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 second unpolished compendium (Opus I being the first) 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.
DANCING DISTANT MUSE
Poetry
Surely some inspiration must reside by little creek, some brilliant new insight or thought-provoking observation or heart-warming poetry.
But it better hurry and find its way into my head before my lunch-break concludes.
That little uninvited red ant found its way along some torturous path along pants’ seams and jacket folds to make a cameo appearance on my paper. So why can’t the oft invited but seldom seduced teasing Muse at least briefly grace the page and pen?
She taunts and teases and flirts in this place of bubbling water,
as she dances just out of reach,
through leaves and over ripples,
alluring and sensual and enticing, she lightly dances along the creek-side stage,
slipping in and out of stage-master’s dappled gold lighting,
swirling her sheer and clinging garments to the music of the stream…..
but I seem doomed to just watch,
she not so much as brushing my cheek with insight or inspiration on this early spring day.
Her petulant pout would audaciously blame me for failing to grasp her dancing lithe figure;
she says she is offering all I could want;
if stream and the sun and now a sweet duck pair should fail to deliver her insights and wisdom,
then surely ‘tis me
who refuses her gifts.
Perhaps Ill return empty handed today,
no essay or poem to pass
on to the world.
But still I will savor this dance
of the Muse,
and smile while still hoping
for surprise of embrace.
FACES THROUGH THE GLARE
I’ll miss the faces in the commute. All the faces, sipping coffee, talking on phones, all hidden behind the glare of windshields;
faces of this peculiarly United States ritual.
For the most part they look stressed or worried or concentrated or thoughtful,
seldom do you see smiles through the windshields rounding the corner.
Most of the faces are alone,
an anonymous feel,
feeling somehow invisible
behind glass.
So you see those faces unmasked of pretense,
alone with their own thoughts and worries and plans.
Through the windshields the faces of poignant struggles
of God’s children,
struggles not
revealed through the safety glass filter,
struggles individual
yet commonly shared,
there in the framed portraits
of the faces
glimpsed
through the street
corner
glare.
DECEPTIONS OF PERCEPTIONS
Perceptions….
What deceptions, our perceptions!
How illusory our opinions!
How conveniently flexible,
our approvals and disapprovals,
Often as not
mere rationalizations,
constructed upon our
vested interests.
OLD CHILDREN AT PLAY
Such effort we invest in avoiding reality!
Oh my gosh, just look at it! Our makeup, our hairstyles, our ever changing clothing styles, our video games, our professional sports, our entertainment, our books, our movies, our Television shows, our economic theories, our religions, all of them, all of them, contrived masks we desperately employ to cover up and hide and decorate reality!
We begin as children, playing our make-believe games. As adults we look on children and think their play cute, or we think it practice and preparation for the real world of their adult lives. Horse manure! Childhood play is merely practice and preparation for an adult life of fantasy and illusion and delusion.
If we are lucky in our adult lives we become managers and can expand our little worlds of fantasy and self-deception, forcing other people to accommodate our make- believe fantasies.
And woe to those who would point out the reality! Ostracized at best, banished from social contact and dismissed from employment, exiled, chastised, rejected, scorned, and at risk of crucifixion is s/he who dares to point out the illusions, the fantasy, the facades, and in their place cast some light on the reality we so assiduously avoid.
That which threatens our illusions, which peers under the makeup, which blows the whistle on the financial sleight of hand, which points out the management fallacy, which reveals the fundamentally unpredictable nature of economy and the indefensible silliness of religion, poses threat to that most dear, our power to create a world of our own.
Dare not to tell the boss there might be a better way, avoid at all cost meaningful discussion of religious precepts, do not innocently ask the reason for the new style, do not query into the reason for cheering this team versus that, at all cost do not interrupt the game, the many games, the ongoing games…….for the children have not stopped playing make-believe. The playground bullies have become bosses, the kid with the ball now lives through a flickering screen, the schoolmate reading your palm has become an economist, the child in the corner engrossed in fairy tales has become a priest.
DEFINITION OF SPIRITUAL
That bedrock foundation of eternal Reality, purpose, and meaning behind the fleeting, illusory, temporal veil of this physical expression.
SUPERSTITION VS RELIGION
The difference between superstition and religion:
Superstition has to do with the world, and worldly outcomes and attempts to influence them.
Spiritual faith deals with undeniable whisperings of the heart about that which is greater, and more enduring, than this fleeting world.
LAYING FOUNDATIONS UNDER EXISTING BUILDINGS
Why are spiritual books, books about the very purpose and meaning of life, not at the top of the bestseller list? What other topics could possibly be more fascinating or important?! Well I should be able to easily answer that. I generally don’t read spiritual books. What do I find more interesting?….nature, science, history, news….perhaps it is through the reality of these topics that I find far more reliable testimony of things spiritual, and meaning and purpose, than any author’s digested version of the spiritual. From the reports and news and analysis of the world I construct my foundation of meaning and purpose. It’s a curious backward construction, like laying a foundation under walls already standing.
And that other person’s foundation? They will not have ever experienced the same framework and structure as I, and their resulting spiritual foundation may not fit the frames and walls of my life experience.
So the “meaning and purpose” books somehow never make it above my Science News and Atlantic. Why anyone else would read my Purpose and Meaning books, I do not know.
But constructing life foundations under existent structures of our life is tricky business, and if wedging a book or two under some corner wall helps prop up a life, so much the better.
The catch is, with this life foundation stuff, the frame and structure of life creeks and rattles a lot less if you insert a little foundation under it. You will find you sleep much better, and upon waking you can build your next day with much greater confidence when you know on what you are building.
THEOLOGY OF COLORSLooking for lessons in life……looking for profound, earthshaking, critically important, paradigm shattering lessons in the little moments of life…..
Nope…don’t see ‘em.
I just get too busy.
Somehow, the lessons are in the doing, in the reacting, in the responses, in the moment.
Somehow the wisdom is in the words, the smiles, the decisions, the work, the product.
All the philosophy and theology and analysis and explanations are just a description, like a description of a soccer game to someone that has never kicked a ball, or an analysis of colors for a blind person.
The analysis and theology and philosophy have value only if they eventually help someone find their way to the spiritual soccer field, and help someone open their eyes to the colors.
No one will ever be praised for understanding of the game of soccer. They will be praised only for their play of the game.
No one will ever be praised for their conceptual grasp of the structure of colors. People want to know what the artist will create with those colors.
READING VS. HOLDING THE BOOK
I sit down on the deck and ‘Tasha races to me across the chilly yard, excitedly maunzing, jumping excitedly into my warm lap! that is so sweet! Such a gift from You! I miss her when not with her!
Obviously, the Spirit, that which is in all, that of which we all are, is everywhere. Our Communion with the Spirit is not limited to altars, churches, temples, mosques, statues, forest, mountains, or beautiful scenery. But Nature and beautiful scenery and a compassionate touch are to be savored and celebrated, not as necessary paths to spiritual connection, but as tangible evidence of the Love of the Sustainer, as promise of the Wholeness awaiting us.
Spiritual experience is available in the prison cell and on the street and in the frenetic commute. Spiritual experience can be powerful enough to warm the soul while in icy wind and cool the fevered spirit in the midst of crisis. Such spiritual embrace, solace, strength, and comfort is the essence of meaningful spiritual experience, triumphing over the physical world’s pain, fear, and discomfort.
But that should in no way devalue the blessings of natural beauty, loving embrace, and moments calm and secure, spiritual experiences bringing the Sustainer’s touch to body, senses, and emotions, as well as the soul and spirit.
We just need to be careful to not mistake the worldly beauty or the intimate embrace of the inspirational music or the transcendent meditation for spiritual experience in and of itself. (Whoa! ‘Tasha just ran toward a Washbaer! She ran by me, I got up to see what she was after, and there was a little masked face by the gate! My running after ‘Tasha sent the Waschbaer scurrying.)
The mountain lake and soaring cathedral and sonorous chant are merely a touch, an opening, a tangible presence made materially manifest. They are no more spiritual experience than holding a leather bound, gold embossed book volume is in and of itself “reading”.
The benefit of the leather-bound masterpiece is measured by what one knows, the knowledge applied, or the understanding altered after one sets down the book and walks away from it.
Likewise, all the worldly experiences of Nature, beauty, prayer, mosque, temple, affection, calm, serenity, crystal waters, and chiming bells are not spiritual. They are mere volumes of spiritual opportunity, containing treasures which if accepted into the soul will then leave one rich even in the prison cell or traffic jam or hospital room.
CUBICLE CRAB
What turned her into that?
Once upon a time she was a little girl. In such a state of continuous misery she now goes through life.
Surely she laughed, when a little girl.
The little girl did not have a permanent down-turned mouth, molded into a life-long bitter scowl.
What happened?
Every event now elicits an angry sigh of frustration and bitterness, almost a growl or snarl, from back deep in that clinched throat come the sounds, in response to every message, e-mail, and request.
With resolute consistency every comment is greeted with cold rebuff, and not the briefest turn of the head from computer’s screen.
Did the child act so?
Did she ever play?
It is very hard to imagine, but surely she must have.
When did other human beings cease to exist in her life, becoming no longer living souls, but interruptions, inconveniences, intrusions, and perhaps threats?
Did this bitter, scowling, perennially angry office worker ever play?
Is that bag of Fritos the only pleasure in her life?
What would she have been like in a world a hundred years ago, on a farm, or this year, in a dung hut in the Serengeti?
Is it modern life that created this cubicle tragedy, or a parent, or personal Choice?
What angels sorrow over this sullen, scowling, bitter child of God?
SPIRITUAL ANOREXIA
Such a joy it is to do “natural” work, work that creates and/or contributes something tangible of benefit to some specific person or group of persons. The lack of such work, the modern jobs of tedious computer, paper, forms, procedures, routine, documents, and busywork, are a source of chronic spiritual malaise in our society. Working for that specific customer’s benefit (whether internal or external customer) feels totally different from working to keep the boss off your back. Let me work on a product I can touch, hold, and hand to someone.
Going home at the end of the workday knowing I invested a precious day of life essentially doing little more than tricks to obey the boss’ commands places an unbearable burden on spirit and soul.
Did we spend millennia freeing ourselves from tyrants and “god”-kings only to give all our waking hours to the modern feudal lords of the business world? In our office boxes of filtered air and glowing screens, must we sacrifice all the spiritual satisfaction experienced by our ancestors as they caught, gathered, and grew food for their children?
In the modern world we have, quite understandably, traded famine and physical want for a life of spiritual malnutrition, if not out and out spiritual starvation.
On the off chance that this technological version of “civilization” survives a few more centuries, humanity will have to come to grips with this spiritual famine that grips the modern workplace. But first humanity must recognize and acknowledge the hunger. We live in a spiritually anorexic society, starving ourselves , denying our emaciated condition while denying our heart the sustenance it craves.
We are caught between the spiritual famine of the workplace and the spiritual anorexia of our modern lifestyles, and our individual and societal souls waste away, until someday it will be too late.
The typical office workday drains instead of nourishing our soul. Our cities and commutes deny us access to the spiritual bounty of sunrise, sunset, breeze, and green. With the little time at our disposal we then starve our souls further with media, “entertainment”, possessions, and distractions.
And through it all, we deny ourselves the life-giving manna that surrounds us in every moment, the opportunity to accept personal spiritual Communion with the souls around us or the Source whose existence we deny.
It took a few thousand years, but our physical hungers eventually motivated us to find alternatives to hunter-gathering and feudal economies.
When will we acknowledge our present hungers? How long will it take to agonizingly alter the course of the techno-media-corporate society that denies us spiritual nutrition? Will we ever allow ourselves to dine at the feast prepared for our souls by the Source of all nourishment?
STILL CALLED
Still pulled. Spirit still calls.
Through the world, in spite of the world,
because of the world,
for the world.
INEFFABLE SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE
What does it mean to “feel right”? How can one describe that?
It’s part of that language of the spirit for which we have no words. We have no words perhaps because it is such a rare experience, and even more rare that we would have an opportunity to communicate it with anyone.
I think that, especially in modern, technical, scientific times, we are prone to write off spiritual experience as non-existent, or merely a trick of the mind, because we don’t have words with which to clearly communicate it, at least not in English, and to my knowledge, also not in Deutsch (German).
We even convince ourselves that our own personal experience of connection with, Communion with, communication with, the One, the Source, the Sustainer, is not valid because it does not happen with a script, with recordable words, with something we can quote verbatim.
There is a terrible loss to the spiritual experience if we limit ourselves to spiritual experience that occurs visibly, or in words of our own particular language.
Such a poor excuse for spiritual experience it must be if it can be described in terms of this temporal world!
“God speaks to me” is a statement that in our society incites derision and ridicule, for “speak” has come to mean only a mechanical vibration of air molecules that in turn vibrate the eardrum. Was the syntax correct, does God have a big vocabulary, does God have a feminine or masculine voice we ask.
Such deep tragedy it is for the individual soul when we seal ourselves off from experiencing anything that cannot be experienced through physical means, transcribed in verbatim quotes, and understood in worldly terms.
The spiritual experience is just that, meaning not of this world, not limited by this world, not explainable in the terms of our daily routine. Conversations with the Sustaining Spirit do not occur in language, or words, or with specific subjects and predicates.
This generation of humanity is only just barely conscious of the spiritual connection with that which lies beyond physical experience. We hear the Spirit as the person deaf from birth hears in the first minutes after getting a cochlear implant. We see the spiritual as the person blind from birth sees after restoration of their optic nerve. We have no context, no experience, no words, no reference points, no specific identifications, no basis with which to associate these new and unfamiliar inputs with anything we can clearly explain and describe and relate to our previous experience.
It is not uncommon for deaf people hearing for the first time via a cochlear implant to request removal of the implant. Their brains having formed their patterns for interacting with the world in the absence of sound find themselves overwhelmed with alien nerve inputs that simply confuse and distract and distress.
We sometimes respond in similar manner to our experience of the spiritual. We don’t want to sense that which cannot be readily expressed in terms rational, physical, and worldly with which we are familiar.
Modern society in large part denies the spiritual. That spiritual experience for which our language lacks words in the first place is not even particularly welcome in polite conversation.
Eventually, that spiritual experience that we could not really fully understand even ourselves, and for which we could not find words to describe it, and which no one else wants to hear about, we begin to doubt. In discomfort and doubt we turn off our awareness to that which goes beyond senses and words.
But eventually we find that life stripped down to experiences merely physical, experiences explainable in biological or psychological terms, experiences expressible and describable with the same language with which we describe shopping and cleaning, this stripped down life feels……not quite alive. Yet even that disquieting feeling hearkens to something not quite expressible in specific words, so we suppress the feeling, a feeling that reminds of those things not explainable and mentionable in modern mixed company.
The brain suddenly assaulted by aural signals from cochlear implants, the mind suddenly swamped in a tidal wave of signals from a restored optic nerve, must learn to sort out those signals, and to give meaning to words like “loud” and “bright”. Uncomfortable and frightening, the experience of sensations alien and foreign and without reference is surely not for the faint of heart. But for those courageously persevering in accepting the avalanche of alien inputs, eventually the mind also gives meaning to words like “music” and “rainbow”.
In experiencing the spiritual we have no worldly reference. We have no words for it, we cannot easily describe it, and we cannot easily find anyone wanting to listen to us try to describe it.
The spiritual is easily denied and avoided…….for a time.
We are free to choose denial of the spiritual. But let us not choose to avoid spiritual experience merely because we do not have words to describe it, or merely because we do not experience it through quantifiable, measurable, physical senses.
We are free to deny the spiritual, but let us not deny it because someone convinced us it is not so. Let us listen, listening not for sounds and words and voices, but listening for……something for which we have no words. If we hear/experience/sense/feel nothing, so be it. But don’t let personal fear or social disapproval stop us from listening, listening with open heart….. just in case.
GOD’S GIFTS IN CONFLICT
Mama bird decorates their new home. Papa bird serenades her from the porch rail.
‘Tasha kitty lazily lies across my arm.
How I love and cherish these feathered and fuzzy companions.
Such joy the little birds’ testimony of Hope and new life brings to my heart!
The mother sits for extended periods looking in the direction of her singing mate.
Such pureness and beauty shine in this scene,. Yet the cat I love would, given the opportunity, destroy it all.
I call my cat and the little birds “gifts of God”. So doesn’t it seem a bit incongruous, and spiritually dissonant, that one “gift of God” who brings me such joy would happily destroy the other?
In the hopeless mental grappling with this distasteful truth of the diverse “gifts of God”, I find myself stumbling into various intellectual dead end alleys, dark and grimy alleys strewn with broken glass.
Is there no resolution, no logical reconciliation of my soul’s instinctive love of these precious living beings, and the hard facts of Nature and survival and carnivorous instincts?
Need logic and objective awareness of the condition of this temporal world so directly clash with heart’s joys and instincts and longings?
“These feathered and fuzzy beings express the gift of Life from God, bringing joy and beauty and God’s affection into our lives….and these gifts of God would peck and claw each others’ eyes out if given half a chance”.
Like I said, incongruous and dissonant.
So is my heart/soul just a pathetic fool, imagining the cuteness, perceiving beauty that is only a delusion induced by wishful thinking?
Does the heart/soul see a beauty not really there? Or does the temporal mind not see beyond what is physically there?
If my cat gets past the window screen, I will see an ending of the tiny feathered physical lives that bring me such joy. But if each life is a quanta of expression of infinite and eternal Source, how can “end” really have any meaning?
Perhaps my earthly eyes and mind are simply too myopic, unable to see past a horizon of time, unable to look up above the surface of these three dimensions. From such a constrained gaze, I see the bird and cat as separate, when perhaps in fact they are just the visible fingertips of God’s hand as they momentarily dip into and stir this temporal soup.
Such clumsy and desperate analogy mainly serves to illustrate the impossibility of portraying in words or imagery that which heart and soul so clearly see.
Heart and soul sense there is far more than intellect can grasp. I can no more deny the sublime beauty of the birds’ nesting than I can deny that my cat would pounce on them. Is God present in the nesting and the pouncing? “Yes”, I hesitantly answer.
I will not pretend to defend that answer. I can only say there is much we do not see with eyes and mortal mind. But if we let our gaze follow the direction toward which heart and soul would point us, we can glimpse something there, just beyond time, almost touching our three dimensions, something close at hand, a Light so close you can almost imagine you finally see its long awaited first pre-dawn glow, in that nesting family and purring kitty.
FIRST GLIMPSE OVER THE NEST
Everybody has their heads up on the edge of the nest, in four different directions! Oh my gosh! and I see a little eye open!….a tiny little pin point of a dark eye!….only yesterday “eyes” were just a bulbous weird looking dark bulge on either side of their head. Eyes are open! And the little guys immediately scramble to the edge to see what they can! Only this morning all four heads were turned in, tucked under or over siblings to stay warm. Now in the sunshine, perhaps the first time they have felt sunshine for an extended time as during the previous sunshiny days they mostly remained tucked under mom, now they are all turned out, little bottoms together, but squirming to get heads high on the edge of the nest!……little eyes are learning to see!……my gosh, what an experience, to open eyes and see that amazing world outside their world heretofore of just fuzz and sticks and siblings and mom and dad and food.
Extending their vision to the world beyond themselves!.....
Isn’t that what we do when we gain spiritual vision, extend our vision beyond merely ourselves, our little world of personal needs and experience, to see that there is consciousness beyond us, outside us, next to and far away from us?
Addendum:
As I listen to the Ira Glass This American Life radio program, on which a devout, orthodox atheist describes his indefensible and oft indulged compulsion since the death of his mother to partake in Catholic liturgy, I think of this bird and nest analogy. We remain in our worldly nest, our eyes mostly closed, not wanting to look over the edge of that nest, not wanting to see how incomprehensibly large the surrounding world is. But something, some instinct that we cannot understand because it calls us to look at something we cannot comprehend because we cannot see it because we have not yet looked……something tells us there is more to existence, more to life, than just our little nest. But how frightened we are to open our eyes and peer over the edge…..but we must…..for we know there is something more. We do not know what flying is, but our heart and soul tells us we want to fly, whatever flying may turn out to be.
Consistently they sit in the nest all facing in one direction, four almost identical little images. Only by facing the same direction can they fit in the nest, for little feathery ovals lined up beside and before each other, though yesterday evening there was usually one of the four buried under the other three. But this morning they lie in a perfect little feathered diamond pattern. The direction they face varies. This morning after the last feeding they face toward the house.
They sit quietly, digesting breakfast, until the next flurry of feeding arrives.
06:46 AM. Mom and dad come right after one another. The babies little heads excitedly bob up and down as they get fed. And there was the first wing flap! Very briefly, just for an instant, but one of them flapped tiny little wings as the second parent arrived! There will soon be much more of that as they prepare to fly. What drama! What a microcosm of life!
The little parents are working their tail feathers off to keep all these little guys fed! Usually the parent comes in from the south side, but occasionally will hop to the north side of the nest to ensure balanced feeding.
06:58 AM
Now between feedings there is quite a flurry of pruning and picking and fluffing. I wonder if the little guys have mites, or perhaps they are simply working at getting rid of baby feathers and transforming to their adult feathers. Maybe that is also an itchy process.
But the little guys survived the later winter storms! They are enjoying spring! They are like birds now, in motion and appearance! Their nest held up! They are looking around and active! That was all in doubt only a few days ago!
Such miracles, such miracles!
Thank You, thank You, thank You!
08:18 AM
The parents sing as they swoop in, so the kids are ready to begin eating.
Sometimes they sit still, and other times little heads bob up and down like popping popcorn.
SOULS FLAPPING
Pre-sunrise! That’s the feeding time! Mom and/or dad are engaged in a flurry of visits before the sun comes up. That’s why I’ve missed feeding time in recent days!
The little guys are peepsing! I remember that big milestone last year. Even through the closed window, I can barely hear this tiny “peeps, peeps, peeps” as mom and dad deliver breakfast.
Glorious life!
The little guys now sit up looking around, their heads above the edge of the nest. My gosh, what amazing growth rate! Little feathery conscious beings, looking at the world that awaits them, eyes bright and open, their vision far more progressed than our spiritual vision, in which our spiritual eyes are barely beginning to discern some shades of light and darkness, and for the most part we keep our eyes tightly shut.
10:09
Oh my gosh, now we’ve got some serious flapping! One little guy is just working and working! What a milestone!…..and this occurring not during feeding, but purely on the little guy’s own initiative.
Everyone is looking around, active, alert, and just this morning, looking ready, as if just beginning to be aware that there is something more, an instinct, a calling, awakening within them.
Such a radical change in personal reality, to even begin to be aware of leaving the tiny confines of a nest and take off flying!
I feel more and more certain that such is the spiritual state of humanity.
The world and our attention to our careers and money and food and possessions, and our unrelenting focus on our bodies, that is our nest, that tiny, constrained, limited dictating nest, in which we for a time grow.
But an awareness grows that there is something more, something stirring within us, some potential we can fulfill, and we occasionally feel called to flap our spiritual wings, to engage in some exercise of the soul, some service or liturgy or meditation or giving that does not really give us a taste of what “flying” will be like, but still serves as critical exercise to prepare our soul to take off into an existence so radically removed from our “nest” that we cannot comprehend it.
SHARDS OF RAINBOWS
How it wrests our attention, this temporal world,…wrests it from the Source and oneness. In music, and art and perhaps all our interactions in which we affect another’s life, we can either hold down their conscious awareness to this temporal world, or we can lift their conscious experience to a glimpse of something better, something higher, something holy.
In each work and interaction we pull someone forward or hold them back.
This temporal world needs no help in holding our attention, its fears and pains and wants and discouragements more than adequate. So let us each resolve as opportunity allows to use our minor influence to point out the distant light, to lift another’s gaze, to leave someone knowing that for a moment they glimpsed a shard of rainbow in this burdensome world of gray, a rainbow spread by our lives refracting light from higher Source.
(Coincidence: For the first time since its writing twelve years and eleven months ago I look at this file to consider it for insertion into the next book and the website. I copy it, use the search term “rainbow” to find related material in the book draft. As I search, I hear the lyrics “All the colors of the rainbow” in the song “Testify to Love” by Avalon on the streaming music service.)
WHAT IS THIS “LIFE” THING?
What is this “life” thing? Might it have once appeared on Mars….or……?
What are those microbes doing surviving in sulfuric acid?!
How can this life thing be so adaptive and persistent?
Why do we not see continuity between the living and the not living? Why do our observations include rocks and viruses, but nothing in between in the development of RNA?
What does the life do? What purpose does it serve? Why should it be so ubiquitous?
Can we answer these questions as long as our only perspective on life is earthly?
Why do we so care about life, its definitions, its variety? Why do we even speculate about life elsewhere?
What is one common characteristic of those wiggling single cells in boiling ocean fumaroles and frozen Antarctic ice?
In each cell and entity, the critical characteristic may well be independence and identity, independence and identity that distinguish it and its behavior from the surrounding water, rock, radiation, temperatures, currents, and air.
The bacteria and amoeba and porcupine are of course not wholly independent of their ambient surrounding. They react, respond, feed, flee, survive and die based on their immediate surroundings. But they also initiate actions independent of just direct response to ambient inputs. (i.e., the inanimate rock cannot start moving in search of more material to grow its structure)
That independence of action is a critical factor in defining life, distinguishing it from the rock, the dust, and the wave reaching the beach.
In the living cell we see a small bubble of matter in the universe that behaves in ways not induced by just mechanical response to the surrounding environs.
The limited evidence on the earth would seem to imply that some principle of the universe dictates that such independent entities may exist everywhere.
It is as if the universe, its nature, its laws, its physics, its structure, is so configured as to give rise to these living entities, part of yet partly independent of, the dictates of the surrounding of the universe.
It is as if, at the smallest level, in its basic fiber, Unity is the underlying imperative of this existence. (Unity being defined as that state of individual entities not losing identity in each other or their surroundings, yet still functioning as part of, living in integration with, each other and their surroundings.)
The function of ecological systems, optimizing variety and number of individual beings, also points to this conclusion.
It is in independence of action and uniqueness of identity that we can define life.
It is in the resulting system of interdependent entities, and the evolutionary trends that lead to ever more extensive independence of those entities (as facilitated by evolving intelligence), and the corresponding evolutionary outcomes that allow ever deeper sharing of experience and cooperation among those entities (via more complex communication), that we see the universal law of increasing Unity that this universe serves.
SPIRITUAL MIRAGES
Human history is the story of ascribing the characteristics of God and powers of salvation (healing) to everything except God. We so deeply hunger for God and salvation that we see it everywhere. Like the starving man in the desert sees mirages of water and rescue, we see salvation in our investments and economy and technology, our entertainment and makeup and possessions.
LIFE’S JOB INTERVIEW
The night! The night!
The accursed night!
That’s when all my weaknesses and fears and worries and concerns come out to play, tormenting, driving nightmares, humbling my sense of spiritual well being.
Do gurus and sufis have nightmares and keep waking at night?
Do I just need to work harder at this meditation thing?
My gosh, I hardly slept a wink last night.
On and on the night dragged, over and over almost going to sleep, then realizing I had again awakened with my head spinning with thoughts about the danged interview today, and the prospects of that kind of job.
I do not want to be bothered by all this! I’m not bothered during waking hours. I hand it over to You. I let Your Purpose unfold, and pray to simply fill my part in it. But the night, the night, and all fears return to torment. Then in the morning it is so danged hard to immediately shake them.
What’s with that?!
‘Tasha sits by me on the porch in the still comfortable shade. Thank You. Such a blessing.
How I will miss her during my long work days if I get a job.
I should be preparing for this job interview most people would say. But in good time, in good time.
Can I take a job that pays so little?
Can I not take a job, even though it pays so little?
Back to that subject of fears at night…..wow…..they are real, huh?
Give us this day our daily bread, and give us this night our nightly fears.
Jeez, I can’t believe anticipation of this silly job interview so got to me. But there were a lot of reasons for it to get to me, life important reasons, purpose important reasons, as well as fear important reasons.
I do trust You! I do commit to Your Purpose!
But the resolve all seems to fall apart when I go to bed.
Hey, at least it’s honest, huh?
There is definitely a refreshing honesty in our nightly fears and nightmares. We can’t even delude ourselves at that point.
Maybe facing the day’s trails after an evening of sleeplessness interspersed with nightmares is even more impressive than facing the day in calm and tranquility after abiding in the serenity of transcendent meditation.
There is no escaping the nightmares of the night, just as there is no escaping the daily nightmares of this harsh world.
Some seek refuge in monasteries and mountains, teaching and practicing tranquility, aided and abetted by the donations of the faithful that still struggle for a living outside the walls or in the valley below.
But others stay awake at night, even in a garden, shedding tears of distress and sorrow. Some even shed tears like drops of blood, while waiting through the long night for their worldly fate to arrive with its nails and wood.
Perhaps there is no lack of faith in experiencing nightmares or staying awake. The faith or weakness thereof, the commitment or lack thereof, are not demonstrated by the relative calm or tossing of evening’s meditation or slumber. It is in the day’s actions, when conscious mind can again choose its path, there the soul is forged, not of peaceful thoughts or contemplative escape, but in the face-to-face wrestling in the mud with the challenges and opportunities of the individual’s life.
Doubts and insecurities? Of course. Uncertain outcomes? Obviously. No way to know the best thing to do, which is to say, unable to foresee outcomes? Obviously.
That’s OK.
There are more important things that worldly outcomes.
Pray and meditate to attain the Communion with that which is eternal, with the loving Source, not in order to resolve this world’s issues nor hide from them, but in order to put them in perspective, and in order to not rely on their outcomes for foundation, but instead to experience a sure and certain and stable and secure and reliable foundation, unseen and unheard, but experienced in far more profound, ineffable, unspeakable ways.
HUMBLING LITTLE FEARS
It takes effort to not be scared. Is that ridiculous? Is that just me? Maybe I should title a book Is Anyone Else Scared? How much of my mental and prayer energy goes into fighting fear! From fear of how I will respond if I meet that person to fear of my fate should I make it to old age. Fear of death is the one biggy that I no longer have to face, though fear of dying still puts in the occasional cameo appearance.
I fear for ‘Tasha kitty being left alone. I fear for me being left alone,. I fear running out of money. I fear never publishing the message. I fear not being prepared for my next presentation. How odd that of all the fears natural and fears cultivated, the one removed from my lengthy list is the big one, fear of death.
My soul and its existence within eternal Source seem secure and comfortable. Yet this flickering shadow of temporal world maintains its grip on my mind. As before sunrise I walked the trail through woods, I rhythmically placed each step, I focused on prayer with the loving Sustainer, my mind began to slip free of the deceiving shackles of worldly fears, at which extended moment of transcendental peace my face went smack right into that thick, icky, sticky cobweb and the world quite literally again ensnared my thoughts and attention as I swatted at whatever unseen multi-legged creature might be assaulting me. It is just pathetic, my regularly failing struggle to banish fear. I can manage that feat for only brief moments before my programmed nature and the world’s cobwebs return the accursed fears back to the forefront of my consciousness, and the struggle renews. But at least I struggle. I have to suspect most of us struggle. Granted, my quota of daily fears seems a bit more ample than most people’s, but surely I am not completely alone in having to struggle with naturally recurring fears.
I intentionally decline to call them “worries”, a term that bequeaths them a certain polite respectability. No, they are fears, rude and unwelcome, loud and distracting. I do not like them. But I must deal with them.
They are humbling little pests, for the advisors and prophets and sages and gurus and saints of the ages would have us believe they evicted fears from their minds. Surely I must be inferior in my spiritual ranking and rating, that I still engage in wrestling with fears, sometimes contemplative and structured Greco-Roman wrestling, sometimes an in the mud, no holds barred, kids on the playground free for all. And it is not even wrestling with much hope of throwing them out of the ring for good. It is just wrestling to break free long enough to take a few steps forward before their tag team menagerie lays hold on another phobia or insecurity and again tries to pin me down into inaction or at least trip and make me fall as I try to stumble through another day of life.
So, like everyone (or am I alone in this?) I will struggle with my fears. I will not struggle alone, for the One that vanquished fear of death remains a present Comforter. And I will figure there must be Purpose in the fears, some necessity for the strengthening of my soul. And there is more than a little satisfaction in at least momentarily winning those struggles. Better to face the moment of icky panic in the cobweb across life’s trail than to sit in the house missing the beauty of life. A life worth living is a life with fears, for fears mean we have ventured forth from our place of security and comfort, whether by choice or life’s coercion. When we fear, we are facing our growth into someone stronger and greater. Let my struggles continue, and let fears continue o spice and flavor my life with their opportunities for growth and triumph.
UNRULY MIND
How to center? How to become immune to the evil in the world? How to swallow my pride and just take a boss’ abuse and injustice? How to not worry about the future?
How unruly and uncooperative is this mind of mine! How ridiculous that I cannot shape my thoughts and feelings to my wishes! How I long to simply be fully present in this sublimely beautiful moment! Feel that sunshine! Let it into my consciousness! Let me see the present beauty, unblinded by worry or fear or plans or goals. Let me accept the present gifts; let my mind mind its own business for a moment, and if it must wander to all those places of obligation and concern, let it at least not drag me along. I will stay here a moment, exactly here, and for a brief moment liberated from concerns and conjectures, worries and willfulness, fears and fantasy, I will be alive.
WINNING WHILE LOSING
Do I need to fundamentally change my approach to life? How does one decide between radical change versus staying the course in the face of perennial failure? Which offers the course of greater faith?….or is it even possible to change? To change one’s self…..no small order, that one. Easier to change the world, I would think. And let’s face it, or at least I should face it, the world does a whole lot more changing of me than I the world. That is a humbling and pathetic commentary, but hey, I am fighting out of my weight class here, and the rules in this bout keep changing, and there is no referee.
Unless the fight is rigged and the world takes a dive, I don’t see that I’ll leave a single mark on it, and the converse is definitely not true. Truth be known, I am looking forward to the bell ending this mismatch.
Who put this bout on the card anyway?! I gotta have a talk with my manager about this one. Not to mention , I got no training! And this opponent throws sucker punches, rabbit punches, below the belt punches, kicks, bites, clinches, and gouges! Where’s that danged towel?! Get me outa here! And the crowd seems to be mostly cheering on the world in this lop-sided pugilistic farce. Heck, I can’t even get close enough to plant a blow of any influence.
C’mon, I’m not gonna knock this heavyweight off its feet, or even break its rhythm. The crowd, the bookies, and the beer vendors know I’m goin’ down sooner or later.
So what am I doin’ out here?!
I’m takin’ my best shots, that’s what Im doin’. I’m comin’ outa my corner and stayin’ in the ring. I’m not lyin’ down, I’m not walkin’ out. I’m winnin’ every time I get hit and don’t quit. That’ll probably be all I win, and I’m the only fool that would call it winnin’, but by gosh, I ain’t letting’ the world chase me outa’ here. I’m gonna keep pesterin’ and botherin’ and buggin’ and irritatin’ it till it knocks me outa here, or they carry me out. I may not change the world, but it won’t quite be able to completely ignore me. And I’ll be proud to leave this blowout without any gold buckle or prize money or title or cheers, ‘cause those are what you get when the world wins.
FEAR
Sun rose again (on ridge). I don’t take anything for granted anymore. The sun rose again.
That is just amazing….as is the orange glow now enveloping the rocks and grass and waving trees around me.
The woods are just so frighteningly quiet without the birds. And there are virtually no birds here anymore. There is a sense of something terrible happening, and it is too late to stop it, but still too early to recognize it. Strange and disturbing, this lack of birds. So quiet, so unnaturally quiet. The doves, the pigeons, the magpies, the woodpeckers, the jays, all gone. At this moment I hear one bird, and now it is quiet. There, a second. far away, a third.
So much we stand to lose, so much we have lost, by our rape of the planet that gives us life.
Several days ago, the last time ‘Tasha went for a walk, she got scared by two “monsters” (people on the trail). She has not asked since to go for a walk. It’s kind of pitiful.
This morning she was at the extent of her line going up the trail leading out of the yard. I felt called to take her for a walk, though she was not asking for one.
We got only to the cross trail when along came neighbor Barb. Poor ‘Tasha was terrified and ran away down the trail
‘Tasha ran into the bushes and disappeared, but as I had hoped, I found her hiding in the back right corner under the deck.
With my coaxing and reassurance, she quickly came out.
But it was so pitiful! She was so scared!
And now she may never want to go for a walk again.
How I hate to see little ‘Tasha scared, bless her fuzzy heart. And I hate to see her bold spirit limited by frightening experiences. But it happens to all of us.
Fear.
What does fear tell us about ourselves, about the nature of our life, about the Creation, about the Creator, about our destiny.
Fear, profound, fundamental, ever present, an integral part of our being and the being of all creatures……..
Does the very existence of fear speak to some presence of evil in the world, something terribly wrong?
When people question the existence of a loving God, I believe fear and awareness of fear underlies that question.
Terror and fear, such powerful forces influencing our behaviors and actions and outlooks and plans.
Fear and terror, such integral parts of our very makeup. Fear of death, harm, pain, disapproval, disgrace, embarrassment, suffering, rejection, poverty, foreclosure, hunger, monsters, bosses, spouses, and parents………
Fear, that which could we eliminate anything from our life, it would surely rank near the top.
What parent does not feel the pulling of deep, heartfelt emotions when they see their child fearful? Of course we know there are parents of an opposite nature, parents who invoke fear in their children. We react so powerfully to fear that even that sentence and the image it conveys brings at least a pang of emotion to any remotely compassionate person.
A child’s fear. A kitty’s fear.
It is not a subject easily addressed, for it is far too intimate, too personal, too much a part of our being.
We even fear fear.
I suspect we are missing much in our understanding of this existence, our lives, the Creation, and God, if we do not directly look at the very nature of fear, and what it says about Creation and God.
Of course we can rationalize that fear protects us from that which would harm us…..but such a miserable, dreadful protection it is.
Yet somehow, it is in facing fears that we attain our greatest accomplishments.
It is as if fear is this evil, enslaving force, limiting our options and freedom.
Fear tries to take control of us, screaming its commands in our face to stop us, or to make us run.
Don’t go there, don’t try that, don’t look, don’t reach, don’t climb, don’t speak, don’t disagree, don’t touch,……
Life is an ongoing battle with fear.
The climb, the speech, the job application, the question, the job change, the move, the game, the class, the test, the new group, and those trivialities do not begin to touch the experience of war, combat, invasion, famine, pandemic, etc.…….
‘Tasha kitty was absolutely terror filled by that person on the trail, her instincts and programmed behavior swamping her consciousness with fear
I’ve often delved into the question of why God’s world is full of suffering and disaster, but I’ve not looked more closely at the question of fear, terror, horror.
I have even gained some understanding of the spiritual aspects of loneliness, sorrow, and grief…..but fear, terror, and horror, for all their practical necessity, something about the core essence of their spiritual nature eludes me.
I suppose it is appropriate to think of such a topic on this infamous date, a scar of a date annually meticulously reopened by our nation’s politicians.
Fear propagates fear, fearful souls inflicting fear upon others, a black emotional pestilence that spreads its malevolent evil through households, across schoolyards, and between nations.
Fear took control of ‘Tasha a few minutes ago.
Will it maintain its grip, preventing her from the explorations that brought such joy to her life?
I do not like fear in its various guises and degrees. Even sorrow and grief have a certain spiritual gracefulness, and tell us of bonds and connections that have no worldly, physical evidence.
Perhaps that observations reveals to me why I so detest fear.
In the moment of terror, we are pulled completely into this world. Our consciousness is momentarily torn from the embrace of our God and our spiritual foundations.
We are never more present in the physical world, in the sense of being disconnected from conscious awareness of spiritual foundations, than when we are in the grip of terror.
Terror and fear and horror would tell us there is nothing else, this world is all, death is an absolute end, our existence is only our body.
Tasha was deceived by fear, running in terror from Barb who loves all fuzzy critters and would have given ‘Tasha lubbins and scruffins. Fear always deceives. The physical threats of which it informs us and from which it protects us may be real, in the ephemeral, temporal sense of that word. But fear would have us believe that that is all, there is nothing beyond the ephemeral and temporal and physical and worldly.
Fear teaches lies. Fear holds us back. Fear controls us from the inside.
All good and compassion and generosity and love and kindness and empathy and understanding and peace and embrace and creativity and forgiveness have to struggle their way out from under layers of and behind walls of fear.
Fear is the great deceiver.
Lest there be any confusion, I speak not of the “fear” as used in the Old Testament admonishment to “fear your God”, meaning respect, acknowledge, submit to. This archaic use of the word is in a context of growing to know the spiritual, the eternal, that which reveals this temporal world as ephemeral and passing.
No, I speak of fear that, as already stated, does the opposite, blinding us to the spiritual, the beautiful, the eternal.
Fear poses perhaps the greatest spiritual challenge we face. And if so, that means it poses the greatest opportunity.
In conquering fear, we break the heaviest chain this world places on our soul, of the many chains that would hold our conscious awareness to the physical and deny the spiritual.
“You are not given a spirit of fear” says the New Testament, and I can now see that that statement refers to our awareness of the spiritual, the eternal, and Foundation Source of which our souls are part. That connection, that personal Communion with the Infinite, is of a nature for which fear has no meaning.
Our fear comes only of this world, only of the physical, only of that which is temporary and would bludgeon us into believing that we too are temporary.
We are not given a spirit of fear, for fear has nothing to do with spirit. Fear is of the body, the world, the carnal, the mortal, the passing temporal.
Maybe that is why I so instinctively delight in battling that demon, as I do in my rock climbing. While trying to get myself to make that next precarious move, or while letting a little more money seep out of my bank account as I write this instead of looking for a job, or while walking into that room to do that presentation in a couple of weeks, I will still fear, because I still am in and of this world.
Fear will enter my thoughts, will try to chain me to the floor of my worldly cell, will try to tell me that I am here, that I have no hope other than this world, that I must give all my attention to survival and money and approval.
I will accept that opportunity, that great challenge of this life, to break another link in the chain. By my choice of actions in the face of fear, I will allow the Comforting Spirit to further liberate me from the controlling, possessing forces of this world.
Lusts, passions, hungers, needs, angers, sorrows, and grief, all these would exert their control and pull us deeper into the physical and temporal, and further from the spiritual and eternal. But placing its steely grip deeper into our consciousness than all these is fear; recognized, unrecognized, overt, subtle, surprising, chronic, justified and unjustified, real and imagined; fear and anxiety and terror and horror and nervousness and apprehension and phobias provide us the great challenge, the great choice, the great opportunity.
Even when we have chosen generosity over greed, compassion over retribution, forgiveness over bitterness, when we have opened the cells, removed the bars, and unlocked the shackles that hold us down to this world, still the chains of fear chafe and tear and grind and weigh and restrain our soul.
We are given a body of fear, but we are not given a spirit of fear. As we accept the help and presence and support and embrace of the promised Sustaining Spirit, we will find that with Its help, within that growing relationship with the One, the still active fears induced by the world through our instincts and body will not forever chain our soul.
GRIEF AS PART OF FAITH
‘Tasha is snoozling in the closet. ‘Tasha has medicine! ‘Tasha’s life does not appear to be in imminent danger! Isn’t it ridiculous how we celebrate the mere delaying of the inevitable?
I wonder why that is. Is that lack of faith? It seems silly at best, and more like pathetic.
‘Tasha is snoozling after asking to go outside!
That’s the first time since Wednesday that she has asked for anything! How I missed that irritating little demanding maunz! Thank You!
So, all my Christian faith and knowledge should leave me unbothered by the death of a loved one. Yet such cause for celebration is ‘Tasha’s recovery!
Her death remains inevitable. Assuming she survives this bronchitis, she will die within perhaps ten or twelve years. If I am alive at that time, I will suffer the same anguish and worry I suffered this morning.
But by gosh, irrational or not, still I celebrate her life having not ended this morning!
I think You do the same.
In the sense of mortality and eternity, none of this makes any sense whatsoever. But it is so. We do celebrate life, as tenuous and temporary as it may be. We do worry about death, inevitable as it may be.
That’s kind of a pathetic state of affairs, isn’t it?
If we say that we celebrate life because we know it is actually eternal, then that should also mean we do not worry about the momentary separations caused by physical death.
Maybe it was ‘Tasha’s suffering I worried more about.
It is true that I worried about her suffering. But man, I did not want her to die.
The fact is, we are made to worry about our suffering, and to long for our happiness, in this worldly life. God just made us that way, and we should accept it.
Of course I don’t want ‘Tasha to die. Of course I would miss that one constant worldly companion in my life. Of course I carry a heavy sense of responsibility for her welfare, health, and comfort. By gosh, those are all good things.
Facing with dread the death of a loved one is no different than not bubbling with enthusiasm about a dental procedure, though you know it will turn out OK and will fix future problems.
Even if I knew that someday I would lose all my teeth, I still would want to celebrate keeping them as long as possible, and I would enjoy every bite I take with them.
So fine, in some grand eternal perspective, celebrating ‘Tasha’s recovery from what I thought might be a life threatening situation is silly. Yes, someday she will die anyway. Yes, I will see her again in the eternal Home.
All that spiritual knowledge helps.
But God made us to be present in this temporal world, our consciousness overwhelmed with the feelings and sensations and experiences of the moment. Work that faith and those beliefs for all they are worth to mitigate the pain, grief, and sorrow. But the pain, grief, and sorrow are as real, and as much a part of the Purpose, as is the pain of that cut or fracture or incision.
We should gratefully celebrate every moment of God given life, whether Heavenly or earthly.
We should strive for such depth of interpersonal Communion that death of that loved one causes pain as surely and naturally as would the physical separation of a limb.
Regardless of faith and belief, I think denying these emotions would be to deny our God created nature.
In full faith in Heaven, resurrection, and eternal life, I celebrate ‘Tasha’s little fuzzy life right here and now, and someday, if she dies before me, I will deeply suffer her loss, and run to the sustaining Spirit for solace.
To do less is to turn from the intensity of the gift of life given us by the Creator.
HOW HEAVEN WILL WORK
At the book store I see a musical instrument contrived by a professor. He calls it a psaltery. Its musical tones are beautiful, relaxing, and harmonious.
It strikes me how the Destiny Home (Heaven) will work! Today our musical instruments symbolize the nature of this temporal existence. We can make harmonious, beautiful music, and can make music that blends and flows and complements the music of the person next to us. Or, we can make noise, dissonance, discord, chaos, and conflict.
Our choice of finger placement, keyboard actuation, fret position, these all determine whether we create harmony or clashing noise. And those finger placement and keyboard chords often do not come easily. That is analogous to the sinful nature of this world. Through choice and effort and will and desire, we can learn to play beautiful music. But even then it takes effort, and even then we may strike sour notes. Such is our worldly nature.
In the Destiny Home all will function per the will of our God and our Choice of what we desire for eternity. All notes we strike by the choices of our new lives will be harmonious! We will have freedom far greater than today, the range of notes from which we can play being unbounded. The new natures we will have chosen for ourselves, in the image of the First Born, will no longer be prone to conflict, one person’s notes no longer crashing over another’s.
All will function in Unity and harmony, each conscious will released, unchained, and free, and each striking chords and notes that rise in harmony with each other and with the loving Creator.
We will no longer be bounded by the rigorous disciplines requiring we struggle to get our fingers on the right keys and frets and valves. Each living composition will be clearly heard, individual and unrestrained, and sublimely beautiful.
And to encourage our wait for that day, and prepare us for our contribution to the grand symphony of eternal Creation, today we can continue the disciplines of positioning our fingers to play as best we can, as beautifully as we can, as lovingly as we can, while forgiving ourselves and others for the inevitable sour notes and miscues that mar today’s clumsy rehearsals, but do not dim the promise of the eventual masterpiece.
AN ACHING SOUL
How diverse we are in our wants, needs, hungers, desires, and longings. How steadfastly we hope for that which we so deeply want, actively pursuing it for years against all odds, until finally, drained of energy, in later years we just wait on it, perhaps occasionally making an enfeebled gesture of effort, like the last weak flutters of an expiring butterfly.
This world does not kindly treat the achings and longings of our soul, but for those lucky enough to have them, it is impossible to let them go.
I cannot imagine not having achings and longings of the soul, but I never hear anyone speak of them. People at work seem so businesslike, and people at social occasions seem so chipper, and people one on one seem so obsessed with complaining about such trivial minutiae.
The deep, lonely, aching, longings of the soul, …..am I the only one to feel them? Are investments and sports and styles really that much more important? Am I missing out on all that is of real value in life, the possessions and entertainment that dominate today’s social exchange? Such a social pariah is the person who dares mention longings of the soul! Yet the pain abides, unspoken by few or by many we may never know. So we who are so blessed and cursed, or at least I, embrace them, their pain our reliable companion and assurance that we are intensely alive.
Coincidence
I write this asking if others share achings of the soul. Then my daily bible reading is Isaiah 61, mentioning “brokenhearted”, “all who mourn”, “those who grieve”, “the oil of gladness instead of mourning”, and “spirit of despair”.
LAWN CARE
A little tiny baby fawn! With spots! Below the bedroom window!
It walked along the back of the house, up to the deck where 'Tasha lay in the doorway.
Too precious! It hopped up the hill, munched a leaf, and hopped across the back yard before disappearing behind the next yard.
In powerful testimony to why I so dislike lawns and lawn care, moments after this scene the teams of lawn care people began swarming over the yard across the street, making a horrendous clanging noise of trailer gates and roaring motors which would frighten away a bull moose in heat, much less a tiny, defenseless fawn.
Their yard will look great, and it will be a painting of green death, the precious gift of unchained and natural life banished to its doom.
BETWEEN CHAIN-LINK AND CONCRETE
The geese in the river behind the parking lot capture the essence of this world, beauty, right, and Nature trying to survive in the world’s noise and pavement and “industry”.
Tenacious, life perseveres, ancient rhythms and patterns flowing through broken and dammed and channeled rivers of time.
Just as the river’s water must go somewhere, life will flow somewhere, in spite of our malls and parking lots and strip cutting.
A few geese survive, cracking ice as they cross the shallow rivulet, an intrusion of Heaven between the chain-link and asphalt of modern existence.
FOX PLAY
I go up the hill this morning resolved to let my Savior sustain me, and for this morning to banish my usual questions of life plans and job and future.
I sit dangling feet over the sunrise bench (as I write “sunrise” I sense a glow explode warmly over me, the sun clearing the east ridge to strike this lower). A fox passes below! It disappears to my left, below the ridge. My gaze travels a little farther to see a second fox!….lying and rolling on the white shale. The first fox pops up over the edge of the bluff to join the second! They play!….in glorious joy of life, they play! Rolling and running and chasing, back and forth across the little open area, these beautiful creatures play and cavort and romp, and my spirit plays with them.
Thank You, Thank You, thank You.
For a moment they do not fear me, and they open a window to glimpse how the world will someday be.
ANSWERLESS WHY
“Why”. Such a dead-end word. It may, in the occasional fortunate circumstance, elicit an answer, but inevitably that answer must be predicated upon some reference principles and presumptions about which we can also ask “why?”
Throughout my life the deceptively short little word has dogged me, and I have found my actions and motivations stifled in those all too frequent occasions when a parent or boss or myself could provide no sufficient answer to the innocent sounding query. Clearly the vast majority of the normal human populace is not so afflicted with this obsession with “why”, which is just as well, or the vast majority of activities in which we so rabidly engage would promptly grind to a perplexed halt.
But for those of us (I say “us” in wanton optimism that I am not alone in this affliction) cursed to obsessively need a reason for everything, “why” becomes a Stone of Sisyphus, each successful uphill answer leading back to the base of yet another steep and slippery slope of “why?”.
That endless, spiraling, ever deeper nature of ‘why” evokes yet another order of the question; “why” should “why” lead to no ultimate answer? When each precept used to answer “why” in its turn merely invokes its own “why’, the very foundations of existence begin to appear as if built on mere whim and fancy, and that likely itself being fleeting and fragile.
Can it be that in the ongoing pursuit of “why” we discover the real answer in the nature of the endless string of sequential rational “why’s”?
At the nonexistent end of the chain of answers to each successive “why” are we indeed left staring at seemingly arbitrary “whim and fancy”, at nothing more substantial than “I will Be What I Will Be”, at nothing less than God?
FORGET ABOUT GETTING TO HEAVEN
The great missing of the mark for the Christian occurs in the effort to get to Heaven in the next life.
We see the true embodiment of Christian faith in the effort to bring the holy purity of Heaven into this present life.
DEMONS’ TEMPTATIONS, GOD’S OPPORTUNITIES
From sunrise free writing notes on the ridge
Our wants! They torment! I awake from dreams about the hope of being young and dating. . I still want such relationship! Lasha kitty crying to me for her breakfast, I cry to God, “I want…” “I want…,” “I want….”. It is a natural want, a God-given want, a tormenting want, a potentially destructive want. I do not cry to God to fulfill that want. I simply cry.
Is anyone in life reasonably satisfied? Are those happy, healthy looking families at church reasonably satisfied? How about the rich and powerful and famous people who fill our Television Screens and magazine stands? How many conversations do we have with someone that speaks of how good life is? Actually, I can think of a few people, a few whom I seldom hear bemoaning their fate, and Heaven knows, they have more to complain about than most people. Any elderly person that doesn’t indulge in a soliloquy reciting their quite significant hardships is a portrait of courage!
This writing gets interrupted by a huge chattering shrieking tiff in a bush far below, from which finally emerges a very large Waschbaer (raccoon), walking with a gait just like the new little bear in the area walks.) At this distance, with no size references, ridiculous as it seems I am not sure which it was. But from the sounds of the tiff it sounded like somebody’s day got off to a really bad start. Someone wanted something that conflicted with someone else’s “want”, both probably wanting to stay alive.
Which brings us back to the topic at hand. We want, sometimes greedily, but often quite naturally, necessarily, and reasonably. I do not think any belief system, institutional, societal, or personal, can claim relevance unless it admits and addresses that fundamental, inescapable, and perennial aspect of our being. A belief system can call “wants” good or bad, temptations from Satan or gifts from God, can admonish us to ignore them, conquer them, or indulge in them, but whether we succumb, struggle, surrender, or seek, we better admit that the nature of this life and the nature of ourselves means we will usually want and seldom be satisfied.
Perhaps the most damaging and dangerous belief system of all is that which claims that “wants” can be satisfied, that most people should expect to be satisfied, that in fact most people are satisfied, and what is wrong with you that you are not satisfied?! Welcome to the modern world of marketing.
Wants, needs, grief, sorrow, worries, insecurities, pain, and dissatisfaction are the norm, at least when threat, danger, desperation, and terror momentarily abate. (Look at the deer on the slopes below! Five in a row, two larger mothers at front and back of the line, three little fawns between! Too sweet! Thank You!)
I think the real faith, the powerful faith, the belief system that warrants my respect, does not condemn “wants” as evil, dos not deny the existence of wants, does not tell me to find peace by simply turning off my wants. Such approaches to a core aspect of the essence of my being and the nature of this world range from unrealistic denial to a cowardly abdication of responsibility. The only worse approach is to counsel giving in to wants, pursuing satisfaction of wants, in other words, that modern day religion that fanatically proselytizes with every billboard, magazine ad, and TV “word from our sponsors”.
I need a faith of courage that will help me face, and face down, my ‘wants”, not deny them. I want a community of belief that puts no pretensive smile on the grim reality of daily life, but which also does not indulgently dwell in self-pity whining to the point of missing the empowering joy that awaits when we turn from our wants to instead focus on the person beside us.
Do not tell me I am wrong or weak to wake from last night’s dreams with a lonely longing for the presence of a soul mate with whom to explore life and share lusts.
My faith of choice admits wants, needs, and loneliness. My faith of choice acknowledges that this life will leave most “wants”, including natural, God-given, spiritually pure and beautiful wants, unfulfilled, and with time and age that situation will not improve. But sharing residence with those wants, hungers, aches, and emptiness in my heart is a hope, a peace, even an excitement. My wants, the deep down aching of the heart “wants”, can teach me. They can teach me of the profound nature of the soul, and perhaps even of its destiny. These worldly wants and needs are real enough and painful enough, but they are really only like shadowy projections of silhouettes into this world, silhouette’s of wants and needs profound, spiritual, and eternal.
In this brief worldly life of dissatisfaction, life generally spent in frantic and fruitless pursuit of elusive satisfaction, we have the opportunity to learn, to choose, to sculpt.
In facing the underlying essence of our “wants” we learn the money is really for security, the sex is really for sharing interpersonal experience, the clothes and cars and makeup are really for acceptance.
We choose how we will respond to our inescapable wants, selfishly, indulgently, and destructively, or with strength, control, self-empowerment, and compassionate awareness of that other person’s needs and wants.
In that Choice, we use this world, our nature, our wants and needs and our response to those wants and needs, to sculpt our eternal soul.
This worldly life is and will remain a life of wants and needs, varying only in how acutely painful they may be in any moment. Wants and needs dictate most of what we do every day.
I earlier used the terms “temptations” and ‘natural, God-given” wants and needs. Temptations can destroy. “God-given” needs can bring us joy and help us grow. With each want, each need, each desire, we decide by our chosen response whether it will be a destructive temptation or a blessing of growth, strength, and learning.
Unfilled and unfillable wants and needs and longings comprise the inescapable essence of this fleeting, temporal life. The sooner we accept the fact that we will never satisfy the clamoring cabal of wants and needs that demand our worldly attention, the sooner we can turn to face them and with authority, to at least momentarily quiet the mob, and perceive the distracting and tempting demons as God-given opportunities for us to learn about and sculpt that spiritual identity that will remain after this momentary physical shadow dissipates.
INFINITE UNFULFILLED DESIRES
To my shock, yesterday Chris asked me to go for a walk in the hills. He said something in his telephone message about being on an exercise kick. In fact, he had just bought new boots wanted to try them out.
But hey, naturally I went along. And as expected, I listened to an unrelenting stream of self-focus, a self-focus that denied her the opportunity to enjoy and see the beauty of the place.
The afternoon provided a quintessential example of the human condition, our propensity to focus on complaints and ourselves and our wants and desires to the exclusion of experiencing all that could bless and heal and nurture us.
My awareness of the human condition makes me prone to sink into a negativity, in this case a negativity of unrelentingly focusing on my inability to effectively interact with people, and an abiding conviction regarding the uselessness of my feeble attempts at writing anything that night benefit anyone.
Chris’ chosen focus on the chance of allergies and the chance of mosquitoes and the chance of getting attacked by a bear and the chance of getting tired and the chance of running out of water kept him from seeing the sublime play of late afternoon light.
And me? My keen focus on his negativity, and my intense memory of the recent rejections of my submissions, and my abiding review of the weekend drive with the military group and their disturbing conversation, do these keep me from seeing opportunities for communication and connection?
There will always be an infinite number of things to desire. Maybe we learned to desire by eating the Fruit in the Garden. We gained imagination to conceive of different and desirable possibilities, including all those that can never be. Ever since that first bite, we are burdened with dissatisfaction caused by our wants and wishes, for regardless of what we have, there is always more to be had.
From that ability to imagine also arises our ability to create, and that makes us children of God.
The children of God cannot be God, creating without bound and limit, for then the overlapping and conflicting wishes of one would counter and destroy the wishes of another.
So although we can see infinite possibilities, and hence infinite wishes and desires, we must learn surrender and acceptance to the constraints that allow the children of God to exist together.
By that surrender and acceptance to what is, when in our spiritual petulance we no longer demand every desire that could be, our eyes are then opened to see the infinite beauty of what is.
By that surrender and acceptance to the limits of what we can do and create and form and control we gain control over our desires. We are liberated to no longer create what the material world and our carnal desires would dictate, but to instead create the truly new, creating in Love, as our Maker created us.
FORGIVING IMPERFECT CLAY
Dealing with completely unforeseen shocks of life must play some pivotal role in our spiritual development, don’t you think? No script, no rehearsal, no guidance, advice, or counsel dull the sharp edge of the unforeseen shock. Naked instinct and reaction will put on display some hardwired program normally kept deeply hidden in the core of our computer system. In un-choreographed chaos, values and priorities will jump and wave to catch our attention, while instincts and reactions wrestle for the wheel of our ship.
Is it the “real us”, some unclothed essence of self, soul, and identity that gets revealed in such moments? Perhaps surprisingly, I think not. True, that moment of unplanned response may appear without calculated guile, deceit, or deception. But it also may transpire without the tempering, judgment, and prudence we would choose to invoke if given opportunity to anticipate our response.
I have seen sweet, family dogs momentarily snap and snarl when startled. I have seen myself retreat, charge, stifle, shout, cower and inspire in moments of shock and surprise. I believe the “real me”, the essence of my soul, is he that assesses the instinctive reaction and chooses “how will I do better next time?” The body, form, instincts, and temperaments I inherited are not me. They are the clay I am given to mold.
“I” am the choices I make of what I will do with that clay. The clay is full of grit and stones and imperfections, just as my body is not the strongest, most youthful, and most attractive.
That is all OK. I can accept and love and forgive the imperfect clay of my being, physical, mental, and emotional. And I know the Maker of the clay forgives the imperfections that appear at the surface in moments of surprise.
“I” am he briefly given use of this mortal clay. “I”, my identity, is the sum of my choices of how to try to sculpt the clay, though knowing that most of its imperfections must await the smoothing hands of the Source who breathed life into this clay.
So I can welcome life’s shocks and surprises, for they sometimes reveal the weak and cracked and stony imperfections in my clay. And other times those shocks and surprises serve to bake and temper and cure the clay, cementing in worldly form the choices with which I formed it.
HOLINESS REFINED FROM WORLDLY ORE
If we pay much attention to the imperfections and sins and disappointments and failings and evil of the world, of everyone in it, and of ourselves, we can respond with anger and bitterness (when their sins hurt us), despair and cynicism (at the generally wretched condition of our world, nation, society, and family), and depression and guilt (at our own failings).
If we don’t pay much attention to the imperfections and sins and disappointments and failings and evil of the world, of everyone in it, and of ourselves, nothing ever gets better, we never grow, and it’s better than even odds that things will in fact get a whole lot worse.
For the marriage, the job, the friendship, and a life to have a chance of success, we have to develop some skillful balance of overlooking sins while ceaselessly working toward abjectly unattainable perfection.
For us to have a chance of finding any deep joy in life we have to invoke copious amounts of forgiveness and develop a finely tuned sensitivity to discerning the beauty and holiness that does often flash in the darkness.
As we realistically look at the world, each other, and ourselves, discouragement and depression can overwhelm us if we measure the world and ourselves in terms of distance from what we know could be and should be, a failed and collapsed spiritual structure, our individual human failings tearing down so much more effectively than building up. In this view, how we wish things were, how God might wish things to be, is distant and removed, with our human sin and failings and stubbornness and stupidity erecting barriers to attaining it, and tearing it down on the rare occasions we do attain it.
But perhaps there is another perspective from which to view, and still realistically view, the human condition. From some slightly higher viewpoint we can see the world and our lives not as fallen from Heaven and perfection and the holy, but as raw material, still very raw material, from which we can freely choose to build something holy and beautiful.
In that perspective, the rawness and roughness and chaos of the still unrefined metals and unpolished woods presents not the ugliness of failure and collapse, but instead hold the potential for foundations and strength and beauty.
In that perspective, the occasional beauty and love and kindness and holiness that flickers in this world becomes the first glimpse of the gem emerging from the slurry, the first shine of gold refined from the still crude alloy, the first recognizable contour of the wood destined for grand structure.
In this perspective, the glimpses of that bright and holy in each of us brings motivation and encouragement, countering the despair and depression engendered by focusing on the ugliness of the crumbled rock and twisted wood that fill our world and souls.
In this chosen perspective, though we toil in worldly mines dangerous and dark, and in wilderness of thick woods fraught with dangers, we know for what we toil. And in the piles of stony debris of this shattered world, through the gray dust of our sinful souls, between the tangled thickets of the clamoring people around us, we see the material for sculptures and palaces of a Kingdom that is indeed close at hand.
HOLINESS OF MEDITATION AND WORK
I believe quiet is necessary for some spiritual insights. But I believe that normal life, and life in the trenches of war, and life raising children, also provide spiritual growth and insights. It’s comparable to the equations used to calculate the design of the bridge, the building of the bridge, and driving over the bridge. Each experience offers a piece of the whole, each contributes to someone’s experience of life and personal growth. None of these three is any holier than the other.
THAT’S JUST HOW IT IS
Results in the world, and the condition of the world, should really not be taken too seriously. We are such a mess, our minds, our emotions, our animal natures, our phobias, our lusts, and the world itself is naturally so violent, unpredictable, and generally inhospitable, that we must go through life anticipating disaster and loss and defeat and death.
Today’s wisdom will always be tomorrow’s folly, until that folly again becomes wisdom.
It’s hard to not take the world seriously. But it simply is not practical. We have to laugh. We have to laugh at the world. We have to laugh at ourselves. We even have to laugh at our disasters.
For we are forgiven. We are simply forgiven. We will bounce through the chaos and confusion and catastrophes, and we will come out the other end, and we will be welcomed, and we will know we were forgiven.
Mostly clueless we will go through life, though of course we cannot ever admit that. We must, we have to, believe that we understand, however much evidence of the ages tells us otherwise.
That’s OK. It’s just the way it is.
Accepting “just the way it is” is among the pillars of wise advice anyone can offer. That does not mean surrender or giving up. It actually means an even more glorious effort and more courageous trying. For it means continuing in the face of abject lack of confidence in results. The merest breeze of circumstance can render our most committed efforts merely dust in the wind. To continue anyway, to try anyway, to try for the sake of the effort, to do what is right for no other reason than that it is right, is surely the holiest of paths.
We’re all crazy. The world is an unrelenting sequence of disasters. But still we can try, try in the face of certain defeat in worldly terms.
It is glorious! Nothing could be more glorious!
In accepting that “it just is”, we can also find and extend forgiveness. We just are the way we are. We try, we struggle, we learn, we grow, but still, at any moment, we are the way we are, with all its imperfections.
In our acceptance we can forgive ourselves, forgive the forgotten key, the late payment, the wrong turn. In our acceptance we can forgive the other, the unstable emotional outburst, the false accusation, the suicide.
It just is. We just are.
We are forgiven.
And we can forgive each other.
And we can forgive God.
Let us accept. And let that acceptance energize our struggle and motivate our efforts.
ENDOCRINE HIJACK
Maybe relationships are just one more example of the nature of this temporal existence inevitably pulling us into situations in which we inescapably face the Choice. Sex and finances and innate loneliness drag us into relationships, bio-chemicals hijacking control of our brain. then once we regain consciousness and look around and see where we landed, and with whom, that is when we face that terrible freedom of Choice, whether to love and care or not.
All the effort and energy invested in getting into relationship, that comes as automatically as the thirsty wildebeest going to the crocodile infested river. Then, when the illusory fog of endocrines and loneliness lifts and our lover, friend, or mate stands before us as merely a human being, then we freely choose whether to listen, to understand, to tolerate, to forgive. This world, our bodies, and the chemicals in our brain have captured and bound us and summarily deposited us before the Choice. And there, where only we will answer in our naked freewill, choosing care versus coldness, compassion versus cruelty, Unity versus self, there is the universal Purpose fulfilled.
IMPOSSIBLE NECESSITY
I have slowly, clumsily, and painfully come to accept the very limited role we can play in bringing unity and Communion into each others’ lives.
On and on I write about Unity, and our personal Choice to open to its opportunity, in ever interaction with every person before us, beside us, near us, and a world away from us.
Now I feel compelled to write that we cannot experience profound Unity and deep Communion with each other. We are called, the very marrow of our souls is called, to long for and thirst for and hunger for Unity and Communion. So we frantically chase it in relationships, sex, marriage, affairs, having children, adopting cats, joining the army, playing on the team, and drinking at the bar.
In each of those activities we get a flickering glimpse of Unity and Communion. The same can be said for meditation, religious ritual, job promotions, mountain climbing, and scientific research. Each provide a taste, a glimpse, a brushing touch, of what we instinctively, and often unknowingly, seek.
The great disappointments in life, the divorces, the breakups, the career changes, the affairs, the jumping from hobby to hobby, club to club, group to group, and church to church, often arise from not finding it all, the meaningful Unity, the deep Communion, with that one person, company, clique, or denomination.
With such optimism we enter, because the sex is great or the choir is good or the laughs are plentiful or the décor is pretty…..But eventually, inevitably, we begin to see the imperfections, and with only a little more time, we begin to feel the mismatches and poor fits that chafe and wear and bore and irritate. This person, group, career, faith, or hobby does not quite satisfy, does not completely fulfill. So we move on.
In innumerable guises, it is Unity and Communion for which we long, but the best spouse, most successful career, holiest religion, most benevolent institution, and dearest of friends, can each at best provide only fragments, one dimensional representation, of the real Unity and Communion to be found only with the loving Source.
All the interpersonal Unity and Communion about which I so passionately write is not the end goal. To pursue interpersonal Unity and Communion as the end goal is to experience disappointment and disillusionment.
There is no successful way to partially open to Unity and Communion. To seek God without loving your fellow humanity is to reject the children of the Creator you supposedly seek. To invest your life in selfless service and committed relationships while eschewing the Creator of those people risks bitterness and resentment as the years of human imperfection, injustice, and ingratitude compound.
So after years committed to passionate writing about the need to practice Unity and Communion with each person crossing your life’s path, I say you will never fully experience Unity and Communion with anyone……which provides all the more reason to try even harder. Cherish and savor the fleeting glimpses of imperfect interpersonal Unity and Communion, for in them and through our efforts the Purpose of the loving Source unfolds even in this temporal world. And while seeking and cherishing and savoring such moments in this world, for your foundation rely on the Unity and Communion of your heart and soul secure in the eternal embrace of the loving Sustainer. In the security of that infinite Love, you will find the Living Water and Bread of life that assure satisfaction of your soul’s thirst and hunger.
Once no longer blinded by hunger, your eyes will see the beauty of the flickering glimpses of interpersonal Unity and Communion that flash in the darkness of this temporal world, flashing off living gems of human souls still rough and unpolished, but rich with the still hidden crystalline perfection of Creator’s purpose.
DEATH OF THE VOID
I was shocked last week to hear an acquaintance ask, out of the blue, “how do you know you have a soul?”! I naturally responded that no one has to believe they have a soul. If they don’t want one, relax, don’t worry about it. But she responded she wants to believe she has a soul, and she used to believe she had a soul, until an experience during the depths of her malaria medicine overdose. She described the sense of dying, and the sense of complete shutting down of sensory inputs, which I interpreted to resemble my experience of the Void. I told her this, and briefly described my experience. The following day I began to address her poignant question.
The experience of, and terror of, the Void is the experience of existence and awareness without body and brain.
That is a fear arising from the soul, fear that testifies to existence of soul.
Only an eternal soul would have reason to fear the void.
Peering into the Void is a purely spiritual experience, experienced by the soul. yet its lesson arises from worldly causes.
In daily life our bodily senses and the physical world provide the images and experience which, though temporal and fleeting, serve as the framework in which we sculpt our eternal soul.
Likewise, the terrifying experience of the void arises from physical sources, bio-chemicals, neurotransmitters, toxins, apnea, circumstance and predispositions. The Void teaches a powerful lesson of spiritual reality. In the Void we experience the distilled essence of all our worldly fears, which is to say, what we really fear.
The Void is a place to which we never want to return, but its lesson we must never forget.
We return from the Void knowing what real life is.
We can recognize the Void of emptiness in many of our pursuits and possessions.
The Void, and real death, is hardly loss of consciousness. It is consciousness alone, solitary consciousness, consciousness in the depths of isolation.
In the Void we learn why we seek bright baubles, sensual experience, and social acceptance. In the Void we see that all those worldly illusions only distract us from the Void.
Experiencing the Death of the Void is an agonizingly conscious experience. By comparison, how sweet would be a death of mere unconsciousness. But from those empty depths devoid of warmth we return a warmer soul. We now know a life lived in self-enforced isolation is death. We know the inky depths of the Void lurk behind bright lights, glittering gems, and even many smiles.
We cultivate life, learning as we go what is real and what is empty. We begin to fill the Void by filling others’ Void. And in so doing, we allow entrance of that Source in which no Void can exist. As dark does not exist as a ‘thing”, but is merely absence of light, The Void, so terrifying in the purity of its undiluted emptiness, does not exist as entity or reality. It is merely soul’s perceived absence of Source. But infinite Source cannot be absent. We can only turn away from it. And when we have had enough of the Void, we can turn back toward the loving Source. For it never turns from us.
ARE ANIMALS CONSCIOUS?
Are animals conscious? They are, in a way, more conscious than humans, more intensely present, more acutely aware, while our conscious presence is distracted, diluted, preoccupied with our plans, complaints, impressions, assessments, and wishes. How rarely is the modern person really present in the moment, unless bright lights or loud noises or shocks or sex momentarily wrest our attention from our preoccupation with the inner Youniverse of thoughts of our own creation.
Yes, animals are conscious, as we can only wish to be, a consciousness ironically ever more denied us by the assault of the very sensory overload and media inputs we ourselves create in our hunger for conscious experience.
WHERE CONSCIOUSNESS RESIDES
Is there some balance of consciousness for which we should strive, some place balanced between presence in the spirit and Source versus immersion into this temporal world? That question fascinates me, and I play with and explore and probe the possibilities.
Often we have little choice in the matter of where our consciousness resides. The temporal world assaults our senses and commandeers our fears, and we could for a terrible moment believe our existence and consciousness and self is fully contained within and sprung of and determined by this physical existence, and we cry in our own wordless scream, “Father, why have You deserted me?!”
But even that forlorn cry, that irrepressible welling in our breast, testifies to more, to that of which we are sprung, that Source of self and the Source of this world, this world of which we are only momentarily a part, the Source from which we are only momentarily apart.
At times that world commands our attention. But in other moments we have opportunity to reclaim our consciousness, and in the respites from worldly torments, to allow Source beyond illusory time to nurture our true essence. We choose the degree to which we will pursue our freedom beyond the world’s dictates to our conscious experience. We will find that the greater the degree to which we exercise that freedom, the more enduring it becomes. Even in the duress and pressure and intimidation of this world, we realize that along with the temporal sensations and emotions that define our worldly experience, we, an essence of self, exists independent of the world, a self conscious of its Source, conscious of its immortality, conscious of being loved.
DO NOT DENY THE SELF
Some philosophies propose that our “self” gets in the way of knowing the Greater. I suppose that’s true in some sense. But our self is part of that Greater. We shouldn’t too summarily dismiss the worldly self, for it is, we are, a child of God. Only through the temporal self can we come to know God. It is the individual self that experiences God’
Maybe it is not the self per se that acts as barrier to knowing God. Maybe we do not have to lose all sense of self in order to know the Greater. Self is, like it or not, the center and focus of our universe of experience and knowing. Awareness of self is part of awareness of God. It seems patently unnatural to deny existence of the self. But that central focus of experience of Life God and the Universe is only a starting point from which to grow. We need not lose the self to gain wisdom and unity with Creation. We need only expand the self. The loving Source did not bring each individual self into existence only to admonish it to seek dissolution back into cosmic nothingness.
All Creation and cosmos awaits each individual self to grow, to embrace its Source, to accept the redemption and forgiveness and affection that heal the pains and calm the fears, allowing each individual to grow in personal strength and identity in intimate Unity with All.
The self impedes the experience of God when it hides from God. The self, in all its individual identity and unique personal experience, becomes the experience of God when it accepts embrace.
In the response of our individual self to life’s inevitable and natural fears, wants, needs, hungers, and insecurities, we can choose to face them alone as threats, us against the world, or we can choose to see them as paths through which to grow, paths to be explored with the guidance of the present Counselor.
Either way, by either Choice, it is the individual self that will flee from unity or grow toward Unity.
Do not dwell on fears, worries, and insecurities of the self, allowing them to dig for you a dark hole of isolation from Source and Unity.
But also do not deny the fears, worries, needs, and insecurities. Accept them as opportunities to come to better know the Sustaining Spirit.
To seek dissolution of the self into nothingness is like the person who, rightly so, eschewed gluttony and worldly indulgence, but who then simply sat at the base of the mountain, afraid to climb, explore, and challenge the self.
Accept your self with all your fears, needs, and worries as your Creator accepts you. And in facing - neither wallowing in nor denying - the fears, needs, and worries of the self, in the embrace of eternal Love begin a journey of never ending growth into Unity with the infinite Source.
EXTENSION OF THE SELF
There is so much more to you, to your being and essence and wholeness, than this mere momentary temporal physical existence.
This time in this world is, even while experiencing it, only a tiny extension of your eternal and unbounded Self.
There is great comfort to be had in regaining awareness of your full being, that which extends beyond this tiny place and time of physical experience.
Death is not even as dramatic as a transition. It is merely a pulling back of a tiny extension, like pulling a finger back from touching a small point on a specific surface.
Our relationships in this world are, for all their beauty, even at their best no more than the brushing of fingertips compared to the depth and breadth and wholeness with which our individual souls immerse into each other beyond this moment in the world.
RIPPLING INFINITY
Break time, along the creek. In moments like this, I feel I have walked innumerable banks of endless streams, and countless shores of boundless seas.
I suppose it is the infinity that pulls me,
the inexorable flow of time made visible and tangible, and always the other side waiting to explore,
the infinity of God’s restless Creation
rippling,
shimmering,
and inviting.
CALCULATED GIVING
Is it not true that even a brushing touch of another’s suffering brings our thoughts back to ourselves?
“How will their situation affect me?! Will my planned and ordered life get sucked into the maelstrom of their crisis?” Am I the only wretched soul that thinks in such terms?
How I calculate the impact on my life, my schedule, my convenience, my finances, when I see the injured kitty or get the call about the broken hip.
This terrible, calculation arises continually, at each volunteer opportunity, each need of another, each request and each news of tragedy, injury, loss, hunger, and sickness. All my supposed Christian love and compassion gets filtered through that calculation.
I seem incapable of viewing the world, life, and people other than through the kaleidoscope distortions of my self and personal experience.
Such a humbling and hopeless confession that is! Such a grim and abject condemnation of the very core essence of my being. Such a concise distillation of the meaning and source of sin and world’s suffering.
And such a testimony to incomprehensible Love that offers forgiveness, that offers redemption and salvation and forgiveness, even to me.
As I calculate the costs to me should I deign to help someone in need, I must not calculate any cost to accept the fullness of Life in eternal light. For that terrible cost has been paid.
As I weigh the balance of net benefits before offering help, an entire universe functions to bring me the opportunity for eternal life. As I run the numbers to determine whether to share an infinitesimal fraction of my life with someone in need, the embodiment of all life, the First Born of the Creator of all universes, temporal and eternal, offers me relationship and solace and comfort and abiding embrace.
The contrast is beyond comprehension, beyond my petty calculations.
I accept the infinite gift, with prayer it will wrest me out of my pathetic calculations, so that in spite of my nature I might pass on some small portion of that boundless Love to another.
(Inspired in no small part by the experience of finding the injured little kitty on the highway near Roemerville.)
WHAT OTHERS THINK OF YOU
Others’ opinions….how much should they matter? It would be silly to pretend they do not mater. It is enslaving to let them matter too much.
Obviously we need higher reference values than people’s opinions with which to guide and govern our actions. But at some point, ignoring people’s opinions simply becomes stubbornness, and even uncaring and self-absorbed.
Like everything in life, a balance is necessary. In finding that balance, perhaps people’s opinions should play a role similar to feelings and emotions. Feelings and emotions are merely signposts, reference points informing us about our momentary situation in and condition of life. We should not “obey” our feelings and emotions, but only stir them into the broader picture of where and how we will direct our lives.
Likewise, people’s opinions should be stirred into our learning and decision and growth process, not as a controlling factor, or even a major factor. We should not always respond to people’s opinions. But we should always listen, even if most opinions we dismiss. If we are resolute in our directions, confident in our spiritual foundations, and strongly grounded in our faith, we should be able to constructively entertain people’s opinions of us and place them in the proper relevance.
Sounds easy, huh? And of course, it is not. But the necessity to try is inescapable. And the challenge of that trying makes it all the more imperative to have that secure foundation, that absolute bulwark of relationship with the Creator, relationship in which the overriding opinion about you is merely unconditional Love.
ETERNAL PLACES
Black ‘Tasha kitty, eyes yellow and bright, lies in glistening golden leaves,
We sit together,
in the dense scrub oak,
a natural world
removed so few paces
from houses and fences and streets.
She knows when it’s time to go.
Such places will await our return.
for you see, such places are eternal.
DEFIANT DECORATIONS
Why did I put up the Christmas decorations? There are plenty of arguments to not put them up. I had not put them up until late this morning, when I made a Christmas call to Sally and she mentioned making a Christmas decoration to put up.
I live alone. I have no one in the house to enjoy the decorations.
Christmas decorations I associate with home and childhood, times long gone but happy.
Many of my decorations come from long gone marriages, and from gifts from my parents to a wife no longer a wife.
Then there are the many decorations made by my dad. Those are of course special.
Still, I put up decorations for myself, not exactly investing time in them, as I put them up while talking on the telephone.
Still, I celebrate them, though until Sally mentioned the word “decorations” the thought of putting them up had literally not even entered my mind
Clearly they are not a big deal for me. I’ve been far too busy, working far too long hours, to put up decorations.
But put them up I finally did, and in the process faced many poignant and not a few downright unhappy memories.
But I put them up.
For they are an exercise in defiant faith. After a life of learning that Santa Claus is only a cruel myth, seemingly designed to undermine the faith and trust of children, after a life of divorces, at a point in life when I will likely receive few presents, at a point in life where I don’t really want presents, at a point in life where I am distanced from family, at a point in life where I can look on those childhood Christmases and see what a strange, isolated, lonely kid I was…..in defiant faith I can see the beauty and joy of our Christmas season. In the face of our human condition, in the face of my failings and the failings of others, I can still believe in happy endings, in Christmas mornings that will arrive in some eternal sense, in the goodness and kindness and generosity that the Christmas holidays symbolized.
The birth of my Savior is not particularly commemorated by the frosted little plastic outhouse, or the jingle bell, or the basketball-dribbling moose. Though this season resonates in my heart because it commemorates the birth of my Savior, the decorations and festivities seem to have little to do with that most important birth of Hope.
All season I have celebrated that miracle of birth of Hope in this world. But when I hang up the decorations, I conduct a quite earthly ritual, a ritual of home and homes, some more enduring than others. I commemorate relationships, most of them failed, all of them flawed….but I commemorate them in faith, that someday, an eternal someday, even those divorced spouses and split girlfriends I will one day greet, our flaws having been cleansed, our sins forgiven, and the material gestures of these little decorations will one day be suffused with the white Light of Love.
THE END OF HOPE
Wow! The city is green! Only this morning as I gaze down on it does that fact strike me. Sometimes last night it must be that winter’s barren brown surrendered to summer’s living luxuriance, for only yesterday this green did not so forcefully strike me.
The city is green again! No longer turning green, becoming green, or growing green, but from below my feet to distant horizon, it is green again.!
How glorious, that day when hope is left behind, needed no more, when faith and hope and expectation have served their caring role, and these words so long
our soul’s support,
we tenderly set aside;
the canes and crutches of
longing souls,
now retired
to place of honor,
for that day
awaited
has finally come,
and free we run,
our souls released
from birth’s
long pain.
And hope and
Faith may finally
rest,
their job well done
now passed.
That day,
that day,
when glory
reigns,
and journey
new begins.
VIRGIN RELEVANCE
Like the rest of the Christmas story, isn’t there great and powerful Truth in the story of the virgin birth?….Truth not limited by finite physical triviality, but real Truth, personally relevant for every soul.
The potential of God resides in each of us. We define ourselves and determine our lasting impact on all unfolding Creation not by what we produce according to the temporal dictates of humankind and worldly constraints, but by the degree to which we let the Creator work miracles through us. The symbolism of the virginity of Miriam (Mary) speaks to us in that each hour of each day we choose to what degree we will let this world possess us. With each surrendering to the world, we remove another opportunity for a miracle to be born of our life. We can surrender to the world, and produce that which is of the world, or we can open our life to the creative potential of God that can bring radical change and love to the world.
GOD’S SUFFERING
The following is conjectural, speculative, a stab at modelling God in this world. It’s included in the spirit of including rough draft material. Let it prompt thought. The reader should not get too tangled up in it.
Is there evidence through human history of the Choice becoming clearer? Certainly the Choice becomes clearer through our individual lives as we grow from infancy. Patterns we see in individual growth are often mirrored in Nature as a whole, so just as the Choice grows clearer as we mature, is this world also evolving to promote the Choice?
I ask the initial question in light of ancient Aramaic not having a word for evil. Ancient Hebrew had only “the Tester”, today pronounced “the Satan”. So did the concept “evil” appear in response to growing Choice through history? Can we see God’s Purpose of introducing freewill-consciousness unfolding? Does the universe evolve in such a way as to prepare for the very essence of God to enter individual vessels? On the pre-time “side” of this Universe is Source and Consciousness undivided. That Source and The One Consciousness then enters this world of its own creation, passes through it, and then emerges as individual souls, again One, but no longer subject to the tearing and sundering this fleeting world inflicts. When we grieve and when we shed tears of joy and beauty, we are sensing the Source from which we came, of which we are still part, and we are glimpsing that Light which lies ahead, when all that is alive will be rejoined, all again whole and One, but in that coming time also still individual, each following the First Born through the worldly travails to be born anew, Purpose fulfilled through the sacrifice of the God-Source who abides in each of us.
God is in us, we are of God, there is no “we” here and “God” there, and our suffering and grief and pain is the necessary suffering of that One God.
POWER, DREAMS, IDENTITY, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND GOD
Are dreams practice drills?
As day’s events get stored into memory, the dream-conscious mind exaggerates and modifies facts and circumstances, posing new challenges and questions for the individual.
The mind is working during dreams, trying alternatives, exploring scenarios, speculating outcomes, including wildly improbable, outrageous, elaborate convolutions constructed from small threads and crumbs of actual facts and events of the waking hours.
One has to wonder if to some degree the self defines its identity during dreams in its free Choice of values applied to responses to situations……or perhaps it is the already defined identity (formed by values chosen during waking hours) that responds to hypothetical situations posed by dreams.
Or perhaps dreams’ exaggerated, hypothetical situations pose the Choice, and it is in our subsequent waking hours that we form our values and identity in response to that Choice.
Whether the identity of “self” that walks our dreams is defined before, during, or after the dreams, dreams remain inescapable, an essential part of our response mechanism and preparation mechanism allowing survival in this temporal world, and I suspect, an essential component in defining our spiritual identity.
Dreams belong to a moment of conscious experience, in spite of being largely, though not entirely, isolated from external, objective, physical stimuli. That we are conscious in dreams explains why we feel intensely aware and alert. When is the last time you were not paying attention during a dream? But all the events of the dream, events that often seem completely and frighteningly out of our control, are mere constructs of our own mind, at least so far as we know.
(A hummingbird repeatedly flitters so close to my face that I squint my eyes out of concern for that long beak so close to them.)
Dreams illustrate the degree to which our conscious experience is largely subject to brain processes utterly out of our control. We certainly do not consciously choose the channels and programs that perform the dreams and nightmares of our nights. Yet there they are, vivid and terrifying, products of our own mind, unbidden and inescapable, yet we create them, yet we are trapped in them.
In our dreams, after the fact at least, we readily recognize that our terrors and experiences were entirely of our own making. We find it much harder to admit that the terrors and joys of our waking hours might also be of our own making.
So what, in our dreams anyway, comprises the identity of the self?
If entire worlds, detailed and vivid, arise from our brains without acquiescence of our conscious self, where does that leave identity? Are we merely spectators, strapped in a seat of the theatre of our life, watching and feeling and fearing and cowering and loving at the whims of neuro-biological cascades of chemicals and discharges?
What a most curious state of affairs that would be, consciousness evolved out of a universe, consciousness at the complete mercy of neuro-chemical dictates, and more cruelly, conscious experience deceived into believing it has some say in the matter. Yet doesn’t the nature of our dreams, worlds and emotions created unbidden and uncontrolled from our own brains, testify to just such a dire fate?
I ask again, where is the “self”, in the sense of more than helpless spectator, in the dream? In answering that I believe we return to the beginning, humanity created in the image of “I Will Be What I Will Be”. There is no end to the depths of profound meaning to be explored in that name.
I Will Be What I Will Be….in that image we are created, and then placed in a world and in dreams utterly out of our control.
In that name in whose image we were created we see the meaning of God-like power.
To create worlds and universes and lives at the snap of cosmic fingers or the whim of godlike wish is not power of any note, for such invocation of existence out of nothing is done in the absence of challenge or resistance.
Created in the image of “I Will Be What I Will Be”, we are imbued with a far more profound power, real power, meaningful power, the power to sculpt, create, and shape who and what we choose to be, in the face of challenge, opposition, resistance, and constraints.
In a vacuum of no external interaction there is no opportunity for identity, no meaning to “self”.
The waking experience of jobs and wrecks and wars and love and unforeseen events out of our control hands us the opportunity for real power, not power over the world and others, but power to consciously choose the core essence of our being by choosing the values and priorities we will apply in responding to that temporal world.
In the biologically induced dreams to which the neurons and synapses of our brain carry us at night, as in our waking hours, we careen and stumble through perceived experiences not of our conscious choice. But still, it is our identity, our individual defined self, that wanders those mental constructs, responding with our chosen values and priorities, that with which we choose to define our “self”, that which empowers us in the image of “I Will Be What I Will Be”.
TWO COMPONENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
1.Information integration, that absorption of sensory input from sources external to the individual. The earthworm and sea sponge experience this consciousness.
2.Awareness of Choice, that which for any set of inputs, thoughts, and experiences, provides opportunity to shift from programmed responses, or to modify the program that defines the responses.
HARSH NURSEMAIDS OF THE CHILDREN OF GOD
How terribly, terribly
frightening
this human world.
How stunningly beautiful,
this human world.
How paralyzingly lonely,
how joyously embracing,
fear and ecstasy
intertwined,
tragedy and triumph
most intimate lovers,
one seldom far from the other
Within the hour
tears turn in the moment
to nurture the warmth of a smile.
Beautiful, majestic,
terrifying and joyous,
inconceivably irrational,
these children, mere children,
these awakening souls
Awash in their fears
and their joys,
So silly and pointless and grand,
Never far distant
from triumph and tragedy,
the harsh, loving nursemaids
of the children of God.
ALMOST SEEING
Sometimes I feel like I come so close to understanding.
Consciousness, immortality, individuals, conflict,…….all this arising within this physical structure.
Sometimes it’s as if I can almost see it, the One Source of life pushing through this straining gauze of temporal reality, life of necessity pushing through this physical passage in order to emerge reborn on the other side as individual life, conscious beings aware of each other.
Maybe I’m just trying to see this life in ways that would allow taking it a little less seriously, seeing its momentary form as something not lasting (as clearly it is not), but simply something to endure, and in the process, as our individual consciousness begins to take shape, to use as a starting point in applying our freedom to shape that consciousness.
The One Source, submitting It/Him/Herself to this temporal structure that divides that Source of Life into…..us, you, me, and the bunny now munching in the midst of the thriving bluebell flowers that fill the yard this spring.
Sometimes I can almost see it, and imagine that Source of life emerging on the other side of this physical, temporal process of Creation, emerging as individuals.
We think of Creation in terms of earth, moon, sun, critters, all physical manifestations of this universe.
I suspect the real Creation is what lies beyond this world, and this world is to ultimate Creation what the paintbrush, or the sculpture’s mold, or the hammer and chisel, are to the artist.
Life, the very essence of life and consciousness, have exploded from a single Source just as the physical Big Bang exploded out of the Singularity.
We each come from that One Source, and in this physical life we just begin to taste the first awakenings of individual consciousness.
We arise, we are born, we are still being born, and in our spiritual infancy as our consciousness arises in this world, we engage in our petty conflicts and indulge in our frustrations that the universe does not function per our will.
We are no longer alone, we are part of the One that declared “I Will Be What I Will Be”, and we are the result, we are what the One chose to be, we, conscious, free, individual.
While still in this world that gives birth to our consciousness, we can only do the best we can in the inevitable maelstrom of clash and conflict.
We are able for the moment to only clearly perceive the physical, the temporal, our consciousness only just beginning to hear the faintest whispers and dimmest shadows that betray the awaiting Creation for which we are born.
We are the spiritual newborns, eyes tight shut, our consciousness overwhelmed with the sensations of the physical surface upon which we lie, our consciousness not nearly capable of opening our eyes to see directly the infinite and eternal spiritual room that lies beyond our touch.
But then we blink, momentarily allowing that first glimpse of Light to enter consciousness.
Slowly, fearfully, reluctantly, we acknowledge that there is more than what our skin touches, that we are empowered to detect, perceive, and explore a world that lies beyond the end of our still clenched little fingers.
Such is our spiritual condition in this world, our physical bodies and senses analogous to the blanket in which the newborn is wrapped, touch and contact being the sum of its sensations, until finally it opens its eyes. We are in the process of opening our spiritual eyes, to discern that which lies beyond the physical, the temporal, the temporary.
This world, this physical life, is merely the briefest of passings, the living Source passing through a sieve of time and space that divide that Source into individual, conscious souls.
The Seven Days of Creation were hardly the end. They were simply the defining of the foundation from which eternal Creation would be built.
So here, in momentary clash and pain and fear and conflict and harshness, we awaken, awakening first to our own consciousness, awakening to self-awareness, then awakening to our empowerment, our Choice, our freedom.
Sometimes I can almost see, when I try to open my eyes.
LIGHT OF SOURCE
Sunrise on the ridge.
05:37, the sun breaks the horizon.
Such light!
That moment,
stones and bushes aglow;
oh, that I were an artist and could share that beauty,
the blue shadow blanketing the horizontal surfaces,
ponderosa, mahogany, and eastern edges of basaltic plates glowing golden-yellow,
while robins sing with all their hearts.
Sublime and holy,
such moments keep momentarily at bay the distracting noise and illusions of the clamoring world.
Blessed embrace of pure light,
light enveloping,
softly ever brighter,
light of promise fulfilled,
light of timeless dimensions,
pure and infinite in its white,
white containing all,
a silver white
beyond snow white,
light invited,
light of Presence.
Galaxies swirl
and coalesce
and scatter,
only to reform.
The lights of fusing stars
mere dim reflections
of that light of Source
unseen.
A moment timeless,
a moment expanding,
stretching, suspended,
moments beyond number,
suspended in heights and depths
of dimensions
suffused with the timeless Light,
the present Light.
Written while watching a cloud of gnats coalesce, condense, spread, re-condense, drift, and diffuse,
glowing like stars in a galaxy, as they hovered suspended over the dark shadow of the forested ravine below.
White breasted swallows swirled and soared and dived and glided along the edges of the rock walls.
And I in my curious ignorance ask “what draws the gnats together?”
Dear God, I just could not leave this morning, a morning in which You allowed me to see, to really see, this sublime and holy beauty.
Birth of Consciousness
Consciousness born, here and on how many planets, thrashing, crying, in confused desperation, consciousness born,
struggling
in birth,
struggling
with newborn, Godlike awareness,
of something, something
beyond itself,
consciousness expanding,
first dim awareness
slowly growing,
brighter,
the oppressive fog of self-focus
slowly lifting,
and realization,
both desperately sought and long denied,
grows,
that we are not alone.
QUANTA OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Quantum consciousness…..I really find that concept appealing.
Quantum consciousness…..Localized, individual, separate, loci of conscious experience.
Such is the Creation.
Information integration and experience units, coming into existence, limited in their existence, interacting together for a time, each in its turn disappearing from this world……quanta of consciousness.
Each point, each locus, reacting and absorbing and interacting with all within its sensory reach, each incident photon leaving its mark, generating some transitions among electron shells, each event at each point affecting infinitely others.
It’s almost like a grandiose, universal scale experiment. Can individual conscious entities come to interact in Unity, or will conflict and suffering remain inevitable?
How much choice do the individual conscious entities have in that outcome?
At this point we are, even if loathe to admit it, woefully isolated and pathetically stupid. We can’t sense what others need, want, or intend, and we can’t anticipate, calculate, and deduce what others need, want, or intend.
So, we clash in conflict.
Even if we were fully empathetic, our needs, hungers, survival, instincts, programming, brain chemistry disorders, and general spiritual blindness, would surely still lead to clash and conflict.
“Our Father which art in Heaven” seems to have cast us out here alone to sink or swim. At least some of the time. At other times, some of us are acutely aware of a presence, a support, a sustaining, a comforting, which arises directly from Source unbounded by worldly form.
But it is important to note we are not always in such intimate oneness with the Source/Sustainer. Anguished cries of Yeshu (Jesus) in the Garden and on Golgotha testify to that.
There really do seem to be times in which the Creator tells us to try to figure out things for ourselves.
There are times when we are free to make our own choices.
Sometimes those are moments of terror and aloneness.
I think faith in God’s supporting love does not mean expecting continuous, 24/7, bubbling bliss of certainty and inspiration. I think it means accepting that on occasion the Father does boot us out, presumably for our own good, though it certainly does not feel like that at the time.
Faith in God sometimes means going it seemingly alone, and accepting that fact, and not giving up hope on again experiencing the supporting Counselor.
I think it is far more honest, and a far greater expression of faith, to admit that we sometimes do not sense the embrace of God, and by gosh, it just may not always be our fault.
Sometimes we want it, ask for it, look for it, pray for it, meditate for it, reach for it, and cry for it, but it’s just not overtly, obviously, inarguably present.
I think our spiritual life and our faith would be better off if we admitted to ourselves, God, and others, that sometimes the Father leaves us to our own devices to feel peace and wholeness and tranquility.
The pillar of cloud and fire does not always lead the way. The hand we hold out to God does not always feel held. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Relationship with God is a dynamic, changing, interactive experience, not a static, unchanging, constant, reliable experience.
In other words, relationship with God is a living thing.
Quanta of consciousness…..their wave functions in varying and changing degrees of overlap with each other and with their Creator…..
Some of us run away from our Heavenly Father. Others of us have to get kicked out. It’s all part of the process of finding that healthy, whole, continually growing maturity for which we are intended.
Dare we think of God as a demanding, hard, disciplinarian Father?! Isn’t God the Father loving and cuddly, per the modern image?
I think we miss the picture if we don’t see that good parental love must include discipline, and must include kicking us out, and must include sometimes leaving us on our own.
I look forward to the moments of deep spiritual connection with the Source. And I accept that sometimes I do not feel that.
I will try to always seek that depth of connection. I will sometimes fail to make the effort.
Other times, I will cry for it, but not experience it in obvious ways.
The path, the counseling, the guidance, are not always immediate and evident. Sometimes we are left to find our own path.
For that is part of Love, part of the good parenting, part of that Purpose that is giving birth to quanta of consciousness, free, and destined to be empowered, once mature, once loving, once compassionate, once ready, and once all the waiting Creation is ready.
CONSCIOUS REALITY
Consciousness. God created consciousness, individual consciousness.
Yet to be individual, each conscious entity must be isolated.
Yet in order to not simply be alone in consciousness unbounded, the conscious beings must have means of interaction, and rules for those interactions.
Hence, consciousness, at least as we know it, exists within a physical matrix, providing both individual identity as well as means and rules for interaction.
It is the consciousness, the individual, free, and creative consciousness, that is the essence of “I Will Be What I Will Be”, creating life in His/Her own image.
For this generation, meaning we conscious beings existing as human beings in whatever age, our physical structure, body and brain, and the world in which we exist, define the rules by which we can interact.
That is a momentary necessity, as we learn what our consciousness is, as we make our choices about what we want out consciousness to be.
I ponder this topic after asking myself the question, what is the reality of an interaction between conscious entities lacking a physical manifestation? Specifically, as I dwell on my dreams in which it seems so real that I am embraced, touched, comforted, I think to myself, what if in fact my sleeping mind were open to interaction with a spiritual being? What would the reality be of that loving spirit placing in my thoughts the sensations of physical contact and affection? Is it real if there is no actual physical contact, no “fingerprints” as it were?
Which is to ask, is there any reality to virtual reality? Is the physical matrix in which our consciousness resides necessary for reality?
In asking this, I keep in mind that the sensations of affectionate touch in my dreams are physical in their perceived experience, and mapped onto my awareness of my physical body. That knowledge of arms and legs and touch and skin provide the references for that interaction, if in fact it is interaction.
I slowly begin to integrate the various concepts that I have considered for a couple of decades now.
Reality does in fact exist only in interaction.
Interaction between conscious beings results in the deepest, most multi-faceted form of reality, because of the scope of information involved in sharing of consciousness.
The interaction between conscious beings requires means and rules, or it degrades into nothingness and chaos, all identity and individuality being lost.
Our present conscious identities need the constraints of this physical life through which we interact. The reality of our interaction lies in the information exchange and sharing of life experience. That is why that reality is eternal. The physical interaction medium is only the momentary crude medium by which we facilitate interaction as we begin to comprehend our own consciousness.
For those individuals that so desire it, a radically different set of interaction media and criteria will be possible.
We are all part of the loving Source, pure consciousness, that consciousness instantiated in individuals. As God “Will Be What I Will Be”, so we likewise, in the image of God, will choose what we want to become.
That will determine the mode of interactions our consciousness will experience in the next life.
Any universe of individual conscious beings will by physical, but not physical as in our present universe. “Physical” means that structure that gives individual form to conscious beings and mediates interaction among those beings. That may or may not entail a body as we know it. (As I write, the “summer snow” returns, in masse, suddenly, the little cotton tufts drifting between my face and the computer screen, the blue sky filled with hundreds of little, fuzzy, dancing stars. Now with an unseen change of breeze, they dissipate and disappear. What fun!)
So, what about virtual realities, conscious beings interacting by pure thought, like programs in separate computers creating virtual worlds for each other, but without bodies?
Because it is interaction it is real. But it will also have constraints, which will impart boundaries on the reality those beings experience.
Why the boundaries? Imagine we had fewer boundaries. Imagine we could read each others’ thoughts, impart images and experiences into each others’ minds by mere will, and manipulate each others’ dreams.
How many people do you know that you would want to let do that to you? As it is, marketers come frighteningly close enough to that, and look what they have done to us.
Nope, it’s not a pretty option.
But imagine someone you intimately trust, imagine someone with whom you share all the experiences and feelings possible. Now imagine a world in which you could share even more, have even fewer constraints, an existence in which you could feel what each other feels, could give and receive affection and sensations of touch at any time, anywhere, could give and receive warmth and tangible embrace.
Welcome Home…..some future, next life Home that is.
I know with certainty that the depth of our interpersonal interactions while in this present life are akin to that of cocoons, hanging by threads and occasionally getting jostled into each other by the breeze, but sensing only the crude “bump” of momentary collision that must suffice for relationship. We do not yet have the spiritual eyes and wings and tastes and ears to fully experience the reality of each other. We are not yet ready for such depth of interpersonal interaction.
If we want, and only if we want, we can choose deeper interaction, choose to grow, choose to seek that spiritual awareness that will allow our entrance to far grander and deeper reality in the next life.
That interaction that today we call “virtual reality”, interaction without all the constraints of our present physical existence, may turn out to be a far deeper reality than what we now experience. It will still have its boundaries, necessary for individual identity and meaningful interaction, but much more spontaneous in its response to our loving choices of interaction.
(A deer walks up beside me! A pretty doe! She’s about five meters up the yard. She watches me type. Now she turns toward me, as ‘Tasha cruises the yard. How magical!)
I’ve been waiting on this understanding for months now! The tactile dreams and my perplexity about their reality finally opened my awareness.
If a conscious being implanted in my dream thoughts an experience, is it real? It is if we shared it, if someday we can discuss it. At that point it is as real as my footstep in the sand, representing my interaction with this physical earth.
That implanted dream experience also could occur only per the rules of interaction, tactile sensations of touch having meaning only in the framework of the form of the body with which I am familiar.
Once free of these bodies, how boundless are the possibilities for our futures!….and how joyous and exciting!
Conscious beings, interacting within those boundary constraints necessary to their spiritual condition and maturity…..such is the essence of existence.
How wondrous are the possibilities of ongoing Creation!