Stand Up For Your Truth

HOW TO LEVERAGE YOUR OWN CONSCIENCE AS PURE LAW

Gary Z McGee, Staff Writer
Waking Times

If we heed these wise words by Lao Tzu, then it stands to reason that we focus more on developing highly evolved people capable of honoring universal laws, rather than waste our energy bludgeoning people with invalid laws that violate the golden rule, the nonaggression principle, and the universal laws that dictate health.

But what constitutes a highly evolved person? What might a highly evolved person’s character look like? How do we define such a broad concept? In Five Counterintuitive Traits of Highly Evolved Humans, I broke down the emotional disposition of highly evolved people. In this article we’ll break down the political disposition of highly evolved people.

Choose a courage-based lifestyle over a fear-based lifestyle:

Does your government have a taste for blood and a thirst for power? A highly evolved person, with their own conscience as pure law, would choose smart rebuking over fearful obsequiousness.

Don’t allow such a government to have its way. Question its authority. Practice strategic civil disobedience. Count coup on overreaching power constructs. Challenge outdated, immoral, and unjust laws. Be the personification of checks and balances. Dare to be a courageous David facing down the Goliath of the state.

We don’t need more people who blindly obey in deadly fear. That’s already the vast majority of people. We need more people who are highly evolved enough to smartly rebuke any and all governments that use violence to “solve” problems.

Choosing a courage-based lifestyle over a fear-based lifestyle is choosing to no longer be a victim. It’s choosing, instead, to become a hero. It’s choosing courage over fear, self-sacrifice over comfort and security, adventure over banality, fierceness over obsequiousness, and ruthless skepticism over blind faith.

Understand that the vast majority of people are still willing to live fear-based lifestyles. Sympathize with them for having not woken up yet, but do not pity them. It’s not their fault they were brainwashed, conditioned and indoctrinated into living fear-based lifestyles, but it is their responsibility to educate themselves and to break themselves of their conditioning.

You can lead people to knowledge, but you can’t make them think. You can, however, remain ruthless with your courage-based lifestyle. Become a beacon of courageous hope. Especially for those who are still living fear-based lifestyles. Call it tough love. As Derrick Jensen said, “Love does not imply pacifism.”

Choose heart-centeredness over political divisiveness:

Bipartisan politics is old hat. It’s high time you toss that hat in the fire. Highly evolved people have already done so. They have gone Meta with politics. They’ve gone beyond the outdated, codependent divisiveness of bipartisanism and graduated into an updated, interdependent metamorality.

Metamorality, coined by Joshua Greene, is based on a common ground that all humans can agree upon while proposing a utilitarian deep pragmatism that empathically broadens the mind and compassionately opens the heart to the plight of us all as interdependent beings on an interconnected planet. Highly evolved humans use this strategy, along with the Astronaut Overview Effect, to go big-pictur

Going big-picture helps us change our minds. Or, at least be more flexible and open in our thinking. It puts things into proper perspective. It helps us feel more empathic and less psychopathic toward each other. We’re better able to see the world as one, without borders.

We’re better able to narrow our highfalutin politics down to a single concept we can all agree on: freedom. We’re better able to see through all the red herring cognitive biases of the climate debate and realize that our problem is a single problem we can all agree on: pollution. We’re better able to cut straight through the divisiveness of religion and narrow it down to a single concept that we can all agree on: love. Especially love for our children, and creating a healthy environment for them to grow up in. And suddenly there are not so many differences between us.

Choosing heart-centeredness over political divisiveness puts a compassionate spin on our conscience. Indeed, it puts the “conscience” in having our own conscience as pure law. For pure law is universal law, based upon the healthy interconnectedness of all things.

Choose self-improvement over self-preservation and create a better world:

When it comes down to it, becoming a highly evolved human is about spitting out the unhealthy blue pill of comfort, safety, and security based on outdated laws, and having the courage to swallow the healthy red pill of curiosity, questioning, and skepticism that questions bad laws in order to create healthy laws that align with universal laws.

It’s about becoming the personification of checks and balances. It’s about putting in the hard and difficult work of becoming a highly evolved person who has the wherewithal to “use their own conscience as pure law.” And to teach others how to do the same.

The answer is not creating more bad laws to shove down people’s throats. The answer is creating people smart enough to question the authority that seeks to shove bad laws down people’s throats. Indeed. The answer is teaching people how to become bigger than the law, how to gain the capacity to have their own conscience as pure law, and how to become a more valuable human. As Niels Bohr said, “Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.”

If, as Plato famously said, “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws,” then it stands to reason that we should focus more on teaching people how to act responsibly and less on creating laws. Especially since humans are so terrible at making good laws. And especially-especially since humans are even more terrible about abusing their power regarding those ill-conceived laws.

As Edward Abbey wisely suggested, “Since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.” The few seeking to rule others do so through the enforcement of bad laws.

So, it is incumbent upon anyone with their own conscience as pure law to ruthlessly interrogate such bad laws and then mercilessly check and balance any authority seeking to enforce such bad laws. We do ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren a disservice when we decide not to.

There is no greater cause than becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in. Will you defend outdated unethical laws and merely turn a blind eye to those who unjustly enforce them? Or will you defend the people’s right to ruthlessly challenge unethical laws and those who unjustly enforce them? The choice is yours. As William James said, “We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

from:   https://www.wakingtimes.com/2019/01/21/how-to-leverage-your-own-conscience-as-pure-law/

20 Seconds to Change Your Life

20 Seconds of Insane Courage – Sometimes That’s What it Takes

26th September 2012

By Chris Bourne

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

When you look back on your life, the trials the tribulations, the challenges and opportunities, you’ll probably notice the really big occasions hung finely balanced on the feather edge of uncertainty. On one side is the abyss of some indescribable failure, and the other, some seemingly monumental achievement. These moments invite something deeper of ourselves, something more complete, something more authentic. If we can face them with total acceptance and commitment, then we’ll connect with the full flow of the soul and it will carry us through like an unstoppable wave. When I look back at these times in my life, I see that this level of surrender, this level of commitment, required something special: “20 seconds of insane courage”

Facing the darkness

I saw this moment of uncertainty we all face from time to time so eloquently encapsulated in a recent Matt Damon film “We bought a Zoo”:

“You know, sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage, just literally 20 seconds of embarrassing bravery, and I promise you, something great will come of it.”
~ Benjamin Mee

I can recall facing the darkness many times in my life, long before I realised I was simply creating it myself. Only later, I understood it was exactly these moments where I needed depth of soul more than anything. Yet an inner tightness and struggle – the need for an outcome – contracted my inner space so much, it strangled the very soul out of me. Although I worked hard to control myself, I was a quivering wreck!

If only

How many times have you said to yourself “If only”? “If only I’d done it this way, then that would have happened. If only I’d done that, then it would all have turned out alright.”

If I’d learned long ago to relax my grip on life and simply let the sweet spot of the soul sing through me, then all would have been different. But then of course, you have to know what you are not, to truly feel the sweetness of what you are.

So a point arrived in my life where I simply decided to let go. The struggle was not worth it any more. Even if it meant jumping off that cliff edge, not knowing if I could fly, I’d simply rather jump. Have you faced times in your life like that yet? A relationship that really needs to end, a crucial change of location or leaving a job that doesn’t serve? Such occasions eventually come knocking on our door.

Following the soul is just like this. It can begin softly yes. But certainly in my experience, true realignment is going to require us staring into the abyss of such uncertainty. Why? Because no matter how society conditions us to control life, nothing is ever certain to the soul.

It is uncertainty that makes the soul what it is. 

The Sweet Spot

In these moments, that’s when we need to look for the courage. But courage to do what? To effort and struggle for some kind of talent, some kind of gift, some kind or reward, target or outcome? Not at all. These are exactly the things we need to let go of.

We need to soften into these and just let go. You’ll know when those 20 seconds are inviting you. You’ll feel it. You’ll feel the tightening in your throat which makes your voice squeaky or hoarse, the stiffness in your muscles that makes your body awkward and ungainly or the tightness of your chest that makes your breathing shallow and rapid. These are the tell tale signs that you’ve stepped into the 20 seconds.

And in these moments, that’s when we have to soften, to soften into these symptoms. When the outer world is screaming for some kind of external reaction from you, what we really need to find is an authentic internal response:

  • to let go of the need for an outcome
  • to soften into the body, move and let it relax
  • to expand the chest and deepen the breathing with calmness
  • to open into the void of presence
  • to let the sweet shot of authentic beingness simply swing through us

The return to light

When all the pressure is on, soften, simply open and then the 20 seconds expands into an eternity. Look for the authentic feeling that wants to bubble up, the authentic expression of beingness. Let it wash through and over you. Let the swing carry you so that you may hit the sweet spot of who you are…

In this moment, anything can happen.
In this moment, you can truly change reality
to something more aligned,
in harmony with the universe
and the essence of who you are

To me, it is the return to light…

Chris

from:    http://wakeup-world.com/2012/09/26/20-seconds-of-insane-courage-sometimes-thats-what-it-takes/

10 Year Old Takes on Pipe Line with A Song

What a 10-Year-Old Did for the Tar Sands

Why a First Nations student from British Columbia is taking on a controversial trans-Canadian pipeline project—through song.

posted Aug 15, 2011

 

Ta'Kaiya photo by Carol Carson

Photo by Carol Carson.

Ta’Kaiya Blaney’s song, “Shallow Waters,” co-written with her music teacher, was among B.C.’s top five finalists for the David Suzuki 2010 Songwriting Contest.

Ten-year-old Ta’Kaiya Blaney stood outside Enbridge Northern Gateway’s office on July 6, waiting for officials to grant her access to the building. She thought she could hand deliver an envelope containing an important message about the company’s pipeline construction. But the doors remained locked.

“I don’t know what they find so scary about me,” she said, as she was ushered off the property by security guards. “I just want them to hear what I have to say.”

The Sliammon First Nation youth put in a great effort learning about environmental issues and the pipeline in particular, and hoped to share her knowledge and carefully crafted words. Enbridge officials said they were unable to provide Ta’Kaiya space or time and failed to comment because the Vancouver office is staffed by a limited number of technical personnel. Their headquarters are located in Calgary.

So Ta’Kaiya stood outside, accompanied by three members of Greenpeace, her mother, and a number of reporters and sang her song “Shallow Waters.” The song’s video has hit YouTube and been viewed more than 53,000 times

to read more and see Ta’Kaiya Blaney sing her song, go to:   http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/what-a-10-year-old-did-for-the-tar-sands