The Blog of Love

I have a special Gathering of The Peacemakers video presentation featuring pictures, commentary and live music from the event. 

But, before I share that let’s first explore Love and Abundance, topics of this weeks’ Blog of Love.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how to keep my awareness focused on intentions of love, abundance, and compassion for myself and my world.   

Here’s what I found: It all begins with your mind by committing to only producing thoughts of love, gratitude and forgiveness in your life right now.  This might sound obvious but think about it…We are exposed to thousands of ads, images and other external stimulus daily.  Things we read yesterday are easily pushed out by this daily psychic invasion. No wonder we often feel confused and unbalanced. 

That’s why we must CONSTANTLY REMIND ourselves of this awareness.  And trust me, no one needs this reminder more than me.  (A Gemini who’s mind thinks of new ideas at 420,000 miles an hour)  But back to the love…

I recently reread a fantastic article by Harold Becker—president and founder of The Love Foundation—which really resonated with me today.  His thoughts go along with exactly what I’ve been thinking and feeling:

I say YES!  Yes, yes, yes. 

Here are simple steps to merge wealth and poverty into abundance for all:

But here’s the challenge:  Often within 60 minutes of arriving at work I go on awareness autopilot.  Meaning I forget to actively concentrate on loving abundant thoughts.  Keeping your now moment awareness focused on love takes practice.  Sometimes I forget for the whole day.

There’s good news though!  Every moment you do this you’re getting better and better at maintaining this loving abundant perspective.  And that’s why it’s important to pace yourself.

My abundant occurrences over the past few months:

• I received a promotion at work and got a raise
• I got a $100 tip
• I have noticed very HIGH END cars around me ALL the TIME.  ($60,000+)
• People call me excitedly with business ideas where my skills fit it perfectly

The awareness of love, abundance and bliss is a wonderful place to be.  See you there?

Much love and abundance to you,

~ Aaron Mangal

Chief Love Generation Officer

P.S. You’re probably wondering where the special Gathering of The Peacemakers video presentation is.  Pete, A fellow bringer of light and videographer from The Gathering has diligently put together a beautiful video blog with pictures, live music and insights from The Gathering of the Peacemakers.

To meet Pete and other Peacemakers visit: http://lifeisnowcommunity.blogspot.com/

Note: The first Gathering of the Peacemakers blog entry is at the bottom of the page.  The most recent is at the top of the page.

A few months ago I read a book called Money is Love. It really opened my eyes about what money really is, and how most of us have such as limited perspective of money, myself included. The book was so powerful that I contacted the author, Barbara Wilder, and asked her to do a short interview with me. She graciously agreed.

Here is our interview with Barbara Wilder, love expert:

Who are you?
I am Barbara Wilder. I am first and foremost a lightworker. I founded the Transformational Light Center in Boulder, Colorado, where I lead workshops and do transformational therapy and healing work with groups and individuals. I am also the author of two books. Money Is Love: Reconnecting to the Sacred Origins of Money and Embracing Your Power Woman: 11 Steps to Coming of Age in Midlife. I spent twenty-five years in the entertainment industry, first as and actor in NY and LA, and then as a production executive and script development exec and script writer in film and television in LA. In the past couple of months I have been reconnecting with my roots. I have written, directed and acted in my first play. It had it’s first performance in February, and it’s next will be in May. It’s called Power Woman Magic. Very fun.

What would you say is your life purpose?
I believe one’s life purpose in an ongoing process that continues to unfold as we move through life. The thread that I see most clearly now in my life is to reach out to others to share my deep belief in love, light, prosperity, and peace on earth for every single being.

How do you use love to grow your business?
When we are in a state of love and grace, our businesses grow around us. I always tell people to choose love instead of fear and there is always enough.

How do you personally use the Money Is Love philosophy in your own life?
I work with the tools I teach in my book. I bless every monetary transaction I enter into with the mantra “money is love.” I meditate daily with the light. I always direct light and love into my bills as I pay them. I use the light meditation and journaling from the book to continue to heal my own personal issues and the societal issues around money.

What is the most important thing you’d like people to take away from your book?
War, poverty, hunger, and crime are caused by the fear that surround money and its scarcity. Money is energy, and energy is limitless. Only our fear and our limited way of thinking make money seem scarce. Choose love over fear. Infuse your money and your finances with love, and you will find peace with your finances. Once you have found peace with your own finances, you will begin to spend money as love, and that will help infuse the world economy with love. As money healed with love and light moves throughout the global economy, it will begin to heal the entire world, so that there can be abundance for all. The Great Mother wishes abundance for all her children, not just a chosen few. Live in love.

Blessings,
Barbara Wilder

We really appreciate Barbara and the work she is doing, and highly recommend checking out Barbara’s work at her website: BarbaraWilder.com

With Love,
Justin

I watched a video webcast last night by the #1 expert on superfoods and super health in the world, David Wolfe.

This guy has such an incredible amount of energy and enthusiasm, he makes you want to change your diet completely and just eat whatever he eats!

Of course, if you’re like the average person, you’ve probably never even heard of half the stuff he eats.

So where do you start if you want to upgrade your diet? Here’s how I started getting into superfoods:
Chocolate Smoothies

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well raw, unprocessed cacao (chocolate) actually has the highest amount of antioxidants of any food known to man. I also found out last night that it’s the #1 wei-
ght loss food in the world.

And to top it off, chocolate contains PEA, the chemical of Love!

Where can you get raw chocolate?

You can buy it at most health food stores or online. Look for raw cacao powder or raw cacao nibs. The best stuff I’ve found is actually sold by David Wolfe at Sunfood.com.

What else can you put in your chocolate smoothies?

Here’s what David Wolfe puts in his:
Raw cacao beans (or cacao nibs)
Fruit
Spirulina
Maca
Goji berries
Raw cacao butter
Sun is Shining (a greens mix from Sunfood.com)
Honey
Water

The best thing about chocolate smoothies is that you can eat them at any time of day (I had one for dinner last night). Oh, and in case you’re wondering, they are delicious.

Love and Super Health,
Justin

P.S. - Email me for my own chocolate superfood smoothie recipe.

(justin AT yearoflove DOT org)

It’s been a long, strange and incredible journey for me over the past year or so on the spiritual path. I guess it started when I began working on the fellowshipping.org website. I wanted to make it easier for Christians to connect with each other, but I also wanted to get the message of the gospel out to as many people as I could. I still believed in Hell at the time, and I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone going there (not just friends and family, but anyone).

Around that time, I started a blog and in one of my blog entries I challenged myself to pray for 2 hours a day for a week. I accepted the challenge.

During all of that praying, the topic of Hell kept coming up and one morning I woke up with a feeling that I should do some research on the topic. I googled Hell and a bunch of links jumped out at me claiming that Hell was not real or didn’t exist. I thought that was too good to be true, until I actually started reading some of the websites.

I ended up reading almost non-stop for three weeks. I barely left the house and I didn’t do any work on my websites. I just read everything I could find about this teaching called Christian Universalism.

Finally after three weeks I decided I was convinced. I came to believe that there was no Hell. This wasn’t a decision I made lightly. I didn’t believe it just because I wanted it to be true. I did the research and I concluded that there was no way that Hell could exist. (The main site that I researched was tentmaker.org for those that are interested.)

I felt like a giant weight had been lifted off my entire being. For most of my life I had been afraid of Hell. I knew that I had been “saved”, but whenever I read certain passages in the Bible, I started to doubt my “salvation” and wondered if I might end up in Hell. I never really felt secure.

But even in those moments when I trusted that I really was safe from eternal damnation, I “knew” that a lot of my friends and family were going to Hell along with a huge percentage of the rest of the population (unless they got “saved”).

I used to walk around depressed, thinking about every person or group I saw, and that no matter how much fun they were having, or how kind and loving they were, there was a good chance they were destined to spend eternity in Hell, because they weren’t “saved”.

That is what fundamentalist Christianity did to me.

So once I came to realize that Hell doesn’t exist, a lot of things happened. The most immediate change was how I felt when I saw other people. I didn’t have that sad feeling gnawing away at me any more.

For the first time in my life I felt like everything was alright with the world. I didn’t have all the answers yet (and still don’t), but I felt such an incredible feeling of love toward everyone. And I finally came to realize that a God who is truly loving and forgiving would never send his creations to Hell to suffer for eternity.

So now I still believe in God, but I no longer call myself a Christian. I believe there is a lot of truth in the Bible, but also lots of half-truths, lies, misinterpretations and blatant mistranslations.

I struggled for years trying to figure out how God could be the embodiment of love and the model for forgiveness, yet also punish people by sending them to Hell for eternity for simply failing to accept Christ as their savior.

That never felt right to me. But, I accepted that belief for so long, because I didn’t see another alternative. For some reason I thought that the only two options were Christianity and atheism. It had never dawned on me that God could still be real but that the Christian story could be false, or at least misleading or misinterpreted.

Once I was finally able to consider that as an option, a lot of things changed for me. I started to realize how many great spiritual books and teachers are out there. I realized how much I was limiting myself by viewing the Bible as the only spiritual text.

As crazy as it might sound to some, I believe that Christianity was severely hampering my spiritual growth.

Any time I would read something that conflicted with my belief system, I would be quick to dismiss it. Each time I did that, I would become more entrenched in my close-minded belief system. Why did I do that? Why was I so quick to defend my “faith” and dismiss anything that conflicted with my beliefs?

Because I was scared. Scared that I might be wrong. Scared that maybe God didn’t exist and that we were all alone on this earth.

And so I had to keep my belief system intact, because it was too depressing to think that we might be alone here with no divine protector, and again, because I wasn’t aware of any other alternative.

Looking back on how I first came to be a Christian, it was the same emotion that came into play. Fear. Fear of going to Hell and burning in eternal flames.

I can still vividly remember going to an all-night youth group event when I was about 11 years old. After a hockey game, a speaker came out on the ice and talked about Heaven and Hell. He said that I could make a decision that night to choose Heaven and therefore be safe from Hell.

I prayed a prayer to accept Jesus into my heart that night. Then, the next year at the same event, I prayed it again just to be safe.

Looking back at it all now, it is easy for me to realize that it wasn’t the speaker’s logic or scientific facts that convinced me as an impressionable 11-year-old. It was a simple fear-based transaction. I was afraid of Hell, and so I did what I thought I had to do to avoid it.

Then I started to read the Bible. I read things like “Love your neighbor” and “Thou shalt not steal/lie/murder” and I knew in my heart that these were spiritual truths. Then I read that the Bible was the word of God and it was inerrant. I figured that since there were so many spiritual truths, it must really be God’s inspired word.

This was, of course, before I considered all the questions that brought up such as:

Where did the Bible come from?
Who wrote the books?
Who translated them?
Who decided which books were the inspired word of God?
And how did we know that the Bible was never changed, mistranslated or misinterpreted?

Each of these questions weighed on me as I delved more deeply into Christianity. I really wanted to believe that Christianity was true, because I wanted to know for sure that I was eternally safe, that I was going to Heaven when I died. But the more I thought about it, the more “plot holes” I discovered in the Christian story that I could not resolve.

There were so many fundamental questions that I could never answer, such as:

Why would God create us knowing that so many of us would never be “saved”?
What would happen to people that never heard the gospel in their lifetime? What about kids who died too young to make a decision to “get saved”?
Wouldn’t it be better not to have kids at all than to have a child if there was a chance that he or she would have to spend eternity in Hell?

Nothing in my life has terrorized me more than the concept of Hell.

So when I was finally able to prove to myself that Hell wasn’t real, it made a huge difference in my life. I no longer had to worry about whether I was “really saved”. I also started to trust more in God, knowing that there was no chance he was going to send me or anyone else to Hell.

Since that time, I have been reading and studying lots of spiritual teachings, and continuously reshaping my beliefs.

I have come to see Christianity as one step in my spiritual evolution. I’ve tried to keep all of the spiritual concepts that I believe are true and beneficial, and I’ve discarded the limiting beliefs and concepts that never felt right in the first place.

I believe that God is love and that it is not quite accurate to call ourselves children of God, but more accurate to call ourselves God incarnate.

The more we act in love toward one another, the more we are acting as our true selves, uniting in love, and teaching each other to remember who we really are.

But if we continue to spread messages of fear and eternal damnation, we only separate ourselves — from each other and also from our true Divine selves.

We are God. We are Love. Let’s unite in love and live up to our true Divine nature!

About twenty bringers of Light and Love attended our first ever Global Love Day event. We discussed how people around us have a wide variety of opinions on regarding dealing with humanity and how to live your life.

It appears many people are rooted in their beliefs to a point where they have difficulty accepting & practicing new ideas.

What we realized is that we must be patient, compassionate and loving toward those who don’t necessarily have the same philosophy.

How can we patiently, compassionately and lovingly act as a catalyst for the growth of others?

Meet The Cultural Creatives
According to Paul H. Ray PH. D. and Sherry Ruth Anderson PH. D., authors of The Cultural Creatives, there are 50 million individuals who are just discovering each other.

These Cultural Creatives, made up of 60% women and 40%, do not fit into traditional demographic categories.

They are defined by their perspective on the world and fundamental life priorities. Cultural Creatives often reject traditional political terms of “left or right, liberal or conservative”.

Cultural Creatives are an invisible force of people who come in all shapes, sizes, colors and backgrounds.

The key is for the Cultural Creatives to find each other, unify and collectively lead the world into a brilliant positive transformation.

Here are common beliefs among Cultural Creatives:

Authenticity – They believe actions must be consistent with what you think and say

Whole Process Learning – Cultural Creatives appreciate authentic and complete knowledge and learning on topics with thinking rooted in humanity as an interwoven piece of nature

Idealism & Activism – They deeply value contributing personal experience, action, time and money in projects they create & support

Globalism & Ecology – Cultural Creatives are deep thinking opinion leaders who seek answers and solutions beyond ordinary environmental concerns toward ecology and a sustainable way of life

The Importance of Women – Women’s personal experiences, ways of knowing, feeling and processing 1st person stories are vital to learning and embracing the ethic of caring

Altruism, Self Actualization and Spirituality – Cultural Creatives believe in having well developed social consciousness, taking immediate massive action and living a journey of spiritual transformation

Remember, Ray and Anderson’s research is by no means perfect or 100% accurate.

My opinion is even non Cultural Creatives will embrace these types of values especially due to the rapid evolution of human consciousness.

The bottom line: We have control over outcomes in our world, therefore we MUST create positive beautiful loving realities and take immediate action to maintain them NOW.

That is why Justin, myself and millions of others are committed to living a life of love everyday.

Thank you for being a part of this blissful, exciting and transformative journey!

With Much Love,

Aaron & Justin