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## Flight 9525

By Robert Trainor

Copyright 2017

By Robert Trainor

Smashwords Edition

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

## PREFACE

This book was written in reaction to the crash of a German airliner that was hijacked by a suicidal copilot who then flew the plane into a mountainside. All 150 people on board were killed.

## WHY IS THERE SUFFERING AND INJUSTICE IN THIS WORLD?

In the movies, someone always figures out a solution and everyone is saved at the last second because no one would dare to put something like what actually happened to Flight 9525 onto the big screen. Probably the first time the passengers became aware that something might be wrong was when the pilot began banging on the cockpit door. "Strange...what's going on? That's not something you would expect the pilot to be doing." And then, a minute later, everyone would definitely have known that something was wrong when the pilot shouted out, "For God's sake, open the door." It was daylight out, so one of the first instincts would have been to look out the window and..."Oh my God, we're heading straight into the mountains." The first screams...the pilot picking up an ax and bringing it down again and again against the cockpit door. By this time, it's nothing but terror. The mountains approaching, more and more people screaming. It's never a whole lot of fun to be one of the victims in a mass execution. At the same time, it's just so hard to imagine that you're about to die. You've lived all this time, survived so many things.

They say that the 150 people on Flight 9525 died instantly, but that's probably a bit optimistic. It's true that when you slam into a mountain at 420 mph, you're not going to last long. By way of comparison, if you jump out of a plane without a parachute, you'll only be going 120 mph when you hit the ground, so there's obviously not going to be any prolonged death agony when you collide with something at 420 miles per hour. But for those sitting in the back of the plane, there would have been an extra half second to "enjoy the ride" from the time the front of the plane plunged into the mountain until the time the back end of the plane reached the mountain. True, it's only a half second, but a lot of images and emotions can go through your mind during that time. The face of a wife or husband, the faces of children...and then, the obliteration. And one has to wonder: Is there a kind of recognizable body agony that the spirit is aware of as its vehicle for life on planet earth is dismembered into a dozen pieces?

Afterwards, the living will go on the blame rampage. Someone besides the suicidal co-pilot is going to have to take the fall on this one. If we can blame enough people, it will soften the blow, but for those in that plane, there was no softening of the blow. Just a cruel and merciless extinction.

Don't we owe it, in memoriam, to look at this execution of 149 people with wide-open eyes and not sweep it under the rug? Shouldn't we try to discover a deeper meaning for these tragedies that are so common in the modern world?

Once the news cycle passes, the horror of what those on Flight 9525 must have experienced begins to fade from most people's minds. There's inevitably a new catastrophe or massacre somewhere, and besides, we have to move on with our lives. Bills to pay, places to go. But there are some people—not many, but a few--who don't find it so easy to get the last instants of the victims out of their minds, and for these people, there is often a much more profound series of questions that arise. These questions center on our concept of justice, and the deeply held belief (or feeling) that there is a kind of actual justice in the universe. It's interesting to note how often our thoughts are concerned with justice--not justice in the legal sense, which is just a relatively minor offshoot of the search for true justice, but justice in the sense that we all want to be treated fairly. And when we feel that we're not being treated fairly, we usually react in an antagonistic or violent way.

Consider the basis for all disputes—isn't it because at least one of the parties in the dispute feels that he or she is not being treated fairly? These disputes can be about money, emotional issues, or anything else that people fight about. Sexual jealousy, if one looks at it closely, is actually a perverted outgrowth of the search for justice: "I loved you with all my heart and gave you everything, but now you love someone else." However, for those on Flight 9525, the search for justice has come to an end, and it's really impossible, totally impossible, to imagine that the end of their lives represented any form of justice.

When considering tragedies like Flight 9525, one of the central issues is the relationship between our concept of God (or some form of higher power) and justice. I realize that there are many people who do not believe in God, but when one complains about injustices like Flight 9525, it's fair to ask to whom this complaint is being made. Except for the suicidal co-pilot who was determined to crash the plane into the mountain, everyone else on that flight was innocent, totally innocent. And yet their lives were mercilessly extinguished, and I think this fact is what we find so disturbing about this kind of incident. If such awful events can happen to others, then it's obvious that they can happen to any one of us. It doesn't matter how many good deeds we do, etc.—our lives can come to an end without any semblance of justice. Maybe, for instance, one is walking along a street and some lunatic with a gun shoots you (or me) to death because he's trying to see how many people he can murder in a day. And if it's your child and/or your lover who is shot to death, the natural questions are: Why did this happen to them? Why did this happen to me? Now, when one asks questions such as these, to whom are the questions being addressed?

There you are, alone, late at night, lying in bed as you try to make sense of the tragedy that has overwhelmed your life. You might be a person who is not at all religious and considers God to be a gigantic fairy tale invented by brainwashed people who have no real insight into reality and cling to old ideas that have lost all their relevance. But a voice in your head says, "Why did this happen to my nine-year-old child? She had never hurt anyone; she was the light of my life. So why did this happen?"

This voice in your head is talking to someone! You're not asking yourself why it happened because you had nothing to do with the murder of your child, and also, you have absolutely no idea why it happened. _You want to know why it happened!_ And the reason you want to know why it happened is because it calls into question every feeling and belief that you've ever had about the meaning of your existence. Before, you took your child's life as a given—and rightfully so. Before, you felt at least somewhat protected from all the nasty forces and events that are constantly overtaking human beings.

Basically, the voice in your head is appealing to a higher power; basically, that voice, with those questions, is demanding some kind of answer from the higher power. You did nothing wrong; your child did nothing wrong. But there she is, lying on a street corner with a bullet through her brain, and if she had left the house a minute earlier or a minute later, maybe even ten seconds sooner or later, she'd be alive. It's so unfair; it's so unjust; it's so totally outrageous.

The modern world, with all its murders, wars, and killing sprees would be enough to make anyone question the whole concept of God. "When my daughter was nearing that street corner, where were you God? Out to lunch? Taking a break? Something more important come up? Did you have a doctor's appointment or something?"

But still, at least for a while, you're still talking to this higher power, and you're still asking this Being for some kind of explanation. There has to be an explanation, doesn't there? Because if there isn't, then our lives are totally meaningless and existence is just a fraud that was perpetuated on billions of innocents who are all, eventually, going to die and be swept away forever.

So let's be clear about this: Every one of us would like to have an answer as to why all the innocent people on Flight 9525 had to die. This crash was a crime—and I don't mean that in a legal sense. Flight 9525 represents the most awful kind of crime, a crime against existence, a crime against being alive, a crime against everything a human being could ever hope for. An awful crime—the worst crime imaginable.

We are going to examine this crime along two fronts: We'll begin by considering, rather briefly, the human being's role in the creation of these catastrophes, and then we'll consider the deeper meaning behind these events.

The modern world has essentially been created by science, and the prevailing view is that science is our savior. It used to be that God was the savior, but that turned out rather badly when religion became corrupted by all sorts of sinister influences. Besides, what could religion really offer? Just a lot of psalms and hopes and commandments. Words, words, words. But when science came along, it gave us so many things that we had secretly been yearning for: The light bulb, the car, the computer, etc. As religion died out as a meaningful factor in most people's lives, science became triumphant, and only a few people noticed that not everything that science gave to us was beneficial. Leading the way in this regard were the gun, the plane, and the nuclear bomb.

Guns have now killed probably half a billion people since they were invented, and currently, we're living in a world where there's a gun murder about every ninety seconds. This figure, however, does not include those who die in wars, which means that while you're reading this paragraph, someone on this earth will probably be murdered by a gun. It's really quite remarkable when you stop to think what a bloodbath our world has turned into. There are shootings and massacres and slaughters everywhere, and the tool that is used to create these atrocities is almost always the gun.

Curiously, amidst all this carnage, science is never blamed in any significant way. We'll chase down a criminal who murders someone, and we'll go to war if some other group starts using their guns irresponsibly, but we'll never take on the root cause of all this victimization. We just can't bring ourselves to point the finger of blame towards the criminal who stalks amongst us. Science can't be to blame! Who would even suggest it? Sure, science invented the gun, but it's the human being who pulls the trigger.

And so everyone gets bogged down in the senseless gun debates that go nowhere, but if Ebola strikes and a few thousand people die, we become tremendously disturbed and do everything we can to prevent the spread of the virus. Meanwhile, like clockwork, another two thousand people a day are gunned down. Fourteen thousand a week. Piles and piles and piles of victims. And after the relatives weep over the bodies, everyone else goes on with their life as if nothing happened.

Guns are very powerful—obviously. Because they're so powerful and _threatening_ , no one really wants to start a crusade for their elimination. I certainly don't—I'd probably be gunned down! It's just interesting to note that in a world where people are becoming increasingly obsessed with terror, the terror that we're really terrorized by is the gun. Not a political group or a religious group because if those groups didn't have any guns or armaments, we wouldn't care two hoots about them. Let them spout off and make fools of themselves! But when they have guns in their hands and start spouting off, then it often ends up being a case of kill or be killed. Watch out for the crossfire!

The reason we're so blind to the root causes of all the dead bodies that are piling up everywhere is that we're suffering under the peculiar illusion that guns aren't really all that powerful because they need a trigger finger to do their dirty work. It's not the gun's fault! The gun is presumed to be entirely innocent, and so we'll drag the murderer into court and pronounce sentence on him as if that somehow takes care of the problem. If only it were so simple.

It's estimated that in 2012, eight and a half million guns were produced in the United States. (It's also estimated that there are eighty-nine guns for every hundred persons in America.) Considering the world as a whole, I'll take a wild guess and say that about thirty million guns were produced in 2012. That's just one year's production, and it isn't like the people who bought guns in 2011 are throwing them away so that they can upgrade to a 2012 model. Basically, what this means is that there are guns everywhere, and it's hardly an exaggeration to say that you or I may be the next victim.

In a sense, guns are like germs except that the cycle of this disease, the gun disease, isn't measured in a season but is measured in centuries. Ebola starts small, but once it moves into society as a whole, it can spread like wildfire. Similarly, guns were fairly pathetic back when they were first invented, and I'm sure there were a lot of people in those days who were anti-modern and went into battle with their knives and swords, but after they were all blasted into kingdom come (or wherever you go to when you die), the demand for guns began to surge until now, in 2017, we're in the midst of a virulent epidemic that has long since spiraled out of control. The Black Plague was bad, but the Black Plague of the gun is the worst plague that man has ever encountered.

So, to put it simply, science came to us with the light bulb in one hand and the gun in the other. I know that most people reading this will not see why science should be blamed for the gun, so I need to resort to a little fable to prove my point. Let's say that the gun had never been invented and all violent disputes were settled with fists, rocks, or knives. Nirvana! There'd still be the occasional murder, but let's face it: A world without guns would have about one percent of the murders that are committed nowadays—bear in mind that I'm including the victims of wars in this statistic. But then, into this idyllic world where murder was a rarity, some aliens from Planet Gun (located in the Hiroshima galaxy) flew by and parachuted a book down onto planet earth. The title of the book was _How to Make a Gun,_ and unfortunately, the person who picked the book up failed to destroy it and gave it to some politician who was having trouble with his opponents. And then, the next thing you know, approximately five hundred years later, you have the bloodbath called planet earth.

Now, in the scenario I just gave you, who would be blamed for all this? Those malevolent aliens! They destroyed our world with their malevolent invention. So now we'll just change the word: That malevolent thing called science! It's true that science has created many helpful inventions, but it's also true that science has invented the tools of mass murder that threaten the survival of each and every one of us. It is just so amazing that science escapes all blame for the tragedies that are constantly occurring in this world. We have completely capitulated to the things that are murdering us, and bizarrely, we blame ourselves for what is going on. It isn't, for instance, the gun that causes all these murders—it's the human being who is to blame. Really??? This strikes me as a kind of pathetic human chauvinism where we assert that objects have no power and that only human beings are capable of creating results.

So little Johnny, who's four years old, walks into the room with a loaded pistol that he found somewhere. What do we do? Talk about his right to bear arms? Or grab it out of his hand? And now big Johnny, who's forty years old, walks into the room with a loaded gun in his hand. What do we do? Assume he's sane and that he won't pull the trigger and put us all to death? I guess that's our only choice, isn't it? Because, apparently, we're living in a world where the germ called gun is unstoppable. Nothing can be done. We can weep over the half billion victims until doomsday, and before another century or two goes by, if we don't blow ourselves up first, we'll have another half billion victims to weep over. But, so what? Those pesky victims! They must have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But we're special because we have tags on our shirts that say Do Not Exterminate. Couldn't happen to us!

However, the malevolence didn't just stop with the invention of the gun. You would think that would be more than enough, but it wasn't. Because after the gun came the plane. I don't think there is a better symbol of our own folly than the plane. So big, so monstrous, so unnatural. And, from the malevolent point of view, the beauty of the plane is that when it all goes wrong, as in Flight 9525, no one escapes alive. Total extermination. However, the loss of life goes far beyond what occurs in a few measly plane crashes because science figured out very quickly that planes could be used to drop bombs on people. Yippee!

It's difficult to determine how many people have died by being bombed from above. I've read that on the first day of the battle for Stalingrad in 1942, about forty thousand Russians died from the Nazi air attack. So I'll take another wild guess and say that two million people have died in this manner. Chicken feed—at least compared to the gun. The important thing here, of course, is that you really don't want to be one of those two million people.

But the plane has another very important role to play in the bloody passion play being put on by science. Here, we need to get the bugle out and start playing Taps. Taps for all of humanity because everyone is included in this ghastly technological ark of extermination. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the marriage of the gun and the plane produced one very ugly and sinister child—the missile. Now, said the malevolent ones, what can we put onto a missile. Ah ha!

The nuclear bomb really does show how absurd the whole thing has become as we all wander around assuming that we're the most evolved beings in the universe. Yes, we're so evolved that we've managed to figure out a way to exterminate ourselves in no time flat. Guns are obviously very tedious and inefficient when you're trying to wipe out all of humanity. What you need for that task is a really big gun, and nobody can deny that nuclear weapons are the really big guns of the really Big Boys.

Nowadays, we've been mesmerized into thinking that nothing _really_ bad is going to happen. Sure, we'll have a gun murder every minute, and there'll be the usual collection of wars, massacres, and atrocities, but that's just par for the course. Nothing to be alarmed about—it happens all the time. But since we're lucky enough to be wearing those tags on our shirts that say Do Not Exterminate, we don't have anything to worry about. We're certainly not going to be victims in a nuclear holocaust because...because why? Because we're special? Because God (who we don't really believe in) would never permit such a thing to happen? With the invention of nuclear weapons, why do we actually think that we're not all on Flight 9525?

It wouldn't take much to destroy the earth. I know that "it can't happen here" and that we're all perfectly safe because we have science on our side, but the fact remains that all of us, every single one of us, could become a victim in a matter of seconds. Throughout the world, there are a small number of people who have the ability to launch nuclear weapons, and all it would take to bring the "plane" of planet earth down is one rogue "pilot." So it could happen here, and it could happen before you reach the end of this sentence...Still here?

Flight 9525 is so very symbolic of the modern world. The plane reaching its cruising altitude; people chatting in an aimless and pleasant way. How could they have known that they had only nine minutes to live? How do we, the living, know that a nuclear holocaust isn't nine minutes away? When technology is the cause of a disaster, your life can be over in seconds. Planes and nuclear bombs, at least symbolically, are closely related because the invention of the fifty megaton nuclear bomb has put everyone living on this earth onto the same plane, and as we have seen, all it takes is one deranged person to bring the plane down, one deranged person to blow up the world. All you need are the codes.

And so, if we look at all this honestly, we can see that technologies invented by science are the root source by which the vast majority of people become victims. There are, of course, things like hurricanes, tornados, and earthquakes that are not caused by human activity, but the death toll from these events is beyond microscopic when compared to the carnage that guns and bombs cause. It's so tragic, isn't it? Why in the world are humans not motivated to destroy the tools that were invented to destroy them?

However, I want to go beyond the physical causes that create so many victims on a daily basis and look at the metaphysical causes. I am using the word metaphysical to signify that I want to search for a much deeper meaning to all this, some kind of spiritual or philosophical explanation for the terrible things that are going on in this world. Much of what I will talk about is somewhat abstract and perhaps theoretical, but I think people are searching for answers that go beyond the standard and rather meaningless explanations that religions have put forth to account for tragedies like Flight 9525. Simply put, the three basic questions that I want to examine are: 1/ Is God (or some form of higher power) a myth? 2/ If God is real, what are the characteristics of this Being? 3/ If God is real, then why do human beings suffer? Why would an all-merciful, all-loving, and all-powerful Being permit Its creations to suffer?

The latter of these three questions, to my knowledge, has never been answered with anything but weak and unsuccessful rationalizations by those who believe in God, and the failure to answer this question has led many to the conclusion that God does not exist.

The God concept is central to an understanding of justice and our role in the universe, but it's important to be clear about what God represents because the word God has been associated, almost exclusively, with formal religion; however, when I use the word God, I am only using it as shorthand for the Creator of the universe. One can certainly quarrel with all the interpretations and theologies that have been appended to the word God, but it is difficult, if not logically impossible, to contend that the universe was not created by someone or something because everything in the material world is created. If you buy a car, or any other object, it was created by somebody. Similarly, children are created by their parents, and everything in nature is created by the earth. So if we follow this logic, we can see that the universe, which is a material thing, was created by its Creator.

The word God has essentially been hijacked by those who have an agenda, moral or otherwise. God has also been created in man's image, and for many, this Being is simply a gigantic father figure who hands out punishments and rewards depending on the value of the life that one leads. The myths that have developed around good and evil, such as heaven and hell, may be helpful in terms of controlling destructive impulses, but it's important to remember that these concepts were invented by human beings and are not necessarily valid.

Occasionally, the Creator of the universe has been depicted as having a body, but this is an obvious misperception that comes from downsizing a vast concept into human terms. To be humorous about it, God doesn't live in a house with a thousand angels where he spends His day on a huge computer that allows Him to monitor the activities of everything in creation. In other words, at least on the physical plane, God is not a separate being, and the only evidence we have that the Creator exists is the fact that we live in an observable created universe. That is: When you see a book on a table, you take it for granted that the book was created by someone. The Creator, then, can best be defined as the One who had the power and the knowledge that allowed the universe to come into being, which then gave rise to all the various forms of life.

When one looks at the universe, it seems, at least in the largest sense, to be perfect. Consider planet earth and its orbit around the sun. The speed of the orbit is estimated to be around nineteen miles a second (68,400 miles per hour), and if this speed were to increase or decrease by any significant amount, we would either fly off into outer space or be pulled into the sun. In addition to that, the earth revolves on its axis at 1,000 miles per hour. To top it all off, the earth is tilted (23.5 degrees) on its axis while it revolves around the sun, and this tilt, with its associated variations, is what creates the seasons.

The earth, then, is truly an amazing creation. Just the idea of creating a world like ours is astounding enough but consider the power of the Being who created it from nothing. For example: Let's say that someone asked you to build a computer. What would you do? How would you go about it? For most of us, just creating the metal for the metal case that houses the computer would be a project beyond our abilities, and it's safe to say that there are very few people alive who know how to create a computer chip.

And now, compare the abstract knowledge and intricacies of the computer world to the solar system. Amazing! At least if you had to construct a computer, you would know that the materials exist that would allow you to do this, but how would you create a universe from nothing? Thus, we can see that one of the most fundamental characteristics of the Creator is His/Her ability to create the material world. Please bear in mind that unlike the example I gave above where I described the difficulties in creating a computer, the Creator of the universe began with nothing. You could, conceivably, create a computer if you had the technical knowledge and the raw materials, but how would you create a computer if you had to create the raw materials? And I'm talking about raw materials in the broadest sense—you would, for instance, have to create, out of thin air, every object in the computer. You would also have to create the air that you breathe.

Before we go any further, it's important to realize, logically, that the physical universe must have originated out of the non-physical. This is true of all physical objects including, of course, the body—at some point in time, every object in the physical world had no existence but was brought into existence by the Creative power. You can go back further and further in time and watch all the transformations of physical matter, but eventually, you would reach a point where there was nothing--no solar system, no galaxies, no physical matter at all.

Why is this true for all physical materializations including the universe as a whole? Because the alternative, which is that physical matter has existed for infinity, is logically impossible. If physical matter has existed forever, where did it come from? Who created it? Occasionally, science attempts to explain this phenomenon by asserting that there were billions and billions of random particles floating around and that they just happened to combine to form the universe. (The Big Bang theory is another version of this hypothesis—here, the random particles are condensed into a small but extremely dense block of matter that exploded.) This line of "reasoning" avoids any intelligent attempt to explain the origin of the universe by miniaturizing the physical matter that created the universe into small random particles that magically united and then expanded exponentially. But what real difference does that hypothesis make? One is still faced with the problem of who created the random particles. And remember, there have to be enough random particles to form not only our solar system and our galaxy but also, the entire universe. That's a lot of random particles!

And so the universe, and all that is visible and can be measured, must have been created by an invisible, unmeasurable source. One can contend that this source was visible, but that would essentially imply another universe created this universe, and eventually, one would arrive at the first universe ever created. In other words, if one believes the universe we live in was created by a visible source, then the origin of physical creation has only been pushed backwards in time until one comes to a point where the invisible created the visible. When I say invisible, I mean something that has absolutely no physical weight and can never be measured by any physical instrument. Thus, when we go back to the beginning, physical matter originated from the non-physical. This is just another way of saying that the universe was created by some unseen force or power.

So let's look at this force or power and see what our connection is to it—we were created by it, so we must be connected to it. To successfully examine this, I think we need to begin with a real understanding of the nature of our existence. Fundamentally, what are we? How do we define the human being? To me, the human being is best defined as the experience of consciousness. That is, we are aware that we exist. And death would be the cessation of that awareness. One can take away everything else that is connected to oneself—the house, the bank account, the car, the girlfriend or boyfriend, the children, all the experiences from the past, all the hopes for the future, and all the thoughts that one has ever had, but even so, one will still experience life if one is conscious. Consciousness is the bedrock reality of existence—it's what we're given at birth, and afterwards, we make of it what we will.

So what is consciousness? Many of us would probably define consciousness as the activity of our thoughts, but this is inaccurate for two reasons. First of all, a person can have no knowledge of language (and thus there is no thinking) but still there would be the experience of consciousness. Secondly, thought is, in fact, an impediment to the experience of consciousness. I'll give you an example of what I mean: Let's say that your girlfriend just phoned you and told you that she was ending your relationship because she had found someone else that she liked more than you. Stunned, you go outside and sit down on the back steps. So many thoughts, and feelings provoked by those thoughts, are whirling through your mind—anger, all the memories of the pleasant times that you had shared, jealousy, etc. And as time goes on, these thoughts and feelings will inevitably lead to sorrow and depression.

But what about your surroundings? Are you aware of the weather? Are you aware of any birds or animals that may be around? You're oblivious to those things, aren't you? And since pure consciousness is the awareness of life, your inability, at that moment, to perceive life—the life within you and the life surrounding you—means that you're not really conscious in the sense that I'm using that word. Pure consciousness manifests itself as awareness—the awareness of being alive--and to have a mind that is cluttered with and obsessed by thought is to have a mind that is not really aware, not really conscious of its environment.

For the Creator, everything radiates out from and is created by consciousness. How else could the universe have been created? What else is there? Creators must obviously have a consciousness to create their creations. Consciousness, in this sense, means the awareness of self-existence, and it is this consciousness that created everything. This consciousness would not be essentially different than the consciousness of the human being. The actions and thoughts of the human being, however, are not the same as the consciousness of the human being because consciousness is simply the awareness of self-existence.

Consciousness, the awareness of being alive, is the same wherever it resides, so the same consciousness would exist in both the Creator and His/Her creations. We share with the Creator the consciousness of being alive, and our consciousness is not essentially different than the God consciousness, but please be aware that I am using the word consciousness to mean the awareness of existing, of being alive. Merely that and nothing more. That really has to be repeated because otherwise, there will arise the objection of how some human actions could be so fundamentally evil (or perhaps a better word than evil is unnatural). Thus, logically, it seems that God, Who could be defined as the consciousness of being alive, exists not outside but within His/Her creations. To put it even more simply, God is consciousness. And to experience consciousness is to experience God.

The human consciousness exists...does it exist within the body? Or is the body more a reference point, a temporary docking zone, in time and space? Where does consciousness really reside? I know that the body seems like the right answer, but since the body dies, this would mean that consciousness also dies, and that would seem to indicate that the consciousness of the Creator could also die. Essentially, the Creator has no body—only consciousness. And so it seems to me that consciousness, the individual consciousness, relates to or temporarily inhabits a specific body but does not really dwell within that body.

Here I am, sitting at my computer, and I'm trying to determine where my consciousness is located. It's a very interesting endeavor that I've never attempted before. And the answer is: My consciousness seems to be slightly in front of my forehead. Or...the main point is that it doesn't seem to be residing inside my head. I'm not sure that I would say that it's outside my head, but it definitely doesn't seem to be inside.

Confusion arises because the brain, and the activities of the brain, are located, of course, inside the limits of the body. As I struggle to find words to explain all this, I can feel that my mind is working and that this mind exists inside my skull. But the pure consciousness of being? The awareness of being alive, without any thought interfering seems to be located _slightly_ in front of my head.

However, when I go outside to a natural setting where there are no cars, etc. and passively observe the surroundings, my consciousness seems to expand away from my body to a greater distance, perhaps a couple of feet.

How much time do you spend being aware of your surroundings and how much time do you spend thinking about things? Be honest! I think, for most of us, it's about 99% thought and 1% awareness, so we have, practically speaking, very little contact with the Creator consciousness; the consciousness that has no judgment or desire; the consciousness that is simply aware of being alive.

The brain, or mind, is a physical entity, and so it is therefore subject to physical experiences. These experiences are registered in the brain and become memory, and from that memory, we act. Unfortunately, these activities are subject to numerous distortions based on one's upbringing, desires, and fears, which result in the mind deviating from what might be presumed to be the natural activities of the Creator. This God consciousness is obviously quite powerful, and even though it has no physical reality, it is capable of creating physical reality—in fact, that is the (only) way that physical reality is created.

Because consciousness is invisible, with no physical reality, it is therefore indestructible. It is also the source of all physical life and everything that exists within it. "Everything" would include death. The consciousness, then, creates death by withdrawing its support from the body. But perhaps we should examine this issue a little more carefully.

Let's go back to the beginning: The origin of the universe was the consciousness of the Creator; this consciousness, the God consciousness, was spontaneously passed on to the human being; from this consciousness, the human being became aware of existence and became able to function (and be a creator) in the material world.

I've mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating: The God consciousness I am talking about is quite a bit different than the thought process that goes on in the brain. God consciousness is simply the sense that you are alive. It is a "pure" consciousness in the sense that it is not driven by lust, greed, ambition, or fear. It simply is. But that does not mean this consciousness does not have great power because, from this consciousness, everything in the universe was created.

However, a lot seems to be lost in "translation" when the brain interacts with this consciousness. Usually, the God consciousness becomes almost completely lost under the thought patterns that each brain creates. This is probably the underlying reason why the ancient mystics attempted to banish desire from the mind since a mind blinded by desire and physical passion has become a slave to the urges of the body. The body is, in so many ways, overestimated. It has no power to think and isn't much different than a block of wood. It's very dense and inert when compared to the mind. It exists and it has urges, like food, water, and sex, but the body and the mind are not really comparable. A good analogy is that your body is your docking station on planet earth, but that's all it is. Basically, it's just a robot that obeys the commands and wishes of your mind. It was created, but it does not create. It dies, but consciousness, the God consciousness, does not.

So when a body dies, what happens to the consciousness?

The brain is the only part of the body that has any communication with the God consciousness. Please remember that this consciousness is simply the awareness of being alive, along with the power to create physical reality. The brain, however, is part of the body and is usually more aligned with the body than it is with the consciousness that gave it birth. The brain is where memory is stored, and memory becomes, for most, an important factor in their lives. Consciousness, being wholly non-physical, can never be bruised, but both the brain and the body can be bruised. When I speak of the brain being bruised, I am not talking of physical injury to the brain, but the bruising that occurs to the mind when it is traumatized by past events.

What we see in all this is that physical reality carries within it some interesting problems. For one thing, it appears that the God consciousness and the brain often do not relate very well. Virtually all of the major religions as well as those people with genuine mystical insight have pointed to this problem as one that needs to be solved if a person is to have any deeper understanding of existence. To some extent, the teaching from these sources has stressed the necessity of stepping back from the physical and associating oneself with the spirit (or, in Christian philosophy, the soul).

The mind primarily functions through thought. What is thought? How does it arise? First of all, it arises through language—without language, there can be no thought. And into this wave of thinking, there arises the concept of the "I". This "I," with all its memories, desires, and fears, is the focal point, the center, of every thought. As such, the thought process concerns events that either have happened to the "I" in the past or are being considered as possibilities for the future. Someone insults or rejects me, and I think about that, or I receive an interesting job offer and spend a great deal of time thinking over the pluses and minuses of this new opportunity. Thought is not really concerned with _now_ —one doesn't think about _now_ —rather, one thinks about the past (whether it be the immediate past or the far-distant past) or the future. Because of this, thought, unlike awareness, cannot really experience the present. Awareness, obviously, is the experience of _now_.

It's interesting how different the thought process and awareness are from each other. One can't, for instance, think and be aware at the same time. True, complete, and total awareness only happens when there is no thought. I think most of us see very little value in awareness, at least as a general way of living. It seems impractical, while thought is what we rely on to guide us through life. But when one looks at thought honestly, how much of it is devoted to that which is truly practical? One percent? Two percent? The rest of the time thought is just prowling around with all its obsessions, lusts, fears, jealousies, ambitions, phobias, and jokes.

I mention all this because I think awareness is entirely synonymous with the consciousness that we have been discussing. Awareness is a state of being, and by being aware, without any intrusion of thought, we return to the God consciousness from which—not from which we originated because the God consciousness is eternal--but from which we have separated ourselves to some extent. We're a little too enamored with our thoughts and with all the wonders of physical life! And the way to step back from being entrapped by physical life is to be aware. Because awareness, awareness of the environment, awareness of others, awareness of one's thought process, etc., creates a way of experiencing reality that does not originate from the self-centered parameters of thought.

It's fairly obvious that one of the fundamental issues behind the various plights and disasters that plague humanity is the separation between the God consciousness and the activities of the ego. I am using the words "God consciousness" as an exact synonym for awareness, while the ego manifests itself through the activities of thought. The ego: Constantly striving, often jealous, sometimes filled with malice and hatred--me, me, me. And this obsession with the "me" must obviously divide one from others and create a conflict where egos battle for supremacy. But when one is truly aware—just observing without any judgment or desire to change what is being observed—there is no conflict, either inside oneself or with others.

But there still remains the problem of death. Why does it occur? To answer this, we must go back to some basic principles. The Creator of everything, consciousness, has no beginning and no end, and obviously, a thing that has no beginning or end does not suffer death. What is perceived as death must therefore be some kind of illusion. But instead of the word illusion, I think the word misunderstanding describes it better.

In our daily lives, we experience "death" every day when we sleep at night. However, it's not really accurate to say that we lose consciousness when we sleep—rather, this consciousness moves into another dimension, which often manifests itself in dreams. Sleep is actually a form of deep consciousness. You must have noticed that when you dream, the experiences that you encounter in the dream seem every bit as real as the experiences that you encounter in daily life. Sleep is really a different kind of consciousness, and one of the most interesting things about sleep is how closely it mimics death. We leave the physical world behind us and pass into another dimension entirely. And in that dimension, we enter realities that are sometimes much deeper and considerably more vivid than the waking realities that we experience. I doubt very much that the primary purpose of sleep is to rest the body; rather, it seems to me that the purpose of sleep is much more creative than that. What really happens to the consciousness during sleep? What does it experience and where does it go?

So is death just a deeper, more long-lasting form of sleep? The one significant difference in the analogy between sleep and death is that when we awaken in the morning, we can remember who we are, but generally, one is not directly aware of any experiences from a previous lifetime. A few people have claimed to remember incidents from a past life, but there is no real way of determining whether these remembrances are fact or illusion. However, there is a commonsense explanation as to why a person is unable to remember events from past lives.

A little over thirty years ago, someone I knew died unexpectedly, and as I lay in bed before I went to sleep, I spent three or four nights thinking about death. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like death and sleep were virtually the same. Except, of course, for the difference I noted above—the inability of the living to recall any events from a past life. On the last night of these meditations about death, I had an experience that I'll never forget.

I'm a very light sleeper and always wake up at least a couple of times during the night. With the exception of the night I'm about to describe, I haven't slept straight through a night since I was in my early twenties. But on this particular night, for the first time in what could be called my adult life, I slept straight through for a solid eight hours. I can still remember all this as if it were yesterday.

Suddenly, I was totally awake—it was light out, and the clock said ten minutes to eight. I had the strangest feeling inside me because I couldn't remember anything about myself. I felt very peaceful and relaxed, but my mind was trying to grasp who I was and what I was supposed to be doing after I got up. I had the impression that I was flat on my back in a raft that was floating around in the Atlantic Ocean on a cloudy, calm day where the sun was completely hidden. There was just no clue as to any direction. I actually felt this image of the raft at that time—I'm not looking back on it now and trying to find words to describe it.

So there I was floating around in the ocean of my own bedroom—I had absolutely no idea how I had arrived there, and I had no idea which way was towards shore. Neither could I remember who I was living with. At the time, I was living with my sister and her daughter, and finally, when the clock said eight, I began to realize that I was living with two other people and that both of them were women. But who were they? It felt like they were younger than me, which they were, but I couldn't remember their names or see their faces at all.

And then, with a kind of startling shock, I realized that I couldn't remember my name. I knew I had a name, but I couldn't, for the life of me, remember it. I wasn't at all frightened by these things—it was more like my mind was totally mystified because it knew that the things it couldn't remember were things that it always remembered. For a minute or two, I tried to figure out my name, but all I came up with was a great big blank.

But as the hands of the clock moved around to ten past eight, I could remember that I was working down at the corner store, which wasn't far from the house. I could see the corner store in my mind, and I knew that if I was supposed to work that day, I needed to get out of bed because I always started work at eight-thirty. My schedule in those days was Monday through Friday, and I began to realize that I had worked there the day before and that it hadn't been a Friday—this meant it must be a work day for me. So without thinking about anything else, I jumped out of bed, got dressed, and arrived at work by eight-thirty. On the walk there, everything I couldn't remember before came drifting back to me—I knew that I lived with my sister and her daughter, and I could now remember my name.

But after I had been in the store for five minutes and was restocking a shelf, I realized what had happened. "THAT'S WHY!" I said to myself, in a very loud voice. "That's why it's impossible to remember any past lives--all I had done was to sleep for eight very deep hours, and I wasn't even able to remember my own name. What if that sleep had been for ten years or a century? And also, what if I had been born into an entirely different culture that used a different language?"

I suppose if you haven't actually experienced something like this, it's difficult to grant it much credence or feel the effect that such an experience can have on you, but if you look back at your own life, I'm sure there are times when you've woken up from a deep afternoon nap and have felt totally disoriented for a minute or so. The only difference for me was that my deep nap lasted for eight hours. And so, because I had this experience, I began to look on death differently and started to call it the Big Sleep. It's really amazing, what with the total loss of consciousness, how similar sleep and death are—the only real difference is that you generally remember your name when you wake up in the morning.

It's interesting to realize that the finality of death is the key factor when considering cases like Flight 9525. After all, if the passengers hadn't died but had merely suffered a few scrapes and bruises, this story of the plane that was hijacked by the co-pilot wouldn't have any interest. Similarly, if people were shot through the heart but came back to life in five minutes, then "death" by means of a gun wouldn't carry any real significance.

However, the great injustices always bring us face to face with death. It's so outrageous to forever lose a person who one dearly loves because some lunatic with a moronic, violent agenda decided that he/she had to kill someone. It's the forever part of death that makes this whole question of injustice leap into our consciousness. You kiss your lover goodbye; she walks onto a plane; the co-pilot deliberately smashes it into a mountain; and all you're left with is the body parts of your dear friend. You'll never speak to her again; you'll never go out to dinner with her again; you'll never do all those things that you so much loved doing together. It is just such a gigantic rip-off.

This is a good time to consider the standard scientific explanation for death, which is that physical systems, such as planet earth, need to be able to displace the old with the new. This seemingly logical explanation is one of the main tenets of the theory of evolution, which has replaced the Bible as our current version for how human life was created.

In the beginning, if we follow the idea that the universe was created by a Creator, there was nothing physical—no people, no animals, no solar system, no galaxies, no universe. And then, with one great cosmic breath, the universe was created. This idea isn't that dissimilar from the Big Bang theory, but it does have important differences. The Big Bang theory, even if it does sound like a lame joke coming from sex-starved boys, has supposedly been proven to be true, but lately, there have been some astronomical observations that don't seem to entirely back up the proofs. (Not that the "proofs" really prove anything because when science attempts to explain metaphysical issues with "proofs," it ends up being a glorification of some obvious idiocies.) It's just so silly to think that microscopic specks like humans (speaking in universal terms) can really understand something like this. But if I don't come up with some kind of counter explanation to what the scientists have postulated, I'll lose this argument by default.

My theory, which I'm calling the Soft Birth theory, is that the universe was created outside of any reliance on known physical laws, like gravity and inertia. Poof! And it was there. If miracles are events that transcend physical laws, then the creation of the universe was a miracle. And if a miracle transcends physical laws, then it doesn't have to be bound by them. The physical laws were part and parcel of the creation of the universe, but that doesn't mean they're superior to the Creator who created them. So the Creator doesn't have to move through supposedly logical progressions like evolution but can simply create whatever is desired or imagined. Poof! And the human being was there! If a Creator can create a universe, it ought to be obvious that a human being would be a relatively simple creation, and so there would be no need to go through the exceedingly convoluted path of evolution.

The theory of evolution was developed during the time that the industrial revolution occurred, and what it very accurately describes is not the genealogical history of the human being but the nature of the industrial revolution. Here, with the struggle between different brands, products, and companies, we clearly see the survival of the fittest. But to apply the term survival of the fittest to the rise and progression of the human being is nothing more than glorified Nazism—it's certainly no surprise that Hitler was an advocate of genetic breeding and strongly believed in Darwin and the survival of the fittest.

It's amazing to me that anyone, anyone at all, believes that the theory of evolution describes anything more than a bizarre and ugly fantasy that has been pounded into our heads for so long that most of us now accept it as the gospel truth. In fact, of course, the theory of evolution is the new gospel and has, for the most part, displaced the Bible as our authority on how life was created. Before I begin discussing this, I want to state as _emphatically_ as I possibly can that my rejection of Darwinism does not, in any way, shape, or form, imply that I believe in the Christion version of how we originated. I totally reject both the Christian and Darwin versions of reality—the only reason I spend more time attempting to refute Darwinism than Christianity is because Darwinism is now accepted through all levels of "intelligent" society as a fact that is completely beyond dispute. And thus, we are supposed to believe the following genealogical absurdity that supposedly describes our origin: Amoeba, tadpole, frog, mouse, rat (another inspiration from the textbook of science), Chihuahua, beagle, cocker spaniel, bulldog, wolf, stunted bear, full-blown bear, mutant chimp, gorilla, YOU, and there you have it--the complete biological history of man!

It would help if, for once, people would be willing to consider the possibility that Western Culture has been based on a single line of thought that has evolved menacingly through the preposterous fairy tale of religion and turned into the monstrous wave of mass murder that goes by the name of science. The altar has been moved, the icons have been transubstantiated, and the modern priests of science have discarded hell for the more realistic threat of nuclear annihilation, but nothing has really changed, and we are all at the mercy of a very bizarre wave of incredible folly.

Does anyone, anyone at all, realize what it means to subscribe to Darwinism? Here, in the hallowed and much revered halls of King Darwin, we are told that the survival of the fittest is the way that the species maintains itself against the challenges that nature presents. In other words, kill or be killed. Is it any wonder that Hitler was a devout worshipper of Darwin? Is it any wonder that we live in a world where there are a billion guns and there is a murder every minute or so?

And then, when we have a callous, mean-spirited, ridiculous "philosophy" like Darwinism as our guiding light, is it any wonder that we're on the verge of extinction? And also, for those who advocate Darwinism, is it any wonder that they look on the constant slaughter of innocent victims by gunfire with anything more than one great big yawn? So what if they died? One way or another, they were just a pawn in the bloody and apocalyptic game of Darwinism.

I know it sounds wonderful to hear that we're "evolving," but the sad fact is that, essentially, all we're evolving is the mechanisms for murdering each other. All the other "evolutions," like the car and the computer and cell phone, are just pleasant distractions that divert us from the main show, the bloody reality of modern culture. I realize my view will be considered extreme and unrealistic, but there are literally hundreds of millions of people who would agree with me—the problem is that they can no longer speak because they've been gunned down and have forever lost their voices.

The theory of evolution is such a tacky theory--so cheap and tawdry as it trivializes our creation into some bizarre chemical chain reaction that kept evolving into higher and higher life forms. By the way, if the human being evolved from the tadpole and the frog, then why are there so many tadpoles and frogs still inhabiting the earth? Did they miss the evolutionary bus? And do you really honestly think, feel, or sense that if you went back through your genealogical records for the last ten million years or so, you'd find that your ancestors were two frogs who mated in a swamp on a cold, dark, and dismal night? Come on! The theory of evolution is really the height of blatant stupidity even if it is exalted to a commandment by the intelligentsia. Brainwashing comes in many forms, and the bloody cult of Darwinism is the most obvious example of brainwashing in the modern world.

We are not the product of chemicals; rather, we are the product of consciousness, the consciousness of the Creator. And this Creator didn't need "evolution" to create the universe. He/She doesn't have to move in such a slow and robotic way but can simply create without having to obey all the laws of physical matter. There's a great resistance nowadays to admitting into consideration anything that is not observable or measurable. That's because we've been scammed for a couple of thousand years by people who were spiritual frauds, and so we've retaliated by throwing out the baby with the bath water. Forget about all the interpretations and pronouncements of organized religion, phony psychics, and gurus. Concentrate on this one question: Does the non-physical exist or is it a mirage? Is there, to phrase the question another way, anything beyond or behind what you can see, hear, taste, touch, or smell?

If you take the position that there is nothing beyond the five senses, then you are left with what seems to be an impossible riddle: How was everything created that your five senses can perceive? The antagonism to admitting that the non-physical is an actuality has gained the reputation as being a position that is based on ruthless logic, but how is it logical to assert that created objects have no creator? It's roughly the same thing as asserting that you have no mother and father and came into existence by chance.

Once upon a time, I read a quantum physics book that attempted to explain this. Supposedly, way back when, there were zillions of atomic particles floating around, and just by chance, they united to form the universe. Those random particles! The creator of this theory admitted that the odds of the random particles combining to form a universe were incredibly small—far less than one trillionth of one percent, BUT, since we were alive on planet earth, this meant that the particles must have combined to form the universe—otherwise, we wouldn't be here.

This theory, besides being farfetched to the point of absurdity, still doesn't account for the existence of the random particles. Where did they come from? Hmmm...A Creator? The Creator concept can be very bothersome to some because it might seem like I'm trying to trick people into going to church and memorizing the Ten Commandments. And then we'll be forced to celebrate Christmas, Easter, and all the rest of it. But my only purpose here is to lay a foundation from which we can then examine tragedies like Flight 9525. So let me reemphasize two fundamental principles: 1/ Humans beings did not create the universe, and 2/ The universe, and everything in it, was created by its Creator. This all seems simple and obvious to me, and I hope you feel the same way about it.

When we realize and accept that the universe was created by a Creator, we can look to that universe to deduce clues as to what the nature of the Creator might be. When you read a book, you can begin to understand, to some extent, the personality, nature, and ideas of the author. So what do we begin to understand when we "read" the universe?

To me, there are four things that stand out. First, as I have already mentioned, is the vast infinite perfection of the universe. Second is the strange flaw of injustice as it relates to human beings. Third is the fact that every living being dies and that this death is rarely a happy event. Fourth is the perplexing issue of insects.

I'll begin with insects—to me, these beings are a _clue_ to something that we have, as yet, not comprehended. Please put aside all the scientific explanations for an insect's existence, which are nothing but slapdash attempts to explain what is actually a profound mystery. Yes, the scientists will say that insects are part of the food chain, etc., etc., but this is really missing the point. For good examples of what I'm talking about, let's take mosquitos, cockroaches, and ticks. Can you think of a single positive reason for these creatures' existences? If they all disappeared tomorrow, do you think it would affect us, or anything else, negatively at all? Besides the fact that insects like this are extremely ugly and incredibly vicious, even if it is on a relatively small scale, I don't see what purpose these beings serve, even to themselves.

There you are, out on your back patio on a lovely summer evening, when a bloodthirsty wretch of an insect called a mosquito comes along and ends up sucking some blood out of you. Bad enough! But if you're really unlucky, the mosquito might give you West Nile disease, and then you could end up dying because you were minding your own business as you tried to enjoy a pleasant evening. Or maybe you'll be taking a tranquil walk through the woods and a tick will fall onto you, with the end result being that you contract Lyme's disease.

Who created these little monsters? The Creator, of course, because the Creator created everything. We can look at a splendid sunset or any other wonderful natural phenomenon and marvel at the beauty being expressed, but it's also worthwhile to look closely at an insect and observe all the rapacious ugliness that an insect expresses. Have you read about people being staked to rocks in the desert and then covered with honey so that they can be devoured by ants? It's true that the human being bears most of the blame for this type of atrocity, but it's also true that the ant is really demonstrating its true nature. I'm sure that if you came across a person staked to a rock in the desert, you'd work to set him or her free, but the ant has an entirely different agenda. And if we look at this agenda without trying to water it down with some bogus evolutionary explanation, we can see that ants are incredibly savage and vicious beings. If they were as big as dogs and there were as many of them on the earth as there are right now, humans would be gobbled up alive in a matter of days—guns or no guns.

So insects represent one clear problem that must be overcome when one is trying to understand the Creator. What's generally happened is that people idealize the Creator and sweep under the rug those manifestations of creation that are gross and unpleasant. (I suppose that it's possible to make an argument that the problems created by insects are caused by human beings. The argument would go something like this: If we lived a more natural life, a life that was based less on technology and cities, then insects would not create the problems that they currently do. Cockroaches thrive in crowded city conditions, etc. But this argument fails to consider the nature of the life of an insect. What is the point of a life that is based on crawling around and preying on other beings?) There's no getting around it—if you observe ants closely, it's really an appalling show. It's so appalling that it calls into question every notion that you've ever had about a divine and merciful Being who created the universe.

Somewhat similar to the problems that insects create, when one is attempting to understand the Creator, is the problem of injustice, especially when this injustice causes a person to die. This is, of course, a very common occurrence, and we need to consider it carefully before we come to any hypothesis about the Creator.

A woman and child are taken hostage by an abusive husband, and eventually he murders them. What did they do to deserve such a fate? It's probably incidents like this that cause many people to reject God as a fairy tale. On the one hand, God is presented as all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-merciful, but then, on the other hand, this God sits by passively while the mother and child are murdered. And occasionally, to make things even worse, the one who murdered them is never caught.

So where was God when all this happened? Was He goofing off? Was He on vacation in paradise? The most common excuse given for God's unwillingness to intervene when rapes and murders are occurring is that the tragedies and injustices in this world are a result of the free will that was supposedly given to human beings by the Creator. When this explanation is examined closely, it clearly fails to answer the question. First of all, when an eight-year-old girl is abducted, raped, and then murdered, I don't see how one can talk about free will. Yes, the murderer exercised his will, but as is _always_ the case, the victim was deprived of his or her will to live. This is also exactly what happened to the passengers on Flight 9525 who were executed because of the violent whims of a psychotic individual.

Can you imagine what everyone felt as the pilot beat on the cockpit door with an ax in a desperate attempt to break through the door and get to the controls of the plane? That, right there, would be enough to frighten the wits out of anyone. Your execution is rapidly approaching. _What is it_ _going to feel like as you're being put to death?_ Will it really be instantaneous? Or will the process whereby your life is extinguished be more like a collection of horrible moments? Maybe your execution will only take a second, but who can imagine and who would want to experience that second?

And my question is: Why do human beings have to experience such awful moments? How, in this perfect universe, has such a thing become possible? To repeat a question I have asked many times: Where was God when this plane crash happened? How could a supposedly loving Being permit this to happen? Here, the free will argument completely falls apart and becomes practically a mockery of victims. Parents will, to some extent, allow their children free will, but if their three-year-old child runs into the street, they will dash out to save the child. You don't hear a parent saying, "I had to let Sarah run around in the middle of the expressway because I've given her free will." It doesn't make any logical or emotional sense for a Creator to allow His/Her creations to destroy themselves.

The free will argument is just a desperate attempt to make sense of something truly horrible with a quick and superficial rationalization. And so, since organized religion has been unable to come up with a sensible answer, people turn away from the possibility of there being a spiritual, non-physical explanation to the problem of injustice. Instead, they accept the irrational scientific explanation that everything connected to humans is based on random association. And since it wouldn't be logically satisfying to limit this random association to just humans, the idea is extended to the whole universe.

Can you see what's happened? Because religion has become so absurd and so far removed from true spiritual aspirations and insights, people have, in a kind of passive despair, accepted the modern notion that our only purpose in living is to propagate the species. Why bother? What's the point in propagating the species if, at the end of it all, humanity is going to become extinct because, in the scientific view of reality, everything on earth (along with everything in this universe) will eventually be obliterated forever? The whole theory of evolution is so utterly cruel and ridiculous. It glorifies the slaughter of those who are unfit to live—survival of the fittest—on the grounds that life here on planet earth is constantly evolving to some higher state. This is quite clearly nothing more than the old, thoroughly discredited Nazi vision of life, which arose out of the excesses of the industrial revolution.

Let's return to the question that we're analyzing: Why do these horrible atrocities, like Flight 9525, exist in this magnificent universe? It's somewhat similar to buying a magnificent house, but then, a week after you've signed the mortgage, you go downstairs to the basement and find a section of the foundation that is all rotted out. Another analogy would be that you've won some great award—Most Outstanding Person on the Planet—and afterwards, you're going along a receiving line where you're shaking the hands of all these wonderful people. But then, when you reach the last person in the line, he pulls out a gun and shoots you through the heart.

This is where death comes into the picture. It's just all so depressing to live a life where there's so much to be grateful for, where there are so many valuable lessons learned, where there are so many days that make one fall in love with life, but then, the last person you meet in your line of days shoots you through the heart. Of course, usually, even in this ludicrous world, you won't be shot to death—more likely, you'll have a heart attack or cancer or some other dreadful thing that will bring your breathing to an unceremonious halt. And then, after that, you're thrown into the furnace at the crematorium. Isn't that something to look forward to?

Is there any positive explanation for all this? Or are we just oversized ants whose lives have no real meaning at all?

Their bodies all torn asunder after they plunged into the mountain; their dreams forever extinguished; children who had never done anything to anyone; lovers who would never look into their lover's eyes again; mothers who would never hold their children again. All of them innocent, absolutely innocent.

So before we even attempt to come up with a positive explanation for this catastrophe, we should pause before the dismembered remains of the victims. What had they done to deserve this? Nothing, absolutely nothing. So hideous...so unjust. Where were you God? In this perfect universe, how could this have happened? The last minute on that plane would have been nothing but agony and terror.

So is there a positive explanation for all this terror and tragedy? It can't really be that we were just created to suffer and die. Can it? What is the point of this whole thing? It often seems like life is a grand adventure, even a quest. There's a constant drive for something more, as if there's some buried spiritual treasure out there. But then, one day, we find ourselves on Flight 9525, and the quest goes out the window as we're reduced to screaming in terror at our approaching fate. Most of us won't die in such a dramatic and super-sudden way, but death is death, so it pretty much amounts to the same thing. So what is the explanation?

First of all, if we're mired in some kind of devout worship of the theory of evolution, there will never be an explanation. If, supposedly, we're all in the process of evolving to some superior state, 150 dismembered bodies on a mountainside don't make any sense at all. Neither do the hundreds of millions of victims of gun violence make any sense. But if one realizes that the human being is a creation of consciousness, then we move closer to finding an explanation. Because, with this realization, we're recognizing that we are not separate from the Creator but have, inherently, the same consciousness that the Creator possesses. What this means is that we've eliminated the division between the Creator and the human being, so the question as to why the Creator allowed an earth to exist that was nothing but an out-of-control bloodbath no longer has any meaning. We are the Creators, and this is what we're creating. There's no superior Creator standing above us passively as He/She watches millions and millions of people being shot to death. We _are_ the Creators.

But we still haven't answered the question as to why consciousness has moved into such a violent and destructive dimension. It's really an immense question that has never been satisfactorily answered.

Before attempting to answer this question, I would like to discuss an interesting concept that I call the Perspective Guest. The perspective is that we are microscopically small beings in an incredibly vast universe that has existed for billions upon billions of years. Let's say, for instance, that reincarnation exists and one has lived millions of lives. The events of one life would then amount to virtually nothing in the great scheme of things. In other words, although the pain of injustice and death is a significant concern in one single life, it fades away to insignificance if a person lives millions and millions of lives—assuming, of course, that these lives end in a reasonable way and aren't just a constant repetition of the injustice that occurred to those on Flight 9525.

I connect the word Guest with Perspective because I don't think we really consider our relative size in relation to the universe, and so it's necessary to allow the Perspective Guest into one's life and allow Him/Her to explain an alternative view of existence. The basic principle is that humanity is so small, in terms of the size of the universe, that nothing we consider important is likely to have any significance whatsoever.

Astronomers now estimate that the universe may contain a trillion galaxies, with the average size of each galaxy being about two hundred billion stars. (The estimate for the number of galaxies keeps rising--just a few years ago, the universe was estimated to contain two hundred billion galaxies.) The age of the universe is estimated to be fourteen billion years, but this estimate is, of course, not to be taken very seriously. Who really knows? Most likely, the universe is much older than that, but fourteen billion years is certainly a long, long time.

Because of our relative size to the universe as a whole, it's fair to say that we're probably way too small to understand the deeper meaning of things. Quite honestly, none of us have much insight into death and have wavered between the religious idea that there is eternal life and the scientific idea that death is the end of everything. A kind of fairy-tale-type hope battles sinister realism, and while the religious viewpoint seems somewhat ridiculous, the scientific view is clearly illogical and is simply based on a collection of intellectual principles that arose out of a justifiable antagonism to religion.

Put simply, our ability to understand the universe and our roles in it are, quite possibly, beyond our capacities. Science and religion have made a few exceptionally feeble attempts to explain the meaning of our lives, but the truth lies beyond anything that has, at least as of yet, been discovered. Heaven and hell? Evolution? The Big Bang theory? God the Father? Really? Can anyone take these types of ideas seriously? As Aristotle once said, "My only advantage is that I know that I don't know, while everyone else thinks that they know."

But for those who believe in the wonders of technology, science is the new religion, and therefore, it can't be questioned. Meanwhile, for those who believe in some supposedly sacred book that's been passed down for a couple of thousand years, there's nothing more to learn or understand. What so many of us don't seem to realize is that there are many other possibilities for explaining the universe that don't have anything to do with the ideas put forth by religion or science.

Folks, the best hope when trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe is to say to oneself that you're not going to rely on anyone else's opinions about this. You'll listen to those opinions because you're not really given a choice to ignore them, but it's a serious mistake to accept them inwardly as truthful pronouncements from some kind of knowledgeable authority that can't be challenged—whether the authority be that of science or that of religion. No, what these pronouncements are, obviously, is the pronouncement of some other human being. This person may cloak himself in a priest's robe or a college degree, but robes and degrees aren't going to solve the problem of injustice—in fact, they've demonstrated that they can't solve the problem because the ideas emanating from the robes and degrees are exceptionally shallow. Incredibly so! And no, I didn't come from a frog or a tadpole or an amoeba. And no, I'm not going to hell because I have so little respect for organized religion. It's amazing to me that in 2017, we're still dealing with such ludicrous concepts as if there might be some truth to them.

Let's examine this question of our relative size in relation to the universe carefully. Imagine a painting that's one hundred trillion miles high and five hundred trillion miles wide and that this painting is actually a painting of the whole universe. Now suppose that I gave you a billion years to find yourself in this painting, but after the billion years had passed, you hadn't been able to find yourself. Since, for the purpose of this exercise, I'm an all-knowing Being, I understand what the problem is. Although this huge painting is done in exquisite detail, the universe is so incredibly big that even galaxies have had to be miniaturized millions of times so that they could fit into the painting. So to be helpful, I give you a microscope that can magnify everything in the painting a trillion times over, but still, at the end of another billion years, you haven't even been able to find the Milky Way, much less yourself. After that, I give you a gigantic microscope that magnifies everything by infinities, and finally after a few million years, you believe that you've finally discovered a speck in this painting that looks like you. It turns out that the speck is only the Milky Way, but at least you know that you're on the right track! And then, five million years later, you discover yourself! And what are you doing? You're having an argument with your boss as you try to convince him that the ideas you have about his new project for an expanded break room are extremely important.

Yes, this belief we all share, at least to some extent, in our significance is an interesting phenomenon. We constantly run around in a perpetual state of anxiety and urgency as we seek to prove how important we are. And what about our ideas? Aren't they important? Well, speaking in cosmic terms, our ideas really don't amount to anything at all. They're just phantoms that delight us for an hour or a day or a week or a month or a year or a lifetime, but then they vanish like fireflies on a summer night. We're just so utterly tiny and puny. I do believe that the universe is trying to tell us something!

And the something that it's trying to tell us is that, at present, we're too small to understand the real mysteries that perplex us. Neither religion nor science can help us to unravel these mysteries because in the great scheme of things, they represent the first tentative and exceptionally feeble steps towards some kind of comprehension of our existence. At best, we're all mere toddlers when it comes to a philosophical understanding of the universe. And what do the pre-toddlers of religion and science really understand about the metaphysical aspects of injustice? The answer: Not much of anything.

Thus, any admittedly remote possibility of discovering the solution to the mystery of injustice can only be found through inner investigation and a willingness not to be bound by the outmoded constructs of science and religion. (Science certainly has its positive uses and applications, but when it ventures into metaphysical theory—such as evolution and the Big Bang theory—it offers nothing but a collection of illogical absurdities. Just because science has invented the light bulb, the car, the gun, the plane, computers, and the nuclear bomb doesn't necessarily mean that it has any insights _at all_ into metaphysical questions. In fact, on principle, it might be wise to exclude the scientific viewpoint from participation in any philosophical discussion because a method of knowledge that has learned how to create the instruments of earthly extinction will probably be an impediment to an intelligent investigation into the origin of injustice.)

However, despite my insignificance and the fact that the question of injustice has never been satisfactorily answered by either religion or science, I do want to look into this question and see what I can find. Even though the attempt to solve the mystery of injustice is likely to be futile, I want to keep examining this issue because if we hope to discover the fundamental reason for the extreme injustices that exist in this world, it is going to require a lot of persistence.

Please bear in mind that we have eliminated the three reasons that are commonly given for the existence of injustice—1/ that it is a random event in a Godless universe; 2/ that God has given us free will; 3/ that God is a benign force who refuses to intervene in human affairs. I've explained sufficiently why hypothesis #1 is false; among the many reasons why hypothesis #2 and #3 are false is that they presume God is outside us. But God is, essentially, consciousness—just as we are essentially consciousness. And from this consciousness, somehow or other, injustice is arising, and at least on planet earth, this injustice is arising more and more frequently until, now, we are all threatened with immediate extinction. Why? Why is this so?

I want to look at the injustice that exists in this world as if it were a crime. It is a crime, of course, but what I mean by that is I want to look for clues surrounding the issue of injustice that might lead us to a better understanding of the issue.

Please bear in mind that this crime has never been solved, so it stands to reason that the solution is not going to be an obvious one—not by any means. What we are looking for is something within the God consciousness that is creating this problem. Everything in existence is based on consciousness, and there is, as I have previously mentioned, no essential difference between the God consciousness and human consciousness. This consciousness manifests itself as the awareness of existence and is extraordinarily powerful because it has created _everything_ in the known universe. There is no other source for the creation of the material world—thus, everything we see in the observable world springs from this consciousness. Everything.

When we observe the solar system and the universe, we can see that in the largest sense, it exists in perfect order, but when we observe the environment we live in, this order begins to break down. No one would call the murder of 149 people on Flight 9525 a manifestation of perfect order. And even on a much more mundane level, no one would say that our governments are an example of perfect order. Neither does our workplace environment or home life show much beyond a sense of controlled chaos. However, these examples of disorder can all be attributed to a conflict that I mentioned earlier—the egotistical activities of thought interfering with the ability of people to perceive things in a loving way.

But even though we know the principal reason for this disorder, which often manifests itself as injustice, the question remains: Why is this happening? Why does the perfection of the universe not manifest itself in our lives? What is the root cause of it all? Why all this pain and suffering?

When all is said and done, I don't think it's possible to escape the conclusion that there is some element in consciousness, the God consciousness and the human consciousness, that is leading us astray. There is nothing else but this consciousness, so everything arises from it.

If we delve deeper into this issue, which means examining things that are quite small, we come across something I have already mentioned--the curious case of insects. For the last thirty or forty years, I have thought that insects (particularly ants, ticks, cockroaches, and mosquitoes) and injustice were the two things for which there were, as yet, no real explanation. And I think, as strange as it might sound, that injustice and certain types of insects are linked.

First, we'll have to dispense with the knee-jerk explanation for the existence of insects. Yes, some insects play positive roles by pollinating many of the foods that we eat, and they also perform some waste management services that improve the environment. But there are a number of insects that are nothing but an abomination and call into question the whole nature of existence. What I am basically saying is this: The two things on this earth that have, up to this point, defied any rational explanation are injustice and insects. Even death is easier to understand than these two things, and since they remain outside our understanding, I am inclined to link them together.

I would rather not give you an example of a specific insect to consider because some of these creatures are just so gross and brutal that it almost defies description. However, for the sake of completeness, I must mention the Argentine ant. Incredibly vicious and predatory, the Argentine ant has now invaded every continent, establishing some truly massive colonies. In Europe, there is a colony that is 3,700 miles long, while in California, there is one that is 560 miles long. While it can be argued that some ants help the ecosystem, no one is claiming that Argentine ants do anything for the environment—for instance, they kill all other ants in the territory that they inhabit. You can read more about Argentine ants on various web sites, but I'll spare you any further details so that, hopefully, you won't have any nightmares about them. These creatures _are_ living nightmares. Voracious, cruel, and completely devoid of even a scintilla of compassion. It's just impossible to observe them without becoming engulfed in a real sense of horror.

I bring up the issue of insects because we really have to keep our eyes open when we're examining the nature of existence. To completely explain injustice, it's going to be necessary to completely explain the nature and structure of the consciousness that created the universe. This is not going to be easy and is going to require a lot of investigation and perhaps some intuition. Above all, we can't stop after a half hour and say: I give up—I can't figure it out. It's so amazing: We're a lot more concerned with listening to or participating in a senseless going-nowhere political debate than we are in truly examining existence. I think the main reason for this is that the mysteries of existence appear to be far beyond our capacity to solve. Maybe that's true, but does anybody think that participating in a political debate is going to solve anything? And after the debate is over, what are you left with? Antagonism, anger, and a lot of egotistical ravings. However, it's interesting to ask questions of yourself that are original and relate to your own existence. Here, I don't mean asking yourself questions about what you're doing with your life but questions that go far deeper into the nature of human life and the tragic experiences, like injustice, that are common to human beings. However, the answer to these questions will never be found if one ends up falling back on the stereotyped explanations that religion and science have been producing for centuries.

One of the core principles I am emphasizing is that there is no fundamental difference between God and the human being—between the consciousness of the Creator and the consciousness of the human being. We have spent centuries where we pictured God as an outside force who was separate from us, but God permeates every single thing in the universe. Obviously. To deny this is to assert that there are some things in existence that are not-God. And if these things are not-God, who created them? Another God?

So God has been projected as being outside of ourselves, and we've ascribed all sorts of virtues onto this Being. Thus, because human life has so many travails and injustices, God is seen as being highly virtuous, as well as all-knowing, all-merciful, and all-loving. In this way of thinking, God becomes the Savior, the one who will rescue us from all the calamities that surround us. There is, however, a definite reluctance to admitting that God is behind the creation of injustice, guns, and the Argentine ant. What have you created today, My Lord? I've created the most vicious and horrible insect imaginable. And also, I've created enough nuclear weapons to end the life of every single person on earth.

So, for most, the usual antidote to the deadly problems we face in our lives is to try and close the gap between the human being and God the Savior through things like prayer, meditation, good works, and following the golden rule. There is, obviously, nothing wrong with doing any of these things, but when these things are done to bridge the gap between God and the human being, it is a false dichotomy, an illusion. God isn't over there—God, the Creator, is here.

Thus, there is no higher power left to appeal to. Before, we always felt that God was on our side and that He would save us, but as the bodies of innocent victims multiply around us, that has turned out to be a dangerous delusion that has no basis in reality. Think of all the people who have died in wars—fifty million, at least, in World War Two. Fifty million prayers that went unanswered, and the reason they went unanswered was because there was no one there to receive them except a meaningless mirage.

Looked at very closely, one has to wonder if physical existence is a failed experiment. Why that would be, I don't know, but it's certainly not outrageous to think that there are some serious design flaws in our physical reality. I suppose most people would consider the Argentine ant to be a somewhat distant and tiny threat to their existence, but's it's fairly clear to me that they represent a serious design flaw in the creation of our earth. The same would go for mosquitoes and ticks. And obviously, the murder of innocent people is a deadly design flaw. _These things should never have come into existence!_ If the creative power can design something as intricate, marvelous, and perfect as the universe; and if the creative power can design something as incredibly complex, efficient, and long-lasting as the human body, then surely it could design a world where violence and the Argentine ant never came into existence.

There is something _violent_ about physical existence. I suppose those enamored with science will praise this violence as some kind of necessary quality to promote evolution, but this claim is nothing but a manifestation of cynical hypocrisy because no one will ever praise violence when the violence is being turned on them. Nothing is ever real until it happens to you. Those on Flight 9525, along with all the other victims that are created each and every day by guns, guns, and more guns, deserve to be heard.

But amidst all these negative clues, there is the phenomenon known as the near-death experience. You've probably heard accounts of people who are clinically dead but end up returning to life, and the experience they have while they are "dead" is a most remarkable one. This experience has happened to literally thousands of people and is characterized by a number of stages that one passes through while transitioning from life to death. There is a sense of peace, followed by the knowledge that one has left his or her body (for instance, one is outside the body and looking at the doctors while they work on the body). Next, one enters a tunnel of darkness but quickly becomes aware that there is a light at the end of this tunnel of darkness. Finally, one enters the light, which is often described as the most beautiful light that one has ever seen.

But before one fully enters the light, there occurs a conversation between the "dead" person and a deceased relative of the dead person. (Curiously, the relative is always, even if very recently, deceased.) During this conversation, the "dead" person is given a choice between proceeding into the light or returning to his/her body.

Science, _of course_ , has tried to belittle the near-death experience with various slanders that bear no relation to reality—that the experience is a dream or that it is caused by lack of oxygen. But the fact that the near-death experience is strikingly similar in those that experience it negates the scientific objections. As I said, there are thousands of persons who have experienced this phenomenon, and you can read some of their accounts on the internet.

There can no longer be any doubt that this phenomenon is real, and I think it is an interesting clue to the nature of reality. Almost without exception, the people who have experienced the near-death phenomenon have felt a great sense of peace and tranquility as they pass through the tunnel of darkness and proceed toward the light at the end of the tunnel.

What I'm interested in here is not so much the fact that this offers fairly convincing proof that one survives death, but rather, what this experience tells us about the nature of consciousness. If consciousness survives the body and is therefore indestructible, then why did it enter a body in the first place? The quick and easy answer is that consciousness desired to experience physical life. But why? What's the benefit? Why bother descending into this vale of tears where people are slaughtered by the millions?

I can't help thinking that physical existence is based on mistaken assumptions and poor choices. Life on earth is very grandiose and often beautiful, but it almost always ends badly—the only real question is how badly it ends. Something, in the field of consciousness, has gone wrong. That's indisputable. When you're a passenger on Flight 9525 and you're only a hundred yards from slamming into the mountain that will dismember you to bits, it's blatantly obvious that something has gone wrong. Not just with the plane but with reality itself. Things like Flight 9525 should never occur; to be murdered by a gun should never occur.

Essentially, we're all on our own personal Flight 9525. The plane may be flying high now with you and your friends having a wonderful time, but the day is coming when the plane is going to slam into the mountain—it's just a question of when.

We begin and end with the question why. Is earthly life some kind of rite of passage to a higher dimension? This idea has been around for at least a couple of thousand years—in Buddhism it is believed that after you have led many earthly lives and have been purified of desire, you are liberated from the cycle of death and rebirth (and also suffering) and enter into a state of perfect peace and happiness—nirvana. In the Western Christian tradition, which isn't nearly as well thought out, heaven is attainable after a single lifetime.

The Buddhist idea has some merit because it would explain why there is suffering. In this view, suffering is a way to cleanse oneself of impurities. But even if this is true, we still run into two essential problems: First, why is the chain of suffering necessary to reach a place where there is no suffering? What's the point of that? It just sounds like a rationalization to explain suffering. Hopefully, suffering does have a positive purpose, but I'm not convinced that it's anything more than a design flaw in consciousness—or perhaps a design flaw in the way that consciousness creates the material world. And secondly, where does the Argentine ant fit into the chain of rebirths that lead to nirvana? You may think all this talk of insects is nonsense, but they do have to be explained in any coherent theory of the universe. So is the Argentine ant involved in the chain of rebirths? And if not, what is its purpose in living? As ugly and vicious as it is, it's still a conscious being.

Another problem with the whole progression-to-an-ideal-state idea is this: Why have some beings entered nirvana while others have many more lifetimes of suffering in front of them? The moralistic explanation for this is that the laggards made poor choices and will be held back from their promotion to a better state until they learn from their mistakes. It's all so trite, isn't it? Work hard, keep clean, and you'll enter the abode of the Gods. But besides being trite, it's also unjust because the people making wrong choices make their wrong choices through some form of ignorance. But why are they saddled with ignorance while others are granted the intelligence to make right decisions? After all, your ability to make intelligent decisions is dependent on many things that were given to you by others—a good upbringing and education, for instance.

The point I'm trying to make here is that we have to be very careful not to fall into the traditional traps that so many people fall into when they examine the real mysteries of existence. And since the mysteries are so profound and difficult to solve, we tend, instinctively, to go along with the long-accepted theories that have been promulgated by either religion or science. Religion, at its core, tells us to work hard, be good citizens, and obey the golden rule so that we'll be promoted after we die. It's good practical advice for living in this world, but the promotion part of the equation is highly dubious and looks suspiciously like a parental controlling device—if you're good today, I'll reward you tomorrow. Meanwhile, science doesn't have a clue. It senses, probably realistically, that the religious explanations are likely to be false, but it has _absolutely_ no counter explanation. I suppose the closest science comes to an explanation is that there is no explanation—you're just an overgrown ant who was put here to propagate the species, and once you die, that's an end to your existence. When you look at it closely, this non-explanation is just a rebellion against some of the more obvious absurdities of religion.

Another possibility that I haven't discussed yet is the idea that we have become separated from God and that our suffering occurs because of this separation. We need to look carefully at this idea because it does seem to answer many of the questions that I have posed in this book. The basic principle of the separation concept is that we have left the safety and security of the non-physical God consciousness and placed ourselves into physical existence. As a rough analogy, it would be like a teenager running away from home because the outside world seems to offer everything that could be desired. But then, when the runaway comes into contact with the real world, suffering is encountered. No longer sheltered by the parents, the runaway is subjected to numerous forms of abuse before he or she realizes that the life one formerly led is far superior to the new life that one has mistakenly chosen.

And so, in our runaway earthly life, we encounter signposts along the way that are meant to guide us back to our real home. It's quite possible to look at ants and wonder if they're tiny omens, omens that say: This is the wrong place for you to be. It would be somewhat similar to a dream that seemed rather pleasant, but then, some kind of omen or sign appears in the dream that indicates the dream is going to descend into fear and horror. Eventually, in both the dream and waking life, the real horror appears—the injustice of murder. The Green River serial killer strangled to death at least forty-nine women, and when one views a documentary about this killer and his victims, it's difficult not to feel that earthly life is a kind of never-ending nightmare. Such a horror show!

In the face of these appalling tragedies, the only way most people can maintain any sense of optimism and hope is to forget about all the innocent victims who have been slaughtered by predators. I think the expression that is used to describe this phenomenon is whistling past the graveyard. We'll just pretend that everything is alright and that although there are a "few" victims here and there and mostly everywhere, it's nothing to be really concerned about and shouldn't be allowed to affect our overall viewpoint about life on planet earth. Thus, we lift our spirits up to heaven but keep our eyes on the ground so that we won't trip over a dead body. You may think I'm exaggerating, but that's what it's coming to.

Have you ever seen interviews with those who have lost a loved one due to violence? For instance, consider the parents of the twenty children who were murdered in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, by a mentally ill person. The parents of these victims aren't whistling past the graveyard—that's for sure. Rather, they maintain both an intense animosity towards guns and a profound grief for the loss of their children. But who cares about them? Since it hasn't happened to me, I can pretend that it never happened, or I can pretend that it could never happen to me. We've become so heartless and sociopathic about the whole thing. Twenty murdered children? No big deal. And anyways, what are we going to do about it? I guess, nowadays, the best strategy is to prepare to duck and cover when the gunfire erupts.

So guns, along with insects and murder, are another omen that indicates we've come to the wrong place. It's similar to walking into a room where four or five people are brandishing their guns. Wouldn't you consider that a bad sign and wouldn't you walk out of the room as quickly as you could? Unless, of course, people had already begun shooting at each other, in which case the duck, cover, and crawl strategy would be option number one. What a pathetic and ridiculous world—a world swarming with guns, insects, and murders. And also, a world where everyone could be annihilated within a matter of seconds by a nuclear weapon. I think it's fair and logical to say that each and every victim in this world could be considered a sign that we've come to the wrong place.

And so, according to the theory of the separation, these signs are meant to point us in the right direction, point us back towards home—a home where there is only peace, love, and happiness. If this theory didn't fit the facts so well, I would be inclined to dismiss it quickly because it relies on something that seems to be a logical fallacy: How can the God consciousness and the human consciousness separate from each other? I can see a way around this problem, but first, I think we have to be clear that any real separation in the God consciousness and the human consciousness is impossible. Consciousness is consciousness—it's totally indivisible. The God consciousness and the human consciousness are the same—it's impossible to separate them into two parts.

A considerable portion, if not almost all, of the separation idea is founded on the old-fashioned idea that God is a superior entity and we are inferior entities who are attempting to bridge the gap between God and ourselves. So we should follow the golden rule and so on and so forth. And also, in this way of thinking, God is seen as being perfectly good, while the human being is seen as being corrupted by evil. Again, this is all very trite and driven by a subtle but strong puritanical dislike of humanity where, in order to explain or justify suffering, the human being is made into the scapegoat.

What interests me in the separation idea is the possibility that consciousness may have wandered away from its natural home. Here in our daily life, we've certainly done that as our minds have become constantly obsessed with the microscopic trivialities of thought. So let's call what we're talking about The Wandering and not The Separation. Wander is an interesting word with a number of different meanings that include the idea of moving in a meandering and aimless way, and also, wander can mean deviating, digressing, straying, or becoming sidetracked.

Consciousness, as we have discussed, contains enormous power—it is no exaggeration to say that the power inherent in consciousness created the universe. However, we do have to wonder about the health of this consciousness when it can create all the negative things that we see on this earth. _Something has gone wrong_. Somehow or other, consciousness has taken a wrong turn, and we are now trapped on a planet where murder is taken for granted and occurs thousands of times a day if we include those who die in wars.

There is, indeed, much that is beautiful on this planet, but this beauty is being extinguished before the injustices that plague humanity. Is the urge to live in the material world and experience physical reality somehow a wrong path that consciousness has taken? But why? Why would it devolve into a wrong path? And if it is a wrong path, for some reason or other, why would any consciousness walk down that path?

We do have to face the fact that the power of the Creator, at least in the physical world, is a flawed power. We've always resisted facing this fact even though it's rather obvious. After all, if the Creator created everything, then that force has to be held responsible for every single one of the atrocities that have occurred and will occur on this earth. Yes, these atrocities are committed by men and women, but the men and women were all created by the Creator. The essential point here is that we have to reject the false idea that God is over there, I'm here, and the two of us are different entities. This idea has propped up religions since day one, but it is clearly false since it postulates that there are things in this universe that are not-God. Clearly, everything is a manifestation of God, a manifestation of the creative power of consciousness. Logically, it's ridiculous to ascribe all the noble qualities to God and all the evil qualities to man. Each and every quality that exists inside ourselves must also exist in God because God is the creator of everything. Everything. There is nothing that is not-God, and to say that the human being has misused the power that was granted to him by God is to belittle God. There are no footnotes or exceptions to everything, and the God consciousness permeates every single thing and idea in this universe. Obviously—otherwise, you would have something in existence that is not-God, and then we'll have to invent another God to account for the creation of that which is not-God.

Many people have found the everything-is-God idea (which is called pantheism) to be repellant, even if logical, so they have arrived at a kind of compromise. The compromise is this: Yes, God is everywhere, but the human being has separated himself from God by falling prey to the seven deadly sins—gluttony, lust, avarice, pride, sorrow, wrath, and laziness. And in this way of viewing reality, one can only unite with God by turning away from the seven deadly sins. This is another form of the purification idea that we've discussed before as God is elevated to an exalted throne, while man is debased as an inferior creature who will need many lifetimes to purify himself. There is, for some, comfort in adhering to and following this idea—supposedly, if you make a sincere attempt to be good, follow the commandments, say your prayers, and cleanse yourself, you will eventually be rewarded. In other words, if you can turn away from sin, you will be protected. Once again, all this can be good practical advice, but I don't think it at all describes the true relationship between ourselves and the Creative power. As I've said many times, we are the Creative power—there is no fundamental division in the consciousness of the Creative power. It is all one.

There may, however, be levels within this creative consciousness. Consider this example: There are many genres of music, some of which are rather crude and almost barbaric, while others are quite refined and express great beauty. To be immersed in music that is essentially ugly and violent will obviously lead the listener to different experiences than those that are encountered by people who listen to music that elevates their spirits and thoughts. In the same way, I have to wonder if physical reality is a gross and painful expression of consciousness, while the non-physical reality that has been encountered in near-death experiences is apparently free of suffering and any of the other atrocious ailments that plague physical life. This still does not answer, of course, the question as to _why_ this painful choice of physical life would even be an option to consciousness.

(Another idea that has some relationship to The Wandering concept is the possibility that physical life is an illusion and that everything one perceives with the five senses is essentially a mirage. This idea has merit, but for the purpose of our discussion, it makes no difference whether physical reality is an illusion or not because if it is an illusion of some kind, the suffering that comes from injustice still exists. What we are asking, very persistently, is why does suffering, or the perception of suffering, exist? This world of ours, in 2017, has become a tidal wave of suffering, misery, and murder, and as I walk through the woods on a pleasant spring day, I can't help but look up towards the sky and say, "Why? Why is there so much suffering and injustice in this world?" And the reason I ask these questions is because if we can ever figure out the root cause of suffering and injustice, we should be able to do something about it. You can't fix your car until you know why it isn't working. And life on this earth isn't working for billions of people who are currently alive, and it certainly hasn't worked for the half billion victims our culture has produced with its mania for guns and massive million-person killing sprees, which go by the name of wars.)

I understand that the things I have been discussing are often theoretical and are not based, for the most part, on any direct knowledge that I have. To be honest with you, I don't know what the answer to the question of injustice is, but I do know that the answer exists because there is obviously a cause (or reason) for everything that exists in this world. For every creation, there is a reason. I also feel certain that the answer to this question of injustice is not to be found in any religious or scientific book. Rather, it's to be found by a very inquisitive mind that is free and totally independent from any of the standard orthodoxies of the modern age. I do believe that an understanding of insects such as the Argentine ant is perhaps the best clue we have that would enable us to unlock the mystery of injustice.

Be observant! Be aware! Insects could be a false lead, and there may be other leads that I have missed. My basic point in bringing up insects is to show that any coherent explanation of the God consciousness must include everything--including especially those things that are living nightmares.

Examine nature closely—things like trees are very interesting. Allow your mind to wander and engage in free association—don't just get bogged down in the incessant worry and turmoil of daily life. Try to walk in a natural setting for an hour a day, and while you're out there, ask yourself this question: Why is all this (that I am seeing) here? _Why am I_ _here?_ I know it's an immense question—particularly because not many people are interested in things like this. But what could be more interesting? Wouldn't you like to know why you are here? Don't just fall back on some traditional religious explanation because you can't figure it out in twenty minutes or twenty hours or twenty years. Meanwhile, science will tell you that the only reason you're here is because your parents participated in a lustful event that ended up in the creation of your body. And that without this body, which carts around your consciousness all day, you wouldn't be anything at all. (I'm coming around to the view that the consciousness carts around the body as a kind of peculiar offspring that it's trying to disassociate itself from.)

Please don't fall into the trap of believing the words of another because for something to be real to you, it has to be more than a belief—it has to be knowledge. Those who know, don't believe; those who believe, don't know. That's obvious. (I'm speaking, of course, of real knowledge—not the assertions of know-it-alls.)

Finally, I think that the key to unlocking the mystery of injustice is awareness because awareness puts you in touch with the God consciousness. Thought is deceptive and based on personal experience, prejudice, and desire, but awareness allows you to come into direct contact with what actually _is_. Thought is of the past memories or the future hopes and fears, but awareness is the experience of _now_. It is thus uncontaminated by personal bias, and if you're not very careful, any examination into the question of injustice will be skewed by thought, which always has some kind of an agenda. When it comes to solving the mystery of injustice, _all_ the agendas are clearly false because agendas come from the past, and nothing in our past, either individually or collectively, has solved the mystery of injustice. Obviously! The solution to this is there, but it will require a very perceptive and aware mind to find it.
This is one of many books of mine that can be purchased on various web sites--currently, as of June 2020, there are 24 novels, 4 novellas, 9 anthologies, and 6 non-fiction books, so there is plenty to choose from!

I would like to emphasize that my novels are _very_ dissimilar from one another and have all sorts of different plots, themes, and attitudes. I've written a number of murder mysteries, four love stories, a gothic tale, a trial of a police officer for murder, a couple of unusual fantasies, a story about a homeless guy, a trial of a young guy who thinks that he's discovered the secret to life, a locked-room mystery, a book about a psychiatrist and a troubled woman, a tale about a student/teacher relationship, two satires, an unreliable narrator mystery, and three novels that are essentially political, sexual, and social commentaries.

