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Sunday, Nov. 20, 2005 — Warren, Michigan

Letter from Mark David

Dear Friends of the Light,

A few mornings ago I was awakened (in that predawn way Spirit seems to prefer) with snatches of a message I was too tired to want to hear.

Reluctantly, I reached for the notepad I usually keep by my bed.

It wasn't there.

Yet more reluctantly still, I stumbled half-blindly from bed, found the stray notepad and began to scrawl.

Some 15 minutes later, I fell back to sleep. When I awoke, I had little recollection of what I had written.

When I glanced at my barely decipherable scratchings, I recoiled. From an old script that, no doubt, was first published lifetimes ago, I heard, "Who am I to write this?"

The answer was, "You to whom it was given."

I share this because we all have access to powerful knowings. We all know more than the limitations of our still-stretching minds believe we do. We all know more than we are, at times, comfortable admitting that we do.

Even as I write these introductory words, I am reluctant to deal with those notes. Yet I know, as the one to whom they were given, it is my responsibility to own them and share them with you.

It is your responsibility, too, to open to all you know and to share it when so called.

As I wrote in a recent Notes (11/13/05), the time to hide is past. The time to show yourself — first to yourself and then to the world — is now.

It's time not only to gaze at the burning bush of all-knowing, not only to become that all-loving/all-powerful light, but to be it where others can see it in you, that they might then see it in themselves.

Finally, as we move into the final third of this Cosmic Liberation Portal, may you open more fully to freedom and liberty in all aspects of your life.

Abundant blessings,
Mark David
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Notes from the Freedom Trail

America as the New Jerusalem...
America as a Shining Light Among Nations...

These words intrude into my consciousness in the predawn semiwakefulness of an Ohio morning. I turn over, trying to ignore them, preferring the silence of sleep.

They repeat...

America as the New Jerusalem...
America as a Shining Light Among Nations...

And they continue to repeat until I surrender.

Even in surrender, my logical Canadian mind is reluctant. It doesn't want to write this. No part of my mind wants to write it.

Yet, even as I pen my objections, my higher mind insists that it is true.

Perhaps it takes a Canadian to write this. Certainly non-Americans and even some Americans might view these statements about America as the New Jerusalem and a Shining Light Among Nations as self-aggrandizing or offensively nationalistic.

The Founding Fathers knew this; some, perhaps, even at a conscious level. Certainly at deeper levels they all understood that they were creating a template for heaven on earth.

People of a conspiracist bent like to talk about the Founding Fathers' Masonic machinations and pre-trilateralist plots.

Perhaps that's true on some dimensional level. After all, in our multidimensional omniverse, anything is possible.

On that same basis, however, so is the reality I'm guided to present, which uses some of the same physical evidence to make my case as do conspiracy theorists: the illuminating force of the eagle, the mottos e pluribus unum ("out of many, one") and novus ordo seclorum ("new order of the ages"), and the metaphysical symbolism on current banknotes (the pyramid and its radiant-eye capstone). To this I would add Lady Liberty's presence on early coinage and in New York Harbor, as well as the motto In God We Trust, which, to me, is a call to trust the God Presence you are.

However, my point here is not to argue whose interpretation is correct. It doesn't really matter.

Nor is it to argue for Manifest Destiny in its wrong-hearted historical meaning of "divine right to territorial expansion."

Yet there is a manifest destiny here.

It's a destiny that transcends small-minded, closed-hearted, fear-based politics. It's a destiny that transcends this country as we know it on this plane of existence.

Like all destinies, it exists as a potential.

And like all potentials, this one can be ignored, squandered or crushed.

It can be and it has been....to fear, to lies, to the smaller-self agenda.

It's an agenda that lives in our capital cities only because it still lives within each of us.

One of the problems with fundamentalism of all stripes — be it left or right, religious or secular — is that it carries a tiny grain of truth within it that is then distorted beyond its ability to be a force for Go(o)d.

Too many of us see the grain of truth but not the distortion, which is most often a simplistic absolutism that perpetuates duality.

Here are some examples.

• Abortion. While abortion is not a fundamentally desirable procedure, nor are the societal/cultural conditions that lead to its persistent presence (regardless of its legal status).

• Freedom. Of course, freedom is desirable, but not absolutely. Is it desirable, for example, when it's expressed at the expense of others?

• America as a great nation. True, but not when that greatness is expressed from a place of fear, chauvinism, insecurity or ego.

We live at a time when we cling to a black-and-white "reality," even as that reality ceases to exist.

Everywhere you look, in your own life and in the life of our planet, the once seemingly sharp edges that separated black from white, good guys from bad, are fuzzing over. The resulting shades of gray create borders and boundaries that are no longer easily distinguishable.

I say "seemingly" because, in truth, those edges have always been an illusion, one that we created to give us a fixed world/life view that in its apparent stability helped us to feel safe and protected.

In my novel, The MoonQuest, the inhabitants of the mythical nation of Q'ntana live in land where "once upon a time is a forbidden phrase and fact the only legal tender." It's land where nothing is left to interpretation...nothing is left to dream...nothing to vision.

That's precisely what we create for ourselves when we deny the existence of these shadings, of the spaces between black and white, of the only true currency, which is the freedom to live in the uncertainty of our humanity.

Yet we live at a time when each of us clings to that old black-and-white currency in some aspect(s) of our life and world view. Somewhere in your life and somewhere in mine, we cling in white-knuckle fear to some illusory fixedness that allows us to operate in perceived security.

All that would be great if it truly protected us. It does not.

There are no clear moral boundaries. There is no single definition of right and wrong.

Even the sixth commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, is not absolute. Does it apply in self-defense? Does it apply if you believe in the death penalty?

If there ever was a single definition of right and wrong, of black and white, of good and evil, there is no longer and never will be again.

Such concepts cannot exist in this multidimensional omniverse of which we are becoming increasingly aware and in which we are increasingly learning to function.

What does any of this have to do with freedom...with America?

I speak here neither politically nor nationalistically.

I speak as someone for whom the black-and-white of political right and left simply doesn't work anymore.

I speak as an outsider, as the observer I have always (though not always willingly) been.

I speak as one who never expected to live in America and yet was called to this country at this time in my history and yours, at this time in its history and the world's.

I speak as someone called to a Freedom Trail that is as much yours as it is mine...that is as much America's as it is any individual's...that is the world's, if America will take the heartful leadership role its founders en-visioned for it.

And what I say is this: Don't squander the vision upon which this country was founded. Don't squander the Declaration of Independence. Don't squander the Liberty Bell. Don't squander the Statue of Liberty.

As I have traveled the Freedom Trail this past year, I have spent time at many sites sacred to the true American vision, one totally unrelated to any political or nationalistic view.

Each of those places carries potent energy and a powerful reminder of the potential that lies largely untapped in this land.

But let's leave the national view aside for a moment.

Take a moment and look in your own heart, whether or not you live in America. Look within from a place of heart, not from a place of judgment.

Look within from a place of compassion, a place of forgiveness, a place of loving awareness.

• In what state is the vision of freedom that resides in your heart?
• Where are you still bound by duality?
• Where within you have the many not come together as one?
• Where within you is the new order of the ages, the New Jerusalem, not in its fullest expression?
• Where are you not in trust of the God That You Are?
• Where do you still act, speak and think from ego?
• Where do you still treat yourself as a slave?

Having answered honestly and mercifully — without beating yourself up for your lack of perfection, for why you've fallen short— now ask where can you do better.

It's time, as I said last week, to for you to become the torch of liberty. It's time, too, for America to become that torch that so symbolizes its potential and expresses its ideal.

The latter cannot happen without the former. The nation can not be what its citizens are not yet. The nation cannot meet a potential unrealized by its inhabitants.

As the US Congress seeks to renew the Patriot Act, as military-based measures are being proposed to handle the avian flu in this country, as liberties are being eaten away in every nation in what seems like inconsequential or situationally necessary bites, it's time to look within.

Our governments are reflections of what we carry within. None of us is exempt from that reflection. Not one.

Even though I'm not an American citizen and cannotr vote here, I'm not exempt. If I live here, then whatever I mourn in this country and wish were otherwise must also exist within me. I cannot expect the government that is me to change if I will not.

Whether or not it was right to invade Iraq doesn't matter if lies got us there. And if lies did get us there, this would not be the first war to be launched under false pretenses.

It may, however, be the last.

This is the time of Revelation — not in the Armageddon-like sense...unless that's the outcome we choose. It's a time when the servitude that has cobbled together our illusions is shattering...and it's taking the illusion along with it.

You cannot live free in the illusion. You cannot live free from a foundation of lies. You cannot live free in hiding...with any part of you in hiding.

You can believe you are free under those conditions But it's not real. It's not true, any more than the safety of an ego-based, black-and-white response is — in your life or in the life of your government or nation.

I believe America has a role to play in this shift of the ages. Perhaps it takes an outsider, an observer, to see the potential for true greatness (not ego greatness) that so many immigrants have been attracted to over the generations.

No, the streets here are not paved with gold...not literally.

But in a sense they are. The golden vision that created this nation is paved into every road, built into every brick and imprinted on every soul.

In its humanity, America is no more perfect than the Americans that comprise it. Nor should it be judged for its imperfection.

But it should be held accountable. We should be held accountable. Not in judgment, but in loving awareness in our own lives that we might live in closer alignment to the ideals that were designed to make America a midwife to the birth of the age of light, the new order of the ages.

America possesses unprecedented wealth, power and potential. That wealth and power will be channeled into the realization of its potential as a true force for light the moment you and I do the same in our own lives.

When we do, America truly will be a shining light among nations and herald of the New Jerusalem.
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The MoonQuest...Read it for free

More than ever, I believe that it's time for all that has been hidden to be revealed, for all that is visionary to be seen, for all that is empowering to be experienced.

It is in that spirit that I offer you my novel, The MoonQuest. I offer it, as did Charles Dickens, in regular instalments. Unlike Dickens, mine are free.

I offer it in this fashion because I know its time has come. And until the publishing world agrees with me (or self-publishing becomes an option), this is the best way I know to share with you its energy, power and message.

Click here to read it for free

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(c) 2005 Mark David Gerson. All rights reserved. This material may be freely shared and reproduced as long as it is for personal use, no fee is charge for viewing/reading it, and this copyright and contact information is included. Any other use requires permission from the author. To subscribe or contact the author, click here.