This is the season for bringing light into dark places. So why not shine it into your own innermost recesses, where the seeds of conflict sprout and grow?

What are those seeds? Fear and desire are big ones, but less in their own right than for how they affect how we live our lives and trigger responses to the world around us. Misperceptions. Misunderstandings. Confusion. False images. Faulty communication. Expectations. Judgment. Unclear or conflicting intentions. The list is long and far beyond our ability to cover in a few paragraphs.

Perhaps the most insidious, however, are the set of characteristics that make up our personalities and the awareness with which we direct our attention. For together they determine what we will focus upon and how we will interact with that aspect of reality presented for our consumption in any particular moment.

Whew! I'm glad that's over. Thanksgiving's passed, and appreciation once again can take a back seat to resentment over life not working out the way we want.

You say you want peace. If you're serious, then quit fighting.

• Quit fighting with others to get your way, or keep them from getting theirs.
• Quit fighting with the political system and those who want to use it to move your country one way or another.

Maybe one of these days I'll write a book about my life in the light -- or more accurately, my journey into the darkness.

I've hesitated talking about it for a number of reasons. Concern over what people might think wasn't one of them. After all, I've never lived that way before, and now is no time to start.

So for all you who are prone to judgment, think what you like.

What to do when you don't know what to do?

You ask, and you allow the feelings to tell you. You stop the judgments. You stop the doubts.

You acknowledge that, yes, as you live in a certain reality there can be challenge, but many times, as you have seen in hindsight, the challenges were the best thing that ever happened, because they have brought you to a place of understanding yourself and your power, more than if you had not had the challenges.

- Jeshua

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9/27/09 Message of the Day
Channeled by Judith Coates
http://www.oakbridge.org/

Many are beginning to think they have some divine purpose to fulfill. Permit me to suggest that purpose has more to do with their own expansion than anything they add to the world.

Don't get me wrong. Service can be a good thing.

I for one have long advocated seeing our lives as about more than the chase of desires or struggle for survival. Stepping outside our own concerns to lend a helping hand, create a vision, or make a difference offers a sense of fulfillment that can otherwise be lacking, not to mention make a much-needed contribution to build a better world.

As we move into the energy of 9.9.09 perhaps you will join me in using it to look at our world in another light.

Think of some of the things we know or which are said about energy.

This is a world of energy. Energy subsists all matter. Energy is intelligence. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Energy flows in waves, at different frequencies or vibrations.

Thoughts are energy. Emotions are energy. Energy is light. Light is energy. Our bodies and world are made of energy.

Our problems, both those we experience externally such as wars, crime and violence and those we experience internally as emotional and psychological suffering will not be solved until we address this underlying neglect of our inner dimension.

Did you ever feel fragmented or compartmentalized, like you had to pick and choose which parts of you to be shown to the world? If so, don't despair.

That's the normal state of human affairs.

We so much want to be accepted or gain some benefit (e.g., profit) from our relations with others that many of our encounters break down into one of two categories:

• we try to show them what they want to see, or
• we try to entice them to give us what we want.

Either way, rarely do we let our hair down and show ourselves in our entirety, warts and all.

You have come here many times. And during those visits, you have become so wrapped up in the dramas created for you to experience that you have perhaps forgotten who you really are and what you are about.

Even so, within those lives you have undertaken many threads of experience to examine certain issues from different sides, and in the process add your unique imprint on the collective consciousness of mankind.