My name is Rev. Jacquelyn Cuyler, and my husband and I own a holistic company and both are self-published authors. I do all of the marketing for our company, and so I will be posting the information about his, as well as my books.
We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident…Where is the Self in Government? By Rob Wright
Available on Amazon, Kindle, Nook and you can get your hard copy here: http://purepath.wix.com/path#!books/ca19
Excerpt:
Debates and party lines, protests and wars, rights given and taken away… it goes on and on. Our minds spin through the muck of a seemingly ailing country, world, and solar system stretching far beyond the view of our telescopes and satellites. A tired new voice emerges daily claiming this is the answer and that is not. The talking heads disagree or agree with said measures or persons, stirring the pot of debate over issues we did not even realize we faced while narrowing the scope of possible solution. Out-of-the-box thinking is successfully filtered.
Each opinion and its giver strive to prove they hold a monopoly on truth, and their side will be the key that unlocks a hidden utopia to finally bring the nation and world to a greater understanding. Citizens wait, either idly or frantically busying themselves for the arrival of the next politician or group to finally bring clarity to the unclear. Old issues are rehashed and new issues are drummed up in attempt to persuade an electorate that this will be the straw that breaks our back, and this will be the one thing that will fix it all.
This country has seen protests and debates ranging from war to civil rights for many years, but where has it brought us? Have we come closer to solving the issues; are the squeaky wheels finally receiving the grease? It seems, objectively, as the doomsday prognosticators with gnashing teeth circle the wagons, that we have only pushed each other away from the table of communion, a place where we can live and let live as a democratic republic, as a grand Constitution once promised, constructed during a time of greater uncertainty than our way of life had ever faced.
We have been through a time when we fought for freedoms, inalienable ones nonetheless. Freedoms allocated upon birthright by our Creator are now being negotiated by men in high places who are ruled by those who elected them, not by vote but by financial favor. They now decide which laws pertain to whom and who has the freedom to do what, both exactly and or vaguely.
Men and women who yearned for political, religious, and industrial freedom to pursue their own happiness tossed and turned, hoping to determine a plan which allowed such pursuit. Never did they precisely describe what happiness, religion, or industry was though they took deliberate steps to ensure we could all experience individual views of these.
For happiness, peace, and hope is derived of an individual experience. One man’s happiness is another man’s greatest fear. Those in fear scramble to regulate another’s processes and foothold on happiness. There became that turning point where one neighbor, not finding happiness within their personal kingdom and path, sought to evaluate another neighbor’s pursuit of a unique path toward a dream, finding it to be either startling, incomprehensible, or in contrast with their own set of values. When that focus shifted the neighbor began spending most of their time deconstructing and judging the other’s path, causing the neighbor in question to feel the need to validate their very own journey.
In my youth, when civics was still taught in school, I learned a basic explanation of the aim and mission of democratic freedom. Quite simply, your freedom ends where another’s begins. Straightforward, simple, succinct, however I wish to slightly amend such a concept. Our freedom ends nowhere essentially, for we are also free to respect the freedom of others. We are also free to set personal boundaries. It ends only upon such moment that we are injurious to another, and if we have became injurious we inherently injure our own freedom, and there are laws in place for these occurrences. The question we must ask ourselves in applying such reasonable thinking: What exactly is injurious to me? Certainly it is not all of the trivial trespasses to which we cry foul so frequently! We have started to place punitive worth on hurt feelings and petty disagreements, deeming them most injurious, negating the freedom to be strong in one’s own standing, unyielding to the conceptions of others.
There exists no issue without two obvious sides and multitudes of other sides even yet to be perceived. There is spoken no statement without rebuttal among some portion of a body politic, even if that portion is a solitary individual. We can either continue the debate on what and who deserve what or how, or finally agree to disagree, without feeling like a debate inhibits our own pursuit of that magical yet undefined, individual paradigm of happiness. One does not have to be believed in order to pursue personal belief.
We have had teachers, pastors, gurus, clerics, rabbis, philosophers and so on deliver the message of self-evaluation and seeking, but somewhere we decided it prudent to evaluate our neighbor, telling them they are wrong and fight to keep our view the reigning status quo of the day or the era. In the meantime, we forget that government also has a “self”, created by mirroring the very heart of its people, giving them the governing body they inevitably deserve.
That government, in turn, begins acting outside of its rightful duty, its Self, just as the people have. Without self-reflection it perpetuates a survival based policy structure, fearing that one day a group of barbarians, faceless and unnamed, will come to tear it out of our hands. There is a new villain for every new era whether it is personified as a group, nation, or social ill. This villain becomes the straw-man that we must ban together against, and when such villain loses its monstrous persona it fades, long before the war against it ends. We then change geography or public polling and create a new monster, for if there is nothing to fight, there is nothing to fear. If there is nothing to fear, we will feel safe, and if we feel safe, those in power feel powerless. A hero needs victims to protect, and men wishing to be heroes not birthed of altruism, but out of self importance and external validation become well intentioned villains who hide and plot in plain sight. They have perfected the art of making people believe that for freedom to exist we must fight and struggle to keep it, and help can only come from the powers that be, perpetuating a dynasty of fakers and hoaxers, preying on naivety of a people to maintain a stronghold on usefulness.
If we remain in the battlefield of the mind, we can always conjure a fear to defend against and a war to fight outside of ourselves; for it is far easier to destroy a city and control a region than it is to defeat the inner demons truly causing all of the trouble.
The same is true in our individual lives; we create faux monsters to fight in our nightmares and in our waking, hoping to prove we can still survive this cruel world and providing easy excuses as to why we fail. Yet the cruelty of this world has been completely concocted by a well constructed paradigm of fear that will only be dismantled through inward focus of the individual. The principle of failure has been perverted from that of being an inevitable outcome of trying various things before finally catching success, into a concept of finality and ultimately a validation of our fears and doubts.
It is time to heal, not fix, name-call, or vehemently swear we are right. We just need to heal, and the whole is healed by the same measure that heals the individual: internal seeking with compassion, love, and understanding, even when we admittedly do not fully understand. We do not have to understand how another person feels or believes. We observe it, yes, but it is up to them to understand themselves, and up to us to view differing opinions without getting our ego knotted up by something we oppose.
The answers for peace and cohabitation among a group of people as diverse as Americans had been provided for long ago and was bolstered by a Constitution derived from ancient philosophies of liberty and existence. It is we who think we lack the information and ability, and it is we who are buying into the greatest lie ever told—abundance must be fought for and procured, and happiness is only appropriate if everyone agrees that a particular way is the only true way, and all other ways inhibit the true way from evolving into fruition. This is the grand illusion, and too many are fighting in support of it no matter what party or creed from which they operate.
We have been taught of the great I AM, yet we run in the opposite direction from it, moment by moment. As soon as one owns “I am this…” as a concrete aspect of their being, they have gone too far, hoping to have found their validation of identity. You just are. Period. You are life in all of its vast diversity. Now be that completely, and let others be that as well, and we shall see how things turn out.
“I am conservative”, “I am liberal”, “I am libertarian”, “I am straight”, “I am gay”, “I am a scientist”, “I am a plumber”, “I am Christian”, “I am Buddhist”, “I am Muslim”, “I am Hindu”, “I am American”, “I am Chinese”, “I am black”, “I am white”, “I am old”, “I am young”, “I am rich”, “I am poor”.
Dissecting these abrupt first-person proclamations, the only thing each one of these people has in common is “I AM”. Every other tagline past those two words pigeonholes every debate and unique point of view. These two words that so perfectly and fully describe the state of consciousness are the only two that should bear any relevance mattering between another person’s ears. It is time for us to find our own I AM, and dwell only in that space, caring not for another’s tagline or classification of being, other than to honor and respect their personal quest and expression.
The mere ability to say and acknowledge I AM is the miracle of it all. If we do not stop to appreciate this miracle, such a simple, universal declarative then we, as a people, as a nation, and as a world are doomed.
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We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident...Where is the Self in Government?
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