Let Your Light Shine
Philly Fountain – M. Ulto 2006
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the Glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our very presence automatically liberates others.
Nelson Mandela (quoting Marianne Williamson in his Inauguration Speech, 1994)
I was reading today about the duality of our spiritual evolution – the struggle to accept loneliness and separateness, especially when based on exceptional skill or talent, while balancing our connection to a higher power, to Oneness. Our focus as a nation, especially during this election year, is on failure, folly and foibles of the powerful and wealthy. All well and good, pointing out what needs to change, but all this finger pointing does not do much for change. It creates more noise in the media realm, creating an increase in the signal to noise ratio of rational thought. We have drowned out the signal of something better with the noise of all that is negative. Dwelling in this space, we latch on easily to the three tenets of easy media – celebrity, tragedy and fear. If its gossip, it’s newsworthy. If its erroneous speculation, it’s newsworthy (hello, Mr. O’Reilly). If it’s going to generate more fear by hyping and selling our social trauma, it’s newsworthy.
Where is the community or connection in this kind of noise making? Where are issues of real social need – health insurance, education, poverty, hunger, war? They are backdrops for the true intent of the noise – to discredit, create chaos and disorder, so that polarization allows for people to pitted against everything and for nothing. We are a nation of people who have forgotten how to live with each other and instead put up new barriers every day. And in keeping people preoccupied and socially fearful, the focus on the issues that really matter, that require hard work and rigorous thought, these important points of community are ignored for the easier task of negation. Divide and conquer in a political sense.
The ancient Egyptians called this the idea of the “One and the Many”, and saw it as a dialectic or flow, rather than a conflict or duality. The person moves fluidly from a conscious of the Self or “Many” individuals to a consciousness of the “One” or the Source energy that flows through all things. For they are One, and aloneness and fullness are but aspects of the “One” experience, and can be experienced at different times along the continuum of experience.
The emphasis on duality in your society has led you to value the “One” state over the “Many” state. It is only when you can hold them in balance on that continuum of experience called life that you will fully experience the richness and diversity that is life on planet Earth.
Archangel Michael through Celia Fenn
Let your light shine, be secure in the knowledge that you are NEEDED to make change, to make things better, to connect and create. Be very aware that any state, bliss or misery, is an extreme and not able to sustain itself endlessly. There is no failure in feeling alone, in feeling separate from all things, but know this is only part of the story. There is also massive denial in living blissed out, which does not allow for the reality of individuation, but sends all motivation and responsibility up to a higher power. We are agents of our own change and we direct our lives, either consciously or subconsciously. Know what your intention is in this life and move on it, create communities, make peaceful change.
Peace,
Melissa
