By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

THERE ARE VOICES all around us, 24/7, giving us information, opinion, criticism and advice. Too many of them, some say; an overwhelming glut of incoming information. Still, we listen, unable to avoid the din. Much of it, we must acknowledge, is our own mind-speak, critiquing what we hear and sorting out what is acceptable to us. Even asleep, we continue to talk to ourselves in images and dreamscapes.

There is a lot of noise and fear being broadcast in this current financial meltdown; the word Depression is being bandied about, sending people to a Google exploration of the experiences of early 20th-century Americans. While those relatives of ours didn't have some of our social safety nets to depend on, like Social Security or Medicare or food stamps, they did have the benefit of less chatter to confuse them and clutter their mental/emotional body.

Many citizens couldn't afford a daily paper back then, and even if they could, they got their news once a day, not in heart-stopping "breaking news" alerts; cable television didn't loop continually with frightening statistics and dire projections. Instead, Americans had plenty of absorption time to consider the impact of news events, and eagerly gathered around their radios to listen to FDR encourage them in occasional informal speeches called Fireside Chats; something Obama is replicating as a weekly address on both radio and YouTube.

While the information stream may make 21st century discernment more difficult, we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that what we face today is unique. It's no accident that we use the term 'toxic' to describe assets acquired under less than moral circumstances; the whole of our financial system is toxic to the entirety of the planet and has been, in one way or another, for longer than we can remember. That it is failing now should be encouragement that the paradigm is finally shifting; still, if the word 'failing' has you clutching your heart in panic, throw it out with the garbage, won't you? None of this is new to humankind; we've done it all before.

How long have we played out this same tired, unproductive game? Here's a minor prophet from the Bible, Micah, circa 690 B.C.:

Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong! Its rulers give judgment for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the Lord and say, "Surely the Lord is with us! No harm shall come upon us."

Sound familiar? The military-industrial complex and big business are wrestling with Obama's government for supremacy, now; they don't like what they see coming, as capitalism shifts into some new form they cannot control so handily. Under Bush, our judiciary was salted with so many partisan players that we hardly raise an eyebrow when two judges in Pennsylvania are recently reported to have collected almost three million in bribes to shift young offenders into private prisons.
The perks of televangelism and donations to giant church conglomerates across this nation can be summarized by the tax-free multimillion-dollar lifestyles and private jets of their leaders. And reading Micah's rant brings to mind the out-of-context snippets of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's discourse on God damning America; to those that have, as Jesus put it, the ears to hear, that seems the logical consequence of the aggression and inequality of our most recent endeavors.

If we stand back far enough, the nation has become a sitcom that we watch as an example of dysfunction and slapstick; and nobody's laughing. With all the madness assaulting us from the media, such as the Republican push to brand anything Obama does as Socialistic, or the Glenn Becks of the world who have settled on Chuck Norris as the leader of a counter-revolution, it should be plain enough that we need to use some discernment in what we allow to affect us. And that, as always, means we must make deliberate choices -- not so much of what we hear, much of which is unavoidable, but how we hear it.

"In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present," suggested Francis Bacon. In a world of polarization, it is ever so. Some spiritual schools of thought define the imbalance of darkness we see around us as emblematic of karma being burned quickly, allowing us to come into balance for the ultimate renewal of the planet. Clearly, the acceleration of spirituality -- which we might define as simple decency, lovingness, charity and compassion -- is flooding across the planet to bump up against those who are unwilling to adapt their behavior, and confound those who are listening to a voice other than that of love.

The voice that comes from within our thought process may or may not tell us the truth; we make progress on this plane by working within that very process to advance our unfoldment. For instance, what must have been going on in the mind of the German teen who killed 15 in a school shooting before committing suicide, or the Alabama man who killed 10, including his own mother and the wife and baby daughter of the local sheriff, before turning the gun on himself? What of the young Southern California man who listened to the internal voices telling him he was a prophet of God, leading him to commit suicide in front of a looming golden cross in Dr. Schuler's Crystal Cathedral? This kind of random death culture seems contagious lately.

The spiritual community would cite the increasing vibratory signature of the paradigm change as perilous for those that are unstable; I believe that's true. In the 90s, we were warned that those who came to a shift of perception late in the game would do so with great difficulty. As well, when we look around the world at the crumbling sociopolitical infrastructure, it's not difficult to see how hopeless it looks to those who cannot filter the changes through their intuition; who have not developed a heart-capacity to handle the many challenges we face. Among those foundations that are shaking apart is the religious community; there are many small churches across this nation that practice their faith with an open mind and teachable heart, but there are many more that have failed their seekers in ways both obvious and tragic.

When George Bush revealed that God had told him to bomb Iraq, I was quite confident that we did not share the same Deity. That still, small voice that urges us to find the loving approach in patience and harmlessness is profoundly different than the Old Testament God that hurls thunderbolts and strikes down entire tribes that offend Him. It was the New Testament Jesus who gave us the "greatest of these," as love; indeed, Jesus was the founder of a paradigm-shifting "New Deal" in thought, word and deed a few thousand years ago. And the obvious truth is that too many in this nation would call him a Socialist, too, if he stood on a street corner preaching that radical message today.

"Love does not dominate; it cultivates," said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Christ spirit that rises from the muck of misapplied belief is hand in hand with Goddess, supporting life and love. Domination is death; cultivation is life. The one is the essence of competition; the other, of collaboration. In competition, there is only one winner; in collaboration, everyone wins. Think about that just a moment. Do you hear it? Do you get a sense of how easy it is to tell if some bit of information is life-giving or life-defeating?

The more authentic we allow ourselves to be -- in other words, the more we discover and affirm our own self-worth and realize that the only opinion of ourselves that counts is our own -- the easier it is to develop an ear for truth, and avoid being manipulated. When we know who we are, incoming assaults on our emotions and our well-being are no more annoying than buzzing flies, to be waved away.

Neale Donald Walsch.

It's worth noting that there is no competition -- none -- in winnowing down learned behaviors and ego-posturing to become our authentic selves; stepping into our uniqueness puts an end to such false exteriors, and allows us to join with others as equals. That is also known as standing in our own power; not so frightening, is it?

Neale Donald Walsch, whose daily reminders can be found here, sent through this message recently:

.... if you think you have nothing to lose, you win. If you think you have something to win, you lose. It all drives to motivation. Why are you doing what you are doing right now? To avoid loss? To achieve gain? Wrong reason both times. Life is not about win-and-lose. Life is about being or not being, expressing or not expressing, who you are.

Don't do things for personal benefit. And don't do things to avoid personal damage. Do things to feel personal authenticity. Then your life will make sense, no matter what is going on around you.

Until we can form our own authentic understanding of life's journey, we may get easily sidetracked by someone else's opinion. Think of everything you hear as a cantaloupe, resting in a giant stack at the market. Pick it up and examine it. Thump it for resonance. Is it hollow? Does it seem that whatever is inside has already begun to wither and dry? Or is it full, thick with possibility? Feel it, smell it -- in short, use all your senses to examine it. If it is not worth your time, set it down and find another. As well, do not concern yourself overly with those melons that remain in the bin; they will be picked over eventually, found wanting and be discarded.

Everything we hear is only a mental construct. It may or may not have any truth in it; it has the ability to spark fear or hope only as we allow it to. The more we trust our own ability to discern between what is real and what is not, the more comfortable we will be in our own skin; and vice versa. In this season when there is no Walter Cronkite to trust, news is just a constant slipstream of information and conjecture; we must learn to trust ourselves to know what is worth our attention. Learn to hear, smell, taste, sense the lovingness in any bit of information; that is the basis of not only our safe passage through this remarkable timeframe, but the very essence of the New Paradigm we are creating.

"We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give," said Winston Churchill, who knew hard times aplenty. Melody Beattie tells us, "Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow."

Did you hear that? Did you feel your heart expand when you read it? That feels authentic; not dire predictions and sad reminders of how badly we've gone wrong. Our heart is the seat of our soul, and we will feel a response there when we hear what is life-affirming. All the rest is dross.

We are, indeed, in the Last Days of the old way; the new way will not be found in the rubble of our discarded thoughts, but in the fullness of our expanding hearts. That's where the still, small voice speaks from, if we have the ears to hear; and if we practice listening, eventually that will become our own authentic voice.