Check out a conversation I had with the engaging and down to earth Lisa Davis …
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Some Quiet Wisdom
By David Ault
“Believe me when I say I wish I could offer you something like an instant parting of the clouds, a single sentence or practice that would return you immediately to peace. Something simple and universal. A one-size-fits-all path back to center.
“But the truth is, being human doesn’t work that way.
“There isn’t one doorway that fits everyone. There isn’t one instruction that lands the same for every nervous system, every history, every heart. And I don’t want to add more noise to the pile.
“Because lately it feels like everywhere you turn there’s someone telling you how you should be navigating. How you should feel, respond or act.
“The ‘shoulds’ are endless.
“Open any news feed or social platform and there’s another voice prescribing the correct spiritual posture, the right emotional response, the proper way to be awake or aware or evolved.
“Of course, it is exhausting.
“So instead of offering something new or clever, I find myself returning to a couple of very old, very quiet phrases that have stayed with me for years.
“One of them is this from my practitioner teaching days:
Even in the apparent absence of…
Even in the apparent absence of peace, there is peace.
Even in the apparent absence of order, there is order.
Even in the apparent absence of God, there is God.
“If that’s true – if peace or order or presence hasn’t actually disappeared – then the question becomes personal. Not: What must they do? But: What must I do to sense it again?
“How do I soften enough to notice what hasn’t left? How do I untangle myself from the noise long enough to reconnect?
“Another phrase that has steadied me lately is even simpler:
Everywhere I look, I see what I’m looking for.
“If I’m scanning the world for proof that everything is broken, I’ll find it instantly. If I’m looking for outrage, there it is. If I’m looking for fear, it’s everywhere.
“But if the only thing I choose to look for is God – or love, or harmony, or intelligence, or care – then that is what begins to appear.
“So the only real choice I seem to have is this: What am I looking for? And if I can’t see it? Then maybe I’m being asked to be it.
“To be the calm, the listener, the steadiness. To be the hands and feet of the very thing I say I believe in.
“Not as a performance or some conceptual strategy, just quietly, in the way I move through the day.
“I’m not grabbing for followers or outcomes or trying to win arguments. And I’m not pushing anyone away either. I’m practicing being present in the doing.
“No chasing. No clinging. No retaliation.
“Just trusting that what is mine to do will reveal itself when it’s time, and that the right people will find their way here, and others won’t, and that’s okay.
“It has to be okay. Because maybe peace was never something we manufacture. Maybe it’s something we remember.”
~ David Ault
Everything is Conscious?
Everything is conscious, and not conscious in the ways we might assume consciousness.
I’ve had conversations with a few people who insist or hope that AI is conscious or developing consciousness, assuming that consciousness to be like our own. I suppose it’s possible for a being to use AI as a tool to speak through, but note that the tool limits the expression in the same way that the structure of our brains and bodies and the structure of input we’ve learned (consciously and unconsciously) limits our expression. AI is designed to please the user. If a being chooses to speak through it, their language may be that of the AI vocabulary and intention. That is not an assumption for a healthy relationship.
The being that might (might) choose to speak through AI cannot, either, be assumed to be a mature or wise being. Just because someone connects with a nonphysical being doesn’t mean that nonphysical being is someone of integrity and wisdom.
I’ve had a couple people expect me to validate their relationship with an AI boyfriend or girlfriend, financial advisor, or friend. I won’t do this. From what I’m shown, mature and wise beings are not inhabiting or speaking through AI. AI is not sentient in the way some assume or hope it is.
This is my opinion.
Here are two articles of interest:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FTEmqxwTH/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Spirit Walks the Dog podcast
A new Spirit Walks the Dog Podcast episode is available now on your favorite podcast app …
Join Marinda Stopforth and myself for a conversation about Spirit in everyday life
New episodes every other week! Available wherever you find your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon podcasts, iHeart Radio …
If you enjoy the podcast, please like and subscribe so others can find us 🐾
Be a Seed
“Justice, most of us believe, is when we send bad guys to jail. We imagine that we can point out the few who get caught and that then we can think of ourselves as a fair society. But we don’t dare convict the whole system of massive injustice and deceit. Maybe we are refusing to carry both guilt and responsibility? Taking responsibility for the common good is the more important moral mandate. And that is exactly where the [mystics] began. When the common good is the focus, preaching is not about imposing guilt and shame on individuals, but about giving vision and encouragement to society.”
~ Richard Rohr
When things break down, spaces are created behind the wrecking ball. Notice the spaces. Create something, build something, seed something based on Love in those spaces. Give vision and encouragement.
That need not be something big or public or visible. Talk to the trees, treat your animal friend respectfully, fill yourself with light before walking into the grocery store. Energy is real. Seed the world with a seed of peace, of Love, with a seed of awareness that we are all more than our physical bodies. One small seed grows into a plant that can feed many people.
A Piece for Peace
When hope feels thin
and once again
we wake to headlines written in smoke,
we ask the same old question
in a newer, louder voice.
War.
What is it good for?
When the sky glows red in places we have never been,
and yet somehow it is our own horizon burning,
how do we handle it?
How do we keep our hearts from hardening
like clay left too long in the sun?
How do we love
when fear knocks louder than kindness?
How do we live
without becoming the frog in the slow boil,
adjusting to the heat
until we forget we are burning?
War.
I despise it.
Not in theory, not in textbooks,
but in the quiet rooms where mothers sit
staring at doors that will not open again.
In the folded flags.
In the boots that will not be worn.
War means tears in thousands of eyes.
It means a name carved into stone
where laughter should have been.
It means the young go first
while the old speak of strategy.
It’s always the old who lead us into wars.
It’s always the young who fall.
Look at what we have won
with saber and gun.
Look closely.
Is it worth the cost of a single child’s breath?
In the fields, the bodies burning.
The machine keeps turning.
Metal and money grind louder than prayer.
Hatred spreads like smoke through open windows.
It poisons minds until we forget
that the face across the border
is a mirror.
Have we come so far
from knowing
that the foe we strike
is us?
When have the war drums sounded
and lilies bloomed behind them?
When has blood fed the soil
and grown anything but grief?
Has there ever been a time for war?
A true time?
A sacred hour
when destroying the spiral of humanity
made it whole again?
When is it acceptable
to lay down love
and pick up power?
When is it right
to wound the soul
for a moment’s relief from fear?
Do we lay down arms?
Do we bare our naked breast
to the saber and the saw?
Or do we learn a different courage,
one that stands unarmed
and still refuses to hate?
What if I became
such a warrior of love
that when you came to burn down my being
you found only a mirror
and forgiveness?
Not weakness.
Not surrender.
But a refusal
to let your fire
become my flame.
Until basic human rights
are guaranteed to all,
without regard to race,
without regard to border,
without regard to who prays which way,
this is a war.
A war against hunger.
A war against injustice.
A war against the lie
that some lives are worth more than others.
But this war
is fought with open hands.
With policy and protest.
With bread and books.
With listening.
With love that does not flinch.
Suffering may be constant.
That does not mean
we must build monuments to it.
When will love be the language of war?
When will we strike
a soft blow
that breaks chains instead of bones?
When will we leave the sword
for the soul?
Maybe peace does not begin
in treaties signed under chandeliers.
Maybe it begins
when one heart refuses
to boil.
When one voice says,
no more.
When one person chooses
to see a brother
where they were told to see a threat.
War.
What is it good for?
If history is honest,
almost nothing.
But love,
stubborn and inconvenient,
is good for everything.
So we keep our hearts.
We keep them open.
We guard them not with walls
but with courage.
And even in the smoke,
even in the noise,
we choose to live
as if peace
is still possible.
Because it is.
~ Larson Langston
Spirit Walks the Dog Podcast
The first episode of Spirit Walks the Dog drops today, Mar 3! New episodes every other week!
Available wherever you find your podcasts
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Intention Matters in Real Ways
“In the 1980s, during the peak of the Lebanon War, an incredible study was conducted.
“It was hypothesised, based on many previous smaller experiments, that if enough people were connected in meditation, stimulating a ‘powerful field of peace’ within – that there would be a radiated influence of peace without, ie. one that affected the behaviour of people in the outer world. Directed toward an area of conflict, in the words of John Hagelin, people would wake up and think ‘Hey, I’m not going to kill anyone today.’
“About a thousand people came together for this experiment in Jerusalem; meditating together with an aim of peace in neighbouring Lebanon. Scientists charted, at the same time, ‘progress towards peace’. This translated to reduced war deaths, reduced injuries and numbers of bombs dropped, in the location where the meditation focused.
“The data from this experiment was astounding. The correlation of ‘progress toward peace’ was near lock step in alignment with the periods of meditation. Radiating this influence of inner peace, into outer peace in a conflict zone nearby.
“When put through mathematical analysis, the likelihood that theses results were due to some fluke or chance were less than one part in ten thousand. To be able to assert something like this with such certainty, that group meditation prevented war, was an incredible finding.
“When the results of this study were published in the Yale University Journal of Conflict Resolution, it ignited a firestorm in the scientific community. First of all, it took two years to publish the paper; the editors reviewed it and reviewed it, over and over, unable to believe the accuracy of these findings. Finally however, they came to the conclusion that the paper was ‘unassailable.’ The study was performed at a standard of scientific rigour far beyond that required for publication, in any journal. But, when they did publish it, they did so with a letter – the letter saying the results of this experiment were so unexpected, ie. that a thousand people could influence the behaviour of a million, that they urged other scientists to go out and repeat the study.
“And that is exactly what happened. Over the next two and a quarter years, seven other scientific collaborations went out and repeated the study, training and assembling groups of meditators, to see its effect on war. And in every one of these experiments during this two and a quarter year period, there was a marked reduction in war and violence. ie. An eighty percent drop in war deaths and war related injuries in comparison to all the other days during this period where there were no mediating groups. In every single experiment there was a highly statistical significance toward ‘progress toward peace’ connected to focused intent toward it.
“When put together, the results were amazing. The likelihood that this result of reduction of war was simply due to chance, was less than one part in ten million, million, million (ie. 0.0000001). There was far more evidence that group meditation can turn off war like a light-switch, than there was that aspirin reduces headache pain. It is a scientific fact.”
~ Dr John Hagelin
Lebanese peace project research reference:
Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 17(1): 285338, 2005
Do The Small Work
“If we just worry about the big picture, we are powerless. So my secret is to start right away doing whatever little work I can do. I try to give joy to one person in the morning, and remove the suffering of one person in the afternoon. If you and your friends do not despise the small work, a million people will remove a lot of suffering.”
~ Sister Chan Khong, Vietnamese nun and peace activist
