While thinking about Christmas, dinner with family, traditions, religious celebrations, what could be our greatest gift to all we care about in this world?
How do we truly share our greatest gift, our best attributes to family, friends, our community, and beyond? How do we live from the inside out to become someone most people reading this may never consider? Why is it that so many of us fail to acknowledge our innate sacred talents that we are here to share… and open our hearts as our gift of love to the world just as we find it? Content with changing ourselves first.
Let us begin by first thinking outside of ourselves 
and what we think we know about Maitreya and Buddhism.
It is important to remember that we can follow the tenets and principals of Buddhism, and still follow the teachings of another philosophy or religion. That there is no separation in the universe, that we are all one. We are the expression of life.
You can consider yourself a Christian, Hindu, Jewish, 
Moslem, etc., and still follow the sutras guiding what is known as our Buddha nature.
Many people do not consider Buddhism as a religion, but as a sacred path that is lived day-to-day.
Can we choose to be a Buddha? Or does Maitreya Buddha choose us as we are moved by both the crown of thorns worn by Jesus and this bodhisattva vow to what is sacred within us.
Something that represents the continuum of consciousness that arises moment to moment, dependent on causes and conditions, and thus persists in a state of perpetual flux that keeps us aware of our surroundings i.e., living in the moment. To what quantum physics tells us never dies.
Just what is it Jesus lived and died for? (Perhaps correcting our sins as we live with virtue and our innate nature) What is it we are celebrating?
In celebrating his life, I think he would want us to remember both his teachings, the bodhisattvas vow and Maitreya. That all life is meant to be inclusive, as we define and ask, what is our gift… what are we contributing.
I like the idea of taking what is known as the bodhisattva vow that is to guide our thoughts and 
actions. As historians we often have difficulty getting people to separate facts from truths.
They are not the same thing. It is why knowing the history of how and why things occur is so important.
We need to see ourselves as infinite. Turning inward with looking to our consciousness that realizes who we are beyond self to a connection with all that existed 
yesterday, exists today, and will exist tomorrow.
I like the analogy of rain falling from the clouds that rose from over the ocean and is swept by the wind inland to where it meets the mountains.
The rain falling nourishing and bringing to life everything in nature in its path. Rain then traveling downstream eventually 
returning from where it came with the sun along for the ride… all becoming transformed.
We are the rain, enhancing the ecosystem through our lives, before returning to the ocean. The cycle continuous… never-ending. Even to the moon and stars that embody the true circle of life.
WE are meant to learn outcomes of cause and effect, gain wisdom, and become teachers of universal understanding. Beyond politics, beyond religion, beyond self-interest. We teach as we learn and as we learn we are to teach further. It 
is why we are here.
“To develop a complete mind: Study the art of science; study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else” – Leonardo DaVinci
With everything in nature finding and knowing its role and going there. Ours is to be like nutrients raining down as water for all before returning to be replenished again and again. We are the rain…
It begins with seeing beyond our individual self-
interest. To our neighbor, to our community, and waking up the world as to how we are to sustain all life on the planet.
Why understanding how complimentary opposites work with having an institutional memory for how and why things occur as they do. Why trial and error become the by-product of our actions.
To what the shaman taught us as children in the 
beginning that we each have a responsibility like an umbilical cord tied to nature and the universe… both timeless and never-ending.
Why Indigenous peoples the world over have looked to the stars and what they define as the circle of life. It’s having a connective tissue with this fabric 
of life, all life and contributing our own nutrients to the whole.
The Navajo circle of life
To what the ancient people of China said was that we are but one of the ten thousand things. That nature was not placed here only for our own singular advantage, but that we are here to contribute for the benefit of all. What we take we replenish; we return in kind.
It is how we respond to this knowing, that defines our fate, our gift. To what the shaman and holy man/woman have said for thousands of years. 
Speaking to us for what is authentic and eternal.
The Gateway to Heaven” on HuaShan Mountain in Shaanxi Province, China.
What is it that defines the sacredness to where and how we relate to what some see as this great unknown?
In antiquity and history there is described a sacredness asking from where we are “living or doing it from”. Or more precisely to what ends we 
will take to go there that are meant to define us.
With our past never where we left it… it just follows us as something sacred yet without fixed limits.
Our consciousness the response to vibrations we both produce and encounter like a cosmic roadmap with what are seen as our own sacred relics we leave behind and return to that guide our way. While we hold in thought teachers like Jesus and Maitreya and the Bodhisattva vow.
Why our history is essential to both our present and future and waking up to who we have always been so important and that we act like it.