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All this physical life is after all merely a parable, a corporeal telling of a tale with meanings disguised, a momentary riddle condensing truths eternal.
Higher Perspective excerpt
Take away our individual awareness of pain and fear and death, and Life becomes a wondrous phenomenon to marvel at as it spreads across the planet and changes and evolves and adapts. Viewed in detachment, all the carnivorous consumption and competitive combat become academic functionalities in a localized entropy storm. But being part of that consumption and combat makes us look at life with other than detached academic objectivity. We know all too well what it feels like to be prey and target. Curiosity at the ability of chains of nucleic acids to self-replicate becomes our personal imperative to replicate. Read more of Higher Perspective
Summary of Life excerpt
Somewhere and somehow through all this, you, a kernel of conscious experience - information integration - and uninformed choices, will endure. You will be shaped, and you will do some shaping. The surreal nature of worldly life will prove to be a malleable matrix of circumstance that seems to chaotically and exasperatingly rage about you, but through it all is providing exactly the opportunities for Choice that will serve your growth…..or not…..that growth part is entirely up to you. Read all of Summary of Life
Three Principles
Copyright 2021 Don Ray. Feel free to print and share.
Were we to boil everything down to three principles:
* Unity, meaning the strengthening of all individuals as individuals, and the strengthening the bonds among individuals, is the overarching calling, direction, objective, and joy for which we (unknowingly) strive in this life and are destined in eternal Life.
* Genuine spiritual practice and authentic worship ultimately is actualized in how you treat all living forms and beings placed before you.
* The Creative force of Love, called Christos by some, underlies all existence. You are not alone.
Copyright 2021 Don Ray. Feel free to print and share.
Excerpt from Storm of Creation Click to read all.
Copyright 2020 Don Ray
....This world is merely a storm,
all existence is storm,
a rude disruption of the eternal status quo.
Creation does not unfold as a gentle ripple across the shimmering surface of space-time.
Creation, of a universe or your soul,
explodes at the sharp end of the lightning bolt,
expands through the concussion of the thunder.
Turn and face it,
let it disrupt your life,
this thunder of ongoing Creation......
Winning With the Stacked Deck of Life
We, our identity, our nature, our self, our spirit, our soul, is a direction, a direction we choose. From the physical starting point of conception and the mental/emotional starting point of childhood, both starting points utterly out of our control, in what direction do we choose to go? Our choice of direction, not our starting points or even what we are now, that is who we are, the essence of our identity.
Excerpt from What's Left After Conforming
So we muddle on, conforming to the world on some days, conforming to our nature on others, just surviving on some days, serving Source and Purpose on others.
Perhaps the only advice is to be true to something, and be conscious about that choice. And serve something, and be honest with yourself about that Choice.
Go to What's Left After Conforming
Currency of the Soul
Patience and faith are the currency of the soul.
Compassion and generosity are their investment vehicles.
Life itself in all its depth, breadth, and meaning
is the dividend.
Beauty in the Madness
On a recent sunrise contemplative walk, I experienced a most curious peaceful insight. It arose in part in response to a recent afternoon spent at an acquaintance’s house where he had me watch innumerable old video clips of war in its countless forms - documentary video clips, movie excerpts, compilations, technology of weaponry, cavalry charges, black and white movies with handsome heroes charging into a wall of spears or a hail of bullets, etc., etc. - a compendium of testimonies to the madness of the human condition.
It is not an occasional madness, not an aberration, not an exception; ......read more
Seeing Through Our Dreams and Scars
The perspectives of age are not necessarily right, but instead reflect what we became. The perspectives of youth are distorted by what we wish to become. Scars and imagination distort our views from either end of life. Fortunately, in between life keeps us sufficiently occupied to not be too deceived by the distortions of our dreams and scars.
Read all of Seeing Through Our Dreams and Scars
Cuddling and Carnivores
Excerpt: ...... In these morning visitors who so sweetly greet the rapidly growing pigs, pigs being raised to be executed and eaten, we see the embodiment of the nature of this world; we see affection and care and conscious awareness shining out from under the necessity to kill, butcher, and eat........ (Read more)
Natural Faith
Coyotes, deer, robins, horses, pigs, and a kitty reveal the meaning of life.
Link to Natural Faith
Terrifying Passage from the Garden to the Kin'dom
Excerpt: Imagine what existence would be like without fear and pain.......
........What would our existence be without something driving us?.....without cold and wind driving architecture, without social strictures and the need for acceptance driving our acceptable behavior, without hunger and war driving technology.
Upon erasure of the manifold motivations derived from fear and pain, we find remaining the distilled essence of humanity.......Read more
Inexorable Life
The life flow and growth will inevitably happen as long as we don’t hew to extreme collapse into the little self. There are therefore usually no perfectly right or wrong choices. Life and its Source are far more generous and forgiving and creative than that.
Daily Life and Eternal Questions
Thank God for the time-consuming details that form the life we eventually lead in spite of our grandiose visions. There in the unforeseeable happenstance is our opportunity of response, response and choices that give definition and meaning to the term "individual". We were unable to pursue our individual goals, our seemingly God-given goals, and the world and our souls are probably better off for that. Instead the time - consuming details provided the answers to those questions echoing through eternity, "Were we loved? - did we love?"
Our Ancient Birth
Occasionally “birth” and “Choice” get put into words, faltering descriptions and dim explanations of the nature of this life. When time is right and circumstances of Purpose come together just so, one of those explanations -theories – theologies – philosophies - or religions flourishes for a time, grabbing some collective imagination or inspiring some exclusive cult. In its various forms and latest incarnations of words and liturgy people will worship – recite – study – chant – meditate - and crusade. Meanwhile in the farm field and battlefield, the boardroom and bedroom, the temple and the tavern, the Choice in its infinite form will remain unchanged, and our birth will inexorably continue.
Bridges of Sound and Light
Sound and light, this stuff that serves as the tenuous connection among souls, this flimsy bridge we struggle to refine and craft and carve and polish, then call it “art”.
Sound and light, fleeting and gone in the very moment we perceive them, but imparting some miniscule fraction of another’s soul into our consciousness, thereby making us conscious of our own soul.
The composers and musicians and painters and poets are the spiritual corps of engineers, fabricating their structures to bridge the void between our souls.
Music can shine a light, paintings can stir rhythms, and we are left more human by their touch.
The palette of notes and the chords of colors hover before our consciousness, inviting us to awareness, momentarily filling the void between us, revealing visions and dreams and aspirations shared, their fading echoes and receding glow leaving us a little less alone.
Pray Alone, That You May Love Together
If one is to fully realize one’s humanity, if one is to accept the title “child of God”, if one genuinely desires transcendent experience, one must open the mind and heart to perspectives not taught in words or texts or scripture or ritual or creed. One must open to the learning that comes only from deeply personal relationship, relationship with the greater, the larger, the holy, the Christos by whatever name and form one can accept it.
The Inevitable and the Certain
In this world the balance required to maintain the Choice (necessary for the creation of pure Love) means that that which is holy and pure will inevitably come to disaster.
Worldly opportunities will appear, seemingly offering a chance for the holy and pure to take root and flourish. But inevitably the world tears the unfitting holy asunder, the best appearing opportunity proving to be yet another mirage, the corrupt and shattered nature of this world again ignoring or distorting or destroying Truth and its source.
Yet still the opportunities must be taken, illusory and doomed as they are. For the temporal balance that assures the pure and holy will be sullied also assures the Light will not be extinguished. The holy may dissipate, but it also permeates. Hope is momentary, but also eternal. Crucifixion in its many guises may be inevitable, but Resurrection in its many forms is a certainty.
Dark Matter and the Light of Love
In the universe darkness and violent collisions and explosions and chaos have led to the ignition of fusion in stars. The dark universe became filled with light and eventually, out of collisions and catastrophe, on at least one planet the violence led to ignition of life.
So too in the ongoing evolution of life and humanity, violence – collisions – catastrophe – and cruelty provide the chaos analogous to the chaos of the universe. Just as fusion can ignite in individual stars and life ignite on the fetid surface of a young planet, out of social and societal chaos and disaster, individual Love can ignite.
Read all of Dark Matter and the Light of Love
Our Actions: Coerced; Compelled; Chosen
Gently peel away the worldly façade and recognize what is really transpiring in most of our human endeavors.
Everything we do falls into a few categories. 1) We do that which we think facilitates our survival-security-and comfort. 2) We do that which connects us to something or someone. 3) We do that which is irrationally loving.
Read all of Our Actions: Coerced; Compelled; Chosen
The Scrum of perfection
Life is a scrum, an unfair – odds stacked – guaranteed to lose – struggle….and from the grime and blood and dung arise the Light of Beauty and glimpses of Love.
Look not for perfection, in anyone or anything or yourself. Look for the moments of Light, the flash of eternity, and celebrate your role in creating Love made crystalline perfect by the imperfections of this world and its people through which that Love is filtered, refined, and distilled.
Apprenticed to God
Oh, to not be productive, to be liberated from the need to be productive!....to live in a universe of no hunger, fear, or suffering, our potential for creation now liberated to create beauty and life, to explore, to find new ways to express the joy of Unity and to reach toward exciting new heights of that Unity.........But it is here, in this world of Darwinian conflict and cruelty, that we learn to create. Here the children of God are apprenticed to the Creator, learning to create, discovering what we can create, choosing what we will create.
Apprenticed to God,
given examples to inspire, given freedom to ignore them.
This material world pulls our strings of hunger and fears and lusts,
but even as we clumsily plod per those pulls of needs, aversions, and desires,
occasional sparks of creativity still hint at the potential for which we were created.
Forgiving God
Perhaps it is we who need to forgive God.
Blinded to spiritual Reality, the delusional veil of physical existence shrouding our conscious experience, that consciousness caged in a cranium and constrained to interact via a defective wetware device called a brain, the resulting attenuated conscious experience consumed by possessing demons of necessary hungers and lusts when not tortured by pain and fear, all this while anticipating the inevitable dark void of death…..
……shackled in this clinging morass of temporal existence we are supposed to attain heights above the angels?!
Read more of Forgiving God
Knowledge of Good and Evil
To have profound knowledge of good and evil you must be inescapably trapped in a situation out of your control. If you can merely wish yourself out of an unpleasant situation, if your conscious experience is not bound to some interaction matrix (the role served by this temporal-physical existence), your experience of good and evil is no more real and substantive than if you were watching a movie or playing a video game.
Read all of Knowledge of Good and Evil
Overlapping Projections of Gods
In that place of Light,
each individual conscious being
projects a soft reality,
strong but flexible,
Without the cutting, sharp,
jagged edges of the
clashing, conflicting, colliding
individual realities of this world.
Boring Angels
Pray to and with God, give thanks for angels, but it is with kindred spirits, it is in the mutually shared struggles and celebrations of kindred spirits, that we experience Unity and the fulfillment of Purpose.
Read all of Boring Angels