Patricia Pearce

Helping You Be the Change

Love’s Insurrection

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We are here to participate in Love’s long-awaited insurrection.

Dear One,

I know you are feeling anxious and disturbed about all that you see happening in the country right now, how it seems that ominous forces have burst out of the shadows and are threatening the fabric of the social order. Your fear is amplified by your awareness of how other countries have descended into chaos in conditions such as these, when people have been led astray by falsehoods and mobilized to violently impose their way upon the world.

Your fear is understandable. The old ways are dying, causing tremendous anxiety and tumult, and you sense that this could be a moment that breaks the spell of division, or a moment when falsehood, hatred, and violence gain momentum.

Let me begin by reminding you that violence is a stance of weakness. It is what people resort to when they sense that their cause is lost. And indeed there is a lost cause in all of this, a cause that has been lost from the beginning of time because it could never truly exist. This attempt to secede from Reality, secede from the truth of Union, of Love, has been a lost cause from the moment it dawned in the human mind.

I know this may not be the time to try to offer you reassurances that the turmoil you are seeing isn’t ultimately real, that it is a projection of the mind. I know that in this moment, as you look at the news, it seems frighteningly real.

It has always seemed real to the aspect of mind that generates and participates in this human drama of good versus evil, of enemies and battles that has played itself out in so many ways over so many centuries. Surely these last months have shown you how capable the mind is of fully believing something that isn’t true.

There is little point in trying to talk this aspect of mind out of its fear, because for it, the story is true, just as a nightmare is real to the mind that is dreaming it. Simply hold it, along with its fear, in absolute compassion. Cradle it in kindness.

Neither try to try to persuade those who remain loyal to the ways of ego that Love is the only Truth. Attempting to convince them will only be a distraction to you now. Simply hold them in compassion, and do not tether yourself to their disbelief.

What is needed now is for you, and all who are willing, to turn your awareness to the Self within that knows that, despite what you see playing out on the world stage, there is only one Reality, and it is Love. In Reality, you are safe and always have been. In Reality, there are no enemies, and never could be. This is the greatest service you can offer in this time of transformation into the New.

Even though you may feel unprepared for this moment, you are not. You have been preparing for eons. Join now with the Truth that is within you. Allow it to inhabit every fiber of your being. Allow the Joy and Gladness of Reality to resonate in your own being and radiate from your own Heart. Do not be timid about experiencing this Joy, for It is what you are.

I know that many will believe that it is naïve in such a moment as this to abide in Love. But what is truly naïve, and indeed absurd, is the the idea that anything but Love could exist, or that division could ever be real except for in the very fertile human imagination.

Place that imagination in the service of Love now. Imagine the world that you know wants to come forth. Imagine what it looks like when humans have been restored to their right minds, knowing themselves to be Love incarnate, a world in which each knows that they are a precious and unique expression of the Infinite Life here to give expression to the Love that is the Source of All That Is.

Imagine such a world in which these countless incarnations of Love are celebrating one another, thriving together, bringing forth the essence of their beautiful Beingness, rejoicing in the web of Life that is this magnificent planet.

Then allow yourself to feel that world in your body. Allow it to come alive in your cells. Be that world, because the new world that is arising does not come forth by battling with the old, but by joining with the New.

This is the only true insurrection—a word which means “to rise up.” As you transcend (trance end) the ways of ego, forgoing all judgment and all concept of enemy, and as you align yourself only with Love you help this new world to arise. You become a participant in Love’s long-awaited insurrection.

Eternally,
Your True Self

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The Ego’s Last Stand

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Are we willing to walk off the battlefield of the mind?

As I look out over our political landscape this week, I see what is happening from two levels. One is the literal level of a democracy under siege, in which a minority faction is attempting to overturn the will of the majority and commandeer the mechanisms of power.

The other level is the symbolic, the mythic, the story of our journey toward awakening. On that level I see an epic drama playing out in which the mind is coming face to face with the ego of its own making and wrestling with the choice before it: to continue to live in allegiance to the ego and adhere to its ways or to claim its freedom and step into the Reality of Love, into the unitive consciousness that is its true nature.

In this unfolding drama the mind is beginning to recognize the ego for what it is—a “separate self” that is itself an illusion—and is seeing how ego operates behind the scenes, relentlessly asserting its own “reality” and sustaining that “reality” through blame, attack, coercion, division, intimidation, threats.

Shocking though it may be, this is an important step in the mind’s awakening, because it must first see the illusion it has believed in in order to leave it behind.Continue Reading

Yielding: The Way of the Christ-Bearer

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By yielding to the Reality of Love, Mary births Its expression in form.

Ever since Donald Trump appeared on the political scene I have seen him as symbolizing the ego patterns that we must now leave behind if we are to survive as a species on this planet. By depicting in such an overt manner how the ego mind operates, what it believes, and how it plays out in the world, Trump has precipitated a jump into warp speed of our awakening process.

Recently, there have been reports that his mental health is deteriorating due to the loss of the election and his waning ability to bend circumstances to conform to his will—something that in the past he has always seemed to manage.

Symbolically, this is showing us the ultimate impotence of ego. Other than within the confines of its own fabricated alternative world, it has never been able to alter Reality, which is Love. The attempt to do so—to fracture Reality, to overturn Love—has been the great egoic escapade humanity undertook, and we have failed. Not for lack of effort, but simply because it can’t be done. Continue Reading

The Great Conjunction

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It is the conjunction within that opens the way for a new world.

When I was a child, one summer evening I was out in our front yard with my mother watching a sky ablaze with spectacular pinks and oranges. It was one of those sunsets where you feel like you are witnessing the otherworldly.

My mother was a woman of deep faith, although she rarely spoke about it. But that evening, gazing at the sunset, she confided in me, “This is how I imagine the Second Coming will be. Jesus will descend on clouds like these.”

As far fetched as it may sound, her understanding of the Second Coming was quite conventional. In the Second Coming, Jesus—who was understood to be the one and only embodiment of Christ—would descend to earth again and establish a long-awaited reign of peace.

The Second Coming has been anticipated for centuries, since the time of the first followers of Jesus who expected his return to occur at any moment, and certainly during their lifetimes. That no such dramatic re-appearance happened caused some consternation among the emerging community. There was no intervention from the heavens. No overthrow of the worldly powers-that-be—and all these centuries later we are still waiting.Continue Reading

Ode to Darkness

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As a culture we are starved for Mystery.

I love this time of year. I love the long quiet nights, the candles, the turning inward. For me, the winter solstice, when the days begin to grow longer, always comes too soon. I want more time to immerse myself in the darkness.

I know this is a difficult season for many people, when the lengthening nights seem to evoke feelings of despair and dread. Yet I find the darkness beautiful. I experience it as the Mystery, the Unknown, the Numinous that is so much vaster than my conscious awareness can fathom.

This morning I got up early, before the first daylight. The crescent moon cradled itself toward the eastern horizon and the morning star gleamed in the pre-dawn sky—and it was the darkness that bestowed upon them their beauty.

I am awed by the fact that the universe is comprised mostly of dark matter. It is overwhelmingly made up of something that is hidden to us, undetectable to us, and yet unmistakably present.

That’s the way I experience the darkness. There is a Presence in it that transcends the reach of my ordinary senses. In the darkness I perceive the limitations of my knowing. I bow before the Mystery.

I suppose it is our fear of the unknown that makes us fear the darkness and want to drive it away, dispel it with whatever feeble torches we can fashion. We are so afraid of not knowing.

And yet turning toward the Mystery is so essential. To apprehend that there is so much we do not know is the beginning of wisdom, the portal to awe.

I had a dream once, years ago, in which I am out in the wilderness, in the mountains, staying at a lodge. It is night, and I step out onto a balcony and look up. When I see the canopy of the Milky Way overhead, a deep relief washes over me, and I realize that, having lived for so long in the city, I have been suffering from star-vation.

As a culture we are starved for Mystery, starved for the awe that comes when we accept our inability to comprehend the vastness of our existence, starved for the parts of ourselves that linger beyond the light of our awareness.

In the winter months, we sometimes don’t get enough sunlight to meet our body’s need for vitamin D. But in our contemporary society, in which we go to such great lengths to banish the night, there is another sort of deficiency that inflicts our spirits: darkness deprivation.

This alienation from the Unknown, this estrangement from Mystery, is making this planetary time so much more difficult than it needs to be.

We find ourselves collectively in a time of darkness, of unknowing. Having watched in shock the sunset of our certainties, we no longer know what to expect, and we cannot see what is before us.

And yet Love encompasses All. It is as present in the darkness as it is in the light.

In this season, many of us celebrate the incarnation of Christ-consciousness. And while traditionally that consciousness has been ascribed to a single individual, it is a consciousness that lies within us all. Dormant perhaps, as the seed lies dormant in the dark soil, but present nonetheless.

Christ-consciousness has been described as the awareness of existing in relationship with All That Is, which means being aware of existing in relationship with the darkness as well as the light, the unknown as well as the known. This is the awareness that flowers into trust, into faith.

May this season of the long nights bestow upon you the blessing of the darkness. May you experience awe in the face of the unknown, and bow before the Mystery of your existence with All That Is.

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Dismantling: An Act of Creation

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The new world simply can’t be built upon our past beliefs.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend my husband, Kip, and I pulled out our Bananagrams game and started playing. If you aren’t familiar with Bananagrams, it’s sort of like Scrabble in that it has little tiles with letters on them, but it has no board. You use the tiles to build your own grid of interlocking words based on the letters you’ve drawn, like a crossword puzzle.

But the other thing about Bananagrams that’s different is that you can rearrange your words at any time. If you draw a letter that you can’t fit into your existing grid, you can tear apart any or all parts of your puzzle and start over.

Kip and I played collaboratively rather than competitively, because it’s just more fun that way. We would draw the next letter and then we would both look at how it could be incorporated into the grid we had built together.

What I learned in the process is that Kip is totally fine with tearing things apart. He has no compunction about dismantling entire regions of the grid if there’s a word he sees could be built with the latest letter, and he always trusts that it will all turn out okay, that there’s a way all the letters can be reconfigured into something new.Continue Reading

The Reality of Oneness

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You are the eyes through which the Universal Mind sees Itself.

A friend emailed me recently asking if I could clarify what I mean when I use the term “oneness.” It’s a term she finds quite distasteful because to her it smacks of an amorphous, undifferentiated blob.

Although in my writing I often use terms like inter-existence, inter-beingness, interdependence or interconnectedness rather than oneness, I thought I would take some time to describe in more detail what I mean by all of it.

To do that, though, I need to give some autobiographical context, because when I speak of this it isn’t an abstract concept for me. It comes from a very formative experience I had years ago.

Almost two decades ago, a very close friend of mine died, and her death prompted me to resolve to open to deeper dimensions of my existence that I sensed were there but had never known.

Some while later I began to experience an onslaught of synchronicities too numerous and implausible for my worldview to accommodate. It felt like my reality was cracking apart.Continue Reading

Joy Lessons from Philly

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Joy opens a portal for a new possibility to come forth.

It’s been an interesting time here in Philadelphia in recent days as the whole world watched and waited to see if Philly would deliver the needed votes to tip the outcome of the election. Given that this is the place where our democratic form of government was conceived, I don’t think the significance has been lost on anyone that this is the place where its future seemed to be hanging in the balance.

I moved here in 1997, and as a native of Denver it was a big adjustment for me to come here to the densely populated East Coast, far from the open spaces and Rocky Mountains that I love. It was also devastating to see the extent of the poverty in Philadelphia, the poorest of the major cities in the US, which was once a thriving hub of the Industrial Revolution. But when the factories closed to relocate, they left behind working class neighborhoods that became vast wastelands of unemployment and despair.

And yet, when I moved here I fell in love with Philly. I loved the racial diversity, and how this city is such a microcosm of the world. I loved the expansive parks here that have been set aside as a protected watershed, including the Wissahickon woods where the soil sparkles with with traces of mica.

I loved the art and culture, and that I could go hear the Philadelphia Orchestra in their concert hall a mere 15 minutes from my house, an orchestra I used to listen to recordings of when I was a music major in college.

I was also captivated by Philadelphia’s history, by the cobblestone streets of Old City where redbrick colonial houses still stand, by William Penn’s vision that this place be a Holy Experiment where people of all faiths could live in harmony, by Independence Hall where a new vision of government was conceived that dethroned the idea of monarchy.

Funny, Tough, and Joyful

In recent weeks, during this election season, I’ve found myself falling in love with Philly all over again, but in new ways. I have loved the playfulness and humor that is endemic to this place, and how people took President Trump’s comment that “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and ran with it.

And speaking of running, I love that they just organized a benefit run to raise money for Philabundance, our local hunger relief organization, which they are calling the Fraud Street Run (a word play on our long-standing annual tradition of the Broad Street Run).

The Fraud Street Run will start at the now famous Four Seasons Total Landscaping and end at the Four Seasons Hotel in Center City. (If you’ve been appreciating Philly lately too, you might consider donating here.)

In recent weeks I’ve even fallen in love with Philly’s gritty toughness, which I never fully appreciated until now. Here people don’t engage in the gratuitous niceties that I was accustomed to, having grown up in the West. Here people call things the way they see them, and they aren’t easily intimidated or bullied. Lately I have come to understand that when the stakes are high, you want a good dose of that don’t-mess-with-me energy that is core to Philly’s culture.

But I think the thing that has inspired me the most about my adopted city in this whole election drama has been the Joy that has been set loose here—people dancing while waiting in line to vote; people of all colors, shapes, gender orientations and religions dancing outside the Convention Center in what became a block party to protect the vote count.

This eruption of Joy was intentional. The organizers here who have been preparing for this moment understand the power of Joy to de-escalate tensions and shift the narrative of confrontation, and they made sure the d.j. booth was ready so the party could begin.

Joy is a very high-frequency energy. In its presence fear, hate, and anger melt away. Joy dethrones the idea of division, overthrows the idea of oppression. It opens a portal for a new possibility to come forth and take hold.

We know we’re not out of the woods yet. We can see how the old order does not go quietly into the night. But when the people start dancing, the new world is already well on its way.

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