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Saturday, December 28, 2013

Dying To Be Me - Anita Moorjani




In this truly inspirational memoir, Anita Moorjani relates how, after fighting cancer for almost four years, her body—overwhelmed by the malignant cells spreading throughout her system—began shutting down. As her organs failed, she entered into an extraordinary near-death experience where she realized her inherent worth . . . and the actual cause of her disease. Upon regaining consciousness, Anita found that her condition had improved so rapidly that she was able to be released from the hospital within weeks . . . without a trace of cancer in her body!

Within these pages, Anita recounts stories of her childhood in Hong Kong, her challenge to establish her career and find true love, as well as how she eventually ended up in that hospital bed where she defied all medical knowledge.

As part of a traditional Hindu family residing in a largely Chinese and British society, she had been pushed and pulled by cultural and religious customs since she had been a little girl. After years of struggling to forge her own path while trying to meet everyone else’s expectations, she had the realization, as a result of her epiphany on the other side, that she had the power to heal herself . . . and that there are miracles in the Universe that she had never even imagined.

In Dying to Be Me, Anita freely shares all she has learned about illness, healing, fear, “being love,” and the true magnificence of each and every human being!

This is a book that definitely makes the case that we
are spiritual beings having a human experience . . . and that we are all One!

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Discrimination

The first Light that Christ taught is discrimination, discernment.

What is right and what is wrong? There was a very strong philosophy in the ‘60s especially, and that philosophy was saying to us in the newspapers and on the radio, “There is no right and wrong. Everything is right. No matter what you do, it is right. If you want to do it, it is right.” That was wrong. For me it was wrong.

A boy came to my class. After the class, we used to give ten or fifteen minutes recess. He came to me and said, “Torkom, there is one thing wrong with you.” I said, “What is wrong with me?” He said, “There is no right and wrong. Everything is right.” “Then,” I said, “I am not wrong.” “Gosh,” he said. “But I will tell you one thing to teach you a lesson. Now,” I said, “look at this knife.” Then I put the knife in his hand and said, “Cut your artery now.””No,” he said. “Oh, it is right,” I said. “No, it isn’t right.” “Well, you know exactly which is right and which is wrong. Then what are you talking about?”

Why did they manipulate or create such a philosophy? They wanted to use it for their own license. “Because there is no right and wrong, I can do anything I want.” It was self-deception. So the Christ Light, the first Light, is discrimination.

- Torkom Saraydarian (Teachings of Christ vol.1, p.3420)

Friday, December 6, 2013

Marianne Williamson...A Spiritual Woman....for Congress

Woman - Torch of the Future


Dear Friends,

I have officially announced my candidacy for election to the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s Congressional District 33.

I know many of you are not surprised. At my Sister Giant Conference in Los Angeles last year, I urged almost two thousand women to consider running for office using the principles of non-violence to birth a new American politics. After experiencing the energy and enthusiasm of the conference, I spent long months pondering how I could best further such a movement. The response that feels most real and true to me is to run for office myself.

I do not think of this move as a career change. Rather, I feel I’m further expanding my work by taking the transformational principles to which I have dedicated myself for the last thirty years into another area where they are sorely needed. While a new paradigm, holistic, relational perspective now saturates many areas of our society — from education to business to medicine to spirituality — our politics seem to be outside its reach. And we cannot afford to turn away from politics. We might not touch it, but it certainly touches us. And the increasingly calcified thought forms that dominate U.S. politics today — based more on the past than the present, more on fear than on love, and more on economic than humanitarian values — threaten to sabotage our collective good and undermine our democracy.



The biggest threat to our country today is not from armies invading our shores. The biggest threat to our democracy is not bombs falling from the sky over an American city. No, our biggest threat is a pattern of a thousand cuts – the slow but now constant chipping away at our democratic freedoms—one capitulation to moneyed interests at a time, one politically gerrymandered district at a time, one government surveillance program at a time, one limiting of our voting rights at a time, one intimidation of journalists at a time, one Patriot Act at a time, one National Defense Authorization Act at a time, one Trans Pacific Partnership so-called trade deal limiting our sovereignty at a time. So at what point— after how many moments when Americans mutter to ourselves “Ya gotta be kidding me!”—do we stand up to our own government and say, “Hey, guys! Whose side are you on??”

That question will not be answered in a meaningful way until it is asked in the most powerful way. And that means not just from the sidelines and not just from online petitions. The question must be asked more often by people sitting in those seats, inthat building, in that city.

And that’s why I am running for Congress. I hope you’ll join me.
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To me, the critical crisis that looms today is a crisis of democracy itself. For with every challenge that confronts us now — from economic disparity, to the clear and present danger of climate change, to our high incidence of child poverty, to the corruption of America’s food supply, to our high incarceration rate, to our over-reliance on military force and the need to develop more enlightened methods of peace-building –the most important issue of all, like a disease underlying all the other diseases, is the undue influence of money on our politics.
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We have developed, over the last few decades, a system of legalized corruption in the United States, in which those with money are accorded much more political influence than those who are without. And that is not democracy. If only those with financial leverage can wield political influence, then those without such leverage – children, for instance – too easily see their interests sidelined.

Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people and for the people” is becoming for all practical purposes a government “of a few of the people, by a few of the people and for a few of the people.” Citizens of the United States should not be always on the defense, fighting for the biggest pile of crumbs left over after moneyed interests have feasted on the public purse. Adding additional and an equally critical injustice, the gerrymandering policies in the vast majority of our states — in which the dominant political party in each state redraws Congressional districts to protect their own party or incumbents — allows candidates to pick their voters rather than allowing the voters to pick their candidates! Yet these situations will not be corrected unless “we the people” correct them.

Those who have sought inner wisdom and spiritual understanding are the last people who should be sitting out the political process, for those who see into the cause of a problem know better than to simply address its symptoms. And those who have a clue as to what changes one heart have a clue as to what will change the world. Humanitarian values are democratic values, and those who are most committed to them must find our political voice.
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We cannot allow our government to continue drifting in a blind and heartless direction, and expect to bequeath to our children the blessings of liberty that were bequeathed to us. There is need for a politics of conscience, a new era of public discourse in which love is not minimized, the voices of women and children are not marginalized, and the future is not bartered for a pot of unrighteous gold.
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Martin Luther King Jr. said we needed a quantitative change in our circumstances as well as a qualitative change in our souls. Now, as then, we must bring the fullness of our internal selves to the task of changing our country. Cynicism, complacency, disengagement and anger have no place in the politics that are called for now.

The people of the United States have been faced with serious problems before, and we’re faced with serious problems again. But generations before us have risen to the task of correcting America’s course when it needed to be corrected, and today it’s our turn.

I ask for your support, that this campaign might be more than simply an effort to send one woman to Congress. May it be a vessel for revitalized citizenship for those who participate, and a new possibility for love in action.

Thank you very much for reading this and for sharing it with others. God bless you, God bless America, and God bless the world.

- Marianne Williamson