ABUNDANCE

The source of all abundance is not outside of you. It is part of who you are. Acknowledging the good that is already in your life is the foundation for all abundance. The truth is: Whatever the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world. That’s the new paradigm to uphold in the New Earth as the advocates of the great Shift urge us to shift. Crazy, doesn’t it sound crazy, and illogical when you know in your head that you are just “a poor little me?” But that’s your head, your little head that’s saying it, not your consciousness, if you are conscious of a consciousness. Poor little me, whose needs are not being met, I don’t get any respect, any attention, acknowledgment. I am being taken for granted. If people are kind, I suspect hidden motives.

But if inner peace is important to you and you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than a little material female or male you would remain peaceful and nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations. Then out of your alertness would come a response. Who you are (consciousness) and not who you think you are—“a poor little me” (mind), would be responding. It would be powerful and effective but it would not produce any situation or person an enemy. There’s a man named John Wesley Powell, an amateur naturalist and a Civil War veteran, who proved to the world in 1875, that the wild Grand Canyon region in Arizona USA was no longer “unexplored.” He led a government expedition funded from his own pocket.

His book, “The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons” first published in 1875, is one of the great tales of American adventure. It describes a canyon as ‘a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps, or the Himalayas.' But it is also a tribute to the Canyons’ natural beauties. John Powell was struck by the awesomeness and breath-taking grandeur of the Grand Canyon and saw the fullness of life all around him in the narration of his adventure. The fullness of life is there at every step, as he savored the wonders of the Grand Canyon that cannot be adequately represented. “Language or illustrations must fail.”

If you don’t become stunned and speechless when looking out into the vast interlinking Arizona-Utah-Nevada horizons replete with the glories and beauties of form, color unrivalled even by mountains, colors that vie with sunsets and sounds that span endless space from tempest to tinkling raindrops from cataracts to bubbly fountains, you must be dead. It is a concept of sublimity never again to be equaled on either side of Paradise, Powell’s pen gasped.

In spite of the intoxicated prose, Powell’s book was a great success. Just in the millions of copies that got sold he must have made a hefty return of his investment, talk about God-given grace and abundance because he did not withhold what inner riches he had from the world. Reading about the book in a top travel magazine glued me to my seat one late morning at a coffee shop in the Fort. I forgot the time, I almost didn’t catch my friend who has been waiting for me for half an hour at another place in Makati to meet with another friend at another location. In the face of incomprehensible mystery, Powell was only aware of the depth of beauty of the Grand Canyon itself as I too was vicariously experiencing the abundance and sublimity of God’s creation with him. As my invisible guru E. Tolle would explain, the feeling of awe is not derived from the fact that there are billions of canyons out there like the Grand Canyon, but the depth of the Beauty and its divine Presence that contains them all. When you are aware of space, you are not really aware of anything except awareness itself, your consciousness of being. You then sense the vast depth of Beauty in space as your own depth. Through you, the universe is becoming aware of itself, of its own depth of beauty.

If the thought of lack – whether it be money, recognition, or love – has become part of who you think you are, you will always experience lack. I find John Wesley Powell’s adventure story an acknowledgement of the good that is already in his life, a refusal to accept the limited and more narrowly egoistic view of himself which would be a reaction to the egoistic limitations of the unconsciousness of others. Not that I would recommend anyone to imitate his dauntless view of himself as an explorer considering the dangers that he and his ragtag group had to face in the yet unexplored canyons when it was clear no government funds at that time were coming to support his expedition.

This, I know is an extreme view of one’s own unlimited sense of self – his willingness to create an image of his consciousness, his being by containing the vastness of his own depth. But it would appear that destiny was calling him. Someone some time would lead a hardy team of explorers two or three of whom would defect to escape from the impossible mission of fighting the cataracts of a fearsome beast of a river in full flow, only to be killed by hostile natives at that time in the 19th century up in the wilderness. John W. Powell endeavored to find out how complex is God’s creation of the Grand Canyon and the fact that it has taken five million years to carve a vertical mile of the Colorado River through the earth’s rock strata. One of the North American continent’s great rivers, the Colorado drains an area of 350,000 square miles, more than two and a half times the size of Great Britain.

The native Hualapai people knew the river as Haulata, the ‘backbone of Mother Earth.' Tumbling down the Rocky Mountains with a gradient 25 times greater than then Mississippi, it is a “fearsome beast in full flow.” Pressed between thousand-foot walls of dark grey granite, the river was the color of wet clay. The walls of the Inner Gorge, John Welsley Powell writes, are the lowest layers of canyon rock. Known as the Vishnu Schist or the basement of rock, it is almost two billion years old, the rocks contain virtually no fossils. They belong to the Precambrian era. Powell pressed his palms against the ancient walls and tells us: “I was touching some of the very foundations of the planet, from an age when life on earth had barely begun.” Powell noted the Grand Canyon’s watery voices – “a land of song, full of the music of waters.”

In all of God’s creation, music appears to be the central sound of the celestial spheres, and the wonders of the Grand Canyon on planet Earth cannot be adequately represented. Again, Powell tells us: “Language and illustrations must fail.” The source of all beauty and abundance is not outside of you. That's why Jesus Christ said, For the Kingdom of God is within you. It is a part of who you are. In Luke 17 (King James Version)"And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you."