

Doubt and Reassurance Volume II

(Also available in soft-cover print editions)

Dr. Don Ray

_Don Ray's work published by Quantum Embrace Publishing at_ Smashwords

Copyright © 2011 Don Ray

All rights reserved.

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Guide tips for this journey:

You should know what you're getting into, so here's an overview.

In looking at the nature of the entries in this book, to include some contrived list of chapters just seemed like deceptive advertising, implying far greater organization and rational planning than I could ever muster.

Instead of distinct elements and topics conveniently lending themselves to a socially acceptable compilation of chapters worthy of a passing grade in English class, the entries are arranged in a progressive direction. They grimly start out heavy on the doubts. But then, in the spirit of a climbing expedition in which you have to start the summit ascent in the middle of the night, about the time you feel you can't stand stumbling through any more darkness you seem to notice that just maybe you can discern a little bit more light, and soon, although the darkness still surrounds, you can see beyond the attenuated beam of you headlamp, and your spirits lift with the reassurance that warming sun lies just over the horizon.

So if in reading you begin to doubt you can handle any more grim assessments of the state of the world, fast-forward to the sunrise and reassurance by skipping to the later sections. Within those later sections you reach the summit for this climb, a feeble stab at a summary of the Purpose that the condition of the world and humanity so majestically fulfills.

Whether you take the long technical route or a shorter, more scenic trail, I pray the burden of your doubts is somewhat lightened, and the waxing glow of reassurance assists your route finding.

Of course on any trail, landmarks and mile-markers can provide some reassurance that at least you're not totally lost. So here are some things to watch for along the way. It seems more accurate to call them "landmarks and milestones", but editing software insists I call them:

Table Of Contents

* Part I: The world's a mess. We're a mess.

No point pretending otherwise

*Part II Physical brains, disabilities, guilt, confession,

Whoo hoo! Now we're having some fun!

*Part III: Hints of growing light and approaching spring.

About darned time, huh?!

* Part IV: The metaphysical structure, purpose, and ontological foundation of existence and eternity.

Say what?!

* Part V: Corollaries arising from the metaphysical structure, purpose, and ontological foundation of existence and eternity.

Say what again?!

**********************

Part I

Got doubts about the world in which we live and the lives we lead? When doubts are well placed and justified, at least some reassurance is to be found in knowing that someone else shares those doubts.

Part I

(back to table of contents)

Why our morbid fascination with mass shootings, the shooters, and the next disaster?

Look at all those hits on my website in the twelve hours after posting an essay about the Virginia Tech massacre! (April, 2007)......Such a fascination we have with disaster and evil.

Why should bad news, disaster, evil, mayhem, war, murder, and violence so capture our interests?

Is it simply because such events pose a potential threat to us? "If it happened to them, it could happen to me, so I better stay informed." Or does our interest in these events reflect some innate interest in evil itself?

No doubt, psychologists have published volumes on this subject which I have no qualifications to discuss.

But I can at least consider the source of my own curiosity.

Does this curiosity about evil arise from the same source as my curiosities about the baffling behavior of physics at the quantum level, the bizarre life forms living equally bizarre life cycles in coral reefs, and the mind boggling variety of planets and nebulae and moons that inhabit this universe?

Does this curiosity about evil ironically stem from a desire to know God, whether we believe in God or not?

Somehow it's hard to ignore tales and rumors of entities and events that just might shed a little light on the mysterious, hidden workings of the universe that shapes our lives. As kids we gathered in macabre reverence around the dead cat in the empty lot, morbidly intent on learning what did happen to the dead, which was really to ask, what does happen to us?

Finding a few animal bones in the woods is always worthy of a pause for inspection, for after all, aren't there bones in us, though we can't see them, and here before us is a chance to see the un-seeable and extrapolate the discovery to understanding our own makeup.

Tales of ghosts in the bed-and-breakfast in which we spent the night, an article about an Unidentified Flying Object, the mystic's description of visiting avatars, all such things arrest our attention, and arrest it to a greater degree than the astonishing and verifiable discoveries of science.

We gape in insatiable curiosity around any liturgical hawker's booth that purports to unveil some aspect of the reclusive creator of that universe.

The itinerant avatar, the tale of reincarnation, and the paranormal event, all provide tantalizing hints of that which we suspect, and perhaps hope for, that there is more, something beyond this material world we see, something more profound than our daily routine and physical body and common death.

And finally, in the unspeakable acts of Jack the Ripper and Cho Seung Hui, like the animal bones that grab our attention in the woods, we see exposed something that might reveal some aspect of the inner workings of a vaguely discerned realm of evil and good that might underlie this temporal world.

Do we see exposed in such acts the bones of something that resides in each of us, or some aspect of an eternal battle between good and evil, or some dark past from which our souls are trying to evolve, or some glimpse of the demonic forces that battle the good God that we hope also exists?

We don't even understand enough to know why we are curious, intrigued, and irresistibly drawn to those reports about the mind of the killer. But we know we are drawn. There is something we want to know, we need to know, and chance discoveries of a dead cat, or bones by a trail, or news of a horrific exercise in evil might reveal to us a little of what is usually kept as mystery and secret.

We will peer into the reports and articles that direct their analytical light into the shadowy depths of the mind and soul of the mass murder. But we will never see very far into that abyss.

Yet there is something else to be learned from our watching the news and reading the reports. Our interest and curiosity themselves can teach us a lesson.

In our interests we cannot deny an instinctive awareness that there is something we should understand, something about that dead cat and those bones and that demented mind that can teach us something about ourselves and the unseen influences that shape this worldly life.

We need not wait for the chance childhood discovery of the deceased animal to learn about bones and biology.

And we need not wait for the breaking news event to ask questions about the nature of good, evil, and their manifold manifestations in human life.

In following our curiosity about what lies within, we ask what invisible bones underlie our life structure. In asking what lies without, we ask what forces and mysteries and mystical influences shape behavior and events. Perhaps we will discover those questions come together and arrive at the same answers.

Perhaps we should let the chance discoveries and morbid fascinations of this spiritual childhood of ours teach us most of all of our own curiosity, affirming that there _are_ profound questions we want to better understand, and from that discovery, send us on a pro-active voyage of discovery of that which exists within, and simultaneously that within which we exist.

*****************************

Trading Diamonds for Whale Teeth

Thoughts while in the Otago Museum, New Zealand

The museum displays include Maori recordings of their history, but history conveyed not in documents and illustrations, but in objects intricately carved. Hardly primitive, the Maori visual art is used to express _deeper_ meaning than mere facts, capturing the _feeling_ of history. Such an artistic expression of history can include dimensions of reality missing in our factual descriptions using chronologies and written word.

In another display, an armored tropical atoll warrior figure reminds me oddly enough of the mountaineers with whom I climbed last week, both adapting to extreme conditions by use of appropriate clothing. Museum displays such as this Maori art reveal not differences between peoples, but our sameness, only masked by different construction, clothing, and media, as dictated by our environments. Expressed through wildly differing forms, in museums such as this the human spirit is revealed to be universally shared.

This sameness is again illustrated in a display of sperm-whale teeth used as jewelry. Our diamonds, their sperm-whale teeth, all the same thing. Except obtaining that sperm-whale tooth required courage and daring, and its owner might have known a relative that died getting their "cetacean diamond". Further, their "diamond" ( tooth ) was a byproduct of getting food to survive, not a possession hunted for its own sake. With that background of honor and courage, I would stack the value of their sperm-whale teeth against our diamonds with their anonymous, bloody, and cruel histories anytime.

**************************

Lightning Strikes

I recently read an article about Suzanne, a young woman struck down by a lightning bolt.

Her nervous system decimated by the current that coursed through her spine, her brain partially deadened by the lack of oxygen during the time her heart did not beat, her completely disabled life now bears no resemblance to the sporty, active, popular life she lived only two years before.

Suzanne's mother made the comment "When you are in public, you want to tell people she wasn't always that way. They don't know the real Suzanne."

True, no doubt.

But I suppose that's true of all of us.

We do not know the real Suzanne because she's trapped in a body that cannot speak, cannot move other than an occasional finger or hand movement. We do not know the real Suzanne that used to, and no doubt would still like to, accomplish, act, do. We do not know the real Suzanne because she can no longer communicate or express who she is.

Yet her tragic situation represents only a more extreme case of the barriers and hurdles we all face. None of us can take on all the activities we would really like to, none can find words that really convey the complexity and depth of our thoughts and emotions.

Let us keep in mind that in dealing with most people, we do not really know them, just as they do not know us. We are all trapped in bodies that constrain our abilities, to greater or lesser degrees. We all fumble with words, and we are all crippled in our communication by the blows of childhood comments, the strikes of rejection, the shock of criticisms, that leave us to varying degrees insecure, hesitant, and protective of our inner selves.

The people passing Suzanne's wheelchair in the grocery store have no way to know of her long jump record or her now missing smile. When passing anyone on the street, in the hallway, or between the cubicles, we have no way to know of their real aspirations, pain, and joys.

Let us learn from Suzanne's example, and keep in mind that behind the personally crippling effects of a bottle, or a history of abuse, or a consuming drive for money, career, and prestige, everyone has loftier aspirations, everyone has an authentic smile, however long hidden.

As we struggle to maintain patience in the relationship, professionalism in the meeting, and sanity on the freeway, let's keep in mind that we all have a real self hidden by the spiritually crippling lightning strikes of personal circumstances.

******************************

Flower Stalk

I go hunting on those morning walks through wooded hills, stalking insights, words, phrases, descriptions, treasures rare and elusive.

The first brush strokes of fall clearly apparent

on a cluster of leaves here,

in a crisp wisp of air there.

Last flowers and desperate grasses

work furiously,

racing the inexorable orbit of the planet,

racing to turn dirt, sun, and water into next spring's life.

Formed of nothing but minerals from soil and mixtures of water and dust, the structural marvel towers above its slender base, more than 1000 (!) times as tall as it is wide, reaching toward the sky, crowned by bright structures of unthinkable complexity, to broadcast a message of life itself.

Its maker has no need for humility as rising sun illumines the marvel of the seed stalk of grass.

All for naught, in this doomed piece of Heaven.

Demon bulldozers spurred by ravenous bank accounts lurk just over the hill, anxious to crush and tear and bury under hot, black, dead tar that which would live, that which would nourish our souls.

***************************

Hawk

Caressing unseen surfaces,

streamlined,

effortless,

frictionless,

coasting down invisible hills,

raised by transparent wisps of spirit.

Motionless, floating, seeing all,

ancient memories fed by

endless sights,

wind curves

unseen by

man,

feather

spirits,

seeking place,

no compromise, drawing

life in precise parabolic arcs

suspended in blue and white space.

**********************************

**Ya Gotta** _Sing_ **Those Carols!**

I write during that season when sounds of Christmas come from the radio, 24/7 if one so desires.

Only a century ago (how short a century now seems to me!) people heard such sounds only in church, or when family sang at home, or when carolers came by, or perhaps at a special performance.

A few times during the Christmas season people would have heard the music of Christmas, and in a number of those occasions they heard the music because they were singing it themselves.

How much more meaning would the lyrics of those songs have had for people singing them themselves. Surely to read the words, to sing them, would unavoidably force one to a greater awareness of what they say. It's hard to sing something without being aware of what you're singing.

Today the marketers ensure we are awash in Christmas music for a solid six weeks before Christmas. I cynically suspect that musical deluge is largely motivated by the hope it will encourage us to more generously give our hard earned money to the poor starving multinational corporations that own the big box stores in which we shop.

And ironically, awash in a tsunami of carols and musical cheer, compared to pre-radio and pre-Muzak times only a tiny fraction of the population knows the lyrics to those traditional carols, and fewer still know the message.

(I type with 'Tasha kitty purring and purring, deeply vibrating my left arm as I stroke her.)

I would be the last to say we should remove the Christmas carols from the radio. I love them and look forward to them each year.

We should just be aware that listening to the carols no more incorporates their spirit into our hearts than playing video games makes us strong and brave. Ironically, in the age of adventure movies we spend more time indoors, inundated with sports we grow fatter, and awash in Christmas carols and images we grow less conscious of their real meaning.

It's the spiritual equivalent of Type II diabetes. The person that consistently grabs the snacks at the convenience stores, always has a soda in hand, gets that bag of chips from the vending machine at work, this person's body continually awash in carbohydrates and the insulin that allows the body to process them, eventually develops a resistance to its own insulin.

So too when our visual and aural senses can so readily access images of adventures and sounds of carols, we develop an oblivious immunity to them.

It's great that after millennia of starving masses, at least some countries now have such bountiful food supplies that Type II diabetes poses a problem. We just need to learn to accommodate this bounty with self-discipline in our eating habits.

It's great that we can now hear Christmas carols and their two thousand year old message around the clock for over a month. We just need to make the effort to ourselves sing once in a while, so that we do not cheat ourselves out of the joy that comes from incorporating that message of hope into our lives. When we do that, even if we only sing alone with the radio accompaniment, other lives will still be touched by the music of our lives, and the meaning of Christmas will not be relegated to a song, a gift, or a single month.

*************************

Potential

Surely the great life struggle is not against Nature and the elements, to build structures and civilizations; it is the struggle with the individualego/ self, even if never to conquer in the face of our myriad weaknesses, to at least progress toward our longed for personal potential.

Most to be pitied is that person who does not aspire, does not wrestle their limitations, does not long for their potential.

***************************8

Surviving modern life: reclaiming your rhythms

We live like pin-balls, bouncing from bumper to bumper. If you have seen Japanese Pachinko games, they offer an even better analogy for our modern techno-lives. Pachinko resembles vertical pin ball, but with no flippers. The balls bounce chaotically from point to point, inexorably moving downward, toward their ultimate fate at the bottom of the machine, just as we inexorably move to our ultimate and commonly shared fate.

All the bombarding inputs, the ceaseless contact with people, the relentless demands upon our time, all this shatters the natural rhythms of our lives.

Living in reactive mode works for a while, keeping the boss off our back, keeping the bills paid, getting the kids to their meetings, but it can't go on forever. Stress, tension, and associated illness eventually add up.

Our modern techno-world destroys our natural rhythms. If we want to reclaim the joy and peace and health of those rhythms, we must fight to regain them.

I've discovered that whenever I begin to feel "off" in my life, I should look to the rhythms by which I live.

For instance, to give one small example, I've finally accepted the necessary weekly rhythms of regular physical exercise. It is essential to one's health, invaluable for one's state of mind, darned helpful for one's emotional condition, and once discovered and made routine, a source of boundless joy.

The first benefit of adhering to rhythms in your life comes from having something to which to look forward. If you plan on that vacation or long weekend or quiet evening at home "once you finally catch up" you will quickly discover that you never catch up, and the light at the end of the tunnel gets farther away instead of closer. Discouragement, resignation, and hopelessness begin to stalk you in that ever darkening tunnel of "to-do's".

Imagine instead your daily, weekly, and annual cycle of rest and relaxation waiting for you on your dayplanner, welcoming you, providing something to look forward to. Wouldn't the hassles of the day, week, and year become more tolerable? Knowing you have hope for escape makes bearing today's imprisonment to duty a bit more tolerable.

I gained a new appreciation for natural rhythms while sea kayaking off the coast of New Zealand. Added to the familiar rhythms of sunrise and sunset were the rhythms of the tides. It became necessary to plan life, well, at least plan the day's coastal kayaking route, around those natural rhythms. The integration of all our activities into the rhythms of the seasons, days, and tides led to a profound peace and clarity of spiritual vision.

Every last shred of existence in this universe functions according to rhythms. From the life cycle of galaxies to the periodic wave-form of sub-atomic particles, Nature builds existence upon rhythms. What audacity possesses humans to imagine they can live otherwise?!

Each day I experience the stress of establishing the day's schedule based less upon any natural cycle but more on the demands of the moment. Sure, if I acquiesce to the demands of the world I may accomplish a lot, but at the price of a growing sense of dissatisfaction, a feeling of disquiet, a malaise of unease.

Over the years of professional life, physically and emotionally I finally felt the lack of rhythm in my life catch up to me, and had to take measures to regain rhythm. I have learned to eat on a schedule and to exercise on a more or less prioritized cycle that takes precedence over weather and work load. I continue to struggle to schedule some semblance of rhythm for time for escape, for vacation, for friends, for Nature.

Perhaps the time has finally arrived to acknowledge I am a part of Nature, a part of the Creation, and I cannot by will or goals or contrived priorities escape the cyclical needs that link me to my evolutionary heritage, that link me to my Creator. Whatever role in some grand Purpose, Design, Universe, or Creation I would play, doesn't it make sense I could more effectively fulfill that role if I lived in harmonious matching rhythm with that Creation, Universe, Design, or Purpose?

Again, our shattered, temporal, human, western, technological world will not make rediscovering rhythms easy. Every ring of the phone, every incoming text-message, every beep of received e-mail, tears and claws at natural rhythms. The boxes in which we live, drive, and work, the artificial light, the filtered air, the genetically engineered, chemically preserved food from anywhere in the world, all hide and warp and subsume the natural rhythms from which we sprang.

Still, I have faith that one searching for those rhythms can find them. The person searching must pay a price, no doubt. A disappointed acquaintance.... a disgruntled boss.....a movie you never got to see. Our human contrived world does not exist in rhythm. Each arrhythmic interruption demanding you accommodate its schedule will exact a toll when you audaciously insist on adherence to your, to our, rhythmic foundations.

That inevitable price is worth it. Ironically, in the long term your peace, health, and productivity can benefit that boss, that family member, that financial project that would by its stringent demands have severed you from your rhythms in order to accommodate its schedule, deadline, or due date.

We must give in, surrender, accept, and submit, not to the project schedule, not to the school schedule, not to the television schedule, but to our natural selves, our rhythms, rhythms of sleep, of eating, of ebbing and flowing energy, of peaks and valleys of creativity. Long term such submission will make us more productive, healthier, happier, more at peace, and perhaps, even a bit wiser.

******************************8

Chicago Subway

I was drawn to it, this city scene, in a macabre re-enactment, like watching an ugly wreck. ? As I unconsciously suspected would happen, on a sad American train I am compelled to fiendishly write.

A mumbling, shaking old woman reads "inside the Third Reich". Is she homeless? Is she rich? Did she make the salad I'll eat on the airplane tonight? Unlike the view from German trains, from these windows looking past the dead desolation of concrete rail bed and steel tracks, here lies only more desolation of concrete and steel. Token islands of growing green survive only at the mercy their masters condescend to bequeath. Bright fresh painted car and motorcycle advertisements make the old church "welcome" sunshine-emblem look even duller.

I can't begin to imagine the lives of the people in those houses. White faces of perky news anchor people whine from ad placards. For me it's a shocking transition from the glistening white snow and blue ice of Tasman glacier that filled my senses a few weeks ago. Layers upon layers of graffiti leave all the graffiti illegible. I've got to admit, even graffiti adds life to these soulless, colorless canyons of brick. The graffiti artists are Michelangelos compared to the architects of these multi-story crypts.

The lady emptying trashcans pulls a magazine out and pauses to look at pictures of the latest styles.

As a naïve newcomer I note in curiosity that this crowd in this car is _all_ white. South bound moments ago the crowd was _all_ black.

Faces etched with crushing sadness scurry into sports pages and "how to please your lover" articles.

News is replaced by high tech red-letter headlines about nothing.

Page 14, my God, page 14: a 23 month old toddler is shot in a drive-by shooting while her 17 year old mother watches. We pass movie billboards advertising danger and suspense.

The highest fence I've seen outside a racetrack debris barrier surrounds the only patch of unpaved land on the entire route.

Why do graffiti faces never show smiles?

Page 25, father shoots a nine year old boy.

The passengers are _still_ all white.

***********************************

Observation on a flight to a place long forgotten:

In first class......she's beautiful.....the bone structure, facial profile, curve of the lips, size of the nose. Yet as her man sleeps, she pulls out three makeup cases, two mirrors, and an assortment of brushes to try to improve what nature has given her. Somehow our society has done her a grave injustice, to ingrain her with this constant concern that she is not good enough, is not pretty enough, is not attractive enough.

***************************

Faithless Fear

Listen to the sirens!

Wow! What is going on?!

God help somebody.

Such strange times, these.

It is almost as if a sense of foreboding underlies the fabric of our nation, waiting on the next Columbine, Oklahoma City, or Twin Towers, the media stoking the fear that keeps ratings high.

Perhaps one of the greatest impacts when a nation loses its faith is the increase in fear, the ease with which a faithless people are frightened.

A nation of easy morals and material priorities is a nation subservient to fear, for in threat to life and possessions, _all_ is threatened, there _is_ nothing else, no other foundation on which to rely.

We were not an easily frightened nation in 1776, or 1941. In 2001 the Twin Towers rattled our martini glasses and interrupted our football games, and we begged our leaders to save us from the freedoms that had given our flag meaning for 225 years.

Our leaders seemed conveniently prepared to oblige our wish.

So we remain free to drink our martinis and watch our football, our faith placed in guns and the stock market....the same guns used at Columbine, the same market that fell with the Towers.

....and decisions once formed and votes once cast by faith, are now molded by fear. "Security concerns", physical and fiscal, have taken precedence, filling the vacuum in the absence of faith-based courage.

The sirens pass, this time.

*************************************

Why are we in a bar?

Bright colors of fall,

belying inevitable gray of winter;

Brightness of party scene,

belying missed hopes.

But all those souls,

in all the bars,

are at least

assuaging

their fears

and loneliness

together, with a smile,

the modern American scene,

faced together.

We struggled against the elements,

and we gathered in tribes.

We struggled against the next tribe,

and we gathered into castles.

We struggled against

weather, seasons, and pestilence,

and we gathered at barn raisings, hoedowns, and ceremonies.

We struggled nation against nation,

and we came together in armies.

We strove for economic and manufacturing power,

and we came together in factories, mines, corporations, and unions.

We reached out for the unseen Purpose,

and we came together at pyramids, temples, and churches.

And now,

bereft of family,

of bonds, of stability,

we battle our loneliness,

and we come together in bars,

meeting over a glass of chemicals,

attempting to dissolve away the veneer

of discipline, the work place, the modern contrived priorities.

Mightily we struggle,

valiantly we laugh,

boldly we say

"good to meet you"

in this modern war

with the condition

of our souls.

We

drown

in tepid

loneliness,

but in tribute

to the human spirit,

we refuse to drown alone,

clustering together,

toasting the

flickering

embers

of our lives,

accepting our fate,

but not succumbing to it,

the modern Americans;

connectionless,

touchless,

always

armed

with

a smile;

Defending

their Alamo

of loneliness,

their Bataan of isolation,

locking arms in comradery

at the barricades

of a loveless

society.

*************************

Lights in the Gray

Memories of scene,

a place,

a time

fade to uniform gray,

while the touch,

the smile,

the gift

shine through distant past.

*****************************************

Spiritual Leprosy

A plague of loneliness besieges our world. Zombie-like undead shuffle into bars, night after night, seeking some touch of any sort. Their curse prevents them from even recognizing the touch once it's finally offered. If they feel the touch it may send them fleeing in panic, or their pain induced madness may induce them to strike and claw and bite at the proffered contact, or their long deadened, jaded, scarred nerve endings simply can't feel the touch, even when in full embrace.

Like emotional lepers, bits and pieces of our feelings have simply fallen by the way- side, casualties of the ravages of this 21st century disease of loneliness. When we've lost enough of our emotional wholeness, akin to the leper, it finally becomes obvious enough so that others shy away from us, crossing over the street of life to avoid contact.

So the most abused, the most neglected, the most neurotic, get recognized, their scarred and disfigured personalities further securing their isolation. For most though, the lost emotional appendages are not evident enough to frighten away others. In time, the damage plays its inevitable role, preventing meaningful contact between souls, preventing feeling deep affections.

Emotional lepers with invisible scars shuffle through this land of spiritual plague and pestilence.

How will future societies view our state?

We wonder in disbelief at our forbears' ignorance of the causes of their problems. "How could the cholera infested cities have not realized that their putrid water supply and primitive hygiene caused the disease?" we ask.

Centuries from now perhaps humanity will look back on this time of self-induced demolition of souls and understand the why's and reasons. They will see our psychotherapy as equivalent to bleeding with leaches. They will see our crime and violence and gang warfare as the evident buboes of our technology and economics.

Hopefully those future generations will have learned preventive measures and will wonder at our ignorance in isolating ourselves from Nature and its rhythms. Perhaps those future generations will shake their heads at our incomprehensible worship of flickering box altars in every home and gathering place, video altars to which we sacrificed the precious time of our lives and entrusted the raising of our children.

Perhaps future generations will wonder "Why did they immerse themselves in superficial appearance, pursue an endless quest for physical sensations, and commit their lives to obtaining material possessions, all contributing to their self-induced loneliness?"

To people of the future our behavior and our society's values will appear as unfathomable as would some starving tribe doing nothing to hunt or gather or cultivate to alleviate their hunger, but instead scurrying about and expending all their waning energy to pile up rocks in inscrutable geometric patterns. Our loneliness is spiritual, it is our souls that ache, yet never in history has a society so thoroughly eliminated the spiritual from its priorities and daily existence, or so adamantly denied the existence of "soul".

To ignore the reality of our soul and its needs while suffering the pangs of modern loneliness is like a starving person trying to assuage their hunger by convincing themselves they don't have a stomach.

We all stumble and shuffle through the land of lonely spiritual plague, no cure at hand, our emotional leprosy having stripped us of even the ability to reach out and touch one another. Yet with no hope, no cure, and no respite, we can and must still rail against the absurdity, each victim acting as a limited and temporary comforter to the other.

In this we can triumph, in this we can forge our dignity, in the midst of the cold realization that no cure exists for our lonely isolation, we can hope for our own power of will to triumph over the hopelessness and despair.

Throughout the human story, each moment of testing has its unrecognized heroes, true heroes for they did not conquer, did not attain the rewards of heroes, but continued the struggle in the face of abject hopelessness and anonymity: the inmates in concentration camps throughout history, comforting each other; the dying in the besieged fortress, sharing a crumb of bread before mutually facing starvation. In this day and time, in a warped and almost unrecognizable way, one finds this human dignity and triumph in the bars and lounges, those smoky dens of most intense loneliness, the front line triage centers of human isolation.

Just as the doomed and dying cling to each other to avoid falling down, the modern lonely souls smoke and drink together to facilitate their escape from their individual prisons. They support, smile, laugh, joke, feign a common interest in a sport, sympathize with a sad story, humor an obviously exaggerated tall tale, all the time battling the absurd social condition by flaunting their own absurdity.

\-----------------------So what to do?

Rage against the loneliness!

Take loving action, engage in activity, movement and motion, purely for the sake of life, purely in defiance of, directly in the screaming banshee face of, loneliness! To defy loneliness by reaching out to others even when you are untainted by any hope for yourself is to claim a certain purity and dignity.

Unselfish loving action is an insistence that in the midst of our lonely dying we don't have to quit trying to communicate, to touch, to help someone feel. Indeed, the walls that separate us all may stand un-scalable, impenetrable, and indestructible, but better to chip and claw and dig at them purely for the sake of defining our humanity than to sit and let them slowly, night by lonely night, encroach upon us, until crushing our singularly isolated soul under their oppressive illusion.

**************************

Fragile Castles

What strange malaise is this that grips my soul?

What inner hopelessness besets my spirit?

How this place weighs on me,

this monument to personal profit,

this opulent extravagance made the more burdensome

by the token remnants of Nature left in torn and tattered shreds

lying about and around our castles,

castles fragile behind their high facades,

for they too were built on principles of personal profit,

not pride,

leaving walls hallow and decayed

though glossy paint has not yet dried.

*************************

Tadpoles in the Tracks of Civilization

The puddle in the car tracks is full of the biggest wonkin' tadpoles I've ever seen!

How did they get there?!

There's no natural

body of water, just

a dip from truck ruts.

How did they survive

to get 3 centimeters (one inch) long?!

They paddle vertically, mouths gulping air,

shining silver bellies belying

the survival of life

in even the bleakest

of our scars on this

World.

This spring's beauty

exceeds any I've seen,

not visually, but because

I feel a part of it,

in it,

immersed in it,

all volume filled with life,

a drifting seed,

a swooping bird,

the butterfly monarch,

Life would take root

in the very air itself

did not fertile ground

offer more tempting Home.

Wild roses bless

the precious gift

of eyesight,

playing their part

in harmony with a dozen

other types of flowered instruments of

Beauty, performing a

grand symphony of

Spring.

Immersed in the

Passive beauty of God

and Creation,

we must

drive a little faster,

fill our view with

a larger screen,

tint our glasses darker,

lest

we see the dead and

jagged ugliness

of our creations.

(The man watching me write this says he has called the city to spray for mosquitoes and put in more drainage.)

****************************

Myth, Math, and Morals

Of _course_ the Minoans and Ionians were the first scientists!....liberating humanity from the drudgery of mythology.

(I write this after reading in Masks of the Universe, 2nd Edition, 2003, pages 45-49, by Edward Harrison, Cambridge University Press)

(I get up to retrieve this book, and return to of course find 'Tasha kitty having claimed my chair. As happens several times a day, I try to move her over so I can sit down, and as every time, she responds in total, limp perplexity, as if she has utterly no idea what it is I want.)

Millennia ago, in the lands of the Mediterranean Sea, Minoans and later, Ionians were island based seafarers.

For one thing, this meant that during their weeks at sea they had little space for the great dead weight of stone temples, pyramids, and altars so essential to maintaining the burden of mythology and liturgy that characterized other civilizations of the time.

Second, as sailors, the practical knowledge of patterns of tides, currents, weather, and water was both inescapable and invaluable. Land bound Egyptians and Persians could afford the luxury of perceiving the occasional earthquake and thunderstorm as the upset and indigestion of some god.

But an Ionian merchant sailor needed an information model of more pragmatic utility. Hence "the love of wisdom", natural philosophy, was born beside the water. "What comprised the earth" and "how did it work" became necessary questions instead of heretical questions. Rising tides, shifting currents, and approaching storms combined with economic and survival interests to motivate humanity to finally accept the responsibility to try to understand.

In fits and starts, interspersed with ample interludes of dark ages and shamanic deceptions, we've been at the task of understanding ever since.

Centuries of practical, maritime knowledge of repeating patterns finally triggered the revelation that we can understand at least _some_ things, and we can _use_ that understanding.

The power of knowledge blossomed forth, and 2600 years later airplanes fly and cell phones ring.

To a greater degree than the Minoans could have dreamed, we have sailed away from the temples, altars, and pyramids that once anchored civilizations, anchored in both the positive and the negative sense of the word.

Knowledge, practical and economically beneficial, allows us to 'sail" tides and currents far beyond the Ionian Sea.

But other storms now bedevil us, and dark waves crash across the bow of our societies.

From those first speculations in Miletus 2600 years ago about atoms and planets and an earth round instead of flat, we have sailed far, on the winds of technology and science, so far that in distant, storm-tossed seas we have lost our way.

Practical survival and economic needs lifted Minoan and Ionian eyes up from the altars to gaze upon a wondrous world of regularity, structure, and mathematics, a world comprehensible as more than just playground and battleground of petulant gods.

2600 years later, as waves of suicide, murder, depression, drugs, crime and personal emptiness capsize our foundering societies, will practical, spiritual needs open our eyes to new personal revelations denied by our science, technology, and material possessions?

****************************

Artificial Life

Scientists are working on creating a living entity, creating it from scratch that is. Cool. That will of course raise all kinds of religious, spiritual, and philosophical questions.

But we will find these questions for the most part to be the same age old religious, spiritual, and philosophical questions that remain as salient as ever.

Of course fears of humanity striving for godlike powers will arise, and arise for good reason.....that's always been humanity's quest and always will be, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes to our detriment.

Along with spears, machine guns, and nuclear weapons, any newly contrived control of the creation of life will undoubtedly be used for evil. Along with X-rays, PCB's, and thalidomide, it will undoubtedly be used for good and turn out to pose horrible, unseen dangers when not adequately controlled. Along with wheels, fertilizers, and electricity, it will undoubtedly redirect human life in dramatic new directions.

And when it's all said and done, some people will claim our engineering of life as proof that humanity no longer needs God or the spiritual. Humanity will toy with this proposal for a few generations and find itself wandering in an emptiness that will once again us them fleeing back to anything offering meaning and purpose.

*************************

**Horoscopes_Fortune Telling_Astrology_Omens, and what they really tell us**.

I read of the skyrocketing numbers of United States citizens that believe in horoscopes, alien abductions, and astrology.

I read of the newly robust beliefs in Xinhua (China) in propitious signs, fortune telling, and omens.

Such tragedy!....how rapidly we sink into these spiritual dark ages! How quickly enlightenment fades!

.....and for good reason. Our new economic gods and scientific gods and technological gods have proven impotent and petulant as we seek their help in nourishing our souls and answering the age-old questions that long predated any investment tools or cellular communication.

For all our theories and equations and institutions, we still want, we still need, answers to those questions.

For all our phones and keyboards and PDA's, we still don't want to be alone.

For all our knowledge and Internet and security devices and government agencies, we still fear.

Above all, we fear being alone and facing an unseen future.

So we invite aliens and ancestor's spirits into our personal paradigm, and we frantically look to stars and planets, shamans and fortunetellers, to cast at least some feeble light onto the deeply shadowed path lying beyond the appointments in our planning calendar.

*****************************

Panama Energy

Leaving the climbing gym yesterday I meet Juan, a man of broad dark face and jet black moderate length hair, curling symmetrically right and left from a central part. After a simple "hi" to the stranger, I get pulled into the conversation because Juan just returned from a family vacation in Panama.

Hey, how often do you get a chance to hear first hand about Panama?

To say the least, Juan is not averse to talking about his experiences, and I'm soon starting to regret my initial friendly overture to this bright eyed verbal encyclopedia of the Panamanian bus system.

But Juan's nonstop express bus conversation swerves onto a detour upon invocation of the term "energy". Maybe because Juan senses I'm a receptive listener, or maybe because he couldn't contain his enthusiasm for sharing his exciting news, Juan begins talking about places of "energy" even greater than the famous Machu Pichu site in Peru, places where rivers flow uphill and you have to use the parking break so cars won't roll away.....uphill of course.

I see no point in entering into a physics debate with bright eyed Juan, who maybe because of his own peaceful "energy" I had instinctively taken a liking to.....but naturally my mind cries out "No! Wait! Let me explain!"

In Juan's comments about "energy" I see the innocent, childlike trust of so many well-intentioned spiritual searchers. I hear a sensitivity to places of aesthetic beauty and people of warm hearts.

( I try to write with 'Tasha purring loudly in her box as I sit on the floor and pet her. Now that is a place of positive energy! )

In Juan's conversation I also hear evidence of collapse of what was once the finest science education system in the world, now crumbled into pathetic ineffectiveness, and I see the age old pattern of how easily naïve people are deceived by authors and witch doctors willing to spin a sellable yarn of deceit for the sake of making a fast buck.

Juan recites what he's read about the collision of tectonic plates in Panama as the reason for the concentration of "energy" there. I bite my tongue to not rudely burst his delusion.

So what insights does this conversation provide?

First: If Panama has rivers flowing uphill, I'm buying stock in Panamanian hydroelectric companies.

Second: M.C. Escher was a realist artist after all!

Third: People like Juan _do_ sincerely seek the beautiful and the spiritual, and _do_ possess the care and sensitivity to discern it.

Fourth: New age conmen and scam artists have fooled good hearted people into thinking this mysterious spiritual "energy" is isolated to certain geographic locations. Juan did indeed perceive a special uplifting experience, but it had nothing to do with geographic locations and plate tectonics. Juan felt his soul revived by the beauty of Nature, natural life rhythms, and the gentle, welcoming, helpful people of the villages he visited. Such uplift, natural beauty, and spiritual renewal is available _anywhere_ those ingredients come together. We possess the power to evoke anywhere the blessings that Juan calls "energy", wherever we preserve, pause, protect, help, touch, and listen.

Finally, tales like Juan's illustrate the critical, even desperate need for every society to vigorously invest in solid science education for _all_ its citizens in order to protect them from the inevitable pernicious assault by charlatans and shamans.

All human history stands as consistent testament to the innocent open-mindedness of uneducated people, and our human ability to believe _anything,_ without pause for critical, objective analysis. The associated misery, suffering, poverty, pestilence, and societal stagnation that inevitably accompany ignorance and superstition surely must compel rational people that solid education in the scientific method and principles of logic for all citizens is an _essential_ armament in the battle against the ever lurking dark ages that surround the brief blossomings of civilizations.

_However_ , this education in the sciences must not again be the cold, spiritless science that demands its disciples forsake all hope of soul and divinity.

People instinctively recoiled from the godless, lifeless incarnation of science in the late 20th century. Knowing they needed more than offered by test tubes and computers, but traditional religious institutions having crumbled under the weight of time and bureaucracy, western people fled to fundamentalist mega-churches and New Age ashrams.

People and nations must, absolutely must, return to solid, logic based, science education for _all_ , no longer in order to "beat the Russians", but to protect ourselves as individuals and society from the deceivers and marketers ever ready to fill any void of knowledge we allow.....and that science must not again claim the place of God in people's hearts, but must humbly accept science's limitations to how and what, while accepting a greater Source for why.

Juan, and all citizens, need and deserve the light of science education, so that in their courageous personal quests they can find even greater personal spiritual heights, not shadowed by misconceptions and misplaced faith.

***********************************

Voices in the Dark

On the hill above my house, feeling the approaching sunrise.

A mere two hours ago young revelers explored different aspects of their still fresh lives, under the dark night blanket covering this same hill, perhaps on this very spot.

Disturbed my slumber, they did, but it was a disturbance caused by echoing laughter and friendship, reminding me of similar invaluable times at similar ridiculous hours in the predawn morning of my life.

The young hearts this morning couldn't see my house through woods below, so there was no rudeness or thoughtlessness in their unintentional disturbance of the peace.

Such a difference that makes in trying to return to sleep, compared to the late night loud voices on neighborhood street, waking all in houses dark to declare they do not care, will willingly harm, hold no regard for feelings or welfare of others.

Voices awake you in night's deep slumber, the laughter in the hills carries you back to youthful exuberance, the yelling in the street joining sounds of breaking bottles to shatter the night and tremble the soul.

Following either, morning rises, and golden diamonds pierce the dark horizon.

****************************

Tribal Anglicans

Last night on TeleVision I watched rules and laws, commandments and traditions, bring tribes to the edge of war and a church denomination to the verge of self-destruction, leaving me to ask just how destructive are rules, regulations, edicts, and commandments to ourselves and our institutions.

Rules and regulations...... I even make them up for myself. This ritual of morning writing unfolds according to a personal discipline. My daily routine follows rules. How else can we know what to do moment to moment?! The world is too unpredictable, too irrational! We are too easily tempted and distracted! Of _course_ we need rules and laws and guidelines and regulations! I sit here writing at sunrise in the morning cold because of a personal discipline rule that I apply to myself. Otherwise I would get the heck down to the relatively warmer house and eat some warm breakfast right now.

But I made a rule for myself that I would first write in the morning, write while on the ridge at sunrise, weather permitting. And I credit to that discipline, ritualistic in its repetition, much of whatever I write that might have any value.

In last night's documentary on the Travel Channel, two clans in Papua New Guinea were about to reluctantly go to war because traditional rules dictated that one owed the other cowry shells, but the one tribe had agreed to new rules with the government that all payments would be made using that new fangled invention "money". Honor, commitments, tradition, and integrity were on the line.

The clans were related. The leaders anguished over the prospects of going to war. But rules had to be followed. Only when negotiators agreed to a compromise involving payment in both money _and_ shells could both sides feel the rules had been satisfied, and war averted.

The Old Testament is in no small part a history of ever growing lists of rules, rules issued in many cases at the demand of the people.

The New Testament is in no small part a railing _against_ the tyranny of rules, Yeshu (Jesus), Paul, and others facing death because they taught that a law of Love should take precedence over human contrived ritual and regulation.

In the news today the worldwide Anglican Church is at odds with its United States franchise, the Episcopal Church, over a rule about gay clergy. Agonizing debate over shapes of dots over "i's" and length of crosses through "t's" will determine if people who would like to remain as one organization will allow themselves to do so.

The parallels between the two clans in Papua New Guinea and the feuding conclaves of the Anglican Church are striking.

With such fervent commitment we allow words on paper to overrule the love hidden in our heart. Tribes, congregations, denominations, and nations will assault, destroy, and divide because of word on paper or a self-inflicted tradition. In the absence of awareness of that one dictate or rule, they would instead happily and generously invite each other to sit together and celebrate a meal shared in camaraderie.

Perhaps people in such situations of disagreement must ask the following: had no one ever told you about this rule, had script or oral tradition never informed you that this principle supercedes unity, brotherhood, compassion, and God's love, how would you respond to that human being standing before you? Would you, in your heart, in the absence of the debt of shells or the ancient verse, instinctively know that you should revile, reject, or rebuke them?

Were it not for someone long past or demandingly present telling you God's or gods' will in this matter, as that other person stands before you, how would God's counseling Spirit directly call your heart to respond?

How often do rules and dogma incite acceptance and compassion? How often do rules and dogma incite conflict and crucifixion?

Of course we need rules, regulations, laws, precepts, and commandments, self-generated as disciplines for individual life and institutionalized as foundations for society. Obviously our choices of interpretations of rules will vary from person to person, church to church, and tribe to tribe. But it is in our response to those inevitable differences of interpretation that we will show the world the overarching law our heart has chosen to follow.

In that documentary last night, the anguished expressions and words of the tribal leaders revealed the highest law to which they ascribed. Within that law written on their hearts, in spite of the calls for blood and vengeance by tribal members, the leaders found a way to satisfy without bloodshed the rules and traditions and laws of shells and money.

Will we invoke rules, laws, and commandments, or our interpretations thereof, to sow discord, conflict, and division? Or while remaining true to our disapproval, will we use our disagreements to demonstrate forgiveness, tolerance, and compassion?

Will we use the rules to which we so zealously ascribe to show the world how hard we can harden our heart in their defense? ....or to fulfill that commandment, and the one "like unto it", that Yeshu deemed the greatest?

****************************

Cargo cults are alive and well

During World War II the natives of Papua New Guinea watched strange white alien beings arrive on their islands, proceed to clear out long strips of jungle, set up huts and structures and tables by those cleared strips. The strange white aliens sat by the cleared strips, in their strange huts and at their strange tables, moving sticks across pieces of very, very thin bark even whiter than the aliens themselves. And after some days of performing these rituals, giant flying objects, bright and shiny, descended from the heavens to alight on those clearings to deliver astonishing gifts of food and objects with magical powers.

The resourceful, hardworking natives were quick to learn from this astonishing lesson. With their stone tools they cleared strips in the jungle. They erected huts and structures and tables beside the cleared strips. With thin bark and straight sticks they emulated the ritual motions of the white aliens as best they could. And they waited for the shiny sky canoes of the gods to descend and deliver food and magical implements.

Of course they had to wait a very, very long time......and of course in spite of their faith and careful analysis, their patient wait was to no avail.

The native's response to the quite evident facts they witnessed, cleared jungle strips and curious rituals of sticks on thin white bark resulting in food descending from the sky, was perfectly reasonable. They took the facts at hand, combined them with their own perfectly natural desires and wants, and stirred together with their open mindedness and diligent hard work proceeded to take action to replicate this amazing event.

The result anthropologists labeled "cargo cults".

Through no fault of their own, they were just missing some of the salient background explanations.

Cargo cults are alive and well today, not in Melanesian Islands, but in New York, San Francisco, Beijing, and any other modern city.

With each day we see new technological marvels, which for most of us appear as mysterious as they do marvelous. We hear terms such as "energy", "dark matter", "field lines", and "quantum fluctuations".

We experience the descent of marvelous gifts out of the unseen ether, images on our screens, music in our ears, conversations in our hands, power and information and energy flowing at the behest of ritual patterns on keyboards or touch-screens.

And like the natives of 1942 Papua New Guinea, we are hungry.

We are hungry for healing, hungry for hope, hungry for touch, hungry for contact and meaning and source and to not be alone and to not be afraid.

So our adaptable and flexible and resilient and optimistic minds go to work, stirring together our glimpses and rumors of science and technology with our wishes and hungers.

And beside the cleared runways in the jungles of our ailing bodies and lonely hearts, we practice the rituals to which we conveniently affix the magical appellation "scientific", because surely invoking the holy name of "science" will enhance their power.

And then we wait, wait for the touch to heal, wait for the energy to flow, wait to feel younger and to be balanced and to overcome depression, wait for this modality and that chakra and some spirit and the obligatory focus to deliver the cargo of food for our hungering soul.

The natives of Papua New Guinea were right in recognizing the role of runways and structures and pen and paper (or sticks and bark) in invoking the arrival of astonishing shiny objects out of the sky, objects full of food and healing power.

The modern day cargo cults are right in recognizing the potential of science, the necessity of energy, and the power of focus and touch and spirit.

The conclusions of the island natives and the urban denizens are perfectly understandable and even rational in their uninformed way.

But the jungle clearing and the sticks writing on bark could not of themselves get the airplane to arrive. And the crystals and energy vials and recitations and rituals do not of themselves bring the peace and wholeness and healing for which we long.

Supporting the arrival of the airplane were metallurgy and aerodynamics and electro-magnetic radio communication and navigation, not to mention the tractors and plows and fertilizer that produced the food delivered by the airplane....and the stick scratching on the bark needed to be filled with ink.

The visually evident artifacts of runway and flight control station were only the concluding outcomes of all the technology and planning not visible to the natives.

The visually evident artifacts of drawings of energy lines and ritual touch and any shiny object supposedly imbued with healing powers are on their own as comically impotent and perpetually empty as that stretch of jungle cleared with stone tools, waiting for the shiny food container to descend from the heavens.

Supporting the arrival of wholeness and peace and healing for our souls (and the commensurate benefits for our body) must be love and compassion and forgiveness and Unity and surrender to that greater than us. It is not the touch that heals, it is the sincerity and love and tenderness that evokes someone to compassionately give that caring touch. It is not the sparkling crystal that heals, it is one's openness to the sparkling glimpses of beauty that permeate all Creation. It is not the chant and meditation that brings lasting peace, it is that the chant and meditation can facilitate relationship with the loving Source of all life.

Though totally misapplying their poignantly naïve efforts, the natives were on the right track to recognize that by application of effort they could benefit from marvelous new sources of food and healing from beyond their familiar island.

In our modern cargo cults we are correct in recognizing that from beyond the familiar islands of our isolated material existence and our possessions and our technology, there is a source of healing for our souls.

But the natives could not gain the benefits of aviation technology by applying the familiar stone tools to their familiar jungle.

In our modern cargo cults we try to apply our familiar stone tools of material objects and physical manipulations and ritual recitations and personality worship. But the source of healing and nourishment for our aching souls lies not in remaining on these familiar worldly islands and applying the spiritual equivalent of stone tools.

We need but to seek the Source of the runway and the airplane and the cargo, to let that Source into our lives, and to accept our Oneness with that loving Source. In Unity with Source, we no longer need the cargo delivered to the runway, for the spiritual nourishment grows within us.

We can then become the runway for others, our compassion and forgiveness and care and listening and empathy delivering into their lives the spiritual nourishment they need until they too choose not to wait on deliveries, but to deliver to others.

******************************

Hand waving tricks

I take notes as I listen to the excited and irritatingly enthusiastic instructor.

I find myself listening to an invocation of magic seemingly motivated by the worst of motivations, trying to pull God's strings to manipulate outcomes to fit our wishes.

I see hand waiving tricks, literally in this case, as we are taught hand positions that will focus and trap "energy".

But I see that were it not immersed in this New Age American marketing hoo-hah, Qigong _could_ be used as a technique to move the toxic material-mind out of the way, allowing people to experience Deep Communion with Source.

The positive effects spiritual health can have on physical health are indeed often dramatically real. But the connection between spiritual and physical health arises because the techniques used to promote spiritual health allow one's eternal spirit, an expression of the One Spirit, to become manifest in your worldly consciousness. The powerful physical benefits of spiritual exercise do not arise from anything as finite and limited as "trapping of energy" by holding your hands in some magical position.

The Qigong system fails if pursued as a means of magic power. But _surrender_ to the "energy flow" (to use the instructors terminology) or "loving Purpose" as I call it, does indeed imbue one with power, or more accurately said, facilitates one's instinctive awareness of optimal living within the loving Purpose.

I do not want to be too critical of the instructor's presentation because in Deep Communion I have experienced so much of what she describes. Indeed, physical actions do open pathways for the spiritual experience, and I hope this class helps someone.

But it is tragic that the potential good gets so perverted in physical misinterpretations. I am _appalled_ by the invocation of the word "science" in promoting these techniques.

Trying to chain the profound depth of spiritual experience to physical foundations is looking in the wrong direction.

The invocation of magical powers as a sales trick is a deeply tragic loss of what could be so beautiful. One can experience wholeness, there is connection, there are miracles, and it is not chained to any worldly physical energy or space-time magic. The healing power of spiritual energy is experienced in the joy of Wholeness and immersion in Love even while dealing with pain and illness, or even in dying. _Physical_ healing may or may not happen, and the culmination of spiritual healing is the awareness that the physical healing may not even matter.

There is _so much_ awaiting our discovery beyond this thin veneer of our physical experience. But as soon as we actively pursue spiritual experience with the intent of worldly profit, including "feeling good" and "healing", and even the seductive temptation of "enlightenment", we have turned away from the blessings the spiritual realm would offer us.

****************************

Don't Look Down!

I'm blessed to get to fly over Canyonlands, Utah on the way to Singapore. Below me unfolds some of the grandest aerial scenery in the world. And these poor guys around me have their window shades closed as they watch old videos.

Underway I recognize Keystone, Loveland, Lake Dillon, Crested Butte, the Snow Bowl Mountain in Arizona, maybe Zion National Park. I fly over the sites of so many blessings, so much learned, so much discovered about myself, and how to blend myself with that glorious Creation.

The hand of God lies open below as a parade of ancient wonders majestically pass in revue, but in this airplane cabin most eyes reflect the glaze of the flickering video screens, more at ease with human creations, preferring to gaze at things smaller than themselves, hoping to be told by commentator and marketer what to think, avoiding the towering mountains and gaping canyons that might prompt unwanted thoughts, or even threaten with humility.

***********************************

Dark thoughts

How grim the thoughts, how dark the mood, how bitter the temperament that can rise unbidden in human heart not tempered by self-awareness.

My freewill Choice can usually keep these hounds at bay, but present they are, in depths within my heart, though I cannot speak for other people.

They are usually easily tamed, rendered docile by a conscious glance and stern rebuke. Their danger is posed by their stealthy approach, quietly encroaching on mood and attitude when my guard is turned.

They would nip at my spirit, sending me down the path more pessimistic, more sensitive to frustrations and my own and others' shortcomings.

But once I invoke awareness of my self, my thoughts, my emotions, simply turning that bright light in their direction suffices to send them scurrying back to their foul lairs.

Of course they will return, again and again through all my worldly days, some days even distracting my conscious thoughts from the purring 'Tasha kitty now settling onto my lap, my having retreated into the house from writing in the autumn chill of the sunrise hilltop.

To varying degrees we can _choose_ our peace and satisfaction. Indeed, we _must_ consciously choose our peace and satisfaction, for the human heart is perennially restless, never permanently evicting the hounds of worry, insecurity, doubts, bitterness, and dissatisfaction.

In this temporal existence these hounds will always stalk our spirit, always threaten to pursue us up isolated trees of despair or anger or depression.

But running from the pursuing hounds is always a mistake, running to distractions, drink, drug, or debauchery. Running from the pursuing melancholy only excites and invigorates its hunt.

We must turn and face them, while we still recognize it is hounds mainly of our mind's own creation that dog us. And once faced and recognized, often as not they can be sent fleeing, by nothing more than the sharp rebuke of our freewill Choice.

With their distracting baying now removed to a respectable distance we can once again more clearly discern our surroundings, including the presence of beauty and sources of joy that the snarling hounds of frustration, anger, and bitterness would keep us from seeing.

***************************

Part II

(Return to Table of Contents)

How temporal, these mortal brains and their imprisoned minds!

Knowledge of eternal life, God's infinite Love, and inexorable, unfolding, divine Purpose all scatter and dissipate like frail morning fog before the slightest breeze bringing pain or grief or fear.

How inconsequential in the eternal scheme of things are the momentary losses and travails of this world, yet they fill my worldly mind and fragile heart as if they were my eternal destiny, great oppressive weights seemingly never to be lifted from my soul.

Trapped, trapped in this moment, remains the conscious mind, great constructs of mental and emotional cathedrals crumbling to ruin at the slightest tremor of this moment's grim news or lonely foreboding.

Supposedly eternal consciousness resides in a prison of neurons and synapses, chained to this moment's pain and emotions.

Shouldn't faith in our loving Creator and certainty of eternal life liberate us from the brief injuries, physical and spiritual, that flicker across our lives? Yet here in this moment my conscious thoughts remain trapped, and grief and loneliness seem to fill my universe to every corner and for all time.

"Why have You deserted me?!" cried my Savior to our Father, as even He, with full knowledge of destiny eternal, found Himself trapped in a moment eternal, a moment of this world, all of eternal existence and infinite Creation limited by this temporal world to that instant, that moment of worldly conscious experience.

The next tragedy, next loss, next injury, next fright, next threat, will again unceremoniously sentence my conscious thoughts and awareness to the solitary confinement of the moment, locked away from the light of skies infinite and holy promises eternal. In that we have no choice, for our consciousness, eternal though it may be, is for now born of the temporal matter of this world. But in that very temporal nature we find our hope. Each grief, each pain, does end, and all pain, all grief, will end.

The glimpses of eternal sky through the bars of our temporal dungeon are real. Though shackled in the moment's sensations and emotions, we can still occasionally choose to glance up, to seek that glimpse through window high of the eternal Destiny awaiting outside these tiny cells of conscious time, a waiting Destiny from which we can someday look back on this corporeal struggle and time shackled consciousness as the merest speck in a boundless, living firmament, a tiny seed of infinite, God-given potential that gave birth to individual consciousness destined to grow free of the tyranny of pain and grief.

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Corollary to this temporal nature of our consciousness:

The preceding has a very practical implication for our spiritual life, an implication practiced even by Yeshu (Jesus), the Son of Man.

Since our corporeal natures in this life mean that our consciousness can be easily overwhelmed by the inputs of the world, it is only perfectly natural that if we choose to seek connection with spiritual inputs, we must occasionally escape this world.

There is a good reason that even Yeshu, the First Born, _needed_ to escape to the wilderness and hills, away from the crowds, and even away from his closest friends.

Regardless of our spiritual strength and closeness to the sustaining Spirit, our conscious minds need escape from the unrelenting assault of this world's inputs.

We must accept that we are part of "this generation" to which Yeshu referred, meaning this lineage of humans born of this physical world, hence our consciousness must struggle to escape domination by the pains, fears, lusts, passions, hungers, and distractions of physical inputs.

On the other hand, through the world's inputs we also experience the guiding of the Holy Spirit and the love of the eternal Source. Let us not perceive all the world's inputs to our consciousness as some kind of "enemy" to be escaped and conquered.

We live in continual danger of our conscious mind becoming overwhelmed with the desires, wants, lusts, fears, hungers, pains, reactions and emotions engendered by the world and our worldly nature. But that does not mean we are called to take the easy path of complete escape to some personal hermitage.

We are to take enough escape, to occasionally follow Yeshu to the quiet, far side of the lake, to escape the crowd and the incessant demands of our worldly body, in order to finally be able to hear the whispering Spirit, that we may learn and grow and refresh and strengthen, that we may return to the world and the crowds and the family that need us and fulfill us.

The physical inputs of the world, both our inner world of programmed needs and the external sensory inputs to our body, are not the "enemy". They are part of God's Creation and the unfolding Purpose of which we are a part. But we need the wisdom and perspective gained in the quiet moments of escape in order to discern the path through the cacophony of worldly feelings and sensations.

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Crippling disabilities

Your spiritual Self, your essence, who and what you really are, is actualized and expressed in this temporal world through your brain, a physical organ. This happens the same way your conscious will is exerted through your arms and legs and hands and mouth.....which is to say, imperfectly, with paralyses, with spasms, with numbness, with clumsiness, with tripping, and with the spiritual and mental equivalents of stubbed toes, bitten tongues, out and out face-plants, and just flat not being able to do certain things you want to do.

So keep trying, and don't blame yourSelf for your brain- induced spiritual and mental handicaps anymore than you would blame yourself for your spine induced paralysis or palsy.

Do with your mental and psychological and spiritual disabilities as you should do with your physical disabilities. Know the direction you want to go and find a way to resolutely, even if haltingly, limp, crawl, hobble, or role in that direction, even if not able to run that way as fast and effortlessly and directly as you might wish.

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God's Retrial

What about that fact that the fundamental nature of our being seems pretty much counter to the high spiritual state to which we are supposedly called?

Protection of the self, optimizing survival, avoiding pain, maximizing comfort and security......there we have the basic, universal components of the human being.

That is our starting point from which to try to attain spiritual purity?!

My gosh, high spiritual calling is a calling to the antithesis of our very God-created nature! That's no small undertaking!

To grow in courage, in selflessness, in generosity, in self-sacrifice, in peace, this is almost like telling God S/He blew it and we're going to strive to become the opposite from what S/He created!

I thought of this as I watched 'Tasha kitty hunt bugs and lizards earlier today. She is being exactly as cats were created to be, utterly devoid of mercy, compassion, and any empathy for that baby lizard scurrying through the grass between the rocks, the lizard trying to dodge little black paws pouncing on and around it.

Are we different from the programmed 'Tasha kitty? In trying to become Christ-like, or Buddha-like, or Mohammed-like, we are not even starting from ground zero, we're starting from way below zero, a handicap start so profound as to make you question if the race even really exists.

It is awfully natural to bear a grudge, to want revenge, to feed yourself before the other guy, and to feed your comfortable vehicle with gasoline made from corn when one tank full of that gasoline (or the corn that produced it) could have fed a starving village for a month.

This is not exactly an encouraging scenario, filling out our resume for our application for admission to Heaven while every cell of our human nature seems programmed to invest all our energy in protecting ourselves and optimizing our enjoyment.

Kind of seems like a goofy system to produce residents for some eternal Heaven, don't you think? "Let's program 'em with all kinds of self-oriented survival instincts, limit their intellect, wire pain and fear and lust signals directly to the central control circuits of their brain, then make them overcome all those natural tendencies for surviving a few years on earth if they want their soul to survive for eternity."

This hardly seems sporting!

So what witnesses can the weary defense attorney's for God call to the stand to counter this incriminating testimony and try to salvage that image of a loving and compassionate Supreme Being that the institutional PR agencies have worked so hard to polish for the past thousand years?....(while ignoring the previous few millennia when the institutional religions painted God(s) as vengeful, wrathful, arbitrary, jealous, and demanding, a much easier PR assignment by the way).

Maybe this spiritual court-case drama will be resolved by a surprise ending, concluding in a shocking twist of events as a former witness for the prosecution breaks down under cross-examination, revealing what really happened in that infamous Garden.

Or maybe the witnesses for the prosecution, those witnesses in our own hearts, will begin to question what they saw. Maybe some new evidence, some new evidence of the heart, will reveal that along with the innate ability to hunt and kill and survive and profit, we also feel other behavioral influences, influences not always cultivated and encouraged, but still undeniable; tuggings of compassion and empathy, awareness of tenderness and cuteness, an ability to recognize beauty and the sublime and right and wrong.

For all our insistence that we are as programmed as my cat, instinctively seeking to kill critters smaller than us, determined to define and defend our territory, and consistently choosing the softest chair to sleep in, under cross-examination we cannot quite deny that we do sense and feel and discern other levels of awareness, awareness that gives us conscience, and truth be known, awareness that gives us free Choice.

That saintly behavior we are told to follow, so directly in contradiction to our God- created nature, is perhaps not as impossible as we would like it to be.

And then there is that other extenuating circumstance. For all our condemning testimony that God demands we behave in ways directly counter to the instinctive nature we were supposedly given by that God, in fact, transcripts contradict our testimony. It seems the record shows that quite consistently God has said we do _not_ have to attain saintly behavior in contrast to our worldly nature. Rebellious tribes still enter promised lands, zealous persecutors of the faithful still get a second chance at serving that faith, thieves and prostitutes enter Paradise along with, and maybe in front of, the well dressed and properly behaved.

I think the trial of God for allegedly creating our human natures to fail Heavenly entrance requirements will end in a hung jury......as it always does......ample evidence and arguments supporting the premise of both sides. The jurors, each of us when we are not in the witness box for the prosecution, are each left to search their own hearts and ask themselves the verdict they want.

Just keep in mind how many court dramas end with the star witness for the prosecution instead finding him/herself on trial.

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Our love-hate relationship with Guilt and Sacrifice

At last week's disabled sports group pot-luck, Martha and I once again wandered down the treacherous conversational road of religion and spirituality.

She has started attending a different church, the church of religious science. Martha launched off on how their view of Jesus does not involve all that guilt baggage of typical Christian religions ( her description, not mine ). Her church does still acknowledge the value of Jesus' teachings.

OK, now let's fast forward to this morning.

('Tasha kitty is "helping" as I write this by guiding my fingers with her little paw.)

The Christmas carols on the radio speak of "redeeming grace", and "we are the reason for your sacrifice".

Hold those scenes of Martha and carols as I rewind to a couple of days ago, when I transcribed old notes from my trip to Egypt. I learned all about Osiris dying for humanity, and being resurrected. The fact is, such tales of saviors dying for humanity are not uncommon. Even the Mayan and Aztec religions contain elements of someone having to die to save the rest of our sorry souls.

Now, Martha is bummed by any implication that she played a role in requiring that Jesus be crucified. But whether we like the personal implications are not, we should at least be willing to ask why has this theme of necessary sacrifice so consistently permeated so many historic religious beliefs? When some belief, even with its manifold perversions and gross distortions, consistently appears in diverse, separate cultures, anthropological curiosity if nothing else dictates that we consider the implications.

From where did, and does this concept of sacrificial redemption arise? Is it just a persistent and remarkably consistent scam concocted by self-serving priests separated from each other by millennia and continents?

Maybe it is a conspi... _( now PC kitty "helps", "lightly " walking onto my lap with his "lithe" 15 ½ pounds )._ OK, where was I, Oh yea, conspiracy theories. Those are always popular. Egyptian priests, Israelite prophets, Celtic Druids, and Mayan shamans were/are actually all members of a secret society, probably led by the Pope, a secret society sworn to make the rest of us feel guilty and helpless to pull ourselves up by our own spiritual bootstraps, so we need somebody or some thing to die for us to placate a torque'ed off god, or gods, ........ "drive those nails and pass another virgin".

There, you have it, conspiracy, evil priests, we do not really need to feel guilty about anything. There, everyone is satisfied, the audience leaves happy, everyone heard what they wanted to hear, I sold a bunch more books and got invited to appear on PBS station fundraising telethons...... But what is this? Someone in the back of the room has not left?....probably just fell asleep. No, wait, it seems they do not yet fully swallow, uh, I mean, comprehend, the priest and Pope guilt conspiracy theory.

This troublemaker is pointing out those irritating nuisance details like wars, atrocities, genocide, and reality TV shows, and now this contrarian construes these trivialities to argue that humanity's not perfect, and maybe even there is room for improvement, which is simply a polysyllabic phrase for the "g" word.

Who is this troublemaker?! Obviously they know nothing about 21st century marketing. You don't sell books or self-therapies without making people feel good and fuzzy, even if you accomplish that by pointing out how rotten those other liberal conservative fundamentalist heathens are in comparison to _us_.

Maybe this irritatingly curious loiterer is an operative from the Pope and his worldwide, millennia's old conspiracy to make us all feel wracked with guilt!...........................................................................

Oops. I seem to have dozed off and had a weird dream, thanks to being immobilized by the 15.5 pounds of fuzziness contentedly purring on my lap.

Let's return to more or less rational thought processes, unmarketable as they are.

The imaginary Pope's operative in my dream did have a valid point. Humanity is arguably not quite perfect yet. Shoot, maybe even you and I are not quite perfect.

What if some poor, misguided wretch did posses a heart a little wiser and more compassionate than the rest of us, and worse yet, tried to apply that wisdom and compassion to help pull humanity just a little further out of our self- made pit of slime and ooze?

To answer that question, we have ample precedent. On the most savage, brutal, and heartless leaders we often as not bestow the titles chief, king, Caesar, general, team captain, CEO, and Secretary of Defense. Those that would drag us into moral debauchery we put on our magazine covers, concert stages, and children's designer labels. Those that get serious about peddling peace, tolerance, selflessness, and forgiveness, wind up in prison cells and on crosses.

The fact is, we, humanity as a whole, prefer the people that pander to our selfish interests, and we seldom seek out and reward those that challenge us with the truth about ourselves.

The fact is, human spiritual progress _does_ require sacrifice! Progress entails breaking free of the norm, and we all resist change from our norm, and seldom reward or appreciate those that would love us enough, individually or in the human aggregate, to try to pry us out of our dark status quo into a nominally brighter, hence dangerously revealing, truth.

For progress, redemption into our potential, and spiritual growth to occur, some brave soul has to make the sacrifice of unpopularity, rejection, and maybe even crucifixion.

You may accept or reject the theology of "balance of payments for a vengeful God" invoked by Aztecs, prophets, and televangelists to justify extracted hearts and crucified Messiahs.

But by gosh, I think if you are realistic about it, you will find that because of our human nature (some would say "sinful nature"), personal sacrifice is required of any soul that wants to "save" us, from any destructive aspect of our condition.

The teacher, minister, and AIDS caseworker live on poverty wages. The peace activist gets imprisoned. The civil rights campaigner gets assassinated.

Might it just be that there is a profound lesson in the thousands of years of religious invocation of sacrifice as necessary for redemption to our higher potential?

In spite of institutional distortions and perversions through the millennia, do we inescapably, instinctively realize the necessity for sacrifice? Do we, in spite of our denials, find sacrifice intensely, personally relevant in our individual lives? Do our hearts trump our intellect in recognition of the need for sacrifice if we are to spiritually grow, if we are to accept the unpopular lessons of those who sacrificed themselves to help us grow, and if we are to help others grow, redeeming each other to our higher potential.

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The Source of Guilt

I listen further to the tapes of Joseph Campbell. Yesterday I spoke with Cathy who's listening to the same tapes. In that conversation I asked Cathy about the distressing tendency for today's young girls to mutilate themselves. I was quite surprised by her answer. ( 'Tasha kitty gives my lap honest to goodness pawsages as I sit on the couch. ) In response to my question, Cathy says their cutting and burning may arise from guilt, which even plays a role in tattoos and body piercing. "The pain feels good".

I was shocked! What an important and unexpected revelation she gave me! I told her at the time, I had recently questioned the relevance for modern people of Paul's Biblical letters because they were so targeted to an audience immersed in concepts of guilt, and focused on sacrificial methods to attain atonement.

In contrast, our society hammers home the doctrine that the only thing you should feel guilty about is feeling guilty. Yet here before me stood a youthful product of that self-focused society, speaking of guilt, and of its broader context of not living up to one's potential!....a sense, an awareness, so powerful, so inescapable, that it drives our teenagers to cut, bleed, and burn themselves.

I've long held that the call to Unity is intrinsic, innate, engrained in the very fabric of the Universe and sewn into our conscious soul.

Lack of personal Unity I've believed each person would be aware of, but primarily as loneliness or emptiness.

I think I swallowed the modern ethos that guilt was passe'. But in Cathy's verbal slap of awareness, I think I slowly gain awareness that a propensity for guilt, or dissatisfaction with the self, is also intrinsic, innate, and engrained in our being.

This makes perfect sense, testified to by both history and our spiritual nature. (The corner of the page gets torn by 'Tasha bites.)

Guilt, and the associated need for sacrifice and atonement appear universally in Aztec, Inca, Pharaonic, Greek, Hebrew, and Shinto religions. Such universal burning, cutting, bashing, chopping, and crucifying can occur _only_ if arising from a universally possessed experience. All history and theology testify to a universal guilt, an awareness of incompleteness.

(Now I write around fuzzy kitty bottom and paws.)

And this makes perfect sense!

For the most part we miss out on the Unity experience by our own volition. We are unwilling to serve others, to listen, to open the self. It is we that withhold compassion. It is _our_ hearts that choose to not love.

We are pulled to Unity. All that denies us Unity causes pain. We deny ourselves Unity, and from that denial arises the pain of guilt, a gnawing dissatisfaction with the self.

It is absolutely inevitable, and it is the underlying inner pain that through myriad interpretations led to extraction of beating hearts on Aztec altars and 13 year old girls in the United States digging holes in their forearms.

Like a nebulous pain in our abdomen, we cannot precisely identify its source.

( _Tasha's fuzzy kitty bottom and paws have squirmed around, but still cover the bottom of the page.)_

Two hundred years ago in the absence of detailed medical knowledge, the non-specific abdominal pain was addressed with inappropriate and ineffective remedies. Likewise, lacking deep understanding of the reason for that gnawing, inner dissatisfaction with the self, we try to assuage our guilt with blood and pain, sometimes of others, sometimes of ourselves. Through all human history the tragedy continues, through each individual life it continues, until choosing Unity and pursuing eternal growth, while accepting the loving welcome of the Creator.

Our inescapable guilt arises not from our imperfections and the associated failure to attain our potential. Our guilt arises from having not yet chosen to strive for that potential, and in that Choice to strive, to simply accept the love and Purpose of the Source.

Our blood and pain of whatever sacrifice we offer are mere empty symbols, providing only distraction from our real pain. It is only by sacrifice of the self, a living, daily giving of the self to the loving Purpose, that our guilt and inadequacy disappear into the wholeness not of perfection, but the wholeness of eternal growth.

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All this talk about guilt! Cripesamighty, what's next.....Confession?!

The One Barrier to Unity

(While on my sunrise prayer walk in the hills I think about how this evening I may watch TeleVision with my friend Bob, and for the ten thousandth time listen to him talk about "trying to get a life". )

"Your purpose awaits you!"

That is the message for everyone looking for some direction in their lives.

But you will never find your purpose, that fulfillment, until surrendering to something greater, until accepting your part in a Wholeness of an overarching Purpose.

As long as the projects are _your_ projects, the goals _your_ goals, you will create them in vacuum and void, and hence without any reference for direction, no externally oriented compass for guidance. You will build your career, business, and house, and you will feel you have oared across miles of ocean, feeling every exhausted fiber of your being that confirms your efforts, but still sitting in the middle of an ocean that looks exactly like it did before you started rowing, in spite of the titles, accounts, and possessions accrued along the way.

From this fundamental truth arises the pleading from the First Born to confess your shortcomings!

I can imagine Yeshuah (Jesus) almost desperately pleading with people, sorrowfully observing their self imposed emptiness, knowing that they can be saved from that sense of being lost if only they accept their role in the Wholeness of Creation......but even then, that baptism of acceptance still does not suffice to allow entry of the peace of Unity......because having lived for the self, the nature of the individual stands in mismatch and discord with the loving Source.

Surrendering to one's role in the loving Creator's Purpose requires _growth_ to incorporate one's self more completely into that Purpose. That personal growth can only happen voluntarily. That Choice to accept Unity can only be actualized if one _desires_ to grow, which is to say, one is willing to change. One can only change if one confesses the need to change. One recognizes the need to change only if one recognizes one's imperfections.....and so the entire opportunity that awaits, your purpose, your fulfillment, your wholeness and personal completion, all pivot upon the willingness to confess one's shortcomings. With that act of free will, you are saved, saved from the void, the emptiness, the vacuum, the unfulfilling wanderings that leave you without reference.

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Buddha's Desires

No sooner do I sit down outside than 'Tasha Aengelchen kitty hops into my lap and begins to purr and purr and purr.

Finally, she gets a moment of satisfaction from her life of maunzing dissatisfaction.

We sit here together on this morning, 'Tasha purring, squirrels, robins, and a host of others filling the surrounding trees, low angle light of still rising sun illuminating the thick display of lilacs that in turn fill the entire yard with a fragrance sublime and intoxicating.

The visual, aural, and aromatic blessings are so extreme, so glorious, so encompassing, that for a moment 'Tasha kitty and I both experience satisfaction, blessed satisfaction.

For a moment, on this still, cool morning, I think not of money worries, the job opportunity I never heard back from, the group of soporific students I must teach in a few minutes, and the lesson I have not yet prepared.

'Tasha does not think about the fact she remains on a line, she does not get to hunt for her food, and her lifelong companion PC kitty is gone.

I scruff her soft coat and she purrs. We both feel momentary satisfaction.

As just elaborated, innumerable needs remain unmet, innumerable wants unfulfilled. Yet the sensory inputs of this world, the contact that 'Tasha receives, and the fulfillment for me of pursuing this writing, leave us momentarily satisfied.

I say momentarily because soon enough the world will provide ample reminders of all that we do miss and need, and obligations to that world will pull us from this blessed moment of morning perfection.

'Tasha has taught me much about dissatisfaction, as she yowls about the house, even when fed and full and played with.

She knows what she is made for, to be outside stalking, hunting, and exploring.

She knows something critical is missing from her life.

And occasionally, for what would look like no reason to anyone not closely attuned to the needs of kitties, she inconsolably yowls about the house in tragic despair and perennial dissatisfaction, in spite of having just received all my best efforts to feed and play.

She will sit at the door to the file storage room. She will look up at it yowling, as if thinking that perhaps behind that mysterious door resides that which will finally fulfill and satisfy her.

Occasionally I will open that door, allowing her to wander among the rubble of my filing system. She gracefully navigates the openings between boxes and stacks of file drawers, puts her nose into the pile of climbing gear, and finally comes back out into the hallway, her yowling only momentarily abated.

As in recent months I have each day read a verse from Buddhist wisdom, I find the quotes often address the subject of satisfaction, and the need to divorce one's self from the desires and passions and wants of our worldly existence.

Indeed, for the sake of inner peace and tranquility, eschewing desires and wants would in principle remove the very source of dissatisfaction.

But 'Tasha kitty (still curled up against my right forearm, head turning so bright yellow eyes can see the source of that crunching sound in the grass) demonstrates how natural is dissatisfaction. All my counseling to put away her desires and wants and instead seek the tranquility of inner satisfaction go unheeded.

'Tasha is now satisfied because she is putting my right arm to sleep and because hosts of birds and squirrels provide her surround-sound, 3D sensory, interactive entertainment, while my lap keeps her warm.

Maybe 'Tasha in her kitty wisdom declares that transcendental states of satisfaction are just not natural. She is irritatingly honest in her prowling-yowlings about the house when I won't let her outside, as she is delightfully honest in her purring and cuddling when lap-time suits her fancy.

(Boy, something in the woods sure has her attention!)

I have come to find that in almost everything in life "balance" is the watchword. I say almost everything because surely there are some redeeming qualities: holiness, compassion, love, honesty, for which excess is a good thing. But most of us are in little danger of even attaining balance of those attributes, much less excess.

But for everything else, I maintain balance is the optimum to be sought. I suspect that is even true of satisfaction.

Surely an excess of satisfaction might risk lethargy and chronic ambivalence. How can one passionately campaign for justice, or tirelessly work on cures, if one is satisfied?

More personally, how can one personally grow and progress and spiritually mature if one is satisfied?

I feel 'Tasha has carried dissatisfaction a little too far. Her focused and amplified misery makes me miserable as her mournful yowls fill the house. Heaven knows I know many people that do the same thing, cruelly yowling through their days about each and every inconvenience to any poor victim within earshot.

With a continuously alternating mix of success and failure I strive to relieve myself of the burdens of desires for material possessions and money and security and social relationship and title and honor. Unloading those burdens of desire is what makes moments like this one so sublimely beautiful, and what allows me to savor the embrace of the infinite when I go to bed each night.

But as for satisfaction with my spiritual state, and my efforts to help and give and care, I pray I never entertain the thought of becoming satisfied.

Likewise, though painful in its experience, I hope I can continue to feel pain upon seeing a bulldozer destroying a forest, and I hope I continue to feel tears upon reading about another school shooting.

To remove desire, to bask in self-imposed satisfaction, seems terribly dishonest, or at least terribly selfish, albeit it pleasant and convenient.

If one is to optimize one's impact in the world, and maximize personal growth; in other words, if one tries to love to the greatest degree possible, one must neither sink into bitter despair caused by dwelling on all that is wrong and missing, nor float away on a transcendental cloud by blinding one's self to even compassionate desires.

At this point in the morning 'Tasha hops off my lap, being true to her oft dissatisfied self, allowing my right forearm to begin to tingle with returning feeling, and telling me I need to bring this epistle to a close and get to work.

I pray that in the coming hour, self-satisfaction with my teaching will allow me to not freeze up in insecurity as the students stare blankly at me. And I pray that my self-satisfaction will be balanced by dissatisfaction driving me to further improve my efforts to impart some modicum of knowledge. I don't think the Buddha would disapprove.

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Part III

(Return to Table of Contents)

Peering Into the Void Within

'Tasha kitty sits above me on the back of the rocking chair, at least for a moment.

Satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and the role of each in fulfilling our life's role in the Purpose: that theme recurs over and over of late, prompted by 'Tasha kitty's yowling, perennial dissatisfaction, as well as my own gnawing, spiritual hungers.

It seems our lot in this temporal life to at least subconsciously sense some minimal, reptilian, spiritual awareness of something missing, something lacking, some void. The beautiful celebrity squandering her life in pathetic cycles of debauchery and rehabilitation, the once model parent or student gunning down colleagues or classmates, the suicide note, all these testify to our shared dissatisfaction, some universal void.

Whether recognized, acknowledged, identified, or not, it tries to claw its way out from inside our soul, uncomfortably reminding us that we have a soul, even if we deny it.

During prolonged stretches of inclement weather, 'Tasha kitty sometimes paces the house, forlornly yowling, aware that something in the very marrow of her nature remains unfulfilled. Her little kitty brain may or may not comprehend exactly the unrelenting source of dissatisfaction, that her nature calls to be in Nature, watching, alert, prowling, pacing, patrolling, listening, hunting, alive. But she knows she misses something, she knows dissatisfaction, and her yowls ensure I also know about it.

In response to her yowls I will swing her string and paper ball toy, or toss the sponge golf balls, and for moments of leaping, twisting, pouncing, batting, chasing kitty- abandon, 'Tasha gets distracted from her fuzzy dissatisfaction.

But as long as she cannot really fulfill her nature by engaging in the fully natural outdoor behaviors that call to her, the void in her life persists.

Yet this world does not readily fill that void. Cold, snow, and storm sometimes keep 'Tasha in the house, of her own choice.

When she goes outside, I keep an eye on her and limit her wanderings, as raccoons, foxes, and coyotes have proven the demise of all the free roaming cats in the area.

I do my best to allow 'Tasha opportunity to fill the void by fulfilling her nature, and by play to distract her from that void still unfilled, but eventually she must just accept the state of being, with some howling in the process.

Pretty much like us, I would say. We _know_ we miss something fundamental to our essence and nature.....at least our unacknowledged soul knows that, whether we grant it admission to our consciousness or not.

That gnawing void drives us to parties, goads us to jump into any opportunity for relationship, and sells us the styles and trends and behavior that we so desperately pray will bring us notice, approval, acceptance, and praise.

Like 'Tasha and her string toy, we pounce on the affair, the sale, the new model, the game, the fight, the sport, and the bottle, in desperate play to distract us from the terrifying Void within.

Now for the bad news, as if this was not already grim enough. If we come to understand the Void, if we unambiguously identify that for which we long, we eventually come to recognize that this physical world will at best ration it out only in temporary doses, momentary reprieves, each at best inevitably doomed to end with loss, separation, pain, grief, and/or sorrow, in direct proportion to how completely the interlude fulfilled our soul's need. That should keep the rehab clinics, suicide hot lines, liquor stores, and gun dealers in business a while longer!

(I have to interrupt typing these notes because of 'Tasha's yowling. With some blue sky finally showing, perhaps she can get outside and fulfill her nature for a little bit. We should all be so lucky.)

Oh my gosh, what a grim scenario we face!

Once we know what our hearts really need, we see we cannot really have it, just like I cannot let 'Tasha roam completely at will because in the process of fulfilling her nature she would become a fulfilling snack for some other resident of Nature.

So why bother with the potentially disconcerting project of looking into that inner Void if this temporal, physical, human existence will leave it more or less empty anyway? The old adage "ignorance is bliss" never seemed to ring truer.

But I do not think our hunger will let us _not_ look, at least not forever.

Heaven knows, that hunger gets us to try everything else: every relationship, product, purchase, food, religion, organization, affair, hobby, and latest incarnation of technology.

Who knows, maybe all those distractions are pulling us in some direction. If we are so ready to obey the latest edicts of some marketer, trend setter, or celebrity, why not at least give passing attention to the cries of our own heart?

Once we do take pause from our frantic pursuit to fill the unknown void, and instead courageously look into that void, and listen to our heart, we at least begin to take some informed control of our soul's destiny. That surely seems like a good thing, in spite of, and perhaps more so because of, this physical, human world's uncooperative attitude toward caring for the needs of our heart.

And what of this temporal, human world's inability to fully nourish our soul's needs? Must that necessarily preclude hope?

Once we begin to comprehend the real nature of our hunger, we can begin to recognize the previously unseen moments of nourishment that feed our soul. Just as our bodies receive enough nourishment without eating continuously, if we become attentive to special moments, we discover that our spirits receive enough nourishment to survive, and sometimes even thrive.

With growing understanding of our now shrinking Void, we discover we are empowered to create our own nourishment for our soul, when we bring sustenance to another's soul.

And as growing insight snowballs, along with discovering the abject hopelessness that this temporal, physical world's bright lights and baubles will ever fill our soul, we discover this temporal world need not be the only source of Hope.

Upon our Choice to seek, and therefore to give, that compassionate, tolerant, patient, empathetic, listening Unity for which we have always longed, we find we will often still hunger, even more intensely hunger. But now we have Hope, Hope bolstered by the occasional fulfilling feasts we now learn to recognize even in this world; Hope emboldened by certainty that our spiritual hunger itself testifies to Source and Sustainer, Destiny and Home, Hope not limited to mere fleeting, mortal frailty.

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Our True Desire

We seek and cleave to fragile temporal love because we long for eternal love. That seeking is perfectly natural. It is OK. But during the prolonged famine's when we have no temporal, worldly love, it helps to understand for what we really long, and to recognize that we have never been without it.

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Crossing Spiritual Dunes

In this modern world of FaceBook, MySpace, and tweeting, our spiritual connection with people, so desperately needed, is sometimes akin to drinking from shallow, muddy puddles.

And God help us, some of the puddles are poisoned.

But drink we must.

As shallow and contaminated as our imperfect human connections are, we must sip from the wet residue that we find in the puddles of the minimal human connections we can find.

Like nomads in the desert we learn to survive on those puddles, hording what moisture we can, greedily lapping up the last drops left on the top of the glistening mud, our thirst never slaked, but we get enough moisture to survive another day, to look for the next oasis, or pray for the next puddle.

Sometimes the social whirl brings a veritable rain storm, water falling all around us, and we stand looking up, trying to catch all the drops we can on our parched tongue, but the showers never last long, and the sands immediately soak up the rain, and we are left with only the knowledge of the taste of sweet, cool, pure water, but still we thirst.

How we long for the life-giving oasis of a person that intimately, compassionately listens, and occasionally in our journey we come across such welcome places.

But rare they are, rare enough that we cannot make our journey depending on such lucky finds.

Yet we each have the power to be that oasis for someone else. In the desiccated sands of modern society, we may have to survive on the smallest drops of care and compassion, yet we are empowered to ourselves become a deep pool of life giving, quenching, living water for those nomads that cross our path.

We have little control over our worldly path chancing upon the distant oasis, much less coming upon the running stream of another soul offering depth of solace and understanding. But nothing prevents us from being that soul of care and compassion for another.

And in so doing, in application of our tools of tolerance and forgiveness and patience and understanding and listening to another, we may find we are digging a well, a well that taps into depths of living water that will nourish our soul for the long journey, a well from a Source with no end, a Source of living water not reliant on the fickle showers and quickly drying pools at the surface of this human world.

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Between Grief and Faith

There is a fine balance to be struck between sorrow at the world's condition versus stoic resignation that the world's suffering fulfills the Creator's Purpose.

To lose this balance is to have compassion either rendered impotent under an overwhelming burden of sorrow or stifled mute by cold heart steeled against the grief.

In the balance we find motivating power in the pain of sorrow, and courage in the strength of faith.

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The Grand Canyon of spiritual progress

Struggling to see the grandeur in the human condition.

I write on a thundery morning, awaiting sunrise on the ridge. Beautiful! Thank You! So what will happen with jobs and teaching and economy and Alicia? I really feel like just kickin' back and watching. But I should give an answer to that tutoring request. For now I will just savor Your beautiful morning. Dear God, your waters of life surround.... Cleansing, healing, dynamic, alive.

Your world makes no sense, You know, at least the human part of that world. Utterly irrational it is, a nonsensical paroxysm of self-destruction.

Blessings such as this morning are the small islands of peace that lie surrounded by the ongoing, brutal conflict.

"Deep breaths", "deep breaths" I say before plunging back into the maelstrom.

In dealing with this worldly life I try to perceive that intimidating daily task in terms of crossing the Grand Canyon.

The first explorers chartered with crossing the Grand Canyon must have viewed its precipitous depths as an intimidating, discouraging, terrible barrier, a sight to sink the strongest spirit. But from our perspective, out our bus and car and airplane windows, we have the luxury of perceiving the majesty and grandeur of the Grand Canyon, a sight to be enjoyed and celebrated.

Likewise I would hope that someday, from a higher and future vantage point, I will perceive the grandeur and majesty of traversing these human trials that today so discourage. So to help gird my spirit for another day, I try to look ahead to that future day, that today I may get some motivating glimpse of the grandeur. For somewhere in all the irrational conflict, ignorant self-destruction, and mutual violence, something great is being born, born of a birth wracked with Creation's pain.

Infantile, self-absorbed, tantrum throwing, and willfully ignorant, we are the children of God. To see that glory is as difficult for us as it must have been for that first explorer peering over the edge of the Grand Canyon to imagine people planning their vacations around coming to this impassable hole in the ground.

But as difficult as we make it to see God's glory in our human behavior, it does help to look for it. It is there, you know. And seeing the glimpses of beauty makes the day's crossing a little easier.

****************************

Baby Bonsai

Awaiting the sunrise. Quiet this morning, having been awakened only by a hungry 'Tasha kitty this morning, instead of by the neighbor lady screaming at her family at 04:00 AM as on the morning before.

This rare weekend alone did of course turn into a special gift. I gained some subtle enhanced awareness of the balance between disciplined work on one's life project and acceptance of the gifts provided by the loving Sustainer.

It all works out, if we try. A great peace, long missing, fills my heart this warm morning, a sense of balance and proportion, glorious surrender and great expectations.

In the inspirational little bonsai forest above my house, where ancient, gnarled, miniature pines grow out of solid rock, against all odds a new little pine seedling has sprouted.

I thrill to watch its progress this spring. Among its hardy elders that symbolize the survival of good and life against all odds in this harsh world, the little sprout adds its unique symbolism. Until now, an aura of risk and fragility hung over the little bonsai spirits. For all their courage and tenacity, still it seemed a careless visitor or burst of wind could put an abrupt end to their valiant struggle.

But little sprout, miraculous new life appearing through rock solid impossibility, adds its chorus of eternal life renewal to the hymn of courageous endurance resonating from its hoary elders.

Tenuous roots of ages past may indeed someday succumb to world's violent indifference. But new life, like the molten gold sunrise now flowing across the robin's egg firmament, will surely arrive, the impossible nature of its circumstances testifying to the miraculous love of its Source.

********************************

Permanence

We desire to hold on to the moment.

We seek security in permanence.

We struggle against the rhythms, the ebb and flow, the cycles of Creation.

We grasp green emeralds, shiny gold, and sparkling diamonds as illusions of permanence, diverting our glance from the glory of living green, glowing sunsets, and laser beam dew drops.

Yet even in their fading, their dimming, their evaporation, the trees and sunsets and dew stand closer to eternity than the gold that will tarnish or the diamond to be stolen.

For the falling leaf, the sinking sunset, the vaporizing dew, will return, over and over, in beauty limited only by our choice to see.....

.....as too our lives and souls that we so dearly hold can reveal their joy and beauty when we let go, finding eternity not in permanence, but in endless Creation.

********************

Fall's Promise

Dry leaves rustle in fall struck trees, warming sun gives a kiss of dear departure, with promise to soon return.

Last muted autumn colors drift sleepily toward winter slumber.

In fall resides future's promise, the foliage of life now strewn across waiting earth, returning quickening spirit to soil patient,

all nature closing its eyes for

restful slumber,

a peaceful sleep,

secure, unworried,

certain in coming spring,

Autumn's

crisp, rustling,

gay colors reassuring,

to sleep secure,

savoring healing slumber,

Fall's promise, never broken.

*************************

Boundless

Infinite distances,

infinite smallness,

infinite layers of structure and complexity and simplifying, unified equations,

and infinite spiritual discovery!

All with _one_ simple, unifying theme!....

running through it all!

Eternal and infinite growth, learning, and exploration await us!

But always, with a sure and certain foundation!

I am certain of this, that in looking to the small, scientists will find structure even smaller than quarks and multi-dimensional strings, and in looking to the cosmos scientists will never find the ends of the universe(s). In directions of complexity and simplicity discoveries will always await us.

And in our souls and our relation with the loving Source, our opportunity for spiritual growth likewise will never stop, will never suffer the death of completion.

For only in growth is life. Only death is static and unchanging.

Yet through an eternity of discoveries within infinite possibilities, a single theme will always run, Unity among free individuals and with the Source of which they are part.

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Order from Chaos

(Notes from morning prayer walk through forest wet from last night's storm):

The needles! The patterns of the pine needles! On this gloriously wet morning after yesterday's heavy rain, the pine needles lie flat in aligned and curved patterns of shiny orange on the forest floor. (I try to write this around 'Tasha kitty's fuzzy bottom and tail sitting on my paper. )

An order of a striking beauty and surprising color has been created by the chaos of the rain.

The _potential_ for this ordered pattern already existed in the structure of the individual needles: their length, the geometry of their cross section, the concave and convex grooves and ridges along their length. Then, under the pummeling and stirring and mixing of yesterday's giant rain drops and numerous hail stones, in the great irony of Nature, the added energy of chaos results in spontaneous, aligned, geometrically structured, aesthetically pleasing _order_.

Hardly a unique example is this. Such pre-ordained order arising from prerequisite chaos seems the norm in Nature.

The inflating early universe instilling a temperature difference between the radiative energy and those first hydrogen nuclei eventually led to the majestic ordered spirals of galaxies out of the infinite chaos of the Big Bang.

Fine Structure Constant and electron shell quantum mechanics lay an eager foundation awaiting only the violent chaos of super-nova explosions and stellar system geologies to produce the sublime order of the Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) molecule.

From solutions of randomly dissolved salts grow exquisite crystals....and last night, under the pounding of rain and hail, random stacks of elongated ponderosa pine needles were arranged into interlaced arcs and curves across the trail.

Should we expect Nature to limit itself to formation of predisposed order out of chaos only in physical, material systems?

What of the violent wracked convulsions of human civilizations?

What of the external, and internal, chaos that besets our individual souls? Never welcomed, always avoided, but never escaped, chaos and confusion grant us only occasional respite.

Yet just as galaxies and life arose from violence and chaos, don't our learning, growth, and strength arise from the challenges and confusions of our lives?

The potential for Deoxyribonucleic Acid ( DNA ) long lay in bonding angles and electron exchange properties of carbon and hydrogen. It needed only the chaotic crucible of heat and cold and rock and storm to actualize its miracle.

What potential resides within each of our souls, awaiting the forge of life's inevitable challenges and the hammer of our individual choices to be sculpted into order out of the chaos, strength out of fear, wisdom out of ignorance....

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Sometimes I Can Almost See

Man, sometimes I feel like I come so close to understanding.

Consciousness, immortality, individuals, conflict,.......all this arising within this physical structure.

Sometimes it's as if I can almost see it, the One Source of life pushing through this straining gauze of temporal reality, life of necessity pushing through this physical passage in order to emerge reborn on the other side as individual life, conscious beings aware of each other.

Maybe I'm just trying to see this life in ways that would allow taking it a little less seriously, seeing its momentary form as something not enduring (as clearly it is not), but simply something to endure, and in the process, as our individual consciousness begins to take shape, to use as a starting point in applying our freedom to shape that consciousness.

The One Source, submitting It/Him/Herself to this temporal structure that divides that Source of Life into.....us, you, me, and the bunny now munching in the midst of the thriving bluebell flowers that fill the yard this spring.

Sometimes I can almost see it, and imagine that Source of life emerging on the other side of this physical, temporal process of Creation, emerging as individuals.

We think of Creation in terms of earth, moon, sun, critters, all physical manifestations of this universe.

I suspect the real Creation is what lies beyond this world, and this world is to ultimate Creation what the paintbrush, or the sculpture's mold, or the hammer and chisel, are to the artist.

Life, the very essence of life and consciousness, have exploded from a single Source just as the physical Big Bang exploded out of the Singularity.

We each come from that One Source, and in this physical life we just begin to taste the first awakenings of individual consciousness.

We arise, we are born, we are still being born, and in our spiritual infancy as our consciousness arises in this world, we engage in our petty conflicts and indulge in our frustrations that the universe does not function per our will.

We are no longer alone, we are part of the One that declared "I Will Be What I Will Be", and we are the result, we are what the One chose to be, we, conscious, free, individual.

While still in this world that gives birth to our consciousness, we can only do the best we can in the inevitable maelstrom of clash and conflict.

We are able for the moment to only clearly perceive the physical, the temporal, our consciousness only just beginning to hear the faintest whispers and dimmest shadows that betray the awaiting Creation for which we are born.

We are the spiritual newborns, eyes tight shut, our consciousness overwhelmed with the sensations of the physical surface upon which we lie, our consciousness not nearly capable of opening our eyes to see directly the infinite and eternal spiritual room that lies beyond our touch.

But then we blink, momentarily allowing that first glimpse of Light to enter consciousness.

Slowly, fearfully, reluctantly, we acknowledge that there is more than what our skin touches, that we are empowered to detect, perceive, and explore a world that lies beyond the end of our still clenched little fingers.

Such is our spiritual condition in this world, our physical bodies and senses analogous to the blanket in which the newborn is wrapped, touch and contact being the sum of its sensations, until finally it opens its eyes. We are in the process of opening our spiritual eyes, to discern that which lies beyond the physical, the temporal, the temporary.

This world, this physical life, is merely the briefest of passings, the living Source passing through a sieve of time and space that divide that Source into individual, conscious souls.

The Seven Days of Creation were hardly the end. They were simply the defining of the foundation from which eternal Creation would be built.

So here, in momentary clash and pain and fear and conflict and harshness, we awaken, awakening first to our own consciousness, awakening to self-awareness, then awakening to our empowerment, our Choice, our freedom.

Sometimes I can almost see, when I try to open my eyes.

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Birth of Consciousness

Consciousness born, here and on how many planets, thrashing, crying, in confused desperation, consciousness born,

struggling in birth,

struggling with newborn,

Godlike awareness,

of something, something

beyond itself,

consciousness expanding,

first dim awareness

slowly growing brighter,

the oppressive fog of self-focus

slowly lifting,

and realization,

both desperately sought and long denied,

grows,

that we are not alone.

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Part IV

(Return to Table of Contents)

Disclaimer on the following section: "Nuts and bolts summary of life, the universe, and everything"

I find this section has the literary charm of Cliff Notes, with lots of facts crammed in at the expense of the feeling and breathing and living essence. The reader not in the mood for such specific speculative analysis is invited to fast-forward to material that better strikes their fancy. I know I would like to.

_But over and over and over you hear people ask what's life about, what's the purpose of existence, how can eternal life work, what's the nature of the soul (if it exists at all), etc., etc., etc. So it seems appropriate to not beat around the bush and to lay out a model that takes a stab at pulling together consistent answers to such questions._

Prelude to the summary of life, the universe, and everything.

As I wrestle with whether to include the following somewhat tedious speculation about the functioning of life, the universe, and everything, I keep in mind my conviction that our beliefs and understanding and models of reality, even the following clumsy example, should serve one primary purpose.

What we believe is important and has meaning only in so far as it influences how we relate to one another. The meaningful essence of any belief system is to be found in this. It is in this aspect that glimmers of Truth can be found flickering between the temple columns and around the altars.

The value of a belief system lies in the degree to which it encourages, motivates, and sustains the believers to care, to love, to forgive, and to tolerate their fellow humanity, and to grow in relationship with the loving Source.

Make no mistake, in this temporal world faith, belief, and religion are _essential_ to that encouragement, motivation, and sustaining nourishment of the soul.

I submit the following with the prayer it will clarify and strengthen the reader's faith, or provide some small light on their path to finding their faith.

A nuts and bolts summary of life, the universe, and everything (with a smile, a wink, and a tip-of-the-hat to Douglas Adams)

When Columbus watched sails disappear over the horizon, he saw nothing that countless others had not seen for millennia.....but in that old view shared with all the other sailors of all time, he perceived a new reality, a round world, a world on which he could sail as far as he wished with no fear of falling off. Afterwards, everyone could watch sails disappear over the horizon and now see a round world open to their discovery.

We all see the same life horizon, share similar life experiences of birth, death, joy, fear, love, and grief. But are there new perspectives still to be discerned from those horizons?

Reality exists only in interaction

Remember the old question: "if a tree falls in the forest, but no one is around, is there sound?" It turns out we must extend the question to more than the crashing sound of the tree!

My analysis of the branch of physics called "quantum mechanics" convinces me that experienced reality exists only via interaction. In other words, the photon that doesn't intersect an electron (or some other interaction potential) does not yet have existence with defined properties and coordinates in our physical world. A sub-atomic particle, a soccer ball, or a person have existence and reality only in the sense of how they relate to the rest of the universe.

Everything not actualized by interaction remains a potential for interaction.

All factors in the universe (space-time structure, speed of light, gravitational constant, fine structure constant, etc.) have values that support existence of individual conscious beings.

This is no small trick. It means the universe can locally integrate information in a temporally stable pattern such as DNA and the brain. Further, some of these information patterns (namely in your brain) have the capability to self-reference themselves, leading to consciousness.

The universe structure is balanced so as to allow these conscious systems (people) to be both independent of each other, yet still communicate.

Again, no small trick. Even relativity enters into the fact that each individual information integration unit (like you) will exist in their own perception of reality, independent of others. Only you see what you see, only you have your thoughts about it. Yet in spite of this independence, the "systems" (humans) are not isolated. They can communicate their very individual information patterns (form, thoughts, intent, feelings) by exchange of energy wave patterns. (We can see light, hear sound, feel touch, etc.)

These conscious entities have free-will

(in case you're skipping through, we're still in the science part)

Again invoking the physics of quantum mechanics we see that events and patterns are not pre-determined, but the future has an innate uncertainty, even if we know everything about the present......but present conditions do influence the future. In the conscious mind, self-referencing thought patterns influence the next resulting thought patterns. Combined with the large number of indeterminate quantum states in the mind, this leads to free-will choice. i.e. you are not programmed.

The highest form of reality exists in the individual's interaction with life.

"Love is real!"

As stated above, I believe physics shows actualized reality exists only in interaction. This is true of a light photon intersecting an electron.....and it's true of people's lives. The greater the range of interaction, the greater the depth of the resulting formed reality. This means that love, by allowing shared interaction at the deepest, most complex level, forms the most profound and complete reality.

Universal direction emerges

Scientists determine laws of physics and nature by observing what events predictably repeat. e.g. The fact the glass falls down every time, never falling up, leads to postulating a law of gravity. The consistent development of all factors in the universe leading to existence of free-will conscious entities implies formation of such beings is an underlying natural direction for universal development (like falling down is the natural direction for the dropped milk glass, and convergent evolution naturally leading to strikingly similar species evolving from different ancestors in widely separated locations, e.g. river dolphins.)

Further, existence itself requires interaction. The development of the universe is a history of ever more complex interactions. All factors in the development of the Universe point to ever increasing scope of interactions among conscious individuals as the overriding direction to which all other factors contribute.

Hence the universe moves inexorably toward formation of loving individuals. Some would describe this as "purpose" of the universe, though more scientific terminology such as "interaction boundary condition", "superseding law", etc., sound more politically marketable. But this summary of "life, the universe, and everything" is probably not very marketable anyway, so I'll just brazenly continue to use the term "Purpose".

The next step

The Choice to interact with agape' Love provides humanity the opportunity to take the next step in the development of the Universe. This next step in scope and depth of interaction fulfills the very essence of the nature of reality as established in the foundation beginnings of the Universe.

Unity and Communion

Don't confuse this with church communion. We will use Unity and "Communion" to refer to the depth of interaction of an individual with other people, with life, with Nature/Creator/God/Universe/Source/Wholeness/Thor/Zeus/ Acuecucyoticihuati (that's a real name by the way), etc. (Sorry about the long list of names, but seeking Unity/Communion is not limited to one sect, belief, denomination, or title).

Be careful about mixing this with related words like "connection", "interconnection", "unification", "wholeness", "oneness". These words don't convey the sense of complete integration with another while still retaining complete individual identity.

Unity is symbiotic, both participants gaining strength, freedom, and peace in the process. That which promotes connection and bond and synergy promotes unity, _and_ that which strengthens and sustains and nourishes the individual promotes Unity, because the highest Unity exists when formed with the strongest, healthiest, freest individuals.

The Choice

We have one overriding capability in our free-will nature. That is the Choice of the level of Unity to seek with others and with the Creation/ the Universe/ God/ ... whoops, here we go with the names again.

Freedom in Unity

Try creating a musical composition in a room full of people with each playing their own song and instrument at the highest volume. The result is no music. Even if you manage to hear your song, what's the point if no one else hears it?

In contrast, express all your artistic soul by playing an improvisational musical piece in the midst of a group in which all members are aware of each other's music, each creating his/her own expression, but doing it in rhythm and harmony with the other members.

You find your freedom, your expression, is far greater in the latter case.

The created music of your life has reality only in terms of how it blends with others'; not succumbing to others' music; not dominating others' music; not following others' music; not leading others' music. Playing in crescendo harmony with others; this is the freedom and strength of Unity.

Freedom has meaning only in reference to some boundary. Even freedom to roam the entire world is still constrained to the surface of the planet.

Freedom to paint whatever image you wish still requires you limit yourself to painting on some kind of surface. The painter lacking brush and pallet and colors can hardly be called free to paint.

Without the boundary condition of interacting with something, freedom does not exist. It's in this sense that Unity/Communion interactions with others create freedom.

Hence the irony that the person choosing collapse into the self, not subjecting their life to the needs/feelings/life of others (rejecting Communion/Unity) winds up with no freedom. Instead, they find themselves chained alone within their own finite body, brain, and senses.

Individual awakening to Unity

Individuals can grow in their awareness of Unity. This manifests itself in increasing sensitivity to life, to love, to the existence and nature of all that surrounds each individual. This individual growth in awareness extends an evolutionary direction evidenced throughout natural history.

We see through the developing structures of the early universe, and in the evolving complexity of life, repeating patterns of entirely new forms of existence arising from increasing complexity of interactions. And those new forms of existence in turn exhibit increased ability to interact at yet more complex levels.

Quarks to atoms to molecules to planets to microbes to plants to animals to people, each in turn is capable of integration over a greater spectrum of interaction information.

Just as physical forces that formed atoms and planets provided opportunities for life and life's concomitant new forms of interaction, the social forces that drive humanity provide opportunities for the complex interactions of Unity and Communion, and resulting new forms of existence.

The parenting bond, the sex drive, the need for affection, the drive to communicate with others, the formation of communities, the inexorable development of technological communication, growing awareness of the environment as a source of life instead of something to abuse, all provide opportunity to fulfill Nature's drive toward Unity.

Just as not every planet has life on it, not all Communion and Unity opportunities provided by Nature get used.

Most of our emotions testify to the profound reality of interpersonal Communion, e.g. the feelings when with good friends, the desire to join in social activities, the security of holding or being held by someone you love.....but lacking awareness of Communion and Unity, and living in a shattered world, we misdirect the drive. We join gangs. We use drugs, smoke, and drink to be accepted. Motivated by Unity/Communion with our tribe, we slaughter the other tribe.

Once awakened to the nature of the Choice and our role in a universal trend toward Unity and Communion, we can consciously move toward genuine Communion/Unity instead of relying on sometimes misleading spiritual hungers.

The nature of the individual

Our personalities, knowledge, limitations, experiences, and appearance are dictated by circumstance and genetics. On the other hand, one thing defines our individual self-chosen nature: that is, in whatever situation we find ourselves, with whatever life, body, and brain, do we strive to grow towards greater Unity or to move toward greater collapse into ourselves. i.e. in the Choice, our individual Choice, we define our Self.

Physical existence is just a pallet upon which to paint our reality.

The Choice of depth of interaction defines individuals and their reality. Physical existence simply provides a medium for that interaction between individuals. Hence physical existence is simply a pallet upon which we choose what higher level of reality to create by our Choice of depth to which we will share our lives with others.

Consistently, when people ask themselves what moments in life were most meaningful, real, and alive, they describe Unity/Communion situations. Sometimes with family as a child, sometimes with a life-risking adventure (providing Unity with the reality of nature), sometimes with a great personal accomplishment ( and remember, that which strengthens and liberates the individual also promotes higher levels of Unity), sometimes with a lover, sometimes with a social experience, sometimes with an exposure to the beauty of nature, and often with their children.

Sculpting your soul

By your Choice and the resulting interactions in this physical world, you have the power to create your essence, your eternal soul. You sculpt yourself out of whatever raw material you are given. The beauty of the resulting sculpture does not depend on the size of the stone, the type of rock, or where it stands. It depends on simply what you choose to form out of it.

Physical constraints

Just as the physical environment (poverty or luxury, war or peace, etc.) provides the specific situations for the Choice (whether to love or not) your eternal soul has to work through a physical interface to this universe. That interface medium is your brain and body. What you would wish to do with that brain and body (whether or not you can actually do it) reflects your Choice to focus on your own universe or expand your universe to incorporate others.

In making the Choice you have to decide how to deal with worldly limitations of plague, war, recession, gangs, etc., in your environment.....and in making your Choice you must also deal with internal limitations of drug dependency, sex dependency, manic-depression, hormone imbalances, schizophrenia, abused-child syndrome, Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder, etc., etc., etc.

The essence of the "eternal you" lies not in these conditions and limitations, nor even in the outcomes of your battles with them. It's your Choice to _struggle_ with those challenges and limitations, though some of them will remain too strong to overcome, that defines your essence and sculpts your soul.

On eternal life

The fact all the universe is precisely balanced to allow living, free-will, conscious individuals implies this overriding requirement extends further beyond this temporal existence. Since interaction and information patterns define the reality of the individual, the individual essence can continue after physical death if the information patterns associated with that individual continue to exist in any form in any universe.

This makes possible the sculpting of our eternal soul by our Choice. Beyond this temporal life we get the outcomes of our Choice, either for isolation unto the self or unification with a greater reality.

A person's belief about eternal life influences the extent to which they can choose Unity and Communion. Unity/Communion bonds limited to this temporal physical existence will break, due to death, separation, etc. Because such bonds are a high form of reality, their breaking induces a very real pain, called grief.

Such inevitable end of Communion relationships makes choosing them impractical and illogical if one does not anticipate the possibility they continue past death.

Hence rejection of eternal life also profoundly limits the ability to accept complete life during this temporal existence.

A few conclusions associated with the Unity/Communion model of reality

Though a person may indeed sincerely believe that this physical existence is only a temporary pallet upon which to paint the eternal reality of our souls, that person still grieves when a loved one dies.

It's OK and normal and healthy to grieve (up to a point of course). That sensation is real, because the severing of bonds with another soul is a literal rupturing of something profoundly real in terms of the highest level of interaction reality. (Though obviously grief combined with hope for eternity differs from grief without such hope.)

Bonds of love are literally (ontologically) far more real than material existence, because of the greater range and depth of the interaction, and their eternal nature.

In spite of the suffering we perceive in this temporal human world, the structure of the universe is that of Love. It allows complete freedom. It offers complete Communion, Unity, closeness, and affection, if we so choose. It offers all that for eternity, while this worldly time of Choice with its associated trials is finite.

Choices limiting Unity and Communion

Nicotine, alcohol and other drugs collapse one into ones' own mind, limiting the extent of real life and Unity and Communion one can experience.

Materialism, immersion in TV, video games, slot machines, are all the same thing.... a collapse into the self, which you are indeed free to do, but by minimizing real life interaction it leaves one with no living reality.

It works out! There is hope!

The whole Universe orbits around providing the Choice. The temporary limitations on your life at this small point in space and time cannot withstand that influence. You will have all the opportunity you desire to grow into Unity.

Nothing new here.

Though not usually calling it "Unity", humanity has strived for it since the beginning of consciousness; cave paintings strived for Unity and Communion with Nature; Etruscan funerary art captured the Unity bonds of affection and intimacy between man and wife.

Humanity has always seen and felt the drive toward interpersonal Unity, but dimly, through the shards of our shattered existence.

Many people would read all the preceding and recognize it as just another modern jargon for something they already deeply and personally experience without need for any of this analysis.

Religion often entails seeking Unity. As with people, the differences among religions lie in the extent of the range of Unity.

Individuals choose varying degrees of chosen Unity mean:

Some people can love their children but work as a hit man for the mafia.

Others can love their tribe/nation but slaughter the next tribe/nation.

Likewise, religions vary in the scope of Unity and Communion they preach:

Some preach taking care of fellow believers, but it's OK to slaughter heathens, infidels, and gentiles.

Some animist and pagan religions preach awareness of nature, natural rhythms, and natural objects, but say little about relationship with other people.

Some religions espouse not doing to others what you don't want them to do to you.

Others espouse doing to others what you want them to do to you. (more pro-active than the former.)

Teachings on Communion and Unity range from benign tolerance to sacrificial love.

To interpret familiar phrases in terms of Unity and Communion:

"Give up your life that you may gain eternal life" captures the essence of choosing to turn from worldly life with its collapse into the self, and instead turning toward Unity with the Whole.

"Follow the will of God" is simply giving oneself to Unity with the Universe and the Creator.

Obviously "love others as yourself" is the consummate expression of the goal of Unity.

"Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit" eloquently expresses this model's premise. i.e. opening one's self to the scope of interaction entailed in agape' love is literally a birth of the individual soul to a higher life reality.

We can't talk about purpose of life without dealing with God and religion

If God/Creator, exists, why doesn't God reveal Him/Her/It self?

That would destroy our freedom of Choice.

What about supernatural intervention in this world?

A matter of definition. With all physical/space/time structure balanced to allow existence of free-will individuals and provide the Choice, the "intervention" or "miracles" people ask about would simply be hidden in the normal functioning anyway. If not woven into "explainable physics", "miraculous" events would risk removing our freedom of Choice by making universal influences too obvious.

What about the individual personalities worshiped by various religions?

Examine them in terms of their demonstrated contribution to Unity, and don't judge them in terms of what their followers did (and do)! How much love did Thor, Odin, Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, Mohammed, actualize in this world? Note: "actualize love" is not the same as "talk about". Talk's cheap. What did they do?

The teachings and examples of these leaders may help you in your path toward Unity. Many describe the Spirit of their leader/God providing active support here and now in attaining Communion as they open their life to that leader/God/Spirit. Such interpersonal relationship entails a high form of Unity reality.

In crude worldly analogy comparing spiritual belief to spiritual relationship, knowing in your mind beyond a shadow of a doubt what a wonderful spouse a person would make, and how wonderful it would be to live with that person and share your lives together, is not even remotely the same as actually living with them.

Who and what a person worships (= strives for, = seeks relationship with) reflects the person's Choice. From Satan to Buddha to Yeshu, a full spectrum of Communion and Unity levels is available on the religious buffet, ranging from total collapse into the self to total self-sacrifice.

End of the summary of life, the universe, and everything

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Part V

(Return to Table of Contents)

Speculations on corollaries arising from the preceding summary of life, the universe, and everything.

Heaven, Pets, and Bigoted Relatives

By gosh, "I think this is how it works!", though I always say that with the caveat that I would never pretend to really understand the workings of the infinite loving Source. I just find it helpful for my faith to cobble together some kind of feeble understanding of how the Creation, individual souls, and eternity _might_ function.

So, here goes my latest version of a model for existence of eternal souls.

The consciousness wave function of an individual can easily enough be replicated in any hyper-complex collection of indeterminate states, including for example, human brains. Hmm. Did I hit you a little too fast with that? Let's rephrase it to say that all that makes you "you" (an identity which I've long described as the sum of your personal choices and response to consequences of those choices) could, in principle, be transplanted into any system complex enough to accommodate all the "programming" associated with your personality.

So, after a physical death in one place, to continue the essence of a soul in another living entity is a piece of cake. With only an undetectable tweak of a few gazillion quantum states (such as formed by brain cells, neurons, and ganglia ) and voila, that essence of values you sculpted during your last life (those values capturing the essence of your soul ) arrives somewhere else. (In other writings I've expounded on how quantum states, which appear indeterminate to us, could be adjusted to accomplish a universal Purpose without our being aware of it. )

Now, when I say "somewhere else", I really mean " _somewhere else_ ". With unfathomable numbers of universes and galaxies within those universes among which to choose, you, as a component of the creation potential of the loving Source (that's the "created in His image" part) wind up in exactly that universe, time, and place consistent with what you sought during your last life. You wanted it, you've got it, almost like a world custom created to accommodate exactly how you think the world should be.

Now, here's a snag: Most folks who want to live in a loving, compassionate, "connected with each other and God" kind of Heaven, also hope to meet their departed buddies, loved ones, and fuzzy pets in that Heaven. Yet I know darned good and well that some of the people I really care about and really want to have living in my neighborhood in Heaven may not choose exactly the same kind of Heaven I might choose. It's kind of an "I want Burger King, she wants McDonald's, but we want to dine together" sort of quandary.

The key point: you get what you want in the next life, _and_ you may very well get multiple cracks at this lottery, thanks to events like death and birth.

So, let's say you want that Heaven with all your loved one's sharing the crystal condominium with you. Let's say you want everyone in that world to exist freely, independently, but in Unity. I don't mean you just think this sounds good, I mean you try to shape your present life and decisions and priorities around exactly those values consistent with such a future life.

OK, you die, and you wake up in some universe that functions exactly like what you wished Heaven to be. Cool, except will your dear aunt Tilde and childhood dog Scruff be there? Dog Scruff's residency is probably not a problem, but what if Aunt Tilde was nice to you, giving you lots of presents and candy, but otherwise she was pretty much a self-absorbed biddy out to make as much dough in real estate as possible. The Heaven you envision is the last kind of place she was shaping her life for.

So in your Heaven will there always be an empty condo in the complex, because Aunt Tilde chose something different?

I believe that as through eternity we each experience various realities, we all eventually come to the conclusion that our very existence, not to mention wholeness, joy, and fulfillment, arise from Unity Communion with other conscious beings. So what's that mean for Aunt Tilde?

Keeping in mind all the gazillion universes and galaxies and star systems, imagine that in her next life Aunt Tilde winds up in some place where all land is subject to "development", where she's not bothered with rules and regulations impeding her deals, where she's not bothered with family or friends interrupting at inconvenient times her accumulation of riches. (Aren't you glad you're not there? )

Let's say that Aunt Tilde finds after a lifetime of that place that it's not to her liking. She decides she might prefer a little more green between the asphalt and warmth between the people. She finishes up that life, in the ripple of quantum states the seed of her conscious essence is planted in another world, and she gets to again fine tune her wishes of who she wants to be and what kind of world she wants to live in.

Eventually, she gets the hang of this interpersonal connection thing, finally she accepts the presence of the loving Spirit in her life, finally, through several, or several million lifetimes, she winds up wanting exactly the kind of Heaven you wanted.

Her condo in your crystal building doesn't go empty. And because time is a pretty flexible and relative thing, you don't have to wait for her to complete her several dozen lives. She's there waiting for you when you arrive. You took a short cut. She took a little detour along the way. Since each universe has its own time, and the loving Creator can place a soul's conscious essence in any time in any universe, all Aunt Tilde's other lives do not keep her from being there waiting in your Heaven.

So my uncle, a delightfully sweet and conscientious man who had one little flaw, that being an unflinching, racist bigotry, will have opportunities to change his opinion before I see him in my Heaven. After all, I certainly don't want any bigots in my Heaven, but I do want my uncle there.

In this model there is implication of remarkable god-like power for individuals. You get exactly the kind of universe that fits your willed creation! I find that perfectly consistent with our individual souls, created in the image of God, existing within the super-Universe of the loving Source.

I like the image. An infinite matrix of universes, created for us, us as individuals, created to give us the power to shape ourselves and live in a world of our choosing, but also providing the opportunity for further growth. An infinite matrix of universes, but each point, each star, each planet, each unimaginable set of laws of physics, supporting life that provides the opportunity for us to freely choose to be together.

If you step back and look from a distance at the preceding model for eternal souls, and you consider all the individual souls on all their individually created paths, and further you consider them all eventually coalescing into a mutually and freely chosen Unity, you can picture Creation as an image of a loving God-consciousness exploding into the oblivion of spaces and times, sacrificing the Oneness to give birth to infinite numbers of conscious souls, granting them each the god-like power to define themselves.

Then, eventually, over time so infinite that time is revealed as illusion, all those individual souls, born of the Source, scattering like glowing embers of exploded fireworks to pass through the myriad universes that give body to their consciousness, freely choose their Destiny Home, coming together again, not to melt into oblivion of Oneness, but coming together as individuals, free, separate, living eternally in freely chosen Unity with each other and Wholeness with the loving Source of which they were always part.

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The Gravity of Desires

_Everyone_ needs, whether recognizing or not, Unity and Communion. In _any_ and _all_ interactions those two related needs pull as inevitably as gravity, while potentially destructive components (destructive to Communion and Unity) repel....and therefore interpersonal orbital paths are established in a manner directly analogous to formation of galaxies and stellar systems, momentums and gravitational attractions pulling hither and yon,

( _While writing the following on paper I had to work around 'Tasha kitty lying on top of the paper. She therefore gets credit for any unusual poetic forms._ )

Paths pulled apart,

collisions destroying, and

sometimes, perfect orbits

miraculously

evolving. We

must limit

interactions, for example

affairs and multiple spouses,

because too many "objects", each with their own gravitational pull, inevitably lead to

destructive conflict and collisions.

You _will_ be pulled, hence if you do not seek and accept those pulls constructive to your Unity (including growth and nourishment of the Self) other attractors may pull you in destructive directions, such as food, drugs, and sensations pulling with their own illusions of transitory Unity experience.

You will always get pulled toward worldly Communions, distracting you, filling your life, and precluding the life-giving, Unity-building Communion with the One Source. Even in the presence of these destructive pulls, the essential strengthening of your individual soul can come from the free Choice to invest time and effort in prayerful connection with the loving Sustainer.

Unlike planets, you have some choice over which pulls to accept and reject. In this analogy between gravity and Unity, your soul is more analogous to a space ship than an asteroid. You possess at least some propulsion power to adjust your path as friends, family, pets, work, temptations, distractions, interruptions, and TV shows pull and tug in conflicting directions.

Which pulls may contribute to formation of beautiful, stable, orbiting systems, which pulls will lead to destructive collisions or drifting into an empty void?

The physical components of this universe inflated in the Big Bang, then, under the influence of forces strong and weak, electromagnetic and gravitational, the shattered universe reformed into new structures of atoms and molecules, planets and people.

In analogy, out of the "explosion" of the self-sacrificing One God now arise conscious individuals, their motions linked and connected by the Unity Imperative, collisions and cataclysms leaving cratered scars and shattered lives, but eventually, on occasion, free souls sorting out into majestic, stable orbits.

One must limit interpersonal Communion bonds. Too many simultaneous, complex pulls, like too many planets trying to orbit the same star, lead to collisions and gravitational tidal forces that will shatter and tear apart fragile Unity orbits.

In this temporal existence of the birth of our souls we must accept the finite limitations of the Communion we can experience.

We must expect and accept the pain of unavoidable departures and goodbyes. We must not take on too many bonds, involvements, commitments and lovers that ironically will eventually lead to less, not more, Communion and Unity.

Such limitations during this worldly time of our spiritual birth reflect the necessary, constraining conditions for our birth into _individual_ consciousness. Not recognizing and accepting these limiting constraints, trying to grab too much, too much food, too many lovers, too much sensory overload, too many possessions, underlies the spiritual illness that afflicts modern society.

Never has technology offered so much opportunity to connect. But the friend's conversation gets cut off because of another incoming call, neighbors and extended family remain strangers because technology allows us to leave the neighborhood and drive across town for the date, club meeting, or kid's soccer game.

Many quick phone calls and love affairs are easier than the depths of true closeness, but in their quantity they preclude quality.

Our finite human nature in this physical existence precludes having unlimited bonds, connections, and relationships. It also precludes too much intimacy in any one relationship.

Though we _should strive_ for the greatest possible depth of meaning and Communion in relationships, we must accept that even the best matched and most committed of souls will have differences and will need some distance. To not recognize this is to risk a relationship demise analogous to two stars that spiral closer and closer until pulling each other apart in cataclysm.

Even with such limitations, we are inexorably called to seek stable, close orbits with others. But our only chance of attaining such miraculous Unity with others lies in first seeking Communion with the One Source

For millennia, time in the field, on the hunt, or at the village loom provided ample, connectionless quiet for the soul to open to the essential whisper of the loving Spirit. Nowadays, God gets cut off by a text-message.

Just as the mistress destroys the marriage by adding one more "gravitational pull" that disrupts the bond and orbit of the married couple, draining limited time and energy, so the cell phones, e-mails, and Tevo recordings create a tangled web of demanding connections that at the end of each day again succeeded in keeping us from going home to the quiet, to the whispering Spirit, to Connection with ourselves and something greater than ourselves.

Modern lives are overfilled with sensations and shallow connections. If in the midst of myriad, conflicting pulls our souls are to attain the elegant beauty of stable, constructive Unity orbits with other souls and with the loving Creator, we must make some sacrifice, a sacrifice of our time.

This time sacrifice is as real, tangible, and counter to our instincts as are burnt offerings of firstborn sheep in the Sinai 3000 years ago. In this seeming sacrifice of life cut out of our busy schedule, we escape the chaotic, fleeting, worldly bonds pulling hither and yon, and instead gain the stable bond of resonant eternal Unity we were unknowingly seeking in the first place.

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Productivity

Curious how the mind, or is it the soul?... is sometimes so terribly resistant to focus concentration, discipline, and control. It takes little to distract me, and the most minor upset to my routine will suffice to leave me distracted and frustrated the rest of the day. I just read Walter Russell's claim that men of genius are simply, by their own effort, more adept at concentrating the mental energy of the universe. ( Walter Russell was supposedly one of the founders of the concept and term "new age". )

That being the case, I am woefully incompetent today. Today I will accomplish nothing, by most people' standards. Not a single step will I make toward the publishing goal. I spent the morning helping Sarah, this afternoon I will exchange e-mail with my mom and then belay kids from the School for the Blind. Tomorrow I take disabled Dave on the "Castle" tour. From what little I've read of Walter Russell so far, he would not count such days as productive. Edison, Twain, and Roosevelt were productive.

To be admired as productive one must leave behind sculpture, painting, books, inventions, or institutions.

By this criteria, raising a child, comforting a friend, assisting a person in need, do not count as productive investments of one's time.

Walter Russell may indeed have far more to say on this subject. I've read only a brief biography and should no more draw conclusions about him from that than one should judge a person based on their first handshake.

But I will say that it is a common conclusion to evaluate a person's genius, creativity, or spiritual rank according to the tangible objects, creations, or societies left in their wake.

I would contradict that by speculating that many of the most productive inventors, scientists, artists, and politicians left their prodigious contributions because they lived at disconnected, cold distance from their fellow humanity.

The person giving their life to caring for a disabled relative, lovingly raising children, or volunteering to serve in capacities generous and compassionate, should take heart.

Worldly monuments, titles, and accolades may indeed not accrue to your biography....but when all such temporal and ephemeral contrivances have turned to dust long removed by time's breezes, your loving efforts will still be lauded by choirs eternal and immortalized in heavenly monuments unfailing.

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Infinity in the finite

In the finite we can know the infinite.

If we focus on the boundaries, our size compared to the universe, our abilities compared to those of the Olympian, our accomplishments compared to the Nobel Prize winner, our giving compared to that of Jesus, there is no limit to how small we can make ourselves feel. There is always a bigger house, bigger accomplishment, bigger planet, more selfless Love.

We live as finite beings, but within that finitude lies immortality.

All Purpose, all existence, all meaning, all eternity, all fullness, are captured in a small house full of laughing family, sharing friends, and welcome strangers.

All infinity, life, Godliness, and holiness, are contained in a single loving touch.

All Meaning, All Purpose

All arises from the One Consciousness.

All would exist in perfect fit and

harmony, if the One Consciousness

had remained One.

The One Consciousness chose to give

free life and consciousness

to individual souls within the existence,

an existence that expressed and

expresses the will of its Source.

All conflict and suffering arise because

the Creation allows

the individual conscious beings

to pursue their own will,

disconnected from the rest of

existence.

No longer harmoniously functioning

in Wholeness

engendered of One Will,

the Creation

is shattered, individual conscious wills

clashing and in conflict.

The Wholeness remains possible, awaiting

those individuals who choose

Unity with the Source that gave them

birth, a Wholeness no longer

of a Single Will, but a Wholeness

grown to include the infinite dimensions

of innumerable wills, the wills of

free individuals that choose Unity

with all Creation and the Creator.

This world is the birthplace and place of Choice,

where Creator and Creation suffer

the agony of birth

and grief of death,

the Wholeness torn and bleeding,

in order to bring forth conscious souls,

souls free and individual,

free to choose isolation

in their own willfulness,

and free to instead choose personal

empowerment arising

from living within Purpose and Unity.

Merely a way station,

this temporal world, from which

souls free and conscious

in the image of their Maker

in turn create themselves, and set their

course through eternal growth.

**************************

Living Responsibility

Another day begins, full of potential, promising and terrifying.

Such responsibility, a day of conscious life! How blessed and fortunate, the monastic monk and uniformed soldier, their regimen and routine dictated, stripped of burdensome choices and stressful decisions.

A day of life!....rare, precious, fleeting gem of sparkling possibilities, no petty bauble this, a treasure, a gift, a responsibility of inestimable weight.

************************

It is not the destination, but the direction....

As we crawl over the unavoidable and uncontrollable barriers, hurdles, obstacles, chasms, and mountain ranges of this temporal life, the destination we reach does not define our essence and identity.....

....it is in our choice of _direction_ for which we choose to strive and struggle that we sculpt our souls.

*********************

Building Eternity On Houses of Cards

How intently we stare into the future, desperately trying to see our fate, frantically trying to shape it, in a curious blend of willfulness, resignation, determination, surrender, hope and near panic.

We cannot ignore that darkness before us. Action must be taken, with whatever cards we are dealt and what little knowledge we have, we must attempt to build our house, whether distressingly aware or resolutely in denial that any unexpected puff of future breeze can send our thoroughly planned and meticulously erected construct flying in abject collapse.

Yet even should we find the cards of our delicate house lying in heaps at our feet, or strewn across distant fields, we have no less than that with which we started; we have lost nothing we would have had had we done nothing.

Though our creation may have been reduced to mere memory, we have at least that memory, and the knowledge and satisfaction of our ill-fated accomplishment.

All our effort is not lost, for the effort itself is gain, for in that effort we are sculpting our eternal souls, and no mere breeze of fickle worldly circumstance can dislodge that which is carved in eternal stone.

So let us peer dimly into future dark, let us boldly place the cards we're dealt into the towering structures of our guesswork dreams, worldly houses of cards, fragile and tenuous structures of our wishful creation, careers, families, and companies all destined to eventually topple in the unforeseeable breezes of time. Yet with each card placed, each plan made, each value chosen, we add enduring form and bulwarked structure to our souls. We build our transitory, worldly constructs for future dark, that our souls may grow into eternity bright.

*************************

Wasted and eternal time

The career and daily tasks and fleeting acquaintances mean nothing.

The career, the daily tasks, the fleeting acquaintances are Holy and of eternal import, the foundation provided upon which to experience the loving Creator and the framework through which the Creator's Love can touch others.

In its irrational, violent, tragic chaos, this temporal world provides us the Choice.

In the hospital and battlefield, in the mosque and the cathedral, each individual soul stands at the pinnacle of Creation. Strip away the illusions of circumstance and each soul stands primal, naked, vital, before the same infinite light of the One, each choosing in each moment to move toward or away from Unity.

Each of our circumstances, conditions, and lives simply form different clothing on the same Choice.

Created as free conscious individuals in the image of God, this existence provides us, in our freedom, the opportunity to choose Unity with the loving Source.

Now the great irony, the great mystery, the great contradiction:

Every interaction, every opportunity for Love, generosity, compassion, giving, and affection, in and of itself, is futile, finite, imperfect, and mortal.

Every interaction, every opportunity for Love, generosity, compassion, giving, and affection provides an open door for Unity with the loving Sustainer, and thereby eternal blessings and fulfillment of the very Purpose of existence.

******************************

Future Memories

Real life,

surrounding,

in our isolation;

Rustling memories of home,

pulling us back to life, pulling us

away from

the tasks,

the goals,

the chores,  
the obligations

that would steal us

from the green and growing

meadows that surround our souls

A hawk's cry, reminding, that

the wind to lift our souls

surrounds,

is ever present,

awaiting

only our Choice

to spread our wings

to use

our gifts

to soar above the

pavement, the structured,

the dead, built by man;

to soar

to forgotten

homes, to green

meadows for the soul,

to see

again

the kitten

antics that

make us smile

playfully foiling

our concerted efforts

to be serious, professional, mature.

Wind

of life, lifting

caressing, holding up,

all those with courage to

try the wings of their souls.

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**Author biography** _and message to the reader_

Some degrees in physics, some time in research laboratories and thatched hut villages, some teaching in universities and management in international technology: all sound like credentials to lend credibility to the role of author. But such experiences provide only tools and terminology and opportunity, not wisdom and insight.

You and I share the same foundation for whatever wisdom and insight we may glean out of life, the joys and grief, the celebrations and hunger that make up daily living. I hope through this book my knowledge of physics and funerals, science and spirit, quanta and cultures, can help you bridge the illusory gap between intellect and heart. If so, that will happen not through transfer of wisdom, but through an opening of windows to allow realization of your own wisdom.

Questioning "what" and "how" led me to universities and degrees in physics. Questioning "why" led me to cathedral and temple and mosque. I have been blessed to learn from a winner of the Einstein Award and from village shamans. But such learning seems inconsequential in comparison to life's lessons: the grim look on the face when after the wreck you ask "will she be OK?"...the feel of the hospital sheets after the stroke...and every warm embrace and authentic smile and sincere welcome.

I am grateful to professors and priests, research centers and jungle shrines. But they provide only the paint color to be applied to the structure built of the scope of real life, built of pets and people, love and loneliness, homes and hospitals.

I pray my degrees and travels, survival and losses that led to my books can bring a little light to your very real life and reveal to you the brightness of your heart's wisdom and the Source awaiting our discovery.

Author contact and scheduling of speaking engagements

DrDonRay@HotMail.Com

Website and blog

SmashWords link

GoodReads

Other titles by Don Ray

Doubt and Reassurance Volumes I and II

The Reassuring Universe ,illustrated hard-cover and soft-cover editions

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