Produce Your Life

BY MICHAEL HAUSER

OK it’s over! We’ve collectively agreed that change is what we want, change is what we need and that change has appeared in the form of President-elect Barack Obama. Now what?

Change on national and global scales is evident, but what does change mean to us personally? What is change when you’re financially ruined or chronically ill? How do we move to another state of being when we can’t see outside our own pain?

Because we live in a world that is ultimately a projection of our thinking, we sometimes can’t see a new answer beyond our present conditions. At times we don’t even know the questions to ask because we only see the confinement of who and what we think we are. If we do come up with seemingly “new” answers, we understand that these are merely reorganized thoughts appearing as such. There is a better way to achieve change.

In order for us to produce life-changing results, we must engage in a radical undertaking and ask for something greater to intervene. This greater presence and intelligence is Spirit, and though this intervention is invisible, it shows forth its face as us and through us. Spirit disregards race and age, and is willing to use those who are willing. Are you willing to be used for a greater purpose?

The government can, on one level, bail us out, but something superior can cause everlasting transformation when we permit it to emerge from within so that it can direct, guide and maintain our lives. This intelligence, Spirit, can lead and sustain us and organize our course of actions to be aligned with the highest good.

Obama demonstrated his familiarity with Spirit by looking out, through its eyes, beyond the ugly appearances of the world. He ignited a nation with the idea of changing the way things are, he touched the lives of millions by his consciousness and the knowledge that there’s got to be a better way. And we hope and pray he has a way, but his is not the only way. As noted in Helen Schucman and William Thetford’s classic text A Course in Miracle, “God has provided the Answer, the only Way out … because, while on the one hand He knows the truth (love), on the other He also recognizes our illusions (fear), but without believing in them.”

We are capable of escaping our history and enacting change, like Obama, by giving up the ghostly images we have of ourselves, abandoning any sense that we require something from this world and laying down our arms, letting the light that resides in us to illuminate our paths.

Change happens when we deepen our meditation, allowing ourselves to be swayed into an ecstasy that is not of this world. Change resembles dying to the world of flesh, wars and rumors, and though we die, we live wide open to a better way, a system that maintains and sustains itself as you and I. We smile at each other, knowing change is occurring and we feel the energy of transformation that is taking place in the world touch us.

But, as Obama also said in his victory speech, “[change] can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.” In order for us “to reclaim the [gay] American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth” that Obama speaks of, we must do what he has done—overcome the histrionics of our lives and propose a new way of being, which means stepping outside of our comfort zones and “when we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.”

Michael Hauser is a spiritual teacher and television producer. He can be reached at livingvertically.com