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Despondent angel: Look Up!
So often, the small abrasions of everyday life cause our gaze to gravitate downward. And yet, there are so many positive things in our lives we don’t acknowledge.
Look up, and see all the amazing possibilities that being alive presents. Your life’s journey would be very boring if darkness were not interwoven into it. The downward gaze is self-referential and internally considering. Raise your gaze through external considering, empathically connecting to what others are experiencing and feeling.
Great horizons open when you will yourself to raise the downward gaze.
See:
A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler for ways to raise the lowered gaze
See also:
Awakening from Depression
Antidote to Worry
Dealing with Zones of Inner Jeopardy
and
For those with time to read more, consider the card “Water of Life Available in the Babylon Matrix:”
Accessing the water of life while in the Babylon Matrix.
From one vantage, we live in an arid, toxic world of concrete and asphalt with nothing to nourish our weary spirits. But look beneath the surface of our world, and you can find the same primal nourishment that all humans have found. There are still people and other mammals capable of caring, and there have never been so many available in need of care.
The primal nourishment we need is love. The other necessary side of that primal nourishment is the opportunity to love others and provide resources for their development.
There are eight billion of us on this planet. Most have some capacity for caring, and even more have some receptivity to be cared for. And if you don’t care for people, other life forms here are capable of giving and receiving love.
And when we consider the availability of resources for self-development, we live in a golden age, with far more to offer than any other age we know. The internet, for example, is like a vast well of zeros and ones — you can send your bucket anywhere and, depending on your intentions, can come back with muddy, toxic residue or sparkling, clear water. The closely guarded secrets of any esoteric tradition, once available only to the most advanced initiates who had reached the inner courtyard, are now only a three-second Google search away. For example, this link will take you to a complete, free translation of the Tibetan book of the dead. https://archive.org/stream/TheTibetanBookOfTheDead/The-Tibetan-Book-of-the-Dead_djvu.txt
According to historians, during the Dark Ages, the most educated people on the planet were monks with the extraordinary good fortune to live in one of a few monasteries that had libraries which, in the rarest cases, contained as many as one hundred books. Anyone reading this, by contrast, has access to more books and other cultural resources than they could process in tens of thousands of lifetimes. Most people in our age have a supercomputer in their pocket that gives them access to more music than they could listen to in hundreds of lifetimes. It’s available to them twenty-four hours a day. Yet, just a few generations ago, a king or emperor could only access music through a live performance.
When it comes to the ability to express ourselves culturally and nourish others with our inner resources, the present era providesa an upgrade that’s like replacing two-cylinder engine with a warp core. Suppose in the Dark Age of 1990, I proposed that, as a person with a very limited income, I would make an oracle of over six hundred cards that could be continually upgraded and expanded and that, furthermore, I would make it available for free to several billion people. For most of human history, I could propagate such an artifact at the speed of handwriting with a quill pen, while now it propagates at something closer to light speed.
I can walk into stores where I can buy fruits, vegetables, and other food products from all over the world.
And if a bond of love exists between me and another person, no geographical distance keeps me from instantaneous communication with them. I can be out walking in the sunshine, or doing chores while, with my hands free, I have an engaging conversation with someone thousands of miles away. These are just a few of the commonplace miracles of the present era we usually take for granted.
We can all too easily poison ourselves by gazing anxiously at the darkness and deficiencies of our world. Look again and see that you have all the opportunities, and then some, that any human being has ever had to access the water of life.
My friend Rob Brezsny has written an amazing book, Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings, and begun a movement, that reverses the dark, paranoid view of life that has become the norm in our culture. For a brief introduction read: Catch the Cosmos Doing Something Right
Pronoia — How the Universe is Conspiring to Shower you with Blessings by Rob Brezny
Read my review of Pronoia: Is the World Spiraling Toward Eucatastrophe or is that just my Pronoia?
