"The Fall" Was Just A Dream:
Can we really separate reality from what is in our mind?
Does a waking life know when it is truly awake?
Does it keep waking up one level of awareness at a time?
Can consciousness only handle so much that
It focuses on some truths, leaving others behind?
Your heart is set on a timer that rouses itself from sleep
We often say "not yet...let me return to my dream I now miss"
Knowing we can never go back, we cry, "Let me have but this!"
But if you learn not to deny the seed of thought that accompanies a change of heart
Then listen to the feeling- it is an urge to know
If there is a world on the other side of the rainbow
Though tornadoes of fables can take us there from time to time
We must realize as children we once lived in Oz’s prime
But there was trouble in paradise and something needed reform!
So buying into the seeds of doubt, no longer innocent we were reborn
Pretending there was no soul, no God, and no future perfect rest
Was our attempt to infiltrate the black and white world, throw away its ugliness, and save the best
But somewhere along the way we buried our heart in the empirical empire
Which suffered a drought because hope no longer rained down from shapeless clouds we used to give perfect form to with our faith
They became filled with mistrust and doubt
It was a world suffocated from lack of love’s courage and duty and unity and that lived in the darkness of the shadow of its own lies
It ruled our hearts with the fear that even our consciousness dies
But in our wildest moments we listened over the cries of helplessness surrounding our hearts and took a trip into inner space
Where we, like children, dreamed of an emerald city, not knowing that was where our true nature lay
And thus afterwards we went back to the grind of living out our perception of ourselves as less than divine
But where our hearts will lead us to is the same place for everyone
Heaven on earth is an urge that cannot die, as sure as we are born
Remember the spirit; the Presence; the awe of life
We are vessels all containing the same mind; in our imagination is where the universe resides; and in our hearts the best possible universe is alive--
It gives credence to the highest idea we can have of ourselves
That we are love, truth, and beauty and nothing else
And nothing we think, say or do to seemingly contradict this can actually rot the core of this, our god self being
Inherent in all things; all in all
Sleeping through our identity crisis
Nothing can change without first wanting to be changed
Who can see without first believing?
Who can know without experiencing?
What happens when the universe wakes up
Is that it will know the greatest story ever told
Each and every vantage point eventually
Sacrificed the comfort of sleep in order to save the world
Friday, May 9, 2008
Response to Eric Coleman's "High-Level Officials Warn of Fake Terror"
Eric Coleman:
High-Level Officials Warn of Fake Terror
11:26am Thursday, May 1
An article I found pointing out that our govenrment might use false flag terror attacks to obtain dictatorship in America. This claim is backed up by Ray McGovern, former CIA Analyst during the Regan and Bush (1) Administration, Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski former US National Security Advisor during the Reagan Admin, Former United Nations weapons inspector and Marine Scott Ritter and several other journalist and highly level officials. Note that the article isn't directly backed by any of the aforementioned people, but their individual statements corroborate its claims. But do not take their, or my word for it, it would be against everything I said in my notes if I asked you to blindly believe and listen to me, so do some research, but I am certain that even after a miniscule amount of research, you find a staggering amount of evidence that ours, (and most) governments terrorize its own citizens to advance there platform. I just want more to be aware and not fall for the old tricks, its time we all got smarter and more aware.
http://www.infowars.com/?p=1843
High-Level Officials Warn of Fake Terror
George Washington’s BlogApril 30, 2008
A variety of current and former high-level officials have recently warned that the Bush administration is attempting to instill a dictatorship in America, and will itself carry out a fake terrorist attack in order to obtain one.
Background
FBI agents, Time Magazine, Keith Olbermann and The Washington Post and Rolling Stone have all stated that the administration has issued terror alerts based on scant intelligence in order to rally people around the flag when the administration was suffering in the polls. This implies — as an initial matter only — that the administration will play fast and loose with the facts in order to instill fear for political purposes
More to the point, a former prominent republican congressman stated that the U.S. is close to becoming a totalitarian society and that the Bush administration is using fear to try to ensure that this happens.
General Tommy Franks stated that if another terrorist attack occurs in the United States "the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government".
Current U.S. Congressman Ron Paul stated, the government "is determined to have martial law", and that the government is hoping to get the people "fearful enough that they will accept the man on the white horse"
And Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, said "if there is another terror attack, "I believe the president will get what he wants", which will include a dictatorship.
Terror on U.S. Citizens by American Government?
But would the government actually kills its own people to instill sufficient fear so that it can get what it wants? Read what the following very smart people are saying, and then judge for yourself:
A retired 27-year CIA analyst who prepared and presented Presidential Daily Briefs and served as a high-level analyst for several presidents, stated that if there was another major attack in the U.S., it would lead to martial law. He went on to say:
"We have to be careful, if somebody does this kind of provocation, big violent explosions of some kind, we have to not take the word of the masters there in Washington that this was some terrorist event because it could well be a provocation allowing them, or seemingly to allow them to get what they want."
The former CIA analyst would not put it past the government to "play fast and loose" with terror alerts and warnings and even events themselves in order to rally people behind the flag
The former assistant secretary of treasury in the Reagan administration, called the "Father of Reaganomics", who is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service, and, said: "
Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?" He goes on to say:
If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush’s declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.
A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives’ Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel’s complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.
Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?
A member of the British Parliament stated that "there is a very real danger" that the American government will stage a false flag terror attack in order to justify war against Iran and to gain complete control domestically
A former National Security Adviser told the Senate that a terrorist act might be carried out in the U.S. and falsely blamed on Iran to justify war against that nation.
President Carter recently impliedly acknowledged the risk of staged provocation in order to start a war against Iran.
The former UN Weapons Inspector, an American, who stated before the Iraq war started that there were no weapons of mass destruction is now saying that he would not rule out staged government terror by the U.S. government.
And an allegedly-leaked GOP memo touts a new terror attack as a way to reverse the party’s decline.
No way, That’s Nuts
Sounds nuts, right?
Sorry to have to tell you, but "false flag terror" — that is, state-sponsored terrorism, blamed on the "bad guys" of choice — is an age-old trick which has been used by governments around the world for thousands of years to consolidate power and create support from their people. See this article on the Reichstag fire, and this article on the perennial ploy of those grabbing power.
But even recent events provide a glimpse into the world of false flag terror:
On October 12, 2005, Australia’s largest newspaper quoted the well-respected former Indonesian president as saying that the government had a role in the Bali bombings
And Americans dressed as Arabs have apparently been setting off car bombs in Iraq (apparently, when it was discovered that some of the cars used in Iraqi bombings recently came from the U.S., the cover story became American cars were involved in car bombings only because they had recently been stolen from the U.S. and then shipped to Iraq — but does it make sense that Iraqi insurgents would steal cars in the U.S. and ship them all the way to Iraq?)
Similarly, Britain’s false flag attacks in Iraq made the news. And the press has acknowledged that the death of the lead investigator into the Basra incident was mysterious.
And the former director of the National Security Agency said "By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism - in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation"(the audio is here)
History proves that the officials’ warnings of a terror attack by our own government are well-founded.
*************************************************************************************
Shep Glennon's Response:
Watch Out for a False Attack & A Neocon Totalitarian Government
In my response to Eric Coleman, who brought up the issue of state-sponsered terrorism as well as the main topic of discussion here tonight: false flags. The government has made us totally vulnerable to them. They can raise the terrorist threat level to ensure a military regime takeover of the United States. The possibilities are real. Watch out.
AM is Aaron McGruder, outspoken cartoonist, the brains behind The Boondocks
SL is Salon.com journalist Stephen Lemons
SL: A lot of folks would argue that no matter what our disagreements are internally, if we’re attacked from the outside, we have to come together and support the current administration even if we have problems with it. How do you respond to that argument?
AM: I don’t think that’s true. Look, they're telling us these people are bad because they hate us, and they hate our way of life. And they hate our way of life because they hate freedom, and they hate the fact we have freely elected officials. This is what the president said. Well, he wasn’t elected! We really have to think about that. Considering that people around the world, other people, people “over there,” “bad” people will always try to do bad things, that’s kind of outside of your control. The only thing you can be responsible for is what goes on here. The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy. None. The only thing we can exercise some will on is what happens here domestically. So I think the focus is wrong.I don’t think the American people should be worried at all about Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or anybody, because our government is going to do what it wants to do to them regardless of what happens here. And what happened here is what allowed those attacks to take place. The intelligence community failed. Security failed. The military failed. Everybody failed at the same time. I can be really nice to them and say, “You guys really messed up and need to check yourself.” Or, I could not be nice and say, “You know, I don’t think it’s really probable that all the systems can fail at the same time, which means something far more insidious took place.” People are really afraid to get into that.
SL: Are you suggesting that some collusion on the part of our government in the September 11 attacks?
AM: I’m not suggesting that. I’m saying I’m not going there. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're idiots, and not that they had something far more nefarious in mind. However, history does teach us that the government has done things like that before, particularly with Pearl Harbor, where there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence that [FDR] was aware of it and lured the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. He literally left it undefended. There’s some new evidence that has just come out about the CIA planning terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the ‘60s and how they were going to set up Castro for it in order to get America behind a war in Cuba. That’s not even a conspiracy theory. The CIA drew up the plans, even though it never happened. So if I were to go that route, I wouldn’t be crazy. But I’m not going to go that route. I’m just going to say that the American people need to be concerned about what happens here. Forget what happens overseas. That’s out of your control. Be concerned with what happens here. Because honestly, if your game is tight here, we can’t be attacked. If our intelligence community and airports and military are doing what they're supposed to be do, then we should be relatively OK.
SL: This reminds me of the strip where Huey calls the FBI terrorist hotline, tells them he's got a tip on someone who helped the terrorists, and it's Ronald Reagan. Do you think there's been enough coverage of the support our leaders have given the mujahedin in the past?
AM: The media have reported on it. But it's not so much [that] they said it or not, it's the way they've said it. When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story. Like, anthrax -- very, very important. Pay attention, it's scary. When they report on the U.S. creation of these people, these terrorists, it's all very matter of fact. Like, oh yeah, we gave them a whole bunch of money, and now on to sports. So a lot of it is not necessarily an issue of it being covered up. In fact, it can't be covered up -- it's well known. But to me, it's not given the right emphasis. The question is to what extent is the government culpable for creating the people who have done this? And to what extent should they be held responsible for the actions of terrorists that they have supported in the past? That's what this is all about. I'm talking about Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., their whole crew, up until the crew that's in there today. After the embassy attacks in Africa, they were well aware of Osama bin Laden. They were well aware of his location in Afghanistan, his protection by the Taliban, and this Bush administration gave them $43 million this year! And nobody talks about it, and nobody holds them accountable, and that's wrong.
SL: To be fair, though, I believe even the Clinton administration supported the Taliban in the beginning because they were viewed as a stabilizing force.
AM: Well, to hell with Clinton, too. I'm not a Democrat. I don't give a damn about Clinton. Hold these people responsible! You know, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have supported individuals and regimes that have slaughtered millions across the globe. And they need to be held accountable for that.
SL: Your depiction of the news media in your strip makes it out to be almost a cheerleader for the government. Is that a fair assessment of your opinion?
AM: They've absolutely been playing cheerleader for the government, to the extent that even they've had to admit it. I watch news shows, and they're like, "Yeah, we're treating Bush differently now." I don't want the news to be patriotic. I don't want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don't want any of that. I want the news delivered unbiased. I thought that was the whole point with journalism. They've thrown that out the window. And because they've all thrown it out the window at the same time, it's supposedly acceptable. No! It's ridiculous. I don't need to see that. This is war. It's serious. People are dying on both sides. How dare the media just give in when the government says don't air any of Osama bin Laden's video messages! What is this? He's going to rub his nose and something is going to blow up over here? Like terrorists don't have satellite television, and they can't watch foreign news and get the same messages. That's insane. It's totally and thoroughly irresponsible behavior by the entire institution of the media.
SL: Don't hold back, Aaron.
AM: I won't. I was talking to some television journalists about this who gave me some interesting insight. Right now, they're scared to be critical of the government. Everything is about access. Reporters are afraid that the administration will cut them off. Decades ago, the mark of a good reporter was how much dirt you could dig up. Like the Watergate scandal. They were actively trying to find out what was going on and report the truth to people. Now it's the exact opposite. Nobody wants to say anything that makes the government mad, and that's ridiculous. Also, after the attacks, now people think it's unpatriotic to say anything critical of the government. Come on, Bush is a moron. There is no doubt about it. And they really didn't have a problem going there before. But now, nobody wants to call him on it. People get excited because he can speak well. What world is this? When we're happy that the president can articulate well. That's something they only used to say about black men. "Oh, you speak so well." That's nuts. You don't say that about the president. We're supposed to have higher standards. The media are a big part of shaping the perception of the country, and right now, they're not asking the tough questions. They're not exploring, for example, the Bush administration's financial ties with Afghanistan. The fact that George Bush Sr. has financial investments in the area, and those investments become much more valuable when the Taliban government is removed. I'm not talking about getting into a whole bunch of conspiracies. Report what's actually happening, and challenge the government to explain itself. Why didn't they ask more questions? Like, how did this happen? How did four planes get hijacked in one day? And who got fired? That's the question I want to know the answer to, because a whole bunch of people should have gotten fired for what happened on Sept. 11. Report on the fact that G. W. Bush is sealing presidential papers. Indefinitely. His, his father's, Reagan's. It's totally unconstitutional. Why don't they talk about that?
SL: On the topic of George W's I.Q., I think that idea is pretty threatening to people right now, because like it or not, we're stuck with him.
AM: Yes, but living in denial doesn't help the situation. We have to confront the very scary fact that the president is a moron. He's really dumb. He's got some really smart people around him, and people weren't afraid to say that before. They said it in a nice way, but they said it. It was like, he's dumb, but he's got Cheney and he's got Powell, so we'll probably be OK. But now they act like he's done something great. You know, he's called [the terrorists] "evil." That's really some childish stuff. They're bad, we're good. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. That's so incredibly stupid. What do you think they do? They call us "evil." I just see so many parallels between both sides in this war, and it's really uncomfortable. You know, they kill civilians, we kill civilians. They say they're justified, we say the same thing. This is gang warfare on an international level. That's all it is. And when gang warfare happens in American cities, we say it's wrong. When somebody loads a gun, goes 20 blocks and kills the guy who killed his brother, it's not justifiable homicide or self-defense, it's murder and we put people in jail for it. Why is it acceptable that we do it now?
See the interview in its entirety at:
http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2001/12/07/mcgruder/index.html
Also see the links Eric used to bring this to my attention:
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/04/high-level-officials-warns-of-fake.html
********************************************************************************
BT:
Yes, let's take the opinions of a professional cartoonist as the gospel truth. Everyone run and hide!! Gimme a break...
CW:
wow. this is incredibly uninformed garbage, almost unprecedented in its idiocy. this article came to mind: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060701faessay85411/joseph-s-nye-jr/transformational-leadership-and-u-s-grand-strategy.html
PDH:
I'm sorry Shep, but I need something more concrete and credible than two website links and a rant by the creator of Boondocks.
Eric Coleman:
Well the second article had quite a few links to words and audio clips from high level officials, and editorial pieces looking into all that is speculated. In case you missed it, here are those links, and then some.
Time Magazine Article on threat warnings and news correlation http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1211369,00.html
British Soldiers carrying out false flag attacks in Iraq
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-09/19/content_3514065.htmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4260894.stm
Keith Olbermann threat warnings and fear mongering http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Olbermann_The_Nexus_of_politics_and_0815.html
Rolling Stone threat warnings and fear mongering
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18056504/truth_or_terrorism_the_real_story_behind_five_years_of_high_alerts
Washington Post threat warnings and fear mongering
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60088-2004May27.html?referrer=emailarticle
Daniel Ellsberg former American military analyst
http://web.archive.org/web/20060615080434/http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2MDYmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTY4MTU5MjcmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXky
Ron Paul Republican United States Congressman from Lake Jackson, Texas, a physician, and a 2008 U.S. presidential candidate.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/121005slamsbush.htm
Former Republican Congressman and CIA official Bob Barr
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/december2005/111205totalitariandanger.htm
US Gen. Tommy Franks
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/20/185048.shtml
Ray McGovern former 27 year CIA Analyst
http://web.archive.org/web/20051218073049/http://faculty.schreiner.edu/tomwells/ray_mcgovern_bio.htmhttp://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/191005McGovern.htm
Zbigniew Brzezinski former US National Security Advisor during the Reagan Admin
http://www.senate.gov/%7Eforeign/testimony/2007/BrzezinskiTestimony070201.pdf
Former United Nations weapons inspector and Marine Scott Ritter
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/241005weaponsinspector.htm
Former National Security Agency Director Lt. General William Odom
http://hammernews.com/odomspeech.htm
Francesco Cossiga former President of the Italian Republic
http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/cossiga_ex_italian_pres_intel_agencies_know_911_inside_job.htm
Andreas von Bulow state-secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Defence (1976-1980) and Minister for Research and Technology (1980-1982)http://www.prisonplanet.com/020403vonbulow.mp3
Yukihisa Fujita Japanese politician of the Democratic Party of Japan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qntZZyGjos
Fujita Pt. 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWgpizXEnL4&feature=related
George Galloway Scottish Politician http://prisonplanet.com/Pages/Sept05/130905Galloway.htm
I hope that is enough creditablility, from home, abroad, official and journalistic. But forget all that, look at the facts and use your own brain to rationally come to a conclusion. Hell the rolling stone article broke it down on a date to date analysis for when alerts were issued and what else was going on with the news that day.
Me:
My post was the posing of a question, it wasn't meant to be scholarly. I guess what BT, PDH and CW wanted was a well-informed, fully-documented report. No where in there does it try to be anything more than opinion. Maybe BT, PDH and CW didn't fully READ THE ARTICLE? It was an interview, not the freakin' 9/11 Commission guys. It's a man trusting his intuition and making logical philosophical statements to back it up. Either our administration has made a terribe failure, and are idiots, or there is something more nefarious at stake.I suppose I should have just reposted your article, Eric, because it has a lot of sources that people can check out. People want opinions from status, and you gave them status.My brain tells me- Bush already revoked part of the Constitution- the right to a fair and speedy trial by jury- with his secret prisons. The PATRIOT Act is a prime example of using fear to trample civil liberties. What, may I ask, is so "patriotic" about this?
My question to BT, PDH, and CW is what is it about this man's judgment that is so faulty?
Questioning the almighty mighty Gov... i mean our government is unpatriotic, even if it is constructive criticism.
My constructive criticism to the government would be to stop reading The Prince, because it is better to be respected than feared, not the other way around. The good violence does is only temporary. The people will resent you forever once they find out. People are going to look back on this moment in history, and especially the period of 1945-1999 as a dark moment in history. The government and the CIA have been murderous, clandestine, arrogant, self-righteous hypocrites, and greedy; all due to foreign woes. This isn't what America was made to be. George Washington, in his farwell address, warned about getting mixed up in foreign interests. And now the shit we pull with neoliberal globalization, state-sponsered terrorism, unfounded and unjust wars, enthocentrism, the PATRIOT Act and lies, lies, lies have dragged our good name in the mud.
How can we earn our respect back? Responsibility; accountability. I wish we could end NAFTA, revise World Trade, keep soldiers in America and isolatate ourselves; but I think the change has to occur with an attitude adjustment of Americans as a whole. Responsibility; accountability...how else can institutions of power be reformed, if not from the inside, in the minds and hearts of blind men and women?"How come the president wants to fix other countriesWhen he ain't fixed his own yet?" asked Tupac during the first Iraq war. How can you remove the speck from someone else's eye when your own eye is bespeckled? You ain't cleaned up your backyard but you're going around tryin to fix up other people's. “It’s been difficult for the government of Iraq to create a constitution. Why don’t we just give them ours? It’s been working for 200 years but it’s not like we’re not using it anymore.” Unknown
To BT-I'm glad you understand this post was an opinion. Listen- I wouldn't be surprised if the goverment were up to its old scare tactics, and I just wish other people knew the real reasons we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and all the lives we destroyed and continue to destroy- from COINTELPRO to Israel to being the cause of illegal immigration...if people had more knowledge of their government's wrongdoings and lies, I wouldn't be so afraid. I'm just trying to be prepared, and pose questions and evidence (see Eric's postings for that) and raise awareness so that others may understand the folly of blind patriotism.By the way, if this is your way of trying to convince me to "see the light" and convert me into conservatisim, then you'd have better luck brushing a wild tiger's teeth. If you only stopped by to mock my words and retreat back to neconblogworld.net, well then you did a damn fine job.
To CW-Can you also read Eric's 18 links he posted for you, since you did not even bother research the link to the George Washington Blog I posted at the bottom of the article, because there's your information. I wish you'd have been more specific, too, rather than vaguely trash something. And how did you and Brian know I was thinking of tagging you guys on this post haha that's weird...
To PDH-You and BT were negligent enough to write off a cartoonist...come on- Jesus was a carpenter and Gandhi worked a spinning wheel. I've never seen such righteousness and intution in anyone else, than these two men, but do I judge and stereotype them for not being credible and concrete? Find me a flaw in Aaron's thinking about 9/11 or the media or the way Bush treats his enemy. He's deductive, and also a part of the media, and wise. He wasn't trying to present a formal debate.If you want credible and concrete, read the 18 links Eric posted from Time, ex-C.I.A., the Washington Post and politicans domestic and abroad.And can you please also be more specific?What is it with you three? Are we going to have a debate or are you just going to fail to use your minds this time? It's a shame, all the time (I assume) you spent reading the article, and now you're gonna float away and not even write a decent response?
High-Level Officials Warn of Fake Terror
11:26am Thursday, May 1
An article I found pointing out that our govenrment might use false flag terror attacks to obtain dictatorship in America. This claim is backed up by Ray McGovern, former CIA Analyst during the Regan and Bush (1) Administration, Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski former US National Security Advisor during the Reagan Admin, Former United Nations weapons inspector and Marine Scott Ritter and several other journalist and highly level officials. Note that the article isn't directly backed by any of the aforementioned people, but their individual statements corroborate its claims. But do not take their, or my word for it, it would be against everything I said in my notes if I asked you to blindly believe and listen to me, so do some research, but I am certain that even after a miniscule amount of research, you find a staggering amount of evidence that ours, (and most) governments terrorize its own citizens to advance there platform. I just want more to be aware and not fall for the old tricks, its time we all got smarter and more aware.
http://www.infowars.com/?p=1843
High-Level Officials Warn of Fake Terror
George Washington’s BlogApril 30, 2008
A variety of current and former high-level officials have recently warned that the Bush administration is attempting to instill a dictatorship in America, and will itself carry out a fake terrorist attack in order to obtain one.
Background
FBI agents, Time Magazine, Keith Olbermann and The Washington Post and Rolling Stone have all stated that the administration has issued terror alerts based on scant intelligence in order to rally people around the flag when the administration was suffering in the polls. This implies — as an initial matter only — that the administration will play fast and loose with the facts in order to instill fear for political purposes
More to the point, a former prominent republican congressman stated that the U.S. is close to becoming a totalitarian society and that the Bush administration is using fear to try to ensure that this happens.
General Tommy Franks stated that if another terrorist attack occurs in the United States "the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government".
Current U.S. Congressman Ron Paul stated, the government "is determined to have martial law", and that the government is hoping to get the people "fearful enough that they will accept the man on the white horse"
And Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, said "if there is another terror attack, "I believe the president will get what he wants", which will include a dictatorship.
Terror on U.S. Citizens by American Government?
But would the government actually kills its own people to instill sufficient fear so that it can get what it wants? Read what the following very smart people are saying, and then judge for yourself:
A retired 27-year CIA analyst who prepared and presented Presidential Daily Briefs and served as a high-level analyst for several presidents, stated that if there was another major attack in the U.S., it would lead to martial law. He went on to say:
"We have to be careful, if somebody does this kind of provocation, big violent explosions of some kind, we have to not take the word of the masters there in Washington that this was some terrorist event because it could well be a provocation allowing them, or seemingly to allow them to get what they want."
The former CIA analyst would not put it past the government to "play fast and loose" with terror alerts and warnings and even events themselves in order to rally people behind the flag
The former assistant secretary of treasury in the Reagan administration, called the "Father of Reaganomics", who is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service, and, said: "
Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?" He goes on to say:
If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush’s declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.
A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives’ Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel’s complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.
Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?
A member of the British Parliament stated that "there is a very real danger" that the American government will stage a false flag terror attack in order to justify war against Iran and to gain complete control domestically
A former National Security Adviser told the Senate that a terrorist act might be carried out in the U.S. and falsely blamed on Iran to justify war against that nation.
President Carter recently impliedly acknowledged the risk of staged provocation in order to start a war against Iran.
The former UN Weapons Inspector, an American, who stated before the Iraq war started that there were no weapons of mass destruction is now saying that he would not rule out staged government terror by the U.S. government.
And an allegedly-leaked GOP memo touts a new terror attack as a way to reverse the party’s decline.
No way, That’s Nuts
Sounds nuts, right?
Sorry to have to tell you, but "false flag terror" — that is, state-sponsored terrorism, blamed on the "bad guys" of choice — is an age-old trick which has been used by governments around the world for thousands of years to consolidate power and create support from their people. See this article on the Reichstag fire, and this article on the perennial ploy of those grabbing power.
But even recent events provide a glimpse into the world of false flag terror:
On October 12, 2005, Australia’s largest newspaper quoted the well-respected former Indonesian president as saying that the government had a role in the Bali bombings
And Americans dressed as Arabs have apparently been setting off car bombs in Iraq (apparently, when it was discovered that some of the cars used in Iraqi bombings recently came from the U.S., the cover story became American cars were involved in car bombings only because they had recently been stolen from the U.S. and then shipped to Iraq — but does it make sense that Iraqi insurgents would steal cars in the U.S. and ship them all the way to Iraq?)
Similarly, Britain’s false flag attacks in Iraq made the news. And the press has acknowledged that the death of the lead investigator into the Basra incident was mysterious.
And the former director of the National Security Agency said "By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism - in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation"(the audio is here)
History proves that the officials’ warnings of a terror attack by our own government are well-founded.
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Shep Glennon's Response:
Watch Out for a False Attack & A Neocon Totalitarian Government
In my response to Eric Coleman, who brought up the issue of state-sponsered terrorism as well as the main topic of discussion here tonight: false flags. The government has made us totally vulnerable to them. They can raise the terrorist threat level to ensure a military regime takeover of the United States. The possibilities are real. Watch out.
AM is Aaron McGruder, outspoken cartoonist, the brains behind The Boondocks
SL is Salon.com journalist Stephen Lemons
SL: A lot of folks would argue that no matter what our disagreements are internally, if we’re attacked from the outside, we have to come together and support the current administration even if we have problems with it. How do you respond to that argument?
AM: I don’t think that’s true. Look, they're telling us these people are bad because they hate us, and they hate our way of life. And they hate our way of life because they hate freedom, and they hate the fact we have freely elected officials. This is what the president said. Well, he wasn’t elected! We really have to think about that. Considering that people around the world, other people, people “over there,” “bad” people will always try to do bad things, that’s kind of outside of your control. The only thing you can be responsible for is what goes on here. The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy. None. The only thing we can exercise some will on is what happens here domestically. So I think the focus is wrong.I don’t think the American people should be worried at all about Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or anybody, because our government is going to do what it wants to do to them regardless of what happens here. And what happened here is what allowed those attacks to take place. The intelligence community failed. Security failed. The military failed. Everybody failed at the same time. I can be really nice to them and say, “You guys really messed up and need to check yourself.” Or, I could not be nice and say, “You know, I don’t think it’s really probable that all the systems can fail at the same time, which means something far more insidious took place.” People are really afraid to get into that.
SL: Are you suggesting that some collusion on the part of our government in the September 11 attacks?
AM: I’m not suggesting that. I’m saying I’m not going there. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're idiots, and not that they had something far more nefarious in mind. However, history does teach us that the government has done things like that before, particularly with Pearl Harbor, where there’s an overwhelming amount of evidence that [FDR] was aware of it and lured the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. He literally left it undefended. There’s some new evidence that has just come out about the CIA planning terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the ‘60s and how they were going to set up Castro for it in order to get America behind a war in Cuba. That’s not even a conspiracy theory. The CIA drew up the plans, even though it never happened. So if I were to go that route, I wouldn’t be crazy. But I’m not going to go that route. I’m just going to say that the American people need to be concerned about what happens here. Forget what happens overseas. That’s out of your control. Be concerned with what happens here. Because honestly, if your game is tight here, we can’t be attacked. If our intelligence community and airports and military are doing what they're supposed to be do, then we should be relatively OK.
SL: This reminds me of the strip where Huey calls the FBI terrorist hotline, tells them he's got a tip on someone who helped the terrorists, and it's Ronald Reagan. Do you think there's been enough coverage of the support our leaders have given the mujahedin in the past?
AM: The media have reported on it. But it's not so much [that] they said it or not, it's the way they've said it. When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story. Like, anthrax -- very, very important. Pay attention, it's scary. When they report on the U.S. creation of these people, these terrorists, it's all very matter of fact. Like, oh yeah, we gave them a whole bunch of money, and now on to sports. So a lot of it is not necessarily an issue of it being covered up. In fact, it can't be covered up -- it's well known. But to me, it's not given the right emphasis. The question is to what extent is the government culpable for creating the people who have done this? And to what extent should they be held responsible for the actions of terrorists that they have supported in the past? That's what this is all about. I'm talking about Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., their whole crew, up until the crew that's in there today. After the embassy attacks in Africa, they were well aware of Osama bin Laden. They were well aware of his location in Afghanistan, his protection by the Taliban, and this Bush administration gave them $43 million this year! And nobody talks about it, and nobody holds them accountable, and that's wrong.
SL: To be fair, though, I believe even the Clinton administration supported the Taliban in the beginning because they were viewed as a stabilizing force.
AM: Well, to hell with Clinton, too. I'm not a Democrat. I don't give a damn about Clinton. Hold these people responsible! You know, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have supported individuals and regimes that have slaughtered millions across the globe. And they need to be held accountable for that.
SL: Your depiction of the news media in your strip makes it out to be almost a cheerleader for the government. Is that a fair assessment of your opinion?
AM: They've absolutely been playing cheerleader for the government, to the extent that even they've had to admit it. I watch news shows, and they're like, "Yeah, we're treating Bush differently now." I don't want the news to be patriotic. I don't want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don't want any of that. I want the news delivered unbiased. I thought that was the whole point with journalism. They've thrown that out the window. And because they've all thrown it out the window at the same time, it's supposedly acceptable. No! It's ridiculous. I don't need to see that. This is war. It's serious. People are dying on both sides. How dare the media just give in when the government says don't air any of Osama bin Laden's video messages! What is this? He's going to rub his nose and something is going to blow up over here? Like terrorists don't have satellite television, and they can't watch foreign news and get the same messages. That's insane. It's totally and thoroughly irresponsible behavior by the entire institution of the media.
SL: Don't hold back, Aaron.
AM: I won't. I was talking to some television journalists about this who gave me some interesting insight. Right now, they're scared to be critical of the government. Everything is about access. Reporters are afraid that the administration will cut them off. Decades ago, the mark of a good reporter was how much dirt you could dig up. Like the Watergate scandal. They were actively trying to find out what was going on and report the truth to people. Now it's the exact opposite. Nobody wants to say anything that makes the government mad, and that's ridiculous. Also, after the attacks, now people think it's unpatriotic to say anything critical of the government. Come on, Bush is a moron. There is no doubt about it. And they really didn't have a problem going there before. But now, nobody wants to call him on it. People get excited because he can speak well. What world is this? When we're happy that the president can articulate well. That's something they only used to say about black men. "Oh, you speak so well." That's nuts. You don't say that about the president. We're supposed to have higher standards. The media are a big part of shaping the perception of the country, and right now, they're not asking the tough questions. They're not exploring, for example, the Bush administration's financial ties with Afghanistan. The fact that George Bush Sr. has financial investments in the area, and those investments become much more valuable when the Taliban government is removed. I'm not talking about getting into a whole bunch of conspiracies. Report what's actually happening, and challenge the government to explain itself. Why didn't they ask more questions? Like, how did this happen? How did four planes get hijacked in one day? And who got fired? That's the question I want to know the answer to, because a whole bunch of people should have gotten fired for what happened on Sept. 11. Report on the fact that G. W. Bush is sealing presidential papers. Indefinitely. His, his father's, Reagan's. It's totally unconstitutional. Why don't they talk about that?
SL: On the topic of George W's I.Q., I think that idea is pretty threatening to people right now, because like it or not, we're stuck with him.
AM: Yes, but living in denial doesn't help the situation. We have to confront the very scary fact that the president is a moron. He's really dumb. He's got some really smart people around him, and people weren't afraid to say that before. They said it in a nice way, but they said it. It was like, he's dumb, but he's got Cheney and he's got Powell, so we'll probably be OK. But now they act like he's done something great. You know, he's called [the terrorists] "evil." That's really some childish stuff. They're bad, we're good. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. That's so incredibly stupid. What do you think they do? They call us "evil." I just see so many parallels between both sides in this war, and it's really uncomfortable. You know, they kill civilians, we kill civilians. They say they're justified, we say the same thing. This is gang warfare on an international level. That's all it is. And when gang warfare happens in American cities, we say it's wrong. When somebody loads a gun, goes 20 blocks and kills the guy who killed his brother, it's not justifiable homicide or self-defense, it's murder and we put people in jail for it. Why is it acceptable that we do it now?
See the interview in its entirety at:
http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2001/12/07/mcgruder/index.html
Also see the links Eric used to bring this to my attention:
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/04/high-level-officials-warns-of-fake.html
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BT:
Yes, let's take the opinions of a professional cartoonist as the gospel truth. Everyone run and hide!! Gimme a break...
CW:
wow. this is incredibly uninformed garbage, almost unprecedented in its idiocy. this article came to mind: http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060701faessay85411/joseph-s-nye-jr/transformational-leadership-and-u-s-grand-strategy.html
PDH:
I'm sorry Shep, but I need something more concrete and credible than two website links and a rant by the creator of Boondocks.
Eric Coleman:
Well the second article had quite a few links to words and audio clips from high level officials, and editorial pieces looking into all that is speculated. In case you missed it, here are those links, and then some.
Time Magazine Article on threat warnings and news correlation http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1211369,00.html
British Soldiers carrying out false flag attacks in Iraq
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-09/19/content_3514065.htmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4260894.stm
Keith Olbermann threat warnings and fear mongering http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Olbermann_The_Nexus_of_politics_and_0815.html
Rolling Stone threat warnings and fear mongering
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18056504/truth_or_terrorism_the_real_story_behind_five_years_of_high_alerts
Washington Post threat warnings and fear mongering
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60088-2004May27.html?referrer=emailarticle
Daniel Ellsberg former American military analyst
http://web.archive.org/web/20060615080434/http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk2MDYmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTY4MTU5MjcmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXky
Ron Paul Republican United States Congressman from Lake Jackson, Texas, a physician, and a 2008 U.S. presidential candidate.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/121005slamsbush.htm
Former Republican Congressman and CIA official Bob Barr
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/december2005/111205totalitariandanger.htm
US Gen. Tommy Franks
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/20/185048.shtml
Ray McGovern former 27 year CIA Analyst
http://web.archive.org/web/20051218073049/http://faculty.schreiner.edu/tomwells/ray_mcgovern_bio.htmhttp://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/191005McGovern.htm
Zbigniew Brzezinski former US National Security Advisor during the Reagan Admin
http://www.senate.gov/%7Eforeign/testimony/2007/BrzezinskiTestimony070201.pdf
Former United Nations weapons inspector and Marine Scott Ritter
http://prisonplanet.com/articles/october2005/241005weaponsinspector.htm
Former National Security Agency Director Lt. General William Odom
http://hammernews.com/odomspeech.htm
Francesco Cossiga former President of the Italian Republic
http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/cossiga_ex_italian_pres_intel_agencies_know_911_inside_job.htm
Andreas von Bulow state-secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Defence (1976-1980) and Minister for Research and Technology (1980-1982)http://www.prisonplanet.com/020403vonbulow.mp3
Yukihisa Fujita Japanese politician of the Democratic Party of Japan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qntZZyGjos
Fujita Pt. 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWgpizXEnL4&feature=related
George Galloway Scottish Politician http://prisonplanet.com/Pages/Sept05/130905Galloway.htm
I hope that is enough creditablility, from home, abroad, official and journalistic. But forget all that, look at the facts and use your own brain to rationally come to a conclusion. Hell the rolling stone article broke it down on a date to date analysis for when alerts were issued and what else was going on with the news that day.
Me:
My post was the posing of a question, it wasn't meant to be scholarly. I guess what BT, PDH and CW wanted was a well-informed, fully-documented report. No where in there does it try to be anything more than opinion. Maybe BT, PDH and CW didn't fully READ THE ARTICLE? It was an interview, not the freakin' 9/11 Commission guys. It's a man trusting his intuition and making logical philosophical statements to back it up. Either our administration has made a terribe failure, and are idiots, or there is something more nefarious at stake.I suppose I should have just reposted your article, Eric, because it has a lot of sources that people can check out. People want opinions from status, and you gave them status.My brain tells me- Bush already revoked part of the Constitution- the right to a fair and speedy trial by jury- with his secret prisons. The PATRIOT Act is a prime example of using fear to trample civil liberties. What, may I ask, is so "patriotic" about this?
My question to BT, PDH, and CW is what is it about this man's judgment that is so faulty?
Questioning the almighty mighty Gov... i mean our government is unpatriotic, even if it is constructive criticism.
My constructive criticism to the government would be to stop reading The Prince, because it is better to be respected than feared, not the other way around. The good violence does is only temporary. The people will resent you forever once they find out. People are going to look back on this moment in history, and especially the period of 1945-1999 as a dark moment in history. The government and the CIA have been murderous, clandestine, arrogant, self-righteous hypocrites, and greedy; all due to foreign woes. This isn't what America was made to be. George Washington, in his farwell address, warned about getting mixed up in foreign interests. And now the shit we pull with neoliberal globalization, state-sponsered terrorism, unfounded and unjust wars, enthocentrism, the PATRIOT Act and lies, lies, lies have dragged our good name in the mud.
How can we earn our respect back? Responsibility; accountability. I wish we could end NAFTA, revise World Trade, keep soldiers in America and isolatate ourselves; but I think the change has to occur with an attitude adjustment of Americans as a whole. Responsibility; accountability...how else can institutions of power be reformed, if not from the inside, in the minds and hearts of blind men and women?"How come the president wants to fix other countriesWhen he ain't fixed his own yet?" asked Tupac during the first Iraq war. How can you remove the speck from someone else's eye when your own eye is bespeckled? You ain't cleaned up your backyard but you're going around tryin to fix up other people's. “It’s been difficult for the government of Iraq to create a constitution. Why don’t we just give them ours? It’s been working for 200 years but it’s not like we’re not using it anymore.” Unknown
To BT-I'm glad you understand this post was an opinion. Listen- I wouldn't be surprised if the goverment were up to its old scare tactics, and I just wish other people knew the real reasons we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and all the lives we destroyed and continue to destroy- from COINTELPRO to Israel to being the cause of illegal immigration...if people had more knowledge of their government's wrongdoings and lies, I wouldn't be so afraid. I'm just trying to be prepared, and pose questions and evidence (see Eric's postings for that) and raise awareness so that others may understand the folly of blind patriotism.By the way, if this is your way of trying to convince me to "see the light" and convert me into conservatisim, then you'd have better luck brushing a wild tiger's teeth. If you only stopped by to mock my words and retreat back to neconblogworld.net, well then you did a damn fine job.
To CW-Can you also read Eric's 18 links he posted for you, since you did not even bother research the link to the George Washington Blog I posted at the bottom of the article, because there's your information. I wish you'd have been more specific, too, rather than vaguely trash something. And how did you and Brian know I was thinking of tagging you guys on this post haha that's weird...
To PDH-You and BT were negligent enough to write off a cartoonist...come on- Jesus was a carpenter and Gandhi worked a spinning wheel. I've never seen such righteousness and intution in anyone else, than these two men, but do I judge and stereotype them for not being credible and concrete? Find me a flaw in Aaron's thinking about 9/11 or the media or the way Bush treats his enemy. He's deductive, and also a part of the media, and wise. He wasn't trying to present a formal debate.If you want credible and concrete, read the 18 links Eric posted from Time, ex-C.I.A., the Washington Post and politicans domestic and abroad.And can you please also be more specific?What is it with you three? Are we going to have a debate or are you just going to fail to use your minds this time? It's a shame, all the time (I assume) you spent reading the article, and now you're gonna float away and not even write a decent response?
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Searching for the Silences of My Soul: Revised
"Searching for the Silences of My Soul"
Outside in the park, I could echo any sound I heard. After I heard a bird call, my mind could replicate the sound perfectly, as if the vibration left a ripple in my head that I could recall. But could I echo the silences of my soul?
I could describe to you and articulate most things I could see in the park to try to give you a sense of the beauty. Instead of saying “it was spring and it was noon and there were a bunch of trees,” I could say “I felt nature animated and colorful like a Disney cartoon. The harsh midday light accentuated the light colors of green leaves, purple wildflowers, and endless light blue sky, and the perpetual chirping of the various birds meant it was springtime in the park again. As I entered the forest, it was like entering a kingdom of sacred beauty that had opened its heavenly gates unto me. No other humans were in sight, and yet I didn't feel alone; it was all so alive. The forest was like one living, breathing organism; a nurturing mother, and I was going to nest in her for a short time. I didn't even feel as if I existed, I just felt like a floating eyeball. And yet all birds and flies and squirrels acknowledged my existence; I accepted them as my witnesses.
I could even articulate the pain in my leg I received from running too hard during my midday jog in the park. It felt like barbed wire had been thrown into a dire, left to char as embers encompassed its sharp nubs, and then was removed from the pit of flames and cast into my nervous system while still glowing orange. It even felt like someone had taken the time to tie this barbed wire around my veins and muscles and tie it in knots. Then, every time I put pressure on my right foot, it felt like someone was tugging on the barbed wire, squeezing my veins and nerves and muscles into my bones, so they all pressed together tightly, at chronic intervals. I could explain this to you, but it’s easy when compared to describing inner peace?
It wasn’t easy to feel like an apparition without transcending this. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, counting to make sure they were even. This didn't work out too well; saying “one” in my head could take me three seconds! Still, I began tuning out my thoughts with numbers as I tried to turn my concentration inward. Then the front of my brain got fuzzy, and I could feel it warming up. I let my consciousness take center focus of my attention and traverse my inner space. Was it possible to cancel out all noise? Where those stories of the Zen Buddhists true? Was it possible to meditate on nothingness? These questions entertained me, but after all the times of falling asleep in an attempt to search for the silences of my soul, I sincerely doubt it. What color is nothingness? Black? White? Did it look like a Rorschach ink blot? Is true silence achievable? I think they were bullshitting in order to have a good laugh at ignorant people who practiced meditation to feel trendy. But I did feel joy…if ignorance is bliss, I felt like one simple-minded savant. Could I begin to describe to you, or paint you a picture of how it felt to sit and meditate and feel the glowing depths of my soul?
How I ended up looking for homeostasis in suburban park has much to do with my confusion and rare moments of clarity as I look to become conscious of the presence of some kind of spirit- God, the Tao, the universe overwhelming me with comfort, whatever you want to call it. The first moment of clarity that tipped the scales toward a definitive belief in God that came from a sober experience happened a year ago, when I didn't know what to believe about God. It happened by the stage of my college coffeehouse café where I sang “We Shall Overcome” while holding hands with a circle of my peers and an old black woman. Born in 1917, she had struggled through oppression in the Mississippi delta, enduring hardships nobody ought to endure. She was dead, no doubt, but the actress who played her had channeled her spirit so precisely that early on in the production I had forgotten she was a twenty-four-year-old actress.
She looked like a seventy-five year old woman, with her cane and hunched back, and my eyes followed the slow shuffle of her feet. She had done her braided hair in the shape of a bun; it was jet black and appeared tough as rope. Nobody my age would dare attempt this hairstyle unless they were attending a nineteen-fifty’s throwback party. There was a look of stern confidence engrained on her face that could not suppress the age marks of painful experience. She had the old, worried wrinkled face and eyes of a woman who knows just what hard work is. Her parents had been sharecroppers, and she had to drop out of school at age twelve to support them. Those deep unflinching eyes seamlessly extended to the size of a dinner plate when she grew excited. Her dark brown skin was the color and texture of a chocolate covered raisin; I could see her pruny hands and wrist sticking out of the sleeves of an old-fashioned pink blouse covered in white polka dots and with ruffles on the shoulders. The blouse was cut off at the top of the knees and thick calves separated the blouse from white, high socks. The story of Fannie Lou Hamer’s life was told in first-person, from the beginning- “I was born October 6, 1917…” By the end of the first fifteen minutes of the performance, I decided to let slip my consciousness of the illusion and took in the story as if the real Fannie was sitting there, weaving a story out of nothing but the yarn-ball of her memories. Her commanding voice seemed to draw its power from images of lynchings painted on the back of her eyelids. She turned her pain into strength, and with the authority of raw emotion, she was as righteous as a persecuted saint in Babylon.
And so I let the ghost of Fannie Lou Hamer slip into my mind and tell me her secrets through spoken word and African-American spirituals. I clapped along when she clapped, sang along when she sang, laughed when she laughed, and cried when she cried.
I’ll never forget- she struggled to speak as she recounted the story of her own near-fatal beating. Her bus was full of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member as it hiked across the South to get black people registered to vote. It was never easy, and in one town, the police pulled her bus over and imprisoned everybody on board. The cops brought two young men, fellow SNCC members, into to her cell. Fannie Lou was made to lay face down as the young men were given nightsticks and forced to beat her. They beat her until she was a bloody pulp, even cracking her in the back of the head. They cried out as they carried on:
“Oh God, please forgive me!”
Fannie Lou was hysterical as she told us how she prayed she would die then and there; she told us this as she shook her fist in the air and looked through the ceiling and into the heavens.
“But God had bigger plans for me”, she said.
I was so angry I became dizzy; I couldn't speak because I knew anything I could say would be irrelevant in comparison. How the hell could this happen? I was crying and pursing my lips together as they quivered wildly. There was no doubt now that I was in the midst of a hero; an angel who had every reason to give up. And yet she still preached hope, among faith and trust in God.
Why did you keep faith? Where did that mind of yours disappear to- what fantasy world was there waiting for you when the world struck you a blow that left you for dead?
By the end of the show, she had come down from the low-rise stage to the small audience and requested everyone join hands in a circle, so we did; in all, about eleven of us. We were blind to color and creed, gender and sexuality, singing “We Shall Overcome” though I didn't know the words. We were united by a dedication to never let what happened to Fannie happen in our time, on our watch. The brave look on everyone’s face told me they had been transformed as well. There was no denying a flood of holiness that bonded our circle with a fellowship that was ours to never forget. I remember forgetting any doubts I had about God at that point. God had finally come to me because I was finally ready. As I clasped my neighbor’s hands I didn't realize it, but I was swinging my arms back and forth as I sang.
It was a feeling of being face to face with something larger than me- like how a bird must feel seeing me walk into the park where nobody else is around, and stare into its eyes. Except I don’t see anything bigger than me with my eyes but I was conscious of the presence of eleven hearts praying in unison, and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of childlike innocence. I mean, here I am, a twenty year old man who’s impulsively swinging his arms widely back and forth before he even remembers to feel embarrassed by it. I felt like a two year old meeting Barney the Purple Dinosaur, except Barney has this ancient wisdom of what it truly means to be alive; to have a pure emotion, or faith, hope and trust in an unseen, unconditionally loving creator. This was the collective good intentions of mankind multiplied by infinite but condensed into a drop of chemical liquid secretion that was now tickling my brain and sending chills throughout my nervous system. I was in the right place at the right time, the stars had aligned, and my soul’s purpose was budding in the soil of my consciousness. What I became aware of was how my shocked and wounded sense of broken security had rebuilt itself at the joined hands and voices of that famous spiritual. I had set logic and reason aside to get lost in a story and internalize the narrator’s emotion; that was my choice, and I always try to open myself up to the truth of a story and act is if it is actually happening in my heart. And now I had chosen to do something I never dreamed I was capable of- holding hands in a circle and sing a Christian spiritual, after a lifetime of a closed mind toward what I perceived to be the closed mind of organized-religion, and it felt natural. It was nature’s apparent ability to create order out of chaos, to reproduce itself, to grow and learn from itself and adapt and evolve; and most importantly, to heal itself. The lizard’s tail grows back when plucked. And Fannie Lou Hamer taught me faith, hope, and trust in God ain't nothin’ but a lizard’s tale, but you got to regenerate your own tail when life plucks it off. And sometimes regenerating a tale is the only way to perform this feat.
Maybe my soul is deep enough to contain both sorrow and joy; maybe I can’t see my soul because I’m looking to acknowledge something intangible when my soul really is tangible. I’d say my soul is always there, but it takes a response to an external stressor, like a story, a song, or nature to prove I am actually living out my soul. If ever you were a child full of awe and wonder, you can understand; the bird calls and the green grass before you is the manifestation of my soul; anything pure and natural, such as the unconditional love of a strong family; the truth of a child’s or a faithful and wounded woman’s speech; and the beauty of nature in all its symmetry. The universe is us living out our souls; it is the formal manifestation of its divine origin. The spirit is in forms, always; but in our mundane habit of going through the motions we forget that the dolls collecting dust and taking up space in our closet once provided hours of conversation and play; that the neglected pool in our backyard collecting algae once was the center of so much laughter when dad lost control of his tractor lawn-mower and headed straight into its surface. That movie once made me feel frustration at the criminal justice system; that poem gave me hope when I thought of hanging myself over unrequited love; that song sends chills down my spine because it captured being seventeen so completely, but it’s just a song, right? I think there’s an inherent nature in all things that can elicit a response in our self and remind us of why we’re here. There’s something comforting and glowing about some people that I think my life depends on being in their presence. The trees call my name as I sit in my dorm room, and dreams give me messages. And every now and then, one of the following events occur: stars align; I feel chills; messages make me stop breathing; parallel events happen in synchronicity; I have awe-inspiring daydreams; reality feels magical; I get lost in a moment; and time disappears. It often feels like my memory has put those moments in my life in my subconscious, thrown away the rest, and puts on a looped recording of all of my dreams and nightmares, experiences that thrilled me, moments of hitting rock bottom, and moments of glory. There is a part of me always alert, waiting to transcend the limits of mundane complacency; every moment, I am subconsciously looking to see if the chemistry of my soul can synch up with the chemistry of my surroundings in order to produce, in my mind, consciousness of its divine spirit.
A candle in the sun can think “I am the light!” all it wants, but nothing beats the experience of being a light unto darkness. For you don’t know what you haven't experienced, and the light must experience darkness in order to know what its purpose is. And we are the light. It’s not that we’re coming from anywhere or going anywhere. We’re still candles in the sun, but we have called upon the darkness of ignorance in order to know ourselves, and we forget about our nature and the sun and we get scared. All we need to do in order to bring the sun back is to remember these clouds of darkness are here because we depend on them to provide a point of reference so that we might know ourselves as light in relation to it. These clouds of suffering, of ignorance, of fear, of lies—we can extinguish them, because that’s our nature. But somewhere along the way we forgot we were agents of God, like how when you're dreaming or tripping and you forget what you're experiencing isn’t real, but it seems real because that’s how powerful our minds our when they lose their reference point. Maybe the storm and stress got so heavy, and maybe we didn't know how to respond to it. Maybe we lost faith and denied we had a soul. But the light never went out, and it never does. Not even when we’re sleeping, unconscious or weeping. Not even when we die, because it is so determined to finish what it started. Now all we can do is look for the light in others—in the books we read, in our relationships, in our passions—maybe our souls are looking for themselves in other forms so that it finds a clean mirror, a mirror that tells the truth. Maybe that’s what love is, when two lights reflect each other luminously. We’re all sacred souls on a sacred journey, and in this way, the journey is the destination. That one point of beginning and end, of Alpha and Omega, that’s not where the drama and the comedy are—the beauty of the flower is in watching its lifespan, not by watching its point of zero-state.
All this I remembered as I basked in the light of the park. But it was easy to reflect on old memories—it wasn’t challenging me at all; I felt as if I wasn’t growing in the sunlight of my fuzzy happiness. It’s like an advanced Tetris player who is gaming on the “easy” setting. I decided to shape shift into bamboo so I could be skinny enough to thrive in the darkest regions of my consciousness. What unresolved conflict in my past would I find? I’ve described to you what my soul might look like, and it is light; but what about the darkness? Could the narrator in my head describe what was seen as I entered the wilderness’ underbrush called my unconscious mind?
In the thick, shadowy jungles, the unexplored territory lay just as pure as anything else. Yet I rarely have shown much light on it, except in my dreams or when my imagination runs away with me. Sometimes both attractive and repulsive thoughts of S&M and the ingesting of drugs and alcohol took me there and turned me into both gods and beasts for the time being. I often carried those desires into out-of-control extremes, so I am taking a sabbatical from drugs and mental pornography, hoping to find myself as able to exist without them. Maybe someday I shall return to their suffocating arms of irrational paranoia and temporarily satisfying and yet overall unsatisfying sexual scenarios, but that’s another story. I would in fact be writing about that if my meditation police hadn’t said “whoa, don’t go there!”
As I sat in the wilderness to meditate, I felt someone walk up behind me and tap me on the shoulder. “Are you on drugs?” the voice asked, with a concerned look upon her phantom face.
“I am drugs!” I cynically replied in my haste. What I meant to say was this:
“I am the child of a passionate night of intercourse between the minds of Salvador Dali and Lewis Carroll. The earth is a microscopic universe, and I am a microscopic earth; the difference between me and the universe and the earth being I have a brain that allows for the marriage of form and consciousness through the freedom and limitations of what it means to be human.
The earth is a child of the universe, and I am a child of the earth, making me a son of a son of a big bang. The offspring of the birth pangs of a red shift. I am made up of tiny universes as well.
I am also the son of God just as much as I am the son of man. I am Jesus and Krishna, but what makes me dangerous is my ability to deviate from enlightenment. I must say, we are all born enlightened beings, but then illusion takes over. My inner child is God and the insecure voices in my head are Satan; Satan writes most of my term papers. But this—what I’m doing now—is creative and pure, because meditation on something called the soul, and prayer with God the universe, that is childish. That means right now I am God. The Father and I are one, and I am honoring Grand Father Universe and Mother Earth by holding communing with them now. But once I’m back among my vulgar friends, I too will want to be vulgar and crude. I say things I don’t mean to be funny, because on the level of my lower appetites, I desire it. I’m a rebellious son- one minute I could be inspired by the Holy Spirit and speak Pure Truth; another minute I could be lying and leading you astray. Everything I say and do can either bring you to the Devil or God. I should just become a religious man, so people aren't confused as to what side I’m on, for you can never tell nowadays. I’m a hypocrite, baby! Everything I say and do, if you misinterpret it, will either lead you to the grave and push you in, or resurrect you from the dying bed you're lying in. My soul wants me to stop being a hypocrite, and every day, if I learn from my mistakes and if guilt and disgust moves me to change my habits, I will become a vessel for pure Truth, Love, and Beauty. One day at a time…I can only transform my deadly sins into their holy equivalent one day at a time.
But let’s not talk in such extremes. Everything I do is either in accordance to my virtues or my vices, yes. But the thing is, my mind lives on the beach, where my virtues and vices blend into each other. Take war for example: join the front lines of an infantry unit and see how handy your vices come in then, because I bet that everything society abhors in you will become necessary to cope with the everyday reality of evil and death. Society, those tribal moralists, they call what is good for them ‘righteous’ and what is bad for them ‘evil.’ But evil needs to exist in order for good to exist. And in war, the dark side of us may very well indeed become our best friends, because listening to it will keep us alive. You see, a virtue can easily become a vice, and vice versa, given the right conditions. That’s why you’ll see me throwing my vices into the sea of virtues, just hoping someone will see that even my faults are the products of my good intentions. This shoreline of ambiguity is where I do my best thinking.
The most religious thing I can do, rather than be a hedonist or a monk, is to live my life the middle way. To strive for that balance between peace and adrenaline, between love and fear of the enlightenment I am fully aware of and the enlightenment I forget in my ignorance.
We are the light looking at itself in a mirror with dust all over it; but the dust of negativity cannot rot the core of our being, though it will give us the illusion of imperfection. But it is the dust that allows us to know the light for what it really is—the power of light is only realized in its obscuration.
When you have a fear of losing something, on some level you have already lost it. And when you aim high, you are bound to land among the stars.
And you’d be surprised of what you miss when you're not looking for it—and my awareness can only focus on so much; I am always blind to something. That’s why I’m here, in the shade of this thicket of bamboo, deep in the heart of the untrodden wilderness. Tell me spirit, what has not been done?”
She looked at my outstretched leg, which was tense and burning from jogging too hard, and she called forth the wind to massage it.
“You mustn't force your body,” she told me. “You must listen to what it is telling you. Sometimes it seems like you are slowed down, and you are too impatient to regain your autonomy, so you say ‘I AM in control’ and push too hard. But there was a part of your body that was meant to be slowed down, so it could rest. Don’t push it, child, don’t push it.
“Some parts of your body you was not MEANT to be in control over- such as pushing through pain when that pain is warning you not to push because it needs time to heal. That’s right, you can be in control over your tongue and your brain, even your penis, but before you came here, on this big beautiful earth, you carved out some lines that you just couldn't cross. It’s in your genes. And before that, when you and I were one, we carved out a line called pain. The gift of pain is as precious a gift from the Other Side as the gift of freedom is. Free will and freedom to create your own reality- that’s beautiful, and you own it. But you mustn't, in your haste to be yourself, lose control by trying to gain control—such as taxing your body’s limits and riding roughshod over the healing process. You can’t skip the quiet moments; sometimes you just got to slow down, stand still, or even go backwards. It’s part of the master plan—the limits you make here on earth and the limits you made before you got here have a reason for being. Pain, baby, and stress; you have to use it the right way. You got to use just the right amount of freedom in certain areas, and control in the others. Then you can fly.
It’s not so much quiet meditation that brings enlightenment, though reading an old book in a new light can bring out a new Truth you have missed. But listen to the longing of your crude, untapped power that hints at the invincibility of your strength, the limitlessness of your desires, the immortality of your soul and the infinite of your imagination. It seems impossible, reckless, and wishful, but isn’t that true for all dreams of glory?
There is a part of you that knows your beginning, middle, and even your end. But if you only reflect upon your self, you’ll be stuck in the middle. Some have been stuck there for a million years. Listen to the Truth of your pain and nightmares. Fear not the weeping ghost playing the piano in the attic of your mind, nor the humiliating horrors of your imagination. Reach your hand further into hell whenever you can, because once you are shocked, the worst is over; its transformation into heaven can begin.
Embrace those souls that seek you in their life, and play Jesus to the lepers. For you cannot save yourself; only through the pain and love shared with others can you be healed and find the courage to be reunited with your God-self entirely, and in doing so cast the doubting, whining, and whimpering part of you into the darkness where it belongs.”
Her words echoed in my head. Was she a ripple in time? She sounded a lot like me. I had considered these ideas before, but never had they so articulately been brought into existence using speech. Was she telepathic? I decided I might as well ask her the big question, then.
“Why am I here?”
“To be a painter, an author, a director, a composer—who comes to live inside his own beautiful painting, story, film, or musical for a while. To be in three places at once: to be the seed of creative thought behind all experience, to be the flower, the experience of the seed in the process of becoming itself, to be the conditions which inspire the seed to grow: the soil, the rain, the air, and the light. Don’t you see where your soul is now?”
My eternal soul, I whispered in a hushed and astonished voice. I am the planter and the planted. I am the universe, the earth, and the body. Right now, I remember that I make my own conditions- my perspective and attitude and understanding of life are all under my control. The soil, the air, the rain, and the light- faith, love, hope, and knowledge—they are all my choice; I choose to be conscious of the spiritual, and my destiny is a result of this choice because all I say and do will be in accordance to the lenses in which I view the world.
Just then, these lyrics to some Pink Floyd song passed through me: “All you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be.” That’s really humbling to me. God may be living vicariously through me, but I’m only a subjective experience of God. But all that I touch and all that I see, as long as I don’t stop believing, will ultimately bring me to where I need to be. It’s brought me here, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. As Fannie Lou might say, “Jesus’ blood ain't failed me yet!”
And that remembering brings my soul forth, in its purest essence, and I can see all that I can’t see with my naked eye; feel all that I can’t feel with my naked body; and perceive all I cannot perceive with my naked mind. I’m living out my soul by being conscious of it and meeting it halfway with faith. In doing this, I bring it the experiences it desires. My mind and body—instead of being slaves to themselves—can become tools for my spirit to express my soul’s longing. My soul’s longing is ultimately to know itself, and in doing this, will liberate itself. Could I liberate the universe, the earth, and my body by using only the dialogues between my mind and soul? I’ve seen artists liberate tree branches by turning them into instruments of paint brushing. Why couldn't I do the same with words? Why couldn't I paint the picture-perfect masterpiece behind my eyelids using language? I have this phantom voice in my head; she narrates my visions. My deliverance unto a higher state of divine consciousness is her goal. I will then be a vocabularist!
Outside in the park, I could echo any sound I heard. After I heard a bird call, my mind could replicate the sound perfectly, as if the vibration left a ripple in my head that I could recall. But could I echo the silences of my soul?
I could describe to you and articulate most things I could see in the park to try to give you a sense of the beauty. Instead of saying “it was spring and it was noon and there were a bunch of trees,” I could say “I felt nature animated and colorful like a Disney cartoon. The harsh midday light accentuated the light colors of green leaves, purple wildflowers, and endless light blue sky, and the perpetual chirping of the various birds meant it was springtime in the park again. As I entered the forest, it was like entering a kingdom of sacred beauty that had opened its heavenly gates unto me. No other humans were in sight, and yet I didn't feel alone; it was all so alive. The forest was like one living, breathing organism; a nurturing mother, and I was going to nest in her for a short time. I didn't even feel as if I existed, I just felt like a floating eyeball. And yet all birds and flies and squirrels acknowledged my existence; I accepted them as my witnesses.
I could even articulate the pain in my leg I received from running too hard during my midday jog in the park. It felt like barbed wire had been thrown into a dire, left to char as embers encompassed its sharp nubs, and then was removed from the pit of flames and cast into my nervous system while still glowing orange. It even felt like someone had taken the time to tie this barbed wire around my veins and muscles and tie it in knots. Then, every time I put pressure on my right foot, it felt like someone was tugging on the barbed wire, squeezing my veins and nerves and muscles into my bones, so they all pressed together tightly, at chronic intervals. I could explain this to you, but it’s easy when compared to describing inner peace?
It wasn’t easy to feel like an apparition without transcending this. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, counting to make sure they were even. This didn't work out too well; saying “one” in my head could take me three seconds! Still, I began tuning out my thoughts with numbers as I tried to turn my concentration inward. Then the front of my brain got fuzzy, and I could feel it warming up. I let my consciousness take center focus of my attention and traverse my inner space. Was it possible to cancel out all noise? Where those stories of the Zen Buddhists true? Was it possible to meditate on nothingness? These questions entertained me, but after all the times of falling asleep in an attempt to search for the silences of my soul, I sincerely doubt it. What color is nothingness? Black? White? Did it look like a Rorschach ink blot? Is true silence achievable? I think they were bullshitting in order to have a good laugh at ignorant people who practiced meditation to feel trendy. But I did feel joy…if ignorance is bliss, I felt like one simple-minded savant. Could I begin to describe to you, or paint you a picture of how it felt to sit and meditate and feel the glowing depths of my soul?
How I ended up looking for homeostasis in suburban park has much to do with my confusion and rare moments of clarity as I look to become conscious of the presence of some kind of spirit- God, the Tao, the universe overwhelming me with comfort, whatever you want to call it. The first moment of clarity that tipped the scales toward a definitive belief in God that came from a sober experience happened a year ago, when I didn't know what to believe about God. It happened by the stage of my college coffeehouse café where I sang “We Shall Overcome” while holding hands with a circle of my peers and an old black woman. Born in 1917, she had struggled through oppression in the Mississippi delta, enduring hardships nobody ought to endure. She was dead, no doubt, but the actress who played her had channeled her spirit so precisely that early on in the production I had forgotten she was a twenty-four-year-old actress.
She looked like a seventy-five year old woman, with her cane and hunched back, and my eyes followed the slow shuffle of her feet. She had done her braided hair in the shape of a bun; it was jet black and appeared tough as rope. Nobody my age would dare attempt this hairstyle unless they were attending a nineteen-fifty’s throwback party. There was a look of stern confidence engrained on her face that could not suppress the age marks of painful experience. She had the old, worried wrinkled face and eyes of a woman who knows just what hard work is. Her parents had been sharecroppers, and she had to drop out of school at age twelve to support them. Those deep unflinching eyes seamlessly extended to the size of a dinner plate when she grew excited. Her dark brown skin was the color and texture of a chocolate covered raisin; I could see her pruny hands and wrist sticking out of the sleeves of an old-fashioned pink blouse covered in white polka dots and with ruffles on the shoulders. The blouse was cut off at the top of the knees and thick calves separated the blouse from white, high socks. The story of Fannie Lou Hamer’s life was told in first-person, from the beginning- “I was born October 6, 1917…” By the end of the first fifteen minutes of the performance, I decided to let slip my consciousness of the illusion and took in the story as if the real Fannie was sitting there, weaving a story out of nothing but the yarn-ball of her memories. Her commanding voice seemed to draw its power from images of lynchings painted on the back of her eyelids. She turned her pain into strength, and with the authority of raw emotion, she was as righteous as a persecuted saint in Babylon.
And so I let the ghost of Fannie Lou Hamer slip into my mind and tell me her secrets through spoken word and African-American spirituals. I clapped along when she clapped, sang along when she sang, laughed when she laughed, and cried when she cried.
I’ll never forget- she struggled to speak as she recounted the story of her own near-fatal beating. Her bus was full of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member as it hiked across the South to get black people registered to vote. It was never easy, and in one town, the police pulled her bus over and imprisoned everybody on board. The cops brought two young men, fellow SNCC members, into to her cell. Fannie Lou was made to lay face down as the young men were given nightsticks and forced to beat her. They beat her until she was a bloody pulp, even cracking her in the back of the head. They cried out as they carried on:
“Oh God, please forgive me!”
Fannie Lou was hysterical as she told us how she prayed she would die then and there; she told us this as she shook her fist in the air and looked through the ceiling and into the heavens.
“But God had bigger plans for me”, she said.
I was so angry I became dizzy; I couldn't speak because I knew anything I could say would be irrelevant in comparison. How the hell could this happen? I was crying and pursing my lips together as they quivered wildly. There was no doubt now that I was in the midst of a hero; an angel who had every reason to give up. And yet she still preached hope, among faith and trust in God.
Why did you keep faith? Where did that mind of yours disappear to- what fantasy world was there waiting for you when the world struck you a blow that left you for dead?
By the end of the show, she had come down from the low-rise stage to the small audience and requested everyone join hands in a circle, so we did; in all, about eleven of us. We were blind to color and creed, gender and sexuality, singing “We Shall Overcome” though I didn't know the words. We were united by a dedication to never let what happened to Fannie happen in our time, on our watch. The brave look on everyone’s face told me they had been transformed as well. There was no denying a flood of holiness that bonded our circle with a fellowship that was ours to never forget. I remember forgetting any doubts I had about God at that point. God had finally come to me because I was finally ready. As I clasped my neighbor’s hands I didn't realize it, but I was swinging my arms back and forth as I sang.
It was a feeling of being face to face with something larger than me- like how a bird must feel seeing me walk into the park where nobody else is around, and stare into its eyes. Except I don’t see anything bigger than me with my eyes but I was conscious of the presence of eleven hearts praying in unison, and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of childlike innocence. I mean, here I am, a twenty year old man who’s impulsively swinging his arms widely back and forth before he even remembers to feel embarrassed by it. I felt like a two year old meeting Barney the Purple Dinosaur, except Barney has this ancient wisdom of what it truly means to be alive; to have a pure emotion, or faith, hope and trust in an unseen, unconditionally loving creator. This was the collective good intentions of mankind multiplied by infinite but condensed into a drop of chemical liquid secretion that was now tickling my brain and sending chills throughout my nervous system. I was in the right place at the right time, the stars had aligned, and my soul’s purpose was budding in the soil of my consciousness. What I became aware of was how my shocked and wounded sense of broken security had rebuilt itself at the joined hands and voices of that famous spiritual. I had set logic and reason aside to get lost in a story and internalize the narrator’s emotion; that was my choice, and I always try to open myself up to the truth of a story and act is if it is actually happening in my heart. And now I had chosen to do something I never dreamed I was capable of- holding hands in a circle and sing a Christian spiritual, after a lifetime of a closed mind toward what I perceived to be the closed mind of organized-religion, and it felt natural. It was nature’s apparent ability to create order out of chaos, to reproduce itself, to grow and learn from itself and adapt and evolve; and most importantly, to heal itself. The lizard’s tail grows back when plucked. And Fannie Lou Hamer taught me faith, hope, and trust in God ain't nothin’ but a lizard’s tale, but you got to regenerate your own tail when life plucks it off. And sometimes regenerating a tale is the only way to perform this feat.
Maybe my soul is deep enough to contain both sorrow and joy; maybe I can’t see my soul because I’m looking to acknowledge something intangible when my soul really is tangible. I’d say my soul is always there, but it takes a response to an external stressor, like a story, a song, or nature to prove I am actually living out my soul. If ever you were a child full of awe and wonder, you can understand; the bird calls and the green grass before you is the manifestation of my soul; anything pure and natural, such as the unconditional love of a strong family; the truth of a child’s or a faithful and wounded woman’s speech; and the beauty of nature in all its symmetry. The universe is us living out our souls; it is the formal manifestation of its divine origin. The spirit is in forms, always; but in our mundane habit of going through the motions we forget that the dolls collecting dust and taking up space in our closet once provided hours of conversation and play; that the neglected pool in our backyard collecting algae once was the center of so much laughter when dad lost control of his tractor lawn-mower and headed straight into its surface. That movie once made me feel frustration at the criminal justice system; that poem gave me hope when I thought of hanging myself over unrequited love; that song sends chills down my spine because it captured being seventeen so completely, but it’s just a song, right? I think there’s an inherent nature in all things that can elicit a response in our self and remind us of why we’re here. There’s something comforting and glowing about some people that I think my life depends on being in their presence. The trees call my name as I sit in my dorm room, and dreams give me messages. And every now and then, one of the following events occur: stars align; I feel chills; messages make me stop breathing; parallel events happen in synchronicity; I have awe-inspiring daydreams; reality feels magical; I get lost in a moment; and time disappears. It often feels like my memory has put those moments in my life in my subconscious, thrown away the rest, and puts on a looped recording of all of my dreams and nightmares, experiences that thrilled me, moments of hitting rock bottom, and moments of glory. There is a part of me always alert, waiting to transcend the limits of mundane complacency; every moment, I am subconsciously looking to see if the chemistry of my soul can synch up with the chemistry of my surroundings in order to produce, in my mind, consciousness of its divine spirit.
A candle in the sun can think “I am the light!” all it wants, but nothing beats the experience of being a light unto darkness. For you don’t know what you haven't experienced, and the light must experience darkness in order to know what its purpose is. And we are the light. It’s not that we’re coming from anywhere or going anywhere. We’re still candles in the sun, but we have called upon the darkness of ignorance in order to know ourselves, and we forget about our nature and the sun and we get scared. All we need to do in order to bring the sun back is to remember these clouds of darkness are here because we depend on them to provide a point of reference so that we might know ourselves as light in relation to it. These clouds of suffering, of ignorance, of fear, of lies—we can extinguish them, because that’s our nature. But somewhere along the way we forgot we were agents of God, like how when you're dreaming or tripping and you forget what you're experiencing isn’t real, but it seems real because that’s how powerful our minds our when they lose their reference point. Maybe the storm and stress got so heavy, and maybe we didn't know how to respond to it. Maybe we lost faith and denied we had a soul. But the light never went out, and it never does. Not even when we’re sleeping, unconscious or weeping. Not even when we die, because it is so determined to finish what it started. Now all we can do is look for the light in others—in the books we read, in our relationships, in our passions—maybe our souls are looking for themselves in other forms so that it finds a clean mirror, a mirror that tells the truth. Maybe that’s what love is, when two lights reflect each other luminously. We’re all sacred souls on a sacred journey, and in this way, the journey is the destination. That one point of beginning and end, of Alpha and Omega, that’s not where the drama and the comedy are—the beauty of the flower is in watching its lifespan, not by watching its point of zero-state.
All this I remembered as I basked in the light of the park. But it was easy to reflect on old memories—it wasn’t challenging me at all; I felt as if I wasn’t growing in the sunlight of my fuzzy happiness. It’s like an advanced Tetris player who is gaming on the “easy” setting. I decided to shape shift into bamboo so I could be skinny enough to thrive in the darkest regions of my consciousness. What unresolved conflict in my past would I find? I’ve described to you what my soul might look like, and it is light; but what about the darkness? Could the narrator in my head describe what was seen as I entered the wilderness’ underbrush called my unconscious mind?
In the thick, shadowy jungles, the unexplored territory lay just as pure as anything else. Yet I rarely have shown much light on it, except in my dreams or when my imagination runs away with me. Sometimes both attractive and repulsive thoughts of S&M and the ingesting of drugs and alcohol took me there and turned me into both gods and beasts for the time being. I often carried those desires into out-of-control extremes, so I am taking a sabbatical from drugs and mental pornography, hoping to find myself as able to exist without them. Maybe someday I shall return to their suffocating arms of irrational paranoia and temporarily satisfying and yet overall unsatisfying sexual scenarios, but that’s another story. I would in fact be writing about that if my meditation police hadn’t said “whoa, don’t go there!”
As I sat in the wilderness to meditate, I felt someone walk up behind me and tap me on the shoulder. “Are you on drugs?” the voice asked, with a concerned look upon her phantom face.
“I am drugs!” I cynically replied in my haste. What I meant to say was this:
“I am the child of a passionate night of intercourse between the minds of Salvador Dali and Lewis Carroll. The earth is a microscopic universe, and I am a microscopic earth; the difference between me and the universe and the earth being I have a brain that allows for the marriage of form and consciousness through the freedom and limitations of what it means to be human.
The earth is a child of the universe, and I am a child of the earth, making me a son of a son of a big bang. The offspring of the birth pangs of a red shift. I am made up of tiny universes as well.
I am also the son of God just as much as I am the son of man. I am Jesus and Krishna, but what makes me dangerous is my ability to deviate from enlightenment. I must say, we are all born enlightened beings, but then illusion takes over. My inner child is God and the insecure voices in my head are Satan; Satan writes most of my term papers. But this—what I’m doing now—is creative and pure, because meditation on something called the soul, and prayer with God the universe, that is childish. That means right now I am God. The Father and I are one, and I am honoring Grand Father Universe and Mother Earth by holding communing with them now. But once I’m back among my vulgar friends, I too will want to be vulgar and crude. I say things I don’t mean to be funny, because on the level of my lower appetites, I desire it. I’m a rebellious son- one minute I could be inspired by the Holy Spirit and speak Pure Truth; another minute I could be lying and leading you astray. Everything I say and do can either bring you to the Devil or God. I should just become a religious man, so people aren't confused as to what side I’m on, for you can never tell nowadays. I’m a hypocrite, baby! Everything I say and do, if you misinterpret it, will either lead you to the grave and push you in, or resurrect you from the dying bed you're lying in. My soul wants me to stop being a hypocrite, and every day, if I learn from my mistakes and if guilt and disgust moves me to change my habits, I will become a vessel for pure Truth, Love, and Beauty. One day at a time…I can only transform my deadly sins into their holy equivalent one day at a time.
But let’s not talk in such extremes. Everything I do is either in accordance to my virtues or my vices, yes. But the thing is, my mind lives on the beach, where my virtues and vices blend into each other. Take war for example: join the front lines of an infantry unit and see how handy your vices come in then, because I bet that everything society abhors in you will become necessary to cope with the everyday reality of evil and death. Society, those tribal moralists, they call what is good for them ‘righteous’ and what is bad for them ‘evil.’ But evil needs to exist in order for good to exist. And in war, the dark side of us may very well indeed become our best friends, because listening to it will keep us alive. You see, a virtue can easily become a vice, and vice versa, given the right conditions. That’s why you’ll see me throwing my vices into the sea of virtues, just hoping someone will see that even my faults are the products of my good intentions. This shoreline of ambiguity is where I do my best thinking.
The most religious thing I can do, rather than be a hedonist or a monk, is to live my life the middle way. To strive for that balance between peace and adrenaline, between love and fear of the enlightenment I am fully aware of and the enlightenment I forget in my ignorance.
We are the light looking at itself in a mirror with dust all over it; but the dust of negativity cannot rot the core of our being, though it will give us the illusion of imperfection. But it is the dust that allows us to know the light for what it really is—the power of light is only realized in its obscuration.
When you have a fear of losing something, on some level you have already lost it. And when you aim high, you are bound to land among the stars.
And you’d be surprised of what you miss when you're not looking for it—and my awareness can only focus on so much; I am always blind to something. That’s why I’m here, in the shade of this thicket of bamboo, deep in the heart of the untrodden wilderness. Tell me spirit, what has not been done?”
She looked at my outstretched leg, which was tense and burning from jogging too hard, and she called forth the wind to massage it.
“You mustn't force your body,” she told me. “You must listen to what it is telling you. Sometimes it seems like you are slowed down, and you are too impatient to regain your autonomy, so you say ‘I AM in control’ and push too hard. But there was a part of your body that was meant to be slowed down, so it could rest. Don’t push it, child, don’t push it.
“Some parts of your body you was not MEANT to be in control over- such as pushing through pain when that pain is warning you not to push because it needs time to heal. That’s right, you can be in control over your tongue and your brain, even your penis, but before you came here, on this big beautiful earth, you carved out some lines that you just couldn't cross. It’s in your genes. And before that, when you and I were one, we carved out a line called pain. The gift of pain is as precious a gift from the Other Side as the gift of freedom is. Free will and freedom to create your own reality- that’s beautiful, and you own it. But you mustn't, in your haste to be yourself, lose control by trying to gain control—such as taxing your body’s limits and riding roughshod over the healing process. You can’t skip the quiet moments; sometimes you just got to slow down, stand still, or even go backwards. It’s part of the master plan—the limits you make here on earth and the limits you made before you got here have a reason for being. Pain, baby, and stress; you have to use it the right way. You got to use just the right amount of freedom in certain areas, and control in the others. Then you can fly.
It’s not so much quiet meditation that brings enlightenment, though reading an old book in a new light can bring out a new Truth you have missed. But listen to the longing of your crude, untapped power that hints at the invincibility of your strength, the limitlessness of your desires, the immortality of your soul and the infinite of your imagination. It seems impossible, reckless, and wishful, but isn’t that true for all dreams of glory?
There is a part of you that knows your beginning, middle, and even your end. But if you only reflect upon your self, you’ll be stuck in the middle. Some have been stuck there for a million years. Listen to the Truth of your pain and nightmares. Fear not the weeping ghost playing the piano in the attic of your mind, nor the humiliating horrors of your imagination. Reach your hand further into hell whenever you can, because once you are shocked, the worst is over; its transformation into heaven can begin.
Embrace those souls that seek you in their life, and play Jesus to the lepers. For you cannot save yourself; only through the pain and love shared with others can you be healed and find the courage to be reunited with your God-self entirely, and in doing so cast the doubting, whining, and whimpering part of you into the darkness where it belongs.”
Her words echoed in my head. Was she a ripple in time? She sounded a lot like me. I had considered these ideas before, but never had they so articulately been brought into existence using speech. Was she telepathic? I decided I might as well ask her the big question, then.
“Why am I here?”
“To be a painter, an author, a director, a composer—who comes to live inside his own beautiful painting, story, film, or musical for a while. To be in three places at once: to be the seed of creative thought behind all experience, to be the flower, the experience of the seed in the process of becoming itself, to be the conditions which inspire the seed to grow: the soil, the rain, the air, and the light. Don’t you see where your soul is now?”
My eternal soul, I whispered in a hushed and astonished voice. I am the planter and the planted. I am the universe, the earth, and the body. Right now, I remember that I make my own conditions- my perspective and attitude and understanding of life are all under my control. The soil, the air, the rain, and the light- faith, love, hope, and knowledge—they are all my choice; I choose to be conscious of the spiritual, and my destiny is a result of this choice because all I say and do will be in accordance to the lenses in which I view the world.
Just then, these lyrics to some Pink Floyd song passed through me: “All you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be.” That’s really humbling to me. God may be living vicariously through me, but I’m only a subjective experience of God. But all that I touch and all that I see, as long as I don’t stop believing, will ultimately bring me to where I need to be. It’s brought me here, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. As Fannie Lou might say, “Jesus’ blood ain't failed me yet!”
And that remembering brings my soul forth, in its purest essence, and I can see all that I can’t see with my naked eye; feel all that I can’t feel with my naked body; and perceive all I cannot perceive with my naked mind. I’m living out my soul by being conscious of it and meeting it halfway with faith. In doing this, I bring it the experiences it desires. My mind and body—instead of being slaves to themselves—can become tools for my spirit to express my soul’s longing. My soul’s longing is ultimately to know itself, and in doing this, will liberate itself. Could I liberate the universe, the earth, and my body by using only the dialogues between my mind and soul? I’ve seen artists liberate tree branches by turning them into instruments of paint brushing. Why couldn't I do the same with words? Why couldn't I paint the picture-perfect masterpiece behind my eyelids using language? I have this phantom voice in my head; she narrates my visions. My deliverance unto a higher state of divine consciousness is her goal. I will then be a vocabularist!
Sunday, April 27, 2008
The Good News is Up to You!
There once was a time when I thought nature was God
It was so beautiful that I was in awe of life
I was just a child with an over-active imagination, they said
You were egocentric and practiced animism
Well, I said, maybe God is the imagination that creates beauty then!
There once was a time when I thought God was love
You just had chemistry with someone, they said
You were a stoned teenager perceiving an illusion
He didn't love you the same way you loved him, anyway
Well, I said, maybe God is a chemist and perception then!
There was once a time when I thought God was truth
Be careful of the word truth, they said
Morality is situational and truth is relative
Haven't you heard of a gray area or a paradox?
Well maybe God is the good, the bad, and the space between then!
There once was a time, and that time is now, when I thought God was the universe
And was love, truth, and beauty
But in order to experience the love, truth, and beauty qualities
God had to create their opposites
God, being pure creative thought energy and multiple universes of waves
Condensed wave functions’ oscillations of the energy into the slow vibration of matter as we know it today
And it was chaos at first for the purpose of all the chemicals synching together
In a synthesis of evolution that was conscious of its choices
And only our universe’s laws were conducive to life
So God settled on the physical plane
Circuits of consciousness in invertebrates evolved into the consciousness of primitive tribal man
God had settled in everything, but now consciousness was becoming expanded
And God found humans to be most open to having the whole universe reside in him
Wise men from East and West were the two hemispheres of God’s brain
Some praised reason while others focused on intuition and neither were more right than the other
We’re all the figments of God’s imagination
We’re all capable of making God’s dream lucid
So we can create our own reality—really, we’re just the imagination of ourselves
We’re all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively
Death and time aren't real after all!
And I have evidence from praxis, my own personal gnosis
And I have evidence from teachers, including many scientists
They're all crazy fools for attempting to bring God out of the heavens
And into the minds and hands of man
But I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if this wisdom hasn’t set me free
As they say, Jesus’ blood ain't failed me yet!
Are you ready to work on your self not just physically or mentally, but spiritually?
Metaphysics holds that the creator and the creation are not separate. All forms in life are a manifestation of God, who is the substance of all form. Our consciousness flows directly into God, who is experiencing life through us. The less obstructions, the more we realize the holiness of our beings. By looking inside, we can learn more about God than reading any religious text. All it takes is an open mind curious enough to find the answers, and they will flow into us.
"In India when we meet and part we often say, 'Namaste," which means I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides, I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us." Ram Dass
What is the highest idea you could have of yourself? That you are love, truth, and beauty? Well, reflect now on the moments in your life in which you have embodied love, such as when you made someone's day by giving love to them; when you said something so true you couldn't believe the words came out of your mouth; when you felt beautiful and looked in the mirror and it reflected how you felt.
I say- that is the real you. That is the true nature of your soul. All it can do is be love, truth and beauty. All else is a result of thought- if you're negative, you'll wallow in that, and practice it. You'll attract what you fear because you're expecting it. We can't ignore the reality of negative thoughts, because they do represent a perspective, but we can refrain from acting on them or expecting them from others in life. It doesn't have to be OUR perspective, and it can't be our reality if we don't believe in it. When I say "I expect you to be yourself," I mean be your soul- love, truth, and beauty. Acting in accordance to this is doing God's will.
A key thing to remember is that there is a reality behind appearance- a spiritual structure to all form. When you see a flower, there is a reality behind its appearance- a seed. And there had to be right conditions to inspire the seed to grow. Humans work that way too. We see each other, and we see each other act different ways. But each deed, each experience, each shout- it all comes from a seed of thought. Our thoughts become our actions; our actions become our habits; our habits become our character; our character becomes our destiny. But those seeds need the conditions- our prescription of perspective- the lenses in which we view shapeless reality- and this constitutes the culmination of our knowledge. You can’t know what you haven't experienced. So experience is like the flower who germinates seeds that are carried by the winds of time and space to grow again in a cycle. Understanding, through knowledge gained from personal experience and the wisdom of reflection on our knowledge in relation on how to act, this understanding is still, it is the Taoist state of being, just pure being. It is knowing, not thinking about right or wrong or left or right- those cease to exist. It is not doing. It is meditation on some truth, beyond good and evil. And essentially, that’s what our souls do. Our souls are truth, love and beauty. And all thoughts come from our knowledge which comes from our experiences. We are like flowers- in a constant state of becoming, traveling through the cycles of realization. Our souls are God's longing to experience itself fully and completely. And calling forth the Presence of God- which is always there, in everything, is a state of remembrance and reception. What is called divine inspiration is the God in you waking up! And when your God is attentive- that is- when the real you is attentive- it falls in synch with the God of its surroundings. Thus coincidences will seem synchronous because of how strangely right the world can be- we call those moments "more than coincidence...something supernatural, like a glitch in the matrix," "déjà vu,” "the chills," or a "sixth sense". But we make our own coincidences, and our own synchronicity, by having faith that the universe will unfold as it should. It's the choice between being a believer or someone who can't conceive of the spirit, or believe in a spirit they shouldn't fear. Because God's love is uncondtional.
So our thoughts are seeds behind our appearance to others, and they are creative. Behind our thoughts are conditions of attitude, because a seed cannot grow if it is not sown in the right conditions. As Jesus taught:
“Faith is our earth in which we take root; hope is the water through which we are nourished; love is the air through which we grow; gnosis (understanding) is the light through which we become fully grown”.
Gospel of the disciple Philip, authored by a Valentinian gnostic Christian (!)
Heracleon, Fragment 19, in Origen's Commentary on John 13.15
Nag Hammadi library
If these are the lenses in which we view the world, then we can see clearly that the divine works in all ways. There comes a choice between acting on thoughts lower than love, truth and beauty and acting on the understanding that we are love, truth, and beauty. That is the part of us that is God. I'm not going to say "God has given us a gift of a piece of himself inside our filthy animal heads!" Rather I'm going to say we are God, the choice is whether we act on it. My temporary self, who will live and die- I no longer identify myself with that vessel. I can't, unless I want to be attached to this life; but attachment to this life is what will block me from heaven.
Our consciousness is a subjective experience of God's consciousness- we're all just ideas of God's imagination. The whole universe is connected to everything-
"To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour"
William Blake
By looking within, by following our Tao- those activities that make us feel one with the universe (mine is through dancing, writing, boogie boarding and mystical teachings), the unvierse will work with us and in us. As long as we stay true to ourselves, and trust the freedom given to us by the universe, we will be acting in accordance to God's will, and the universe will give back to us. God is the universe- and we are God's friend. He needs us just as much as we need "him". We are his autonomous agents- we are him in disguise, sent out so God can experience himself. Just follow your innermost desires, learn from your mistakes, be true to yourself, don't deny experience, and you will not go to "hell"- which is just a state of self-imposed ignorance. The moment you vow to follow a spiritual journey is the moment you are saved- and your past will be forgiven because it will be seen in this new light of gnosis through experience.
We create our reality. We really are in control. Your imagination is eternal, because it is not yours. There isn't even a you or a me, there is just a creation of our imagination. We're all one. Never forget unity. Our love, truth, and beauty will create the highest reality, but only through stress. We need to push our highest selves to the limits by acting in accordance to them- this will make society tremble at the power of love and those who are not on our level will fight back. Through the struggle, we will progress and expand. We can only become our God after going through hell- first passively (you before you were saved) and then consciously (if you work on not being a hypocrite and fixing your mind by breaking your bad habits).
One day, I shall never worry any more. Until then, my mind is a saint and a philosopher, comforting me one minute and then doubting my comfort the next. But the part of me that is God will live on after I die. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm sure the universe's consciousness will work with me and as my soul, just as it has before, because I have vowed to meet it halfway. I am a self-created being; but my interaction with other beings help me evolve. I'm sure the universe will be like the winds that scatter the seeds of the flower into new fertile ground.
UNAWARE
"You know nothing of yourself here and in this state. You are like the wax in the honeycomb: what does it know of fire or guttering? When it gets to the stage of the waxen candle and when light is emitted, then it knows. Similarly, you will know that when you were alive you were dead, and only thought yourself alive."
Sufi master
Instead of trying to extinguish my desires, I am going to work on only acting in accordance to love, truth, and beauty. My holy intentions should meet heaven halfway. As long as my heart is pure, my thoughts should reflect this. By putting my heart into everything, making my work a conscientious labor of love, I can reflect the divine within. In order to purify my heart, I'm going to be conscious of the Holy Spirit which is within me, the whole universe that shines it light, and this should bring out the Spirit on others, which should in turn cause me to fear less and doubt less. We're all sacred souls on a sacred journey, so I'm working on only addressing the light inside people, and not their lower self. I only wish to expect things based on a positive attitude. I'd hope that you join me, and the world could become a better place, more conducive to heaven on earth.
"A person is a person through other people"
The principle of ubuntu according to Nelson Mandela
The awakening of God as a universe that understands itself can only happen not by looking inward for gnosis alone, but also by acting in accordance to your Tao and expecting love, truth and beauty from others, which should elicit whole clans and networks to sparkle and eventually cause a conflagaration of human consciousness that acknowledges the living spirit- the Presence in all things.
"The opposite of attachment is to say, baby, I accept the here and now fully and completely"
Ram Dass
God is here and now. Presence in the eternal present. God is a state of being we can attain if we seek it. The universe works with us and in us. Freedom in just the right areas and control in just the right areas- this can cause us to fly. Are you ready to fly?
Join me as I refer to the teachings of Stephen Hawkings, C.S. Lewis, drug trips I had, Bill Hicks, Y.B. Yeats, native American folklore, ancient Buddhist texts, the Holy Bible, Kahlil Gibran, Ram Dass, my mystical experiences, Neale Donald Walsch, Eric Coleman, Nikolai Tesla, Einstein, De Broglie, John Wheeler, Robert A. Wilson, Timothy Leary, William Blake, Nelson Mandela, Eric Voegelin, Anne Lamott, St. Theresa of Avila, Taosim, Natalie Goldberg, and more! to support my thesis that Jesus was a Bodhisattva, the Buddha achieved Christ status and that you and I have an inherent Christ-consciousness/Buddha-nature. I am following the light of Masters- those lucid dreamers- and sharing the wisdom. Indeed, these two figures paved the way for us, and one of them died in the process; it’s up to you and me to fulfill their prophecies. The New Age is upon us.
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The imagination has unlimited possibilities.
I can imagine specific objects in a specific setting doing specific things, but the variables are unending, if I include variations that are illogical, such as the absurdities of a Dali painting. Colors, shapes, shadows, shades…I could have just one action- a man throwing a basketball into a hoop- and only manipulate other variables such as colors, shapes, shadows, shades and contexts such as the background, the fine details and the expressions on the man’s face- and I would eventually reach an end, fifty million years later. Because when I say fine details, I mean the patterns of this man’s sock; the different locations, directions and overall fate of sweat; the position on the court from which he shoots; the styles he uses to shoot; the number of gravel particles on the pavement- you get my drift. The possibilities seem endless to the mind, which is turned off by the task of having to go through such a tedious experiment. Now imagine then, after the fifty million years of mixing and matching variations, we adjust something big- the man now misses the shot, and we have to go through every single possible way in which he could miss the shot. Bam, another ninety billion years right there. Now, if we were to do even this, imagine going through every possible scenario of every thing both physically possible and impossible. We can’t even conceive of this, and if we do, it’s only a vague idea. We’d have to account for temperatures, weight, the tectonic plates, increased expansion of the universe, names both pronounceable and unpronounceable, languages known and unknown, and every number including our ignorance of the limitlessness of numbers- infinity.
Please read the following article:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/6929/h_kaku2.html
Now, we enjoy our reality because it is somewhat predictable. This is comforting- the laws of physics make us feel secure. If I clean my room and then go to class, I know that when I’m gone an orb of light won’t appear out of thin air and shoot paintballs all over my room; my computer won’t set itself on fire; child porn won’t come out of my faucet and my phone won’t dial 911 automatically, mimic my voice, assume my identity and “turn myself in” so that when I come home the police are waiting for me. Causality is very much a source of order and stability in a scary world of the law of entropy and uncertainty.
But my reality sometimes bores me or overwhelms me, causing me to seek escape. I might tell my friend I’m secretly a woman to make my life more exciting, or daydream about metaphysics because my mind is restless for answers. Sometimes I envision the past or the future. But my memory isn’t that reliable, so when I conjure up the past, I can only do it to the best of my ability. Some details might be general or vague, but the bulk of it is there. It’s the best possible of all my ability to reflect on reality past. When I try to predict the future, the setting is an overly-general façade and I project, to my best ability, what I think will happen based on what seems logical to me. I realize the possibilities are endless, but I assume so much. Does this remind you of Hawking’s theory?
Now, even in the present, I assume. I project. I predict and I speculate. Most of all, I interpret. A person says to me, “I don’t faith alone will save you. I believe you have to do more than just go to church every Sunday; that something more is required. Someone can’t just say ‘you are forgiven,’ and that’s it.” I interpret this as someone who has done something so bad in their past that they feel like accepting Jesus as their savior alone isn’t enough. I know she’s a Christian. Just earlier today, I remembered something terrible I did to someone, how recent it was and how crippling it is to think I could do something so horribly disgusting. I saw it is baggage- how should I live with myself? How can I live with myself? Maybe I was just projecting this on to her. But it is a possibility that she feels guilty about something to, and it’s more likely than a lot of other possibilities. I always assumed faith alone will save you, based on the following quote:
“[sic: narrator] ‘But I don’t understand. Is judgment not final? Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?’
“[sic: spirit guide] It depends on the way ye’re using the words. If they leave that grey down behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.’ (Here he smiled at me.) ‘Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning.’
“I supposed that I looked puzzled, for presently he spoke again.
“ ‘Son,’ he said, ‘ye cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless he brought no message back. But yet can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end fo all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We are always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.” C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce.
I believe I’m saved now that I let Jesus into my heart. In the C.S. Lewis sense, I’m in heaven. But I’m not perfect because I still have some kinks of doubt to work out, so I’m not in deep heaven. I’m working to not become a hypocrite by taking responsibility and accountability for everything that comes into and out of my body:
“It is often difficult for people who have not had continuity in life to understand that freedom without responsibility and accountability is as detrimental as slavery. Freedom cannot be an end unto itself. Freedom from something must flow into freedom to be something else or it is not truly freedom. The object of getting free is being fee: the object of being free is living free.” http://www.radicallyinclusive.net/content.cfm?id=2008
So what does all of this have to do with the imagination?
Well, reality is my subjective account of a wave function. I perceive through my senses- my eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue and nerve endings. Also, what I choose to believe is what I perceive. I can interpret life from a number of different perspectives, but I narrow down the perspectives to what I call that of my individual identity, Shep Glennon, based on how I was born, what has happened to me, what I believe, and what I do. What I’m doing is assuming life is one way, one of infinite possibilities. My perception itself is a wave function, as chosen by my imagination so as to try to make sense of all phenomenon. I could have an existential crises that makes me lose my faith (though I’m going to say this is impossible for goodness sake), and this would constitute a “quantum” leap, to use the analogy based on Hawking’s universe theory, that forces me to reevaluate my life.
In other words, my imagination is as unlimited as the universe, and “reality” is just the wave function I’ve chosen out of a certain amount of possibilities. Really, I know there’s only two paths for me- to believe or not to believe. I believe in metaphysics, which inspires me to pursue an active spiritual life that overlaps with some religious doctrine but ultimately is a belief all its own- a synthesis of “supernatural” experiences of mine and spiritual teachings that have made me slap my head with deep recognition. To believe or not to believe in a God is the big variable in my life- it’s the difference, to refer back to the aforementioned example of a basketball player, between me making a the shot and missing it. Luckily, my convictions are rooted in science. Metaphysics states that the creator and the creation are not separate. I feel as though this simultaneously proves and disproves the existence of God, because it does not make God transcendent but immanent in the natural. And yet, I ascribe ignorance to a fundamental—but not lasting—boundary that in fact does make God transcendent. This ignorance is the idea that rejects a Christ-consciousness / Buddha-nature inherent in all humans. We all speak of how this addiction or that bad habit is keeping our famous artists from realizing their potential—“Oh, Kurt Cobain. Oh, Jimi Hendrix, and Charlie Parker. They had so much potential, but they wasted it away.” And I believe these hypocrites are right—if those awesome musicians had found a high that was not of this world—a spiritual high; if they could find inspiration and relaxation from their own mind and nothing else—they could have made music just as classic. But the people who say this, including me, are addicts and slaves to bad habits ourselves. To quote the Bible, why are we trying to remove the speck from their eye without first removing ours? Well, here is my truth—we can. We CAN stop being hypocrites. It will involve a lot of work, but I know we can. And if everyone did this, panentheism could become pantheism, and it would be heaven on earth. The only thing stopping us is how much we choose to limit this possibility with our mental blocks. First, we have to imagine it as possible. Second, we have to work on believing it is possible, with all our hearts. And finally, we can create it as a reality.
So we live in a rational world of cause and effect. Our dreams provide a nice escape from the shackles of causality. But according to many, including me, our dreams are not that far off from the truth, so that if we interpret them correctly, we can see that our dreams are just a parallel wave function to our waking life—dreams just express the same reality in a less limited way. Dreams, being free from cause and effect, are a parallel universe that shed a new light on our lives by looking at it from a perspective of unlimited possibilities. When we sleep, it’s a quantum leap to the nearest wave function that lacks the laws of causality. It’s still logical in its own metaphorical way.
This is why I advocate the use of psychoactive drugs for spiritual growth only- plants like marijuana, shrooms, and salvia are keys to parallel universes in which reality is looked at from a new perspective of meta-consciousness. Limited amounts of LSD and DMT are okay my by arbitrary standards- I’ve come to mistrust synthetic drugs, but DMT is produced naturally by the brain and may hold the key to understanding consciousness and reality. But overuse of these drugs can lead to trips in which naïve drug users may never return from.
My theory is that this reality we live in was chosen because it was the best of all possible realities- its conditions were the most conducive to life. But only through a mixture of this reality and consciousness of the spiritual reality, which masters like Jesus and Buddha were able to attain, can we attain knowledge of where we’re from, why we’re here and where we’re going- our origin, purpose and destiny. Looking at the universe as if it were blind and impersonal won’t get us anywhere anymore. Valuing objective and positivist science over subjective experience and metaphysics is a dead end.
I adhere to the Bill Hicks school of philosophy:
“All matter is merely energy condensed into a slow vibration. The universe is one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Life is a dream, and death isn’t real. We are the imagination of ourselves.”
Life is a dream, and Jesus and Buddha were lucid dreamers. Ram Dass and Joel Goldsmith as well.
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“The nature of the mind is clear and luminous,But obscurations are adventitious”
ancient Buddhist text
That means negativity and fear and ignorance all happen by chance to us when we are immature in our Christ consciousness, but our true nature is eternity- God's consciousness- and we are responsible for our own negative thoughts. When we were born, we were so full of faith that we thought ourselves immortal; and in a sense, we were right- consciousness does not die. Consciousness isn't even ours- it's God's.
But we began instantly to identify with our physical body and its sensations, and that is where the lie began. Still, we felt like anything was possible.
Then people began to say “we die” and we began to believe them, not knowing it was only the form that died, not the spirit. The child gets more and more corrupted by negativity- but this is just immaturity. We need to get our imagination and awe of nature back, as well as the belief in immortality. We understood, as children, that life wasn’t real. We need to remember this, but come at it with a more mature approach. God is in nature and in our consciousness- the "perfect mind" that is obstructed by everyday immaturity and negativity; the imagination that we are scolded for daydreaming with; the love truth and beauty our soul longs to express and experience and recognize in others. The tools of imagination plus nature = creation of form. The tools of imagination plus imagination = new ideas. Ideas are what will liberate us into the Kingdom of Heaven. Knowledge is known through experience learned, witnessed and observing and respecting God. Wisdom is being able to apply knowledge on a day-to-day basis. Understanding is when knowledge and wisdom are used to show others your own subjective experiences. If we can get people to understand that believing is seeing, we can begin to liberate.
Because space and time are not real, that perfect state of unity that is the kingdom of heaven exists right now, nowhere, which is somewhere in the imagination. It is why we are all here. The state of perfection being born of the unity of all human forms already exists, but we are just catching up to it. Our pasts selves, our present selves, our future selves; they all exist in the ethereal. They all belong to the eternal, as subjective experiences of the one mind of the God that is dreaming all this up in a timeless realm. If we listen to God, we listen to the best of our selves from every life we have lived, because only the part of us that is God is saved (Matthew 19:25), which is another way of saying that the true nature of the mind is "clear and luminous"--our true consciousness- which shines with love, truth and beauty-- is God. The past-present-future selves guide us because they are God knowing what it is that we need to remember so the future perfect bliss can be attained, which it already has, but just so the prophecy can be self-fulfilled. It is why we pray and why we meditate- so that we can shut out the noise of the world and hear God-who is our past, present, and future-bestow on us the grace to receive the message in the near future. Because now that our eyes are open for the answer, we will be able to notice it, and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimists and atheists think they are right because they already made up their mind or on some level believe that life sucks and God doesn't exist, so they will go around looking for things to confirm this belief. But once one has faith- as you may have noticed- the lenses in which you perceive life are now oriented toward finding God- and you do. This explains why believing is seeing, because what you believe becomes a radar to pick up confirmations of this belief in everything.
In Matthew 18: 6-9, Jesus clearly says that hell is only faithlessness (ignorance)- the idea that God is not in all of us.
C.S. Lewis explains this clearly:
“[sic: narrator] ‘But I don’t understand. Is judgment not final? Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?’“
[sic: spirit guide] It depends on the way ye’re using the words. If they leave that grey down behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.’ (Here he smiled at me.) ‘Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning.’
“I supposed that I looked puzzled, for presently he spoke again.
“ ‘Son,’ he said, ‘ye cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless he brought no message back. But yet can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end fo all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We are always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce.
Also in Matthew 18:6-9, he shows that Christ is evident to the child, because the child is in constant communion with nature. The child sees God in everything, there is no limits stopping him from being in awe of nature and no cap on his imagination- the possibilities for him or her are endless. The child truly sees the world as a bunch of tools and also a canvas in which to express the divine within, using their imagination and faith. Why do children possess such imagination and faith? Because they understand "The mind is clear and luminous"- their minds are in the state of Christ-consciousness without even knowing it. But what men do to them is they get them to buy into this world of lies, fears and suicidal tendencies. They get them thinking that their imagination isn't real, and that God isn't real, and reduce life to chemical and biological and physical functions, not knowing that God is the substance of all physical form as well as the imagination, which is the house of the consciousness where God rests in.
Life is God manifesting himself in many and all ways so that he might know himself through experience. And it can only do this through condensing its thought into energy into matter, and use evolution and a complex cosmic symphony of syntheses first physical and then mental to awaken its own power.
There is no future heaven, because time isn’t real. There is just a house we cannot see with our eyes, a house that holds the highest thoughts of love, truth, and beauty, and we can only seek to dwell in this house for a moment. But a day will come when each of us dwell in this house forever. There is only a choice of seeing us all as one, or seeing us all as separate, that will unlock this house for all of us. Kahlil Gibran understood that the houses we live in now are only temporary, and they only limit us. These houses can be seen as our bodies and our minds, which dwell in lowly thoughts of negativity, with huge padlocks and still no peace.
This house “becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.
“Though its hands are silken, its heart is full of iron.
“It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeer at the dignity of the flesh.
“It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.
“Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
“But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.
“Your house shall not be trapped nor tamed.“Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.
“It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.
“You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, not bend you heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down.
“You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living.
“And though of magnificence and splendour shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.
“For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.”
Kahlil Gibran The Prophet
He doesn't literally mean there’s a great gig in the sky, but its beat goes through the infinite vibrations of your highest longings.
When you have those moments where truth shocks you and makes you slap your head, where attraction is like recognition of your soul mate (the other half of your synthesis) and you act on this recognition in responsible love, where there is the beauty of acts of giving that make you weep--this is God recognizing himself. God is the highest part of ourselves- the truth, the love and the beauty- and acting in accordance to this in ourselves in expecting it from others is the highest way to act. It is communion with life.
"In India when we meet and part we often say, 'Namaste," which means I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides, I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us."
Ram Dass
The imagination is the closest humans can come to being God, because our imagination is as unlimited as God is. We are all the imagination of God, and human imagination is only limited by human limits. Once we start to imagine ourselves as God, and really believe it, it will gradually become true.
You don’t see with your eye
You perceive with your mind
The eye is but a window, seen through and not with
Sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste are all intermediaries
They are all used THROUGH the eye, finger, nose, ear and tongue
And not with them
The BRAIN isn’t even perceived with…
It, too, is the tool, an intermediary of a higher consciousness
The one consciousness that is experiencing itself subjectively
Our brains too are like windows
There’s only one consciousness, and it unifies all of us in terms of thought
Time isn’t really real
Eternity is
God is the eternal universe
And really is a triune, then
The past God which we now take for granted
This God created cosmos out of an urge to know itself
By slowing thought energy into a condensed vibration
To create the first particles of light in a starburst
Then through a series of choices and synthesis of matter and ideas, evolved into the world that lead up to the present moment
We see this God in the caverns, the atmosphere, the clouds, the water
They are ancient
Even trees, blades of grass; even our bodies are God of the past because we were not born today!
And then there is God now- the God of the eternal present- because past and future are only illusions but they still exist on the three-dimensional scale
This is God experiencing life
God is in every particle and every particle is infinite
The form it is in now is only temporary
And God rests also in our minds
God is our collective consciousness
Right now we are all living out the urge of God the past to know himself
Each of us has a purpose- God realizing himself
And finally, there is the future God
Who shall not want
This God is no longer an urge but a knowing
This God can only be and not do
In a state of pure blissful heaven
Its work is done
Right now we are all catching up to the future God, the future perfect rest
And we are also living out the soul’s longing of the past God, the urge of Genesis to bite the apple of knowledge of good and evil
And right now, God is in all forms
Except the future God has no negativity
The future God has no desire
And so in order to catch up to the God that is not afraid
We must find eternity within our own consciousness
That is what is meant by Christ-consciousness
That the universe flows through us
To say God is within
Is not just to say God is in
Saying the Father is in me is not enough
Because God is also WITH me
WITH-IN
The universe, if I have faith in it, if I trust it
Will work with me and not against me
That is what objective science fails to realize
The feel on the outside looking in
But God is on the inside looking out
Matthew 19:25- “Who than can be saved?,” they asked Jesus
26- Jesus looked straight at them and answered, “This is impossible for man, but for God everything is possible”
(Good News Bible- Catholic Study Bible)
Man cannot be saved
My name, William Shepherd Glennon, it cannot be saved
The part of me that wants, that fears, that says “I” as if “I” were apart from God
That will not be in the future perfect rest!
I will know good and evil, and “evil” will be the idea I can hold on to what is temporary about me
No, I hold on to nothing, because I am the universal me
The eternal me!
Jesus here is saying God is within all of usJust like how he said “I and the Father are one”
He’s saying the temporary forms God takes-Jesus, Peter, a tree, a bird, me, you
We were born in a night to perish in a night
In the view of eternity, all those temporary embodiments of the spirit are miniscule
I as in my body will not last
But the part of me that is God
The Imagination that sees through and not with my brain and eye, as the writer William Blake calls it
The love, truth, and beauty as New Age writer Neale Donald Walsch calls it
The luminous mind as the Buddhists call it
The Brahman the Namaste is directed at, as the Hindus call it
The Atman and the Soul/Spirit are just God while it is in temporary form
God in you and God in me
“The pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in man." (Gibran) Because we have knowledge of good and evil, we have a choice, whereas animals only have the nature of instinct to dictate their actions. That then which is "pure and innocent" in animals is their inability to perform evil, but that which is "purer and more innocent in man" is to choose the right thing over the wrong. But biting the apple in the Garden of Eden allowed for this to happen, and thus was only a parable to say that God had an urge to know what good really meant by finding out first what evil really meant.
"There was once a soul who knew itself to be the light. This was a new soul, and so, anxious for experience. “I am the light,” it said. “I am the light.” Yet all the knowing of it and all the saying of it could not substitute for the experience of it. And in the realm from which this soul emerged, there was nothing but the light. Every soul was grand, every soul was magnificent, and every soul shone with brilliance of My awesome light. And so the little soul in question was a candle in the sun. In the midst of the grandest light—of which it was a part—it could not see itself, not experience itself as Who and What it Really Is.
Now it came to pass that this soul yearned and yearned to know itself. And so great was its yearning that I one day said, “Do you know, Little One, what you must do to satisfy this yearning of yours?”
“Oh, what, God? What? I’ll do anything!” This little soul said.
“You must separate yourself from the rest of us,” I answered, “and then you must call upon yourself the darkness.”
“What is the darkness, o Holy One?” the little soul asked.
“That which you are not,” I replied, and the soul understood.
And so this the soul did, removing itself from the All, yea, going even unto another realm. And in this realm the soul had the power to call into its experience all sorts of darkness. And this it did.
Yet in the midst of all the darkness did it cry out, “Father, Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Even as you have in your blackest times. Yet I have never forsaken you, but stand by you always, ready to remind you of Who You Really Are; ready, always ready, to call you home.
Therefore, be a light unto the darkness, and curse it not.
And forget not Who You Are in the moment of your encirclement by that which you are not. But do your praise to the creation, even as you seek to change it.
And know that what you do in the time of your greatest trial can be your greatest triumph. For the experience you create is a statement of Who You Are—and Who You Want to Be."
God in Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God
The realm of darkness is the realm of duality- good and evil, up and down, big and small, truth and ignorance, ugliness and beauty, fear and love, and it is the realm of relativity. Things only exist here because of their polar opposites allowing them to exist. But the point is to view every obstacle from the attitude: I am the light! I am God and eternal and immortal and I am love, truth and beauty, baby! There is nothing you can do to kill me. You can disembody my spirit, but you can’t kill what is in you, too. Doing this will call forth the future God and bring it into the present.
So we go through our lives with an identity crises, and usually we do things that disgust us along the way. That is just us finding out who we are by finding out who we are not. Eventually, we will all know ourselves to be God, as it says in Matthew 19:26
The body is a collector of trash that mixes around experiences in the compost heap of your consciousness until the compost becomes a fertile soil from which truth and beauty can arise is now my way of looking at consciousness. I think it’s a sin that modern objective scientific standards don’t value the subjective conscious experience of each human being, because that’s where our boundless imagination lies, and it’s where real insights into life and love come from. It’s also a sin how some religious folk don’t see the truth to Zen Buddhism, because meditation—looking inward—will bring us closer to God than any ancient religious text ever will. Your time is coming—when all the stars align. Capturing the moment when the universe passes through you. “The universe within you”—inspired me to write:
To say God (universe/nature) is within
Is not just to say God is in
Saying that God is IN me is not enough!
Because God is also WITH me
WITH-IN
The universe, if I have faith in it, if I trust it
Will work with me and not against me
That is what objective science fails to realize
They depend on information from on the outside looking in
But God is on the inside looking out
Children are constantly in awe of life, and this humbles them. Children also feel immortal- their faith is something we should envy! They understand that they are an unlimited mind trapped inside a finite being, but they are so tapped in to the infinite of their imagination, it’s almost as if they intuitively know God—God is so evident to them that they don’t even need to label it. Heaven to them isn’t a place you go when you die, because you can’t die; heaven is in the realm of their imagination.
Learn to slow yourself down and become dumb so you don't take anything for granted, that is how children live. Jesus even says “you must be like this child—humble and faithful—if you desire to enter the kingdom of heaven". God is evident to the child, because the child’s unlimited imagination is not yet boxed in by the restrictions mankind will try to give the little boy or girl. This unlimited longing is the soul of God- it is the Imagination which sees the tree and turns it into a canoe, paper, and a house. Nature is God’s urge, a synthesis of chemical and biological equations that evolve into all that we call nature. Even the universe is nature, because it is natural. Every starburst is nuclear fusion—the creation of the periodic table of elements (although Earth’s is more complete)—all the tools we will ever need. Now the greatest tool is the mind—our unlimited imagination. The synthesis is no longer just physical, but with humans, the synthesis’ are creative, and the tool is the mind of God in all of us. What we construct with our love (born of the humbleness and awe of nature/universe, born of trust and faith we have in God that everything is not as real as it seems- life is a dream and death isn’t real and God delivers what we ask of him; born of the perception that everything is One) will create reality to its Most High.
I also believe in the following interpretation of “No man comes to the Father, but through me”:
“In almost all holy books, and especially in the words of holy beings, we are dealing with transmissions to different levels of disciples and devotees who can hear different things. In the New Testament, are the words of Jesus or of the Christ? We have really at least two beings in that one being. One of them is Jesus who is the Son, a form of the Father made manifest on Earth: ‘I am the Father, the Father is in me.’ Then there is the Christ, which is the consciousness out of which that form is manifested, the consciousness that acknowledges the Living Spirit. That’s not necessarily Jesus, the man. The predicament is that, depending on our degree of readiness, we become involved with the devotional relationship either to Jesus, the man, or to Christ, the consciousness, Christ, the love. And my experience is that particular Biblical quote is that it is Christ speaking, not Jesus; that Jesus is a historical statement of the perfection made manifest, and at that historical moment Christ said to somebody, ‘You can only come to the Father through me,’ though it may have been interpreted as coming through that body which was Jesus. For someone else, at another moment, it means that greater body out of which that body comes, which is the Christ body. And that Christ consciousness is what would be called the Living Spirit. It’s like the statement, ‘Eat of my flesh; drink of my blood.’ He didn't expect people to come up and tear off his arms or drink out of his veins; that is the universal form speaking, saying ‘Consume the universe into yourself; drink of the universe so that you may know the Father.’ That’s not Jesus speaking, that’s the Christ.
And the problem occurs that much heavy violence has been done through interpreting that initial statement as a statement of Jesus rather than as a statement of the Christ. Its misinterpretation has led to proselytizing [sic: converting to Christianity], which has led to a lack of acknowledgement of other people’s ways of meeting the Christ other than through the form of Jesus.”
– Ram Dass
I believe it’s possible people don’t have to be Christian to obtain the Christ consciousness (the consciousness of the one being from which all form is manifested- the one being that is in us and we are in it- the consciousness of this living spirit), but I wish to become a Christian because I choose Jesus to be my guide. God is always speaking- the question is- are we listening above the noise of the world so that we might hear? I have had moments of intimate enlightenment with God, and this has led me to Christianity. My heart tells me God would never damn his children, but I do believe in a form of Hell. But God’s light is in everyone, so a person can use this light to overcome their sins and leave Hell, thus making the time they spent in there Purgatory (C.S. Lewis). I believe judgment day will only enlighten those who never remembered the Christ consciousness, killing their sins and not the actual souls of the people.
Listen, everyone can be Jesus if they develop the Christ within. We just chose not to because we feel obligated to be attached to certain things. We place values of people, objects, and desires that get in the way of our Christ-like ambitions. If you wanted to, you could give up everything. You could never sin again. You could become like Jesus Christ. But you want to hold on to your lust, your gluttony, your parties, your paycheck. That’s all your choice. You chose not to be like Jesus.
Reporter: I need my paycheck because I have a family to provide for.
Jesus Christ: You made your family dependent on you. That was your choice.
Reporter: That is true.
Jesus Christ: I didn't have a family because I did not listen to any desire except for the one to talk to God. If you wanted to be me, you could drop everything and be me. But you have habits. And dreams. And they all include doing imperfect things because you have to make mistakes. Because you're human. Do you want to be human, or do you want to be God?
Reporter: I want to be human just like everyone else, but I also want your willpower.
Jesus Christ: You can have it.
Reporter: I can?
Jesus Christ: You too can be like me. You have itches, you see. You don’t scratch every itch, that is, you don’t do everything you desires ask of you. You would probably be the most materialistic man with the busiest schedule and the most kids. You wouldn’t have time for all of it. So you prioritize your itches. One itch said you wanted love, so you looked for a woman. One itch said you wanted to be a part of society, so you got a job. You put those in front of your animal itches, your itches for screwing every hot blonde and going to every party. All you have to do, if you want to be me, is to stop scratching. That is it. You will always itch, but the feelings will pass. If you focus on your goal, your transcendence into the divine, you will learn to ignore your itches at will. Itching is the human condition.
Reporter: So God made us itch so we could learn what it was like to be human?
Jesus: It is true. God wants to experience himself through us. Recall that I said experience is the ultimate teacher. To deny it is the only real sin. We need to make mistakes, we need to lie, to steal, to hurt others so we can feel bad about it. We need that guilt because guilt is an experience, a teacher. Guilt is saying “I know right from wrong, and what I did was wrong. I had reasons for doing it, reasons that included happiness. But that perceived happiness is not worth the guilt- I now see I would have been happier if I hadn't done it”
Reporter: So guilt would lead to change?
Jesus: Yes, guilt is one of the vehicles of change. From experience comes knowledge. Knowledge is the ultimate vehicle of change. Knowledge cannot come from a hypothetical theory alone. Knowledge comes from dynamics. From experiencing a real force. Experience is the basis of all knowledge. Experience is the truest form of reality.
Experience of the eternal now- seeing eternity in a grain of sand- feeling the presence of God in the very room you are in now- dunking yourself into the universe of your consciousness and the limitlessness of your imagination – that is where the kingdom of God is. It’s up to you to make the highest choices.
Truth, love, and beauty are the highest parts of you. They are the qualities of you that are God, whereas God is the essence of your consciousness and imagination—those are not qualities. You are truth, love and beauty! This is the real you. Self-doubt forgets these qualities. When you act forgetting these are you are selling yourself short. When you expect others to act less than these qualities, they tend to fulfill your expectations of them. If your choices are to bring you to the kingdom of heaven, then never forget there is a place in you and your neighbor were the kingdom of heaven resides. Expect this from yourself and others, and the world will no longer act out of fear and dehumanization, because people will realize they are all one, and that God is in every particle, in every detail, in all of nature. The only way God can not exist is in the stains of the human mind, which doubts faith.
“The Kingdom of God is within you” Luke 17:20 (Good News Cahtolic Bible)
“I assure you that unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:3 (Good News Catholic Bible)
“Who is saved?” “With humans, this is impossible; but with God, all things are possible” Matthew 19:25 (Good News Catholic Bible)
“ ‘I and the Father are one.’
The Jews picked up stones again to stone Him.
Jesus answered them, ‘I showed you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you stoning Me?’
The Jews answered Him ‘For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God.’
Jesus answered them, ‘Has It not been written in your Law, “I said, you are gods”? If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), do you say of Him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, “You are Blaspheming,” because I said “I am the son of God”? If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father.” (John 10:30-38) New American Standard Bible
- all quotes from Jesus
http://thingsgodtaughtme.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/the-kingdom-of-god-is-operating-now/
“God is all in all…The Christ in you, the Christ in me”
http://www.hallvworthington.com/Scripture_Grouping/ChristInYou.html
http://www.frimmin.com/faith/godinall.php
The kingdom is voluntary- it is here and now, waiting for us. It is a choice. It is a vehicle. The word “Mahayana” means “Great Vehicle” in Sanskrit, and is a form of Buddhism. Jesus Christ is another vehicle leading to the same place – A Quantum Leap to a parallel universe of heaven. Children have one foot in this world and one foot in ours- their heads are in the clouds. Right now, we can only achieve moments of this world, and we call it transcendent, but we can make it a reality. We can turn panentheism- an immanent and transcendent God into a pantheism- a purely immanent God.
In a way, all our desires are people. When I say “That was my fear speaking,” or “That was my lust speaking,” I am personifying my base desires into separate categories from my luminous mind. But I stop short of saying “That was my God speaking” when I speak words of love, truth and beauty- I say “it came from the heart” But my heart is God.
Every soul is a variation of God, a culmination of perspectives I call prescriptions- because they are a collection of lenses. Time isn’t real- we live in an eternal now- so when we “die,” our soul is still a longing. That longing is so strong, that if it doesn't feel like its job is finished (if it feels like it doesn't know itself completely), it will find a new body to embody. I’m not sure how this works- I don’t think it’s exactly reincarnation, nor is it heaven. It might be that I live on in all the good works I’ve inspired in people like my brother and sister and friends and strangers who witnessed me doing good and I influenced them to do good. It could be in the fact I may have saved people from darkness. It could be that I never really existed in the first place. Or maybe I existed on another plane, so that the closest reality that isn’t affected by entropy still yields my existence.
From what I can tell, my life could just be a collection of people. First of all, I have an unchanging essence from my childhood- my inner child who is in awe of nature, who uses his imagination without feeling scolded, who is innocent and humble and faithful and never afraid. Secondly, there is all the people I tried to be- the heartless dolla’ dolla’ bill gangsta who don’t take no shit, the non-hypocrite activist, the ever-ridiculous stoner, the always-serious philosopher, the melancholy recluse, the diligent scholar, the Olympian athlete, the model with the perfect body, the smooth talking lover of both sexes, the dog of man, the savior of women, the Devil’s advocate, the indifferent guru, the skeptic confident in his doubt, the soldier of love, the machine of war, the so-called “rebel” who is just a parallel conformist, nothing but a clump of dirt- and Jesus. And let me not forget all the people I’ve imitated out of appreciation or curiosity, like Nas, Hannibal Lector, and friends and others I idolized. And finally, there are all the voices in my head, which I think is more in line with what those Bible passages say.
You see, I don’t believe in God as separate from a line. I believe in a line called God. On this line are three things- the Universe, the Earth/Nature and Enlightened “Man”. This is my God line. It includes all the wave functions of parallel universes, which is infinite. It includes the earth with its creations- and when I say Nature, I include Children, because children are natural. Then there is Enlightened Man- the child who knows Good and Evil and has followed The Infinite Way to see no distinction between their consciousness and God- this is what is meant by the Christ-consciousness or the Buddha nature’s potential fulfilled. Man is not saved, as it says in Matthew 19, only for God this is possible- so the part of man that is God is saved. But of course, God implies its opposite as light implies darkness. God “created” the darkness- here, let me quote a friend of mine, Eric Coleman:
“Something to think about: No matter how dark it is, no matter how long or how deep you are in the darkness, once you light a match, it is gone. No amount of darkness can overcome light; you can't create darkness, you can only extinguish the light. Darkness itself cannot do that, it requires something else to act for it. Light in itself burns away darkness; that is an inherent advantage light has over darkness. It merely has to exist in order to defeat it; nothing more.”
Is it that inside of my brain there is a memory of light, and this allows me to close my eyes and still have light? Or is it that light is the true nature of my mind?
I like Neale Donald Walsch’s theory that God, in order to experience “his” power, is experiencing himself through us in order to know himself this way. But in order for God to know the love, truth and beauty it is capable of, their opposites had to exist. So the illusion of darkness- the lie, the unreality, the ignorance, the ugliness, the fear- the illusion of separateness- it all had to exist on some level in order for God to experience this- it could know of the darkness in order to know of the light. This darkness is what’s known as being born into this world- it is a kind of brainwashing experience to be around so much darkness in our society and be exposed to and accept the hypocritical nature of those who tell us what is right and wrong and then do wrong.
The door to darkness is the illusion of a self apart from God, and this is the door of Self-Absorption. Imagine Self-Absorption as a body. The left brain of this person is Worthless and the right side is False Prophet. The Worthless concept leads to Suicide, and the False Prophet side leads to Self-Martyrdom.
On the left side, the worthless side of this person, is low self-esteem. It begins with self-absorption- watching too much TV and overeating are a sign of this side of the brain being used. This side tends toward any of the following characteristics:
Seeks extreme comfort
Is painfully shy
Is self-destructive
Is lazy and stagnates
Seeks attention
Worries about the past and future
Is overly critical and conscious of the self
Is self-defeating
Wonders if they are good enough
Is fearful of uncomfortable situations, intimidating people, pain, death and change
Is anxious about irrational things
Is depressed
Feels sorry for self
Feels helpless and hopeless
Feels as if they have no control
Feels out of control
Feels worthless
Is suicidal
(That sounds like me as a teenager.)
The right side of the brain of this person is the false prophet. This side also beings with self-absorption, but leads to something that hurts more than the self, but whole groups of people. Characteristics of this side include:
Is materialistic
Fear of losing objects or position or reputation
Is a control freak and jealousy
Egotism, vanity, pride, arrogance
Feelings of entitlement and authority
Is irresponsible toward others and the earth
Is indifferent and unaccountable toward other’s well-being and the earth’s
Is a user, a leech, a parasite
Is a manipulator
Is a con artist
Is a greedy businessperson who uses other people as objects for profits
Is a tyrant/a dictator
Is a false prophet
Lives toward self-martyrdom
This monster you have just created in your head, using a visual image of the combination of all of these characteristics, is about to get worse. Think of the seven deadly sins:
Lust
Avarice (extreme pride)
Sloth
Wrath
Gluttony
Envy
Greed
Now, we’ve all done these. But did we learn from them?
“Watch your thoughts, for they become your words
Watch your words, for they become your actions
Watch your actions, for they become your habits
Watch your habits, because they become your character
Watch your character, because it becomes your destiny”
Frank Outlaw, attributed to
The key to understanding the final judgment of the Bible is when you decide to break your addictions. First, you need to become aware that you have a habit that is controlling you, and not the other way around. Then you break the addiction the same way you started it- with the thoughts that led up to doing it. Your thoughts are the roots of your destiny- so being conscious of your own thoughts will make your life a self-fulfilling prophecy in accordance to what you think about yourself. Once you can look at that monster of darkness as separate from you- a creature born of habit that finds it mistake in ignorant thought- you can slay it. This monster is what receives eternal damnation, not your love, truth and beauty which see us all as one big whole. Your monster was born of ignorance and fear, but once you believe death isn’t real, at least not conscious death, you become aware that only you can save yourself through the words of your master- be it Jesus, Buddha, the Tao, or a maybe a combination of all three of them. Ultimately, you will realize you are them- God- and become them. It may take many lifetimes, but you’ll be going in the right direction. The better part of you is the urge for God to know himself, this is your “good karma,” and this is what moves forward.
“Imagine that there is a box around your mind. This box is your protection against the unknown infinity that surrounds it. This infinity is God, and true reality. Our connection to this infinity is our imagination. We can imagine anything we want, sounds, visualizations, feelings, emotions, etc. Now then... think about all the things that have been invented, where did they come from?... They sparked in the mind of an artist, someone who saw something in their minds, then set out to make it 'real'. Through their creativity, they made all the things that we have taken for granted. Anyway, back to the box... our imagination can see things outside our box, and a soon as we make them real, we don't bring them into the box, we merely stretch the limits of our box to this new limit.Notice how new things are exciting? That is a thrill of being vulnerable, being outside the box. Notice how the more you do them, the more boring they become. We need to stretch our imaginations further to bring about the same thrill. But sometimes, when we found hate, or were fearful, we either built our boundaries stronger, or retreated further away from the side of our imagination that scared us. But once we have seen that far, we cannot go back. So if we retreat, we become even more fearful, and do everything to avoid being so vulnerable. If we build our boundaries even stronger, then we become more ignorant.It is only with love and courage that we can explore outside our box/cage without fear. And we can be left vulnerable, because we are safe with the love we have. It is when we understand that there is no such thing as a bad experience, or a good experience, just an experience to learn from... with love, we can see these experiences as pleasurable and benefits us.Now then, can you see that hate and fear create these boundaries, and that they separate us from God. And if we are all of one consciousness, the only reason why we are separate is because of the hate we have for each other. And that hate causes suffering. When we have love for each other, we then understand that we are one, and we bridge the gap between ourselves, and we become less separate. Through love, we become unified, and find bliss.Ok. Our fear of death, is the fear that we shall cease to exist. Well... Through my logic, we are God, God is infinite, therefore, we are infinite. Imagine God is the whole spectrum of light, well, we're just different colours of light. Different parts of the spectrum. Energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. God is energy, we are energy. Our spiritual energy, our consciousness cannot be destroyed. But it can move into different vibrations, different octaves. When we die, our spirit is ejected from our rotting carcass, and we move into which ever vibration was closer to us. If we lived in love, through Good Karma, we move up into the higher vibration. If we lived in fear and hate, through Bad Karma, we will move down into the lower vibration.I'm not quite sure if that’s the way it works... but then you figure it out... all you have to do is look within yourself. You are the only one that holds the answers to your life.” Unknown
The scientist Tesla had a vision in which he saw the universe as a symphony of octaves.
“Nikolai Tesla invented the alternating current generator which unleashed the modern technological revolution after a series of visions in which, among other things, Tesla ‘saw’ that everything in the universe obeys a law of Octaves.” Robert A. Wilson < http://deoxy.org/eoctave.htm>
Indeed, “He had seen in a flash the universe composed of a symphony of alternating currents with the harmonies played on a vast range of octaves. The 60 cycles-per-second AC [sic: alternating current, which he invented] was but a single note in a lower octave. In one of the higher octaves at a frequency of billions of cycles per second was visible light. To explore this whole range of electrical vibration between his low-frequency alternating current and light waves, he sensed, would bring him closer to an understanding of the cosmic symphony.” Margaret Cheney Tesla: Man Out of Time page 87
The harmony is all there. The chords to every song are out there, waiting to be synthesized. Every song builds upon one another and evolves just like the chemical equations that turned invertebrates into man. Music is evolving; our minds our evolving.
“The eight families of elements are:
1. Alkalis
2. Alkalines
3. Borons
4. Carbons
5. Nitrogens
6. Oxygens
7. Halogens
8. Noble Gases
The first four families, Leary argues, are terrestrial; that is, they are heavy and tend to fall to Earth. The second four families are extraterrestrial; that is, they tend to float off into space. Similarly, he says, the first four circuits of the nervous system are terrestrial; their function is to control survival and reproduction at the bottom of the 4,000-mile gravity well in which we presently live. The second four circuits, then, are extraterrestrial; they will come into full play only when we live normally in zero-gravity—in free space.”
Robert A. Wilson <http://deoxy.org/eoctave.htm>
Those that think they’ve broken down the world into the one and only model but reduce it all to a heartless machine- be wary of this. Love born of a deep understanding of unity, if somehow ignored in a theory, is not something that can be ignored.
“Knowledge is not by deduction, but Immediate by Perception or Sense at once. Christ addresses himself to the Man, not to his Reason. Plato did not bring Life & Immortality to Light. Jesus only did this.”
--Here we must remember that for Blake Jesus is the Imagination—the two words are for him synonymous—the living principle itself. Blake goes on to say that “Jesus supposes every Thing to be Evident to the Child & to the Poor & Unlearned. Such is the Gospel. What Jesus came to Remove was the Heathen or Platonic Philosophy, which blinds the eye of Imagination, the Real Man.”
--Man being, of course, for Blake, a living spirit; he is not referring to the physical “garment,” the material body.
He continues:
“Jesus consider’d Imagination to be Real Man & says I will not leave you Orphans and I will manifest myself to you; he says also, the Spiritual Body or Angel as little children always behold the Face of the Heavenly Father.”It is clear that Blake suspected the Greeks, including Pythagoras himself, founder of Western mathematics, as being responsible for what he calls the “wrenching apart” of Nature from the living Imagination. He writes specifically about harmonics, and in this challenges the Pythagorean element in Greek thought.
In considering the Given Senses he is at pains to argue that we do not see with them, but through them: it is the True Man, the Imagination, who is the perceiver. Plato had himself written that we see through the eye, not with it: a phrase repeated in many contexts by Blake. In his Auguries of Innocence he wrote that:
“We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see With Not Thro’ the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to Perish in a Night…”
(Shep: temporary eyeball but eternal perceiver)
“I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it, not with it”—so he concludes his notes on A Vision of the Last Judgment: Which Judgment is, for Blake, precisely and specifically the awakening from natural to Imaginative perception.
The passage on the natural senses is as follows:
“Ah weak & wide astray! Ah shit in narrow doleful form,
Creeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the ground!
The Eye of Man a little narrow orb, clos’d up & dark,
Scarcely beholding the great light, conversing with the Void; [Shep: we can only see so much light but there is an imperceptible reality going on around us]
The ear a little shell, in small volutions shutting out [Shep: we can only hear so much but there are imperceptible octaves around us]
All melodies & comprehending only Discord and Harmony;
The Tongue a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys,
A little sound it utters & its cries are faintly heard,…
Can such an Eye judge of the stars? & looking thro’ its tubes
Measure the sunny rays that point their spears at Udanadan?
Can such an Ear, fill’d with the vapours of the yawning pit
Judge of the pure melodious harp struck by a divine hand?”
Such is the world to those who look not through but with eye and ear and the other bodily organs. The sense of haring can register, Blake notes, harmonics (discord and harmony) but not melody—“shutting out all melodies” because harmonics are a physical phenomenon whereas melody belongs to the Imagination, and exists only in terms of meaning and imaginative experience.”--Kathleen Raine
Some more evidence:
http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/existence.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_from_bit#It_from_bit
All this metaphysical evidence is telling me that the present is eternal, existence is as shapeless as a cloud, and only we can give it substance and meaning using our imagination, which is the universe’s greatest gift to the human race. In life, if we work on building our noblest virtues that sees us all as God- we will be creating an ark- a Great Vehicle that will take us on a Quantum Leap toward a perfect reality.
"You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.
And I say that life is indeed darkness save for when there is urge,
And all urge is blind save for when there is knowledge,
And all knowledge is vain save for when there is work,
And all work is empty save for when there is love"
Kahlil Gibran The Prophet
The light of God is the urge, and the darkness was the lie. If anyone reading this has ever been on a drug trip so powerful they forgot there was another reality other than the one they were hallucinating, that may be the key to understanding this life. The lie seems real, but it is just in the “mind of God”. The urge is for God to know himself through Work, but it is our love that will save us all by fulfilling the prophecy of the genesis.
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 (“self”) and spirit (“God”), 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 (do a wikipedia search on this and find Nelson Mandela's quote)/community and family ties (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 convictions, 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 strengths 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.
Justice is love in action. Justice is unity plus peace. The big issues, abortion and gay marriage, should become resolved just by the fact that kindness and unity give fetuses and gays the benefit of the doubt.
The book The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran expresses the heaven on earth that will one day come.
“Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light. But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship. And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and more innocent in man.
When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,
‘By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed.
For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.
Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of life.’
And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart,
‘Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.’
And say in the autumn, when you gather the grapes of vineyard for the winepress, say in your heart,
‘I too am a vineyard, and my fruit shall be gathered for the winepress
And like new wine I shall be kept in eternal vessels.’
And in winter, when you draw the wine, let there be in your heart a song for each cup;
And let there be in the song a remembrance for the autumn days, and for the vineyard, and for the winepress.”
Kahlil Gibran
We are all eternal vessels, or in the process of building them at least. Faith, positive thinking, patience and discipline and whatever our personal Tao is- shaking our asses, boogie boarding, whatever- will bring us closer to our great vehicle. The unlimited longings of our soul, our imagination, cannot be contained forever.
What Gibran was talking about in The Prophet is communion with everything- so that all our lives are an act of worship. We put love into everything we do in this case- and if everyone did this- it would be heaven on earth. And that is what I am looking forward to. I don’t want it all to end, but I know we can do so much better if we stopped being hypocrites. We should expect more from each other. Remember- you are love, truth and beauty. Your life should be to experience this, and bring it out in others. Anything that gets in the way of this should be thrown out into the darkness so it can cry and gnash its teeth. The seven deadly sins are insatiable- they feed upon each other. That monster I spoke of before can be killed once we all wake up. Jesus’ prophecy can be fulfilled, but it involves us to progress, and to progress, we must choose to progress. No one else can do it for us- we have to find the Christ within to be our own saviors.
I’ve realized that thoughts and words are powerful, and come from the limitless realm of the imagination. The great changes in the world—slavery abolition, women’s suffrage, the writing of the Declaration of Independence—all had to be imagined as possible before they were created. I’m sure many people thought they were impossibilities, but imagination, positive thinking, affirmative speech and eloquent writing have clearly made a difference in the world. Writing truly is the religion, because it allows for the capturing of truth, love, and beauty, as well as self-actualization. It can help turn justice into a reality. What is more heavenly than all of this?
The Dr. Seuss character of our imagination is our inner child that never dies. The second one is making characters out of the voices in my head. The inner child represents me before I was filled with self-doubt, self-hate, negativity, fear of change and death, sexual promiscuity, and other forms of self-created vice. The inner child hasn’t been scolded for having an over-active imagination and isn’t made fun of for being slow. With him, the possibilities are endless. This is the most creative part of my mind. This child reminds me of who I really am. He is saying “who I was before all my traumatic incidents—that is still me!”
The neurotic voices in my head that argue with one another came out in my “Searching for the Silences of My Soul” short story:
As I sat in the wilderness to meditate today, I felt someone walk up behind me and tap me on the shoulder. “Are you on drugs?” the apparition asked, with a concerned look upon her phantom face.
“I am drugs!” I cynically replied in my haste.
I wrote this after meditating in a bamboo forest at the park behind Marymount, beside the Donaldson Run stream. No one ever actually stopped to interrupt my meditation, but as I tried to be at peace, my self-conscious side assumed some soccer mom walking her dog, dressed in pink sweatpants and a sleeveless white T-shirt with a blue fanny pack, would walk over in her running shoes and tap me on the shoulder to voice her concern with my actions. Many people—students and adults alike—have assumed I’ve been on drugs when I was sober, even before I started using drugs. And this is just one of the many voices in my head that keep me from being at peace. Anne Lamott says to imagine these voices are mice trapped and suffocating inside a jar, but I usually just envision shooting them point-blank. This doesn't work. I have to find new ways of silencing these voices each time, and I do this by answering them the only way I know how-by explaining to them that this life is a fiction and I can be as crazy as I want. I usually just get so ridiculous I end up laughing at my own weird imagination.
My mom told me that if you open yourself up to knowledge, to guidance, to answers—then they will flow into you. I learned that this is true. I’m reading a book to help me with meditation, though; it’s a Christian metaphysical book called God, the Substance of All Form and I really like it, though it tries to pretend it wasn’t influenced by Buddhism.
In my first essay, “Believing is Seeing,” I talked about my hallucinations from a drug called salvia. I was tripping the summer I graduated high school, in fact, at my going-to-college party, and I had a vision where all my thoughts were seeds deep in a soil. The more attention I gave certain thoughts, they would sprout and grow upwards, until I spoke the words out-loud—this would make them hit the surface and bloom. What Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones said about “composting” made me slap my head with recognition: Goldberg related the body to a collector of trash that mixes around experiences in the compost heap of your consciousness, until the compost becomes a fertile soil from which truth and beauty can arise. In my writings about experience, consciousness and knowledge, I have originally used the organic metaphor to explain my view of God and life and the soul many times, but now I will add the compost heap.
The way Natalie Goldberg related to the body as a collector of trash that mixes around experiences in the compost heap of your consciousness, until the compost becomes a fertile soil from which truth and beauty can arise, is now my way of
looking at consciousness. Although I always looked at it as organic, I never once saw my unconsciousness as a compost heap. But it is so true- we sense a lot of crap during the day. We hear bad words, lies, and we watch actions born of fear. We eat crap a lot, too. We have moments of glory in the midst of all this. It all gets filtered into the same place, but instead of how our food gets digested—which is that the nutrients get sucked out and the waste is expelled—our minds can expel the nutrients and feed off of negativity! It’s a choice, as opposed to the instinct of nature. Do we feed ourselves crap or gold?
We humans have the choice of the lenses in which we view the world. All we need to do is be open to the answers, and they will come to us. If we practice positive thoughts and affirmative speech, if we have faith, it will surely create our reality in this direction, and we will be able to see the works of the divine because we believe it. It must be conceived and believed through our thoughts, words and deeds. We will find our imagination coming true through the power of thoughts. We can create peace on earth if we stop writing it off as impossible. Receiving the kingdom of Heaven must be a personal choice; no one else can do it for us. And heaven will created on earth, not after we die. It must be a conscious decision of love and faith over fear and doubt, and a training of the mind to see the world in this way. This choice will help return us to the child within.
I have moments of truth where I slap my head, where my eyes roll back, and I feel what St. Teresa of Avila must have felt, and I never would have received these moments of beautiful mystical epiphany if I didn't have imagination, an awe of nature and an open mind coupled with the heavy words- faith and trust in something I cannot prove- the universe that works within me. These moments of love, truth and beauty are God in me recognizing “himself” in another form. But as Natalie Goldberg points out, “There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever.” So even though this essay is coming to a close, and it is the culmination of hours of meditation on life and moments of truth, I will be writing something new tomorrow that I feel is important enough to share with the world."
I think our true nature is perfection, because our true nature is Brahman, the God, Allah- praise be to his name. The only thing in our way of perfection is taking comfort in temporal pleasures- we limit ourselves with self-doubt, attachment, negativity, fear...we limit our unlimited minds with self-imposed preconceived notions- all we need to do to be perfect is to first conceive of ourselves as being perfect.
"God: Can you simply agree that on some of the questions of life the mystery is too great for even you to solve? Why not hold the mystery as sacred? And why not allow the mystery to be sacred, and leave it alone?
We are now trying to do the impossible, which is to speak of the unspeakable. It is what religion seeks to do. Have you ever looked down into a high powered microscope, and seen pictures or movies of molecular action, and said, “Good heavens, there’s a whole universe down there. And to that universe, I, the now-present observer, must feel like God!” Have you ever said that, or had that kind of experience?
Walsch: Yes, I should imagine every thinking person has.
-Indeed. You have given yourself your own glimpse of what I am showing you here. And what would you do if I told you this reality of which you have given yourself a glimpse never ends?
-Explain that. I’d ask you to explain that.
-Take the smallest part of the universe you can imagine. Imagine this tiny, tiny particle of matter. Now cut it in half. What have you got?
-Two smaller halves.
-Precisely! Now cut those in half. What now?
-Two smaller halves.
-Right. Now again, and again! What’s left?
-Smaller and smaller particles.
-Yes, but when does it stop? How many times can you divide matter until it ceases to exist?
-I don’t know. I guess it never ceases to exist.
-You mean you can never completely destroy it? All you can do is change its form?
-It would seem so.
-I tell you this: you have just learned the secret to all of life, and seen into infinity. Now I have a question to ask you.
-Okay…
-What makes you think infinity goes only one way?
-So…there is no end going up, any more than there is going down.
-There is no up or down, but I understand your meaning.
- But if there is no end to smallness, that means there is no end to bigness.
- Correct.- But if there is no end to bigness, then there is no biggest. That means, in the largest sense, there is no God!
- Or perhaps, all of it is God, and there is nothing else.I tell you this: I AM THAT I AM.AND YOU ARE THAT YOU ARE. You cannot not be. You can change form all you wish, but you cannot fail to be. You can only fail at not knowing Who You Are, and in this failing, experience only the half of it.
-That would be hell.
-Exactly, yet you are not condemned to it. You are not regulated to it forevermore. All that it takes to get out of hell, to get out of not knowing-is to know again.There are many ways and many places (dimensions) in which you can do this.You are in one of those dimensions now. It is called, in your understanding, the third dimension.
- Are there any more?
- Have I not told you that in My Kingdom there are many mansions? I would not have told it to you were it not so.
- Then there is not hell—not really. I mean, there is no place or dimension to which we are everlastingly condemned!
- What would be the purpose of that? Yet you are always limited by your know-ingness—for you—we—are a self-created being. You cannot be what you do not know your Self to be. That is why you have been given this life—so that you might know yourself in your own experience. Then you can conceive of yourself as Who You Really Are, and create yourself as that in your experience—and the circle is again complete…only bigger. And so, you are in the process of growing—or, as I have put it throughout this book, of becoming. There is no limit to what you can become.
- You mean, I can even become—dare I say it?—a God…just like You?
- What do you think?
- I don’t know.
- Until you do, you cannot. Remember the triangle—the Holy Trinity: spirit-mind-body. Conceive-create-experience. Remember, using your symbology:
HOLY SPIRIT = INSPIRATION = CONCEIVE
FATHER = PARENTING = CREATE
SON = OFFSPRING = EXPERIENCE
The son experiences the creation of the fathering thought, which is conceived of by the Holy Ghost. Can you conceive of yourself as one day being a God?
-In my wildest moments.
-Good, for I tell you this: You are already a God. You simply do not know it. Have I not said, “Ye are Gods” (Gospel of Luke)? "
- Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God
This isn’t avarice or hubris or a false prophecy- this is everything I hold true, and I am not alone. Jesus even said we could have the same power as him in the Gospel of Matthew, as long as we believed. In a way, Jesus is like Peter Pan, telling us that heaven is Never-Never Land. The film The Orphanage says it best- “Seeing is not believing, it’s the other way around. Believe, and you will see”. This may seem like kid’s stuff, but science, politics, philosophy, religion and whole cultures rise and sleep to this rule. Now you realize you and I do too. Dreamer, Thou Art Lucid!
http://ageofmurdanstorm.blogspot.com/2008/01/life-is-what-i-make-it-power-of-belief.html
http://ageofmurdanstorm.blogspot.com/2008/04/dreamer-thou-art-lucid.html
It was so beautiful that I was in awe of life
I was just a child with an over-active imagination, they said
You were egocentric and practiced animism
Well, I said, maybe God is the imagination that creates beauty then!
There once was a time when I thought God was love
You just had chemistry with someone, they said
You were a stoned teenager perceiving an illusion
He didn't love you the same way you loved him, anyway
Well, I said, maybe God is a chemist and perception then!
There was once a time when I thought God was truth
Be careful of the word truth, they said
Morality is situational and truth is relative
Haven't you heard of a gray area or a paradox?
Well maybe God is the good, the bad, and the space between then!
There once was a time, and that time is now, when I thought God was the universe
And was love, truth, and beauty
But in order to experience the love, truth, and beauty qualities
God had to create their opposites
God, being pure creative thought energy and multiple universes of waves
Condensed wave functions’ oscillations of the energy into the slow vibration of matter as we know it today
And it was chaos at first for the purpose of all the chemicals synching together
In a synthesis of evolution that was conscious of its choices
And only our universe’s laws were conducive to life
So God settled on the physical plane
Circuits of consciousness in invertebrates evolved into the consciousness of primitive tribal man
God had settled in everything, but now consciousness was becoming expanded
And God found humans to be most open to having the whole universe reside in him
Wise men from East and West were the two hemispheres of God’s brain
Some praised reason while others focused on intuition and neither were more right than the other
We’re all the figments of God’s imagination
We’re all capable of making God’s dream lucid
So we can create our own reality—really, we’re just the imagination of ourselves
We’re all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively
Death and time aren't real after all!
And I have evidence from praxis, my own personal gnosis
And I have evidence from teachers, including many scientists
They're all crazy fools for attempting to bring God out of the heavens
And into the minds and hands of man
But I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if this wisdom hasn’t set me free
As they say, Jesus’ blood ain't failed me yet!
Are you ready to work on your self not just physically or mentally, but spiritually?
Metaphysics holds that the creator and the creation are not separate. All forms in life are a manifestation of God, who is the substance of all form. Our consciousness flows directly into God, who is experiencing life through us. The less obstructions, the more we realize the holiness of our beings. By looking inside, we can learn more about God than reading any religious text. All it takes is an open mind curious enough to find the answers, and they will flow into us.
"In India when we meet and part we often say, 'Namaste," which means I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides, I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us." Ram Dass
What is the highest idea you could have of yourself? That you are love, truth, and beauty? Well, reflect now on the moments in your life in which you have embodied love, such as when you made someone's day by giving love to them; when you said something so true you couldn't believe the words came out of your mouth; when you felt beautiful and looked in the mirror and it reflected how you felt.
I say- that is the real you. That is the true nature of your soul. All it can do is be love, truth and beauty. All else is a result of thought- if you're negative, you'll wallow in that, and practice it. You'll attract what you fear because you're expecting it. We can't ignore the reality of negative thoughts, because they do represent a perspective, but we can refrain from acting on them or expecting them from others in life. It doesn't have to be OUR perspective, and it can't be our reality if we don't believe in it. When I say "I expect you to be yourself," I mean be your soul- love, truth, and beauty. Acting in accordance to this is doing God's will.
A key thing to remember is that there is a reality behind appearance- a spiritual structure to all form. When you see a flower, there is a reality behind its appearance- a seed. And there had to be right conditions to inspire the seed to grow. Humans work that way too. We see each other, and we see each other act different ways. But each deed, each experience, each shout- it all comes from a seed of thought. Our thoughts become our actions; our actions become our habits; our habits become our character; our character becomes our destiny. But those seeds need the conditions- our prescription of perspective- the lenses in which we view shapeless reality- and this constitutes the culmination of our knowledge. You can’t know what you haven't experienced. So experience is like the flower who germinates seeds that are carried by the winds of time and space to grow again in a cycle. Understanding, through knowledge gained from personal experience and the wisdom of reflection on our knowledge in relation on how to act, this understanding is still, it is the Taoist state of being, just pure being. It is knowing, not thinking about right or wrong or left or right- those cease to exist. It is not doing. It is meditation on some truth, beyond good and evil. And essentially, that’s what our souls do. Our souls are truth, love and beauty. And all thoughts come from our knowledge which comes from our experiences. We are like flowers- in a constant state of becoming, traveling through the cycles of realization. Our souls are God's longing to experience itself fully and completely. And calling forth the Presence of God- which is always there, in everything, is a state of remembrance and reception. What is called divine inspiration is the God in you waking up! And when your God is attentive- that is- when the real you is attentive- it falls in synch with the God of its surroundings. Thus coincidences will seem synchronous because of how strangely right the world can be- we call those moments "more than coincidence...something supernatural, like a glitch in the matrix," "déjà vu,” "the chills," or a "sixth sense". But we make our own coincidences, and our own synchronicity, by having faith that the universe will unfold as it should. It's the choice between being a believer or someone who can't conceive of the spirit, or believe in a spirit they shouldn't fear. Because God's love is uncondtional.
So our thoughts are seeds behind our appearance to others, and they are creative. Behind our thoughts are conditions of attitude, because a seed cannot grow if it is not sown in the right conditions. As Jesus taught:
“Faith is our earth in which we take root; hope is the water through which we are nourished; love is the air through which we grow; gnosis (understanding) is the light through which we become fully grown”.
Gospel of the disciple Philip, authored by a Valentinian gnostic Christian (!)
Heracleon, Fragment 19, in Origen's Commentary on John 13.15
Nag Hammadi library
If these are the lenses in which we view the world, then we can see clearly that the divine works in all ways. There comes a choice between acting on thoughts lower than love, truth and beauty and acting on the understanding that we are love, truth, and beauty. That is the part of us that is God. I'm not going to say "God has given us a gift of a piece of himself inside our filthy animal heads!" Rather I'm going to say we are God, the choice is whether we act on it. My temporary self, who will live and die- I no longer identify myself with that vessel. I can't, unless I want to be attached to this life; but attachment to this life is what will block me from heaven.
Our consciousness is a subjective experience of God's consciousness- we're all just ideas of God's imagination. The whole universe is connected to everything-
"To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour"
William Blake
By looking within, by following our Tao- those activities that make us feel one with the universe (mine is through dancing, writing, boogie boarding and mystical teachings), the unvierse will work with us and in us. As long as we stay true to ourselves, and trust the freedom given to us by the universe, we will be acting in accordance to God's will, and the universe will give back to us. God is the universe- and we are God's friend. He needs us just as much as we need "him". We are his autonomous agents- we are him in disguise, sent out so God can experience himself. Just follow your innermost desires, learn from your mistakes, be true to yourself, don't deny experience, and you will not go to "hell"- which is just a state of self-imposed ignorance. The moment you vow to follow a spiritual journey is the moment you are saved- and your past will be forgiven because it will be seen in this new light of gnosis through experience.
We create our reality. We really are in control. Your imagination is eternal, because it is not yours. There isn't even a you or a me, there is just a creation of our imagination. We're all one. Never forget unity. Our love, truth, and beauty will create the highest reality, but only through stress. We need to push our highest selves to the limits by acting in accordance to them- this will make society tremble at the power of love and those who are not on our level will fight back. Through the struggle, we will progress and expand. We can only become our God after going through hell- first passively (you before you were saved) and then consciously (if you work on not being a hypocrite and fixing your mind by breaking your bad habits).
One day, I shall never worry any more. Until then, my mind is a saint and a philosopher, comforting me one minute and then doubting my comfort the next. But the part of me that is God will live on after I die. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm sure the universe's consciousness will work with me and as my soul, just as it has before, because I have vowed to meet it halfway. I am a self-created being; but my interaction with other beings help me evolve. I'm sure the universe will be like the winds that scatter the seeds of the flower into new fertile ground.
UNAWARE
"You know nothing of yourself here and in this state. You are like the wax in the honeycomb: what does it know of fire or guttering? When it gets to the stage of the waxen candle and when light is emitted, then it knows. Similarly, you will know that when you were alive you were dead, and only thought yourself alive."
Sufi master
Instead of trying to extinguish my desires, I am going to work on only acting in accordance to love, truth, and beauty. My holy intentions should meet heaven halfway. As long as my heart is pure, my thoughts should reflect this. By putting my heart into everything, making my work a conscientious labor of love, I can reflect the divine within. In order to purify my heart, I'm going to be conscious of the Holy Spirit which is within me, the whole universe that shines it light, and this should bring out the Spirit on others, which should in turn cause me to fear less and doubt less. We're all sacred souls on a sacred journey, so I'm working on only addressing the light inside people, and not their lower self. I only wish to expect things based on a positive attitude. I'd hope that you join me, and the world could become a better place, more conducive to heaven on earth.
"A person is a person through other people"
The principle of ubuntu according to Nelson Mandela
The awakening of God as a universe that understands itself can only happen not by looking inward for gnosis alone, but also by acting in accordance to your Tao and expecting love, truth and beauty from others, which should elicit whole clans and networks to sparkle and eventually cause a conflagaration of human consciousness that acknowledges the living spirit- the Presence in all things.
"The opposite of attachment is to say, baby, I accept the here and now fully and completely"
Ram Dass
God is here and now. Presence in the eternal present. God is a state of being we can attain if we seek it. The universe works with us and in us. Freedom in just the right areas and control in just the right areas- this can cause us to fly. Are you ready to fly?
Join me as I refer to the teachings of Stephen Hawkings, C.S. Lewis, drug trips I had, Bill Hicks, Y.B. Yeats, native American folklore, ancient Buddhist texts, the Holy Bible, Kahlil Gibran, Ram Dass, my mystical experiences, Neale Donald Walsch, Eric Coleman, Nikolai Tesla, Einstein, De Broglie, John Wheeler, Robert A. Wilson, Timothy Leary, William Blake, Nelson Mandela, Eric Voegelin, Anne Lamott, St. Theresa of Avila, Taosim, Natalie Goldberg, and more! to support my thesis that Jesus was a Bodhisattva, the Buddha achieved Christ status and that you and I have an inherent Christ-consciousness/Buddha-nature. I am following the light of Masters- those lucid dreamers- and sharing the wisdom. Indeed, these two figures paved the way for us, and one of them died in the process; it’s up to you and me to fulfill their prophecies. The New Age is upon us.
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The imagination has unlimited possibilities.
I can imagine specific objects in a specific setting doing specific things, but the variables are unending, if I include variations that are illogical, such as the absurdities of a Dali painting. Colors, shapes, shadows, shades…I could have just one action- a man throwing a basketball into a hoop- and only manipulate other variables such as colors, shapes, shadows, shades and contexts such as the background, the fine details and the expressions on the man’s face- and I would eventually reach an end, fifty million years later. Because when I say fine details, I mean the patterns of this man’s sock; the different locations, directions and overall fate of sweat; the position on the court from which he shoots; the styles he uses to shoot; the number of gravel particles on the pavement- you get my drift. The possibilities seem endless to the mind, which is turned off by the task of having to go through such a tedious experiment. Now imagine then, after the fifty million years of mixing and matching variations, we adjust something big- the man now misses the shot, and we have to go through every single possible way in which he could miss the shot. Bam, another ninety billion years right there. Now, if we were to do even this, imagine going through every possible scenario of every thing both physically possible and impossible. We can’t even conceive of this, and if we do, it’s only a vague idea. We’d have to account for temperatures, weight, the tectonic plates, increased expansion of the universe, names both pronounceable and unpronounceable, languages known and unknown, and every number including our ignorance of the limitlessness of numbers- infinity.
Please read the following article:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/6929/h_kaku2.html
Now, we enjoy our reality because it is somewhat predictable. This is comforting- the laws of physics make us feel secure. If I clean my room and then go to class, I know that when I’m gone an orb of light won’t appear out of thin air and shoot paintballs all over my room; my computer won’t set itself on fire; child porn won’t come out of my faucet and my phone won’t dial 911 automatically, mimic my voice, assume my identity and “turn myself in” so that when I come home the police are waiting for me. Causality is very much a source of order and stability in a scary world of the law of entropy and uncertainty.
But my reality sometimes bores me or overwhelms me, causing me to seek escape. I might tell my friend I’m secretly a woman to make my life more exciting, or daydream about metaphysics because my mind is restless for answers. Sometimes I envision the past or the future. But my memory isn’t that reliable, so when I conjure up the past, I can only do it to the best of my ability. Some details might be general or vague, but the bulk of it is there. It’s the best possible of all my ability to reflect on reality past. When I try to predict the future, the setting is an overly-general façade and I project, to my best ability, what I think will happen based on what seems logical to me. I realize the possibilities are endless, but I assume so much. Does this remind you of Hawking’s theory?
Now, even in the present, I assume. I project. I predict and I speculate. Most of all, I interpret. A person says to me, “I don’t faith alone will save you. I believe you have to do more than just go to church every Sunday; that something more is required. Someone can’t just say ‘you are forgiven,’ and that’s it.” I interpret this as someone who has done something so bad in their past that they feel like accepting Jesus as their savior alone isn’t enough. I know she’s a Christian. Just earlier today, I remembered something terrible I did to someone, how recent it was and how crippling it is to think I could do something so horribly disgusting. I saw it is baggage- how should I live with myself? How can I live with myself? Maybe I was just projecting this on to her. But it is a possibility that she feels guilty about something to, and it’s more likely than a lot of other possibilities. I always assumed faith alone will save you, based on the following quote:
“[sic: narrator] ‘But I don’t understand. Is judgment not final? Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?’
“[sic: spirit guide] It depends on the way ye’re using the words. If they leave that grey down behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.’ (Here he smiled at me.) ‘Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning.’
“I supposed that I looked puzzled, for presently he spoke again.
“ ‘Son,’ he said, ‘ye cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless he brought no message back. But yet can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end fo all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We are always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.” C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce.
I believe I’m saved now that I let Jesus into my heart. In the C.S. Lewis sense, I’m in heaven. But I’m not perfect because I still have some kinks of doubt to work out, so I’m not in deep heaven. I’m working to not become a hypocrite by taking responsibility and accountability for everything that comes into and out of my body:
“It is often difficult for people who have not had continuity in life to understand that freedom without responsibility and accountability is as detrimental as slavery. Freedom cannot be an end unto itself. Freedom from something must flow into freedom to be something else or it is not truly freedom. The object of getting free is being fee: the object of being free is living free.” http://www.radicallyinclusive.net/content.cfm?id=2008
So what does all of this have to do with the imagination?
Well, reality is my subjective account of a wave function. I perceive through my senses- my eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue and nerve endings. Also, what I choose to believe is what I perceive. I can interpret life from a number of different perspectives, but I narrow down the perspectives to what I call that of my individual identity, Shep Glennon, based on how I was born, what has happened to me, what I believe, and what I do. What I’m doing is assuming life is one way, one of infinite possibilities. My perception itself is a wave function, as chosen by my imagination so as to try to make sense of all phenomenon. I could have an existential crises that makes me lose my faith (though I’m going to say this is impossible for goodness sake), and this would constitute a “quantum” leap, to use the analogy based on Hawking’s universe theory, that forces me to reevaluate my life.
In other words, my imagination is as unlimited as the universe, and “reality” is just the wave function I’ve chosen out of a certain amount of possibilities. Really, I know there’s only two paths for me- to believe or not to believe. I believe in metaphysics, which inspires me to pursue an active spiritual life that overlaps with some religious doctrine but ultimately is a belief all its own- a synthesis of “supernatural” experiences of mine and spiritual teachings that have made me slap my head with deep recognition. To believe or not to believe in a God is the big variable in my life- it’s the difference, to refer back to the aforementioned example of a basketball player, between me making a the shot and missing it. Luckily, my convictions are rooted in science. Metaphysics states that the creator and the creation are not separate. I feel as though this simultaneously proves and disproves the existence of God, because it does not make God transcendent but immanent in the natural. And yet, I ascribe ignorance to a fundamental—but not lasting—boundary that in fact does make God transcendent. This ignorance is the idea that rejects a Christ-consciousness / Buddha-nature inherent in all humans. We all speak of how this addiction or that bad habit is keeping our famous artists from realizing their potential—“Oh, Kurt Cobain. Oh, Jimi Hendrix, and Charlie Parker. They had so much potential, but they wasted it away.” And I believe these hypocrites are right—if those awesome musicians had found a high that was not of this world—a spiritual high; if they could find inspiration and relaxation from their own mind and nothing else—they could have made music just as classic. But the people who say this, including me, are addicts and slaves to bad habits ourselves. To quote the Bible, why are we trying to remove the speck from their eye without first removing ours? Well, here is my truth—we can. We CAN stop being hypocrites. It will involve a lot of work, but I know we can. And if everyone did this, panentheism could become pantheism, and it would be heaven on earth. The only thing stopping us is how much we choose to limit this possibility with our mental blocks. First, we have to imagine it as possible. Second, we have to work on believing it is possible, with all our hearts. And finally, we can create it as a reality.
So we live in a rational world of cause and effect. Our dreams provide a nice escape from the shackles of causality. But according to many, including me, our dreams are not that far off from the truth, so that if we interpret them correctly, we can see that our dreams are just a parallel wave function to our waking life—dreams just express the same reality in a less limited way. Dreams, being free from cause and effect, are a parallel universe that shed a new light on our lives by looking at it from a perspective of unlimited possibilities. When we sleep, it’s a quantum leap to the nearest wave function that lacks the laws of causality. It’s still logical in its own metaphorical way.
This is why I advocate the use of psychoactive drugs for spiritual growth only- plants like marijuana, shrooms, and salvia are keys to parallel universes in which reality is looked at from a new perspective of meta-consciousness. Limited amounts of LSD and DMT are okay my by arbitrary standards- I’ve come to mistrust synthetic drugs, but DMT is produced naturally by the brain and may hold the key to understanding consciousness and reality. But overuse of these drugs can lead to trips in which naïve drug users may never return from.
My theory is that this reality we live in was chosen because it was the best of all possible realities- its conditions were the most conducive to life. But only through a mixture of this reality and consciousness of the spiritual reality, which masters like Jesus and Buddha were able to attain, can we attain knowledge of where we’re from, why we’re here and where we’re going- our origin, purpose and destiny. Looking at the universe as if it were blind and impersonal won’t get us anywhere anymore. Valuing objective and positivist science over subjective experience and metaphysics is a dead end.
I adhere to the Bill Hicks school of philosophy:
“All matter is merely energy condensed into a slow vibration. The universe is one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Life is a dream, and death isn’t real. We are the imagination of ourselves.”
Life is a dream, and Jesus and Buddha were lucid dreamers. Ram Dass and Joel Goldsmith as well.
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“The nature of the mind is clear and luminous,But obscurations are adventitious”
ancient Buddhist text
That means negativity and fear and ignorance all happen by chance to us when we are immature in our Christ consciousness, but our true nature is eternity- God's consciousness- and we are responsible for our own negative thoughts. When we were born, we were so full of faith that we thought ourselves immortal; and in a sense, we were right- consciousness does not die. Consciousness isn't even ours- it's God's.
But we began instantly to identify with our physical body and its sensations, and that is where the lie began. Still, we felt like anything was possible.
Then people began to say “we die” and we began to believe them, not knowing it was only the form that died, not the spirit. The child gets more and more corrupted by negativity- but this is just immaturity. We need to get our imagination and awe of nature back, as well as the belief in immortality. We understood, as children, that life wasn’t real. We need to remember this, but come at it with a more mature approach. God is in nature and in our consciousness- the "perfect mind" that is obstructed by everyday immaturity and negativity; the imagination that we are scolded for daydreaming with; the love truth and beauty our soul longs to express and experience and recognize in others. The tools of imagination plus nature = creation of form. The tools of imagination plus imagination = new ideas. Ideas are what will liberate us into the Kingdom of Heaven. Knowledge is known through experience learned, witnessed and observing and respecting God. Wisdom is being able to apply knowledge on a day-to-day basis. Understanding is when knowledge and wisdom are used to show others your own subjective experiences. If we can get people to understand that believing is seeing, we can begin to liberate.
Because space and time are not real, that perfect state of unity that is the kingdom of heaven exists right now, nowhere, which is somewhere in the imagination. It is why we are all here. The state of perfection being born of the unity of all human forms already exists, but we are just catching up to it. Our pasts selves, our present selves, our future selves; they all exist in the ethereal. They all belong to the eternal, as subjective experiences of the one mind of the God that is dreaming all this up in a timeless realm. If we listen to God, we listen to the best of our selves from every life we have lived, because only the part of us that is God is saved (Matthew 19:25), which is another way of saying that the true nature of the mind is "clear and luminous"--our true consciousness- which shines with love, truth and beauty-- is God. The past-present-future selves guide us because they are God knowing what it is that we need to remember so the future perfect bliss can be attained, which it already has, but just so the prophecy can be self-fulfilled. It is why we pray and why we meditate- so that we can shut out the noise of the world and hear God-who is our past, present, and future-bestow on us the grace to receive the message in the near future. Because now that our eyes are open for the answer, we will be able to notice it, and it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimists and atheists think they are right because they already made up their mind or on some level believe that life sucks and God doesn't exist, so they will go around looking for things to confirm this belief. But once one has faith- as you may have noticed- the lenses in which you perceive life are now oriented toward finding God- and you do. This explains why believing is seeing, because what you believe becomes a radar to pick up confirmations of this belief in everything.
In Matthew 18: 6-9, Jesus clearly says that hell is only faithlessness (ignorance)- the idea that God is not in all of us.
C.S. Lewis explains this clearly:
“[sic: narrator] ‘But I don’t understand. Is judgment not final? Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?’“
[sic: spirit guide] It depends on the way ye’re using the words. If they leave that grey down behind it will not have been Hell. To any that leaves it is Purgatory. And perhaps ye had better not call this country Heaven. Not Deep Heaven, ye understand.’ (Here he smiled at me.) ‘Ye can call it the Valley of the Shadow of Life. And yet to those who stay here it will have been Heaven from the first. And ye can call those sad streets in the town yonder the Valley of the Shadow of Death: but to those who remain there they will have been Hell even from the beginning.’
“I supposed that I looked puzzled, for presently he spoke again.
“ ‘Son,’ he said, ‘ye cannot in your present state understand eternity: when Anodos looked through the door of the Timeless he brought no message back. But yet can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end fo all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We are always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce.
Also in Matthew 18:6-9, he shows that Christ is evident to the child, because the child is in constant communion with nature. The child sees God in everything, there is no limits stopping him from being in awe of nature and no cap on his imagination- the possibilities for him or her are endless. The child truly sees the world as a bunch of tools and also a canvas in which to express the divine within, using their imagination and faith. Why do children possess such imagination and faith? Because they understand "The mind is clear and luminous"- their minds are in the state of Christ-consciousness without even knowing it. But what men do to them is they get them to buy into this world of lies, fears and suicidal tendencies. They get them thinking that their imagination isn't real, and that God isn't real, and reduce life to chemical and biological and physical functions, not knowing that God is the substance of all physical form as well as the imagination, which is the house of the consciousness where God rests in.
Life is God manifesting himself in many and all ways so that he might know himself through experience. And it can only do this through condensing its thought into energy into matter, and use evolution and a complex cosmic symphony of syntheses first physical and then mental to awaken its own power.
There is no future heaven, because time isn’t real. There is just a house we cannot see with our eyes, a house that holds the highest thoughts of love, truth, and beauty, and we can only seek to dwell in this house for a moment. But a day will come when each of us dwell in this house forever. There is only a choice of seeing us all as one, or seeing us all as separate, that will unlock this house for all of us. Kahlil Gibran understood that the houses we live in now are only temporary, and they only limit us. These houses can be seen as our bodies and our minds, which dwell in lowly thoughts of negativity, with huge padlocks and still no peace.
This house “becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.
“Though its hands are silken, its heart is full of iron.
“It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeer at the dignity of the flesh.
“It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.
“Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.
“But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.
“Your house shall not be trapped nor tamed.“Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.
“It shall not be a glistening film that covers a wound, but an eyelid that guards the eye.
“You shall not fold your wings that you may pass through doors, not bend you heads that they strike not against a ceiling, nor fear to breathe lest walls should crack and fall down.
“You shall not dwell in tombs made by the dead for the living.
“And though of magnificence and splendour shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.
“For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.”
Kahlil Gibran The Prophet
He doesn't literally mean there’s a great gig in the sky, but its beat goes through the infinite vibrations of your highest longings.
When you have those moments where truth shocks you and makes you slap your head, where attraction is like recognition of your soul mate (the other half of your synthesis) and you act on this recognition in responsible love, where there is the beauty of acts of giving that make you weep--this is God recognizing himself. God is the highest part of ourselves- the truth, the love and the beauty- and acting in accordance to this in ourselves in expecting it from others is the highest way to act. It is communion with life.
"In India when we meet and part we often say, 'Namaste," which means I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides, I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us."
Ram Dass
The imagination is the closest humans can come to being God, because our imagination is as unlimited as God is. We are all the imagination of God, and human imagination is only limited by human limits. Once we start to imagine ourselves as God, and really believe it, it will gradually become true.
You don’t see with your eye
You perceive with your mind
The eye is but a window, seen through and not with
Sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste are all intermediaries
They are all used THROUGH the eye, finger, nose, ear and tongue
And not with them
The BRAIN isn’t even perceived with…
It, too, is the tool, an intermediary of a higher consciousness
The one consciousness that is experiencing itself subjectively
Our brains too are like windows
There’s only one consciousness, and it unifies all of us in terms of thought
Time isn’t really real
Eternity is
God is the eternal universe
And really is a triune, then
The past God which we now take for granted
This God created cosmos out of an urge to know itself
By slowing thought energy into a condensed vibration
To create the first particles of light in a starburst
Then through a series of choices and synthesis of matter and ideas, evolved into the world that lead up to the present moment
We see this God in the caverns, the atmosphere, the clouds, the water
They are ancient
Even trees, blades of grass; even our bodies are God of the past because we were not born today!
And then there is God now- the God of the eternal present- because past and future are only illusions but they still exist on the three-dimensional scale
This is God experiencing life
God is in every particle and every particle is infinite
The form it is in now is only temporary
And God rests also in our minds
God is our collective consciousness
Right now we are all living out the urge of God the past to know himself
Each of us has a purpose- God realizing himself
And finally, there is the future God
Who shall not want
This God is no longer an urge but a knowing
This God can only be and not do
In a state of pure blissful heaven
Its work is done
Right now we are all catching up to the future God, the future perfect rest
And we are also living out the soul’s longing of the past God, the urge of Genesis to bite the apple of knowledge of good and evil
And right now, God is in all forms
Except the future God has no negativity
The future God has no desire
And so in order to catch up to the God that is not afraid
We must find eternity within our own consciousness
That is what is meant by Christ-consciousness
That the universe flows through us
To say God is within
Is not just to say God is in
Saying the Father is in me is not enough
Because God is also WITH me
WITH-IN
The universe, if I have faith in it, if I trust it
Will work with me and not against me
That is what objective science fails to realize
The feel on the outside looking in
But God is on the inside looking out
Matthew 19:25- “Who than can be saved?,” they asked Jesus
26- Jesus looked straight at them and answered, “This is impossible for man, but for God everything is possible”
(Good News Bible- Catholic Study Bible)
Man cannot be saved
My name, William Shepherd Glennon, it cannot be saved
The part of me that wants, that fears, that says “I” as if “I” were apart from God
That will not be in the future perfect rest!
I will know good and evil, and “evil” will be the idea I can hold on to what is temporary about me
No, I hold on to nothing, because I am the universal me
The eternal me!
Jesus here is saying God is within all of usJust like how he said “I and the Father are one”
He’s saying the temporary forms God takes-Jesus, Peter, a tree, a bird, me, you
We were born in a night to perish in a night
In the view of eternity, all those temporary embodiments of the spirit are miniscule
I as in my body will not last
But the part of me that is God
The Imagination that sees through and not with my brain and eye, as the writer William Blake calls it
The love, truth, and beauty as New Age writer Neale Donald Walsch calls it
The luminous mind as the Buddhists call it
The Brahman the Namaste is directed at, as the Hindus call it
The Atman and the Soul/Spirit are just God while it is in temporary form
God in you and God in me
“The pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent in man." (Gibran) Because we have knowledge of good and evil, we have a choice, whereas animals only have the nature of instinct to dictate their actions. That then which is "pure and innocent" in animals is their inability to perform evil, but that which is "purer and more innocent in man" is to choose the right thing over the wrong. But biting the apple in the Garden of Eden allowed for this to happen, and thus was only a parable to say that God had an urge to know what good really meant by finding out first what evil really meant.
"There was once a soul who knew itself to be the light. This was a new soul, and so, anxious for experience. “I am the light,” it said. “I am the light.” Yet all the knowing of it and all the saying of it could not substitute for the experience of it. And in the realm from which this soul emerged, there was nothing but the light. Every soul was grand, every soul was magnificent, and every soul shone with brilliance of My awesome light. And so the little soul in question was a candle in the sun. In the midst of the grandest light—of which it was a part—it could not see itself, not experience itself as Who and What it Really Is.
Now it came to pass that this soul yearned and yearned to know itself. And so great was its yearning that I one day said, “Do you know, Little One, what you must do to satisfy this yearning of yours?”
“Oh, what, God? What? I’ll do anything!” This little soul said.
“You must separate yourself from the rest of us,” I answered, “and then you must call upon yourself the darkness.”
“What is the darkness, o Holy One?” the little soul asked.
“That which you are not,” I replied, and the soul understood.
And so this the soul did, removing itself from the All, yea, going even unto another realm. And in this realm the soul had the power to call into its experience all sorts of darkness. And this it did.
Yet in the midst of all the darkness did it cry out, “Father, Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Even as you have in your blackest times. Yet I have never forsaken you, but stand by you always, ready to remind you of Who You Really Are; ready, always ready, to call you home.
Therefore, be a light unto the darkness, and curse it not.
And forget not Who You Are in the moment of your encirclement by that which you are not. But do your praise to the creation, even as you seek to change it.
And know that what you do in the time of your greatest trial can be your greatest triumph. For the experience you create is a statement of Who You Are—and Who You Want to Be."
God in Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God
The realm of darkness is the realm of duality- good and evil, up and down, big and small, truth and ignorance, ugliness and beauty, fear and love, and it is the realm of relativity. Things only exist here because of their polar opposites allowing them to exist. But the point is to view every obstacle from the attitude: I am the light! I am God and eternal and immortal and I am love, truth and beauty, baby! There is nothing you can do to kill me. You can disembody my spirit, but you can’t kill what is in you, too. Doing this will call forth the future God and bring it into the present.
So we go through our lives with an identity crises, and usually we do things that disgust us along the way. That is just us finding out who we are by finding out who we are not. Eventually, we will all know ourselves to be God, as it says in Matthew 19:26
The body is a collector of trash that mixes around experiences in the compost heap of your consciousness until the compost becomes a fertile soil from which truth and beauty can arise is now my way of looking at consciousness. I think it’s a sin that modern objective scientific standards don’t value the subjective conscious experience of each human being, because that’s where our boundless imagination lies, and it’s where real insights into life and love come from. It’s also a sin how some religious folk don’t see the truth to Zen Buddhism, because meditation—looking inward—will bring us closer to God than any ancient religious text ever will. Your time is coming—when all the stars align. Capturing the moment when the universe passes through you. “The universe within you”—inspired me to write:
To say God (universe/nature) is within
Is not just to say God is in
Saying that God is IN me is not enough!
Because God is also WITH me
WITH-IN
The universe, if I have faith in it, if I trust it
Will work with me and not against me
That is what objective science fails to realize
They depend on information from on the outside looking in
But God is on the inside looking out
Children are constantly in awe of life, and this humbles them. Children also feel immortal- their faith is something we should envy! They understand that they are an unlimited mind trapped inside a finite being, but they are so tapped in to the infinite of their imagination, it’s almost as if they intuitively know God—God is so evident to them that they don’t even need to label it. Heaven to them isn’t a place you go when you die, because you can’t die; heaven is in the realm of their imagination.
Learn to slow yourself down and become dumb so you don't take anything for granted, that is how children live. Jesus even says “you must be like this child—humble and faithful—if you desire to enter the kingdom of heaven". God is evident to the child, because the child’s unlimited imagination is not yet boxed in by the restrictions mankind will try to give the little boy or girl. This unlimited longing is the soul of God- it is the Imagination which sees the tree and turns it into a canoe, paper, and a house. Nature is God’s urge, a synthesis of chemical and biological equations that evolve into all that we call nature. Even the universe is nature, because it is natural. Every starburst is nuclear fusion—the creation of the periodic table of elements (although Earth’s is more complete)—all the tools we will ever need. Now the greatest tool is the mind—our unlimited imagination. The synthesis is no longer just physical, but with humans, the synthesis’ are creative, and the tool is the mind of God in all of us. What we construct with our love (born of the humbleness and awe of nature/universe, born of trust and faith we have in God that everything is not as real as it seems- life is a dream and death isn’t real and God delivers what we ask of him; born of the perception that everything is One) will create reality to its Most High.
I also believe in the following interpretation of “No man comes to the Father, but through me”:
“In almost all holy books, and especially in the words of holy beings, we are dealing with transmissions to different levels of disciples and devotees who can hear different things. In the New Testament, are the words of Jesus or of the Christ? We have really at least two beings in that one being. One of them is Jesus who is the Son, a form of the Father made manifest on Earth: ‘I am the Father, the Father is in me.’ Then there is the Christ, which is the consciousness out of which that form is manifested, the consciousness that acknowledges the Living Spirit. That’s not necessarily Jesus, the man. The predicament is that, depending on our degree of readiness, we become involved with the devotional relationship either to Jesus, the man, or to Christ, the consciousness, Christ, the love. And my experience is that particular Biblical quote is that it is Christ speaking, not Jesus; that Jesus is a historical statement of the perfection made manifest, and at that historical moment Christ said to somebody, ‘You can only come to the Father through me,’ though it may have been interpreted as coming through that body which was Jesus. For someone else, at another moment, it means that greater body out of which that body comes, which is the Christ body. And that Christ consciousness is what would be called the Living Spirit. It’s like the statement, ‘Eat of my flesh; drink of my blood.’ He didn't expect people to come up and tear off his arms or drink out of his veins; that is the universal form speaking, saying ‘Consume the universe into yourself; drink of the universe so that you may know the Father.’ That’s not Jesus speaking, that’s the Christ.
And the problem occurs that much heavy violence has been done through interpreting that initial statement as a statement of Jesus rather than as a statement of the Christ. Its misinterpretation has led to proselytizing [sic: converting to Christianity], which has led to a lack of acknowledgement of other people’s ways of meeting the Christ other than through the form of Jesus.”
– Ram Dass
I believe it’s possible people don’t have to be Christian to obtain the Christ consciousness (the consciousness of the one being from which all form is manifested- the one being that is in us and we are in it- the consciousness of this living spirit), but I wish to become a Christian because I choose Jesus to be my guide. God is always speaking- the question is- are we listening above the noise of the world so that we might hear? I have had moments of intimate enlightenment with God, and this has led me to Christianity. My heart tells me God would never damn his children, but I do believe in a form of Hell. But God’s light is in everyone, so a person can use this light to overcome their sins and leave Hell, thus making the time they spent in there Purgatory (C.S. Lewis). I believe judgment day will only enlighten those who never remembered the Christ consciousness, killing their sins and not the actual souls of the people.
Listen, everyone can be Jesus if they develop the Christ within. We just chose not to because we feel obligated to be attached to certain things. We place values of people, objects, and desires that get in the way of our Christ-like ambitions. If you wanted to, you could give up everything. You could never sin again. You could become like Jesus Christ. But you want to hold on to your lust, your gluttony, your parties, your paycheck. That’s all your choice. You chose not to be like Jesus.
Reporter: I need my paycheck because I have a family to provide for.
Jesus Christ: You made your family dependent on you. That was your choice.
Reporter: That is true.
Jesus Christ: I didn't have a family because I did not listen to any desire except for the one to talk to God. If you wanted to be me, you could drop everything and be me. But you have habits. And dreams. And they all include doing imperfect things because you have to make mistakes. Because you're human. Do you want to be human, or do you want to be God?
Reporter: I want to be human just like everyone else, but I also want your willpower.
Jesus Christ: You can have it.
Reporter: I can?
Jesus Christ: You too can be like me. You have itches, you see. You don’t scratch every itch, that is, you don’t do everything you desires ask of you. You would probably be the most materialistic man with the busiest schedule and the most kids. You wouldn’t have time for all of it. So you prioritize your itches. One itch said you wanted love, so you looked for a woman. One itch said you wanted to be a part of society, so you got a job. You put those in front of your animal itches, your itches for screwing every hot blonde and going to every party. All you have to do, if you want to be me, is to stop scratching. That is it. You will always itch, but the feelings will pass. If you focus on your goal, your transcendence into the divine, you will learn to ignore your itches at will. Itching is the human condition.
Reporter: So God made us itch so we could learn what it was like to be human?
Jesus: It is true. God wants to experience himself through us. Recall that I said experience is the ultimate teacher. To deny it is the only real sin. We need to make mistakes, we need to lie, to steal, to hurt others so we can feel bad about it. We need that guilt because guilt is an experience, a teacher. Guilt is saying “I know right from wrong, and what I did was wrong. I had reasons for doing it, reasons that included happiness. But that perceived happiness is not worth the guilt- I now see I would have been happier if I hadn't done it”
Reporter: So guilt would lead to change?
Jesus: Yes, guilt is one of the vehicles of change. From experience comes knowledge. Knowledge is the ultimate vehicle of change. Knowledge cannot come from a hypothetical theory alone. Knowledge comes from dynamics. From experiencing a real force. Experience is the basis of all knowledge. Experience is the truest form of reality.
Experience of the eternal now- seeing eternity in a grain of sand- feeling the presence of God in the very room you are in now- dunking yourself into the universe of your consciousness and the limitlessness of your imagination – that is where the kingdom of God is. It’s up to you to make the highest choices.
Truth, love, and beauty are the highest parts of you. They are the qualities of you that are God, whereas God is the essence of your consciousness and imagination—those are not qualities. You are truth, love and beauty! This is the real you. Self-doubt forgets these qualities. When you act forgetting these are you are selling yourself short. When you expect others to act less than these qualities, they tend to fulfill your expectations of them. If your choices are to bring you to the kingdom of heaven, then never forget there is a place in you and your neighbor were the kingdom of heaven resides. Expect this from yourself and others, and the world will no longer act out of fear and dehumanization, because people will realize they are all one, and that God is in every particle, in every detail, in all of nature. The only way God can not exist is in the stains of the human mind, which doubts faith.
“The Kingdom of God is within you” Luke 17:20 (Good News Cahtolic Bible)
“I assure you that unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:3 (Good News Catholic Bible)
“Who is saved?” “With humans, this is impossible; but with God, all things are possible” Matthew 19:25 (Good News Catholic Bible)
“ ‘I and the Father are one.’
The Jews picked up stones again to stone Him.
Jesus answered them, ‘I showed you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you stoning Me?’
The Jews answered Him ‘For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God.’
Jesus answered them, ‘Has It not been written in your Law, “I said, you are gods”? If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), do you say of Him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, “You are Blaspheming,” because I said “I am the son of God”? If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me; but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father.” (John 10:30-38) New American Standard Bible
- all quotes from Jesus
http://thingsgodtaughtme.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/the-kingdom-of-god-is-operating-now/
“God is all in all…The Christ in you, the Christ in me”
http://www.hallvworthington.com/Scripture_Grouping/ChristInYou.html
http://www.frimmin.com/faith/godinall.php
The kingdom is voluntary- it is here and now, waiting for us. It is a choice. It is a vehicle. The word “Mahayana” means “Great Vehicle” in Sanskrit, and is a form of Buddhism. Jesus Christ is another vehicle leading to the same place – A Quantum Leap to a parallel universe of heaven. Children have one foot in this world and one foot in ours- their heads are in the clouds. Right now, we can only achieve moments of this world, and we call it transcendent, but we can make it a reality. We can turn panentheism- an immanent and transcendent God into a pantheism- a purely immanent God.
In a way, all our desires are people. When I say “That was my fear speaking,” or “That was my lust speaking,” I am personifying my base desires into separate categories from my luminous mind. But I stop short of saying “That was my God speaking” when I speak words of love, truth and beauty- I say “it came from the heart” But my heart is God.
Every soul is a variation of God, a culmination of perspectives I call prescriptions- because they are a collection of lenses. Time isn’t real- we live in an eternal now- so when we “die,” our soul is still a longing. That longing is so strong, that if it doesn't feel like its job is finished (if it feels like it doesn't know itself completely), it will find a new body to embody. I’m not sure how this works- I don’t think it’s exactly reincarnation, nor is it heaven. It might be that I live on in all the good works I’ve inspired in people like my brother and sister and friends and strangers who witnessed me doing good and I influenced them to do good. It could be in the fact I may have saved people from darkness. It could be that I never really existed in the first place. Or maybe I existed on another plane, so that the closest reality that isn’t affected by entropy still yields my existence.
From what I can tell, my life could just be a collection of people. First of all, I have an unchanging essence from my childhood- my inner child who is in awe of nature, who uses his imagination without feeling scolded, who is innocent and humble and faithful and never afraid. Secondly, there is all the people I tried to be- the heartless dolla’ dolla’ bill gangsta who don’t take no shit, the non-hypocrite activist, the ever-ridiculous stoner, the always-serious philosopher, the melancholy recluse, the diligent scholar, the Olympian athlete, the model with the perfect body, the smooth talking lover of both sexes, the dog of man, the savior of women, the Devil’s advocate, the indifferent guru, the skeptic confident in his doubt, the soldier of love, the machine of war, the so-called “rebel” who is just a parallel conformist, nothing but a clump of dirt- and Jesus. And let me not forget all the people I’ve imitated out of appreciation or curiosity, like Nas, Hannibal Lector, and friends and others I idolized. And finally, there are all the voices in my head, which I think is more in line with what those Bible passages say.
You see, I don’t believe in God as separate from a line. I believe in a line called God. On this line are three things- the Universe, the Earth/Nature and Enlightened “Man”. This is my God line. It includes all the wave functions of parallel universes, which is infinite. It includes the earth with its creations- and when I say Nature, I include Children, because children are natural. Then there is Enlightened Man- the child who knows Good and Evil and has followed The Infinite Way to see no distinction between their consciousness and God- this is what is meant by the Christ-consciousness or the Buddha nature’s potential fulfilled. Man is not saved, as it says in Matthew 19, only for God this is possible- so the part of man that is God is saved. But of course, God implies its opposite as light implies darkness. God “created” the darkness- here, let me quote a friend of mine, Eric Coleman:
“Something to think about: No matter how dark it is, no matter how long or how deep you are in the darkness, once you light a match, it is gone. No amount of darkness can overcome light; you can't create darkness, you can only extinguish the light. Darkness itself cannot do that, it requires something else to act for it. Light in itself burns away darkness; that is an inherent advantage light has over darkness. It merely has to exist in order to defeat it; nothing more.”
Is it that inside of my brain there is a memory of light, and this allows me to close my eyes and still have light? Or is it that light is the true nature of my mind?
I like Neale Donald Walsch’s theory that God, in order to experience “his” power, is experiencing himself through us in order to know himself this way. But in order for God to know the love, truth and beauty it is capable of, their opposites had to exist. So the illusion of darkness- the lie, the unreality, the ignorance, the ugliness, the fear- the illusion of separateness- it all had to exist on some level in order for God to experience this- it could know of the darkness in order to know of the light. This darkness is what’s known as being born into this world- it is a kind of brainwashing experience to be around so much darkness in our society and be exposed to and accept the hypocritical nature of those who tell us what is right and wrong and then do wrong.
The door to darkness is the illusion of a self apart from God, and this is the door of Self-Absorption. Imagine Self-Absorption as a body. The left brain of this person is Worthless and the right side is False Prophet. The Worthless concept leads to Suicide, and the False Prophet side leads to Self-Martyrdom.
On the left side, the worthless side of this person, is low self-esteem. It begins with self-absorption- watching too much TV and overeating are a sign of this side of the brain being used. This side tends toward any of the following characteristics:
Seeks extreme comfort
Is painfully shy
Is self-destructive
Is lazy and stagnates
Seeks attention
Worries about the past and future
Is overly critical and conscious of the self
Is self-defeating
Wonders if they are good enough
Is fearful of uncomfortable situations, intimidating people, pain, death and change
Is anxious about irrational things
Is depressed
Feels sorry for self
Feels helpless and hopeless
Feels as if they have no control
Feels out of control
Feels worthless
Is suicidal
(That sounds like me as a teenager.)
The right side of the brain of this person is the false prophet. This side also beings with self-absorption, but leads to something that hurts more than the self, but whole groups of people. Characteristics of this side include:
Is materialistic
Fear of losing objects or position or reputation
Is a control freak and jealousy
Egotism, vanity, pride, arrogance
Feelings of entitlement and authority
Is irresponsible toward others and the earth
Is indifferent and unaccountable toward other’s well-being and the earth’s
Is a user, a leech, a parasite
Is a manipulator
Is a con artist
Is a greedy businessperson who uses other people as objects for profits
Is a tyrant/a dictator
Is a false prophet
Lives toward self-martyrdom
This monster you have just created in your head, using a visual image of the combination of all of these characteristics, is about to get worse. Think of the seven deadly sins:
Lust
Avarice (extreme pride)
Sloth
Wrath
Gluttony
Envy
Greed
Now, we’ve all done these. But did we learn from them?
“Watch your thoughts, for they become your words
Watch your words, for they become your actions
Watch your actions, for they become your habits
Watch your habits, because they become your character
Watch your character, because it becomes your destiny”
Frank Outlaw, attributed to
The key to understanding the final judgment of the Bible is when you decide to break your addictions. First, you need to become aware that you have a habit that is controlling you, and not the other way around. Then you break the addiction the same way you started it- with the thoughts that led up to doing it. Your thoughts are the roots of your destiny- so being conscious of your own thoughts will make your life a self-fulfilling prophecy in accordance to what you think about yourself. Once you can look at that monster of darkness as separate from you- a creature born of habit that finds it mistake in ignorant thought- you can slay it. This monster is what receives eternal damnation, not your love, truth and beauty which see us all as one big whole. Your monster was born of ignorance and fear, but once you believe death isn’t real, at least not conscious death, you become aware that only you can save yourself through the words of your master- be it Jesus, Buddha, the Tao, or a maybe a combination of all three of them. Ultimately, you will realize you are them- God- and become them. It may take many lifetimes, but you’ll be going in the right direction. The better part of you is the urge for God to know himself, this is your “good karma,” and this is what moves forward.
“Imagine that there is a box around your mind. This box is your protection against the unknown infinity that surrounds it. This infinity is God, and true reality. Our connection to this infinity is our imagination. We can imagine anything we want, sounds, visualizations, feelings, emotions, etc. Now then... think about all the things that have been invented, where did they come from?... They sparked in the mind of an artist, someone who saw something in their minds, then set out to make it 'real'. Through their creativity, they made all the things that we have taken for granted. Anyway, back to the box... our imagination can see things outside our box, and a soon as we make them real, we don't bring them into the box, we merely stretch the limits of our box to this new limit.Notice how new things are exciting? That is a thrill of being vulnerable, being outside the box. Notice how the more you do them, the more boring they become. We need to stretch our imaginations further to bring about the same thrill. But sometimes, when we found hate, or were fearful, we either built our boundaries stronger, or retreated further away from the side of our imagination that scared us. But once we have seen that far, we cannot go back. So if we retreat, we become even more fearful, and do everything to avoid being so vulnerable. If we build our boundaries even stronger, then we become more ignorant.It is only with love and courage that we can explore outside our box/cage without fear. And we can be left vulnerable, because we are safe with the love we have. It is when we understand that there is no such thing as a bad experience, or a good experience, just an experience to learn from... with love, we can see these experiences as pleasurable and benefits us.Now then, can you see that hate and fear create these boundaries, and that they separate us from God. And if we are all of one consciousness, the only reason why we are separate is because of the hate we have for each other. And that hate causes suffering. When we have love for each other, we then understand that we are one, and we bridge the gap between ourselves, and we become less separate. Through love, we become unified, and find bliss.Ok. Our fear of death, is the fear that we shall cease to exist. Well... Through my logic, we are God, God is infinite, therefore, we are infinite. Imagine God is the whole spectrum of light, well, we're just different colours of light. Different parts of the spectrum. Energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. God is energy, we are energy. Our spiritual energy, our consciousness cannot be destroyed. But it can move into different vibrations, different octaves. When we die, our spirit is ejected from our rotting carcass, and we move into which ever vibration was closer to us. If we lived in love, through Good Karma, we move up into the higher vibration. If we lived in fear and hate, through Bad Karma, we will move down into the lower vibration.I'm not quite sure if that’s the way it works... but then you figure it out... all you have to do is look within yourself. You are the only one that holds the answers to your life.” Unknown
The scientist Tesla had a vision in which he saw the universe as a symphony of octaves.
“Nikolai Tesla invented the alternating current generator which unleashed the modern technological revolution after a series of visions in which, among other things, Tesla ‘saw’ that everything in the universe obeys a law of Octaves.” Robert A. Wilson < http://deoxy.org/eoctave.htm>
Indeed, “He had seen in a flash the universe composed of a symphony of alternating currents with the harmonies played on a vast range of octaves. The 60 cycles-per-second AC [sic: alternating current, which he invented] was but a single note in a lower octave. In one of the higher octaves at a frequency of billions of cycles per second was visible light. To explore this whole range of electrical vibration between his low-frequency alternating current and light waves, he sensed, would bring him closer to an understanding of the cosmic symphony.” Margaret Cheney Tesla: Man Out of Time page 87
The harmony is all there. The chords to every song are out there, waiting to be synthesized. Every song builds upon one another and evolves just like the chemical equations that turned invertebrates into man. Music is evolving; our minds our evolving.
“The eight families of elements are:
1. Alkalis
2. Alkalines
3. Borons
4. Carbons
5. Nitrogens
6. Oxygens
7. Halogens
8. Noble Gases
The first four families, Leary argues, are terrestrial; that is, they are heavy and tend to fall to Earth. The second four families are extraterrestrial; that is, they tend to float off into space. Similarly, he says, the first four circuits of the nervous system are terrestrial; their function is to control survival and reproduction at the bottom of the 4,000-mile gravity well in which we presently live. The second four circuits, then, are extraterrestrial; they will come into full play only when we live normally in zero-gravity—in free space.”
Robert A. Wilson <http://deoxy.org/eoctave.htm>
Those that think they’ve broken down the world into the one and only model but reduce it all to a heartless machine- be wary of this. Love born of a deep understanding of unity, if somehow ignored in a theory, is not something that can be ignored.
“Knowledge is not by deduction, but Immediate by Perception or Sense at once. Christ addresses himself to the Man, not to his Reason. Plato did not bring Life & Immortality to Light. Jesus only did this.”
--Here we must remember that for Blake Jesus is the Imagination—the two words are for him synonymous—the living principle itself. Blake goes on to say that “Jesus supposes every Thing to be Evident to the Child & to the Poor & Unlearned. Such is the Gospel. What Jesus came to Remove was the Heathen or Platonic Philosophy, which blinds the eye of Imagination, the Real Man.”
--Man being, of course, for Blake, a living spirit; he is not referring to the physical “garment,” the material body.
He continues:
“Jesus consider’d Imagination to be Real Man & says I will not leave you Orphans and I will manifest myself to you; he says also, the Spiritual Body or Angel as little children always behold the Face of the Heavenly Father.”It is clear that Blake suspected the Greeks, including Pythagoras himself, founder of Western mathematics, as being responsible for what he calls the “wrenching apart” of Nature from the living Imagination. He writes specifically about harmonics, and in this challenges the Pythagorean element in Greek thought.
In considering the Given Senses he is at pains to argue that we do not see with them, but through them: it is the True Man, the Imagination, who is the perceiver. Plato had himself written that we see through the eye, not with it: a phrase repeated in many contexts by Blake. In his Auguries of Innocence he wrote that:
“We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see With Not Thro’ the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to Perish in a Night…”
(Shep: temporary eyeball but eternal perceiver)
“I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it, not with it”—so he concludes his notes on A Vision of the Last Judgment: Which Judgment is, for Blake, precisely and specifically the awakening from natural to Imaginative perception.
The passage on the natural senses is as follows:
“Ah weak & wide astray! Ah shit in narrow doleful form,
Creeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the ground!
The Eye of Man a little narrow orb, clos’d up & dark,
Scarcely beholding the great light, conversing with the Void; [Shep: we can only see so much light but there is an imperceptible reality going on around us]
The ear a little shell, in small volutions shutting out [Shep: we can only hear so much but there are imperceptible octaves around us]
All melodies & comprehending only Discord and Harmony;
The Tongue a little moisture fills, a little food it cloys,
A little sound it utters & its cries are faintly heard,…
Can such an Eye judge of the stars? & looking thro’ its tubes
Measure the sunny rays that point their spears at Udanadan?
Can such an Ear, fill’d with the vapours of the yawning pit
Judge of the pure melodious harp struck by a divine hand?”
Such is the world to those who look not through but with eye and ear and the other bodily organs. The sense of haring can register, Blake notes, harmonics (discord and harmony) but not melody—“shutting out all melodies” because harmonics are a physical phenomenon whereas melody belongs to the Imagination, and exists only in terms of meaning and imaginative experience.”--Kathleen Raine
Some more evidence:
http://www.simpletoremember.com/vitals/existence.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_from_bit#It_from_bit
All this metaphysical evidence is telling me that the present is eternal, existence is as shapeless as a cloud, and only we can give it substance and meaning using our imagination, which is the universe’s greatest gift to the human race. In life, if we work on building our noblest virtues that sees us all as God- we will be creating an ark- a Great Vehicle that will take us on a Quantum Leap toward a perfect reality.
"You have been told also that life is darkness, and in your weariness you echo what was said by the weary.
And I say that life is indeed darkness save for when there is urge,
And all urge is blind save for when there is knowledge,
And all knowledge is vain save for when there is work,
And all work is empty save for when there is love"
Kahlil Gibran The Prophet
The light of God is the urge, and the darkness was the lie. If anyone reading this has ever been on a drug trip so powerful they forgot there was another reality other than the one they were hallucinating, that may be the key to understanding this life. The lie seems real, but it is just in the “mind of God”. The urge is for God to know himself through Work, but it is our love that will save us all by fulfilling the prophecy of the genesis.
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 (“self”) and spirit (“God”), 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 (do a wikipedia search on this and find Nelson Mandela's quote)/community and family ties (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 convictions, 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 strengths 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.
Justice is love in action. Justice is unity plus peace. The big issues, abortion and gay marriage, should become resolved just by the fact that kindness and unity give fetuses and gays the benefit of the doubt.
The book The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran expresses the heaven on earth that will one day come.
“Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light. But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship. And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and more innocent in man.
When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,
‘By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed.
For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.
Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of life.’
And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart,
‘Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.’
And say in the autumn, when you gather the grapes of vineyard for the winepress, say in your heart,
‘I too am a vineyard, and my fruit shall be gathered for the winepress
And like new wine I shall be kept in eternal vessels.’
And in winter, when you draw the wine, let there be in your heart a song for each cup;
And let there be in the song a remembrance for the autumn days, and for the vineyard, and for the winepress.”
Kahlil Gibran
We are all eternal vessels, or in the process of building them at least. Faith, positive thinking, patience and discipline and whatever our personal Tao is- shaking our asses, boogie boarding, whatever- will bring us closer to our great vehicle. The unlimited longings of our soul, our imagination, cannot be contained forever.
What Gibran was talking about in The Prophet is communion with everything- so that all our lives are an act of worship. We put love into everything we do in this case- and if everyone did this- it would be heaven on earth. And that is what I am looking forward to. I don’t want it all to end, but I know we can do so much better if we stopped being hypocrites. We should expect more from each other. Remember- you are love, truth and beauty. Your life should be to experience this, and bring it out in others. Anything that gets in the way of this should be thrown out into the darkness so it can cry and gnash its teeth. The seven deadly sins are insatiable- they feed upon each other. That monster I spoke of before can be killed once we all wake up. Jesus’ prophecy can be fulfilled, but it involves us to progress, and to progress, we must choose to progress. No one else can do it for us- we have to find the Christ within to be our own saviors.
I’ve realized that thoughts and words are powerful, and come from the limitless realm of the imagination. The great changes in the world—slavery abolition, women’s suffrage, the writing of the Declaration of Independence—all had to be imagined as possible before they were created. I’m sure many people thought they were impossibilities, but imagination, positive thinking, affirmative speech and eloquent writing have clearly made a difference in the world. Writing truly is the religion, because it allows for the capturing of truth, love, and beauty, as well as self-actualization. It can help turn justice into a reality. What is more heavenly than all of this?
The Dr. Seuss character of our imagination is our inner child that never dies. The second one is making characters out of the voices in my head. The inner child represents me before I was filled with self-doubt, self-hate, negativity, fear of change and death, sexual promiscuity, and other forms of self-created vice. The inner child hasn’t been scolded for having an over-active imagination and isn’t made fun of for being slow. With him, the possibilities are endless. This is the most creative part of my mind. This child reminds me of who I really am. He is saying “who I was before all my traumatic incidents—that is still me!”
The neurotic voices in my head that argue with one another came out in my “Searching for the Silences of My Soul” short story:
As I sat in the wilderness to meditate today, I felt someone walk up behind me and tap me on the shoulder. “Are you on drugs?” the apparition asked, with a concerned look upon her phantom face.
“I am drugs!” I cynically replied in my haste.
I wrote this after meditating in a bamboo forest at the park behind Marymount, beside the Donaldson Run stream. No one ever actually stopped to interrupt my meditation, but as I tried to be at peace, my self-conscious side assumed some soccer mom walking her dog, dressed in pink sweatpants and a sleeveless white T-shirt with a blue fanny pack, would walk over in her running shoes and tap me on the shoulder to voice her concern with my actions. Many people—students and adults alike—have assumed I’ve been on drugs when I was sober, even before I started using drugs. And this is just one of the many voices in my head that keep me from being at peace. Anne Lamott says to imagine these voices are mice trapped and suffocating inside a jar, but I usually just envision shooting them point-blank. This doesn't work. I have to find new ways of silencing these voices each time, and I do this by answering them the only way I know how-by explaining to them that this life is a fiction and I can be as crazy as I want. I usually just get so ridiculous I end up laughing at my own weird imagination.
My mom told me that if you open yourself up to knowledge, to guidance, to answers—then they will flow into you. I learned that this is true. I’m reading a book to help me with meditation, though; it’s a Christian metaphysical book called God, the Substance of All Form and I really like it, though it tries to pretend it wasn’t influenced by Buddhism.
In my first essay, “Believing is Seeing,” I talked about my hallucinations from a drug called salvia. I was tripping the summer I graduated high school, in fact, at my going-to-college party, and I had a vision where all my thoughts were seeds deep in a soil. The more attention I gave certain thoughts, they would sprout and grow upwards, until I spoke the words out-loud—this would make them hit the surface and bloom. What Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones said about “composting” made me slap my head with recognition: Goldberg related the body to a collector of trash that mixes around experiences in the compost heap of your consciousness, until the compost becomes a fertile soil from which truth and beauty can arise. In my writings about experience, consciousness and knowledge, I have originally used the organic metaphor to explain my view of God and life and the soul many times, but now I will add the compost heap.
The way Natalie Goldberg related to the body as a collector of trash that mixes around experiences in the compost heap of your consciousness, until the compost becomes a fertile soil from which truth and beauty can arise, is now my way of
looking at consciousness. Although I always looked at it as organic, I never once saw my unconsciousness as a compost heap. But it is so true- we sense a lot of crap during the day. We hear bad words, lies, and we watch actions born of fear. We eat crap a lot, too. We have moments of glory in the midst of all this. It all gets filtered into the same place, but instead of how our food gets digested—which is that the nutrients get sucked out and the waste is expelled—our minds can expel the nutrients and feed off of negativity! It’s a choice, as opposed to the instinct of nature. Do we feed ourselves crap or gold?
We humans have the choice of the lenses in which we view the world. All we need to do is be open to the answers, and they will come to us. If we practice positive thoughts and affirmative speech, if we have faith, it will surely create our reality in this direction, and we will be able to see the works of the divine because we believe it. It must be conceived and believed through our thoughts, words and deeds. We will find our imagination coming true through the power of thoughts. We can create peace on earth if we stop writing it off as impossible. Receiving the kingdom of Heaven must be a personal choice; no one else can do it for us. And heaven will created on earth, not after we die. It must be a conscious decision of love and faith over fear and doubt, and a training of the mind to see the world in this way. This choice will help return us to the child within.
I have moments of truth where I slap my head, where my eyes roll back, and I feel what St. Teresa of Avila must have felt, and I never would have received these moments of beautiful mystical epiphany if I didn't have imagination, an awe of nature and an open mind coupled with the heavy words- faith and trust in something I cannot prove- the universe that works within me. These moments of love, truth and beauty are God in me recognizing “himself” in another form. But as Natalie Goldberg points out, “There is no permanent truth you can corner in a poem that will satisfy you forever.” So even though this essay is coming to a close, and it is the culmination of hours of meditation on life and moments of truth, I will be writing something new tomorrow that I feel is important enough to share with the world."
I think our true nature is perfection, because our true nature is Brahman, the God, Allah- praise be to his name. The only thing in our way of perfection is taking comfort in temporal pleasures- we limit ourselves with self-doubt, attachment, negativity, fear...we limit our unlimited minds with self-imposed preconceived notions- all we need to do to be perfect is to first conceive of ourselves as being perfect.
"God: Can you simply agree that on some of the questions of life the mystery is too great for even you to solve? Why not hold the mystery as sacred? And why not allow the mystery to be sacred, and leave it alone?
We are now trying to do the impossible, which is to speak of the unspeakable. It is what religion seeks to do. Have you ever looked down into a high powered microscope, and seen pictures or movies of molecular action, and said, “Good heavens, there’s a whole universe down there. And to that universe, I, the now-present observer, must feel like God!” Have you ever said that, or had that kind of experience?
Walsch: Yes, I should imagine every thinking person has.
-Indeed. You have given yourself your own glimpse of what I am showing you here. And what would you do if I told you this reality of which you have given yourself a glimpse never ends?
-Explain that. I’d ask you to explain that.
-Take the smallest part of the universe you can imagine. Imagine this tiny, tiny particle of matter. Now cut it in half. What have you got?
-Two smaller halves.
-Precisely! Now cut those in half. What now?
-Two smaller halves.
-Right. Now again, and again! What’s left?
-Smaller and smaller particles.
-Yes, but when does it stop? How many times can you divide matter until it ceases to exist?
-I don’t know. I guess it never ceases to exist.
-You mean you can never completely destroy it? All you can do is change its form?
-It would seem so.
-I tell you this: you have just learned the secret to all of life, and seen into infinity. Now I have a question to ask you.
-Okay…
-What makes you think infinity goes only one way?
-So…there is no end going up, any more than there is going down.
-There is no up or down, but I understand your meaning.
- But if there is no end to smallness, that means there is no end to bigness.
- Correct.- But if there is no end to bigness, then there is no biggest. That means, in the largest sense, there is no God!
- Or perhaps, all of it is God, and there is nothing else.I tell you this: I AM THAT I AM.AND YOU ARE THAT YOU ARE. You cannot not be. You can change form all you wish, but you cannot fail to be. You can only fail at not knowing Who You Are, and in this failing, experience only the half of it.
-That would be hell.
-Exactly, yet you are not condemned to it. You are not regulated to it forevermore. All that it takes to get out of hell, to get out of not knowing-is to know again.There are many ways and many places (dimensions) in which you can do this.You are in one of those dimensions now. It is called, in your understanding, the third dimension.
- Are there any more?
- Have I not told you that in My Kingdom there are many mansions? I would not have told it to you were it not so.
- Then there is not hell—not really. I mean, there is no place or dimension to which we are everlastingly condemned!
- What would be the purpose of that? Yet you are always limited by your know-ingness—for you—we—are a self-created being. You cannot be what you do not know your Self to be. That is why you have been given this life—so that you might know yourself in your own experience. Then you can conceive of yourself as Who You Really Are, and create yourself as that in your experience—and the circle is again complete…only bigger. And so, you are in the process of growing—or, as I have put it throughout this book, of becoming. There is no limit to what you can become.
- You mean, I can even become—dare I say it?—a God…just like You?
- What do you think?
- I don’t know.
- Until you do, you cannot. Remember the triangle—the Holy Trinity: spirit-mind-body. Conceive-create-experience. Remember, using your symbology:
HOLY SPIRIT = INSPIRATION = CONCEIVE
FATHER = PARENTING = CREATE
SON = OFFSPRING = EXPERIENCE
The son experiences the creation of the fathering thought, which is conceived of by the Holy Ghost. Can you conceive of yourself as one day being a God?
-In my wildest moments.
-Good, for I tell you this: You are already a God. You simply do not know it. Have I not said, “Ye are Gods” (Gospel of Luke)? "
- Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God
This isn’t avarice or hubris or a false prophecy- this is everything I hold true, and I am not alone. Jesus even said we could have the same power as him in the Gospel of Matthew, as long as we believed. In a way, Jesus is like Peter Pan, telling us that heaven is Never-Never Land. The film The Orphanage says it best- “Seeing is not believing, it’s the other way around. Believe, and you will see”. This may seem like kid’s stuff, but science, politics, philosophy, religion and whole cultures rise and sleep to this rule. Now you realize you and I do too. Dreamer, Thou Art Lucid!
http://ageofmurdanstorm.blogspot.com/2008/01/life-is-what-i-make-it-power-of-belief.html
http://ageofmurdanstorm.blogspot.com/2008/04/dreamer-thou-art-lucid.html
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