For regular readers who want to see the most recent added entry without searching through the entire following page, go to the blog.
Unedited material from the wilderness:
Opus I
Opus II
Opus III
Opus IV
See the preface to Opus I for the list of excuses for why the following does not politely fit in traditional literary topic continuity and thematic progression. In other words, it's a mess, just like real life.
Maybe your life is a mess too. Maybe you don't politely fit into world's themes and institutional continuity.....or maybe that is just wishful thinking on my part, thinking that maybe there is someone else out there facing the same peculiar inner conundrums that I face.
At any rate, unfiltered - unedited - and in random order, here is a third unpolished compendium (Opus I and II preceding it) of observations about real life, that exasperatingly uncooperative and unpredictable white-water river- rapid in which we find ourselves every morning.
Jump around in this material. For all the stuff you could care less about, you just may come across something else that strikes a chord, something to help you tread the rough water a little longer, something that in brazen honesty reveals the beauty of the flowing chaos and your beauty as you daily negotiate it.
Peace and every good,
Don
All material copyright 2020 Don Ray. But feel free to print and share what you want. Who knows how long this will be available.
LEARNING THROUGH THE STORM
Life is growth, which is to say, life is continual learning, learning about the self, learning about the circumstances in which you find yourself. And upon learning, then choosing your response to all you have learned, and in the process, creating your identity. There is no end to this process. But you can find underlying peace in the process, even when the process itself seems frightening and distressing.
DISAPPEARING ROAD STRIPES
By now the poignant emotions fade, as always. How strange, that even the most intense moments and feelings of life can merely slip behind us and disappear, like the road stripes disappearing one by one behind a car.
GENETIC MANAGEMENT PANIC
Oh, the panics. Managers seem genetically programmed to panic, and their panic response is to fire accusatory questions at anyone within range. And then, oddly, the panic over the critical issue will promptly disappear as the next perceived critical issue appears. Often as not the panics arise over a mouse scurrying across the floor, while in the meantime, going unnoticed, the entire building has become engulfed in flames.
In the scurry to chase the mouse “facts” are copiously generated upon demand, for no one dare admit they do not know the whereabouts of the mouse.
In the desperation to catch the mouse and be the hero and quiet the rampaging tirade of the mad queen, err manager, the eyes play tricks, and mice are seen everywhere, and felt slipping up pants legs, and everyone screams and runs about and reflects the stern visage of the scowling boss….and then the boss spies a spider, and the steady and predictable state of panic continues without pause, only shifted in focus….while no one notices the glowing cinders drifting down from the crackling roof beams.
TRIGGERING NEGATIVE AVALANCHES
The pastor asks the kids something to the effect of “is God present here?”, and then something like “how can you see God?”
The first response is a kid blurting out that when he blinked his eyes he saw a scary figure of someone in the hallway of his house.
Listen to the ensuing epidemic of fear among the children. It took only the first child, saying “I saw someone in the hall when I blinked my eyes” to start the epidemic. One voice, one statement, unleashing a cascade of statements of fears and nightmares and dimly seen images in the dark. So also we see conversational cascades initiated by statements of complaints, or anger, or bitterness, or gossip, or accusation, or condemnation. How readily we children follow that first negative comment. How hard it is to turn such conversational tsunamis, these tumbling torrents giving vent to the ever waiting dark elements of our humanity.
How rarely the statement of beauty or peace or tolerance elicits such eager consensus from the group, sending the group’s conversation in a direction toward light and the uplifting. But far from reason to surrender to the inexorable negative tides, this fact should motivate to try all the harder to interject that which is positive, that which builds instead of tearing down, that which brings respite from negativity, which brings hope in the face of entrenched hopelessness, that which for a moment surprises and startles and interrupts and confounds and contradicts our steadfast insistence on staring at the darkness, that comment of beauty or hope or gratitude that briefly opens our eyes to glimpse the unnoticed Light that embraces us.
HORRORS OF OLD AGE
Such a struggle, old age! Such an amazing misery!…the mind and body failing! And so many years it can last. All the joys, all the joys of life, all the expectations, all to which we looked forward during all the other years of our lives, gone, leaving us with only suffering in the moment, and nothing to which to look forward.
Amazing! Potentially decade after decade of this noble suffering! Each day brings only the prospect of what new physical disaster may befall us.
What reasons to smile can we find? All that we fear throughout the rest of our lives, the prospects of pain and disease and helplessness and unemployment and being at the mercy of others and not being able to pursue anything we enjoy….all those fears come to fruition if we are blessed/cursed to survive into old age.
Loss of eyesight, loss of hearing, all our friends dying, the world changing into something incomprehensible, the love of our life gone, no more sex, the joys of good food no longer a joy, the doctor visits and medical treatments we once dreaded now becoming a regular norm….it is a staggering and most intimidating fate, old age.
I find no brilliant insights or revelations in this observation, other than the realization of the great respect in which we should hold those souls who with grace and courage and nobility endure day after day of physical and mental torments, and day after day of loneliness, and day after day of having nothing to which to look forward in the next day except more of the same, but actually not even that relatively optimistic scenario, but instead an anticipation of an inexorable worsening of fate and condition.
WILDERNESS OF FEAR
In moments of emotional distress it can be hard to see natural beauty. It certainly takes more effort this morning to let that healing sunrise into my thoughts, in spite of its glory. Overhead: soft draperies of intertwined baby blue and baby pink, at 30 degrees above the horizon: glowing coals with bands of deep red edges, on the horizon: dripping bands of molten gold. But still last night’s pain intruded on that beauty. Pain ,hurt, and fear, how difficult it is to lock them out of our thoughts. Smashing through the door like a rabid grizzly, or burrowing under defenses like a maggot, somehow they find their way in. Instead of pretending otherwise, it is important to acknowledge their intrusive skills at filling any dark, unoccupied corner of the mind, acknowledging their ability to find the dark recesses in order that we may redouble our efforts to fill every corner with light. This morning’s sunrise, joyous music, a scene of Nature, all can help dissipate the dark bile of pain as it tries to seep into the lowest recesses of the mind.
The pain, hurt, and fear will never rescind their efforts to penetrate and fill our minds at every opportunity. So we must never fail to look for the brighter, the hopeful, the living.
Pain, hurt, and fear, the wild beasts and denizens of the wilderness of the untamed mind, enter without our permission. In contrast we must choose to mentally construct optimism – beauty - and peace, like a warm - secure home in the midst of that wilderness.
ONE BREATH
A black squirrel! It sits in the branches of a tree behind Paul’s house.
It did not see ‘Tasha kitty, and came down to the ground until ‘Tasha leapt after it, sending it scurrying back up the tree, though not far.
Subtle hints of brown permeate its coat, making it appear like a normal squirrel that got dusted in a chimney.
‘Tasha roles in the needles, expressing the very essence of her being.
Of what possible remote relevance can that possibly be to any other person’s life? What makes one life relevant to another? How did Walt Whitman make the life of that dying soldier relevant to me last night?
In posing the query, I promptly recognize I have asked a meaningless question.
“Relevance” implies conversely a potential for irrelevance, a condition possible only in states of separation, distance, disconnection, and discontinuity.
Walt Whitman did not make the last moments of the dying soldier relevant to my far removed life and situation.
The poet reveals relevance by pushing aside the illusory veils of separation that we drape around over lives to isolate ourselves from the other.
We hold such precious isolation as critical to survival of individual identity. It must be “I and you”, “me and them”, the self and the others”, each separate, each isolated, or else we risk our very essence.
We must not entertain thoughts of oneness, each an expression of the same Source, all animated by the same breath of God, for then our greed and injustice and rudeness and impatience are inflicted not with impunity upon that person separate, disconnected, and irrelevant, but on that common One of which we are part, and whose suffering we therefore share.
Relevance? Nothing must be made relevant by poet or teacher, for everything, every last molecule and every breath by every living being great and small, near and distant, past and present, is intensely relevant, for it is part of us and we part of it, in the great unrecognized, unaccepted, denied, and rejected Wholeness of the Source.
We momentarily feel that Truth when the poet lets us hear the rattling gasp of the dying soldier, the journalist lets us see the anguish of the disaster victims, the producer lets us sense the majesty – harshness – wonder - and struggle of Nature. The lives are all far away and we can close the book, turn off the screen, and leave the theatre with not the slightest measurable, quantifiable difference in our life.
Yet in our hearts, with no worldly justification, we sense the profound relevance of those lives. From them perhaps we can learn that we must not wait on the crafted verse, the documented disaster, or the enthralling cinematography to reveal the relevance of all life. We can ourselves remove the illusory veils of separation from our lives and accept the bond of Unity connecting all beings who share the same Breath of Life.
WORTH AND DIGNITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL
I remain deeply disturbed by last night’s episode of Ken Burn’s The War……as I should be. The first hand descriptions of barbarity, savagery, cruelty, and inhumanity sank deeply into my weak and tremulous soul. I think how sheltered I have been. I wonder how I would have reacted in such horrific circumstances.
And on this morning, for the first time in who knows how many years, I think of the high school history teacher I referred to as “Admiral Hazlitt”. Mr. Hazlitt always brought into his history lessons the phrase “worth and dignity of the individual”.
It took me a while this morning to pull up that memory. I can now finally appreciate that Mr. Hazlitt tried to plant a seed of an idea, attempted to incorporate a recurring theme and lesson, in the facts of history he taught us. He probably wondered if he ever got through to any of us bored, soporific, rebellious, distracted high school students.
Well, he did. And wherever he is now, I hope he finally knows that.
It is quite likely that Mr. Hazlitt served in WWII. At the very least, he lived through it. Perhaps that played some role in creating his passion for the “worth and dignity of the individual”. To this day I clearly remember the conviction with which Mr. Hazlitt repeatedly worked that concept into each stage of history.
“Worth and dignity of the individual”….who could argue against that? Yet in how many countries at how many times in history has such a principle actually been espoused by leaders or practiced by citizens? Here is a principle at least momentarily raised to honor by that unique event in human history knows as ‘the United States”. And it is a principle practiced with defiant rebelliousness by one Yeshu bar Yosef a couple of millennia ago.
It is a value singularly Christian, and singularly loving and compassionate. It is a value under continual and relentless assault throughout history, by individuals in the way they treat others, by marketers manipulating behaviors to sell harmful products, by politicians using the electorate’s fears to erode freedoms. Caste systems, politburos, and “patriot’ acts are avowed enemies of the worth and dignity of the individual.
We each choose on each day our response to that phrase’s clarion call to a higher plane of human existence. In situations routine and circumstances dire we still make that individual choice.
Last night I heard of a United States marine slicing open the cheeks of a conscious prisoner in order to pry out his gold fillings with a bayonet.
Last night I heard of a United States soldier in the heat of hand to hand combat strangling the dying enemy, hearing the enemy gasp “mama” as he neared death, and in an instinctive reaction of the soul, letting that enemy go.
Worth and dignity of the individual” is an intensely individual value, a freely chosen value, a value that we express (or not) in each interaction, each job, and each vote. In bedroom, boardroom, and battlefield, we loudly shout to the world our disdain for or devotion to the worth and dignity of the individual.
As good ol’ Mr. Hazlitt kept interjecting the phrase into his history lessons, in the naivety of someone raised in a still free United States at its zenith, I think I may have thought that steady societal progress toward valuing “worth and dignity of the individual” was a given, was inevitable, was inexorable, was even pre-ordained, and it was something political, institutional, and national.
I now realize progress of “worth and dignity of the individual” is anything but automatic through history, and that such progress occurs only as the net aggregate of intensely individual choices.
I think Mr. Hazlitt would approve. And I thank that dedicated high school teacher of those decades long hence for lessons that still teach and inspire.
MARKETING DRIVEN EVOLUTION OF THE SPECIES
Isn’t it interesting how topics of such intense interest for us are of absolutely no interest to someone else? As example, I suspect I just initiated a topic of interest to me, and no interest to you.
How can something so exciting, fascinating, intriguing, important, and relevant for me not also grab your interest?! What’s wrong with you?!
OK, I know, I write this from my peculiarly odd perspective in life. Certainly, many people shared an intense interest in the just concluded World Series, a topic I find as relevant to life as the interior color of the garage in some randomly chosen house in Iowa.
I guess it’s just me who finds the discovery of eight more galactic Einstein rings absolutely enthralling, and I should have anticipated that my high school students would just drool and slouch further as I excitedly described it.
But my oddness aside, don’t you see some profound implications in the fact that what excites and interests me doesn’t mean a flying hoot to you? Oh yeah, we’ve already established the negative answer to that question. But being accustomed to talking to myself, I’ll continue down this fascinating (to me) train of thought.
I would warrant that among a tribe of chimpanzees, pod of humpback whales, or pack of marketers (with apologies to the chimpanzees and whales for in any way associating them with marketers), what interests one of them probably interests all of them. The banana, krill, or elderly potential victim that holds the attention of one will also be of intense interest to the others.
Surely it is seldom that the fruit, smell, or threat that excites one chimpanzee does not also hold relevant interest for all others.
But not so in humans. Einstein rings for crying out loud!……do you not fathom how astonishing it is that we can actually detect and see and record Einstein rings?! Oops, sorry if my shouting woke you up.
Would it help if I explained that Einstein rings form when the gravitational curvature of space-time induced by the closer of two perfectly aligned galaxies symmetrically distorts the light from the more distant galaxy? What’s that you say?….oh, I guess that was just snoring I heard.
But back to the real topic of the moment, we humans, unlike “lower” life forms (har! “lower”…..what a joke!…..well, except for the marketers) each possess unique and diverse interests that don’t mean squat to others.
Along with all the other distinguishing traits that we invoke to lay claim to our humanity, (art, language, laughter, tools, warfare, torture, sadism, marketing….in descending order of redeeming values) perhaps we should include our ability to create and contrive individual interests of absolutely no discernable value to anyone else.
I’m not sure whether that fact testifies to an awe inspiring, even godlike power of individual creativity, or to the fact that our childlike attention is easily held by any topic that sparkles brightly enough, even if devoid of any intrinsic worth. (Did I mention that Einstein rings sparkle?)
As illustration of lack of intrinsic worth, I can point to this essay. Its topic (“diverse interests among humans as identifying characteristic of the species”, in case you didn’t read the abstract) of such keen interest to me will arguably contribute little to anyone else’s life. Well, actually it is already contributing to my kitty’s life, for as long as I sit here typing she gets to lie across my left arm, putting both herself and my arm to sleep.
But beyond that appreciative fuzzy audience, I will probably need invocation of the forces of darkness (have I mentioned marketing?) to convince anyone else they are interested in this.
Which brings up another interesting (to me) point. If there is any force in the universe that can take the uniquely diverse, creative interests of humans in all their variety and cover it up by spreading a uniform layer of common interest across it, it is marketing. Countless regions, states, and cultures once beset with individual foods, spices, traditions, clothing, dance, and song can now thank marketing for the bland uniformity that ensures the meal I order from the laminated menu is being shared at the same time with people in several continents. The movie I see, you will see. My sports hero will be your sports hero. Our gossip about the entertainment celebrity will be your gossip. My tie will be the same width as your tie.
And now I see the light! I stand corrected! The diverse interests of human beings are merely a vestigial remnant of our evolutionary heritage! Our diverse interests may still make us, me with my Einstein rings, others with Britney and the World Series, unique in the animal world. But there is hope!….hope that we can finally evolve to catch up with our simian and cetacean cousins and their aforementioned uniformity of interests.
As we speak, corporate marketers diligently strive to instigate the next great leap in human evolution, spreading that smooth (not chunky, heaven forbid!) peanut butter of common interests across every tribe, state, and nation. Within a few decades my interests, likes, and dislikes, my topics of excited conversation, will be the same as yours, and ours the same as the farmer’s in Bangladesh.
This marketing induced quantum leap in evolutionary development of the human species, the elimination of those diverse interests that lead to such boring conversations, social ostracism, and marital strife, will rival even the most dramatic of past evolutionary events…..which as I recall had something to do with a giant asteroid obliterating most life on the planet….but maybe you’re not interested in that.
JERKS IN WAITING
Man, that is one de-motivating S.O.B. I wonder what in his background makes him that way. Or does he freely choose to assault others’ spirits? What would happen to an organization experiencing leadership via positive motivation, encouragement, openness, communication, and esteem building? Why are so many leaders so personality disabled? Do they simply reflect the general cross-section of the human populace, and many people, if placed in a position of leadership, would also exhibit such a void in communication, listening, and empathy skills? I find a strong appeal in that compelling premise. Alternative explanations would propose that only mean, inconsiderate jerks aspire to management, or only mean, inconsiderate jerks can succeed at management. I know both premises to be patently false.
Abusive managers, sad as this fact is, merely reflect another facet of the general human condition, just like the guards at the concentration camps and Abu Graib, just like the debauchery of the rich celebrity, just like the corruption of the politician. In each case we see behaviors waiting within each of us for their opportunity for release.
ESCAPE INTO RITUAL
Thoughts while looking at a few notes from the first full month at the new job.
As I type the above line, a deer walks by. Beautiful in the snow! He has a tiny little antler. He’s maybe in his first winter. His neck is a little burly, making his nose look a little shorter.
I worry about his right front leg. Oh no, he’s limping! Bless his heart. He holds up his leg. Will he survive the winter? The leg is not obviously broken. It moves. But the knee seems terribly stiff. And the ankle seems limp. Oh sorrow and sadness. God’s Creation, God’s life, suffering, suffering.
I dare not do anything that might startle it, for I don’t want it to have to run.
I doubt it can really run without causing more damage.
Now it looks down the slope into the lower yard. Can it make it? Oh sadness.
It’s left front foot slides but it makes it down the slope.
Another!
Again young! With both antlers, also small.. Oh good, the injured little guy at least has some company. How sad to be alone.
Oh beauty that blesses me.
He makes it up the hill! He makes it up strongly and bravely!
Now to the notes from work:
Incredible. I see all the panic notes, the demands to create quality systems.
My notes include my poignant notes to self about what I would want to do.
I see the lists of options dictated by management for suppliers when all I wanted to do was understand problems and work with these small business guys to our mutual benefit. The new system may well destroy the positive relationships I had been cultivating.
I see my notes from a chewing out by the boss, notes ironically covered with oil spots from my times on the shop floor trying to get to know the workers and the workplace in my naïve hopes of establishing a quality culture.
I shudder a bit upon looking at those notes and the high stress this workplace causes. The sustaining Spirit is doing a remarkable job of getting me by and sustaining me.
I listen to all the acronyms the consultants banter about as if I knew what they meant.
I get assaulted about things I’ve not done because I didn’t know I was supposed to do them, then later get assaulted about having still not gotten them done, though in the meantime my 11.5 hour workdays were occupied with trying to learn the jobs of the three engineers who got booted out of the group during my first week, engineers no longer even around to teach me how to do their job.
Mainly I get beat up for not reading my boss’ mind, anticipating his latest off the wall edict.
In seeming abject discontinuity the preceding leads to the following insight.
I understand ritual!
As I approach lunch preparation and in opening the can of soup I try to invoke the mentality of the Japanese tea service in a desperate effort to quiet my mind, I recognize the essential role ritual plays in helping the mind momentarily escape an unrelenting assault in the ongoing battles and harshness of life. There is no magic in any ritual, but it may indeed feel like magic, as the mind experiences a blessed, even if momentary, respite from the struggle for survival.
NEO-FEUDALISM
I suppose only complete collapse can loose the sharp clawed grip of today’s feudal lords and get the gullible masses to finally glance up from their self-inflicted servitude to cobble together a more equitable economic.
But within hours the forces of yet another vile incarnation of evil neo-feudalism will slither out of their shallow graves, and dukes and earls become investment bankers and CEO’s will again through their fiendish machinations manipulate the masses so as to pervert any new economic system so it too will bleed the many to profit a few. The latest incarnation of feudal lords will, as always, dress well and assure us they have our best interests at heart as they conscript our crops and children for the siege of their rivals’ castle or corporations, or charge us interest and manipulate inflation to secure our shackles of indebtedness.
CHILDREN IN LIGHT OF GOLD
Instinct kept me moving, till to my surprise I was all the way there.
An apple tree by ruins of a pioneer house gave me the best apple I’ve ever tasted.
I think it made the tree happy that someone finally enjoyed its fruit.
I walked the road, eating the little apple.
By climbing just a little further past the falls I found tranquility and isolation, and my fingers played in overshooting curtains of water,
parting them aside.
From above I look down on golden trees spotlighted from above
between canyon walls of narrow spacing,
flowing water shimmering silver at their feet.
Children play,
new arrivals excitedly calling
“I see it, I see it!” as the waterfall comes into view.
Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.
DISCOVERING WHAT CONTROLS YOU
A young, small bunny enters the yard as ‘Tasha kitty lies on my lap.
‘Tasha watches with an intensity of the sort business people watch the value of their stock portfolio during trading hours.
I rock in my chair, and ‘Tasha’s body has no choice but to move with me, but her head remains perfectly still, her neck angling right and left and right and left so ‘Tasha’s locked on laser eyesight does not lose its focus on the approaching bunny.
With similar intensity I often stare at beauty and flowers and storm clouds and the other manifestations of Nature’s majesty.
‘Tasha has no intent of leaving her warm spot in my lap in order to chase the bunny. ‘Tasha never chases the bunnies, unless they just almost bump her on her little black button nose. But ‘Tasha’s nature, who and what she is, dictates that she must focus her rapt attention on fuzzy things like bunnies entering her yard.
Each of us have our list of what grabs our attention. For some it is natural beauty, for some it is violent videos, for some it is attractive members of the opposite or the same sex, for some it is a flashy car, for some it is bright lights.
It’s important to realize what it is that grabs your attention, because it reveals your inner drives.
‘Tasha is a hunter and carnivore at heart. Regardless of how recently she ate the bowl of food I provided, a bunny entering the yard will and must and should grab ‘Tasha’s attention.
Ask yourself what grabs your attention, and what does it tell you about your drives, motives, urges, desires, needs, instincts, values, and priorities.
Does the bright and shiny attract you? Does the violent and combative hold your attention? Does the sale, the bargain, the discount grab your thoughts?
What grabs your attention tells you what exerts influence, and perhaps even control, over you.
Do you want it to control you? Do your spoken values and priorities align well with what grabs your attention?
‘Tasha’s quite happy being a would-be hunting carnivore, so having her attention arrested by passing bunnies does not bother her at all.
Can you say the same about whatever holds your gaze, gets you to pause, gets you to turn the page, stop switching channels, invest your time, and spend your money?
‘Tasha can do nothing about her nature. We are not so lucky.
If the billboard, the TV scene, the actress, the jewelry, the investment graph, and all the various bright and shiny things that compete for our attention do not reflect the priorities and values we claim we want to develop in our lives, we can, and are under the obligation to, at least take stock of our nature and decide how we want to respond to it. This is the price of self-awareness.
Sometimes recognition of what within us gets us to look, watch, stare, and gaze allows us to alter our behavior to accommodate our consciously chosen values. I don’t spend nearly as much time distracted by car races as I once would have.
Sometimes recognition of what within us gets us to look, watch, stare, and gaze does not allow us to make a change in our nature, but does allow us to control our nature. The pretty girl appearing on the TV screen will grab my attention as it always has, but today I won’t watch the program just because of the pretty girl.
What grabs your attention, turns your head, detours the path of your mind? Does the answer speak of something controlling you, or will you control it?
IRRATIONAL RELIGIONS
Surely religions and ethnic identities provide the most powerful testimony to the reality, the inescapable reality, of the universal pull toward Unity.
Let’s face it. In order to stick to a given religion or ethnic identity, people willingly put up with some of the most irrational, wacky, goofy madness humanity has ever contrived. In fact, when you list wacky, goofy-assed behaviors and beliefs, odds are most of the items at the top of the list will be securely anchored in religion and ethnicity and national identity.
Now, obviously the other guy’s religion and clothing and rituals and practices are silly. Thank goodness ours are so perfectly enlightened and reasonable and based in certainty! Just like our lawns and neckties and sport coats and high-healed shoes and hairstyles, well, today’s hair styles, and worship of drug gorging athletes and media personalities are rational and reasonable.
We all want to belong! We are willing to not only put up with wacky, goofy- manure to do it, but we even manage to convince ourselves that our wacky, goofy ideas and behaviors are not wacky and goofy! How readily we will suspend our intelligence and rational logic, and dispense with comfort and practicality, in order to believe or wear anything that will allow us to march in unison with the culture around us.
In our desperate, and generally misguided struggle to pursue what none of us recognize as Unity, we will wear what the other people wear, do what the other people do, and believe what the other people believe, and it doesn’t really matter a rat’s behind whether it makes any sense or not.
Cripes-a-mighty folks, is it not obvious as the nose on your face?! We are all desperate to experience at least some superficial connection with someone or something, to experience some crumb of acceptance and belonging, and we don’t really have any other reason for wearing those shoes or that robe or that hat or that coat or, God knows, that strangling strip of colored cloth tied around our neck.
Now, if we finally admit that most of our behaviors, from putting on our best clothes for Easter to getting naked for the solstice orgy, are ultimately all for the same reason, to belong and connect, then do you think that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to a little more directly and honestly approach the need for that Unity?
Maybe we could even break down and offer a little of that acceptance and Unity we so desperately crave to someone else, maybe even someone who doesn’t wear the right clothes and believe exactly the right things…..my gosh, maybe even offer a little of that acceptance and Unity to someone with slightly different skin pigmentation or size of nose or accent!
In all our clown-hats and shaved heads and unshaved heads and died robes and bonnets and tattoos and incense and blood sacrifices and uniformity of clothing and intellectually contorted belief systems and magical altars and countless other wacky, goofy traditions and styles and beliefs we so fervently clutch to our bosom, we are crying out that we want to belong, belong to someone, belong to something.
It is the poignant, farcical, tragic, hilarious, touching, and ludicrous tapestry of human behavior through the ages, an infant’s cry to “see me, look at me, accept me, love me”.
Surely such a historically consistent testimony to desperate, inescapable need for Unity with someone and something does not groundlessly arise.
Surely it testifies not just to a doomed desire, a hopeless need, but to an instinctive sensing that in our striving for Unity at any cost, we are striving for something real, for something almost within reach, even if for something unrecognized and unnamed.
What would happen if we figuratively stepped down from our high heals, looked past the smoke from our incense, looked up from our investments, and momentarily removed the tie, robe, vestments, suit, and uniforms that give us membership with a few but isolate us from the many? Might we find all the trappings of our social and religious and ethnic identity get in the way of the embrace of life and humanity, an embrace that could satisfy our deepest yearning?
What if we dared to free our god from the shackles of scripture and orthodoxy, and listened to what that newly freed god spoke to our heart? Our gods of possessions and investments might prove silent and empty, and the God of Creation might prove far more flexible and tolerant than we might like. But perhaps upon finally listening, instead of reciting, we might find that we do belong, we are accepted, and we have always belonged and been accepted, and only our insistence that the other guy with the wacky, goofy beliefs did not belong kept us from experiencing our own belonging, our own wholeness and acceptance within Source unnamable.
Addendum:
We may find we can treasure all the more our own wacky, goofy beliefs and styles, not because ours are right and all the other guys’ wrong, but because we recognize the cherished connection that those beliefs and styles allow us to experience with others and with Source, but no longer precluding connection with people of different beliefs and styles. We may discover a profound beauty in the variety of paths and beliefs and rituals, all the multitude of paths ensuring no soul is left without a way, from their individual point of departure to a destiny point where we all can come together.
PESKY, SENSELESS SCRIPTURE
Copyright 2020 Don Ray
Websites tend to disappear into the ether. Feel free to copy and share the following.
There are times when the human race’s proclivity to race to the lowest common denominator and then tear it asunder in order to plummet to yet darker depths can become a bit overwhelming.
Exerting a large scale political influence on the species or the nation or the community entails communicating in a manner that the masses will understand, which means communicating in terms of fear and anger expressed in the most simplistic and childish manner.
The perennially frightened pie-eyed masses will follow he (it is almost never a “she”) who best plays their chords of fear and bigotry. He who tries to reason with the mob will become the target of the mob.
It is a singularly unlovable species, and a consistently dangerous species. Humans would long ago have destroyed the planet were it not for their penchant for destroying each other, the regular self-decimations of their numbers momentarily postponing their inexorable march to planet-wide obliteration of life.
If one reads the scriptures about God’s/gods’ relationship with this species so singularly skilled at propagation, the most fathomable and easily understood lessons entail God/gods getting fed up and destroying this bipedal infection from off the face of this endangered lovely blue jewel of a planet. That course of action is imminently plausible and defensible. There’s a scriptural story we can all understand.
Not so comprehensible, and growing less comprehensible by the day, are the scriptural descriptions of forgiveness, redemption, and salvation. Those verses of course we reserve for ourselves and those who share our beliefs and societal foundations, while keeping the verses of mass destruction and vengeance handy to apply to everybody else.
Forgiveness, redemption, and salvation…..not the stuff of reality shows or political campaigns. Forgiveness, redemption, and salvation ……barely rating a footnote in the history of human behavior.
Yet there the words concepts are, offered to the species as a whole even after all our millennia of strident determination to not let them influence our treatment of each other.
Forgiveness, redemption, and salvation….words so alien to a normal day of life on this planet that were we honest about it, we don’t really quite know what they mean. Actually, we don’t have a clue what they mean.
Yet they won’t go away. They peskily intrude on our preferred invocation of fire-flood- and vengeance for everyone we don’t like.
As we trenchantly maintain our scowling condemnations of each other, as we meticulously exorcise forgiveness-redemption-salvation from our policies and psyches, the words still abide even if unspoken.
The words, forgiveness-redemption-salvation, seem sewn into the fabric of a message that we cannot escape. We have crucified them, burned them, and always ignored them, yet still they furtively scurry into our consciousness these millennia later.
They will never force themselves upon us. But they will also never leave us alone.
They are an invitation.
The briefest glance at our lives and our world reveals our response to the invitation. But still it abides, patient, waiting for the passing of the madness that afflicts our individual lives, our nation, and our species.
Forgiveness – redemption – salvation….. impractical – implausible - and irrational…….unlike our preferred verses of floods – fire – and wrath.
Forgiveness – redemption – salvation ……. making no sense at all…..making them singularly appropriate to our human world and condition.
MADNESS IN THE PURPOSE
Obviously the world is quite mad.
Obviously the reality of Unity is not something most people experience, or realize they want to experience.
Obviously the world wages wars and genocides, and crucifies those who would dare try to stop the madness.
Economic systems rise and fall in value without warning, institutions formed to support freedom and democracy become bastions of authoritarianism, love and affection are rejected, peace is summarily abolished, cigarettes are smoked, and during it all the human race steadfastly races toward rendering the planet uninhabitable as quickly as possible.
The world is obviously quite mad.
This condition of madness, being as universal as the laws of physics, must surely then play some fundamental role in the loving Purpose, as contradictory as that may sound.
To fulfill a loving role in this mad world, I suspect it is quite important to acknowledge, recognize, and accept the madness, just as recognition of a person’s developmental disabilities is critical to lovingly and effectively interacting with that person.
You don’t expect the adult with a four year old’s mental development to respond to your comments about physics and chemistry. To expect otherwise is to invite frustration and to impede your ability to accept and love that person with special needs.
Likewise, to expect to significantly positively influence the world, or an institution, or a company, or a family member, is merely to invite frustration. They are all mad. We are all mad.
And it is for a purpose, it is for the Purpose, as unfathomable as that fact seems.
Perhaps the madness is an unavoidable side effect of the shattering of consciousness into individual entities. Perhaps the madness necessarily arises in the process of our developing free choice.
When Yeshu (Jesus) said “they know not what they do”, He addressed our madness.
So, our brilliant contribution to the company, our loving suggestions for the spouse, the revolutionary treatises and beautiful composition, all go unheeded, unaccepted, and unwanted….if we’re lucky. With a little worse luck, these loving offerings elicit firing, divorce, or crucifixion.
Oh well, it’s just how it is.
The human condition seems to be a chaotic cauldron of conflicting conscious perceptions, irrational and unpredictable.
So, whatchagonnado? It makes offering whatever contribution, love, and wisdom you bring to the party a somewhat discouraging prospect.
Yet somehow beautiful and loving things do happen. Via miracles and coincidences and unexpected paths, between rejections and generally being ignored, once in a while love does shine forth and warm some soul, somewhere.
Somehow, it seems our calling is to remain open for opportunities to give and love, and to keep trying to give and love even in the face of rejection and crucifixions.
Such perseverance embodies a profound act of faith.
It entails loving a world that does not love back, and it entails a completely irrational course of action that flies in the face of all evidence and logic.
The world is mad, we are all mad, trapped in our little isolated compartments of conscious experience, resolutely shutting from our thoughts what the other guy might be feeling or thinking or sensing or needing.
Without regard for results and outcomes, we are supposed to give our meager personal gifts of love to that mad world.
There is some kind of perverse beauty in the whole thing. Love becomes a very pure thing when freely given to those who resoundingly reject it.
There is also a certain peace to be gained from recognition of the world’s madness, and the associated surrender to not trying to fit in, no longer attempting to accommodate the world, finally not even desiring success or accolades or even acceptance.
Perhaps then it becomes possible to love quite purely, to truly offer one’s self in sacrifice, as did Yeshu, relying on the miracle of the unfolding loving Purpose to ensure that Love, once crucified, lives on.
EACH LOVED
Copyright 2020 Don Ray
Websites tend to disappear into the digital ether. Feel free to copy and share the following.
If we get even a glimpse of it, it is overwhelming,
a glimpse of the enormity of our lives,
of every life.
even a glimpse of the importance of each detail,
of the intricate web of connectivity,
of the criticality of each decision,
of the scope of each influence,
in glimpsed overview
it is overwhelming.
We go through life in amazing obliviousness
to the astonishing import of each conversation,
each gesture,
each opportunity.
But our ignorance in no way diminishes our impact,
the utterly unique individual role we play
in every other life with whom we come into contact.
All these elements in an expanding Universe of consciousness,
each element a universe unto itself,
fates and outcomes
an unforeseeable mix of choices and influences,
all fitting together,
the tiniest alteration sending lives down
radically different courses.
So flexible, this evolving Universe,
incorporating and accommodating
each of us individuals and all our choices,
the future triumphs and tragedies that await us
flipping between triumph and tragedy upon the infinite details
of a single circumstance of a single moment.
Overwhelming, even a glimpse,
overwhelming and reassuring,
the glimpse revealing the cherished nature
of each individual life.
The Universe a grandiose mélange of lives,
yet each life singular and precious and fraught with potential.
The grand Universe orbiting about each single constituent universe,
each absorbed in its situation and experiences,
each for the most part unaware of its role,
each loved, each loved, each eternally loved.
SHADOW LIGHT
Copyright 2020 Don Ray
Websites tend to disappear into the digital ether. Feel free to copy and share the following.
Dark shadows on a dim gray background,
our lives hungering for illumination.
We seek the Source of the faint Light,
but there is no place or form or direction,
for this Light suffuses all.
The dense fog of our desires fills our world,
rendering the Light a distant memory.
Yet wherever we look, there it is,
sometimes brighter, often dimmer,
but always there, always everywhere,
unreachable and inescapable,
just enough background illumination of existence
to reveal the silhouettes
we mistake for reality.
We desperately grip our illusions of security, and who can blame us? Of course God forgives us. But will we forgive God?
THE NATURE OF YESHU (or “Jesus” in modern United States parlance)
Yeshu knew! Yeshu knew He had a message of Love that would help maintain the balance of Choice in this harsh world. His pure heart knew His role was to love as best He could.
Yeshu knew He would have to publicly die in order to cast that message into motion through the ages.
He did bring redemption to human souls, redemption to every soul that chooses to act on His message (not merely intellectually believe, but act). Yeshu brought hope of eternal life, but not because His sacrifice was necessary for God to relent from vengeful wrath and give in to Yeshu’s request for us to have access to eternal life. Yeshu brought us the hope of the eternal life that the loving Source had always intended for us.
Other religions also offer, in various guises, some version of that hope of life, or at least hope of peace, or at least hope of a good harvest this fall. Religions not offering hope of something don’t stay in business very long.
But in the great unfolding of human life on this planet, in the unending cycle of cultural paroxysms - progress - dark ages - and nations rising in order to fall, all these tsunamis of change washing new belief systems and paradigms in and out of the human conception, the time had come to provide yet another message of hope, a message to encourage and reassure and motivate, a message to provide the Choice for individual human souls, and of course a message that would, like all holy messages, promptly be subject to distortion and manipulation.
The horror of Yeshu’s crucifixion process, including the flogging and the crown of thorns, the brutality and bloodiness of the torture, the public nature of the cross, the spear in the side, all were necessary to demonstrate without ambiguity that He had died. His message, His hope, His example, would arc through human history only if launched by followers fanatically committed by evidence shocking and incontrovertible.
They watched Him die, they watched a killing unfold so horrific, so horrendous, so thorough, that the overwhelming shock upon seeing and hearing him alive and present several days later would wrench their lives into entirely new directions, all their worldly plans and concerns rendered inconsequential in comparison to their personal witness that the great Fear that defines our human lives, the ending in death that awaits us all, was unambiguously defeated, right before their eyes.
That crucifixion and resurrection were indeed necessary, and did indeed bring us eternal life (also translated as “whole, complete, and full” life), not by bribing a cruel and vengeful God, but by ensuring that the message of whole, complete, and full life would be delivered, giving us the Choice of whether to accept it.
How fully and completely human was this Yeshu who chose to become Christos!
Listen to the pathos of his prayer! “Lead us not into testing, but deliver us from the tester”. And again, in the garden, “take this cup from me!”
This was not superman, immune to pain! This was one of us! In his heartfelt prayers, prayers recorded for us, we do not hear any mystic transcending of pain and suffering, we hear down to earth acknowledgement that this life is harsh, and that He, just as we, did not want to experience pain and suffering and testing!
These prayers are not great, mysterious, inscrutable, illustrations of divine holiness that has attained some state of consciousness removed from this world! No! This is not the prayer of a mystic -guru -transcendent being. This is a prayer of one of us, natural and authentic and sincere and heartfelt, and it is prayer with which we can identify.
This is not prayer beyond our understanding, this is prayer within our reach: “deliver us from testing!”
This is prayer acknowledging the harsh nature of this world. “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”. Not “thy will is done”, but a pleading that “thy will be done”, unambiguously stating that God’s will is not always done in this life.
The harsh nature of this world, not functioning as a loving God would want it to function, a world that tests us…….the Lord’s Prayer makes profound testament about the harsh nature of this life, and makes poignant statements pleading to be delivered from that harshness.
A man, a soul, a spirit uttered that prayer, just as each of us, all of us being human and souls and spirit, can speak that same prayer.
That man, that soul, that spirit, so agonizingly aware of the harsh and brutal nature of this world that tests us and does not function according to the will of the Creator as does the Kingdom of Heaven, that man, that soul, that spirit, did what He could do to influence that world, our world. He fulfilled His role, accepting the testing this world demanded, enduring unimaginable horrors in order to shock a handful of men and women into action, thereby casting into history a message, a message to which we this day, and every day of our lives, choose how we will respond.
RESPONSE AND ETERNAL SCULPTURE
Your response to the world, not the world’s response to you, sculpts your Soul and essence of your being.
DIVORCE OF SCIENCE AND SPIRIT
To treat science and spirituality as divorced, distinct, and separate is like dealing separately with each organ of the body. Practical limitations dictate such specialized focus, but we should not let that fact deceive us into forgetting that the living beauty the parts sustain arises only when the parts function together in the Wholeness that gave them existence and purpose in the first place.
REALITY SCULPTED BY LIFE OUT OF A MATRIX OF POSSIBILITIES
At the sculpted rock pools above the canyon waterfall. A truly glorious place of refuge for my soul. This place is indeed precious to me. And up here, usually no one comes, everyone stopping at the base of the falls. Brisk today, a sharp breeze threading its way down the narrow canyon.
In the smooth curves of water-carved stone I see some glimpse of the blossoming of events through eternal time in our Destiny Home. The flowing, changing, vital, dynamic water of life will flow through the infinite potential possibilities of a universe created by the loving Source, but flow without conflict, our lives in the aggregate sculpting a reality cut of the raw marble of dimensions and laws of physics.
Into that blank and featureless potential of fields and physical constants anxiously awaiting our arrival, we will by our lives, choices, and actions, carve mountain ranges of reality, and all in unity with the loving Spirit.
Thoughts added later:
That will be the difference from our present universe! The conscious beings will be integrated into the physics. We will be free, completely free. But the physics of the Destiny Home universe will preclude conflicting wills. What we “carve” out of the potential universe that the Creator provides will be unbounded, but not in conflict between conscious individuals! Consciousness integrated into the matrix of the physics will allow this glorious outcome!
EVERYONE’S EXODUS
We all find ourselves on our own personal Exodus, continually, throughout our lives. We are all in the process of leaving some enslavement. That worldly enslavement pursues us, threatening to take us back. Only if we accept miracles of rescue from the Source can we receive deliverance from our various enslavements.
So we each wander in our personal wilderness, heading indirectly toward some unseen promised land. Along the way we will inevitably rebel against the principles and values and ethics and morals and God that could bring us entrance to that Promised Land.
So we will spend this worldly life wandering in our personal wilderness, receiving enough spiritual manna and coming across enough springs of love to sustain our spiritual survival and growth.
And we will grow, if we persevere, growing as children, growing in grace so that we will be ready to enter that Promised Land. There our souls will not have to survive on bits of spiritual manna and infrequent trickles from the wellspring of love. In that promised land we will feast on continual Unity with all Spirit, and we will know not a moment’s separation from Love. And because of the necessary growth during our wandering in this wilderness, we will not inflict on that Promised Land and on each other the spiritual destruction we have wrought on this world and ourselves.
So we must for now wander through this wilderness until we die. Here on our personal Exodus we will daily join the struggle that promotes our strength and growth.
So these children wander, occasionally distracted by idols of their own making. The children wander, seemingly aimlessly, their forty or more years bringing them sometimes closer, sometimes further from their promised land.
But from their moment of birth, that crossing of the Red Sea into this worldly wilderness, there is no going back.
A life of enslavement, a life of no freedom, no choice, no personal responsibility, cannot be regained. Conscious, self-aware, alive, and free to wander, these children, we, are doomed and blessed to wander, creating our selves in the process.
Occasionally we glimpse the Promised Land, that place of infinite and perpetual Unity with Source, sustainer, Spirit, and even each other. And at that glimpse sometimes, we cry in fearful dismay and turn to flee, for surely such spiritual intimacy would overwhelm us, dissolving our self, our individual identity, in that sea of Light and Communion.
So we turn back to our familiar wilderness, the love in the Promised Land appearing as too intimidating a giant to our childlike vision. We wander further, growing stronger as individual souls. But we remember that glimpse; we cannot quite forget the brushing touch of love, and grace, and wonder what it would be like to live immersed in it.
But to live in that Promised Land of loving Unity we must be wholly part of it, also loving, accepting, and blessing, as we are loved, accepted, and blessed.
So the children wander, their journey their destination, following the various pillars of smoke and fire that guide them to that promised day when they will no longer see indirect and distant the manifestations of Source and sustainer, but will live in and with Source and Sustainer.
Each in our own Exodus we wander, through our individual wilderness, seeking the next oasis of spiritual respite. Between oases the barren wasteland and craggy mountains of this world seem harsh and threatening. But we wander in freedom….and we wander in hope.
Let us not forget the miracle of life that placed us free and conscious in this wilderness. Let us not lose sight of the miracle of redemption that gives us hope.
Let the children know that their Promised Land awaits. And let us celebrate the journey that is our birth into that Land.
SIMPLE QUESTION
The question I wish everyone could directly ask of each other: “what’s it like being you?…living your life?”
LIGHT OUT OF WRITHING DARKNESS
Any circumstance and situation can be used by the Lord for the loving Purpose. The grim and tragic and frightening circumstances of life are not that way because suffering is part of the loving Purpose. God did not “make” the child sick or make you suffer as part of a detailed script to unveil glory. But out of the chaos and catastrophe that serve as cauldron of Creation of freedom, Creation truly infinite and unbounded, at any point in the churning storm, form and order and beauty and love can begin to coalesce when we so choose. Out of the howling gales begins to glow a light. From the writhing mists begins to form structure eternal.
Such is the power and potential of Love, awaiting our Choice to give it form and bring it focus.
PROVIDING THE CHOICE
Is it possible to provide people the opportunity for the Choice?
Can we, by our actions, give people the opportunity to choose Unity?
My instinctive answer to myself is “yes”.
I even think that is what Yeshu (Jesus) did, and does.
There is no clearer, no more graphic, no more eloquent posing of the Choice before us than the life, sacrifice, and message of Yeshu.
Ultimately, I almost think that is the very nature of the salvation He offers.
He submitted to crucifixion in order that, because of His Resurrection, His message would continue. And that message is the message of Love, which is to say, the message of the Choice.
Is God’s redemption actually simply God’s Love providing us the Choice?
I could imagine that. I could well imagine that.
When we lay our lives on the line, giving people the opportunity to make the Choice for Unity, are we providing the opportunity for redemption?
Surely it is good to give people the Choice, for that is how we grow closer to becoming the children of God that our Creator hopes we will choose to become.
I believe that was a significant component of the need for crucifixion and God’s plan of redemption.
Yeshu changed lives because He gave them, and gives us, the Choice, of how to respond.
The door to Heaven is open by Yeshu posing for us the question of whether we will choose to love or not.
I now see that it is when we are at our most vulnerable that we pose to people the Choice that can shape their souls.
That is exactly what Yeshu did.
I see the result of vulnerability all the time.
How many young men do I know that, upon becoming a father, upon holding their very own baby, suddenly chose to change the course of their lives, rearrange their priorities, and suddenly discover the deep joys of Unity in that bond with that utterly helpless infant in their arms.
Yeshu was indeed the lamb, the innocent sacrifice, voluntarily offering his life, submitting to our will, and in the process, offering us the Choice.
In that helpless babe, or lamb, or refugee, that lies before us, we are given the Choice of whether to care, whether to love, whether to open our hearts to feel the spiritual truth we may never have felt before.
Yeshu sent his apostles on their way with the admonishment to not even take extra sandals or cloak or staff. He placed them at the mercy of the world. In the process, Yeshu gave each person in each village the Choice of whether to care, whether to invite, whether to listen.
Amazing, the plan of redemption lying through submission, submission of the most innocent, that we may choose whether to accept or crucify Him, and in the process sculpt our eternal soul.
Saving grace, redemption, cleansing, all arise through opportunities of Choice, and we give that opportunity to others when we lay ourselves before others, placing our fate on their mercy, on their Choice.
Will they reject our Love? Will they listen or condemn? Will they nurture or neglect the infant?
When we turn the other cheek, we turn the key to open to our enemy the Choice.
When the thief takes our money and we offer them our cloak, we offer them the Choice.
When Yeshu waited on that terrible night in the Garden of Gethsemane, He gave us all the Choice of what we will do with Him.
QUANTUM OF FUZZINESS
Desperately writing in the office.
I grab the moment after 10:30 when all the managers are in the president’s staff meeting, the tormentors occupied with tormenting each other.
Poor ‘Tasha kitty clearly seemed depressed this morning, bless her fuzzy heart. I was worried about her. She has held up so bravely since I started this job
I hung up her bouncy bird today for the first time in ages. I hope it helps her. How desperately I need that ‘Tasha kitty gift of God, something to love and by whom to be loved. In pets like ‘Tasha, PC, and Bruter Baer, many of us experience the purest love that will ever enter our worldly lives. It is not a little thing, this fuzzy relationship. God help the people that cannot feel the sublime, spiritual Unity of such a pure, loving bond.
We feel the touch of God, we momentarily feel the very Purpose of Life, we glimpse the potential residing in all Creation when we allow a kitty to purr in our lap or a dog to excitedly lick our face.
A tiny quantum of this hunting, biting, clawing, snarling, growling world is momentarily liberated from its fearful struggle for survival and allowed to briefly enter the Kingdom for which we long.
JOY OF THE PATH
Few joys are more profound than being on track for fulfilling that essence of who and what you are. The catch is, this temporal, human world does not always encourage and reward us for such a fulfilling path. Oddly enough, that fact allows us to discover an even deeper joy, a profoundly intimate, personal, spiritual, existential joy of Unity with the Source. That path of fulfillment better offer such perquisites, because that path that fulfills your essence and places your life in harmony with the Purpose seldom pays well in worldly terms (though one occasionally sees exceptions).
So in moments when you feel “in the zone”, doing something so right, so in unity with the loving Creator, that you feel bulletproof, unafraid of poverty, unemployment, worldly failure, and disapproval, revel in the feeling, savor it, for that feeling comes from the Comforter, the Counselor, that Spirit promised by Yeshu (Jesus). For a moment, run with the joy, love generously, give gloriously of yourself, certain and confident of spiritual outcomes, for a blessed moment unconcerned about the fleeting breeze of worldly outcomes.
GODS AFFECTION
On this rare and precious moment, a Sunday morning, I pause to give a tiny sacrifice of time to express my gratitude to my Lord and Savior.
Such amazing support!
‘Tasha was simply beyond belief this morning! Such lubbins’, perfect lubbins, no sharp claw snags, just whisker kisses and pawsages and walkabouts, all around, over and over and over, on and on, as I drifted in sleep in and out, glorious loving from God, affection of the Creation, relaxing.
And now as I type, there’s a deer! Walking into the yard on this rare morning at home! Bunnies scamper away before the deer’s nose snuffling along the ground! And another deer! Beautiful!
All this after a sunrise beyond words, sharp edged but tattered tapestries of ember red and orange, hanging in Salvador Dali composition across the sky, their thin draperies actually displaying colors of rainbows as they wavered before the approaching sun, bands of colors progressing across the underside of the perfectly placed continent of cloud.
On and on this went, arresting beauty, beauty so glorious it finally wrested my mind from the travails and stresses of the job, and all this, all the fuzzy affection and the visual beauty, on this morning when I had time to savor it all.
Meanwhile, on the horizon, that silver-white light that I know, from somewhere, somewhere before this world, that light, complete, full, all contained within it, bright silver white beyond mere white, as if bursting through a tear in the robin’s egg blue of the horizon sky.
And as the sun approached the edge of the mesa, the pine tree direct in sun’s unseen path began to glow, to glow afire, brighter and brighter, just that one tree, on its right and left dark, dark green remaining dark, but that one distant tree gloriously transmitting the bright orange light of sun yet unseen.
And on that brief Saturday bike ride after work yesterday, a coyote! Beautiful and majestic! And unafraid! I really got to watch it, and it watched me! How long since I’ve seen one of those beautiful creatures?!
All these blessings, and I pause and say thanks to my Creator, for all these miracles landing in my life at this peculiar moment in time when I so badly need them, blessings beyond the ordinary, the purrfection of ‘Tasha’s lubbins this morning! The lying beside my face, the tugging on my shirt, the nose stosses!……incredible!….perfect, setting my sleeping senses a-sail on a mental sea finally calm.
JOHN 14 MYSTERIES
For those curious about the 14th chapter of the Book of John (what, that’s not everyone?!), here are some perspectives to prompt thought and discussion. I hasten to say I am no theologian. The following invokes no academic reference material or meticulously researched exegesis. It’s personal and from the heart. It’s validity must be determined by your heart.
It's all rough draft material, not literary art, so please delve into it with patience and tolerance. If in spite of its manifold shortcomings it prompts some reassuring new thoughts and perspectives, it will have served its purpose.
Verse 2: “I am going there to prepare a place for you”.
That sounds like Yeshu still had work to do. Might we also have work to do? Might we keep working after our souls move from this life to the next? We can transition to a better world, but it may well be a “world” of ongoing growth and evolution and development, all that occurring in perfection of Unity.
So could Yeshu leave this worldly temporal existence and literally live and work and create and build a world in which we will someday reside?….or many worlds?…..as opposed to simply landing in an already intact “Heaven”?…..who’s to say “no”?
2: “In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so I would have told you”.
Look how beautifully individual this image is! This is not a Heaven of melted together oneness having lost all individual identity! This is an existence profoundly structured so as to promote the individual!…yet not individuals alone and isolated, as we often are in this life, but all within one “house”!
4: “You know the way to the place where I am going”.
This statement did not follow a list of instructions, an issuing of maps, or a reciting of credo. Seemingly out of the blue Yeshu says “you know the way”, so much out of the blue that Thomas responded (5) “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
Yet Yeshu’s comment implied they already knew the way, they already in their hearts were seeking their path, their role in the Purpose.
What had these apostles done to indicate they knew any way to any promised land? They had followed! They were seeking, they were open, they were trying, they were following that image and word of God that entered their lives. That is the way. Perhaps whenever we follow that opportunity, whenever we remain open to the possibility of the holy entering our lives and calling us, perhaps it is in that Choice that we are in fact following Yeshu, following that path that goes through Him, the only path to the Father/Mother/Source.
9: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father”.
Naturally we might interpret that to refer only to seeing Yeshu, that man perfectly embodying Unity with Father/Mother/Source. But I passionately believe we see the Father, glimpses of the Father, distorted and imperfect glimpses, in every act of kindness and selflessness and generosity.
I believe Yeshu was saying that the Father is here, now, in the living souls around us. We should not look for the Father/Mother/Source in the skies or miraculous patterns or apocalyptic wonders. We should look for the Father/Mother/Source in the eyes of that person before us, and in the acts of love.
Unlike us, Yeshu, living in perfect Unity with the Father/Mother/Source, provided undistorted view of the Father. This is critically important! The Father/Mother/Source was/is embodied in a human being! What does that say for how we should see the people around us?
20: “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”
What a profound revelation of Unity! Each soul clearly remains individual, each with defined separate identity, yet each living as part of One, within each other, each an expression of One!
6: “No one comes to the Father except through me”.
Here in the midst of our spiritual evolutionary development our souls and spirits and hearts are still mired in our physical natures. We will attain that state of being - that state no longer enslaved to our worldly physical nature and our corporeal brains - our souls will be liberated - when we have attained that state that Yeshu was in. We will by redeeming grace pass through that state, Yeshu’s state, that state of full Unity with the loving Source, that state no longer enslaved to our worldly being. In that sense our path goes through Yeshu the Christos.
7: “If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well”.
Yeshu’s soul was no longer controlled by the animal inputs of the brain and senses. He experienced those worldly senses and inputs, but had put them in perspective, living in Unity with the Source and Purpose.
Yeshu fully understood the nature of our spiritual existence, and the loving Source from which arises that existence. So indeed, if anyone really knew Yeshu, knew Him and could talk with Him and ask Him, anyone who really new Yeshu would have the opportunity to know the Father/Source.
7: “From now on you do know him and have seen him”.
One does not have to know all at once in order to know someone. The apostles were getting to know the deeper aspects of Yeshu. He reassured them that through Him they could learn of the Father/Source, and had already begun learning of the Father/Source.
10: “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?”
The conscious Spirit of the Father is the Life and Love in each of us, though in all of us it is imperfectly actualized because we remain mired in our worldly condition from which our soul is born. But that soul in birth, that essence of us, is indeed the Father/Mother entering this world, being born into individual identity.
Having accomplished liberation from this world’s enslavement and control, the incarnated Father/Mother existing as an individual human being, as embodiment of Purpose fulfilled, was in Yeshu. Yeshu, in Unity with the Source, was in, not separate from, not sending messages to and from, but in the Father.
10: “The words I say to you are not just my own, rather, it is the Father living in me, who is doing his work”.
So, Yeshu was possessed? Yeshu was just following instructions? Yeshu was just a mouthpiece? Yeshu was God?
No, no, no! Everyone has the opportunity to live in Unity and wholeness with Creation and Creator. In that state (achieved only by Yeshu), we would understand. Our actions would not be as a puppet mouthing words not of our own choosing. They are our words, but they would be words of understanding, words of Truth and consistency and Unity with the Purpose.
If we fully understood, if we had insights into profound Truth and we then taught those lessons, we could, in analogy to what Yeshu said, proclaim that we were not teaching our opinions, not teaching our ideas, but teaching what we had seen and experienced and lived.
In our greatest freedom, in liberation from all our worldly fears and desires, we would finally be completely free, and everything we would say and do would be an expression of the loving Purpose, yet still fully of our own volition.
Yeshu embodied this spiritual state.
31: “the world must learn that I love the Father and I do exactly as the Father has commanded me”.
These “commands” to which Yeshu refers come in the form of seeing an opportunity to doing something profoundly right, then following that course of action. When we do that we do as Yeshu did, “as the Father commands”, as our heart discerns the path best serving the Purpose, and our path to the Father/Mother/Source.
Perhaps the profound lesson of John 14 lies in the radical change in where we are told to look for God……not in parting seas, not in supernatural pillars of fire, but in that Spirit that can enter each person.
We must no longer experience God through supernatural dramatic incursions into our world, incursions that miraculously change worldly outcomes. We can experience God through (16) “another counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of Truth.”
We are no longer limited to a worldview of division, with us here in the physical world and God seemingly somewhere else most of the time.
“On that day you will realize that I am in the Father, you are in me, and I am in you”.
What a gloriously intimate image of an ongoing relationship with the Father/Mother/Source!
Yeshu experienced this relationship, and called, and calls, us to share in it, letting that Spirit enter our hearts, letting us begin to grow toward what Yeshu embodied, the way and the truth and the light.
The way and the truth and the light lie before us, awaiting our Choice. When we choose to seek the way to fulfill Purpose instead of our own way, when we determine to open to truth whatever it might be, when we choose to seek Light and whatever about us it reveals, we will discover that our actions also show others the way, that we will feel compelled to speak that truth, that our lives will bring some of that light into the world. In doing that will we be following Yeshu’s path to reach the Source/Father/Mother.
Addendum
“Our Daily Bread” refers to all that sustains our souls, souls thirsting and hungering for the contact, the spiritual affection, the Unity, the connection, with Source and with gentle spirit.
Give us that which our souls need to survive today” is plaintively personal, poignantly human, human in the sense of a gentle soul, a soul familiar with the Kingdom and therefore in pain in this shattered world, a soul asking for that which s/he so badly needs to spiritually survive.
“Give our souls that miraculous sustaining spiritual nourishment we need to feel Your Sprit and support even when this world denies us such nourishment.. Reassure us that You are with us. Help us see the beauty that is present in the harshness. Give our spirit that drink of living water without which we cannot survive.”
Verse 12: “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13: and I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. 4: You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”
“I will give you whatever you ask in my name”: But we must ask what is meant by asking in that name? What is the embodiment of that name?,,,,,submission and surrender to the Purpose.
Asking in Yeshu’s name inherently means not asking for specific outcomes and results of our choosing!
When instead we ask that something be made of our life, when we subsume all our will and individual desire to the Source and Purpose, all that we ask in that spirit, which is the spirit of Yeshu, that will be granted us. That the Lord use our weakness, that the Lord use our mistakes, that the Lord take our lives and use them for the Purpose, those are requests in Yeshu’s name, in Yeshu’s spirit, in the essence of the being of Yeshu. That will be granted. Our lives will not be wasted if we surrender, if we submit, if we seek to fully immerse in whole Unity with the unfolding Purpose.
“Will do even greater things than these”?! What madness! Who has worked greater miracles, who has healed more, who has raised people from the dead?! How could anyone do more than the Christos?!
Yet there is another interpretation. What are the “greater things” to which Yeshu refers? Isn’t surrender to the Purpose, to the Source, the greatest thing?
I originally read these verses and immediately presumed they referred to flashy miracles. But what is the greatest of commitments and accomplishments and service to the Creator?…..surrender to and immersion into one’s role in the Purpose.
For all the various ways of struggling to understand “greater”, and “I will give you whatever you ask in my name”, by far the most important point we need to take from these verses is the meaning of “in my name”. We need to understand this has nothing to do with reciting the name “Ye’shu”, “Jesus”, “Hey’sus”, “Ie-shu’-uh”, “Yae’-sus” or any other personal favorite pronunciation of a relatively common name from the first century. “In my name” refers to living in, seeking oneness with, trying to emulate, striving to follow, that man who surrendered, that man who after 40 days in the wilderness turned from his will and desires, relying on his Father/Mother/Maker for his spiritual and physical “daily bread”, asking that Father/Mother/Maker to deliver him from the testing and trials, but accepting those tests and trials when they were necessary to fulfilling His role in the Purpose.
“In that name”, when invoked in submission and surrender to the Creator’s Purpose, when we ask not for our will or specific outcomes but ask anything “in His name”, meaning ask that events and outcomes serve not our will but the Purpose and the Creator, that prayer request in the true essence of the name of Yeshu will indeed be granted. No life surrendered shall be of waste, no life shall be lost from the Purpose and Source, no losses and sacrifices shall go for naught when committed in surrender and acceptance to the loving Purpose.
For regular readers who want to see the most recent added entry without searching through the entire following page, go to the blog.
Unedited material from the wilderness:
Opus I
Opus II
Opus III
Opus IV
See the preface to Opus I for the list of excuses for why the following does not politely fit in traditional literary topic continuity and thematic progression. In other words, it's a mess, just like real life.
Maybe your life is a mess too. Maybe you don't politely fit into world's themes and institutional continuity.....or maybe that is just wishful thinking on my part, thinking that maybe there is someone else out there facing the same peculiar inner conundrums that I face.
At any rate, unfiltered - unedited - and in random order, here is a third unpolished compendium (Opus I and II preceding it) of observations about real life, that exasperatingly uncooperative and unpredictable white-water river- rapid in which we find ourselves every morning.
Jump around in this material. For all the stuff you could care less about, you just may come across something else that strikes a chord, something to help you tread the rough water a little longer, something that in brazen honesty reveals the beauty of the flowing chaos and your beauty as you daily negotiate it.
Peace and every good,
Don
All material copyright 2020 Don Ray. But feel free to print and share what you want. Who knows how long this will be available.
LEARNING THROUGH THE STORM
Life is growth, which is to say, life is continual learning, learning about the self, learning about the circumstances in which you find yourself. And upon learning, then choosing your response to all you have learned, and in the process, creating your identity. There is no end to this process. But you can find underlying peace in the process, even when the process itself seems frightening and distressing.
DISAPPEARING ROAD STRIPES
By now the poignant emotions fade, as always. How strange, that even the most intense moments and feelings of life can merely slip behind us and disappear, like the road stripes disappearing one by one behind a car.
GENETIC MANAGEMENT PANIC
Oh, the panics. Managers seem genetically programmed to panic, and their panic response is to fire accusatory questions at anyone within range. And then, oddly, the panic over the critical issue will promptly disappear as the next perceived critical issue appears. Often as not the panics arise over a mouse scurrying across the floor, while in the meantime, going unnoticed, the entire building has become engulfed in flames.
In the scurry to chase the mouse “facts” are copiously generated upon demand, for no one dare admit they do not know the whereabouts of the mouse.
In the desperation to catch the mouse and be the hero and quiet the rampaging tirade of the mad queen, err manager, the eyes play tricks, and mice are seen everywhere, and felt slipping up pants legs, and everyone screams and runs about and reflects the stern visage of the scowling boss….and then the boss spies a spider, and the steady and predictable state of panic continues without pause, only shifted in focus….while no one notices the glowing cinders drifting down from the crackling roof beams.
TRIGGERING NEGATIVE AVALANCHES
The pastor asks the kids something to the effect of “is God present here?”, and then something like “how can you see God?”
The first response is a kid blurting out that when he blinked his eyes he saw a scary figure of someone in the hallway of his house.
Listen to the ensuing epidemic of fear among the children. It took only the first child, saying “I saw someone in the hall when I blinked my eyes” to start the epidemic. One voice, one statement, unleashing a cascade of statements of fears and nightmares and dimly seen images in the dark. So also we see conversational cascades initiated by statements of complaints, or anger, or bitterness, or gossip, or accusation, or condemnation. How readily we children follow that first negative comment. How hard it is to turn such conversational tsunamis, these tumbling torrents giving vent to the ever waiting dark elements of our humanity.
How rarely the statement of beauty or peace or tolerance elicits such eager consensus from the group, sending the group’s conversation in a direction toward light and the uplifting. But far from reason to surrender to the inexorable negative tides, this fact should motivate to try all the harder to interject that which is positive, that which builds instead of tearing down, that which brings respite from negativity, which brings hope in the face of entrenched hopelessness, that which for a moment surprises and startles and interrupts and confounds and contradicts our steadfast insistence on staring at the darkness, that comment of beauty or hope or gratitude that briefly opens our eyes to glimpse the unnoticed Light that embraces us.
HORRORS OF OLD AGE
Such a struggle, old age! Such an amazing misery!…the mind and body failing! And so many years it can last. All the joys, all the joys of life, all the expectations, all to which we looked forward during all the other years of our lives, gone, leaving us with only suffering in the moment, and nothing to which to look forward.
Amazing! Potentially decade after decade of this noble suffering! Each day brings only the prospect of what new physical disaster may befall us.
What reasons to smile can we find? All that we fear throughout the rest of our lives, the prospects of pain and disease and helplessness and unemployment and being at the mercy of others and not being able to pursue anything we enjoy….all those fears come to fruition if we are blessed/cursed to survive into old age.
Loss of eyesight, loss of hearing, all our friends dying, the world changing into something incomprehensible, the love of our life gone, no more sex, the joys of good food no longer a joy, the doctor visits and medical treatments we once dreaded now becoming a regular norm….it is a staggering and most intimidating fate, old age.
I find no brilliant insights or revelations in this observation, other than the realization of the great respect in which we should hold those souls who with grace and courage and nobility endure day after day of physical and mental torments, and day after day of loneliness, and day after day of having nothing to which to look forward in the next day except more of the same, but actually not even that relatively optimistic scenario, but instead an anticipation of an inexorable worsening of fate and condition.
WILDERNESS OF FEAR
In moments of emotional distress it can be hard to see natural beauty. It certainly takes more effort this morning to let that healing sunrise into my thoughts, in spite of its glory. Overhead: soft draperies of intertwined baby blue and baby pink, at 30 degrees above the horizon: glowing coals with bands of deep red edges, on the horizon: dripping bands of molten gold. But still last night’s pain intruded on that beauty. Pain ,hurt, and fear, how difficult it is to lock them out of our thoughts. Smashing through the door like a rabid grizzly, or burrowing under defenses like a maggot, somehow they find their way in. Instead of pretending otherwise, it is important to acknowledge their intrusive skills at filling any dark, unoccupied corner of the mind, acknowledging their ability to find the dark recesses in order that we may redouble our efforts to fill every corner with light. This morning’s sunrise, joyous music, a scene of Nature, all can help dissipate the dark bile of pain as it tries to seep into the lowest recesses of the mind.
The pain, hurt, and fear will never rescind their efforts to penetrate and fill our minds at every opportunity. So we must never fail to look for the brighter, the hopeful, the living.
Pain, hurt, and fear, the wild beasts and denizens of the wilderness of the untamed mind, enter without our permission. In contrast we must choose to mentally construct optimism – beauty - and peace, like a warm - secure home in the midst of that wilderness.
ONE BREATH
A black squirrel! It sits in the branches of a tree behind Paul’s house.
It did not see ‘Tasha kitty, and came down to the ground until ‘Tasha leapt after it, sending it scurrying back up the tree, though not far.
Subtle hints of brown permeate its coat, making it appear like a normal squirrel that got dusted in a chimney.
‘Tasha roles in the needles, expressing the very essence of her being.
Of what possible remote relevance can that possibly be to any other person’s life? What makes one life relevant to another? How did Walt Whitman make the life of that dying soldier relevant to me last night?
In posing the query, I promptly recognize I have asked a meaningless question.
“Relevance” implies conversely a potential for irrelevance, a condition possible only in states of separation, distance, disconnection, and discontinuity.
Walt Whitman did not make the last moments of the dying soldier relevant to my far removed life and situation.
The poet reveals relevance by pushing aside the illusory veils of separation that we drape around over lives to isolate ourselves from the other.
We hold such precious isolation as critical to survival of individual identity. It must be “I and you”, “me and them”, the self and the others”, each separate, each isolated, or else we risk our very essence.
We must not entertain thoughts of oneness, each an expression of the same Source, all animated by the same breath of God, for then our greed and injustice and rudeness and impatience are inflicted not with impunity upon that person separate, disconnected, and irrelevant, but on that common One of which we are part, and whose suffering we therefore share.
Relevance? Nothing must be made relevant by poet or teacher, for everything, every last molecule and every breath by every living being great and small, near and distant, past and present, is intensely relevant, for it is part of us and we part of it, in the great unrecognized, unaccepted, denied, and rejected Wholeness of the Source.
We momentarily feel that Truth when the poet lets us hear the rattling gasp of the dying soldier, the journalist lets us see the anguish of the disaster victims, the producer lets us sense the majesty – harshness – wonder - and struggle of Nature. The lives are all far away and we can close the book, turn off the screen, and leave the theatre with not the slightest measurable, quantifiable difference in our life.
Yet in our hearts, with no worldly justification, we sense the profound relevance of those lives. From them perhaps we can learn that we must not wait on the crafted verse, the documented disaster, or the enthralling cinematography to reveal the relevance of all life. We can ourselves remove the illusory veils of separation from our lives and accept the bond of Unity connecting all beings who share the same Breath of Life.
WORTH AND DIGNITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL
I remain deeply disturbed by last night’s episode of Ken Burn’s The War……as I should be. The first hand descriptions of barbarity, savagery, cruelty, and inhumanity sank deeply into my weak and tremulous soul. I think how sheltered I have been. I wonder how I would have reacted in such horrific circumstances.
And on this morning, for the first time in who knows how many years, I think of the high school history teacher I referred to as “Admiral Hazlitt”. Mr. Hazlitt always brought into his history lessons the phrase “worth and dignity of the individual”.
It took me a while this morning to pull up that memory. I can now finally appreciate that Mr. Hazlitt tried to plant a seed of an idea, attempted to incorporate a recurring theme and lesson, in the facts of history he taught us. He probably wondered if he ever got through to any of us bored, soporific, rebellious, distracted high school students.
Well, he did. And wherever he is now, I hope he finally knows that.
It is quite likely that Mr. Hazlitt served in WWII. At the very least, he lived through it. Perhaps that played some role in creating his passion for the “worth and dignity of the individual”. To this day I clearly remember the conviction with which Mr. Hazlitt repeatedly worked that concept into each stage of history.
“Worth and dignity of the individual”….who could argue against that? Yet in how many countries at how many times in history has such a principle actually been espoused by leaders or practiced by citizens? Here is a principle at least momentarily raised to honor by that unique event in human history knows as ‘the United States”. And it is a principle practiced with defiant rebelliousness by one Yeshu bar Yosef a couple of millennia ago.
It is a value singularly Christian, and singularly loving and compassionate. It is a value under continual and relentless assault throughout history, by individuals in the way they treat others, by marketers manipulating behaviors to sell harmful products, by politicians using the electorate’s fears to erode freedoms. Caste systems, politburos, and “patriot’ acts are avowed enemies of the worth and dignity of the individual.
We each choose on each day our response to that phrase’s clarion call to a higher plane of human existence. In situations routine and circumstances dire we still make that individual choice.
Last night I heard of a United States marine slicing open the cheeks of a conscious prisoner in order to pry out his gold fillings with a bayonet.
Last night I heard of a United States soldier in the heat of hand to hand combat strangling the dying enemy, hearing the enemy gasp “mama” as he neared death, and in an instinctive reaction of the soul, letting that enemy go.
Worth and dignity of the individual” is an intensely individual value, a freely chosen value, a value that we express (or not) in each interaction, each job, and each vote. In bedroom, boardroom, and battlefield, we loudly shout to the world our disdain for or devotion to the worth and dignity of the individual.
As good ol’ Mr. Hazlitt kept interjecting the phrase into his history lessons, in the naivety of someone raised in a still free United States at its zenith, I think I may have thought that steady societal progress toward valuing “worth and dignity of the individual” was a given, was inevitable, was inexorable, was even pre-ordained, and it was something political, institutional, and national.
I now realize progress of “worth and dignity of the individual” is anything but automatic through history, and that such progress occurs only as the net aggregate of intensely individual choices.
I think Mr. Hazlitt would approve. And I thank that dedicated high school teacher of those decades long hence for lessons that still teach and inspire.
MARKETING DRIVEN EVOLUTION OF THE SPECIES
Isn’t it interesting how topics of such intense interest for us are of absolutely no interest to someone else? As example, I suspect I just initiated a topic of interest to me, and no interest to you.
How can something so exciting, fascinating, intriguing, important, and relevant for me not also grab your interest?! What’s wrong with you?!
OK, I know, I write this from my peculiarly odd perspective in life. Certainly, many people shared an intense interest in the just concluded World Series, a topic I find as relevant to life as the interior color of the garage in some randomly chosen house in Iowa.
I guess it’s just me who finds the discovery of eight more galactic Einstein rings absolutely enthralling, and I should have anticipated that my high school students would just drool and slouch further as I excitedly described it.
But my oddness aside, don’t you see some profound implications in the fact that what excites and interests me doesn’t mean a flying hoot to you? Oh yeah, we’ve already established the negative answer to that question. But being accustomed to talking to myself, I’ll continue down this fascinating (to me) train of thought.
I would warrant that among a tribe of chimpanzees, pod of humpback whales, or pack of marketers (with apologies to the chimpanzees and whales for in any way associating them with marketers), what interests one of them probably interests all of them. The banana, krill, or elderly potential victim that holds the attention of one will also be of intense interest to the others.
Surely it is seldom that the fruit, smell, or threat that excites one chimpanzee does not also hold relevant interest for all others.
But not so in humans. Einstein rings for crying out loud!……do you not fathom how astonishing it is that we can actually detect and see and record Einstein rings?! Oops, sorry if my shouting woke you up.
Would it help if I explained that Einstein rings form when the gravitational curvature of space-time induced by the closer of two perfectly aligned galaxies symmetrically distorts the light from the more distant galaxy? What’s that you say?….oh, I guess that was just snoring I heard.
But back to the real topic of the moment, we humans, unlike “lower” life forms (har! “lower”…..what a joke!…..well, except for the marketers) each possess unique and diverse interests that don’t mean squat to others.
Along with all the other distinguishing traits that we invoke to lay claim to our humanity, (art, language, laughter, tools, warfare, torture, sadism, marketing….in descending order of redeeming values) perhaps we should include our ability to create and contrive individual interests of absolutely no discernable value to anyone else.
I’m not sure whether that fact testifies to an awe inspiring, even godlike power of individual creativity, or to the fact that our childlike attention is easily held by any topic that sparkles brightly enough, even if devoid of any intrinsic worth. (Did I mention that Einstein rings sparkle?)
As illustration of lack of intrinsic worth, I can point to this essay. Its topic (“diverse interests among humans as identifying characteristic of the species”, in case you didn’t read the abstract) of such keen interest to me will arguably contribute little to anyone else’s life. Well, actually it is already contributing to my kitty’s life, for as long as I sit here typing she gets to lie across my left arm, putting both herself and my arm to sleep.
But beyond that appreciative fuzzy audience, I will probably need invocation of the forces of darkness (have I mentioned marketing?) to convince anyone else they are interested in this.
Which brings up another interesting (to me) point. If there is any force in the universe that can take the uniquely diverse, creative interests of humans in all their variety and cover it up by spreading a uniform layer of common interest across it, it is marketing. Countless regions, states, and cultures once beset with individual foods, spices, traditions, clothing, dance, and song can now thank marketing for the bland uniformity that ensures the meal I order from the laminated menu is being shared at the same time with people in several continents. The movie I see, you will see. My sports hero will be your sports hero. Our gossip about the entertainment celebrity will be your gossip. My tie will be the same width as your tie.
And now I see the light! I stand corrected! The diverse interests of human beings are merely a vestigial remnant of our evolutionary heritage! Our diverse interests may still make us, me with my Einstein rings, others with Britney and the World Series, unique in the animal world. But there is hope!….hope that we can finally evolve to catch up with our simian and cetacean cousins and their aforementioned uniformity of interests.
As we speak, corporate marketers diligently strive to instigate the next great leap in human evolution, spreading that smooth (not chunky, heaven forbid!) peanut butter of common interests across every tribe, state, and nation. Within a few decades my interests, likes, and dislikes, my topics of excited conversation, will be the same as yours, and ours the same as the farmer’s in Bangladesh.
This marketing induced quantum leap in evolutionary development of the human species, the elimination of those diverse interests that lead to such boring conversations, social ostracism, and marital strife, will rival even the most dramatic of past evolutionary events…..which as I recall had something to do with a giant asteroid obliterating most life on the planet….but maybe you’re not interested in that.
JERKS IN WAITING
Man, that is one de-motivating S.O.B. I wonder what in his background makes him that way. Or does he freely choose to assault others’ spirits? What would happen to an organization experiencing leadership via positive motivation, encouragement, openness, communication, and esteem building? Why are so many leaders so personality disabled? Do they simply reflect the general cross-section of the human populace, and many people, if placed in a position of leadership, would also exhibit such a void in communication, listening, and empathy skills? I find a strong appeal in that compelling premise. Alternative explanations would propose that only mean, inconsiderate jerks aspire to management, or only mean, inconsiderate jerks can succeed at management. I know both premises to be patently false.
Abusive managers, sad as this fact is, merely reflect another facet of the general human condition, just like the guards at the concentration camps and Abu Graib, just like the debauchery of the rich celebrity, just like the corruption of the politician. In each case we see behaviors waiting within each of us for their opportunity for release.
ESCAPE INTO RITUAL
Thoughts while looking at a few notes from the first full month at the new job.
As I type the above line, a deer walks by. Beautiful in the snow! He has a tiny little antler. He’s maybe in his first winter. His neck is a little burly, making his nose look a little shorter.
I worry about his right front leg. Oh no, he’s limping! Bless his heart. He holds up his leg. Will he survive the winter? The leg is not obviously broken. It moves. But the knee seems terribly stiff. And the ankle seems limp. Oh sorrow and sadness. God’s Creation, God’s life, suffering, suffering.
I dare not do anything that might startle it, for I don’t want it to have to run.
I doubt it can really run without causing more damage.
Now it looks down the slope into the lower yard. Can it make it? Oh sadness.
It’s left front foot slides but it makes it down the slope.
Another!
Again young! With both antlers, also small.. Oh good, the injured little guy at least has some company. How sad to be alone.
Oh beauty that blesses me.
He makes it up the hill! He makes it up strongly and bravely!
Now to the notes from work:
Incredible. I see all the panic notes, the demands to create quality systems.
My notes include my poignant notes to self about what I would want to do.
I see the lists of options dictated by management for suppliers when all I wanted to do was understand problems and work with these small business guys to our mutual benefit. The new system may well destroy the positive relationships I had been cultivating.
I see my notes from a chewing out by the boss, notes ironically covered with oil spots from my times on the shop floor trying to get to know the workers and the workplace in my naïve hopes of establishing a quality culture.
I shudder a bit upon looking at those notes and the high stress this workplace causes. The sustaining Spirit is doing a remarkable job of getting me by and sustaining me.
I listen to all the acronyms the consultants banter about as if I knew what they meant.
I get assaulted about things I’ve not done because I didn’t know I was supposed to do them, then later get assaulted about having still not gotten them done, though in the meantime my 11.5 hour workdays were occupied with trying to learn the jobs of the three engineers who got booted out of the group during my first week, engineers no longer even around to teach me how to do their job.
Mainly I get beat up for not reading my boss’ mind, anticipating his latest off the wall edict.
In seeming abject discontinuity the preceding leads to the following insight.
I understand ritual!
As I approach lunch preparation and in opening the can of soup I try to invoke the mentality of the Japanese tea service in a desperate effort to quiet my mind, I recognize the essential role ritual plays in helping the mind momentarily escape an unrelenting assault in the ongoing battles and harshness of life. There is no magic in any ritual, but it may indeed feel like magic, as the mind experiences a blessed, even if momentary, respite from the struggle for survival.
NEO-FEUDALISM
I suppose only complete collapse can loose the sharp clawed grip of today’s feudal lords and get the gullible masses to finally glance up from their self-inflicted servitude to cobble together a more equitable economic.
But within hours the forces of yet another vile incarnation of evil neo-feudalism will slither out of their shallow graves, and dukes and earls become investment bankers and CEO’s will again through their fiendish machinations manipulate the masses so as to pervert any new economic system so it too will bleed the many to profit a few. The latest incarnation of feudal lords will, as always, dress well and assure us they have our best interests at heart as they conscript our crops and children for the siege of their rivals’ castle or corporations, or charge us interest and manipulate inflation to secure our shackles of indebtedness.
CHILDREN IN LIGHT OF GOLD
Instinct kept me moving, till to my surprise I was all the way there.
An apple tree by ruins of a pioneer house gave me the best apple I’ve ever tasted.
I think it made the tree happy that someone finally enjoyed its fruit.
I walked the road, eating the little apple.
By climbing just a little further past the falls I found tranquility and isolation, and my fingers played in overshooting curtains of water,
parting them aside.
From above I look down on golden trees spotlighted from above
between canyon walls of narrow spacing,
flowing water shimmering silver at their feet.
Children play,
new arrivals excitedly calling
“I see it, I see it!” as the waterfall comes into view.
Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.
DISCOVERING WHAT CONTROLS YOU
A young, small bunny enters the yard as ‘Tasha kitty lies on my lap.
‘Tasha watches with an intensity of the sort business people watch the value of their stock portfolio during trading hours.
I rock in my chair, and ‘Tasha’s body has no choice but to move with me, but her head remains perfectly still, her neck angling right and left and right and left so ‘Tasha’s locked on laser eyesight does not lose its focus on the approaching bunny.
With similar intensity I often stare at beauty and flowers and storm clouds and the other manifestations of Nature’s majesty.
‘Tasha has no intent of leaving her warm spot in my lap in order to chase the bunny. ‘Tasha never chases the bunnies, unless they just almost bump her on her little black button nose. But ‘Tasha’s nature, who and what she is, dictates that she must focus her rapt attention on fuzzy things like bunnies entering her yard.
Each of us have our list of what grabs our attention. For some it is natural beauty, for some it is violent videos, for some it is attractive members of the opposite or the same sex, for some it is a flashy car, for some it is bright lights.
It’s important to realize what it is that grabs your attention, because it reveals your inner drives.
‘Tasha is a hunter and carnivore at heart. Regardless of how recently she ate the bowl of food I provided, a bunny entering the yard will and must and should grab ‘Tasha’s attention.
Ask yourself what grabs your attention, and what does it tell you about your drives, motives, urges, desires, needs, instincts, values, and priorities.
Does the bright and shiny attract you? Does the violent and combative hold your attention? Does the sale, the bargain, the discount grab your thoughts?
What grabs your attention tells you what exerts influence, and perhaps even control, over you.
Do you want it to control you? Do your spoken values and priorities align well with what grabs your attention?
‘Tasha’s quite happy being a would-be hunting carnivore, so having her attention arrested by passing bunnies does not bother her at all.
Can you say the same about whatever holds your gaze, gets you to pause, gets you to turn the page, stop switching channels, invest your time, and spend your money?
‘Tasha can do nothing about her nature. We are not so lucky.
If the billboard, the TV scene, the actress, the jewelry, the investment graph, and all the various bright and shiny things that compete for our attention do not reflect the priorities and values we claim we want to develop in our lives, we can, and are under the obligation to, at least take stock of our nature and decide how we want to respond to it. This is the price of self-awareness.
Sometimes recognition of what within us gets us to look, watch, stare, and gaze allows us to alter our behavior to accommodate our consciously chosen values. I don’t spend nearly as much time distracted by car races as I once would have.
Sometimes recognition of what within us gets us to look, watch, stare, and gaze does not allow us to make a change in our nature, but does allow us to control our nature. The pretty girl appearing on the TV screen will grab my attention as it always has, but today I won’t watch the program just because of the pretty girl.
What grabs your attention, turns your head, detours the path of your mind? Does the answer speak of something controlling you, or will you control it?
IRRATIONAL RELIGIONS
Surely religions and ethnic identities provide the most powerful testimony to the reality, the inescapable reality, of the universal pull toward Unity.
Let’s face it. In order to stick to a given religion or ethnic identity, people willingly put up with some of the most irrational, wacky, goofy madness humanity has ever contrived. In fact, when you list wacky, goofy-assed behaviors and beliefs, odds are most of the items at the top of the list will be securely anchored in religion and ethnicity and national identity.
Now, obviously the other guy’s religion and clothing and rituals and practices are silly. Thank goodness ours are so perfectly enlightened and reasonable and based in certainty! Just like our lawns and neckties and sport coats and high-healed shoes and hairstyles, well, today’s hair styles, and worship of drug gorging athletes and media personalities are rational and reasonable.
We all want to belong! We are willing to not only put up with wacky, goofy- manure to do it, but we even manage to convince ourselves that our wacky, goofy ideas and behaviors are not wacky and goofy! How readily we will suspend our intelligence and rational logic, and dispense with comfort and practicality, in order to believe or wear anything that will allow us to march in unison with the culture around us.
In our desperate, and generally misguided struggle to pursue what none of us recognize as Unity, we will wear what the other people wear, do what the other people do, and believe what the other people believe, and it doesn’t really matter a rat’s behind whether it makes any sense or not.
Cripes-a-mighty folks, is it not obvious as the nose on your face?! We are all desperate to experience at least some superficial connection with someone or something, to experience some crumb of acceptance and belonging, and we don’t really have any other reason for wearing those shoes or that robe or that hat or that coat or, God knows, that strangling strip of colored cloth tied around our neck.
Now, if we finally admit that most of our behaviors, from putting on our best clothes for Easter to getting naked for the solstice orgy, are ultimately all for the same reason, to belong and connect, then do you think that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to a little more directly and honestly approach the need for that Unity?
Maybe we could even break down and offer a little of that acceptance and Unity we so desperately crave to someone else, maybe even someone who doesn’t wear the right clothes and believe exactly the right things…..my gosh, maybe even offer a little of that acceptance and Unity to someone with slightly different skin pigmentation or size of nose or accent!
In all our clown-hats and shaved heads and unshaved heads and died robes and bonnets and tattoos and incense and blood sacrifices and uniformity of clothing and intellectually contorted belief systems and magical altars and countless other wacky, goofy traditions and styles and beliefs we so fervently clutch to our bosom, we are crying out that we want to belong, belong to someone, belong to something.
It is the poignant, farcical, tragic, hilarious, touching, and ludicrous tapestry of human behavior through the ages, an infant’s cry to “see me, look at me, accept me, love me”.
Surely such a historically consistent testimony to desperate, inescapable need for Unity with someone and something does not groundlessly arise.
Surely it testifies not just to a doomed desire, a hopeless need, but to an instinctive sensing that in our striving for Unity at any cost, we are striving for something real, for something almost within reach, even if for something unrecognized and unnamed.
What would happen if we figuratively stepped down from our high heals, looked past the smoke from our incense, looked up from our investments, and momentarily removed the tie, robe, vestments, suit, and uniforms that give us membership with a few but isolate us from the many? Might we find all the trappings of our social and religious and ethnic identity get in the way of the embrace of life and humanity, an embrace that could satisfy our deepest yearning?
What if we dared to free our god from the shackles of scripture and orthodoxy, and listened to what that newly freed god spoke to our heart? Our gods of possessions and investments might prove silent and empty, and the God of Creation might prove far more flexible and tolerant than we might like. But perhaps upon finally listening, instead of reciting, we might find that we do belong, we are accepted, and we have always belonged and been accepted, and only our insistence that the other guy with the wacky, goofy beliefs did not belong kept us from experiencing our own belonging, our own wholeness and acceptance within Source unnamable.
Addendum:
We may find we can treasure all the more our own wacky, goofy beliefs and styles, not because ours are right and all the other guys’ wrong, but because we recognize the cherished connection that those beliefs and styles allow us to experience with others and with Source, but no longer precluding connection with people of different beliefs and styles. We may discover a profound beauty in the variety of paths and beliefs and rituals, all the multitude of paths ensuring no soul is left without a way, from their individual point of departure to a destiny point where we all can come together.
PESKY, SENSELESS SCRIPTURE
Copyright 2020 Don Ray
Websites tend to disappear into the ether. Feel free to copy and share the following.
There are times when the human race’s proclivity to race to the lowest common denominator and then tear it asunder in order to plummet to yet darker depths can become a bit overwhelming.
Exerting a large scale political influence on the species or the nation or the community entails communicating in a manner that the masses will understand, which means communicating in terms of fear and anger expressed in the most simplistic and childish manner.
The perennially frightened pie-eyed masses will follow he (it is almost never a “she”) who best plays their chords of fear and bigotry. He who tries to reason with the mob will become the target of the mob.
It is a singularly unlovable species, and a consistently dangerous species. Humans would long ago have destroyed the planet were it not for their penchant for destroying each other, the regular self-decimations of their numbers momentarily postponing their inexorable march to planet-wide obliteration of life.
If one reads the scriptures about God’s/gods’ relationship with this species so singularly skilled at propagation, the most fathomable and easily understood lessons entail God/gods getting fed up and destroying this bipedal infection from off the face of this endangered lovely blue jewel of a planet. That course of action is imminently plausible and defensible. There’s a scriptural story we can all understand.
Not so comprehensible, and growing less comprehensible by the day, are the scriptural descriptions of forgiveness, redemption, and salvation. Those verses of course we reserve for ourselves and those who share our beliefs and societal foundations, while keeping the verses of mass destruction and vengeance handy to apply to everybody else.
Forgiveness, redemption, and salvation…..not the stuff of reality shows or political campaigns. Forgiveness, redemption, and salvation ……barely rating a footnote in the history of human behavior.
Yet there the words concepts are, offered to the species as a whole even after all our millennia of strident determination to not let them influence our treatment of each other.
Forgiveness, redemption, and salvation….words so alien to a normal day of life on this planet that were we honest about it, we don’t really quite know what they mean. Actually, we don’t have a clue what they mean.
Yet they won’t go away. They peskily intrude on our preferred invocation of fire-flood- and vengeance for everyone we don’t like.
As we trenchantly maintain our scowling condemnations of each other, as we meticulously exorcise forgiveness-redemption-salvation from our policies and psyches, the words still abide even if unspoken.
The words, forgiveness-redemption-salvation, seem sewn into the fabric of a message that we cannot escape. We have crucified them, burned them, and always ignored them, yet still they furtively scurry into our consciousness these millennia later.
They will never force themselves upon us. But they will also never leave us alone.
They are an invitation.
The briefest glance at our lives and our world reveals our response to the invitation. But still it abides, patient, waiting for the passing of the madness that afflicts our individual lives, our nation, and our species.
Forgiveness – redemption – salvation….. impractical – implausible - and irrational…….unlike our preferred verses of floods – fire – and wrath.
Forgiveness – redemption – salvation ……. making no sense at all…..making them singularly appropriate to our human world and condition.
MADNESS IN THE PURPOSE
Obviously the world is quite mad.
Obviously the reality of Unity is not something most people experience, or realize they want to experience.
Obviously the world wages wars and genocides, and crucifies those who would dare try to stop the madness.
Economic systems rise and fall in value without warning, institutions formed to support freedom and democracy become bastions of authoritarianism, love and affection are rejected, peace is summarily abolished, cigarettes are smoked, and during it all the human race steadfastly races toward rendering the planet uninhabitable as quickly as possible.
The world is obviously quite mad.
This condition of madness, being as universal as the laws of physics, must surely then play some fundamental role in the loving Purpose, as contradictory as that may sound.
To fulfill a loving role in this mad world, I suspect it is quite important to acknowledge, recognize, and accept the madness, just as recognition of a person’s developmental disabilities is critical to lovingly and effectively interacting with that person.
You don’t expect the adult with a four year old’s mental development to respond to your comments about physics and chemistry. To expect otherwise is to invite frustration and to impede your ability to accept and love that person with special needs.
Likewise, to expect to significantly positively influence the world, or an institution, or a company, or a family member, is merely to invite frustration. They are all mad. We are all mad.
And it is for a purpose, it is for the Purpose, as unfathomable as that fact seems.
Perhaps the madness is an unavoidable side effect of the shattering of consciousness into individual entities. Perhaps the madness necessarily arises in the process of our developing free choice.
When Yeshu (Jesus) said “they know not what they do”, He addressed our madness.
So, our brilliant contribution to the company, our loving suggestions for the spouse, the revolutionary treatises and beautiful composition, all go unheeded, unaccepted, and unwanted….if we’re lucky. With a little worse luck, these loving offerings elicit firing, divorce, or crucifixion.
Oh well, it’s just how it is.
The human condition seems to be a chaotic cauldron of conflicting conscious perceptions, irrational and unpredictable.
So, whatchagonnado? It makes offering whatever contribution, love, and wisdom you bring to the party a somewhat discouraging prospect.
Yet somehow beautiful and loving things do happen. Via miracles and coincidences and unexpected paths, between rejections and generally being ignored, once in a while love does shine forth and warm some soul, somewhere.
Somehow, it seems our calling is to remain open for opportunities to give and love, and to keep trying to give and love even in the face of rejection and crucifixions.
Such perseverance embodies a profound act of faith.
It entails loving a world that does not love back, and it entails a completely irrational course of action that flies in the face of all evidence and logic.
The world is mad, we are all mad, trapped in our little isolated compartments of conscious experience, resolutely shutting from our thoughts what the other guy might be feeling or thinking or sensing or needing.
Without regard for results and outcomes, we are supposed to give our meager personal gifts of love to that mad world.
There is some kind of perverse beauty in the whole thing. Love becomes a very pure thing when freely given to those who resoundingly reject it.
There is also a certain peace to be gained from recognition of the world’s madness, and the associated surrender to not trying to fit in, no longer attempting to accommodate the world, finally not even desiring success or accolades or even acceptance.
Perhaps then it becomes possible to love quite purely, to truly offer one’s self in sacrifice, as did Yeshu, relying on the miracle of the unfolding loving Purpose to ensure that Love, once crucified, lives on.
EACH LOVED
Copyright 2020 Don Ray
Websites tend to disappear into the digital ether. Feel free to copy and share the following.
If we get even a glimpse of it, it is overwhelming,
a glimpse of the enormity of our lives,
of every life.
even a glimpse of the importance of each detail,
of the intricate web of connectivity,
of the criticality of each decision,
of the scope of each influence,
in glimpsed overview
it is overwhelming.
We go through life in amazing obliviousness
to the astonishing import of each conversation,
each gesture,
each opportunity.
But our ignorance in no way diminishes our impact,
the utterly unique individual role we play
in every other life with whom we come into contact.
All these elements in an expanding Universe of consciousness,
each element a universe unto itself,
fates and outcomes
an unforeseeable mix of choices and influences,
all fitting together,
the tiniest alteration sending lives down
radically different courses.
So flexible, this evolving Universe,
incorporating and accommodating
each of us individuals and all our choices,
the future triumphs and tragedies that await us
flipping between triumph and tragedy upon the infinite details
of a single circumstance of a single moment.
Overwhelming, even a glimpse,
overwhelming and reassuring,
the glimpse revealing the cherished nature
of each individual life.
The Universe a grandiose mélange of lives,
yet each life singular and precious and fraught with potential.
The grand Universe orbiting about each single constituent universe,
each absorbed in its situation and experiences,
each for the most part unaware of its role,
each loved, each loved, each eternally loved.
SHADOW LIGHT
Copyright 2020 Don Ray
Websites tend to disappear into the digital ether. Feel free to copy and share the following.
Dark shadows on a dim gray background,
our lives hungering for illumination.
We seek the Source of the faint Light,
but there is no place or form or direction,
for this Light suffuses all.
The dense fog of our desires fills our world,
rendering the Light a distant memory.
Yet wherever we look, there it is,
sometimes brighter, often dimmer,
but always there, always everywhere,
unreachable and inescapable,
just enough background illumination of existence
to reveal the silhouettes
we mistake for reality.
We desperately grip our illusions of security, and who can blame us? Of course God forgives us. But will we forgive God?
THE NATURE OF YESHU (or “Jesus” in modern United States parlance)
Yeshu knew! Yeshu knew He had a message of Love that would help maintain the balance of Choice in this harsh world. His pure heart knew His role was to love as best He could.
Yeshu knew He would have to publicly die in order to cast that message into motion through the ages.
He did bring redemption to human souls, redemption to every soul that chooses to act on His message (not merely intellectually believe, but act). Yeshu brought hope of eternal life, but not because His sacrifice was necessary for God to relent from vengeful wrath and give in to Yeshu’s request for us to have access to eternal life. Yeshu brought us the hope of the eternal life that the loving Source had always intended for us.
Other religions also offer, in various guises, some version of that hope of life, or at least hope of peace, or at least hope of a good harvest this fall. Religions not offering hope of something don’t stay in business very long.
But in the great unfolding of human life on this planet, in the unending cycle of cultural paroxysms - progress - dark ages - and nations rising in order to fall, all these tsunamis of change washing new belief systems and paradigms in and out of the human conception, the time had come to provide yet another message of hope, a message to encourage and reassure and motivate, a message to provide the Choice for individual human souls, and of course a message that would, like all holy messages, promptly be subject to distortion and manipulation.
The horror of Yeshu’s crucifixion process, including the flogging and the crown of thorns, the brutality and bloodiness of the torture, the public nature of the cross, the spear in the side, all were necessary to demonstrate without ambiguity that He had died. His message, His hope, His example, would arc through human history only if launched by followers fanatically committed by evidence shocking and incontrovertible.
They watched Him die, they watched a killing unfold so horrific, so horrendous, so thorough, that the overwhelming shock upon seeing and hearing him alive and present several days later would wrench their lives into entirely new directions, all their worldly plans and concerns rendered inconsequential in comparison to their personal witness that the great Fear that defines our human lives, the ending in death that awaits us all, was unambiguously defeated, right before their eyes.
That crucifixion and resurrection were indeed necessary, and did indeed bring us eternal life (also translated as “whole, complete, and full” life), not by bribing a cruel and vengeful God, but by ensuring that the message of whole, complete, and full life would be delivered, giving us the Choice of whether to accept it.
How fully and completely human was this Yeshu who chose to become Christos!
Listen to the pathos of his prayer! “Lead us not into testing, but deliver us from the tester”. And again, in the garden, “take this cup from me!”
This was not superman, immune to pain! This was one of us! In his heartfelt prayers, prayers recorded for us, we do not hear any mystic transcending of pain and suffering, we hear down to earth acknowledgement that this life is harsh, and that He, just as we, did not want to experience pain and suffering and testing!
These prayers are not great, mysterious, inscrutable, illustrations of divine holiness that has attained some state of consciousness removed from this world! No! This is not the prayer of a mystic -guru -transcendent being. This is a prayer of one of us, natural and authentic and sincere and heartfelt, and it is prayer with which we can identify.
This is not prayer beyond our understanding, this is prayer within our reach: “deliver us from testing!”
This is prayer acknowledging the harsh nature of this world. “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”. Not “thy will is done”, but a pleading that “thy will be done”, unambiguously stating that God’s will is not always done in this life.
The harsh nature of this world, not functioning as a loving God would want it to function, a world that tests us…….the Lord’s Prayer makes profound testament about the harsh nature of this life, and makes poignant statements pleading to be delivered from that harshness.
A man, a soul, a spirit uttered that prayer, just as each of us, all of us being human and souls and spirit, can speak that same prayer.
That man, that soul, that spirit, so agonizingly aware of the harsh and brutal nature of this world that tests us and does not function according to the will of the Creator as does the Kingdom of Heaven, that man, that soul, that spirit, did what He could do to influence that world, our world. He fulfilled His role, accepting the testing this world demanded, enduring unimaginable horrors in order to shock a handful of men and women into action, thereby casting into history a message, a message to which we this day, and every day of our lives, choose how we will respond.
RESPONSE AND ETERNAL SCULPTURE
Your response to the world, not the world’s response to you, sculpts your Soul and essence of your being.
DIVORCE OF SCIENCE AND SPIRIT
To treat science and spirituality as divorced, distinct, and separate is like dealing separately with each organ of the body. Practical limitations dictate such specialized focus, but we should not let that fact deceive us into forgetting that the living beauty the parts sustain arises only when the parts function together in the Wholeness that gave them existence and purpose in the first place.
REALITY SCULPTED BY LIFE OUT OF A MATRIX OF POSSIBILITIES
At the sculpted rock pools above the canyon waterfall. A truly glorious place of refuge for my soul. This place is indeed precious to me. And up here, usually no one comes, everyone stopping at the base of the falls. Brisk today, a sharp breeze threading its way down the narrow canyon.
In the smooth curves of water-carved stone I see some glimpse of the blossoming of events through eternal time in our Destiny Home. The flowing, changing, vital, dynamic water of life will flow through the infinite potential possibilities of a universe created by the loving Source, but flow without conflict, our lives in the aggregate sculpting a reality cut of the raw marble of dimensions and laws of physics.
Into that blank and featureless potential of fields and physical constants anxiously awaiting our arrival, we will by our lives, choices, and actions, carve mountain ranges of reality, and all in unity with the loving Spirit.
Thoughts added later:
That will be the difference from our present universe! The conscious beings will be integrated into the physics. We will be free, completely free. But the physics of the Destiny Home universe will preclude conflicting wills. What we “carve” out of the potential universe that the Creator provides will be unbounded, but not in conflict between conscious individuals! Consciousness integrated into the matrix of the physics will allow this glorious outcome!
EVERYONE’S EXODUS
We all find ourselves on our own personal Exodus, continually, throughout our lives. We are all in the process of leaving some enslavement. That worldly enslavement pursues us, threatening to take us back. Only if we accept miracles of rescue from the Source can we receive deliverance from our various enslavements.
So we each wander in our personal wilderness, heading indirectly toward some unseen promised land. Along the way we will inevitably rebel against the principles and values and ethics and morals and God that could bring us entrance to that Promised Land.
So we will spend this worldly life wandering in our personal wilderness, receiving enough spiritual manna and coming across enough springs of love to sustain our spiritual survival and growth.
And we will grow, if we persevere, growing as children, growing in grace so that we will be ready to enter that Promised Land. There our souls will not have to survive on bits of spiritual manna and infrequent trickles from the wellspring of love. In that promised land we will feast on continual Unity with all Spirit, and we will know not a moment’s separation from Love. And because of the necessary growth during our wandering in this wilderness, we will not inflict on that Promised Land and on each other the spiritual destruction we have wrought on this world and ourselves.
So we must for now wander through this wilderness until we die. Here on our personal Exodus we will daily join the struggle that promotes our strength and growth.
So these children wander, occasionally distracted by idols of their own making. The children wander, seemingly aimlessly, their forty or more years bringing them sometimes closer, sometimes further from their promised land.
But from their moment of birth, that crossing of the Red Sea into this worldly wilderness, there is no going back.
A life of enslavement, a life of no freedom, no choice, no personal responsibility, cannot be regained. Conscious, self-aware, alive, and free to wander, these children, we, are doomed and blessed to wander, creating our selves in the process.
Occasionally we glimpse the Promised Land, that place of infinite and perpetual Unity with Source, sustainer, Spirit, and even each other. And at that glimpse sometimes, we cry in fearful dismay and turn to flee, for surely such spiritual intimacy would overwhelm us, dissolving our self, our individual identity, in that sea of Light and Communion.
So we turn back to our familiar wilderness, the love in the Promised Land appearing as too intimidating a giant to our childlike vision. We wander further, growing stronger as individual souls. But we remember that glimpse; we cannot quite forget the brushing touch of love, and grace, and wonder what it would be like to live immersed in it.
But to live in that Promised Land of loving Unity we must be wholly part of it, also loving, accepting, and blessing, as we are loved, accepted, and blessed.
So the children wander, their journey their destination, following the various pillars of smoke and fire that guide them to that promised day when they will no longer see indirect and distant the manifestations of Source and sustainer, but will live in and with Source and Sustainer.
Each in our own Exodus we wander, through our individual wilderness, seeking the next oasis of spiritual respite. Between oases the barren wasteland and craggy mountains of this world seem harsh and threatening. But we wander in freedom….and we wander in hope.
Let us not forget the miracle of life that placed us free and conscious in this wilderness. Let us not lose sight of the miracle of redemption that gives us hope.
Let the children know that their Promised Land awaits. And let us celebrate the journey that is our birth into that Land.
SIMPLE QUESTION
The question I wish everyone could directly ask of each other: “what’s it like being you?…living your life?”
LIGHT OUT OF WRITHING DARKNESS
Any circumstance and situation can be used by the Lord for the loving Purpose. The grim and tragic and frightening circumstances of life are not that way because suffering is part of the loving Purpose. God did not “make” the child sick or make you suffer as part of a detailed script to unveil glory. But out of the chaos and catastrophe that serve as cauldron of Creation of freedom, Creation truly infinite and unbounded, at any point in the churning storm, form and order and beauty and love can begin to coalesce when we so choose. Out of the howling gales begins to glow a light. From the writhing mists begins to form structure eternal.
Such is the power and potential of Love, awaiting our Choice to give it form and bring it focus.
PROVIDING THE CHOICE
Is it possible to provide people the opportunity for the Choice?
Can we, by our actions, give people the opportunity to choose Unity?
My instinctive answer to myself is “yes”.
I even think that is what Yeshu (Jesus) did, and does.
There is no clearer, no more graphic, no more eloquent posing of the Choice before us than the life, sacrifice, and message of Yeshu.
Ultimately, I almost think that is the very nature of the salvation He offers.
He submitted to crucifixion in order that, because of His Resurrection, His message would continue. And that message is the message of Love, which is to say, the message of the Choice.
Is God’s redemption actually simply God’s Love providing us the Choice?
I could imagine that. I could well imagine that.
When we lay our lives on the line, giving people the opportunity to make the Choice for Unity, are we providing the opportunity for redemption?
Surely it is good to give people the Choice, for that is how we grow closer to becoming the children of God that our Creator hopes we will choose to become.
I believe that was a significant component of the need for crucifixion and God’s plan of redemption.
Yeshu changed lives because He gave them, and gives us, the Choice, of how to respond.
The door to Heaven is open by Yeshu posing for us the question of whether we will choose to love or not.
I now see that it is when we are at our most vulnerable that we pose to people the Choice that can shape their souls.
That is exactly what Yeshu did.
I see the result of vulnerability all the time.
How many young men do I know that, upon becoming a father, upon holding their very own baby, suddenly chose to change the course of their lives, rearrange their priorities, and suddenly discover the deep joys of Unity in that bond with that utterly helpless infant in their arms.
Yeshu was indeed the lamb, the innocent sacrifice, voluntarily offering his life, submitting to our will, and in the process, offering us the Choice.
In that helpless babe, or lamb, or refugee, that lies before us, we are given the Choice of whether to care, whether to love, whether to open our hearts to feel the spiritual truth we may never have felt before.
Yeshu sent his apostles on their way with the admonishment to not even take extra sandals or cloak or staff. He placed them at the mercy of the world. In the process, Yeshu gave each person in each village the Choice of whether to care, whether to invite, whether to listen.
Amazing, the plan of redemption lying through submission, submission of the most innocent, that we may choose whether to accept or crucify Him, and in the process sculpt our eternal soul.
Saving grace, redemption, cleansing, all arise through opportunities of Choice, and we give that opportunity to others when we lay ourselves before others, placing our fate on their mercy, on their Choice.
Will they reject our Love? Will they listen or condemn? Will they nurture or neglect the infant?
When we turn the other cheek, we turn the key to open to our enemy the Choice.
When the thief takes our money and we offer them our cloak, we offer them the Choice.
When Yeshu waited on that terrible night in the Garden of Gethsemane, He gave us all the Choice of what we will do with Him.
QUANTUM OF FUZZINESS
Desperately writing in the office.
I grab the moment after 10:30 when all the managers are in the president’s staff meeting, the tormentors occupied with tormenting each other.
Poor ‘Tasha kitty clearly seemed depressed this morning, bless her fuzzy heart. I was worried about her. She has held up so bravely since I started this job
I hung up her bouncy bird today for the first time in ages. I hope it helps her. How desperately I need that ‘Tasha kitty gift of God, something to love and by whom to be loved. In pets like ‘Tasha, PC, and Bruter Baer, many of us experience the purest love that will ever enter our worldly lives. It is not a little thing, this fuzzy relationship. God help the people that cannot feel the sublime, spiritual Unity of such a pure, loving bond.
We feel the touch of God, we momentarily feel the very Purpose of Life, we glimpse the potential residing in all Creation when we allow a kitty to purr in our lap or a dog to excitedly lick our face.
A tiny quantum of this hunting, biting, clawing, snarling, growling world is momentarily liberated from its fearful struggle for survival and allowed to briefly enter the Kingdom for which we long.
JOY OF THE PATH
Few joys are more profound than being on track for fulfilling that essence of who and what you are. The catch is, this temporal, human world does not always encourage and reward us for such a fulfilling path. Oddly enough, that fact allows us to discover an even deeper joy, a profoundly intimate, personal, spiritual, existential joy of Unity with the Source. That path of fulfillment better offer such perquisites, because that path that fulfills your essence and places your life in harmony with the Purpose seldom pays well in worldly terms (though one occasionally sees exceptions).
So in moments when you feel “in the zone”, doing something so right, so in unity with the loving Creator, that you feel bulletproof, unafraid of poverty, unemployment, worldly failure, and disapproval, revel in the feeling, savor it, for that feeling comes from the Comforter, the Counselor, that Spirit promised by Yeshu (Jesus). For a moment, run with the joy, love generously, give gloriously of yourself, certain and confident of spiritual outcomes, for a blessed moment unconcerned about the fleeting breeze of worldly outcomes.
GODS AFFECTION
On this rare and precious moment, a Sunday morning, I pause to give a tiny sacrifice of time to express my gratitude to my Lord and Savior.
Such amazing support!
‘Tasha was simply beyond belief this morning! Such lubbins’, perfect lubbins, no sharp claw snags, just whisker kisses and pawsages and walkabouts, all around, over and over and over, on and on, as I drifted in sleep in and out, glorious loving from God, affection of the Creation, relaxing.
And now as I type, there’s a deer! Walking into the yard on this rare morning at home! Bunnies scamper away before the deer’s nose snuffling along the ground! And another deer! Beautiful!
All this after a sunrise beyond words, sharp edged but tattered tapestries of ember red and orange, hanging in Salvador Dali composition across the sky, their thin draperies actually displaying colors of rainbows as they wavered before the approaching sun, bands of colors progressing across the underside of the perfectly placed continent of cloud.
On and on this went, arresting beauty, beauty so glorious it finally wrested my mind from the travails and stresses of the job, and all this, all the fuzzy affection and the visual beauty, on this morning when I had time to savor it all.
Meanwhile, on the horizon, that silver-white light that I know, from somewhere, somewhere before this world, that light, complete, full, all contained within it, bright silver white beyond mere white, as if bursting through a tear in the robin’s egg blue of the horizon sky.
And as the sun approached the edge of the mesa, the pine tree direct in sun’s unseen path began to glow, to glow afire, brighter and brighter, just that one tree, on its right and left dark, dark green remaining dark, but that one distant tree gloriously transmitting the bright orange light of sun yet unseen.
And on that brief Saturday bike ride after work yesterday, a coyote! Beautiful and majestic! And unafraid! I really got to watch it, and it watched me! How long since I’ve seen one of those beautiful creatures?!
All these blessings, and I pause and say thanks to my Creator, for all these miracles landing in my life at this peculiar moment in time when I so badly need them, blessings beyond the ordinary, the purrfection of ‘Tasha’s lubbins this morning! The lying beside my face, the tugging on my shirt, the nose stosses!……incredible!….perfect, setting my sleeping senses a-sail on a mental sea finally calm.
JOHN 14 MYSTERIES
For those curious about the 14th chapter of the Book of John (what, that’s not everyone?!), here are some perspectives to prompt thought and discussion. I hasten to say I am no theologian. The following invokes no academic reference material or meticulously researched exegesis. It’s personal and from the heart. It’s validity must be determined by your heart.
It's all rough draft material, not literary art, so please delve into it with patience and tolerance. If in spite of its manifold shortcomings it prompts some reassuring new thoughts and perspectives, it will have served its purpose.
Verse 2: “I am going there to prepare a place for you”.
That sounds like Yeshu still had work to do. Might we also have work to do? Might we keep working after our souls move from this life to the next? We can transition to a better world, but it may well be a “world” of ongoing growth and evolution and development, all that occurring in perfection of Unity.
So could Yeshu leave this worldly temporal existence and literally live and work and create and build a world in which we will someday reside?….or many worlds?…..as opposed to simply landing in an already intact “Heaven”?…..who’s to say “no”?
2: “In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so I would have told you”.
Look how beautifully individual this image is! This is not a Heaven of melted together oneness having lost all individual identity! This is an existence profoundly structured so as to promote the individual!…yet not individuals alone and isolated, as we often are in this life, but all within one “house”!
4: “You know the way to the place where I am going”.
This statement did not follow a list of instructions, an issuing of maps, or a reciting of credo. Seemingly out of the blue Yeshu says “you know the way”, so much out of the blue that Thomas responded (5) “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”
Yet Yeshu’s comment implied they already knew the way, they already in their hearts were seeking their path, their role in the Purpose.
What had these apostles done to indicate they knew any way to any promised land? They had followed! They were seeking, they were open, they were trying, they were following that image and word of God that entered their lives. That is the way. Perhaps whenever we follow that opportunity, whenever we remain open to the possibility of the holy entering our lives and calling us, perhaps it is in that Choice that we are in fact following Yeshu, following that path that goes through Him, the only path to the Father/Mother/Source.
9: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father”.
Naturally we might interpret that to refer only to seeing Yeshu, that man perfectly embodying Unity with Father/Mother/Source. But I passionately believe we see the Father, glimpses of the Father, distorted and imperfect glimpses, in every act of kindness and selflessness and generosity.
I believe Yeshu was saying that the Father is here, now, in the living souls around us. We should not look for the Father/Mother/Source in the skies or miraculous patterns or apocalyptic wonders. We should look for the Father/Mother/Source in the eyes of that person before us, and in the acts of love.
Unlike us, Yeshu, living in perfect Unity with the Father/Mother/Source, provided undistorted view of the Father. This is critically important! The Father/Mother/Source was/is embodied in a human being! What does that say for how we should see the people around us?
20: “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.”
What a profound revelation of Unity! Each soul clearly remains individual, each with defined separate identity, yet each living as part of One, within each other, each an expression of One!
6: “No one comes to the Father except through me”.
Here in the midst of our spiritual evolutionary development our souls and spirits and hearts are still mired in our physical natures. We will attain that state of being - that state no longer enslaved to our worldly physical nature and our corporeal brains - our souls will be liberated - when we have attained that state that Yeshu was in. We will by redeeming grace pass through that state, Yeshu’s state, that state of full Unity with the loving Source, that state no longer enslaved to our worldly being. In that sense our path goes through Yeshu the Christos.
7: “If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well”.
Yeshu’s soul was no longer controlled by the animal inputs of the brain and senses. He experienced those worldly senses and inputs, but had put them in perspective, living in Unity with the Source and Purpose.
Yeshu fully understood the nature of our spiritual existence, and the loving Source from which arises that existence. So indeed, if anyone really knew Yeshu, knew Him and could talk with Him and ask Him, anyone who really new Yeshu would have the opportunity to know the Father/Source.
7: “From now on you do know him and have seen him”.
One does not have to know all at once in order to know someone. The apostles were getting to know the deeper aspects of Yeshu. He reassured them that through Him they could learn of the Father/Source, and had already begun learning of the Father/Source.
10: “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?”
The conscious Spirit of the Father is the Life and Love in each of us, though in all of us it is imperfectly actualized because we remain mired in our worldly condition from which our soul is born. But that soul in birth, that essence of us, is indeed the Father/Mother entering this world, being born into individual identity.
Having accomplished liberation from this world’s enslavement and control, the incarnated Father/Mother existing as an individual human being, as embodiment of Purpose fulfilled, was in Yeshu. Yeshu, in Unity with the Source, was in, not separate from, not sending messages to and from, but in the Father.
10: “The words I say to you are not just my own, rather, it is the Father living in me, who is doing his work”.
So, Yeshu was possessed? Yeshu was just following instructions? Yeshu was just a mouthpiece? Yeshu was God?
No, no, no! Everyone has the opportunity to live in Unity and wholeness with Creation and Creator. In that state (achieved only by Yeshu), we would understand. Our actions would not be as a puppet mouthing words not of our own choosing. They are our words, but they would be words of understanding, words of Truth and consistency and Unity with the Purpose.
If we fully understood, if we had insights into profound Truth and we then taught those lessons, we could, in analogy to what Yeshu said, proclaim that we were not teaching our opinions, not teaching our ideas, but teaching what we had seen and experienced and lived.
In our greatest freedom, in liberation from all our worldly fears and desires, we would finally be completely free, and everything we would say and do would be an expression of the loving Purpose, yet still fully of our own volition.
Yeshu embodied this spiritual state.
31: “the world must learn that I love the Father and I do exactly as the Father has commanded me”.
These “commands” to which Yeshu refers come in the form of seeing an opportunity to doing something profoundly right, then following that course of action. When we do that we do as Yeshu did, “as the Father commands”, as our heart discerns the path best serving the Purpose, and our path to the Father/Mother/Source.
Perhaps the profound lesson of John 14 lies in the radical change in where we are told to look for God……not in parting seas, not in supernatural pillars of fire, but in that Spirit that can enter each person.
We must no longer experience God through supernatural dramatic incursions into our world, incursions that miraculously change worldly outcomes. We can experience God through (16) “another counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of Truth.”
We are no longer limited to a worldview of division, with us here in the physical world and God seemingly somewhere else most of the time.
“On that day you will realize that I am in the Father, you are in me, and I am in you”.
What a gloriously intimate image of an ongoing relationship with the Father/Mother/Source!
Yeshu experienced this relationship, and called, and calls, us to share in it, letting that Spirit enter our hearts, letting us begin to grow toward what Yeshu embodied, the way and the truth and the light.
The way and the truth and the light lie before us, awaiting our Choice. When we choose to seek the way to fulfill Purpose instead of our own way, when we determine to open to truth whatever it might be, when we choose to seek Light and whatever about us it reveals, we will discover that our actions also show others the way, that we will feel compelled to speak that truth, that our lives will bring some of that light into the world. In doing that will we be following Yeshu’s path to reach the Source/Father/Mother.
Addendum
“Our Daily Bread” refers to all that sustains our souls, souls thirsting and hungering for the contact, the spiritual affection, the Unity, the connection, with Source and with gentle spirit.
Give us that which our souls need to survive today” is plaintively personal, poignantly human, human in the sense of a gentle soul, a soul familiar with the Kingdom and therefore in pain in this shattered world, a soul asking for that which s/he so badly needs to spiritually survive.
“Give our souls that miraculous sustaining spiritual nourishment we need to feel Your Sprit and support even when this world denies us such nourishment.. Reassure us that You are with us. Help us see the beauty that is present in the harshness. Give our spirit that drink of living water without which we cannot survive.”
Verse 12: “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13: and I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. 4: You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.”
“I will give you whatever you ask in my name”: But we must ask what is meant by asking in that name? What is the embodiment of that name?,,,,,submission and surrender to the Purpose.
Asking in Yeshu’s name inherently means not asking for specific outcomes and results of our choosing!
When instead we ask that something be made of our life, when we subsume all our will and individual desire to the Source and Purpose, all that we ask in that spirit, which is the spirit of Yeshu, that will be granted us. That the Lord use our weakness, that the Lord use our mistakes, that the Lord take our lives and use them for the Purpose, those are requests in Yeshu’s name, in Yeshu’s spirit, in the essence of the being of Yeshu. That will be granted. Our lives will not be wasted if we surrender, if we submit, if we seek to fully immerse in whole Unity with the unfolding Purpose.
“Will do even greater things than these”?! What madness! Who has worked greater miracles, who has healed more, who has raised people from the dead?! How could anyone do more than the Christos?!
Yet there is another interpretation. What are the “greater things” to which Yeshu refers? Isn’t surrender to the Purpose, to the Source, the greatest thing?
I originally read these verses and immediately presumed they referred to flashy miracles. But what is the greatest of commitments and accomplishments and service to the Creator?…..surrender to and immersion into one’s role in the Purpose.
For all the various ways of struggling to understand “greater”, and “I will give you whatever you ask in my name”, by far the most important point we need to take from these verses is the meaning of “in my name”. We need to understand this has nothing to do with reciting the name “Ye’shu”, “Jesus”, “Hey’sus”, “Ie-shu’-uh”, “Yae’-sus” or any other personal favorite pronunciation of a relatively common name from the first century. “In my name” refers to living in, seeking oneness with, trying to emulate, striving to follow, that man who surrendered, that man who after 40 days in the wilderness turned from his will and desires, relying on his Father/Mother/Maker for his spiritual and physical “daily bread”, asking that Father/Mother/Maker to deliver him from the testing and trials, but accepting those tests and trials when they were necessary to fulfilling His role in the Purpose.
“In that name”, when invoked in submission and surrender to the Creator’s Purpose, when we ask not for our will or specific outcomes but ask anything “in His name”, meaning ask that events and outcomes serve not our will but the Purpose and the Creator, that prayer request in the true essence of the name of Yeshu will indeed be granted. No life surrendered shall be of waste, no life shall be lost from the Purpose and Source, no losses and sacrifices shall go for naught when committed in surrender and acceptance to the loving Purpose.