Frannie Rose
Spiritual Teachings
One Simple Voice
COUCHED IN OUR INDIFFERENCE
-Frannie Rose
10/20/09
Many historians and philosophers speak of history and the dreadful
slaughter human beings have inflicted upon each other, this earth and
ourselves. They easily cite
horrifying examples of crimes against humanity since the beginning of
time. Every night on the evening
news, we see more and more of what human beings have done in their brokenness,
and we watch our hearts become covered with fear and muted with shell or armor
that keeps us from feeling the true humanness that we have been created to
feel.
In 1999 at the White House Conference for a New Millennium, Elie Wiesel
an author and holocaust survivor, read the historic speech entitled “The Perils
of Indifference”. In this speech,
he spoke to the crimes humanity has brought to bear on itself. The words in his
historic quote, speak the meaning of indifference, “Indifference reduces the
other to abstraction.” This
profound phrase of genius is manifested throughout our world this day in a
myriad of ways.
When I speak of indifference, I speak to the shell that we have created
over our hearts. We have created
it there to hide us from our true worth and to keep us from the part of
ourselves that has the infinite power to change us. We go through our lives, covering up from this part of
ourselves, our hearts – disguising this cover-up by being driven to distraction
to get somewhere else, somewhere far from here, the here that would be called
by some, as living within our hearts.
And what do we do with this indifference? We hide behind it, thinking that we are hiding from it when
we are only hiding from our true Selves.
Does hiding behind your four walls really make you safer? Or does it hide your heart from the
problems that exist outside of them?
Does hiding your heart in political correctness when you are working
with an employee really help them?
Or does it protect you from your own need to use your heart in the
communication. Have we relied on
our indifference to keep us from using our hearts? Have we created indifference
to keep us from feeling them?
In the center of our hearts lies the life within us, felt by some to be
a piece of God Self. And if you
are spiritually in tune with this you can see your heart is aligned with your love,
your compassion, goodness, truth kindness, hope and faith. Are these not the seeds of the
heart? Or as mentioned in ancient
texts, aren’t these the fruits of the spirit? Do we not grow these seeds when we are in a beauty filled
relationship? Or when we wish to
create peace? Do we not honor
these seeds when we go to Church on Sunday, or temple on Saturday? Why then do we hide from them all other
days of the week when we deal with each other?
Our indifference that reduces another human being to abstraction reduces
our experience of God by distraction.
If we are disconnected from our hearts because our egos are more
important and the shell of this large false self mutes our pain, then we do not
have to see each other as human beings with soul depth and heart. We instead can see one another as
intangible and remote, unrelated to our humanness – the humanness that we are
unable to relate to in ourselves.
If we extract a mind being, and bury the heartfelt being, we are no
different than those who have slaughtered and maimed. Where then is that God Self? Where are the kindness, the love and the hope that bring us
to our deepest essential purpose?
It is lost with our humanness.
Look around you at those you pass in the supermarkets, in the banks, and
in your workplace at your coworkers.
Look into the eyes of your fellow human beings and smile. Know that when you connect with
another, your own heart too is warmed and your spirit soars. You are sharing
your strength, the strength of the human race. When you avoid the knowing of another’s heart with your
indifference, you do this to all of humankind. For what you feel within you is what you give without, what
you give to the world.
-Frannie Rose
**************************************
Its Not Often in My Life
(March 2, 2009)
by Frannie Rose
It’s not often in my life, that I sit with the emptiness and see what comes up from the depths of my soul. Tis not often when I give my heart a chance to breathe a sigh of freedom, from the burden of this mind. And when I do, I go back to the time I was in bed ill and sullen, when all I had was hours before me, to look up at the curtains and watch the light move slowly through them as the sun rises higher in the skies. And what comes to me is the way the wind made them dance by the screen as my heart so wished to dance in my life. The light on the curtains warmed the air, and warmed my heart. And when the day aged slowly the sun would leave the window and find my bed, filling me with warmth as I lay like a cat taking his afternoon nap – with the knowing that God was touching me.
For brief moments in my now more active life, I long for the feelings this warmth brought to me. And today I sit reflecting upon the emptiness I have now purposefully planted in my life. The empty garden that I am readying for springtime, nurturing the soil and pulling the weeds so there is space for new blossoms to grow. What will I plant there? Only God knows now, as only God always knew. But this time I am more than conscious that though I have choices, I do not have the outcomes in my hands. I sit with the knowing that this garden is unknown to me until it blossoms. The glorious colors will unfold when all is revealed, when the buds begin to open in the springtime sun; the same sun that came through my window to heal me many years ago.
Life doesn’t give us new messages, it teaches us parallel lessons. As we learn and become conscious of what lessons are being taught us, we find those same lessons echoed repeatedly through the future. Each lesson giving us a chance to test our learnings and find a balance. To remain conscious we need to allow space for these lessons, and plant seeds with these learnings, so that our lives can be lived from a place of inner knowing. To live blindly is to live without meaning and purpose. For that is depending upon where your thoughts take you instead of where your heart leads you. It is covering your eyes, and plugging your ears. It is covering your heart while muting your soul.
The mountaintops are covered with snow, and they do not reveal what is underneath their frigid coating. In the springtime when the flowers and the new buds bloom, there will be new worlds of beauty and love. If one looked now at the frigid mountaintops and then looked away, one would never understand what lay deeper beneath that snow; the beginning of new growth, the formation of new gardens.
Our lives are lived many times from the surface of the snow covering. And we see the snow and look away, never to look back again until the next winter when we see the snow again. All that has happened in between the seasons; all that growth which bloomed in colors through its season and now lay dormant once again, is unknown to us. If one sleeps through a winter snow shower, and the sun comes out while they sleep and melts the snow, one would never know the beauty of the snowfall for they were fast asleep and unconscious to that awesome wonder.
Our hearts are asleep for most of our lives, only to awaken with a jolt to the sheer intensity of romantic love. Our hearts grow deeply into passion with this fellow human being until our minds get hold enough to erode this feeling with the thoughts of this person. Years pass and the relationship begins to fall away, as we never truly allowed our hearts to grow, and gave the light to our minds instead. The mind, can talk us out of anything even love, if we listen to it.
And this is what happens to us. Each day we tread water looking for a ship to save us, and never feel the water we are treading, the smoothness of it, the beauty of its flow, and the fragrance of the sea life that flows within it - the heaven. The presence of each moment is elusive to us, as we strive for future moments making them the goal instead of now. The wonder and beauty of life slips away from us, and soon we don’t even look at the mountaintops, or at the skies, as we look only in the direction our two tiny feet are leading us.
Walking through life should be like walking through the fog. We focus only on the step we are taking now, the future in a cloud of haze, the past gone to us as well. We can see our feet and our hands and the mist around us, standing in wonder. What will life reveal to us? We do not know. What has the past taught us? Let's leave that now behind. We must focus on each step we take, in order to see where we are going, and we stand with the mist, breathe the mist and feel the mist on our skin. We are one with this moment now, no other, in Union with the Presence inside of us - in Union with our God; in Union with our hearts as life is slowly revealed to us one minute at a time.
It is not often in my life, when I sit with the emptiness
that I have chosen to live in. And
it is not often that I allow my self to reflect upon this emptiness; where it
has taken me, and where I sit now.
But I am grateful for the choice that I have made to do so. I am filled with gratitude for the days
I could lay and watch the light move through the curtains and bathe in the
sun’s warm splendor, as I have found a depth that was elusive to me during the
days I looked only to the snow covered mountains in winter. I know the glorious gardens that grow
beneath it, as they grow within me as well. I shall walk through this fog, one step at a time, in
wonder; and breathe in the mist of God as I step, feeling Him on my skin and
within my heart; one sweet present moment at a time.
Last night at a hospital dinner, I slipped away and went to the Chapel that the Sisters of Charity had built.
And there, up on the wall was a life sized sculpture of Jesus on the Cross, nailed securely
by his hands, and feet – his body firm and youthful, just as he suffered at the time of his death.
Tears came to my eyes of his deep struggle. The cross only a symbol of his pain -
having strived to show the masses, a God who created a world of beauty and love. This Heaven on Earth,
free to all who changed their paradigm from the world man has made, to the world of life.
This is the world of peace, goodness and love. This, the world of infinite possibilities,
the colors and shapes that grow in the meadows as flowers – each being another manifestation of God’s love.
He ventured from town to town as a teacher, sharing this inner gift of Heaven with them,
explaining away through beautiful parables, the lies of ego that they perceived as truths,
while guiding them to harmony, peace, and honor of one another
through slow, small ripples, changing the world.
How did he know to do this? He followed God’s voice as he was led through his life,
letting go of outcomes and finding new ways to heal those ailing, with the Peace of God – as he knew the ailing
were even closer to the desperation of finding God. Their struggle led them to that empty place of need,
the fertile ground in which the seed could sprout, God! God! God!
Last night I felt his desperation as I looked up at him through my plight, though never exactly the same,
as it holds a vein of light that I know Jesus shared. And the despair that led to his death
must have been so great matched up against the determination of those in contrast to him.
He tried to eliminate evil by showing the world goodness and Peace,
and his heart must have been scarred by their violence and indifference.
All the peaceful warriors and prophets of God, no matter what their religious way, have been sending us the same message
of peace.
It is written in every language,
in every belief
the simple way of peace.
Yet we do not see the simplicity and the connection in the message.
I wish in my lifetime that I will see the proof that humankind has transcended
through evolution in its wisdom, this resistance to a life of Peace.
As for one day, when God walks as a He or She among us,
would it not be the greatest sin to turn our heads yet again?
I know in my heart, that in all these years, humankind has not yet learned how to turn within –
that the desire to accumulate more on the outside has covered deeply the heart of God and His Peace on the inside.
We live like ostriches now, burying our heads in the sands of our own problems, our concerns,
our status and our wealth – never going deeper inside ourselves to the Paradise of Presence: Heaven within,
Heaven on Earth.
This Paradise of Presence that Jesus died for.
For in truth, are not the greatest sins that divide us gluttony and greed?
Don’t we spend our lives building layers of structure around our hearts?
And are not these layers the biggest boulders that stand between one another?
As they stand between each of us and God?
Look deeper within to find your heart, the heart of His Peace.
“Seek and ye shall find”.
God is at the very core of our being,
God is at the center of the circle of life,
no matter what our religious belief,
God is at the center
and He exists surrounded by the wondrous Heaven of the world He created
Within and without -
Inside and outside of each and every one of us.
-Frannie Rose
********
A Letter to a Healer
It has been almost 5 years since my life began again venturing out into the world as a person of worth for the very first time. For now, I am whole – filled with essential purpose overflowing from the great cup of life. Before illness, I was broken into pieces of “have to’s”, and “should be’s”. Now I am who I am – a beacon of love, of life and of kindness – an instrument to share with the world this wondrous vision of Peace.
It never occurred to me at the time I met Him that he would be a driving force in what would become a burning desire in me to help others. For at that time, I was trying with all my heart to preserve this self. But the hope that existed deep inside this heart drove me onward – forcing me through the obstacles that stood on The Way. There was nothing that could stop me from finding the answers. A need to be, far outweighed the never- ending victim thoughts inside this head. I had to exist – and each day of struggle made that wish ever stronger.
Our work together at first looked very simple, but in hindsight was quite complex – as it covered not just a sick body – but a wounded soul. It would take a Key Master, to open the doors that led to the answers to free me. The infinite keys He held in his hands, overwhelmed me. As it turned out, One simple key was all it took.
The key was that of my most persistent hope.
At first when I began this letter, I thought I was writing about my doctor – as he healed me in many wonderful ways. But now as I write I realize this is a letter to him as my heart has a deeper knowing of the Healer beside him. The One who came to our examining room and sat between us time and time again. The One behind my doctor’s smile and behind his eyes. The One who gave him the eyes from which to see and the heart to touch my hand. The One who brought him to the place of compassion when he first met me.
The One.
For as long as I could remember there was a dark, quiet, pensive place inside of me that would only be nurtured within the silence and the true meaning of life. As a young girl I sat in the library between the aisles of shelves with books in hand; books of essence and poetry and philosophy, that brought me to a deeper place within. Escaping from a world of fast paced learning and competition, I sat there surrounded by the wisdom of the centuries – away from the screaming realities that I thought I must tend to. Deep within these shelves, laid the keys to a child’s kingdom – simple, white papers with black ink – depicting the map of a future heart's desire. A path that laid uncovered.
I was in tune with this deep within, but a child is taught to ignore heart and to follow her mind.
And so it was that the break between this heart and mind began.
Looking back it would have been so simple if I had learned to heed my heart’s call. But I was not ready to rest in those books, in those quiet, secluded aisles that somehow I yearned for. I went on to live a mind's life – to explore new worlds and be new things. So very far from heart I wandered. So very far from who I was and who I was destined to be.
The ever-winding road I walked led to priceless gifts along the way, but alas to great struggle. The competition between mind and heart is never considered easy. It is a duel between virtue and compliance, between integrity and competition, between peace and unease. And it was this struggle that began the cracking of the protective shell of ego that had taken years to build strong - the shell that distanced the world from my heart – the depth of the shell protecting my ears from hearing its wailing calls. Later to manifest as a broken body.
Illness and suffering deepened the journey toward wholeness – as I could clearly hear through the cracks that there was more to who I was beneath the shattered shell, down there – that this tedious cracking was necessary. Just like a desperate squirrel caught in a well, the efforts to salvage a will to survive became the quest I endeavored for many years. A fight to find what had attacked my body – became a fight to uncover what had ravaged my soul.
Underneath it all, laid The Key Master. His disguise was so cloaked that I had forsaken Him. He had tried to take me on the direct journey to this heart, but my thoughts about this self, conditioning from the past and the thickness of this shell prevented me from seeing that. I had been on the crooked path to completeness – following mind and not heart. Each detour I walked through took me further from my path – further from being who I was, further from living my heart’s truth.
Until I finally gave up, and sat on the side of the road with the emptiness inside of me, the shell stayed intact. Within the silence and the emptiness one could hear piece-by-piece crack as if a lonely chick were inside laboring to get out. The chick, my inner Essence, the Self – this life, fighting to exist yet ever so imprisoned by a shell that I had unknowingly created. That life so connected with the One, the Key Master – the Entity that would arise from within to set me free.
From that emptiness a man with great compassion came into light – one with a depth that he may not be the knowing of – who stopped and listened and heard at long last, a weak voice deep within me. It wasn’t just the science or the medicine that brought about this sacred healing. It was the deeper listening and most of all the essential connection between this tormented voice, and his deep heart. The One was in the room with us, clearly felt by the joy in my heart when we worked together. But neither one of our mouths said the words,
nor acknowledged that this Other was even part of our precious work together.
In hindsight I can almost see clearly the picture of God hovering over us as we worked together to find the solutions to set my Essence free from a body that was too broken to do the heart’s work. Through the heart, hope leaked out from underneath the burden of a hopeless mind.
Hope – what is that? Hope, we spoke of.
In those 15 years of illness, I could not clearly see what had happened as I was dealing from a place of thought. My mind had become so overactive that this heart remained uncovered beneath the rubble of a cracked shell. It listened to other minds, many wrong, trying to lead me out of the misery of illness and pain through means that were of mere science. Mere science alone cannot heal. Mere science alone whether admitted or not,
contains variables that even the most perfect of all scientists cannot control.
What variable, you ask? The variable of Grace.
Nothing happens in this life without the variable of Grace. We cannot see it, and when we are deep in endless thought we cannot feel it. And in science that which we cannot see, prove or reproduce does not exist. If you ask a doctor he will tell you, “Medicine is not an exact science”. No science is. The experimenter himself is a life Essence.
And within the concept of life lies the Unmanifested - always the element of Grace.
When one struggles – from a place of mind there is no such thing as hope, there is only the darkness. It is seen by the mind empty of solutions and answers, bringing the thinker back to the questions themselves. In this darkness a patient’s mind can only imagine all the fearful endeavors that await. It begins to envision these struggles and worst-case scenarios creating more “what if” questions than a heart could ever hold. It obsesses on finding the answers that will not come, going round and round within the same question. When finding no solutions,
a problem must be continually revisited until finally, surrender, a mind gives up –
and from there comes the trueness of Grace.
However, heart sees unknown as opportunity and liberation from the known - as the darkness is felt as a wondrous place of infinite possibilities. Somewhere within this darkness lies the freedom of goodness, love, compassion and joy. There is no imprisonment of these feelings, as the darkness has no limits, no limiting doors or bars. There is a field within that darkness
where beauty flies, and souls are set free.
It is called hope.
From deep within the emptiness in this field of hope rises God. God springs up from the depth of despair, the feelings of lack, and helplessness. When one listens to that wailing voice from beneath the cracked shell, surrendering to it and allowing it to do its work – a life can be miraculously changed.
From sickness to health – from mind to heart.
The man who came into the examining room may be innocent of this Grand Being present between he and the patient. But if he is cognizant, and if he allows his heart to bond with the Grace of this Being, a connection between himself and his patient becomes a connection through Grace. And the healing powers of such an encounter are endless, infinite, and sacred – taking on the qualities of the One,
Our God, the Creator of all things: infinite, omnipotent and omniscience.
I will speak to this man soon of this vision of peace, love, and healing that science can bond with –
to create the complete beauty of a healed soul. I will speak to him of
the One being present within the room of healing, each time he sees a new patient.
And as for these two souls – this doctor and this patient,
Grace has been the catalyst that has changed our lives incessantly.
For him, our synchronous meeting has changed the how in ways that he doctors and heals,
and for me, it has changed my essential purpose forever.
-Frannie Rose
