The Lesson of Tea Lights

Believe it or not, this article emerged, while I was ‘attempting’ to write an introductory page for my new Funeralization site. Just shows what can happen when musing about spirituality and society, and what happens when you’re not paying attention.

Over the past 15 years I have served many families in some of their most difficult and stressful moments, whether accompanying a loved one in the process of dying, at the death of a loved one, and serving the family as Officiant at the funeral ceremonies. Much apart from the spiritual and compassionate roles I play as spiritual guide and Officiant, my roles as a creative and caregiver have also been a great learning experience.

The past two years have been real eye-openers in many ways. First of all, it would be very easy to become a conspiracy theorist and to view the entire situation as an unabashed attempt to hobble and cripple the population by restricting social freedoms and liberties, foreclosing opportunities that traditionally and rightly accompany life-cycle transitions, and generally imposing mandates, requirements, and measures that, in the mind of the informed and educated, had no rhyme or reason.

The social, personal, cultural, and spiritual damage has been devastating. If technology hadn’t done enough to isolate and dehumanize, a so-called pandemic was used (or misused) to further hobble humanity. Most of the population were too entrenched in fear politics, anxiety, anger, confusion, depression to be able to get a handle on what was happening or to accurately assess the rationale of everthing from the political word-salad, to the finger pointing, to the misinformation that changed on an almost daily basis, most of it contradictory, and providing no basis for confidence in government or science.

For almost two years people were forced to live and die in isolation, without the support of loved ones around them. Loved ones were kept from visiting the hospitalized or dying, and were isolated from them by mandates and security forces. Wherever one turned, the rules seemed to be different; nothing made sense. Even the last resort for succor and security, one’s church or synagogue or temple, were made unavailable. For those without such support there was only despair which turned quickly into resentment. Deprived of physical contact, social contact, and ultimately even religious and spiritual respite, faith and spirituality assumed a new face: it became stronger and more personal. It had to necessarily.

Now, there’s a great deal of recovery and healing that needs to take place, and it has to take place, if we are to recover. Recovery has to take place at all levels physical, mental/emotional, spiritual, social, political, and it will but things will have to be different if we are to recover from the uncertainty, the loss of our groundedness, if we are to overcome the cultural insanity and confusion that has raised their ugly heads, if we are to reaffirm our humanity.

If you are really honest and awake, you will recognize that your electronic toys, your fake ideologies, your blind faith in cliché promises of affluence, wealth, and success are all mirages, illusions, delusions, lies. It’s incredible that the species that claims to be the pinnacle of Creation simply does not realize that the bubble may be artificially big and that it’s going to burst, as all of our bubbles have done in the past; the bigger it gets, the bigger the mess when it finally bursts.

The paradigm of such delusion is the federal government. Resources are limited, backing for currencies is limited, production, whether of goods, services, or intangibles is limited, the number of graduates in marketing, finance and accounting far outweighs any realistic demand for such talent or availability of jobs for the graduates, yet our so called “educational institutions” keep on cranking them out on an annual basis with no regard as to whether they are employable in their fields! Inflation has run amok yet everyone is still in La-La Land or Denial Paradise while shortages in everything has become the rule, fuel prices are at record highs, etc., yet we are being told that inflation is under control and that gas prices are not our own fault! What are the population looking at that they can’t see through the deceptions?

While all of what I have just presented may seem incredibly complex, a daunting complexity of myriad factors all with cross-effects, interactions, and whatnot. NOT! It all boils down to one conspicuous fact: For several decades now, no less than four generations have been conditioned and manipulated to reach outward for just about everything to the detriment of everything. Secularism, materialism, consumerism, capitalism are all ideologies that call the human spirit out of its natural abode, enticing it farther and farther centrifugally outward and away from its center; by this time, most human beings are hopelessly lost somewhere out there. Human beings like shiny things, and if you show them shiny things they become mesmerized; only the shiny thing exists. Brain, heart, spirit all shut down and only the shiny thing exists. Now put that shiny thing into someone else’s hand and watch Jack and Jill Average climb ever upward until they come tumbling down, and break their crowns, as the nursery rhyme goes. Well, the welfare state and big technology, the corporations, and the ruling elite are holding the shiny things, people, and guess what you’re doing?

There is a point of no return in the dehumanizing program; we haven’t yet reached it but it does appear to be lurking in ambush just around the next corner. Don’t you think it’s time to adjust your course? Maybe even to reverse your course? Do you have the strength, the courage, the guts to do that?

Some people are inching their way towards recovery and healing, back to natural normal. They’ve rejected any notion of new normals; we’ve had so many “new” normals in recent history that they’re no longer new and certainly not normal! What I think some people are looking for is natural normal, the normal that evolves slowly, at a livable pace; the normal that was not manipulated and fabricated by fake news, deceit, marketing, the information glut, constant sales pitches. All stressors.

The natural normal of peace, stillness, groundedness, equipoise, equinamity, union, transcendence; the normal of flow, of change, of growth, natural growth, not stimulated artificial growth. Natural growth that results in strengths not in mass or quantity that collapses under the least resistance, just like modern egos, economies, and ideologies.

In recent months, I have been seeing positive change happening, evidence of human resilience in a small population of evolved individuals. Curiously, the change is being noted, observed, and confirmed in recent surveys by Pew Research and Gallup. Recent events have made increasing numbers of Americans more spiritual, even if they are less religiously affiliated.

So, what does “more spiritual” and “less religiously affiliated” mean? Well, more spiritual is a positive direction, meaning that more people are looking for something larger that life, more meaningful that what they have had. Less religiously affiliated simply means that people are becoming more spiritually oriented — meaning that they are tending to return to their core of being, within — but less likely to rely on institutionalized religion as the source or foundation of their spirituality.

It should be noted that mainstream religious institutions have not fared well in competition with materialism, rationalism, consumerism, capitalism because the shiny things were very distracting and, for a time, managed to distract from the faint light burning deep in the soul. Even with the glaring headlights of technology, the faint tea light was still there, it was just drowned out by the sheer lumens of the LEDs of technology’s shiny things. But many people with insight are rediscovering that the LEDs are cold and harsh light, whereas even the tiny tea light has a comforting gentle warmth and movement; its light, too, is soothing, calming, non-intrusive. They’re getting to like the tea light; they are finding that they can actually live and live better in the presence of the tea light.

I use tea lights a lot in the ceremonies I design because they are easy to teach from. They are and do exactly what I teach human beings should do. They, the tea lights, are right there, visible, perceptible, and palpable for all to experience. They are what they are, and they don’t need me to elaborate on what they are by nature. They are what many of us are by nature or would like to become by nurture: gentle, warm, capable of more but humble, and enlightening.

On the example of what humankind has become and how valuable something as simple as a common tea light can be as a teaching moment, think now how the realizations and revelations of the tea light assume far-reaching effects in the situation in which one is confronted with existential challenges.