Swami Beyondananda’s 2008 State of the Universe Address

Dear Friends, 

 

I know of no one other than the Swami Beyondananda who can pinch us with his remarks and make us wake up laughing. He is a master of both words and wisdom that he delivers with just the right amount of loving advice.

 

Perhaps the most important things is, he helps us see the lighter side of the seriousness of the world situation. I hope you will enjoy his address. Be careful, you might have to read some of these sentences twice to see the wisdom of his words. I never realized that learning could be such a good laugh as well. Yet in the totality of this he truly speaks from the heart. 

 

Please enjoy, with love to all,

 

Carl Azcar

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Every year at this time, I am asked to make predictions, and each time I politely refuse because I don’t want to jeopardize my nonprophet status. But this year is different. With 2012 just one quantum leap year away, we humans might finally be ready for a quantum leap of our own. The message is coming in loud and clear. Time to shift or get off the pot.

In order to upshift our karma into surpassing gear, however, we must shift our awareness downward from the static of the head to the ecstatic of the heart. If we are to have an awakening instead of a wake, I predict heart times ahead.

Heartenment, after all, is just the thing to counteract the disheartenment in the heartland. Take the economy -- please! After years of untreated Deficit Inattention Disorder, the U.S. dollar is now worth less than a dollar of Monopoly money. As the most recent Greenspan report tells us, the average American family barely has enough green to span the average month. Meanwhile, trickle down economics has proved true to its name, leaving a growing class of pee-ons at the bottom.

Then there’s electile dysfunction. Instead of transparency around how votes are cast and counted, we have an apparent trance. The secret ballot has been taken to the next level, and now voting machines with secret software count the votes in secret. This is called “faith-based” vote counting. Hey, some of those new “smart” voting machines are so smart, that they don’t even need voters! This makes perfect sense because government of, by and for the people has now been efficiently transformed to government of, by and for the very, very few people. Talk about minority representation. We are now governed by a smaller minority than ever in our history!

Even when we do manage to get an election, the body politic still suffers from impotence. As we learned after the 2006 election, just because we vote for someone doesn’t mean they are going to vote for us. Instead of canceling the Iraqi Horror Picture Show, the Democratic misleadership has gone along with the same basic neocon con, only with a cosmetic makeover – sort of a wolfawitz in sheepawitz’s clothing.

Though the upwising continues, irony deficiency and truth decay still plague the body politic. Instead of forums that shine light on political issues, the media has encouraged againstums where incendiary phrases spark heated arguments. So, while red tribe Republicans and blue tribe Democrats argue whether it’s wronger to kill the born or the unborn, the born keep dying while the not-yet-born are stuck with the bill. No wonder our moral compass has gone south. 

As if global warring isn’t enough to worry about, now there’s global warming. It would be sad indeed to have come this far, only to see the headline: “Human Race Ends In a Dead Heat.”

No wonder so many people are scared shiftless. The good news is, this is the State of the Universe Address and I am happy to report that the state of the Universe is copasetic – ever changing, same as always. This is particularly heartening when we realize that that universal state is also our own.

When it comes to universal wisdom, you can’t beat the Universe. First of all, the Universe is everywhere all at once. Talk about being on top of things. Even as it keeps expanding, the Universe has it together -- which means, as part of the universe, a part of us has it all together too. We are inextricably connected to the Universe. It is inescapable. Without the Universe, we’d be nowhere.

Here is more amazing news. We are all descended from the same Big Bang! When the Big Bang went boom, all of the Universe’s parts departed from one particle. And that includes us. So, we might as well proclaim it proudly. “The Big Bang is my pop. Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!”

The Big Bang is everybody’s pop, which means we are all related. If we are indeed a fractal chip off the old block, Universe-wise ... then somewhere we must be as wise as the Universe. For millennia, spiritual teachers have told us to look inside for this universal wisdom. It turns out, they were right. The real spiritual pilgrimage is actually a journey of about twenty-four inches, roughly the distance from the head to the heart. 

Yes, everyone is equipped to attune to universal wisdom because everyone has been given a heart. And yet, the heart seems to be the last gift we open. The most underdeveloped resource on the planet is the treasure inside our own treasured chest! Given all the craziness in the world, maybe if we invested in expanding our hearts, we’d have less need to shrink our heads. 

And less of a need to be so all-consumed by consumerism. We have learned to spend so much energy pursuing happiness that we never stop to think what would happen if we actually caught it -- or rather, if it caught us. With all this hot pursuit, we have left real happiness in the dust. It is sad indeed that we end up jealous that someone else’s happiness might be bigger than our own. Freud called this “happiness envy.” 

As the saying goes, money can’t buy happiness, although it can buy anti-depressants. But if you are seeking more out of life than not being depressed, the key to happiness is to grow your own. Every one of us should be asking, “What good am I?” What good can I add to the greater goodness? Maybe if we had greater goodness, we’d need fewer goods. As human beings, our biggest asset is love, so now is the time to get up off our big fat assets, and practice supply-side spirituality. Because we aren’t here to earn God’s love, we are here to spend it. We are here to re-grow the Garden from the grassroots up, and have a heaven of a time doing it! 

Now while the solution is simple, no one said it was going to be easy. Just as the human potential movement has made great gains over the past 25 years, the inhuman potential movement has more than kept up. Everywhere I go, the little David’s I meet all ask the same question: How can we get Goliath to go lieth down? I have good news and I have other news, and they are both the same: It’s up to us. We must lead ourselves out of the bewilderness. Yes, we’ve been politically abused, so the first step is to disabuse ourselves. We must start overseeing instead of overlooking. 

By overlooking what we should have been overseeing, we have become enablers for the lowest common dominator. Whether it’s called globalization or gobble-ization, it’s the same old mining operation -- that’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine. Because we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine that someday that “mine” will be ours, we have agreed to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with our government. We promise not to ask them what they are doing, and they promise not to tell us. That way, we can pretend to believe we are invading a country to keep the peace, when we are really there to keep the pieces.

Meanwhile, back at home, they’ve given last rites to the Bill of Rights, and newspeak has become the new spoken language of the mainstream media. Now before we just shrug and say, “Orwell, what can we do about it?” we need to see the only way to overgrow Big Brother is with bigger brotherhood -- and even bigger sisterhood. Time to heal our spiritual dyslexia, and realize our natural state is sacred, not scared. The scared masculine and the scared feminine have given us the dysfunctional dance of abusers and enablers. Now we must empower the sacred masculine and sacred feminine to come together and conceive what has been inconceivable – the truly evolved human.

We need to amplify the love and light to counterbalance the darkness and fear, and that is why we need a nongovernmental Department of Heartland Security to secure the heartland and let the powers in power know in no uncertain terms, “Bigger brotherhood is watching you.”

To do that, we must migrate en masse --regardless of political or spiritual affiliation -- to the land of the heart. Instead of squabbling over the differences that separate us, we must cohere around the heart-core values we share in common. That is the only way we can trade our insecurity for inner security. No matter where we stand on climate change, one thing is clear. Global heartwarming is bound to change the political climate for the better.

Whatever the problems, we have the wherewithal to address them. Now all we need is the aware-with-all. Whether you call yourself a creationist or an evolutionist, or take the simplest approach of all to the Great Unknown -- not knowing -- one thing is undeniable: We are all one with the same One. The story of separation, survival of the fittest, and lowest common dominator --that is the old story. 

Only we have the power to close the book on the old story once and for all, by declaring: And they all lived happily ever after.

And happily ever after begins now. 

© Copyright 2008 by Steve Bhaerman. All rights reserved.