Rise Up and Celebrate

Pray Tell:

Stretching the

Truth About

Church Attendance

The most important aspects of working as a healer are spiritual integrity, the ability to be a clear channel, and the release of ego. Reiki healers say that for those who began to work as healers for the first time around 1997 or early 1998 that they have been working in highly accelerated energies.

The question becomes what is human energy?

Obviously it might be described as our physical output powered by the Sun and the food that we eat and the environment that we live in. Human energy might also be contained within our aura which is a field of subtle, luminous radiation surrounding us (like the halo or aureola in religious art). In mainstream society the depiction of such an aura in art often connotes a person of particular power or holiness. However, all people, or all living things, or all objects manifest auras. Often an aura becomes interconnected with our third eye and they can change various personality traits as their layers can change colours.

But there’s a form of human energy connected to all of this that drives outputs of behaviour that is then linked to the outputs of others. All of this collected energy creates a larger layer of energy that drives our society’s behaviors. This sort of energy challenges healers as they try to navigate through cultural patterns that we all contribute to.

Presently the way our mainstream society interacts with spiritual values and religion is becoming more challenged as well and certain recent discoveries shed some surprising light on this.

A new University of Michigan study finds that Canadians and Americans are much more likely to exaggerate their attendance at religious services than are people in many other countries.

"Americans have long been viewed as exceptionally religious compared to other nations in the developed world," said Philip Brenner, a research fellow at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the author of the study. "But this study suggests that American religiosity may be exceptional not in terms of actual behavior, but rather in terms of identity.

"In the U.S., and to a lesser extent in Canada, the gap between what we say and what we do is substantial, and has been so for the last several decades."

The study appears in the forthcoming Public Opinion Quarterly in it, Brenner analyzed two types of evidence about religiosity for each country: conventional survey questions asking respondents how often they attend religious services, and time diary data recording Sunday activities. The data, covering a period from 1975 to 2008, came from a variety of time use studies and cross-cultural surveys, including the ISR World Values Surveys and the American National Election Studies.

In addition to the United States and Canada, the countries studied were the Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway, Finland, Slovenia, Spain, Austria, Italy, Great Britain and Ireland.

While conventional survey data show high and stable American church attendance rates of about 35 to 45 percent, the time diary data over the past decade reveal attendance rates of just 24 to 25 percent -- a figure in line with a number of European countries.

America maintains a gap of 10 to 18 percentage points between what people say they do on survey questions, and what time diary data says they actually do, Brenner reports. The gaps in Canada resemble those in America, and in both countries, gaps are both statistically and substantively significant.

Outside of North America, the largest gaps are found in the Catholic countries of Europe, but even in high-attendance Ireland, the gap only ranges from about 4 to 8 points.

"The consistency and magnitude of the American gap in light of the multiple sources of conventional survey data suggests a substantive difference between North America and Europe in overreporting."

Given these findings, Brenner notes, any discussion of exceptional American religious practice should be cautious in using terms like outlier and in characterizing American self-reported attendance rates from conventional surveys as accurate reports of behavior. Rather, while still relatively high, American attendance looks more similar to a number of countries in Europe, after accounting for over-reporting.

"American religion may however, be considered exceptional in a new way in light of these findings: unlike the other countries examined, American behavior continues its consistent failure to match self-reported rates. American religiosity as an outlier is a concept that may be better applied to identity and self-concept rather than behavior," he said.

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The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Michigan. Link

Yet somehow even with this awareness of awakening that the modern age has brought to us. Even with its ability to look into the distance, the depth and all of the past in its endless continuity, still when one loved one, adult or child, casts off their physical form we once again cry foul.

That human instinct rises up and wails its time-worn and weary lament, that the end has come and eternality has been stolen. We forget the evidence of modern science, ancient history and the very word of our soul.

What farce is this?

Stop believing! Stop feeding such insanity, eternal means Eternal.

If we live forever then we live for eternity. If we all live for eternity then nothing can be stolen, taken away or lost before its time. Nothing that “is” can be lost at all.

It is time that we stop looking at death as an end. It is time that we stop pretending we are sorry for a loss of life that has not been lost. It is time we start weaning ourselves from the addiction to this insane belief in separation and loss.

Stop feeding into the hype.

It is time to start celebrating life, to start looking for that life in the invisible, and finding it in our feelings and intuitions. It is time to start honouring those people who have danced in this physical world with us. Not from a place of absence do we celebrate - but from a place of appreciation. We have now learned to dance with them in their incorporeal and eternal presence.

It is time to stop making death a crime; it is not.

Death is the joyous return to the “infinite”. Not that we go anywhere, we simply shed the apparent confines of a physical form and continue dancing unrestricted by our deluded belief in confinement.

It is time to set the dead ones free and turn our attention to healing the insanity of loss and the futile belief that we can take a life or cause a death. How very egotistical that would be. There are billions of entities upon this planet who are engrossed in a nightmare and they desperately need our help. They need us to see the truth for them rather than to feel sorry for them. They need to see us in celebration rather than lowering ourselves into their trenches of ignorance in mindless commiseration.

Death is not the end whether it be the passing of the ninety-eight year old in a hospice bed; the teenager from addictive overload; or the child whose ‘life’ is ‘cut short’ in another violent altercation. It is a transition that calls upon us - who know to be in integrity with our “knowing” rather than hiding in our own fear of ostracism for not becoming entangled in their web of fear.

We are the ones; each one of us who know the oneness. Let us not waiver in our attention to truth.

We are the creators for we are “one” and in that “oneness” we create the world we seek to see.

That world will not change until we change, until we live our integrity. So let us not cry for the lost, there are no lost; let us sing with the living. Let us dance a dance that will never be forgotten, reach each of us into our own heart and find there awaiting the heart of all divinity.

We are ‘God’ consciousness, the God particle, the “one’ expressing in infinite variation. The life that in all its exuberance flows over and becomes the tangible physical reflection of true spiritual perfection.

We are here to celebrate - so today let us live our highest and only purpose. Let’s do what we are here to do. Let’s celebrate this dawning of a new day, year, both solar and galactic.