Far be it for me
To ask for my liberty
I'm only an American
It's not like we're United or anything
And we don't seem to stand for anything
All our messages are conflicting
We go against our own Declaration
Of being endowed by our Creator
With freedom to live, liberty to pursue happiness, and equality
We were not created equally mentally or physically
But in our God-given rights
Our rights not to be held to a double-standard
And it is that right that is is being infringed upon us today!
In the GLTB society we have less freedoms, we have less liberty, and we certainly aren't treated with equality because of this double-standard
This is a fight in which we are being denied the same financial rights as a straight couple; and state and church and federal governments more often than not refuse to recognize our Holy Matrimonies
It's a simple case of misunderstanding that has gone way out of hand
It has spiraled downward into a seemingly complex argument of religion and politics and family values
Please allow me to break it down!
The homosexuals choose the way they feel about people the same way you choose your last name, whether or not you like ice cream, or your favorite color
It's like that except for the fact that two people who love each other, who happen to be of the same gender, and are capable of having a happy, healthy, loving relationship and raising healthy kids in a safe and loving environment, are being denied this future
These are people who are reasonable and in love with each other
But what we have is a community saying, "I don't like the color purple, me and my friends and family think it's the wrong color to like, so YOU shouldn't like this color either"
Call it "mirror-imaging;" call it "lack of empathy;" I call it egocentrism
It's looking at the world from only one perspective and then trying to get the whole world to see it that way too
Little children do this all the time
It's immaturity and it's out of control
It's also a case of people who aren't homosexuals who are pretending to be experts on homosexuality
To quote the poet Nasir Jones,
"We fear what we don't understand,
Hate what we can't conquer;
Guess it's just the theory of man -
became a monster."
And it's true for the most part of history
Let me use this theory as a lense in which to look back-
Since the dawn of mankind, otherwise smart, mature people have been governed by irrational fears over things they couldn't understand, and hatred of feelings they couldn't conquer:
The earliest civilizations feared that storms were punishments from the gods and wondered what they were doing wrong;
They killed people who didn't worship the same god or gods they did because they couldn't convert them and therefore couldn't conquer their minds;
They have divided the world into "us versus them" to explain these fears
With "us" being the ever-pious and just,
And "them" always being heathens and evil
Kids do it all the time; they pick on people who are different then them
Even if it's something as uncontrollable as a last name
But now we have these kids, who never learned empathy, grow up as figures of false authority
And they dehumanize whole races, civilizations, genders, ethnicities, religions, and other minorities -
Even left-handed people, for a time, were considered evil due to the unusual nature of their hand preference -
Evil!
For something as unusual and yet trivial as hand-preference!
Little do these egocentric people know that the "strange and otherworldy evil-doers" are just their brothers and sisters in a different location or body or orientation
And as long as the "different people" believe in freedom of life, liberty to pursue happiness, and equality, they are our friends in arms
Homosexuals have the same family values and have to work on the same kind of lust and fear getting in the way of commitment as you do;
Promoting homosexuality is not what the media is doing- it is integrating the reality of actual humans who happen to lovesome of the same gender into pop culture where it belongs.
It's not promoting homosexuality as an alternative to heterosexuality, it won't turn your children gay!
You're either born gay or you're born straight or you're born with the ability to be inclined more gay or more straight depending on what your early childhood experiences and fears and desires are.
For all you family values people out there- most homosexuals are on your side!
The conflicting values are irresponsibility versus responsibility, and irresponsible people can be straight or gay
Homosexuals are no more or less hedonistic than any other person their age.
So all of this holding homosexuals to a double-standard is no different than childish egocentrism on a political and cultural scale, and it MUST be stopped!
As a teenager I feared my own homosexual urges and hated the fact I could not be normal because I could not find some magic pill to rid myself of them...
But I found out it was normal to have those urges, just unusual to have them to that extent
I found out it was something I could accept and learn to live with
And I plan on having kids some day
I'm just really open to the fact that my love, my true love, my soul mate may come to me in the form of male or female
I don't really care!
I understand now what my limits are and what I'm capable of
I may not be able to control my desires, but I can control how I act, and I choose to act responsibly and enter into a loving and healthy relationship
You might say, I've grown up since when I was a teeanger who was under the spell of fear and hatred
And as a nation, we can't let fear and hatred govern our lives!
As a nation, we need to be the grown-ups of the world and move past the childish mentality of egocentrism and "us versus them"!
We need to grow up if we want to lead the world in freedom, liberty and equality, because we are a localized community of brothers and sisters to be United, and its time we started acting like a Union, and stopped holding our Gay-Lesbian-Transgender-Bisexual minorities to double-standards because of our irrational fears!
To quote the Fellowship Church- "The object of getting free is living free; the object of living free is staying free"
The Union we entered into over two-hundred years ago for freedom was born of a revolution; but the war is never truly over
We need to stay free
And that is a process that lasts until the end of time!
Let us no longer be governed by fear and hatred!
Let us practice what we preach-
And stand for something God-given called freedom!
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Thursday, March 6, 2008
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.
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.
Soul Evolution- Part II. & III. Shared Values: A Public Philosophy/ Why America's Headed on the Wrong Path
II. Shared Values: A Public Philosophy
Augustine wrote of free will of choice. You don’t need to read it; let me explain it to you in one sentence. We don’t know the future, and we are responsible for our own actions. Freedom, then, is God’s gift to man. But in relation to the purpose of mankind, soul evolution through mind consciousness to reach enlightenment, God’s Law would be freedom, liberty to pursue happiness, and fellowship. Freedom means freedom to live; freedom to live means freedom to grow and evolve in one’s unique way; growth means a fertile environment, a livelihood and freedom of choice. Liberty to pursue happiness means finding one’s unique golden mean; the golden mean is balance between ego and spirit, awareness, and self-esteem; it means freedom to be unified with a person who they love regardless of caste or class or tribe or gender or race; it means liberty to make mistakes; it means not to be denied rights in a double-standard system. Fellowship means equality and unity; it means celebrating our differences, because differences make us beautiful; it means respect for self, mankind, the earth and the universe- in other words, respect for God. The laws of man should be in accordance to this- the primary virtues that come from God.
If you want to evolve in your soul (liberation/moksha of Hinduism/Buddhism; redemption/salvation of Abrahamic religions; being one with the nature and universe of Taoism and native religions), and see a new beauty that puts childlike awe of nature and belief in magic through the higher-focused lenses of eternal divinity, then God is the way to go.
Trade in your immaturity for these shared values: responsibility, conscientiousness, empathy and ability to turn pain into strength/loss into lesson gain, altruism/giving and sharing, consciousness/awareness, understanding, good humor, independence and unity/ healthy relationships with self humans and objects and nature, ubunutu/community and family ties (unconditional love and support) and loyalty, knowledge of self-rhythms, positivity, intelligence and knowledge of ignorance, reasonable hope and trust, health/wellness and stress management/ability to express emotions, developed convinctions, forgiveness, discipline, learn how to participate with inevitability- develop faith in change and have no fear of death, honor and integrity, authenticity and conscientiousness in creativity, listening to one self’s inner higher powers, self-respect based on divinity of everything including the self, raw honesty, faith in change, patience, effectiveness in realizing-organizing-marketing ones specific specialty, love and communication/eloquent speech, rehabilitation as justice first and violence as justice last, will to learn/openness and finding happiness by keeping up with ever-evolving balance (temperance/middle path) – managing one’s separate ego versus united part of the soul/self-esteem and managing one's strenghts and weaknesses.
My shared value system takes what is the best from all cultures and all religions and makes them secondary to the primary value of what I have said before: freedom, and all that it implies (freedom to live, liberty to pursue happiness and equality in fellowship of all humans). That is the only morality that does not come from mankind’s conventions of civilization and culture. Secondary values, according to Eric Voegelin, are the things like trust, punctuality, responsibility, conscientiousness and positivity and all the shared values I listed; they are not virtues in themselves, but only in relation to the right object. For instance, a Nazi could be punctual to the execution of a Jew just the same as a churchgoer could be punctual to a sermon; a gangster could be conscientious in cleaning up the blood from the scene of his murder in the same way a community-minded individual would clean up the trash in a park. Every culture praises sacrifice to the state, but how is sacrifice a primary virtue when your state is fighting for spreading tyranny? (This concept is taken from Eric Voegelin in his work Hitler and the Germans). This is what Tim Leary calls tribal morality, and it also governs cleanliness rules and sexual mores. (homosexuality, which once could have been detrimental to a tribe because it took away from procreation, and so was frowned upon by tribal morality; now, for some tribal moralist mentalities, it is good because the world is getting overpopulated and has too many babies in adoption agencies needing parents, but it is still bad for most tribal moralists today because it is unusual and therefore unnatural; something to be feared or hated; a threat to peace of mind.)
The political implication of my religious views, my religious being everybody else’s religious views, is that a political entity must take freedom into account as their highest value. That even means the freedom not to follow the secondary values of a given society, because, like I said before, those secondary values could be directed toward tyranny.
A modern day example is societies that impose Shari’a, which forces people to follow secondary and therefore man-made conventions as if they were following God. No, making women wear burkas and not allowing them prominent positions is a false interpretation of Islamic text because it inhibits the freedom of women. The women should be given the choice of whether they want to follow this interpretation, which some Muslim women do, because they want to live life as it was lived in the traditional time of Muhammad. Sharia also has a homophobic political system and does not allow free speech that criticizes Muhammad. This is the result, I speculate, of in inability to recognize God’s law as distinct from man’s law. Also, some Mormon polygamist sects force marriages, often between blood relatives, and hold women as subjects to men. Any claim of God's law that goes against Freedom of a life of progressive growth of the soul, Liberty to pursue happiness in a balance and have the opportunity to hold any job if one has the skills and the opportunity to marry whoever one chooses, and Equality- in the spiritual sense that everyone/thing is God incarnate and all souls are on the way to liberation and so deserves respect and is responsible for each other's souls - any claim going against this- whether it be in Leviticus or St. Paul's Gospel because it goes against homosexual rights, or whether it be the way mankind tries to twist religion into supporting chauvinism (which people have done with the Bible), racism or anti-Semitism (Christian Identity Movement or religions that have been used to call a race of people the Devil), is not inspired by the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is Freedom- Free Will, Free Choice, Free Love, Free Salvation, Free Opportunity...Freedom is God's Eternal Law. That is why killing is wrong in itself, because it goes against freedom, and anything that causes harm- rape, robbery, or assault deprives a person of immediate liberty. A crime that removes liberty at a slower pace, such as defacement, cat burglery, or making threats is a crime that is not as serious and yet it still removes opportunity to pursue happiness. Pranks fall under this category, as does anything that does not involve the trespassor and the victim together in an interaction of physical harm or physical loss. Identity theft falls in between these two categories- it is not immediate restriction of liberty and yet it is serious enough to make a person bankrupt. Punishments should fit the crime, and involve the trespassor getting an empathy dose. I'm not saying kill a murder or rape a rapist, though it sounds just, it is not. It means ending the cycle of harm by getting to the root of the trespassor's behavior, probably by someone who has committed the same crime but is now reformed. This way, the two speak the same "language" and are able to learn from each other in a manner that, under guidance by a third party, manages to resolve the conflicting moralities by getting into the spiritual drama that allowed for it to happen. The trespassor remains under rehab (committed in-patient if a serious crime, commited out-patient if less serious) until they can demonstrate knowledge of why the crime was wrong and an apology to the victim (or the victim's family) and restitution work. Of course, intent must be looked at. If it was a crime of passion (temporary insanity), it will likely not be committed again, except the trespassor has emotional issues needed to be worked out. Crimes of profit- money or notoriety or otherwise- are the main focus of rehab, because it shows conflicting morality of acceptable behaviors to obtain an end. Crimes of (constant) insanity- where the subject has a frontal-lobe defect or acute psychological drama, are special cases where rehab alone will not work. Either these people need to be put in an institution forever or else they need non-violent (but liberty-restricting) therapy until cured. People with sick fascinations they cannot control are too dangerous for society.
God’s law, say religious people, is the Ten Commandments. I disagree, all except for murder, I prefer to call them the Ten Commitments. To me, God’s only law is freedom and all that it implies. The Ten Commandments are values, values that if one commits to, will lead a life toward liberation of the soul- it will grow and bloom and only fade in the shadow of your transgressions and trespasses, but will always be there. And should you choose to reach enlightenment, your soul's liberation will be complete. (for more on enlightenment, try Raja Yoga or other mysticism)
Remember that free will and free choice mean the freedom to make mistakes. God only wants us to be free and gives us all a spirit guide to keep us on the right path, since we are free to follow the wrong path. God doesn’t ask that we all give up earthly pleasures, God only asks that we find a balance. We are separate yet equal from God- the immanent source, the seemingly transcendent yet immanent Holy Spirit. We are still the source; everything is connected back to God. We are God. So is nature and the universe, in all its dimensions/cosmic strings.
When people talk about a transcendent God, I speak not to deny them; I just say what they call transcendence I see as immanence. Sure, life as we know is only a nerve ending to God’s brain, but God’s brain is still immanently connected to ours and our hands and our feet and every cell in our body. We can access God’s brain through mystical revelations of many means: meditation, dancing, prayer, psychoactive drugs, sleep and writing trances, just to name a few. Sometimes we get flashes from eternity and call it déjà vu or synchronicity (meaningful coincidences) or by being in the moment when performing a task that motivates us: kama sutra or surfing or skiing or climbing a mountain or taking nature walks or dancing or epiphanies that cause us laughter or Nobel peace prizes or to perform good karma.
It all involves mind over matter; a healthy attitude in which you set yourself up to receive answers in a self-fulfilling prophecy. God the source (some call it the collective consciousness or akashic records or the first cause or the Creator of the Genesis) connects to us, us being God the son, through the Holy Spirit (some call it a spirit guide), which manifests itself in those aforementioned ways (flashes from eternity) to seemingly transcend existence to allow us to communicate with God. Near death experiences and out-of-body experiences or drug trips that seem to take us out of this world only move us from one dimension of the universe to another.
That is the myth of transcendence. I am a pantheist, and I worship the same God as you, but if your God and fear are not separate, then I only worship part of your God- the positive part. God is unconditional love. God is divorced from fear. Fear is only an instinct that protects us from something harmful- and God is never harmful. God is positive side of the force, the Qi, because God is the source of the force, and only installed negativity (see Pt. I) so, causally, the positive side of the coin could exist thanks to its opposite. But this causal plane is not all there is. Negativity was never meant to rule our hearts and be used by the hands of sinister or ignorant politicians and preachers and public figures and parents and peers to lead us into a land of lies and confusion, at least not forever.
Observation wise, we are not seeing all that is there. Parallel universes, alternate dimensions, cosmic strings…it’s all beyond the naked eye. It’s all God. When I speak of immanence versus transcendence, I’m talking about beyond these strings, up and down to the eternity that is the universe, even beyond black holes as all immanent because it is all still the universe that we are a part of, just not able to access with our human faculties. The myth of transcendence has caused us to not identify the earth with God, and look what we’ve done to it. I’m doing it too! I suck at being an environmentalist. And look at what we’ve done to other people for not sharing our same opinions or last names or status or country or skin color or gender or sexual orientation or path to God or way of expressing ourselves- we’ve dehumanized them!
III. Why America's Heading on the Wrong Path
When nature stopped being important, and got replaced with another green- MONEY; when we decided we were too busy to socalize or focus on community, we gave ourselves up to the false god on ever wall in every building- a clock- TIME; when we sold ourselves short and the advertisers won our hearts over, beating God in the bidding contest for our spare time, we joined the CULT of the SELF-ABSORBED CONSUMER. This is the American, western False Trinity. Relationships with real people and nature and God have been trumped by this trinity, and it's aboout time we show the world that America's soul has not been corrupted entirely, and that we hold these truths to be self-evident: Our Creator endowed us with certain inalienable rights- freedom to live a free life, liberty to pursue happiness, and fellowship! (the Declaration of Independence lifted its trinity from the European fundamental rights of “life, liberty and fraternity” slogan from the zenith of Europe's enlightened ideas; I just synthesized and made gender-neutral the two) This is our Absolute Law of Morality- and it is all we need for freedom.
Life, liberty to pursue happiness, and fellowship- they promote fairness, respect, community and equality. It promotes everything our elected officials should be fighting for.
America could lead the world in democracy by actually living up to God’s Law of Freedom and Absolute Law of Morality, which is right there in our Declaration. But we vote Democratic so the government’s agencies can do all the moral duties for us, fighting for affirmative action and raising the minimum wage and making green energy initiatives. That’s not the government’s job! That’s our job! That’s our churches and community’s job! That kind of stuff should be second nature- and because it isn’t- we’ve obviously got a ways to go. The world population should increase from 6 billion in 1992 to 9 billion in 2042. (http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html) Remember all the crap we had in 1992 and multiply it by three billion. There’s not enough dumps for that crap!
“for the rest of the world to reach United States levels of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet Earths.”- E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life http://home.comcast.net/~neoeugenics/eow.htm
Interview with E.O. Wilson from Salon magazine:
Salon-Stephen Hawking recently said that the human race won't last this millennium unless we start to colonize space. Do you agree?
E.O. -I admire Stephen Hawking but I think he's completely wrong. All of the evidence shows that we can turn Earth into our permanent, safe home. This is where our species evolved. It's what our biology adapted to, in exquisite detail -- our physiology, the way our mind developed.
-But what if we do stay on the same track we're on now?
-Then Stephen Hawking might turn out to be right.
-And in that case how long have we got?
-It's highly unlikely that homo sapiens will go extinct -- ever -- but we will have lost most of the natural environment, and the species of animals and plants in it, by the end of the century. I don't, however, see it going that way. We can and we will learn to live on this planet sustainably.
-You won a Pulitzer for a book called "On Human Nature," and you really believe that?
-Yes. I think people are smart enough to act in the global interest when they see it is their own interests at large.
http://dir.salon.com/story/people/conv/2002/01/14/eowilson/index1.html
Soul Evolution- Part IV. A Paradigm Shift in Consciousness
IV. A Paradigm Shift in Consciousness
The mind is a window with the temporary ego (the “I” who “does”) and the temporary world of the existence of the form of matter on one side and the eternal essence (the part of you that is God) in the world of the existence of eternal energy on the other. The eternal energy world and the matter world co-exist, but we cannot see the energy world. Even outer-space is not empty, it contains the universal consciousness- The Eternal, The Source of DNA. DNA is the language of God, the language of form and evolution and matter and mass and instinct and conditioning to get us from amino acids and invertebre to self-conscious and mystical creatures who's purpose is not just to reproduce and consume and make waste but to give and share and create things for progress and to learn and be in touch with both the world of form and the world of formless spirit. Our resources are our hopes and dreams and ambitions; our imaginations are our only limitations, and we are beginning to create new realities, new truths and uncover new dimensions.Computer software is like consciousness- we make a specific program governed by its own logic and laws and create through that project. And through story-telling, we experience ourself through the characters. The world of form is like the Matrix, and through our mystical keys, we can leave this Matrix and find our true purpose and destiny. The only thing to “transcend” us our way of thinking- our self-consciousness, our ego, our attachment to this world of form; if we just let go of it all, we can be one with the Eternal, and find a direct link to God the All, to which our souls are only part. Once we are conscious that we are only an extension of our creator (our soul, which is part of God), we can leave our self-absorbed ego, the mere tool of the soul, behind. Where we're going, we can only take the best of our selfs, the part of our self that was celebrated when we were children due to its innocence, and the part of our older self that history celebrates because of its nobleless and selflessness and charity and progress and skill and creativity and beauty and love and truth and eccentricity and wisdom. To be ourselves, in all its labeling of stupidness and glory in this world; to be our true selves, not the one who tries to imitate someone else. The part of us that can only "be". That is what we take with us.To get from who we are now to who we want to be, we must find out who we really are. This means asking questions, and finding answers, about our individual natures. At our best, we are God, and transcend our ego by simple daily acts when we give and help, not expecting anything in return; when we share our possessions as second nature; when we have moments of clarity about ourselves and realize we are more than we once were aware of; when we pass the threshold of drama and are able to laugh at life; when we create things while putting all our heart into it; when we are transformed emotionally and spiritually and psychologically by the beauty of a work of art or a story.When we forget we are God experiencing itself through us, we cause pain. The great paradox of life is that we don't need anything, but we do. We feel we need so much forever but when we get it, we realize it dosn't matter. Nothing matters. And yet everything matters. When we die, and we see the circle of life and all the beautiful drama of it all blurs together, either we are so tempted to return to it that we dive back in, or we realize we experienced enough, and that our soul has achieved its purpose, and we settle back into the eternal shapeless shape of love, eternal truth, and beauty; awaiting all the other souls to join us. Life is part of the experience and something we have to experience, but after a while we know ourselves better, and live more on the balance where we forget less and less that we are God. Once we achieve that knowledge, that we are lights from its ineffible energy, and that we no longer need experiences on earth, that our job is done and our souls have evolved the way they planned to evolve since the beginning, then we go back to God. But for now, they key is to balance our soul's desire to experience material life and our soul's desire to experience spiritual life. We must listen to its voice of reason and balance...To find our selves, we stop denying experience, so we stop our vicious cycles that only end up hurting us. That means find our moral plan and sticking to it. It means knowing what we want; our strengths and our weakness; and going after our dreams so we can learn and grow. What we need is respect and awareness; of our selves, of our neighbors, and of the planet; and in doing so, we find God. The best we can do now is find a balance- between our ego and our soul, the profane and the sacred, the city of man and the city of God, the temporal and the eternal, our weaknesses and our strengths. Everything in moderation, including moderation. Happiness is an art accrued from these simple virtues. To find our soul mates, to find our purpose- God’s plan/our soul’s plan (the same thing), to find balance- in doing so we find ourselves and God. That means making mistakes. That means being bold and exploring our selves, no longer afraid of what we'll find. It also means being afraid and living with our fears but knowing that everything will be alright in the end. Our fears are here to protect us from harm, but to find our irrational fears and kill them by understanding what causes the anxiety is part of our plan. Our temptations are here for a reason, too. Our imagination and God can turn temptations into dust by replacing them with mystical visions of a future place where we have all we desire, multiplied by 100,000,000 trillion percent.A new world is at hand, one where we cannot tolerate irresponsibility from those who seek to murder on the basis of our differences, those who seek to destroy the planet, those who seek to turn men into machines, those who seek to cause harm and promote social injustice. Sports is healthy, politics is unhealthy; wars should no longer be personal and over Gods and territory and resources, but for fun and done through competition. Mankind is the body politic, the only country is earth, and the only God goes by many names, to which all religions and science study. But to fight the war for unification, we must also fight the dark side of our ego (being absorbed in the temporal self): irresponsibility, ignorance, fear, selfish desires, vanity, spite, arrogance, indifference, jealousy, lack of self-respect, laziness, hopelessness, boredom, and any kind of immaturity that prevents us from growing or living life truly free or that causes harm. We all have these voices; the key is not to let them take over. We hear them, we examine and understand them, and then we let them pass, knowing this kind of thinking stunts our growth into God's loving arms.Everything that is matter is no-thing because it is temporary; matter comes from energy and energy is the Source, the Force, the Chi; the way in which our universal consciousness acts. To look into an object and find the Holy mind that crafted it by turning its energy into matter is to find eternity in a grain of sand. The bodies we have are temporary and yet they are the product of our eternal soul, as are our material creations, if we are conscientious in making them, reflecting the divine inside of us as we create. Things that are made in haste are not Holy. But even every piece of junk is made from the same stardust as our planet and that same stardust is a material form from the Source, when it exploded into the periodic table of elements, the first-cause of matter in our universe. So then even the profane will turn into sacredness when its matter is broken down into quarks and gluons and beyond that into spiritual energy...broken into eternityWhat is profane about man is the ego. The ego is necessary- it is the tool of the soul to manipulate matter to reflect God inside of the soul, the essence who only can be. Our eternal essence, our soul, since it can only be, cannot manipulate matter, so it highers the ego, the doer, to create. Our ego is then necessary to experience life (to live in a world where one can percieve and manipulate matter)But to remain attached to the ego and this world of matter means to divorce from God into purgatory until you see the light within you. There are many who are trying to get you to see the light- one being me right now. Find your spirit guide- your mental manifestation of God- both inside of you (a voice of God) and outside of you (your meaning and purpose). My spirit guide is my voice of inspiration, and guides me to reach within and find strength I didn't know I had. My spirit guide is the collective love, truth and beauty of my day. My spirit guide has no distinct face- it is like Buddha and Jesus shapeshifting and creating Holy Coincidences that show me the Way. When I am in tune and balanced, my spirit guide sings to me in the songs stuck in my head. When I tell someone something that makes their day, when I say something so real that I can't believe it's my own words, when I glow beauty and create beautiful bodies of words, my spirit guide is channeling me directly to God. Some say my spirit guide is my pineal glands, a divine antenna. It picks up the divine in everything within and without. My spirit guide lives vicariously through my environment and my internal voice of God, every moment. I percieve with my six senses. It's a matter of mind over matter: I believe, I ask for guidance and answers and knowledge, knowing I already have them, and they pour into me. I ask, and I recieve; I seek, and I find...There are different levels of consciousness. To experience the world through higher circuits of awareness of dimensions is our ultimate purpose, once we all leave the world of form behind. We find our that our collective, cohesive web of souls have created life on earth, experienced life through DNA, which contains our collective memories, and share our experiences in a new reality of heaven. I assume our universal consciousness will create a reality like a dream that not only contains only the highest experiences of human and animal life, but also makes anything concievable possible in this new world. Our life is like a straight video game now, with us as the players but our collective souls as the creators, so I can imagine that this new world would be like a video game with all the cheat codes on, so we can free fall through endless beautiful skies and then listen to a choir of mountains perform a rock song through a synchronized earthquake and sing along as a booming voice of thunder. It will be a lucid dream, where we create our own softwares and experience them. Past the speed of light to a universe governed by laws limited only by our imagination and full of extreme joy and freedom...heaven...the mind of God...the universal consciousnessTo get in touch with this universal consciousness, join those who seek to experience the divine through trance, only to feel the awe of life, the awe of nature, the awe of the universe and its future possibilities. Dancing, shouting, skiing, snowboarding, skating down a slope, catching a wave, praying, meditating, being in awe of nature, practicing yoga, conducting scientific experiments, taking mind-expanding drugs (none of that opiate, speed, alcohol crap), automatic writing, lucid dreaming, free falling, praising the word of the masters of God (If you praise specific people as God, do it because they represent the status that mankind, all being manifestations of the divine, will be oneday because eventually we will all be just as aware as these masters) and taking part in other religious-mystical-scientific-concentrating-conscientious-channeling methods to experience the divine. Get sensual self-esteem high from running or making love or other physical feats- how you feel when you put your health first and give to people is how you should always feel because that is always who you are, you just lose that state of mind when you change your attention to focus on something else you still need work on. Being in love is a way as well; in loving a single person you can love all that is good about the world, knowing they are they same and your spirit guide has finally reached the manifestation with which you wish to live with. Tantric sex is another way to contact the eternal source. As our souls progress toward liberation, through many lives and many methods, and as we respect and begin to understand the ways of nature and the universe, celebrating its differences but realizing its holy unity, we will become less attached to the emptiness of the world of form and more attached to our universal consciousness that is the seemingly formless empty space. Telepathy will become possible as we all share our experiences and leave our bodies and the world of form behind. We will all become the angelic souls we are trying to be now. The mind will no longer be a window into the world of form, but a window unto its own imagination and soul. Who knows what kind of specific realities I am speculating, all I know is let's get there and find out! Let the paradigm shift in consciousness begin!
I’m talking about a paradigm shift in consciousness that works to save the world as we know it today and preserve it not just for our grandchildren but out of a moral center. That is why I am espousing pantheism. Pantheism makes the most sense to me. It solves the identity crises that has caused an existential rift in Western thought of “where is God?” because it shows that mankind, nature and the universe are all God; but I say it also shows that when humans don’t realize this, and forget that they and the everyone are divine, they are only hurting themselves and others, and that is the cause of all the suffering in the world. People will think too highly of themselves and become cocky, arrogant, have a holier-than-thou sense of entitlement, or they will think too lowly of themselves, and disrespect themselves, misunderstands themselves, and have low self-esteem. In both cases, they are being an ego- feeder ( "ego" as in the temporal self associated with being a "doer" as opposed to the eternal self focused on just "being"); and placing too much importance on what is only temporary about them instead of what’s eternal- their souls.
Everything we know, being God, is holy and interconnected and therefore, everyone who disrespects another human being, and/or the earth, are actually going against themselves!, albeit unknowingly because the usual lesson from society teaches them wrongly or doesn’t show them at all what is sacred and what is profane.
All the religions of the world harness the Holy Spirit when they are being positive, and speaking falsely when they are being negative and preaching fear and hate or misunderstandings and therefore perpetuating suffering. But most religions warn against desire- and desire, which can positive only when balanced out with the realization that our desires are not us, is demonized. We can, contrary to fear-mongering religious leaders, indulge in sins of the flesh in moderation, without accumulating negative consequences if we do place only minimal importance on our desires in the big picture of Divine Identity. Life is an experience, a divine experience, if you can pass through it with a fun-loving yet unattached persona. Highly evolved souls, which Neale Donald Walsch and I are calling Masters (his idea), are those known as Buddha, Jesus and other men worshipped in religion. The thing is, humans are humans; they are not the source and there is no transcendental God. The Masters have such a deep connection to the source, though, that the Word stems to flow off their tongue every time they speak. I have yet to investigate the Words of Masters, but from what I can tell they preached fellowship, liberty to pursue happiness and freedom, so it passes through the filters of what I call the fundamental rights of humanity, endowed to us by our Source.
We could be our own saviors if we want to; we don’t need organized religion. All we need is the Holy Spirit to guide us and we will speak the same virtues as a Christ or a Buddha. The source is is within and without us, and when we channel our Holy Spirit, it acts as an antenna straight from the Source to guide us and give us answers. It is our voice of reason, our stable chakras, our intuition; it speaks to us in positivity, in reasonable faith, hope and trust; we see it on our dreams as it tries to integrate the part of us we are ignoring. bringing into the light of our consciousness. It pushes the truth out of people and makes us humble yet divine at the same time. It is in our pineal glands and frontal lobes that we can channel Logos and blessed deeds; to paraphrase Neale Donald Walsch, we are The Source whenever we create pure thoughts, words and deeds of pure love, truth and beauty.
The Holy Spirit each one of us have is unique. It talks to us in codes only we as individuals could understand. It gives meaning and positive inspiration and motivation for authentic conscientious creativity and desire to learn and grow. It can shock us when we weren't expecting it, coming to save the day in the form of a phenomenon or a miracle that to someone else is just luck or a chance. In the case of shock, it is God winking at us. It's the feeling that the stars must have aligned and sent you blessing straight from the source- and that's exactly what it is.
It is what C.S. Lewis showed in The Great Divorce as illuminated spirits from heaven that come into purgatory to show the light of the Lord is waiting for them. It is what shamans and Sylvia Browne call the spirit guide each one of us have. Some people call it a guardian angel, some call it coincidence, serendipity or synchronicity. It could be a wake-up call, though it doesn’t have to be as dramatic as waking up in the hospital after O.D.’ing or a the four walls of a lonely prison cell; it could be the lyrics to a song that saves your life or a good conversation that changes you forever.
You and the spirit have planned out your life before you were born, and the spirit communicates through you all ways, immanent within and without you in your environment, to keep you on the right path so you don’t fail to evolve; if you lose your true self badly enough, you could get stuck as a “ghost” on earth! (Sylvia Browne talks about this).
The Holy Spirit is subjective to each one of us because of our different experiences and emphasis of importance and meanings we find in words and objects. Relative to the situation, it will generally will be the voice of reason and balance and faithful positivity and laughter at the irony of it all.
This is what people call God, as well as Eternity, the First Cause (I don't like that expression, because there doesn't necessarily have to be a first cause to everything; but there was a first cause at least on the causal plane that set of a chain reaction of our universe of form and existence that interacts with how we choose to feel about inevitability and causation), the Source, Logos, Reason, Intuition, Positive Inspiration and Motivation, the collective conscious/unconscious/Akashic records memory of everything that's existed, the Psycho-Atomic circuit, the Mothership, the Universe, Allah, Jah, Christ, Mother Earth, enlightened souls, Brahma, Qi, Krishna; I could go on for a while...God is Everything. Everything is Eternal. Nothing can be created or destroyed, it can only change form. God is form and formlessness; in the temporary and in the eternal, because the temporary always goes back to the eternal. There is no empty space- there is just non-existence of form and energy we cannot see.
God, when in form (which is always temporarry) is man, nature and the universe, the latter of which being everything that exists, has existed and will ever exist on every dimension and parallel universe. The Holy Trinity is the Source /Eternity / Formlessness Energy (Father), the Part/Manifestation in Matter / Temporary Form (Son- Us) and the our Spirit Guide, who we use to channel the Source / Formlessness through our Divine Mental Faculties / Pineal Gland (Holy Spirit).
Pantheism is the answer- it is a spirituality everyone can adopt, no matter if you are religious or not or what religion you are. Pantheism is a spirituality where it's only you and God at every moment. You want to speak to God? Catch a ride on your Holy Spirit Guide, and have a conversation! It'll be the voice of reason and positivity and growth and understanding within you. Your Qi.
Once you see the eternity in everything; that form is just energy in a temporary state of matter and that the energy that created it is the Spirit World of God where all our Essences/Souls came from and to which they shall return- you can stop being attached to Form. You live and love and celebrate in form - namely, your bodies, and the bodies of those you love; and their personalities; but you see that when you lose the form- people leave and die and love of form changes and break-ups happen, their essence is still the same, the memory lives forever, and they will forever exist in the spirit world where this a collective consciousness (Akahsic records) of all Souls and you can relive them at any time here on earth through writing and imagination and mysticism and raja yoga.
Once you realize everything is divine, that you are no better or worse, just more or less aware, than your peers; that God is in Nature and the Universe; in things seen and not seen; under every microscope and telescope and in every meaningful event and love you share with the part of people and objects and words that is Eternally Constant, their Essence, their Soul; once you realize all of this you will begin to feel more relaxed. More assured. More Godly and yet more humble. You will stop seeing what is temporary- money, time, our stage presence, our egos...you will find God in everything. And you will love it, love it all, knowing everything belongs somewhere, and that is with you in the heavenly grid of eternity, the matrix of eternal love, truth and beauty that is Heaven; ever-present but unattainable until death, when you catch a ride on that train with your spirit guide to High Heaven, a dimension of higher understanding, a plane of eternity, a parallel universe of Holy Joy!
And as you realize this, you will realize you have obligations to attend to. You will go about your life, with a new sense of awe intact, but you will sometimes forget your newly discovered spirituality. But to forget is only temporary. Soon you will realize your work, because it is our creation, is a part of neutral and finite matter that becomes eternal when you mark your individual stamp on it. Reflecting the divine within by conscientious application of skills and individual touch, you have molded a mirror-image of your soul onto nature in a beautiful and divine relationship. You put your heart into it. You find yourself.
You were born into this world forgetting your essence, you think you and your mother are the same, and then you become egocentric, and then you join a group for solidarity, and you try to define yourself in relation to the world. But when you wish to find your essence, your purpose, your love, your religion- And whatever avenue you chose up until this point- Christianity, Islam, Mother Earth or Mothership- to channel God, you've been confronted by the seeming irreconcilability of work and love, nature and society, individual and community, of highs and lows, of conflicting morals, of what you want and what you need, of religion and philosophy, religion and science, and religion and religion. Either you've looked down on other religions as immature or you've started questioning your own religion, maybe just enough to have serious doubts about it. Let this Manifesto be a reassurance to you. It's not your religion that's flawed, it's what man has done to your religion. Let this manifesto be a way to discern fact and fiction in your spiritual questions. God has been there you whole life, yes, whether you knew it or not. It's the forms he takes- the way life unfolds so you either find the right path of purpose and love and fulfillment over the path of attachment, of pity and suffering, of loneliness and emptiness. God is whatever keeps you on the right path. A song, a love who helps you find yourself, the sacredness of nature, a film, a quote, a friend, a secret signal from nature like on a lonely day where you just wanted to give up and you see your favorite animal- a butterfly- and it's as though life is winking at you...maybe it's inner strength, a will and determination to not give up- some motivation that keeps you going blindly into the uncertain future - inspiration of a voice within - when you reach down and find strength you didn't know you had...it's balance- finding the part of you that you tried to leave behind and integrating it in a way you can live with yourself- and when you reverse the path of suffocating yourself with soul-hindering clutter...it's a voice of reason you can speak with at any time. You talk to the source and you know it's God because it's everything you're lacking - it's total enlightenment, it's the unconditional love without fear - it's telling you to only be sure of the joy of love, truth and beauty that you are, because that is you at your best, and you should always be thinking of yourself as that- God is the voice telling you to look for the love, truth and beauty of others to find your essence, to find your balance and your foundation of faith, hope and trust...
Maybe you accept this pantheistic view of God, but you still feel a sense of sadness for the people you love who are suffering over addiction or other negative constant behavior and wish explaining God to them was as easy as it seemed in your head. Just be confident in your faith. If they are really considering finding God, let your confidence attract them. "What's new?", they might ask you. Be honest.
"I have found God, and my unconditional love for you is a manifestation of God. God is inside of you, and inside of me, and by loving Who You Really Are- your eternal soul, it brings me so much joy. But I would be a lot happier if you understood this for yourself and stopped [insert behavioral attachment here] because it is stealing your identity and turning you into a half-man half [insert object of attachment]. Your wisdom and our bond could shine a lot brighter if you sought out spiritual growth to balance out your earthly attachments, and the only way to even the scale would be for you to stop [insert attachment here] until you are wise enough to know that you are truly free from it, and that natural high you get in the place of the [attachment] will bring you a new joy you have never felt before. Right now, you assume what you're doing is a victimless crime. It's not true. You're hurting yourself and those you love you by using [attachment] as a crutch to feel happy when the real happiness comes from within. It's self-deception, a vicious cycle of attachment, and it's getting in the way of your ability to complete your cycle of self-awareness. Find you without [attachment], then go back to it if you really must."
Any variation or part of that is fine.
If this behavior starts out as something time and money consuming like an addiction, the person you love will have more time on their hands for discovering their true selves and true purpose in life once they quit it. After that, poor health might be the next obstacle they have to face. The more you guide the people you love to find a balance, and by guide I don't mean force, the happier they will be and you in turn will be; your relationship will grow to new heights. But you have to practice what you preach and listen to their suggestions, too; even if you don't like them, at least consider them. Practice knowing your rhythms- you can find your strengths and weaknesses so you can balance yourself out. Remember, the more balanced you become, the more aware you will be of your self and your surroundings, and the easier it will be to connect to the divine Holy Spirit that is transporting messages between you and God. That's all life is, anyway. One relationship with you and God, the source; the self and the eternity, the all; the part and the whole; the child and the parent. For as long as you live, your third eye Holy Spirit will be your God-sense; your intermediary to Eternity, and come to you in many forms. Eventually, the more you grow, the more of a positive impact you will have upon the world. Good karma and unconditional love will flow between you and the world with every inhate and exhale. Your priorities will straighten up. Things will fall into place. You will laugh at your consistent inconsistencies, your quirks and the strange situations you end up in. You will smile feeling at home whenever you lay your head, because God is always there with you.
"Where am I": if you ask yourself this, the answer is always "Here"
"What time is it": the answer is always going to be "Now"
Those are Eternal constants in your life...proof that God the Source is always with you
You are never alone.
The more good vibes you effortlessly give off, the more people will become attracted to you that you will welcome as sacred messengers of God. By this point, your communication skills should be well developed because of your articulated sense of understanding. Your soul mate and you will connect in passion, intimacy, and eloquent communication as you explore each other's tangible and intangible qualities. A union of souls will take place and the spiral of your soul will now be linked in with an interlocking soul. Who knows how many lifetimes it took to find you, you will ask. No answer will be necessary.
The more good vibes you give off, the more respectable and honest and smart and funny you will become. You will be careful not to do harm over somebody else's rights. You will keep your integrity as you pick up trash and clean your home and jealous folk try to crush you down. You be creative, whether with children or with objects, or both, and you will turn your community into a great place to be creative in. You will no longer accept some parts of the world as they are, and you will fight for your peace of mind. You will be the change you want to see in the world.
You have convictions- they are the same values all souls share because the fight fear and they seek peace and love and understanding and awareness and creativity and spirituality. Maybe they're in different words than the shared values I listed. If so, send them to me and we can work on this manifesto together. In fact, your constructive criticisms, critiques of society, and perspective on God is more than welcome.
You are a person of convictions- I know this because deep down, everyone is. Everyone who develops a sense of morality past rigid dogma is true person of convictions because they will not accept the easy answers. They will question morality up and down, and apply it wherever a chance to apply it opportunes itself. The person of convictions is a free thinker. You are a free thinker. God gave you free will, free choice, free thought. It will not overwhelm you. Your spirit guide is there to keep you protected.
Open yourself up to God, to the answers, to knowledge, to guidance. You will see them everywhere you go in nature.
That is the paradigm shift in consciousness. It starts with the attitude, imagination and the convictions, which conceives of a million thoughts every second, which grow in the garden of your mind. The thoughts you give attention to get the most sunlight, and two or more thoughts can synthesize and parent an idea, a concept that articulates the life you are experiencing. Keep in mind “mind over matter”, because your life is not determined by what happens to you, it’s your perspective and belief system that interpret this reality and make it good or bad. It’s not that events are value neutral; good and bad is determined by how much oppression of freedom and infringement on fairness and respect and equality; but that is only true if you have reached this level. To the moral relativist, life is very different in relation to attitude and experiences that one sees as bad, another, in their confusion, can see as acceptable. Depending on how we cope with our belief systems in our Conscience, and how society reinforces or works to modify our behaviors, we come up with new belief systems that accommodate for internal and external reaction to our experiences. You see how it all starts with belief? Our perspective are the lenses in which we view the world, and provide the foundation for all our seeds of thoughts to grow and manifest into blooming speech and then finally experience, which in turn influences attitude and the cycle starts all over again. This is understood after hearing about the near-death experiences studied by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying (where people saw different things when they were clinically dead but there was a pattern of religious figures; the religious figure depended on what religion the patient was) reading Conversations with God and watching the film The Orphanage, all of which clarified my beliefs in mind over matter
The mind, I say, is so powerful! You know it is! Turn your pain from life into strength- use it to break your crutches and use it grow deep down in your soul. Use your third eye. Expand your consciousness. The more this mental transformation is practiced, the more answers will show up all around you. Meaning! Meaning will interact with an open-mind and over-active morality. It's not that you are judging all that is around you...you are feeling its pain. And you are turning that pain into strength and using the power of giving and sharing and loving and understanding and forgiveness, yes, forgiveness, for you trespass, too! And you keep giving and growing and learning and becoming more responsible, more aware; you wake up inside individually and socially and become more accountable for your actions. You learn not to fear death, or God, or inevitability- come what may!, you cry, with every knew low there is an equal and opposite high! With every new loss, a gain in truth! With all the pain that you let yourself feel in your over-active imagination and empathy, you grow stronger with reassurance and faith and understanding! You keep on growing, you sacred soul, and you are the change you want to see in the world, and the change I want to see, too!
We all want to see you be that change! God wants you to be that change!, God is inside of you, in your eternal soul- separate but together - You want to see You be that change! So go ahead and choose life, and you and the world will reciprocally bless one another until the end of your Shiva dance on the causal plane! The world is ready for you to take your place among the Eternal Enlightened Plane of Soul, Nature and Universe- to be a God amongst Gods. God is incomplete without you, and always waiting for you to choose the right path of growth. Love the life you live and live the life you love; find your balance; find your God through your Spirit Guide, and then the future of mankind and the trembling, ravished planet will have one more potential guardian on its side.
I am not alone in this call to usher in a paradigm shift in consciousness. Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life, Daniel Pincbeck’s 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl all support my belief in concept; I have yet to read their works. Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, Wes “Scoop” Nisker’s Crazy Wisdom Richard Hopper’s Jesus, Krishna, Buddha and Lao Tzu: The Parallel Sayings and the film Waking Life are all great examples of what I am saying, and these works have profoundly impacted my belief system. They are so plain and simple; the Torah, Bible and Quran have influenced those works but the authors also took the liberty of uniting those texts, and even the mystical teachings of Taoism, Christian Gnosticism, Islamic Sufism, Raja Yoga and Jungian psychology to show that we can experience The Source without words, only pure Holy Spirit is needed. If we realize we are all divine- us, the earth and the universe, it could end dehumanization and over-consumption and stop our parasitic relationship with the Earth. It could make us realize all religions are universal and that all names, races/ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations are different, yes, but we are still equal, and all one in God, and therefore the differences should be celebrated.
The mind is a window with the temporary ego (the “I” who “does”) and the temporary world of the existence of the form of matter on one side and the eternal essence (the part of you that is God) in the world of the existence of eternal energy on the other. The eternal energy world and the matter world co-exist, but we cannot see the energy world. Even outer-space is not empty, it contains the universal consciousness- The Eternal, The Source of DNA. DNA is the language of God, the language of form and evolution and matter and mass and instinct and conditioning to get us from amino acids and invertebre to self-conscious and mystical creatures who's purpose is not just to reproduce and consume and make waste but to give and share and create things for progress and to learn and be in touch with both the world of form and the world of formless spirit. Our resources are our hopes and dreams and ambitions; our imaginations are our only limitations, and we are beginning to create new realities, new truths and uncover new dimensions.Computer software is like consciousness- we make a specific program governed by its own logic and laws and create through that project. And through story-telling, we experience ourself through the characters. The world of form is like the Matrix, and through our mystical keys, we can leave this Matrix and find our true purpose and destiny. The only thing to “transcend” us our way of thinking- our self-consciousness, our ego, our attachment to this world of form; if we just let go of it all, we can be one with the Eternal, and find a direct link to God the All, to which our souls are only part. Once we are conscious that we are only an extension of our creator (our soul, which is part of God), we can leave our self-absorbed ego, the mere tool of the soul, behind. Where we're going, we can only take the best of our selfs, the part of our self that was celebrated when we were children due to its innocence, and the part of our older self that history celebrates because of its nobleless and selflessness and charity and progress and skill and creativity and beauty and love and truth and eccentricity and wisdom. To be ourselves, in all its labeling of stupidness and glory in this world; to be our true selves, not the one who tries to imitate someone else. The part of us that can only "be". That is what we take with us.To get from who we are now to who we want to be, we must find out who we really are. This means asking questions, and finding answers, about our individual natures. At our best, we are God, and transcend our ego by simple daily acts when we give and help, not expecting anything in return; when we share our possessions as second nature; when we have moments of clarity about ourselves and realize we are more than we once were aware of; when we pass the threshold of drama and are able to laugh at life; when we create things while putting all our heart into it; when we are transformed emotionally and spiritually and psychologically by the beauty of a work of art or a story.When we forget we are God experiencing itself through us, we cause pain. The great paradox of life is that we don't need anything, but we do. We feel we need so much forever but when we get it, we realize it dosn't matter. Nothing matters. And yet everything matters. When we die, and we see the circle of life and all the beautiful drama of it all blurs together, either we are so tempted to return to it that we dive back in, or we realize we experienced enough, and that our soul has achieved its purpose, and we settle back into the eternal shapeless shape of love, eternal truth, and beauty; awaiting all the other souls to join us. Life is part of the experience and something we have to experience, but after a while we know ourselves better, and live more on the balance where we forget less and less that we are God. Once we achieve that knowledge, that we are lights from its ineffible energy, and that we no longer need experiences on earth, that our job is done and our souls have evolved the way they planned to evolve since the beginning, then we go back to God. But for now, they key is to balance our soul's desire to experience material life and our soul's desire to experience spiritual life. We must listen to its voice of reason and balance...To find our selves, we stop denying experience, so we stop our vicious cycles that only end up hurting us. That means find our moral plan and sticking to it. It means knowing what we want; our strengths and our weakness; and going after our dreams so we can learn and grow. What we need is respect and awareness; of our selves, of our neighbors, and of the planet; and in doing so, we find God. The best we can do now is find a balance- between our ego and our soul, the profane and the sacred, the city of man and the city of God, the temporal and the eternal, our weaknesses and our strengths. Everything in moderation, including moderation. Happiness is an art accrued from these simple virtues. To find our soul mates, to find our purpose- God’s plan/our soul’s plan (the same thing), to find balance- in doing so we find ourselves and God. That means making mistakes. That means being bold and exploring our selves, no longer afraid of what we'll find. It also means being afraid and living with our fears but knowing that everything will be alright in the end. Our fears are here to protect us from harm, but to find our irrational fears and kill them by understanding what causes the anxiety is part of our plan. Our temptations are here for a reason, too. Our imagination and God can turn temptations into dust by replacing them with mystical visions of a future place where we have all we desire, multiplied by 100,000,000 trillion percent.A new world is at hand, one where we cannot tolerate irresponsibility from those who seek to murder on the basis of our differences, those who seek to destroy the planet, those who seek to turn men into machines, those who seek to cause harm and promote social injustice. Sports is healthy, politics is unhealthy; wars should no longer be personal and over Gods and territory and resources, but for fun and done through competition. Mankind is the body politic, the only country is earth, and the only God goes by many names, to which all religions and science study. But to fight the war for unification, we must also fight the dark side of our ego (being absorbed in the temporal self): irresponsibility, ignorance, fear, selfish desires, vanity, spite, arrogance, indifference, jealousy, lack of self-respect, laziness, hopelessness, boredom, and any kind of immaturity that prevents us from growing or living life truly free or that causes harm. We all have these voices; the key is not to let them take over. We hear them, we examine and understand them, and then we let them pass, knowing this kind of thinking stunts our growth into God's loving arms.Everything that is matter is no-thing because it is temporary; matter comes from energy and energy is the Source, the Force, the Chi; the way in which our universal consciousness acts. To look into an object and find the Holy mind that crafted it by turning its energy into matter is to find eternity in a grain of sand. The bodies we have are temporary and yet they are the product of our eternal soul, as are our material creations, if we are conscientious in making them, reflecting the divine inside of us as we create. Things that are made in haste are not Holy. But even every piece of junk is made from the same stardust as our planet and that same stardust is a material form from the Source, when it exploded into the periodic table of elements, the first-cause of matter in our universe. So then even the profane will turn into sacredness when its matter is broken down into quarks and gluons and beyond that into spiritual energy...broken into eternityWhat is profane about man is the ego. The ego is necessary- it is the tool of the soul to manipulate matter to reflect God inside of the soul, the essence who only can be. Our eternal essence, our soul, since it can only be, cannot manipulate matter, so it highers the ego, the doer, to create. Our ego is then necessary to experience life (to live in a world where one can percieve and manipulate matter)But to remain attached to the ego and this world of matter means to divorce from God into purgatory until you see the light within you. There are many who are trying to get you to see the light- one being me right now. Find your spirit guide- your mental manifestation of God- both inside of you (a voice of God) and outside of you (your meaning and purpose). My spirit guide is my voice of inspiration, and guides me to reach within and find strength I didn't know I had. My spirit guide is the collective love, truth and beauty of my day. My spirit guide has no distinct face- it is like Buddha and Jesus shapeshifting and creating Holy Coincidences that show me the Way. When I am in tune and balanced, my spirit guide sings to me in the songs stuck in my head. When I tell someone something that makes their day, when I say something so real that I can't believe it's my own words, when I glow beauty and create beautiful bodies of words, my spirit guide is channeling me directly to God. Some say my spirit guide is my pineal glands, a divine antenna. It picks up the divine in everything within and without. My spirit guide lives vicariously through my environment and my internal voice of God, every moment. I percieve with my six senses. It's a matter of mind over matter: I believe, I ask for guidance and answers and knowledge, knowing I already have them, and they pour into me. I ask, and I recieve; I seek, and I find...There are different levels of consciousness. To experience the world through higher circuits of awareness of dimensions is our ultimate purpose, once we all leave the world of form behind. We find our that our collective, cohesive web of souls have created life on earth, experienced life through DNA, which contains our collective memories, and share our experiences in a new reality of heaven. I assume our universal consciousness will create a reality like a dream that not only contains only the highest experiences of human and animal life, but also makes anything concievable possible in this new world. Our life is like a straight video game now, with us as the players but our collective souls as the creators, so I can imagine that this new world would be like a video game with all the cheat codes on, so we can free fall through endless beautiful skies and then listen to a choir of mountains perform a rock song through a synchronized earthquake and sing along as a booming voice of thunder. It will be a lucid dream, where we create our own softwares and experience them. Past the speed of light to a universe governed by laws limited only by our imagination and full of extreme joy and freedom...heaven...the mind of God...the universal consciousnessTo get in touch with this universal consciousness, join those who seek to experience the divine through trance, only to feel the awe of life, the awe of nature, the awe of the universe and its future possibilities. Dancing, shouting, skiing, snowboarding, skating down a slope, catching a wave, praying, meditating, being in awe of nature, practicing yoga, conducting scientific experiments, taking mind-expanding drugs (none of that opiate, speed, alcohol crap), automatic writing, lucid dreaming, free falling, praising the word of the masters of God (If you praise specific people as God, do it because they represent the status that mankind, all being manifestations of the divine, will be oneday because eventually we will all be just as aware as these masters) and taking part in other religious-mystical-scientific-concentrating-conscientious-channeling methods to experience the divine. Get sensual self-esteem high from running or making love or other physical feats- how you feel when you put your health first and give to people is how you should always feel because that is always who you are, you just lose that state of mind when you change your attention to focus on something else you still need work on. Being in love is a way as well; in loving a single person you can love all that is good about the world, knowing they are they same and your spirit guide has finally reached the manifestation with which you wish to live with. Tantric sex is another way to contact the eternal source. As our souls progress toward liberation, through many lives and many methods, and as we respect and begin to understand the ways of nature and the universe, celebrating its differences but realizing its holy unity, we will become less attached to the emptiness of the world of form and more attached to our universal consciousness that is the seemingly formless empty space. Telepathy will become possible as we all share our experiences and leave our bodies and the world of form behind. We will all become the angelic souls we are trying to be now. The mind will no longer be a window into the world of form, but a window unto its own imagination and soul. Who knows what kind of specific realities I am speculating, all I know is let's get there and find out! Let the paradigm shift in consciousness begin!
I’m talking about a paradigm shift in consciousness that works to save the world as we know it today and preserve it not just for our grandchildren but out of a moral center. That is why I am espousing pantheism. Pantheism makes the most sense to me. It solves the identity crises that has caused an existential rift in Western thought of “where is God?” because it shows that mankind, nature and the universe are all God; but I say it also shows that when humans don’t realize this, and forget that they and the everyone are divine, they are only hurting themselves and others, and that is the cause of all the suffering in the world. People will think too highly of themselves and become cocky, arrogant, have a holier-than-thou sense of entitlement, or they will think too lowly of themselves, and disrespect themselves, misunderstands themselves, and have low self-esteem. In both cases, they are being an ego- feeder ( "ego" as in the temporal self associated with being a "doer" as opposed to the eternal self focused on just "being"); and placing too much importance on what is only temporary about them instead of what’s eternal- their souls.
Everything we know, being God, is holy and interconnected and therefore, everyone who disrespects another human being, and/or the earth, are actually going against themselves!, albeit unknowingly because the usual lesson from society teaches them wrongly or doesn’t show them at all what is sacred and what is profane.
All the religions of the world harness the Holy Spirit when they are being positive, and speaking falsely when they are being negative and preaching fear and hate or misunderstandings and therefore perpetuating suffering. But most religions warn against desire- and desire, which can positive only when balanced out with the realization that our desires are not us, is demonized. We can, contrary to fear-mongering religious leaders, indulge in sins of the flesh in moderation, without accumulating negative consequences if we do place only minimal importance on our desires in the big picture of Divine Identity. Life is an experience, a divine experience, if you can pass through it with a fun-loving yet unattached persona. Highly evolved souls, which Neale Donald Walsch and I are calling Masters (his idea), are those known as Buddha, Jesus and other men worshipped in religion. The thing is, humans are humans; they are not the source and there is no transcendental God. The Masters have such a deep connection to the source, though, that the Word stems to flow off their tongue every time they speak. I have yet to investigate the Words of Masters, but from what I can tell they preached fellowship, liberty to pursue happiness and freedom, so it passes through the filters of what I call the fundamental rights of humanity, endowed to us by our Source.
We could be our own saviors if we want to; we don’t need organized religion. All we need is the Holy Spirit to guide us and we will speak the same virtues as a Christ or a Buddha. The source is is within and without us, and when we channel our Holy Spirit, it acts as an antenna straight from the Source to guide us and give us answers. It is our voice of reason, our stable chakras, our intuition; it speaks to us in positivity, in reasonable faith, hope and trust; we see it on our dreams as it tries to integrate the part of us we are ignoring. bringing into the light of our consciousness. It pushes the truth out of people and makes us humble yet divine at the same time. It is in our pineal glands and frontal lobes that we can channel Logos and blessed deeds; to paraphrase Neale Donald Walsch, we are The Source whenever we create pure thoughts, words and deeds of pure love, truth and beauty.
The Holy Spirit each one of us have is unique. It talks to us in codes only we as individuals could understand. It gives meaning and positive inspiration and motivation for authentic conscientious creativity and desire to learn and grow. It can shock us when we weren't expecting it, coming to save the day in the form of a phenomenon or a miracle that to someone else is just luck or a chance. In the case of shock, it is God winking at us. It's the feeling that the stars must have aligned and sent you blessing straight from the source- and that's exactly what it is.
It is what C.S. Lewis showed in The Great Divorce as illuminated spirits from heaven that come into purgatory to show the light of the Lord is waiting for them. It is what shamans and Sylvia Browne call the spirit guide each one of us have. Some people call it a guardian angel, some call it coincidence, serendipity or synchronicity. It could be a wake-up call, though it doesn’t have to be as dramatic as waking up in the hospital after O.D.’ing or a the four walls of a lonely prison cell; it could be the lyrics to a song that saves your life or a good conversation that changes you forever.
You and the spirit have planned out your life before you were born, and the spirit communicates through you all ways, immanent within and without you in your environment, to keep you on the right path so you don’t fail to evolve; if you lose your true self badly enough, you could get stuck as a “ghost” on earth! (Sylvia Browne talks about this).
The Holy Spirit is subjective to each one of us because of our different experiences and emphasis of importance and meanings we find in words and objects. Relative to the situation, it will generally will be the voice of reason and balance and faithful positivity and laughter at the irony of it all.
This is what people call God, as well as Eternity, the First Cause (I don't like that expression, because there doesn't necessarily have to be a first cause to everything; but there was a first cause at least on the causal plane that set of a chain reaction of our universe of form and existence that interacts with how we choose to feel about inevitability and causation), the Source, Logos, Reason, Intuition, Positive Inspiration and Motivation, the collective conscious/unconscious/Akashic records memory of everything that's existed, the Psycho-Atomic circuit, the Mothership, the Universe, Allah, Jah, Christ, Mother Earth, enlightened souls, Brahma, Qi, Krishna; I could go on for a while...God is Everything. Everything is Eternal. Nothing can be created or destroyed, it can only change form. God is form and formlessness; in the temporary and in the eternal, because the temporary always goes back to the eternal. There is no empty space- there is just non-existence of form and energy we cannot see.
God, when in form (which is always temporarry) is man, nature and the universe, the latter of which being everything that exists, has existed and will ever exist on every dimension and parallel universe. The Holy Trinity is the Source /Eternity / Formlessness Energy (Father), the Part/Manifestation in Matter / Temporary Form (Son- Us) and the our Spirit Guide, who we use to channel the Source / Formlessness through our Divine Mental Faculties / Pineal Gland (Holy Spirit).
Pantheism is the answer- it is a spirituality everyone can adopt, no matter if you are religious or not or what religion you are. Pantheism is a spirituality where it's only you and God at every moment. You want to speak to God? Catch a ride on your Holy Spirit Guide, and have a conversation! It'll be the voice of reason and positivity and growth and understanding within you. Your Qi.
Once you see the eternity in everything; that form is just energy in a temporary state of matter and that the energy that created it is the Spirit World of God where all our Essences/Souls came from and to which they shall return- you can stop being attached to Form. You live and love and celebrate in form - namely, your bodies, and the bodies of those you love; and their personalities; but you see that when you lose the form- people leave and die and love of form changes and break-ups happen, their essence is still the same, the memory lives forever, and they will forever exist in the spirit world where this a collective consciousness (Akahsic records) of all Souls and you can relive them at any time here on earth through writing and imagination and mysticism and raja yoga.
Once you realize everything is divine, that you are no better or worse, just more or less aware, than your peers; that God is in Nature and the Universe; in things seen and not seen; under every microscope and telescope and in every meaningful event and love you share with the part of people and objects and words that is Eternally Constant, their Essence, their Soul; once you realize all of this you will begin to feel more relaxed. More assured. More Godly and yet more humble. You will stop seeing what is temporary- money, time, our stage presence, our egos...you will find God in everything. And you will love it, love it all, knowing everything belongs somewhere, and that is with you in the heavenly grid of eternity, the matrix of eternal love, truth and beauty that is Heaven; ever-present but unattainable until death, when you catch a ride on that train with your spirit guide to High Heaven, a dimension of higher understanding, a plane of eternity, a parallel universe of Holy Joy!
And as you realize this, you will realize you have obligations to attend to. You will go about your life, with a new sense of awe intact, but you will sometimes forget your newly discovered spirituality. But to forget is only temporary. Soon you will realize your work, because it is our creation, is a part of neutral and finite matter that becomes eternal when you mark your individual stamp on it. Reflecting the divine within by conscientious application of skills and individual touch, you have molded a mirror-image of your soul onto nature in a beautiful and divine relationship. You put your heart into it. You find yourself.
You were born into this world forgetting your essence, you think you and your mother are the same, and then you become egocentric, and then you join a group for solidarity, and you try to define yourself in relation to the world. But when you wish to find your essence, your purpose, your love, your religion- And whatever avenue you chose up until this point- Christianity, Islam, Mother Earth or Mothership- to channel God, you've been confronted by the seeming irreconcilability of work and love, nature and society, individual and community, of highs and lows, of conflicting morals, of what you want and what you need, of religion and philosophy, religion and science, and religion and religion. Either you've looked down on other religions as immature or you've started questioning your own religion, maybe just enough to have serious doubts about it. Let this Manifesto be a reassurance to you. It's not your religion that's flawed, it's what man has done to your religion. Let this manifesto be a way to discern fact and fiction in your spiritual questions. God has been there you whole life, yes, whether you knew it or not. It's the forms he takes- the way life unfolds so you either find the right path of purpose and love and fulfillment over the path of attachment, of pity and suffering, of loneliness and emptiness. God is whatever keeps you on the right path. A song, a love who helps you find yourself, the sacredness of nature, a film, a quote, a friend, a secret signal from nature like on a lonely day where you just wanted to give up and you see your favorite animal- a butterfly- and it's as though life is winking at you...maybe it's inner strength, a will and determination to not give up- some motivation that keeps you going blindly into the uncertain future - inspiration of a voice within - when you reach down and find strength you didn't know you had...it's balance- finding the part of you that you tried to leave behind and integrating it in a way you can live with yourself- and when you reverse the path of suffocating yourself with soul-hindering clutter...it's a voice of reason you can speak with at any time. You talk to the source and you know it's God because it's everything you're lacking - it's total enlightenment, it's the unconditional love without fear - it's telling you to only be sure of the joy of love, truth and beauty that you are, because that is you at your best, and you should always be thinking of yourself as that- God is the voice telling you to look for the love, truth and beauty of others to find your essence, to find your balance and your foundation of faith, hope and trust...
Maybe you accept this pantheistic view of God, but you still feel a sense of sadness for the people you love who are suffering over addiction or other negative constant behavior and wish explaining God to them was as easy as it seemed in your head. Just be confident in your faith. If they are really considering finding God, let your confidence attract them. "What's new?", they might ask you. Be honest.
"I have found God, and my unconditional love for you is a manifestation of God. God is inside of you, and inside of me, and by loving Who You Really Are- your eternal soul, it brings me so much joy. But I would be a lot happier if you understood this for yourself and stopped [insert behavioral attachment here] because it is stealing your identity and turning you into a half-man half [insert object of attachment]. Your wisdom and our bond could shine a lot brighter if you sought out spiritual growth to balance out your earthly attachments, and the only way to even the scale would be for you to stop [insert attachment here] until you are wise enough to know that you are truly free from it, and that natural high you get in the place of the [attachment] will bring you a new joy you have never felt before. Right now, you assume what you're doing is a victimless crime. It's not true. You're hurting yourself and those you love you by using [attachment] as a crutch to feel happy when the real happiness comes from within. It's self-deception, a vicious cycle of attachment, and it's getting in the way of your ability to complete your cycle of self-awareness. Find you without [attachment], then go back to it if you really must."
Any variation or part of that is fine.
If this behavior starts out as something time and money consuming like an addiction, the person you love will have more time on their hands for discovering their true selves and true purpose in life once they quit it. After that, poor health might be the next obstacle they have to face. The more you guide the people you love to find a balance, and by guide I don't mean force, the happier they will be and you in turn will be; your relationship will grow to new heights. But you have to practice what you preach and listen to their suggestions, too; even if you don't like them, at least consider them. Practice knowing your rhythms- you can find your strengths and weaknesses so you can balance yourself out. Remember, the more balanced you become, the more aware you will be of your self and your surroundings, and the easier it will be to connect to the divine Holy Spirit that is transporting messages between you and God. That's all life is, anyway. One relationship with you and God, the source; the self and the eternity, the all; the part and the whole; the child and the parent. For as long as you live, your third eye Holy Spirit will be your God-sense; your intermediary to Eternity, and come to you in many forms. Eventually, the more you grow, the more of a positive impact you will have upon the world. Good karma and unconditional love will flow between you and the world with every inhate and exhale. Your priorities will straighten up. Things will fall into place. You will laugh at your consistent inconsistencies, your quirks and the strange situations you end up in. You will smile feeling at home whenever you lay your head, because God is always there with you.
"Where am I": if you ask yourself this, the answer is always "Here"
"What time is it": the answer is always going to be "Now"
Those are Eternal constants in your life...proof that God the Source is always with you
You are never alone.
The more good vibes you effortlessly give off, the more people will become attracted to you that you will welcome as sacred messengers of God. By this point, your communication skills should be well developed because of your articulated sense of understanding. Your soul mate and you will connect in passion, intimacy, and eloquent communication as you explore each other's tangible and intangible qualities. A union of souls will take place and the spiral of your soul will now be linked in with an interlocking soul. Who knows how many lifetimes it took to find you, you will ask. No answer will be necessary.
The more good vibes you give off, the more respectable and honest and smart and funny you will become. You will be careful not to do harm over somebody else's rights. You will keep your integrity as you pick up trash and clean your home and jealous folk try to crush you down. You be creative, whether with children or with objects, or both, and you will turn your community into a great place to be creative in. You will no longer accept some parts of the world as they are, and you will fight for your peace of mind. You will be the change you want to see in the world.
You have convictions- they are the same values all souls share because the fight fear and they seek peace and love and understanding and awareness and creativity and spirituality. Maybe they're in different words than the shared values I listed. If so, send them to me and we can work on this manifesto together. In fact, your constructive criticisms, critiques of society, and perspective on God is more than welcome.
You are a person of convictions- I know this because deep down, everyone is. Everyone who develops a sense of morality past rigid dogma is true person of convictions because they will not accept the easy answers. They will question morality up and down, and apply it wherever a chance to apply it opportunes itself. The person of convictions is a free thinker. You are a free thinker. God gave you free will, free choice, free thought. It will not overwhelm you. Your spirit guide is there to keep you protected.
Open yourself up to God, to the answers, to knowledge, to guidance. You will see them everywhere you go in nature.
That is the paradigm shift in consciousness. It starts with the attitude, imagination and the convictions, which conceives of a million thoughts every second, which grow in the garden of your mind. The thoughts you give attention to get the most sunlight, and two or more thoughts can synthesize and parent an idea, a concept that articulates the life you are experiencing. Keep in mind “mind over matter”, because your life is not determined by what happens to you, it’s your perspective and belief system that interpret this reality and make it good or bad. It’s not that events are value neutral; good and bad is determined by how much oppression of freedom and infringement on fairness and respect and equality; but that is only true if you have reached this level. To the moral relativist, life is very different in relation to attitude and experiences that one sees as bad, another, in their confusion, can see as acceptable. Depending on how we cope with our belief systems in our Conscience, and how society reinforces or works to modify our behaviors, we come up with new belief systems that accommodate for internal and external reaction to our experiences. You see how it all starts with belief? Our perspective are the lenses in which we view the world, and provide the foundation for all our seeds of thoughts to grow and manifest into blooming speech and then finally experience, which in turn influences attitude and the cycle starts all over again. This is understood after hearing about the near-death experiences studied by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying (where people saw different things when they were clinically dead but there was a pattern of religious figures; the religious figure depended on what religion the patient was) reading Conversations with God and watching the film The Orphanage, all of which clarified my beliefs in mind over matter
The mind, I say, is so powerful! You know it is! Turn your pain from life into strength- use it to break your crutches and use it grow deep down in your soul. Use your third eye. Expand your consciousness. The more this mental transformation is practiced, the more answers will show up all around you. Meaning! Meaning will interact with an open-mind and over-active morality. It's not that you are judging all that is around you...you are feeling its pain. And you are turning that pain into strength and using the power of giving and sharing and loving and understanding and forgiveness, yes, forgiveness, for you trespass, too! And you keep giving and growing and learning and becoming more responsible, more aware; you wake up inside individually and socially and become more accountable for your actions. You learn not to fear death, or God, or inevitability- come what may!, you cry, with every knew low there is an equal and opposite high! With every new loss, a gain in truth! With all the pain that you let yourself feel in your over-active imagination and empathy, you grow stronger with reassurance and faith and understanding! You keep on growing, you sacred soul, and you are the change you want to see in the world, and the change I want to see, too!
We all want to see you be that change! God wants you to be that change!, God is inside of you, in your eternal soul- separate but together - You want to see You be that change! So go ahead and choose life, and you and the world will reciprocally bless one another until the end of your Shiva dance on the causal plane! The world is ready for you to take your place among the Eternal Enlightened Plane of Soul, Nature and Universe- to be a God amongst Gods. God is incomplete without you, and always waiting for you to choose the right path of growth. Love the life you live and live the life you love; find your balance; find your God through your Spirit Guide, and then the future of mankind and the trembling, ravished planet will have one more potential guardian on its side.
I am not alone in this call to usher in a paradigm shift in consciousness. Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life, Daniel Pincbeck’s 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl all support my belief in concept; I have yet to read their works. Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, Wes “Scoop” Nisker’s Crazy Wisdom Richard Hopper’s Jesus, Krishna, Buddha and Lao Tzu: The Parallel Sayings and the film Waking Life are all great examples of what I am saying, and these works have profoundly impacted my belief system. They are so plain and simple; the Torah, Bible and Quran have influenced those works but the authors also took the liberty of uniting those texts, and even the mystical teachings of Taoism, Christian Gnosticism, Islamic Sufism, Raja Yoga and Jungian psychology to show that we can experience The Source without words, only pure Holy Spirit is needed. If we realize we are all divine- us, the earth and the universe, it could end dehumanization and over-consumption and stop our parasitic relationship with the Earth. It could make us realize all religions are universal and that all names, races/ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations are different, yes, but we are still equal, and all one in God, and therefore the differences should be celebrated.
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