Soul Evolution- Part I. On the Nature of Good and Evil

“Soul Evolution” A Sermon to Liberate the Soul of the Self, America, and the World

I. On the Nature of Good and Evil
II. Shared Values: A Public Philosophy
III. On Liberating America's Soul, a critique of Western values
IV. A Paradigm Shift in Consciousness
V. On the Nature of Souls
VI. Liberation Theology: Saving Those Left Behind, Within and Beyond our Borders
VII. The Eternal Damnation Lie
VIII. Experience Vs. Dogma
IX. Just War Policy
X. Conclusion.

Introduction:
Brothers and Sisters, I talk to God. You do too, when you let your little light shine. Anyone can. When I let my little light shine, I drink from its waters for inspiration. But I am still thirsty. The Soul of America will not be Liberated until we reach a conclusion- we need a resolution. You see I had a dream, just the other night, where our corner of the universe bathed in some bright light. There were giant clouds of gas and millions of stars still shining against the backlight of some sort of mysterious source that kept up what seemed like centuries of brightness. Just then out of nowhere, a shadow cast over this serene scene of ineffable light, and everything but the stars went black, but not before the colors of the shadow inverted with the puffy white gaseous clouds. Oh it was a long and immense darkness; centuries and centuries seemed to have past by in my dream as I witnessed what would have been pitch black if it weren’t for about five blinking stars left. But it seems it was darkest before the dawn, and the stars started to return to their luminescent state, ten thousand at a time. But just then, the space between the stars began to light up again. Before long, the universe was back to its glowing self, with the mysterious radiant light shining brighter than the stars.

I took this dream to mean Genesis/Big Bang/whatever you want to call the birth of our corner of the universe, followed by a period of confusion where the sacred and the profane get inverted and then, a period of dark ages. The few remaining stars were the only points of hope left. The light at the end, being more powerful than the stars, I took to mean our souls. That stars aren't the only things that shine, that now is the chance for the energy of the divine within us all to illuminate to its maximum potential. The dream made me feel like forever had gone by as I was watching it in its total, zen-like silence. It was my story. It is the story of religion and humanity; it is the story of America, too.

I. On the Nature of Good and Evil

Life, whether or not we’d like to admit it, is about redemption and salvation. I prefer to call it learning and evolving our souls by expanding our consciousness until we reach enlightenment, but why not just stick with the Christian terminology, because it means the same thing.

We are born innocent, and we crap all over the place and hit people because we don’t know any better. They call this innocence. Then, if we’re lucky, we learn right and wrong from our parents, but we often pick and choose in a game called situational morality. It’s not okay to lie, except when the truth will hurt someone’s feelings. It’s not okay to kill, except when your country sanctions it. It’s not okay to steal, unless you really need something. And we often are irresponsible, ignorant, immature, and quick to doing something we later regret. Situational morality is a steam-fogged forest we are lost in unless we can stand on the mountain of eternal morality, but the clouds also dip onto the mountains and fog it up as well. Religious fanatics, those rigid, dogmatic and holier-than-thou preachers who stand on these mountains, are just as blind as those situational moralists on the ground who too have good intentions.

People don’t always make the right decisions by others and by themselves. Unexplainable urges caused by hereditary instinct and hard-to-break-with-an-average-willpower habits caused by social conditioning both lead to automatic responses to situations. Fear, temperaments, arousal, wanting something physical like sweet foods or abstract like acceptance or domination; they all take the wheel in our zombie auto-pilot-mode selves. Some of these urges are here to help us: fear, for instance, is a natural instinct designed to save our butts from getting hurt. But sometimes we are afraid of things we need to face, like responsibility or truth, because sometimes the truth hurts. We can put it off until we die, leaving the truth in the inbox like an unopened email, but anyone can still read the truth about us after we die. The natural tendency of the truth, it seems, is to come from the dark out into the light, no matter how many years it takes.

Sometimes the truth isn’t the truth at all. Out of context, the truth might seem unforgivable, but given the context, understandable. Sometimes the truth just is what it is, a cold hard fact that is neither bad nor good. The truth means different things to different people. I may not be able to tell you the absolute truth, but I sure can tell you what it means to live a lie, even if that lie made things on an even keel and kept peace and cohesion for the greater good at the time. I’m talking about my reaction to a bi-sexual orientation and the sexual frustration of being predominantly attracted to men. But as we know, what we know about our selves changes over time, and I am no longer dominated by the fear of my own sexual desires.

Sexual orientation and the truth- they both change with time for many people. It’s a known unknown- nobody understands it well enough to explain to me the definitive truth about sexual orientation in no more than three to five sentences, at least not without somebody else arguing something else. Maybe it’s because everyone’s personal story involving homosexuality is different that nobody understands it, and people usually fear what they don’t understand, and hate what they can’t conquer. These urges make up part of the story of my life, but ultimately, my story is about morality. I wasn’t brought up religious, so how did I find God and God’s morality?

Morality is learned, and most people never get past the morality of man-made convention, because it requires them to do some hard thinking about moral relativism and moral absolutism- does an Eternal Law of God exist, and if so, what is it? Or is God just superstition, and both a gift and a curse on the collective imagination of the fearful and rebellious masses? Regardless of the answer to this, we often come to a point in our lives where moralities are conflicting and we are asked to make a choice. Either we make a choice and stick to it, or we make a choice and switch teams mid-game, or push the problem aside for another day and sit on a fence until we are forced to make a choice. When the situation comes, some people are ready with their ready-made excuses for making their choice, and others panic and arbitrarily make a choice.

We hear of stories where people believe in some kind of source of values that transcends interests of the self and comes from some unknown outside source, therefore applying to all of mankind for the good of mankind. These people live and die for a code, even if it conflicts with the laws of their sovereign authority or their family or their tribe of friends or their community. We are inspired and horrified by these stories. From Robin Hood to Jesse James, from Jesus to Al Pacino in the Godfather, from Joan of Arc to the Protestant Reformation; from the Shawshank Redemption to Johnny Depp in Blow; from the slave revolts to the civil rights movement; they could be martyrs, warriors, folk heroes, oppressed minorities or men and woman looking back at their personal sins and asking the people they wronged for forgiveness.

Polluting the earth. Making fun of people who are different. Snapping at people. Living a lie. Stealing from my family. Reinforcing other people’s negative behavior. Ignoring problems until they get huge. Being careless and at times downright reckless. I have many sins; we all do. They are our personal vices. We tell ourselves how to be perfect, but we don’t act on it. Sometimes we have no excuse. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t get other people in trouble. It would be a victimless crime of character flaw if it didn't hurt anyone. But when something happens to me, I have discovered, it happens to everybody. Whether I know it or not, I am a role model and a standard by which people judge. Whether I know it or not, I am responsible for not only having than good intentions behind everything I do- I am also responsible for examining my actions and correcting my mistakes when I make them. I ask for forgiveness, and though I may not obtain it, I will at least have forgiven myself for admitting I did something wrong.

We do things until we get caught. Then we feel the hot shame on our cheeks and a dead feeling in our stomach, like the floor dropped out beneath it and all our intestines and guts are riding a roller coaster. Our heart beats so fast, we don’t know why it hasn’t exploded yet. Our ears widen with fear, our ears perk up, and a sound that cannot be detected by human ears escapes our vocal chords. We are a sorry bunch. I’ll be the first to admit my own stupidity, but I’ve come to terms with it, knowing it is temporary, an awkward phase of foolishness I find beautiful in retrospect.
““To feel trivial and idiotic and to live with this feeling is to be a hero in a way that no god can be” – Stevie Smith
That is why I celebrate my stupidity.

“It's not a matter of right and wrong, really there is no wrong. Not in our own minds. Our own reality. You can never set off to do the wrong thing. You can never say the wrong thing. In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take-what you do or say or how you choose to appear-is automatically right the moment you act. Because you can do nothing wrong, you are always right. Even when you say, ‘I'm such an idiot, I'm so wrong...’ your right. Your right about being wrong. You’re right even when your an idiot."
Whoever realized this, I hope, also realized responsibility. Surely they felt the shame of guilt gnawing at the back of their throat. It’s not what happens- what happens is either inevitable and therefore uncontrollable, or it is you attempting to do the right thing. But when you make a mistake- and you don’t fix it – it carries a weight. A secret burden on your soul, keeping you down, keeping you in pain. Making things right means reaching inside to find a strength you didn't know you had. It means defying the odds and possibly being scorned. It means being your own hero…

Because looking at our archetypical heroes, we see all that is good and decent about humanity. The human who by definition isn’t perfect lives a life full of trespasses both done unto them and by their own hands unto others, and even themselves. These trespasses are ignored, justified, stored in the back of our minds, made a big deal about, celebrated by certain factions of society, and the source of embarrassment. They make the drama of the world go round and round, because they all have to do with our bruised, holy egos; our self-image and our-self esteem; our definitions of respect, praise and blame. In history, wars, inventions, songs, poems, and whole lives have been built on pride, prejudice, treason, vengeance, jealousy, lust, admiration, praise and blame. What I’m saying is, our heroes were beyond the inflated and bruised egos have had much to do with the terror and beauty of the history of humanity. Religious wars, class struggles, school shootings, imperialism, art, dance and comedy have all often been employed by our egos and what they have to say about truth, rights, pride deserved and undeserved, and the need for emotional security. Our self-esteem is fragile. Our ego, which is the many I’s of our self-image, seem to be defined by how we feed our many urges.

But our heroes teach us not to do things because it will please ourselves or the crowd. They teach us to do things because there is some kind of morality, some kind of karma, some kind of eye watching and listening to us. We should do good for the sake of doing good, or for the sake of God. Not even because of the selfish reason that it will get us into heaven, or that it feels good to give, but just because we keep evil alive every time we are irresponsible enough not to seek redemption for our mistakes. Our mistakes are irreversible, but that doesn't mean we shouldn’t try to compensate the world for our misdeeds. Ignoring the problem by being ignorant and apathetic is all that is needed for evil to exist.

Is it egocentrism and lack of empathy that causes evil? Is it shortsightedness? Is it vain glory, fear and preventative strikes during heated competition? Is it the lack of a referee to keep two parties in check when an argument gets out of hand? Is it when the balance of power and resources and means of production are not shared equally by humanity? Is it when people pretend to have a false explanation to life and attempt force that explanation into reality? Is it when people with power abuse that power? Is the carelessness of people who can’t afford to be careless? Is it imitating something that hurts other people, be it physically or emotionally, because you don’t know any better? Is it the fact that morality is often relative? Is it because people misunderstand other people and act on false pretenses? Is it when one person or peoples ignores the cries of help coming from another person or peoples? Is it when ignorance or half-truths are attempted to be passed of as the absolute truth, thereby confusing humanity and leading them into dichotomization and dehumanization? Is it immaturity gone on too long? Is it when something that was once functional and is now dysfunctional is forced beyond its appropriate means and not eschewed in favor of the practicality and yet complexity of change? Is it laziness? Is it self-absorption? Is it failure to deal with the inevitable events of life in a healthy way? Is it failure to deal with negative, intense emotions in a healthy way? Is evil caused every time a cycle of deceit, abuse, fear and hatred is perpetuated?

Cold-blooded killers who kill for profit are rare. Criminally insane persons with frontal lobe deficiencies are rare too. Crimes committed in the heat of passion are less rare. Crimes committed by brainwashed subcultures such as gangs or religious fundamentalists are less rare as well. And then there is the mainstream brainwashed culture- people like you and me who laugh and perpetuate bad karma because it has been positively reinforced by the immature factions of society. We make lines of appropriateness, and then we cross them. We pollute, we act out of fear of having to think for ourselves, and we hurt ourselves by neglecting obligations. I believe I just covered most of us. So what’s wrong with looking at our heroes, be they objective ones like Martin Luther King, Jr. or folk heroes like Buddha and Jesus who did the right thing by spreading a transcendent morality. Sure, they had sins, too. MLK maybe cheated on his wife; Jesus maybe doubted his worth as he died on the cross and asked why God forsook him; Buddha maybe lived a lavish, excessive lifestyle before he became Buddha. But they all pointed to a dude upstairs as the source of their values. They might as well have been pointing to the stability of the collective body of mankind or the ground beneath their feet. Wherever this ineffable being is, it goes beyond the self-absorbed ego.

Do you hear the voices? The youthful voices of blissful ignorance that calls us all down to their level when we’re tired of being our upstanding citizen selves and want to walk on the wild side, to bathe in the excrement of danger and let the dirty dog within us have its day, howling at the moon and dodging searchlights of responsibility? It’s self-inflicted character assassination- while reputation takes years to build, only a simple stone causes it to crumble. When your the light at the end of the tunnel sinks down in a contractual fog of worker bee ambitions, you take your eyes off the prize and dog out of the race. You’re finishing your work, but not in spirit; it’s a half-hearted attempt at the perfection you promised to achieve. You want to go back and be carefree. Memories and lies spread out side-by-side in a banner of sentimental affection.

You better hope you lived life to its fullest in your youth because, dammit, that’s when it is easiest to. That is a lie.

Why should we want to relive the love of old friends and lovers and other objects of affection? Their time has come and gone; we are not the same person. All I’m saying is, burn out your love of temporary things like a rockstar supernova right now so it can die and you can move on. Don’t try to prolong the essence; doing so only defeats the purpose. The only difference between addiction and character, which are both defined as behavior practiced most often, is that one is a negative habit and the other a positive habit. An obsession is never good for the health, even if it means bringing positive inspiration and motivation into your life, because the object of obsession is an end in itself and acts as a commander, barking orders into your ear. There are more than one ways to tap into the divine inspiration; ways that even involve nothing but your own mind, so why get obsessed with a temporary thing? So even while a friend, lover or hobby will make you happy to get out of bed in the morning, you better love them with all your heart, because you won’t have them forever, and you won’t need them were you’re going. You need to love them to death. Raze and ravage them with an army of love! Torch their sleeping quarters with the scent of your sweaty skin! Leave no stone unturned in your investigations and discoveries! Leave your friends speechless by positing violent theorems where you link your dreams with reality, your solo with the chorus, your logic with the eternal algorithmic grid, and your gut feelings with the universal consciousness! Then let them posit their theorems; you two can create equations of friendships and courtships by building off of the souls you bare to one another. You will have no fear, no expectations, and no obligations other than respect! You will create your life with a serenity prayer, oh, and then you will kill it!, you will murder your stable present with the same idealism and sustained intensity that created the relationship in the first place; by the impassioned, disciplined loyalty of giving and receiving love! Crazy, carefree, unrivaled love! Let it burn out, people! And when it dies, just like you knew it would, you are not back at square one because you will have gained a truth from this loss. With every new low, there is a new high you can achieve, so if you are patient and keep on pushing through faithless moments where you can’t move for the life of you, you can have your divine ecstasy further up the road. Some friendships last forever, but usually when you love something, there comes a point where you let it go for a while. If you can keep the fire fight going where you can be your true selves around each other and it makes magic from the ashes, then keep on with your furious love!

To balance the sacred and the profane- recall that all of life is sacred. Our souls, nature, and the universe. Nature is only a temporary thing, but it is ancient and without it, humanity could never exist. Nature is surely our mother and is therefore sacred. The sacred is the eternal, and, besides nature, the formless. But celebrating the profane is important too- in a way- life is profane, because life is temporary! But at the same time, it is sacred, because without life, our souls could not evolve! That is the paradox- everything matters, and nothing matters. The sacred, then, should be in relation to what makes our souls grow. Our souls grow from balance- not renouncing everything profane, but not indulging in it all, either. Celebrate life- take advantage of it while we're here and still have the chance.

“Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy and colorful and lively.”-Mel Brooks

Use your body- tax it sometimes for crying out loud- push it to the limit at times in a healthy way- like cliffhanging or kyaking. Shake, dance, move, be loud, laugh- it's good for the soul!

Find a love you can touch- press your lips on it and smell it! Taste it!

Practice your masculinity or feminity while you still have chance!

Celebreate cultural dfiferences- "what makes us different is what makes us beautiful"

Relax! Don't worry so much! Don't let fear of failure get in the way of your attempts!

Emphasize growth over staying at one level all your life- try new things, go to new places, meet new people! Change is good!

Be moved by spiritual joy- have faith and comofrt in life and death and other truamas- it happened for a reason- to make your faith even stronger!

Practice the joy of love, truth and beauty- that is your essence!

Participate and observe in nature- free fall, ski, skate, catch a wave, don't just move horizontally- go down a slope! Go to a forest and meditate, pick a flower, plant a flower, plant trees, get lost in the woods and build a fire and pitch a tent! Go fishing! Fly a kite! Train animals and learn from them, too! Save animals! Take only what you need from Mother Earth...

Create- express yourslef as an individual but also in sports teams and clubs. Drama is good in the form of role playing or virtual reality to release stress and express intense emotions like anger and fear and kinky sex in a fun, safe and nonthreatening way!

Meditate and be one with the universe!

Learn- focus your passions, learn general knowledge, learn technical skills, learn how to do things like change a tire, build a garden, fix a leak, cook a meal, or live out in the woods for a while! Learn finacial skills, problem-solving, academics, science, rhetoric, multi-cultural studies, languages, and spiritual knowledge!

That’s the way to do it if you are a mood swinger like me, prone to fits of melancholy electric tears, blind optimism and seasonal depression. People like us could never live the life of the “middle way” Buddha discovered, or found the “golden mean” of Aristotle’s happiness to be much help- we balance extremes on the tightrope of belief in a structure to reality and a belief in random chaos. We lose ourselves in shortsighted fits of Devil’s advocacy, faithlessness or red-herrings of a scientific or simple way to explain God. We try to reinvent the wheel when we set out to carry the cross Christ had to bear or, like a modern-day Nietzsche, re-explain God for the purpose of making mankind divine without there having to be organized religion. But what would motivate us to do something like that? We do it for the sake of our open mind and over-active empathy and imagination. We feel the pain of everyone, and then we feel nothing, like Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis.

That’s not to discredit Buddha or Aristotle. I’m not saying I don’t listen to those voices of moderation and temperance. Sometimes I do! But sometimes you have to be extreme, and have no "off" switch, because the spirit takes over you and there's nothing you can do but be obsesed with the Spirit. I might neglect obligations, friends and sleep...but it's just me putting all my heart into my work, which is the only way I work.

But then there are those voices want to harm the world, and they’d kill me if they had the chance. It’s not me they want, it’s just that they want to live- keep existing, so they keep adapting, and feeding off of my weaknesses so they can stay alive by any means necessary. In theory, it’s nothing personal; thank goodness we're not on a first-name basis! For their insanity to exist, they will try to run me with the whip of fear and herd me into the valley of death by telling me to submit to them...

These voices don't want me to grow. They want me to stagnate, to get stuck in some immature level if I have no business being in. They want me to ignore my sense of right and wrong; they want me to neglect caring for my body and mind and soul (but they LOVE my Ego!) and others (unless it gets something from them)...it is a parasite that is a force of destruction. Destruction can be beautiful, but this is not beauty. This is insanity...it is based on lies, on fear, and suicidal tendencies. It is the "us versus them" mentality. It wants to control, and to dominate...it wants things I don't need.

The voices are hedonistic, they are fun, and they are there for me when I need to blow off steam. Sometimes they use my lips and my lungs to voice their sorry or silly opinion. I hear them in pessimistic songs; I hear them in dead baby and racist jokes; I read about the voices in the newspaper from time to time, doing everything from harmless pranks on mischief night and not taking responsibility for it, to beating up homeless people with baseball bats; I laugh at their honesty when stand-up comedians profess them…but they aren’t funny unless they are recognized as stupid and therefore something not to be admired! They want me to doubt faith one minute, and they want me to be a blind optimist the next; they want me to second-guess people’s motives and then they turn around want me to be a naïve sucker- they’ll change shape and do whatever they have to do to survive. They live to keep me down- I swear they want to kill me, and they want me to kill, too, and they want me to take reckless chances because they lie to me and tell me I only live once! They play tricks on me; they lower my self-esteem; then they inflate my ego too! They tell me to curse, to discriminate, to kill, to commit suicide, to take my eyes away from my obligations for one second so they can entertain me, and I fall for it many times. Their entertainment is only a passing cloud, while I could have had the whole sky. What a cheap reward.

Sometimes I listen to the voices that tell me to give in because they disguise themselves as the positive voice within me that tells me to take a break and do something trivial and relaxing to take my mind off work because I just finished an assignment and deserve a break. That's okay. But these negative voices sometimes jump the gun, and in doing so, expose their ulterior motives. I won't even be anywhere near finished, and it's "go take some time off..."

Other times, they wait until the last minute to start panicking. Sometimes I employ these voices to motivate me. “Get this work done or you’ll be finished! You’ll fail and lose your teacher’s respect and you’ll be a loser if you don’t do this work” I scare myself into shape sometimes. But I don't work best under stress, that's just because I'm concentrating. I don't need fear to concentrate. Under the gun, I leave things out and I don't have time to revise and go past superficial ideas.

These voices tell me not to do things, too. Not to see if my shirt was made by a company that runs on child labor; not to try to fight the good fight to bring about a paradigm shift in consciousness to save the world. It is the voice of laziness, of idleness, of apathy and indifference. It wants me to do nothing in the face of injustice. They are my cancer. They want me to lose myself.

Sometimes I need these voices. They tell me to give up, so when I need to imagine the perspective of someone who has given up for the sake of putting myself in the role of depressed people, I will employ these voices so I can remember where they are coming from. Using them now to destroy them later. How Machiavellian of me.

But I need to have fun, and the key is balance. The occasional getting wasted on alchohol or pot brownie or video-game binge is important. It's part of celebrating life while we still have the chance. The thing is, these same feelings are the ones that go overboard a lot of times and suck people into the web of death. The good time crowd goes wild and ends up roadkill for some straight-laced goody-two shoes who never touched a drop of liquor to say "i told you so". There are some people who never tried psychoactive drugs or booze who criticize it- what B.S. Moderation is key- and some drugs are extreme in themselves- such as opiates and stimulants- that only make you addicted and want to kill you. The addiction - the voices in your head- become a parasite. And then there are people with addictive personalities who will turn booze or pot, which don't have to be habit-forming, into an obsessive-compulsive addiction in order to feel like they're having fun or getting relaxed or getting what they need. Drugs can be replaced by yoga and meditation for their spiritual equivalent, althought yoga is a lot harder to practice. Yet the affect of yoga is greater because the high came from within. Drugs to party on can be used mildly, too; it's just when drugs become the end in themselves to feel good that it becomes dysfunctional and needs to be quit.

Some of us are searching for a lover. Some of us are searching for money and power. Some of us for fame. Some of us for a family. Some of us for ourselves, some for a purpose. Some of us for this thing called God. Some of us for the perfect form. I do not judge...this is pursuit of happiness. But what about searching for the perfect party scene...it is the fun people are searching for. The good time. The thrill. The wild energy...like any other thing you search for, there is a positive way and and a negative way. The positive way knows what is restricting to the soul's growth and acts on it. The negative way keeps the soul down by using once functional but now dysfunctional methods to oppress the soul from obtaining its needs. Sometimes we die before our soul's needs are obtained, and that is why we may choose to live again. But some people get so confused that they get attached to the world of the living. It's the voice that doesn't want to get over something, and it relives moments and ideas over and over again...in which case, if one dies and is so confused it doesn't go toward the light, it remains as a ghost. It doesn't know it can try again in another life. As long as we go into our scenes with our consciousness always tuned into being aware and smart about what is good for our souls and what is bad for our souls, we can walk in with faith and confidence- we know what we want. But the voice that worries too much, that goes against the voice of clarity and reason, is bent on stagnating our souls and killing our bodies and turning our minds into a glitch that repeats vicious cycles over and over again. This voice is guided by the ego, anxiety (I use fear and anxiety interchangeably, but they mean two different things. Fear is based on an immediate threat and anxiety is something more vauge that causes uneasiness), social conditioning (rewarded negative behaviors- which I will get into), and suicidal tendencies...

So they were the snake in my garden. I bit the apple of good and evil, and I had to go through hell to get to heaven. I wish I could say I knew evil like the back of my hand, but it’s a shape-shifting chameleon of lust (C.S. Lewis and I call it this; Freud calles it the "id;" Buddhism calls it the "ego" ; the many I's, according to Gnostic mystic G.I. Gurdjieff; “lust for rich man’s gold”- “Simple Man” Lynyrd Skynyrd; desire- Buddha, City of Man- St. Augustine, hell-Abrahamic religions; the dark side- I Ching; eros, thantos and Dionysus- ancient Greeks and Lewis and Freud and Nietzsche) borne of vicious cycles of untreated vices in character that result in of the eternal soul stagnation and, here on earth, stupidity born of immaturity. One day, though, It will no longer whisper in my ear, asking me to play with fire. I love to kid, and project myself into the shoes of someone I’m not, but sometimes I take it too far, and that is the danger of playing games with these voices. For me, it’s like giving matches to a pyromaniac. I should know when to stop; I should know where the line is, but I let myself cross it thinking maybe it’ll be worth it or be different this time. Not so. I’m always ending up apologizing to my self and others later on.

I can’t wait to give up this chameleon of falsehood, of lust and temptation; power and arrogance and lack of respect and ignorance and jealousy and money and fear and worrying and fame and shock and awe and blood and guts and harm cause sometimes I just want to make people hurt! This is the Devil, the cause of all suffering in the world, which is the only hell I’ve ever known to ring true: This chameleon, I will give it up at the gates of heaven and in its place, a song in my newly liberated heart inspired by God’s smiling face! But as C.S. Lewis reminds us, Hell is only Hell for as long as you hold on to it. It becomes purgatory when you realize you had a choice all along. Thank God we don’t know the future, or else free will would never exist! And even though there’s two paths to go- attachment or non-attachment to earthly things, there’s always time to change, even in death, when we exchange our material currency for light years of spiritual wealth. I can’t wait to see what kind of simple truths I will carry around in my haloed head when I trade my attempts to articulate a piece to the meaning of existence for God’s grace. Maybe the meaning of life is not meant for words; maybe it is best expressed as a formless dance of gravity, gray matter, dark matter, gluons, quarks, monads and atoms dancing to the beat of the universe, visible only to the spirit world; but you can catch a glimpse of in the corner of your eye when your pineal gland drops miniscule melanomin onto the windshields of your tired eyes, which are driving down the three-AM turnpike of your term papers and temp jobs.

I know God would never want me to cause harm to anything or anyone. God would never want me to give up or be alone or be unhappy or be afraid. God is the voice of faith and comfort. But blind faith is not God. The voice of blind faith is not the same as the voice of comfort. Blind faith is accepting what people tell me- conditioning. The voices of social conditioning, of crude humor, of racism, of too easy answers, of stupidity..."maybe thing's will work out fine" when, if I used common sense, I could have prevented an accident...God speaks through common sense, through intuition (the kind of spiritual instinct of irrational inspiration), through positivity...God also speaks through stillness, and just being. No mental clutter, just shutting off the mind. God speaks through assurance and reminds me that my dead friends have souls that are at peace now, that my life will work out fine and that the roof will not collapse on me, that my stoner friends will find God one day, that my atheist friends don't need me to convert them, that the whole world will still be fine even if I die with my song unsung. The war of good and evil, of light and dark, was going on before I was born, and will go on when I die. People are fighting the same fight as me; it's okay. God is the voice of reason in my life. God tells me not to be afraid of aliens and ghosts. Not to be afraid of what people think of me. Not to be afraid of every big person that walks in the room. God reminds me that if someone strikes me down, I shall become more powerful than I am now. God talks to me whenever I find inspiration.

Whenever you have a burning question, listen to the words of the next song you hear, the words of the next conversation you have, the storyline of the next movie you see. All avenues of communication are around you to talk to God.
- paraphrasing Neale Donald Walsh

When people talk about Spirit Guides, or the Holy Spirit coming over them, or hallucinations, or synchronicity (coincidences that are meaningful) and serendipity (finding something meaningful you didn't intend to find when you set out to do something), or hearing Voices of Reason or God- it is them participating with the divine source of existence through the Holy Spirit, also known as Qi (read: Chi, the life force of Taoism).

Whatever the voices you hear are, you should be able to tell, by the way they make you feel, if it is God or fear/falsehood...God is comfort and faith. If you wonder how people can lead productive, healthy and kind and giving lives without having God in their vocabulary, it's because God to them is positivity, being in the moment, being one with nature, being in connection everything, one with the universe, feeling inspired, feeling comfort in their skin, feeling truly alive. It could be dancing, it could be meditating; as long as they are relaxed and open. If you are open to the divine, you start to notice things, and "You start to trust the things that deeper comfort brings, before you've checked it" (Pedro the Lion). You have Faith.

Some people call the pineal gland "the god spot". It's the "third eye," they say. My friend calls it an antenna to God. To me, when people choose life, choose health, choose respect, choose awareness, choose responsibility, choose the positive and choose to grow up and be balanced, be conscientious in their creations, be authentic, and seek their true nature and the nature of Logos and nature and the universe and symmetry and a soul mate, they are all following the path of Growth of the Soul that leads to God the Source. If they stray on the other path, of attachment to temporary things and the ego, then they lose themselves. But they don't lose themselves forever. Everyone has a "Spirit Guide" that manifests itself in nature or in a voice in their head to put people on the right track. Everyone's Spirit Guide is different, and their spirit guide knows what it is will keep that person on path of spiritual growth and Light. If someone's favorite animal is a butterfly, then a butterfly might land on someone's windowsill when they are going through a rough patch in their life. If some kind of coincidence happens, or whatever it takes to return a person to their purpose, that is the Holy Spirit (positive life force/spirit guide) manifesting itself.

If we fix our atennas on God- open ourselves up to guidance, answers, knowledge...we can channel the Source (God) in a direct connection via the Holy Spirit (inspiration, synchronicity, some psychoactive drugs- but be careful not to get attached to it, a voice in your head- a God-interpreter; God speaks no verbal languages, but you can interpret God through this positive, loving, inner voice)

In truth, God is in everything because the Source is in everything.

Existence is just a temporary form of non-existence. For a person to raise their consciousness up to the level of non-existence, they can join the energy realm of the Spirit and leave their form behind. Non-existence is the Source of your Soul- your essence as it exists when it just "is". If you worship a tree, knowing full well God is in every form of nature, worship what is non-existent about it- it's eternal essence. Forms of the essence is beautiful- forms in nature are beautiful and holy and sacred because they just "be". A tree, a rainfall, an animal eating another animal- they just "be". By "being", they are authentic and unattached to existence. To be a rock, a man can find his essence and what is eternal about him. He has no attachment to his current form. Man knows that through his essence he can get to the Source- God. Just by being oneself, by not being an "I", man is connecting to the Source within himself.

You are not the "doer" who is trapped in a causal world of existence- that is just an extension, a manifestation of you in matter and mass. Your true self, an energy essence called a soul, "does" nothing. It just "be"-s itself, which, collectively, with all the other souls, is God in formlessness, whereas now when you are alive are experience God in the form. Religion worships God in the formless and the form (God the Father/Source and God the Son/Jesus) and the connection between the two (the Holy Spirit which moves us). Buddhism calls it existence and non-existence. Mysticism attempts to connect the two directly- yoga, dancing, spirit guides, automatic writing and other trances.

The big religions teach us to evolve our soul. Christianity tells us to move our soul up from original sin and into the arms of the Lord by ending sinning. Buddhism tells us to liberate our souls in an act called moksha where we are lifted up from samsara (birth-death-rebirth cycle) to enlightenment by ending desire/attachment. Even metaphysics, like Tim Leary's 8-circuits of consciousness, shows a lateral progression from backwards-forwards movement to traveling through space and time and beyond to other universes and possibilities. I believe our souls are evolving, and the purpose of politics should be to forster the nurting paternal/maternal foundation for our lights to shine- our souls to become liberated. The politics that promote this are Freedom of life so we can progressively grow (this means activity over stagnation including mental, physical and spiritual growth, anti-fear, pro-health, pro-authentic creatvity for a livlihood that fosters continued growth, in other words, a real job as compared to the wage-system currently devised), Liberty to pursue happiness and not be restrained by what takes away our opportunity for happiness (anti-double-standards, anti-discrimination, and pro-fairness so we can go about our own ways to find our answers and love and balance so is therefore pro-education, pro-fun and pro-people's right to choose who they will marry) and finally Equality of fellowship of humanity and the earth and its creatures and the universe and all that is beyond the universe- this means respecting the self, the community and culture on a micro-scale, the community and culture on a macro-scale (those who need our help in other locations/countries) and the earth (pro-responsibility, pro-environmentalism, pro-celebrating life and form and our differences and pro-consciousness expansion through mysticism and certain scientific/religious drug use). This is God's Eternal Law. Any laws that promote God's Eternal Law are Just. Anything else is tribal morality and social mores that are conventional- things like the drinking age or seatbelt laws etc. This leads to part 2, which discusses Primary Virtues (God's morality) versus secondary virtues (tribal morality) in greater detail.

*We are free because we won’t know the future, but in a way, we have self-imposed limits on our freedom because of what material things we get attached to for security, consistency, love, and communication; still, given the will and strength we are free to change these limits. You can take comfort in the fact that the future will be nothing like you ever imagined it.