Our Time Is Now
Gojira is my favorite band, and as with everything I'm really into, I'm a bit of a fanatic.
They are of the progressive metal genre, and have been around for many years. They hail from France but the Duplantier brothers (two brothers in the four-piece band) now reside and raise their families in New York.
Anyway, yes, I love them so much, and only started using Instagram because they are so much more interactive on that platform then Facebook.
<< On a side note, I am happy to say that I have been off Facebook with no plans to return for well over a year now, lol.
Social media is definitely addictive, but hey, that's a different blog.
This week on October 14, Gojira released a kick ass new song "Our Time is Now" and it's in honor of all the fighters and activists, tirelessly going out there and sparking a light in the dark world, is how Joe put it.
They made a lightning bolt symbol and Joe Duplantier put it on his palm and asked us to do the same, and let them know what we stand and fight for in this world, saying that we are the lightning bolt , the spark that will shape our future.
Joe is amazing and his beautiful wife is an activist, doing powerful performance art in New York. She is an obvious and wonderful influence on Joe using his global Voice in the world for Good.
I created my own post on Instagram with the above photo I took, in unity, love and solidarity and will share that here:
I stand for freedom for all people everywhere and the God-given right to be yourself. I stand for love and not hate. I stand for the earth. I stand for awareness and the interconnectedness of all life. I stand for compassion and kindness. I stand for Life Itself to unfold in every perfect way in every miraculous moment. I stand for you. I stand with you.
Let's take a look deeper into these statements.
I stand for freedom for all people everywhere and the God-given right to be yourself.
However we have come to exist in this lifetime is God-given, or whatever word you would like to use. Even if there is some choice in the matter, it's far removed from anywhere we find ourselves in this moment. Whatever package and circumstance you arrived here with seems to be random and unavoidable. Fate, whatever, but it is what it is. That's why that's such a valid aphorism. I live by that mantra.
I am what I am and you are what you are. If we can just be cool with that, we'll all get along just fine. All this boils down to simple acceptance of what is and (at least) tolerance for the same. I had a bigot for a father and all it made me feel was both confusion and revulsion, but I have also had to acknowledge some of those same traits in myself, due to my conditioning. In my heart, everyone is equal. Period.
In my nondual understanding, everyone is God, so there is never a question about this for me, even when there is resistance to this Truth. We can stop judging and comparing and labeling everything, which limits our open response to life as it unfolds for us.
If content we are indulging in too much is making us feel bad, we can walk away and look within instead of outside, and spend some quality time in our own heart.
We can learn to love ourselves for the unique spark of life that we are. We can make this a priority and not allow anyone to bring us down. We stay elevated and uplifted by gratitude and the awareness of the miracle of our living and breathing, right now.
So please, do YOU. There is no one else that can do this, and it's why you are here.
I stand for love and not hate.
It's far easier to join in on a mob mentality and believe a lot of rhetoric about a person or a situation, but the truth is always that you have no idea what another person is feeling, or dealing with.
This entire existence is only appearing because of the deepest love, a love we cannot even comprehend, but when we tune in, we can feel it, deeply. It calls to us on invisible levels and vibrates within every cell of our being, this love.
Think of how you feel when you drop into an experience where you felt a ton of love. Really feel how elevated and expansive this feeling is and how it colors everything with its higher frequency. Now recall an experience or a person whom you feel a lot of dislike for, and evaluate your feelings again.
It's so tight in the body to be really angry or to feel bad feelings towards someone. Being completely selfish, I don't like feeling that way at all, because it feels awful on the body level. I trust this. Love on the other hand is so freeing in how energy is felt in the body as everything feels lighter and more expansive. This is natural, that's why it feels like that. This is what we want to cultivate and prioritize.
It also comes back entirely to the central nondual theme, that everyone and everything, indeed is God and there is literally, nothing else. So what's to hate, except our own ignorance, and that doesn't help us either, so we can drop that.
In a pinch, I ask a simple question about making a choice about something.
How does this serve my highest and greatest good?
If it's a broader choice that encompasses more than myself, it changes a bit.
How does this serve the highest and greatest for all involved?
There must be an affirmative, positive kind of answer for a choice to be made. one way or another. Another way to look at the same thing, is to feel the energy around your choice. Is it elevated or not so much? Your answer is there.
Choose love. It's really the only choice for a happy life, so be selfish and be a force of love.
I stand for the earth.
Our planet is as alive as you or I and way older, baby. Can you even imagine being such an immense and ancient Being as Earth? No fucking way and you are lying if you think you can comprehend it.
She is also as neutral as the infinite multiverse around her, as neutral as the sun.
If you don't feel sure about my bold statement, maybe you can also imagine how it would really be if she were taking revenge on us on the daily? We would have been annihilated long ago.
Please.
We can definitely do better as a species inhabiting this living Being, by doing the little things consistently, if nothing else. We can all look into our hearts and see how we can more and better, stand with our beloved planet Earth.
We can use our powerful voices to denounce the destruction of our homes and planet.
The idea of finding other planets to escape to without taking responsibility for what we have done and are still doing on this jewel we've been given Life on is actually insane.
Let's all work together to take better care of our Home. We owe it to her.
I stand for / as Awareness and the interconnectedness of all Life.
Tantric nondual philosophy made beautiful sense out of how my innermost heart felt about this experience we are all having - together.
Everything is God, and God is Awareness; therefore there is also nothing separate in our experience, only in the conditioning we have each received, and the way Consciousness works in this dimension or level of Itself. It's part of the experience to feel individualized, but upon investigation of this, it is easily seen as bullshit, I mean as the true Reality.
There is nothing separate about anything at the energetic levels, the ones that matter.
We can understand that everything that happens, affects everything else. There is no way that this can be disputed, and on the deepest levels there is never any ONE at fault for anything that happens.
How could there be? No one is some independent entity that controls events, besides holding your pee in, that is. If you are lucky enough to control that.
This higher view of Life is so natural and effortless and is the only philosophy or explanation that I have ever heard about or read about that matched what was always originally held deep within my heart.
It's why inside, you have never felt like you are aging; you have always felt eternal even as you understood this to be untrue for a human being. Yet the feeling is still there, always there. It's almost as familiar as Awareness (God; Shiva) Itself, the real nature of Everything.
This knowing of our foreverness.
For me, the point of my life is to embody this understanding as much as possible before the physical vehicle expires. Some days are better than others, but as long as I am still breathing, and aware, I am on the right track.
I stand for compassion and kindness.
This is super important for me, because it wasn't always the case. Even today, while driving, I had to admonish myself to be kind and not competitive or overly irritated by other people on the roads. To just lighten up already.
It's a challenge, but we all need challenges in our lives to grow, so I welcome my teachers, I embrace my many challenges, as much as possible.
Being kind and compassionate also begins with ourselves, and I am not different than many people, in that we don't always honor ourselves with this heart-set. Yet it's like everything else that starts in our own hearts, like peace and happiness. If you want these things, they begin with you, and your inner world.
It's so easy to be kind towards ourselves when we love ourselves. So loving ourselves becomes a priority if we really want to be happy and fulfilled in our lives. There is no way out but in. It's absolutely true. There is no other way to affect change except by changing ourselves.
When you change yourself, you change the world. That's a line from a Gojira song. It's been entirely true in my own experience, and in fact, it's the only way to change the world.
So try being mega kind and compassionate with yourself, absolutely start there and see how much more kindness and compassionate feelings there are lying dormant within you. Sometimes it freaks me out how deeply I can feel things, but when I simply allow myself to feel without any resistance at all, it's so expansive and uplifting; there is a knowing of the oneness of everything again, even for an instant.
I stand for Life Itself to unfold in every perfect way in every miraculous moment.
A beautiful nondual tantric stance that resists nothing that could ever happen in Life, since seeing and knowing everything as Shiva (God) Itself, is Perfection only. Nothing can be wrong and there are no mistakes. There is only Shiva.
One can still have a voice and activity that appears to be resisting, if this larger Truth is held within the heart. Only good and justice is sought, never anything else.
But what is, IS and is appearing that way for its own reason, that is in one big way, none of our fucking business, and in another, entirely relevant as a teaching for us if there is resistance to it. This is why there is really no end to growing here in this experience of Shiva, as Shiva, and as jiva, the individualized soul, if you will.
They are the same. There is only That.
So all of life is unfolding to be experienced and celebrated for what it is, as it is.
We want to make our own changes first, in our own inner world and then we can see clearly, what needs to be changed in the outer.
Standing in this truth means being open to all experiences and people.
It entails holding gratitude in the highest for every breath you are gifted with, and being able to come back to this effortlessly.
It's also about loving yourself unconditionally, as a prerequisite to loving EVERYTHING unconditionally. This is the path of love.
I stand for you. I stand with you.
I would also add, I stand as you.
What you care about affects me and matters to me.
Even if I don't share all the same views, I respect and honor you, because you are perfect as you are.
And in conclusion, I have always fought for legalizing marijuana and for the feds to reschedule pot on the federal level. It has been a big deal to me as someone who actively enjoys it, and as someone in the past who was arrested and jailed in my own residence because of ridiculous laws pertaining to its use and possession.
I have always fought and stood for women to be treated and paid as equal to men. I have had to demand almost every raise I have ever received and that hasn't changed.
As someone who is more fluid than not, but female presenting, I have been a victim of sexual harassment at the workplace since I began my career at 19 years old. The last episode was only a couple of years ago, with plenty in between. This shit really needs to change.
I have stood for wildlife and animals my entire life, especially horses, shelter animals and wildlife, like marine animals being forced to entertain people in unnatural captivity, and circuses, and things of that nature, torturing and abusing endangered, precious animals for their entire lives, only to be tossed aside when they are all used up and broken. People need to honor and respect these beings who are our equals - not abstract objects.
I am one of those people who would say that I like being around animals more than people. I love people, don't get me wrong, but that feeling of being able to fully express oneself with no conditional experience from the so called "other" being is much more possible with an animal than a human - for me at least.
Yet everything is God, so what gives?
For me, it seems to be a depth or degree of understanding of what that really means, that everything is God. This is part of growing, as this depth of comprehension expands and overwhelms the conditioned responses more and more.
And finally, if you are ridiculously blessed, what is truly natural re-establishes Itself permanently within the embodied form you are experiencing, but as God Consciousness, with your cute face.
LOVE
One night alone I met the moon.
I saw its halo and the love around
Now take your path, don't ever lose your time.
Just watch the light from inside.
I watched inside and my eyes burned, The moon was right. The roots so deep, and the head so high I want to be in and watch it out.
I know the reasons why I failed. The stars illuminate my being. Behold thy servant, you the force around That makes the planets be.
GOJIRA
