venice to see its worst flooding today oct 2018,since1872. People were wading through three feet of water. The signs are not Gaia’s wrath upon her children. Mother nature is not vengeful and punishing in her ways.We are fearful now, when we see the power of nature barreling as hurricanes and forest fires ablaze…but it is not mother nature punishing her creation. She is not the personification of earth shattering chaos. She is mother earth unconditionally birthing the best that she can possibly give. And all that she can and has to give. She is having to survive one on slaught after on slaught. She is unwell and weak, and yet she gives so willingly. It is we who are going to have to mend our ways and respect Mother nature. Despite the hype…there is nothing to fear from mother nature. It is we who need to save our selves and the planet,as we do not live in a fools paradise. Mother has taught us better and we really do know better. Forgive us for our prideful ways. We need to learn to live in harmony with our selves and all our relations. 70% of our insect populations have died…Mother’s heart beat is carrying the weight of our willful blindness. When will the prodigal child come back to mother, and touch her feet in deeply felt gratitude and not some entitled, superficial toleration of her unbound generosity. She has given and given to where there is little wriggle room in her womb for more and more expansion, more damming, more drilling, more poisoning.She clearly sees us for who we really are. Her season has come and gone,and we have given lip service to her cylces,her waxing and waning, her not being her full self…Mother earth now needs palliative care, due to the toxins in her body and her sense of disorientation. We need to be all grown up and take responsibility for our actions and behavior.” To which she said,”AMEN.” And she was happy.

Anita Khaldy Kehmeier · November 20, 2018 at 4:38 pm

“If a particular society’s cultural world—the dreams that have guided it to a certain point—become dysfunctional, the society must go back and dream again.” Thomas Berry.

Anita Khaldy Kehmeier · November 24, 2018 at 8:40 am

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Twelve Principles of Universe, by Thomas Berry
August 22, 2016
The Twelve Principles of Universe by Thomas Berry

Universe, our solar system, and planet Earth in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence constitute for the human community the primary revelation of Ultimate Mystery whence all things emerge into being.
Universe is a unity, an interacting and intrinsically related community of beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time. The unity of planet Earth is especially clear; each being of the planet is profoundly implicated in the existence and functioning of every other being of the planet.
From its beginning Universe is a spiritual (meaningful) as well as a physical reality.
Universe has a violent as well as a harmonious aspect: but it is consistently creative in the larger arc of its development.
The three basic laws of Universe or Cosmogenetic Principles, at all levels of reality are: differentiation, autopoiesis or subjectivity, and communion.
The emergent process of Universe is irreversible and non-repeatable. The movement from non-life to life on planet Earth is a one-time event, so too the movement from life to the human form of consciousness.
Earth, within the solar system, is a self-emergent, self-nourishing, self-governing, self-healing, self-educating community. All particular life systems in their being, their nourishment, their governing, their healing, and their education, must integrate their functioning within this larger complex of mutually dependent Earth systems.
The genetic coding process is a process through which the world of the living evolves, educates, and rules itself. At the human level genetic coding mandates a further trans-genetic cultural coding by which specifically human qualities find expression. Cultural coding is carried on by educational processes.
Earth is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
The human is that being in whom Universe attains reflexive consciousness of itself.
Earth is primary; the human is derivative.
The present human situation can be described in three sentences:
In the twentieth century the glory of the human has become the desolation of Earth.
The desolation of Earth is becoming the destiny of the human.
All human institutions, professions, programs, and activities must now be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually-enhancing human-Earth relationship.
In light of these statements it is proposed that the historical mission of our times is:
To reinvent the human: at the species level with critical reflection within the community of life systems in a time-developmental (timely!) context
The Universe is a Green Dragon, by Brian Swimme:

Our ancestry stretches back through the life forms and into the stars, back to the beginning of the primeval fireball.

This universe is a single, multiform, energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence, and life. All of this is new. None of the great figures of human history were aware of this. Not Plato, not Aristotle, or the Hebrew prophets, or Confucius, or Newton, or any other world-maker.

We are the first generation to live with an empirical view of the origin of the universe. We are the first humans to look into the night sky and see the birth of stars, the birth of galaxies, the birth of the cosmos as a whole. Our future as a species will be forged within this new story of the world.

The Dream of the Earth, by Thomas Berry:

If the dynamics of the universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the sun, and formed the earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the
continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present
understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the universe, we can have
confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.

Anita Khaldy Kehmeier · November 24, 2018 at 10:06 am

Donald Trump became president of the United States. But make no mistake, it is really Holy Darkness that won this election.

Last year, Kali, the Hindu Goddess of death, destruction and resurrection, appeared on the Empire State Building, projected as an avatar of conservation by the filmmakers of Racing Extinction, a documentary about the environmental catastrophe now upon us. At the time I was so struck by the image, I wrote an article about the apparition. This is the sign of the times, Kali Takes New York, I raved.

On election night, as the results were projected onto the Empire State Building, all I could see was Kali’s fierce stare. This was déjà vu. This time, Kali took America.

Donald Trump might already be picking his deplorable cabinet, but it is the Dark Mother, the destroyer of worlds, oracle of holy change, the tenderhearted be-header, that won this country. Kali has brought down our house in a shocking blow; all the illusions of America, stripped in a single night. We are not who we thought we were. Now we must get ready to stand in her fires of transmutation. We need them.

Listening to Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, one had the impression that this was a different woman from the political candidate that we have come to begrudgingly accept as the champion of the Democratic Party, assured by the establishment to become the first Madam President.

Stripped of her hopes and lifelong dreams, speaking honestly and transparently about her pain, this woman in a dark suit was a far cry from the controlled, manicured version of her shiny political persona. Stripped of her agenda, stripped of her certainties, this Hilary might have won the country. This Hillary touched our hearts. This is what we look like after the Dark Mother has had her way with us.

We stop shining of the false light. As our heart breaks, as our veneer cracks, we open to more integrity, more truth, more tenderness. We stop trying to be all things for all people. We become this one small thing, feigning nothing.

“Only to the degree that people are unsettled is there any hope for them.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Paradoxically, the price of true hope, it seems, is being unsettled beyond repair. And this is exactly the opportunity our political moment is presenting to us all. Right now, from all corners of our shocked culture, there are cries of hope, demands of needing to become even brighter lights amidst the spreading darkness. I disagree.

I think that this moment gives us an opportunity for reckoning only if instead of running for the light, we let ourselves go fully into the dark. If instead of resolving our discomfort too quickly, we consider the possibility of staying in the uncomfortable, in the irreconcilable, in the unsettled.

Before we rush in to reanimate the discourse of hope prematurely, we must yield to what is present. Receptivity is the great quality of darkness; darkness hosts everything without exception. The Dark Mother has no orphans. We must not send suffering into exile — the fear, the heartbreak, the anger, the helplessness all are appropriate, all are welcome. We can’t dismember ourselves to feel better.

We can’t cut of the stream of life and expect to heal.

Cutting off the inconvenient is a form of spiritual fascism. By resolving to stay only in the light in times of immense crisis, we split life; engage in emotional deportation, rather than hosting the vulnerable. Difficult feelings need to be given space so they can come to rest. They need contact.

In a culture of isolation, be the invitation to everything.

The intuition that the Dark Mother has returned is pervasive if we heed the signs, and our thirst for the dark is deep. Her every apparition spreads like wildfire. My Kali article went viral within hours, it was as if that image of Kali up there on top of the world overlooking Manhattan nourished the collective soul.

There is a great yearning for change in the order of things, and the Great Mother is leading the revolution. I’m with her.

kaliimwithher

Christian theologian Mathew Fox speaks extensively about the reemergence of the Dark Feminine archetype into our collective consciousness in his piece The Return of the Black Madonna. It is really in darkness, he reminds us, “where illusions are broken apart and the truth lies.”

We are collectively getting so sick and tired of lies, of the superficial, of the shiny neon lights of pop culture, pop spirituality and politics as usual. We thirst for the Real. And the Dark Mother is here to quench.

We saw darkness reclaiming its place also in the passing of Leonard Cohen, this most belated of biblical prophets. He left us with his last and perhaps most spiritually astute album, “You want it Darker,” which has skyrocketed in popularity. The entire album is the ultimate invitation into Holy Darkness. Once he famously preached that the cracks are how the light gets in. Now, he assured us God wants it darker.

Many have interpreted it to be an expression of hopelessness. No. He is asking the only relevant question of our time, whether we can swallow the pill of darkness and still say Hineni! I am here, God, here I am, bring it on! In his last interview about the album, Cohen says that this track is about offering ourselves up when the “emergency becomes articulate.” I think we can all agree that it has finally become articulate.

The mystics tell us that we need spiritual crisis. That we must enter the Cloud of Unknowing, the deepest despair, the most profound darkness within, without hope, in order to grow spiritually. They call such a time of deep crisis, of great uncertainty, the Dark Night of the Soul. There, in our radical desperation, in our absolute abandonment, it is said, the Divine Doctor awaits. Holy Darkness was Her medicine all along.

Darkness heals us without a spoonful of sugar; the wound is the gift, and this election is a good dose.

As the spirit of the Dark Mother hovers upon the collective waters, she has much to teach us. Kali is the great protectress and ultimate sacred activist. She is standing at Standing Rock, roaring against the black snake and the abuses of corporate capitalism. She is marching in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

She is here mourning the dying out of species and showing her terrible tongue at the shocking xenophobic, nationalist regressionism swallowing the planet. She is the changing of the tides, and she means business. She has come to burn up the old paradigm of separation and transfigure the collective heart.

Scientists tell us we live amidst the 6th extinction. Every 20 minutes, another species disappears from our planet. Our oceans are dying, our rivers are burning. Kali beckons us to embrace our sacred fury and let our heart roar for all living beings. Like her, we must rise as protectors, else perish as fools. She knows that we belong to each other and share one fate.

Recently, three protesters at Standing Rock got their Kali on. In a radical act, worthy of the great Mother herself, they crawled inside the Dakota Access Pipeline, putting their bodies on the line. Reading about it, I was shocked, I was troubled, I was moved. Suddenly I realized that love is always a disturbing presence. We must disrupt the order of things to obey the orders of Love.

These acts will keep growing, because the fires of truth that Kali has lit are spreading. As the old story of convenience and profit turns to ash, hearts across the planet are aflame for love and justice. Over a million people checked into Standing Rock after organizers worried that police can track protesters through their Facebook statuses.

Started by an indigenous mother, the Standing Rock protest has become a cultural creative movement no one could anticipate. Here everything meets: social justice, ecological justice, economic justice, sacred activism. And there are reasons to celebrate, such as the Army Corps’ momentous decision to deny the pipeline permit.

This might not be the end of DAPL, but this victory is a testament to the sacred fire. This is a beginning. This is what a prayerful movement looks like. This is what a culture waking up looks like. The struggle is far from over, but the zeitgeist has spoken. Hineni! it bellows.

Deeply we recognize that we are living amidst the churning of ages, although the climate catastrophe is not yet visible, most scientists now believe it is inevitable.

Climate change is here, whether we believe in it or not. Politically, with the election of Donald Trump, our country and the world have entered a dark night of the soul. We might still live in a culture of shine, greed, glam and white supremacy, but the Dark Feminine has now reemerged into this cycle, and heaven has no fury like the Great Mother scorned.

Now we must rest here in this darkness, to lay heart to the ground as a country, and feel intimately all that is being unraveled here. After all, every seed must go into darkness, must turn inside out, must break open in order to grow.

It is my prayer that our country sprouts. That this regression give rise to a counterculture of grassroots movements the likes of which we have never seen. And to a culture of love beyond measure.

***

VeraDeChalambertVera de Chalambert is a spiritual storyteller and Harvard-educated scholar of comparative religion. She recognizes the intricate process of healing and awakening, unfolding for so many around the planet at this time, and offers healing sessions and spiritual direction via Skype and phone. Vera has studied with spiritual teachers, healers and visionaries the world over, and mined for her soul at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, and Jason Shulman’s School for Nondual Healing and Awakening. She is deeply influenced by Buddhist and Kabbalistic lineages, and is a lover of the world’s great wisdom traditions. She speaks internationally and writes about mindfulness in the modern world and the Divine Feminine. You could visit Vera on her website, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

I am taking a mussar class at KE. We read a book by Rabbi Rami – I heard a presentation by Rabbi Rami, where he said we were in the Kali youg period of history, which was predicted by ancient yogis.

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