Solving the Perplexing Puzzle of Prosperity

Spirituality, Prosperity, Abundance and Full Divine Surrender have always been a particularly perplexing cocktail for this enchanted, amnesiac fairy gone human.  They seem to be a puzzle whose completion is ever evasive.  But lately All Pervading Daddy Warbucks has been hookin’ this sistah up with weighty wisdom, insight and miscellaneous booty from all sides!   It all started (that’s a dangerous way for an ancient soul to begin a sentence, eh?!) when I won a raffle at church and walked away with a fresh, sparkling copy of “The Abundance Book”, which lays out the most basic universal laws of abundance and includes a 40 day prosperity plan.  Auspicious, huh?  And then A Course in Miracles has been throwin’ down some sweet gospel on the essential matter of divine abundance.  And yesterday on facebook, my dear friend Marianne Williamson spit forth this priceless piece of the puzzle:

”Most people limit their lives by censoring their desires. Don’t censor them: allow yourself to own what it is you really want. The desire is telling you something. If the desire is appropriate, your owning it paves a path for its manifestation. If not, owning it is also necessary so you can surrender it for transformation. Live in the excitement of being pregnant with the life you truly want.”

LIVE IN THE EXCITEMENT OF BEING PREGNANT WITH THE LIFE YOU TRULY WANT.  That is sheer and utter music to me.  Upon reading it, I noticed that a big chunk of my mind had been preoccupied with figuring out how I was going to survive in Kauai.  The energy behind the thoughts was anything but pregnant with the life I truly want.  It was all about figuring out what compromises I was begrudgingly willing to make in order to barely get by.  Ewwwww… but for most of us, that is our default modus operandi~ squeezing ourselves into unflattering molds imposed by a world devoid of soul.  What if it wasn’t?  Am I dreamer?  GOOD.  Let me dream.  In fact, a wise man once told me, “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…” (Grin)  Listen, we are ALL dreaming, all the time.  Even the author of the beloved childhood anthem, “Row, row, row your boat” knew what was up.

The question is what dreams do you choose to dream?  What dreams are worth being entertained by the divine flood of light that you ARE?

I want to go to Kauai and WRITE MY BRAINS OUT!  I want to pop out a sacred book while I’m there.  A book that will make the world tingle and dance and take hecka unabashed deep breaths.  I want to write a book that will stealthily, sexily seduce the masses (you and me and everyone we know) into a state of ecstatic celebration and a holy remembrance of the here now Heaven!  Screw retail and all of its wretched second cousins twice removed…  Let them curl up in shriveled pathetic balls where the sun don’t shine.  Why can’t I live the life I want to live?  Well… only because up until now, I have told myself that I can’t.   Because we have slumberishly acquiesced to being so damn ruled by the zzzzzzzz inducing limitations we have unconsciously inherited by our anally clenching predecessors.

But then I always get caught in my slipperiest trap of a construct that says, “Oh, but Athena, is that dream truly God’s will for you, or is it just your ego, bullyishly taking control of the steering wheel?”  Wonder woman!  Seems like I have been stuck in that tired cesspool for centuries!   No, wait, I don’t want to dis it entirely… I think the deep, scrupulous inquiry of the origin of ones motivations is of crystalline value.  I should ask myself who is in the driver’s seat as I dream myself into existence.  And I have found that the seemingly disparate worlds of action and surrender, effort and grace melt into one holy bindu (single point of consciousness) when I return to the well of holy silence daily to wash my mind clean.

I am willing to take thirty-ish minutes a day to offer all my desires and dreams and fears and bona fide divine chaos back into Gods hands.  “Here God,” I say humbly.  “Please take ALL of this mish-mash and just give me back what is most true and blessed by your omnipresent Love.”  And the more I do that, the more that I am realizing the implicit unity between effort and grace, desire and renunciation, passion and service.  PASSION and SERVICE?!  Could those two really walk hand in hand in peaceful, blessed communion?  To this starry eyed mystic, it seemed too good to be true.  Could it really be a service to you to read these words that gush from me as very waves of the ocean of passion and bliss?  Nah…

Seriously, for a long time, I equated suffering with serving.  Serving meant doing something that you really didn’t want to do, because a wickedly elusive, punishing authority figure said you should, in order to be “GOOD”.  You gotta love the back draft, back lash of organized religion… puts some unsightly hair on more than a few billion chests…

Here is something I have learned about abundance, prosperity and gratitude in the most recent chapter of my existence (Note that I have been studying it for longer than I can remember… but only recently have I mounted this winged beast named Synthesis.)~ My ability to truly feel the abundance, the prosperity that has been promised to us all by our Heavenly birthright is directly correlated to my conscious recognition of the sacred, interconnected, underlying reality of all Life.  I have been on this relentless path of forgiveness… thanks to A Course in Miracles… and the more I forgive, the more I am able to Love.  And the more I am able to truly, unconditionally Love, the more I feel RICH right now, the more drunk I become on the beauty that just keeps seamlessly splooging (in fountainous fashion) from the very core of my being, the very core of existence!

The perfect embodied example of this is the choir at the East Bay Church of Religious Science.  I bow in reverence to their sacred, celebratory offering of song.  No joke, I cry every time they sing.  And you know what?  Half of the singers are crying as they pour their honey wine voices out on high upon the holy congregation.  And the other half are practically levitating in ecstasy!  They are a sea of faces of every color, shape, age.  Their faces are meandering epic poems exalting the infinite journeys of the One Creator.   Yesterday in church, the choir director, a luminous, large black woman, spilling with spirit was ESPECIALLY inspired.   They sang a song about surrender and she opened her arms wide to the sky as she soulfully belted the flaming melody.  She held nothing back.  I repeat she held NOTHING back.   No fear of looking good.  No fear of being judged.  Just a pure, complete offering to God, through God, AS GOD, with God.  Her freedom and purity sets the tone for the choir and all who were present to drink the sonic exlixer.  The energy was so high and pure it tickled and left me blinking and awe struck.

She told us yesterday, “We are not here to entertain you… though it may be entertaining.  No, we are here to serve as a sacred mirror for you, so that you remember who you truly Are.”

This holding nothing back, this offering EVERYTHING of one’s self in service of the Highest… This is true prosperity.  It lives now, shining as the One face of Eternity.  The giving IS the receiving, the service is the passion.  The effort is the grace.  Amen.