I have this uneasy feeling the universe is in trouble. Like serious trouble.
There is this thing called the "Great Attractor." It is a mass thousands of times more massive than the Milky Way, our tiny little galaxy, which itself is about 100 light years across.
We are HURDLING towards this Great Attractor at a mind-blowing rate of 1.3 million miles per hour.
The Great Attractor is pulling millions of galaxies in a small region of the universe towards it. We should be there in about 250 million light years.
I mean if you don't ask "why" then you, at the very least, aren't having enough fun with your time on Earth.
I like to believe us millions of galaxies are all converging at the Great Attractor for an important meeting. We are being summoned to a meeting of the minds.
The only reason I can imagine that we are having a meeting of such importance is because something is broken. Something, of major consequence, is happening that needs our help.
Because of this I also believe that Earth is actually a training ground. Like boot camp for soldiers that are being prepared to go to war.
We are being trained with real life or death situations where we must ultimately come together to fix our spaceship, aka Earth.
It's 6:30 am. I didn't wake up with the plan of writing this post. Although, I have been thinking about it.
My plan was to read a little out of Thomas Merton's wonderful book, "New Seeds of Contemplation."
I opened it up to page 76 and read this:
"If you want to now what is meant by "God's will" in man's life, this is one way to get a good idea of it. "God's will" is certainly found in anything that is required of us in order that we may be united with one another in love. You can call this, if you like, the basic tenet of the Natural Law... In other words, the natural law is simply that we should recognize in every other human being the same nature, the same needs, the same rights, the same destiny as in ourselves."
Thomas Merton
I simply no longer believe in coincidences. Freud said, "there are no mistakes." I live that existence. Like the Great Attractor, I am now being pulled in a way that I am meant to be pulled.
As I stand on Earth today I now know: Everything has meaning. Everything is sacred. Everything matters.
I am not going to call this person out unless there was recording that I can confirm what I heard. I was so shocked by what I am pretty sure I heard that I can't even believe it. But I am fairly certain a person in an important public position publicly chastised me by saying it wasn't fair for my neighbors that homeless people were walking around my property. (Even if he didn't say it, it hardly matters. Our new anti-panhandling laws in Summit County are saying the exact same thing.)
When a person says that it is unfair for another person to "walk around" we are clearly not ready.
We haven't learned a word Jesus, for example, taught us 2000 years ago.
You may think that 250 million light years will surely be enough time for us to get our act together, I'm not so sure.
I feel like we have made almost no progress on the Golden Rule. According to Greg M. Epstein, the current Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, " 'do unto others' … is a concept that essentially no religion misses entirely,"
Every religion says it over and over and over again. And we just ignore it as a society. Government, I'm sure, feels they have too much "important work" to consider such niceties.
But I am here to tell you, THE ONLY WAY we will ever fix things like children dying of things like malaria and global poverty is by working together.
We somehow must make working together sexy. We must create marketing messaging around helping your fellow human as attractive as getting the next iPhone. I simply believe this is the only way we will ever get to the next level of our capability as a species.
"I got mine" is an incredibly powerful force. This animalistic desire is rooted deep in the DNA of our monkey brains. It's quite possible we'll never evolve out of it. However, I don't believe that for a second. Our spiritual guides throughout history have put these higher planes of existence in front of us because they know we can do it. They know we can be better. They know our destiny is an enlightened existence where we become a powerful galactic force that will start by fixing our world and then will be ready to fix the universe.
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