Sedona Scene/Sedona Soul:
Engage. Embrace. Hold Within The One.

A New Mantra For Our Time

By Barbara Mayer
(July 11, 2014)

If we are to make a personal testament about ourselves, our beliefs, and how we want our lives to matter, one of our most basic thoughts would include the reality that we are not here alone. We belong.

Our personal analysis of how we belong depends on our psychological and spiritual maturity, as the ego of its nature demands attention and approval. An integral part of being human, however, is that our very identity rises from the fact we are part of something where, for better or worse, we belong and we matter.

We live with at least the innate admission that the poet John Donne knew the truth when he wrote, “No man is an island. Each man is a piece of the continent, a part of the mainland. … Therefore never seek to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” And yet, even as we cling to all those parts of humanity and society where we feel we belong, there is the other side of human nature based in the ego where, for millennia, the self with a capital “I” has stomped its way into our individual craving for attention and respect. If we still live in an “I and Thou” mindset, the “I” is definitely much more important than the “Thou”. That’s the way it has always been.

However, just as there really is no “always”, this new time is calling to us from the wisdom and innate truth not preached by any “higher authority” but from within our own hearts which, of their very nature, exist to love. However we belong, our own truth contains the need to love and to be loved. That is who and what we are. In this new time, however, we are tasked with accepting the truth that we, together, are part of this world and each other’s desire to survive. We do belong, but the times are changing. Even as war and chaos and judgment, self-righteousness, hatred, ignorance and greed rage around us, new seeds are already springing up all over our planet. The Age of Exclusion and separation is dying from its own fallacies of imbalance and the immaturity of thinking power is more important than peace. We rise and we fall together — and the human heart, which is finally joining with the Divine Heart in new and beautiful ways –has a better answer.

We come from love, and our destiny is to return to Love’s fullness beyond our wildest human thoughts. When we find fault or the need to separate from anything other than us, we judge and condemn our own selves, which is not a very positive way to live. It is also not part of the Oneness in which there is no “I” nor “Thou” but a greater identity of One. Dualities exist on their own lesser planes, yes. But we are talking about Essence here, and the Only True Essence is the Oneness from which all else emanates. That is the message this new time of Aquarius and Inclusion is bringing. Let the dead bury their dead. We have new living to create, and that new living is based on what the new human being can become in the fullness of its own heart and its own reality.

We have had enough of the old and the halting growing pains of our own species. A new and beautiful, inclusive and loving way of being on this planet now opens its reality to us. And it’s really very simple.

We Engage –that is we recognize each person, living thing, event, idea, or group. Then we hold them in a simple Embrace of acceptance and, as much as possible, of love. We embrace them with our eyes or our minds and most importantly with our hearts – and then we Hold them Within The One.

That is a practice which can easily become a reality. It also leads to a new way of being humanly divine and divinely human.

A simple mantra for our times, and most importantly, for ourselves: Engage. Embrace. Hold Within The One. No judgment. No ego. No hesitation. Simply Hold Within The One where all is perfect and beautiful and part of creation’s plan, even as our own judgment hides its perfection from us. And in doing this simple practice, you become part of this Age of Inclusion and the very maturity of what the human race is destined to become.

Respect the dead and honor them. We stand on the shoulders of what they have accomplished and their place in the human continuum. Now respect yourself and the future your own spiritual maturity can achieve.

Whatever is not perfect will not survive. Only Love within The One remains. Only Love.

Barbara Mayer is a poet, author and interfaith/interspiritual minister who lives, writes and shares the Spirit in Sedona, Arizona.