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Articles Spirituality Secrets of Love, Loss, and Forgive
30 November 1999
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Spirituality
Secrets of Love, Loss, and Forgive
Our education prepares us for the market place but does not prepare us for living lives of meaning. We have had sex education, but not love education, and what passes as love in the family and elsewhere is often judgmental, conditional, and dismissive, and we have been taught about original sin, but were told nothing about original loss and original blessings.
We are told by the Hindus that the Mortal in the womb sings a song asking never to forget who she is and where she came from, and after her birth into Chaos the song turns into a lament that cries out that she has already forgotten. In the womb, the Mortal is in touch with her Soul and her Spirit, and when Soul, Spirit, and Mortal are connected, the Mortal is in love and in Harmony. Yet soon after she is born into Chaos she looses touch and forgets, and this is the Original Loss.
Workshops on Loss, Love, and Forgiveness are about remembering and being prepared for living loving lives, for only love will provide meaning despite what those who prepared us for the market place may have tried to tell us. The workshops are about remembering who we are and where we came from; we are love and we came from love. The workshops are also about original blessings, and these include the blessings that we are able to give ourselves and each other, for blessings are of the essence of love and forgiveness.
We need safe places in which to live, and safe places in which to die, and the workshop is about creating a Sanctuary or safe place within, and about creating Sanctuaries in friendships. Only then will we be well prepared to create a Sanctuary in the family, and learn to love our work so that the workplace will also become a Sanctuary. Only then will we be prepared to create sanctuaries in the community and treat our sacred planet with the love and respect that it deserves before it is too late.
The following is a quote from the Preface of my new book:
?Not long ago, I imagined another conversation that was taking place deep within the family of Mankind where they were talking about the survival of Mortals and the need for a Global Hospice:
?The planet does not look well. She has a Global fever, and she also has a terrible skin disease caused by too many Mortals scratching unmercifully at her surface, and her circulation is in poor shape. Her blood chemistry is so bizarre that it is a wonder she is alive, and her primary care givers are surgeons who are always taking something out and covering up, and both the surgeons and all the rest of us pay so little attention to her overall wellbeing. The doctors and the politicians and the clergy all have their different remedies for the malaise of our times and tell us they will fix everything, but I have little trust in them any more. I think the planet will survive, but the Mortals may have to go.?
Then someone said: ?The Mortals don?t look very well either. They act as though they have forgotten how to love, and seem to spend their lives in fear and hatred. All the institutions that were supposed to serve and nurture them have gone their own ways. There is little trust in politics, for most politicians seem as puppets of global business and slaves to reelection. Education lives by test scores and is training students for the market place and not for living lives of meaning. Religion has banished its soulful feminine side and is preoccupied with fundamentalist masculine issues of judgment and control, fomenting wars while talking about love and peace neither of which is possible without the balancing feminine. Health care has lost sight of its mission of healing and caring for Mortals no matter whether they live or they die. Allopathic medicine has prostituted itself to the dictates of the pharmaceutical industry, product manufacturers, and financial managers, and there is no reimbursement for loving care that heals even if it does not fix. Science, coldly and objectively masculine, is widely worshiped by Mortals, and art?feminine and soulful?that would keep science balanced and down to earth has been banished into museums and recording studios, and is also a casualty of the bottom line. The media are embedded in the institutions and manufacture images of people and news bytes for their employer, so they too are not to be trusted. It is little wonder that the Mortals don?t look well, and the institutions are leading the way to their extinction, and they will have to go?the institutions if not the Mortals.?
To accept the idea that we may have created a state of malignant Chaos will require great courage and acceptance of personal responsibility from all Mortals, for the institutions will continue to maintain that all will be well so long as we follow them. We Mortals will have to die to the way we think and behave; no half-measures or excuses or delays, because the way we are living is killing us and is killing the planet that feeds us, and we may only have a short time to live.?
The workshop at Dzogchen Beara is simply a beginning, because if we are to change anything, we must begin with ourselves.
Michael Murphy is offering a one week residential course at Dzogchen Beara, Allihies, West Cork, Ireland. April 23-29, 2005 (date to be confirmed). I have attended Michael's workshops several times and cannot recommend them highly enough. You may contact Michael to reserve your place by emailing him at mmurphy103 @ netzero . net (please remove spaces in the email, this has been done to reduce SPAM!)
N. Michael Murphy, MD has developed and facilitated soul-searching workshops in Belgium, France, Holland, Ireland and the US. He co-founded and was full-time Medical Director of St. Peter?s Hospice in Albany, NY for 16 years. He is a Clinical Professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at Albany Medical College, and the author of The Wisdom of Dying: Practices for Living, (Element Books). A second book, Secrets of Love, Loss, & Forgiveness is seeking a publisher.
