Otherwise, the assault of modernity - from crass consumerism to a 24-hour news cycle to the compulsivity of the wired world - wrecks whatever we have left of our nervous systems, making the true spiritual meaning of Christmas seem as distant as the furthest star. It's only when we consciously carve out a space for the holy - in our heads, our hearts and our lifestyles - that the deeper mysteries of the season can reveal themselves.

The holidays are a time of spiritual preparation, if we allow them to be. We're preparing for the birth of our possible selves, the event with which we have been psychologically pregnant all our lives. And the labor doesn't happen in our fancy places; there is never "room in the Inn," or room in the intellect, for the birth of our authentic selves. That happens in the manger of our most humble places, with lots of angels, i.e. Thoughts of God, all around.

Something happens in that quiet place, where we're simply alone and listening to nothing but our hearts. It's not loneliness, that aloneness. It's rather the solitude of the soul, where we are grounded more deeply in our own internal depths. Then, having connected more deeply to God, we're able to connect more deeply with each other. Our connection to the divine unlocks our connection to the universe.

According to the mystical tradition, Christ is born into the world through each of us. As we open our hearts, he is born into the world. As we choose to forgive, he is born into the world. As we rise to the occasion, he is born into the world. As we make our hearts true conduits for love, and our minds true conduits for higher thoughts, then absolutely a divine birth takes place. Who we're capable of being emerges into the world, and weaknesses of the former self begin to fade. Thus are the spiritual mysteries of the universe, the constant process of dying to who we used to be as we actualize our divine potential.

We make moment-by-moment decisions what kind of people to be -- whether to be someone who blesses, or who blames; someone who obsesses about past and future, or who dwells fully in the present; someone who whines about problems, or who creates solutions. It's always our choice what attitudinal ground to stand on: the emotional quicksand of negative thinking, or the airstrip of spiritual flight.

Such choices are made in every moment, consciously or unconsciously, throughout the year. But this is the season when we consider the possibility that we could achieve a higher state of consciousness, not just sometimes but all the time. We consider that there has been one - and the mystical tradition says there have also been others - who so embodied his own divine spark that he is now as an elder brother to us, assigned the task of helping the rest of us do the same. According to A Course in Miracles, he doesn't have anything we don't have; he simply doesn't have anything else. He is in a state that is still potential in the rest of us. The image of Jesus has been so perverted, so twisted by institutions claiming to represent him. As it's stated in the Course, "Some bitter idols have been made of him who came only to be brother to the world." But beyond the mythmaking, doctrine and dogma, he is a magnificent spiritual force. And one doesn't have to be Christian to appreciate that fact, or to fall on our knees with praise and thanks at the realization of its meaning. Jesus gives to Christmas its spiritual intensity, hidden behind the ego's lure into all the wild and cacophonous sounds of the season. Beyond the nativity scenes, beyond the doctrinal hoopla, lies one important thing: the hope that we might yet become, while still on this earth, who we truly are.

Then we, and the entire world, will know peace.

But I assume that while you've experienced destruction, you've also been blessed by miracles. Destruction is usually material, while reconstruction begins on a spiritual plane -- not seen physically at first, but bursting forth like little knowings in the soul. I'm sure it's not easy -- in fact, the most brilliant dawns often emerge after nights of anxiety and anguish -- but there's no way you're not burning through layers of meaninglessness not just for yourselves but for all of us. I know you're learning in whole new ways what it means to live in community, to be there for each other, to survive without much of what you thought you needed in order to survive, to throw yourselves on God's mercy at a time when nothing or no one in the mortal world can lift you up in the way you feel you need, and to hug your kids like you've never hugged them before. From broken houses to broken hearts, you're having to sift through the debris of a world that needs to die now, and for the sake of all of us, make room in your hearts for some powerful new beginnings.

The rest of the country is doing what we can for you...praying, sending money and material help, definitely not turning away. And at least as importantly, we're bearing witness not only to your agony but to your courage. We deeply acknowledge the journey of sorrow you're having to take within yourselves -- not only to endure but to triumph, and ultimately to transcend the storm not only of Sandy but of the times in which we live.

I know I speak for many in sending you all the love in the world.

Marianne

People involved in the inner journey discover the value of the feminine, or spiritually receptive and inclusive, aspect of human consciousness. Everyone archetypally is a parent to future generations. And a motherly love - putting the care of children before every other consideration -- is the ultimate intelligence of nature. Yes, women are homemakers -- and the entire earth is our home. Yes, we are here to take care of the children -- and every child in the world is one of our own. We have evolved to a point to be ready to say these things, in a meaningful way and with a collective voice. Making money more important than your own children is a pathological way for an individual to run their affairs, and it's a pathological way for a society to run its affairs.

But people often say to me, "I don't want to get involved with politics because it makes me upset. What am I supposed to do with the anger, the rage, the cynicism?"

Well, I know what we shouldn't do. We shouldn't use our own upset as an excuse for not helping. We shouldn't come up with a pseudo-spiritual excuse for turning away from the pain of the world. There is nothing spiritual about complacency.

These are very serious times, and serious people need to be doing some serious thinking. The last thing we should do is allow ourselves to be infantalized by a counterfeit version of enlightenment. No true search for enlightenment ignores the suffering of other sentient beings. Ever.

Albert Einstein said we would not solve the problems of the world at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. We need more than a new politics; we need a new worldview. We need a fundamentally different bottom line. We need to shift from an economic to a humanitarian organizing principle for human civilization. And women, en masse, should be saying so.

The US incarcerates more of its people than any nation in the world, or any nation in history. Our military budget is almost twice that of all other nations of the world combined. At 23.1 per cent, our child poverty rate is so high that it is second only to Romania among the 35 developed nations of the world. 17,000 children on earth die of starvation every single day. We are the only species systematically destroying its own habitat. And two billion people - almost a third of the world's population - live on less than 2 dollars a day. There's a lot more to those statistics than a simple "To Do" list can fix. Those facts will only change when we bring to our problem-solving a far more committed heart.

Currently, the U.S. Congress is comprised of 16.8 per cent women. Our State legislatures are comprised of 23.6 per cent women. Would our legislative priorities be what they are today - tending always in the direction of serving those with economic leverage first -- were those legislative bodies anywhere near gender equal? Would the "war on women" exist as it does now? Would child poverty - or poverty, period - be given such short shrift? I like to think not.

Yet there are understandable reasons for the lack of female participation in our electoral politics, not the least of which is that the entire political system is contrary to everything a feminine heart stands for. It lacks inclusion. It lacks poetry. It doesn't nurture. It doesn't love. And without those things, the feminine psyche disconnects.

Where does that leave us though, if we simply shudder at the thought of politics and then ignore it altogether? Talk about being co-opted by a patriarchal system! We will have gone from men telling us condescendingly to not bother our pretty little heads about important things like politics, to not bothering our pretty little heads without even being told not to! The suffragettes struggled and suffered so much on our behalf; what a travesty of everything they stood for, if we simply look away as though we can't be bothered.

And yet we should be bothered. Our challenge is to not look away, but rather to transform the field; to create a new political conversation, our own conversation, out of which we can speak our truth in our own way.

My hope and intention is that Sister Giant will be an incubator for the emergence of that new field of political possibility, entailing a new conversation about America and a serious sense of sisterhood. It will cover everything from psychological and emotional issues to a spiritual perspective on politics, to actually training women how to run for office. I want to be a cheerleader for women who have never considered running for office or being involved in a campaign, but who in the quietness of their hearts might think, "Why not me?"

As we awaken individually, we will act more powerfully collectively; legislation and political campaigns will embody a new kind of thinking only if we engage en masse. In the absence of our engaging the political system, we allow it to become something other than what we are. That in fact is what has happened, but it's also what we can change. For what we engage, we transform. And what we engage with our hearts is transformed forever.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the desegregation of the American South was the political externalization of the goal of the Civil Rights movement, but that the ultimate goal was the establishment of the beloved community. He said it was time to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of human civilization. He wasn't called a New Age nutcase or considered an intellectual lightweight for saying such things, and neither should we be. I don't think making love the new bottom line is naïve; I believe that thinking we can survive the next hundred years doing anything less, is naïve. Sister Giant is a place for anyone who agrees with that - male or female, from the political Left, the political Right or the political Center. It will, I hope, contribute to a new conversation, a new America and a new world.

Sister Giant

What I hope we'll see now is a loud and fervent call by religious leaders in the United States - particularly Christians, because they are the majority - for religious non-judgment and love. Tolerance itself is not enough, for it still implies judgment. America at its best is an expansive mindset: an agreement that the point of freedom is not that those who think like we think and pray like we pray can feel at home here, but that all of us can feel at home here - because it is home to all of us.

That is freedom, that is America, and that is love.

In this case, the common wisdom is a lie.
                                     
From a spiritual perspective, the scenario above is upside down. From a spiritual perspective, the original high of a romantic connection is thrilling because it is true. It is in fact the opposite of delusion.  For in a quick moment, a gift from the gods, we are likely to suspend our judgment of the other, not because we are temporarily insane but because we are temporarily sane.  We are having what you might call a mini-enlightenment experience.  Enlightenment is not unreal; enlightenment - or pure love -- is all that is real. Enlightenment is when we see not as through a glass darkly, but truly face to face.
 
What is unreal is what comes after the initial high, when the  personality self reasserts itself and the wounds and triggers of our human ego form a veil across the face of love. The initial romantic high is not something to outgrow, so much as something to earn admittance back into - this time not as an unearned gift of Cupid's arrows, but as a consequence of the real work of the psychological and spiritual journey. The romantic relationship is a spiritual assignment, presenting an opportunity for lovers and would-be lovers to burn through our own issues and forgive the other theirs, so together we can gain reentrance to the joyful realms of our initial contact that turn out to have been real love after all.

Our problem is that most of us rarely have a psychic container strong enough to stand the amount of light that pours into us when we have truly seen, if even for a moment, the deep beauty of another. The problem we have is not that in our romantic fervor we fall into a delusion of oneness; the problem is that we then fall into the delusion of separateness. And those are the romantic mysteries -- the almost blinding light when we truly see each other, the desperate darkness of the ego's blindness, and the sacred work of choosing the light of mutual innocence when the darkness of anger, guilt and fear descend.

Marianne Williamson will delve deeply into the romantic mysteries in her February 17-19, 2012, workshop in Los Angeles called THE ENCHANTED LOVE WORKSHOP: Building the Inner Temple of the Sacred and the Romantic. Live streaming available. Go to www.marianne.com for details.

WISCONSIN CAPITOL PRAYER VIGIL
March 10, 2011

This is an effort to take a positive, spiritual, Unity approach to influencing what has been the ongoing debate and disagreement at our Capitol and throughout the state. This prayer vigil is open to anyone that is willing to take a moment or more for focused prayer or meditation.

At 7:00 am and at 7:00 pm, the vigil participants will take some time for a focused prayer or meditation. The timing could be 10 seconds or an hour, depending on your situation and desired participation.

This prayer vigil is meant to be non-partisan, we don't pray for any particular results with the politics or parties. What we do pray for in everyone and every situation is:
• Divine Order
• Peace
• Justice
• Understanding
• Compassion

Be creative and let Spirit flow through you. Some ideas for prayer and meditation:

• An affirmation, example: "I choose, in this moment, to release and replace any appearance of fear or mistrust with light and love and peace."

• The Prayer for Protection
"The Light of God surrounds us,
The Love of God enfolds us,
The Power of God protects us,
And, The Presence of God watches over us."

• Visualize the Capitol glowing in white, healing light

• Create whatever prayer or meditation you feel will help bring peace and Divine Order to everyone in Wisconsin and beyond.

We will begin this practice immediately and continue until peace is restored. Share this with any souls your think would be open and willing.

Peace & Blessings,
Barry Roberts & Sandy Strietelmeier

Just as we wouldn't tolerate elements to enter our home that needlessly endanger our own children, so we shouldn't tolerate elements in the world that needlessly endanger anyone's children. Homemaker and motherhood are not just material conditions that belong to a few; they are states of consciousness that belong to any woman who assumes them. Women should be the keepers of the conscience of the world. We are keepers of the internal flame - the light of humanitarian values and the primacy of love - and our greatest power lies in keeping it lit.

Corporate profits should not be our economic bottom line; the safety and welfare of this planet, our collective habitat, should be our bottom line. On this, we should insist. For we are the homemakers of the world....

Money should not be our societal bottom line; the welfare of our children should be our bottom line. On this, we should insist. For we are the mothers of the world...

Any mother, should she see something dangerous in her home, would say, "No, not in this house! No way! Not here!" And as women of the world become the strong moral force that in our collective state we are capable of being, then when dangerous elements born of unrestrained greed and aggression enter the world, it is we who should lead the cry, "No, not on this planet! No way! Not here."

A common anthropological characteristic of every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when she senses a threat to her cubs. From the lioness to the tigress to the mama bear, any threat to her cubs is met with the fiercest response. The adult female hyenas even encircle their cubs while they're feeding, not letting the adult males get anywhere near the food until the babies have been fed.

Surely the women of America could do better than the hyenas.

Imagine if we were to insist -- as with our collective political and financial power we could insist -that the amelioration of unnecessary human suffering become society's new bottom line. From the 17,000 children on this planet who starve to death each day to the millions who lack a basic elementary education, from the relative complacency of the industrialized nations to the brutalization of women through the world to the billion souls among us living as best they can on less than $1.25 a day, it is the sleeping giant of a conscious and awakened womanhood that can provide the only sustainable solution: putting human civilization back on the track to probable survival by giving back to it its heart.

Women worked hard, and many at great personal sacrifice, to provide for the modern Western woman the extraordinary opportunities and powers that we now enjoy. While not all our battles for equality have been won, still enough of them have been won that our focus should not be solely on getting more power, but on how to use most effectively the power that we have. We have not only the right but also the moral responsibility to speak out loudly not only for our planet and our children, and for the millions of sisters around the world who cannot speak up for themselves. Not centuries ago but weeks ago, a fourteen year old girl in Bangladesh was raped, then caned as her "punishment," and then died of her wounds. Let us speak, and act, for her.

In honor of our foremothers, for the sake of our oppressed sisters around the world, and for the love of all of our children both born and not yet born, we should wake up now... kick ass now... and change this world before it is too late. For that kind of thing is woman's work. Twas always thus, and will always be....

Given the current make-up of the US Congress, the passage of the bill this session is somewhat unrealistic of course. But that does not matter; no true warrior for peace and justice ever let "realism" stop them. If that were the case, there would have been no abolitionist movement, suffragette movement or civil rights movement. When it comes to doing the right thing, it doesn't matter whether the status quo is with you yet. You just keep on keepin' on. We're building something in the ethers here; when the tipping point will get here, no one knows.

The idea of this bill getting out of committee this year is almost laughable, but so what? Let's not let laughter stop us -- let it propel us. Laughter is a powerful thing, as long as it's a laughter in anticipation of what you know in your heart is bound to become reality someday, rather than the cynical laughter laced with inner tears at the sight of what already is.

For two per cent of the current Dept. of Defense budget, this bill would celebrate and honor and -- most importantly -- support with actual resources the extraordinary peace-making efforts of Americans both here and abroad. It's not enough to simply fight violence with violence. We must do more than that; we must proactively create a world in which violence has no room to breathe. This is hardly some pie in the sky idea; it's an idea that would institutionalize the drive towards peace creation. Whoever wants to laugh at that can laugh. There is already enough support given to a war machine in this country; it could be argued that were we in our right minds, we would cry all day just thinking about it. So why shouldn't we create a peace machine? As John Lennon said, "Let's give peace a chance." One of the ways to do that is by giving it some political heft.

On President's Day, let's remember these words of President John F. Kennedy: "Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." Today, let's take a stand for peaceful evolution, despite the extraordinary material forces arrayed against it. The ways of violence and brute force have always amassed material power, but don't let that stop you. Love has cosmic support.

This President's Day, do something that you might do if you were President. Take a stand for peace. Write your Congressperson and give support to the Dept. of Peace bill. Tell him or her you'd like them co-sponsor it. Find out more about it at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h112-808. Write an Op Ed, attend a Town Hall meeting of your Congressperson, send this information to your mailing list. Make a beautiful noise about a beautiful idea.

We won't eradicate war until we more deeply embrace peace, and that takes more than just a wish or even a prayer; it takes spine. One of the leaders of the Egyptian protest movement said something remarkable after the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. He said, "We're dreamers and we made it happen." We're dreamers too, but dreams must do more than dream. Now we must do the "make it happen" part.

What better day to do that than on President's day. And who knows? If our noise is loud and powerful and beautiful enough, even our President might hear....

We are joined as brothers because we are joined, period. This is the mystical meaning of the line "one in Christ."

From a spiritual perspective, yes love will ultimately prevail. Buddha became enlightened; the Jews made it to the Promised Land; Jesus resurrected. All those are religious tales that inform us of the basic imprint of the universe. No story is over until the happy part, and if it's not happy yet then the story isn't over.

But that is only the beginning of a framework for understanding. We mustn't let the phrase,"Love will ultimately prevail," be a mere platitude that serves to justify complacency...either spiritual or political. For whether we learn to love one another through wisdom or through pain is completely up to us. How long it takes before love prevails is completely up to us. How much human suffering occurs before love prevails is completely up to us. Free will does not mean we get to determine what ultimately happens, but it does mean we get to determine what happens in the immediate future to us and to those we love.

When you have thousands of people acting out a high-emotion, high-stakes drama such as that which is occurring in Egypt today, almost anything can happen.

On the one hand, we are witnessing the purity and power of the quest for freedom. The demand for basic human rights, the repudiation of a dictator, and the protest of an economic order in which 40 per cent of one's population lives on less than 2 dollars a day - all of this is a pure, democratic rising up of the human spirit. And if America doesn't stand in support of those things, then we've completely lost our own moral center.

At the same time, this situation has gone from volatile to violent. Freedom is rising, but the forces of oppression are cracking down. Chaos overrides not only the impulse to freedom but also the impulse to basic human decency. Blood is spilling. People are dying.The situation has gone from liberating to tragic.

Right now, let's pray for a miracle.

May a great wave of sanity and peace flood the minds and hearts not only of the protestors, but also the military and police and government. The phrase "may cooler heads prevail" comes to mind. May men and women of honor and good will within every corner of Egyptian society be listened to, and their words and ideas heeded. May thousands of small miracles that you and I will never ever know about quiet down a conversation over here, cause a peaceful solution to emerge in a neighborhood over there. May a general sense of peace and good will - something we'd seen almost miraculously on display at the beginning of the protests -- return to the streets of Egypt.

Try closing your eyes and see, with your mind's eye, legions of angels roaming through the streets of Cairo. Do this as frequently as you can throughout the day. It is no idle fantasy. This is the exercise of spiritual power, and in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., such power is "more powerful than bullets." Even when we are materially passive, he said, we can still be "spiritually active."

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle means that as the observer changes, there is a change in that which is observed. Worldly news anchors report the news: miracle- workers help change the news by the nature of their thoughts. And the greatest medium of miracles is prayer. So today, let's pray for Egypt.

Dear God, please pave a miraculous path for the people of Egypt, to peace and freedom and joy unending. Bless their hearts. Guide their minds. Illumine this moment. May love prevail. Amen.

Sometimes I look at the world around me and despair, as I suppose most everyone does, at the current spate of humanity's trials and tribulations. But I see enchantment and miracles and and love all around me too, and I know that they are God's consistent response to the mess humanity can make of things. How tragic the suffering a wrong-minded view of the world creates, and how merciful that the universe keeps throwing us new opportunities to do things differently. I know that beyond this world is a realm of greater possibility, and the veil that separates us from there is so much thinner than we think.

Every time we see beyond the veil, we become veil-lifters for others as well. Our criticism, blame, judgment and such only thicken the veil, while forgiveness and mercy and compassion dissolve it. It really is so simple, yet sometimes so difficult. And yet it is the choice we make, every moment of every day.

Turning Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday into a national holiday is one of the things that America got right. It's a day set apart from all others, when all generations will pause to think about a great man, his legacy and what it should mean to us.

So far that sounds great, and to a large extent it's what's happened. But I've been around for all of the MLK birthday celebrations so far, and the yearly "celebration of his life" is starting to look in ways like a Disneyized version of both the man and his legacy. The last thing we need today is a romanticized version of Martin Luther King, Jr., much less an idealized version of the struggle that he stood for.

In l945, when Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower toured the former German concentration camp at Ohrdruf, , he famously said to an aide, "Take pictures. Take lots of pictures. Some day some sons of bitches are going to try to say this never happened."

I haven't heard anyone say that the Civil Rights movement never happened, but the national memory is turning pretty soft. Despite the successful efforts of the Texas School Board to foist upon all American schoolchildren the audacious rewrite of history that gives short shrift to the Civil Rights movement -- and the shameless willingness of textbook publishers to go along with that - the facts do remain the facts. The Civil Rights movement was and remains one of the most significant social justice movements in the history of the Unites States. And despite the almost odd emphasis on "community service" which has come to mark this day- as in, you know, help the homeless, feed the poor, be "non-violent" -- Martin Luther King, Jr. stood for a love that was more significant and more difficult, involving a lot more suffering than just being a good citizen for a day. If all Martin Luther King Jr. had stood for was community service - if his message to black America had been simply to ameliorate the suffering in its midst through compassionate one-on-one action -- then he would probably not have died how or when he did. Let's be clear about that, and not hand down to our children some whitewashed version of the man and his mission. Martin Luther King was far more courageous and more dangerous to the status quo than is reflected in this contemporary caricature.

He challenged the United States to allocate its vast and gargantuan resources in a more fair, just and compassionate way; and for that, he died. He challenged, at the end of his life, the increasing American militarism that sent young men to die for old men's mistakes; and for that, he died. He demanded that the United States make good on its creed of liberty and justice for all, not just in word but in deed; and for that he died. We do not serve his legacy, and we do not serve our children, by portraying either the life or the struggle or the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. as simply the story of a peaceful man who sought to establish "the beloved community" and then, for some mysterious reason that shall remain shrouded in obfuscation, was shot on a motel balcony and died.

No, kids, if you believe that, then you're not asking enough questions. Yes, it's our job to keep his dream of the beloved community alive, but it's also our job to be as critically intelligent as he was regarding the entrenched resistance to the materialization of that dream.

A Protestant theologian in the 20th Century wrote a commentary on the story of the Good Samaritan as he made his journey from what we might call "good" Samaritan to "conscious" Samaritan. The first time the Samaritan saw a beggar on the road, he stopped to give him alms. The second time he saw a beggar on the road, he stopped to give him alms. The third time he saw a beggar on the road, he stopped to give him alms. About the fourth time he saw the beggar on the road, he stopped to ask himself, "Why are there so many beggars?" Martin Luther King would not just ask us to help those who suffer; he would ask us to challenge the institutional forces that make all that suffering inevitable.

On King's birthday this year, a good doctor in Oakland received a Martin Luther King, Jr. Hero's award for treating children with asthma in a low-income community. It struck me, as I watched the award ceremony, that in order to truly honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., we need do more than honor the good doctor who treats asthma: we need to ask ourselves, and demand of our government, what environmental standards have been so compromised, and to whose financial benefit, that so many children in American today, particularly in our most disadvantaged communities, have asthma to begin with.

In order to truly keep Dr. King's dream of the beloved community alive, we must dream our own contemporary version of it. We can dream of an America that is not willing to protect the privileges of the few at the expense of the needs of the many; we can dream of an America in which our citizens are not so easily manipulated to equate the size of our military budget with the safety of our future; we can dream of an America, and a world, in which love and not money are civilization's bottom line.

MLK's love was not a complacent love, any more than his political activism was cynical or angry. When confronted with the accusation that he was an extremist, Dr. King made this reply, "Perhaps I am, but I'm an extremist for love." Did you hear that kids? Be extremists....for love. Do not be tricked into thinking that the struggle for the beloved community is easy, unchallenged, or over. It is none of those things. Just as in the days of Dr. King, the struggle for justice is often difficult, it attracts the ire of the prevailing system, and it is far from over. On this one day each year, when we think of Dr. Martin Luther King -- what he gave us, and what we lost -- in order to honor him most deeply, we will do more than community service. We will remember that our service must not stop there. We will try, as he did, to truly step up to the plate. And like him, we will change the world.

So it's basically irrelevant whether Jared Loughner specifically related to the hate speech around him in some linear, causal way. Thoughts can go viral, as we have seen throughout history when group pathologies overcame the better angels of a people (Hitler's Germany was an example). And as it is written in The Course, "all thought creates form on some level." If enough hate-thought and hate-speech is present, it's almost inevitable that some hate-filled manifestation will emerge somewhere within that field of consciousness. Jared Loughner was swimming in the thought-forms and images of hate, as almost all of us are these days. And to an obviously deranged mind, violent thought forms are like gasoline to an already smoldering fire.

I heard a not-yet-declared 2012 Presidential candidate on television, refusing to condemn the use of gun imagery in political dialogue. "After all," he said, "we have free speech." Darn right, Sir. And something else we should have is a dose of healthy shame. Maybe it shouldn't be illegal to talk about one's political opponents as though they're enemy combatants. But it should be unthinkable.

Hopefully after the events in Tucson, things will quiet down and our political dialogue will become more civilized and respectful. One can only hope. We had two days of a sober, silent and tender collective heartbeat, and even in its sadness it was inspiring. The Tucson memorial had some stunning moments. As it was after 9/11, Americans got quiet for a moment of group sanity....we felt the authenticity of our humanness...we actually remembered we were a nation. But it didn't last then, and we will see whether it lasts now.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is often said that "every problem comes bearing its own solution." Tragedy takes us to the very state of consciousness which, were we to hold to it, would go far toward preventing further tragedies. Whether pundits, politicians and media personalities choose to use this tragedy to grow spiritually, to increase their compassion, to commit more deeply to love, is under no one's control but their own. But each of us can decide for ourselves what we will personally do with this latest national tragedy. We can remember that just as hate thought and hate speech do indeed affect the entire world, so do loving thought and loving speech. The only thing greater than a forcefield of hate is a forcefield of love. And each and every one of us -- with the thoughts we think, the words we use and the things we do -- contribute, or fail to contribute, to the field of consciousness that will save us all.

America is looking deeply at itself right now, and we have desperately needed to do that. Vigils are being held all over the state of Arizona, and on invisible planes we know that miracles are happening because of it. Hearts are softening; sanity is returning. People are remembering that all of us are human, and all of us are infinitely valuable. A deranged young man merely reflected the insanity of our current political discourse, and as the saying goes, "every problem comes bearing its own solution." It has taken a tragedy like this to make us all take a deep breath.

All of us are praying for Congresswoman Giffords and the others who were shot today. But let's put feet to our prayers, as well. Wherever we are and whoever we are, we can participate in de-escalating the violence of our society by de-escalating the violence in our hearts. Whoever we haven't forgiven, tonight let's simply do it. Whoever we're thinking about with anger, tonight is the night to let it go. And to whatever extent we haven't been a powerful voice for love in our own lives, let's commit tonight to stepping up our game. Life is a serious business, and to whatever extent we haven't been playing it seriously, let tonight be the night when we awaken from our stupor and decide to be a player in the healing of our world.

Among other things, let's look deeply at how easy it is for deranged people to get guns not only in Arizona, but in other places in our country as well. If you feel this isn't right -- that it isn't safe for us or for our children -- then know the only way we will override the resistance of the National Rifle Association is if we ourselves get involved in the effort. THe NRA is right that guns don't kill people -- that people do. But with so many unstable people out there, there is no rational reason for us to make it so easy for them.

May those who died in today's massacre rest in peace. They have done what they came to do this lifetime, and it is time for them to sleep.

But for the rest of us, it is time to wake up. To pray yes, but also to act. To think deeply, but also to speak powerfully. To feel concern, but also to act with courage. God's blessing doesn't just mean that He does something for us; it also means that He does something through us. And now is the time to let Him. God bless Arizona, God bless America and God bless us all.