Over the past years, I have undergone a life-altering transition from living on autopilot to recreating my life as a spiritual calling and a force for good. One aspect of this transition has been the acknowledgement of what I call the "Foundational Laws of Spiritual Physics", detailed below. Basically, these laws state that any action that does not promote the overall betterment of mankind (or soul-kind, for that matter) is a waste of energy at best, and a horrifically destructive force at worst. Any person, life-path, or civilization that tries to deny these laws suffers the same fate as any material object that tries to deny the laws of material physics - it will be inherently unstable, unsupportable and destructive to itself (and probably to anything around it, as well).

We can see clear evidence of this anywhere we care to look. Indifference and emptiness are becoming a national pastimes, abuse begets further abuse, crime creates more crime (and increasingly more martial law enforcement in which mistakes are simultaneously costlier and less accountable for), communal violence that is not only tolerated, but actually glorified as entertainment, escalating nuclear "deterrence", retributive wars giving way to preemptive wars...the list goes unrelentingly on.

In fact, this unrelenting spiral of dispirited behavior is often so overwhelming that we sometimes just give up and quit looking altogether - out of fear, social pressures and the frustration that stems from the belief that nothing we could possibly do would help. We even go so far as to stifle our own divine nature as children of God - abandon our gifts, our purpose and our dreams - in order not to be denounced as selfish, egocentric or over-reaching by those who stand to benefit from our self-imposed impotence. Like the biblical servant who hid his gold talents rather than risk losing them in investment, we not only squander the potential God gave us to grow in this world, but, by refusing to stick our necks out and do something with ourselves, we are essentially returning our gifts unopened and saying that we just don't trust God to know what s/he was doing when we were created in the first place.

For our own good and for the good of all creation, we must stop our present descent into apathy. In the words of the Episcopalian Bishop, Phillip Brooks, we must each seek to, "Be such a [person], and live such a life, that if every [person] were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise." Remember the parable of the unfruitful servant, and commit to using your talents more wisely.

The Foundational Laws of Spiritual Physics

God is real

God is love - A lot of people go to a lot of trouble to convince others that God is spiteful, jealous, bigoted, discriminatory and even arbitrarily cruel - mainly to justify their own un-Godly behavior. Bullhockey! Remember - if it isn't good, it isn't God.

The opposite of love is fear - What we see as anger, hatred, indifference, bigotry, etc., is actually the manifestation of some fear - fear of loss, fear of insufficiency (love, food, money, status, etc), fear of exposure (hypocrisy, wrong-doing or even just imperfection) and so on. By focusing on eliminating the root causes of the fear, rather than simply dealing with the symptoms, we are able to treat and prevent problems as opposed to simply punishing them after the fact.

We are all children of God, and we are all one through God - There is no "you" separate from "me". All separateness is an illusion created by the limited perceptions of the material bodies (what I like to call our naked-ape suits) that our souls inhabit during their journeys.

You cannot affect the part without affecting the whole - Holding something back from another, or hurting another to protect or advance oneself, makes about as much sense as keeping all your money in your left pocket so that your right hand can't get to it, or cutting the fingers off of one glove and using them to double-insulate the other hand from the biting cold. Built into this law is the reality that what comes around, goes around. Good, bad, indifferent or just downright strange, the truth is, if you deal it at some point, you'll feel it at another. So behave. It's for your own good.

We are here for three reasons: to love each other, to learn from the world around us, and to grow and advance as spiritual beings - "Stuff happens!" is often God's way of accomplishing this. If you don't pay attention and fail to learn these lessons, stuff happens over and over until you get it right. (God apparently doesn't go in for social promotion - you've got to make a passing grade in order to move on.)

We each have our own unique Light - We each have special gifts, talents and abilities that, when cultivated, enable us to love, learn and grow with a richer enjoyment, deeper understanding and greater impact than "living on autopilot" alone could accomplish. We often feel this Light as an emotional pull towards a certain behavior or activity, a surge of energy and loss of time-sense when engaging in a certain activity or a feeling of some sort of purpose or destiny. When we follow this route, much less unpleasant stuff happens, and we "get" the rest of the stuff faster.

All strife and pain in the material world is caused by denial of these laws - 'Nuff said.