Sananda's words are simple, yet powerful

Tell a friend about this article - click on the little yellow envelope!

Some of his message is easy - "focus on your most cherished dreams" - while other parts are more challenging - "encourage your enemies" and "lay down your weapons". I don't know about you, but I'd much rather put my energy into "sharing my visions with trusted ones". I could talk about my dreams all day! But the "encourage your enemies" part is going to be a lot harder. I mean, who wants to encourage their enemies to do anything except bog off? Let's face it though, we aren't going to wake up tomorrow morning to a world of peace, joy and abundance if we haven't put in a bit of effort today are we?

I don't think it means encourage them to create havoc or mayhem or anything else that we think they're capable of. I think Sananda is saying "encourage your enemies" to find peace, understanding and fulfillment. If we each take one step every day towards encouraging someone we don't particularly like to find more joy, love or abundance, then I reckon a world of peace is only a matter of a few leaps and bounds away.

I'm sure that encouraging those people we don't like doesn't have to feel like pulling teeth - God's not that mean! I reckon it's more like stopping to actually hear what they're saying to us, instead of instantly jumping to conclusions the moment they open their mouth. How many of us have someone in our lives that we can instantly point to as being "a pain in the neck", or "a bully", or "a wimp", or a "nuisance"? I'll bet you 9 times out of 10 these irritating so and so's are like bits of grit that slip into an oyster. The poor oyster spends its days spitting out secretions to stop the grit from causing it irritation, only to find it's produced a beautiful, valuable pearl for its effort. And if we take a long hard look at ourselves, (no, not at that irritating ba***rd - it's too easy to see their faults isn't it?) we'll probably find there's some aspect of our personality that could do with a bit of a wake up call.

Take the 'playground' syndrome
Here's George, in his last year at school. An average student, fairly bright, fairly good looking who's starting to lose his "most cherished dream to be a ground-breaking biotechnician" because life's already been a bit hard to him. He's a bit afraid of speaking his truth outright as he's seen his big brother being shamed by his older sister and beaten up by his dad when he's tried. So he bites his tongue and squashes his feelings, putting on a plastic smile and a brave face when he'd rather speak his mind. He doesn't feel totally secure in this hard and fast world, so he eats more than he should to keep himself comforted and fills his waking moments with TV, books, gossip and shopping to compensate for his loneliness. As he feels a bit threatened by the rich or powerful or successful kids in his class, he only spends time with others like himself, and as a result hasn't really learned about the wonderful richness of life and of the uniqueness of everyone on the planet. He hasn't dealt with his own inner hurts or insecurities, and so hasn't got time for anyone else's. In fact, if he does see someone less fortunate than himself, George often uses them unconsciously as a bit of an ego-prop.

One day, a new kid starts at his school. Now, it might be that George's ego has got a bit complacent lately and thinks its got sole ownership of righteous indignation (his sister's been really mean to him lately). Anyway, his ego looks outside of itself this wet, windy Wednesday (because it really doesn't like to admit that it might be feeling a tad low in the self-worth department today) - and finds some other poor soul it can hang its judgement on. You guessed it, the new kid, Mildred. Oh look! it says. Mildred over there's a right nuisance. She's a real whiner, she doesn't have any consideration for anyone else and all she can talk about is her problems! And she's ugly too. I'm far superior to her. Hey everyone - let's make Mildred the scapegoat this week shall we, so we don't have to deal with our own inadequacies.

And the whole playground puts poor Mildred into "coventry" - stops playing games with her, ignores her when she walks by and talks sarcastically about her behind her back. In fact, they get a little high on it all, it does feel good to be so right when someone else is so wrong.

Okay, poor Mildred is a pain in the butt. She's hard to talk to, tries to drum up sympathy with every breath (often loudly expelled), and has got long wiry hairs growing out of her nostrils.

But hey, she's a human too. She may not be the most intelligent kid on the block, and perhaps she is depressing to hang around. But that's no reason for George and his mates to be so hard on her. What they don't know is that Mildred sobs into her pillow at night because she feels so alienated. She's failing at her assignments at school because she's so depressed and she can't get her head around the maths. She hasn't got the self-esteem to go up and approach George or his mates directly to make friends, because she saw the looks they gave her when she arrived at school on her first day. She'd cut her nose hairs if she could, but her mum won't let her use the pointy scissors. In fact, her mum doesn't give her much support at all. The only way Mildred learned to gain attention from her mum when she was growing up, was to cry. Her mum didn't bother with her apart from trying to stop "her bloody awful whining", she was too busy looking after Mildred's baby brother, the "Little Angel".

Well, you can make the ending up yourself. There's a good one and a bad one. And probably a few mediocre ones too.

But there's a point in my sarcastic rendering of George and Mildred. And its basically that I'm sure if we are each a bit more honest with ourselves, we can all find a bit of George and Mildred in us. Maybe you haven't been graced with nose hairs. Maybe you are a biotechnician. But you can see what I'm getting at can't you?

I've been learning a lot of self-honesty and humility lately. Yes, humility - after all, the ego likes to be arrogant doesn't it. It likes to think it knows it all, or is the most righteous person on earth, or has the medal for suffering the greatest woes ... there are as many aspects to egos as there are humans (and some!) And I've come to the conclusion that we can actually learn a lot from everyone we meet. Not just the nice ones, or the educated ones, or the funny ones. But from the ones that make our skin crawl, our hair curl and our blood boil. In fact, I'd bet we could probably grow larger pearls of wisdom from the latter group than the former if we had the guts to dig around in our own murky depths.

And do you know the beauty of all of this? It's that once we've acknowledged our own murky depths, and forgiven them - once we've acknowledged our enemies' finer points as well as forgiving them their annoying aspects - we find we're actually more alike than we realise. We may all show different outer traits, different personalities and speak in different languages. But underneath, where it really counts - we all share something in common. We all feel. We all experience joy and pain, suffering, love and sadness. And once we can see that, we can honestly feel more connected to our brothers and sisters, whatever walk of life they hail from. However much they get under our skin at first.

If we can but begin to communicate from a place nearer our hearts rather than from our ego-driven minds, we will find a sweet vulnerability that lies just beneath the surface. Some nuts may be harder to crack than others (and you might be one of them!). But I reckon its worth it in the long run.

So share your visions with trusted ones. And encourage your enemies. Encourage them to share what's in their hearts. And together we'll build a world that's so bright and joyfilled that we'll scarcely believe we're on earth.

Copyright © 2006 Aannsha Jones