Independence Day by Tina Erwin

     The Fourth of July is a great summer holiday and there will be lots written about how valuable freedom is to all of us.
    We will hear all about how freedom isn't free. It isn't. We pay for it by the good and bad decisions our elected representatives make.
    The Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights were designed to be the guide through the generations and for generations to come of how to run this country to maintain all of these freedoms that we all hold so dear and for which so many of us have died - again and again. However, not everyone believes this. Some elected officials deny the very rights that we celebrate on the 4th of July.  Some elected officials are deliberately putting our country at risk.
     When anyone, including any elected official who wrongly believes that he or she is above the law, seeks to circumvent the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of this country, this person needs to be impeached, removed from office through the correct legal means.
    When anyone, including any elected official who wrongly believes that he or she is above the law seeks to subvert the safety and security of this country, with individuals and governments that wish to destroy these United States and its visitors all over the world, this person and his or her lieutenants, need to be impeached, removed from office through the correct legal means.
      When any elected official seeks to subvert the rights of freedom of speech, denies the truth of situations and lies to the American people and its allies, this person and his or her lieutenants, needs to be impeached, removed from office through the correct legal means.
      When any elected official seeks to destroy the very basis of good order and discipline that define the US military and the safety and security of this country, this person and his or her lieutenants, needs to be impeached, removed from office through the correct legal means.
       American tourists, American personnel working in Embassies, American military personnel and American staffers working for aid agencies all over the globe are now less safe than they have ever been. They have a target on their backs, thanks to the most recent actions taken by elected and non-elected officials. Never in history have Americans been in such a precarious situation put there squarely by those supposedly elected to see to our safety.
        All Americans have a duty to stand up and tell their elected representatives how they feel about the most recent actions happening today and demand that those responsible at the highest levels, be removed from office, for they no longer represent the best interests of the American People.
       Either we stand up for freedom or we no longer deserve to enjoy it.
     And yes, sometimes being 'spiritual' means standing up for the right thing and then doing the right thing.

KS&L 281 Are We Creating War? A Memorial Day Perspective by Tina Erwin

We tell people to make love, not war, but we see people who supposedly love each other kill each other in their own homes. We are, as a civilization, exceptionally hypocritical and profoundly violent.

         We fight with our neighbors, our friends, co-workers and families. We are the microcosm of war on a day-to-day basis. Is it any wonder that governments struggle with the macrocosm of crazy leaders fighting other crazy leaders? We even fight each other politically, but blessedly, in the United States, without overt violence.

However, we do engage in ‘dirty tricks’ in national and business politics. The first casualty is always the truth. First we distort the truth, so that it looks like something else and then we pretty much finish it off, by making something that starts out as good into something horrible. We have so distorted the truth that we have no idea what to believe anymore.

Television networks, which condemn cries for vengeance in other countries, think nothing of airing shows, which promote vengeance among teenagers, business people and neighbors. It sells product because people love conflict. Are we teaching our young people that vengeance is an acceptable behavior?

We cry and demonstrate against military deaths, as if death were somehow surprising. People live and they eventually have to die of something. People look at numbers and are horrified, without realizing that in an average year, the entire United States military, all services combined, has roughly 2200 people die per year, when we are not at war.  Contrast that statistic with the fact that over 6,000 young people die each year when they go to college: six thousand. In the last six years, 36,000 kids died in college where they were supposed to be safe. No one is upset about that statistic. Contrast this with the six years of the Iraq war, where four thousand people have died in that conflict. Horrible, heart wrenching as it is, in six years, that number is still dramatically lower than one year of deaths in college. It is chilling to consider that a young person statistically is safer in the military than in college, even when we are at war.

 We loose 100,000 people to hospital mistakes every single year:  one hundred thousand people. Where is the press coverage of this? And the list goes on. People live and they die all kinds of deaths. There has to be a way for people to leave when the experience they came for in this time and space is over. War, emotional, personal, national, neighborly war, is frequently a method of exit.

Another thought to ponder is that conflict offers each of us an opportunity to ‘stand up for something’ and to discover whether we ‘have what it takes’ to be a courageous person. Courage is action in the face of fear, difficulty and hardship. Well, to be able to show courage, you have to have fear, difficulty and hardship. So, back to polarity we go.

         So, these are some of the reasons there is war, and it serves to remind us that we need to be very, very careful when we accuse someone else of ‘warmongering’ or being violent. Unless this planet undergoes some unimaginable spiritual transformation that takes the concepts of violence out of our emotional structure, there will continue to be ‘low intensity conflicts,’ as a minimum and major wars as a terrible potential.

We may also want to be circumspect in using negative words about the military. Most military people really want to make peace and actually want to avoid war at all costs.

For example, if you ask a US Navy Commander, how he feels about his job of being captain of a nuclear submarine carrying 24 nuclear missiles, that could pretty effectively destroy the entire world, he will immediately tell you that he feels he was successful at his job if he never fires a weapon in anger.  That would be the definition of peace keeping. Yet, if you contrast that with a home-owner how owns a gun, he or she expects to use it to stop an intruder.

Military people really understand how terribly costly war is. Ultimately their goal is to be peacekeepers, not war makers. Actually, the military is really the only agency working to ensure that wars do not happen. Civilians in government make the decisions to ‘go to war’. Congress has to approve this, not the military. At the end of the day, how ironic is that? 

So on this Memorial Day, let us all be grateful for the sacrifice of men and women thorugh the ages who defended our freedom and let us always remember, that freedom is costly and will always have to be earned. 

KS&L 382 It's Just God's Will by Tina Erwin

         Recently someone mentioned to me that life is pretty much what happens when you are making other plans. But then those ‘other plans’ are just God’s will after all and that ultimately there is nothing that we can do about it.

         Really? What happened to free will?

         So, here’s the question:

         Are the things that happen God’s Will or the Free Will of the individual?

         Yes, things happen and we have free will in how we handle them, how we adjust. It's the point of free will. If we are left thinking that it is God’s will that horrible things happen then what’s the point of ever trying to improve things or make a difference?

          Lets look at an example.

         What if someone we love dies as a result of that person being in a car with a drunk driver. Our loved one made a conscious choice to get in that car. Perhaps he or she didn’t make a decision to die that night but they did choose to accept the risk of death that getting in the car would engender. This isn’t God’s will it is free will.

         Our family can go to pieces at the death of this person or our family can work diligently to heal. Which is God’s Will: healing or hurting?  But then ‘will’ implies a directed outcome, so why would God insist we hurt? Isn’t God helping us heal? Yes and no. We have a choice in how we heal any catastrophic event in our lives. We can rise to the karmic opportunity presented, and embrace our grief, pain, and suffering, or we can retreat from life and martyr ourselves for the rest of our lives. We make that choice, God doesn’t. However, if we choose to heal, God will help us find a teacher who can help guide our way to insight and understanding when we ask Him for help.

         But if it is true, that God wants us to heal, why does it hurt so much when we lose someone? It hurts because we have massive connecting ties to people we love and when those ties are broken, they come recoiling back to us and it is endlessly painful. But it doesn’t have to be painful forever. In this example we each have a choice in how we respond to any event. We can choose to heal it or to allow pain to direct our lives.

         So many people mistakenly think that an event is 'God's Will' and God has nothing to do with it. A person uses the gift of God: free will and makes a decision. That decision creates karma and that karma has to be satisfied. Everything happens in perfect order because Karma balances that order. God's will, if someone can call it that is really karma. What we do comes back to us. Every move we make creates a decision tree and how the karma is returned is always a function of which fork in the road we take, which branch of that tree we use.

         And karma never wastes energy so even a tragic event is pregnant with its potential positive consequence. This means that we always need to analyze what we learned from any event.

          Yes, life happens while we were making other plans because the karma that we create can come back to us at profoundly unexpected and usually inconvenient moments. But when each of us incorporates the lesson of a life-changing event and learns from it, then we acquire wisdom. Ultimately, that must be God's hope: that we will all become wise.

KS&L 67 Independence Day

by Tina Erwin

       What does independence day mean on a spiritual level? Perhaps it just means the freedom to be spiritual in any manner we wish. Maybe it is looking around the world and noticing where that freedom exists and how it was gained. Maybe it is looking around ourselves and noticing what we had to do to be free from that which has tormented us emotionally for a very long time.

         Either way we look at it, gaining independence either from a petty despot, or an emotional prison requires some type of effort, some type of sacrifice. We cannot define independence if we do not know what imprisonment looks and feels like - obviously a polarity issue.  So we have to fight for what we believe in, we have to fight for what is the right thing to do and sometimes we have to have help to achieve that independence. 

         Often, it is extremely difficult to remove a powerful despot as we have observed throughout history - we just have to have help.  If imprisonment is the norm, how do we have any conception of what freedom feels like unless we are aware enough to know that we long for it? If we are numb to our situation, we stay in denial, we stay in a place of fear. 

         If we choose to come out of that situation, it can be really, really scary - most people at least know what the torture routine is. If we have to leave what we know to understand something new, we have to have a whole new level of courage and the number of people who have that level is not as high as we think or would like it to be.

          Emotionally, we have to have help to remove that emotional despot/monster who has tormented us, sometimes for life times. Help that is often costly in what we realize we have to leave behind. Imagine that the people who left Europe for the United States had nothing but their courage in their pockets. Most of them had modest means. Yet they longed to know what it would feel like not to be imprisoned.

         People who declare their independence from their secret torturers, their old fears, their guilt and sadness also arrive usually with little more than their courage in their pockets. Yet, it is that very courage within them that gets them through as they accept help.

         So just maybe the bottom line for any type of independence is the very, very, very first freedom of all, courage.  So to all those courageous people throughout history, to all those who have fought for their emotional freedom for themselves and/or others, Happy Independence Day now and for always.

      

KS&L 118 Freedom

Have you noticed that they seem to be showing the movie Independence Day over and over? If you haven't seen this film, it is about the alien bad guys trying to take power from the earthling good guys. Seems we have seen this scenario lots of times.

As a point of comment it is good to remember that aliens have been here for a very, very long time, eons actually and they have yet to take ownership of this planet. Pretty much they leave it to us, no matter how tempting it seems to be to those pesky off-worlders.

For any movie to sell tickets we seem to have to be fighting against something to figure out what we value and who we are and to have an opportunity to really think outside the box. Which brings up the concept of freedom. What is it and why are we so willing to die to preserve it?

Freedom is a karmic opportunity for self government always very hard won at usually an extremely high cost. It is so precious and the truth is that we don’t take it for granted. If we did, why, we could just live anywhere, it wouldn't matter. However, if you want to live overseas, seldom do you think about living in a country that is NOT free. You would know immediately that freedom here, in North, Central and South America, Northern and Southern Europe and the newly freed old eastern block countries was won at a high cost and that all of us who live in these areas value it highly.

No one wants to willingly live in North Korea. So, perhaps it is fair to say that no one consciously takes freedom for granted. We live it, enjoy it and wear it within us like the life blood that keeps us alive. Non free countries are slowly dying. Free societies are growing.

Back to that wonderful scientist, Dr. Bruce Lipton who noted that a body is either in a state of growth or decline - that there is no middle place. Perhaps this is also true of societies. Societies that are free grow at an amazing rate, sometimes stumbling on themselves, making lots of mistakes, pissing off their neighbors and generally plunging ahead are ones that are struggling to move forward.

Societies that are leaving oppression behind have to break out of their stagnant, standstill economy and begin to move forward. People hate change. People who were clinging to control of the stagnant economy don’t give up easy. It is incumbent upon people fighting for freedom to know what freedom costs - that there is sacrifice. That which you sacrifice for, you appreciate. It lets you know what you value.

When we were fighting for our independence, the French and Germans sent some of their best generals to help us and they did an amazing job of organizing a rag tag army to support General Washington. These two countries helped bank roll our fledgling country. Many Germans and Frenchmen died helping us win our freedom. Their deaths were probably not too popular back home. However, many of us are grateful for their sacrifice to us. Stories of one country sacrificing for another to enjoy freedom are growing in the last two to three centuries. Sometimes you just have to have help. Sometimes someone has to believe that you can escape oppression and can achieve freedom and they have to be willing to endure sacrifice to help you get there.

So, to all those aliens who do in fact leave us to work out our own karma and learn what freedom is, what world cooperation can be, thank you for not overtly meddling!

Next, to all those countries who helped us to be free and to establish our fledgling government, to all the native Americans who fought along side us, to all those immigrants who sent their family members to give the ultimate sacrifice, thank you.

And to all those who continue to offer their military service so that someone else can enjoy what we so value: Thank you beyond words!

Happy Fourth of July

KS&L 67 Independence Day

What does Independence Day mean on a spiritual level? Perhaps it just means the freedom to be spiritual in any manner we wish. Maybe it is looking around the world and noticing where that freedom exists and how it was gained. Maybe it is looking around ourselves and noticing what we had to do to be free from that which has tormented us emotionally for a very long time.

Either way we look at it, gaining independence either from a petty despot, or an emotional prison requires some type of effort, some type of sacrifice. We cannot define independence if we do not know what imprisonment looks and feels like - obviously a polarity issue. So we have to fight for what we believe in, we have to fight for what is the right thing to do and sometimes we have to have help to achieve that independence.

Often, it is extremely difficult to remove a powerful despot as we have observed throughout history - we just have to have help. If imprisonment is the norm, how do we have any conception of what freedom feels like unless we are aware enough to know that we long for it? If we are numb to our situation, we stay in denial, we stay in a place of fear.

If we choose to come out of that situation, it can be really, really scary - most people at least know what the torture routine is. If we have to leave what we know to understand something new, we have to have a whole new level of courage and the number of people who have that level is not as high as we think or would like it to be.

Emotionally, we have to have help to remove that emotional despot/monster who has tormented us, sometimes for life times. Help that is often costly in what we realize we have to leave behind. Imagine that the people who left Europe for the United States had nothing but their courage in their pockets. Most of them had modest means. Yet they longed to know what it would feel like not to be imprisioned.

People who declare their independence from their secret torturers, their old fears, their guilt and sadness also arrive usually with little more than their courage in their pockets. Yet, it is that very courage within them that gets them through as they accept help.

So just maybe the bottom line for any type of independence is the very, very, very first freedom of all, courage. So to all those courageous people throughout history, to all those who have fought for their emotional freedom for themselves and/or others, Happy Independence Day now and for always.