leaving a legacy
Leaving a Legacy
A Legacy of Consiousness
A Legacy of Love
A Legacy of Service
A Legacy of Forgiveness
A Legacy of Peace
Living & Dying
The End of Time
Leaving a legacy
As we pass through life, we hope to leave some kind of a legacy -- an imprint of our existence. For most people, having children remains the most obvious way of transcending the temporal.
If we don’t have children, we may attempt to leave a legacy in other ways. To those with exceptional talent, we may contribute great works of art or architecture, or scientific and humanitarian achievement. Yet even with public recognition, we may feel our accomplishements are empty as we face our mortality.
We ask, who will remember my existence? What will I contribute of lasting value? We see those closest to us move away or die. Our dearest friendships change. A love relationship ends. The world crumbles around us, disintegrating into an abyss of uncertainty and oblivion. Even the famous are often soon forgotten. What legacy is there? Do we simply live, die, and disappear?
Perhaps the most transforming and revolutionary legacy we can leave for future generations is the legacy of consciousness – a deeper sense of the meaning of truth and life. We are all connected in consciousness. When we grow, others feel the effect. Our contribution of enlightenment brings everyone closer to this worthy state. When one tells the truth, others can too. When enough people change their minds about abuse or injustice and align with truth, falseness can no longer stand. The ripple effect is personal and powerful. The impact of my personal salvation shifts the community as well. My healing may be just the needed boost for someone else’s lonely quest for identity and self. Destiny calls us all to our purpose of enlightenment. When we answer, it isn’t only ourselves we save -- we begin to redeem the world.
return to top of page
A legacy of consciousness
This terrain is hard won. To discern truth, we must redeem ourselves from the past. As we grieve our traumatic history, we not only redeem ourselves, but also the world. Whatever horrors we face and release individually, the universe shifts with us. As we resolve our past, it becomes easier for others to do the same. As our consciousness expands through our healing, the whole world knows itself more fully.
The contribution of children to life is not the only legacy – in fact it may prove deadly with overpopulation. We need to consider another type of legacy beyond childbearing, one that sears a lasting imprint on the universe. It is the legacy of love. Love fosters life and moves human consciousness to enlightenment. The legacy of love is a foundation on which future generations can grow towards light.
We can all leave a legacy of this most important sort -- the ability to love. As we love, we foster growth in other people, in plants and animals, and in all that exists. As we cherish life in all its forms on planet earth, including ourselves, love becomes our legacy.
Love readily comes through all of us -- if we are freed our our past. If we remain psychically crippled from a traumatized childhood, it is difficult to love freely and fully. It is imperative that we investigate our history and grieve the injuries of childhood, if we wish to love with conviction. Healed of our past, our life-force, our love-force, flows freely through us.
Every quantum of love-energy that we emit is recorded in the universal log of life. Every incident of life affirmed, of illusion shunned, of a person nurtured into his or her full potential is registered. Every time we love, beyond the constrictions of fear and convention, we leave a legacy of love. Love is the most profound legacy of all.
As I love myself, others, and nature, I write my name in the ledger of immortality
return to top of page
A legacy of service
Out of new consciousness, we begin a life of service. It is not obligation or guilt that calls us to serve, but a deepened understanding of what will bring true satisfaction in our daily living. By sharing the light that burns within us, we not only serve the evolution of consciousness on the planet, but we discover the only real way to allay our own anxiety in existence. As we serve life, and its evolution into consciousness, we align with our true self and with God, and our fears from childhood are quieted.
No longer living out of the destructive behavior of the terrified child, we can serve life at last. As we face our worst demons, the internalized fears of the child living at the mercy of unconscious parents and the culture that bore them, we grow into adult autonomy and possibility. Our new partner is not limited parental figures, but God, with whom we are one. This consonance with God brings us a profound peace – for we are no longer a lonely, abandoned, and helpless child. We are an adult partnered with the source of life itself. We are God’s co-worker with a mission: to bring enlightened living to a troubled world.
I dedicate my new life to the service of enlightenment.
return to top of page
The legacy of forgiveness
Only adults can forgive
Children can not forgive. They are victims in captivity, living at the caprice of their parents who are often their perpetrators. Since most adults remain emotional children, their noble claims of forgiveness are self-deceptive, while their denied prison walls remain thick and real.
Only adults can forgive, and only after they have escaped the prison of the family and social convention. To forgive, we must have aligned with our true self after an arduous process of incrimination and grief.
Since unforgiven abuse chains us to the past, we adults must find a way to absolve the crimes of our history – especially the betrayals of mother and father. If we can forgive our parents, forgiving others is secondary. Forgiveness allows us to live in the vigor of our adult capacities. But how can we forgive for real?
Some forgive so easily? Why can’t I?
For those who remain emotional children, forgiveness comes easily and quickly – often in the name of God or goodwill. But this benevolence is false and dissociative. Hidden under this adult magnanimity is a frightened child, seeking parental approval and fearing reprisals. Steeped in clouds of denial, these adults lack the fortitude to indict their perpetrators, most often their parents – a necessity for true forgiveness.
Those who readily forgive elevate themselves for their noble deed, but are pseudo-enlightened. “Spirituality-lite” forgives with the wave of a wand and resents those who wrestle with darker realities. With smiling condescension, the dissociated demean the anguish of those grabbling with the cruelty of long-ago. Those who fail to face their troubled past will pathologize the struggle of those who do.
False forgiveness
Those who readily forgive their parents do so because it’s too hard to hold them accountable. To admit that our parents hurt us, we must grow up and surrender the child’s dream of parental love and rescue.
Others rationalize that their parents did “the best they could” … while the child was incested, or psychically tortured under their parents “good enough” watch. People exonerate parents for their crimes to avoid the pain of indicting them. But without indicting our perpetrators, we can not grieve the harm done. And the violated child remains imprisoned and suffers and rages alone. One day, this child will become an adult and seek retribution in insidious ways, harming himself and others – even his own children.
So how do we forgive?
Forgiveness is adult work. Only enlightened adults, living out of the true self, can forgive our abusers. Only an illuminated perspective can recognize bad behavior for what it is -- the expressions of an abused child.
Until we heal our childhood traumas, as individuals, and collectively as a community, nation, and world, we will always seek revenge and turn to violence. We will go to war with our partners, our neighbors, and co-workers – even with other nations -- until the raging child within us is appeased with love and care. As long as there is a neglected, wounded, and raging child at our core, who remains denied, untended, and unloved, we will always seek conflict and wishes of peace, like last year’s Christmas cards, though obligingly sent and well-intended, are quickly forgotten and discarded. Peace is possible, but requires a battle. The war is not with external enemies, but with the demons within our own psyches. Peace, which is part of our essence, will remain inaccessible, until we integrate the traumas inflicted during childhood. We will never know peace as long as it remains buried under the rubble of childhood pain. With understanding, we begin to forgive our persecutors and perpetrators, including our parents, for we see them for who they are – unconscious, traumatized children themselves. With this hard-won perception, peace begins at last. Now, we can truly wish peace to others with the conviction of those who have fought the battle for peace within themselves -- and won. At the end of time – the eternal begins The end of time is not just our death – but also the eternal now. We live with this paradoxical tension between time and eternity -- between dying and life eternal. Caught in time, culminating in death, we embrace life. As we live fully in the moment, we bask in eternity. If we can not live fully in the present, if we are trapped in unresolved issues from the past, in particular, traumas from childhood that reverberate unconsciously through our days on earth, it is difficult to feel the grandeur of life and its transcendent, universal nature. Instead, we are caught in a prison very small – death row really, counting days. For all rare outsiders to become fully alive, we must part company with systems that diminish our spirits -- that wish us dead. It is not an easy choice to leave familiar “familial systems” and embrace autonomy. We struggle with how to use our allotted time: dying to belong -- or living to be free? When we are filled with a deep sense of the true self, time ends. We become eternal. If we are not afraid to live fully, we are not afraid to die -- we can appreciate the full life-cycle which includes dying and death. Embracing life, we face death with equanimity. There is a limit to the days we will spend on earth. It is imperative that we use our time well, coming to consciousness and giving our gifts. As we become consonance with our human identity and our spark of the divine, we enter enlightened living and trade time for eternity. Living in the eternal now – time ends. Time on earth, used well, leads to eternity in this world and the next. As any year ends, or any period that has been exceptionally challenging or even rewarding, we may take a deep breath and say, Thank God it's over. It was a tough time. Many of our negative assumptions about ourselves were challenged in order to release our true selves. Yet we are grateful for the gift of time for through it we grow. Yet getting older doesn't guarantee enlightenment. Only if we use our years on earth consciously, looking within ourselves, learning from our experiences, aligning with the spark of the divine at our core, will the gift of wisdom be ours. As a year concludes, we can review the events of these days, the good and the difficult, and embrace them all as gifts to grow on. As we are true to our nature, step-by-step through time, we evolve into the true person God intended us to be. A bright new time is dawning, but its potential is rooted in the daily, even hourly struggles and victories of this old time that is passing. For the gift of these days together, we are deeply grateful. Time is a paradox. In the eternal now, I am perfect -- yet I evolve into this perfection through time. On the first day of a New Year, or the first day of any new chapter in our lives, we enter a new time. There is excitement in the air, for the gift we receive today is time -- a new day, a new year, another chance to heal and grow. Time is the medium of evolution allowing the unfolding of God’s purpose. The days of this New Year and new time, used consciously, will awaken our purpose and lead to our enlightenment. Time used constructively heals the wounds that would crush our life’s expression. Time used mindfully carries us like a mighty river to our depth. Time used consciously transforms our life experience into wisdom and illumination. No wonder we’re excited at the prospects of this New Year and its gift of time. To heal takes time. We must proceed slowly, day by day, unraveling the damage that confounds the full expression of our identity. Our wounds run deep for all of us for they were inflicted practically from our first breath. The painstaking work of loving all the lost parts of ourselves, including our orientation, back to life, vitality, and full expression must be done slowly, day by day, throughout this bright New Year. Today we begin the journey back to our self and truth. We take the hand of our frightened child who was shamed into believing he or she was of little value and hold him in our care and protection. We comfort this terrified child, buried within us, who hid himself for safe-keeping until this very moment. We open his prison and with our love, breathe life into his forgotten existence. Today we begin a sacred journey through a new time. Slowly, through the days of this new era, we develop our dishonored child into the fulfilled adult God intended. As we finish our days on earth in the riches of enlightened living, we leave behind us a planet and heirs, not ravaged, but enhanced by our existence.
return to top of page
The legacy of peace
At Christmas, we receive holiday cards wishing Peace on Earth, Good Will toward All. But, if we are honest, these sweet sentiments seem like wispy dreams in the face of life’s realities and the actual emotional atmosphere of our own lives. We sincerely yearn for Peace on Earth -- and in our lives, yet peace seems like a dissociated fantasy -- not a real possibility.
As we become conscious of our past and face our demons, the horrors of the child growing up in an unfriendly world and family, we will no longer need to externalize terror and see the face of evil in others. When we face the traumas of childhood directly, we will no longer seek the magical promise of “the peace that ‘passes’ all understanding” – but rather we find the peace that comes from understanding.
return to top of page
Living & dying
How to face death consciously
As we live, so shall we die. If we have lived consciously, we can die consciously.
Conscious living is adult activity. Enlightened adults approach death as we have approached all of life’s other profound transitions -- with reverence, maturity, and trust in life’s ability to transform and regenerate life into something more wondrous. Even out of death, we intuit life will be renewed somehow.
If we live in an infantile state, we will approach death as a child. We hope that a magic parent will come to our rescue and return us to bliss, for this is how we’ve lived life -- waiting for rescue. But since our parents never came for us in life, we wonder why should this time be different? Now death becomes a terrifying prospect. Perhaps this is why we prefer to die ill, anaesthetized, even distracted by suffering, making sure to the bitter end that we will feel nothing essential. We especially resist naming the true source of our suffering -- the betrayals of our childhood, now soon to be buried forever. We die as we have lived – numb -- even numb to one of life’s most profound and informing processes, dying.
Ideally, when our time comes to die, we will have lived, matured, and awakened. We will have done our homework on earth. We will have become our own person and have given our gifts back to life enhanced, developed, and evolved. With a sense of completion and satisfaction, we face the mystery of death consciously, trusting our adult capacities and life’s wonder to lead us through. God is deeply indebted to awakened adults for their contribution to the enlightenment of the universe.
I die as I have lived -- consciously evolving into the mystery of the next level.
return to top of page
Time and eternity
There is a finite quality to time and to the length of our journey on earth. One day we will die. In fact, as we spend the days of our lives, each day brings us closer to our death. However, if we use our days to grow, each day also brings us closer to our enlightenment – and consonance with the mystery of transcendence.
The gift of time – as a year ends
When we think of our evolution, both emotional and spiritual, we can't help but be grateful for the gift of time. Growth is a process -- not an event. We need days to sit with new feelings. We need time to reflect. Time to practice new behavior and ways of being that weren't possible even yesterday. We need time to heal -- even time to befriend God. The very evolution of our souls is a journey through time.
The gift of time -- as a year begins
return to top of page