From a Sermon given Winter Solstice Worship Service on January 1, 2023.

Recently I had the opportunity to work in a healing clinic with a young woman in a great deal of torment who was seeking help in regards to her relationship with her family. This woman had a brother who had become the legal guardian of their mother and the mother’s estate; and was blocking contact between the mother and daughter and siphoning off family funds to his own financial benefit. As you could imagine, the woman was in horrendous pain, a big component of which was due to something in psychology we would label cognitive dissonance. She just could not understand what was happening, and it was rocking the very foundation of her worldview.

In these sessions there is a very limited amount of time, usually less than 15 minutes. For me it’s always a question of how I can make the best impact in such a truncated time frame. I watched the other healer in the room talk to the woman about society’s current collective energy space, in which the toxic male is coming out from the corners swinging to eradicate all that could become the sacred feminine. This was a framework the woman could understand somewhat. I could sense she felt a bit of relief from her pain as she recognized she was part of a bigger picture. 

But her central disorientation remained. She wanted to know why the situation was happening specifically to her. On some level she knew that we all as individuals create our own reality, even when we do that in a group context. Spiritually she recognized that there was more to the story than just her family going along with how people are doing things these days. I could see her struggling with guilt and ongoing confusion, and more importantly, I watched her getting lost to the perspective that she was the victim here. This can be a problem in that many seekers after the Truth fall prey to the blame-others game that is so prominent in human cultures. Believing one is a victim can significantly slow down the ultimate resolution for individuals for many years in any one lifetime, or even many lifetimes to come. 

So, what I talked to her about was the fact that she and the soul that is her brother have been in an escalating situation since Babylonia. For centuries they have been playing a kind of psychic ping pong game. I saw the two of them as part of a snowballing joint venture, where the actions of the one led to the next lifetime in which the other had the opportunity to respond in kind or add a different element to the story. They were drawn to each other like moths to a flame both getting burnt over time, without awareness of the full picture.

In other words, the elements of their cosmic dance were not confined to fun adventures. The “good times” were there, but they were increasingly overshadowed by the painful events. Brother and sister had had many mishaps in which they had harmed each other. The sense of betrayal and distrust from these wrongdoings built up and escalated to the point that it overwhelmed the real spiritual connection behind it all, such that in in 2022 the dance had became all about revenge.   

In 2022 and now in 2023 I am increasingly running across folks like this sister and brother, in agony and screaming for help without knowledge of what is causing their distress. Given that we are living in the apocalypse, the time in which all that has been hidden is being revealed, many people are peeling their particular onion, weeping as they go. Individuals who have been victimized through criminal acts or dehumanizing actions are rightfully finding their voice in demanding an end to the abuse. Society as a whole has been working through layer and layer of excruciating heartbreak as we wrestle with the revelations and details of how various groups of people have done horrible things, seemingly inhuman things, to various other groups of people.

Lately I have talked with this community quite a bit about the need for folks to take the healing one step higher, the need to distinguish between justice and revenge. Today I want to add in an important consideration–the dimension of time. Unless you truly understand that time is an illusion, real justice is evasive. Unless you understand that time as an illusion, you are stuck on what some label the carousel of time.     

So back to my story about the healee in a great deal of turmoil about the relationship with her brother.  When I attempted to reframe her situation from what is happening in the contemporary moment to what had been happening over time, she drew a blank. My words did not appear to make sense to her in any immediate sense.  I could hear the telepathic communication from her.  Her response more or less was along the lines of “I don’t know if I believe in reincarnation, but if it is real so what? So what if we have been in relationship since the dawn of civilization, since when does what he is doing now make it OK?”    

Thing is, it doesn’t. Nothing about the choices this brother is making to isolate and exploit the members of his family is OK. That said, what is going to permanently stop the abuse and is going to make possible a real level of healing for all is outside the boundaries of time.

I’ve been at that place where she lives, the place where very little information about time and about how reincarnation really works can get through the massive amounts of societal programming to the contrary.  I understand the mindset where the only thing that is considered real is what has occurred in the life experience of the body in which one is inhabiting. Decades ago as a seminary student I did over two years of reading hundreds of past lives in others. The only way I could make sense of what I was seeing was by setting aside the strident, outraged objections from my analyzer about how crazy what was coming out of my mouth sounded. I knew I had to be true to myself and the person I was reading in the sense of accurately describing what I was seeing. Disconnecting my brain from my mouth was the only I could figure out to not let my cognitive dissonance destroy what I recognized as my vital, emerging spiritual perspective.   

Many Eastern religions that recognize reincarnation often talk about Maya the “veil of forgetfulness,” the energy that works to protect human beings by helping us forget our past life experiences, and thereby not get lost to all that we have thought, felt and done over sometimes millennia. But the thing is, the energy of this veil itself is shifting under the apocalypse, the great time of revelations. It is no longer universally protective for us to forget what has occurred through other of our physical bodies. We have more important challenges now. . .challenges related to finding entire new ways of making sense of the world around us.

As much as I get overwhelmed episodically like the rest of humanity, I have to say I am glad for the new challenges. I don’t know about you, but I personally do not want to explore the same lessons over and over and over and over and over and over again because I keep forgetting what I learned. Yes, the infinite Godhead who operates outside of time and space allows spirit who has incorporated into a human body to reexperience toxic relationships with ourselves, each other and the environment around us as much as we want, as many generations and lifetimes as we desire. But know this–some of us are figuring out that we no longer value chaos and pain as the price of our forgetfulness.      

In the present time frame, enough of us are saying enough is enough. Most are not aware that it is time we are attempting to transcend. We just know our individual and collective lives seem at best, like a hamster madly dashing-on-its-wheel-for hours-or-at-least-until-it-is-exhausted kind of thing, getting nowhere real; at worst a painfilled death-enhancing rat race with others. Many want to jump off the wheel, that carousel of time.

Folks in the Eastern part of the globe often recognize that the wheel upon which they are stuck has to do with time, or what is often referred to as karma. Before you get inundated with perfect pictures or illusions that those folks have it all together about karma though, let me assure you otherwise. As someone who has recently been binge watching dozens of Netflix series from Japan, China and Korea, most of which directly explore spiritual themes like the astral plane, ghosts, guides, demons and other spiritual players, reincarnation, and the afterlife, I can tell you this is definitely not the case. These cultures may have a significant heads up when it comes to openness towards considering concepts about karma. However, they are no farther along with fully incorporating how to work with it; how to resolve it from a place of neutrality. I would love to teach a few million people in Asia how to approach embodied life on Mother Earth from the center of one’s head. 

Ironically, we do not have enough time in our short worship service today to explore much of what karma is and what it is not. So let me jump to a bottom line. If you think something bad that is happening to you or someone else needs to be met with some kind of payback; if you find yourself thinking some distressing event is due to your karma or some one else’s, you are still lost to the spinning of the wheel of time.   

Whether you use the increasingly old-fashioned term “ego” to describe that stuck place where the hurt seems bigger than the solutions; whether you are now talking about the solutions for individual trauma or “complex trauma” for extraordinarily harmful events; whether you are focused on multigenerational transmission of limiting concepts like scarcity and hatred; or whether you are fond of working through a big-picture symbol such as Kali, the dark Mother Goddess–it’s all about time. After all, in the Hindu pantheon Kali is not only the ultimate energy behind both creation and destruction. She is also known as the Goddess of Time. Why? Because spirit cannot fully explore creation and destruction without also mastering time.

So, what did I do with my healee who did not understand the dance with which she and her brother have been engaged?  I cleared the pain from her energetic body so she had the best possible chance at ultimately getting beyond the blame-game. I considered sharing something of my own story of my brother’s abject treatment towards me, which included stealing several thousand dollars of my inheritance. She might have felt less alone if I did, but I realized that she had already gotten some of that sense of connection. The next important step in her healing had more to do with other things. Rather, telepathically from soul-to-soul I thanked her profusely for bringing up my matching pictures in regards to my hate-filled brother.  And then I planted what seeds she might find useful for a a new way to look at the situation. I worked with her future self for when she is ready to address what she has been creating with her brother for 4,000 years.

  

As to those of you here today and here at some point in the future, this is what I have to say about transcending time. Learn to dance. Give up the marching towards an endlessly-repeating cycle in which others are in charge of the reality you are creating over all eternity. Rather, tiptoe your own way through the tulips, lightly, with as much awareness and amusement as you can muster.

Fox trot, do the Texas two step, swing your arms around madly in your private space, I don’t care. Just get out there and dance. Move that body. Listen for the beat of the music. Be in the present moment as fully as you can, and notice what sensations you get from your body where the past has perhaps dulled your aliveness. And then dance some more, lightly. Live that life, noticing the flow, changing steps as you need for your healing. Explore your essence to whatever extent you can. Let the rest play itself out.

You have all the tools you need. You know what to do if you falter or miss the beat. You have the life-affirming support of those in this community and in other spiritual and other kinds of communities, including in the spirit world. You have the blessings and full and ever-present support of your Creator to meet any and all stumbling steps and as-of-yet unmet challenges.

Dance on the strings of time like your life depends upon it.

Copyrighted by the Rev. Dr. Resa Eileen Raven, 2023.