I’ve watched recently some videos of police as they face gunmen shooting up schools. Armed and doing their duty, they charge into these situations clear of dangers they face. And while those are brave acts, there’s a higher order of bravery I’d like to discuss: The bravery that looks like living one’s Charmed Life and what that looks like.
Sure, it’s one thing to charge into a building you know a gunman awaits. But is that really brave? Or is that responding to the what-is-ness of life? If we can create any reality we want, why not create a reality in which a person needn’t experience such things?
A while ago, I experienced something which showed me what real bravery looks like. What happened back then forever changed my life. Real bravery looks like living authentically. That means creating a life that looks nothing like what others are doing.
And the most honorable life is one that reflects the pure positive state of All That Is. A state of pure love for everyone and everything. There, a person must enjoy an experience of life that reflects that love back at the person. That’s what I learned a while back when I had the experience I’m about to share.
Anger personified
One day, I was out and about, enjoying life. I walked through downtown, greeting everyone I made eye-contact with with a twinkle in my eye and a smile. Meanwhile my positive focus emanated from me. I felt on top of the world.
I stopped to catch the lightrail and, while I waited, a young man came walking down the platform. It was obvious he was houseless. He walked with slumped shoulders, his eyes cast to the ground.
But something must have prompted him, because as he got near me, he looked up and caught my eye. I gave him a dose of positive energy and greeted him silently with my smile. What happened next was astounding.
“What you looking at faggot,” He said with hostility. “You wanna die today?”
When he said this, I felt no fear, no threat. I didn’t even have time to think about what he said. Immediately from my lips came a response that, even today, startles me. But what he said in response to that, startled me even more.
“You wanna die today?” he asked.
“Do you?” I asked in return and he turned his hard stare from me back to the ground. As he did so, without missing a beat, he said “Yes”.
Violence is a cry for help
At first, I couldn’t believe my response just as much as I couldn’t believe his. So surprised I was, I did a double-take. I wasn’t sure what just happened. Apparently, the young man wasn’t sure either, because as distance grew between us, he kept looking back towards me, a look of surprise in his own eyes.
I’ve said this many, many times. Rage, seething and violence are all cries for help. A person willing to wage violence on another does so out of their disconnection from their Broader Perspective. So disconnected are they, they see the world around them as frightening, threatening. It’s no wonder they feel the need to wage war against it.
The appropriate response to such people isn’t meeting them with violence. It is meeting them with understanding. Hopefully doing so well before violence becomes their last resort.
The trouble with our world today, if there is trouble, is so many of us live our lives so disconnected from All That Is that we perceive the world as scary, random and out of our control. When, in fact, our individual experience is 100 percent our creation.
Think I’m “victim blaming”? Read this.
And since all of us come into the world through people who came before us, it’s almost a given that we’ll adopt those people’s fears and insecurities as our own.
So real courage, real bravery isn’t about running into an active shooter situation to kill someone who themselves is so disconnected they kill others. Real courage is short circuiting the notions that make people think it’s necessary to arm themselves then shoot up a school in the first place.
The power of invincibility
Invincibility is another matter entirely. Invincibility looks like moving through the world knowing nothing in the world can harm us. Including houseless strangers, school shooters or any other violence.
Indeed, it’s knowing everything in the world reflects back to us our inner state of being. A chronic Positively Focused state reflects back to us only things that nurture and delight and surprise us. There, even a threatening houseless youth or armed attacker reveals who they really are: someone in pain. Someone harmless to us.
These days, I move through the world worried about no one. Instead I see the world and everyone in it as my creation. And the world indeed reflects that knowing to me, in the form of people who express kindness, love and warmth. Those with rage-full hearts can’t find me. Because I’m on a totally different vibrational level.
This is what the Charmed Life creates. In addition to a life one loves, it creates a world that reflects back to us the charmed state of being we nurture internally. Creating that life takes a while. Only because nearly all of us have adopted bogus beliefs from those through whom we came into the world.
And it is an act of courage to reach beyond those bogus beliefs. To reach for that state of being consistent with what we knew before coming into a body. The courage to go our own way, live authentically, then transform life from what others think it is, to what we want it to be.
It is to be the change we want to see in the world.