I love life. I had fun being me but I can’t tell you how excited I am now to explore what else I can be. I really feel that. No regret, no remorse – I loved and I was loved and I still feel the love that is currently being shared with me every minute. I see, I feel, I hear it all.
I respond to everyone, every time they think of me. I can do that. It just feels like a wave of me. They’ll get it.
Right now, when they feel it, they cry.
They think they are missing me, not feeling me.
It’s just a way of understanding what’s happening. But the hugs will get stronger, not weaker. My desire to be present will be known – not because I’m stuck and can’t move on but because I’ve been gifted with the grace of God, with the true awareness of my divine.
What would I say to the religious and the non-religious?
Jesus was there. He stood before me as the Light that opened the door for me. He led me right into the arms of The Buddha who graced me with peaceful acceptance of everything as perfect.
I know I work with other Ascended Masters that are teaching me all the different ways the mind has interpreted our divinity over time.
It’s like a big maze and I walk through it with each one of them showing me where they took a different path, where they allowed people to follow them and how people got lost there instead of continuing on.
That’s what’s happening now, right here. This is a new way of thinking. It’s a new belief system and it can take a piece from every religion and let there be something more in all.
I accept people for who they have chosen to be, according to what they have been taught but I also know that underneath all of that, in everyone, is a soul that knows better.
That knows there’s more and that the whole point of living is to explore what else we can be. That’s what you’ve been doing your entire life.
That’s why we are where we are right here today - having this conversation as if I just went to Europe and we’re chatting online.
I’m good. Tell them I’m good and tell them I’m even better because of you and this (channeling) and everyone else that is reaching out to me in this way and communicating with me as if they really believe I can hear them – because I can.
Channeled by Laura Mirante 12/2022
Photo credit: https://baptistnews.com/article/jesus-and-buddha-are-talking-with-me-about-loving-and-blessing-my-enemies/
The photo was found with an article written by a Pastor talking about Jesus and Buddha. It feels appropriate to share here:
I seem to have a larger list of enemies these days, those I find it harder to love and bless.
But Jesus is insistent about how we relate to our enemies: “You have heard it was said ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Stephen Shoemaker
And Paul, listening to Jesus, tells us the character of such prayers — not “knock some sense into him” but prayers to bless: “Bless those who persecute you and do not curse them.”
Bless them?!
I’ve led prayers for our enemies in church, but I don’t think I’ve ever asked God to bless them in church. Maybe such a spiritual exercise in and out of church would help the condition of my soul.
“My enemies list has grown exponentially. It is not good for my soul.”
Karl Barth once defined one’s enemy as anyone who tempts us to return evil for evil.
That’s a pretty familiar enemy; I meet them every day, even across the dinner table or in the next pew at church. But now with the constant 24/7 news, my enemies list has grown exponentially. It is not good for my soul.
So I need a little help with how to love and bless my enemies, and here comes the Buddha to help. It all starts with self-compassion, or “maître,” where we practice lovingkindness toward ourselves. Then we begin to expand that lovingkindness toward others.
The practice is what Burmese Buddhists call “metta.”
We send out goodwill, first to ourselves, then to others, first to those we love, then to our acquaintances, then to the neutral persons in our lives, then to the people who “get on our final nerve,” as they say in the South, then to all beings.
For those we don’t like we pray, to use the words of Buddhist nun Pema Chodron,
“May this person who is driving me crazy enjoy happiness and be free of suffering.”
In the daily practice of metta we repeat four phrases for ourselves first, then to the larger circles of loved ones, acquaintances, neutral people, enemy-types and then to all beings:
May I be free from danger.
May I be free from mental suffering.
May I be free from physical suffering.
May I have the ease of wellbeing.
I think Jesus had something like this in mind when he gave us this instruction in the Sermon on the Mount. I have tried it lately, and it seems to be working.
The lines of W.H. Auden strike home:
O stand, at the window
As the tears scald and start.
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart .
It all begins with God blessing our crooked little hearts.
Stephen Shoemaker serves as pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Statesville, N.C. He served previously as pastor of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte, N.C.; Broadway Baptist in Fort Worth, Texas, and Crescent Hill Baptist in Louisville, Ky.
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