So many items confront our waking thoughts. Health, politics, environment, tragedy, weather, sports, job, money, love, spirituality, human beings (just turning 7 billion and rising) and countless other concerns large and small, concrete and abstract, near and distant. One can hardly seem to get enough time to think about just a few of them. Continue reading »
by Stephen Cocconi © 2011
The World Trade Center and the Pentagon were symbols of American indomitably in both Economics and Military powers, respectively. Calling the audience to understand how much of the Middle East has been cowed and controlled by the West from as far back as the Crusades almost 1,000 ago. Beings born into that part of the world, many Infant, but mostly Baby and a few Young Souls, have used that place to experiment with such lessons as racial and sexual discrimination, religious intolerance, and religious intolerance in the name of spiritual supremacy. All these factors made fertile ground for the rise of hatred in the Arab world and centralize it in a few extreme people like Osama Bin Laden. American’s and the West needed the wake-up call that suffering anywhere, in a world of 6 billion plus people, is suffering the will eventually felt everywhere. The Trade Center’s destruction was the event that brought to Americans awareness, that “we are all one”…like it or not.
The Icons smashed meant illusions dashed. Everyone is still reeling from the events of September 11th. For most Americans, the issue of safety was brought to the forefront. Michael said, “safety is an inner state” meaning that only when you are aware of your world and surroundings, and bring peace of mind because you trust your ability to survive, can you ever feel safe inside.
Freedom, but more particularly Liberty (the permission to move in an uninhibited fashion) may well be in question in the years to come. Americans have long believed that “unlimited consumerism” is the same as Freedom. This is the paradigm that corporate culture has instilled in many for a number of decades. In Michael’s view, the media culture of the United states has produced and is capable of the most sophisticated propagandizing of any society in history. Notice how well the media has turned the bombing in New York into a series of quick, sanitized, images, that evoke a strong emotion and then jump to another equally as shocking. Your system is jolted repeatedly until the only response is “numbness.” Michael’s admission to the crowd is: “Consider the source (meaning agenda) of where you get information.”
If not you, who? If not now, when?
What happens next? In Michael’s view, for the short-run, you will hear allot of “sabre-rattling”. But it is up to each American to begin the real quest for freedom. What this looks like, will begin as people redefining what icons like the “American Flag” mean to them. (Military strength, economic might, or due process, a nation of equality, and free speech.) With this redefinition, comes the personal responsibility to clear unhealed emotional backlogs. In the meditation of that evening, Michael lead the audience in several exercise designed to seek out and subdue the terrorist within each of us.
In the closing of the ceremony, all stood and sang “Amazing Grace.” People were able to leave the evening with a sense of peace and resolve. It is this “peace within” that Michael, like so many others in the healing and spiritual community, foretell as the only real long-run way to put an end to violence without. Yet, in the final analysis, to get to peace within, the denial of all the history that has preceded must be examined and reparations and amends, made.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Here is the World Clock. Numbers are ideas that we hold in reverence. They imply tangible assessment and reveal our accountability.
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by Stephen Cocconi – Channeling Michael – 1996-2012
Abuse is a vague word. It is vague because there are so many ways in which it can be perpetrated. At its foundation is an experience of pain and suffering that someone is unconsciously transferred; enlisting someone else (almost always less powerful) in the torment as to diffuse it inside themselves. Continue reading »
To begin with this is not an article merely of diagnosis or prediction, but one of lament. I offer no grand, nor spiritually uplifting fix for changes to our nation, save one: participate by voting! Continue reading »
I am grateful, either because of luck or divine choice, to have been born in the United States of America! Growing up in California with its redwoods, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada made me appreciate nature, being outdoors and cutting edge thinking. Specifically being on the peninsula south of San Francisco, I was witness to and bathed in one of the most altering movements of our time. The theme songs were rock ‘n’ roll; the activities expansive thinking that rejected traditions without accounting for their cost or pretense. It was a time of civil rights, rejection of war, experimentation with drugs and sex, but more importantly asking the question: WHY?
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Proselytizing, I can’t stand it. The abstraction of my soul and how God interacts with it is my business! Religion might have the positive intention, and perhaps might provide the benefit of a person gaining a primary understanding of spirituality; but it is something that should be sought out by the individual, not sold or marketed to them.
