Ask and You Shall Receive

Original photograph by Sandy Chase

I am sitting here, goose bumps covering my skin and tears welling up in my eyes. Each hair on my body is alive as if each is reaching for the sky while my body seems to be melting into the space beneath it.  My breath is still slow, my heart content to beat in time with the rhythm that has pulsed through it.  I am alone but not lonely.  I am still but far from doing nothing.  I am alive and I am aware even as the universe fades from view in eyes wide open.


Thus ends my midday meditation.  It’s not the first time that I have been graced with such an explosion of emotion.  Once, when I was about 14, I had such a tremendous experience while meditating that I stopped practicing until I could better understand the experience.  In that moment I cried like a baby as a sense of love came cascading down from points all around me.  I felt the room fade away as all that remained was the sense of love that filled the areas where intense pain once dwelled.  Light filled darkness, and the unusual experience of joy filled my heart.  Needless to say, I was not prepared to handle it.


I was not alone but I was lonely in my youth.  I was a tortured soul if ever there was one, with parents who instilled such agreements in me as “I am not worthy” or “I am nothing”.  They also created agreements for me that caused me to fear love, to fear commitment, to fear giving myself freely and to fear trusting in anything with a heartbeat.  Yes, they drew up the contracts but it was me who readily agreed to sign them.  I did not understand the latter part of that equation until after my children were born and love began to invade places I kept locked deep within me.  Today, those places are becoming "public parks" where anyone can visit without a moment's hesitation on my part.


It was not until recently that I decided those contracts must become null and void.  Now, you just don’t cancel a contract with fear or anger.  It just doesn’t work that way.  Rather, you must replace those contracts with agreements that make them null and void.  You don’t “ask” for release, you release yourself (action, by the way, is the purest form of asking).  I’ll say that again, this time without the parentheses. Action is the purest form of asking. Perhaps, for those of you who don’t know me, this requires a bit of explanation using my patented analogies.


Say I want to have a successful business in landscaping and I am a very creative landscaper with many talents for the task.  I sit in silent prayer asking the Universe (or God) to make my business successful.  I do this for countless hours a day, several days a week for several weeks in a row.  At the end of the practice, I look at my sales figures in total disbelief.  “Zero sales!?,” I shout.  “The universe must hate me.  That law of attraction stuff is nothing but nonsense!!”


I suggest that is simply not so.  What you have truly done is ask the universe to make you successful at sitting still and praying, to which it replied “YES!”  I have found in my experience that action is the only question the Universe actually understands.  If I sit in a church somewhere and pray for world peace, and then leave the building and attack a person walking down the street, which request am I actually asking the Universe to meet?  That answer seems relatively simple, and to me is one reason gurus like Gandhi said, “BE the change you wish to see in the world” and not “pray that the world changes”.  Make sense?  I can’t find anything else that is clearer spiritually.

Source: Photobucket (username:eyeness)

Having this experience within me, I discovered that I cannot simply ask that an agreement with fear be nullified.  I cannot ask for an end to loneliness while remaining in an empty room attached to a need for companionship.  I cannot ask to be loved while continually spreading fear to those around me.  I cannot ask to “see the light” while sitting on the basket that covers it.  No, I must make other agreements and, in turn, ask the question correctly.  I must walk out of my empty room toward a room filled with others (or lose my attachment to companionship) if I no longer want to be lonely.  I must spread love if I want to see love in return.  I must lift the cover if I wish to see the light under it.  Action, therefore, is the question the Universe understands.


Now, back to the analogy.  I ask the Universe to have a successful landscaping business not by praying for it, but rather by going out and doing a good job at a good value.  I relish in my passion for it and it, in return, provides me with success.  I have made an agreement with success by not only identifying my passion and talent but by putting that passion and talent in ACTION.  To this, the Universe always says “YES!”

Once I discovered this truth a new reality was born for me.  I have replaced the agreements I had with fear with new agreements with Love.  I have replaced the agreements I had with anger with new agreements with joy.  I have replaced the agreements I had with judgment with agreements with peace.  Mostly, I have replaced agreements I had with death with new agreements I have with life.  Amazing, huh?  I have begun asking the questions correctly.  I used to pray that I could become a writer.  Now, I write.  A prayer never once put a moment of inspiration through my fingers onto paper, actually typing them did.    An agreement I had with a dream has been replaced with a new agreement I have with action.  I have replaced asking with action and expecting with doing and have found a great new world in front of me.

What agreements does the Universe have with you?
Source: NASA

Now, the goose bumps have subsided, and I can return to the rest of my passion-filled day.  See, prayer may not get inspiration from fingers to paper, but it does get inspiration from Source to fingers.  Prayer in itself is a question.  Meditation is, after all, an action.  The Universe always says “YES” to both, and anytime we believe it has failed what really has failed is our perception of what we have asked or what we have done.  The Universe never fails, ever.


Be well, and prosper my dear friends.  It’s all up to YOU.

Peace. ☮   ©2011 Thomas P. Grasso All Rights Reserved ☮ ℓﻉﻻ٥ ツ

I Have Said Goodbye to Anger

So I was alone, helpless as the day I was born.  Actually, I was even more helpless, because in addition to not having hope I knew I did not have it.  So there I lay, floundering in my own despair, searching for a light to guide my way.  I reached for you but you weren't there,  gone was the life-after-life - the solace to which I had become accustomed.


You were my strength; you were my weakness.  You cradled me in your arms as I sat helpless and bleeding.  You stood with me as I faced torment.  You lit my way as I groped down the narrow valley in which I was thrown.  You held me up when I thought I would fall, you pushed me down as I struggled to stand.  You helped me find my way as you kept me lost.  You gave me a name even as I had forgotten who I was.


You helped me escape unbearable suffering as you heaped on the misery.  You filled my cravings as you kept me wanting more.  You kept me from looking by telling me what I saw; you stopped me from searching by destroying all I had found.  You forced me to be who I wasn't so that I could escape who I was; you created disdain for me while holding me true to a lie.   I do not judge you in these descriptions, they are what I see when the blinders have been removed.


I have said goodbye to you.  Not because I see you as good or evil, and not because I dislike you.  I have said goodbye because I no longer need the walls that you create.  I have said goodbye because I no longer fear my shadow.  I have said goodbye because I have said hello to the me that was before I embraced you.  I love you for the experience you have given me and for the now that I live in joy.  I could not have gotten here without you.


Goodbye to you my friend; my foe.  I am sure we will meet again someday, yet I can promise you that I will see you this time.  I will feel you come and I will simply try to watch you go. 

©2010 Thomas P. Grasso All Rights Reserved ☮ ℓﻉﻻ٥ ツ

Video games and our children

My wife and I got into a discussion about the use of electronics by our children, ostensibly due to my youngest daughter's upcoming birthday and my desire to buy her an iPod touch.  Well, not actually what "old timers" would call a discussion, we were texting each other from about 45 miles away, which is very ironic given the topic.  Veronica was against the idea, understandably given what is going on with kids and electronics in the world today.  It seems wherever you go you can see a young child or teen with some form of electronics (sometimes running into walls while walking), and it is easy to see why any parent would be reluctant to introduce such mind-numbing distractions.  Not to mention the costs of getting that broken nose fixed, most people today are oblivious to the world around them when using electronics, with rubbernecking at an accident on the highway replaced with texting about it and good sound family discussion being replaced with texting and an occasional grunt when asked "how was your day dear?"  So I get it.  How on earth could any parent buy their 6-year old an electronic device that captures their attention better than any explosion could?

Yet, how can you not?

My goal here was not to gift a device that would be used as a new-age version of a pacifier.  It would not be turned over to my 6-year old with the intention of allowing it to absorb her mind like the sponge we have seen so often.  It would not be to hand it to her at dinner so she could ignore her family.  It would not be used in a way that would allow her to miss the world between points A and points B.  It would not be used in place of good, sound parenting to teach the boundaries of living in our society.  Rather, I see it as a way to teach exactly all of those things and allow good parenting to occur.  When I see a person of any age (myself included) so engrossed in their electronic device that they cannot tell you what they had for dinner five minutes ago it does cause the cursory shaking of my head.  When I see an man across the restaurant texting away while his wife is telling him about her day only to realize that the "man" is a mirror I completely understand where my wife is coming from.  When I see a kid so engrossed in a video game at the dinner table that she can't even eat her dinner I get it.  Hold on a second...

...what did you say dear?  Sorry, I was typing on my computer.  Sweetie, you there?  I guess she'll text me.

 Anyway, my goal in getting the iPod touch was multifarious (a fancy word I learned on my computer).  First, I think she would love the games I put on it.  Second, a kid today without a great working knowledge of modern electronics can't set up my home entertainment system for free, which is a travesty in any household (of course the trick would be getting them away from their games long enough to do the work).  Third, it would allow us to parent her and teach her boundaries when using the iPod, something that was certainly not available to us considering my parents would still view pocket calculators as "those new fangled contraptions".  What I see in kids and adults today isn't the fault of the technology, but the fault of parents or of those who are responsible to teach boundaries.  You know, boundaries?  "Don't put your hand on the stove Michael", or "Don't climb on the table Gianna", or "Tom, blah blah blah blah" (I am, after all, still typing on my computer).  It isn't the kid's or the technology's fault when that kid is handed a video game at dinner and allowed to play with it throughout the entire dinner without ever coming up for air.  It isn't the kid's fault that you have to call them 50 times because they can't hear anything but the beeps coming from the screen.  It isn't the kid's fault that they miss the entire world around them because the are trying to get Mario to a new universe.  It isn't the kids fault he loves to write on his computer (I think I just heard something about the need to evacuate...nah, that must have been the PS3 game going on in the living room).


The fault lies solely on the shoulders of those whose job it is to be parents.  It's the fact that we aren't teaching and that we aren't parenting that causes kids to walk into walls.  So, my fear is that when my daughter gets to the age my wife deems appropriate for such games, she will not have the necessary skills to put the damn thing down to enjoy what matters (or to learn that getting to Level 1,000,443 does not) nor the knowledge that what those around her are trying to say is more important that Mario jumping to an alternative universe.  I can almost hear the arguments now between two stubborn females...one not understanding the beauty of the game and the other not understanding the beauty of the world around her as the veil of Nintendo cascades down upon the world she used to see.  So I believe we teach her now so that when the veil does come down around her she can easily blow it to one side to see beyond it, even if Micheal and I would certainly get a kick out of the "female" discussion.  I guess the question still is in me that wasn't really addressed in the discussion (I reread the texts and I am SURE it wasn't).  How can we teach her the place this technology should have in her life if we don't get her the technology and introduce it into her life?  If we don't, she will only learn from the examples of her peers, something that scares me more than any iPod ever will.


The man in the mirror is laughing at me right now.  Damn him and his judgmental ways.  I had better go now before my wife unplugs the compu...


The views expressed here are not indicative of any one person or set of events.  Any resemblance to real events is either coincidental or simply in your own mind. Get over it, if this angers you, you probably need to talk to the person in the mirror.  ALWAYS READ THE FINE PRINT!!



©2010 Thomas P. Grasso All Rights Reserved ☮ ℓﻉﻻ٥ ツ